Beyond Recall

Chapter 8

The kids had the radio on.

Music that Gaz would not have tolerated in his own car, Russian rock, and booming inside the small Fiat, heavy drumbeats and the thwack of a base guitar. No checking with Gaz as to whether he liked it. He reckoned that the kids, for all the confidence that they displayed, might have been scared half out of their wits, and this was the dose to fire up courage. As Gaz saw it, they were naive, barely more than adolescent, and were way out of their depth.

A light drizzle had started. A sheen was on the pavements and water dribbled round the weeds clogging the gutters. A few pedestrians hurried, shoulders bowed to minimise the rain, clinging to umbrellas because with the rain had come a sharpening of the wind.

They had driven down the fiord and he had looked across and seen an aircraft carrier moored up on the far bank, and cranes, and also a scrapped destroyer and two submarines, one against a pier and another in a floating dry dock. It was natural for Gaz to take in the intelligence sights of the naval port, but he also saw the famed ice-breakers and cargo ships and small tankers, and the water was dark, and the cloud pushing down on it was grey. High above the apartment blocks with their dulled concrete cladding was a giant mountain of a statue that seemed to stretch up from the ground and pierce the clouds. The statue was a monument to war dead, he knew that, had taken that in from the detail given him on the trawler. He saw the fishing port. Lines of rust buckets tied limply together and no movement… What did he know of Murmansk? Population 300,000. A community where wages were marked up so people stayed there, prepared to live with six weeks of ever-present day-light in the summer and an alternative of six weeks of darkest night in the winter. No civilian jobs and no private industries, but the state needed workers to keep the place ticking over: naval, security, military, and customs, and all the bureaucracy that went with local government and the power machine far to the south in Moscow. The only homes he saw were squat complexes down on the coast and great shoebox apartment blocks that closed in on each other.

Who was he now? An invalided British serviceman with a PTSD medical history on his computerised records. A Norwegian fisherman, resident in a village up by the North Cape of the European mainland. He had the paperwork to prove it, and an ID card with the boat’s name on it, and a twenty-four-hour visa that would expire at noon on the following day. All bullshit because he spoke not a word of Norwegian and would not have survived three minutes of half competent interrogation. But it was thought sufficient to get him through a block in the port area, and into that sector where a trawler, bringing a hold filled with chilled red king crabs, would have tied up. Good enough for a cursory check from any poor bastard huddling at a gate in the rain while mosquitoes tunnelled up his nostrils.

Gaz had not worked a major city before. Had done the countryside of the Province’s border lands, and round the farms of eastern Tyrone, and knew the Creggan estate on Londonderry’s south side better than anywhere in the world; was at home in the empty wastelands of central Syria, or amongst the maize fields and the poppy plantations of Helmand, but short of knowledge for a dense, closed city.

They passed apartment blocks that had no football spaces, no gardens and no decent walkways, the outer casings of concrete or brick stained dark from air pollution and corrosion. Few shops and with opaque windows anyway, and bus-stops which always interested Gaz, and he could not see any bars – he had started to look for cover opportunities. Realised what NCOs in the unit would have called the ‘bleedin’ obvious, mate’. He would not be on his own; he would be with them, reliant on their tradecraft, an infant in their hands. They passed a park, its grass overgrown and the bushes ragged, but there were fine ornate buildings with porticos behind a fountain, and a statue of a military man, a cape dangling from his shoulders.

A sneer played on Timofey’s mouth as he turned off the road. “That was Kirov, Sergei Kirov. An ally of Stalin, the boss of Leningrad, but in this country, then and today, the top man does not like to see a deputy with ambition. He was assassinated. It is the same in politics as it is in mafia. A big man cannot be challenged by a rival, must be destroyed. We survive, Natacha and I, because we have no ambitions. We go our own way, free spirits. If we can sell, can find enough arseholes prepared to buy, make some money, walk away, then we are content. That is why we help you, not because we love you, friend, or believe in your right to bring a war into our country, but because we get money for it. You know what we argue about, Natacha and me? We argue what we shall do with the money. Who knows… except in this city there is nothing to spend money on. That man was killed because he climbed too high, was a threat. Who is the man you will kill, friend?”

He evaded. “Not the right time.”

“An FSB officer, yes? You will kill an FSB officer?”

“I need to see him, look at him, identify him, follow him home, know where he lives.”

“Then you will kill him? Why this officer?”

“At a different time, we talk then.”

She said, perky and pleased to interrupt, “I would like to kill an FSB officer – well, kill him a bit and then stamp on his throat, and then hurt him some more, then make him cry that I should finish the work, hurt him that much. I was in the gaol because of FSB… maybe you should let me help you.”

