A Deniable Death

by Gerald Seymour

  She’d had no communication with Badger, had tried enough times for a link. He was not switched on, maybe had not the time, or inclination, to talk. Maybe he’d been taken . . . and was dead. Her obligation was to be at the extraction location. If she held her hand above her eyes, down almost to the bridge of her nose – where her freckles were thickest – and squinted hard, she could see a wall of men, not soldiers or police but marsh men, the madan, from the cradle of civilisation. Ninety years before – she had read it in the digests preparing her for service in Iraq – they had been described by the British military as ‘treacherous and deceitful’. They lived in the shelter of the marshes from which they ‘looted and murdered indiscriminately’, and the last invader to have taught them a degree of discipline had been Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, eight centuries back. They would be formidable but bluff. An appearance of unshakeable will and unstoppable force might win through. She did no more pep talks. If they went into the crowd and broke legs, tossed bodies, crushed teenagers, and fired gas, but did not break through, they would be torn limb from limb, like the security people trapped by a mob in Fallujah. They were all good at the wheel, her Boys, but she was happy, in difficult times, to have Hamfist driving. The first Pajero was level with her.

  She couldn’t speak to Harding because his head was encased in his gas mask and he had canisters across his lap. Corky’s gas mask was on his forehead, and the engine was revved. She hitched her loose skirt, climbed up and into the back seat of the second Pajero, Hamfist’s. Whatever the outcome, she would have diplomatic immunity, but they would not: the immunity once enjoyed by men working for private security contractors had long since been withdrawn. They might face big problems. Not her. Had she said, then, that the issue was ridiculous and given an instruction for a route across the sand onto Highway 6 and the road south to Basra – and safety – she would have been ignored. Abigail would have lost her credibility. She sat in the back, with hardware around her and had her pistol on her lap, cocked. She hooked the straps of the mask into place.

  They surged.

  Would the waters part? Would the fucking Israelites stay dry or get soaked? Time to get an answer.

  Corky threw some, and Shagger did, then zapped up the windows. Harding and Hamfist had thumbs down hard on the horns. Inside the armour plate and the blast-resistant glass, she could hear the thud of the grenades letting out the gas clouds, the thundercrack of the flash-and-blast ones, the banshee bellow of the horns. She held the pistol tight. Some scattered in front of Harding, but others were thrown sideways. Hamfist’s went over something that might have been a leg, a stomach or backbone. If Harding stopped, or Hamfist, they would be ripped apart, cut into small pieces, and the men would lose their balls. Fuck alone knew what they would do to her. Her own people lived among the Lancashire county set where they hunted, shot and regarded themselves as affluent country heroes. They always preached that a driver should never swerve to avoid wildlife on the road, or for a domestic cat or dog, but should go straight through it and so retain control. Harding did, and Hamfist. They were through the gas clouds, the crowd was thinner, and they hit the barricade.

  It would have been built during the night. Old wire, rusted and sharp – good for getting up against the axles and snagging them – some collapsed fencing and a couple of oil drums. That was the first. The road was raised and the banks fell away and the local Clausewitz would have thought it good for blocking the milch-cow run. They went through it. The wire sprang up and thrashed the windows. Hamfist nearly stalled, which gave the young bloods the chance to get close and their fists were against the windows. Abigail saw the faces and the hate: she knew what would be done to the Boys and didn’t care to think what would be done to her. They were through the first block.

  The second was more of an art form. The first would slow them, but the second would stop them, and then they were fucked. She hung on to the back of the seat in front. A gang of twenty or thirty were either side of the second block, and had axes, hammers, spades and firearms. Maybe the worst thing would be fire. They could be burned out. If they were stopped and the engine was lit, they would have to come out, as rats did when smoke was pumped down their hole.

