Beyond Recall

Chapter 4

Gaz walked down the path to the gate, over the gravel where Knacker had sat through the night, and Aggie trailed after him. The island’s taxi waited for them and Knacker was by the open rear door, and his clothes – after a fashion – had dried in the machine and were almost wearable.

The wind had dropped and the rain was now far out to sea, and the sun glinted between powder-puff clouds. Gaz thought the weather had been a theatrical effect and exploited by Knacker, as if the limit to his resources was not easily measured. He had been told to leave the bag he had packed but had been advised what to wear. Just bring some rough ground walking boots, what you’re comfortable in. No clothing. All will be given you. Passport, papers and credit cards? Not necessary, we handle all that, and a float for cash. We’ve had a passport put together. Which meant that his acceptance of the job had been taken for granted and that no one had ever seriously considered that he would stand up at his full height and say, ‘Sorry and all that, but I don’t care a flying fuck for what happened at that village all that time ago, and have no interest – none whatsoever – in seeing a young Russian officer, FSB you tell me, face any form of justice, of the legal kind or extra-judicial. So, please, get off my property and travel back to where you came from because I have important work to be getting on with, decorating and home repairs and mowing. Goodbye…’

What to say to Aggie? Usually, when uncertain, he said little, less if possible. He thought that Knacker had played her consummately. There were anglers who came to the Orkneys for wild brown trout, and none could have coaxed a beast on to a barbed hook with such skill. She had floundered and had spoken the spiel, and he had not been able to fight her. Her use was over. She stood by the taxi, her head drooping, and had learned much of him that he had wanted concealed, and had blurted out that he should go as asked. Maybe she appreciated that what was done and what was said could not be revoked.

Knacker said to her, “Thank you Aggie, and I’m obliged to you for making my clothes presentable. We’ll take good care of him. Have a nice day.”

She caught Gaz’s hand, squeezed it. A kiss and a cuddle beside the taxi with old Lachlan eying them? Did not seem appropriate. Gaz nodded to her. He felt haunted, and betrayed, and isolated.

They drove away and Knacker said that he’d a bag to collect at the hotel. Gaz knew Lachlan because he did pickups for the holiday owners that Gaz worked for, and some crab fishing, was useful at plumbing and helped kids with football, so the news of Gaz going away would be round the island, and round again, within the hour. Saw Murdo out with his sheep but close to the road and he’d have seen Gaz, and saw Lisa who cleaned many of the houses where Gaz worked. The whole island would have known that an aircraft had made a sharp descent at the core of the storm overnight, and known that if it had come for Gaz then there was much he had hidden from them. At the hotel, he sat in the back of the taxi while Knacker went for his bag and to pay his bill and Lachlan waited for him to speak, but he didn’t oblige.

He thought of a great man who used to slip away from the islands 1000 years before, so Aggie had told him. The times of Sweyn Asleifsson, cunning and clever, and living as a pirate off deceit and subterfuge, using an island as a safe haven; a predator and a plunderer, and taking Ingirid as his wife after slaughtering her lawful husband, and unable to settle and restless and chasing excitement and the whiff of risk, probably chained to his past and unable to put down roots, and talked of but rarely seen… Gaz doubted he would last long enough as an Orcadian to feature in its past, be subject to a saga.

Knacker came out, carrying a grip, had changed from his suit into casual dress, an olive-green wax coat and rough corduroys and heavy brogue shoes, a tattersall shirt and a flat cap and might have been going to a gymkhana. They were driven to the airstrip, out on the northern shore, and the wind-sock hung limp. Knacker seemed to add an extra bank note to the sum required for payment to Lachlan and murmured something about meeting Gaz when he came back, made it sound as if he were off for a visit to a mainland dentist. He carried Knacker’s bag, because he was a subordinate, no longer a civilian handyman and running from the past. Back in uniform and subject to those disciplines and Lachlan’s eyes seemed to beseech an answer. Gaz asked his own question.

“There was a hard man here, centuries ago, Sweyn Asleifsson. What happened to him – I never read that, his end.”

“You’d not want to know his end. Safe journey.”

“What was his end? In his bed?”

“And with his woman warm beside him? Want to believe it… He went away, didn’t have to. Should have stayed for a harvest. Went over the sea and seemed to win a battle but not a war, died fighting. The last man to fall. It’s in the saga… No good came of him.”

On the island, as Gaz had learned, they told stories as if the events had happened yesterday, and they had read them in a newspaper or seen them on a TV news bulletin… had a different sense of the past. A young pilot greeted them and seemed to carry Gaz farther back in his life and he climbed up into the Cessna as if he were scrambling on to a Chinook ramp or into a Puma hatch. They took off. No bullshit from the pilot and no nostalgic looping circle of the coast line so he might spot his bungalow or find Aggie making her way to the hotel where she’d offload her pottery, no chance to spot the various properties he looked after and the lawns he was supposed to cut. He wondered if he would ever come back, ever want to, and left behind in his temporary home was little that was precious to him, nothing that was permanent. Knacker was on a call, less than a minute, and his hand shielded his words, and all that Gaz heard of it was “… good luck then, Arthur, and give it them hard…”

He was on his way and Knacker said nothing to him but sat beside the pilot, ignored him… He could remember the officer, the Russian, would never forget him.