Gaz deflected, but realised that a gamble of epic proportions had been taken by Knacker Incorporated in packing him off to sea, then into mainland Russia, but he had been only vaguely briefed as to the value of the end product. A big operation and an expensive one, one that oozed risk. He was the mushroom man, kept in the dark and fed on shit. At the finish of the day his role would have been small but pivotal, but Gaz was barely flattered.

She said, “You want to know why my father hanged himself? Why it happened? Why he took a rope to a tree, to end his life?”

“If you want to tell me.”

He could have told her that he did not give a damn why her father had killed himself, and did not want to talk, needed to concentrate his thoughts… and needed, maybe, to reconcile himself to the fact the plan was rubbish, the method of infiltration poorly prepared, that he was little more than a cloth hung out on the drying frame that spun in his garden at the back of the house on Westray. Too much was asked of him, and he should have refused. He supposed that this evening, or at dawn the following morning, the trawler would tie up in the docks and he would be there and would meet the second man on the crew outside the gate and they would go together back the secure area, and then cast off – would get the hell out, leave this couple alone with their dreams. Could get out then. Would be free, be clear, would have failed.

But he would not: he was trapped, was Knacker’s man.

The building blocks were being set, discreetly, in place.

Alice had come to Tromso in northern Norway, and had been lifted from there in a charter, had come down at Kirkenes. Before the plane had lined up to approach the runway, she had been able to see out of the porthole, courtesy of the pilot’s manoeuvre, the thick pine forest on the Norwegian side of the frontier, then the scrape in the ground where the trees and foliage had been bulldozed clear – the border zone – and then had been able to look farther inland, out on to the Kola peninsula and had seen more forest. Her view had disintegrated because of low cloud and gentle rain, but she had seen a bleak landscape. She wondered if the tundra wilderness were populated, saw no homes, and no small farms. The only sign of development, other than the border strip, had been the monstrous, nickel smelter with high chimneys spouting fumes, a handful of kilometres into the Russian side. Alice could pick up and discard campaigns, had once been vegan but no longer, had once been a teetotal non-smoker but now did both, had once followed the mantra of abolishing pollution and industrial contamination, and that one had lingered. She thought the smelter a disgrace and its belched smoke a national humiliation for those across the border and the big cats down in Moscow… and out there was their boy.

She had no coat, no hat and no umbrella. She walked across the tarmac. Had given the pilot a mischievous ‘come on’ grin when she’d thanked him for the ride, and he had grinned back. She had chucked off any tiredness from the long flight back from the Middle-East. Fee was waiting for her at the terminal building. From his cockpit, the pilot might have watched her. Not so demure, little Alice, with her freckles and pale face and fair hair tending towards red. They hugged, showing the pain of being apart. They broke and walked towards the transport.

“Get him across? Work well?”

“Yes, he went. Seemed in reasonable spirits.”

“Only ‘reasonable’?”

“That’s good enough. Be more worried if he was dancing a jig. It’s a pretty fuck awful place where he’s gone. Should be there by now and staking out.”

“What’s he like?”

“Pretty ordinary. What you’d expect. I mean, he was broken by what happened, what he saw. Wasn’t our finest hour, dragging him out of his cave, his refuge, but needs must…” She shrugged.

Her own boys, the recruits, and the Facilitator, were due to land in seventy-five minutes. Contact, after a fashion, was broken. She passed no comment on them, was more interested, concerned, about the man that Knacker had brought on board: he’d a skill at that, unrivalled, getting men and women to go farther up the road than was ever warranted by a simple call of duty. Those were the ones Knacker selected, the ‘pretty ordinary’ ones. Alice did not travel anywhere in the orbit of harm’s way on her own, was always accompanied by a close protection team of Royal Military Police or hemmed into the back seat of a vehicle with a gang of sweaty Hereford boys… had sometimes wondered how she would be on her own, looking after her own back. Perhaps Fee read her.

“Actually, it’s not too bad what’s asked of him. The plan holds water.”

Drunk, rolling on his feet, clutching at other pedestrians on the crossing the father of Timofey had his eyes fixed on the grand new building on Lenin Prospekt.

Had the traffic been heavy there was every chances he would have been run down. He weaved, lurched, and carried on. He was uncertain of the entrance, where he would find someone to whom he would denounce his son, and the girl who was his son’s whore.

It was a heady cocktail that drove him across the wide road. Alcohol, the indignity and shame of the way he was treated in his own home, the insults he faced daily: supreme was the certainty of arrest and imprisonment in a penal colony on a charge of treason, espionage, betrayal of the state. Again and again, he rehearsed, among the vehicles and gripping the arms of fellow pedestrians who tried to shake him off, what he would tell the clerk at the desk, and the gratitude he’d get for his revelation. Better he had never been woken, better he had stayed asleep. He made it across.

