Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

He felt he could not threaten her, that she would not crumble. Lavrenti said, “I am glad you have plenty to concern you, as I will have in my next appointment. I have expenses to file so need my desk and my computer… so kindly find a corner at your work-space, Captain, for my successor, or the canteen.”

He waited. They retreated. Were in his office little more than half a minute, and came out with their laptops, and outer clothing, and a coffee flask, and the major carried a photograph of a couple who could have been his parents, but not a wife and children. What he understood of power, Lavrenti reckoned, was that if it were not enforced then it withered, and at pace. He felt vulnerable as he settled in his chair, tapped in, and brought up the record of his expenses. He was both confused and nervous, and did not warm to the list of trivia, what he might have reacted to had he not been distracted – a diplomat, a bear, a gang of eco-warriors and a boat full of wriggling crabs. It was hardly possible for them to have mutual relevance.

No indication that he was regarded as a ‘special’ man, and deserving additional respect, and leg room. The front seat, passenger side, was held forward by the girl, Natacha, and the invitation was clear. Gaz climbed in, shifted his backside, swiped away the debris of magazines and food wrappers and chocolate tinfoil and pizza packaging. The front seat was dropped back against his knees and she settled in front of him. When the boy, Timofey, switched on the ignition, the motor coughed, spat, then caught. They had been parked in an entry where a track led off the main highway.

He was offered what she called kosiak . They were out on the road, and the Fiat shook and rolled and Timofey was getting the maximum from it. Did he want what she called kosiak ? He thought he should have felt nervous. Rather liked them, and would have been more worried if they were political, ideological refugees from the system of governing their country. There was something brazen about them which he found attractive, and their crossing of the open ground, could have been two hours of it, had impressed him. Done better than he had, and he wore the right gear. Felt confident. The boy drove well and carefully and would not have attracted attention. Did not crowd close to lorries’ tail bars or sweep into the centre of the road, engine straining to get past. They were heading for Murmansk and the countryside was the same as that they’d crossed on foot. Dwarf trees, bare rock, boulders carpeted in lichen, and dark lakes. He saw trucks and occasional cars and one convoy of military transport. Timofey laughed, said something to her. Then turned to Gaz and spoke in fractured English:

“In Russian, kosiak is a joint, a spliff. I learned that from the tourists I sell to because English is how I communicate when I trade with foreigners. It’s what I do, friend, I sell marijuana. I said to Natacha that you were a professional man and that you would not want that smoke – was I right?”

“You were right.”

“And you will want to know whether Natacha and I take a joint. No, we do not… We just sell and trade… You are in good company, friend.”

A hand came back, bony and emaciated, with bitten-down nails, and Gaz gave him his, and the car was driven with one hand on the wheel, and the grip now was iron hard and crushed Gaz’s fingers. Then Natacha had swivelled in her seat and a small and delicate hand, like a pianist’s, held the two of theirs and kissed them. All three laughed and they careered down a long and winding road.

At last, Gaz saw the silver of the sea… and he shivered and the cold came close to him. On the floor of a cell he would not be laughing, not holding hands and not taking kisses, not if he were spread-eagled on a pavement, rough hands searching his pockets and fingers going into his orifices and machine pistol barrels gouging the skin on his neck. The shiver had started and he did not know how to stop the chill and the tremor.

She said, “What you have come for? It is important?”

He could have answered that he had come to make the killing of a man easier, make the death simpler, but did not. He gave no answer.

The kids had the radio on.

Music that Gaz would not have tolerated in his own car, Russian rock, and booming inside the small Fiat, heavy drumbeats and the thwack of a base guitar. No checking with Gaz as to whether he liked it. He reckoned that the kids, for all the confidence that they displayed, might have been scared half out of their wits, and this was the dose to fire up courage. As Gaz saw it, they were naive, barely more than adolescent, and were way out of their depth.

A light drizzle had started. A sheen was on the pavements and water dribbled round the weeds clogging the gutters. A few pedestrians hurried, shoulders bowed to minimise the rain, clinging to umbrellas because with the rain had come a sharpening of the wind.

They had driven down the fiord and he had looked across and seen an aircraft carrier moored up on the far bank, and cranes, and also a scrapped destroyer and two submarines, one against a pier and another in a floating dry dock. It was natural for Gaz to take in the intelligence sights of the naval port, but he also saw the famed ice-breakers and cargo ships and small tankers, and the water was dark, and the cloud pushing down on it was grey. High above the apartment blocks with their dulled concrete cladding was a giant mountain of a statue that seemed to stretch up from the ground and pierce the clouds. The statue was a monument to war dead, he knew that, had taken that in from the detail given him on the trawler. He saw the fishing port. Lines of rust buckets tied limply together and no movement… What did he know of Murmansk? Population 300,000. A community where wages were marked up so people stayed there, prepared to live with six weeks of ever-present day-light in the summer and an alternative of six weeks of darkest night in the winter. No civilian jobs and no private industries, but the state needed workers to keep the place ticking over: naval, security, military, and customs, and all the bureaucracy that went with local government and the power machine far to the south in Moscow. The only homes he saw were squat complexes down on the coast and great shoebox apartment blocks that closed in on each other.

Who was he now? An invalided British serviceman with a PTSD medical history on his computerised records. A Norwegian fisherman, resident in a village up by the North Cape of the European mainland. He had the paperwork to prove it, and an ID card with the boat’s name on it, and a twenty-four-hour visa that would expire at noon on the following day. All bullshit because he spoke not a word of Norwegian and would not have survived three minutes of half competent interrogation. But it was thought sufficient to get him through a block in the port area, and into that sector where a trawler, bringing a hold filled with chilled red king crabs, would have tied up. Good enough for a cursory check from any poor bastard huddling at a gate in the rain while mosquitoes tunnelled up his nostrils.

Gaz had not worked a major city before. Had done the countryside of the Province’s border lands, and round the farms of eastern Tyrone, and knew the Creggan estate on Londonderry’s south side better than anywhere in the world; was at home in the empty wastelands of central Syria, or amongst the maize fields and the poppy plantations of Helmand, but short of knowledge for a dense, closed city.

They passed apartment blocks that had no football spaces, no gardens and no decent walkways, the outer casings of concrete or brick stained dark from air pollution and corrosion. Few shops and with opaque windows anyway, and bus-stops which always interested Gaz, and he could not see any bars – he had started to look for cover opportunities. Realised what NCOs in the unit would have called the ‘bleedin’ obvious, mate’. He would not be on his own; he would be with them, reliant on their tradecraft, an infant in their hands. They passed a park, its grass overgrown and the bushes ragged, but there were fine ornate buildings with porticos behind a fountain, and a statue of a military man, a cape dangling from his shoulders.