Beyond Recall

Prologue

Location: Delta Alpha Sierra, June 2017

He thought he might have to kill her.

She came up the gradual slope of grit and scree. Because there were thorn bushes and tufts of yellowed grass, her livestock went ahead of her, shepherded by two dogs that alternately walked close to her heel and charged to head off attempts by the more independent goats to break from the group. The thought of taking her down distressed him.

He would have been described, he reckoned, as a kindly boy: twenty-six years and four months old, with no history of vindictiveness, cruelty, or violence that could be called gratuitous, that had found its way on to his personnel file. Enjoyed his work and considered good at it by his superiors. He was used to making fast judgements on what confronted him. He lay cramped in the hide that he had fashioned in the night’s darkness, a few stars to give him enough light to burrow under the lip of earth and stones. He had used the excavated earth to build a shallow parapet and was protected by camouflaged scrim netting that would – hopefully – prevent light reflecting off the lenses of the optics he had brought with him. The problem that faced him was that the goats and the dogs seemed intent on moving in a straight line that ended at his hide. If they kept going, the four dozen goats and the two dogs and the one girl would meander or stamp right over him. The goats would scatter, the dogs would set up a chorus of hysterical barking, she would scream, and the cavalry – hers, not his – would come.

He had been trained to kill, and had both the kit and the expertise.

His decision. Not one that could be shared, kicked around the briefing room. The guys in the unit, and the girls, liked to think of themselves as an élite collection of individuals without the constraints of laid-down procedures. They were supposed to think, weigh up consequences, then act. Instructors had drilled into him the techniques of punching, eye gouging, heel-of-hand chopping, bollocks kicking, everything that would incapacitate an enemy, and he had fired thousands of rounds on ranges from his assault weapon, and had been in the buildings where they did short-range pistol shooting. He carried pepper sprays and grenades that did smoke or flash-and-bang. There seemed to him an inevitability about her progress up the hill towards him; she might reach him in five minutes, or in ten if the goats found forage.

A mobile phone was in a pouch sewn into the upper arm of his tunic. A short wave radio was at the top of the rucksack he had carried into the hide. He could have sent a message telling Control that he was about to be compromised, might have to bug out and fast. The sun was behind him and threw shadows, but the ground above and below the lip that he had chosen was well lit. With his gear there was no chance of him slipping away unobserved. They were Shami goats. He knew enough of the Syrian culture, had been lectured on it, to recognise that these were prized beasts. They were tall, had fine coats, red and black and brown, and had distinctive drooping ears, mostly white. They were top quality and valuable, treasured for the quality of the cheese and yoghurt made from the milk taken from their ample udders. These goats would not have been left in the charge of an imbecile kid, nor one who would plant themselves on a stone and drift off into a fantasy world of boys or girls, of peace or war, of… She would be bright, and looked bright, and there were moments when the sunlight caught her face. She drifted after the herd and sometimes bent to stroke her dogs’ heads and seemed alert, and he saw worship in the dogs’ eyes as they looked up at her.

Why might he have to kill her?

Because this was Syria and the village she had come from was at the bottom of the slope, adjacent to a main highway, and was half an hour from a front line that had not been stabilised. The road had, Control had briefed the night before, a ‘specific strategic importance’. Away from the road, out of sight and dumped there as a sort of after-thought, was a village: probably home for centuries to a community of people existing from hand-to-mouth agriculture. Now, at the arse end of the war, it was a cluster of untidy single-storey concrete blocks built without a planner’s pattern, with water from a well and intermittent electricity that probably came from a dangerous tap into a main cable running north to south on the road’s verge. It would have been visible, of course, to helicopters or drones, but it seemed to have missed out on the agonies of the fighting that had rolled backwards and forwards across this God-forsaken landscape. She had been early from her hut and had gone with the dogs to the barricaded pen where the animals were kept during darkness, and had started out in search of food for them. The rest of the village was now awake and on the move. Control had said that it was necessary to learn about the village, who visited, where its allegiance lay: there should be eyes on the ground because satellites and drones did an imperfect job. Human Intelligence ruled, and it was the trade. Where did its loyalties lie? He was supposed to find out. There were alternatives to killing her.

