Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

It would be good to meet the contact… In Afghan and Syria they often went with a local man, might be a policeman and might be a collaborator. Was never supposed to be fully trusted, but all the guys and girls went overboard to make the man driving them into a friend. Would try to read him, and see if there was sincerity in his eyes or shiftiness. The driver could nudge the mission towards success, what some in the SRR even regarded as glory. Flip the coin, see its reverse face, and the man might be subject to a raft of pressures in Syria. Could be that his whole posture was counterfeit, or that his family were the bargaining chip and would be wasted without cooperation, could be that the opposition made a better offer. Could be that the driver would arrive at a pre-arranged roadblock, get out of the vehicle and walk over to his father, his cousin, his uncle, his wife’s family and deliver Gaz – never did know and always better to get a ride with the Hereford lot or a lift in a Chinook. He was hurrying, was late, reckoned the contact boy was anxious, afraid, and pacing, cursing.

Through the trees, Gaz saw timber lorries on a road and climbing an incline, then quiet, then came into a sad and disused picnic lay-by. As it had been described. Collapsed timber tables with benches – might have been damaged by the weather and might have been vandalised. A surface of chip stones was carpeted with vigorously growing weed. He crouched down, still inside the cover of the low trees. Saw layers of dumped plastic, bags and wrappers and cartons. Looked for a car, and looked for a boy.

Like a kick in the stomach. Before being pushed out of the regiment, he would have easily settled himself and hidden away, waited for a contact to show. The lay-by was empty and nobody walked in circles, smoking, checking a wrist-watch. Birds sang, and a hawk went over and screamed, and a few cars passed on the road that was mostly hidden. He waited for an engine to slow and then the growl of tyres on gravel at the start of the lay-by, and then the pick-up car to come into view. And waited. And wondered… five minutes gone, ten, fifteen… and cursed. Confidence fled. A car came into the lay-by. Gaz stood. Dumb of him to have allowed doubt. The engine was switched off, and a man, middle-aged, climbed out, stood with his back to Gaz, fiddled with his flies and peed at the matted grass in front of him, shook himself, wriggled his arse, fastened his trousers and was back in the car and starting the engine. The emptiness and the silence returned. Nothing to do but wait – and hope. Sensible, Gaz reckoned, to go through the back-up plan, but it seemed to him to be shot with holes.

‘Don’t worry, shouldn’t fret, something’ll show up – always does.’ What Knacker would have said if he could have reached him on a phone. Gaz had been at the lay-by a couple of minutes short of an hour. He was still hunched in the undergrowth near to the collapsed picnic bench.

He heard a car’s wheels on the stones behind the trees, where the slip-road came. He braced himself, ready to drag himself up. He had decided he would stay in cover until the car was at a halt, then would slip forward; he expected a window to be wound down, the codeword given, and he’d be inside a saloon, a fast handshake and they’d be off, the tyres squealing on the loose ground, and his heart could stop pounding, and… A police car came into the lay-by. It parked some forty paces from him. Two uniforms on board.

Knacker would have shrugged. ‘You’ll reckon a way round it when the pick-up gets to you. That’s who you are, what you do.’

The mosquitoes seemed to search for him. Some had success. Gaz could not stand up and could not flail and could not sit in a bush and light up a pipe… In his trade they reckoned that cows were bad because they would gather in a half-moon around a hide dug into a hedge, and sheep were crazily difficult because they were liable to stampede, and dogs were always curious. The policemen opened the door of the vehicle and were unwrapping sandwiches and unscrewing a flask.

Knacker would have said, ‘Think on the bright side – ask them for a lift into town, if the contact doesn’t show.’

The police were well dressed and their vehicle had been washed. They settled into their meal, then each had a cigarette, and then poured from the thermos. They might catch half an hour of sleep. One back-up plan seemed to Gaz to be the most realistic: give it an hour, maximum. Give it an hour and then go through the trees again and look for the animal track and follow it as far as the lake, and forget about the sense he had had that he was watched as he moved but had heard nothing. Get back to the lake and trail around the end of it and go by the little beach in front of where the fish had jumped, and look for the dead tree. Get a bearing off it, reach the fence. Don’t worry about prints in the ploughed strip or about leaving torn clothing on the wire, just run at it and jump, roll and fall. Walk back into town. Show up at the safe house and be turning over some variation of ‘not capable of organising a piss-up in a brewery’, and facing the big man.

Knacker would have said, ‘Just needed a bit of patience, and it was all going so well. I’d have thought better of you.’

Would go back to the island and drag the mower out of the shed and start catching up on a backlog of cutting grass, and doing the little jobs. Tell Aggie that he had flipped… would never have another chance of suffocating that black dog, the one that tracked him each dark night. He tried to remember good days… Not a whole heap of them. Bad for him to reminisce and hard for him to maintain that blood was not on his hands. He pinched himself. Hurt himself by twisting a fold of skin between his fingers as much as the mosquitoes did on the rest of his skin. He sat, and the insects feasted.

The policemen ate their food and crumpled the paper wrapping and chucked it aside. They shared a bar of chocolate and the tinfoil went the way of the sandwich wrapping, and they both swallowed from a plastic bottle of soft drink and dumped it with the rest of their garbage. Then they settled back in their seats, closed the doors and windows, and prepared for sleep. Enough to make a man cry.

Knacker would have said, ‘Remember you’re the best, Gaz. Not just because you were the witness, but because you are top of the tree. Why we chose you.’

And he stayed put, could not work out an option. Instead, he focused, remembered the target, why he was there providing a meal for mosquitoes, saw the face, needed to cling to it.

Not much to fill the boxes. The music centre and the widescreen TV, then into the kitchen.

Lavrenti could have called Mikki or Boris, told them to get off their arses and come up to the apartment and take over the packing up. Or at least politely request their help. Did neither. The removals company had assumed that he would not himself – Major Lavrenti Volkov – do the work. It had been explained that the company was not responsible for breakages if items were not correctly wrapped… He was losing his temper: two plates were cracked and a glass broken. But still he did not call them.

It mattered little how much he damaged. His mother would replace everything when he returned to the capital. Settling him into life in the Arbat quarter of Moscow would be her next project. There, he would be shot of Mikki and Boris, would tell his father that he longer required them. A big step for Lavrenti. A plate slipped from his hand, landed on its edge, and the pieces scattered. He kicked out, lashing then into the wall.

This was a good apartment by Murmansk’s standards. The landlord would have hoped for some personal advantage to come his way if the rent was at rock-bottom, and the maintenance charges waived. He was another who would find that patronising an officer of FSB carried a bad kickback. The window had a view of the docks: idle cranes, moored and rusted hulks, a destroyer awaiting cannibalisation. Not a cruise liner in sight although they had been promised, and the wind rippling the oily water. Through the same window, in view if he pressed his nose against the glass, was his official car, black and polished, and leaning against it were his minders.