A Deniable Death

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘Stay close.’

  ‘Of course.’ He finished the glass of water offered him, and stood. He had heard it said that the man behind the desk, elderly, a little obese, bald and almost haggard, had been a junior on the planning team for the incursion into Tunis when the life of Khalil al-Wazir, who rejoiced in the title of Abu Jihad – Father of the Holy War – was taken, and the blueprint of the operation was taught to recruits as a model. Gabbi would not have considered flippancy with this man, who had much blood on his hands. It was the end of a long day: the dusk fell on the city, throwing shadows on the buildings. The last of the sunlight blistered on the sea beyond the empty beach. ‘Call me.’

  ‘We hope to hear soon. The Americans bring the money, the British bring the idea and the location. We bring you. It’s a good arrangement, and gives us currency for the future, which is leverage. I do not know, no apologies, where you will go.’

  ‘I have, my darling Lili, a problem.’ He had been in Hamburg that day. He had operated. After seven hours in theatre – the patient was a prince from Riyadh who might, if he survived, buy a new wing for the neuro-surgery section – the consultant drove slowly and carefully home. He had been, unusually, complimented by the Chefarzt for the skill and precision of his work, but he could not be sure that the beast was fully extracted or whether enough remained to grow again beyond the most delicate reach of his knife. He had done his best and been praised. ‘It is from Iran, from my past, and it pinions me.’

  He came off the autobahn and turned for Lübeck. His pleasure at the praise was diluted. What he might say to his wife, after he had read a story to his daughter, as they sat at dinner and she poured wine, served the food she had cooked and told him of her day played on his mind. When he interrupted her, she would hear him out with a frown and an ugly twist at her mouth. Then she would snap, ‘Tell them to go to hell. Put the phone down on them. Reject them out of hand. If they persist then call the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz. It’s what they’re there for, to deal with foreign threats. They’re in the book. Are you intimidated by those people? Are you, Steffen? They’re no part of your life.’ She could not understand. He would not know how to explain to Lili – a little thicker on the hips since childbirth, and fuller in the bosom, with the first grey hairs that needed the salon’s attention, dressed from the best of the shops in the Königstrasse – the power and reach of the al-Quds Brigade and what could be done to the elderly couple who had fostered and mentored him. They would end the meal shouting, and doors would be slammed and the little girl would be crying on the stairs. No one who had not lived there would understand.

  He came off the big traffic circle and headed for Röckstrasse. Sleet was in the air, and there might be snow before morning.

  She might throw at him, ‘Are you not prepared to stand up to these people, tell them to go fuck . . .’

  He owned a fine villa. Much of the old part of Lübeck had been devastated by British bombers in the spring of 1942, but the grand properties beyond the Burgtorbrücke had survived untouched. He was proud to have been able to buy a home on this street. It was an accolade to his work and endeavour. The light was on in the porch to welcome him, and the sleet flew in lines across it.

  He would say nothing. She would not understand. Neither would her father, nor counter-intelligence officers. He thought himself alone, isolated.

  He parked his car, went inside and told Lili of the praise heaped on him. He read the story to Magda, sat at the dinner table, complimented Lili on the cooking and asked about her day. He said nothing of the cloud hanging over him.

  He had been dozing, might have been snoring gently, when the first shot hit the Pajero.

  He was thrown forward, bounced off the back of the front passenger seat, then cannoned into the door. More shots followed.

  Badger had woken fast. Since they had been on the big drag, which she had said was Highway 6, she had opened her window, unclipped the rifle and let it rest on her lap. The guy called Hamfist had a weapon peeping out into the growing darkness. He was awake. There were men milling in the road, lit by the Pajero’s headlights and probably half blinded by them. One crawled and seemed to scream up into the night. He might have had a broken leg.

  ‘What the fuck . . .’ Badger murmured, for want of something sharper.

  The road was clearing and the girl was shooting, Hamfist too. He heard her say it was thieves, and that Harding had hit one with his front fender. Corky might have winged another. They had gone straight over one of the tyres left in the road to slow vehicles down.

