A Deniable Death

by Gerald Seymour

  It had been Len Gibbons’s turn, three decades earlier – if Jennifer’s rumour was to be believed – to have ‘one chance only’ and to ‘eff it up’. She thought she was now presented with a copper-bottomed opportunity to join his team. The crowd at the gate, in the half-day that had passed from her handing out the trifles, had doubled. The threat when the next belt of darkness came was, likely, twice as great. She couldn’t get the boys to drive her back to al-Qurnah and try to rustle up rooms at the one building in the town, beside the big river and adjacent to the dead tree claimed as the ‘Tree of Life’. One of the Shia zealot movements had control of that building. The alternative was to leave the site, drive onto a berm or a bund and park there where they were visible for ten miles or more. She couldn’t call up a friendly UK platoon and have them do their security because the Brits were now in Afghanistan, and the marines, the Fort Bragg guys, too, had switched wars, had quit their last combat with a chorus of ‘Fucking good riddance to a motherfucking place.’ There was nowhere else to be. It was her ‘one chance only’ and she assumed that Len Gibbons, far away, doodling, would understand.

  She asked the boys how much they reckoned she should shell out.

  She went back inside, and hitched up her robe – did the act of a Basra tart – offloaded an additional two hundred and fifty American dollars and split the notes ten times. Twenty-five dollars each, and a demand for some action.

  It was a weak hand, the worst.

  This time she had Corky on her right and Hamfist on her left. Again she called out the oldest men, with those who wore clothing of the best material, and pleaded for the space they needed to monitor the wildlife successfully. Corky had said they could not be further back and do their job. Hamfist had said that any guy at the sharp end had to believe in the honesty of the people in support. She handed out money, repeated the pleading and went back towards the building.

  She was a tough girl. Abigail Jones, convent-school educated, red-brick university, only took the bus in grim weather and ran to work most days in London along the Embankment, and home again. She could sleep on shit-laced concrete, hike and trek – and could almost have wept. There were more coming and none were leaving, and some now had rifles. In these parts any man with balls had access to a rifle.

  Harding asked, ‘How long do you think we have until we lift them out?’

  She shrugged.

  Shagger asked, ‘What do we do, miss, when this crowd start coming?’

  ‘Let me think about it, and give me some fucking space.’

  There were two Black Hawks on the apron in the sun. One of the crews was in an annex where a room offered bunk beds and thick enough window blinds to blot out the ferocity of the sun’s glare. They would be wearing ear baffles so that the roar of the aircon systems wouldn’t keep them awake. The second crew, four personnel, was in the annex rest room and sprawled in easy chairs. They were in the dog days of the empire, and the final evacuation from the one-time colony was mere weeks away so little more than skeleton forces remained. The buildings they occupied were tired, the paint scuffed, and would not receive renovation. Inevitably they had caught the mood of ‘drawdown’, and had taped in their lockers at the Baghdad base a pencil picture of a snake divided into segments, one for each day they would serve on that posting. Most were now filled in and only part of the tail remained.

  That crew who were awake, supposedly ready to kick themselves out of the chairs into the open-top jeep and have the bird airborne within three minutes of the bell going, found this assignment littered with unanswered questions. The four-blade twin-engine helicopter, with a lift classified as ‘medium’, was the workhorse of the American military, and carried stores – Meals Ready to Eat, the chemicals for latrines, home-town hacks looking for stories that didn’t exist – and also flew special-forces units. It was reliable, flew like a dream, caused little hassle and less grief. But the American military effort was now scaled down, the troops reduced to spit-and-polish bull-shit in camps, so the guys in the two crews were generally just bored shitless. Each bird, each crew, could lift an additional eleven troops with full combat gear. They were on standby, but they didn’t know when they would be called out or whom they would pick up; they had not been given an exact extraction point. New, out of the Sikorsky factories, the Black Hawk had set their taxpayers back, minimally, $14 million. It was expensive hardware that sat on the tarmacadam outside the annex, and the ‘ready’ crew waited to be told something.

  No one came.

  Normally when special forces were involved – infiltration and exfiltration – herds of liaison men and women hovered, their cell phones ringing and their comms busy. There were none.

