round the neck, and an anorak. He held out the keys. ‘Your husband’s, Mrs Foulkes.’
Half asleep, early in the morning and no alarm set: ‘What?’
‘Bringing back your husband’s car. We picked it up from the car park where he left it. Sorry we couldn’t manage it yesterday.’ He was turning away.
It was a forlorn chance. ‘And where is he? Where’s he skived off to?’
In mid-stride he paused, angled his face to her. A laugh without a chuckle. ‘Don’t imagine they tell me things like that. Not for the likes of me to know. Just a thought – if he’s away more than a couple of weeks, I suggest you turn the engine over, so’s the battery’s not flat when he gets back.’
She closed the door on him, failed to thank him. Upstairs, she checked an Internet site, a town hall’s page, learned a date and a time, then called the guy who did accounts at the Naval Procurement offices.
He stood under a palm tree and gazed out over the marshes.
They were a source of fascination to him, an endless pleasure. He enjoyed little in his life. Mansoor was in his thirty-first year. He should, by now, have been prominent in the al-Quds Brigade, looking for further promotion and higher command, but the chance was denied him because of the explosion of the Hellfire missile fired from the Predator drone, neither seen nor heard, and giving a warning in fractions of a second as the light stream and the roar of power fell from the sky.
He could stare out over the marshes, watch the wind move the reeds and ruffle the trees on the island across the lagoon, see the hunting herons and kingfishers, the ripples on the water when the fish rose and always there was the changing weather – threatening, benign, calm, dramatic – and the light. No two days were similar.
He would not advance because of the injuries. Muscle, tissue, even some bone had been torn from the back of his left leg, above and below the kneecap. He would have recovered better if he had been close to medical aid: he had not. Numb with pain, Mansoor had been carried on a litter from northern Iraq across the mountains. The hospital where he had received the first serious treatment had been in the Iranian city of Saqqez. There had been traces of gangrene in the poorly bandaged wounds and the surgeons had deemed it necessary to take as much again of the remaining muscle, tissue and bone as the missile had. His limp was pronounced and his future as a combat officer was finished. He had been sent to the marshes on the border as security officer to the Engineer, Rashid Armajan.
He would not have believed it possible. He knew the names of the birds that flew over the water and nested in the reeds, those that were gentle and harmless and those that had sharp talons and wickedly curved beaks. He knew also where the otters lived and bred, where there might be pig with young, and which island had the greatest infestation of poisonous snakes. He also knew that in these marshes, half a century before, there had been striped hyenas, wolf packs and, rarely, a leopard. Crippled, he provided security for the Engineer and learned about the beauty and life of the marshes.
At first, while his wife continued to work as a computer operator at the Crate Camp Garrison, he had loathed the prospect of guarding this man. He had, almost, considered leaving the al-Quds. He had arrived at the house, had been billeted in the barracks that fronted onto the lagoon, had come to know the family, and the wild life of the marshes and could not have said now which mattered most to him.
There were godwits and a small swimming group of pygmy cormorants and babblers, and he kept Japanese binoculars hanging from his neck. It the birds panicked he would look hard to see if a pig had disturbed them, a large dog otter, even a leopard or a wolf. It might be pilgrims going to and from Najaf across the border, or smugglers bringing opiate paste from Afghanistan and crossing Iranian territory. The birds were, almost, the sentries that watched over the little community, and more efficient than the men he commanded. With time, he had realised he was honoured to have responsibility for a man as important in the defence of his country as the Engineer.