  He could see the lights of the first Pajero, where Foxy was, then the flash and the screaming moving light – it would have been about a hundred metres in front. The light went past the front of that vehicle and carried on across black open ground. There must have been a berm or a dune because it exploded. Shagger swore and called it an RPG round. Hamfist matched the obscenity. They’d gone off the road into a ditch and Badger’s elbow was driven sharply into his ribcage.

  He thought they bucked over the sand and scrub for about a quarter of a mile. Then the wheel was wrenched again and they tilted, climbed and ground up onto the road. For a few seconds the two vehicles were side by side, stationary. The Six lady didn’t speak, but there was a fast exchange between Harding and Shagger in a military patois. Badger deciphered enough to learn that thieves had put tyres on the road to slow vehicles, then stop them to rob the passengers of valuables and cargo. One thief had been run down, another had been shot. Around thirty bullets had been fired at the two Pajeros, and one rocket-propelled grenade.

  Was it par for the course? Badger didn’t ask. Neither Harding nor Shagger reckoned their tyres had been damaged.

  Now she spoke: ‘Can we, please, move off and get the hell out?’

  They went on in darkness.

  Mostly the road was clear, but a few times men emerge would from the dark, dragging along a pack-beast, and a few times great lorries drove towards them and made a chicken-game challenge. There were dull lights at a shack that seemed to serve food but had no customers, and there was a police road-block, but the Pajeros had their pennants up and were waved through without having to slow. Badger reckoned they wouldn’t have slowed anyway, would have kept going and might have started shooting again.

  They’d come into a town. She whispered that it was the Garden of Eden and Badger hadn’t any idea what she meant, but again the windows were down and the guns readied. They crossed a bridge, and there was enough light for him to make out a sluggish, stinking flow of water. It looked a crap place, and he didn’t see an orchard with apples, any naked girls or a fellow with a fig leaf for modesty. Out of the town, the bridge behind them and the road emptying again, they were on a track and the front Pajero threw up a dust storm they had to drive through. There was enough moon for the surface to be visible without the vehicles’ headlights.

  Badger closed his eyes, clamped them tight, and the pain lessened in his ribs and arm.

  The end of a road, at a broken gate that had posts set into a sagging wire fence: through the gate there were heaps of discarded, rusted piping that went nowhere. He realised it meant oil and that it had been bombed. He’d carried his bergen, the fullest and heaviest, and had made certain he accepted none of the Jones Boys’ offers to help. There was a single-storey concrete building with little compartment rooms that were filthy, shrapnel-spattered, looted. He’d taken one, and Foxy had been next door – but there were no doors. There was pain, though.

  Badger was on the sleeping bag spread on the concrete floor. He didn’t realise she was there. He could hear a constant drone of mosquitoes in flight but they had not bothered with him yet. There was no light, but the subdued sound of a radio playing soft jazz, maybe New Orleans – he’d have had to strain his ears to hear it better.

  Staying still on the bag killed some of the pain. She was standing over him. ‘Are you bad or good, hurt or in one piece?’

  He blinked, tried to make her out in the darkness, cou
ldn’t. The movement he made in reacting to her voice hurt his ribs and he bit his lip. ‘Thanks for asking. I’m fine.’

  ‘Are you injured?’

  ‘Bruised.’

  ‘Does that mean “wrecked”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I have to ask.’

  ‘I’ve answered.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘What for?’ Badger shifted to face her. He had told the truth, and he would go on.

  ‘Because I want to.’

  He heard authority in her voice and doubted there was a future in argument.

  ‘I want to know what state you’ll be in when you go forward.’

  ‘I won’t be a passenger – not alongside him.’

  ‘Open your shirt.’

  He did. He could smell her breath and sweat – no deodorant. Excellent, professional. In this sort of place, Badger reckoned, you wouldn’t know when you might have to burrow into a hole while the bad guys went by, and the smell of toothpaste or deodorant was the worst giveaway. Now he rated her higher than he had just on the evidence of her skill through the ambush, shooting well and fast, leaving the driver to do the driving and Hamfist to put down the main suppressive fire. He had the buttons on the camouflage top loose and rucked up the lightweight khaki T-shirt. He wouldn’t show that it had hurt. She didn’t use a torch but moved her fingertips across his skin, paused when he winced. Her face was close to his and the darkness was around them. A guy did a trumpet solo on the jazz that was playing, and he had to lift his arm so that she could get more easily onto the place where the elbow had hurt his ribs. He couldn’t see her eyes, but her breath was on his face. The pain seemed to go.