The girl who worked for Knacker handled the wheelchair as if it were a shopping trolley. Fee brought Arthur Jennings to Ceausescu Towers. Arthur had been in many corners of the world that he’d have laconically described as ‘tricky’, but being pushed across half a dozen traffic lanes from the railway station to the main gates was an awesome experience, except that he felt safe in her big, muscled hands. Known to all who worked closely with her as Fee, but born Tracey Dawkins, she glowered at motorists and some yelled obscenities that she seemed to relish… Arthur knew she lived in a housing authority flat in Peckham, and her mother was across the landing – how had that been fixed? Arthur always chuckled at the details of Knacker’s legendary ability to circumvent bureaucracy. She had been a persistent school truant, a serial shoplifter, and a magistrate had sent her towards the army rather than a custodial sentence. Had gone into the famed and secretive 14th Det as a clerk, and not looked back. Knacker was a renowned talent-spotter. It was said she had chased after him for a position: ‘even wash your scrubby smalls, Mr Knacker’, and all the usual civil service employment boards had been ignored. They made it across the road and she laughed out loud and Arthur grimaced. At the gates it was not necessary to identify themselves. They were well known to the pair festooned with kit, weapons, and body armour.

“Good to see you, Mr Jennings. Not keeping too bad, I hope.”

“Hanging on, thank you. Managing, thank you.”

“You’re looking well, Miss Dawkins. That was an expert display in pedestrian protocols. One of the best.”

“Fuck them. You boys been eating too many sandwiches?”

Both were laughing as she scribbled names on the sheet, and winked, and a side gate was opened for her to manoeuvre the wheelchair through, and she’d have put money on it that one of the armed guards would have said to the other. ‘Means something’s happening if old Jennings is in to see God Almighty. Something tasty.’ Usually the first to know. She’d hand him over to one of the Director-General’s personal staff, who’d take Arthur Jennings up to the fifth. The D-G would want to run a rule over a mission that had the potential of a damn great blow-back in their faces if it exploded – as most of the worthwhile ones did.

“You talk rubbish. You talk vodka shit.”

But Timofey’s father persisted. “Not too pissed to realise this is danger. Too great a danger. I say ignore it.”

And Natacha laughed and pirouetted. “It would be fun and entertainment, and if it hurt them then it would be pleasure.”

His father could barely stand and would have known that if he slumped back on to the couch he would lose the argument. “You know nothing. What is asked of you, you don’t know. You get involved and where does it end? You would be fools, and it involves me.”

From Timofey: “And we get paid. We get money, more money than we have, and with money we can be somebody.”

From Natacha: “Hurt them, damage them, make them squeal. Those weeks in the cell, with those women, all we talk about is hurting them, but don’t know how… This is how.”

Like kids around a clown they circled him and confused him and he found it difficult to follow what they said and his eyes had glazed, and the effort to be coherent was supreme. “It would be treason. You know that word, treason. Know what they do to a traitor? They beat, they torture, they make a man scream to die, and keep him alive, and beat him some more, and if he lives he goes to the camps. How long survive there? My age, what of me? In a camp, a labour camp, a strict regime camp, every day worse, then praying to die. For what?”

“For what? To have money. Money is a reason. It is not political, it is for money.”

“Maybe go stand in Lenin Prospekt after it is finished and watch big men, fat cats, come in their chauffeur cars, see others chucked away and disgraced. Maybe watch it.”

His father cried, tears running on his cheeks, and he was turning and reaching out for something to grip, “You should not do it, must refuse and…”

He fell, or might have been pushed. His feet tangled. He was spread-eagled on the couch. Timofey and Natacha ignored him and the argument was over. His father whimpered, and might have wet himself, but neither his son nor his son’s girl noticed him anymore, did not even seem to smell him… They left him on the couch. The apartment was in his name. He was the rightful tenant, but he was expelled from the bedroom which they now used. He had to sleep in the living area and they might be watching TV or might be cooking and drinking and might be playing music loud, and he was no longer allowed access to his own room. The father of Timofey had only the bottle for solace and had only the money that they gave him after they had been out to sell weed or ’phets. If the FSB investigators came for him and locked him away then he would not even have the bottle. They were back in the bedroom.

He cried out, “It would be a conspiracy that betrays the state. You would be idiots…”

Beyond the door, still ajar, he was answered only by the grinding of the bed springs.

“So, Arthur, where are the miscreants of the Table taking us?”

Arthur Jennings answered the questions posed by Richard Carter, Director-General, God Almighty. “It’s about a village in central Syria, Dickie. Has a strategic position, excellent for monitoring traffic down a main highway. Can get better results with ground-based cameras, local input or covert use of recce troops than from drones and satellite facilities. When the war was still being fought there we identified its importance. Took action – you’ll know what I mean if I say Knacker was involved.”

A dry smile, equivalent of a Martini barely stirred. “I would.”

“Special Forces called regularly there, we had the villagers on board and…”

Gaz watched her walk towards the building. He had been kicking his heel at Kirkwall, principal town and principal airport of the Orkneys, for near to two hours. Knacker was long gone in the Cessna – and he’d seen it take off and head south towards mainland Scotland. Would he see Knacker again during the mission?

