The kid with the football shirt, Lewandowski’s name and number – nine – faded on the back, was hauled past the commander. His arms were bound and he was held by two men who dragged him towards the football pitch, his legs seeming to stagger and slip below him. It might have been an act and might have been an accident. The kid had control of his legs and could pivot on one and lash out with the other. He had good purchase… Go quickly, or go with a fight? Gaz did not know. In Londonderry once, up in the Creggan estate and in the roof of a derelict house, he had seen a child, brought by his mother to waste ground for a kneecap punishment – would have been labelled as anti-social which might have meant vandalism, or might have meant he’d called a local strongman ‘a feckin arsehole’, or might have meant stealing. Little more than a kid and going to be shot in the kneecaps, from the back, and hadn’t fought, had just lain there and waited, like he was drugged. He would never run again. The Bayern kid’s trainer caught the Iranian officer on the side of the cheek, and the kick had enough power to twist the man’s neck and topple him so that he staggered and might have gone down had the Russian not grabbed him, held him upright. Gaz thought it a powerful enough kick to have loosened teeth, might even have damaged the ligaments holding the jaw. He was held but they had no grip on his legs and he managed one last kick and caught the officer’s groin. The officer jackknifed, and the pain would have been severe. Clever? Maybe… Worth doing? Perhaps. The commander squirmed: nobody laughed, not like they would have done on an English cricket pitch. Maybe the kid had not thought it through, maybe he hadn’t reckoned on consequences, just launched fury as a response… the consequence might have been coming anyway and all he’d done was hasten it.
They were all on the chairs under the crossbar, and all quickly had the nooses slung around their necks. The women and the children had troops close against them, chest to chest, and were spitting and were being whacked with rifle butts, and the noise was of pandemonium. Gaz held her wrist so tightly that he might have snapped the bone, and she whimpered and so did the dogs, quietly but in distress.
There was a crack. A crack like a rifle-shot.
A crack that was carried on the sharp wind to Gaz, and he squinted to see what had made the sound and saw the chaos and then the scrum of movement between the goalposts. Four boys had been hoisted on the crossbar. Too much weight. Chairs dragged clear, the crossbar snapping. The roped kids falling and militia around them and the commander back on his feet, hobbling and gesticulating. They used bayonets on the bound kids on the ground, using the blades as if they were clearing rough ground.
Gaz thought there was more to come, that the killing had only started, and he could not look away. By text he was told to hold his ground… he was a witness and therefore valuable. Not intended that a Special Forces team having carved a path through the depth of the storm should then get stuck in a fire-fight against an al-Quds unit. He held her wrist and she did not fight him, and he thought his strength leached.
Had Alice been on the phone, when the three were brought in front of her, to her lover, confidante and fellow journeygirl for Knacker, she would have said, ‘No lie, Fee, but they look proper evil bastards.’ Hereford boys escorted them into the tent, were wary of them, with good reason.
And Fee might have answered her: ‘Evil is good, rack it up, and a little cunning to garnish it – where they’re going.’
The contact they had collected on the way to this shanty town of hovels for displaced persons quizzed each of the men in turn. Their recent histories were laid out. Common for the trio was an ability to focus on the flight from the village of Deir al-Siyarqi during the critical minutes before the cordon around the village closed. All those who had escaped from their homes and had run, half-dressed and fresh from sleep, across the football pitch and up the dried river-bed, had been pursued only a few hundred yards before the IRGC people had given up and had loosed wasted shots after them. They had gathered in the far distance, had hidden and had watched until dusk. None of the three had returned to the village that night, and in the morning they had watched as the birds circled in the air and the pall of smoke was not yet dispersed. One had lost his parents, one had lost his parents and two brothers, one had lost his wife. The camp where their credentials were examined by Alice for suitability was eight miles from the village that had been their home. The flotsam of the war in that sector were kept there, supplied with minimum nourishment and basic shelter. Alice had been driven there fast, the vehicle kicking up dirt from the open ground, to the rim of a plateau. The regiment guys had been reluctant to stop there more than half a minute. Time enough for her to soak up an atmosphere, and flick images of what she saw on to her phone. There had been drone pictures for her to sift through but nothing as cold and comprehensive as seeing it with her own eyes: all the roofs blown off or sagging, all the walls blackened from fire damage. The mound of the mass grave was still prominent, and she had stood for a few seconds where she imagined Gaz had been hidden, and from which he had seen the day play out… They had then driven to the shanty town where the detritus of the seven-year war were living out their lives. Quite moving, actually, not that sweet Alice with her face of extreme innocence and a scattering of freckles, gave time to sentimentality. She thought the men fitted Knacker’s requirements.
She would have said, had she been on the phone to Fee, ‘I think they’ll manage a good job, and go through shades of shit to get there to do it. Will be a painful job on him when they know where to go.’
Fee would have replied, ‘Painful and slow and him wishing he’d not been born. Well done, girl.’
And that was Alice’s business completed, and she could get back on the road with her escort, and the three chosen men would be moved by the man who had brought them to this sprawl of shelters, and they’d call him FoxTrot which was F for ‘Facilitator’. FoxTrot would shift them in a camper wagon across country, through back roads and tracks to the Lebanese border, bring them to Beirut where ‘sympathetic local assets’ would provide cash and travel documentation in the names of three citizens from Beirut, and they would fly north. The beauty of it was that they had seen Alice but did not know her name and she had spoken to them in Arabic, and could have been German or Dutch or Swedish, and the regiment boys were in mufti and did not have to speak and were masked. Fee was right to praise her; it had gone well. They left in a dirt cloud, and she’d be back in the Yard in the morning. It had gone well at her end, but that was the easier one, by a country mile.
She texted Knacker, spare with detail. Three on the move. Told him all he’d need to know. Alice reckoned him a good guy, the only man she’d follow into hell.
Knacker and Fee sipped apple juice. He rarely drank alcohol and she could do without. Some teams were used to being pissed up when an agent was launched, but he thought that irrelevant and juvenile and had trained his girls to follow the stricture.