A Deniable Death

by Gerald Seymour

  The beam of the light was off him. He splashed, heaved, charged and thought each step the last he was capable of. The light raked the reed beds, then passed over the open ground and the hide. Nothing there. He didn’t see Badger, crouched, holding the Glock locked in both fists for a steady aim. Neither did he see Badger in the throwing position to arc smoke or gas in his direction and towards the boat. He saw only a scurrying pair of coots, then a drake stampeding clear.

  He dropped the cable.

  His feet tangled with it, then he was beyond it, one more step. The light swept off the open space and across where the hide was, tracked over the water and locked on him. Two shots were fired.

  In the Province, it had been taken as read that a croppie who had shown out to PIRA would be captured, tortured for information on his work, call-signs and targets, then trussed, blindfolded and put in the back of a van. It was assumed that the last sound they’d hear would be the scrape of metal on metal when a handgun was cocked, and that death would be ‘a bit of a bloody relief’ after what had gone before. That had been drunk talk, subdued and slurred. No bastard would find the microphone, and the cable had gone down. He’d lost sight of it.

  Where was Badger, and where was the fucking cavalry?

  Two more shots fired. Could have been from a rifle or carbine, but not a pistol. The light lit him well. The bullets were aimed close enough to him for a spatter of the lagoon water to come up and into his face. The engine had power and the light surged closer. He heard the shouting more clearly.

  He should keep still. The voice was shrill and he sensed that adrenalin surged. It would be the goon, the fucking officer, who sat in the chair and watched the birds. Wrong: watched one bird. He took a deep breath and flopped down into the water. It came over his stomach, then his shoulders. His head went under and the foul stuff was in his nose, mouth and ears. He tried to push himself away and the light was over him.

  Foxy used his hands on the mud and pushed the cable aside. He felt the air forcing itself free of his chest. It was lodged in his throat and he knew he couldn’t hold it longer – and didn’t have to.

  A hand clenched hard into the gillie suit. It had been pathetic: he would have been, when he reckoned he had dived, no more than a foot below the water’s surface, moving at the pace of a bloody great slug and kicking off a trail of mud. The hands had him, heaved him up, and his head was clear of the water. He heard laughter – not of humour but of contempt – and the breath spurted from his mouth. Then he cried out because he couldn’t replace it fast enough and panted.

  The light blinded him. He couldn’t see who held him, who laughed at him. The laughter was killed, and the shout was of real anger – as if he had inflicted pain – the reprisal a blow to the side of his head. He didn’t know what had aroused the anger and stifled the laughter.

  A rope was looped under his arms and across his chest, then drawn tight, with a jerk that squeezed more breath from his lungs. The pain pinched, and another hand had caught at the neck of the suit. The engine pitch rose and the boat gathered speed. He was dragged through the water. If his head had not been held up by the fist he would have been swamped and gone under.

  He wondered where Badger was, what he had seen.

  The engine noise softened. He felt his feet, one in the boot and one in the sock, scrape over the mud. The engine was cut and the big light went out but a torch was in his face and he squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t know how much time was needed, but thought it would be many hours.

  The rope was used to pull Foxy over the quayside and onto the ground. He was on his stomach, but a boot went into his ribcage and pushed him over. He rolled on his side and came to rest on his back, like a fish hauled by anglers into a boat, then left to gasp on the deck. There was a jabber of voices around him and rifle barrels close to his face.

  Many hours were needed, and Foxy didn’t know if he could give them, in Lübeck, enough time.

  He sat in his office.

  To those around him, who worked late in the treatment rooms at the university’s medical school, he was Steffen Weber. To himself he was Soheil, in Farsi, the ‘star’.

  He did not need to ask. He had seen three patients that day and conducted lengthy examinations of their conditions. One he could help, with surgery, but two had conditions beyond his skill. He would deliver verdicts, positive and negative, the next afternoon. He had seen the patients, been in and out of the office and had gone past the desk his secretary used. She had left no note on his own desk to tell him: Your wife rang and requested you call her. She will be at home.

