Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

The seat of his trousers would be damp, and the flies would become steadily more aggressive, but this place – between Turret 33b and Turret 29a – along the Wall built with the driving will and perseverance of the Emperor Hadrian, gave Knacker a sense of perspective for his efforts that day, and yesterday and tomorrow. He was above the outer limit of the fort, Brocolitia, where the grasslands still covered the ruins of a great civilisation. The Wall itself, ten feet high and with turrets set along its entire length and with forts built to house garrisons of legionaries and auxiliaries, was a few feet in front of him. The cattle eyed him, would have been cautious of him had he come closer. In front were layers of differing colours and then a growing mist and then a deepening shadow, then a narrowing stretch where the ground merged with the sky and he could see no farther… which would have been the problem faced each day, every day, each week and every week, by the officer leading that cohort of Batavian troops. He had a frontier to defend. Facing him, somewhere in dead ground, beyond hills and beyond sight, was his enemy, and Knacker sympathised.

Since he had left the ‘bandit country’ of the Province, Knacker’s existence had seemed to have him peering over the border fences of his opponent – Russia, always, Russia, fucking Russia always – and never knowing what was beyond his knowledge. It would have been the ongoing worry of the commander of a cohort of regular troops recruited from an area of what was today northern Germany and running into the Netherlands. The troops would have been trained, to the highest standards of fitness, and motivated to fight… but, what if familiarity with the guard duties had sapped their alertness, and what if the best men were drawn away from this part of the Wall and sent farther west where more trouble lurked, and what if the auxiliaries given him as replacements were less efficient? He assumed such concerns nagged in the mind of an FSB commander controlling border troops with a headquarters unit in Murmansk and a line of guard posts and roadblocks watching over a closed frontier zone. How good was the commander of the cohort, and how good at his job was the FSB senior officer in Murmansk? The two men would have a single matter in common and would not have doubted its truth. Both would have understood the threat . Always a commander’s fear: the threat becoming reality on his watch.

The flies were bothering. The cattle were quiet. A hen harrier was working the ground in the middle distance. A fine looking creature, a predator, and it flew low. Had it been spooked and flown off shrieking, then it would have meant that an intruder, crawling on his belly, was approaching. Would have been a fox in the time the cohort watched this sector, and might in today’s territory have been Gaz who had the reputation in his field that many envied. His wife, Maude, might have looked up from the rim of the pit she was working in and might have clucked cheerfully at the sight of it, and pointed it out to her neighbour and they’d have enjoyed the spectacle of it. He supposed himself to be the archetypal intelligence officer, and the cohort’s commander would have had one, and it was necessary for him to attune his mind to the business in hand… getting a man in and getting him out. There was no safety in walls or fences or deep man-made ditches. Knacker could barely imagine the degree of effort, and the cost, of producing this Wall running from the west coast of England to the east, and could hardly have conceived the outlay of the little east German statelet that had tried to build a barrier preventing escape from its sad, malnourished country.

Healthy reflections, Knacker thought. He comforted himself. However great the wall, fence or ditch, it was only as strong as its weakest link. A useful cliché in Knacker’s trade. The guard who was reeking with a summer cold or convulsed in winter flu, or dreaming of his centurion’s daughter, any of them could be on guard duty in a turret and not see the threat materialising from the gloom, his mind far away before a knife crossed his throat.

He seemed to have spent a majority of his adult life facing the barriers set up by the Russian state. The Service at Ceausescu Towers was obsessed with Russia, the machinations of the Kremlin, its enmity and cunning, its mischief and deceit. Nothing to be proud of but it was the life he led. Farther along the Wall that early evening was his wife. Maude, as she cleaned mud and dirt off scraps of material or pottery shards or found a coin that had fallen from a purse eighteen centuries before, refused to humour him with support for the overwhelming attention given to Moscow matters. She would not permit it as a third person, a decent sized elephant, in her bedroom, her kitchen, her lounge. Had been that way since the first day of their married lives: she on a dig at Herculaneum and him wandering around the drugs fortress of the Scampia development and testing his skills and his nerves, then meeting for dinner, late, in their Naples hotel – and it had rained every day for the week. Back home, she had her own friends on her own terms. Yes, two boys born to them, and for the births of both he had been away, and a conversation – repeated to Knacker – was “Don’t know how you put up with him, Maude, I wouldn’t – ever considered divorcing him?” She had answered, a reliable source repeated, “Considered divorce? No, never. Murder? Yes, often.” But those in the road in the south London suburb of New Malden who had no idea that he was anything other than a common-or-garden civil servant, Pensions or Agriculture and Food, would have made erroneous judgements, not recognising the hidden sinews of the marriage, that had lasted – so far – twenty-eight years. His work was not talked of, by him, by her, by their sons, now both of student age. She came here, to the ruined wall, as often as she was able, and he would call by when he could hitch a lift or find an opportunity. The pilot had made a deviation, dropped down at Newcastle, and a taxi had taken him close to the Mithras temple. It was a good place for clear thinking.

The tails of the cattle flicked in irritation and Knacker reckoned the flies were increasingly active. Maude would come for him when her digging day was over, not a moment before, and till then he must share the burden of the insects with the herd. He imagined the anxieties of the commander of the cohort based here, with responsibility for this segment of the empire’s defences. Imagined his arrogance, and his trappings of power, and the disciplined stamp of the troops on the parade ground, and imagined also the private moments of anxiety. Knacker wore a leather bag across his shoulder, contents delivered by courier to the police office at Newcastle’s airport, and in it were aerial pictures and ground-level images of the fence and the cameras and the ploughed strip on the border that now concerned him. There would be a commander there, back from the frontier, and unaware of a looming threat… He, Knacker, was not that man, did not have a cohort to lead, did not sit behind defences, did not rely on an untested link.

His eyes were on the far distance, an area shielded in the darkness of the spreading evening. There, hidden from sight but clear in his mind, was the man who Knacker wished most to identify with – perhaps dressed in skins, perhaps naked except for a colouring of blue woad paint, perhaps gaunt and hairy, perhaps as anonymous 1800 years before as a contemporary intelligence officer who sat and chewed his thoughts among the cows. Of course, there would have been, out there among the Caledonian and Brigantes tribes, an intelligence officer of proven worth, or what was the Wall for? Maybe the same damned flies had come for this man as now circled Knacker. He thought of this man, watching for weakness, as his friend, and… A horn blasted behind him. Some of the cattle stood and peered towards the road. Knacker pushed himself upright, would not want to keep her waiting. He walked across the field but thought more of his ‘friend’ than his wife, and the car door was opened for him.