A Deniable Death (54 page)

‘What are you?’ Badger murmured. ‘Foxy, you’re a stupid bastard.’

He loosed the spring. He had bent his knees, straightened them and, in the same movement, had heaved himself up with his arms. His knees landed hard on the quay. Water cascaded off him, and more sloshed in his boots. He tried to run fast, straight, but his movement would have been that of a shambling bear and he was huge and wide-bodied in the gillie suit. He threw the first of the grenades, the ‘flash and bang’, which did the stun job, and saw it fly forward as the guard fell back in his tilted chair, then pitched sideways. He had dropped his weapon. There was bright light, white, and with it came the deafening noise that ripped through his headpiece, under the scrim. He reached the door, and the guard was on his side, clutching his head. Badger threw two more flash-and-bangs into the hallway, and followed them with two gas ones. If they’d done their job they would have deafened, blinded, induced vomiting and put up a smokescreen that men would hardly want to charge through. Another, gas, went towards the guard who had sat close to the house. He hurled two more flash-and-bangs in the direction of the man beyond the barracks towards the elevated bund line. He himself had some protection from the scrim that dripped water and covered his face. Enough? He didn’t know – would find out soon.

He kicked the weapon away from the guard at his feet, who was trembling, and heard volleys of screaming – in terror – from inside the barracks. He turned his back and ran – shambled – towards the lamp.

‘You know what you are, Foxy? I’ll tell you. An idiot.’

The hands hung a foot, or a foot and a half, off the ground, the head level with Badger’s waist. Foxy was a bigger man than himself. Not even on tiptoe could Badger reach the rope knotted to Foxy’s ankle. Nothing to step on so he jumped. He caught the leg. He had the knife in his hand and sawed hard at the rope.

He didn’t know how long he had – seconds, not minutes. The gas inside the barracks would be good, but the one he had thrown towards the guard by the house would drift and thin, and the blindness from the flash would be short-lived. Seconds left, and he had no free hand to throw more grenades. He saw the rope fray.

There was shouting – might have been the goon, the officer, or one of the older guards.

They fell. He was on top of Foxy, and Foxy’s body took the weight of his fall, but the wind went from his lungs and he had to gasp. ‘Bloody idiot, you are. Nothing else.’ Almost slapped Foxy’s face. Badger tossed the last grenades: a smoke one towards the barracks, one flash-and-bang in the direction of the house and the other towards the last guard who had been outside. He hoisted Foxy onto his shoulder in the fireman’s lift and staggered.

Badger couldn’t run. He managed a crabbed trot, but not in the straight line that would have gone direct to the pier.

It seemed to him that he went slowly, and his back was exposed. He didn’t weave because he sought to break a rifleman’s aim but because of the weight of the man – the
idiot
. And Foxy was a
stupid bastard
. He expected to hear the drawl put him down, counter him with contempt, but heard only the shouting behind. He went down the pier.

He dumped Foxy. He dropped his shoulder and let Foxy fall into the dinghy. The impact shook the craft and water splashed into it as it rolled. He pushed it away from the pier and went into the water, which was at his waist, reached across, snatched the Glock that was under Foxy’s back and pulled it out. He had the twine at the front end of the dinghy in his hand and struck out, best foot forward. He couldn’t have said how long it was till he was beyond the flood of light from the high lamp, when the first shots were fired at him, not aimed but a wild volley on automatic. Then he was out of his depth and used the side of the dinghy to support himself, kicking with his legs and paddling with his hand.

‘A fine bloody mess you’ve put us into, Foxy.
Idiot
.’

There were more shots and two came near. Water spouted in front of the dinghy. Badger groped behind him, didn’t turn. He found Foxy’s hand, took hold of it, squeezed the Glock into the palm and told Foxy he could help. He could either shoot back or he could use his hands to propel them. They had reached a fair speed now, and there must have been a suspicion, in Badger’s mind, of hope. He thought his aim would take them close to the mud spit where the bird had been and across or around it. Then they’d hit the shallow water and wade through it, get over the open ground and reach the inflatable and the bergens, and— That was a lifetime ahead. There were no shots from behind him in the dinghy, but that didn’t bother Badger and he thought Foxy would have enough nous, experience, to shoot when required to.

