Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

Only one shot fired. The crash of the firing in his ears and a moment of lost hearing, and the smell of the discharged bullet, and the flash of the ejected round.

Timofey dropped his stone, stepped back, raised his hands. Natacha froze. Not a surrender, but she ducked her head and knelt. The prisoner had jack-knifed into the foetal posture. His hearing sang with the sound of the discharge, but the quiet and the emptiness had come back to the tundra. Gaz pulled the officer to his feet.

Gaz said, “I understand, Natacha and Timofey, that you feel you would be paid more if this man were dead because that was the purpose of the mission. I understand that my prisoner has seen your faces and can identify you and I do not know how to protect you from that risk. I understand the gravity of the risks you have taken but Major Volkov is in my custody. I have to guarantee his welfare. I cannot feed him because I have no food, and I cannot give him water because I have none. But I can defend him, and will. I will go to my grave to defend him so that he can be delivered to a court and go in front of a judge. That is the way it is and your hopes of payment, and your anxieties about identification, are secondary. That is where we are.”

Gaz walked tall, the prisoner a pace in front, and gritted his teeth; sweat ran in his eyes, and he felt the pain where she had hit him with the stone, and where her teeth had bitten.

He heard them following. He did not look back at them and had the pistol tight in his fist with another round ready to fire but with the safety lever raised. A sort of peace fell, and the intrusion of a shot being fired seemed long past, as if forgotten.

He lifted down the Dragunov, checked the magazine, armed the rifle.

Jasha had been asleep. Exhausted, he had lain across the front step of his cabin, his head on the bottom of the door jamb. He did not know how long it had been before he had lost the trembling in his hands, had put out of his mind the size of the teeth and the strength of the claws. And it was not just Jasha who had collapsed under the weight of the stress, but the bear also. Zhukov had lain on his back, his stump still raised, had not yet stuffed it into its mouth to suck the wound clean. Both man and beast shattered.

He put on his vest and shirt and slung the rifle on his shoulder. It would have been the same for both of them. First sleep, then slowly waking, then disbelief that it had happened, then the sound of a single shot. Near to the door was the debris of the experience. Spatters of blood, the rusted staple, and the pliers. He stepped over them. The dog did not follow him. Both Jasha and Zhukov had a rooted suspicion of intruders on their territory. Uppermost in his mind was the memory of seeing the two city kids skipping among rocks and bogs with a military man struggling to keep up with them.

The sun on his face, Jasha looked for Zhukov. He might have seen the bear’s haunches between low trees. But they were still heavy with leaf and it could have been the back of the bear’s head. He set off. He could go fast across this terrain, and the bear would likely follow him. He went towards the place where he believed he had heard a pistol discharged.

Alice reached Fee.

“How is he?”

They stood together on the coast line, could see past the repair yard and the quays for the cruise boats and up the inlet, almost to the open Barents Sea.

Alice answered, “Just quiet, as when stuff stacks against him. Focused.”

“And said?”

“Don’t think he really said anything.”

“End of an era.”

“End of fucking everything as we know it… It was pretty specific what came to us. That Operations Group Executive didn’t mince it. Back home, and soonest. Seems there’s been a coup d’état , and that the D-G’s gone off to meet a surgeon’s knife and the DD-G has his hands on power. All the pantomime stuff, the Round Table, it’s gone to the trash can. And Matchless is for the fairies, the Service won’t go up that road any more. Dominic told me all that, more than he should have, along with the ‘homeward bound’ bit.”

“Wants to get his hand in your knickers.”

“That is disgusting,” Alice pouted. “Probably true…”

They made a point, Fee and Alice, of discretion. Their relationship was not an open secret. Had it been, they’d have likely received overtures to join up with splinter groups bent on advancing the cause of their sexuality: and fuck-all business of anyone. But they were not observed in Kirkenes, and Alice had slipped her hand into the crook of Fee’s arm, had a hold of that muscular elbow. A couple of relaxed lovers… not a pair of girls who had heard that the purpose of their professional lives was disintegrating, that their boss was surplus to requirements.

“… Dominic says that the best Knacker can hope for is a berth in Finance and Resources. No more fieldwork. No chance of him being where he is now, on a border and staring into the haze and the mist, and waiting.”

The message had come through. Alice had taken it. She had gone to find Knacker up on the border, watching the fence, escorted by their Norwegian guide. Had passed it on… Had been greeted with an impassive face, something of a shrug: no obscenities, no collapse of the shoulders, barely a twitch at the sides of his mouth… It was payback time for Knacker, the D-G’s protective parasol under which he had thrived, now gone.

“We’re casualties, poppet, go down the plug with him.”

“I will fucking miss it, really will.”

Fee had the fags out and Alice lit them. They would stay put and wait for the arrival of the small fishing boat, and the Harbour-Master’s Office had told Fee it was out of the main shipping channels and at the north end of the inlet, and they’d see it within an hour. No indication of whether their man was aboard. That was their vigil. Alice threw away her cigarette and it buried itself in fresh seaweed dumped from the last high tide.

Alice said, “We’re doing a vigil and so is he. He’ll stay up there until we know where our man is, and whether it’s been win or lose. He’ll work until they cut his legs off at the knees… Tell you something – all of those guys and girls that he recruited, then put in harm’s way, exploited and used, never let them cop out while they were still functioning, they never complained. Bizarre. Why not? They’d cause to… If not dead, they could have queued right across Vauxhall Bridge, and marched on VBX, then slagged him off. Didn’t. Never bitched about him, seemed almost grateful to him. Funny old world.”

They gazed out at the sea, focused on the headland around which the trawler would come, and, held each other tight.

Mikki said, “That is a pistol shot.”

Boris said, “It would be nine mills, a Makarov.”

“One was stolen, a Makarov.”

“Stolen from a cop, taken off an idle fucker.”

“And being pleasured?”

“Good chance it’s the one from the cop. Where was the shot?”

“Towards the border, where else?”

Quietly spoken and with a minimum of fuss they put a call through to the barracks at Titovka, and their presence in the ranks of FSB was repeated to a duty officer, and the advice that intelligence indicated an attempt would be made later that day to breach the fence dividing their Federation from the NATO country of Norway. Not specific, but emphasised that FSB did not expect their warnings to be discounted. A map had been dragged out and spread wide. Boris said where he thought the shot had been fired. Mikki stood at his full height and sniffed the air. They would both identify where the sound had come from, could factor in wind strength and direction, estimate how far from the road the pistol had been fired. They parked off the road.