Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

Lavrenti was thirty-two years old. His father had been thirty-eight when he was born, far away in the death throes of the failed Afghan campaign, and his mother was thirty-six. His had been a difficult birth and the experience was not repeated. An only son, an only child, alone on the fast track, all their efforts deployed to propel him through èlite schools and an élite college.

He had served two years in the north, far beyond the Arctic Circle, because his father had demanded the opportunity for him. It was a hideous place, awful people, and almost as grim as the sand and the shit and the company of his previous posting… The future looked better.

He would return to Moscow. Would head up a new section, reporting directly to the senior officer of a directorate who had once served as his father’s chief of staff. Would have good ‘opportunities’. He understood that there would be considerable financial benefit in this new work: monitoring private enterprise in the capital. With power, as he was well aware, came the ability to create fear. He would see that truth every day and witnessed it now as he sat in a barely furnished room, a colonel fawning over him.

He was tall, blond, carrying no surplus weight, working out in the gym had become the necessary therapy of those two years in the north. Pale blue eyes, usually hidden by lowered lids, a square and strong jaw, a facial tan flawed by the fucking scar on his cheek. Had a past that very few knew of, had a hidden shadow that burdened him… They talked of how it would be and he sensed the friendship he was offered.

He did not easily accept friendship. Lavrenti was curt, to the point, businesslike. His work was praised, what he had achieved in the north and – of course – his record in a combat zone. His previous work on the staff members of foreign embassies in Moscow and their locally employed personnel was lauded, also his ‘investigations’ of foreign journalists who went home with the precursors of breakdowns speeding them to Sheremetyevo and the flight out. He accepted coffee and water. No alcohol, no cigarettes. There would have been a packet in a drawer of the colonel’s desk, and a bottle and glasses. He would accept no favours from this man, wanted not the slightest baggage. Matters were concluded; he would return north, pack up, then transfer south. Would he, please, pass on to his father – Brigadier General Volkov (the name meant ‘wolf’ and was appropriate) – good wishes and best regards?

Lavrenti would not commit himself, shrugged, a finger worrying at his scar, stood and walked out.

Her name, Faizah, meant she was ‘victorious’, a winner. The customer jabbed a finger at the ‘special of the kitchen’ on the lunch menu she had offered him. Little in her life that day, or any day in the previous two years, told Faizah that she was not anchored at the bottom end of existence, was a scarred failure. Hers was a familiar name in the distant central deserts of what little remained of Syria, her former homeland, after the devastation of war.

The four men at the table had come to the bar for three consecutive days and each time she had served them drinks, then food. They must have liked her, had tipped her well. They were Norwegian, in Hamburg to see a demonstration of an engine suitable for powering a twenty-metre fishing trawler, were going home that evening, had come for their final lunch. Not that they needed to see the menu because they always chose the same – schnitzel , with Flensburger beer. They were looking at an iPad open on the table. There was a chorus for more beer to be brought… Perhaps they liked her out of sympathy. She was a migrant far from home and – obvious to them – damaged.

She scribbled their order on her pad but suddenly her expression froze, as her eyes locked on their iPad. It showed a photograph of two men in uniform. Behind them was a rotund figure, a smile on his face and wearing a military beret. It was the nearest figure that riveted her. He wore officer’s insignia on his shoulder, a camouflage tunic, open at the throat. His hair was hidden under a high cap, gold braid and a badge on a blue background and a top of deep grass-green. He stared at the lens, at her, and his eyes gouged into her mind. There was no smile at the mouth and the lips were dried out and his expression held contempt, perhaps arrogance, and there was a narrow line where the knitting of the flesh had been clumsy, running from near to the lobe of his left ear and down his left cheek, disappearing into the folds of his tunic collar…

Blood draining from her face, a hand catching at her mouth and a chill on her neck, and feeling that place on her chin where the wound had been opened and the dirt and dust had been absorbed before it had been treated. The Norwegians had sympathy for her, acknowledged that she would never be classified as ‘pretty’, carried a wound on the chin that would go with her to her grave… as the scar on the officer’s face, in the photograph, would last for the remainder of his life.

“You all right, kid?”

“You seen a ghost? What is it?”

“Heh, what is the problem?”

She collected herself, a migrant waitress in a bar on a side street off the main drag to the Hauptbahnhof , managed a brittle smile. She asked them in her halting German where the picture was taken. She tried to sound offhand, but failed, tears distorting the image on the iPad. They all peered at it, bemused by her reaction. What was the website? She was told. What was the picture? Told that also. Who was the man nearest the camera? Given his rank, but not a name… And then, politely, one of them gestured towards the glasses on the table and tapped his watch to indicate that time was limited if they were to eat and drink before catching a flight that would lift them, via Copenhagen, beyond the Arctic Circle and home.

She handed in their order: four plates of schnitzel and four more glasses of Flensburger. She told the manager that she needed to get out of the bar. She worked hard, she slept in a garret of the building. She did long hours that she knew to be in contravention of European legislation. She was paid below the minimum rate. A fuss was made but then her employer noted a steeliness in her eyes and gave his permission – but not for long, to be back by late afternoon. Another girl carried the beers to the table and the Norwegians broke off from conversation and stared as she walked out of the bar and into the rain, no coat, no umbrella, but a mission… the wound on her chin would never be forgotten, nor the line on the military man’s left cheek.

She walked briskly, the pavement puddles splashing under her feet, drenching her ankles. She knew where she would go, and what she would say, would be ashamed of herself if she did not take the chance.

Delta Alpha Sierra, May 2019, the first hour

First light was a dirty opaque wash. A storm blew. The sound of explosions was distant.

Rain would come later, not the sort that fell at home, pattering down from dull cloud, but torrential, slashing through clothing and kit, and running into his hide. Gaz, with a corporal’s rank in an obscure and understated unit, had been, with two others, dropped off in the small hours by helicopter – and had walked the last four miles.

Ahead of him and hard to follow were the outlines of the few buildings that comprised the village. Because its name, Deir al-Siyarqi, was usually written only in what the military categorised as ‘worm scribble’, it was listed in the letters of the NATO alphabet. Where he was, a call sign. If threatened, Gaz, or any of the others, could press the panic tit and broadcast an emergency call from Delta Alpha Sierra and know that a big bird would be tasked for immediate response and would likely come with a pair of Apache flying close fire support. He felt a wariness, the caution that went with the loneliness of deployment as a recce guy. Should have been a piece of cake, they had said at the briefing at the Forward Operating Base.