“Of course, but when we’re farther down the road, I’ll see you then – just have, for now, a few loose ends to tie up. It’ll be good, plain sailing, and you’ll be well looked after by the lady. She’s Fee, that’s what she answers to. My name for her, and with a slight adaptation of the old rhyme: Fee, fie, foe, fum, I smell the blood of a British man,/ Be he alive or be he dead,/ I’ll grind his bones to make my bread. Probably substitute Russian for British and you’ll get the drift. Quite passionate and very focused, and I rate her. She was a clerk at Ballykinlar in the Province and years after I’d transferred to the Service in London, and she lapped up all those silly stories about me, decided she wanted to join me. Took leave, this is fifteen years ago, followed me out of the Vauxhall building, accosted me in the street. What do I do? Well, for a start I gave her a photo of a section head and asked her to find me his address. Two mornings later I am crossing the road from the station and she’s close to running me down on a bicycle and she palms me Danny Williams’ home address in Wimbledon, SW19. Not bad, and I took her on, and fought through the appointment boards. Couldn’t be better… Not everyone’s cup of tea, but mine. My workload goes well with her, and she was at the FOB with me in that unpleasant bit of Syria, knows her Russians and their security apparatus and their strong points, and their weaknesses. Don’t worry, Gaz, she’ll look after you. See you when I see you.”

She came around a corner and had a guardsman’s stride and her skirt was rucked up above her knees to accommodate it. Cropped hair and no make-up. She opened the door, came in thrust out an arm.

“I’m Fee, and you’re Gaz. Good man, glad you’re on board.”

She shook his hand, a bone crusher.

He said, “I did not know what other options were around.”

“None – except that you could have stayed curled up in a corner, no hope and no chance and no future, and not wanted. Hardly an option. At least, now, you’re wanted.”

She lit a cigarette. Puffed, exhaled and the cloud near obliterated the No Smoking order on the wall. She took a laptop from her shoulder-bag. No jewellery but a tattoo high on her left arm, almost at the shoulder and it showed a small heart, size of a fifty-pence piece, an arrow stabbing through it. She hardly seemed of romantic inclination, and he wondered what was the shape, size, species, of her lover. She had the laptop powered and flicked keys and he recognised the attachment providing the necessary security, and plugged in a cable with an earphone link and handed the earphones to Gaz. He watched the screen: saw a harbour filled with yachts, and launches roped to marina piers, and a narrow set of steps leading up from the sea; then a cobbled street and cheerful window-boxes of flowers lightened the screen, and a building that had been recently pointed between traditional stonework; and saw the name of the bank, and a commentary gave its Channel Islands location, and its name, and a printout was displayed and a deposit had been paid into an account for Gary Baldwin, aged 29, d.o.b. 1991, and a passport number, and also displayed was his signature. He was credited with £10,000. The account number filled the screen for five seconds then disappeared but he had memorised it, and she switched off the laptop, and took out her earphones.

“Don’t get on a high horse. It is not disrespectful, nor does it tie you in. It’s a simple contract and you do a job and are rewarded for it. Not an insult and we are not concerned with maudlin patriotism, but of gaining strategic advantage. And if it doesn’t work out there’s enough to pay for a quite respectable funeral.”

And she smiled grimly, and he laughed, and could not remember when last he had, laughed as he had on that morning before he, and Arnie and Sam, had taken the lift into the storm and towards the village… But he reckoned she rarely joked, might have meant it.

“More coffee, Arthur?”

“Thank you, no.”

“Press on then.”

“Managed to get a bit out of hand at a time when we were changing the batteries for a covert camera, and the local boys had over-judged the support we were prepared to offer, and went and shot up an Iranian compound down the road, which led to consequences, dire ones. The battery charger was in a hide when the al-Quds boys came calling, was a witness… Sadly the experience left our boy rather scarred, and…”

Delta Alpha Sierra, the fourth hour

The girl was in front of him and the goats milled around her, and her dogs snarled, showed their teeth if any of the beasts seemed about to break away to find better grazing. He could not tell her to shift, could not break their mutual silence, so he huddled in his hide and used the binoculars. He had tucked all of his gear into his Bergen, and the waste and the urine in the bottle, and all the food packaging. The cordon line, down the slope in front of him, was 100 yards away and the centre of the village was 200 yards from him, and the football pitch half as far again. He was stuck fast, and realised it. Not that there was, yet, much for him to see, and anyway the weather misted the view and the squalls of wind raised clouds of dirt and the rain was constant. The texts came in: always calm, and designed to reassure, and that was part of the discipline of the controller back at the Forward Operating Base. They were good, tried hard not to foment panic.

But stark messages reached Gaz. He was told that the Chinook on stand-by was grounded by weather: he doubted if the cockpit crew and the gunners would stay down if his life, and those of Arnie and Sam, were directly threatened, but that’s what he was told. The Chinook was a noisy old beggar at best, and he’d have to be well clear of his present position or fifty IRGC would be looking to blast it as it came in. Told that for the Chinook to move would require an escort of fast fixed-wing and, or, Apache gunships, and they’d need visibility for close support – which did not exist. Two sets of wheels from the gun club were on their way but navigation would be shit, and the fast route was over open terrain and not metalled roads… and if the fixed-wing aircraft were to drop ordnance around him, create a little sanitised zone and take down half a company of al-Quds ‘martyrs’ then it would need ministerial permission… so, his situation was under review. The girl, looking down, had a better view than he did. But he saw enough, didn’t like what he saw.

