by Henry Porter
Harland and Eva bent down and withdrew to the digger. Harland guessed the men had been sent to watch the site until the weather changed and work could begin again. They must have overslept or got bored – at any rate they hadn’t thought to look down to the plateau.
From where he stood he couldn’t see the car, but a little later the men, some of them dressed in old combat fatigues, reappeared, hauling Ibro along a bank of snow above the road. Their voices carried up the slope and it became obvious that they were moving directly towards them. Half of him wanted to run back down the way they’d come. But he couldn’t leave Ibro and The Bird. Without saying anything, they slipped back along the wall of rock, at the end of which they found a good hiding place in a crevice, behind some pine saplings. But it wouldn’t take two. He pushed Eva down and told her not to move, then scuttled around the top of the pit and down the other line of rock. He groped his way down to a point where the outcrop fell away into a void. He grasped hold of a narrow tree trunk and used it to swing round into a gap between two slabs. Below him was a drop of thirty feet.
Harland heard the voices come closer. A young man in a ski hat and leggings appeared and immediately noticed that the branches had been removed from the pit. He jogged to the edge, peered down and then shouted to the others. Two more came and finally a fourth man, dragging Ibro by the collar of his jacket. Harland saw he was cut on his head and bleeding from his right leg. He was prodded to the top of the pit and forced to kneel with his hands behind his head, whereupon they began questioning him. Much of it was abuse, but after a bit Harland recognised one or two of the words because of their similarity in Russian. He understood they were asking him who else had been in the car. Ibro looked up at his interrogators with silent contempt, for which he received several kicks and blows. At length they tipped him into the pit and told him to lie face down by a mangled skeleton. That gave them great amusement.
Harland waited with his face hugging the cold surface of the rock. If he moved a little he could just see where he’d left Eva. He prayed she wouldn’t do anything rash or betray her presence.
Suddenly the young man in the ski hat aimed his automatic weapon into the air and fired off a burst. Harland turned to see one of the pair of ravens crumple in mid-flight and fall to the ground. This seemed to upset two of his companions and they shouted and jabbed at him with their guns. A row ensued, but died as quickly as it had flared. It occurred to him that these men must have been in the paramilitary squad that had taken part in the massacre. They were being used to oversee the work because they could be relied upon to keep quiet. It was their crime as much as Kochalyin’s.
He became aware of the sound of a truck, grinding and labouring up the final stages of the track. A few seconds later it came into view, throwing up a jet of mud from its back wheels. It pulled up and another man in fatigues got out. The new arrival sauntered over to the pit to inspect Ibro and hurl a few insults his way. The others called him back. Cigarettes and a bottle of liquor were handed around and they fell to laughing and needling each other. It was the familiar, easy companionship of any group of men out on a job.
One of the five moved up to a flat piece of ground above the main plateau and pulled out a cellphone. He was obviously having difficulty getting a good signal and he paced around trying to find the best spot. Once or twice Harland thought he might be in danger of being spotted, but the man was too absorbed to notice him. After about ten minutes he shouted to the others and slid down the bank to rejoin them.
Harland was extremely cold. The muscles that had been torn in the top of his thigh after the air crash at La Guardia were playing up again. He rubbed his leg, clenched and unclenched his hands and worked his toes inside his boots. Then he looked at his gun, slipped the safety catch down towards the double action trigger and tried to estimate the number of rounds in the clip. He stared at the blotches of pale blue lichen on the rocks and padded the cleft in front of him with damp leaves so that he could look through without chafing his face. Occasionally he glanced over to where Eva was, but saw no movement.
He was now certain that The Bird must have been killed in the explosion, which meant their only option was to sit tight and wait until the men had finished their work that evening. Why the hell didn’t they get on with it? What were they waiting for, these cowherds and mountain men?
