he had heard. No question came.
Had he been asked, he would have whispered, airily, that he had heard nothing of importance. It always threw interrogators waiting for an interpreter’s translation of a suspect’s fifty-word statement when a digest of around five words came back. He would not have said that the talk was of ‘defection’, rejected, and ‘abandoning family’, out of the question. He could have added that the Engineer and his wife spoke quality educated Farsi to each other. He could have latched onto a discussion, brief, that the Engineer would himself be a target if the regime failed and his association with the Revolutionary Guards Corps became general knowledge. He could have finished with an assessment, from the Engineer’s voice pitch and the wife’s, how their morale stood, and he would have assessed that her nerves were near breaking point and she was depressed. He said none of it.
It annoyed him that the query did not come – annoyed him enough him to hiss, ‘Not interested? Don’t you want to know?’
‘If there was anything I needed to know you’d have told me.’
‘I thought you’d want to hear their talk.’
‘Only if I need to know it.’
The headset was taken. He felt the strength of the young ’un beside him, little bastard, eased over and broke wind again. The bloody flies were swarming over the scrim of his headgear.
Would they come to blows? Foxy reckoned there was a chance of it. He closed his eyes, thought about sleep, and more about Ellie. He wondered where she was and what she was doing. He could have drunk a two-litre bottle of water straight down, but it was rationed, a discipline that couldn’t be broken. They had the water they had brought in – the greatest weight factor in the bergens was water. Only thinking of Ellie could clear his mind of the need for more water than was allowed. He rinsed some in his mouth, then swallowed it but eked it out. He couldn’t think when he had last disliked a man – loathed or detested one – as much as he disliked Badger, and he thought it mutual. It was probably inevitable that they would fight. The quiet closed round them.
It was the last hour before the grey smears appeared on the horizon in the east. They were all exhausted and needed sleep. None of them would get it.
It was the crisis time. The Jones Boys had usurped her. She didn’t give the orders, didn’t open her mouth and make suggestions – she did as she was told. The extent of the crisis yawed ahead of her.
Each of them – Hamfist, Corky, Shagger and Harding – wore their T-shirts: they had gone into their bags, dug them out, stripped off what they already had on and had done a fast change. The extent of the crisis brought them together, made them a team, and a team needed a uniform: from a uniform came strength. They were paid to protect her, so they would. She had passed control to them. She knew them like the callouses on her hands, the virtues and weaknesses of each man, but she could not have said who among the four would emerge as the leader. None had. Interesting to her, because the sharing of their responsibilities showed – her opinion – stunning trust. But they were trained as fighting men, when trust was implicit, and now they were fighting.
She thought it medieval. Abigail Jones had childhood memories of traipsing around castles, mostly motte-and bailey, in the Welsh Marches – Ludlow, Caus, Wigmore, some that were shoulder-high ruins and others that were towering relics – and her father, the barrister, had lectured on battles, sieges, the storm tactics of attackers and desperate defenders, and she had imagined men-at-arms running from one battlement to another to stem the latest thrust, knowing that if the line was broken, the wall fell, they were gone, throats slit. Shagger had the vehicles, Harding had the door of the building, and Abigail tagged along with Corky or Hamfist.
They chased shadows caught in the beams of the big torches. It was not the ultimate attack, but probes – and if they found weakness they would come on, do it big-time. A mob always knew how to sniff out weakness, and she thought a crowd of men from out of the marshes – gassed, bombed, their habitat drained and their buffalo dead – would know how to scavenge for weakness, would be bloody near gold-medal standard at it. At first the shadows had kept back, hugged the no man’s land between light and dark.
They were bold now, and the crisis had come.
They must defend the building alongside which the Pajeros were parked, and try to keep clear the approach ground between them and the broken perimeter fence. In front of them was the familiar track to the dragged-back gates, but behind them, inside the compound, was darkness.
