She eased across him, slipped a leg over his hip and her fingers played on his skin.
Foxy Foulkes was dreaming. He had forgotten the name of the hotel and which junction he had come off at, and had forgotten the number of the motorway. He had forgotten, too, what the room had looked like, its decor, and what was in the chilled mini-bar. He had not forgotten, over seven years, that a lift had been offered from the training course for Greater Manchester Police, that she had been in the force’s computing team and was going to a seminar in London. He was going south. She had put her hand on his thigh, and music had played. He’d wrenched the wheel at the junction, and they’d checked in without baggage. Both had been half stripped before they used the little key to open the fridge and take out a half-bottle of fizzy stuff. It was a hell of a good dream, him with Ellie, now his wife.
His blazer was on the floor, in the dream, and his trousers and underpants, her clothes scattered over them. It was passionate, even frenzied, at the start, but the second time had been calmer and quieter. He’d told her they were soul-mates, and in the dream they did it a third time – nearly bloody killed him – and she’d sighed… He had dozed, and then thought he was dreaming, but he was awake.
He heard a grunt through the wall and struggled to find Ellie. Then he sat up, listening. Bloody hell, were they at it?
Abigail Jones asked herself, ‘What did you do that for?’ And answered, ‘God only knows.’ She could have talked through a hundred reasons, or ten, and could have decided that none made sense. She used a tiny beam from a pocket torch to guide herself down the corridor, past the open doorway into the older man’s room, and came into the big area where the gear was. She let the beam rove around. Shagger and Corky were on their sides, on the bags, and seemed to be asleep. Hamfist was hunkered against a wall, facing the outer doorway. He had an AK assault job, with two magazines taped, on his lap. He reached towards the small CD/DVD player to cut the music, but she waved a hand and he let it play on. Harding, the American, would be sitting on the building’s outside step, with an image-intensifier sight on his weapon, watching the broken gate and the parked Pajeros.
A burr in the accent, and a whisper: ‘They all right, ma’am?’
‘They’re fine.’
‘They know what they’re into, ma’am?’
‘Probably as much as is good for them.’ The torch was switched off and the jazz lulled them. She sat, cross-legged, with her weight against a loaded bergen.
‘Rather them than me, ma’am.’
‘A fertile imagination isn’t called for… Foulkes – Foxy – told me what he regretted most was that I’d taken his wallet off him. He’d got a photo of his wife in it, and wouldn’t have it with him. Maybe other aspects bothered him, but that was all he let on.’
‘I don’t have a picture of the wife, the ex, or the kids. I sent them money for new bikes last Christmas, didn’t hear back. Doubt there’d be any tears if an RPG aimed straighter, except that the money would stop.’
‘The younger one, Badger, reckoned I was good. Why? Because I hadn’t used toothpaste or soap today or yesterday. His story – the best of the South Africans when they were fighting Cubans in Angola had their teeth falling out. Why? Because they were the most dedicated covert-skills guys in the bush, and toothpaste is like soap – the scent lingers. No soap, no toothpaste, no cigarettes, no alcohol, no curries and nothing spicy. I suppose it was a little lecture in how serious the work is, the way that scent and smell last. I may just have been too damn idle to use toothpaste and soap. Oh, and armpit spray would be an appointment at Abu Ghraib. I learned that this evening.’
She asked herself again, ‘What did you do that for?’ And answered, ‘God only knows.’
They were in grey light. Grey sky before the sun came up above a berm on the left side of the track, to the east of them. Grey water, brackish and stagnant in the centre of a lagoon, and grey mud with dark cracks that showed how far the marshes had been drained artificially, then flooded, then drained again by the dams upstream and evaporation; drought from lack of rain. The reed banks, also, had no colour – that would come with the morning.
Two Pajero jeeps, low on their chassis from the armour plate fitted to the doors and engine casings, the added layers of reinforcement underneath, kicked up dust trails as they took a raised track between what had once been lakes, and went east. No radio on in either vehicle, and no conversation: the briefings were finished and had been reiterated over sips of bottled water before they had loaded up.
They drove along an old bund line, packed dirt and mud thrown up three decades before in the early months of the war with Iran, by bulldozers and earth-moving gear, for the convoys of Iraqi tanks to traverse the marshlands and reach the border for the drive towards Susangerd and Ahvaz. The four employees of Proeliator Security, the officer of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service and the two deniables had no interest in the history of the terrain they crossed.
There was no talk of them being in the lost Garden of Eden, or having passed alongside the Tree of Life in al-Qurnah during the night, or that they were where the Great Flood had occurred and the Ark had grounded. They did not observe that they were in the ‘cradle of civilisation’ where cultures had emerged five millennia before, and where a people, the Madan, had existed among the marshes since before history. Neither did they consider drainage, dam building nor drought. But they had gone by two tiny encampments, shanties with corrugated-iron roofing and other buildings in the traditional style of woven reeds, the mudhifs; children and dogs had chased after them but the thump of generators had not penetrated the thickened windows of the Pajeros. All of the buildings had been adorned with satellite dishes. The armies of the Medes, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs had been here, and the Mongol hordes. British infantry had fought a battle close by ninety-seven years ago, and had struggled in the same heat that would rise later in the day. The marshes had been places of refuge for malcontents, rebels, insurgents, smugglers and thieves. There would never be, nor ever had been, allies here for a stranger.
Ahead, the grey landscape took on light colours – red in the sky, green in the reed banks, mud brown in the water – and dust coated the vehicles. Pigs and otters took cover and birds flew away from the intruders. They could no longer see the derricks of the oil platforms – discarded, damaged, awaiting new investment in the Majnoon fields, but ahead was a horizon.
The vehicles stopped. The dust settled. In the few seconds that it hung, obscuring any view of where they’d halted, two men pitched out, then the woman, and two more men, festooned with weapons, pulled the bergens clear and the small inflatable boat. No hugs, no exhortations about the importance of a mission across a frontier, just a brisk cuff from her on their shoulders, and a nod from the two armed men. The two slid down the bund line onto cracked mud and into crackling dead reeds. The others were back in the vehicles and the wheels spun, forward to the limit of the track’s width, then reversing, and they were gone.
The dust clouds thinned.
Who might have seen that the Pajeros were lighter by two men and two bergens? No one.
The silence fell around them, a lonely quiet, intense and frightening, as it had always been for strangers who came unannounced and unwanted into the marshes.