The Russian officer had pulled up a khaki scarf from his throat and wore it across his mouth and nose, and had the peak of his forage cap low on his forehead, and idled and seemed surplus. The two other Russians, Caucasians, stayed close to him. There had been some tugging matches between the Iranians and the village women. Same reason and same result and a mix of force and verbal violence was used. Teenage boys had been secreted behind older women’s skirts. Not the older kids, the ones who had been down the road in the pick-ups during the night, with AKs, and had a bit of craic and now looked full face at the consequences: some of them had legged it out and some were sitting in the dirt and had their hands behind their necks and were kicked or hit with rifle butts if they shifted. The boys taken from the women were twelve or thirteen years old. They were pulled clear, and once a rifle was aimed at a woman but then her arms were clubbed and she loosened her grip and howled at the wind.

The girl, in front of him had started to shiver and her shoulders convulsed and every now and then she started keening then would suppress it, then succumb again. He wondered if there was a particular woman that she watched, or a boy, or an older man. If she screamed, if she rose to her feet and her goats scattered and her dogs barked and if she started down the hill, then she would achieve little more than draw attention to the ridge and the lip above his hide. Gaz thought she had not yet been seen and that the men who had made the cordon and those inside it had more on their minds. He was cold and rain drove over her and her animals and spattered through the scrim net and on to him, and he felt trapped and was irresolute… It was his training to think on his feet, to be responsible for himself, not to follow the normal army strictures of ‘wait out’ until told what to do. He did not know what was best for him, the prime chance of ensuring his safety. His breathing came harder.

A man was helped down from the back of a lorry. He wore faded jeans and a military tunic too big for him, and needed support because his head was covered by a sack with small eye slits. Two of the Iranian troops steadied him when his feet were on the dirt, then led him forward to where their commander waited. The Russian officer edged closer to the commander. Gaz realised this was the start of what the Sixer at the FOB would have called the ‘business part of the day’. In his youth on Bobby and Betty Riley’s farm, in late spring when the crows had fledglings, a hungry buzzard would fly close to the nests, and all hell would be raised as the crows went airborne to fight off the hawk and the cacophony was desperate… this was the same. At the sight of an informer, coerced or a volunteer, the women started to yell abuse at him, and punched with their fists and chucked insults, some of which Gaz understood but most of them were beyond the range of the local tongue taught to the recce boys. The man seemed to cringe and the escort held him upright and he was lectured by the commander and then dragged towards the corralled group of young men. A woman crouched briefly and threw a stone towards the informer; it missed, but the reaction was swift. A rifle cocked and a single shot fired in the air, high above the women: more sign of ‘business’.

An informer was detested and an informer was feared. Gaz, in Northern Ireland, had monitored the Republicans still keeping the embers of the Troubles alive, and he had served two tours in Afghanistan and had been camouflaged in ditches and on the fringe of maize crops and had watched compounds. There because the naked eye saw more than a drone or a satellite lens, there because of the word slipped to his bosses, or the intelligence people, by informers. Informers gave access where not even Special Reconnaissance Regiment eyes could go, and the fate of such a man or woman was non-negotiable. Likely to be pain first, but gratuitous and inflicted long after contacts and codes had been extracted along with fingernails and toenails, and cigarette burns, and then they would be killed for maximum humiliation. In front of Gaz, the girl had started to shiver and he heard little gasps of breath from her and the dogs at her ankles took her cue and growled low and the goats were restless and Gaz had a tight hold of his weapon… Knew he could not outrun a horde of men if they came chasing for him; he did not have an arrival schedule for the gun club on wheels; and the weather would still prevent close fire support from the air… Bad times, and worsening.

The first of the boys was singled out. He was pulled clear of the group sitting in the driving rain while the wind buffeted their hair and tugged their clothing, and a red mark was painted on the boy’s forehead. He was dragged nearer to the football pitch and stood there with a guard. Not alone for long as the informer moved towards another who wore only boxer shorts and would have come late from his bed.

It had an inevitability and the girl stayed close to him beyond the scrim netting, and suffered.

Arthur Jennings said, “The village was razed, you might consider it a ‘war crime’, Dickie. But people, in my opinion, are amazingly resilient, rather like the weeds in the cracks in my front path, they come back, those that are left. The village will one day be re-populated and life of a sort will resume. And, as we well know, war gutters out – not that we have much to be proud of in that area – and the Russians are still there, and the Iranians, and the Hezbollah still strut in that territory, and the Assad regime is unchallenged, Moscow’s marionette… We know all that. What remains, is the value in strategic terms of that community alongside the highway. What is available from there is raw and uncontaminated intelligence: who uses that road, how often, for what purpose? A north-south link and we should have access to what the road traffic can tell us. Am I talking about putting a team of recce boys on the ground as a long-running commitment? I am not. But we need to insert a team and give the locals the equipment we would want utilised. Dickie, you and I are of the generation that recognises the importance of Human Intelligence. We have a rare chance to acquire some very fair results because of the Russian who was prominent on that day. He became a focus of hatred for the survivors. He is an FSB officer, a gilded youth. Lavrenti Volkov. His father was a brigadier general in KGB, then figured in the early days of FSB before nominal retirement and is on the periphery of a group close to the President. He is currently a major and has a future as part of a dynasty of influence, control. We aim to take him down, I correct myself, have him taken down, but first we put a man close enough to our target to make a positive identification.”

