A Deniable Death (47 page)

The goon did not know who he was. The goon moved on. What was his mission? He was asked in Farsi, Arabic and English, then again in Farsi and finally in Pashto. The wood was raised as he was given a second to show willingness to answer. He could see the wood but his eyes were misted and narrowed from the blows. He could have said:
A colleague and I are on a deniable mission to observe the home of Rashid Armajan, bomb-maker, and using techniques of surveillance as practised in covert rural observation post procedures, with a shotgun mike. We learned that Armajan and his wife were headed for Lübeck where she has a medical consultation and he has an appointment with
 . . .

It was about time drifting, and he didn’t know how much was needed. What was his mission? Maybe, already, the Engineer had reached Germany. Maybe, the following morning, afternoon or evening he would be targeted – if Foxy answered the question
What is your mission?
. Telephone or radio calls, text messages or emails would fly, and a shield would be placed in front of the man. He would be inside a security bubble and the chance would be gone. A shite-face would say that Foxy Foulkes had not delivered and there’d be a cock-sucker on hand to agree. Pig obstinate, and knew it because Liz – first wife – had told him so.

The wood came down. The goon bastard swung it with full force. Foxy’s problem – there were many but the one topping the list: he didn’t know where the blow would land and couldn’t wriggle to avoid its impact. It was on the shins. No flesh there, just skin on bone. Done with the flat of the wood to inflict pain, not the edge, which might have broken the tibia. He might not say anything but he was near to screaming.

The wood was lifted again. Foxy looked up at the face. He didn’t see hate, only frustration, and the wood came down. He jack-knifed because it was in the groin, on the shrivelled little thing that Ellie – two months back – had laughed at when he’d walked naked into the bedroom from the bathroom. She’d turned her back on him and gone back to her book. Great waves of heaving, wanting to vomit, convulsed Foxy. The wood went up again and he couldn’t help himself. He no longer had the strength to cross his legs. He was humiliated, helpless and the pain sources competed, from his feet to the crown of his skull. He didn’t know how much time they needed.

He was hit there again.

The questions came in a babble of languages. He didn’t answer.

He used the tactic he had been told of.

He hit the prisoner again with the wood. He couldn’t see the man’s privates but he could aim for the stomach, and was rewarded with a grunt. The breath bubbled blood in the mouth. When he had been in the north of Iraq, before the injury, men had been taken by the resistance – under supervision of the al-Quds – and denounced as collaborators. Those who served the Great Satan were condemned, but first they were encouraged – with planks, boots, lit cigarettes and fingernail extraction – to tell of their contacts, the safe-houses where they met intelligence officers, and the targets they spied on. Some died prematurely under questioning. Others talked in hoarse whispers and had to be carried outside to be shot. A few surrendered what information was wanted at the sight of the match lighting the first cigarette and walked to the killing place. Sometimes electricity was used but not often, or a man was hooded and made to kneel, then would hear a pistol being armed. He would feel the muzzle against the back of his head, then hear the click as the hammer came down. There was no bullet in the chamber, but he would foul his trousers and wet himself. They did that as much for amusement as to break a man.

He sweated. No window, the door shut, no fan. He had started with blows that had not exerted him and had won nothing. Now he hit with all the strength he could muster. They had been very few, the collaborators who had not bent under a beating.

His father had told Mansoor of what was done in the gaol at Ahvaz. The bombers and assassins – Ahvaz Arabs – suffered heavily as the interrogators built pictures of the networks controlling them, and were not pretty to view before they went to the gallows.

Mansoor had no doubt that pain loosened tongues and broke resolve. The frustration: he did not know who he had.

Mansoor had assumed that the man now stripped and spreadeagled in front of him, unable to protect himself, would talk after a brief display of defiance. The message sent by radio to the security section of the IRGC had not identified him as an al-Quds Brigade officer, although his name was on it, and his location at the border post on the sector that faced the Iraqi town of al-Qurnah. There,
An intruder has been apprehended. Investigations are ongoing, and an officer with an escort should be sent tomorrow morning to take the prisoner into custody in Ahvaz
. All deliberately vague.

The frustration grew with each blow he struck, and the silence that followed it. Twice, he had crouched beside the bloodied face and put his ear near to where the front teeth had been battered out because he was certain the man would answer him. He had heard coughing and groans. He did not know the identity of the man, or the purpose of his mission. It would have helped Mansoor had he gone outside, into the evening air, taken a chair close to a fire that would disperse the mosquitoes, and not allowed anyone close to him. Had he sat, sipped some juice and calmed, matters now clouded would have clarified. He stayed in the room, used the wood again, and yelled the questions. Who was the man? What was his mission? No answer came.

It had been a dream of glory.

In the dream, men came from Ahvaz in the morning. A prisoner would be brought from the cell at the back of the barracks and given to them. With the prisoner there would be an envelope containing a full confession, listing his name, his operation, his controller. The light would be coming up. His men would be armed, ready, and he would tell the senior investigators who had travelled from Ahvaz that he had no more time to talk with them as he would now be making a complex search of the area and would conduct a thorough follow-up. In the dream, he was congratulated for his diligence, and shown deference. In the dream, later, further praise came from his own unit. He had dreamed of the praise, had even recited in silence the words of congratulation showering down on him.

He hit the man again, and again, and again, drew more blood and darkened more bruises. The control had gone from Mansoor’s voice and the questions were no longer soft-spoken but shouted, high-pitched.

He lit another cigarette.

He started again, at the beginning, and asked the first question: who was he? As he had at the beginning, he dragged on the cigarette, let the tip glow, then bent over the stomach. His hand crossed the skin and went towards the hair. The urine ran. He pressed the cigarette down. The man screamed.

Badger heard him.

