Beyond Recall

Chapter 2

Four days of hell, and then a minute in which it seemed to Gaz that a cloud had lifted.

She was coming first thing the next morning, had a ride on a boat that needed a minor repair done in the Pierowall harbour, and she was bringing stock for the hotel’s gift shop. In the kitchen he shrugged into full waterproofs, nearly dry from the day before. It was lunatic to be out on such a day but he was a man persecuted by the weight of obligation and must get up the hill and beyond the castle and repair a paddock fence that had come down because of rotten posts. He would do it because he had promised it would be done, and the weight of the wind would make his efforts ludicrous but he was driven, could not escape a sense of duty.

In Gaz’s life Aggie shared twin roles. She was both lover and carer, companion and therapist. She would have acknowledged the first, was ignorant of the second. Fetching the tools from the shed, which shook in spite of the steel-woven cables anchoring it, he was belted by the wind and rain splattered on him. No man and no beast would have volunteered to be out that day. Gaz thought that love came to Aggie on a ‘take it or leave it’ ticket, but to him it was precious and his life had had little of it.

The friends of his ‘aunt’ were Betty and Bobby Riley, childless, with a 200-acre farm east of Stoke on Trent and off the A50. A new life. Nothing had prepared him, aged five, for rural life. He had gone to the village school, arriving first because he was taken directly after milking was finished and last to be collected, after the second milking in the afternoon. Different to other kids and never belonging; every mother within miles would have masked her mouth and gossiped about the child now living at the Riley farm… he knew some said he was bought for cash. A rough and ready life, without frills or luxuries, and a gruff fondness shown him but not open love. Treated, in fact, like one of the dogs, cursed at, head ruffled and given a decent place by the fire in winter – love of a sort. He had understood it best when one of the older dogs, bad hips and sagging on its haunches, had been taken outside by Bobby Riley who had carried a shotgun and had cartridges in his pocket and put a spade by the kitchen door. Just one shot in the early morning fog, and he’d returned for his breakfast, nothing said, but dirt on his boots and the smell of the discharge on his hands, and his eyes swollen. That sort of love was shown him. Nor was his mother ever spoken of, and he had never returned to the tower block. At first he had been driven to school and back, then had walked both ways, at least an hour, then had bicycled. Then there had been a comprehensive in Stoke and a school bus… there were girls there, and he was ridiculed for his shyness. What love he did know as a teenager was for the isolation and the quiet of the farm, and most of his spare time was spent out in the woodland beyond the fifteen-Acre. He knew the haunts and habits of badgers and foxes and occasional deer, and the rabbits: killed none of them, never used a snare or a trap or a net.

He worked hard at the fallen fence. There would have been time on the Orkney islands when all the barriers that marked a division of property or ensured livestock kept to their own patch were dry stone walls. Stone, there to last, was a currency. The cemetery close to the hotel was filled with headstones, functional and dignified and scoured clean by wind and rain. Many of the men buried within sound of the sea and close to the calling gulls would have shortened their lives by building stone walls, back-breaking work. What had he, Gaz, to complain of as he hammered three new posts into sodden ground, then tapped home the staples? The men and women who had been where he had – the Province, Afghan’s Helmand, and in Syria – did not complain, thought it diminished them… but that was before and this was now.

He worked steadily. He did not hurry. When he had finished he would tidy away his tool bucket in the back of the pick-up, and go home. He had a radio that he rarely listened to and a TV that was seldom watched, and he would get the place as presentable as was necessary, not that Aggie would have noticed.

One day, not soon, he might try to share with her what had happened in a storm in a place far away… but might not. It would open the can, let the worms wriggle free. ‘Be careful what you wish for’, what a teacher or a sergeant, or the psychiatrist assigned to him, could have said. He might one day, but not soon.

Time to be killed before he went home, before she came, and the gale to be endured and the rain to be sheltered from. He drove to the castle. He had no reason to be there. He would go inside, often did, through its low entrance and duck through arches, and would hunker down in what would have been a great hall where a man of authority would have held court. Where such a man would have believed himself in a safe haven, even if his future was death on a scaffold… He would sit there, contemplate, and be the better for it because Aggie was coming, a dose of the therapy he needed. Had found, inside those strengthened fifteenth-century walls, what he looked for, reckoned himself secure from the reach of his history.

Faizah was busy in the bar with customers. Early lunches for office workers and the visitors who flocked to Hamburg. A popular haunt, and the artefacts of the harbour and the traditional trades of the city were prominent, gave atmosphere. Impatient customers flicked fingers for her attention, and a shadow came across the door.

The door was held wide as if a potential customer needed more light to see better inside, and a gust of wind – carrying diesel and petrol fumes and the scent of the street – riffled her hair and lay on the bare skin of her neck, and tickled her scar. There were many times when the bar door opened, heavy and antique, and men and women hesitated there, but she sensed the difference. Had been waiting for someone to come, four days and four nights. She looked up, stared at the door, and a customer was snapping at her: how much longer before she took his order? At first she could not see the face because the light was behind it. The bar was kept low lit because the owner thought that enhanced its atmosphere and its replicas of ships’ figureheads and coiled ropes and imitation firearms. She knew it was what she had waited for.

It had not been easy for her at the consulate on Hohe Bleichen.

