Gerald Seymour - A Deniable Death

Gulls wheeled over him.

He stood at the rail, in fading light, and watched the long, straight line of the boat’s wake. He shivered, sucked in air and used his tradecraft. He wore a long-peaked baseball cap, a scarf covering his mouth, and gloves, and would spend the entire sailing on deck, not inside where it would be noticed if he kept on the cap, scarf and gloves – and on deck no cameras would record him. The wind was brutal and there was sleet in the air, but he stayed at the rail.

The men were in place where he had positioned them. He was ready. Mansoor’s last action was to take out from a shed behind the barracks a small inflatable dinghy capable of carrying four men.

He did not have night-vision – such equipment was kept by combat forces – but he had good eyes, and the moon would be up soon. He had good ears too.

He watched and listened. He did not know what he might see or hear, but he felt confident. If he saw and heard nothing, if he had imagined the loop of wire and the tubing on which the bird sat, then he had not called out a platoon from Ahvaz and could not be ridiculed.

The dark had come and sounds rippled from the lagoon, from the birds and frogs and the pair of pigs, and he believed – concentrating his gaze into the darkness – that the Sacred Ibis, a bird revered for three millennia, had not moved. It was the key.

He stood in the middle of the road and gave his memories full rein.

The road – once the northern trunk route from old West German territory to the German Democratic Republic – ran between Lubeck and Schwerin. East and West had met here, separated by a white line that had been painted across the tarmac. It was natural that Len Gibbons should come to the village that straddled the road and was called Schlutup.

He stared into the middle distance. The dusk was coming slowly and the wind whipped him. He saw only desolate heathland, where no trees grew: dead ground. It had been his place, his territory. He had been ‘Gibbo’ then, and considered bright enough in his twenty-ninth year to be sent from London to join the Bonn station and be given responsibility to run assets in the northern sector. Not as exciting as Berlin, but good work that would have been the envy of the peers who had joined the Service with him. The man had been codenamed Antelope.

Where he looked now there had then been the Customs post and the base from which the Grenztruppen and the Staatssicherheit had been deployed. It had been a complex of buildings, reached by a corridor between high wire fencing, a minefield, dogs, watchtowers – all the paraphernalia that awful state had needed to keep its citizens from flight – and now was levelled. The barracks of the border guards from which they deployed to the watchtowers and patrols in the killing zones had been flattened; the cells and interrogation rooms of the Stasi had been bulldozed. It had been Gibbo’s ground when he had run Antelope. He accepted that a bewildering coincidence had brought him back to Lubeck, extraordinary and unpredictable. He thought that the Fates had dealt him a fine hand, the chance to obliterate old memories and wounds. A successful killing would wipe clean the slate of the Schlutup Fuck-up.

They had travelled – himself, the Cousin and the Friend – on separate flights. His had taken him via Brussels and then a connection to Hamburg. The Cousin had also gone to Brussels, but had had a fixed-wing charter bring him on to the smaller airfield outside Lubeck. The Friend would have travelled in his own mysterious way, by his own routes and channels. Another hired aircraft, most likely, and documentation that would fool most experts and certainly would have been accepted by local officials. They had met by the canal in Lubeck, near to the gardens between the Muhlen and Dankwarts bridges and sat on a bench. The Israeli had smoked cigarettes and the American a small cigar – Gibbons had yearned to ditch his abstinence. The pieces of the jigsaw had come together.

It was where the story of Antelope had been launched by a pastor. The young Gibbons, fresh-faced and revelling in a job that brought him to the cusp of Cold War action, had been standing almost at the point where he was now and had been staring up that road past the barriers. Dogs had been leaping on their leashes at him and he would have been under the gaze of half a dozen pairs of binoculars. Three or four Zeiss and Praktica cameras would have been focused on him. He had known, then, so little of the East. He had once been on an Autobahn drive direct to West Berlin, and on the military train that ran across communist territory to Berlin from Helmstedt in the West. There was little to learn from watching the empty road, the ground where no cattle grazed and the expressionless faces of the guards, so he had turned and walked down the hill.

The pastor had approached him, sidled to his shoulder… The pastor had a friend who was trapped in the East. There was a cafe down the road from which the old border had run and they had gone there. The Pastor had refused alcohol and drunk tea. He had talked more of his friend. Where did the friend work? At the telephone exchange in Wismar – where else? Trumpets had blasted, excitement had gone rampant. Soviet military formations were close, naval forces had moorings on the Mecklenburgerbucht to the north and at Rerik and Warnemunde to the east, and the telephone exchange had the potential to offer up the pouches of gold dust so coveted by the Service. He had filed his report of the meeting for consideration in Bonn and London. With reservations, and instructions for due care on Gibbons’s part, Antelope had come alive.

He stood in the road and was oblivious of the traffic. The dusk had arrived sharply enough for the oncoming lights to dazzle him. Cars, vans and lorries swept past, the slipstreams buffeting him. He stood his ground. The jigsaw’s pieces had slotted together well. He had remarked, without apparent humour, that the marzipan factor had clinched the location, Lubeck. The Americans had the database, and were able to name an Iranian-born neurosurgeon resident in Lubeck who practised there. He performed complicated surgery either in the city’s medical schools, or in Hamburg; there was a home address on Roeckstrasse. The Israeli said that a man would come from Berlin and would have with him necessary equipment. The facilitator was in transit and would reach the city late in the evening, but had not volunteered details of the man’s travel plans. They had gone their ways and would meet again in the late evening. Hands had been shaken. A course of action had been launched and would not now be revoked. They had stood, and the Cousin had remarked, off-hand, ‘I say this, Len, with real pleasure. Your boys who went forward – that old guy and the youngster – they did us proud. My sincere congratulations to them.’ He’d answered that they were unable to beat it straight out because there was kit to recover, but about now they would be on the move and, yes, it had been a first-class effort. He had not thought about them before or since the Cousin had spoken of them.

It was, in a sense, a pilgrimage that Gibbons had made to Schlutup, straight from that bench in his hired VW. There was a small centre, deserted, but dominated by the church where the pastor retired now, had stood in while the incumbent was away. Then there were residential streets of bungalows with a sprinkling in the gardens of the winter’s first snow. He had parked and walked past a lake – ducks had scattered off it. He had remembered the lake, and there were concrete bunkers that British military engineers had put in place when the borders were defined and the barriers had gone up; the structures were now collapsed and overgrown. There was a paddock with horses. One was old, a skewbald, and had had its head down with tiredness. There was a trace in his memory of a young horse, roan on grey, possibly. He had walked onto the death strip where there would have been smoothed sand, firing devices and patrols, and the bankruptcy of the regime was on show. He had found an apple tree. A few rotten fruits had survived the autumn and he imagined the bored young guard, a conscript, far from home, who had tossed down a core and bred the tree. The death strip was now in the possession of hikers and dog-walkers, and he had met children out with a teacher, a man with Schnauzers and a woman with a yellow Labrador. He had walked along the strip where the fences and towers had been dismantled two decades earlier, where few signs survived to corroborate his past and the Schlutup Fuck-up.