Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

A few gulls flew in its wake. Not many, because it was coming back without a catch. No gutted carcases were heaved overboard and the birds had nothing to clamour for. Fee had the better eyes of the two and had a hand at her forehead to shield the glare off the water, and it was hardly necessary but she shook her head. Had he been on board he would have stood at the bow. Would not have waved or jumped about because they were only a few hundred yards from the well-stocked Russian Consulate, and would have been too street-wise to blow the cover prematurely, but would have been there. Nothing to say, just a feeling of growing emptiness. They saw three crew on deck and could make out the silhouette of the skipper in the wheel-house. It came to the quayside, docked carefully. One of the boys jumped ashore and lashed a rope to a ring, and then the engine was cut. He didn’t look at them, avoided their gaze. Another rope was lashed and the boat lay still.

The skipper took it on himself… the engineer slid away and went to the harbour office to do the formalities… came towards Fee and Alice. Cigarettes were lit.

The skipper spoke, with something near to a doctor’s bedside tone, sombre, “We waited. We stayed at the quay as long as we dared. To have stayed longer invited even greater suspicion than we had already attracted. You bluff, and you attempt to make a best friend of a harbour official, but it wears thin. Impatience replaces cooperation. We had to sail. We were ready to hustle him on board as soon as he passed the security checks, and would have sailed within minutes. He did not come. We were sorry to have left without him. We cannot explain it. There was no extra security at the fishing docks. What has happened? A last thing. When we were far up the inlet, at an agreed place, we launched a buoy close to the shore and a small inflatable is packaged beneath it. We had talked of it with him. Very frankly, it is little more than a craft suitable for a beach in summer. I am sorry.”

He broke away, went back on board. Fee and Alice walked towards the town.

Alice said, “I hate this goddamn place.”

Fee said, “It fucking stinks.”

“Just a little nothing town, barely on a map.”

“And under the perpetual shadow of that bloody monster across the border. We’re screwed up, at the end of the road.”

“Best then is to get pissed, make a proper job of it.”

Both kept walking and neither wept and both wished they could.

“We do things differently, Dominic, today and in the future. The sooner that lesson is learned the more comfortable we shall all be.”

Dominic, considered a rising star, had been called to the office now occupied by the acting D-G to report on his communications with the far extremity of northern Norway, where it was adjacent to the frontier with the Russian Federation. He had been able to relay the message that Knacker – called him by that name which raised a serious frown and a shaken head – expected to be out within twenty-four hours, and would be bringing his team with him. ‘All of the team?’ Which was more than Dominic could answer.

“The Service is held back by the presence of a group of decrepit veteran warriors, playing games as if they were still at their preparatory schools. Playing God with people’s welfare, even their lives – which I understand to be this Knacker’s speciality. Has some poor wretch over there, has he? Something quite repellent about men and women who sit in safety while they consign others to risk, often to death. I won’t have it.”

Dominic sailed close to impertinence. He asked if the old adage of ‘rough men’ who might ‘visit violence’, at night, on the folks likely to harm us was now inappropriate.

“That is an attitude, no doubt hawked round by the ‘old guard’. But on my watch it will not be tolerated. Might have been acceptable a century ago, not today. State-sponsored assassination no longer has houseroom, and those who object can go and find themselves alternative employment. Root and branch these ‘rough men’ will be removed from the Service payroll. I won’t have it. It’s a new age that I will preside over… and this Knacker, he has a man on the far side of the Russian frontier, no doubt with a hue and cry up his backside… It will be a new dawn and it starts tomorrow. So, get him home, and his team, before more pain is inflicted. I read a résumé on the justification of this mission. It is preposterous, some woolly idea about a centre of intelligence in some ravaged village in Syria. Should be bottom of any list of priorities, and a Russian citizen to be murdered in cold blood. Might have been acceptable in the past, no longer. They’re going out to grass, all of them. I’ll not permit hankering after the Dark Ages. They are redundant. Understood?”

“Very clearly,” Dominic answered. “I’ll get back on to them. Tell them to find a decent verdant pasture. Have them on the first plane out, those that have a chance.”

“Let’s go do it,” Natacha said.

She was bored, uncomfortable, and tired, and the mosquitoes had taken a liking to her. She reached back and took Timofey’s arm and heaved him up.

They went together, in step, but neither carried a stone. Her idea, not his. Timofey would have turned away from the two men and headed off back the way they had come. He thought, ruefully, that too often he listened to her and did as she said. Had reason to: she had been the one arrested and he had been the one to break free, and she had been the one who had kept her mouth shut during interrogation and he had been at liberty. He sensed a sort of madness about her and wondered what show she would enact. There was always a show with Natacha which made her fun to be alongside, worthwhile when they worked. Was a pain in his gut when she plagued him with the Kursk business – not prepared to move on and ‘get a life’ as he urged. He knew each detail of the Kursk ’s sinking and how long the survivors of the initial explosion had been alive at the stern end, and the telling made him shiver each time she parroted it, and what the navy had done and what fucking Putin hadn’t done. Knew it – and loved her in a rough, unsentimental way.

So, they went to ‘go do it’, and she was in front and skipped gracefully off rocks and on to hard grass tufts and stayed out of the bog, and Timofey laboured behind her. He did not know how she would do it, but supported her aim. She wanted money… He thought it a bad day for them, which had got worse because they had failed to retrieve the pistol, shoot the fucking officer, then get back home. Their only consolation was that they might stay free. Money would help. Money, in his opinion, usually helped.

Her show, and he would stay back. He was confident for her. If she could take a cop’s gun off him then he thought her a certainty. She reached them. The officer watched her, hands still tied behind his back, and something beyond contempt on his face, and Gaz never took his eye off her and removed the pistol from his belt. She was covered by the officer’s eyes and by the pistol.

The silence could have been what Timofey hated most about this bare, desolate space. It seemed to close in on him, then begin to throttle him. So he started to clap, rhythmically, as if they were not by a lake in daylight in the tundra but under the strobe lights of a strip club. It was the part she played. Her dance, and Timofey kept up his clapping but sank on to the ground. They would need money if they were to disappear, shrink off the stage and move on, perhaps reach as far as Archangel and start again there. She was a few feet in front of the Englishman and the officer, and her thin little anorak came off first. A girl by the railway station had been desperate for a spliff last summer and had paid for it with this anorak and Natacha was rarely without it. She threw it down by the officer’s feet. Her dance was sinewy, what they might have done in an oriental dive, not that either of them would have known.