A Deniable Death (26 page)

Abigail Jones had not met Len Gibbons. She imagined, because he was ‘old school’ that he would have moved to a temporary billet, a London club or a camp bed wherever he had set up his operations centre, and that he paced, even chain-smoked, while he waited for a telephone call.

It would have been three years ago, just before she was shipped out to Iraq when she was coming to the end of her London duty, that she had been leaving the canteen area, and the older woman with her, whom she’d known from the Balkans, had stage-whispered a choice morsel about the man standing, seeming elderly and vacant, at the counter, then moving his tray.

The telephone would not have rung because she had sent no message. There was to be no radio traffic, and no satphone communication other than to transmit information categorised ‘critical’. She had nothing important to report.

The woman, Jennifer, famed for indiscretion, had been in Belgrade while Abigail worked in the Sarajevo embassy and they’d become friends, distant, when sharing escape weekends on Croatian beaches. ‘When you get down to Baghdad, darling, don’t eff it up like that one did in his youth. In this hateful place they like to deal in one-chance-only scenarios. A good man, a nice man, and they said he was really capable. He was advanced, given responsibilities. Such a sad story. Never recovered fully, like blight in an apple orchard, and it was thirty years ago.’ Gossip was forbidden, mortal sin. Abigail had asked what the man had done and where he had done it. Jennifer had chuckled and declined to expand on her story – except to tell her that the man was Len Gibbons, left for ever like a bit of driftwood, high and dry, when the tide slipped out. They had parted, gone off in different lifts to different floors, and she had forgotten about the tale until, six years later, she had been told Len Gibbons would field her reports when there was news worth imparting.

He was hardly going to want to know that she had lain in the sand, swaddled in a mosquito net, with her firearm on the ground beside her, fastened by a lanyard to her wrist. He was hardly going to be concerned that she had barely slept, and that Corky and Harding, Hamfist and Shagger would have slept less, that those she proudly called the Jones Boys had used two flares and a thunder flash and had maintained a perimeter of sorts. There hadn’t been a charge but a creeping infiltration, the creaking of stressed wire as the fences, already sagging, had been flattened. The flares had stopped them, had held them in the shadow at the edge of the light pool. The thunder flash had scattered them, driven them back. Hamfist was the one who knew most of this sector and he’d claimed to read the
madan
mind. ‘You can give the feckers – ’scuse, miss – a flash and a flare and we’ll be OK. If it gets to us chucking about the lead we’ll have to quit.’ The flares and the flash had stabilised it during the night and, first light, Corky had urged her to get the treasury open. ‘We can’t shoot them all, miss, or it’ll be worse than Bloody Sunday. We should try to buy them. Do it like an auction – start small and haggle like it’s the bazaar. They’re all Ali Babas, miss, and don’t forget it.’

She could picture him: she’d seen him once in the canteen and a couple more times when he’d been near her as she’d come off a bus near to the Towers’ entrance. There had been a weighted look to him, that of a man burdened: she’d define that as pallor in the complexion, straggling hair, a shuffle walk, clothing that was a little too loose and, above all, wariness, a sense of being left outside any loop that existed. Jennifer had spoken of ‘one chance only’. It was where Abigail was now. The one chance to make it work – so she could justify rare interest in Len Gibbons, who waited for her call.

She had taken twenty five-dollar bills from her money belt, which she wore against the skin at her waist. And almost, taking the notes out and peeling them off the wad, she had giggled – but to herself. It had made a dent in his skin: she had not taken off her money belt when she had been over and across him. The buckle had gouged his flesh . . . Regret nothing. He had not seemed to notice that it had pressed into his flat, muscled stomach. She had gone down to the gate, Shagger yawning behind her, and Corky halfway between them and the vehicles. Hamfist and Harding had been near enough to the Pajeros to start them, and fast. She had called forward the twenty men she thought seemed oldest and had put, into each of the palms offered her, a five-dollar bill. Her own ancestors, a century before, might have given out beads or anything shiny . . . She’d closed each fist on the note. It had humiliated her, the crudeness. Then she had tried to persuade them to head home, get back to the huts built of reeds and the floating island shared with the water buffalo that gave them dung to use as their staple fuel for heating and the high-definition TV. Five dollars was meagre. None of them had shifted.

