A Deniable Death

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘Not going to be fun, Foxy, the next bit – and it’d be good if you helped yourself a bit. Know what I mean?’

  He went deeper into the water. The level rose. He realised that Foxy’s head, upside-down, would go under. He didn’t break his step and the mud gave him a useful grip. He twisted Foxy a bit so that his head lay on the side of the inflatable. They went further out, and he could follow the path of the two jeeps’ lights, bouncing. He thought they were now on a rough track that, maybe, hadn’t been used for many years – the longer the better – and was crumbling. They were moving slowly. If he was ahead of them, for all his burdens, when they swung and came after him, he reckoned he had a chance – slim but a chance – of reaching the extraction point. If they were in front blocking him, and the dawn light came up, he didn’t feel inclined to make any bets on himself coming through, not the chance of a cat in hell. He had seen Foxy’s body, and had heard his screams, and the two encouraged him to keep going forward. His breath sang from his mouth and each step was harder, the burden heavier.

  ‘Don’t get it into your head, Foxy, that I’m doing this for love of you.’

  He was out of his depth. His feet flapped and had nothing to grip against. The weight of the bergens steadied the inflatable, which had to take most of his own weight, and Foxy’s. It didn’t seem possible to Badger that he should tip the bergens into the water and rid himself of them: instructors always talked about the requirement of bringing back kit and in Stores they grumbled if it wasn’t accounted for. It was an obligation to return it after an operation. Requirements and obligations were part of the bible he worked to.

  The lights of the jeeps were harder to see. Important? Yes. It told him that dawn was coming, not there yet but not far away. If they blocked him when the dawn had spread its light, it had all been for nothing. He thrashed his feet, and attempted to paddle with his free hand, and they went forward. If they were blocked . . . Who was listening? Maybe some pigs were, an otter, the birds, but the men in the jeeps wouldn’t hear him.

  Badger said sharply, ‘Not for love of you, Foxy, no. I don’t even like you. And you’re a fucking passenger hitching a ride.’

  Twice they went under. Twice he choked and cleared his throat, then spat out the marsh water. But he kept the pace. Had to.

  Chapter 18

  A wind had risen. It came from the south, perhaps the south-west, and ruffled the water Badger waded through. It was a warm, vigorous wind. It flapped the tips of the reeds off to his left. The bed below him was uneven. Sometimes his boots found a grip and then he was able to lurch forward faster with the inflatable and the weight over his shoulder. He used the craft’s rim for buoyancy when the bed fell away under him. The wind helped to drive him on.

  Little white crests were now whipped up and water splashed over the sides. He fancied that the bergens shifted because they were floating in the bilge. The wind brought the sounds closer of the two jeeps’ engines. If the wind, steadily strengthening, had been from the north, or the north-east, he might not have heard them straining in low gear on the the bund line that was little more than loose-packed sand. Had he not heard them and been able to plot their position, he might have slowed and clung to the rim of the inflatable, let his legs dangle in the water.

  The engine noise drove him forward. If the jeeps could get past him, then swing to their right and come from his left, his route to the extraction point was blocked. Rest was not possible. Badger could not have said when, if ever, he had felt so tired, so hungry and thirsty. He thought once, very briefly, of pictures he had seen on television screens: refugees on the move pushing prams laden with possessions or carrying little suitcases, or the skeletal figures of men gazing at an eyewitness from the far side of a barbed-wire fence. Mostly his mind was blank, as if the screen had been switched off, and the matter of the moment was getting the next secure hold for his right boot on the mud, then following it with the left. Crisis was when the right boot, or the left, slipped and pitched him forward, Foxy’s weight dragging him down. Triumph was when the left boot, or the right, had good grip and he seemed to surge. It was like the flight of a wild animal. Maybe a deer, isolated on Bodmin moor with hounds closing, would have understood what drove Badger on.