He knew it would not be long before organisation was regained behind him. He stamped his feet to get a better grip but the water was up to his chest and the bed below him was mud.

‘It’ll be bad, bloody, Foxy, when they get it together. How did you get me into this? Don’t sulk on me.’

He could see the spit, and it wouldn’t be long before they were organised.

With boots, fists and the butt of his rifle, Mansoor drove his Basij peasants out of the barracks and onto the quay.

It mocked him. He was an officer of the al-Quds Brigade, a veteran of undercover operations in occupied Iraq. He had been wounded in the service of the Islamic Republic and bore the scars of it. Neither his rank nor his experience could alter the enormity of what he saw. It laughed at him. It was a length of rope with untidily cut strands that hung from the lamp-post. It was well lit and the wind stirred it a metre above his head. There was more than a slashed rope to mock him. The pier, away to the side where the dinghy should have been moored, jeered at him, too.

Lashing furiously around him, Mansoor created a fear of himself that was greater than the fear brought by the grenades. He beat his authority into them, and broke off only once. He had gone into the communications room, made the link, sucked in the air to give himself courage and reported that a prisoner had escaped, that his barracks was under attack from a special-forces unit that had now retreated towards the Iraqi frontier. He and his men had beaten off the assault but the prisoner, believed a casualty, had been taken. He had cut the link and gone back outside. His eyes wept and his hearing was damaged, but the scale of the catastrophe inflicted on him ensured that Mansoor regained control. It could not have been otherwise: if he sank into a corner and shivered, he would be hanged as a traitor.

He punched hard, kicked hard, hit his men hard with the rifle butt. His voice was hoarse from bellowing, and he rasped instructions.

The jeep had come forward and he had to swing the wheel because the driver cowered from him. When the vehicle faced out into the lagoon, and the headlights were on full beam, he could see the low outline of the dinghy and a slight wake drifting from it. The outline was visible on the extreme edge of the light thrown by the vehicle.

The shooting was ragged. The Basij, as Mansoor knew, could not have hit a factory door with rifle fire at a hundred paces. There were the Austrian-made Steyr sniper rifles, which had been purchased by the IRGC, and the copy of the Chinese long-range weapon that was in turn a copy of the Russian Dragunov – the Iranian military called it the Nakhjir – but Mansoor had no marksman’s weapon in the small armoury. He had only the short-range assault rifles. They emptied a magazine each in the direction of the dinghy. He snatched at one, took it from a guard. He had seen how the resistance inside Iraq fired when at the edge of accuracy. He wedged himself against the lamp-post. There was no optical aid to the rifle sight, only the forward needle and the rear V for him to aim through. He did a calculation and set the sight’s range at two hundred metres. Squinting, Mansoor could see the dinghy. He thought a naked arm was draped over the side and made furrows in the water, adding to the wake, but he couldn’t see the man who propelled it away.

He twisted the lever, went from automatic fire to single shots. It would have been a difficult shot with a Steyr or a Nakhjir; with an assault rifle it would be worse than difficult.

He had not fired seriously on a range, watched by an expert instructor, since before he had been sent to Iraq. He struggled to remember old lessons of grip and posture, the settling of weight. His breathing slowed, and he began to squeeze the trigger bar. Old memories died hard. He could recapture, with extreme concentration, everything he had been taught on the range used by the al-Quds élite outside Ahvaz . . . but Mansoor was no longer a member of that élite, the special forces. His body was damaged, he had not slept and his temper was torn.

Single shots, three.

The first was short, the second wide – no more than two metres wide and two metres short – and the target was a dark, low, hazed shape. He had to squint to see it with any clarity. He believed that the third shot bucked the shape of the dinghy and that it reared a little.

More orders, more blows and kicks. He put his men into the two jeeps. Their lights speared off past the barracks as they headed down the track towards the elevated path of the bund line flanking the lagoon. He reckoned he had scored a hit, that the jeeps would take him past their flight line, that he would block them . . .

