A voice, shrill and terrified, babbled in Russian—it was a kid's voice.
'The bloody torch, Lofty, give it me,' Billy snapped.
It was ripped from his hand. The beam shone into the face, lit it. Ham swore.
The light pierced his eyes and Vasiliev wet himself. They were above him. The light bounced back from his face and he saw the black cream across their faces, on their hands, and the weapons.
The beam showed half of a kid's face, half of the terror in his staring eyes, the gape of his mouth, and they heard the stuttering breathing. Billy gazed up at the cloud ceiling and the rain racked down on him. Ham beat his fists in frustration into the sand. Noisily, Wickso lugged the gear after him, then dropped it, saw the face the torch half lit, and swore. 'Who the fuck is that?'
Lofty said quietly, 'Murphy's law—when something can cock up, it will…'
'Bloody helpful, Lofty. Stuff it, for fuck's sake,' Billy clattered.
I was observing the obvious, I—'
Wickso said, 'What we going to do, Billy?' Lofty said, 'Your job to think, Billy, always was.'
Billy said, 'I am fucking thinking, so quieten down.'
Lofty and Ham held the kid. Wickso crouched close to them and watched the trees with his back to the sea, the distant light of the Princess Rose, and they left Billy to his thinking as they always had. Lofty and Ham held him, but Lofty knew it was unnecessary. The kid was supine, terrified, and maybe he could see the bright lights of their eyes set in the black of the camouflage cream. The kid was going nowhere.
Billy said, breathing in fast bursts, 'He could be there, Viktor could be…could have been five minutes late, or ten, but we'd bugged out…have to go back, have to see if he's there. Got me?' The voice dropped. 'And there's the sunshine boy, wrong place at the wrong time. Witness. Eyewitness. Saw us, heard us, so we're not deniable. Can't leave him. Anyone got a better idea? Anyone else want to do some thinking? Yes, or no?'
Did he know? Lofty thought the kid knew. The eyes gazed up at them, popped and stared and pleaded. They were trained to kill, but the training was old. They had been taken back into civilian life of a sort, and the training had gone cold. Lofty thought it would be the same for all of them. His hands loosed the kid's battledress, and Ham's, and Wickso eased back in the darkness as if he wanted no part of it. But Billy wasn't challenged, never had been, not by any of them: his was the word of law. Billy had drowned the boy in the lough, and he had led them in the silence that confronted the Crime Squad detectives. Lofty knew there would be no volunteers, not for a killing in cold blood. Billy held out his hand for the torch and Lofty gave it to him. Billy took the torch and he shone it in turn—fast, raking movements—into each of their faces. Lofty twisted his head away from the beam, and Ham, and Wickso turned his back on it. When the beam moved away, they saw Billy's hand reach for four strands of dune grass and he snapped them off, broke one strand so it was half the length of the other three. He put the hand behind his back, where he couldn't see it himself, where he could shuffle the strands. His hand came back, hovered over his lap, and he shone the torch on the four strands of equal length.
'Short strand does it—you first, Wickso,' Billy said, and there was a tremor in his voice. Lofty hadn't heard it before.
Wickso's hand shook as he pulled the grass from Billy's fist, then Ham took his. Lofty's choice of two. Lofty, with Billy, had held the man down under the lough water and it had screwed his life. He walked and talked with ghosts as retribution. Lofty took a strand. The torch shone on to Billy's fist and he opened it: his strand was long. The torch wavered on and Wickso's hand opened—long. To Ham— short. Lofty let his strand drop.
'Just do it, Ham,' Billy said.
'No problem.'
Lofty knew he should have argued, should have kicked against it. He pushed himself up. Billy switched off the torch beam.
'Do it, Ham, so he doesn't get found.'
'No problem.'
'We'll give him an hour, an hour for Viktor, then it's abort. Be ready for us.'
'No problem.' The monotone answer.
Billy headed off the dunes, for the trees. Wickso was close to him, and Lofty had to scurry to catch them. At the trees, Lofty turned and looked back. He fancied, couldn't be certain, that there was a flash of a knife's blade and Ham stood high over where the kid lay. In the trees, Wickso stopped, threw up, then hurried on to catch Billy. They went faster than the first time, made more noise, didn't care. Lofty, clumsy, fell into a trench, a shallow zigzag in the forest floor. The ghosts closed around him, and the trees of the forest seemed to press against him and to crush him.
Locke was cruel and meant to be. 'They haven't called, and they should have. As soon as there's a hand on his collar, they'd have called. It's late. He's not bloody coming. I know it.'
