Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

She would have said, had she been on the phone to Fee, ‘I think they’ll manage a good job, and go through shades of shit to get there to do it. Will be a painful job on him when they know where to go.’

Fee would have replied, ‘Painful and slow and him wishing he’d not been born. Well done, girl.’

And that was Alice’s business completed, and she could get back on the road with her escort, and the three chosen men would be moved by the man who had brought them to this sprawl of shelters, and they’d call him FoxTrot which was F for ‘Facilitator’. FoxTrot would shift them in a camper wagon across country, through back roads and tracks to the Lebanese border, bring them to Beirut where ‘sympathetic local assets’ would provide cash and travel documentation in the names of three citizens from Beirut, and they would fly north. The beauty of it was that they had seen Alice but did not know her name and she had spoken to them in Arabic, and could have been German or Dutch or Swedish, and the regiment boys were in mufti and did not have to speak and were masked. Fee was right to praise her; it had gone well. They left in a dirt cloud, and she’d be back in the Yard in the morning. It had gone well at her end, but that was the easier one, by a country mile.

She texted Knacker, spare with detail. Three on the move . Told him all he’d need to know. Alice reckoned him a good guy, the only man she’d follow into hell.

Knacker and Fee sipped apple juice. He rarely drank alcohol and she could do without. Some teams were used to being pissed up when an agent was launched, but he thought that irrelevant and juvenile and had trained his girls to follow the stricture.

They talked the price of king crabs. The red king crab, with a body size up to eight inches across, three pairs of legs and one pair of claws – currently marketing at $26 a kilo – was classified as an invasive species and one which brought big profits. Fee had done the homework, had brought the Norwegian fishing boat scuttling across the North Sea to Unst in Shetland. The creature, ugly as sin and a delicacy, was in big demand in St Petersburg and Moscow: wanted in all the pricier restaurants in which the new rich flaunted their wealth. The usual top fishing ground was the Kola fiord leading down to Murmansk. Except that this was not a natural species for those waters and pollution was thought to have ravaged stocks this summer season. A plane from the south flew in to Murmansk most days to collect the wriggling brutes in their last throes of life, and went home empty. A hole in the market led to opportunistic advancement. Norwegian waters did not have a fleet of dirty naval carcases leaking oil, chemicals, even radiation poison. It had worked well and a hole was filled. Knacker and Fee sipped their juice. It was the sort of wheeze that Knacker liked… up their noses, pinching their bollocks. Doing them damage and them not aware of it. Knacker had seen his people off across some miserable border, and some came back and some did not, but the usual result was a paper of some significance going on to the desks of ‘customers’ in the selected Ministry offices north of the Thames, or across the Atlantic. The purchase of red king crabs in Kirkenes harbour had made a dent in the cash float that Fee had brought, and he would sign it off. Cheap at the price. He did not laugh out loud because this was only the beginning, most certainly not the end of the beginning, not while his boy – a reluctant hero – was on the move and heading for a rendezvous.

“Would you like to eat one of the bloody things tonight, Knacker?”

“Wouldn’t mind that. But spare me having to watch you pop it into boiling water while alive.”

Gaz paused by the tree. Used its dead trunk to shield him, the basics in avoiding ‘silhouette’, and listened. He heard the rain dripping off the leaves and branches of birches and pines, and heard the ripple of the wind above him, and the shrill call of small birds – and did not hear the cacophony of barking dogs, nor sirens, but might have heard the distant throb of a vehicle engine.

Almost laughable… Gary Baldwin, Gaz, a guy invalided out of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, certified as a sufferer from post traumatic stress disorder, an island recluse who scratched a living from handyman jobs, was the invader – a solitary one-man-band invader – of the country with the largest land mass of territory on the planet. He thought his incursion was so far unnoticed, but doubted that the quiet and serenity around him would last. He pressed on.

Old skills were resurrected. He moved at a loping pace and hugged cover and clung to the edges of the tree line and did not use the open spaces of heather and low scrub where he might have gone faster but would have left a more marked trail. He had never worked in similar terrain. The ground was either rock-hard with a flimsy layer of peat compost sitting on top of granite formations, or it was a bog and his boots went into liquid black mud, and the trees were dwarf height and dense where they had taken root.

He thought they had been at the border later than intended, and tried to make up time. He concentrated on each step in front of him. Where to let his weight land, how to lift a boot from the bog and not leave it sucked under, avoiding brittle branches… There might have been the sound of a jeep’s engine, but he would not have sworn it. He considered how he would be met, how greeted, how they would be. Responsibility for the pick-up, he assumed, would have been delivered into the hands of the original recruit’s grandson. Gaz knew little of Russia, and the sociology of life in the western sectors of the country, but understood there was an undercurrent of resentment from the young against the dictatorship, what a lecturer had called the culture of kleptocracy, and another guest speaker had described the country as a ‘mafia state’. The grandson would be young, idealistic, educated, and would be a free spirit – would think that he was doing something for the future of his family, his friends and his neighbours, for society. He had heard of the Pussy Riot group, and knew protestors were banged up in gaol, that elections were rigged, that dissent was not tolerated… Knew there had been no inquiry into the actions of a Russian officer on liaison duty with Iranian militia troops during an atrocity of which he was a witness. So, a kid who was prepared to help the agent of a foreign power was likely to be a boy with high principles, a total contrast to himself. Gaz did not champion human rights, equality issues. He had been working out of the Forward Operating Base in central Syria at the time of the last UK election and it would have been possible to use a postal vote for the constituency of North Herefordshire, where the barracks at Credenhill were sited, but he had not bothered. He expected that the boy sent to meet him would want to quiz him on politics and talk of persecution, and staying outside gaol… and again he concentrated because the lake was in front of him.

He went around the north side of the water. A fish jumped, broke the surface and clattered back and sent spray flying. The ripples spread wide. He no longer heard what he had thought might be a jeep’s engine. And found the animal track.

The Norwegian boys on the fishing boat had given him a crash course on the ground he’d face, and the wildlife. Might be a bear such as the one that might have broken the fence behind him, might be moose or reindeer, might be a small pack of wolves. He took the path. Had walked for an hour, gone more than two miles, and he thought he was late for the pick-up, went as fast as he dared, but trying to avoid leaving a trail of heavy boot prints. Thought he noted a shape far back among the trees in shadow, and turned fast, but registered nothing, and twice more. Was sure that something, or someone, kept pace with him and was on a parallel path, but never heard and never saw… Now heard a vehicle, a straining lorry engine. He quickened his pace.