Lavrenti bridled, “I don’t have time.”

“Then you make time, find time.”

He faced his father, was a little taller than the older man. “A Jew, a little businessman, a nobody. Why should I meet him?”

“Because of what he has.”

“Maybe, maybe when I have finished in Murmansk.”

He saw colour spread in his father’s cheeks and realised that a rising temper was only narrowly controlled, but he did not back off, and the veins protruded on his father’s forehead. They had a scant relationship, he had never been hugged and held by his father, seldom been congratulated for any academic effort at school, and his ambitions in hockey had been ridiculed, and he had known that his entry to the élite training college for FSB fast-track recruits had been smoothed. His father’s voice rose.

“Not ‘maybe’, not later. Tomorrow before you go back north.”

“There is not time.”

“You see him if it means you shit, shower, dress before dawn.” A gnarled finger, scarred and narrow to the shape of the bone from grenade shrapnel, poked persistently at Lavrenti’s chest. His wife would have told him that he had stayed in his room, when her friends brought their daughters to the apartment.

“And why? Why is it necessary for me to chase after this Jew? Why?”

“I did not think you so fucking stupid. He has holdings north of the Arctic Circle. You know what is there? Are you too much of an idiot to know? There are minerals waiting and begging to be dug from the ground – copper, coal, gold, uranium, tungsten, diamonds. His holding is around an area of the Yenisei River. He is a small man and he bought well. What does he want now?” Spittle spluttered from his father’s mouth, some finding a place on Lavrenti’s cheeks and nose.

“You know, you tell me.” Facetious, sarcastic, almost as if he dared his father to hit him. Never had. Had mostly ignored him. He thought his father would have known about him from quizzing the two minders, Boris and Mikki… and once he had finished in Murmansk he would shed them.

“Protection. Wants a roof. Wants people close to him who will watch his back, have influence, keep away the jackals and wolves. Needs a roof under which he can sit. Clear? You give him a roof.”

“What is it to me?”

“Fucking idiot… What age am I? Past seventy. I wheeze, hack and cough, can no longer run. Death beckons. Dead, I cannot offer the roof. You can. You are the coming man because of my efforts, and fuck-all thanks – and your mother who still has to wipe your arse and also fuck-all thanks. Your future rests with people who make money and who come looking for men prepared to offer a roof. You… I tell you…”

He thought his father indestructible. Could not imagine life without him. His father made a ‘victim’ of Lavrenti, and the old intelligence officer was a man happy only in the company of cronies. Over drinks, they would have discussed the bad times in the Afghan war, and the awful times of the Yeltsin presidency, and now talked of financial opportunities and pledged loyalty to the regime that supplied them. Would not have known how to make conversation with his son.

“As you always do.”

“First I tell you this… you changed, you came back from Syria and were a different boy. We came back from Afghanistan, and had lost, and were the same men but harder, stronger. You are just cold. One day, if you have time, remind me to ask you why you changed. We fought a skilled enemy, you fought peasants… What I tell you, it does not last for ever. The regime will not. When it collapses, and it will be fast because of no prepared and acceptable succession, but a vulture feast on the corpse, the clever man will have his money well secreted outside Russia. Outside, or lose everything. Make what you can while the opportunity is there, get it to London, be ready. Do you hear me?”

Never spoken of before. Brusque exchanges when he returned on the big transporter from the Latakia base, and a grudging acknowledgement of the award of a gallantry medal, along with promotion, but never a table covered with bottles and a detailed critique of how the war in Syria progressed… nor ever a mention of a future beyond the life expectancy of the President, almost as if treason were being discussed. As if a cold breeze fluttered on the hairs at the back of his neck, like the past came and charged at him. He submitted.

“I hear you. What is the Jew’s name, what is his number?… I will call him, I will meet the Jew.”

His father, the brigadier general, clenched his fist, clubbed Lavrenti on the shoulder, which was as far as his affection reached.

Arthur Jennings pursued his goal, quietly, held the attention of the man he briefed, and who might – just might – pull the rug from the enterprise.

“We put a man in there who watched Lavrenti Volkov through a bestial and long day. He makes the positive identification and that is all we want of him. Stands across a street in Murmansk and is brought there by a sleeper that we have woken. He’s useless but the family are on the books and have been bleeding our resources for five decades, unable to get us decent military stuff from the dockyards, but he can chauffeur our man. What do we get, Dickie, that is attractive? Try this: the friendship of the community when it starts a life again in that place, and perhaps more than friendship – could be devotion, gratitude. Which leads to a small and unremarkable oasis of support for our aims, a warehouse of intelligence on that road, in that area, eyes and ears for the foreseeable future. It’s long-term and will pay dividends, cheap at the price and so much more useful than an ‘eye in the sky’ or some turned clerk in their internal ministry. Above that, we gain a useful location into which to insert special forces or returning regime defectors in the future. A short-term bed-and-breakfast. It’s very worthwhile, Dickie, and we’ll get our man in just as soon as the planning gets done. He’s a good fellow, was with Special Reconnaissance Regiment when he was the witness through a long day. Then invalided out, then identified with that wretched PTSD thing, but we’re satisfied he can manage what’s asked of him. Knacker told him that we’d be doing him a favour, giving him back self-esteem, but then Knacker always had a way with words. Get him in and get him out, and…”

“Sorry, Arthur, but isn’t Murmansk quite an unfriendly place, stiff with security and suspicion? And won’t this Lavrenti whatever have a concept of personal protection? Arthur, is it not dangerous?”

