Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

Wenn sich die spaeten Nebel drehn ,

Werd’ ich bei der Lanterne steh’n

Used every necessary muscle… felt the staple move, and saw it emerge, blood with it.

Wie einst Lili Marlene, wir einst Lili Marlene.

The bear watched him, its breath rancid in Jasha’s face. He eased his body away. He should not hurry. He was glad that what he had done had not been seen, as if it were a private moment between the two of them and he must not show fear. He walked away, unable to loosen his grip on the pliers. Walked steadily as if nothing special had happened.

He went back through the cabin door and the pliers fell from his hand, and the staple clattered free and he felt his head spinning and his legs crumbling, and he fell to the floor.

The harbour launch had left them. The fishing boat sailed alone.

The skipper studied his charts and used satnav and could only hope that the choice of location was indeed a section of the inlet’s coast that was not under the highest levels of surveillance. They were beyond the Northern Fleet headquarters at Severomorsk but were short of the submariners’ garrison city of Vidyaevo. It was a simple plan. All the best plans were. He believed that complicated procedures were generally unsatisfactory, prone to failure. It was the last throw. They had waited and had dared to hope that they would see him at the outer gate, flitting in the shadows, and would then be chatting up the security while the stranger came with his bogus papers, and was waved through. There was an emptiness among them and the bottle of scotch was on the table below. It was what they called a back-stop.

They put up black smoke from the stack and seemed to slow and then to veer from the straight as if their steering was affected along with their reported engine trouble. Daylight, but no other way. There was a navigation marker buoy, attached to a heavy weight by a rope long enough to handle the rising tide and a couple of metres below the buoy was a package wrapped in oiled tarpaulin. Inside, deflated and folded tight, was a dinghy. When they were as close to the rocks and the shore line as the skipper dared, and near to an out-of-date iron frame for a navigation light, the weight and the buoy and the package were heaved over the side. Then, as if the engineer had performed a miracle, the dark smoke dispersed and the steering problem seemed resolved, and course for the open sea was resumed.

Gaz said, “So that a mistake is not made you should know what I intend. I will take you to the border, take you over it or under it, and on the far side you will be put into lawful custody. All of your rights will be observed. You will lead and I will be a pace behind you. If you attempt to break clear, then I will shoot you in the leg. As you know, Major, this is wild and hostile territory. You will be crippled, unable to move other than on your stomach, and you can shout but you will not be heard. You will die alone and in great pain. That is what I intend if you play games with me. Now, we start to walk.”

He did not make either a heartfelt farewell to Natacha, nor an insincere one. Did not acknowledge that she had conjured out of the night a police service pistol for him, nor that she had kicked the officer when it had mattered. Nor did he give a hug or a handshake to Timofey. Might have been because they were kids off the street and nothing in his life mirrored theirs, and might have been because their sense of freedom unsettled him. He bent, his back to them, and flicked open the knots fastening the plastic bag around the officer’s ankles, then reached up and tugged down the blindfold bag… It was the first big step, he supposed, the start of the hard yards that, God willing, would take him back to Westray. He gave his prisoner a prod, like he was a dray horse needing encouragement, and they set off on an animal track, a yard wide. He had his weapon ready, had no illusions about the officer’s compliance.

It was what his own instructors would have said to the guys and girls on the Escape and Evasion stuff. The best chance of getting clear was at the start, and that had not worked for the officer, but they also stressed that any time an opportunity came up it should be taken. The alternative was a jumpsuit if ISIS had him, or a Syrian torture dungeon if it were the government. The sun was high, almost hot, and flies clustered on them, and the prisoner could not get them off his face and shook his head violently. It might take four or five hours to reach the fence. Gaz thought it the beginning of the end… Was it better to die, quick and clean, or to squat in a cell and see the sky through blistered glass and bars, without the chance of tasting the air beyond a high wall?

They started out over hard ground, and climbed. He heard a siren. He had the pistol close to the officer’s neck and twisted his head and saw the blue light through the trees hustling fast up the E105 highway. The prisoner did not slow and the siren passed them.

He would try to get close – without the guidance of the kids – to the lake that he had skirted and then the fence where he had come through. They were making good progress, and the prisoner did not fight him.

A handgun had an effective range of ten paces. Gaz would have been rated, on the range with a Glock, above average, but that had been two years ago. To achieve a good shot, a stopper, at ten paces in the chaos of a man breaking away and trying to run, with bushes to deflect a bullet and obscure the target, would have drawn praise from the instructors. A man with his wrists tied at his back was still able to duck and weave.

He had been given no reason to use force against him. Everybody had seen the internet-peddled version of Saddam’s hanging, with guys in the shadows bawling abuse at the dictator as he stood upright, steady, on the trap. All the young squaddies had voiced that it was ‘out of fucking order’, whatever the magnitude of the man’s crimes. He did not abuse the officer, nor use violence, just prodded him forward along the animal trails. And the sun was burning through a veil of cloud, and Gaz gave a curt instruction each time he reckoned they should veer right or left.

When he spoke, a necessary few words, he did not use an obscenity, nor call him by his first name, he was Major Volkov. Others would judge the major, but he would go to the end of any road to bring him to a court of law.

Unable to protect himself from the whip of low branches and of bramble stems, the major was beaten across the body and thorns caught at his clothing. Easier for them to move faster if the bag binding his wrists were removed and he could use his hand to shield his skin. There was blood on his cheeks from small cuts. Each time Gaz saw the smears he looked at the line of the scar that ran from near to the ear and almost to the side of the mouth and remembered. He would shoot if the man tried to belt him, struggle with him, or bolted. Would shoot him; but afterwards regard it as failure. Messed-up thoughts careered in his mind and every two or three minutes he needed to blot them out and concentrate on the direction they took and the climb that brought them to the plateau of the tundra. Almost open ground, only sparse low trees.

Gaz knew that complacency was a killer. It was going too well, and anxiety built. There were long silences: he could not read the major. Was he close to springing the trap? Might he pretend to stumble and twist as if falling, then turn and use his head – the weight of the forehead was as destructive as a knot of wood or a rounded stone – to crash into Gaz’s face, to break his nose? A sudden movement. Gaz stretched, had the pistol barrel hard against the man’s neck and saw the indentation it made, and twisted the foresight so that the skin was caught and blood dribbled. But he said nothing. Remembered the fifteenth hour because that was the one that had collapsed Gaz, changed his life. The fifteenth hour was why he was there, plodding across tundra, bringing home a prisoner.