Another fifteen minutes passed. Harland pricked up his ears. He thought he’d picked up a faint throbbing in the air. Yes, it was the beat of a helicopter coming in from the north. He searched the sky and saw a Sikorsky rise above the wall of rock where Eva was hidden and curl up to the plateau. For a moment it hovered directly above him and he feared he would be spotted. He glanced over at Eva and saw a hand grasp a sapling to prevent it from being blown over in the downdraft. A leg of tan corduroy, however, was exposed for a few seconds. He raised the Glock and darted a look towards the trucks. The Serbs were shielding their eyes from the whirlwind of snow and grit. Thank God. They hadn’t noticed her.
The helicopter swung into the wind, and landed with its pointed snout slightly raised at the place where one of the men had used his phone. He remembered the rosette-shaped swirl in that exact same spot on the satellite picture. The helicopter had visited this place before.
In the corner of his eye he saw a movement. Ibro was using the distraction of the helicopter to haul himself down the pit on his belly. His shoulders were doing all the work; his right leg made no movement at all. The young man who had first noticed the disturbance of the branches caught sight of him and whipped round to spray the ground ahead of him with a well-aimed burst of automatic fire. The ricochets zinged into the rocks around Harland. Ibro’s head slumped down. His arms remained crooked in a push-up position. Harland was pretty sure he hadn’t been hit.
The helicopter’s rotor slowed with a whine and the blades began to droop towards the ground. Eventually the engine was shut down and the cabin doors opened. A smell of aviation fuel reached his nostrils. He didn’t dare to look up because he thought any movement would be seen from the helicopter. So he just held on, his right cheek pressed to the rock, watching the clouds out of his left eye and trying to ignore the insistent nagging of a bladder that had not been emptied since Sarajevo.
Harland picked up the murmur of respectful greetings. He lifted his head a fraction and saw that three men had got out of the helicopter, while the pilot remained at the controls. They had moved down the bank to the plateau and been led to the far side where they stood, looking down the side of the mountain. He could not see their faces but it was plain that an explanation was being given by the man who had made the telephone calls. He seemed anxious to please and there was much gesturing in the direction of the Isuzu.
Harland worked his head between the crack and looked out. The group had moved in his direction and spread out to reveal a figure standing squarely by the grave’s edge. He wore a dark grey overcoat and a black cap with ear flaps. His gloved hands were clasped in front of him as he contemplated the prone figure of Ibro.
Oleg Kochalyin was shorter than Harland had imagined, but he possessed a palpable presence. To Harland, now lying in excruciating discomfort, he completed the dismal fear of the old quarry, a fear that penetrated his being and made him weak and nauseous. He moved his eye from the crack and for a few seconds consciously stilled his panic. Then he glanced up and saw that the darkened sky, which he had somehow attributed to Kochalyin’s arrival, was in fact caused by a bank of low cloud that had snuffed out the sun and shrouded in mist the summit of the mountain.
He looked back at the group. Kochalyin had not moved and, as far as he could tell, had said nothing. He just stood taking everything in, his eyes flicking about him. He pointed to the branches pulled from the grave by Harland and Eva and asked something in Russian. The men did their best to follow what he was saying, then struggled to explain their failure to find out who had moved the branches. They looked at each other and fell silent. Suddenly, from above them, there was a noise which
seemed to roll down the hill. It was a loud phut rather than a bang, followed by a more impressive rumble. Something had blown up inside the hut. The men shouted. He speculated that one of them had left the cooking gas on when they rushed to investigate the landmine explosion. At any rate, a fire had taken hold quickly and smoke was streaming from the door and one tiny window. Three of the men set off to rescue their possessions, paying no heed to the voices that ordered them to stay. Ultimately, thought Harland, these mountain men did exactly what they pleased.
He watched for a few seconds longer, wondering if the explosion could possibly have been contrived by The Bird. But there was no sign of anyone up there and he returned to peer through the crack in the rocks. Now something was happening. He shifted his head in the crack and saw two men drop into the grave and seize Ibro by his arms. They dragged him to the top of the grave where he was questioned again, this time by Kochalyin. Each time he refused to answer he was struck in the kidneys or stomach with a rifle butt, blows which would have felled and crippled a weaker man. Harland couldn’t watch. The pain was too familiar to him. Several times he was on the point of leaping up and firing off as many rounds as he could, but that would do nothing to save Ibro and would almost certainly jeopardise Eva.