His eyes might have deceived him, but he thought three doorways led into the building. Not four and not two, and he was desperate to piss, but first he had a flight of steps to negotiate. He did not know which door he should attempt to open. He saw a car parked at the side of the steps, two men lounging beside it, smoking. Rough-looking men, but he swerved them, and must have wet himself, and started shouting at them that he had important information to offer and… he was told to ‘Go piss yourself somewhere else’. He stumbled and fell and lay on the steps and his hip hurt, and the wet ran down his leg.

He would try again. If he did not try, again and again, then his future was in the penal colony, a certainty leading to his death. Smart shoes came towards him and he clutched at a man’s trouser leg but his hand was kicked away; then he grabbed at a woman’s ankle and held it for a moment before being stabbed with an umbrella… but he had seen which door they had come through. He started to crawl.

Knacker looked through a gap in the curtains into the annexe off the lobby, and could see a table and bench beyond the window fronting on to the Kirkenes street.

The one that Alice called the Facilitator was facing him, but unaware of him. Three men were seated at the table, all in profile. All smoked, all drank Pepsi-Cola, wore T-shirts, and frayed jeans and trainers, and the empty tins were stacked in front of them and a tinfoil ashtray overflowed.

After studying them, Knacker remarked to Alice and Fee, “I was at the Round Table the other day. Old Boot was there, not in good shape and not long with us, I fear. I didn’t dare engage him in conversation or I would have been deluged with Iron Duke minutiae and Waterloo stuff. Had he been here, looking at those ‘hitters’, who we intend to let loose beyond that frontier, I fear he would have given us the standard Wellington quote: I don’t know what effect these men will have on the enemy but, by God, they terrify me. What do they know?”

Alice answered. “They know that they’ll be put in the path of the Russian officer who was at the village. They won’t see us, and I was not given their names when I chose them. They know they have been chosen because we wanted men who will walk over nails, through fire, for the chance to do the guy some hurt. Frothing at the mouth, I’d say.”

Fee said, cheerily, “Remember, Knacker, when we were in Syria, and the gun club boys used to talk about Fire and Forget, the Milan or the Javelin anti-tank missile. Aim it and let it go… What we can expect is a right ruckus on the streets of Murmansk.”

Alice said, “We’ll be long gone, Knacker. Well out of it, and deniable.”

Fee said, “But reverberations, Knacker. Heard far and wide.”

“My impression of them, Knacker, is that they’ll want to get down to a hardware store and get a knife sharpener. Use it to freshen up razor-blades,” Alice said.

“I think that’s the game we’re into, Knacker,’’ Fee said.

He left them. A brisk stride took him out of the town and down to its coast line and there was a fine-looking church there, with a well-tended graveyard and a bench. He sat. He reflected.

Wondered if they knew his identity in the Lubyanka. Wondered if they had heard whispers of a man who was nudging towards elderly and had a silly name. If they had an address in New Malden, and knew of Maude and her hobbies and of his sons. Wondered if they had a file on the Round Table and its ludicrous pantomimes with the sword from the theatrical outfitter, and one on Arthur Jennings, dear man. Wondered if they had a man just like him, and a luncheon club where they performed their own version of pagan rituals. Wondered, most of all, whether they played the sport with any less intensity than he did… wondered if they did not know of him because he would have been regarded as little more than a nuisance, irritating and easily brushed aside; it would hurt to be so dismissed – and might be justified. He had never received, in all his years in the Service, any form of commendation, never been awarded a medal pinned on him by his sovereign, had never briefed a politician, never even met one for a flaccid handshake. The coins rattled in his trouser pocket, except for the denarius cleaned for him by Fee. His fingers rested on it and traced the lines on its face and its reverse and it seemed to show the transitory times of men who sought ‘to make a difference’. Some idiot had dropped it in the mud, and such an idiot might have been distracted by anxieties as to whether that woad-painted bastard away in the far distance was confidently plotting incursions.

He spluttered with laughter. It was going to be good: why should it not be?

“I want a bus-stop,” Gaz said.

The girl Natacha was deep in to her rant. “You have to listen, because this is why my father hanged himself, died because he could not live while all the men whose friendship he treasured were gone, lost… And why I help you. Why? Because it was these people, those in the new FSB palace, in all their palaces, who killed the men who could have been saved on the Kursk. Not all of them, but some. They should be alive, some… after the explosion and the deaths of ninety-five sailors there were twenty-three who were unharmed and who sheltered on the upper deck of the ninth compartment. They should have been rescued. Who could have saved them? The British could and the Americans could – but it was not acceptable that foreigners save our sailors. You understand why I hate?”

Gaz said, “A bus-stop is always good. No one sits outside if it is raining, but they wait for a bus.”

