They would be in God’s care.
‘Before we concentrate on the individual who has brought us together today, who and where he is, there’s something I’d like you both to respond to. First you, Foxy. In your long surveillance career, what was your most satisfying achievement?’
It was, of course, a trick question, and it was not unique to Len Gibbons. He’d heard it put twice during his thirty-five years at Six, in seminars when individuals were being evaluated. The answer usually revealed much about the subject.
They were sitting in a horseshoe on hard chairs, and no notes were taken, but away to the side a board was balanced against the back of an armchair, covered with a drape. He sat at the extreme left, and had introduced himself as ‘Len’. The American was ‘the Cousin’ and the Israeli, from Unit 504 of Military Intelligence, was ‘the Friend’. There was Foxy and there was Badger, and between them the tall, handsome, suited man, ‘the Major’. There had been time for them to go to allocated rooms, have a tepid wash, meet a pack of Jack Russells and spaniels, and drink instant coffee from petrol-station mugs.
Then Gibbons had shepherded them into what might have been a ballroom – no water came through this ceiling – where the main furniture was cloaked in dust-sheets, but at the far end, to the left of a huge, unlit fireplace, there was a small table with a vase of flowers on it and a silver-framed photograph of a young face smiling above a Guardsman’s ceremonial tunic. Gibbons thought it appropriate, and would refer to it. He had set out the chairs while the others were on the first floor – had borrowed enough from the dining room. He had gone to the sister service across the river, the Box, the anti-terrorist command and the Branch. The Box had come up with Badger, and Special Branch had said that Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes was the only one worth considering.
It was a good question because it gave a man enough rope either to climb to a higher level, or to hang himself. He saw Foxy – a capable man with a number of successes behind him – stiffen. Well, he would be evaluating the audience of Gibbons, the Cousin and the Friend, and wondering what Badger’s take on it would be. Gibbons knew the record of Foxy Foulkes: a policeman of thirty-three years, a nine-year spell with Special Branch, four months in Basra, and a further seven years of lecturing in the arts of covert rural surveillance. He was a man who expected to be listened to and was.
Foxy’s tongue flipped over his lips to moisten them. Gibbons saw that. The tie was straightened, which bought another few seconds, then a cough to clear the throat. The man was dependent on his instinct.
Foxy said, in a good clear voice, as if they were his students, ‘Satisfying, yes? Interesting one. There’ve been a few – more than a few. Could be when I was with the Branch and we were doing the business on two Iranian attachés on a Manchester visit they’d made twice before. Our stake-out was on a golf course and there was snow on the ground. I had a youngster with me, didn’t know his arse from his elbow, and we came in close enough to see the drops on their noses when they did their contact – a Muslim kid working in the club’s kitchens. We did the approach so that not a flake of snow was disturbed within the arc of their vision . . . Yes, that was a pretty good one . . . And early in my time with West Yorkshire we had a budding PIRA cell on our patch. The Irish were clever by then and knew the procedures. They had a meeting and stood out in the middle of a football pitch. There was no way we could get close enough with a directional microphone. I had the answer. I picked the lock of the groundsman’s hut, took out the line marker after filling it with the white stuff and went right round them, then did the goal areas. By the time they were used to me I pushed the marker right up the halfway line and they actually apologised for being in my way and stepped aside. They’d been swapping phone numbers, so we had those and bust them up. And another. I did a hide in County Tyrone, up by the village of Cappagh, which was difficult country, populated with very difficult and very suspicious people. The hide was in a hedgerow and looked into a cattle barn where a Barrett .50-calibre was hidden. We thought it needed the human touch, not a remote camera. I’d dug the hide out and the first afternoon a sheep got caught in the hedge not fifteen yards from me. The farmer, a committed Provo, considered reliable enough to have responsibility for the weapon, came up to free the ewe. He walked right over my hide and his wellington boots would have been less than two feet from my face in the camouflage headgear. It was an exceptional hide and we were able to report when the weapon was moved, but the military weren’t fast enough and lost its tail. Anyway, they were three of the best.’
