That crew who were awake, supposedly ready to kick themselves out of the chairs into the open-top jeep and have the bird airborne within three minutes of the bell going, found this assignment littered with unanswered questions. The four-blade twin-engine helicopter, with a lift classified as ‘medium’, was the workhorse of the American military, and carried stores – Meals Ready to Eat, the chemicals for latrines, home-town hacks looking for stories that didn’t exist – and also flew special-forces units. It was reliable, flew like a dream, caused little hassle and less grief. But the American military effort was now scaled down, the troops reduced to spit-and-polish bull-shit in camps, so the guys in the two crews were generally just bored shitless. Each bird, each crew, could lift an additional eleven troops with full combat gear. They were on standby, but they didn’t know when they would be called out or whom they would pick up; they had not been given an exact extraction point. New, out of the Sikorsky factories, the Black Hawk had set their taxpayers back, minimally, $14 million. It was expensive hardware that sat on the tarmacadam outside the annex, and the ‘ready’ crew waited to be told something.
No one came.
Normally when special forces were involved – infiltration and exfiltration – herds of liaison men and women hovered, their cell phones ringing and their comms busy. There were none.
The pilot, Eddie, read a comic book and his co-pilot, Tristram, turned the pages of a Bible, the Old Testament. A side gunner, Dwayne – trained to use a 7.62 calibre machine gun – studied a puzzle book, and Federico, who had the weapon on the starboard side of the cabin, was deep in an aviation engineering magazine. They were not disturbed.
Any other time they had done the lifts for special forces there had been a presence alongside, checking every few minutes that their flight plans were ready and understood, that they knew where all the pylons with slack electricity cables were and which they could fly under, and that the fire power of Hellfires and machine-gun belts had been tested. They’d even demand a check on the fuel loads in the tanks. No one bothered them.
All they had been told was that a phone call would come through on the green handset, and a voice would give co-ordinates to an area approximately sixty kilometres away. That distance, going east, would put them hard against the Iran border.
They read, killed time, waited.
Badger had her in his glasses. Then, alerted, he swung them round, went through a full 90-degree arc with them, and picked up the bulldozer.
The big plant vehicle, with a bucket on the front, had come from behind the barracks and now powered along the bund line to the right. He fancied he understood. Past midday, with the sun at full strength, the smell was sweeter, more foul, and had seemed over the last hour to hang in the air close to him. The one they called the goon, Mansoor, hung onto the outer handles of the cab.
Badger had been up and awake most of the night, and had allowed the older man to sleep from the time that the house lights had gone out until dawn, had let him sleep through for six hours before waking him and starting the routine of three hours on and three hours off. He had let him sleep except when the snores came on too fierce.
In the first light, grey and almost chill, with the sun not yet peeping up from a horizon of reed tops and water expanses, Badger had crawled out of the hide, taken care to rearrange the cover of dead reeds, then had moved away and scouted the bare ground, on his stomach. He had been in the reeds and had seen where a spur came off the bund line and towards where they had made the hide. Then he had reached the open water beyond and the little light flecked the bodies in the water. Already they were swollen, gross – the smell had been building and had not dissipated in the cool of night. Now, in the middle of the day, he imagined the corpses would be even more distended. He understood that men had been tasked to retrieve and bury them.
At dawn he had seen the bodies floating with clouds of insects over them, and in the middle of the day he saw the bulldozer. He didn’t need to see much else. In this little corner of the world, far from anything he had experienced before, men could be shot dead, dumped and the evidence buried. The bulldozer went from his view and the sound drifted and was fainter… It was, after a fashion, what they did to their own. What would they do to those who intruded on their space and affairs, broke the boundaries of the borders and spied – he had read about spies. In the last war spies had been hanged in London, electrocuted in the USA, marched to the gallows in Syria, with a placard round the neck denouncing Israeli espionage, and to an execution chamber at the Sugamo prison in Tokyo: Richard Sorge, Communist agent, spying against Japan on behalf of Russian Intelligence, who denied all knowledge of him… denied all knowledge. It had a ring to it. Almost, in that heat, a shiver convulsed him. Fear? Apprehension? He put it down to the sweat running in the small of his back, where the fingers of Alpha Juliet had been. Denied all knowledge: up in Scotland, with the theatre of that house and the bay with the waves crashing, the cold, the rain and the howl of the pipes, denial had seemed unimportant.
He had the flies and the smell, the sun flaring up off the water, dazzling him, and a mirage haze.
She came back out. His hand hovered, ready to shake Foxy awake.
Her mother followed her, but held back in the shade at the front of the house. Badger thought her beautiful, regal yet doomed. Through the glasses he could see the effort it took for her to walk from the patio to the water’s edge, then little flecks of colour on the ground close to her feet: a flowerbed. Badger swore. She had made a flowerbed, and weeks before there would have been vivid colours in it. There was, against the house, a tap, and over the patio a discarded hose pipe. He thought it reasonable that the tap had not been turned on and the hosepipe aimed at the flowers – maybe his mother’s favourite, geraniums – since her diagnosis. An ex-infantry soldier he had worked with had once said that shock spread in a life much as a hand grenade rolled, bounced and slid erratically across the floor in a bunker or a slit trench. It would have been like that when the news was given them. He thought it would have seemed a waste of time and energy to continue watering the flowers.
She captured him.
She sat alone in front of the water and close to the pier. The children were not back from school, the mother was inside the house and the goon was with the bulldozer. The guards would not approach her. Badger would have woken Foxy, given him a hard nudge in the ribcage – where it might hurt – if anyone had come close to her and talked.
She watched the birds. Did she know that men scavenging for artillery-piece casings had been shot – he assumed for being inside a restricted, sensitive zone – then dumped, were being retrieved now by a bulldozer to be clawed into a pit? Did she know that that was the price of keeping security tight around her? Her work was mine clearance. For Badger the world played at riddles.
What would happen to her?
He had not worked in Northern Ireland. He was too young, and the war there had lapsed to a ceasefire by the time he was trained and operational. He had come across enough who knew the Province. A paratrooper, off the hills above Brecon when Badger had been with them on exercise, had talked of doing back-up protection for handlers when they met with potential Provo informers – touts – in the shadows of pub car parks, in the empty darkened spaces of beauty spots. It always bloody rained, they said, when the proposition of betrayal was put, the approach made. Some, the paratrooper had said, spat it out, some hesitated, and some came on board – bloody ran up the gangplank… Then – this was the rub – they had to go back and tell the wife they were changing sides and taking the Queen’s shilling. He hadn’t forgotten that conversation long into a night. If her husband accepted the offer made, and she came through surgery, they would face a new life, and convalescence in an English seaside town or a suburb of any city in the United States. First, how would the man respond to interdiction, approach? Badger couldn’t say, couldn’t imagine it. But he was sure Mr Gibbons, the Boss, had his finger on the pulse of it.