  He wasted breath on speaking aloud. ‘Don’t help me. Don’t do anything. You’re Foxy, the big man. Leave it to me. I’m the boy, there to do fetching and carrying, the one who has to graft. You’re the top beggar, Foxy, right? Please yourself. Leave it to the boy.’

  It might have been clever of Badger to strip off the gillie suit and go on in his pants, socks and boots, but he could not. It was about his culture: he had to bring back two bergens, a gillie suit, headgear and Foxy. Badger no more considered ditching the suit than leaving either bergen to float on the water, or dropping Foxy in the hope of increasing the possibility of his own survival.

  ‘Do I like you, Foxy? No. What did I get? I had the short straw. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and some shitface had written the wrong stuff in my file, and the computer chucked me up. You don’t deserve me, Foxy. There are some God-awful people who do my job, guys I wouldn’t take water off or a biscuit, guys who are crap. They’re the ones who should have been here, watching over you. See if any of them would have lifted you up and kept going with you. You’re a lucky bastard – say it, Foxy, say, ‘I’m a lucky bastard.’ Better, shout it. Foxy, shout, ‘I’m a lucky bastard to have Badger with me. I didn’t hear you.’

  The whipped reeds sang in his ears and he heard the splash of the small waves he breasted, the little thuds when the inflatable bounced on the crests, and – clearest – the jeep engines.

  He fell.

  He tumbled forward and was buried below the surface. For a moment the great weight kept him down. He struggled to draw in his knees, bend them, then raise his body. His head broke the surface.

  Water fell off him. Algae and weed were in his face. He understood. The bed sloped upwards. He had tripped because it was no longer flat. The water was at his knees, not his waist or chest. He was in the shallows. He still had Foxy on his back and he was left with one free arm to drag the inflatable. It grounded, then came free again. When it grounded the second time it took a greater effort to free it. He could see the headlights and hear the engines better. He could also see ahead.

  The first minutes of dawn made grey and indistinct shapes: might have been raised ground, another bund line or another bed of high reeds. He had gone before on instinct, taken the direction he thought was the most direct path to the extraction point. The light had washed through pastel shades and no clarity. The jeeps were ahead of him, and they swung. The headlights didn’t reach him, but if they kept their course they would stay ahead. He crested a slight slope.

  In the last minutes of the old night, Badger would have seen nothing ahead of him. The first minutes of the dawn, and the new day, showed him an outline of the ground ahead. He tried to remember, and failed. He couldn’t remember the ground between the hide in front of the house and the half-sunken strand of barbed wire that was the border. Close to it was the toppled watchtower. He could recall the burned-out tank and its broken tracks, could picture where the trucks had gone down off a bund line and into the water, contaminating it with old engine oil. He could remember and picture what was on the far side of the border, between the line marked by the rusted wire strand and where the Pajeros had brought them, but couldn’t recall what they had crossed, skirted, waded through to get close to the target location.

  He went over ‘bare-arsed ground’, no cover, and broke the laws that were carved on the tablets of the croppies. He did Shape, Silhouette and Sound, because the inflatable scraped on the dried mud and broke across reed stumps, and Space because he was bunched with the inflatable, which was more of a sledge than a water craft. He didn’t do Shine – he’d broken every other law – but they hadn’t been teaching ‘flight for life’ when they had made the laws of covert surveillance. He went on. Badger thought that within a few
minutes, three or four, they would be across his route out and a line of them would be confronting him. They would have the first of the low sunshine on him – easy shooting, clear.

  ‘Didn’t think of that, did you, Foxy? Didn’t reckon on the trouble I’d have getting you clear, did you? All right for you up there – but I’m bloody nearly on my knees. I’m suffering, Foxy. Have you nothing – anything – to say?’

  Moments returned, filtered in his memory. There had been buffalo in the water, and a settlement – too small for a village – with concrete-block buildings and TV dishes. They had made a wide detour, but that had been daylight and this was dawn.