That morning he had been called by his father, an informer for the Revolutionary Guard Corps. He was a part-time postal official and also helped with the executions at the city gaol. He was a man of few talents and many interests, who let it be known that his son had failed to fulfil expectations. His father would have expected to ride on the back of his son’s successes; he had been uninterested in the medical prognosis after a section of his son’s leg had been gouged out by a missile, and more concerned with his return to authority and influence. That day his father had telephoned him from the prison with details of the public hanging of two Arabs. He had been the link between the hangman and the crane drivers in their cabs, telling them when to hoist the arms. He had enjoyed the morning; it had gone-well. From his father’s knee, through his time as a recruit of the Guard Corps, during his selection for the elite al-Quds, and lying on a makeshift stretcher to be hauled across mountain tracks, he had honed a hatred for all enemies of the state, whether Arabs in Ahvaz or the distant operators of the remote guided Predators. He could not salve his loathing of the Great Satan, take revenge for his damaged leg, but the Engineer had hurt them, which enhanced Mansoor’s loyalty.
In the evening, he might bring out his fishing rod to catch a carp and then, too, he could watch the marshes. He was devastated by what he knew of the illness of the Engineer’s wife. He was, he thought, almost a part of their family.
There was stillness in front of him, safety. The lenses of the glasses roved over the water and the flourishing reed beds. No creature moved sharply or thrashed to escape.
In the heat of the afternoon, the police came. They had two battered pick-ups. Corky had alerted her when the dirt trails were still more than a kilometre away. She had shrugged into a robe and her face was part covered with a scarf. Both Corky and Hamfist had done this territory with their regiments and would have regarded the police as deceitful and treacherous – they had probably sent a few to martyrs’ graves. They had talked this through and the drills were understood. Two spotter ’scopes up on the bund line round the wrecked drilling camp looked down into the marshes that surrounded the site. Harding was behind one and Shagger had the other; both had bird books and pamphlets beside their stools. Abigail had not seen an individual come close to the camp, and none of the Jones Boys had warned her of a ‘dicker’ looking them over from cover. They would have been told, and they would have come. The routine was that she would explain in her halting Arabic that they were a part of a UNESCO-sponsored eco-watch, additionally funded by National Geographic. They had the full support of the ministry in Baghdad, and the provincial governor’s office. She had the papers of each organisation to prove her point: a clutch of ‘To Whom It May Concern’ letters, all with impressive headings, a fifty-dollar bill attached to each one. She had anticipated that after each paper was examined the money would have gone. She knew what they earned, and remarked that she and her colleagues were grateful to the local police for watching over them. She could bore, and did so: her anxiety about the potential for oil pollution of this amazing habitat, unique in the world to Iraq; the species of bird and animal life here, needing monitoring, which were not found anywhere else in the world. Iraqis, from across the country, could be proud of it. Had they not been told she was coming with colleagues and an escort? She had the smile and her appearance was harmless, but the policemen would have seen the two men gazing out over the marshes through ’ scopes, breaking off to write in notepads. They also had cameras, while two more carried automatic weapons and were in the shadow of the buildings. When she had bored them enough, they left.
She said to Harding, ‘That was probably good enough for today, and maybe for tomorrow, but they’ll be back. I don’t think in a couple of days they’d manage enough links to unravel it at Baghdad or Basra level. Three days, maximum four, would push against the limits.’
He nodded. Truth was, she liked him more than the others. The original quiet American, he spoke rarely but, of them all, he was the one Abigail trusted with her life.
She said, ‘I doubt the Fox and the Badger will be in much shape after three or four days.’
Was it flawed? Two men who might have been inserted too late and find the bird flown, or had gone in too early and would be unable to sustain the watch. They might be there too long and show out. She had liked the scrapping between them. There was no way other than to have men on their stomachs, peering through lenses with earphones clamped to their skulls. It couldn’t be done with satellites on the electronics in the drones. It would be their shout. The mission depended on them. She had thought the antipathy, at each other’s throats, more likely to raise the competitive streak that would dominate their relationship. Too cosy, and they wouldn’t be efficient. It was personal to Abigail Jones because she had examined Badger’s bruising and had worked a leg over his pelvis to see it better. He had said something about the smell of her body, then the taste, and she had done as much stripping as he had. She had made a complication where there should have been none. She always kept a couple in her wallet, and when she had gone at first light to clear her system the condom had gone into the hole with their rubbish for burial. All a complication, but Abigail Jones did not do regret.
