He didn’t think she watched the birds or had seen the otter. On his earlier watch, a pair of pigs had crossed in front of him, would have swum over the sunk cable from the microphone, with just their snouts above the water.
The light had changed and was no longer on her face, but the sun’s force was now more to her left side and her cheeks were not in its glare. Badger couldn’t say whether there were still tears. Maybe earlier she had looked too closely into the sun’s reflection from the lagoon and her eyes had watered. A woman who ran a mine-clearance campaign might be made of stern material – or might weep in private because of what had happened to her, to her man and her children. He didn’t know.
Foxy farted. The foul smell hung around them, the residue of the last Meal Ready to Eat they had shared – beef in some congealed liquid. If someone had walked over them, he or she might have thought they’d picked up pig shit on a boot.
He reflected: there was no other way to do the job that the Boss, Mr Gibbons, had set them. They had to be there, marooned and… He watched her.
She was not the woman of a drugs-dealer he had once kept pinged, day after day, while she lounged in a summer garden close to her pool, wearing not much on a rare warm week, and she was not one of the women from the tinkers’ camp who had pegged out washing, lounged and smoked while the men planned thieving, and she was not the woman with the mousy hair and pale face, mistress to the man whose wife was under the patio extension and who would be led away, handcuffed, as the digger moved in. He had pinged many women who were consorts of a target and had not felt any of them were special or worth interest.
The Engineer’s wife dominated any thoughts of Alpha Juliet. An instructor on the last week before Badger had been awarded his Blue Book, certifying his surveillance competence, had told the group that thinking of sex, stripping down women, doing business with them, was excellent for holding the concentration needed in a hide when paint drying might have seemed interesting. He had said that far and away the best shagging he’d had in his life was when he’d been lying on his belly, enveloped in a gillie suit, with nothing happening. It would have been good to remember Alpha Juliet – a fine, strong girl who didn’t blather, didn’t seem in search of commitment and seemed to have chosen him for better reasons than that she had gone without for a week: unfathomable – but he couldn’t remember Alpha Juliet now. He stared through the glasses at the woman, and because he kept the focus on everything familiar about her, he knew which crow’s feet were deepening at her eyes. Her breathing seemed harder, and her mouth would twist when the pain dug.
‘You’ll call me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Because without me you’re worse than useless.’
He didn’t answer.
Foxy went on, ‘And keep watch all round.’
A point of principle: he didn’t react and kept the glasses on her. He didn’t take orders from the older man.
‘Why are you only watching her?’
No response. He held the focus. Her hands were very still, and he thought she had a serenity.
‘You gone soft on her, young ’un? Unprofessional if you have.’
Badger held his silence.
‘If you’ve gone gentle on her, just remember who she is. She’s the wife of Rashid Armajan, bad bastard, bomb-maker and enemy. She shares his bed and, before she went sick, used to spread her legs for the guy who spent his days planning the next generation of nasties to kill our boys inside Iraq. I feel nothing for her. She would have kept a nice tidy household for him, left him with no worries in his life other than working out the best way to blow up, mutilate and kill coalition troops. He was pretty good at it. Forgotten what the man said? ‘A small number of clever and innovative men is capable of wrong-footing us so consistently that the body-bags keep going home, and the injured with wounds they’ll carry to their graves… We call an enemy a Bravo. Rashid Armajan is a big bad Bravo.’ That’s what the man said. She’s that man’s woman and what she has in her head is immaterial to me. It matters that, because of what’s in her head, he’ll travel away from here. Nothing less, nothing more. In case you’ve forgotten it, young ’un, the ceremonies at Wootton Bassett when the dead come home didn’t start with Afghanistan killed-in-action troops. They started with Iraq. We couldn’t stay in Iraq because of the bombs, his bombs, bombs turned out on a production line to the Engineer’s blueprint. My Ellie calls them heroes, the soldiers brought through that town. It’s fantastic, such an honour to those soldiers, to have thousands line a street in respect. Only, sad thing, they don’t see it. They’re in the box. A good number of them were put there by that man and his talent for bomb-making. Because of him, all that the rest of us can do is stand on the pavement and give them respect, which is something but not much. A good number of the first heroes who came through were victims of explosions, his bloody bombs. And maybe by now his gear’s in Afghanistan, I don’t know. So, I have no love for him, and I’m not going soft for her. My Ellie talks about Wootton Bassett and the heroes… Are you getting my drift?’
A crisp whisper. ‘So much of an enemy that we’re going to turn him.’
Surprise, a murmur. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘It’s interdiction.’
‘So, it’s interdiction. Yes.’
‘I checked it with the Boss. It’s their way – spook jargon – of describing an approach. “Interdiction” is “approach”. They hope to turn him.’
‘Is that what he told you?’
‘They’re going to turn him, Mr Gibbons said – like it’s a defection.’
Foxy muttered, ‘Time for my sleep. Wake me when there’s something you can’t do.’
She had fine features and she sat so still. Her back was straight in the chair and she gazed ahead. Almost, her eye line was on him. Nobody came to her, she had no one to talk to, and Foxy slept. The wind had gained strength and he heard its rustle in the reeds.
Chapter 9
‘What the hell are you-’
‘Wake up.’ As normal, when Badger used his elbow to dig into Foxy’s ribs, he held the palm of his hand across the older man’s mouth, loose but a reminder.
‘Where am-’
‘In the hide in the marshes in Iran. What more do you need to know? Could give you the co-ordinates, except you bloody dropped the
The voice whistled back, almost shrill, between the teeth: ‘I was saying, before you fucking interrupted, “Where am I looking?” That was my question.’
‘You don’t have to look anywhere. Just listen.’
The headset was already off Badger’s ears. He tried to pass it to Foxy. Foxy muttered that he needed a piss, always did when he woke up. Badger told him to wait. The cable was caught in the front of Badger’s gillie suit, had fastened itself among the material strips sewn into it and the dried-out reeds. You couldn’t pull a cable tight and hope it would free itself, and it was underneath Badger. They were in darkness, hip against hip, elbows locked and legs bloody nearly entwined. Their movements had roused the mosquitoes, and there were convulsions under the covering that shielded them. The cable wouldn’t come free. Insults were swapped.
‘Be careful, you clumsy bastard.’
‘Use your fingers!’
‘How did you snag it?’
‘If you stayed bloody still I could free it.’
Badger laid down his night-sight kit. It was the hour before dawn. His fingers felt for the tangle in the cable. Foxy had his head down, grappled for and found the headset and put it over his ears. God alone knew how, but the