  He had not telephoned her.

  He could have; she could have; neither had.

  What should he do? He did nothing. He did not call his home and tell her he was sorry for their argument, that he loved her, and their daughter, that nothing should be allowed to come between them. He did not ask her if she had had a good day, did not apologise for being late that evening. The consultant, a man revered in his circles, did not lift the telephone on his desk. She could have rung, spoken of her love for him and her gratitude for him working his fingers to the bone to buy their home, that kitchen, that life for her, and she might have said she accepted his judgement on what he could do and what he could not avoid. She, too, had done nothing.

  Around him he felt a growing tension among his assistants, as if they believed him responsible for a situation in which an unidentified patient had obtained an appointment without the prior submission of X-rays and scans. It insulted them.

  He could not respond.

  As the hours of the day had gone by, his temper had shortened. The last of his patients – the forty-nine-year-old senior officer from the fire station in one of the Baltic coast towns north of the city – had been clearly beyond help, but the visit to the consultant, with his wife, would have marked a closure point from which the patient could prepare for death. The man should have been treated with courtesy, sympathy and understanding. The examination had been short, almost brusque, and the patient had been told that the consultant could offer a final verdict the next day but he should not hold his breath. He had noted that a nurse had stared into his face as the couple had left, showing rank hostility. The distrust proved widespread among his staff. The next target for a vicious response was a mild-mannered clerk from the fees office. There was a hesitant rap on his door. He waved the man in. ‘Yes?’

  ‘You have a patient visiting you tonight, Doctor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Facilities were originally booked for next Monday morning, but have now changed?’

  ‘How does this concern your office?’

  ‘The patient as yet has no name, address or—’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘We have no record, Doctor, of how the account will be settled. We have no debit-card number, no banker’s order.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please, Doctor, how will the account be settled?’

  ‘I have no idea. We will wait and see. Now, fuck off out of my room.’

  The clerk did so.

  He saw Foxy on the quay and the guns pointing down at him. There were torches and a flashlight on Foxy, and the picture in the view-finder of the image-intensifier was pale green, washed out at the fringes and burned through on the focus point. Badger watched.

  What could he have done? Could he have intervened? Might he have saved Foxy? He slapped it from his mind. Badger thought it indulgence to consider what he might, could, should have done. He had done nothing. It would have been dishonest to claim he’d liked Foxy, been fond of him, even that he’d acquired a degree of respect for him. He was not dishonest, never had been. To a fault, Badger spoke it like it was. He couldn’t have said it was anything other than gut-wrenching to see, through the lens’s soft focus, the man he’d shared the hide with – had slept alongside, had eaten, defecated and urinated next to, and from whom he’d been given the big confession of life with a woman who shagged around.

  On the quay they were searc
hing Foxy, had the suit pulled up, his legs, arms and chest exposed. Then hands seemed to go down into Foxy’s underpants and scrabble there for anything hidden. The boots came at him to pitch him over, and they did his backside, searched in there. He couldn’t have done anything because he had seen little of Foxy being taken – he’d been on the far edge of the clear ground, away from the hide, and had the bergens beside the small craft, with the air cylinder used to inflate it. He’d reckoned that he’d pull and Foxy would ride. He hadn’t seen the light come on, and had become aware of the crisis only after the shots were fired. Then he had scrambled, leopard crawl, and seen the scale of it. There had been a light on the boat and more lights along the raised bund line out to the right. They would have had automatic weapons, assault rifles, with an accurate killing range of four hundred yards, and he’d had a Glock with an effective hit chance of thirty yards. He had seen, with the image-intensifier, Foxy ditch the microphone and the cable.

  Badger thought they were like kids up early on Christmas morning. The goon strutted around his prisoner, and the older woman had come out of the house.

  He went to work. The cable came easily. He drew it out of the hide and pulled it up from the slight trench in which it was buried. The main length came sparkling from the lagoon water and made a little wave, which was sufficient to draw in the bird’s carcass. It was dead and he didn’t know how it had died.