“Probably you don’t want to know more than the bones of the business… Except that it’s a big prize, and Knacker’s confident – as always.”

Sitting on a stone and swatting away the horseflies that hovered close, ready to snap at him, Knacker looked out towards the north.

He was alone, not a problem for him. He often felt his own company was preferred to anyone else’s, with the exception sometimes of his wife, Maude. No hurry, and the evening light was good and the view stretched far into the distance. Maude was an amateur archaeologist and currently scraped and scratched at mud and clay and stones at a site down the road towards Hexham, and was not yet ready for his appearance and would eke out a few more hours of work, and not take interruption kindly.

Before sitting, close to cattle who watched him as they lay chewing on the grass, he had walked down a slope and reached the temple to Mithras, first dedicated to that all-powerful Roman empire god in the third century. Quite a senior officer had done the honours, the commander of the First Cohort of Batavians, and those troops had looked for divine help when faced with a resourceful, dangerous – and ruthless – enemy. He supposed that it was reasonable for him to assume that such a man who honoured the Charioteer of the Sun would have had a rank and status similar to Knacker’s own. He had spent quarter of an hour there and had squatted on the stone parapets of the building, until he had seen a hiking party approaching which had seemed the correct time to begin a more important vigil, the one that cleansed his mind. This was a place he came to each time that Maude was active with her excavation team and when he had worries clogging his clear thinking. He had climbed the slope, left the clean scoured walls of the temple behind him, and had taken a viewpoint where a ridge facilitated a grand expanse of open countryside, and the low light enhanced the distance as far as he could see.

The seat of his trousers would be damp, and the flies would become steadily more aggressive, but this place – between Turret 33b and Turret 29a – along the Wall built with the driving will and perseverance of the Emperor Hadrian, gave Knacker a sense of perspective for his efforts that day, and yesterday and tomorrow. He was above the outer limit of the fort, Brocolitia, where the grasslands still covered the ruins of a great civilisation. The Wall itself, ten feet high and with turrets set along its entire length and with forts built to house garrisons of legionaries and auxiliaries, was a few feet in front of him. The cattle eyed him, would have been cautious of him had he come closer. In front were layers of differing colours and then a growing mist and then a deepening shadow, then a narrowing stretch where the ground merged with the sky and he could see no farther… which would have been the problem faced each day, every day, each week and every week, by the officer leading that cohort of Batavian troops. He had a frontier to defend. Facing him, somewhere in dead ground, beyond hills and beyond sight, was his enemy, and Knacker sympathised.

Since he had left the ‘bandit country’ of the Province, Knacker’s existence had seemed to have him peering over the border fences of his opponent – Russia, always, Russia, fucking Russia always – and never knowing what was beyond his knowledge. It would have been the ongoing worry of the commander of a cohort of regular troops recruited from an area of what was today northern Germany and running into the Netherlands. The troops would have been trained, to the highest standards of fitness, and motivated to fight… but, what if familiarity with the guard duties had sapped their alertness, and what if the best men were drawn away from this part of the Wall and sent farther west where more trouble lurked, and what if the auxiliaries given him as replacements were less efficient? He assumed such concerns nagged in the mind of an FSB commander controlling border troops with a headquarters unit in Murmansk and a line of guard posts and roadblocks watching over a closed frontier zone. How good was the commander of the cohort, and how good at his job was the FSB senior officer in Murmansk? The two men would have a single matter in common and would not have doubted its truth. Both would have understood the threat. Always a commander’s fear: the threat becoming reality on his watch.

The flies were bothering. The cattle were quiet. A hen harrier was working the ground in the middle distance. A fine looking creature, a predator, and it flew low. Had it been spooked and flown off shrieking, then it would have meant that an intruder, crawling on his belly, was approaching. Would have been a fox in the time the cohort watched this sector, and might in today’s territory have been Gaz who had the reputation in his field that many envied. His wife, Maude, might have looked up from the rim of the pit she was working in and might have clucked cheerfully at the sight of it, and pointed it out to her neighbour and they’d have enjoyed the spectacle of it. He supposed himself to be the archetypal intelligence officer, and the cohort’s commander would have had one, and it was necessary for him to attune his mind to the business in hand… getting a man in and getting him out. There was no safety in walls or fences or deep man-made ditches. Knacker could barely imagine the degree of effort, and the cost, of producing this Wall running from the west coast of England to the east, and could hardly have conceived the outlay of the little east German statelet that had tried to build a barrier preventing escape from its sad, malnourished country.

