Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

Gaz watched. The girl watched. Neither of them shielded their eyes, did not look away as if that might be – God alone knew how – disrespectful to the kid. The Russian did not move and the two men behind him were expressionless, as if this was a part of a day’s work, might have been right.

The kid was lifted up on the chair, and might now have realised what came next for him. Would have known for certain when the noose made a necklace over his head and under his chin and the knot was tightened. An NCO was in charge of it. The kid was supported and the far end of the rope was knotted at the top, by the crossbar’s angle with the upright post. Gaz saw the NCO look to his commander and received nothing that told him anything of ‘enough is enough’. Might have looked for confirmation at the Russian, and might not. The NCO had his hand on the chair’s back and ducked his head, the signal, and the steadying hands freed the kid’s trousers and the chair was pulled from under him. The boy kicked a long time, his body dancing and spinning, but found nothing that was a haven for his weight, and was suspended and was strangled. The Russian officer now looked away but his minders did not. Gaz had seen sniper kills, and had seen advancing mujahidin cut down by machine-gun fire in a maize field, and had seen others caught on an open hillside by mortar fire as bombs rained down… had not seen anything as played out as the death of the kid from the rope on the goalpost crossbar.

It could have been her brother or her cousin, or could have been the boy she hoped one day might be her husband, but she did not cry out. It was a start and would be worse, and Gaz was its witness.

“When will Knacker be here?”

A reasonable question, a blunt answer.

Fee said, “He’ll be here when he’s ready to be here.”

They had come along the coast, had passed ship building units and tanks for bunkering and a mountain of crab pots and their orange marker buoys, and one hotel, and then the driver had taken a sharp right and had gone up a narrow street of bungalows. Their destination was the one that did not have kids’ bicycles and skateboards outside, was also the one with a pocket handkerchief of uncut grass. He had followed her inside, had dumped his bag in the back room offered to him, had seen there was another bedroom in which her clothing was spread messily. He had showered, shaved, put on clean jeans and a shirt from his bag. In a dining area at the back, blinds down and the lights on, there was a screen and a projector. He had expected that Knacker would do the briefing. She did it well enough. He did not complain, nor did he take notes, but he absorbed. Maps on the screen, from her phone. They showed the border, the territory beyond the closed area, and a single highway leading across tundra to Murmansk.

Next, the maps showed the position of a roadblock far north on the highway, but back from the frontier, another at Titovka, and the barracks and headquarters of the 200th Independent Motorised Rifle Brigade. Then, photographs of the fence flashed up, concrete posts and stock-proof wire mesh capped with razor wire: sections with cameras were marked and those with tumble wires, and the ploughed strip behind, and the depth of the closed area. The picture taken from a blog and showing a hatchet-faced officer. Gaz betrayed himself, a sucked intake of breath, and he could see the line of the scar. Another picture, from stock files, of the new FSB building on Lenin Prospekt in Murmansk. An image of a man, probably middle forties, a cigarette drooping from his mouth. And a young man… fair hair, his attention seemed far away, but piercing eyes and a determined glance… Gaz always looked first at the eyes. He assumed them to be the sleepers, now woken.

“What do we have on the older one, what name, what reliability?”

Fee said, “It would have been his grandfather who was first recruited, then tucked up in bed, allowed to sleep. Handed down the contact to his son. We have no reason to imagine him to be other than reliable, solid and probably looking forward to some distant day when he can get on an Aeroflot going anywhere in the west, and then hightail into Guernsey and draw out his loot. Goes without saying that we are co-signatories and have to sanction any withdrawal. The young one is the grandson of the original asset. We assume him to be hard-working, a graduate, anxious to prosper his career. From what we know of them, they’re a typical Murmansk working-class family, except that grandfather’s own dad was an anti-aircraft gunner on a destroyer putting in to Murmansk during the Arctic convoy days, taking advantage of local generosity. The communications we have had from our courier have been necessarily bare, but nothing that indicates alarms. They have been told what is expected of them – where, when, they meet you. Where I come from, Gaz, south London, we’ve a sense of when it’s going down the pan. Seems good, right now, from what we know.”

“No disrespect to you, but when do I see Knacker?”

“Busy man, has a plateful.”

“Doubt he has matters to concern him that are more important than putting a man across the Russian frontier to spotlight a target.”

“You will see him before you go.”

“And the aim of recognising the target?”

“Running before walking is seldom the best way to progress, Gaz.”

In Syria, at the Forward Operating Base they worked from, the briefings were of extraordinary detail with sand models of locations and ample aerial photographs. Timings were down to minutes and behind every operation was a backup force of the Hereford people and their rough terrain vehicles and the Chinook crews who would go through hellish levels of weather to get to them. He had never felt alone there until the day he was marooned on the hill above the village. He would be alone here.

She said, “Don’t go all fragile on me, Gaz, just don’t. You go in and you do your recognition and you bug out when you have an idea of locations and of his work schedules, and we have the people to do what else is required. I advise, now, a bit of sleep if you can… What else have I to say?”

Gaz did his rueful look. “Something about not getting caught, something about consequences… and something about making a difference.”

“I won’t, but Knacker will, when he gets here.”

The coin was small and a dull colour, once clean silver, but now ingrained with centuries of mud, a denarius , minted six years before Hadrian’s death: it rattled feebly in Knacker’s trouser pocket when his fingers played with his loose change. He carried £4 and 98p, and this one coin was – Maude had told him – worth £60 in a reputable auction room, but she had nicked it. A present for him. Not many said that romance intruded deep into the lives of Knacker and his wife. A pizza eaten on a bench in the gardens beside the abbey in Hexham, and then bed in the guest house and her ‘tired’, and him glad of no interruption to his thoughts on the mission ahead… She had woken at two in the morning, had used a sharp elbow to rouse him, had grinned, had left the bed and rooted in her jeans and had produced what had seemed a scrap of dried dirt, had told him its history, and that it was an unforgiveable felony not to declare a find. Had turned off the light, had gone back to sleep. In the morning she had scrubbed it with his toothbrush, let him scrutinise the face of the Emperor, and the goddess, Pietas, making a sacrifice on the reverse side… A hurried breakfast, and she had dropped him off and gone back to her dig. He let his fingertips caress the surfaces of the coin. He had told her only that he would be away a few days, that it was an insertion initially – not where, not when, not why.

He was back on the Wall. Close to Mile Castle 35, sitting on the old stones that the 6th legion’s stonemasons would have shaped when the foundations were laid, and ahead of him was flattish moorland and cropped grazing and one isolated farmstead. They did sheep here, not cattle, and none was close to him. No flies to irritate or disturb his concentration… Out there by the horizon and beyond it would have been an intelligence officer who probed with his intellect this section of fortification and had a life’s intention to find the point of weakness. Knacker identified with him. Did not know if the man had had a name, only that Mile Castle 35 would have figured in this man’s analysis: dressed in cured skins in winter when snow and frost were on the ground, and near naked in summer with woad paint for decoration. Unshaven, tresses of hair in a tangled mess, and clever, capable of deceit, and painstaking, all of which Knacker reckoned he possessed in plenty. Nothing greatly had changed over the many centuries.