“I don’t know why you have come here. We’re only a consulate.”

Where else to go?

“The sort of people you are asking for, we don’t have them here.”

A message should be passed, responsible people should be contacted.

“And we’re about to close. We’re not open all day.”

She said why she needed to speak urgently to people who would understand.

“I don’t really know what I should do, and anyway I’m due to collect my daughter from nursery, and I only do part-time.”

She had exploded. A gabble of names and a village that was Deir al-Siyarqi, her finger pressing at the scar on her chin, and no tears, just a hard-fought calm, and the controlled anger of Faizah must have struck at a place of pain. A telephone was lifted. First call was to a woman, demanding that she cut short her art class and get to the kindergarten to pick up a child. A second call to Berlin, and delays and impatience, and obvious transfers, and finally…

“…I don’t know who I am speaking to but don’t dare to put the phone down on me, just don’t. There is a young lady here with a story that would freeze blood, and I believe each word she has said to me. And you will listen to her, hear me, listen, and you will do what is needed. So, here she is.”

Nothing prepared. Did not know where to start and a woman’s voice on the phone that was accompanied by a metallic humming and she assumed her words were being recorded. She was rarely prompted, not interrupted, and she told it – most of it. She spoke of the boy, the British soldier, and spoke of a man whom she had seen that day when she had been a witness to an atrocity, and now she had seen his photograph, on a Norwegian site and in military uniform. She told it as she remembered it from two years before and did not doubt her recall of each hour that it had lasted, all as sharp in her mind as a knife’s blade. Her name was taken, the address on Rostocker Strasse. It would be passed on, but no promises given for the attention her story might receive. The wait had started. She had thanked the consul who had shrugged, held her hand longer than necessary as if to signal that all that was possible had been done and something might happen – or not. Faizah had gone back to work and for four days and four nights had noted each time that the old wooden door of the bar was pushed open.

Her waiting was done. Not a tall man. Looked like a bureaucrat and she had experience of them in Hamburg as she had endured the hoops and jumps she’d passed through and scaled to achieve refugee status in Germany. A senior bureaucrat and with a good suit on him, a laundered shirt with a sober tie, and polished shoes. She saw his face, his little moustache, lightweight steel-framed spectacles, recognised him. A smile slipped to his mouth. She remembered him from a Portakabin, Gaz taken away by medics, and her fingers holding her wound because the makeshift work he had done to cover it was loosening. Then he had had a sympathetic smile, and she might have believed it had she not seen his eyes, cold as when the winter settled on the Norder-elbe channel: they had raked over her. He passed her, went to the bar, would have asked for the owner, who gestured towards her, would have said something but not entered into a debate or negotiated for her time. Had gone to a table where a single customer lingered over his coffee, and was invited to vacate the place, and must have looked for a moment into the intruder’s eyes. He pointed to the seat opposite.

She left her order pad on the counter, wiped her hands on her apron, and joined him. He took her hand. Said what his name was, that he had come from London, that her story had taken time to find the right pigeon-hole, and apologised for the delay.

“If you need a name to call me by then it’s Knacker, don’t ask its origin. What I want to say is very simple… We don’t forget. Days, months, years go by and events seem clouded in a haze of time, except that we have not forgotten. We have a message for such criminals: Never underestimate the long reach of our arm. Tell me.”

She pointed across the bar, showed him where they had been sitting and talked of the Norwegian customers and their iPad and what she had seen, and described a photograph.

Lavrenti, the major, walked through the empty rooms of the apartment. At his side was his mother. It was well placed in the Arbat district, where prices were steep even by Moscow’s current standards. Irrelevant to him. Bought outright and valued at $8000 a square metre it had a wide living area with room for dining, a kitchen, two bathrooms, two bedrooms, and a small balcony which would be good in summer and not collect too much of the winter snow. It would be taken by his mother; she would order the curtains and rugs, would furnish the apartment down to the cutlery, the crockery, the bed linen and towels: most likely she would choose the shower heads and instruct on degree of hot water.

In the Lefortovo interview rooms, he could call in a man or woman who needed reminding of their status in the new society. He could sit at his desk after the individual had been kept waiting for a half-hour or more in the entrance hall, after he had been marched along corridors with no decoration, no markers as to where he was in the building, after he was brought to the room and was seated on a hard, straight-backed chair and ignored. No acknowledgement, no courtesy. Could keep a person fidgeting, uncertain and with morale slackening, and would have a closed file in front of him and seemed to busy himself at a computer screen which was, of course, out of the subject’s eyeline. Then, eventually would start with a cold, monosyllabic voice and would play the bored official and deal with questions of identity, addresses of domestic and work life. Any interview carried out in the recesses of the old Lefortovo gaol added to the sense of intimidation, insecurity: as intended. The building was part of the legend of the state’s control over Muscovites… there he was free from any oversight. A suspect might denounce him, with threats of legal action in the courts, and the complaints would be dismissed. His job was to protect the regime from foreign espionage, to keep the regime safe from dissidents, scum, internal agitation, to continue the supremacy of the high-fliers of the ruling group, and to work on a career path that would take him, Lavrenti Volkov, into their ranks. Very simple. In the interview rooms of Lefortovo gaol he worked assiduously towards those aims. He had been to the shit heap of Syria and commendations said he had displayed courage, leadership and ingenuity. He had been to the city of Murmansk and his record there showed diligence, single-minded devotion to the aims of FSB… There was a threat, there must be a threat, it was essential that the threat existed, was alive, and was massed across the frontiers of the state: across the Norwegian border, up the E105 highway. If there was no threat then the work of FSB, Federal’nya sluzhba bezopasnosti, was unnecessary. The organisation could be wound up and its high-ranking officers sent to work in industry, or drive taxis, and anarchy again could rule as it had in the days before the rise of the President. It would not happen on the watch of Lavrenti Volkov, and in the meantime he worked with assiduous devotion, and his career prospered – as had the career of his father, the brigadier general.