  Harding swerved. In the lead Pajero, he would have used all his strength to swing the wheel. The vehicle swayed, made like it would overturn, and went down the bank. About six foot down, Abigail reckoned. She thought they were going over when Hamfist followed. Went down on two wheels, then crunched back onto four, and the Boys were shrieking, as if it was a victory moment. They bounced on the dirt below the road and went through what would have been a disused irrigation channel. The wheels took traction again. She had no idea how many injured they had left behind. They bumped back onto the road, where the bank was less steep, and stripped off the masks. She didn’t like triumphalism, but it was as if she’d loosed her dogs.

  A half-mile down the track, astride it, was the sheikh’s big car. The man himself was sitting on a collapsible chair beside the road. The kid with him held an umbrella above his head to shade him from the sun. Corky went straight on, did not swerve out of the impact. He hit the BMW 7 series a full power blow in front of the left side wheel and sent it off the road. The track ahead was clear. She wondered where they stood, as regards the time and the Golden Hour.

  She uncocked the pistol, put it back into her inner pocket.

  Quiet, a little stunned at the violence she had unleashed, Abigail said, ‘That was burning bridges, and no going back over them.’

  Hamfist answered, ‘It was called for, miss.’

  They drove hard, and she didn’t know what they would find. She made a link with the operations people at the Basra air base and promised co-ordinates. It had been necessary, but ugly . . . and it might be that everything she had started had turned to ugly. They went, trailing sand, towards the extraction point – could go nowhere else.

  It was ground he could handle and Badger made good progress through the reeds. The stems were close set, but he had the skills to insinuate himself, and Foxy, between them. He took each step carefully, tested the weight and kept his boots off the dry, brittle fronds. It was an illusion of success, and he knew it.

  Ahead, already, light filtered through – not from above but from the front. Following this line, he would come within the next several minutes to the edge of the reeds. They thinned fast and the sunlight came into them. It was the same when he looked to the sides. The reed beds, and the soggy mud in which they thrived, were a fool’s sanctuary, Badger knew . . . He could hear them around and in front of him.

  He thought they had boxed him, two at each side and the officer, Mansoor, and the others behind him. There were shouts from the officer. He had regained control and had them organised as he wanted. More were out ahead. He heard the answering calls from the guards and the orders from the officer. Badger was at the limits of his endurance, on the edge of what he was capable of doing, bent by a burden and exhausted. But his mind worked. He realised he was being herded towards the guns, same as the pheasants.

  He went on. He told Foxy why he pushed forward towards the ever sparser reeds where the light shone brighter. ‘Better that way, Foxy, on our feet and going towards where we belong . . . Better to be moving than on our backs when they close round us, us looking up at them, scared, and them pissing on us. Better going forward, Foxy.’

  He heard other noises, clumsier and heavier, and couldn’t place them. He was bent low, found it easier to get a right boot in front of a left boot if his spine was tilted forward. It seemed to spread the weight better.

  They were closer behind and the reeds were thinner ahead and the sun came on brighter and the near dark of the thickest part of the beds was gone. He couldn’t control the depth of his tread and the mud between the stalks of the reeds left perfect indentations, as good as any scenes-of-crime officer would want. The mud was uniform. He couldn’t find wider stretches of deeper water, to his knees or his thighs where he could go to hide the trail. Neithe
r was there a way through where the ground had dried out. Screwed, yes. They had his trail now. Their calls to one another were growing in excitement and he thought them louder to give each other confidence. The shouts of the officer were more frequent as if he, too, sensed an end game was near. Twice more he had heard louder sounds of surging movement, and had heard also a snort of breath. He thought that among the guards there must be one perhaps more obese than the others, winded from his efforts and . . .

  He heard the men coming nearer to him, driving him towards the voices at the front. They would have their best marksmen at the front. Badger wouldn’t be able, when he was flushed out of the reed beds, to run, weave and duck. With the bergens dumped, he could manage a crabbed trot, barely faster than when the paras did forced speed marches on the Brecons with eighty pounds of kit on their backs.

  ‘Foxy, what do you weigh? Must be a hundred and fifty pounds. Don’t worry, I’m not dumping you.’ Important to say it. Foxy wondering whether he was going to be ditched and left to face them again.

