Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

The boy answered. “It is the money. Only the money.”

The girl chimed in, “What else? If you live here what matters? Only money.”

Nothing was as Gaz would have expected it. They went at a pace, skipping and dancing and sliding, slashed by low branches. He thought they were watched, would have sworn to it, but heard nothing and saw nothing and had only his instincts. And, certain of it, he was comfortable with them.

From the boy: “You go after an officer in FSB? What has he done?”

And from the girl: “We hate FSB. Big hate. What has he done?”

“Would take a long time to tell.”

Delta Alpha Sierra, the seventh hour

He could not look away. It would have been rank cowardice to close his eyes or bury his head in his hands. Gaz reckoned she no longer had the heart to rise to her feet, have the dogs go with her and stampede the goats down the slope and charge against the cordon line. No point in such an action, except that she would have been shot, would have had the misery ended.

He racked up the number of bad moments with the worst at the top of his list, and the space was crowded. The most recent ‘worst’ was the death of the handicapped child, probably Down’s syndrome. A teenage boy. His mother hanging on to him, holding him tight against her skirt, and other women helping her to control him, but he was strong, fought them, and broke free. Gaz assumed that the girl close to him, surrounded by her goats and dogs, would have known the lad, from the day he was born. This remote village would not have relied on the help of central government in the years before the start of the war. They would have banded together, every woman in the small community helping the mother. The kid ran in slow ungainly steps, his fists clenched. Would have seen what had happened to other boys, not much older than himself, who would have teased and tormented and loved him as part of their community. Now, the boy wanted to hurt the commander and the officer who so obviously had control of the scene and who directed the action. He was shot. A puppy had run with him, had been shot and wounded, squealed, and was shot again. The boy crawled, making an easier target, then howled. Then a rifle, fired on semi-automatic, ended his life.

The killing now became systematic. More of the boys who had crouched with their arms tied and their eyes blindfolded, were heaved up and dragged away past the surviving goal of the football pitch. They were taken beyond the limit of Gaz’s arc of vision, but the shots came clearly and were echoed back from the sides of the valley, amplified by the low cloud, and carried by the wind that funnelled through the village. Rain swirled over it. Gaz thought the time for a programme of killing had now started and that vengeance for the overnight attack had given way to clearance. He knew the Russian word for ‘provocation’ and the phrases for ‘unacceptable actions’ and ‘severe consequences’. He watched the officer and looked for any indication that he had now seen enough, wished to disassociate himself and stand back. What he remembered was the officer’s action when the Down’s boy had run with closed fists towards him and the commander. The service pistol, inevitably a Makarov, had been as near as made no difference out of the officer’s holster at the moment the boy had been dropped, then was aimed when the boy was wounded and before the final round was fired. An academic had come once to Credenhill and lectured them about the emotions roused by combat. Had used the expression ‘red mist’, had spoken of the threat it gave to police and troops involved in confrontation. He thought the officer was infected with it. Pistol drawn, face flushed, and grenades coming off his webbing, and being primed, and being hurled inside buildings already on fire. Self-control gone. What Gaz also saw was that the two Russian troopers, uniformed and an obvious protection for the officer, had not cocked their weapons; they followed their principal but did not ape him. The academic had spoken of ‘attacker advantage’ and ‘forward panic’ as being parts of a crowd reaction. Gaz thought the officer had now lost self-control: he had become an animal in a feeding frenzy, a fox in a chicken coop.

He could not intervene. He texted the FOB what he saw played out in front of him. The cordon stayed in place and all attention was directed inside it. The women were held back at bayonet point, but that would not last, and all of the boys had now been dragged across the football pitch and into the gully at the far end.

The girl was quiet. The animals cowered close to her.

The officer had thrown three grenades into buildings where the interiors were already set alight. From inside came the explosions, then the crack as rifle bullets stored there were detonated. From one, an old man came out on his hands and knees, his clothing alight, and Gaz thought he would have been taken there by his family, hidden in darkness in the hope he would survive. He was kicked, and was punched. The officer lit a cigarette. His minders stayed away from him, like they were not a part of it. Gaz could easily have shot him, but that was not a role that fitted the ethic of his unit. He would have been killed, his gear captured, and the girl would have died. Gaz held the rifle close, would use it as a final act of self-preservation, did not intervene.

It was beyond anything in his experience. He knew it would get worse: the women and the children, and the old men, were still corralled and would not for long be held back by the tips of steel bayonets. The officer used his pistol to shoot into the head of the first hanged boy, already dead, a wasted bullet… And the wind blew and the rain fell.

Jasha was an intelligent man, had once regarded himself as well read, with brusque opinions, and intolerant of idiots… but that was before he had become a recluse, a hunter. Now in his isolated world, he was yet another Russian who had been scarred by the awfulness of the Afghan intervention – and had been invalided out. Lost and alone, he had found the cabin and made a new life.

He pushed open the door of his cabin, and was confused. The door had no lock, was secured by bolts on the outside and a bar on the inside. He went in, closed it behind him, and his dog came slowly, stiffly, off its sacking bed, and nuzzled his ankle, and seemed spooked. Not that he was calm himself. He had been out on the tundra, had walked on a stalking trail following the sharp scent left by a dog fox, and at first, had been aware that the bear followed him, that he had Zhukov for company.

He had been a soldier who was always short-tempered when confronting the bullshit of the military machine. The war was so obviously unwinnable; defeat stared into the face of the Soviet Union, his country. While he had the freedom to have himself dropped off by a helicopter and go and find himself a lair to lie up in, and watch a village or a trail used by the enemy, and kill and slip away, live to kill again, he could control his frustration. Until he was wounded, hospitalised… Trailing after the fox he had been convinced that the bear used a parallel path and he thought several times he had noted a fleeting shadow of the creature, but not heard it, not seen it clearly, not smelled it, just believed with a stubborn certainty that it was there. His army career had ended in a casualty ward. An officer had toured the beds, handed out cigarettes, treated the injured to brief lectures on the justifications for the war – the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan – and how well it went, and how proud was the country, and the Party, of what they had done. Their sacrifice was recognised and… Jasha had said to the officer’s face that he talked shit, that the war was lost. If he did not believe him, then he should look the length of the ward, and both sides of it and count the number of occupied beds, and note not one was empty. Behind the officer had been a trailing entourage.