His mother chattered about orders for Scandinavian furniture, not much of it because the new cult was for minimalism, and the imported TV, and the German kitchen units, and.… He never criticised his mother, could still recall the scent she had worn, from Paris, the day he had returned from Latakia, the Syrian port city now taken over by the Russian air force, and she had hugged him as if he were a precious toy, and the perfume had stuck in his nostrils, but he had not choked on it, had told her how wonderful it was to be home after a half-year of duty. Nor did he ever contradict his father, high ranking, the best of connections, but who had fought in the failed Afghan intervention. His father had guided his path of advancement: to whom he should duck his head in respect, who was a drunk and a fool and to be ignored, who was a drunk and an idiot but should be listened to, and who was a coming man and who was vulnerable and slipping back. And he never complained about the close attention of his two minders, Boris and Mikki, sergeants in a unit once commanded by his father and now middle-aged and clinging to the last scaffolding of importance, drivers and fixers and the street rubbish that he would soon seek to discard. His father had organised their recall to uniform for his duty in Syria and they were supposed to have ‘watched his back’ and made sure he came home in an aircraft seat and not in a bag; never complained about them because they harboured the secret of a long day in a faraway village, were witnesses. No complaints were made of their work, slovenly, untidy, the least that was acceptable.

His mother said that the apartment was a fitting home for an FSB officer with the best prospects of promotion, a future… He would be monitoring foreign diplomats, those from the west European nations who were most hostile, and would be directing the programmes designed to make them uncertain, paranoid: threats to family pets, burglary of homes and the parasite fear that came from burglary, and the opening of windows in the depths of winter and changing alarms and inserting porn clips on a family’s desktop, and the harassment of locally employed workers. He told his mother that he was grateful for her attention to his new home.

Outside, Mikki was slouched at the wheel of the Mercedes saloon, and Boris ducked his head when he opened its door for Lavrenti’s mother but not for him, respect denied him. They had been there, were witnesses. They went to lunch, a new Italian restaurant.

He should have felt strong, in control of his destiny, but did not.

A printer spewed out the picture.

Leaning forward, peering at the uniformed shoulders and the broad cap and its FSB insignia, Fee said, “Cheerful looking cove, I’d say.”

Alice pointed. “And that’s the line on his face, what we’re told to look for, but you could miss it if you weren’t close up.”

“Have to know him, have absorbed the sight of him.”

“Not just a glimpse. Would need a decent eyeball on him.”

Going south on Kennington Lane, away from the monster building of mud-yellow and lawn-green that was forever Ceauscescu Towers and home of the Service, was the office known to those who needed such information as Knacker’s Yard, or more simply as the Yard. Its door was sandwiched between the entrances to a taxi company and a fish bar and was opposite a tailor specialising in serious alterations. Varied punters seemed to come and go and it would have been difficult to single out that particular door, no number and no name-plate, but a bell and a spyhole, as in any way out of the ordinary. It was. Inside, with a television monitor to aid him and a lens trained on the street, was the same Coldstreamer who fronted up security at Round Table meetings. If he had a firearm it was not admitted to, but certainly he possessed within easy reach cans of gas and pepper spray and flash-and-bang grenades. On the first floor was the Yard and the windows had blinds permanently down but behind them and out of sight were steel plates. One open-plan area and a plain desk that was Knacker’s, and two work surfaces that were the territory of his only aides – Fee and Alice. Other Round Table specialists had a room farther back on that floor and two more had the upper storeys where sleeping quarters were available. Knacker used to say that contamination from the employees in the main building was better avoided if these ‘knights in armour’ (or hooligans) were separated from the herd.

“It’s not just the girl – where Knacker is.”

“Too right, there was the recce boy.”

“What are we looking for from him? What can he do for us?” Alice asked, rolling her eyes. Knew the answer but would be amused to hear it spoken out loud.

And was answered. “I seem to remember this morning that Knacker called it ‘strategic policy advantage’, what we’d be after. Doing harm to this fellow, this Major Lavrenti Volkov, nailing him down, and banking a dividend from it. Why we need this Orkney recluse… I mean, we’ll not get any moralistic crap out of Knacker. It’s for advantage, beginning and end – and what else?”

“Our guy did a runner, ‘getting away from it all’, that stuff. A sick man…”

Fee shrugged. They had done well, located a website far to the north and close to a sensitive Russian border and had queried a hack, and been economical with who needed to know and why. A picture had been sent, and a name and a rank and a location where this officer currently served. A file was up on Fee’s screen. Where the two women were, so far, the business seemed just the area of trade that Knacker was known for, and relished.

