‘It’s not the promenade at Bognor,’ a voice behind him mocked. ‘Shift it.’
He must have opened his hand, let it slip. The stink of the animal clogged his nose. He scrabbled for it, couldn’t find it. The weight of the bergen seemed to pull him back.
His voice croaked: ‘Give me a hand, Badger.’
‘You a passenger, Foxy?’
‘A hand.’
‘Want me to lead? That it? Do a donkey’s job?’
‘I want to stop. Rest.’
‘We have to get there before dark. That’s what the boss lady said.’
‘A drink, and some help.’
‘Say it properly, Foxy.’
‘Some help.’
‘Properly, Foxy.’
‘Please. Some fucking help, please.’
And his voice must have lifted. A flight of ducks lifted out of dried foliage on the far side of the lagoon, and he remembered what Alpha Juliet had said. He wondered, rambling, if they were Marbled or Ferruginous or White-headed Duck. A hand came under his arm. He felt himself propelled forward, and they rounded the sunken trucks, leaning behind the buffalo carcass.
With the hand in his armpit, the weight of the bergen lessened. They edged back under the bund. The mud seemed thinner now and the pace quickened. A water bottle was passed to him, and he swigged.
He couldn’t hide it. ‘Back there, I dropped the GPS. It sank. I lost it.’
No answer. Not even a look that killed. He passed the bottle back. He thought they were heading in the right direction.
The bloody irony of it. When could he have refused, stepped back smartly and walked away? The opportunities were never available for little people like Joe ‘Foxy’ Foulkes…
She was still in bed, alone. The central heating had failed in her workplace of the last two years, Naval Procurement in Bath, and the buildings on the hills south of the city were as little ‘fit for purpose’ as the communal boiler system. They’d shivered all through yesterday, and the decision had been taken to close down until the problems were fixed.
She heard, below the bedroom, the front gate squeal. It needed oiling. She’d asked Foxy to do it twice, reminded him only last week. A vehicle swung into the drive. Ellie got up, shivered, remembered she’d turned the heating up last night to twenty – Foxy didn’t like that, and said sixteen was high enough. But Foxy wasn’t there… She’d had the text.
There were footsteps on the gravel, and two men’s voices. One was by the front door, the other beyond the gate. She hooked on her dressing-gown and parted the curtains. A man was leaning on her gate and his car half blocked the lane. Her eyes tracked across the drive, and there was Foxy’s car. The bell rang.
She had had the text two mornings before: Hi, love. In a hurry – have to be away, work, don’t know how long. Verboten to phone. Luvya Foxy. She had rung his mobile eight, ten, twenty times, but it was switched off.
She went downstairs. It was a decent cottage, in a country lane in a village outside the Wiltshire garrison town of Warminster, pretty with climbing roses over the porch, wisteria on the front walls, small mullion windows, a garden, three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a new kitchen she’d chosen. When they’d met, she’d been coming out of a divorce, with most of her savings gone in legal fees. She’d probably have ended up in a studio flat, if Foxy hadn’t offered her the lift down from the north-west. No way she could have afforded a chocolate-box cottage in the country. She had something to be grateful to Foxy for, but over the last two years that ‘something’ had become vague – almost out of sight since she’d met Piers.
She opened the door. The man wore a white shirt, a chauffeur’s style black tie, probably with an elastic band round the neck, and an anorak. He held out the keys. ‘Your husband’s, Mrs Foulkes.’
Half asleep, early in the morning and no alarm set: ‘What?’
‘Bringing back your husband’s car. We picked it up from the car park where he left it. Sorry we couldn’t manage it yesterday.’ He was turning away.
It was a forlorn chance. ‘And where is he? Where’s he skived off to?’
In mid-stride he paused, angled his face to her. A laugh without a chuckle. ‘Don’t imagine they tell me things like that. Not for the likes of me to know. Just a thought – if he’s away more than a couple of weeks, I suggest you turn the engine over, so’s the battery’s not flat when he gets back.’
She closed the door on him, failed to thank him. Upstairs, she checked an Internet site, a town hall’s page, learned a date and a time, then called the guy who did accounts at the Naval Procurement offices.
He stood under a palm tree and gazed out over the marshes.
They were a source of fascination to him, an endless pleasure. He enjoyed little in his life. Mansoor was in his thirty-first year. He should, by now, have been prominent in the al-Quds Brigade, looking for further promotion and higher command, but the chance was denied him because of the explosion of the Hellfire missile fired from the Predator drone, neither seen nor heard, and giving a warning in fractions of a second as the light stream and the roar of power fell from the sky.
He could stare out over the marshes, watch the wind move the reeds and ruffle the trees on the island across the lagoon, see the hunting herons and kingfishers, the ripples on the water when the fish rose and always there was the changing weather – threatening, benign, calm, dramatic – and the light. No two days were similar.
He would not advance because of the injuries. Muscle, tissue, even some bone had been torn from the back of his left leg, above and below the kneecap. He would have recovered better if he had been close to medical aid: he had not. Numb with pain, Mansoor had been carried on a litter from northern Iraq across the mountains. The hospital where he had received the first serious treatment had been in the Iranian city of Saqqez. There had been traces of gangrene in the poorly bandaged wounds and the surgeons had deemed it necessary to take as much again of the remaining muscle, tissue and bone as the missile had. His limp was pronounced and his future as a combat officer was finished. He had been sent to the marshes on the border as security officer to the Engineer, Rashid Armajan.
He would not have believed it possible. He knew the names of the birds that flew over the water and nested in the reeds, those that were gentle and harmless and those that had sharp talons and wickedly curved beaks. He knew also where the otters lived and bred, where there might be pig with young, and which island had the greatest infestation of poisonous snakes. He also knew that in these marshes, half a century before, there had been striped hyenas, wolf packs and, rarely, a leopard. Crippled, he provided security for the Engineer and learned about the beauty and life of the marshes.
At first, while his wife continued to work as a computer operator at the Crate Camp Garrison, he had loathed the prospect of guarding this man. He had, almost, considered leaving the al-Quds. He had arrived at the house, had been billeted in the barracks that fronted onto the lagoon, had come to know the family, and the wild life of the marshes and could not have said now which mattered most to him.
There were godwits and a small swimming group of pygmy cormorants and babblers, and he kept Japanese binoculars hanging from his neck. It the birds panicked he would look hard to see if a pig had disturbed them, a large dog otter, even a leopard or a wolf. It might be pilgrims going to and from Najaf across the border, or smugglers bringing opiate paste from Afghanistan and crossing Iranian territory. The birds were, almost, the sentries that watched over the little community, and more efficient than the men he commanded. With time, he had realised he was honoured to have responsibility for a man as important in the defence of his country as the Engineer.