He lay there feeling wretched and powerless, as if the blows were raining on him. And then a strange thing happened with his bladder. Some deep physiological memory stirred in him and he was beginning to piss, just as he had when Kochalyin, having kept him in some agonising position for hours, began to really hurt him. He flattened his back to the rock, withdrew his penis and let himself go. When it was over he shuddered, zipped himself up and looked through the crack. It was okay: they hadn’t seen.
He felt better now, more capable of thinking about what to do. Kochalyin made a swift movement with his hand and now Ibro was being dragged to the side of the pit. He cried out as one of them kicked his injured leg. Harland thought he was being taken to the digger. He had to see what was going on. He flashed his head up and took one mental snapshot of the scene. Ibro was being bound by a chain so that his arms were pinioned to his side. They were knotting the chain and looping it around his neck. Harland knew what would follow. The digger’s engine coughed and a plume of exhaust showed in the sky. He darted another look and saw that the chain had been attached to the bucket. The arm was rising. There was a clank as the bucket righted itself in the air and took up the slack in the chain. They were going to hang Ibro if he didn’t answer their questions.
This he would not stand for. He slipped the camera from the jacket pocket and aimed it over the rocks, silently shooting off three frames. He checked the images on the camera’s screen. Kochalyin was clearly visible in all three – as were the date and time. Then he put the camera in his glove and wedged the package in the rocks. Some day soon someone would find it and think to look in the camera’s memory. It was a slight chance perhaps, but his report was out there, complete with accurate coordinates. If he disappeared, someone would come looking here, he was sure.
He drew his gun, rose to a kneeling position and aimed. The only face turned in his direction was Ibro’s. So he scrambled over the rocks and began walking, holding the gun out in front of him at Kochalyin’s back. What was going through his mind were the words of the instructor at the Fort – aim low and let the evil bastard inside you do the rest. He was perfectly calm and utterly focused on killing Kochalyin. He knew he would be killed too, but that now meant little to him as long as Kochalyin went as well. He glanced up at the helicopter, expecting to see the pilot, but there was no one sitting in the cockpit. Still no one turned round. And that, he realised, was because the digger’s engine was revving and the hydraulics along the shaft of the arm were squealing for lack of grease. Besides this, the men were engrossed in what was happening to Ibro. The bucket lifted with a jerk, the chain strained and then pulled Ibro into the air. Harland saw his face going puce. He reached the end of the pit and was forty feet from the digger when he stopped, placed the gun on his left arm, and aimed. Only then did he see Eva walking towards them from the rock. She was calling out in Russian.
‘Enough, Oleg! Enough!’
Her appearance seemed to surprise the men. They shifted and looked embarrassed. They didn’t raise their guns to her because she walked to them with her hands empty. Kochalyin turned to face her. He nodded to the man operating the digger. The arm dropped and Ibro crumpled to the ground, gasping for breath. Eva bent down and loosened the chain around his neck. No one moved to stop her.
‘Enough of this,’ she said, straightening up. ‘This killing, this torture – this shame.’
Then one or two of the men caught sight of Harland and levelled their weapons at him. Kochalyin turned and took him in with an unsurprised nod. But that was not what froze Harland’s blood. It was the face of the man standing next to Kochalyin. The obliging features of Macy Harp had also turned to gaze at him.
Kochalyin saw his expression and smiled.
‘Not everything is as it seems, Mr Harland,’ he said.
Harland couldn’t take it in. Macy! Macy Harp, who’d rescued him with The Bird from the villa in Prague – from Kochalyin’s clutches. Macy, the busy little fixer with the plausible, county manner. What the hell was he doing with Kochalyin? He struggled to make sense of it. Christ, he thought, was The Bird in on this too? Had they been working for Kochalyin all along?
Kochalyin was speaking again, very quietly so that Harland had to move a few paces forward to hear. Now every weapon was levelled at his head. He kept his aim, but he couldn’t fire without hitting Eva and Kochalyin knew that.
