and meandered among the clumps of reeds, some thick, others collapsed: it was a refuge and a goal.
He heard the crack of bullets going above him. They thudded into the hard mud and made dirt puffs. Two shook him – they would have struck the bergens on the holed inflatable. Some were close but more were high and wide, or short and no threat to him. They gave him incentive. A paratrooper, a sergeant, had said to him on the Brecons, ‘I tell you, kiddo, nothing gets you moving better than live rounds when they’re headed at you. They clear the bowels and get you up to pace.’ He seemed now – with the whine overhead and the patter into the mud – not to feel Foxy’s weight over his shoulder, or the pain of his palm, which was raw where the rope attached to the inflatable chafed. With the light came the flies, but the shooting kept Badger going, and there were distant shouts.
He remembered nothing of this place.
He could have been here before or not. He had no recall of the berm he had come across and the bund line to his left, or the dried-out plateau and scant reeds in front of him. All croppies hoovered information. From anywhere and any source, information was gold dust. It might come from a lecture hall or a chance encounter, but all of it had value and should be squirrelled into storage. A driver had taken a team of them, in a police wagon, out onto the Pennine moors for a CROP on what might have been a jihadist training camp. He’d talked of his time in the United Nations police force in Croatia; there had been a story of a breakout from a besieged town and the likely result of failure was being massacred by their enemy. Those Croats had tried to go across country the fifteen or so miles to the nearest haven, and some had been captured – slaughtered – because they had ended up going in circles, all sense of direction lost. They were so weak from lack of sleep and food that they had doubled back on themselves and, two days later, had been where they’d started out. Not a story that was easy to forget. Badger remembered the trite laughter among his fellow croppies. Now he had no compass, but he had the growing light in the east. He, too, was clapped out from exhaustion and hunger.
He would get to the cover of the reeds and the low mist and would push through. He wouldn’t see the Pajeros in front of him but the house, the kids playing with a football, the barracks and the lamp-post from which a fraying rope hung. It was a nightmare. He shouted, ‘We going right, Foxy? You’ll tell me if we’re wrong? Least you can do, stuck up there, is tell me if I’m off course.’
There seemed to be an answering yell, but not from Foxy.
Badger twisted his head. He could see over the skin of Foxy’s buttocks. The officer limped among his guys, ranting at them. The shooting stopped and he made a line of them, then brought them forward.
‘Foxy, is there any excuse for dumping the inflatable and one of the bergens?’
The line of guys, with their officer, was around two hundred yards from him, and more shots were fired, but wide. He had fifty yards to go until he reached the reeds, but the mist came towards him – might last thirty minutes, but every other morning it had burned off quickly. Might be too quick for him.
‘There’s the one with mostly clothing, not that we’ve used it, some of the kit and the last of the grenades. The other’s where communications is. There’s not much in it either. What you reckon, Foxy?’
More yelling from the officer, and they veered away from the direct line, turned a sharp angle and went into the reeds. Nine men with their officer. The foliage swallowed them. They would have seen, from where their jeeps had stopped in loose sand and they had elevation, how far the reeds went, and would have judged they could make their cordon line on the far side.
‘I’m going to dump both bergens, Foxy. Goes against the grain, hurts, but at least it’s all sanitised. Don’t bloody critise me.’
Badger hit the reeds. They lacked the life of the beds beside the hide and were diseased, stunted. He could hear, to his left, shouts and dried stems breaking. He thought – so far – that a fragile curtain of morning mist might have saved him. Useless things now played in his mind. There had been big estates above the Thames, outside Reading, and kids he had known had earned cash from beating: they had been paid to drive reared birds, most of which could barely fly, into the cordon where the guns were. When they came out of the cover they were blasted. He was down on his knees and still carried Foxy, didn’t allow him to slide off his shoulder. He dragged at some broken reeds and made a shallow pile of them over the two bergens. He had, now, only the pistol, the magazine already in it and one more, and he had short-range communications that would link with Alpha Juliet. Everything else that should have been brought home and returned to Stores was in the two bergens. It hurt him to abandon them. Badger pushed himself up and turned his back on them. He began to thread through the stems. The light was growing.
