but she waved a hand and he let it play on. Harding, the American, would be sitting on the building’s outside step, with an image-intensifier sight on his weapon, watching the broken gate and the parked Pajeros.
A burr in the accent, and a whisper: ‘They all right, ma’am?’
‘They’re fine.’
‘They know what they’re into, ma’am?’
‘Probably as much as is good for them.’ The torch was switched off and the jazz lulled them. She sat, cross- legged, with her weight against a loaded bergen.
‘Rather them than me, ma’am.’
‘A fertile imagination isn’t called for… Foulkes – Foxy – told me what he regretted most was that I’d taken his wallet off him. He’d got a photo of his wife in it, and wouldn’t have it with him. Maybe other aspects bothered him, but that was all he let on.’
‘I don’t have a picture of the wife, the ex, or the kids. I sent them money for new bikes last Christmas, didn’t hear back. Doubt there’d be any tears if an RPG aimed straighter, except that the money would stop.’
‘The younger one, Badger, reckoned I was good. Why? Because I hadn’t used toothpaste or soap today or yesterday. His story – the best of the South Africans when they were fighting Cubans in Angola had their teeth falling out. Why? Because they were the most dedicated covert-skills guys in the bush, and toothpaste is like soap – the scent lingers. No soap, no toothpaste, no cigarettes, no alcohol, no curries and nothing spicy. I suppose it was a little lecture in how serious the work is, the way that scent and smell last. I may just have been too damn idle to use toothpaste and soap. Oh, and armpit spray would be an appointment at Abu Ghraib. I learned that this evening.’
She asked herself again, ‘What did you do that for?’ And answered, ‘God only knows.’
They were in grey light. Grey sky before the sun came up above a berm on the left side of the track, to the east of them. Grey water, brackish and stagnant in the centre of a lagoon, and grey mud with dark cracks that showed how far the marshes had been drained artificially, then flooded, then drained again by the dams upstream and evaporation; drought from lack of rain. The reed banks, also, had no colour – that would come with the morning.
Two Pajero jeeps, low on their chassis from the armour plate fitted to the doors and engine casings, the added layers of reinforcement underneath, kicked up dust trails as they took a raised track between what had once been lakes, and went east. No radio on in either vehicle, and no conversation: the briefings were finished and had been reiterated over sips of bottled water before they had loaded up.
They drove along an old bund line, packed dirt and mud thrown up three decades before in the early months of the war with Iran, by bulldozers and earth-moving gear, for the convoys of Iraqi tanks to traverse the marshlands and reach the border for the drive towards Susangerd and Ahvaz. The four employees of Proeliator Security, the officer of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service and the two deniables had no interest in the history of the terrain they crossed.
There was no talk of them being in the lost Garden of Eden, or having passed alongside the Tree of Life in al-Qurnah during the night, or that they were where the Great Flood had occurred and the Ark had grounded. They did not observe that they were in the ‘cradle of civilisation’ where cultures had emerged five millennia before, and where a people, the Madan, had existed among the marshes since before history. Neither did they consider drainage, dam building nor drought. But they had gone by two tiny encampments, shanties with corrugated-iron roofing and other buildings in the traditional style of woven reeds, the mudhifs; children and dogs had chased after them but the thump of generators had not penetrated the thickened windows of the Pajeros. All of the buildings had been adorned with satellite dishes. The armies of the Medes, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs had been here, and the Mongol hordes. British infantry had fought a battle close by ninety-seven years ago, and had struggled in the same heat that would rise later in the day. The marshes had been places of refuge for malcontents, rebels, insurgents, smugglers and thieves. There would never be, nor ever had been, allies here for a stranger.
Ahead, the grey landscape took on light colours – red in the sky, green in the reed banks, mud brown in the water – and dust coated the vehicles. Pigs and otters took cover and birds flew away from the intruders. They could no longer see the derricks of the oil platforms – discarded, damaged, awaiting new investment in the Majnoon fields, but ahead was a horizon.
The vehicles stopped. The dust settled. In the few seconds that it hung, obscuring any view of where they’d halted, two men pitched out, then the woman, and two more men, festooned with weapons, pulled the bergens clear and the small inflatable boat. No hugs, no exhortations about the importance of a mission across a frontier, just a brisk cuff from her on their shoulders, and a nod from the two armed men. The two slid down the bund line onto cracked mud and into crackling dead reeds. The others were back in the vehicles and the wheels spun, forward to the limit of the track’s width, then reversing, and they were gone.
The dust clouds thinned.
Who might have seen that the Pajeros were lighter by two men and two bergens? No one.
The silence fell around them, a lonely quiet, intense and frightening, as it had always been for strangers who came unannounced and unwanted into the marshes.
Chapter 5
They went forward, and were into the third hour since they had trudged away from the drop-off point. Foxy Foulkes still led. There were no maps to follow and this was ground that Ordnance Survey did not cover. Anywhere he had worked in Britain or Northern Ireland there had been big-scale maps with signs marking telephone boxes, churches, pubs and points of interest, like the summit of high ground. There were no buildings and no elevated terrain. He was slowing but he’d be damned if he’d allow the younger man to pass him and take on the role of pace-setter.
There was emptiness and stillness. Both, in Foxy’s mind, were delusions and delusions bred a climate of danger. Among the reed beds and on the little mud islands that rose, perhaps, a metre above the waterline of a channel or an open space, or two metres above a dried-out bed, there would be the small villages of those marsh people who had survived the persecution of the dictator, the ebb and flow of the war fought along the frontier, an invasion of foreign troops, gassing, bombing and shelling, drainage, reflooding and drought. There would be tiny village communities that had TV screens but no schools or medical care. They could exist through murder and thieving, and by being paid for information. Foxy did not doubt that small craft, of which he had seen photographs in the intelligence reports at the interrogation centre seven years earlier, nudged through the passageways between the reed banks. He did not doubt that their progress, not as fast as when they had started out, left a track of sound. The sun was climbing.
It was now ‘bare-arsed ground’. He and Badger had, an understatement, insufficient cover, and no map that helped; the GPS handset guided him. They had been through water to their knees, in stinking mud to their ankles, and in reeds that towered over their heads. The option now was to walk in more water or climb a bank, scramble to the top on all fours, and get on a bund line, or it might be a berm – there was a difference. A berm was an earthwork thrown up by bulldozers as a military defence or a flood barrier, and a bund was a raised road. To go up would make an easier route but they would be exposed – ‘bare-arsed’ – which would break every rule in the croppie’s bible. He wanted water… Better, he needed water.
And speed. He realised he couldn’t set the pace required. To get onto the flat top of the bund, or the berm, would ignore one of the core basics – Foxy taught them when he was out with recruits: Shape, Shadows, Shine, Surfaces, Space and Silhouette. If he went up onto the bund, and took the young’un with him, he would be silhouetted against the skies, the reeds and the mud – might as well have brought a bull horn with him and shouted that they were coming. He stayed down.
His boots went through the water. It was a small satisfaction that their prints in the mud would be hidden by the water.
There was clear, quiet breathing behind him, like the guy had no problems with the weight of his bergen. If they were seen, they would be at the mercy of thieves, who lived off what they could steal and sell on. They would be stolen and sold on, and then they’d be right for the orange jumpsuits, and for what used to be called ‘the Baghdad haircut’ in the interrogation centre. The sun’s light and strength drained his energy, and the cloying mud