“Yes, I heard he was sick, our guy. He has to do the ID, get the eyeball, but we’d not trust him to do the heavy lifting, kill the bastard. Likely would funk it… and there are attractions in using Syrian cowboys. What a strike for them, right into Kremlin land. Imagine word of it sneaking into all those sullen refugee skulls in the camps for dispossessed: be a time for trumpet and tympany. What an encouragement for all those poor beggars who reckon they are losers… and could be, the ultimate aim, the start of the quagmire involvement of the Russians just when they are getting packed up and ready – mission accomplished – to go home. It is attractive and can be done, but right at the start the lad has to do the identification. In and out.”

“Makes sense.” Alice grinned.

He stayed motionless. Gaz had his knees up and his arms hooked around them and struggled to keep his breathing steady. Had no need of a forecast, had sufficient experience of the storms to know that it would rise to a crescendo that evening, then break and be gone. During the night it would hammer in. And the black dog would come snorting at his ankles. He stayed in the tomb-like hall of the castle and little light penetrated the small sockets where the wind funnelled and the rain spat. The islands were about history.

If he had not accepted that events long gone dominated the islands then he could not have settled on Westray. History, to Gaz, was relevant because it gave him insights into the pecking order of importance, where his own life stood – and where he had been and what he had done, had witnessed – and not done, while clinging to his loaded rifle. Had not done anything that marked him out and was no longer a player in the shaping of events. Might one day say something along that tack to Aggie. Might try to breathe into her ear a little of a philosophy he hoped would protect him from the dog.

History was the lifeblood of the Orkney islands. Men and women had lived their lives, brought up children, buried their parents, on the wind-scraped land since the peeling back of the Ice Age. Skara Brae, a settlement of 5000 years before, had been exposed when waves had hit the shore and washed away the sand that had hidden a civilisation. The Ring of Brodger and the Ness of Brodger were rated unique in Europe, and walls there had been built forty-five centuries before to a thickness of fifteen feet. Christians had come 1400 years before Gaz’s arrival, and the sites of a long-gone and disciplined people had been reactivated by Vikings who had scratched the name of a woman on a wall in a burial chamber, dubbing her ‘most beautiful’, and a saint had been murdered by axe blows on the orders of Earl Hakon 900 years ago, and his name “Magnus” given to the cathedral in Kirkwall. Mediaeval disasters had come and gone, and in more modern times naval catastrophes had wounded the prestige of the Royal Navy and the supposed safe anchorage of Scapa Flow… the sinking of the Royal Oak from a German submarine’s torpedoes eight decades before, and 1200 men on board and two in three drowned… Gaz knew the marker buoy and knew the location of the grave of the saint, and the last resting place of so many whose lives had barely scratched on history but who still had outstripped him, Corporal Gary Baldwin, Special Reconnaissance Regiment, (Discharged Medically Unfit for Duty). Behind him was an arch and scratched in the stone was the message from many hundreds of years before: When I see the blood I will pass over you in the night. The history of the islands swamped him, but Aggie cared not a damn for it. Nor did the religion’s carved words impress her, and she’d have rejected that promise of protection, and a message on a haven.

She would be with him early in the morning and then the storm would move on and he would be saved from the demons. He sucked deep breaths and sought to stifle the tremors… She had no respect for the history. Not the first time or the second, in his bed in the bungalow, but the third time they had been together. Her initiative and him wet with hesitancy, and nervous because stripping there was beyond the rules of his life, and her discarding and chucking fragments of clothing towards the cattle who came to watch the antics. Sex at the Knap of Howar, and her on top and him underneath and his body afterwards alive with the welts of nettle stings, and below them were the clean stone walls, sunken, of the homes built some 5,500 years before. Those who had lived there would not have exercised inhibition and Aggie had aped them, and brought him along with her, had taught and freed him, and he had imagined the smells of the fire and the scents of sweat and dirt, the tastes of their cooking, and the sea had burst on rocks below them. She had laughed and eased off him and taken the rubber, folded it, put it neatly in her bag for disposal and then had gone in search of her clothing and had dressed herself… There had been no other real love in his life. He’d thought their loving beside the settlement’s walls and doorways and stores was to test him, see whether she thought him worth pursuing, and had never told him how she rated him… He could picture each stone in the wall closest to him, could hear the cries of fulmars and terns, and could feel the shame of that long-ago day which bred despair. He had done nothing, in his hide above the village, had been a watcher.

It was a horrid storm that came to Westray off the Atlantic, and near as awful as the one that would have gathered strength over the uplands of the Jabal al-Ruwaq and above the headwaters of the Euphrates, but he believed himself safe and Aggie would soon be with him, and the pull of brutal history, recent and long gone but not lost, would be a little more behind him.

Delta Alpha Sierra, the second hour

The wind and the rain came towards Gaz.

It was just past dawn and he was dry, comfortable and fed, and ready to receive his usual visitor. Then he would sleep, then doze, then spend the last afternoon hours getting ready for dusk and the move forward in darkness to the wall where the camera was and would settle down to the intricate work of prising open the breeze-blocks and extracting the battery, replacing it… just about routine and he could have done it with his eyes closed and his mind dead. Except that he would not be sleeping, nor dozing and he had the feeling, strong, that a bad day beckoned.