She was passionate, blasting him with her words. “The President was on holiday. In the sun, in the south, resting, still there five days after the disaster: that sort of man, not prepared to interrupt a holiday. And no senior officer dared to ask for help from the NATO navies. Eventually some cracked in their resolve and foreign divers and foreign equipment were asked for but no detail was given of how the escape hatch operated, and the divers were not allowed to fly to Murmansk but had to come many, many miles by sea, with more time lost. It was believed that if one, just one, of our sailors were rescued by a NATO navy then it would be political catastrophe. Such was the language of those who governed us and defended us. A deputy prime minister came to talk with the relatives of the crew at their base. A woman, perhaps already a widow, blistered him with criticism of their lies. Was she heard? She was sedated. A needle was stuck in her leg. The pride of the government was more important than the lives of sailors. It is why we help you – not just for money.”

The boy laughed. Gaz thought that Timofey had probably heard the story of the Kursk’s loss many times. He needed a bus-stop because there seemed to be no cafés here and no place to wait and watch.

“Eight days after the disaster, the NATO navy opened the hatch on the Kursk but all the men who had lived at first were now dead, too late. Three days too late, at least. Killed by carbon monoxide poisoning in pitch darkness and with water all round them and oil in it. A horrible death. Then the President came. He made a big offer to the families: every widow and every mother would get an officer’s salary for ten years for her sailor husband or sailor son. How many roubles? The President did not know. He went away. Do you understand?”

It was the way of Gaz’s work that there were times when he needed to listen to a tirade or a confession or just gossip in which he had no stake, no interest, but it was necessary to show interest, concern, and not to kill the cooperation of anyone he relied on. The same wherever he had worked. The Fiat was parked. The boy, Timofey, rolled his eyes and had a tired grin. He led them up a side street and out on to the main street, the Prospekt. There were fine public buildings and some flew a flag, limp in the rain without wind to stir it. Timofey led him to a bus-stop and when he looked across the Prospekt he saw the big building which had three prominent towers – at each end and in the centre, and two blocks that were recessed between the towers, and saw a high fence of ironwork and a gate that was guarded. And saw a drunk who was kneeling, arguing with a guard… Saw a parked car half on the pavement, two men idling beside it who seemed uninterested in all that passed them by, and the taller one threw down a cigarette butt and the smaller one held a small book of the sort that contained puzzles or word teasers. He rocked. The girl, Natacha, cannoned into him. He looked at the two men by the car, a black BMW 5 series, and the recognition flooded in him. Cold ran on his neck. Gaz knew them. They would not have known him.

He remembered graffiti in a nationalist corner of Londonderry. Daubed after it was public knowledge that Raymond Gilmore, small-time, low-life Provo, had gone supergrass which had meant the lifting of the city’s IRA brigade principals. It said I knew Raymie Gilmore – thank feck he didn’t know me. It had been regarded, by military and bad boys alike, as quality.

He had watched these two on a foul weather day, wind and powerful rain, while an atrocity was played out in front of them. They had seemed detached from the main action and had trailed around the village and across the football pitch and gone down between the buildings, had stayed close to their officer but had neither cautioned nor encouraged him. Gilmore had died a maudlin drunk, his handlers gone… The guard on the gate in front of the building’s main door was on his radio, complaining – easy enough to read it – about the drunk.

Their presence was the best sign. The bus-stop across the street had a weatherproof roof and sides of reinforced clear plastic. It served several routes… which was good because that meant it aroused no attention if a bus came and was ignored.

“Friend, you want me to stay?” A whisper in his ear.

It was what he had come for. He was not there to have his hand held, to be dependent on these kids. Before the black dog days he had been able to operate as well in solitary as in company, but before… “I want you back at the car, able to come quick, just around that corner. Nearer than where you parked, and watching me.”

“You take that chance?”

Everything he did was taking a chance. He nodded. He thought the girl did not want to leave him, perhaps feared she’d miss out on the big scene, but Timofey tugged her arm roughly. He was alone… Women milled around him with shopping bags, and kids who had come from school and larked and swung their satchels, and a druggie who might have been one of Timofey’s customers… He reckoned now that the pair of them, Timofey and Natacha, were better than he’d bargained for and neither would crumple. Hard to credit. He was in Murmansk, a security-dominated city, one where counter-espionage forces were supreme, and he watched the two foot soldiers and waited for their officer.

What to talk about that had not already been exhausted? Not the dour days in Afghanistan, and not the long weeks in Syria. Instead the two minders ignored the drunk who was on the steps and arguing with the guard, belting on about a plot, an infiltration, an espionage event and too pissed to finish a sentence. They talked of their future.