He could bug out now and emerge from his hole like a startled rabbit and load up his rucksack and rifle, his binoculars around his neck, and get to the top of the slope and forget about her and the dogs and the goats and ignore all hell breaking behind him and start to tramp across featureless ground, without cover or hiding place and no chance of a rescue Chinook, British or American, getting to him within a fifteen-minute window. An alternative was an immediate response demand for the Hereford gang to belt out of their discreet lie-up bivouac, leave dust trails as they came to lift him out… and the whole business aborted. Which did not take into account what would have happened when the dogs barked, and she screamed and the boys down in the village – some of them already wandering and stretching and spitting and pissing over by the goalposts of their stone-littered football pitch – heard them, heard her. Most had assault rifles hanging off their shoulders. Trail bikes were outside some of the houses, and Toyota and Nissan pick-ups haphazardly parked. Women were appearing, carrying bundles of clothing towards the river that skirted the far end of the village, near to the football area, and one spotted the girl and shouted to her, and she answered in a sweet singsong voice, and there was cackling laughter and waving. When the dogs were frenzied, and when she screamed, then the hordes of Hades would come in pursuit. Within two, three, minutes, before the Chinook was even airborne and before the Hereford boys had clanked up their engines, he would have been hunted down.

Not simple, the matter of killing and silencing her and not bringing all hell down on his head. He would have shown out. For his unit, the big disaster was to compromise a mission by being discovered… and an even bigger disaster was to be captured or killed. Better, marginally, to be killed, even though his gear would be worth a fortune to a village community such as this. What would they do? What chance of them making him a cup of tea, giving him a bacon sarnie, and driving him fifty miles across the desert to the Forward Operating Base where he worked? What chance of them rating him as an item of value, establishing him as a British soldier and trussing him up like a Christmas turkey, taking him down the main highway, south, to where the Iran boys were thought to be establishing a garrison camp. Better to be killed, he estimated, than handed over to them… might live to tell the tale, might not. And the Resistance to Interrogation courses they’d sat through promised only a taste of an end-game for a prisoner.

And the other boys, Arnie and Sam, would they give him fire support if he killed her and needed close-quarters backup? An unlikely scenario was that the two men he had tabbed with from the Chinook drop-off would go on the regimental roll of honour for an heroic rescue. Arnie was likely to be half a mile to the west and with a view, just about, of the football pitch, and Sam was at the far side of the road junction, and neither had an eyeline on him. He was not good with words, had not had a testing education – not necessary for his trade. He knew of no word that summed up the degree of catastrophe that he faced as she came up the hill… She stopped. The lead goats were within a short stone’s throw of him, and she was a long stone’s throw farther back. She bent, then knelt, started to pick at a smattering of wild flowers that, somehow, grew among the stones and the gravel, and he thought there was serenity on her face. She stood, and delicately held the flowers, gold and violet, then pushed on because the goats were outstripping her as they climbed. Through the screen of scrim netting he had a fine sight of her. A tall girl with a ramrod back, ebony hair showing underneath a claret-coloured scarf. Dark eyebrows, dark eyes and a strong nose, and a mouth that seemed to move, as if a song was being mimed or a story recited. She wore a jacket of heavy red material and a dress that was brighter than her jacket, and he had a peek of flesh below the hem and saw her sandals. In one hand she grasped a light stick, in the other she held her flowers.

It was his duty to prevent himself being captured; to preserve his freedom he would shoot – or kill. He could have screwed a silencer on to the barrel of his rifle or his service pistol, but the goats would have run and the dogs would have surged at him and the boys below would have heard the dulled reports, and the women who had gone towards the river would have sensed chaos. He supposed he could strangle her.

She might have been nineteen years old, or twenty. She would have spent her life out in the open air with the goats and the dogs. She would be strong, would fight like a cornered she-cat, and his chance of strangling her, pressure on the windpipe until her resistance froze, was poor. He was getting round to telling himself that he had very few options. He used his mobile phone to send a text. Banal, short, he was possibly compromised. He might have to shoot his way out, not good and not definite. She had a sweet voice and he imagined the feel of her skin under pressure, then the convulsion of her fighting him off, and he was uncertain whether he could reach his pistol from the holster, club her insensible. The flowers were bright between her fingers and her lips still moved… He was supposedly a high-flier in the world of covert reconnaissance, one of the best on the team, and he was trusted to succeed. He had no idea what he should do. His rifle was loaded but the safety was on. He probed one of the outside pouches of the rucksack, searching for a pepper spray and a smoke grenade.