It was the town that had shaped Len Gibbons, made him the man he was – not the man the neighbours saw on a weekend morning when they walked their dogs, pushed prams or promenaded on the cul-de-sac off the railway line between Motspur Park and Epsom.

He sat in his
pension
room, on Alfstrasse, with the lights off and the curtains open. He had worked the small easy chair close to the window. The drunks had dispersed and the late-evening stallholders had cleared up and gone. He had used this lodging house on recommendation from a secretary in Bonn when he had travelled north to the town, on the business of Antelope, and had usually been in this room, with the same pictures hung over new but similar wallpaper, the same chest and wardrobe, but a more modern chair. He would have looked out over the same view, the same towers on the great church.

To the neighbours in the cul-de-sac – all of whom knew Catherine well and expected to speak to her if she was out at the front, gardening, or unloading the ecobags she took to the supermarket – he would have seemed a remote sort of man, distant, with little conversation, but harmless. He might have been washing an unspectacular Japanese car, using an electric-powered mower on the small patch of grass beside the path, or retouching the paintwork. He passed the time of day with them, and would smile at their dogs or their children. His conversation would range over the state of the weather, the reliability of the trains into London, and the price of fuel . . . What did he do? They were accountants, salesmen, teachers, hospital staff, widows who stayed at home and retail workers. Him? Some dreary job in London. It was never quite explained whether that meant Work and Pensions or Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, but that was enough to satisfy them, and reason for him to be away on an early train on Monday and back late on Friday. Most would have thought it ‘sad’ that ‘old Gibbons’ slaved away at the expense of leisure and entertainment, and most would have felt sympathy for Catherine who existed alongside such a dull man with so limited a horizon. His suits were grey, unremarkable and bought from a chain, and his ties were those given him at Christmas. What did they know, the neighbours and the casual friends of his wife? They knew nothing. Neither did the mass of those going to work each day in the Towers have a more comprehensive profile of him. Some had made hobbies of archaeology or bell-ringing or whist, or did convoluted jigsaw puzzles, and thought themselves fulfilled. Len Gibbons successfully lived a local lie. Well hidden from view, there was a restless energy in him that a few recognised and some utilised. Now it contemplated, without qualm, the killing of an enemy. The Schlutup Fuck-up, in this town, had marked, moulded and fashioned him: he was a man in the shadows, but possessed of a ruthless determination.

He sat in the chair, listened to the great clocks of Lübeck. He did not think of the prevailing weather, or commuter train timetables, the cost of petrol, or holidays. He did not think of how Catherine would be that evening or whether his son and daughter prospered at their different colleges. He considered, instead, all that had been done to guarantee the death of a man. He thought enough was in place.

Had they known the work of Len Gibbons, his neighbours might have wondered if conscience afflicted him, if that night – in the certain knowledge of what would happen later in the morning, at his own hand, removed but culpable – he would find sleep hard to come by. The neighbours did not know the man living at the mock-Tudor semi-detached home in a safe corner of suburban South London. Any thought of conscience had been gouged out of him when he had worked in this town, listened to the chimes and handled Antelope. No second thoughts, hesitation. What mattered was not the snuffing out of a life but the effectiveness of his work, and the satisfaction that would come from a job well done. There had been brave words in the damp heap overlooking a Scottish sea loch, but they had been for the benefit of the outsiders. The big picture was wiped, and the little picture was paramount: it showed a man, with his wife, coming across a pavement on the campus of the university’s medical school, and another man closed on him. It was the limit of the picture, and he was not troubled by it. He could have slept had he cared to. The Marienkirche was a principal church in Lübeck, rebuilt with extraordinary dedication and skill after the war. The great bells, shattered and lit by a single candle, that had plummeted down from the spires, were off the main body of the nave. They had been there when he had come to Lübeck thirty years before and they would still be there. They were supposed to grip the visitor by the throat and condemn the atrocity of violence. Gibbons didn’t care what would happen later that morning. Neither would the crews of the Wellington and Stirling bombers – who had made the firestorm, brought down the bells and filled mass graves – have been troubled.