A Deniable Death

by Gerald Seymour

  Chapter 14

  Foxy went forward. No call for farewells: no last handshakes, no clenched fists punching against shoulders. He crawled to his right, leaving the mass of dried fronds behind him, and used his fingertips to guide him. He reached ahead to check for obstructions, anything that would break as he went over it.

  The moon would be up later. Now it was not much more than a silvery wedge behind the mist that came up off the lagoon. It was the best time to be on the move, and the creatures in the water helped him: the frogs, the birds, and the pigs that had moved on and were almost up against the raised bund line that divided the lagoon beyond the beds. Croaks, splashes and grunts broke the quiet, and he felt good with the noises around him – not that the goon or the guards, who were more than two hundred yards away, could have heard the crack of a twig breaking.

  He went into the reeds, and wriggled on elbows, stomach and knees. He felt a great stiffness in every joint. He had assumed it would be hard to get his muscles supple again after the hours in the hide, but hadn’t imagined it would be this bad. He had never done such a long stint in a cramped lie-up before. It would make good copy in a lecture hall, with the same old curtains drawn as before: ‘Sorry and all that, guys, but I’m not at liberty to tell you which corner of the world I was in – enough to say it was hot and the donkey shit smelt recent enough. I hadn’t moved more than a handful of yards before every muscle had seized and . . .’ Couldn’t say where, but his audience would be total pillocks if they didn’t understand he’d been behind enemy lines, alone, and going forward. Ellie was forgotten, and Badger, as was a monologue that had demeaned him. He thought about faces in grey light stretching away from him in an auditorium. A spotlight was on him and the men and women in the audience – from an infantry unit, a logistics regiment, the cavalry or the intelligence family – would listen to what he had to say. There would be no when or why but they would finish up with a good idea of what it was like to lie in a hide in the thick fabric of a gillie suit. At the end, there might be a little hint of what it had all been for: ‘You won’t, of course, expect me to break the Official Secrets Act, but out in that dismal wasteland, where the sun shines and we’ve had few thanks for the sacrifices made, we lived with the curse of the IED, that wretched little package at the side of the road, in the body of a dead dog, behind a kerbstone, and always cleverly made. Let’s just say that one man who made the damn things is now pushing up the daisies. Thank you all for your attention.’ He’d smile a little, and take a step back from the lectern, and they’d have learned about the privations of being a croppie. He would expect a brief moment of stunned silence. Then a colonel or a brigadier would stand and lead an ovation.

  He was where the reeds thinned and there was open water ahead. He didn’t know – hadn’t asked Badger – how deep the water was, or how far he had to get from the hide to the mud spit. Most of the time he had held the binoculars in front of his face and the magnification had foreshortened the distance to the concealed microphone. The water lapped in his boots and saturated his socks. So damn tired because they had finished the drinking water some twenty-two hours before and his body had no more moisture to lose in sweat. His mouth and throat felt like sandpaper, and his muscles were slow, unresponsive. He was wading. He made each step forward with huge effort, which became greater with each step he took. He could see the back of the bird ahead, a slight blob of soft colour. If, then, Foxy could have found the cable, he would have yanked it.

  He would have ditched the old discipline that said all gear should be brought out. He would have dragged at the cable, broken the connection and abandoned the microphone. The bird would have flown, spooked by the commotion. He would, too, have made some excuse about having the microphone on the way back, stumbling and dropping it. But he didn’t have the cable in his hand.

  Foxy would not turn around, retrace his steps through the glue that the mud made, and return to the hide – acknowledge failure, exhaustion, fragility – and ask Badger to do the job. He couldn’t. He had opened his mouth and blurted stuff, made a fool, big-time, of himself. He struggled to get the boots moving again and the water level was past his waist. His stomach growled for food and his throat choked for water. He had weakened enough to spill the story of his marriage, then weakened further and done a volunteer. Now the mud was above his ankles and the gillie suit was a lead weight. The smell of the mud was in his face and he thought he was making more noise than the pigs when they had stampeded. Coots ran from him on the water surface and took flight, screaming.