The scream – Foxy’s – was a knife cut in the darkness. Before, there had been the dulled sounds of the frogs, the coots and the ducks, and of the pair of pigs that still rooted in the edges of the reed bed. There were sprints by water birds and territory scuffles, but Foxy’s scream was a slicing wire, and another followed it.

He sat very still and very tense.

Badger would go when he had to. Then he would switch on his communications and make a last staccato call. He would give an ‘expected time of arrival’ at the extraction point, but not yet.

He expected that the dawn would come, the sun would poke up, announcing one more stinking hot day, and he would see – in the magnification of his binoculars – the arrival of military transport, lorries and jeeps. Soldiers, not these crap guys but trained men, would spill out and the search would begin, with cordon lines and others sent forward at the sides to give cover fire. Then it would be right for him to quit. He might also see, before he slipped into the water behind him and the forest thickness of the reeds, them taking Foxy away. He might be on a stretcher or might be dragged. If he was upright, his head would be slumped and a cloth bound around it. The blood, the cuts and bruises would be easy to see, even at that distance. He would have done what he could, stayed to the limits of obligation, and he would track back towards the extraction point. He was confident he would be ahead of the follow-up force – and two things were certain.

Two? Just two.

First: no bright young spark from the Prudential Insurance sales team was going to write a life policy for Foxy. A slow smile played on Badger’s face. There had been a funeral for a CROP technique instructor, young, killed by stomach cancer, before Badger’s time but still talked of. When the coffin had been carried out of a packed church to go to the crematorium, a crackly recording of Gracie Fields doing her hit song, ‘Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye’, had played and the whole congregation had begun to clap. Many were weeping buckets, and they’d kept the nearby pub open till past midnight. It was said to have been the best funeral moment ever. Badger always smiled when he thought of it – he wondered if Foxy had been there.

Second: an operation was unravelling and its security had been breached. There would be
Cancel
flashes and
Abort
instructions. Humour was good for squaddies and croppies, fire teams and ambulance people, but outsiders – other than the psychiatrists – reckoned it offensive and loutish. They understood fuck-all.

The scream came once more.

Fainter, with a blunter cutting edge. That would not mean that the pain was less: it was a sign that his strength was down, and the fight was draining.

He had no protection now from the mosquitoes. The clear ground where the hide had been made was around four foot above the water level. Badger’s place now was on the reverse slope from where the hide had been and his boots were just clear of the water. His body was on the incline and only his head, covered in camouflage scrim net, broke the top line. He had the binoculars with him and the night-sight. One of the bergens was against his boots and the thin rope, holding the small inflatable, with the second bergen in it, was round his ankle. He was ready to go, but not before the time came.

Badger remembered when he’d been a young police officer and they’d escorted ambulances into Accident and Emergency with knife and gun victims. He would see men and women sitting on plastic chairs in the corridors and know that behind doors or screens a life was ebbing; they were there to express solidarity, a sort of love and friendship. He would stay as long as he could. Badger could picture them now: they had politeness and dignity, and seemed grateful to him for his concern. There was often a bit of a choke in his throat when he slipped away to resume his duty, and went out of their lives. It was an obligation to stay – here and at the Royal Bristol Infirmary or the Royal United in Bath.

When he left, the location of the hide would have been cleansed. He had used reed fronds to brush around where the hide had been, smoothing out boot and handprints, then scattered the reeds they’d used for cover. He’d gone over the footfall into the reed beds, the clear ground that led over the rim where he was now and down to the water. The microphone was buried in mud and the length of the cable had been retrieved. The bird’s carcass was beached in front of him.

There was nothing more he could do.

It had gone well – well enough for the spats between himself and Foxy to have been dismissed – and now it was worse than anything imaginable. Foxy taken. He would talk, of course he would. The screams he had heard said that Foxy would talk. In a week’s time, or two weeks, Badger would be in his room at the police hostel and the TV would be on in the corner, half hidden behind a hillock of kit, and he would hear the voice, and look up, and Foxy’s face would be on the screen. He would hear Foxy’s confession in a flat, rehearsed voice, and would remember the screams. The screams said he would talk.

Didn’t like him, did he? Never had – not that, now, it mattered much.

Foxy could barely see. The swelling under and above his eyes had almost closed off his vision. Difficult for him to hear anything because his ears had been beaten and sound was dulled. But he was lucid and could analyse the pain. The cigarettes were worst. The beatings were repetitive and taking their toll of him. What had made him scream was when the cigarettes scorched his skin. Each time it was done he had wet himself. They were the worst because his eyes could pick up the flash of the match and his nose could smell the smoke and he could make out the descent of the hand that held the cigarette. He had started to scream before the fag’s tip had touched him.

An image came into his mind, was clear, then hazed and faded. It was of a small, cramped-up guy who had been brought to speak to them in the base outside Basra. He had been an expert on SERE, American. He wore US combat fatigues and had a flash on his left arm. It showed a shield and a double-bladed military knife, vertical, that cut two lengths of barbed wire. The man said, in a deliberate, far South accent, that the symbol was of Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape through the wire barricades of the enemy’s gaols and territory. He had gestured towards the shield, and his right lower arm and hand had been missing, replaced with a multi-purpose hook.

None of the Brits had come into the lecture hall if they were off-duty; the only ones there were happy enough to have a minor diversion from their work. The others, who were resting or in the canteen, hadn’t thought it worth their time. Foxy had been at the back of the small lecture hall and had listened, half awake; like most of them he had not rated it likely that he would face a situation where he needed to know how to Survive, Evade, Resist and Escape. The start was
clear
: the man, the shield insignia, the hook, and the introduction by a British officer, and the story of how a man, now in his mid-fifties and therefore a veteran, had lost an arm three decades earlier and learned enough lessons from it to have been kept on in the military well past all normal retirement dates.