Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

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

Delta Alpha Sierra, the second hour

The wind and the rain came towards Gaz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bear, too, was a veteran and wounded.

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