  Different noises. Engines revved. It was the sound there had been on the roads north of Bristol during the winter before last. Ice on the roads, snowdrifts on the verges, too much for the gritting trucks to cope with. Badger was in the southeast of Iraq, in the marshlands where the temperature would soon top 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and he remembered the ice and wind-chill of a West Country winter. Tyres spinning, no traction. The racing and shrieking of the engines, the snow, ice and refrozen slush spitting out behind the wheels. Badger understood. The headlights, to his left, were static. No snow, no ice, but drifts of fine sand that would have come in on the winds and caught the top of a bund line. They were loose enough, and deep enough, to block the axles and spin the wheels.

  The light grew. So little time was left to him. They would abandon their jeeps and run.

  The inflatable split and air hissed from it. Badger had Foxy on his shoulder. He heaved on the thin rope and went forward, pulling the bergens. The raised area he had gone over would have blocked off the ground from the water, and might have given – in a long-ago war – tanks the chance to manoeuvre in battle formation over what had been marshland. He had no cover, and the light was coming. Badger did not know whether he would be ahead of them and their line or too far in front of them for rifle fire to be accurate.

  Dead in the mind now, only a wild creature’s demand to survive, but the weight on his shoulder, and what he was pulling, meant he couldn’t raise his speed. Away to his right, the east, the sky lightened.

  ‘Fuck you, Foxy.’

  The jeeps would go no further.

  Mansoor yelled, lifting his voice over the screaming of the engines. At first he could not be heard and the men sat tight, the sand spewing back to coat the windscreen of the second jeep. He hammered the butt of his rifle on the dashboard, and was heard. He yelled to them to kill the engines.

  Silence fell. The officer of the al-Quds Brigade could not have said when he had last slept or eaten. His recall of the night went back no further than the frenzy with which he had struck his prisoner. He had hit, kicked, used his fists and had not backed off. Fear overwhelmed him now. He could look into the darkness and towards where he believed the fugitive was. Beyond the black of the night – with the moonlight long gone – and away to the east he saw a sliver of morning light, lines of subtle colours that ranged through deep grey and soft gunmetal, to silver and the narrowest strip of gold.

  He had his men out of the jeeps. He strained to see movement in front, and cursed. There would be on the road between the small settlement and Ahvaz, reached through villages of farmers and minefield amputees, a convoy of at least one black saloon, filled with intelligence officers of the Brigade, and two trucks of fighting men. He could not consider how it would be for him if the car and the trucks arrived and he had no prisoner. He strained and saw nothing. He gazed at the darkness, blasphemed, and was alone.

  ‘Why were you here? Why did you come to this place? Why could you not have gone to another sector? Why here? Why mine?’

  He thought himself destroyed. He could imagine the faces of the men who would have sat in the car at the front of the convoy. They would show him no sympathy, no understanding. His father in the gallows shed at the gaol showed no sympathy or understanding when a condemned man was led in to stand beside the stool on which he would be perched. Neither did he show it when a man was brought out through the gates and placed under the crane’s arm. He did not know of one officer in the Brigade who would offer understanding. Despair washed around him – and the shout was in his ear.

  A guard, from the Basij, pointed. All of them followed his finger – and saw nothing. The guard was a peasant, one of a line of subsistence farmers. Perhaps he had been sent out to sit on the hillsides north of Ahvaz and watch the sheep, be certain the lambs did not stray. The guard called that he could see a man, carrying another and dragging a load.

  They ran towards the dawn, in a chaotic stampede, but Mansoor, with his damaged leg, could not keep pace with the younger, fitter men and bellowed that they should slow, go only at his speed. He sucked in air, filled his lungs, went as fast as his leg would carry him. They were off the bund line and on flat baked ground. The strip of gold widened below the silver.