  ‘We’re going out through the front of these reeds, Foxy, and it’ll be breaking cover. I don’t know what we’ll find, except there’s guys out there in a cordon line waiting for us. I’ve got the Glock, and a full magazine in it, but I don’t know how far we’ll be from the extraction place, and whether we’ll get any help from them. The border’s ahead but I don’t know how far.’

  He couldn’t hide and they had his bootprints to follow. The camouflage of the gillie suit was wrong for the reeds – good for sand and dried dirt. They were close to coming out of the cover and the light around him was more brilliant. Maybe it was that time the squaddies talked about, when they said they thought of their mothers and fathers, the girls they’d been with and babies they might have made. The bloody flies had found him and were striving to break into the headpiece. Maybe it was the time when squaddies decided whether they wanted Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones to play them into church – and maybe it was the time when squaddies became angry and wouldn’t accept the obvious. In half a dozen paces he would be out of the reeds and guns would face him.

  ‘There may be good ground for us and there may not. I just don’t know. I’m saying, Foxy, that we aren’t taken – not prisoners, no. You up for that? Whatever I shoot, there’ll be two rounds left.’

  He heard the crashing and breaking of stems, and didn’t understand it.

  ‘That’s one for you and one for me. You know what, Foxy? We could get a Bassett job for this. Be good, wouldn’t it? But I’m not lying down and rolling over yet. We’re going to give it a go. You up for it?’

  The scream was close. A man cried out, first in fear, then in terror, then in shock, and last, in pain. Badger was at the edge of the reeds. The scream cut his ears, louder and shriller than any of Foxy’s had been. He saw the boar break from the reed bed, blood on its tusks. The men in front of him, who had had their rifles ready and had seemed alert to their main prey, were now running to the edge of the reeds and Badger’s right. He understood. A huge thing. Maybe twenty stone of it, maybe more. As big as the one that had sniffed him in the hide and had had a short blade up its nostril. He understood that the guards at the back, behind him, had driven the beast before them, as they’d driven Badger, but a guy on the flank of the box had been in the way of the boar’s flight. Not a clever option – he might have had his bowels and intestines ripped out of his stomach wall by the tusks. He screamed again, and, likely, they had no morphine. It ran, and shots were fired at it, would have been well wide. The guy kept screaming, and the boys he slept with, served with, went to him. It gave Badger a chance. He went where the boar had, on dried dirt towards the next raised berm.

  Chapter 19

  Badger had changed the outline of his body. There was open ground ahead of him. Once there had been lagoons and channels, but the water flow had been blocked off and the sun had baked the mud during four or five years of drought. The eco-system in place since the marshlands had been claimed as civilisation’s cradle was wrecked. If a river source, or a filled canal, was left untouched, the marshes survived; if they were all dammed, the reeds died and the water evaporated, the ground dried and life failed. Behind him, the reed bed had taken a last hold in what would have been, once, a wide, deep channel. Now he faced a gradual incline that stretched to the far distance. Where there had once been channels that must have been far outside Badger’s depth, there was now a tacky damp surface below a fragile crust. He couldn’t see where they had come in, but off to the side – too far away to be of help – there was a shimmer that might have been water. He thought himself near the approach route, but not close enough to recognise its landmarks.

  He had no cover other than the low wisps of mist that were being steadily burned off. There were indentations in the ground, little scratched paths where water had once run, and stumps of reeds, broken off six inches above the mud. The stems and leaves were long rotted, and there was the ribcage of a boat, overturned and half buried, not protruding more than a few inches. There were, too, slight tumps where silt had once gathered and perhaps the current had been forced to gouge a way to the right or left. The sun was higher, clear of the horizon, and the heat built. He knew in which direction he must go, and remembered a single strand of old wire he must reach. On his own, he might have used his skills to cross the open ground. He would have reached the horizon and found the wire, part buried.

