Hamfist asked again: ‘Are we fucked, miss? If we are, what can we do about it? Put it this way, miss, I’m not going into the hands of the crowd in front or the crowd behind. No chance, miss.’
Abigail Jones thought of all the women in the SIS, those who did power-walking up and down the corridors, jogged in the midday break, were shagged by line managers and desk chiefs to get up the ladder faster, contributed at seminars and think-tanks, and wanted responsibility. They would sweat for it and spread their legs to be given it. She hadn’t sought it and it had landed in her lap. ‘Where are you, girls, when you’re needed to share the load?’ More important: where was Badger? Prime importance: where was the chopper?
‘Nearly fucked, but still a little slack to wind in.’
She listened for the Black Hawk, but didn’t hear it. She knew it was coming, was airborne and had the co-ordinates. She knew also that the crew would have flown special forces, done difficult stuff, was experienced in extraction, but it had not, yet, showed.
‘Minimal slack, but a bit. You meant that, Hamfist, about not going into a cage?’
She didn’t know where he was, how far forward. Didn’t know how far he had to come. The Iranians, described by her guys as IRGC, were in a cordon line and coming through. They were some four hundred yards from her, her Boys and the two Pajeros. They had good firepower – her team couldn’t match the hardware – and came steadily towards the single man in the olive green, with the officer’s flashes, who tracked Badger.
Of Badger, there was neither sight nor sound. She had powerful binoculars, and the Boys did. They also had trained eyes for watching ground and the subtle changes movement made. Abigail had not seen him. Neither had Shagger, Corky, Hamfist nor Harding, who had the best eyes of them all. It was as though he had disappeared, burrowed into the ground and gone. The cordon line came to the officer. She couldn’t know what was said but saw the little cameo played out: authority gone, rank lost, humiliation on show. He was spoken to – the line had stopped – and his head didn’t lift. He might have mumbled an answer. A more senior officer’s hand thrashed across his face, and there would have been a drawn pistol in it. Her lenses showed the grey, or white, flashes of teeth falling, then the blood drops. He was hit again, was on his knees and kicked. How would it have been in her own crowd? If she failed to bring Badger home, and Foxy, if they were paraded on state television – dead or alive – and if a government had to squirm out apologies, how would it be? Not kicked, not losing teeth, not pistol-whipped, but out on her neck, erased from memory. She’d be – to those who knew – a cult figure of ridicule and hate. Perhaps better to be kicked.
‘Miss, their cage isn’t for me.’ Hamfist said it distantly, as if – each minute – her importance counted a little less.
She looked into their faces. Harding’s was impassive, told her nothing. Corky wouldn’t meet her gaze. Shagger murmured that goddamn hymn.
‘Could we go across country?’ It wasn’t rhetoricaclass="underline" she didn’t know the answer.
There was a chorus, but clearest was Harding: ‘We can’t, ma’am. Go down, get round the firepower in front of us and trek into Iranian territory. Go right or left and we hit water. We wouldn’t do a half-mile and they’d take the vehicles out with the weaponry they have. It would be a shooting war and not on ground of our choosing.. . and it does nothing for the reason we’re here – for the guys, Badger and Foxy. If you’ve looked behind you, ma’am, the outlook is worse.’
Behind was the hard place, the anvil.
The elevated track on which they had come was blocked by the Iraqi vehicles. The mounted machine guns had men behind them, and she could see the layers of belt ammunition, lit by sunlight. They were. 5 calibre weapons and the Pajeros would not be able to go down into the dirt and survive that sort of attack. They were around two hundred yards behind her and the Boys. Local people, local troops, loathed the private security contractors. They might have had a decent relationship with their mentors in the American or British Army, but the private soldiers – not answerable to civilian or military law – were detested. A single shot was fired, from a rifle. She ducked, then focused. An officer in a swagger pose, legs apart and barrel chest pushed forward, stood in front of the Land Rover’s bonnet, held an AK and had it pointed to the sun. A warning. Near to the officer, gesticulating, was the sheik who had lost a BMW top-of-the-range saloon.