  Far in front of him, past the outline of the mud spit – his target – was the house with its security lamps, and away from it the old lamp-post on the quayside in front of the barracks. When he rested and was quiet, he could hear a radio playing softly in the barracks. It had been folly to say he would do it. He was bloody near marooned, unable to move.

  He took another step. Abruptly he was in open water and the reed beds were behind him.

  Foxy realised he should have discussed with Badger how best to approach the spit where the microphone was. He should have worked his way further to the right and nearer to the bund line where he would have avoided the deeper water. But he hadn’t – he had been too proud.

  Another step, and he lost his left boot.

  He could have screamed, but took another step.

  The church was a fine building of weathered red brick. Len Gibbons had walked down the hill from the old border-crossing point, past homes with gardens scoured by frost and a snow shower. He had hugged shadows and felt that the journey to Schlutup was a demonstration of indulgence and weakness. He remembered it so clearly. Sometimes Len Gibbons would meet the part-time pastor, status never quite defined, inside the church, and sometimes outside. They would talk close to the old lifeboat, preserved and mounted on wood blocks above gravel, and the renovated clock, with gold-plated hour symbols and hands, would chime. The church of St Andrew had seemed a safe, reliable, trustworthy place to meet, and the pastor had seemed a man of integrity . . . The young Len Gibbons had seen an opportunity for advancement and had wanted to trust. He went into the churchyard and passed ancient headstones. There were lights inside, a final blaze of organ music. He had wanted to believe, and urged his seniors to accept his judgements. Many said later that it was against their better judgement that they had acquiesced, and had shifted the blame for the catastrophe to the slight shoulders of the young Len Gibbons. But an asset in the telephone exchange at Wismar was of prime importance. An old lesson had been learned; great danger hounded intelligence officers if they believed only what they wished to believe.

  The clock struck the hour, the doors opened and light flooded out. The music was finished but voices came through the doorway, clear and bright.

  He could not have said why he was there, why he had driven out from Lübeck to the place that had altered his working life and reconstructed his values. At first, the pastor had been able to travel into and out of the German Democratic Republic. Stories had been planted of elderly parents living behind the Curtain and to the south of Schwerin, and passes being issued by an official who was a long-standing friend of the family. The pastor had brought back printouts of the numbers called by units of the Soviet Army, Air Force and Navy. Useful? It had hardly mattered. The presence of the agent, Antelope, in such a sensitive position, was important.

  He watched the doorway, and the first of that evening’s congregation emerged and stood for a moment on the step, their breath vivid in the cold. They shivered but did not break off their conversations.

  There had not been sufficient rigour applied to the asset and the story he had told. The pastor had announced, one May day, that he would no longer be able to travel back and forth into the East, as the official had been transferred. Was it possible that the asset, Antelope, could deliver his stolen material to a courier regarded as honest and reliable by the spy masters? Over the following five months, three couriers were identified, then names and addresses given for the past
or to pass them to the asset.

  The man came out of the church in a small group, talking earnestly. Gibbons stayed back, let no light fall on his face. The silhouette of his body was masked by the trunks of the plane trees. Then, the man had always shaved closely and his hair had been cropped short. Now he wore an old coat against the evening chill, and his hair was in a ponytail held by an elastic band. His beard grew randomly across his face. The last he had heard of the man, still recognisable, was that he had started a sentence of six years’ imprisonment at Hamburg’s Fuhlsbüttel gaol. The end of the first week of October was Republic Day in the East. On that day the decision to arrest a pastor had been taken after joint consultation between British and German intelligence officers: the British in Bonn had gone cap in hand to their ally and grovelled on the failure of an operation that had cost the freedom, perhaps the lives, of four couriers. The information had been unwillingly accepted that Antelope was a sting operation conducted by the Stasi from Berlin, that a treacherous telephone operator in Wismar had never existed. Maybe the gullibility of Gibbons’s seniors had saved his own skin. Others would have gone with him to the guillotine had he been too heavily punished for the capital crime of naïveté. He had survived by a thread, but was an altered man.