If he did not kill her, if she raised an alarm and brought the boys sprinting up the slope or chasing on their bikes and in the pick-ups, and if he were captured, then his name would be reviled in the unit. Few would speak well of him if he were killed and his gear lost… He tried to control his breathing, a thumb resting against the safety lever on his rifle, his body coiled, ready to propel himself from where he was hidden, gather up his kit and start to run. He could smell the goats. He lost sight of her because their noses and mouths filled the arc of his vision and one goat had taken hold of the netting and was trying to chew it, and he was clinging to it. He heard the soft growl of one of the dogs. The noise it made was like faraway thunder and he thought the hackles would be erect on the back of its neck, and next was the smell of its breath but it was pushed aside as more goats came to feed off his scrim net. He clung to it.

She was above him and used the lip of his hide as a seat. She seemed to flick her stick at those goats that had been at his netting; they moved away but he still heard the dog’s wary growl. He hardly dared breathe. Her ankles were in front of him. He saw the scarred skin and the bulges of her bones and the dried lesions where her sandals would have rubbed when it rained. Her ankles were tough and strong, and he doubted, for all his fitness training, that he would have been certain of outrunning her. Inside his boots, he moved his toes to ward off cramp, but a tickling in his nose had started and he gulped and tried to hold down the need to sneeze. He wondered if it was dust at the back of his throat or whether an insect had crawled into one of his nostrils. One hand held the rifle and had the thumb against the safety, the other had come off the butt of his pistol and he eased it with painful slowness to cover his mouth and his nose and wondered, if he had to, whether he could suppress the sneeze into some sort of grunt. Might be the same noise as a goat made, might be similar to the rumble from a dog’s throat. His body had stiffened and his breath was held and he needed to swallow, and had only her ankles to look at. A hand came down and scratched her foot. She sang softly to herself, not a song of joy but a lament. A small clear voice.

He had planned to kill her, but had not known how to, or when. The moment came without warning. He was mocked.

She sneezed. And again. What he had tried to avoid, she did. She lowered her head. He saw her scarf and the hair under it fall free to rest on the dirt in front of his hide. He saw her mouth and her eyes and they seemed to linger at a point where the scrim net had the greatest rip from where the goats had chewed it, and he heard her chuckle. A little trill of laughter replaced her song. It was as if she was teasing. He would have sworn that she knew he was there, knew he represented only the slightest danger, knew she would not betray him. Light bounced in her eyes, and her lips were curled wide. She whistled, then pushed herself up. She called to the dogs, and resumed her song. He sensed the sadness of it. She made occasional clucking noises that brought the goats back to her and she whacked a few of them with gusto. She moved on. When she was out of sight she could have gestured to the boys below, those with the wheels and the assault rifles, or she could have signalled to the women at the river’s shallow pools, pointed to where he hid.… Down the road, towards the Iranians, he heard the sound of artillery firing, and he thought there were also the sounds of larger explosions which would be the Russians’ strike jets. In these parts, the war was seldom far away, and he reflected that the village was fortunate to have stayed clear of it, so far. Her dogs were at her heels and she walked well, loping to keep contact with her goats. Probably premature, but he texted again. Reported that a possible danger situation had receded, no exfiltration procedure was warranted. She had gone to the left of his hiding point and was tracking along the rim of the slope and sometimes he heard snatches of her song. She didn’t look back.

The sun climbed and the day wore on and he had hours to kill before dusk, when he would go to the right of the village, towards the road junction, and search out a place where a camera could be sited. He would take samples from the soil and the dust from the concrete blocks so that the surround for the lens would be of the same texture when the technicians built the device. Then, under cover of night, he would set out for the rendezvous point where either the Hereford guys would be waiting for Arnie and Sam and him or the Chinook would come in. Several times he saw her but she never looked back to the place where mischief had played at her mouth, where her eyes had been bright with the fun of playing with him.

Would he have killed her for the sake of the mission? Taken her life if it had helped him to go free? Might have, might not have, felt lucky the decision had been spared him.