Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

“More coffee, Arthur?”

“Thank you, no.”

“Press on then.”

“Managed to get a bit out of hand at a time when we were changing the batteries for a covert camera, and the local boys had over-judged the support we were prepared to offer, and went and shot up an Iranian compound down the road, which led to consequences, dire ones. The battery charger was in a hide when the al-Quds boys came calling, was a witness… Sadly the experience left our boy rather scarred, and…”

Delta Alpha Sierra, the fourth hour

The girl was in front of him and the goats milled around her, and her dogs snarled, showed their teeth if any of the beasts seemed about to break away to find better grazing. He could not tell her to shift, could not break their mutual silence, so he huddled in his hide and used the binoculars. He had tucked all of his gear into his Bergen, and the waste and the urine in the bottle, and all the food packaging. The cordon line, down the slope in front of him, was 100 yards away and the centre of the village was 200 yards from him, and the football pitch half as far again. He was stuck fast, and realised it. Not that there was, yet, much for him to see, and anyway the weather misted the view and the squalls of wind raised clouds of dirt and the rain was constant. The texts came in: always calm, and designed to reassure, and that was part of the discipline of the controller back at the Forward Operating Base. They were good, tried hard not to foment panic.

But stark messages reached Gaz. He was told that the Chinook on stand-by was grounded by weather: he doubted if the cockpit crew and the gunners would stay down if his life, and those of Arnie and Sam, were directly threatened, but that’s what he was told. The Chinook was a noisy old beggar at best, and he’d have to be well clear of his present position or fifty IRGC would be looking to blast it as it came in. Told that for the Chinook to move would require an escort of fast fixed-wing and, or, Apache gunships, and they’d need visibility for close support – which did not exist. Two sets of wheels from the gun club were on their way but navigation would be shit, and the fast route was over open terrain and not metalled roads… and if the fixed-wing aircraft were to drop ordnance around him, create a little sanitised zone and take down half a company of al-Quds ‘martyrs’ then it would need ministerial permission… so, his situation was under review. The girl, looking down, had a better view than he did. But he saw enough, didn’t like what he saw.

The Russian officer had pulled up a khaki scarf from his throat and wore it across his mouth and nose, and had the peak of his forage cap low on his forehead, and idled and seemed surplus. The two other Russians, Caucasians, stayed close to him. There had been some tugging matches between the Iranians and the village women. Same reason and same result and a mix of force and verbal violence was used. Teenage boys had been secreted behind older women’s skirts. Not the older kids, the ones who had been down the road in the pick-ups during the night, with AKs, and had a bit of craic and now looked full face at the consequences: some of them had legged it out and some were sitting in the dirt and had their hands behind their necks and were kicked or hit with rifle butts if they shifted. The boys taken from the women were twelve or thirteen years old. They were pulled clear, and once a rifle was aimed at a woman but then her arms were clubbed and she loosened her grip and howled at the wind.

The girl, in front of him had started to shiver and her shoulders convulsed and every now and then she started keening then would suppress it, then succumb again. He wondered if there was a particular woman that she watched, or a boy, or an older man. If she screamed, if she rose to her feet and her goats scattered and her dogs barked and if she started down the hill, then she would achieve little more than draw attention to the ridge and the lip above his hide. Gaz thought she had not yet been seen and that the men who had made the cordon and those inside it had more on their minds. He was cold and rain drove over her and her animals and spattered through the scrim net and on to him, and he felt trapped and was irresolute… It was his training to think on his feet, to be responsible for himself, not to follow the normal army strictures of ‘wait out’ until told what to do. He did not know what was best for him, the prime chance of ensuring his safety. His breathing came harder.

A man was helped down from the back of a lorry. He wore faded jeans and a military tunic too big for him, and needed support because his head was covered by a sack with small eye slits. Two of the Iranian troops steadied him when his feet were on the dirt, then led him forward to where their commander waited. The Russian officer edged closer to the commander. Gaz realised this was the start of what the Sixer at the FOB would have called the ‘business part of the day’. In his youth on Bobby and Betty Riley’s farm, in late spring when the crows had fledglings, a hungry buzzard would fly close to the nests, and all hell would be raised as the crows went airborne to fight off the hawk and the cacophony was desperate… this was the same. At the sight of an informer, coerced or a volunteer, the women started to yell abuse at him, and punched with their fists and chucked insults, some of which Gaz understood but most of them were beyond the range of the local tongue taught to the recce boys. The man seemed to cringe and the escort held him upright and he was lectured by the commander and then dragged towards the corralled group of young men. A woman crouched briefly and threw a stone towards the informer; it missed, but the reaction was swift. A rifle cocked and a single shot fired in the air, high above the women: more sign of ‘business’.

An informer was detested and an informer was feared. Gaz, in Northern Ireland, had monitored the Republicans still keeping the embers of the Troubles alive, and he had served two tours in Afghanistan and had been camouflaged in ditches and on the fringe of maize crops and had watched compounds. There because the naked eye saw more than a drone or a satellite lens, there because of the word slipped to his bosses, or the intelligence people, by informers. Informers gave access where not even Special Reconnaissance Regiment eyes could go, and the fate of such a man or woman was non-negotiable. Likely to be pain first, but gratuitous and inflicted long after contacts and codes had been extracted along with fingernails and toenails, and cigarette burns, and then they would be killed for maximum humiliation. In front of Gaz, the girl had started to shiver and he heard little gasps of breath from her and the dogs at her ankles took her cue and growled low and the goats were restless and Gaz had a tight hold of his weapon… Knew he could not outrun a horde of men if they came chasing for him; he did not have an arrival schedule for the gun club on wheels; and the weather would still prevent close fire support from the air… Bad times, and worsening.

The first of the boys was singled out. He was pulled clear of the group sitting in the driving rain while the wind buffeted their hair and tugged their clothing, and a red mark was painted on the boy’s forehead. He was dragged nearer to the football pitch and stood there with a guard. Not alone for long as the informer moved towards another who wore only boxer shorts and would have come late from his bed.

It had an inevitability and the girl stayed close to him beyond the scrim netting, and suffered.

Arthur Jennings said, “The village was razed, you might consider it a ‘war crime’, Dickie. But people, in my opinion, are amazingly resilient, rather like the weeds in the cracks in my front path, they come back, those that are left. The village will one day be re-populated and life of a sort will resume. And, as we well know, war gutters out – not that we have much to be proud of in that area – and the Russians are still there, and the Iranians, and the Hezbollah still strut in that territory, and the Assad regime is unchallenged, Moscow’s marionette… We know all that. What remains, is the value in strategic terms of that community alongside the highway. What is available from there is raw and uncontaminated intelligence: who uses that road, how often, for what purpose? A north-south link and we should have access to what the road traffic can tell us. Am I talking about putting a team of recce boys on the ground as a long-running commitment? I am not. But we need to insert a team and give the locals the equipment we would want utilised. Dickie, you and I are of the generation that recognises the importance of Human Intelligence. We have a rare chance to acquire some very fair results because of the Russian who was prominent on that day. He became a focus of hatred for the survivors. He is an FSB officer, a gilded youth. Lavrenti Volkov. His father was a brigadier general in KGB, then figured in the early days of FSB before nominal retirement and is on the periphery of a group close to the President. He is currently a major and has a future as part of a dynasty of influence, control. We aim to take him down, I correct myself, have him taken down, but first we put a man close enough to our target to make a positive identification.”