He lay in his dug-out cavity and was sheltered behind a scrim net in which he had woven lengths of desiccated thorn. No sun had risen behind him but there was always a possibility that light might reflect off his binocular lenses. Gaz was careful, took precautions. Did not hurry when it was not required and followed all the basic laws for the preservation of his safety. He reckoned the detonations of ordnance were creeping closer, mortars and artillery, and sometimes he saw the vivid flashes of the explosions. He blamed the Special Forces people.

Because of the location of the village, Deir al-Siyarqi, the Hereford mobile teams had spent time here. The village was sited in naturally dead ground, hard for strangers to know of its existence. It ran alongside, but was out of sight of, a main highway. The village and its people offered a chance of quiet but comprehensive surveillance of the road. Not everything was done by electronics and satellite photography. The need still existed for a man to be down on his haunches, chewing grass and seemingly half asleep, counting armour moving along the road: see whether it was Russian armour or Iranian armour or Hezbollah armour or Syrian armour, and identify troops on the move. A man chewing on grass, or a camera built into a wall, did a fair job. The village had survived previous campaigns when ISIS had pushed back government troops and was best when it stayed anonymous and barely figuring on a military map. The Hereford heroes had brought some old weaponry and done some training with the kids, bored, then flattered and then pumped up with silly courage. They would – the village teenagers – have thought themselves invulnerable, had been taught tactics by one of the world’s talented units, would have thought themselves beyond and upward of the standard of bee’s bollocks… They would have gone down the road that night, Gaz’s bloody luck, and shot up the tent camp of the Iranians. The equivalent of taking a broom handle, finding a hedge with a hornet nest in it, and giving it a serious whack. Gaz had watched the manoeuvres of Russian troops and those from the Iranian units and the militia from Lebanon and the regular units of the Syrian government. His skill was to be motionless on a hillside, unseen, monitoring and recording and reporting: it was the work of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. He had a combat rifle and a cluster of grenades but did not expect to use them. He was there to replace a camera battery, supposed to arrive unseen, carry out his task, slip away.

He saw the girl. She had the dogs with her. The older village women were already heading for the river, carried buckets. Some boys were on the move and were loading into pick-ups and might be going farther up the road, perhaps had work to get to. Her dogs were always at her heel. He had known this girl for months, had seen from the cheekiness of her smile, the mischief in her eyes, that the secret of his hiding place was known to her. Although she often sat within a couple of feet of his netting, close enough to reach out and touch him, near enough to whisper a confidence, they had never spoken, her to him, him to her – and it made for a sort of comfort. Gaz was certain that she went back to the village and never blathered that he had been there, was still there, never boasted of her skill at finding him. He would have known… The boys from the village would have come out and stared up the hillside and then edged closer, overwhelmed by curiosity… a village elder would have come with fruit and a soft drink… and the Hereford boys would have been told. It would have been fed into the debriefs that he was compromised and should not go back. She had kept her secret, had walked near to him and shown him the cheekiness, and had kept it close – and he did not know why.

With the dogs, she had gone to the pen of old thorn and had swung back the builder’s pallet that doubled as a gate and the goats were gambolling, crazy and excited. He wondered if she had already eaten, what breakfast she took… Occasionally she would bring some grapes for him, and from a fold of her skirt would put them down beside his head, and then move on with the goats. Music played, then was cut off by a belated call to prayer. She ignored it, and let the goats and the dogs lead her… Then she heard the explosions, and he saw more detonation flashes. Villagers, some half-dressed, were spilling from the doorways and cocked their heads and listened. Every action had consequences, what Gaz had been taught, and he watched and felt that the day would go bad and could see the dull shapes of the personnel carriers coming up the road in convoy.

Perhaps he could have moved then… packed his Bergen, stowed his kit, tidied his hide. Crawled out and up on to the plateau where the ground was flat grit and there was no cover, no trees, bushes or rocks. She ignored the rain and had a heavy scarf across her hair and shoulders, and carried a light stick, and bulging at her waist was a plastic bag of food and water. He thought she would have heard sufficient shell and mortar fire to accept a fatalism: would get on with her day and hope that a storm from rain or wind or ordnance would pass her by. He saw the convoy coming on at speed up the road but still short of the track running down to the village, easy to miss, and Gaz reckoned one of the jeeps – in the faint light and with rain and dirt in the wind – carried a Russian flag tacked to a radio aerial.

Once a soldier in the Soviet army, now a veteran, Jasha had turned his military skills to those of a hunter. Decades before, he had lost most of the flesh, part of the muscle and some of the bone in his left leg from one of those shit little mines that the Afghans had scattered close to the Soviet base at Kunduz. He could walk, in a fashion, but not fast.

The bear, too, was a veteran and wounded.

They watched each other. About forty paces between them, and the bear would have known who he was. He called it Zhukov: a good name for a bear. He would have stood some two and a half metres high and might have weighed almost half a ton. Its coat was a rich mahogany brown, its eyes seemed black and had a lifeless coldness, and Jasha thought that the beast would have torn a man to pieces with the long bent claws of its right front paw. Any man would have had to shoot Zhukov between the eyes, and drop him as dead weight if he were that close… any man but not Jasha. He was in his middle sixties, had been a sniper in a regiment of mechanised infantry, had been invalided out and had come to Murmansk in search of some form of hunting therapy while his wound seemed to heal, then went gangrenous, seemed to improve then deteriorate. And Zhukov, his supposed friend – only friend – was in no better health. Both damaged, both suspicious and introverted, and both with the easy habit of killing.

