Foxy had heard, on his Basra tour, that the body could lose a quart of moisture through sweat per hour. He lay still. Ping was croppie talk for having a close view of a target. Could have been eyeball, which was general for all police agencies on surveillance duties, but the guys who bagged the shit, bottled the piss and were an elite talked of pinging a target… It was the talk that kept Foxy alert. Good to think of himself as ‘elite’. He deserved it.
She moved slowly in the sunshine at the front of the house. Her man was Tango One and she was Tango Two. Foxy reckoned her more important to their endeavour than the husband, and more likely to cough up the evidence of a destination. When she was outside, or when she was inside the room with the open window and he could see her shadow move or an interior light lit her, he eased the controls, lifted the volume and struggled for greater clarity in his earphones. He believed it was from her that he would break the damn thing, then get on the move, retrieve the gear and head for the extraction point. After this, Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes – not breaking any confidences, of course, and not spitting too much phlegm into the face of the Official Secrets Act – would be a big man, a valued man, a man in demand. ‘Elite’: he deserved that title, had done since the days he’d lain in the hide on the hill above the farm near Cappagh in County Tyrone and been there long enough to feed the warning that the Barrett 50 calibre was on the move. Guys from Intelligence, and special forces, had called his stake-out ‘epic’, and the battalion adjutant, the unit that had fouled up the cordon and missed the damn thing when it was moved, had made a personal apology, saying that ‘such outstanding surveillance was short-changed’. This was beyond any category he had before been involved in.
The young ’un slept beside him.
There was more washing going out, more pegs slotting on the line, children’s stuff and her husband’s clothing. She would not, of course, hang out her intimate clothing where it could be seen by the guards from the barracks. Her mother followed her and carried the plastic basket with the shirts, shorts, socks, the kids’ dresses, towels and washing-up cloths. He had the binoculars on her, 10?50, but didn’t use the spotter ’scope. The visuals were of small interest compared to the audio system – wouldn’t have said it into Badger’s ear, but the microphone was well placed on the mud spit and well camouflaged. The gear was good and the sound quality was fine but their language was difficult for him because they didn’t speak, mother and daughter, in the classical but in the vernacular. He understood each time she wanted another peg, that the small boy’s shirt had not washed well, and that the girl had torn a skirt playing outside. He had to believe that the clue would be given him.
The young ’un slept. It was unequal. Badger could sleep for the full three hours while Foxy was on stag. When Foxy slept, Badger would elbow him if there was conversation on the patio. He had been woken when the Engineer had come from the house at dawn and paced at the water’s edge, enjoying his cigarette and talking about football scores with two of the guards. He had been woken again when the car had come and the goon, Mansoor, had repeated the warning about keeping clear of the centre of Ahvaz, then asked about the Engineer’s day. He had seen the shrug and heard a remark about ‘meetings, all the day is meetings’. And a question was asked about the suitcase, but he had not caught the reply and had assumed that the wife approved of it. Then he had been allowed to sleep again. Twice he had received the elbow and been told that he was snoring. Foxy, as routine, dug his fist into Badger’s hip each half-hour to wake him and then lie that he was talking or grunting in his sleep. If Foxy couldn’t crash out for three hours, he was damned if Badger would sleep without interruption.
Yes, it would be good. There would be nods and winks, hints-offered, but the secrecy governing where he had been and why would be preserved. He would be introduced as the man who had gone into opposition territory, who had lain up in circumstances of quite extraordinary privation, had witnessed mass murder and delivered, had won through. He would talk about the skills and disciplines needed to achieve aims and ping targets. Who did he have with him, or was he alone? He might be asked that. He’d had a greenhorn, something of a sherpa, there – basically – to hump the gear. He’d enjoy that, and would be feted. Ellie would be proud and… The washing was out on the line and hung limp; there was no wind. There were more flies than before.
The flies had been bad the previous evening, had disappeared during darkness and been replaced by mosquitoes. Now, in the full glare of the sun, the mosquitoes had gone and the flies were back – big bastards. They droned and probed at the scrim mesh on the camouflage headgear and they were on the mud-caked skin of his hands. He thought it remarkable that they didn’t wake Badger, that he could sleep through their persistence. In the night, Badger had taken the shit bags and piss bottles out of the hide, wriggled on his stomach into the reed bed, dug a little pit – on the water line – buried the bags and emptied the bottles. Without the bags the flies should have been less interested. Didn’t work that way. They’d come on in swarms and searched for routes through the scrim into his ears, mouth and nose, settling on his hands. He felt the prick as they bit, but he couldn’t anoint himself with repellent: it would provide an alien scent.