For Mikki and Boris, the truth was that the brigadier general – respected and almost loved – was a different man from the one they had followed through the Afghan intervention. They minded his kid – whom they called the ‘little shit’ or the ‘little bastard’ – because the old man asked it of them. The future was soon, pressing. It would be a hotel… they had enough connections to get the necessary permits and the building resources, and would easily attract a decent ‘roof’ to shelter under. Where? Boris was from Irkutsk and Mikki had been brought up in the far Far East and Kamchatka. Both had made the decision to quit home, abandon friends and family, and join the military security wing of what was then KGB. Both had been on the personal protection detail of the brigadier general when he was a junior colonel and both owed their lives to the time he had called down the air strike right above where they held out, ammunition stocks near exhausted. Their idea now was to site themselves along the M11 highway, perhaps inside the city limits of Veliky Novgorod, and purchase a property in decline that was close to the Volkhov river and near to the lakes and forests. It would be a good stop-over point in the 800-kilometre drive from the capital to St Petersburg. That it was still a dream and not reality was because of their loyalty for the old man who had taken both of them off the streets when they were raw recruits, had kept them close and privileged. Always they had need of a roof, always they had been protected with one.

They talked quietly. There had been a time in Boris’ home city, Irkutsk, when there were gunfights on the streets as mafia groups battled for supremacy, and in Mikki’s home town there had been numbing unemployment when the regime had collapsed and the factories had locked their gates. They had been fortunate, had been on the winning side when the dust of chaos cleared, would not have been without the shelter given them by their officer… Everything they had they owed to the father of the ‘little shit’, and nothing was owed to the ‘little bastard’. They waited for him.

The rain fell. Neither understood why the drunk was still there, had not had his arse kicked. They might have a central building and they might also have chalets amongst trees. It would be a good place, and clean, and used by families. And what pleased them equally was that they would never return to this God-forsaken wreck of a city where it was always day or always night. What helped in the project for the hotel was that each was blessed with a hard-working woman who would turn her back on the city and come with them. Would be better than good and they would be shot of Lavrenti Volkov.

At his desk, his door closed, Lavrenti trawled his screen. No matter that the new major and the impertinent captain had had the chance to get to know each other better in the canteen or in a meeting room, or – for all he cared – in a quiet part of the cell block. He would stay in his office, regardless of what name was on the door, until the end of the working day. Phone calls came to him and most involved investigations that he had been a part of, but three were for the new man. His crisp rejoinder was ‘Wrong extension, nobody of that name is on this number.’

He found clips of the President speaking in the Kremlin, and more clips of the President at armed forces exercises, and watched him on vacation and fishing or hunting or diving in the Black Sea, bare-chested. He thought the man was his saviour. As long as he lived, and power remained in those hands, small and delicate, Lavrenti was protected. As were many others. Many hundreds of men lived well because the President stayed in rude health. Those who had worked on secret missions abroad, and those who had been in the vanguard on the special units in the Caucasus, and those who administered the regime’s justice in the interrogation rooms at Lefortovo, and those who collected the money for providing roofs. It would have been simple to have tapped the keys, to have resurrected the involvement in Syria, plastered the screen with images of Russia’s bombs and Russia’s armour and Russia’s infantry, and with those units of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran to which Russian officers were assigned as liaison. From the next day, he would be in Moscow, alone, and would offer a curt farewell but no thanks, to the two minders allocated him so many years before because that would denigrate his authority. They knew, they had been there. Had seen it all and had never given a sign. They had been there, a handful of paces behind him, and it ate at him. Voices in the corridor, and hisses of irritation, and they would be waiting for him, would wait until he was ready to leave.

Timofey came to the bus shelter, glanced around it and had blinked, and the cold had touched his neck, and he could not see the man. Had come to look for him, to see if all went well, if anything had happened, how much longer they might wait – and that hour was almost on them when the bureaucrats vacated their premises. Could not see his man, did a raking sweep with his eyes – caught sight of a man in the back of the shelter and realised the skill displayed. How to sit in a bus shelter and have his body at that angle and his head turned away and behind a large woman, and his eyes swept on and relief soared, and admiration and… Timofey saw the figure on the step outside the ironwork fence of the headquarters building. He recognised his father.

The guard had called for reinforcements. They were at a door behind the fence, slipping on rubber gloves, were being waved forward. Timofey knew the wide powers and the range of authority enjoyed in the city by FSB. They would not have been awarded such a building otherwise. They dealt with counter-terrorism, and with political dissidents and with supposed corruption in local government, and with drug enforcement… everything above issuing the bus timetable for the city. He was rigid, his heart pounded, and he saw his father and the guards who were coming to get him and take him in. It did not take a high school graduate to realise that his father would have gone down to the Prospekt to snitch on his son… did not take an intellect to comprehend that his father was going to betray him.

