Foxy, deliberately, let it slip.
The snake’s head came to rest on Badger’s hands where they held the binoculars, and he felt his temper go into free-fall.
Foxy said, ‘You see, young ’un, you’re so full of cock that you needed pegging down a notch, maybe four or five. I meet too many kids who reckon they’re special and have achieved fuck-all that impresses me. I reckon then that it’s as good a time as any to peg them.’
He had never hit a man, or a child when he was at school. In the police, in the years before he had gone into surveillance, he had never operated in a public-order environment when the order was given to display the batons and break up a crowd. People in the section house, and those on the team, would have called it ‘red-mist time’, but he’d despised that type of violence. If the psychiatrist who had an overview of them and saw the croppies once a year had known he was liable to the mist, the fast breathing and the burn in his brain then, likely, he would have been pulled out of the job and sent home. Might have been told to find a dark room, lie down and stay there till his head went cold.
‘You were right for pegging, young ’un, because you have bullshit coming out of your mouth, ears and nose. When I get back I’m going to tell my Ellie about you, and we’ll have a good laugh. Her, me and a bottle. I’ll tell her what I did for a guy who thought he knew every answer to every question. Would you have wet your pants or shat in them? I’d like to know so I can tell my Ellie. You went into the reeds, down to the waterline, and I could see your boot treads when I went, where you squatted and where you washed. Some of the time you were about a yard away from where this creature was. It was asleep, and I’ll bet big money you never saw it.’
They did unarmed combat training in the team, and there was talk that they might – soon – be issued with Glock pistols. Arming them was a divisive issue among the croppies, but there was anxiety that a jihadist, in search of the key to Paradise and the beauty pageant of virgins awaiting him, might get a strop if he realised he was under observation, come after the officer and put him – the image fitted – in the orange jumpsuit, then do the video. If there was a chance to go for suicide and the virgins, or the Central Criminal Court and thirty years banged up in Belmarsh or Long Lartin, it was likely he’d go for short-term freedom at the expense of the officer’s life . . . But Daniel ‘Badger’ Baxter was not classified as violent, knew little about self-defence and was more likely to back off, sneak away. He felt it come to boiling point. He had about forgotten what he was there for and the purpose of the headset on his scalp.
‘It was there – where you bloody nearly stepped on it, and that’s from footmarks – and I had my old man out and was about to pee when I saw it. I took the knife out of my pocket, made sure my shadow didn’t fall on it and did it first time. I can tell you it was one hell of a strike. The little fellow never knew what hit him. One minute he’s dreaming of eating a rat and the next he’s short of a head. One stab, straight down, a bit of sawing and the head’s off. You didn’t tell me whether you wet your trousers or shat them. I’ve a good mind, young ’un, an innovative one, and I reckoned the atmosphere in our little love nest was a bit too solemn, needed lightening up.’
They said that the two basics of managing building anger were to count to ten – or fifty or a hundred – and breathe in slowly. His fist was clenched. He was not certain what sort of blow he could land in the confined space. More of a gesture, but a good one. Worth it.
‘So get off your high horse, young ’un, and stay off it. Hang around me and learn, think yourself lucky and—’
Something of a right jab. The punch only had some nine inches to travel. It would have been, if it had landed square on the cheek or on the forehead, little more than a slap, but it caught the end of Foxy’s nose, and had enough force in it to make the older man jolt. There was a moment of shock in his eyes.
The blood came, not much, a run from the left nostril through the moustache, now ragged and untrimmed, to the upper lip.
Nothing was said.
He didn’t know what he could have said.
Badger’s father sold second-hand cars . . . not top-of-the-range but the sort that boys bought when they had their first job and that girls shelled out for when they worked at the Royal Berkshire Hospital and there was no bus route to bring them in. Paul Baxter did tight margins, bought cheap and sold cheap, was nearly honest and kept a couple of good mechanics working for him in the repair shop round the back of the show room. There was a warranty of sorts but difficult to enforce. Most of the cars stayed on the road long enough for his father not to be embarrassed by the sale, but a few did not. He never apologised and never explained – never said how sorry he was that the carburettor had blown up on the motorway, and never explained that a nine-year-old carburettor in that model of Fiat was a driving disaster.
