Badger bridled. ‘I can see better than you.’
There was a silence, and self-satisfaction on Foxy’s face. The silence meant there was something he should have seen but had not.
Badger backed off. He was not prepared to beg for an explanation. He bit his lip and looked again. The bird hopped twice, then came down heavily. The goon was most of the way through the last cigarette and kicked the packet along the edge of the quay. For the first time in that long day he did not seem totally engrossed in the bird. The woman – the mother of the Engineer’s wife – came out through the front door with a glass in her hand, went to the goon and gave it to him. They talked. The children might have had a meal or a story, might have watched the TV. They had been lively when they had come home from school in the middle of the day – one had played with a ball, the other a skipping-rope.
The shadows lengthened
The heat of the day dissipated.
His throat was dry.
Foxy was now fully alert and used his glasses to rake over the bird, the house and the goon. His view slid between the pier where the dinghy was tied, and the barracks and the bund line beyond.
‘Where all this began… I said that in an hour it’ll be dark enough for me to get forward and bring back the microphone and the wire. Are we arguing?’
‘Heard you the first time,’ Foxy said.
Many hours dead, one more to kill, then the journey to the extraction point.
He was breathing hard.
He threw down the cigarette, stamped on it.
There had been months of boredom in Mansoor’s recent life, weeks of tedium that had seemed to drift on with neither high spots nor low moments, merely ordinariness. He had to stifle the panting. Tension gripped him.
He could not show it.
His back turned now to the lagoon, as the light fell and shadows stretched far behind him, he walked with a clipped, slow step – as if he had no further interest in what he had turned away from – towards the door of the house. He took the mother back her glass, then called to the kids. One was playing football with two of the guards and the other had a toy pram. He took them inside and tried to suppress any hint of authority in his voice that might frighten them; he gave no appearance of uttering an order.
With the children inside, he told their grandmother to keep them there, to wait two or three minutes and then to close the door. He thought her a strong woman – anyone of her age would have lived through the battles in either Susangerd, Ahvaz or Khorramshahr and would not have survived if prone to panic: they had been vicious battles with few prisoners taken – women had been killed, women had been raped. She should close the door, bolt it, move the children to the back of the house, but leave the radio or TV on in the front and not draw those curtains.
He walked now across the dirt, saw the cigarette packet, picked it up and headed for the barracks. He did not speak to the two guards who were still sitting in the shade of the trees. He would not have trusted either to act out the relaxed and typical scene – its tedium – if he had spoken to them of a security alert. They would have run round like headless chickens. He kept to the tree line where the shadows were thickest and would go to the barracks by the side entrance. He would not be seen and would give no warning to a watcher.
The bird had moved, had stood.
The cable had been pulled up and had made a loop. He would not have seen it unless his glasses had been on the bird. The loop had raised a length of black-coated metal, which he estimated at between thirty and forty centimetres long.
Mansoor had been in Iraq. He had been there during the difficult days when the troops of the Great Satan had attempted to load maximum pressure on the resistance and on the al-Quds teams sent to guide and advise. He and his colleagues had been lectured that they must always be vigilant against surveillance: no use of mobile telephones, no meetings with sensitive personnel outside buildings where they could be identified by the drones in the skies – the precaution of changing meeting points so that patterns were not established and bugs installed – and he did not think his eyes had deceived him. He had seen a loop of wire and a length of tube, and they were among the dead leaves on the mud spit. How long had the debris been wedged there? Two or three days, no more. Had there been, three or four days before, a sufficient storm to flush out those leaves and dump them high and dry? There had not.
He went into the barracks and woke the men who were sleeping, tossed those who played cards from their chairs and switched off the television. He told the armourer what he wanted and how many rounds of ammunition should be issued to each man. The light was slipping and the high lamp on the post by the barracks, where it ran alongside the far end to the quay, had lit. Evening was coming, and he had only glimpsed the loop and the tube. He did not feel confident enough to demand reinforcements from Ahvaz, and did not wish to hand over the matter to a more senior officer.
He could hear, down the corridor, the chains rattling as the rifles – Type 56 assault weapons, made in the People’s Republic of China – were freed from the armoury’s racks.
‘Do I take a Glock?’
‘You won’t need one.’
‘It’ll be out of your weapon’s range.’
‘I won’t be behind you.’
Badger spat, ‘ “Won’t be behind you!” Great. I seem to remember I half carried you here.’
Calm, authority, a voice used to being heard, not contradicted: ‘You won’t need a Glock. And I won’t be behind you.’
‘I don’t understand what shit you are coming with.’
‘It’s about the quality of the eyes.’
‘Mine are as good as any – all the tests show it.’
‘It’s what you didn’t see, young ’un, when the bird moved.’
‘The bird moved, didn’t take off, settled. Perhaps, last light, it’ll get a frog and-’
‘You saw nothing. You don’t need the Glock and I’m not behind you. You’re not as good as you thought you were.’
‘Which means?’
‘I’m going forward – and I’ll decide when – and I’ll retrieve the microphone and the cable. Clear?’
‘It’s my job.’ The calm fazed Badger, made him uncomfortable – always difficult to argue when a man refused to be riled. He wondered if the older man was capable of getting across the clear ground, through the reed beds, then wading fifty yards and doing the reverse trip. Badger reckoned, when they came out, he would be carrying two bergens and likely have Foxy hooked on his back. ‘I’m going.’
‘I make that decision.’
‘No. I do that sort of thing. It’s for me to do.’
‘I’m going to tell you two things, and do me the courtesy of closing your mouth and listening. If I could square it with any last vestige of professionalism that I have, I’d get you to load up the bergens – now – and we’d sneak out. We’d leave in place the microphone and the cable. They’re found and the balloon goes up. The effect of that is that calls are made and they end up in Lubeck, having been processed through every floor of the Ministry of Information and Security. He will be pulled out, meaning that everything we did was for fuck-all of nothing, and he can make some more of his little toys. Hearing me?’
‘That they’ll find the gear within the next twenty-four hours? A big ask.’
‘You don’t know what to look for – and you’re blind. It’s already been found.’
He might have been punched in the crotch. Badger folded. He could still see the bird and it could not have been famished sufficiently to go hunt another frog for itself, and the feathers on its back were pink from the last of the sun that would be down, buried, in the next fifteen minutes. Changeover time coming. The flies would have been exhausted after bombing the scrim net for all the daylight hours and the mosquitoes would have rested and would be hungry for flesh and would be coming out, hunting. He stank. His stomach was bloated from the tablets, could hardly make wind, and precious little of his body was free of the bites and the scabs had bloody grown and the sores oozed. He looked for the goon and couldn’t see him, then for the cable and couldn’t find it.
