and to have waited too long outside the Golden Hour for their return. It wouldn’t happen again. There would be a junior at Basra, sent down from Baghdad, who would collect the gear and spill out the advances on salaries for spending money. Another guy would be there from the security outfit, and the Jones Boys’ T-shirts would go into a bin as first stop on a journey to the incinerator. Then they’d split. She had lived with them for many months, most of a year, and there would be a brisk, embarrassed handshake, a little formal. Then she’d be gone. It didn’t matter if it were with Badger and Foxy, or if she was alone. They’d be on another flight to Qatar and then a shuttle to the Gulf. Hamfist would go to his room with six-packs and drink himself insensible in private. Corky would shop for rubbish and send parcels, costing a fortune in postal charges, to the woman in Colchester with the eleven-year-old son and the woman in Darlington with the five-year-old daughter. Shagger would walk on the beach and look at the sea, ring his bank to check out what he was worth, eat fast food and spend as little as he could. Harding would be in a six- star hotel, in a room with the curtains drawn against the sun. He would sit on the carpet in a corner and shiver. They did not, any of them, do ethics; they did the job. She would miss them, would never fill the hole they’d leave for her. In common, they were all rootless, playing at soldiers, refusing the advance of age. They were counterfeit… She loved all of them.
Shagger was back. ‘All done, miss.’
‘In an hour go for a broke, and find what we can.’
‘Whatever you say, miss.’
‘It’s a shit world, Shagger.’
‘Same as before, miss. Whatever you say.’
They would have to fight their way out to get to the extraction point. She made a further call, had the connection and voiced fears.
They sat, fully dressed, on the bed.
The Engineer said, ‘He seemed an honest man.’
His wife said, ‘A decent man.’
‘A man to be trusted.’
‘Without arrogance. He did not treat us merely as customers.’
‘I was rude to him and will apologise. Tomorrow will be the start of the future, and we may believe again.’
‘How will we sleep, waiting for a verdict?’
‘We are in God’s hands.’
‘Always… It is a long night.’ A smile, rueful and almost brave. ‘For the children it is tomorrow and soon, for them, it will be the time we go to see him, to be told.’
‘You should eat.’
The man from the embassy had brought them back to the hotel in Lindenstrasse, near to the Hauptbahnhof. He had seen them to their room. His eyes had roved over the interior and he’d glanced dismissively at their luggage, at what she had unpacked. Then he had gone to the window, flicked back the curtains, examined the vista and drawn the curtains again. He had remarked that they should not stand there with a light on behind them and look out. The Engineer’s wife knew nothing of security matters: Why? she asked. He had rolled his eyes at the Engineer, as if he expected him to educate his wife. They should not leave the hotel during the night, should not be out of the room unless a matter of urgency demanded it: a fire alarm ringing. They should not answer the telephone or make any calls. Then he had left them. He would have been, the Engineer believed, from VEVAK, a man used to exercising authority. Most would have been fearful of him. The Engineer dealt with such men most weeks of his working year. He was called the Kalashnikov, the Nobel, and doubted that a bureaucrat from VEVAK had ever been so praised.
He said, ‘I will make a proposition, Naghmeh, if you will listen to it.’
‘We will go home,’ she said. ‘We will finish this and go home.’
‘You will not listen – not now, not ever?’
‘If the physician, tomorrow, tells us he is not a miracle worker, we start for home in the afternoon. Should he be blessed with the skills, we will stay for the operation. I will convalesce, and we will go home the first day he allows me to travel. I will hear nothing else.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘We will go home, whatever time is left to me. To our children, our family, our work.’
‘Yes.’
‘I will not listen to any proposition other than that I can go home tomorrow or when it is permitted.’
A church clock chimed, the sound muffled by the double glazing of the window and the drawn curtain. He was sure he could have picked up the telephone and in his halting English, asked the reception desk to patch him through to the American consulate, likely to be in Hamburg, or the British. He could have made his pitch… but he lacked the courage, facing her across the bed, to make the proposition. He smoothed the bed, and saw her wince. He switched off the bedside light, lay back on the bed and held her.
Neither would sleep that night.
He was at the side of the quay.
It had been hard not to splutter and cough up water. The rope sang, almost a moan, as it twisted under the strain of the weight.
The dousing under the water and the struggle to regain the surface had cleared Badger’s head, purging the exhaustion. He was alive to what he would do. First, he had moved, slow steps, on the bed of the channel, which was littered with stones, broken concrete and ironwork, to the outer end of the pier. He had ducked his head, keeping his mouth and nostrils above the water, and had loosened the knot that held the dinghy to a prop supporting the pier’s planks. He had laid the bag with the Glock and the magazines on the single wood seat. He had worked his way along the length of the pier, under it, then had been against the side wall, made of rotting timbers and concrete blocks. He had allowed himself brief glimpses over the edge, had raised his head high enough to catch snapshots. The three guards hadn’t moved. Foxy hung from the lamp-post and turned in the slight breeze. He did not see the goon or any more guns.
Ahead, there was silence. Behind him, he heard the night sounds of the birds, their splashes in the water, and the incessant frogs’ croak. He coiled himself. His hands went down into the pouches and took out the plastic bags. He prayed that the water had not saturated the grenades.
A post held the timbers in place and had been sawn off some inches above the top of the quay. The high lamp left a small space of dense shadow beside the post. He stacked them there: the grenades and the short-blade knife. He coiled himself tighter, his hands on the top of the quay. He would be fifteen or twenty feet from where Foxy hung, forty-five or fifty from the guard who sat by the door into the barracks. That would be the closest weapon to him, and there were two others within two hundred feet that had a killing range of more than a thousand feet. Behind the entrance to the barracks men would have rifles close by. Badger recalled what military people had told him. On the Brecon mountains, in Wales, he had been with paratroops; in the heather, gorse and bracken of Woodbury Common, south Devon, he had been with marine commandos. He had done surveillance on them to challenge his own skills. He had won their respect and they had talked to him late at night in their bivouacs. They were attack troops and he was a croppie, a voyeur, who should not get involved. The message paras and marines preached – rare for them to agree on something – was that an assault would always achieve short-term aims if launched at ruthless speed, with the devastating factor of surprise. It had hardly seemed appropriate to a guy who made his living by moving with a stealth that did not disturb wild creatures attuned to danger.
‘What are you?’ Badger murmured. ‘Foxy, you’re a stupid bastard.’
He loosed the spring. He had bent his knees, straightened them and, in the same movement, had heaved himself up with his arms. His knees landed hard on the quay. Water cascaded off him, and more sloshed in his boots. He tried to run fast, straight, but his movement would have been that of a shambling bear and he was huge and wide-bodied in the gillie suit. He threw the first of the grenades, the ‘flash and bang’, which did the stun job, and saw it fly forward as the guard fell back in his tilted chair, then pitched sideways. He had dropped his weapon. There was bright light, white, and with it came the deafening noise that ripped through his headpiece, under the scrim. He reached the door, and the guard was on his side, clutching his head. Badger threw two more flash-and- bangs into the hallway, and followed them with two gas ones. If they’d done their job they would have deafened, blinded, induced vomiting and put up a smokescreen that men would hardly want to charge through. Another, gas, went towards the guard who had sat close to the house. He hurled two more flash-and-bangs in the direction of the
