At last light they had their view.
Foxy was beside him.
It seemed so ordinary, so close and yet so remote. He could not have said, without hesitating, what he had expected.
‘You all right, Foxy?’
‘Fine.’
‘Just that you sound clapped out.’
‘I’ll manage.’
‘Good.’
‘And don’t bloody patronise me.’
The evening cool didn’t penetrate the gillie suit. The hood was like a heated wet towel on his head, and his hair would be flat and wet under it. Not only ordinary, but dreary and cheap, the sight gave out no atmosphere of danger, or of a place where an enemy of importance was bedded in. An enemy. A target, like any other. Could have been organised crime, or a serial-rapist inquiry, or a training camp for the rucksack guys or the vest ladies. Just a target, and the only difference was that the Golden Hour would be a fine-run thing, if push came to shove.
They had come past a herd of water buffalo that had gone on grazing while half immersed, and there had been no herdsmen with them. They had seen small columns of smoke to the left, the north, and once there had been voices, kids’, and the sounds of distant life carried across the marsh. He had dragged the inflatable, with Foxy and Foxy’s bergen, and if he hadn’t they would still have been back at the wire. They had gone slowly and twice he had been up to his chest in the water. Once he had gone out of his depth and had had to cling to the side of the craft and grip Foxy’s sleeve. There was a narrow strip, going north to south, of land and they had come onto it. He had gone forward and dared to stand beside the sole tree there. He had gazed out and seen enough, then gone back for Foxy and found that the inflatable had been folded away and was tucked into the top of a bergen. They were together, on their stomachs. The tree was beside Foxy and they had a view that went through slow-waving reeds, then across water and over the brow of an island that was some eight or ten feet above the waterline. A lake stretched away, perhaps three hundred yards across and then there was a steep bank, palm trees and buildings.
To the right there was a group of huts, put together crudely with concrete blocks. Badger had his glasses on them, the start of his traverse, going south to north. There were men in uniform at the huts with infantry weapons. They wandered and smoked, sat and talked, hugging the shade. He scanned to his left and followed two children who kicked a ball without co-ordination. One of the soldiers joined them and squeals of delight carried to him. Tracking further left brought him to the mooring in front of the house where a uniformed man squatted and fished. The lenses picked up a little red dot on the water, a float. There was a block-house building behind the man, and its front was in shade, but Badger could make out a woman sitting in shadow. She was on a hard-backed chair and held a stick. The bright colours close to her were a child’s plastic tractor and a tricycle. He thought where they were now was safe, a decent distance from the target zone. In the last light, a vehicle’s headlights lit the dullness, and the man who was fishing reeled in his line, stowed the rod on the bank and hurried towards the single-storey house. The kids abandoned their game and ran to the woman on the chair. She pushed herself upright with the help of the stick. Where they were was safe, and useless. He didn’t have to ask Foxy’s opinion on it. It was useless because it was too far back, and they would have been voyeurs there, wasting their time.
‘We have to do it now.’
‘You asking or telling me?’ A snarled whisper.
Badger said he was ‘telling’. He was rummaging in a bergen for the audio-direction stuff and a spool of fine-coated cable when the car pulled up and they saw him.
Quite a good-looking guy, hurrying from the car to the woman and hugging her.
It couldn’t be left to the morning. It would be hard in the darkness but he had to hack it, get closer to the guns and where the kids played and the woman had sat. He watched them and they had their backs to him. They went inside… a good-looking guy.
Chapter 6
The dawn was coming up, and the niggle prospered.
The geography of the location dominated, as it always did when cameras or microphones were involved. Distances were crucial. A light wind in the night had rustled the reeds. Barely audible to the ear, they rattled – almost clattered – against each other when heard through the earphones.
Foxy whispered, ‘The sound quality isn’t good enough. I’m here for conversations, maybe half a sentence. The audio’s beam is having to travel through the reeds and that’s dominating any talk by the front of the house and the door inside. I didn’t set the parameters of this caper. I’m the poor bastard that has to get here – wade, paddle, damn near swim. I didn’t choose the ground.’
‘Did I hear that right? ‘‘Wade, paddle, damn near swim’’? You were on your backside, floating and being dragged along.’
The sun was a gold sliver peeping up, far away, above a flat horizon that was unbroken by trees or high ground, only by the reed beds that moved endlessly with the wind’s force.
‘What I’m saying is that where we are now is unsustainable. More important, where the mike’s placed is-’
‘By me, of course.’
‘By you, yes. Where you placed the mike isn’t good enough. If that’s the best you can do we might as well load up, turn round and walk out.’
‘Quit?’
‘I came here to do a job, not for my health. I see little point in staying if I can’t do the work.’
‘So I have to go forward and move the mike?’
‘About right.’
‘And how close do you suggest I go – the front door, into the kitchen?’
Foxy could have stood up, stamped and shouted, but he didn’t. One thing, verbally, to clip Badger’s ears for his rudeness, but another to break the rules of thirty years’ practice. Badger ought to show him respect for his accumulated knowledge. ‘You should get the mike into a position where its beam doesn’t cross a bed of reeds, so screening its access to the front of the house. Simple enough. You up for it, or do I have to do it?’
A shrug from Badger, sour little beggar. The sound was too poor for Foxy to identify more than occasional words. The one who fished had come by the house after darkness and spoken to a soldier, or trooper, or Guards Corps man, but the words had been muffled by the reeds’ movement. The same man had again come into the magnified vision of the image-intensifier, and the night-sight had shown him talking to the target. Both had smoked and their speech had been distorted.
In a half-hour, the house and the low quay in front would be bathed in low sunshine and movement would be dangerous, or stupid.
They had good cover where they were. Off to the right, which was south, there was a bund line that bypassed the shallow island where the mike had been placed by the young ’un the previous evening. It marked a boundary to the lagoon onto which the target’s house faced and came to the main shoreline on the far side of the buildings he’d identified as a barracks compound. The bund line was too far away for the mike to be set, but might make a better route onto the island.
More argument? Not then. Rolling away from him, Badger let his hands slide over his suit and checked it, involuntary and instinctive, then his headpiece. He put more mud on his hands and wrists and was gone.
What else had they bickered over?
The Meals Ready to Eat. One chicken and one beef, both with rice, and he had wanted the chicken. So had Badger. Foxy had insisted, had had the chicken.
The stags… He’d had to sleep, had been dead on his feet, but when the young’ un did the watch Foxy had been woken five times. Hard to get to sleep in the scrape, but he’d been woken five times, and five times could hear sweet fuck-all because of the motion of the reeds. He had let Badger know he needed sleep, not the sound of a reed hitting another reed and a thousand more doing the same.