The bear might have wished to end the hunter’s life because it was in perpetual pain and savage tempered, could have done it without difficulty. Jasha might have wanted to kill Zhukov out of pity, out of boredom and the need for splurged excitement, and had a rifle in his hands, cocked, the safety on and a bullet in place.

But both, in their differing ways, held the other in respect. He accepted the bear wandering close to his cabin, and the bear tolerated the old man intruding on its space in the tundra wilderness of the Kola peninsula. For a full half-hour, under light rain, they had eyed each other. Jasha was usually the first to break off and to go home, and he assumed that Zhukov would feel an honour satisfied and would resume the search for berries, the staple of its diet. A year before, Jasha had gone into Murmansk and had taken himself to a veterinary surgeon and had slapped down a wad of notes and had asked for a tranquilliser dose. For how big a creature? Big. Big enough for a cow? Big enough for a moose. To pacify it or to knock it out? To shut it down, at least a fifteen-minute dose. Money talked and a dart came with the dose and was loaded into the Dragunov marksman’s rifle. He had shot it, the same range as he was now, a good hit in the left shoulder, and the animal had reeled around, had staggered and snarled, had shown teeth and one claw set, but only one. The other front leg, just above the pads, was coiled in a tight knot of barbed wire that had pushed aside the fur and punctured the skin, and had made a wound that was infected and coated in rust. He could have shot it with the wire still attached, could have ended its misery, instead had gone to Murmansk and flashed the money at the veterinary surgeon and had told him the requirement was to sedate a full-grown male moose. He had approached the prone creature with apprehension and had noted the malevolence in the eyes and sensed it wrestled with the power of the drug coursing through it. He had taken a deep breath and had knelt on the ground and used pliers to pull away the wire and blood had flowed. He was not a sentimental man and was familiar with pain, and they were the same pliers with which he had taken out one of his own back teeth, but tears had flowed while he had performed this crude surgery. Five loops of wire had come free and the wound was open and the summer flies swarmed and he had seen then that the bear had already chewed away half of its paw and half of its claws, chewed and worried at them. He had laced it in disinfectant and had realised that the bear’s breathing quickened and had seen the first twitch of a back leg and the first movement of the tongue across massive yellowed teeth. He had given the animal the name of the most distinguished of Stalin’s generals, a man of iron will… Zhukov. He had gone back to his cabin, his refuge, that he had found as a wreck, had insulated and made dry, and had barricaded the door and the windows. The bear had come the next day, and the evening of the following day, had sat on its haunches outside the door and Jasha had peeped through a spyhole and realised that the rest of its foot was now eaten off. A stump had been left at the height of the wire wound. His intervention might have achieved nothing. But the flesh seemed clean and the bear snorted regularly with a hiss of breath to drive away the congregation of flies, and it had watched Jasha’s home, then had seemed satisfied that it had located a benefactor, and it had gone. He had seen the bear many time since, had noted the limping gait and the curve of the wounded leg as it put less weight on the ground, and the way it sucked and spat to remove dirt: the pink flesh had disappeared, replaced by a coarse leathery cover. The hunter was familiar with the single paw print with the pads and the claws, and in front of them the smooth mark of the self-inflicted stump. It was a fine animal… It might stalk him, it might be his friend. But he would kill it if that was the requirement, if the pain ever became unbearable. The wire would have come from the work of the border troops. The border troops had brought up wire when they had reinforced the fence that separated the Murmansk district on the Kola peninsula from Norwegian territory. They’d have dumped it. He hated them.

The hunter, Jasha, had no woman in the city down the E105 highway. Nor did he have a drinking friend there. His business contact was an agent who sold the pelts that he brought in from the wild animals inhabiting the tundra of wild grasses and dwarf birch and cloudberry. He killed his animals for the trophy heads that could be mounted on walls in lodges and hotels and which were popular in St Petersburg and Moscow. He lived amongst the shy, cautious lynx and Arctic foxes and the elusive wolverine, and there were moose and reindeer and the one bear, Zhukov, that fascinated him.

The bear never acknowledged him. Often, when out with his rifle and going in silence and using dead ground, he sensed he was being followed. He thought the beast dominated him and often, in his refuge home, he would talk softly to it, call it by the name he had awarded it, have a conversation, and be convinced of his own insanity. It had watched, it had shuffled round, shown him its back, and turned away to feed off a branch of berries and he was losing sight of it.

“Heh, Zhukov, heh. Friend, I will see you. I hope to. I have no other friend. Stay close and stay safe.”

Down at the main rail station, near to the harbour and the docks – with the rain heavier – Timofey had come to trade.