  Badger had changed the outline of his body. In doing so he could no longer hug the ground, make it his friend.

  With the screaming of the guard gored by the pig, the yells of the others and the shouts of the officer bringing chaos, Badger had taken Foxy off his shoulder – but had not rested. The beast had gone, had careered away and found sanctuary from its enemy in the wafting blocks of ground mist. Badger had not taken the time to rest his shoulder but had hitched the suit up, and heaved Foxy’s body onto his back, then drawn the arms forward until they fell over his stomach and the head rested on his neck. He had let the gillie suit drop over two of them. ‘It’s going to be hot in there for you, Foxy, a steam bath, but it’s the way it is. Nothing I can do about it.’

  He was bringing Foxy back. He had said he would, and there had been no complaint from the old bastard. He couldn’t see behind him, and to twist his head might dislodge Foxy. In front of him was a short horizon – much less distance visible than when he had stood at the edge of the reeds – he knew he must trust in his ability.

  He could hear shouts still but the screams were fainter. He would crawl for the time it took him to count to a hundred. He would stay statue still for the time it took to count to another hundred. He was on his stomach, legs splayed. His knees took some of the weight as he edged forward but his elbows took more.

  ‘The problem, Foxy, is that I don’t know whether one of them has us, whether the rifle’s up, whether it’s a game they’re playing. I don’t know what’s behind and I’ve not much idea what’s in front. I just have to go forward. You up for it?’

  He thought it right to tell Foxy what he was doing and why.

  ‘They could have a gun sight on your arse, Foxy, and mine, and we won’t know it.’

  Badger went on as best he could, his knees and elbows scraping the ground. He moved and counted, then lay, barely daring to breathe, and counted again, and he thought Foxy stayed quiet and still and Badger could not have asked more of him . . . and when the next problem came in his mind, a realisation, he did not share it, like Foxy deserved a reward . . . the next problem was their feet and their boots. Badger’s boots and Foxy’s feet. He did not know whether they stuck out from under the hem of the gillie suit: might just be that a heap of mud or an accumulation of silt, whatever the appearance his gillie suit left for the searching eye, was spoiled, blasted apart, by the sight of a pair of boots and a pair of feet stuck out from under it, and not possible for him to know the answer.

  He reckoned he had done a hundred yards from the reed bed out onto the open ground, and reckoned th
ere might be a thousand to cover. Then he’d have to hope he found the single strand of rusty barbed wire.

  His skills would count for something, but luck might count for more. They said – smug, complacent beggars – that luck had to be earned. Men with towering self-esteem didn’t accept that luck played a part in success. He was going forward again and he didn’t know how much of a trail he had left, where it was wet or where it had dried out, and didn’t know whether his camouflage was good or useless or how many were looking for him. He had gone past the boat and was level with a buffalo’s white ribs. Immediately in front of him there was a small raised patch of sand that might offer slight cover. The sun climbed above him, and the heat grew.

  He didn’t know if a rifle was aimed, whether the adjustment to the sights had been made, whether a safety was off, whether a trigger was squeezed, whether a bullet would kill or wound . . . He went forward.

  He could have treated it as mutiny. If it was mutiny, he was entitled, as an officer of the al-Quds Brigade, to shoot them. Then the proper course of action, if his orders were repeatedly disobeyed, was to report it to his superiors and the guards would face military courts and punishment. But Mansoor did not treat it as mutiny.

  Three times he had demanded that these Basij kids – peasants from the fields and the back streets of Ahvaz where there was no education – should form the line and advance with him. Three times not one had moved. It was their NCO who had been gored, raked from groin to upper chest by a tusk. Had it been one of them, a teenager, the NCO might have known how to talk to them, used a language they understood, and they would have followed him. Mansoor, an officer from an élite unit they feared, did not possess such skills. They were crouched around their man. None would leave him. It would not be possible to carry him back to where the jeeps had stalled: the wound was too deep. They held his hands, and there were sobs. His screams had sunk to the moan of the dying.