Did the man expect a ripple of applause? He might have done and, if so, was disappointed. The Cousin gazed at the ceiling, the Friend at the floor. The Major had been paring his nails but now reached down to the case resting against his ankles and started to ferret in it. Len Gibbons wished fervently that Sarah was there, with her competence and reassurance. It was ridiculous that the players should have been carted up to this pile of old stone, but the Cousin must have felt this to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for baronial glory, and the Friend had demanded remote anonymity. He thought the old couple would be rattling around in another wing, and had learned that a divorced daughter lived with them. She would have been the mother of the officer killed by a roadside bomb, and he wondered what delicacies would be provided at the lunch break. Time to ask the other man the question designed to disrobe, expose.
‘Thank you, Foxy – very comprehensive. So, Badger, what in your professional career are the achievements that give you most satisfaction?’
The man looked straight at him, unwavering eyes, direct and challenging. ‘None, boss, and I don’t send hero-grams to myself.’
Silence. Len Gibbons realised he’d win nothing more from the younger man, no point in demanding it, and he thought Badger had played with Foxy’s ego, tossed it up into the air, let it fall on the bare patch of carpet and ground a heel on it. The veteran had laid out the depth of his experience, put it in a showcase so that the rookie boy was bound to fall short. Each had done well and, like two dogs, they’d circled each other, hitched up a back leg and pissed on the available lamp-posts. He wondered how they would do together.
Gibbons said, ‘A difficult moment now confronts us. We will soon enter realms of great secrecy. You will have seen its quality – the secrecy, this place, your journey here. You both come with your praises sung, but after we begin the briefing process it’s too late for one of you to say, ‘I don’t think I really want to pull the shirt on for this game.’ Put crudely, you either piss now or get off the pot. Are you in, gentlemen, or out? Foxy, first – are you staying or going?’
‘You’ve put me in a difficult position. I don’t know what you’re asking of me. I’m a married man, the wrong side of fifty. I’d have appreciated the chance to talk to my wife but . . . I’m staying.’
‘And you, Badger?’
‘I go where I’m sent.’ Again there was a spark in the young buck’s face and a short, wintry grin.
Gibbons said, ‘It starts now with a young woman, call-sign Echo Foxtrot, and those are the initials of Eternal Flame, which some colleagues call her because the Eternal Flame never goes out. It’s a little joke – a joke because it’s so inappropriate in her case. She’s out a great deal more often than is usually sensible. Step by step, gentlemen, but we’ll start with her and she’ll lead us to the meat. So, Echo Foxtrot . . .’
For her and for the guys with her, known to her inner circle – those entrusted with life-and-death confidences – as the Jones Boys, it was a half-hour of maximum danger. They had been at the roadside, in the shade of some trees, in excess of thirty minutes. Their two SUVs, Pajeros from Mitsubishi’s factories in Japan, were battered and abused. They looked like heaps of sand-scarred, rusted crap but the armour-plated chassis, doors and windows were hidden from any but the most persistent observer. The vehicles were off the road but the engines murmured, and their weapons were armed.
She stood nearest to the road and the dust from lorries’ wheels and pick-ups flew on to her
burqah
. The Yank was Harding and the Irishman Corky. They were close to her,
khaffiyeh
s draped round their faces and covering their hair. They had on dirty jeans, and jackets weighed down with grenades and gas in the inside pockets; each had a pistol at the hip, held in by his belt. In the Pajeros, with heavier firepower on the empty front passenger seats, were Shagger, the Welshman, and the Scot they called Hamfist. They were employees of Proeliator Security, a private military contracting company, and were paid to be bodyguards to Abigail Jones, a Six girl.
