About the only thing that owned Danny ‘Badger’ Baxter was the job. It ruled him. It exerted enough of a pull that he wasn’t concerned that no one had told him where they were going, when or why.
The man in front – Foxy – still snored.
He was woken by the steepness of the descent. They had come through the cloud, and there was a cross- wind, but the pilot flew as if he had the controls of a fighter aircraft. The lights for belt-fastening were late coming on, and Joe Foulkes was jolted forward in his seat, damn near catapulting into the back of the one immediately in front – the man sitting in it had introduced himself as Gibbons. He’d only given his name to Foxy, not to the fellow in the back who looked like a tramp waiting for a night shelter to open. He hadn’t spoken to Ellie that morning – hadn’t wanted to from the prefabricated lounge. He hadn’t had the bottle to explain he was on a magical mystery journey to God alone knew where and wouldn’t be home that night. If he had made the call, explained he would be absent again, he would have listened to the inflections in her voice, whether she seemed to regret it, whether she was indifferent or unable to disguise a riffle of anticipation because he would be away. But he had sent a text: Tied up workwise/called away/will ring when possible/luv massive Foxy. One had come back before they’d boarded: Shame – missing you. Love, Elliexxx. His phone was off now, would stay that way till whatever, wherever, whenever had been done.
He assumed he was to give a lecture. What else did he know? He knew that the greeter from Six might be the man of the moment and in charge, but he was shit-scared, halfway to terrified, of flying – Foxy could see the way the fists held the arms of the seat and the face was white. He knew that his best instincts were usually the first ones, and he had formed an immediate dislike of Badger, but that could be managed: his own age and seniority would determine they were not equals. He would have rank on the younger man, whose appearance was simply inappropriate and It was the sort of landing an aircraft might have made on a carrier’s deck: abrupt, short on the taxi, jerking to a stop. The big sign over a distant terminus was just recognisable as ‘Prestwick’, and a helicopter was waiting close by on an empty desert of wet concrete. Its rotors idled, then picked up speed as the Lear’s engines were shut down. The pilots came out of their cockpit door, and the main man – the one who’d have had battlefield wings over Kuwait or out of Da Nang – spoke briefly to the American passenger. He didn’t make eye contact with any of the others. Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes had several failings but idiocy was not among them. The helicopter, like the Lear, was black-painted, he could see no flight-designation markings, and they were a hell of a way from the tower and the Prestwick buildings, out of sight and out of mind. He reckoned this was a flight that had never taken place.
They came on to the apron and scurried for the chopper. The rotors blew rain into their faces, and a crewman gave them a hand up into the hatch door. They strapped the harnesses into place. The military canvas bucket seats and the frames hurt Foxy’s thighs. It was years since he had been in the close confines of a helicopter’s cabin, with the noise growing until the ear baffles were passed to them – hadn’t been in a helicopter since leaving the base at Basra after a four-month tour seven years back. A shitty place, horrible and…
A man who might have been Middle Eastern stared at him warily and didn’t respond to Foxy’s cautious smile: short, dark-haired, swarthy and stinking of cigarettes; the Six man, Gibbons, had tried to take the fellow’s hand but it had stayed buried in a pocket. The other, taller and pale-skinned, with curly blond hair, lolling comfortably and chewing gum, was late thirties or early forties – Foxy recognised the military uniform of mufti: a double-breasted navy suit with a prominent stripe, black ankle boots and a waxed jacket that might have been useful out on a moor. The eyes seemed distant and didn’t focus on trivia, such as what Foxy wore, Badger’s messy hair or the white knuckles of the Six man. They lifted sharply.
They were in cloud, buffeted by winds, and the pilot made no effort to get below the weather, above or round it. They rocked and shook, and Foxy wondered if the intelligence officer might throw up. He played games in his mind. A business heavy in secrecy and international flavours: it reeked of deniability. He supposed that at Six, if they planned a deniable operation, they dusted down a cardboard file that would have been written in the fifties or sixties and dictated a quiet, remote location suitable for briefings, lectures and… The Mull of Kintyre helicopter crash had taken the lives of police and intelligence officers from Northern Ireland who were heading for a meeting at a garrison camp close to Inverness; the various arms had needed to be brought to neutral territory if jealousies and conceits were not to stymie co-operation. Perhaps tensions and stress points were yet to be revealed. Foxy almost chuckled.
