He flinched, drew his hand sharply back. The touch told him this was not wood, plastic or rubber. The coil might have been six inches across, but could have been as much as nine. It filled the gap between his body and Foxy’s, was level with their hips. He thought his touch on it had been merely the gentlest brush. Foxy slept. Badger knew what he had touched. He had not seen it, but the texture against his fingertips was evidence enough.
Foxy had gone into the reeds with the collapsible shovel, had defecated, urinated, and buried the plastic bag and bottle. Badger had not known whether he had stripped down to his boots and socks or whether he had just wiped water under his armpits and in his groin. His breath had stunk when he came back. Badger’s would have too, but the smell of their breath would have matched the general stench of the marsh and the trapped water of the lagoon. Foxy had been careful coming back, had taken an age, but had smoothed the dirt behind him and scattered more dead stuff, leaving it haphazardly put down – had done a good job. Together they had made an inventory of the water remaining: three bottles, and it should have been seven or eight in that temperature. After the exchange of the headset, Foxy had taken the watch and Badger had slept.
It could only be a snake. Badger had seen snakes in zoos when he was a kid, and there were snakes on the warmest days up in the Brecons that he had known about when stalking paratroops on exercise. There were also snakes in gaps in the heather and on flat stones, which he had seen when edging close to red deer in the Scottish hills, testing himself against their eyesight, hearing and the quality of their nostrils. Anyone who knew had told him that snakes were most dangerous when disturbed suddenly from deep sleep. Then they lashed out. He twisted his head, a considered, slow movement, and looked down into the darkened gap between his body and Foxy’s. They were both in the scraped hole and across the top of it was scrim net, camouflaged and lightweight. Reed fronds were on top of the netting, and some light seeped through. The snake filled the space between their bodies, and it was coiled tight. Its tail was towards him and he couldn’t see the bastard’s head, where the fangs would be.
It had been another hand-over with nothing to be said, and Badger could listen to the breeze in the reed tops, and the charges of birds across the lagoon. Up to the moment when he had slipped his hand down in the hope that his fingers could massage some relief from the irritation of the scabs, he had been desperate for water. But the rules were that water should only be drunk when both were awake and the watch changed. He thought Foxy slept easily, head averted, breathing regular and with a light snoring in the throat.
It was important to him that Foxy slept easily. If he was restless, he might pitch over, roll onto the snake and panic it. It would have slithered into the place it now had, between their legs, and settled itself. If Foxy’s arse landed on it, it would retaliate, it might go right and it might go left. It might go for Foxy’s hand or arm, or try to bite through the suit and the lightweight trousers, or the leg below the suit and above the socks. It might launch itself at Badger. He lay so still, barely daring to breathe, and reckoned the head, with the fangs and poison sacs, was against Foxy but less than a foot from himself. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so bollock naked with fear.
And remembered… Talk in the Pajero, not from Alpha Juliet but from the Welsh guy. All said with the lazy casualness that veterans use to frighten the guts out of rookies. ‘Couple of years ago they was overrun with snakes. The marshes shrank and there was only a quarter of the water there had been. The snakes were disorientated and came into the villages, like they were looking for people and beasts. You watch out for snakes, bad bastards. The main one to watch for is the arbid. It’s bigger than our Welsh viper, goes to about four foot in length. If you see it, you’ll know it, and I hope you never see it. Thick body, black mostly but with red on it. I don’t know about an adult, but I was told its bite kills a kiddie in around twenty minutes. Do we have serums? Sorry, no.’
Could remember it now, word for word. There was a knife in his bergen, but not on his belt. Badger tried to work out how much of an effort it would be to wriggle his body to where he could get down into one of the pouches and extract the knife, but didn’t have a clear view of it. His mind seemed closed down, not functioning for solutions. Shagger had talked some more about the mosquito problem, the tick problem, the foot-rot problem. He had gone through the list of problems as the Pajero had driven north, and one had seemed much like another – until now.
How to wake Foxy? Not easy. How to wake him and not have him thrashing around? He checked ahead and there was no movement at the house.
He imagined the prick of the fangs. He would lash at the fucking thing, but it would be faster and would hit him again in the wrist – where the veins were – and the poison would start to flow… Maybe the morphine they carried would kill him. Couldn’t have him standing up on the clear patch of mud, two hundred yards across the water from the target house, using what strength he had left to rip off the suit and his underclothing, because the pain of the venom was unsustainable, and howling…
He didn’t know what to do. With his head tilted, he could see the coil.
Foxy didn’t seem to move, but his voice was clear, soft, conversational: ‘Is this, young ’un, what you’re looking for?’
His hand came out and was close to Badger’s. His hips rolled and his arse shifted. His legs twisted inside the suit and his body tipped. Badger tried to stop him, to arrest the movement, and hissed for him not to move, but was ignored. Foxy rolled onto the snake. His weight pitched onto it.
‘Is this, young ’un, what you needed to find?’
Chapter 10
There was a low chuckle, no humour.
The clenched hand, three or four inches in front of Badger’s face, obliterated his view of the house. He couldn’t speak. He waited, in that moment, for Foxy’s backside to heave up in the air, the gillie suit to convulse, a scream, and then for the body to heave away and the snake’s- The chuckle became laughter.
The fist, under his eyes, opened.
The dirt was caked in the palm. Badger realised that what bound the mud, stopped it disintegrating as dust, was old blood. He thought the head was an inch long, the neck a further inch.
He couldn’t have said how long it had been since the snake was decapitated – might have been an hour or done in the night, the carcass kept for the joke to be played. The lustre had gone from the wound at the neck and the tissue had whitened. He saw, protruding from the snake’s mouth, open in death, the right fang. It would have been attempting to defend itself when it had died, and it was frozen in that last act of attempted survival. He tried to drag his face away from it, but the headset’s cable trapped him.
Foxy, deliberately, let it slip.
The snake’s head came to rest on Badger’s hands where they held the binoculars, and he felt his temper go into free-fall.
Foxy said, ‘You see, young ’un, you’re so full of cock that you needed pegging down a notch, maybe four or five. I meet too many kids who reckon they’re special and have achieved fuck-all that impresses me. I reckon then that it’s as good a time as any to peg them.’
He had never hit a man, or a child when he was at school. In the police, in the years before he had gone into surveillance, he had never operated in a public-order environment when the order was given to display the batons and break up a crowd. People in the section house, and those on the team, would have called it ‘red-mist time’, but he’d despised that type of violence. If the psychiatrist who had an overview of them and saw the croppies once a year had known he was liable to the mist, the fast breathing and the burn in his brain then, likely, he would have been pulled out of the job and sent home. Might have been told to find a dark room, lie down and stay there till his head went cold.
‘You were right for pegging, young ’un, because you have bullshit coming out of your mouth, ears and nose. When I get back I’m going to tell my Ellie about you, and we’ll have a good laugh. Her, me and a bottle. I’ll tell her what I did for a guy who thought he knew every answer to every question. Would you have wet your pants or shat in them? I’d like to know so I can tell my Ellie. You went into the reeds, down to the waterline, and I could see your boot treads when I went, where you squatted and where you washed. Some of the time you were about a yard away from where this creature was. It was asleep, and I’ll bet big money you never saw it.’
They did unarmed combat training in the team, and there was talk that they might – soon – be issued with Glock pistols. Arming them was a divisive issue among the croppies, but there was anxiety that a jihadist, in search of the key to Paradise and the beauty pageant of virgins awaiting him, might get a strop if he realised he was under