  She eased across him, slipped a leg over his hip and her fingers played on his skin.

  Foxy Foulkes was dreaming. He had forgotten the name of the hotel and which junction he had come off at, and had forgotten the number of the motorway. He had forgotten, too, what the room had looked like, its décor, and what was in the chilled mini-bar. He had not forgotten, over seven years, that a lift had been offered from the training course for Greater Manchester Police, that she had been in the force’s computing team and was going to a seminar in London. He was going south. She had put her hand on his thigh, and music had played. He’d wrenched the wheel at the junction, and they’d checked in without baggage. Both had been half stripped before they used the little key to open the fridge and take out a half-bottle of fizzy stuff. It was a hell of a good dream, him with Ellie, now his wife.

  His blazer was on the floor, in the dream, and his trousers and underpants, her clothes scattered over them. It was passionate, even frenzied, at the start, but the second time had been calmer and quieter. He’d told her they were soul-mates, and in the dream they did it a third time – nearly bloody killed him – and she’d sighed . . . He had dozed, and then thought he was dreaming, but he was awake.

  He heard a grunt through the wall and struggled to find Ellie. Then he sat up, listening. Bloody hell, were they at it?

  Abigail Jones asked herself, ‘What did you do that for?’ And answered, ‘God only knows.’ She could have talked through a hundred reasons, or ten, and could have decided that none made sense. She used a tiny beam from a pocket torch to guide herself down the corridor, past the open doorway into the older man’s room, and came into the big area where the gear was. She let the beam rove around. Shagger and Corky were on their sides, on the bags, and seemed to be asleep. Hamfist was hunkered against a wall, facing the outer doorway. He had an AK assault job, with two magazines taped, on his lap. He reached towards the small CD/DVD player to cut the music, but she waved a hand and he let it play on. Harding, the American, would be sitting on the building’s outside step, with an image-intensifier sight on his weapon, watching the broken gate and the parked Pajeros.

  A burr in the accent, and a whisper: ‘They all right, ma’am?’

  ‘They’re fine.’

  ‘They know what they’re into, ma’am?’

  ‘Probably as much as is good for them.’ The torch was switched off and the jazz lulled them. She sat, cross-legged, with her weight against a loaded bergen.

  ‘Rather them than me, ma’am.’

  ‘A fertile imagination isn’t called for . . . Foulkes – Foxy – told me what he regretted most was that I’d taken his wallet off him. He’d got a photo of his wife in it, and wouldn’t have it with him. Maybe other aspects bothered him, but that was all he let on.’

  ‘I don’t have a picture of the wife, the ex, or the kids. I sent them money for new bikes last Christmas, didn’t hear back. Doubt there’d be any tears if an RPG aimed straighter, except that the money would stop.’

  ‘The younger one, Badger, reckoned I was good. Why? Because I hadn’t used toothpaste or soap today or yesterday. His story – the best of the South Africans when they were fighting Cubans in Angola had their teeth falling out. Why? Because they were the most dedicated covert-skills guys in the bush, and toothpaste is like soap – the scent lingers. No soap, no toothpaste, no cigarettes, no alcohol, no curries and nothing spicy. I suppose it was a little lecture in how serious the work is, the way that scent and smell last. I may just have been too damn idle to use toothpaste and soap. Oh, and armpit spray would be an appointment at Abu Ghraib. I learned that this evening.’

  She asked herself again, ‘What did you do that for?’ And answered, ‘God only knows.’

  They were in grey light. Grey sky before the sun came up above a berm on the left side of the track, to the east of them. Grey water, brackish and stagnant in the centre of a lagoon, and grey mud with dark cracks that showed how far the marshes had been drained artificially, then flooded, then drained again by the dams upstream and evaporation; drought from lack of rain. The reed banks, also, had no colour – that would come with the morning.