Like father, like son. Badger didn’t apologise for hitting Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes across the nose and making it bleed, and didn’t explain that the heat and the dehydration were wrecking him, destroying him and that snakes were bad news for him.
He had his binoculars up.
If they had been in England, and it had been witnessed, there would have been a disciplinary hearing and a kangaroo court. Foxy would have been censured for the jape with the snake and Badger would have been suspended on full pay, pending further inquiries, for striking a fellow officer. It was, actually, quite a good joke with the snake.
They settled and the silence nestled on them. A good joke, yes, but he wouldn’t say so, and Foxy wouldn’t tell him he was ‘sorry, and out of order, no offence meant’.
There would be another flashpoint. Badger did not gamble, but he rated it as a banker that they would explode again. No voices were on the headset and the thirst scratched his throat. They wouldn’t allow themselves another drink for an hour, minimum. The sweat took more moisture from his body, and the house seemed to sway in the binocular lenses. The lagoon shimmered, and his eyes hurt. He had to grind his fingernails into his palm to hold some, any, concentration.
There was washing barely moving on the line, and a guard asleep. An otter swam by languidly, and time was running out for them. He didn’t know what would cause the next explosion of temper.
Hamfist had come forward.
She hadn’t moved, still sat cross-legged. He had brought a bottle of tepid water and put it down beside her hip. He’d seen that her gaze didn’t confront the crowd but was on the ground a little ahead of her. The crowd had just done prayers, had swung away from the gate and taken a line to the east. The stand-off began again.
They reckoned – him, Shagger, Corky and Harding – that she had, temporarily, calmed the crowd. For all the broken heads and probably broken bones, the men seemed comatose. Might have been the heat. He’d had a company commander, up Highway 6 at al-Amara, who daily blessed the heat of the day and thanked the good Lord for any temperature above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit because it drained hostile energy out of the young bucks. The crowd had no shade. Neither did she.
He stood tall. If it had not been for the alcohol he’d have been promoted above his last substantive rank, corporal, could have made it up to platoon sergeant. The drink did him and there had, often enough, been that regretful look from officers when they’d busted him down. He denied to himself that he had a problem with drink: Hamfist had heard it said, and clung to it leech-like, that an alcoholic was a man who couldn’t remember the last day on which he hadn’t had a drink. It was yesterday, and the day before. If they had charged at her suddenly, he was confident of the quick reaction that would have dropped them on the dirt track before they were halfway. If the weapon on the strap across his chest had jammed, he had grenades – gas, blast and fragmentation – and a pistol. If the weapons had jammed and the grenades had malfunctioned, he would have used his hands and boots to protect her.
They would have had to take his life before they reached her. The other Boys were the same.
He was thirty-one years old, and his thirty-second birthday would come round in eleven days. She knew the date. Shagger, Corky and Harding didn’t. She had known the previous year, his thirty-first, and he hadn’t broadcast it but it would have been in the file she’d have flipped through before he’d joined her protection detail. God knew where she’d bought it. It was wrapped up in smart paper, and there was a little card on it,
Hamfist, Happy Day, Best, AJ
, and inside was a crumbling cake, with fruit and orange rind and sliced almonds in circles on the top. The best Dundee cake he’d ever eaten, for all it was damaged in transit. There had been nothing from his wife. He’d not shared the cake but had eked it out and made it last into a seventh week.
He understood what she had done and how she hoped to extricate them, her decision to use the site where there had once been oil-drilling exploration teams. Her decision, too, that they were close enough to the surveillance boys, and inside the Golden Hour of protection. Her decision, now, to sit in the dirt, exposed to the sun, face the crowd and wait. If it came to fighting, they wouldn’t survive another night.