  The old woman came close to Foxy, who was near naked now, on his back and exposed. She gave a keening cry and lashed out with a foot. Badger saw Foxy’s head jolt. She managed one more kick before she was pulled off him. Two guards escorted her back to the house. He felt sick. He went on with the work. He coiled the cable, walked across the open space and down a shallow slope, hidden from the lagoon, and stowed it in the bergen that was in the inflatable. From the other, Badger took out his own Glock and the spare magazines, the gas and flash grenades. He didn’t know what he would do with them. If Foxy had had a Glock, grenades and the gas it was unlikely he’d have made it back from the mud spit.

  When there was no more to be done, he sat down. With the image-intensifier, he had a poor view of the quay, the buildings along it, the lights and the cluster of men standing over the stretched-out shape. He reflected on the scale of the catastrophe. A word kept coming into his mind: deniable. He saw a bruised face, bloodied, one or both eyes closed, the broken look of a man without hope, and a voice in monotone denounced a mission of espionage. Hardly, not at all, deniable. Time to tell the news.

  He had the communications, made the link, said it like it was. Didn’t expect a coherent answer from Alpha Juliet and didn’t get one. Silence hung. After a few seconds he thought the connection had already been open too long.

  Her voice, strained: what did he intend to do?

  Badger said, ‘Hang around, while I have darkness cover. See what happens, what shows. Not come out till I have to.’

  They would be on stand-by for an extraction, but on their side of the border. The shit was in the fan, she told him grimly – unnecessarily.

  ‘Plenty of it,’ Badger said, and cut the link.

  They read their stuff.

  When the door of the ready-room opened, the co-pilot, Tristram, did not look up from the Old Testament. Dwayne allowed his puzzle book to drop into his lap and chewed his pencil stub. The side gunner, Federico, was deep in Aerospace & Engineering magazine, but shifted his feet without taking his eyes off the pages to allow the pilot to go to the door where a communications technician handed him the scrambled receiver-transmitter.

  When he came back in, no more than a minute later, Federico again swung his legs to give the pilot, Eddie, space to pass. Dwayne and Tristram did not look up but waited.

  The pilot said, ‘We can go at any time from now. If we go it’ll be into a hostile environment and close up against the border. There are two guys up there and right now it’s a bad time for them. It’ll be us that goes in for extraction – if that’s the call – and the others do top cover. It won’t be a night for sleeping.’

  The pilot, his side-kick and the gunners looked up from their reading matter and sat taller in their chairs. They peered through the open window and could see the helicopters, floodlit, on the apron, fuelled and armed.

  The old woman, the mother of the Engineer’s wife, had shown them the way. When Foxy was dragged off the quayside, kicks were aimed at him. He was cursed and spat at.

  All his senses reacted. He could feel pain from the kicks and the wetness of spit. He could smell the sweat on their bodies and the food they had eaten on their breath, and he could hear them. Not easy to understand because they used the vernacular of country people from the south, and he thought they’d have been recruited from farms and villages, not a major town. He was dragged. They had stripped the gillie suit off him and he was left with his underpants, socks and his one boot. The rope was still below his armpits and across his chest, burning the skin. He was on his back and more of the flesh was stripped raw on his buttocks and the back of his thighs. He reckoned the heel without the boot bled from the sharp stones embedded in the ground. They thought he was a spy. They didn’t know if he was alone. Some said he was because no attempt had been made to rescue him or to shoot at them as the boat had closed on him – they argued about it. He could measure the excitement of those who had taken him. Was he American, British, or a pale-skinned Iraqi – a Sunni bastard from Baghdad or a Kurd from the north? That was also an area of debate. The goon, Mansoor, strutted beside him. Foxy was bumped along the dirt track away from the house and he saw the old crow woman, in her black, framed in the window, watching. His eyes met hers and he read hatred. He felt a growing numbness to the pain.

  It wouldn’t last. He had seen men who had been taken.