  He did not spring forward to greet the man: How the devil are you? Looking well, considering. In work, or dependent on hand-outs? Do you still believe in the clapped-out empire that faded to dust overnight? Was it all worth men’s lives, the ones you condemned to years in cells or for hanging? He watched the man, once a pastor, go out through the gate, and those around him laughed at something he said . . . All so long ago, but relevant to Len Gibbons.

  That night, he had met the man, had walked away with a package in his hand, then lit a cigarette, which was the signal. German police, plain clothes, had come forward and snapped on the handcuffs. He had killed, in his soul, any last trace of humanity. He no longer believed in mercy. Now, a servant of the Service, he obeyed orders. It was why he had been chosen. All agencies in this field of work needed men like Len Gibbons.

  He turned on his heel and went back to the car park where he had left the VW.

  Foxy reached the mud spit. He had fallen once. The booted foot had tripped against the one that wore only a sock and he’d gone down into the water where it was shallow. His head would have gone under if his hands hadn’t found the bottom, but water – foul-tasting – splashed onto his face.

  He was there. Foxy sucked in air. There was a flap in his face, desperate. The bird’s wings beat, but it failed to launch itself. There was no one for Foxy to ask what the fuck was happening. He had no idea why the bird just flapped its wings hopelessly. He might have figured it out if his mind had been clearer.

  It gave a croak, like a death rattle, and he had his hand up, protecting his eyes from the wings. The cable whipped against his cheek. His fingers found it and ran along its length, then collided with the bird’s body. It went into spasms of action, then was still. The beak hit him.

  The African Sacred Ibis was snagged by the cable. He let go of it and the bird rose a foot off its perch. The cable tautened. The ibis croaked, and the claws on its feet came against Foxy’s hands and ripped at them. The flesh tore. The beak came back at him, was used as a spear. He grasped the cable again and the bird hung from his arm.

  Foxy lashed out with his free hand. It didn’t matter to him that the bird was endangered, that its presence was a jewel in the eco-system of the marshes. He struck out, used full force. He couldn’t see it beyond the vague shapes of the wings as they beat at him but he recalled a long, slender neck – he had seen it when the bird had flown in, and while it had cleaned the feathers on its chest. He knew that his target was the neck, and the blow was hard.

  He was Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes: he had taken on the full might of an African Sacred Ibis, worshipped as a deity in the civilisation of the Pyramids and pharaohs, and had broken its neck.

  It hung from his hand. There were no reflexes, no shuddering death throes. Foxy had killed it. It hung from the entanglement of the cable. It had seemed large when the wings had beaten, the feet slashed and the beak stabbed, but now it was shrivelled.

  He heard only the lapping of water, maybe against the reeds behind him or away to his right. He heard rippling. Maybe the wind had risen with the darkness. He tried to pull the cable free but it gouged against his palm and the limp carcass prevented him tugging it free. Foxy knelt on the mud spit. He could hear his heart, his breathing and the rippling of water, but could see nothing except the patch of white, the wing feathers and the back of the bird. He started to disentangle the corpse from the cable. It would have realised it couldn’t lift off and had sat still, hoping that the approaching beast would somehow avoid it. Only at the last, when the cable around its left leg and body had tightened, squeezing air out of it, had it reacted.

  Foxy didn’t know how long it had been since he had left the hide, not even how long he had been on his knees on the mud spit. A degree of tenderness held him as he slackened the cable and started to free the bird’s body. He found the microphone wedged among the reeds and branches Badger had used to give it stability. When he had freed the bird he laid it down and put reed fronds over it. He took a deep breath, and slipped the microphone into the poacher’s pouch inside the gillie suit. Then he began to coil the loose cable.