  The pilot, Eddie, read a comic book and his co-pilot, Tristram, turned the pages of a Bible, the Old Testament. A side gunner, Dwayne – trained to use a 7.62 calibre machine gun – studied a puzzle book, and Federico, who had the weapon on the starboard side of the cabin, was deep in an aviation engineering magazine. They were not disturbed.

  Any other time they had done the lifts for special forces there had been a presence alongside, checking every few minutes that their flight plans were ready and understood, that they knew where all the pylons with slack electricity cables were and which they could fly under, and that the fire power of Hellfires and machine-gun belts had been tested. They’d even demand a check on the fuel loads in the tanks. No one bothered them.

  All they had been told was that a phone call would come through on the green handset, and a voice would give co-ordinates to an area approximately sixty kilometres away. That distance, going east, would put them hard against the Iran border.

  They read, killed time, waited.

  Badger had her in his glasses. Then, alerted, he swung them round, went through a full 90-degree arc with them, and picked up the bulldozer.

  The big plant vehicle, with a bucket on the front, had come from behind the barracks and now powered along the bund line to the right. He fancied he understood. Past midday, with the sun at full strength, the smell was sweeter, more foul, and had seemed over the last hour to hang in the air close to him. The one they called the goon, Mansoor, hung onto the outer handles of the cab.

  Badger had been up and awake most of the night, and had allowed the older man to sleep from the time that the house lights had gone out until dawn, had let him sleep through for six hours before waking him and starting the routine of three hours on and three hours off. He had let him sleep except when the snores came on too fierce.

  In the first light, grey and almost chill, with the sun not yet peeping up from a horizon of reed tops and water expanses, Badger had crawled out of the hide, taken care to rearrange the cover of dead reeds, then had moved away and scouted the bare ground, on his stomach. He had been in the reeds and had seen where a spur came off the bund line and towards where they had made the hide. Then he had reached the open water beyond and the little light flecked the bodies in the water. Already they were swollen, gross – the smell had been building and had not dissipated in the cool of night. Now, in the middle of the day, he imagined the corpses would be even more distended. He understood that men had been tasked to retrieve and bury them.

  At dawn he had seen the bodies floating with clouds of insects over them, and in the middle of the day he saw the bulldozer. He didn’t need to see much else. In this little corner of the world, far from anything he had experienced before, men could be shot dead, dumped and the evidence buried. The bulldozer went from his view and the sound drifted and was fainter . . . It was, after a fashion, what they did to their own. What would they do to those who intruded on their space and affairs, broke the boundaries of the borders and spied – he had read about spies. In the last war spies had been hanged in London, electrocuted in the USA, marched to the gallows in Syria, with a placard round the neck denouncing Israeli espionage, and to an execution chamber at the Sugamo prison in Tokyo: Richard Sorge, Communist agent, spying against Japan on behalf of Russian Intelligence, who denied a
ll knowledge of him . . . denied all knowledge. It had a ring to it. Almost, in that heat, a shiver convulsed him. Fear? Apprehension? He put it down to the sweat running in the small of his back, where the fingers of Alpha Juliet had been. Denied all knowledge: up in Scotland, with the theatre of that house and the bay with the waves crashing, the cold, the rain and the howl of the pipes, denial had seemed unimportant.

  He had the flies and the smell, the sun flaring up off the water, dazzling him, and a mirage haze.

  She came back out. His hand hovered, ready to shake Foxy awake.

  Her mother followed her, but held back in the shade at the front of the house. Badger thought her beautiful, regal yet doomed. Through the glasses he could see the effort it took for her to walk from the patio to the water’s edge, then little flecks of colour on the ground close to her feet: a flowerbed. Badger swore. She had made a flowerbed, and weeks before there would have been vivid colours in it. There was, against the house, a tap, and over the patio a discarded hose pipe. He thought it reasonable that the tap had not been turned on and the hosepipe aimed at the flowers – maybe his mother’s favourite, geraniums – since her diagnosis. An ex-infantry soldier he had worked with had once said that shock spread in a life much as a hand grenade rolled, bounced and slid erratically across the floor in a bunker or a slit trench. It would have been like that when the news was given them. He thought it would have seemed a waste of time and energy to continue watering the flowers.