  The rope was tight on his chest and seared him. He had seen men taken in the Province, had stayed on in the hide and used his encrypted communications to guide in the arrest team. He had had image-intensifiers if it was dark and early on a winter’s morning, or binoculars if it was summer and already dawn. All of those taken had been experienced men, well practised in the techniques of resistance. All would have regained composure within a half-minute of the door being flattened, the kids starting to bawl, the dog kicked into the kitchen by troops and the woman scratching at the faces under the helmets. All – by the time they were brought out of the door into the fresh air, frosted or already warm – were calm and their composure came from the knowledge that they might endure a kicking or a slapping, but not much worse, then go into the cages at the Maze and mark time until freedom came. He had not seen one Provo plead and weep – they’d had no cause to: they were not about to be killed or to undergo severe torture. They might have done at the start, in the old days when the war was coming up to speed and when ‘robust methods’ had brought PIRA to its knees, but a halt had been called long before Foxy’s time. And he had watched once from a distant ditch, in the Somerset hills west of Taunton, the Quantocks, when an animal-rights activist had been taken from a cottage at dawn: he had burned a laboratory to the ground and driven the scientists working there close to suicide, but he had seemed to think little of going into custody. He had not been about to go through any hoop, and had known it.

  It would be the goon’s finest hour. What every security man dreamed of.

  Foxy’s head bobbed, rolled, and the back of his skull found stones to bounce off; some of the chips were razor-edged and slashed him. He could be thankful that the pain, for now, was numbed. He had done time with the interrogation unit at the Basra base. He had seen Iraqis brought in from the cells of the Joint Forward Intelligence Team – a separate camp within a camp, not answerable to local commanders: those men had known fear, and had cowered. They had had the scars to show what had been done to them. Foxy had sat at bare tables alongside the men and women who organised the inflicting of pain. He had been opposite prisoners who shivered and mumbled answers that he had had to strain to hear, then dutifully translated. It could, of course, be
justified. The men under interrogation knew the inner secrets of the enemy’s principal campaign weapon: the improvised explosive device. They might know who made them, who trafficked them, who laid them, and their answers could – a big word, could, often used by the team – save the life of a nineteen-year-old rifleman, a teenage driver’s limb, or a lance corporal’s sight. People said, from far away in the safety of London, that torture did not provide truth. Foxy would have said they were wrong. He would have claimed that, delivered as an art form and from manuals, it made a man cough. He was not given the freedom of the team’s mess, but they couldn’t operate without his language skills so he had been tolerated, given an occasional beer and told that information extracted and translated had led to the finding and defusing of a weapon, or a raid on a safe-house, or the interception of a courier.

  He knew that pain worked miracles.

  So Foxy understood what was coming to him. When his head twisted, lolled, he could see the barracks, and the light shone down from the street-lamp and fell on the door. The rope went loose and the goon called for a rag to be brought. A guard ran inside. Foxy kept his eyes closed. There were Escape and Evasion people at the base and they said eye contact was bad, that being a sack of potatoes was best. They did the SERE courses, and talked of Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. Few people listened closely because the lectures seemed to add to a nightmare – as they had when men talked in the canteens about what to do if PIRA took them.

  Foxy’s head was lifted and a hand tried to get into his hair for grip but could not, so grasped his ear, lifted, and the cloth covered his eyes. It was yanked tight and the knot hurt at the back. His ear was let go and his head hit the dirt. Then the rope bit again under his arms and he was dragged some more.

  They went onto concrete. He rocked on a step after the top of his head had cannoned into the raised bit – that provoked laughter. There were no more kicks, and he thought that already he was less cause for amusement. There was a fucking cat that lived two doors down from his home, and it liked to come into his garden, pull down songbirds and disable them. Then it would walk away, interest waned . . . He was pulled down a corridor, then to the left. A door was unlocked. Predictable that they’d have a lock-up: for a criminal, a miscreant on a discipline charge or a foreign-born agent who was deniable.