The hands shook.
They were together, hip against hip, shoulder against shoulder, two plastic bags by their knees and four bottles of urine. They might not even understand the mention of a destination, if they were lucky enough to hear one.
Badger said, ‘You’re useless, full of shit.’
‘You’re arrogant, full of conceit and piss. You – you wouldn’t even have scraped through in my day.’
‘I passed out well.’
‘My day it was a proper test. Your day, Health and fucking Safety killed the hard bits. You wouldn’t have come through.’
He was drawn in – shouldn’t have been. ‘I was top rated in marks.’
‘Did you do the claustrophobia one, buried in a box with a pencil-wide air vent, in darkness, silence, and last thing you hear is the instructors walking away? Left for half an hour. You do that?’
‘They’d scaled it back, wasn’t permitted.’
‘Send you up the Fire Brigade Tower, did they? The vertigo test. No restraint harness and lean over the edge of the tower’s top to read the number-plate of a car parked right under you. How were you at that?’
‘As you well know, it had been banned.’
‘Dump you in a car boot, did they? Drive you over rough ground, bouncing, bashing? The boot opens and there’s a German Shepherd looking to make a meal of you. Was that tough?’
‘It had been ditched.’
‘And isolation. What about water and a biscuit pack, driven to the far end of an airport fence, dropped off and told to sit against it, never lose contact with it. There’s a car parked two hundred yards away and you have to log everything that happens to it, moves near it. The hazard lights might flash at midnight, a guy walks past in mid-morning. You’re there as many as sixty hours, and you miss anything, you’ve failed. How did you do?’
‘They’ve cut it back, it’s not the same.’
‘Did you do a run with a twenty-kilo pack, two and a half klicks in twelve minutes?’
‘We did that.’
‘Anyway, I did Claustrophobia, the Tower, the Boot, Isolation and Stamina, and I came out top in my class.’
‘They give you a medal?’
‘The training counted for something, and should be respected.’
Badger said, ‘Assuming it’s not the wrong dialect, and not the wrong tribe, and you can manage what you’re here for, what’s being said?’
They lapsed into quiet, and watched. The Mercedes pulled up, left the dust cloud to fragment behind it.
The driver was out snappily, came round the front of the car and opened the door for the Engineer. They had been together enough years for them to do small-talk on journeys: football teams that the Engineer had never seen and films he would never go to, but he valued the conversations. His own door was opened and he was handed the bag that held his laptop and the papers he had worked on. He stood, arched his back and stretched out the stiffness from the journey. The driver opened the boot and lifted out the new suitcase, carried it to the door, then bobbed his head dutifully, and was in his car, driving away.
Mansoor came to him. ‘I think your wife is resting, and that her mother is with the children and their books.’
Mansoor’s voice was breathy, hoarse, as if he had shouted and strained his throat. He demonstrated the wheels on the new case, ran them on the concrete of the patio in front of the door, showed how they went in all directions and grimaced. He asked what, that day, had happened, and was told men had been close, in the marshes, thieves, but they had been intercepted efficiently. How was his wife? he asked. Good, but tired.
He could smoke in his car but not in his house; he could smoke in his office and in meetings, but not in the presence of his children. She dictated the rules. He could not say how long remained for her – a month more, or the duration of his life. He did not know how long the rules she had laid down would exist.
There were two pigs in the water, near to a reed bed and close to the spit that came off the open ground some two hundred metres from their pier. He watched them, a full-grown boar and a young sow, emerge from the reeds and sink themselves into the water, only nostrils and eyes above the surface. Huge creatures, they moved effortlessly and with grace.
Mansoor told him that, before the thieves came, he had been watching for the African Sacred Ibis, but had not seen one. After the thieves had been intercepted, he had fished but had not caught a carp worth keeping, large enough to eat.
The Engineer had no interest in the bird, had less than no interest in the fishing. He did not share his cigarettes but smoked and walked to the limit of the small pier where the dinghy was tied. He was glad that Naghmeh was resting, that she had not been at the door to greet him and see the new case with the special wheels. Him bringing the case home marked a moment of virtual finality: when it was filled and they left, the road ahead might fork in two directions. They would head for recovery or death. There was no middle way.
Mansoor interrupted his quiet. He did not wish, of course, to intrude in private matters, but when was it likely they would travel? The Engineer said, distant and distracted, that the final arrangements were being put in place, but soon. Soon. They agreed it was a fine suitcase
Mansoor hovered behind him.
What did he have to say?
The voice was still throaty, as if there had been crisis and shouting here. The Engineer was told he should not permit his driver to take him through Ahvaz the following morning. There would be another hanging at the prison – a terrorist of the Ahvaz cells, an Arab. ‘He confessed his crime, placing a bomb near the headquarters of the police, and named associates. The sentence of death by hanging will be enforced. Another was with him. He did not aid the interrogators and committed suicide. I am told there will be powerful emotions in the city tomorrow, and after the last experience… There have been too many bombs from Arab terrorists. The penalty must be exacted. You should keep out of the city.’
He nodded, watching the pigs swim and feed. When the cigarette was finished he threw it down and watched it gutter in the water. He went back to his house to find his children and show his wife the suitcase he had bought for their journey.
Foxy whispered, ‘Try this for a bedtime story to make you feel good. The advice is to keep clear of the centre of Ahvaz tomorrow because they’re hanging a terrorist – sorry, probably a joker that we or the Yanks shoved funds at so he’s a freedom fighter. The Arabs reckon they’re third-class citizens in the blessed Islamic Republic and risk their necks trying to blast the mullahs. Anyway, he’s going to be strung up and it’s likely to make people angry. That tells me the local good guys are infiltrated, compromised, have snitches and touts in their cells, and aren’t secure. That’s why you and I are here. There was another who would have been sharing the gallows tomorrow but he topped himself. When the goon speaks to the boss it’s good, educated Farsi, and I can follow it.’
‘Have you anything else to say?’
‘Like an apology?’
‘For bitching, then sulking,’ Badger teased coldly. ‘You ready to say sorry?’
‘No.’
The house was bathed in light from fittings screwed to the top of the walls. It fell on the patio and across the track to spread over the pier, where the dinghy was tied, and the water. The Engineer sat on the plastic chair and smoked. He could have lived inside the camp of the al-Quds Brigade, in a fine bungalow near to the commandant’s residence, or had an apartment overlooking the Karun river near to the Hotel Fajr Grand. He might have been accommodated in a government-owned villa near to the Ahvaz airport, but he lived here. Her choice. It had been her decision that, when the Americans began to crowd onto their aircraft and head for home, taking with them the body-bags, so many of which he had filled, they should make their home near to the water, the marshes and old civilisations that captivated her, and where she was close to her life’s passion: the clearance of land mines. She had supervised the renovation of the building, had bullied architects and pleaded with builders, had created the world she wanted… and the pain had come. There was moonlight on the far water, the reeds and a spit of mud, beyond the throw of the security lights, and he saw the ripples, the movement of the birds and confusion where pigs browsed. He heard the racking cough of a sentry. He had thought he understood it, but he could not, now, imagine the future.