It had been Len Gibbons’s turn, three decades earlier – if Jennifer’s rumour was to be believed – to have ‘one chance only’ and to ‘eff it up’. She thought she was now presented with a copper-bottomed opportunity to join his team. The crowd at the gate, in the half-day that had passed from her handing out the trifles, had doubled. The threat when the next belt of darkness came was, likely, twice as great. She couldn’t get the boys to drive her back to al-Qurnah and try to rustle up rooms at the one building in the town, beside the big river and adjacent to the dead tree claimed as the ‘Tree of Life’. One of the Shia zealot movements had control of that building. The alternative was to leave the site, drive onto a berm or a bund and park there where they were visible for ten miles or more. She couldn’t call up a friendly UK platoon and have them do their security because the Brits were now in Afghanistan, and the marines, the Fort Bragg guys, too, had switched wars, had quit their last combat with a chorus of ‘Fucking good riddance to a motherfucking place.’ There was nowhere else to be. It was her ‘one chance only’ and she assumed that Len Gibbons, far away, doodling, would understand.

She asked the boys how much they reckoned she should shell out.

She went back inside, and hitched up her robe – did the act of a Basra tart – offloaded an additional two hundred and fifty American dollars and split the notes ten times. Twenty-five dollars each, and a demand for some action.

It was a weak hand, the worst.

This time she had Corky on her right and Hamfist on her left. Again she called out the oldest men, with those who wore clothing of the best material, and pleaded for the space they needed to monitor the wildlife successfully. Corky had said they could not be further back and do their job. Hamfist had said that any guy at the sharp end had to believe in the honesty of the people in support. She handed out money, repeated the pleading and went back towards the building.

She was a tough girl. Abigail Jones, convent-school educated, red-brick university, only took the bus in grim weather and ran to work most days in London along the Embankment, and home again. She could sleep on shit-laced concrete, hike and trek – and could almost have wept. There were more coming and none were leaving, and some now had rifles. In these parts any man with balls had access to a rifle.

Harding asked, ‘How long do you think we have until we lift them out?’

She shrugged.

Shagger asked, ‘What do we do, miss, when this crowd start coming?’

‘Let me think about it, and give me some fucking space.’

There were two Black Hawks on the apron in the sun. One of the crews was in an annex where a room offered bunk beds and thick enough window blinds to blot out the ferocity of the sun’s glare. They would be wearing ear baffles so that the roar of the aircon systems wouldn’t keep them awake. The second crew, four personnel, was in the annex rest room and sprawled in easy chairs. They were in the dog days of the empire, and the final evacuation from the one-time colony was mere weeks away so little more than skeleton forces remained. The buildings they occupied were tired, the paint scuffed, and would not receive renovation. Inevitably they had caught the mood of ‘drawdown’, and had taped in their lockers at the Baghdad base a pencil picture of a snake divided into segments, one for each day they would serve on that posting. Most were now filled in and only part of the tail remained.

That crew who were awake, supposedly ready to kick themselves out of the chairs into the open-top jeep and have the bird airborne within three minutes of the bell going, found this assignment littered with unanswered questions. The four-blade twin-engine helicopter, with a lift classified as ‘medium’, was the workhorse of the American military, and carried stores – Meals Ready to Eat, the chemicals for latrines, home-town hacks looking for stories that didn’t exist – and also flew special-forces units. It was reliable, flew like a dream, caused little hassle and less grief. But the American military effort was now scaled down, the troops reduced to spit-and-polish bull-shit in camps, so the guys in the two crews were generally just bored shitless. Each bird, each crew, could lift an additional eleven troops with full combat gear. They were on standby, but they didn’t know when they would be called out or whom they would pick up; they had not been given an exact extraction point. New, out of the Sikorsky factories, the Black Hawk had set their taxpayers back, minimally, $14 million. It was expensive hardware that sat on the tarmacadam outside the annex, and the ‘ready’ crew waited to be told
something
.