  Two Pajero jeeps, low on their chassis from the armour plate fitted to the doors and engine casings, the added layers of reinforcement underneath, kicked up dust trails as they took a raised track between what had once been lakes, and went east. No radio on in either vehicle, and no conversation: the briefings were finished and had been reiterated over sips of bottled water before they had loaded up.

  They drove along an old bund line, packed dirt and mud thrown up three decades before in the early months of the war with Iran, by bulldozers and earth-moving gear, for the convoys of Iraqi tanks to traverse the marshlands and reach the border for the drive towards Susangerd and Ahvaz. The four employees of Proeliator Security, the officer of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service and the two deniables had no interest in the history of the terrain they crossed.

  There was no talk of them being in the lost Garden of Eden, or having passed alongside the Tree of Life in al-Qurnah during the night, or that they were where the Great Flood had occurred and the Ark had grounded. They did not observe that they were in the ‘cradle of civilisation’ where cultures had emerged five millennia before, and where a people, the Madan, had existed among the marshes since before history. Neither did they consider drainage, dam building nor drought. But they had gone by two tiny encampments, shanties with corrugated-iron roofing and other buildings in the traditional style of woven reeds, the mudhifs; children and dogs had chased after them but the thump of generators had not penetrated the thickened windows of the Pajeros. All of the buildings had been adorned with satellite dishes. The armies of the Medes, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs had been here, and the Mongol hordes. British infantry had fought a battle close by ninety-seven years ago, and had struggled in the same heat that would rise later in the day. The marshes had been places of refuge for malcontents, rebels, insurgents, smugglers and thieves. There would never be, nor ever had been, allies here for a stranger.

  Ahead, the grey landscape took on light colours – red in the sky, green in the reed banks, mud brown in the water – and dust coated the vehicles. Pigs and otters took cover and birds flew away from the intruders. They could no longer see the derricks of the oil platforms – d
iscarded, damaged, awaiting new investment in the Majnoon fields, but ahead was a horizon.

  The vehicles stopped. The dust settled. In the few seconds that it hung, obscuring any view of where they’d halted, two men pitched out, then the woman, and two more men, festooned with weapons, pulled the bergens clear and the small inflatable boat. No hugs, no exhortations about the importance of a mission across a frontier, just a brisk cuff from her on their shoulders, and a nod from the two armed men. The two slid down the bund line onto cracked mud and into crackling dead reeds. The others were back in the vehicles and the wheels spun, forward to the limit of the track’s width, then reversing, and they were gone.

  The dust clouds thinned.

  Who might have seen that the Pajeros were lighter by two men and two bergens? No one.

  The silence fell around them, a lonely quiet, intense and frightening, as it had always been for strangers who came unannounced and unwanted into the marshes.

  Chapter 5

  They went forward, and were into the third hour since they had trudged away from the drop-off point. Foxy Foulkes still led. There were no maps to follow and this was ground that Ordnance Survey did not cover. Anywhere he had worked in Britain or Northern Ireland there had been big-scale maps with signs marking telephone boxes, churches, pubs and points of interest, like the summit of high ground. There were no buildings and no elevated terrain. He was slowing but he’d be damned if he’d allow the younger man to pass him and take on the role of pace-setter.

  There was emptiness and stillness. Both, in Foxy’s mind, were delusions and delusions bred a climate of danger. Among the reed beds and on the little mud islands that rose, perhaps, a metre above the waterline of a channel or an open space, or two metres above a dried-out bed, there would be the small villages of those marsh people who had survived the persecution of the dictator, the ebb and flow of the war fought along the frontier, an invasion of foreign troops, gassing, bombing and shelling, drainage, reflooding and drought. There would be tiny village communities that had TV screens but no schools or medical care. They could exist through murder and thieving, and by being paid for information. Foxy did not doubt that small craft, of which he had seen photographs in the intelligence reports at the interrogation centre seven years earlier, nudged through the passageways between the reed banks. He did not doubt that their progress, not as fast as when they had started out, left a track of sound. The sun was climbing.