The beast seemed to stumble through the cloud. Then – it might have been thirty minutes after take-off – light flooded through the small porthole windows, and rain distorted the view, but Foxy made out the shape of a castle keep in grey stone that matched the cloud. There was more grey from the breaking waves in a bay, and from the stones on a geometrically curved beach. Back from the sand and shingle, a field was half flooded, and behind it a grand house, on three floors, with a portico. Could they not have booked a house in south-west London – or anywhere north of the capital but closer? It spoke of delusions. They were down, but the engines were not killed.
He was last out of the hatch and the crewman steadied him as he jumped clear. The others were ahead and hurried between the puddles towards the main entrance where the rendering was chipped.
Out in front, moving easily and light-footed, was Badger. The American and the foreigner kept pace with him. Foxy felt the rotors’ pressure blasting him from behind and staggered as the beast, anonymous and black, rose again and headed back over the bay. Gibbons was beside him.
‘Why this place?’ Foxy might have nudged a hint of sarcasm into his tone. The outside of the edifice seemed to drip water from roof gullies and guttering, and he expected that half as much again would be falling through the ceilings into the salons and bedrooms. He held tightly to his bag and thanked the Lord he always packed more socks, smalls and shirts than he anticipated needing. All of them had overnight bags except Badger, who likely stank and would be higher by the evening.
‘Not down to me. He who pays the piper calls the tune – know what I mean?’
He blinked in the rain. ‘I don’t.’
‘All in good time, Foxy – if you don’t mind the familiarity. It’s always best if names are in short supply. Our esteemed colleague from the Agency is paying the piper. The Americans are doing the logistics, which means their bucket of dollars is deeper than our biscuit tin of sterling. It’s the sort of place that appeals to them.’
‘And people live here – survive here?’
‘There is a life form in the Inner Hebrides that probably needs to huddle for comfort in the kitchen. I’m assured we won’t be disturbed by the family. Truth is, for this one the piper needs quite a bit of paying because it’s not the sort of thing – Monday through Friday – we usually do. Let’s get out of this bloody weather.’
They went in through the high double doors, but no warmth greeted them. Foxy had good eyes and a good memory, and his power of observation in poor light was excellent: he noted the washing-up bowl in the centre of the tiled floor, the portrait of a villainous-looking kilted warrior above the first bend in the stairs, the faded pattern on the couch, that the paint was off all the doors, the smell of dogs and overcooked vegetables, an older man in earnest conversation with the American and a woman with bent shoulders, a thick sweater and a bob of silver hair. The rain beat on the door behind them, water dripped into the washing-up bowl and Badger sat on the bottom stair, showing no interest in anything around him. Foxy noted all of it.
The voice of the greeter was soft in his ear: ‘Their grandson was Scots Guards in Iraq, attached to Special Forces, didn’t survive the tour. They’d want to help and, as I said, the Americans have a deep bucket. Improvised explosive device, on the al-Kut road. You’re going to hear a bit about improvised explosive devices, but I’m getting ahead of myself.’
Foxy said vacuously, ‘I have some experience, but this should be interesting…’
The man laughed without mirth, and Foxy couldn’t see what had been funny about his remark – about anything to do with improvised explosive devices.
When the Engineer worked in his laboratory, or was on the factory floor checking the craftsmanship of the machine-tool work, he could escape from the enormity of the crisis that had settled on him. It was like the snowclouds that built up over the mountains beyond Tehran when winter came. When he played with the children he could briefly think himself free. When he walked on the track in front of his home and watched the birds hovering, swirling and wafting, there were moments when the load seemed to slip away. When he was at his bench, working on the use of more ceramic material to replace metal parts and negate the majority of the portable detectors… When he was out on the long straight tracks that had been bulldozed beyond the camp into wilderness and studied the capability of his radio messages to beat the electronics deployed against him, he sometimes forgot… The moments never lasted. There was laughter, rarely, and there were smiles, sometimes, and there were