‘This man is the true killer of Tomas,’ Kochalyin was saying. ‘Tomas was like my own son, Irina. You knew that. I paid for his treatment. Whatever our disagreements, I couldn’t have him killed. Harland was the only one who knew where he was. Ask yourself, Irina, is it more likely that I was working with them to kill Tomas, or that Harland was? He is still their spy. He led them to Tomas because he was the only person who could.’
Harland could hardly believe what he was hearing. He spat out a denial. Kochalyin took no notice.
‘I was trying to find him,’ he continued, ‘but Harland got there first. He set up the hit by the river. If you don’t believe me, ask this gentleman here. His name is Mr Harp. He knows the truth because he worked with Harland. He knows what sort of man he is.’
Macy produced an accommodating smile.
‘I’m afraid it is true,’ he said in English. ‘Mr Harland was employed to hunt down Tomas and then Mr Kochalyin here. He is here to kill your ex-husband.’
As this was being said, Kochalyin moved a few feet towards Harland.
‘This man has some crazy ideas in his head. He says I tortured him back in Prague. It is a condition he has – a mental condition. But even if you ask him now, he will tell you that he has never seen me before. And if you ask Mr Harp, who rescued him with his associate, Mr Avocet, he will tell you also that he did not see me there.’ Macy obliged with a nod. ‘Why would I want to torture this man, anyway? You maybe did not know that I was working for British Intelligence?’ He paused. ‘Yes, I, Oleg Kochalyin, worked for the overthrow of that corrupt Communist system. I saw what was going on around us. Everyone did. These were dangerous times, Irina. Naturally, I could not speak of what I was doing, but ask yourself – why would I celebrate the end of those bad days by torturing him? Why would I do that? It doesn’t make sense at all.’
Kochalyin had adopted the rhetorical style he’d used on Harland, the probing interlocutor before administering the electrodes. Harland noticed his appearance with detached interest – a waxy skin, dyed eyebrows, an exceptionally cruel nose, a yellowish sickly colour to the whites of his eyes and pupils that yielded nothing. He noted the expensive but poor taste of his clothes and the flash of gold between his glove and the sleeve of his overcoat, the watch that he had first seen in the video still. Kochalyin was the picture of small-time crookedness, nothing more impressive than tha
t. But what raised him above average evil was his sense of command.
He glanced at Eva and saw a flicker of doubt in her eyes. And then, as if to match Kochalyin’s surreal challenge to the truth, the mist rolled down the mountain and in a very short time smothered the old quarry, isolating them from the rest of the world. The helicopter, the trucks and even the pit were blotted out. Harland noticed Macy looking around, and the man who was clearly Kochalyin’s bodyguard shifted a little and glanced up at the mountain.
‘You surely don’t believe this, Eva?’ Harland demanded. ‘This is a pack of lies. You know it is.’
Kochalyin smiled.
‘You call her Eva when her name is Irina? See how crazy this man has become. Look at him. He is shaking.’
It was true. He was trembling, but that was because he had lain in the cold for so long.
Eva turned to Kochalyin with a look of interest.
‘Then, Oleg, why are you here? Why were you going to kill this man?’
‘Oh, this man is nothing. We knew Harland was here and we wanted to find out who else was in the car. I have to protect myself, you know. Anyway, he would not have been killed.’
If she believes that, thought Harland, she’s lost her mind.
‘But why are you here, Oleg? If you are as innocent as you say, why have you come here?’
‘To protect the reputation of the boy I loved. I admit I have paid these men to destroy the evidence. They were all here that day and they got carried away. They’re crude folk, as you can see, and Tomas was caught up with the excitement. There was nothing I could do. I wasn’t even here when they started killing these people. It was a bad business, for sure, but Tomas was not responsible for his actions and I did not want his memory to be tainted by this.’ He gestured to the grave. Then he turned towards Ibro. ‘I have no intention of killing him, although he came here to kill me. They found many weapons in the car.’