Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

And the other boys, Arnie and Sam, would they give him fire support if he killed her and needed close-quarters backup? An unlikely scenario was that the two men he had tabbed with from the Chinook drop-off would go on the regimental roll of honour for an heroic rescue. Arnie was likely to be half a mile to the west and with a view, just about, of the football pitch, and Sam was at the far side of the road junction, and neither had an eyeline on him. He was not good with words, had not had a testing education – not necessary for his trade. He knew of no word that summed up the degree of catastrophe that he faced as she came up the hill… She stopped. The lead goats were within a short stone’s throw of him, and she was a long stone’s throw farther back. She bent, then knelt, started to pick at a smattering of wild flowers that, somehow, grew among the stones and the gravel, and he thought there was serenity on her face. She stood, and delicately held the flowers, gold and violet, then pushed on because the goats were outstripping her as they climbed. Through the screen of scrim netting he had a fine sight of her. A tall girl with a ramrod back, ebony hair showing underneath a claret-coloured scarf. Dark eyebrows, dark eyes and a strong nose, and a mouth that seemed to move, as if a song was being mimed or a story recited. She wore a jacket of heavy red material and a dress that was brighter than her jacket, and he had a peek of flesh below the hem and saw her sandals. In one hand she grasped a light stick, in the other she held her flowers.

It was his duty to prevent himself being captured; to preserve his freedom he would shoot – or kill. He could have screwed a silencer on to the barrel of his rifle or his service pistol, but the goats would have run and the dogs would have surged at him and the boys below would have heard the dulled reports, and the women who had gone towards the river would have sensed chaos. He supposed he could strangle her.

She might have been nineteen years old, or twenty. She would have spent her life out in the open air with the goats and the dogs. She would be strong, would fight like a cornered she-cat, and his chance of strangling her, pressure on the windpipe until her resistance froze, was poor. He was getting round to telling himself that he had very few options. He used his mobile phone to send a text. Banal, short, he was possibly compromised. He might have to shoot his way out, not good and not definite. She had a sweet voice and he imagined the feel of her skin under pressure, then the convulsion of her fighting him off, and he was uncertain whether he could reach his pistol from the holster, club her insensible. The flowers were bright between her fingers and her lips still moved… He was supposedly a high-flier in the world of covert reconnaissance, one of the best on the team, and he was trusted to succeed. He had no idea what he should do. His rifle was loaded but the safety was on. He probed one of the outside pouches of the rucksack, searching for a pepper spray and a smoke grenade.

If he did not kill her, if she raised an alarm and brought the boys sprinting up the slope or chasing on their bikes and in the pick-ups, and if he were captured, then his name would be reviled in the unit. Few would speak well of him if he were killed and his gear lost… He tried to control his breathing, a thumb resting against the safety lever on his rifle, his body coiled, ready to propel himself from where he was hidden, gather up his kit and start to run. He could smell the goats. He lost sight of her because their noses and mouths filled the arc of his vision and one goat had taken hold of the netting and was trying to chew it, and he was clinging to it. He heard the soft growl of one of the dogs. The noise it made was like faraway thunder and he thought the hackles would be erect on the back of its neck, and next was the smell of its breath but it was pushed aside as more goats came to feed off his scrim net. He clung to it.

She was above him and used the lip of his hide as a seat. She seemed to flick her stick at those goats that had been at his netting; they moved away but he still heard the dog’s wary growl. He hardly dared breathe. Her ankles were in front of him. He saw the scarred skin and the bulges of her bones and the dried lesions where her sandals would have rubbed when it rained. Her ankles were tough and strong, and he doubted, for all his fitness training, that he would have been certain of outrunning her. Inside his boots, he moved his toes to ward off cramp, but a tickling in his nose had started and he gulped and tried to hold down the need to sneeze. He wondered if it was dust at the back of his throat or whether an insect had crawled into one of his nostrils. One hand held the rifle and had the thumb against the safety, the other had come off the butt of his pistol and he eased it with painful slowness to cover his mouth and his nose and wondered, if he had to, whether he could suppress the sneeze into some sort of grunt. Might be the same noise as a goat made, might be similar to the rumble from a dog’s throat. His body had stiffened and his breath was held and he needed to swallow, and had only her ankles to look at. A hand came down and scratched her foot. She sang softly to herself, not a song of joy but a lament. A small clear voice.

He had planned to kill her, but had not known how to, or when. The moment came without warning. He was mocked.

She sneezed. And again. What he had tried to avoid, she did. She lowered her head. He saw her scarf and the hair under it fall free to rest on the dirt in front of his hide. He saw her mouth and her eyes and they seemed to linger at a point where the scrim net had the greatest rip from where the goats had chewed it, and he heard her chuckle. A little trill of laughter replaced her song. It was as if she was teasing. He would have sworn that she knew he was there, knew he represented only the slightest danger, knew she would not betray him. Light bounced in her eyes, and her lips were curled wide. She whistled, then pushed herself up. She called to the dogs, and resumed her song. He sensed the sadness of it. She made occasional clucking noises that brought the goats back to her and she whacked a few of them with gusto. She moved on. When she was out of sight she could have gestured to the boys below, those with the wheels and the assault rifles, or she could have signalled to the women at the river’s shallow pools, pointed to where he hid.… Down the road, towards the Iranians, he heard the sound of artillery firing, and he thought there were also the sounds of larger explosions which would be the Russians’ strike jets. In these parts, the war was seldom far away, and he reflected that the village was fortunate to have stayed clear of it, so far. Her dogs were at her heels and she walked well, loping to keep contact with her goats. Probably premature, but he texted again. Reported that a possible danger situation had receded, no exfiltration procedure was warranted. She had gone to the left of his hiding point and was tracking along the rim of the slope and sometimes he heard snatches of her song. She didn’t look back.

The sun climbed and the day wore on and he had hours to kill before dusk, when he would go to the right of the village, towards the road junction, and search out a place where a camera could be sited. He would take samples from the soil and the dust from the concrete blocks so that the surround for the lens would be of the same texture when the technicians built the device. Then, under cover of night, he would set out for the rendezvous point where either the Hereford guys would be waiting for Arnie and Sam and him or the Chinook would come in. Several times he saw her but she never looked back to the place where mischief had played at her mouth, where her eyes had been bright with the fun of playing with him.