Hamfist couldn’t know whether she had called right or wrong. If a leader came, she might have called right, and if there was no leader and only darkness, she had called wrong. It was a big call, and it would matter for the men up front. The hours drifted, and time passed. The sun had started to tilt and he no longer stood astride his own shadow – it had begun to nudge out towards his left side, and the soft shape of his body on the dirt was broken by the rifle’s barrel.
Not for him to say that they walked a line, a high wire, and that maybe they headed for disaster . . . not for him to say that.
She didn’t drink the water he had brought her. She sat and never moved.
They started up the engines every two hours. One Black Hawk crew would go through the procedures while the other rested, and an hour later it would be reversed.
Each had a pair of General Electric T700–GE–70 turbo shafts and each manufactured a power of 1890 h.p. While the pilot and his colleague sat up front and did their checks, the cabin guys did the look-over on the M240 machine guns. They were ready, and each hour a few of the men and women not yet due to return to the States – or to be shipped to Kabul – would stand in little huddles in what shade they could find to watch. Before the draw-down was well advanced, it would have been possible for the Black Hawks, with their unmarked black fuselages that were the signature of special-forces operations – the covert stuff – to be parked out of sight where only a chosen few maintenance technicians had access. Times had changed. The end-of-empire days dictated that a hefty chunk of the base was now in the hands of local forces and only an area inside a contracted perimeter remained for the Americans. Clerks, typists, cooks, marines off duty from security rosters would watch the exhausts spew fumes, feel the draught of the rotors and dream.
Inside every American compound life was now stultifyingly dull. No fire fights, no patrols, no finds of arms caches, and no bodies to be photographed They stayed behind the blast walls and saw nothing of the country but its skies, blue and merciless. They pumped iron, played basketball and smoked what they could find. The helicopters broke the monotony and intrigued them. On immediate stand-by. Prepared for a mission. Cloaked in secrecy. They attracted attention. When the cabin doors were pulled right back, medical gear and stacked gurneys were visible.
Tristram closed down the engines and Eddie did the calls as the switches were flipped. Dwayne wrapped a tea towel round the breech of his machine gun and the rounds in the belt, then secured it with tape. Federico aped him.
For those on the ground, the rubber-neckers, the attraction was that they might see – a final time – the birds take off and fly low over walls and fences, then across the desert and go into actual mother-fuck combat. The suppression fire of the machine guns would be called for, and there’d be blood on the cabin floor, lives at risk and . . . It was a dream, and good enough for the voyeurs. In draw-down days, excitement was sparse.
They jumped down, boots hitting the tarmacadam of the apron. A few pocket cameras were pointed at them, but their shades were good enough protection.
Tristram said, ‘I got the whole lot of charts and the software fed for the Iran frontier.’
Eddie said, ‘Up to the frontier, not over it.’
‘I have that. The far side of the frontier and they’re on their own. Not negotiable.’
‘Wherever they’re coming from, how far over the frontier, they have to get this side of it. For us to go over there is classified as an act of war. Into Iran, and when we land back I’m up for court martial, bet your life, and castration. No one will believe the navigation screwed me.’
‘But it would be good to fly a last time.’
His voice dropped: ‘Problem is, if we get called they’re in deep shit out there. At the edge of survival. For the sake of those guys, I half hope we don’t get to fly a last time.’
‘I don’t want state secrets, but are you any further forward?’ She had come into central London carrying a plastic bag filled with clean clothing.
‘Can’t say.’ Len Gibbons’s shrug was expressive. ‘Honestly, my love, I don’t know.’
They were in the same coffee shop across Haymarket from his office, and she had already shown him the shirts she had brought on the train. Pity there were no shoes – the only pair he had with him were damp from so much rain and sleet, and now from the sprinkle of snow.