The first blow was from Harding. His weapon was his M-16 Armalite rifle’s stock. Two had come, light-footed and silent, from the shadows, and were a moment away from getting inside the building where the gear was, the water and rations, some of the ammunition and enough of the grenades. Abigail, chasing after Corky, had seen them and Corky had shouted the warning.
It was the crisis because Harding hit one in the testicles with the stock of his rifle, then struck the second across the face. A double-tap, of sorts – one movement, two casualties. The first went down and was retching at Harding’s feet, might have thrown up on his boots, and the second was reeling back, clutching his mouth. Blood was easing out between his fingers, and she fancied he might have spat away a tooth. The first act of physical violence was the start point of the crisis.
She had ceded control.
It would have been the grossest impertinence for her to shout, ‘Don’t shoot! For fuck’s sake, don’t use live rounds.’ A killing would be a disaster. A wounding and hospitalisation would be a catastrophe.
Bruising, missing teeth, abrasions were manageable.
Knives were shown at them when a larger group, six or seven, ran towards the vehicles from different directions – the nearest thing to co-ordination. If the first strike of a knife had hit, and one of them had gone down, they would have been dead – all of them. Dead meant Harding never getting back to see the aunt who had reared him in the trailer camp and never again getting value for money from the Russian whores in Dubai. Dead for Corky was a telegram to a housing estate in west Belfast, being opened by old people he had not seen in twenty years, and two kids who would not have a father. Dead in Shagger’s world was a farm never bought and reoccupied by an elderly couple, pedigree sheep never grazing the fields that looked onto mountains. Dead was Hamfist’s divorced wife getting a large cheque from Proeliator Security and maybe going as far as digging out a photo of him and putting it on the sideboard for a week. And, dead was Alpha Juliet – surrogate mother of the Jones Boys – never again looking into the face of Badger, deciphering nothing, learning less, and seeing in the eyes a message of self- sufficiency and reliance on no one. It had captured her… And dead was having the smelly rag-heads crawl all over her and likely shag her carcass. There were knives in the torch beams that might have been used to gut a good-size carp or skin a dead buffalo calf, or to slash the reeds from which their homes were built.
The alternative to being dead was to quit.
If they quit, they left behind Badger and Foxy, and a mission that had taken months to put together was aborted. She remembered the sergeant who had explained, shyly, that his work was routine, quite boring – he’d spent three and half hours on his knees while he dismantled a device left in a shallow hole near Highway 6, made it safe and gave the forensic people the chance to trace a DNA sample and to find the date-seller and the road- sweeper. She wouldn’t quit.
Hands were on her. She smelt sour breath and felt long nails catch the waist of her robe, then the pressure pushing her downwards. Beside her a knife flickered in Shagger’s beam, and might have been about to close on Hamfist’s chest. Corky came. He had an iron bar. It might have been used once to support barbed-wire defences. Corky was from an estate where knowledge of street fighting came at about the same time as primary school and first communion. He lashed around him. There were groans, a scream. The hands were off Abigail. There were no faces, only hands, and some had their own blood on them. Three knives were lined up. They were at the edge of Shagger’s torch light. She recognised it. They were together to feed each other the courage to charge forward, and the knives were raised boldly. If one of her Boys was down, it was over.
More had gathered behind the knives. They would swamp the Boys and her – there were so few of them, four guys and their ma’am, because the wisdom said that the fewer bodies on the ground, the greater the chances of going in and out without being identified. She hadn’t argued with the wisdom – and the knives’ blades flashed. She didn’t know which, but either Corky or Harding threw the first gas grenade and it rolled among them. The smoke burst from the canister and enveloped them. They were pale figures caught in a white cloud and they seemed to dance as they choked. Another grenade was thrown and the cloud thickened. It was harder to see them, but easy to hear the choking and the coughs.
They took their casualties with them, five who were helped towards the gate.
She knew what she had to do. Her head ached, and the gas was in her eyes, making them water with needle pains.
