A Deniable Death by Gerald Seymour

Author:Gerald Seymour
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Thrillers, War & Military, Fiction
ISBN: 9781250018809
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Published: 2013-02-11T18:30:00+00:00

Hamfist had come forward.

She hadn’t moved, still sat cross-legged. He had brought a bottle of tepid water and put it down beside her hip. He’d seen that her gaze didn’t confront the crowd but was on the ground a little ahead of her. The crowd had just done prayers, had swung away from the gate and taken a line to the east. The stand-off began again.

They reckoned – him, Shagger, Corky and Harding – that she had, temporarily, calmed the crowd. For all the broken heads and probably broken bones, the men seemed comatose. Might have been the heat. He’d had a company commander, up Highway 6 at al-Amara, who daily blessed the heat of the day and thanked the good Lord for any temperature above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit because it drained hostile energy out of the young bucks. The crowd had no shade. Neither did she.

He stood tall. If it had not been for the alcohol he’d have been promoted above his last substantive rank, corporal, could have made it up to platoon sergeant. The drink did him and there had, often enough, been that regretful look from officers when they’d busted him down. He denied to himself that he had a problem with drink: Hamfist had heard it said, and clung to it leech-like, that an alcoholic was a man who couldn’t remember the last day on which he hadn’t had a drink. It was yesterday, and the day before. If they had charged at her suddenly, he was confident of the quick reaction that would have dropped them on the dirt track before they were halfway. If the weapon on the strap across his chest had jammed, he had grenades – gas, blast and fragmentation – and a pistol. If the weapons had jammed and the grenades had malfunctioned, he would have used his hands and boots to protect her.

They would have had to take his life before they reached her. The other Boys were the same.

He was thirty-one years old, and his thirty-second birthday would come round in eleven days. She knew the date. Shagger, Corky and Harding didn’t. She had known the previous year, his thirty-first, and he hadn’t broadcast it but it would have been in the file she’d have flipped through before he’d joined her protection detail. God knew where she’d bought it. It was wrapped up in smart paper, and there was a little card on it, Hamfist, Happy Day, Best, AJ, and inside was a crumbling cake, with fruit and orange rind and sliced almonds in circles on the top. The best Dundee cake he’d ever eaten, for all it was damaged in transit. There had been nothing from his wife. He’d not shared the cake but had eked it out and made it last into a seventh week.

He understood what she had done and how she hoped to extricate them, her decision to use the site where there had once been oil-drilling exploration teams. Her decision, too, that they were close enough to the surveillance boys, and inside the Golden Hour of protection.

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