The arrival of a train from the south always lifted his spirits and was as good a place for him to make money as any in Murmansk. Twenty-four hours from St Petersburg to the Murmansk station, and thirty-six if the train had come from Moscow. Best was when young naval recruits were on their way to Severomorsk up the coast. They would buy. Timofey wore a thin windcheater that barely kept out the fine rain, faded jeans, and trainers that were scuffed and stained. His hair was fair and cut haphazardly and followed no style, but he had a strong face and high cheek-bones and a jaw that jutted and his eyes had that detached look as if his attention was far away as he hustled to get among the mass of the young military guys who stretched and coughed and smoked and would be allowed a few minutes to go and relieve themselves before the final part of their journey, to their ships and their barracks. In better times he would have had Natacha beside him, using her smile to attract the guys in uniform who yearned for the comfort of a wrap or a pill. He worked among them, dealt only in cash, had no time for change, and stuffed the money into his hip pocket; in his jacket’s right-side pocket were the pills and in the left-side pocket were the scraps of paper with the twisted ends. It was not easy for him because not only did he have to do business, but he had to avoid arguments with the smart-arse kids who wanted to bargain, and had also to be aware that the military police would be looking for him, or others like him, and would come piling in with their batons and their handcuffs if he were too prominent.

His phone rang. He let it ring at first. Too busy trading. He let it ring as long as he dared because if it went off for too long then he’d attract attention. He pocketed cash, handed out pills, and that day they went better than the wraps. He moved fast and could hear the NCOs bawling at the kids to get on the buses. A queue had formed near him and he was circled by purchasers. He sold well, but Natacha would have done better. She would have been in there with her smile and the float of her eyebrows, the pout of her lips, and every kid would mentally have stripped her and would be groping for money and she would have given a tiny wiggle of her hips. They would all be submarine boys if they were in transit for Severomorsk where the hunter-killers were docked… and she talked heavy on submarines and had cause… and his phone kept ringing deep in a pocket and he had no time to answer, and a few of the NCOs were pushing in among the kids and heaving them towards the buses and the rain slopped off his hair. He had sold all of his pills, and only a palm full of wraps was left. A petty officer was in front of him. Eye contact made. The man thought Timofey was scum. His eyes and his sneer seemed to pose a question and he fingered the top of a truncheon fastened to his belt. Which would he prefer? Would he prefer a crack of the truncheon on his shoulder-bone and then his shin-bone, or would he prefer to back a discreetly palmed percentage of his takings? Timofey despised the sort of man who wore a uniform, held power because of the baubles on his chest. He was a free spirit: he slipped away, and the phone still trilled in a pocket.

Timofey’s car was parked in a side street. He drove an under-powered Fiat 500, long past the date when it had any value other than for scrap. The car was good for Timofey and Natacha, painted a dull grey, hardly noticed, and would take him now to the gates of the gaol because this was the day she would be freed. He had not been to the trial and had not visited her in gaol. Would have been too easy for the bastards if he had done, would have identified himself. She would not have expected him to come, and he would be round a corner and beyond the cameras and she would exit though a small door in a big gate and would walk away and might just spit in the gutter and would go round that corner and the engine would be running, the passenger door open. She would slide in, would lift his hand and lay it between her legs, and he’d rev the engine and they’d be gone. He had missed her, had missed her bad.

He answered the phone, and heard heavy, gasped breathing. Timofey’s father was a drunk, a certified alcoholic. Most of his cronies in the block were drunk most days from cheap vodka. It sounded like his father was having a panic attack or was afraid or merely drunk.

“Yes…?”

A silence broken only by incoherent grunting.

“What is it? Are you too pissed to say? Why did you ring?”

He was answered. One word. Foreign, awkward on his father’s slurred tongue, and the obvious fear made its sound more indistinct. “Matchless.”

“Say that again.”

“Matchless.”

In Timofey’s language, honed in a tower block close to the church of the Saviour on Waters, that word was a clusterfuck moment.

It was the first time that Knacker had done it, woken a sleeper.

It had taken a committee meeting in emergency session. He had spoken to them with his mobile on ‘secure’, and Alice had given a presentation, and Fee had contributed with sharply constructed personality pictures of those involved. The matter had been tossed briefly in the air… the date and circumstances of the recruitment of a family in the then Soviet military port of Murmansk: their lack of use in half a century; the cost of maintaining their payment structure; and the risk that what had once been a sound signing might now be long past its date, the equivalent of a kettle made useless by aging limescale… The committee’s vote had been four to two in favour of Knacker’s request. The family in Murmansk were, in present-day terms, a ‘waste of space’, contributed nothing, and should receive a sharp tap on the ankle, that would jolt them from slumber. One member of the committee had said, ‘Wake a sleeper, and he belches, goes for a shit, looks in the mirror, and either runs a mile or is the individual you always wanted on board. One of the two, but you have to wake him to find out.’ They would need to send an agent to administer the kick. Alice had said that such an individual had been identified to do the donkey leg, and Fee had said that Knacker was on his case, should have it wrapped in the morning. They were working hard on the logistics, travel schedules, and pulling in increments. A parting shot: “This is all worthwhile, the effort of it and the sleeper woken?”

From Fee, who had worked a dozen years for Knacker: “If it works then we will pocket a grateful ally, small scale but well positioned, and because those people have long memories, the friendship and gratitude would linger over generations. In a heartland of Syria we would have assets and we would have a take on the movement of Assad forces and Russians and Iranians and Hezbollah… If it does not work out, then we will have lost next to nothing, might just have burned the sleepers. We should go with it.”

From Alice, who had been in the Yard with Knacker for fifteen years: “We send a man, known to us, and he links with the sleeper and is ferried round and gets a decent eyeball on the target. Then all he has to do is clarify the identification and give his location, and we get him clear. We have a good candidate for the role. A follow-up team moves in, does the necessary. Not connected to us. Decently removed. Early days, but looking good. Better, looking very good.”

