He had the communications, made the link, said it like it was. Didn’t expect a coherent answer from Alpha Juliet and didn’t get one. Silence hung. After a few seconds he thought the connection had already been open too long.
Her voice, strained: what did he intend to do?
Badger said, ‘Hang around, while I have darkness cover. See what happens, what shows. Not come out till I have to.’
They would be on stand-by for an extraction, but on their side of the border. The shit was in the fan, she told him grimly – unnecessarily.
‘Plenty of it,’ Badger said, and cut the link.
They read their stuff.
When the door of the ready-room opened, the co-pilot, Tristram, did not look up from the Old Testament. Dwayne allowed his puzzle book to drop into his lap and chewed his pencil stub. The side gunner, Federico, was deep in Aerospace amp; Engineering magazine, but shifted his feet without taking his eyes off the pages to allow the pilot to go to the door where a communications technician handed him the scrambled receiver-transmitter.
When he came back in, no more than a minute later, Federico again swung his legs to give the pilot, Eddie, space to pass. Dwayne and Tristram did not look up but waited.
The pilot said, ‘We can go at any time from now. If we go it’ll be into a hostile environment and close up against the border. There are two guys up there and right now it’s a bad time for them. It’ll be us that goes in for extraction – if that’s the call – and the others do top cover. It won’t be a night for sleeping.’
The pilot, his side-kick and the gunners looked up from their reading matter and sat taller in their chairs. They peered through the open window and could see the helicopters, floodlit, on the apron, fuelled and armed.
The old woman, the mother of the Engineer’s wife, had shown them the way. When Foxy was dragged off the quayside, kicks were aimed at him. He was cursed and spat at.
All his senses reacted. He could feel pain from the kicks and the wetness of spit. He could smell the sweat on their bodies and the food they had eaten on their breath, and he could hear them. Not easy to understand because they used the vernacular of country people from the south, and he thought they’d have been recruited from farms and villages, not a major town. He was dragged. They had stripped the gillie suit off him and he was left with his underpants, socks and his one boot. The rope was still below his armpits and across his chest, burning the skin. He was on his back and more of the flesh was stripped raw on his buttocks and the back of his thighs. He reckoned the heel without the boot bled from the sharp stones embedded in the ground. They thought he was a spy. They didn’t know if he was alone. Some said he was because no attempt had been made to rescue him or to shoot at them as the boat had closed on him – they argued about it. He could measure the excitement of those who had taken him. Was he American, British, or a pale-skinned Iraqi – a Sunni bastard from Baghdad or a Kurd from the north? That was also an area of debate. The goon, Mansoor, strutted beside him. Foxy was bumped along the dirt track away from the house and he saw the old crow woman, in her black, framed in the window, watching. His eyes met hers and he read hatred. He felt a growing numbness to the pain.
It wouldn’t last. He had seen men who had been taken.
The rope was tight on his chest and seared him. He had seen men taken in the Province, had stayed on in the hide and used his encrypted communications to guide in the arrest team. He had had image-intensifiers if it was dark and early on a winter’s morning, or binoculars if it was summer and already dawn. All of those taken had been experienced men, well practised in the techniques of resistance. All would have regained composure within a half-minute of the door being flattened, the kids starting to bawl, the dog kicked into the kitchen by troops and the woman scratching at the faces under the helmets. All – by the time they were brought out of the door into the fresh air, frosted or already warm – were calm and their composure came from the knowledge that they might endure a kicking or a slapping, but not much worse, then go into the cages at the Maze and mark time until freedom came. He had not seen one Provo plead and weep – they’d had no cause to: they were not about to be killed or to undergo severe torture. They might have done at the start, in the old days when the war was coming up to speed and when ‘robust methods’ had brought PIRA to its knees, but a halt had been called long before Foxy’s time. And he had watched once from a distant ditch, in the Somerset hills west of Taunton, the Quantocks, when an animal-rights activist had been taken from a cottage at dawn: he had burned a laboratory to the ground and driven the scientists working there close to suicide, but he had seemed to think little of going into custody. He had not been about to go through any hoop, and had known it.
It would be the goon’s finest hour. What every security man dreamed of.
Foxy’s head bobbed, rolled, and the back of his skull found stones to bounce off; some of the chips were razor-edged and slashed him. He could be thankful that the pain, for now, was numbed. He had done time with the interrogation unit at the Basra base. He had seen Iraqis brought in from the cells of the Joint Forward Intelligence Team – a separate camp within a camp, not answerable to local commanders: those men had known fear, and had cowered. They had had the scars to show what had been done to them. Foxy had sat at bare tables alongside the men and women who organised the inflicting of pain. He had been opposite prisoners who shivered and mumbled answers that he had had to strain to hear, then dutifully translated. It could, of course, be justified. The men under interrogation knew the inner secrets of the enemy’s principal campaign weapon: the improvised explosive device. They might know who made them, who trafficked them, who laid them, and their answers could – a big word, could, often used by the team – save the life of a nineteen-year-old rifleman, a teenage driver’s limb, or a lance corporal’s sight. People said, from far away in the safety of London, that torture did not provide truth. Foxy would have said they were wrong. He would have claimed that, delivered as an art form and from manuals, it made a man cough. He was not given the freedom of the team’s mess, but they couldn’t operate without his language skills so he had been tolerated, given an occasional beer and told that information extracted and translated had led to the finding and defusing of a weapon, or a raid on a safe-house, or the interception of a courier.
He knew that pain worked miracles.
So Foxy understood what was coming to him. When his head twisted, lolled, he could see the barracks, and the light shone down from the street-lamp and fell on the door. The rope went loose and the goon called for a rag to be brought. A guard ran inside. Foxy kept his eyes closed. There were Escape and Evasion people at the base and they said eye contact was bad, that being a sack of potatoes was best. They did the SERE courses, and talked of Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. Few people listened closely because the lectures seemed to add to a nightmare – as they had when men talked in the canteens about what to do if PIRA took them.
Foxy’s head was lifted and a hand tried to get into his hair for grip but could not, so grasped his ear, lifted, and the cloth covered his eyes. It was yanked tight and the knot hurt at the back. His ear was let go and his head hit the dirt. Then the rope bit again under his arms and he was dragged some more.
They went onto concrete. He rocked on a step after the top of his head had cannoned into the raised bit – that provoked laughter. There were no more kicks, and he thought that already he was less cause for amusement. There was a fucking cat that lived two doors down from his home, and it liked to come into his garden, pull down songbirds and disable them. Then it would walk away, interest waned… He was pulled down a corridor, then to the left. A door was unlocked. Predictable that they’d have a lock-up: for a criminal, a miscreant on a discipline charge or a foreign-born agent who was deniable.