  She captured him.

  She sat alone in front of the water and close to the pier. The children were not back from school, the mother was inside the house and the goon was with the bulldozer. The guards would not approach her. Badger would have woken Foxy, given him a hard nudge in the ribcage – where it might hurt – if anyone had come close to her and talked.

  She watched the birds. Did she know that men scavenging for artillery-piece casings had been shot – he assumed for being inside a restricted, sensitive zone – then dumped, were being retrieved now by a bulldozer to be clawed into a pit? Did she know that that was the price of keeping security tight around her? Her work was mine clearance. For Badger the world played at riddles.

  What would happen to her?

  He had not worked in Northern Ireland. He was too young, and the war there had lapsed to a ceasefire by the time he was trained and operational. He had come across enough who knew the Province. A paratrooper, off the hills above Brecon when Badger had been with them on exercise, had talked of doing back-up protection for handlers when they met with potential Provo informers – touts – in the shadows of pub car parks, in the empty darkened spaces of beauty spots. It always bloody rained, they said, when the proposition of betrayal was put, the approach made. Some, the paratrooper had said, spat it out, some hesitated, and some came on board – bloody ran up the gangplank . . . Then – this was the rub – they had to go back and tell the wife they were changing sides and taking the Queen’s shilling. He hadn’t forgotten that conversation long into a night. If her husband accepted the offer made, and she came through surgery, they would face a new life, and convalescence in an English seaside town or a suburb of any city in the United States. First, how would the man respond to interdiction, approach? Badger couldn’t say, couldn’t imagine it. But he was sure Mr Gibbons, the Boss, had his finger on the pulse of it.

  There was, he decided, something totally elegant about the woman. Something utterly dignified. He would have been hard put to explain his thoughts.

  She gazed out over the water. He watched her through the glasses, ten times magnification, and there were moments when he believed she looked straight at him, must see him. The heat in the suit sapped him and he fought to maintain his concentration. He had to make his water last – and in his ears were the sounds of the ripples against the pier’s supports and the scrape of the dinghy against the planks. He reckoned, couldn’t be certain at two hundred metres plus, that tears ran down her face.

  Badger could not, in truth, take his eyes from her. He didn’t know how her husband, assuming a surgeon could work a miracle, would respond to the approach.

  They had done more war games at the camp. Through the morning there had been a theoretical headquarters-command scenario of an American invasion pushing in from Iraqi territory on a front south of al-Qurnah and north of Basra. The Engineer’s role had been to describe the new generation of explosive formed projectiles, their deployment, and effect against the enemy’s armour, and the forces of any ‘poodles’ that the Great Satan could whip into line. They had not stopped for lunch, but took a break for coffee.

  When would he be away?

  Again, he found himself alongside the brigadier who had responsibility for this sector.

  He grimaced. He had the suitcase, and they awaited final confirmation of the itinerary . . . very soon.

  After the refreshment stop, they would move on to the area of counter-attack, and the Engineer had prepared a paper on the value of deflecting armoured convoys to specified roads where the bombs could be more effective and more concentrated. He would speak of the value of choke points into which armour would be drawn. He would quote the disproportionate success of the defenders of a Croatian city, two decades before, who had ambushed main battle tanks, hit the first in the convoy simultaneously with the last and then, at leisure, destroyed the wallowing beasts that could not manoeuvre. He would say this could be done by civilian fighters if they had only rudimentary skills in warfare. He would tell his audience of the effect that the explosive devices – manufactured under his direction with minimal metal parts, instead incorporating plastics, ceramics and moulded glass – had on units’ morale, and give them, as a rallying cry, the conclusion that one casualty, without a leg or an arm, needed four men to bring him back from the explosion and a helicopter to fly him to the rear. Ultimately when one man hobbled down the main street of his home town and the civilians living there watched him, sympathising, support for the war would drain away. ‘Let them come, let them face us, let them know the smell of defeat,’ he would finish.

  He was not an easy public speaker, and he tried to memorise what he would say and how he would deliver it, but the brigadier broke into his thoughts. Did his wife approve of the case?

