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.’
It was not possible, as Badger saw it, to conceal rank disappointment. It was in the Boss’s voice as he spoke softly into the receiver. They had all watched him: they were the sort of men, himself and Foxy, the Cousin, the Friend and the Major, who made an art form of studying weakness, setbacks. Badger, briefly, let his imagination wander to the big map on the board propped on the easy chair that the Major had unveiled before uttering that first sentence: ‘… changed the outcome of a war from a triumphant…’ That contact: a remote, clipped accent somewhere along Highway 6, between al-Amara and Basra, probably near the town of al-Qurnah – all marked on the map and linked by a ribbon of red – where the Tigris and the Euphrates met, fuelled his understanding of the heat, the hatred and the sheer danger of the place. The Boss sat very still and seemed to ponder. Then he shook his head, as if to clear his mind, and pocketed the phone.
He said, ‘I can promise you, gentlemen, that in this matter you will not get half-truths and evasions from me. In the business that confronts us, we had a hope of local resources, but no longer. So, it is in our hands alone, which is probably a disappointment but perhaps a blessing. I apologise, Major, for the interruption… Please.. .’
They were no longer fighting cocks, Badger reflected, not pirouetting or prancing in rivals’ faces. Linkage with a faraway place had rendered that sort of pride second-rate. On the map he could see the road, the line of an international border, the symbols of lakes and marshlands and… The Major breathed in hard, as if his mood also was altered. Before the call, he had started by saying that improvised explosive devices had changed the outcome of a war from a triumphant and victorious mission accomplished to something that was close to mirroring ignominious retreat. Then the phone had trilled in the Boss’s suit pocket, and the Major had stood silent while the call was answered. The frown had set in his forehead and he had scratched the back of his neck.