A final question. Had to answer correctly to win the holiday for two in Barbados and the new fitted kitchen, the food liquidizer and the wide screen television. He squirmed in the bed.
What were the consequences in Iran of the spy's report on a military factory at Bandar Abbas?
"Don't know, can't answer, was never told, don't want to know, better not knowing."
To black, to the darkness of the room, and no prizes to carry away.
He took a point on the shadowed wall, stared at it. She was asleep. If he slept he would dream of the crane. She didn't know of the crane, and she slept. There was a small gale of laughter, from the side of the house, and a car drove away. He was drifting… He had always rather fancied Emma Carstairs, and always thought she rather fancied him… drifting, but not sleeping. If he thought of Emma Carstairs, her bold smile and her wriggling her hips to work off her knickers, her hands taking his to the buttons of her blouse, then he wouldn't sleep, and if he didn't sleep then he wouldn't see the crane. He stared at the bare wall.
Chapter Eight.
In the last minutes of the night he moved like a wraith.
He came off Fen Hill and kept inside the tree-line, skirting the end of the marshland. The high winter tides, blown by storms, and the heavy winter rainfall, had made the ground he covered into a swampy bog. The water was always above his ankles and sometimes above his knees but he left no visible track of his advance, and he was hidden by the tree-line. He left behind him the carefully concealed sausage bag and the weapons because, at this time, he had no need of them.
When he came to a small stream feeding the marsh it was necessary for him to wade up to his waist, the sediment clawing at his boots and his legs. The higher ground of Hoist Covert, the name he had read from his map, was ahead of him, and the faint outline of the church tower loomed beyond it.
He moved fast. Once he was out of the bog land and the marsh, he did not stop to unfasten the laces of his boots and empty out the stale dark water and the mud. It was all familiar to him. He crossed the ground as if he were again in the Haur-al-Hawizeh reeds. It gave him comfort to be on familiar ground. He did not move as a trained soldier would, working from instructions and manuals, but used instead the innate skills of a predator. He did not have to consider the dangers of silhouette, of breaking cover, of leaving a scented track behind him. It was natural to Vahid Hossein that he should go as a stalking animal searching for a prey.
He had kept a steady pace and broke it only once when he had seen a single man come with binoculars and sit on a bench between Hoist Covert and a path that led back to the church. He stopped then and checked the ground ahead of, behind, and to the side of the man and watched the traverse of his binoculars. He was only twenty metres from the man when he passed him, in scrub cover. He assumed that the man had come to the bench to watch for birds from the viewpoint that overlooked the marshes; it was a point squirrel led in his mind for future attention.
He moved on past high fences and garden hedges and a sign marking a narrow worn path towards the village.
He climbed a fence and used garden shrubs to mask his movement He crawled on his stomach through a gap in a hedge, lifted a length of chicken wire to go under it, and replaced it. Twice he was within five metres of a house and could hear voices inside, but he kept from the arc of light thrown from the windows. Once he stopped and retraced his steps because a back door opened and a dog, bouncing and barking, was put out to run on a patch of grass. He needed to know where the dogs were: they were a greater enemy than the people.
The houses he went by were of old brick. Some were the homes of artisans, with wilderness gardens stacked with rubbish bags and discarded kids' bicycles, as they would have been in south Tehran. Some were the homes of the affluent, with little tended squares of lawn, heaps of raked leaves and the smell of dead bonfires, as there would have been around the villas on the slopes above Jamaran where the tagt-ut-tee lived, the idol-worshippers who only pretended to re sped the teachings of the Imam.
It was for reconnaissance. It was to find the way in and know the way out.
He heard the noise of cars ahead, slowing and changing down through their gears. He was beside a fence and hidden by ornamental bushes from a small path. It was well timed… He had arrived at his vantage-place when it was light enough for him to see ahead, and dark enough to preserve his cover. It was the few minutes of the point between night and day. He could not yet see the vehicles because bushes were blocking his view. He lay very still. A woman in a night-robe came out of her door and he heard the clink of the bottles she carried. The light above her door flooded the path as she went to the gate. The empty bottles rattled onto the concrete and she went back inside, slamming the door behind her. He saw the lights of cars rolling across the houses ahead of him, and illuminating the open ground.
He crawled on. The photographs of the house and the target man were seared into his memory.
He heard the mutter of low voices as the engines of the cars were killed. The voices were indistinct.
On his knees and elbows he edged forward, and gently parted the branches and leaves of a garden shrub.
He felt the shake in his hands… There was a police car, with two men in it, a dozen metres from him.
Beyond the police car was the open grassland of the photograph, and beyond the open ground were two more cars. Four men stood beside them. Two wore civilian clothes. The others wore blue over ails and across their chests they carried machine-guns on straps.
He felt the cold twist in his stomach.
Beyond the cars was the house shown in the photograph. All the curtains were drawn, and no light showed. He had been told the target was without defence, had no protection. He thought the men in front of the house were changing shifts. He watched. The car nearest to him started up, and the roving eyes of the marksman and the barrel of a machine-gun peeped above the door and out through the opened window as it edged slowly away. One of the men at the house was stretching, arching his back, as if he had stayed the night in his vehicle.
The two men with the machine-guns went to the door of the house in the photograph: he saw their wariness and that one covered the back of the other. When the door was opened there was no light in the hallway. It was professional protection. They went inside and the door closed on them. If he had come a few moments later he would not have seen the machine-guns.
He had the photograph of the man and wanted to look into his face as he took the knife or the gun from under his coat: it was important that the man could see his face and the eye of vengeance.
He slipped away. He crawled through the hedgerow, pulled back the length of chicken-wire, climbed the fence and scurried in the growing light towards the scrub and the shelter of Hoist Covert.
He waded the stream, then staggered across the bog among the trees. It was not the threat from the machine-guns to his own life that made his hands shake and his breath pant. He would be carried as a martyr to the Garden of Paradise; he had no fear of death from the bullets. It was the fear of failure. The brigadier, the man who loved him as a son, who had replaced his long-dead father, would be waiting in the office high in the building of the Mimstry of Information and Security for news of his success. Vahid Hossein could not contemplate the cloud passing over the face of the brigadier if the message carried word of failure.
He came through the trees on to Fen Hill and stopped dead in his tracks.
He had seen the bird.
The beak, tugging, and the talons, clinging, were at the rabbit's carcass. He saw the raw wound on its wing. The bird was at the limit of its strength. Its beak was tearing at the fur but had not the power to rip it aside. It was less than five paces away. He saw the wound and the movement of ants in it, and the colour of the flesh at the wing was not pink and pure but putrefied, like the old wounds of the men in the Haur-al-Hawizeh. The bird flapped the damaged wing and the good wing as if to flee from him but the strength was not there and it only hopped, crippled, a few metres from the carcass. He knew the harriers from the Haur-al-Hawizeh and from the Shatt-al-Arab and Faw. They were often with them as they hid up in the marshes and watched for the Iraqis, waited for the darkness and the opportunity to probe into their enemy's de fences He had grown to love them, to worship the beauty of their feathering. They were light, the harriers, in the darkness of the killing grounds. He dropped to his knees and crawled forward slowly to the carcass. The wound would kill the bird if it could not feed.