  She had not looked at it, had refused to open it, would not discuss with him what clothing she should take – whatever destination was chosen for them. She had sat in her chair in the kitchen for much of the evening after the children had gone to bed, when he had told them more about Prince Korshid and his brothers: the time he had gone to the bottom of the deep well and had found there a girl of unmatched beauty. On her lap was the head of a deav, a serpent, that snored foully. The prince would rescue the girl, but that was for the next evening. He did not say that tension cut the mood in his home, or confide that she had thrown back at him the riposte: ‘If God says it will happen it will happen. Do you attempt to obstruct God’s will with temporary relief? Better to die quietly, with love and in peace, than to chase a few more days of life. Are we justified in fighting it?’ Her mother had watched them, silent, and he had not answered but had gone to tell the story to the children.

  ‘My wife thought it a very fine case.’

  ‘Her morale? Her attitude?’

  ‘Very positive. She is focused on getting treatment she needs for recovery, and is most grateful to those who give her the chance of it.’

  It was rare for the Engineer to talk on personal matters with a senior officer of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. He knew this man’s importance in areas of military responsibility, and also because the papers regarding Naghmeh’s illness would have needed his initialled acceptance. Just as this officer procured for him the most sophisticated and recent electronic equipment from the USA, reaching him via Dubai’s container port, so he had the power to arrange the funding of such a journey and subsequent medical attention.

  ‘You are important to us, brother.’

  Others, in uniform, stood patiently behind the brigadier, waiting
for an opportunity to speak with him, but he waved them away. It was a short, clipped movement but unmistakable.

  ‘I know much about you, brother.’

  ‘Of course. I accept that.’

  ‘You live by the water, close to the border.’

  ‘It was the home my wife chose, before the diagnosis, and a place of rare beauty, near to a command post. It is very peaceful, and—’

  ‘May I offer advice, brother?’

  ‘Of course. I would be honoured to receive it.’

  Which was the truth. Advice would not be given lightly, or be ignored when offered by a man of such seniority.

  Blunt words, the veneer of concern stripped off. ‘You cannot return there.’

  ‘I am sorry, did I misunderstand you? It is where my wife is—’

  A searing interruption. ‘Whether your wife is alive or dead, whether she is happy there, whether she likes to view the water and count mosquitoes is, brother, not of importance. A man of your value should be better protected. You will not go back there.’

  This brigadier had been in place for some four months. The Engineer did not know him well. He could not argue, remonstrate or dispute. If she survived, she would be devastated. It was unthinkable that he should challenge a decision by so senior an officer.

  ‘Of course.’

  A wintry smile. ‘I would suggest that if the Americans invade you go to the deepest hole you can find that a fox has dug and settle in it. Hide for as long as you can, and emerge when you have a new identity. If the Americans come, the shockwave will likely bring down the regime of the Islamic Republic. Revolution will rule. Do you watch CNN, brother? You do not. You are good, patriotic and disciplined. I watch CNN and I see the demonstrations in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and Mashhad. We attack the websites and the mobile-phone links, but we cannot prevent the images escaping our borders. We can hang people, abuse them and lock them away, but when revolt has taken hold it cannot be reversed. There is an expression, ‘a house of cards’, and I fear that is what we will be. We conceive martyrs, we shoot at unarmed crowds but we do not cow the masses. When their time comes, when our authority is fractured, they will rise up, as the crowds did in the last days of the imperial family. The officials serving the Peacock Throne were shot by firing squad, butchered with knives or hanged in the Evin gaol. If our regime collapses and I am still here, I imagine I will be led out to the nearest streetlight and a rope will be thrown up. I will be hanged, as will most of us gathered here today. We appear invulnerable but strength is often illusory. You, brother – maybe you would be on the streetlight beside me. If the Americans come, brother, how many will face the prospect of a rope over the arm of a streetlamp and will trade information to save their neck from being stretched? What better piece of information to give up than the identity of the man who designed the bombs that crippled the Great Satan’s war effort inside Iraq? An American said once, of Serbs who were hunted and accused of atrocities, ‘You can run but you cannot hide.’ It was a popular phrase. It frightened men, intimidated them. You would be named, I would be named and most of the men in this room would be named.