going back over them.’
Hamfist answered, ‘It was called for, miss.’
They drove hard, and she didn’t know what they would find. She made a link with the operations people at the Basra air base and promised co-ordinates. It had been necessary, but ugly… and it might be that everything she had started had turned to ugly. They went, trailing sand, towards the extraction point – could go nowhere else.
It was ground he could handle and Badger made good progress through the reeds. The stems were close set, but he had the skills to insinuate himself, and Foxy, between them. He took each step carefully, tested the weight and kept his boots off the dry, brittle fronds. It was an illusion of success, and he knew it.
Ahead, already, light filtered through – not from above but from the front. Following this line, he would come within the next several minutes to the edge of the reeds. They thinned fast and the sunlight came into them. It was the same when he looked to the sides. The reed beds, and the soggy mud in which they thrived, were a fool’s sanctuary, Badger knew… He could hear them around and in front of him.
He thought they had boxed him, two at each side and the officer, Mansoor, and the others behind him. There were shouts from the officer. He had regained control and had them organised as he wanted. More were out ahead. He heard the answering calls from the guards and the orders from the officer. Badger was at the limits of his endurance, on the edge of what he was capable of doing, bent by a burden and exhausted. But his mind worked. He realised he was being herded towards the guns, same as the pheasants.
He went on. He told Foxy why he pushed forward towards the ever sparser reeds where the light shone brighter. ‘Better that way, Foxy, on our feet and going towards where we belong… Better to be moving than on our backs when they close round us, us looking up at them, scared, and them pissing on us. Better going forward, Foxy.’
He heard other noises, clumsier and heavier, and couldn’t place them. He was bent low, found it easier to get a right boot in front of a left boot if his spine was tilted forward. It seemed to spread the weight better.
They were closer behind and the reeds were thinner ahead and the sun came on brighter and the near dark of the thickest part of the beds was gone. He couldn’t control the depth of his tread and the mud between the stalks of the reeds left perfect indentations, as good as any scenes-of-crime officer would want. The mud was uniform. He couldn’t find wider stretches of deeper water, to his knees or his thighs where he could go to hide the trail. Neither was there a way through where the ground had dried out. Screwed, yes. They had his trail now. Their calls to one another were growing in excitement and he thought them louder to give each other confidence. The shouts of the officer were more frequent as if he, too, sensed an end game was near. Twice more he had heard louder sounds of surging movement, and had heard also a snort of breath. He thought that among the guards there must be one perhaps more obese than the others, winded from his efforts and…
He heard the men coming nearer to him, driving him towards the voices at the front. They would have their best marksmen at the front. Badger wouldn’t be able, when he was flushed out of the reed beds, to run, weave and duck. With the bergens dumped, he could manage a crabbed trot, barely faster than when the paras did forced speed marches on the Brecons with eighty pounds of kit on their backs.
‘Foxy, what do you weigh? Must be a hundred and fifty pounds. Don’t worry, I’m not dumping you.’ Important to say it. Foxy wondering whether he was going to be ditched and left to face them again.
‘We’re going out through the front of these reeds, Foxy, and it’ll be breaking cover. I don’t know what we’ll find, except there’s guys out there in a cordon line waiting for us. I’ve got the Glock, and a full magazine in it, but I don’t know how far we’ll be from the extraction place, and whether we’ll get any help from them. The border’s ahead but I don’t know how far.’
He couldn’t hide and they had his bootprints to follow. The camouflage of the gillie suit was wrong for the reeds – good for sand and dried dirt. They were close to coming out of the cover and the light around him was more brilliant. Maybe it was that time the squaddies talked about, when they said they thought of their mothers and fathers, the girls they’d been with and babies they might have made. The bloody flies had found him and were striving to break into the headpiece. Maybe it was the time when squaddies decided whether they wanted Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones to play them into church – and maybe it was the time when squaddies became angry and wouldn’t accept the obvious. In half a dozen paces he would be out of the reeds and guns would face him.
‘There may be good ground for us and there may not. I just don’t know. I’m saying, Foxy, that we aren’t taken – not prisoners, no. You up for that? Whatever I shoot, there’ll be two rounds left.’
He heard the crashing and breaking of stems, and didn’t understand it.
‘That’s one for you and one for me. You know what, Foxy? We could get a Bassett job for this. Be good, wouldn’t it? But I’m not lying down and rolling over yet. We’re going to give it a go. You up for it?’
The scream was close. A man cried out, first in fear, then in terror, then in shock, and last, in pain. Badger was at the edge of the reeds. The scream cut his ears, louder and shriller than any of Foxy’s had been. He saw the boar break from the reed bed, blood on its tusks. The men in front of him, who had had their rifles ready and had seemed alert to their main prey, were now running to the edge of the reeds and Badger’s right. He understood. A huge thing. Maybe twenty stone of it, maybe more. As big as the one that had sniffed him in the hide and had had a short blade up its nostril. He understood that the guards at the back, behind him, had driven the beast before them, as they’d driven Badger, but a guy on the flank of the box had been in the way of the boar’s flight. Not a clever option – he might have had his bowels and intestines ripped out of his stomach wall by the tusks. He screamed again, and, likely, they had no morphine. It ran, and shots were fired at it, would have been well wide. The guy kept screaming, and the boys he slept with, served with, went to him. It gave Badger a chance. He went where the boar had, on dried dirt towards the next raised berm.
Chapter 19
Badger had changed the outline of his body. There was open ground ahead of him. Once there had been lagoons and channels, but the water flow had been blocked off and the sun had baked the mud during four or five years of drought. The eco-system in place since the marshlands had been claimed as civilisation’s cradle was wrecked. If a river source, or a filled canal, was left untouched, the marshes survived; if they were all dammed, the reeds died and the water evaporated, the ground dried and life failed. Behind him, the reed bed had taken a last hold in what would have been, once, a wide, deep channel. Now he faced a gradual incline that stretched to the far distance. Where there had once been channels that must have been far outside Badger’s depth, there was now a tacky damp surface below a fragile crust. He couldn’t see where they had come in, but off to the side – too far away to be of help – there was a shimmer that might have been water. He thought himself near the approach route, but not close enough to recognise its landmarks.
He had no cover other than the low wisps of mist that were being steadily burned off. There were indentations in the ground, little scratched paths where water had once run, and stumps of reeds, broken off six inches above the mud. The stems and leaves were long rotted, and there was the ribcage of a boat, overturned and half buried, not protruding more than a few inches. There were, too, slight tumps where silt had once gathered and perhaps the current had been forced to gouge a way to the right or left. The sun was higher, clear of the horizon, and the heat built. He knew in which direction he must go, and remembered a single strand of old wire he must reach. On his own, he might have used his skills to cross the open ground. He would have reached the horizon and found the wire, part buried.
Badger had changed the outline of his body. In doing so he could no longer hug the ground, make it his friend.
With the screaming of the guard gored by the pig, the yells of the others and the shouts of the officer bringing chaos, Badger had taken Foxy off his shoulder – but had not rested. The beast had gone, had careered away and found sanctuary from its enemy in the wafting blocks of ground mist. Badger had not taken the time to rest his shoulder but had hitched the suit up, and heaved Foxy’s body onto his back, then drawn the arms forward until they fell over his stomach and the head rested on his neck. He had let the gillie suit drop over two of them. ‘It’s going to be hot in there for you, Foxy, a steam bath, but it’s the way it is. Nothing I can do about it.’
He was bringing Foxy back. He had said he would, and there had been no complaint from the old bastard. He couldn’t see behind him, and to twist his head might dislodge Foxy. In front of him was a short horizon – much less