He ran.

Crossed the street, paused in the central reservation and launched again. Cars hooted and bus brakes screamed, and heads turned. Timofey reached his father. The guards, a few paces away, were wary and would have wondered whether the drunk was about to vomit on their uniforms. A pair of men by a black saloon, a BMW, were watching, had found something of interest in a sea of boredom. He bent and his fists gripped the damp coat and he dragged it up, used wiry strength.

“Sorry, my father, a drunk. Apologies to you. Going to get him home. Don’t know what shit he was giving you, wasting your valuable time. I look after him. Harmless, a fool. Sorry…”

He held his father under his armpits. His father croaked a few guttural words. “An agent was sent. Through the wire… A man came… It is an attack on FSB… Hear me, listen… Listen.”

Nobody did, and nobody could. Timofey held his father upright and had a hand across his father’s mouth.

Timofey said, “Tragic, isn’t it? A good man until the fucking booze got him. Sorry.”

Did not lard it; apology was already enough out of character in that city. He had a hold on the man and they went out into the traffic and the vehicles weaved round them. Might have, if he had not been watched, dumped his father in the path of any heavy lorry that was going too fast for the brakes to work well on a wet surface. He took him past the bus shelter and tried to see his man. Dragged him back to the side street and the Fiat, opened the door and threw him into the back, and said to Natacha that the ‘old bastard’ would have betrayed them and was too pissed to make it into FSB and do the snitch. Timofey went back to the street corner where he could see the guard and the waiting car and the two men lounging against it, and had a view of the bus-stop. He checked his watch. It was the time when offices emptied and bars filled, and men came out with the girls they hoped to shag that evening… and he only cared for the twin prizes: excitement and money, adrenaline rush and cash. And wondered which officer inside that building was of such importance to the foreigners that they sent a man to find him.

Delta Alpha Sierra, the eighth hour

She didn’t cry out loud and that surprised Gaz.

The hours had drifted on and some of the Iranian militia had lit fires to shelter them from the weather and had built little covers to keep the rain off the embers, and they heated food. None for the village women, or the children… the men were all gone, had been taken beyond Gaz’s vision, and he had heard shots and assumed more executions had taken place… from the staccato bursts of firing it had not been a fusillade of weapons on automatic, but aimed.

The goats had moved away from her and seemed to believe it possible to forage but the dogs huddled close. Gaz had released her wrist. He would have liked to have held his rifle in one hand and to have wrapped his other arm round her, give her what little comfort he could. But he did not move and still no words had passed between them and they held this silence. A search party moved in and out of buildings that were not in flames. He saw them, noted them, wondered whether her own home, where the thorn palisade was in which the goats were corralled at night, would be the next to be searched. His legs ached because he could not shift but he had training for it: for her it would have been worse. The text from the FOB told him that a Hereford team was on the way but would lie up until dark. The text also said that the Chinook would fly, regardless of weather, if the vehicles could not get close enough to pull him out, and Arnie and Sam had already moved back and were at the RV point… It was just him that was left, and he was the witness.

What happened next… important to remember every fucking thing that played out in front of him… Rare for Gaz to swear, and it always upset Betty Riley when he did. He had the binoculars on a group of the IRGC as they exited a building and could see that one of them carried – as a trophy – a fag-end. It was a filter-tipped fag-end. The commander was called for, and the Russian officer, and the goons who traipsed after him, sauntered across the dirt. Gaz understood. He didn’t smoke but others did. He did not bring cigarettes to the village as a trifling goodwill gesture, but plenty did. Probably would have been when one of the Hereford teams was visiting, doing some weapons training with the kids, lecturing on a few of the combat basics, and they’d leave cigarettes but not be as dumb as to leave a carton or a packet, just a few filter-tipped fags. Would not have been a pack of local Alhamra, red and gold, but more likely Bensons, brought in from Cyprus after a rest & recreation. It was examined. The fag-end was passed from the commander to the Russian officer and he looked closely at it, like he was some goddam detective. Gaz was not sure how a particular woman in the little group that was hemmed in by bayonet points was identified. One moment she was inside the laager the women made, and the next she had been hauled out and was brought to stand in front of the commander and the officer. She was questioned.

The girl in front of Gaz would have known what she said, exact words of the response, a lip reading from the girl would have given each syllable of the answer. Gaz could not hear and did not have the language but the contortion on the woman’s face told him enough. She would have been an important figure in the village community and her nightclothes hung sodden on her. The breath came faster from the girl’s mouth, hissed through her teeth and lips. The woman’s face was inches from the commander’s and the officer’s. The commander, the senior Iranian, slapped her face, did a double impact job using the outside of his hand for the first stroke and the palm for the second, and the woman shook, steadied, did not fall. There was a moment, huge in the binoculars, when they faced each other and her face was flushed red from the blow. She spat. Twice.