All passed to Knacker, all predictable. His girls, Fee and Alice, could have extracted teeth from the committee without anaesthetic and were persuasive, and it was the sort of operation, small mission, that Round Table people were ideally suited for. Knacker supposed there was a file tucked away in the archives that carried the details of scores of sleepers tucked in their beds, snoring softly. Some would have been signed up for money, and God alone knew that Knacker was hardly generous with government funds. Some would have hated whatever regime of the far left or far right they confronted. Some would have been compromised, barbed hooks gone into their flesh, and he had dealt with that level of recruitment in Ireland and men had wept to be free of him and had not had their eyes dried or a sympathetic smile, and most were now dead. And some were afflicted with ego and the thrill of living the lie and cheating on friends and neighbours and employers and family, and had their vanities expertly massaged by Knacker. The girls had done well to dig out the sleeper, identify him, and start the process rolling. The codeword for shifting the wretch in Murmansk from his pit was Matchless.

He took a taxi. The girl, sweet soul, had said she would go back to her waitressing. He asked for the airport, the private side out amongst the warehouses.

A storm was coming up off the North Sea and must be channelling down the Elbe estuary. He was dropped off at the warehouses. Stood and peered about him and wanted to be greeted. A flashlight was shone at him.

“Are you the one they call Knacker… the name I was given.”

“It’s what I answer to.”

Knacker assumed the pilot to be former military. No laundered white shirt, no gold bars on epaulettes, no clip-on black tie. He wore one-piece overalls in a dull olive and had no rank badge and no ribbon strip and displayed no name tag, but had dark glasses half-buried in his hair. They walked together and turned a corner and in the lee of a hangar was a two-engine Cessna. To Knacker it looked pitifully small and he saw the wings flip a little in the wind.

“Your girl told me where we are going.”

“Good.”

“I have to say, it’s where the weather is tonight.”

“That so?”

“Myself, I wouldn’t put my cat out in it. We might bump a bit.”

“Will we get in?”

“Can but try. Not exactly bulging with alternative strips. But yes, probably.”

The winds lashed the island with the force of a scouring brush. The rain flushed the land clean and would have been running in rivers down lanes and creating waterfalls off the hills. The rain was a drumbeat and the wind made songs in the overhead wires.

On the floor, beside his bed, Gaz lay in the foetal position.

Those who were not among the island’s incomers were familiar with the ferocity of the storms that battered Westray and all the other Orkney islands. The few trawlers and crab boats would have been anchored close to shore in the bay in front of the hotel and the cemetery. The farmers would have been careful to ensure their livestock could weather the blow. The island was battened down and the school would be closed the next morning… and work for a handyman was suspended. A rug was rucked up by his body and he lay on his side on the hard smooth surface of the vinyl covering the floorboards. No one on the island knew that Gaz had been a soldier, had served in the desperate combat areas of Syria, of Afghanistan, or of Northern Ireland. He never talked of it, changed the subject if asked about his past, nor spoke of illness or the help of the psychiatrist, had told nobody of a girl getting punched and a policewoman slapping on handcuffs and time in the cells and in the dock. Had never spoken of the day that a storm – the same winds and the same rains – had come to a valley and a village close to a main highway that was believed to be of intelligence-gathering value. He did not know how Aggie would get across in the morning and expected the mobile to trill in his ear and to hear her voice telling him, Sorry and all that, Gaz, just can’t make it. Won’t last for ever. See you soon… She had not rung and his phone was beside him. Nor had he eaten that evening nor drunk anything, and was a grown man and a wreck.

It came as a low rumble at first, a thunderstorm far away and the clatter distorted in the wind. He strained to hear better. Fixed-wing and likely circling to locate the strip on Westray island. Coughing and louder, an engine straining at the limits of its power. The wind-sock would be horizontal and the wind coming across the runway. Gaz evaluated… He would have said that he knew by face each and every islander, some better than others, but knew each well enough to nod and wave, including the kids and the old people who hardly left their homes… and had known by sight every villager, resident that day in Delta Alpha Sierra, knew their trades and their habits and the routines of their days, and had watched them and stayed hidden from them – and realised a simple truth. An aircraft coming to Westray on such a night, in pitch-dark blackness, with a minimum of navigation lights and with wipers on the cockpit windscreen barely able to clear the rain and give the pilot what visibility he needed, meant a matter of life and of death. He straightened his body and then edged across the floor, did a leopard crawl that he had perfected in a former life, unforgotten, and reached the window and dragged aside the curtain. He wondered for whom the aircraft came. An emergency: a man or woman or child would be in that half-world that was divided by the two extremes, by life and by death. Who had fallen, who had suffered a coronary, who was a stroke victim, who was in such danger that a doctor and nurse had been despatched from Kirkwall on the mainland and sent north to Westray, risking their own survival? He saw the lights. They were low and seemed to waver, to dip and toss and swing to the side then jump, then fall. He wondered which of the islanders had suffered the calamity requiring a flight on that bad a night. Or who was about to be born?

A matter of life and a matter of death for one of their number. The aircraft lights seemed to drop, fall away and the engine roared in the night.