No one came.

Normally when special forces were involved – infiltration and exfiltration – herds of liaison men and women hovered, their cell phones ringing and their comms busy. There were none.

The pilot, Eddie, read a comic book and his co-pilot, Tristram, turned the pages of a Bible, the Old Testament. A side gunner, Dwayne – trained to use a 7.62 calibre machine gun – studied a puzzle book, and Federico, who had the weapon on the starboard side of the cabin, was deep in an aviation engineering magazine. They were not disturbed.

Any other time they had done the lifts for special forces there had been a presence alongside, checking every few minutes that their flight plans were ready and understood, that they knew where all the pylons with slack electricity cables were and which they could fly under, and that the fire power of Hellfires and machine-gun belts had been tested. They’d even demand a check on the fuel loads in the tanks. No one bothered them.

All they had been told was that a phone call would come through on the green handset, and a voice would give co-ordinates to an area approximately sixty kilometres away. That distance, going east, would put them hard against the Iran border.

They read, killed time, waited.

Badger had her in his glasses. Then, alerted, he swung them round, went through a full 90-degree arc with them, and picked up the bulldozer.

The big plant vehicle, with a bucket on the front, had come from behind the barracks and now powered along the bund line to the right. He fancied he understood. Past midday, with the sun at full strength, the smell was sweeter, more foul, and had seemed over the last hour to hang in the air close to him. The one they called the goon, Mansoor, hung onto the outer handles of the cab.

Badger had been up and awake most of the night, and had allowed the older man to sleep from the time that the house lights had gone out until dawn, had let him sleep through for six hours before waking him and starting the routine of three hours on and three hours off. He had let him sleep except when the snores came on too fierce.

In the first light, grey and almost chill, with the sun not yet peeping up from a horizon of reed tops and water expanses, Badger had crawled out of the hide, taken care to rearrange the cover of dead reeds, then had moved away and scouted the bare ground, on his stomach. He had been in the reeds and had seen where a spur came off the bund line and towards where they had made the hide. Then he had reached the open water beyond and the little light flecked the bodies in the water. Already they were swollen, gross – the smell had been building and had not dissipated in the cool of night. Now, in the middle of the day, he imagined the corpses would be even more distended. He understood that men had been tasked to retrieve and bury them.

At dawn he had seen the bodies floating with clouds of insects over them, and in the middle of the day he saw the bulldozer. He didn’t need to see much else. In this little corner of the world, far from anything he had experienced before, men could be shot dead, dumped and the evidence buried. The bulldozer went from his view and the sound drifted and was fainter . . . It was, after a fashion, what they did to their own. What would they do to those who intruded on their space and affairs, broke the boundaries of the borders and
spied
– he had read about spies. In the last war spies had been hanged in London, electrocuted in the USA, marched to the gallows in Syria, with a placard round the neck denouncing Israeli espionage, and to an execution chamber at the Sugamo prison in Tokyo: Richard Sorge, Communist agent, spying against Japan on behalf of Russian Intelligence, who denied all knowledge of him . . .
denied all knowledge
. It had a ring to it. Almost, in that heat, a shiver convulsed him. Fear? Apprehension? He put it down to the sweat running in the small of his back, where the fingers of Alpha Juliet had been.
Denied all knowledge
: up in Scotland, with the theatre of that house and the bay with the waves crashing, the cold, the rain and the howl of the pipes, denial had seemed unimportant.

He had the flies and the smell, the sun flaring up off the water, dazzling him, and a mirage haze.