Without them – and their show of grudging loyalty – she would have earned the title ‘Eternal Flame’, the one that never goes out. She was far from her secure base in Baghdad’s Green Zone, or the premises at the Basra airport complex, because she trusted, with a degree of fatalistic humour, the Jones Boys’ dedication, the quality of their noses and their understanding of when stupidity overtook duty. She did not deal with them on a need-to-know basis but talked each move through with them so that Hamfist, Shagger, Corky and Harding were privy to the secrets of the Six operation that had now run for some two years – ever since an unexploded device had been recovered and subjected to analysis for the uniqueness of a man’s deoxyribonucleic-acid deposits. She had been permitted two four-month extensions of her posting, almost unique, but she hoped to see the operation to its conclusion, to have a part in its death. The Jones Boys would be on the ground as long as she was. It was a commercial relationship that had become family, but they called her ‘miss’ or ‘ma’am’ and took no liberties of familiarity. Each time, though, that she went out and they hit the road, she took care to explain where they went, and why. Now it was to meet an informant.
He hadn’t shown.
There should have been, approaching through the mirage mist of the road, a motor scooter with an old man astride it. The heat would have distorted their first view of him from perhaps a mile down the straight highway; and as it had cleared they would have known him by the matted grey beard. Many months before, the informant had gone through the marshes and along the berms crossing them, with the papers in his pocket to identify himself as a resident of the Ahvaz Arab community on the far side of the frontier. The scooter had been left well hidden and he had walked, waded where there was still water in the lagoons, and had cut old reed fronds to make a broom for sweeping. He had cleaned a road and a pavement, pocketing cigarette butts strewn behind a man who smoked as stress gripped him.
A few days before, the relative by marriage of the ‘cleaner’ had travelled as a pillion passenger on the same scooter with two baskets of dates. He had had similar identification papers – forged but good enough to pass a check by Iranian police, border guards, even men of an al-Quds Brigade detachment posted for the security of a valued man. He had asked vague questions in a coffee shop, had had gossip answers, and had overheard enough of a conversation to win the glowing smile of Abigail Jones, Echo Foxtrot. A fistful of dollars had been paid to the informants for the retrieval of the used cigarette filters and for a snatch of talk. She thought it most likely that either the informant and his relative had decided they had made enough money for their needs, had been intercepted and robbed, had unwisely shown a glimpse of riches in a coffee house, or had boasted and been heard by any of the myriad Ali Babas who lived in what was left of the marsh wilderness.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘But it was good while it lasted. Enough?’
Harding’s eyes raked the road. ‘Has to be, ma’am.’
Corky, wilting in the heat of over a hundred degrees, said, ‘Too long, miss, that we’ve been here.’
‘Shit . . . So, the heroes coming from home will have it all to do for themselves, without a local hand to steady them. No, guys, don’t tell me this is lunatic. They’ll have to go in there and do the business on their own. Shit . . .’
She walked to the lead Pajero. The two vehicles pulled off the dirt and on to the road, accelerating fast.
Five miles down the road, towards Basra city, they saw a huddle of men and a police car. An ambulance was coming towards them. They would not slacken their speed, and their faces were covered, to hide the pale Caucasian features, as were the automatic weapons, loaded and with the safetys off. Easy to see: a small scooter on the sand beside the tarmacadam, a body with its head covered but new shoes exposed. They would have cost in the city what a man survived on in the marshes for a month. A second body was covered, except for the head with its grey beard.
Corky, beside Shagger, said quietly, ‘So they got greedy and were bumped. My thinking, ma’am, they were lucky. If the bastards of the VEVAK had picked them up, then to get robbed and shot would have seemed a blessing. The shoes will be gone before they get put in the ambulance, won’t go to waste – but you had your money’s worth out of them.’
She did not respond. Under her codename, Echo Foxtrot, she had her satphone out of her bag and was tapping out the numbers.
Badger listened as the call was wound up. ‘No, I’m not suggesting there’s anything else that can be done. I appreciate we’re not talking about a flat tyre or an empty tank. I accept also your assurance that neither party would have been where hostiles could lift them. Paid too much – pretty ironic if you try to buy a man and end up going over the top of his avarice quotient. But it is still possible to go forward with this? It’s a setback but not terminal – we are still on course? I value the reassurance . . . You will, of course, be given travel itineraries as soon as . . . Thank you . . . Stay safe, please.’