She had the line filled with washing. Ellie often asked him to empty the washing-machine and put their things on a line when she was in a hurry for work and doing her makeup or running late. It was usual for him to iron his shirts and her blouses. He had learned to iron after he’d gone to London, leaving Liz in the north with the children, and did it well: Ellie was sometimes too busy with overtime at Naval Procurement to get home early and iron. Quite often, Foxy cooked the dinner.
He thought she’d have been a fine-looking woman if the illness hadn’t ravaged her. She was quite tall, not dwarfed by her husband. The lenses showed her figure when she moved and the robe was pressed against her body. She would have seemed handsome from fifty or seventy-five yards, with a strong nose, good cheekbones and a chin that gave off authority… Different when he watched her through ten times magnification. Harsher lines, a greater stoop in the shoulders and the wince at the mouth when she turned or reached up with the clothing or a peg. He sensed a steeled determination to complete the basic task. He watched her. It was what he did well.
Abigail Jones had not met Len Gibbons. She imagined, because he was ‘old school’ that he would have moved to a temporary billet, a London club or a camp bed wherever he had set up his operations centre, and that he paced, even chain-smoked, while he waited for a telephone call.
It would have been three years ago, just before she was shipped out to Iraq when she was coming to the end of her London duty, that she had been leaving the canteen area, and the older woman with her, whom she’d known from the Balkans, had stage-whispered a choice morsel about the man standing, seeming elderly and vacant, at the counter, then moving his tray.
The telephone would not have rung because she had sent no message. There was to be no radio traffic, and no satphone communication other than to transmit information categorised ‘critical’. She had nothing important to report.
The woman, Jennifer, famed for indiscretion, had been in Belgrade while Abigail worked in the Sarajevo embassy and they’d become friends, distant, when sharing escape weekends on Croatian beaches. ‘When you get down to Baghdad, darling, don’t eff it up like that one did in his youth. In this hateful place they like to deal in one- chance-only scenarios. A good man, a nice man, and they said he was really capable. He was advanced, given responsibilities. Such a sad story. Never recovered fully, like blight in an apple orchard, and it was thirty years ago.’ Gossip was forbidden, mortal sin. Abigail had asked what the man had done and where he had done it. Jennifer had chuckled and declined to expand on her story – except to tell her that the man was Len Gibbons, left for ever like a bit of driftwood, high and dry, when the tide slipped out. They had parted, gone off in different lifts to different floors, and she had forgotten about the tale until, six years later, she had been told Len Gibbons would field her reports when there was news worth imparting.
He was hardly going to want to know that she had lain in the sand, swaddled in a mosquito net, with her firearm on the ground beside her, fastened by a lanyard to her wrist. He was hardly going to be concerned that she had barely slept, and that Corky and Harding, Hamfist and Shagger would have slept less, that those she proudly called the Jones Boys had used two flares and a thunder flash and had maintained a perimeter of sorts. There hadn’t been a charge but a creeping infiltration, the creaking of stressed wire as the fences, already sagging, had been flattened. The flares had stopped them, had held them in the shadow at the edge of the light pool. The thunder flash had scattered them, driven them back. Hamfist was the one who knew most of this sector and he’d claimed to read the madan mind. ‘You can give the feckers – ’scuse, miss – a flash and a flare and we’ll be OK. If it gets to us chucking about the lead we’ll have to quit.’ The flares and the flash had stabilised it during the night and, first light, Corky had urged her to get the treasury open. ‘We can’t shoot them all, miss, or it’ll be worse than Bloody Sunday. We should try to buy them. Do it like an auction – start small and haggle like it’s the bazaar. They’re all Ali Babas, miss, and don’t forget it.’
She could picture him: she’d seen him once in the canteen and a couple more times when he’d been near her as she’d come off a bus near to the Towers’ entrance. There had been a weighted look to him, that of a man burdened: she’d define that as pallor in the complexion, straggling hair, a shuffle walk, clothing that was a little too
