It was an indulgence for Len Gibbons to have come here. He knew all the escape stories from this section of the Inner German Border: home-made balloons, gliders built in garden sheds, tranquilliser pills buried in meat and thrown to the dogs, then payment to the traffickers, who would attempt to hide a client under the back seat of a car, with sedatives for a child, and bluff a way past the border troops and the Stasi. One appealed to him hugely. The next day, while the hitman worked and while his own presence on the streets was unnecessary, he would go a little to the north to where he had walked for comfort and peace thirty years earlier, and he would think of Axel Mitbauer of the East German national swimming team. He would be there the next morning because it was unnecessary for him to witness a killing, merely to have a role in its organisation.
He turned away. A car blasted its horn at him, but he ignored it and began to walk to Schlutup’s church, dedicated to St Andrew. He had spent much time there and thought that being there had sculpted him, made him the man he was – whom some hated, some despised and few admired.
‘You didn’t have to,’ Badger whispered.
Low, but almost brusque from Foxy: ‘ “Didn’t have to”?’
‘About you and her. You didn’t have to tell me.’
‘Don’t remember telling you anything.’
‘Please yourself.’
‘I usually do.’
It was enough and couldn’t be put off longer. Did he regret the agony-aunt session now? They hadn’t spoken in the last quarter of an hour and the light had failed. Badger would have gone out, loosed the cable, then faffed about until he found the microphone. He would have come back, reeled in the cable and not thought too much about it. Foxy had made it a big deaclass="underline" he had talked about danger, and the wire, and suggested the goon had seen and noted. God’s truth, Badger had observed nothing that rang alarm bells, and he’d thought he had a good nose for them.
‘And you don’t have to.’
‘ “Don’t have to”?’
‘You don’t have to go. I can do it.’
‘Far as I’m concerned you can barely wipe your arse. What I told you to do, do it and be ready. Then we shift straight out.’
‘It’s done and checked.’
‘Well, check it again.’
Foxy started the slow wriggle backwards, using his elbows and knees to move himself, and his head went past Badger’s chest. Badger ducked – shouldn’t have spoken, but did anyway. ‘Is it her badmouthing you, sneering about heroes and Bassett, letting you know you’re second-rate, that hurts?’
‘You’re out of order, young ’un, and taking a liberty. I don’t remember telling you anything. Reckon I’ll be about fifteen minutes.’
He was gone and Badger was alone. The space beside him gaped. He began to clear out the inside of the scrape and shove their rubbish into his bergen. He took out the Glock and could do the business by touch: he checked the magazine and felt that the safety was in place. He heard, very faintly, Foxy’s crawl towards the reed beds. He pulled their kit out of the hide, lay in silence on his stomach and waited.
Chapter 14
Foxy went forward. No call for farewells: no last handshakes, no clenched fists punching against shoulders. He crawled to his right, leaving the mass of dried fronds behind him, and used his fingertips to guide him. He reached ahead to check for obstructions, anything that would break as he went over it.
The moon would be up later. Now it was not much more than a silvery wedge behind the mist that came up off the lagoon. It was the best time to be on the move, and the creatures in the water helped him: the frogs, the birds, and the pigs that had moved on and were almost up against the raised bund line that divided the lagoon beyond the beds. Croaks, splashes and grunts broke the quiet, and he felt good with the noises around him – not that the goon or the guards, who were more than two hundred yards away, could have heard the crack of a twig breaking.
He went into the reeds, and wriggled on elbows, stomach and knees. He felt a great stiffness in every joint. He had assumed it would be hard to get his muscles supple again after the hours in the hide, but hadn’t imagined it would be this bad. He had never done such a long stint in a cramped lie-up before. It would make good copy in a lecture hall, with the same old curtains drawn as before: ‘Sorry and all that, guys, but I’m not at liberty to tell you which corner of the world I was in – enough to say it was hot and the donkey shit smelt recent enough. I hadn’t moved more than a handful of yards before every muscle had seized and…’ Couldn’t say where, but his audience would be total pillocks if they didn’t understand he’d been behind enemy lines, alone, and going forward. Ellie was forgotten, and Badger, as was a monologue that had demeaned him. He thought about faces in grey light stretching away from him in an auditorium. A spotlight was on him and the men and women in the audience – from an infantry unit, a logistics regiment, the cavalry or the intelligence family – would listen to what he had to say. There would be no when or why but they would finish up with a good idea of what it was like to lie in a hide in the thick fabric of a gillie suit. At the end, there might be a little hint of what it had all been for: ‘You won’t, of course, expect me to break the Official Secrets Act, but out in that dismal wasteland, where the sun shines and we’ve had few thanks for the sacrifices made, we lived with the curse of the IED, that wretched little package at the side of the road, in the body of a dead dog, behind a kerbstone, and always cleverly made. Let’s just say that one man who made the damn things is now pushing up the daisies. Thank you all for your attention.’ He’d smile a little, and take a step back from the lectern, and they’d have learned about the privations of being a croppie. He would expect a brief moment of stunned silence. Then a colonel or a brigadier would stand and lead an ovation.
He was where the reeds thinned and there was open water ahead. He didn’t know – hadn’t asked Badger – how deep the water was, or how far he had to get from the hide to the mud spit. Most of the time he had held the binoculars in front of his face and the magnification had foreshortened the distance to the concealed microphone. The water lapped in his boots and saturated his socks. So damn tired because they had finished the drinking water some twenty-two hours before and his body had no more moisture to lose in sweat. His mouth and throat felt like sandpaper, and his muscles were slow, unresponsive. He was wading. He made each step forward with huge effort, which became greater with each step he took. He could see the back of the bird ahead, a slight blob of soft colour. If, then, Foxy could have found the cable, he would have yanked it.
He would have ditched the old discipline that said all gear should be brought out. He would have dragged at the cable, broken the connection and abandoned the microphone. The bird would have flown, spooked by the commotion. He would, too, have made some excuse about having the microphone on the way back, stumbling and dropping it. But he didn’t have the cable in his hand.
Foxy would not turn around, retrace his steps through the glue that the mud made, and return to the hide – acknowledge failure, exhaustion, fragility – and ask Badger to do the job. He couldn’t. He had opened his mouth and blurted stuff, made a fool, big-time, of himself. He struggled to get the boots moving again and the water level was past his waist. His stomach growled for food and his throat choked for water. He had weakened enough to spill the story of his marriage, then weakened further and done a volunteer. Now the mud was above his ankles and the gillie suit was a lead weight. The smell of the mud was in his face and he thought he was making more noise than the pigs when they had stampeded. Coots ran from him on the water surface and took flight, screaming.
Far in front of him, past the outline of the mud spit – his target – was the house with its security lamps, and away from it the old lamp-post on the quayside in front of the barracks. When he rested and was quiet, he could hear a radio playing softly in the barracks. It had been folly to say he would do it. He was bloody near marooned, unable to move.