  He saw the man. Why had he come? He was alone, carrying the body on his shoulder and dragging what seemed like a khaki litter behind him. He moved at snail speed. For a moment, Mansoor believed fortune favoured him. Then he looked ahead of the man and saw the reed bed that stretched in front of him. He saw also that the first light of day had made a mist shimmer in it.

  The distance to the target was some three hundred yards, and the light was poor and— He demanded rapid-fire bursts on automatic – but they were men of the Basij, not of the Brigade.

  He had no cover. His goal was the reed bed where, perhaps, an old watercourse had run and enough seepage had survived the drainage programme.

  Badger couldn’t see beyond it, didn’t know how wide it was, but was aware of the mist. It crept towards him, and meandered among the clumps of reeds, some thick, others collapsed: it was a refuge and a goal.

  He heard the crack of bullets going above him. They thudded into the hard mud and made dirt puffs. Two shook him – they would have struck the bergens on the holed inflatable. Some were close but more were high and wide, or short and no threat to him. They gave him incentive. A paratrooper, a sergeant, had said to him on the Brecons, ‘I tell you, kiddo, nothing gets you moving better than live rounds when they’re headed at you. They clear the bowels and get you up to pace.’ He seemed now – with the whine overhead and the patter into the mud – not to feel Foxy’s weight over his shoulder, or the pain of his palm, which was raw where the rope attached to the inflatable chafed. With the light came the flies, but the shooting kept Badger going, and there were distant shouts.

  He remembered nothing of this place.

  He could have been here before or not. He had no recall of the berm he had come across and the bund line to his left, or the dried-out plateau and scant reeds in front of him. All croppies hoovered information. From anywhere and any source, information was gold dust. It might come from a lecture hall or a chance encounter, but all of it had value and should be squirrelled into storage. A driver had taken a team of them, in a police wagon, out onto the Pennine moors for a CROP on what might have been a jihadist training camp. He’d talked of his time in the United Nations police force in Croatia; there had been a story of a breakout from a besieged town and the likely result of failure was being massacred by their enemy. Those Croats had tried to go across country the fifteen or so miles to the nearest haven, and some had been captured – slaughtered – because they had ended up going in circles, all sense of direction lost. They were so weak from lack of sleep and food that they had doubled back on themselves and, two days later, had been where they’d started out. Not a story that was easy to forget. Badger remembered the trite laughter among his fellow croppies. Now he had no compass, but he had the growing light in the east. He, too, was clapped out from exhaustion and hunger.

  He would get to the cover of the reeds and the low mist and would push through. He wouldn’t see the Pajeros in front of him but the house, the kids playing with a football, the barracks and the lamp-post from which a fraying rope hung. It was a nightmare. He shouted, ‘We going right, Foxy? You’ll tell me if we’re w
rong? Least you can do, stuck up there, is tell me if I’m off course.’

  There seemed to be an answering yell, but not from Foxy.

  Badger twisted his head. He could see over the skin of Foxy’s buttocks. The officer limped among his guys, ranting at them. The shooting stopped and he made a line of them, then brought them forward.

  ‘Foxy, is there any excuse for dumping the inflatable and one of the bergens?’

  The line of guys, with their officer, was around two hundred yards from him, and more shots were fired, but wide. He had fifty yards to go until he reached the reeds, but the mist came towards him – might last thirty minutes, but every other morning it had burned off quickly. Might be too quick for him.

  ‘There’s the one with mostly clothing, not that we’ve used it, some of the kit and the last of the grenades. The other’s where communications is. There’s not much in it either. What you reckon, Foxy?’

  More yelling from the officer, and they veered away from the direct line, turned a sharp angle and went into the reeds. Nine men with their officer. The foliage swallowed them. They would have seen, from where their jeeps had stopped in loose sand and they had elevation, how far the reeds went, and would have judged they could make their cordon line on the far side.

  ‘I’m going to dump both bergens, Foxy. Goes against the grain, hurts, but at least it’s all sanitised. Don’t bloody critise me.’