She turned. Looked the other way. To the front. The IRGC men and their officer were closer now, and the beaten, kicked man lay in the mud far in their rear. The first shot was answered. She heard the crack of a bullet going high… between a rock and a hard place, a lump hammer and an anvil.
She searched the ground and couldn’t see him.
Two forces and two shots. She had nothing sensible to say and left her Boys hanging on her silence. If they were taken she would have a fair chance of not growing old in either the Evin gaol of Tehran or the Abu Ghraib lock-up in Baghdad. The Boys might have a poor chance of ever smelling fresh air again, particularly if an Engineer had gone into a gutter and bled his life away, and especially if tribesmen from a marsh village had been killed in the break-out with the Pajeros.
She searched again, every damn stone, every rotted reed stalk, a buffalo’s white bones and a frame for a boat encased in mud. She saw a movement and thought it was a rabbit. The lump hammer and the anvil came closer – maybe less than a hundred metres to each side of them. She heard the scrape as one of her Boys armed his weapon.
‘For fuck’s sake, miss, what now?’
It was because they had come back for him, for Badger. It was because Badger had gone to get Foxy. She could have screamed it. All bloody sentiment, the crap about going the extra yard to retrieve a colleague, obligations in a world she didn’t inhabit. She sucked in her breath and would scream that the bloody hole they found themselves in was their fault. Blame should not be levelled at her. She bit it down, clamped her teeth on her tongue, felt blood on her lips – and heard them.
The big blades were spinning pretty circles and the two came, dark and fast, with the profile of killer dogs over the last of the bund lines. There were no pylons here and no phone wires slung from poles. The Black Hawks could have been twenty feet above the ground, could not have been more than forty. She had no more strength and her knees buckled. She could see, when the Black Hawks were above them, the faces of the cockpit crew, then the hatch gunners. They slowed and banked a little, then hovered and she saw that one had taken a position towards the anvil and the other faced the lump hammer. In addition to the firepower from the hatches there were rockets on pods slung forward below the stubbed wings. The rock had stopped and the hard place stayed static.
Abigail Jones was trembling and could barely stand upright under the down-draughts. She cupped her hands and screamed his name.
Futile.
The Boys took a cue from her. They all screamed, five feeble voices against the thunder of the engines. She had no link to the pilot but she could see him clearly through the shield of the cockpit. He pointed to his wristwatch and tapped it hard, like this was no fairground joyride and time was precious. The rotors kicked up dust.
The dirt and sand swirled round them and it was in her mouth and nose, flattening her loose clothing against her torso and legs. The Boys were spewing, coughing, and there was a curtain round them of sand, dirt, debris, stones that scoured their faces. The curtain was dense enough for her not to see, any longer, the lump hammer or the anvil. She lost her view of the rock and the hard place. She was choking and her screams had died.
He came through the curtain.
She didn’t know where from. He was low, bent, and shuffled. The down-blast of the blades rocked him. It was Shagger who reached him first – ten paces from her and now clear of the curtain – then Harding, who dragged off the headpiece. He was huge in the gillie suit and seemed to understand little. His eyes were glazed and without recognition. First, Abigail Jones saw the bare white feet trailing from the bottom of the suit, then the head that lolled on Badger’s chest. Corky had her, no ceremony, and one Black Hawk came down. The skids bounced once, and the other flew cover above. Corky had hold of her collar and his other hand was between her legs and she felt herself airborne, thrown high and forward. The gunner’s gloved hand yanked her into the interior. Badger came next, and it was a struggle for the crew to get him up. He neither helped nor resisted them. Hamfist followed, then the rest… and they climbed, steeply. Her guts dropped lower than her knees. Before they pulled away – flew for safety – the two gunners had a moment of fun: they shot up the Pajeros until the flames started and black smoke spiralled. They went out fast.