The first was at the commander. A bearded face, half of it hidden by his dark glasses in spite of the low cloud and the rain and the lessening light, but he was fast enough to twist away and the mess went past him. The second spit was at the Russian officer. He had not anticipated it. The spit caught him at the nose and in the eyes, and he reeled back as if punched, and in his anger he seemed to choke for breath.

Gaz heard and saw what followed.

A hand on a holster, the flap already loosed, and a weapon held, barely aimed, pointed in the direction of the woman, of her stomach. No hesitation, and the crash of the shot carried on the wind, and the girl in front of him winced as if she had taken the force of it. The officer had fired at her stomach. The woman rolled, staggered, and then lurched forward, was going down, but her arms stretched forward and the fingers of her right hand caught his cheek, one fingernail sticing down the flesh, through the stubble, and the line was immediate and clean cut. It was big in the binoculars. The officer kicked out at her and caught her shin and she fell to the ground in front of him. As Gaz saw it, the officer lost control. His hand went up and felt his cheek and the blood was already flowing and he looked down and saw it run in the palm of his hand.

He fired again. Kept firing. Fired into the inert body of the woman. No more twitches or spasms, her life was already gone. The officer fired until the magazine in the butt of the Makarov was emptied. Then he kicked her, then, in extreme anger, kicked her again. Gaz thought he might be sick but held it back in his lower throat. The girl stared ahead, never moved, did not even shake, and the dogs were close to her but the goats were roaming, which left her more exposed than when they were thick around her. What struck Gaz was the minders had not moved. Had not taken the empty pistol from the officer, nor had deflected the kicks he aimed at the body, nor had sought to calm him.

And it would be worse, Gaz thought. Dusk was still four hours away and still witnesses lived. He watched the officer and the blood dribbled on his face.

The computer was switched off. Anything private to him was sanitised. Lavrenti rose from his seat and the chair went back hard against the wall and marked the paint: little matter. He hooked the strap of his bag over his shoulder, took his pistol from the desk’s top drawer, put it in the bag. A quick look around him and his two-year stint inside the Arctic Circle was nearly done. They were waiting outside, the new major and the captain. He acknowledged them, the briefest and shallowest duck of his head, and neither offered a hand to him as a farewell gesture. Down the corridor. No voices calling out through half-open doors… ignored, like he was a triangle of yesterday’s pizza. He went down the stairs. Usually he alerted his minders that he was on his way but it had not seemed important, not this time. He had noticed a growing impertinence from them these last days. In the big hallway on the ground floor, a colonel waited to receive a guest. The colonel bossed the headquarters building and the outer doors swung open and Lavrenti noted the arrival of an official from the regional governor’s office, and the two men hugged. The colonel would have seen the departing Lavrenti, would have known his tour of duty was completed, but did not acknowledge him. He was about to leave and was fishing the lanyard off his neck that held his local accreditation, and a security man stood and waited for it, and his face was lit in admiration.

“Goodbye, Major, and wishing you well.”

Which startled Lavrenti. Something warm and something genuine. He noticed that the security man wore, proudly, a line of medal ribbons. “Thank you, and you.”

“Because we need more like you, Major. Combat men. Those who have fought in the name of the Fatherland. Been on active service. Not these desk warriors, fuck them – excuse me, Major – but more who have been at the front line, need them. Done time there.”

He was saluted. He went outside, into the drifting spat of the rain. His minders had not seen him. He walked to the gate. The guard there was admitting men and women who were probably in the delegation of the governor’s office but had come in different cars. He was delayed but it did not seem important. He paused in his stride and saw, through the bars, that the traffic on the Prospekt was light. He did not look back at the building, had no more time for it, but was unsettled by the greeting as he had given over his lanyard, and the warmth of it. More like you, Major… combat men, and so few knew.

Gaz saw him.

The officer came out, crossed the space in front of the building but could not push past the delegation entering the gate. He paused. Was wearing his cap and his camouflage tunic and had a bag across his shoulder, and his khaki drill trousers were pressed and had a knife-sharp crease, and his shoes were polished. The same glower in the eyes and the line that had been bloodied when Gaz had last seen it and now was faint but visible. Still the goons with the car, as recognisable as the major, had not seen their man. He flicked with his fingers, cracked them, and Gaz watched the response as the goons turned and gazed through the ironwork fence and jettisoned their cigarettes, and… Gaz was running.

Out from the bus-stop, along the street and past an apartment block entrance, and to the next corner. Looked for the Fiat, found it… a good boy, his Timofey. True to his word. Brought close to the corner, the engine ticking over. The girl was sitting in the back… the most chaotic call-up that Gaz had ever done. That it worked was miraculous… a delegation had gone through the gate and then into the building via a single door, and the officer had been forced to stand and watch, and his own car had not been ready. He did a sharp, short whistle, and the Fiat was coming fast towards him.

