Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

Voices beyond his door.

He removed the protection, pulled on his trousers and a shirt and a sweater, and stubbed out his cigarette. He did not kiss Natacha, nor compliment her on her loving, tousled his hair. She would follow him.

No names given. Their visitor could have been Italian. Timofey dealt to foreigners in the summer months if they came to the Kola peninsula for hunting, fishing, hiking; many required smack or skunk or phets as distraction from the mosquitoes and Murmansk’s lousy standards of cuisine. His father was drunk, barely understood. Natacha stood behind him, wearing her trousers but not much else, and the Italian did not blink or gape, or fluff his words, only smiled and continued to say what would be required, and when… and finished with a few words that left a sour taste, and Timofey understood their warning.

“Please believe me. The people who make requirements of you are not a charitable organisation. You might consider going to FSB and confessing the involvement of your family in criminal espionage and hope to win clemency from your courts. You would not get it. The length of your family’s conspiracy would come into the possession of FSB and the monies you have already been paid that lie in a foreign bank. If you survived the beatings you would go to a harsh regime camp for twenty years, twenty-five years, and there would be no move to bargain for your freedom and swap you.”

A figure was written on a notepad sheet and shown to Timofey.

“That is how much is currently held in the account. A good sum. Unwise to jeopardise your ownership of it.”

Timofey said, “What you ask, it is for very soon?”

“Very soon.”

Natacha said, “But fun, exciting. An entertainment.”

“Be careful, I urge you.”

The Italian messenger slipped away, a door closing on the landing and the slight sound of feet on a long staircase. Natacha did a little dance and he stood for a moment, sombre, then joined her and together they danced and Timofey might have said that the adrenaline running in him gave him a greater sensation than what he’d done with her, and the dance became faster, wilder, and his father lay on the sofa moaning for drink.

Timofey cried out, “It’s like we slept, year after year, and they came and kicked our arses and woke us, and we don’t know what will happen.”

Natacha shouted in his ear, “What I said, fun and exciting, and dangerous.”

They danced till they dropped and sprawled on the floor, and his father snored…

The hunter stood statue-still and listened.

He seemed to hear the wind in the trees and its flight across the scrub and over the rock, and the patter of rain falling. Jasha was a man who had been in military combat and whose ears had withstood the blasting of artillery and mortars, and the echoing explosion close-up of the RPG–7, but his hearing had survived intact. He had come out to shoot an Arctic fox. The pelt would pay well, and if the head were detached then it could be mounted for display in a trophy room of a multi-millionaire, for dollars, not the valueless rouble. He had put down a duck’s carcase in the hope of luring one into the arc of his rifle’s aim. He would have made more money if he had trapped it, then drowned it in a rain butt, then skinned and cleaned the undamaged fur, but trapping seemed to him to break the concord he had with the beasts living around him. He would get less money but regarded an accurate single shot as more honourable… he did not know another hunter who bandied such a word. He thought he heard a hiss of breath. It could have been the wind blowing or the rainwater tipping off the scrub’s leaves. Or it could have been the bear. He would not smell it. He would hardly see it in the shadows that on such a night played deceitful tricks, and the low bushes were constantly moving. But he might hear it. He did not like to believe that the bear stalked him.

The success of the original Zhukov and his ruthless views on the necessity of taking casualties, his belief in ultimate victory, had made him too valuable to be purged, as was the fate of most ranking officers. So, Zhukov was unique, a winner whatever the setbacks. Losing a front paw and the claws in the pads and having a stump had not deterred the bear. But it was an animal. The purchase of the incapacitating drug, its use as a sedative, and the risk to Jasha’s life, and the work he had done on the wound and the extraction of the barbed wire, and the dosage of steriliser – all he had given was low down in the beast’s psyche of gratitude. Jasha thought it followed him that evening.

The Arctic fox had not come. The duck lay fifty paces from him, untouched. Perhaps the Arctic fox knew what Jasha did not. He might be the last to know that the bear trailed him.

Was the bear short of company? Was it tagging along with him? Did it resent his intrusion into its territory? Would it come after him and use its full techniques of innate fieldcraft, then – at the right moment – charge him? Accepting the old wound, Jasha was a fair mover over broken ground, had a sniper’s mentality, was lightly built for his height, and Zhukov would weigh a little below 400 kilos and could move on three pad sets with the quiet of that same Arctic fox that had avoided both bait and bullet. He did not think the bear would register an act of kindness; more likely to resent him, an intruder. Yet, was still, in a fashion, Jasha’s friend.

Jasha, turned, slowly and carefully, and listened and took a step forward, and another, and broke a twig which was a rare mistake for him, and then hurried, expecting all the time that a huge dark shadow would come behind him. One blow of the stump would fell him, one slash from the claws of the surviving pad would lacerate him. He returned to his hut, fed his old dog, lit a lamp and put a post against the door, and thought he had made himself a prisoner in his own home deep in the wilderness between the frontier fence and the distant winding road to Murmansk: was alone, did not know whether he was followed or was stalked. Bad times. What he had known as a soldier soared in his mind. Always for a sniper, without comrades close and with enemies near to him, there were bad times and none of them forgettable.

Delta Alpha Sierra, the third hour

Gaz had a grandstand view as the cordon closed round the village. Could see the homes and the alleyways linking them, and the small enclosures of dried thorn where the animals were husbanded at night. Looked on to the football pitch and the one pool in the river that was deep enough for the women to wash clothes and bedding. All were surrounded. He watched with big binoculars.

Possible to have a moment of doubt as the convoy had approached the track; there had been hesitation and a late swing of the wheels. But the village was in trouble when the vehicles swept down towards it. He could see and he could hear. All done with the precision of a planned military operation, and Gaz assumed that a detailed briefing had been given. He estimated a minimum of 100 men were deployed. Iranians, and not the ragtag stuff that he had watched from his covert points earlier in the year. Disciplined and organised, in uniform and carrying cleaned weapons, and on two of their trucks were heavy machine-guns. A little cluster took his eye. Customers – military intelligence and the Sixers – always wanted to know most about Russians. The Iranian commander walked with them. An officer strutted, and Gaz recognised the rank insignia of captain sewn on the arms of his camouflage tunic, and thought his cap, drooping in the rain and ruffled by the wind, had the badge of the FSB. Blond hair peeping from below the cap and an assured, tanned face and a pistol slapping against his thigh. A pair of men slouched behind him, carrying assault rifles, and the power of his binoculars showed Gaz that neither was where he wanted to be. The weather blistered on to them.