Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

Only Knacker would have granted such opportunities to a low-ranking official. Alice spoke well, had a decent accent and a reasonable Oxford degree in Modern History, but working to Knacker and answerable only to him, she was entrusted with work far beyond her pay grade. Her family had wealth, a certain influence, a home on the hills above the Regency city of Bath… and her lover, sometimes passionate, sometimes noisy and sometimes raising eyebrows, was the formidable Fee. They were a solid item. Four months after teaming up domestically and living in Fee’s housing association apartment in south-east London, Alice had been driven by Fee to the west country. She had been dropped down the street and out of view of her parents’ home – and Fee would have gone to the shops – and she had walked the last 200 yards, and had believed that her mother and her father were too hidebound in their attitudes to accept the relationship, bless it. It had been a hideous wet day, biblical torrents rushing down the street, and Fee had driven to the house, and had been waved in along with their daughter. A few frosty minutes and news of a problem with an electric kettle had surfaced. Fee, huge and muscular and with a gap between her teeth and cropped hair and a bulging backside, had produced a screwdriver, had re-wired the kettle, had programmed their televisions, had fixed Alice’s mother’s mobile phone. Since then, Fee had been up on the roof to check for loose lead, had cleaned out gutters, had re-plumbed a shower unit. She was now adored and was greeted on each visit with a fresh work list… .

They had clearance of a sort, but had been fashionably economical with detail, to drive away from the camp and into the harsh hinterland of the country where grief and brutality and mourning and cruelty were the popular pastimes. Had she used a firearm? Once or twice, a laconic answer. She had an assault rifle across her lap loaded with twin magazines, and a leather pouch filled with grenades, and a medical pack strapped to her hip.

The camp was beyond a hillside, a collection of tented streets, and hanging above it was a pall of smoke from small cooking stoves. A Red Cross flag hung limp by the gate. The Amman based station that looked after Jordan had done the leg work. The guy in front of her, normally crouched behind his weapon and scanning every summit, every ridge and every bend in the track, gestured to her. A lone man sat beside the track, 100 yards from the camp entrance, his head down so that his features could not be recognised, and would have heard their engines rumbling along the track. The man pushed himself up and came loping towards them. He was watched by the guns, fingers on triggers and weapons cocked. It was bad country and only a fool would not have been suspicious of a supposed contact, his motives and loyalties. He was frisked, searched roughly – would be their guide.

Alice shook his hand firmly. The man pointed away to the east and the wheels spun and they headed out across open country… Sort of everyday work, Alice was giggling to herself, to go off-road and fetch herself three killers, not squeamish men, from a village. Down to her to select them. Not work for a recce man with demons in his head who might falter when a trigger needed pulling, but for guys in whom a desire for revenge burned brightly – a mark of the responsibility that Knacker dumped in her sweet little lap where the automatic rifle lay.

Delta Alpha Sierra, the fifth hour

Gaz watched, could not take his eyes from the scene.

He watched, had readied himself, was coiled as a crushed spring. He could have burst from his hiding point, shouldered the Bergen, then run into the rain and the wind that streamed over the flat ground above the rim of the slope, and he would have to have gone fast because there was no cover. He prepared to break out and quit because he was uncertain how much longer the girl could endure what she saw. If the moment came when she could not absorb more of it, and screamed or shrieked or yelled, then he would have to take the gamble, and run. More likely scramble, hunched low and have the rifle ready if it were necessary to give suppression fire. It was a bad option, but all options were poor.

He could have reached under the net and touched her hip, could have felt the sodden material of her jacket, and the dogs hard against her would have snarled and showed their teeth, and might have savaged him. He did not know, God’s truth, whether he should reach out, envelop her and bury her face against his shoulder and twist her so that she saw nothing… Not out of sympathy but because of the risk that she might yell defiance or abuse or agony at them. The goats, sweet and gentle, took their mood from her and stamped close against her, ignoring the dogs. She would have been justified in standing, howling, losing control. Not easy for Gaz, and he was trained and she was not. Hard for her. He thought that if he had gripped her shoulders and pulled her down towards him she would have fought him off. Reckoned he would have failed and he was on his side and had no room to manoeuvre. If her discipline cracked then they would come for her, for him… The Special Forces vehicles were reported to be on their way and they’d be heading into bucketing rain, scouring winds.

The hooded man, the informer, had already separated the young men of the village who had been too slow to evade the closing cordon. Those he had identified squatted in a small circle, their heads bowed under their bound hands and blindfolded with strips of their clothing that had been ripped to make a length of cloth sufficient to go round their skulls. Now the turncoat, what Gaz would have known as a ‘tout’ during his time in the Province, loitered by the circle – might be glorying in the power given him, might be as trapped himself as any man who betrayed family, friends, comrades in arms – and then pointed, condemned the first.

A rope was thrown up and looped over the crossbar of the nearest goal on the football area. Two of the Iranians caught it and started to loop the noose, and another had brought a wooden chair from a house.

And women in their group and hemmed in by rifles, loaded and aimed, had started to moan, a premature keening wail for the dead. Gaz gazed down at the Russian. Would have been an intelligence officer, and most likely from the FSB ranks because they were used in most of the close liaison jobs. Iranians would operate under the supervision of a Russian, he would have his own bodyguard team with him to keep his arse clean and safe, and if push came to shove then the assumed wisdom of the men and women who tasked Gaz was that the Iranians would be ‘good kids’, do as they were told. The Russians had the big artillery, the fast jets that could plaster down ordnance and gas, and the helicopters. They ruled if an officer decided to chuck in his weight. Would he now intervene or would he accept that all was ordained? And what would the girl do if they went ahead, stood the boy on a chair under the crossbar? He had a tight hold on his rifle and a strap of the Bergen was over one shoulder, and there was a pistol in a holster on his hip, and smoke and flash-and-bang were hooked on the front of his camouflage tunic. It was impossible for Gaz to see the face of the boy under the blindfold, and the rain peppered him and the pennants on the aerials of the Iranian personnel carriers were rigid.

The Russian officer stood with arms folded. His legs were a little apart and he might have rocked on the balls of his feet, and the wind rapped him and rain streamed on his face but he made no movement. He neither wiped the rainwater from his face, nor tugged his headgear lower, nor did he intervene. The Iranian commander was close to him and seemed not to need to give orders, as if decisions of protocol and procedure were long taken… The girl in front of him shook and little spurts of breath dribbled at her mouth, and Gaz thought this was the beginning, the beginning of the beginning. The boy would not have realised what was intended for him until two fists, one on each side of him, grabbed his arms and lifted him up and started to march him away from the group – from the other kids who had loaded into pick-ups and driven down the road looking for fun, like it was a night out in Stoke-on-Trent but better because they had fire-power and a base to shoot up. Consequences far to the back of their minds.