A door opened, foul smell hitting him. A jerk at his arm and he was pitched down into the front passenger seat, cannoned down and was bruised. Had only half closed the door when the boy accelerated away… He said it was the black car. They braked hard at the main intersection. The driver scanned. Gaz had seen the officer for a full ten seconds. He had seen the goons, who had once been minders, for an hour, a little more. All put together like a jigsaw. That should have been a moment of rare pleasure for Gaz. Should, mentally, have been thrilled enough to high-five the kids and punch the air.

There had been a four-day stake-out in Helmand, and he had been the lead of a reconnaissance team, had had a full sergeant working to him, and had identified a local hitter, a man with the reputation of having filled coffins to go back to UK for a hearse journey up the High Street in Wootton Bassett: the man was supposed to be an expert in the dark art of building the IEDs that either killed outright or made living a pained misery for survivors. Easiest cliché: they all look just the same and might have been true except that Gaz was the one who had detected in previous surveillance stills that the target tied his turban loosely and with a side knot, not a central one, and it had been enough. A man convicted, sentenced, and executed with a Hellfire strike on the compound from a fast jet and all done because the tying of a knot had been picked up by binoculars half a mile away. Knacker and his crowd would not have relied, just, on Faizah’s identification, of a Russian officer in a changed location and different uniform. Needed his training, what Gaz brought to the table. Had previous, had form, history… If Gaz spotted a man, and identified him, working in the sort of theatre that was his playground, then the man was dead. Not, of course, by Gaz’s hand, but he had that level of power.

Needed more. Needed a location. Needed a quieter street and a backwater location. Needed a better place for the hitters to get to work. The BMW was starting to move away from the kerb. Timofey had pulled out into the traffic and a car almost hit them, and a collision with a motorcycle was narrowly avoided. Gaz glanced behind him and saw the girl sat on top of a drunk.

Her voice was rich in contempt. “His father. His father went to tell them. His father was too drunk to get a hearing. His father is a traitor to us. This is his father. We should put a weight on him and take him to the docks, drop him in the river.”

Which he supposed was the way of the jungle they lived in… an arrogant thought, so he bit at his tongue and said nothing… just pointed ahead and Timofey had locked on the saloon and followed it easily. It had the speed to surge away from them, but it was that time in the late afternoon when the road filled and the offices slopped out. The shops would soon be shutting, the pavement was crowded. Murmansk was on the march and it suited Gaz well. He had no indication that the saloon’s driver used tradecraft, was aware of them, nor did he seem to practise any of the procedures laid down for the evasion of a tail. Their size helped them, a compact little vehicle that could shift between lanes and be hidden by the bulk of buses and lorries. Fact was, it was turning out ordinary and simple. The boy drove well and seemed aware of the risk of showing out, but the drunk’s stink from the back was sharp and Gaz was aware of a dilemma: did not know what, in the world from which the drug-dealing kids emerged, would be the fate of a father wanting to tout on his son. Timofey had his eyes on the roof of the saloon and swinging at lights, going right and climbing a steep and narrower road, and going back often enough to his mirror. Asked, “What is it now that you want?”

“I want him to go home. I want to see his home.”

“Only that?”

“Yes.”

“And he is?”

“He is Major Lavrenti Volkov. He is FSB. Before he worked here he was in Syria. I have to see him, locate him. Because of what happened in Syria.”

“What happened?”

“You don’t have to know. It is another story.”

Timofey persisted. “My father, who did he speak with?”

Gaz said, “He tried to speak with the guard at the gate. He tried also to speak with men who came from the building. Many people came but none wanted to hear what an alcoholic said. Nobody stopped, nobody listened. He had drunk too much, was not heard. If he wanted to betray you, then he failed. That is your problem, and I am not a part of it.”

He had said it easily, was practised at shedding responsibility. It was the way of a reconnaissance trooper. He carried no burden of ‘consequences’, would be far gone from Murmansk when it was decided how to use the information he provided. What happened to the drunk, Timofey’s father, was separate from him. By the following day he would be travelling back towards the island of Westray, and hooking up again with a mobile, calling customers, telling them that he would make up the time on their lawn cutting and the repairs he had promised for them, and maybe heading for the hotel and a beer, and might wonder if the mission had cleansed him of the attentions of the black dog days, and would meet again with Aggie…

He could see the saloon’s roof and remembered everything of the officer: what he had seen at Delta Alpha Sierra and the image of the man this afternoon, smart in his uniform, but wearing the scar of where he had been. Was near to the finish line.