Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

“Can we do it?”

“Why not?”

“You happy?” Mikki asked.

“As I’ll ever be,” Boris said and slapped his colleague’s shoulder.

They drove, blue light on the roof, and would jump traffic lights and overtake crazily, and took the one road that led towards the Norwegian border.

He recognised that the Fiat was approaching the garrison camp at Titovka, where the roadblock was. He had not answered Natacha, no explanations given.

Broke his silence. “We have a misunderstanding…”

A dilemma had faced him, one that he had not before been asked to confront.

He said quietly, “The misunderstanding is because of what I said to you before…”

There was a track off the road. Further up, above the tree line, were the higher chimneys of the camp and a watch-tower on stilts. Timofey was leaning back in his seat, yawning, but Natacha was out of the car, gripping her spade. A thought sprinted in Gaz’s mind: what about these kids, their future, the danger he propelled them towards, the retribution lining up to sledgehammer them? Considered: Knacker would have said, ‘Not your problem, lad, leave the conscience bit outside your knapsack, and I’ll take care of it.’ Only a fast thought, and other issues chased it away, took precedence. They’d suffer… he shrugged, started to explain.

Gaz spoke with no rancour and no emotion. “What I said to you was ‘take him out’, and that refers to him, to Major Volkov. But we do not need a spade to ‘take him out’…”

There were no recent tyre marks on the track surface and the sound of vehicles was behind them on the E105 highway and was muffled by the dense birch copse. The major now seemed to breathe faster: in the final stage of this journey the movement of his chest had been slower and regular, and Gaz thought the man had prepared himself for the moment of execution-kneeling, eyes closed and a final intake of breath and the click of the safety being moved. Now he was listening, and so were the kids in front.

“ ‘Take him out’ was what I said and what I meant. But not shoot him dead. Could have done that on the step of his apartment block, or could have gone up the staircase in the night, tapped on his door, got him there, shot him. Did not have to take him this far out of the city and shoot him. ‘Take him out’ was what I said and what I intend. I will take him out of the jurisdiction of the Russian state. I will take him over the border. Will take him if I have to carry him there and he kicks and screams and wakes the dead.”

In their own styles, all of them reacted. Timofey’s mouth gaped. Natacha blinked. And the officer gulped.

Gaz spoke, had to. “I was once a soldier, but never a killer. I lay in ditches, in holes, and I watched men and saw them play with their kids and kiss their girls and do their functions, and saw them clean their weapons and had the lenses on them when they had a map and planned where to lay the next anti-personnel bomb. Watched, reported, and moved on and was somewhere else when the heavy men moved into position, lined up the long-range weapon and waited for the schedule to be enacted that I’d told them to look for. Was not a part of it.”

He spoke only to the boy and the girl. Gaz did not look at the officer. They were frowning, and each seemed bewildered as if the definition of involvement – what he was prepared to do, was not prepared to do – was incomprehensible.

Gaz said, “I was an eyewitness to a war crime. I was there and I watched. Major Volkov was a party to what was done. He deserves punishment. I am simply a witness, will appear before a legally constituted court of international law. Will give my evidence and hope to see him convicted. I am not a hangman, I do not play with lives. Perhaps that is an honourable principle, worth upholding, and perhaps it is a coward’s way to avoid responsibility. Perhaps. But it is what I can live with. I will take him out of the country, will hand him into the custody of a lawful organisation.”

Natacha said, “I would have done it, if you were frightened.”

Timofey said, “We should have been better rewarded. You have cheated us.”

She said, “We took big risks for you – the pistol…”

He snapped across her. “He sits with a lawyer, tells them of us. We are taken, locked in a shit camp. Dead, and we are paid big money. Alive and it is us who are condemned.”

He did not argue, had neither the breath nor the strength, and thought they both spoke the truth. They were sleepers, had been woken, were unlikely to sleep again. Assets low on the food chain. He himself, in Knacker’s world, was merely an instrument of policy. They, to Knacker and his team, were irrelevant once the assignment was complete.

He opened the door and pushed his legs out, the pistol in his hand: reached in and caught the tunic of the major and yanked. The blindfold had slipped further and the man gazed at him and seemed to try to read him and failed and his lips moved but no words came. He stood the major against the car.

Timofey asked him, “If he is allowed to live, what sentence would he get?”

Gaz said, “Life, if convicted.”

Natacha said, “Then better dead than for ever… and we are sacrificed for your principle that is so valuable.”

Gaz said limply, “It’s how it is. I am not a killer and not a judge, just a witness.”

The officer stared at him, bit his lip, swallowed.

Delta Alpha Sierra, the fourteenth hour

There were few flames left to light the village homes, but the Iranians had fired up their transport, and worked off the headlights.

Gaz watched two of them. Had the glasses with the image intensifier facility alternately on the Russian and the country boy, as Gaz thought of him. Worried more about the boy – could see the outline of his body on the slope where the vehicle lights did not reach – than about the officer. The goats were scattered; the dogs had tried to round them up and bring them back to the girl but they had been spooked by the gas explosion, and had failed. They were back beside her. If he had tried to pull her into the cavity in the sand where he hid, his own Covert Rural Observation Post, there was a better than fair chance she would struggle and the dogs react. Enough eyes were below them that could glance upwards and see indistinct shapes struggling. They were digging a second pit because they wanted to hide everything they had done. If there had been a witness on the hillside they would come searching. He let her stay where she was.

Bodies were dumped in the twin pits. They were thrown in fast, in vague and distorted lines, landed hard and were manhandled to an available slot, and the work went slower because the men were hungry, had not stopped to drink, and the flush from the killings would have dissipated. The Russian had taken a shovel from the hands of a trooper, had started to dig at the far end of the second pit, to deepen and widen and lengthen it. His goons did not help, stood back. Gaz knew this was a country of mass graves. He had heard an UNHCR aid worker comment that ‘Pretty much anywhere in this country that you bat a tennis ball, where it comes down there will be a mass grave.’ Others said that no grass grew above where bodies decomposed, only weeds. The idea that the pits and replaced earth would hide the evidence of the killing for a day or a month or a year was infantile, but they dug and dumped. The officer seemed to regard it as a matter of pride that he should dig faster, throw up more soil, than any of the militiamen. When he turned or twisted and the headlight beams caught his face, Gaz could see that he was working as if demons overwhelmed him. Behind him, his goons smoked and chatted, and the commander from the IRGC shouted encouragement at his men.