Healthy reflections, Knacker thought. He comforted himself. However great the wall, fence or ditch, it was only as strong as its weakest link. A useful cliché in Knacker’s trade. The guard who was reeking with a summer cold or convulsed in winter flu, or dreaming of his centurion’s daughter, any of them could be on guard duty in a turret and not see the threat materialising from the gloom, his mind far away before a knife crossed his throat.

He seemed to have spent a majority of his adult life facing the barriers set up by the Russian state. The Service at Ceausescu Towers was obsessed with Russia, the machinations of the Kremlin, its enmity and cunning, its mischief and deceit. Nothing to be proud of but it was the life he led. Farther along the Wall that early evening was his wife. Maude, as she cleaned mud and dirt off scraps of material or pottery shards or found a coin that had fallen from a purse eighteen centuries before, refused to humour him with support for the overwhelming attention given to Moscow matters. She would not permit it as a third person, a decent sized elephant, in her bedroom, her kitchen, her lounge. Had been that way since the first day of their married lives: she on a dig at Herculaneum and him wandering around the drugs fortress of the Scampia development and testing his skills and his nerves, then meeting for dinner, late, in their Naples hotel – and it had rained every day for the week. Back home, she had her own friends on her own terms. Yes, two boys born to them, and for the births of both he had been away, and a conversation – repeated to Knacker – was “Don’t know how you put up with him, Maude, I wouldn’t – ever considered divorcing him?” She had answered, a reliable source repeated, “Considered divorce? No, never. Murder? Yes, often.” But those in the road in the south London suburb of New Malden who had no idea that he was anything other than a common-or-garden civil servant, Pensions or Agriculture and Food, would have made erroneous judgements, not recognising the hidden sinews of the marriage, that had lasted – so far – twenty-eight years. His work was not talked of, by him, by her, by their sons, now both of student age. She came here, to the ruined wall, as often as she was able, and he would call by when he could hitch a lift or find an opportunity. The pilot had made a deviation, dropped down at Newcastle, and a taxi had taken him close to the Mithras temple. It was a good place for clear thinking.

The tails of the cattle flicked in irritation and Knacker reckoned the flies were increasingly active. Maude would come for him when her digging day was over, not a moment before, and till then he must share the burden of the insects with the herd. He imagined the anxieties of the commander of the cohort based here, with responsibility for this segment of the empire’s defences. Imagined his arrogance, and his trappings of power, and the disciplined stamp of the troops on the parade ground, and imagined also the private moments of anxiety. Knacker wore a leather bag across his shoulder, contents delivered by courier to the police office at Newcastle’s airport, and in it were aerial pictures and ground-level images of the fence and the cameras and the ploughed strip on the border that now concerned him. There would be a commander there, back from the frontier, and unaware of a looming threat… He, Knacker, was not that man, did not have a cohort to lead, did not sit behind defences, did not rely on an untested link.

His eyes were on the far distance, an area shielded in the darkness of the spreading evening. There, hidden from sight but clear in his mind, was the man who Knacker wished most to identify with – perhaps dressed in skins, perhaps naked except for a colouring of blue woad paint, perhaps gaunt and hairy, perhaps as anonymous 1800 years before as a contemporary intelligence officer who sat and chewed his thoughts among the cows. Of course, there would have been, out there among the Caledonian and Brigantes tribes, an intelligence officer of proven worth, or what was the Wall for? Maybe the same damned flies had come for this man as now circled Knacker. He thought of this man, watching for weakness, as his friend, and… A horn blasted behind him. Some of the cattle stood and peered towards the road. Knacker pushed himself upright, would not want to keep her waiting. He walked across the field but thought more of his ‘friend’ than his wife, and the car door was opened for him.

“Hi, how you doing? We’ve had a great day, good finds… And you, your day?”

“Just an average one, not a special one.”

And Alice by now would have touched down on an airstrip in Jordan, and Fee would be escorting their volunteered man on the next stage of a treadmill journey, and much was in place and much needed to be done. He kissed his wife’s cheek and she drove him away; the painted man would have to wait for further consideration. A decent kiss and cheerful, mirroring how he felt as the mission gathered pace. Would soon be past the point of turning back: always a good moment.

At the gate and after a wave to the guards, and a wink and a nod in return, Arthur Jennings, in his wheelchair, was helped into a taxi by a member of the D-G’s staff. He thought it had been a satisfactory meeting, longer than he’d expected and with a sandwich break. Away in the traffic and crossing the bridge, he phoned his protégé.

“Went well, Knacker, in fact I would call it quite satisfactory. I appreciate you are already on course, but the bonus is that you are now sanctioned. Years have not dimmed or withered his dislike of the Kremlin crowd, his contempt for them and their coterie of poisoners. I have to emphasise that he was anxious for the health and the safety of our man, and queried our assessment of risk. I said those were matters taken very seriously. May I rot in hell, but I skated over that, as if going in and out of that place was on a par with taking a train to and from Bognor for the day… Of course, goes without saying, he’ll be beyond reach and should he miss the schedules then he must rely on his own wits if he’s to make it out. His nerve has to hold. But, needs must, he’s the only card we have to bring to the table. You’ll have evaluated that.”

And he rang off. He pocketed his phone and felt alone, rather cold, knew he was prominent in the conspiracy involving the man they’d be using. Had seen a photograph of him. A decent sort of face, which wouldn’t help him where he was heading.

She shot better than Gaz did.

