Inside every American compound life was now stultifyingly dull. No fire fights, no patrols, no finds of arms caches, and no bodies to be photographed They stayed behind the blast walls and saw nothing of the country but its skies, blue and merciless. They pumped iron, played basketball and smoked what they could find. The helicopters broke the monotony and intrigued them. On immediate stand-by. Prepared for a mission. Cloaked in secrecy. They attracted attention. When the cabin doors were pulled right back, medical gear and stacked gurneys were visible.
Tristram closed down the engines and Eddie did the calls as the switches were flipped. Dwayne wrapped a tea towel round the breech of his machine gun and the rounds in the belt, then secured it with tape. Federico aped him.
For those on the ground, the rubber-neckers, the attraction was that they might see – a final time – the birds take off and fly low over walls and fences, then across the desert and go into actual mother-fuck combat. The suppression fire of the machine guns would be called for, and there’d be blood on the cabin floor, lives at risk and
… It was a dream, and good enough for the voyeurs. In draw-down days, excitement was sparse.
They jumped down, boots hitting the tarmacadam of the apron. A few pocket cameras were pointed at them, but their shades were good enough protection.
Tristram said, ‘I got the whole lot of charts and the software fed for the Iran frontier.’
Eddie said, ‘Up to the frontier, not over it.’
‘I have that. The far side of the frontier and they’re on their own. Not negotiable.’
‘Wherever they’re coming from, how far over the frontier, they have to get this side of it. For us to go over there is classified as an act of war. Into Iran, and when we land back I’m up for court martial, bet your life, and castration. No one will believe the navigation screwed me.’
‘But it would be good to fly a last time.’
His voice dropped: ‘Problem is, if we get called they’re in deep shit out there. At the edge of survival. For the sake of those guys, I half hope we don’t get to fly a last time.’
‘I don’t want state secrets, but are you any further forward?’ She had come into central London carrying a plastic bag filled with clean clothing.
‘Can’t say.’ Len Gibbons’s shrug was expressive. ‘Honestly, my love, I don’t know.’
They were in the same coffee shop across Haymarket from his office, and she had already shown him the shirts she had brought on the train. Pity there were no shoes – the only pair he had with him were damp from so much rain and sleet, and now from the sprinkle of snow.
‘Just trying to plan. Audrey said there’s a meeting at the garden centre, advice on how to protect shrubs in winter. It’s next Monday. I didn’t want to accept her invite if you’d just come home that evening. Is it likely?’
He grimaced. ‘In the dark and I haven’t a candle. Be on the safe side, and go.’
They had been through much, had walked those routes together, and he’d valued her as a crutch when the world had caved around his shoulders. Her hand had come across the table to rest on his fist. Her rings were witness to the commitment they had made to each other before marriage and before the career setback. He would not have survived it without her, and he had often speculated which dreary branch of government he would now figure in if he had allowed himself to walk away from Six: Work and Pensions, Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, Education and Sciences?
She had a habit of lowering her voice until it dripped conspiracy. ‘Is it a big one?’
‘By my standards.’
‘People on the ground, at the sharp end, in danger?’
‘I carry the responsibility.’
She looked far into his eyes. ‘Is it like the old days… when you were young, tilting at windmills, the world yours, and me running to keep up? Like that?’
They might have been alone on a Suffolk beach, in a Scottish forest or on a Welsh hillside, and only honesty counted. Len Gibbons said, ‘I can hide it pretty well, but I’ve not felt such excitement in thirty years. I’m alive with it. I’ll go to the end of any road in front of me to see this one through and make it work. Three decades of sneers and titters, I’ve lived with… This sort of makes it worthwhile. All those bastards who put me down, I think I’m going to walk all over them. I feel blessed to be a part of it… Is it going to happen? God’s truth, I don’t know. I’m willing it to… Just have to believe it will.’
She smiled, would have tried to offer encouragement. ‘It’ll be all right, Len.’
‘If it’s not, and goes public, they’ll crucify me at the Towers. .. but it’ll be worse for those at the sharp end, on the ground.’
He lifted her hand, kissed it, passed her another bag, the dirty bundle, and was gone out of the door. The snow had eased, but the sleet drove hard. They were never out of his mind, those for whom he carried responsibility – and the man he targeted.
It was the end of his day. The Engineer stood in the anteroom outside the brigadier’s office and the secretary gave him the fat envelope, telling him it contained his travel documents. He opened the envelope, glanced at the top sheet and said the itinerary would exhaust his wife. She shrugged. She reached down for the big envelope at her feet and said these were the X-ray and scan results requested from Tehran. She unlocked a drawer. From another envelope she took two passports, both bearing the crest of the Czech Republic. Finally from a plastic pouch she took a mass of euro banknotes and ostentatiously counted out a thousand in different denominations.
He read her attitude. Were there no better calls for foreign currency? Was there not a medical framework inside the Islamic Republic superior to any other? Why was so much deference shown to him?
The items went into his briefcase. She rang through, then indicated cursorily with her hand that he should go inside the office. He was greeted. Did he have everything? Was he satisfied? He did and he was.
He wondered whether this ranking officer knew of the questions put to him by a colleague and whether a crude trap had been set for him, or whether the regime was indeed a house of cards. But, that early evening, he was not to be tested and tricked.
‘Come back to us soon and safe with the best news of Naghmeh… I would like you to consider who you are, and therefore understand the esteem in which we hold you. You are, to us, our Nobel or our Kalashnikov, even our Oppenheimer. You are the father of the bomb in the road… Do you know of a town in England, Rashid, that stops when the coffins come through, or of the crowds that line the bridges of the Highway of Heroes in Canada? Do you know of the communities in the United States that come to a silent halt when a local soldier is brought back? You sapped their will to fight, Rashid. You broke their commitment. When the time is judged correct your devices will be shipped to Afghanistan and the sophistication of the war raised. Afghanistan will be fertile ground for you. We will not tolerate the Great Satan’s military – or the Little Satan’s – against our borders. Our prayers go with you.’
He was kissed on each cheek and went out of the door. He hurried to the parking area and looked for his driver. He could not telephone her, never did, so he could not tell her what was in place until he was back at his home.
Stomach runs had arrived, one of the many strains of ‘Basra belly’. It was early evening and the air was cooler, but without a wind, so the smell in the hide was foul. It had come on fast.
Bowel movements were not a chosen subject for conversation among croppies. Nor likely to be, Foxy would have said, among astronauts. How moonwalkers or surveillance men did their business was not big on the talk agenda among colleagues. One minute Badger had been lying beside him, on his rest time, and the next he had been squirming to turn over, and the top of the hide’s camouflage, above the scrim net, had jumped. He had scrabbled for the plastic bags.
Not a smell for living with. Foxy – relief writ large – was more constipated than the other way. There was nothing he could have done – had he wanted – to help. Diarrhoea was part and parcel of a croppie’s job. Foxy did not know how much was in Badger’s trousers, how much in the bag and how much had spilled onto the earth of the hide. Badger was wiping hard, almost furiously. They had with them tubes of sanitary jelly that cleaned hands and that was next on Badger’s list. Then the pills. They hadn’t spoken since the punch was thrown.
On the headset there was only the crackled voice of a radio announcer and music. He watched the front of the house and waited for the car to come, for the children to run out and the target, the Tango, to get home. Strange old life he lived… Because of RIPA, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the trade of law- enforcement surveillance was watched, eagle-eyed, for abuses. Couldn’t call a bad guy a ‘target’ in a briefing because it might come up in the legal process, and to name the accused, in court, as a ‘target’ was likely to be
