She thought few of them reckoned there would be another meeting such as this, outside her home in the warmth beside the lagoon where the birds roamed. She faced the water. It jarred that the security officer blocked part of her view, and that his weapon was displayed. .. The pain throbbed, a drum beating in her skull.
They did the charade and logged birds; some species they could name but most they could not. The spotter ’scope, used by Shagger, stood high on a tripod, and Abigail was beside him with binoculars. The sun was high enough for the heat mist to have formed.
Where they were, the marsh waters were blocked and the ground around the raised walls, bulldozed to safeguard the oil-drilling site against flooding, was bare and cracked. There were precious few birds, endangered or common, to look for and she thought they might have to resort to throwing down bread if they were to get a decent entry into the log.
They were watched, mostly by kids, but there were adults, too, men. When the first half-dozen kids had turned up, seemingly materialising from open ground without warning, and the first couple of men, Shagger had murmured, ‘Had to happen, miss, like it was written down on a tablet. Two sets of wheels and us, no escort, and out here, putting up the tripod and the telescope. Always was going to create interest… and the chance of acquisition. I don’t know how long we can sweat it out.’
She had said, ‘By now they’ll be in place and will – I hope – have their eyeball.’
The sun beat down and she sweated. They were, predictably, the main attraction. She could have hoped that the area around the devastated drilling site had been abandoned by the marsh people – that the war and the draining by the dictator, followed by persecution and uncontrolled flooding, then four years of brutal drought, had driven them away. That would have been optimistic. Harding and Hamfist were sleeping, and Corky sat by the broken gate, his face half hidden by his wraparounds, the weapon lying on his legs. By the end of the day it would come to giving out sweets and they would be wrapped in five-dollar bills. Here, co-operation was bought with a high-velocity bullet and blood in the dirt, or by shelling out bribes. Might be why she detested the place and was counting the days till she was out of it – when this piece of work was finished, wrapped up. There might now be forty at the gate.
They stood and watched. She thought they had a degree of patience unmatched anywhere she had been by any peoples she had known. They stood in the harsh light without water or food. Their entertainment was herself, Shagger and Corky, blocking the easy way into the compound with his rifle. She did not think them hostile yet, merely inquisitive. Later, they might resort to showing pictures, blown up on the photocopier, of a bustard, a bittern or a darter. If they were lucky they had another day in place. If Fortune smiled, it might be three days. Out ahead the mist settled on a horizon of flat earth and reed beds, and far away there was water – where he was. She could remember each cadence of her voice: ‘What did you do that for?’
And the answer had been that God only knew, an evasion. She did not, would not, make a habit of crouching over a strange man to check the extent of bruising and finding her hands, fingertips, running over a flat stomach and going lower, then grabbing one of his hands and dragging it behind her so that it was under her T-shirt and on her skin. Difficult for Abigail Jones to know why she had made a pitch for this quiet, sometimes taciturn, sometimes mocking man who had walked into her life. It had been a compulsion. Regretted? Shit, no.
She had not met the guy in Basra, Six, Baghdad or her last London posting who did the business for her. There had not been a lawyer, a banker or an army man who had interested her. The last had been a teacher, mathematics for fourteen-year-olds, in a Lambeth comprehensive. She’d almost lived with him – three nights or four a week. He’d had no money and no prospects, but was fun and intense. He had jacked in the job, put the pension-scheme payments on hold and sold almost everything he owned, then gone to teach – mathematics or anything – in up-country northern Cambodia. He was Peter. He’d asked her, take it or leave it, if she wanted to come with him, but that would have meant resignation and a bust career.
There hadn’t been another guy since, not in London and not here. .. none of which answered her question. On top of a sleeping-bag in a ruined concrete office building with shell holes to view the stars and glass carpeting the floor, why had she hitched up her robe and lowered herself onto him? She didn’t know. She could still taste him, or imagined it. No regrets, none. What was best, he hadn’t thanked her. He hadn’t assumed he was going into harm’s way with the dawn, and this was a little boost to courage that might have flagged. He hadn’t even seemed surprised, but had been deep in her and had said nothing. It had been good… no regrets. He wasn’t out of her mind – and was beyond the haze on the horizon. She wore a moulded earpiece that doubled as a microphone, and the transmitter/receiver was on her belt. It was her link to them, and she wouldn’t anticipate the code message coming through unless their mission was complete and successful, or they needed to abort fast.
She didn’t expect Shagger – or Hamfist, Corky or Harding – to remark on what had happened in the derelict building that night, but she wouldn’t object to his operational input. He had the experience, which gave his comments value. He was the wrong side of forty, with a little weight gathering across his belt, and he came from the extreme south west of the principality. His parents had slaved through his childhood on a subsistence hill farm, breeding sheep, White Welsh Mountain ewes. He’d gone into the army on leaving the grammar school, joined a para battalion, whereupon his father had ditched his pride and gone bankrupt. Shagger had fought in Africa and the Balkans, done time in Ireland, had been in Afghanistan in 2001 and had left the army the next year, a sergeant. He was one of the drain who had quit to make big money with the private military contractors. He knew about every yard and feature of the road from Baghdad airport to the Green Zone, but he had never quite raised sufficient funds for his goal. He intended, one day, to have the cash in the bank to buy back that farm in the Preseli hills. With each contract he took, Shagger learned more. He gave advice only when it was asked for, and she never rejected it.
She said, ‘They’re fine for the moment. Nothing hostile.’
‘They can see guns and it’s daylight, miss. They’ll chance nothing till it’s dark. They thieve, miss. Always have.’
‘To pull back is a last option.’
‘It’s the worst option, miss. Here, at least, we might be inside the Golden Hour, or on the edge of it. We have to sweat it out.’
‘Would they know about the Golden Hour?’
‘They know that back-up’s guaranteed. Act of faith to them. Where they are, they’d need the faith.’
Badger listened as Foxy murmured translations and interpretations: ‘He’s the security man, the chief. Has a limp so he’s been hurt somewhere. If he was hurt in an accident, it would have been on their roads. If he’s a military casualty it would likely have happened inside Iraq or up in Lebanon. He’s mumbling, doesn’t know what to say, except that she should have faith in God.’
A benchmark of the work of a croppie, as Badger knew it, was to have binocular or ’scope vision, camera lenses or a directional shotgun microphone aimed at a target, eavesdropping, watching, noting, and be able to strip away the armour with which people tried to shield themselves if they expected to be observed. Few did. Not many understood the qualities he brought to his work, and the capabilities of the gear. It was a basic intrusion and he didn’t care. His life was spent watching men and women, noting small private happiness, tension and moments of pleasure. He was a voyeur: he might have been standing on a street in darkness and gazing at the gaps in bathroom curtains as a target prepared to wash, or looking into lit homes and seeing bitter domestic arguments. He might have been watching a killer burn a victim’s clothing, the sharing of the cash, the arming of a group on their way to a hit, a man weeping or a guard fumbling for words to a terminal patient. The gear enabled croppies to peer inside minds and souls. It didn’t bother him. It was his work.