  He didn’t know why, then, the frogs’ croaking was silenced, but he could hear the water rippling.

  ‘Did you think it would be like this?’

  ‘I did not,’ the Engineer answered.

  A shuttle bus had brought them from Hamburg airport, and they had been dumped with their bags on the pavement outside the Hauptbahnhof. The rush-hour crowds surged past and towards them. His experience of a European main-line terminus had been in Budapest as a student in his early twenties. He knew crowds from Tehran, but there he had command of language and the status of chauffeur-driven transport; Naghmeh flinched away from the press of people around her.

  He had seen her gaze, mouth slack and eyes wide, at the prostitutes outside the station and under the street-lights, waists exposed in the cold, skirts barely covering their upper thighs, their faces painted. He had said nothing; neither had she. They had come inside the high arched building and loud music had greeted them. He had known it was Beethoven. She had asked why they played it so loudly in the station.

  ‘It keeps away the drug addicts – I read that. Users of heroin do not like such music,’ he had said.

  ‘Why do they allow those people on the streets in a public place?’

  He had studied the board, searched for the train going to Lübeck. She leaned on his arm, needing its support. He said it was the way matters were handled in Germany, France, Spain and Britain. She had snorted.

  Had he known it would be like this?

  He did not lie: he had not.

  ‘Do they have no respect for us?’

  ‘I cannot argue with them. We are here. We will take the train to Lübeck. At Lübeck we will go to the hotel. I can do no more. Would you have me rant at the embassy, call the ministry or the commanding officer of the al-Quds? Would you have me complain?’

  She looked into his face but could not meet his eyes, which were locked on the departures board. ‘We should not have come.’

  He said what platform the train would leave from and started towards the steps going down to it, pulling their bag.

  ‘Did you hear me? We should have stayed where our own God is.’

  He told her how long it would be before the train left for Lübeck. It was heresy to suggest they might turn back, and they went slowly down the steps.

  He had started on the return.

  Impossible to go quietly now. Each stride forward taxed him to his limits. He gathered in the cable and looped it on an arm. Badger would maybe have to pull him the last few yards into the depths of the reed bed, and he might need, there, to flop and rest. Before he accepted any help, or rest, though, he would get there
. He had a stubborn pride.

  The light came on.

  He was too exhausted, his mind dulled, to realise in the first seconds what the light that trapped him meant.

  No panic, not in the first moments after the beam caught him. For Foxy, it was a time of innocence. To him it lasted an age but it would not have been longer than five seconds. Then the panic broke, and he started to thrash. He was up to his groin in water and the weight of the gillie suit tugged him down. He had one boot for a good grip in the mud and one foot with a sock that slithered and gave no purchase. He flailed his arms as if that would help him to go forward, but the mud had trapped him as effectively as the beam. There was shouting from close by, near to the source of the light, and answering calls from away to the right, where the bund line was.

  The beam closed on him, and he heard the splash of paddles, then the guttural cough of an outboard. Foxy understood. A craft had been paddled towards him, then allowed to drift closer. If he could reach the reed beds there was a chance . . . He dragged his knees up, one after the other, tried to stamp, but the water held him, the gillie suit dragging, and the mud oozed deep beneath his feet. Foxy had done time in the Province, had been on attachment to 3 Brigade, Armagh City, in the ditches, the winter hides, and camouflaged in thick summer scrub, sometimes with an oppo beside him, sometimes reliant for his safety on back-up that would be ‘down the road’. There was fatalism in all of those who did the work that the guys supposedly watching their backs would never react in time if they showed out. He wrestled with the suit, hitched it high and was able to get his fist into the poacher pouch. His hand locked on the microphone. He dragged it clear and dropped it. He felt it knock lightly against his knee, then his ankle. The bootless foot trod it into the slime.