‘Worst thing I’ve ever done, Foxy, is dumping that kit. What I do reckon, though, is that she’ll be at the extraction place. We have to get there. She won’t ditch us like I ditched the bergens. She’s the sort of girl who’ll be there. She’s great. Foxy, all that shit you told me about your woman, about your Ellie, I’ve forgotten it. I’m going to get you to where Alpha Juliet is, Foxy. That all right?’
He went carefully, and the light grew. He could do a better pace without the backpacks to pull, but he knew the cordon line would be in front of him, and the guns. Who knew where he was? No bastard did. Who cared where he was? Alpha Juliet might. No other bastard would. He was deniable. No reason for any bastard to know or care.
Gone2work. A cryptic text to Len Gibbons had shown up on his mobile. It was as if one of the last pieces of the jigsaw had slotted together. Not the final one, but one of the most important.
He was not a grandstander. He didn’t expect a seat where he could sit and watch the deed done. It was still dark on a late November morning at the leisure resort of Travemunde, up the river and north of Lubeck, facing into the Baltic. The text had been sent by the Cousin. The message told Gibbons that the consultant had left home, had arrived at the university and gone into the block where his offices were. Good enough. It seemed to indicate that no security alert had been launched.
Further up the floodlit quay, out towards the groyne on which the lighthouse flashed, there were piers on wood piles and cormorants gathered on the hand rails – black, with long necks, big beaks and the lungs to give them diving time when they hunted. They had been perched on those hand rails when he had been here thirty- something years before. Then there had been a winter morning when he had waited for the first ferry to return across the river from the village of Priwall and bring with it the workers who had jobs at Travemunde or Lubeck. He had last been here a few weeks before the collapse of the Antelope operation. It was, for Len Gibbons, almost a pilgrimage and he might have brought flowers with him if a kiosk had been open. Had he done so, it would have been because he cared to remember the lives that had been lost because of his trust in a man he had met once and so briefly and seen once from a distance. To make this journey, come here and wait in the bone-piercing cold, with the wind snapping off the sea, was of greater significance to him than when he had loitered outside the church of St Andrew and watched the man who had been a pastor.
The ferry came towards him. As he remembered it, there was a cafe on the far side of the river. He would buy himself a hot breakfast – eggs, sausage, a heated pastry and coffee. He was savouring the thought when the phone bleeped again.
Both arrived, all in place. Warm congrats, your favourite Cousin.
He read it twice, then deleted it. Not quite the final piece, but so close.
He had believed in confusion and a complex chain of command, had dared to hope that the terse message, passed through many links in a chain, reporting the capture of Foulkes did not mean that a protective net would be tossed over the target. The Engineer and his wife were now at the consulting rooms and the building was not flooded with detectives and armed uniforms. By a miracle, word from that distant corner of Iran had not seeped out, A cargo ship, monstrous in the dark, passed in front of the ferry.
He shivered, from the cold, nerves. He could absorb the Baltic’s November chill. Len Gibbons had done time as maternity cover in Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, and a decade earlier he had been the second man in Stockholm. Had it not been for the Schlutup Fuck-up he would never have been sent as a fill-in to the former Soviet satellite, and if he had gone to Sweden it would have been as the station officer. The boat laden with containers had passed, the ferry had come in and the ramp was down. He walked on board, as he had done three decades before. Then he had left the pastor on the quay. Now he stood with a few hardy spirits on the deck.
The ramp was raised, and he felt the shudder of the engines below his feet. His mobile bleeped again. His ‘Friend’ was in place.
Len Gibbons switched off the phone, opened its back section and removed the chip. He dropped the phone first into the white wake of the water that was pushed aside by the ferry’s passage, then the chip. It floated for a fraction of a second, then was swamped. He had broken all contact with the conspiracy. In a minute they were at