No rifles or pistols on his island that he knew of. Gaz was rusty and this was a Walther PPK, a close-quarters handgun, too lightweight for the military.

Heavily built for a woman of her agility, Fee dominated with her presence on the floodlit range. They had given a ride on the Cessna to air force people, technicians muttering electronics and frequencies and degrees of gibberish that were a foreign language to Gaz. Had over flown the Orkneys, and might have gone over his home but he had not looked out, nor looked over the smaller island of Papa Westray for her place, nor for the ancient settlement site where she had loved him and which had been a bagful of treasured moments. Then out over the sea again until the Shetlands were reached. Gone across the infrastructure of the wilting oil industry and surplus rigs in postcard-beautiful bays. A loop across the isolated light on Muckle Flugga and land on his right and the ocean going away to a far horizon on his left, and passed the big golf ball radar domes perched on a summit, then a turn and a fast descent, and another bay that faced out to the North Sea and a single scarlet-painted trawler tied up at a pier. They had landed as the afternoon gave space to evening. It was not his way to query what happened, and she had slept on the flight, and there was nothing that he needed to know that was worth waking her for.

The shooting was at twenty-five paces, not stationary targets, but silhouette figures coming from right to left and vice versa, and it was aimed shooting or fast response and suppressive, and through a whole magazine.

At the airfield, they were met by a military Land Rover. Now he was given information, of no interest to him. They were on Unst, they had been over the sophisticated early warning system of RAF Saxa Vord. In their wisdom, confident in the ending of the Cold War, Whitehall warriors had shut the place down and flogged off the RAF’s personnel accommodation. The officers’ mess was now a bunk-house. At considerable cost, the base had been dragged back on line. There was an old range, and an instructor had issued weapons to them both.

She had a greater number of central hits than he had. He thought he had enough holes in the cardboard targets to drop a man, close down the threat. He had been a good marksman in Syria, but other skills were higher on the list, and self-taught… He had gone into the Logistics Corps and was neither popular nor disliked, hardly noticed and could drive a three-ton truck adequately, and they’d had an exercise on the Brecons where there was sparse cover. A sector was marked off and the instructors played the game and went and had a fag and a brew, and a whistle was blown and the veterans went out to find them. Thirty had started and twenty-nine were found. In growing frustration the search for the last one had gone on for another hour, and a whistle had been blown and the transports’ engines had been cranked up, and he’d stood up and brushed old heather and dead bracken off his body and they’d have damn near gone over him a half dozen times. His skills were understood and he was transferred to Stirling Lines at Credenhill in Herefordshire, and put into the training wing of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, alongside the Special Forces of the gun club, but shooting was not the priority. Concealment ruled. They finished. The weapons were cleaned, then handed back to an armourer. He turned away. A trudge back to the Land Rover. How did he feel?

“All right, thank you.”

What sort of weapon did he want to take?

“No sort of weapon. Nice of you to ask. No sort.”

It was considered necessary, Knacker’s opinion and hers, for him to have a means of self-defence, a back-stop option.

“I’d rather not, so let’s move on.”

She bit on her lip. He thought she’d do that rarely. Said nothing and did not argue. His defence was concealment, an ability not to be noticed, and he relied on such talents, and standing up in downtown Murmansk with a peashooter handgun and a magazine of nine rounds was ludicrous. He took a last look at Muckle Flugga, isolated and on a crag and jutting up beyond the last cliff face on the west of the island, and saw gannets circling, and Gaz would have bet money – all of that £10,000 – that had he been there, hidden and covert, Knacker would have found him. They were driven across Unst, came to a quayside, walked together towards a trawler bathed in bright lights.

Two men were on the quay and two more worked at the main mast where a new sail was being hoisted, and farther down on the quay were the ragged remnants of an older sail, a pretty scarlet but with slashed rents. He assumed they had come in that morning and had been at sea in the storm and must have had a pocket handkerchief of sail hoisted and assumed they’d pitched through the swell and the white caps to meet a timetable set for them. Work stopped. He was watched closely. He thought they evaluated him She spoke first to them. “Hi, boys, sorry and all that if you had a bastard of a night but appreciate that you put in the effort. This is your passenger… treat him carefully as there’s nothing in his history about riding a million dollar yacht. See you on the other side, boys.”

With the ripped sail were also tangled ropes and broken wicker crab pots. Their faces were drawn with sleeplessness, all unshaved, and they wore damp clothing, and all smoked and all held coffee beakers. There was a small Norwegian pennant attached at the back end of the trawler.

She said to Gaz, matter of fact, like nothing was that important a deal. “They’re going to ferry you to Norway. Why? Good question but a good reason… You go in one way but we don’t reverse it. They’re going to lift you out from Murmansk. They need to have a look at you because they take a hell of a chance getting involved with you. The FSB who look after all forms of border control in Murmansk, land and sea, would take a bad view of their facilitating the escape of a high-profile fugitive. They’ll decide if you’re worth the risk to them. Have fun, Gaz.”

She walked briskly away, and a hand was given him. He stepped down off the quay and on to the decking, which was where it all began, he supposed, the real stuff. It would have been reassuring to have had a Walther PPK in his belt and against his hip, but he had declined the offer, and ropes were loosed from the quay and an engine throbbed beneath him.