He sat at the table, earphones on his head. She was by the kitchen's inner door. He was cruel because he wanted to wipe the composure off her. 'They wouldn't wait till they were on the beach, or till they were launched. They'll be hanging on and hoping. He's not coming. The whole bloody thing was a waste of time.'
She gazed back at him and gave him nothing. He wanted her to weep or turn away. 'Forget it, Alice. Forget him…he's not coming.'
He thought her steady gaze, unwavering, belittled him.
The second time.
'Very good, Viktor, a session of outstanding value and I want you to know that in London our experts are ready and waiting to receive this latest material, and they all have a huge admiration of what you do for us. Time you were gone, Viktor—and time, Alice, that you were in bed. If Mowbray had smirked she hadn't seen it. And he'd yawned, like he had the first time, to signal their dismissal.
They'd gone down the corridor running. Key into the door. No hesitations, no shyness. She'd said it out loud, told him that since the first time she'd gone on the pill, never before in her life been on the pill, and long enough since the last Gdansk trip to have given the pill's cycle time. Not a minute wasted. Clothes stripped off, his and hers, thrown down, shoes kicked away. The rooms either side would have heard their little cries.
Each day, at her desk in the Service's section of the embassy in Warsaw, and each night at the little apartment the embassy rented for her, she'd pleaded for the day's and night's hours to hurry by. Him on her, then her on him, and fingers finding the secret places of each other. She thought then, and now, that the best thing she did was to make him lose the tension in his shoulders, arms and fingers, and in his mind, as if she lifted off him the burden of it. But hours went too quickly. Rolling away from her, coming out of her, slipping off the bed, dressing with fumbled hands because he gazed so wistfully at her as she lay on the bed, the door closing after him. Alice twisting on to her stomach and burying her face in the soft pillow and feeling the sweat of him on her and the wetness of him in her…and loving him.
They were on the beach, and the rain came off the sea and drenched them.
It was the turn of Jerry the Pole to fish. He thought it was with reluctance that the Russian, Chelbia, gave up the line. The fisherman, Roman, baited the hooks and cast the line out for him because he did not have that skill, then gave him the line to hold. The rain came from behind and soaked the shoulders of his coat and his trousers below its hem, and the sand caked his shoes. The bucket beside his feet was now half-filled with fish caught and dragged in by the Russian, Chelbia…Roman had said that night, and driving rain, was always a good time to fish because the sand on the sea's floor was churned and food was thrown up for the cod, mackerel and plaice.
Jerry felt the sharp tug and whipped back his wrist. He chortled like a child at the weight on the line. 'I used to fish here when I was a small boy, but for fun. In the war I fished here for food, till we left. In my life this is the only beach I have fished from, but never at night.' He was pulling in the line and the slack tangled against his legs. 'Did you fish as a boy, Boris?'
The voice was quiet against the wind's song and the waves on the sand a
nd the rain's beat. 'Only as a boy. I don't have the time to fish now. I used to fish with my uncle. He was a good fisherman. We went to the Kaliningrad canal, and what we caught was eaten—even the heads and bones went to make soup. I loved to fish.'
Jerry the Pole knew that the man, Boris Chelbia, was mafiya, and could not imagine why he was there on the Mierzeja Wislana. The body of him and the stature of him was mafiya. It reeked from his stance, his voice and his authority. The mafiya from Russia were not interested in properties in Wannsee, or the exclusive renovated villas across the Glienicker bridge that faced on to the Potsdam road. They bought the more expensive apartments, newly built, in the heart of the city. They had made their Berlin ghetto off Unter den Linden and in the new luxury towers sprouting across the old no-man's-land of the Wall—Mowbray's hunting-ground, where Jerry the Pole had been king, long ago.
Not often, but sometimes, once a month and not more, Jerry the Pole made himself a plastic box full of sandwiches and, with a flask of coffee, took the S-bahn to the hunting-ground and his kingdom. He would sit on a bench in sunshine or in snow and the new apartments, new offices and new hotels would disappear from his eyes and be replaced by the grey concrete of the Wall, the guards in the watchtowers, the dogs and the guns; and he would feel the pride of involvement and achievement. When he was ready to leave the bench on Wilhelmstrasse or Leipzigerstrasse or Friedrichstrasse, and the memories of the Wall had gone from his mind, he would see the new homes of the Russian mafiya, and he would watch them strut from their new Mercedes cars and he would envy their new clothes, their new confidence. The city was theirs: they knew it, and Jerry the Pole knew it. They did prostitution, and people trafficking, they smuggled cigarettes and cars, they were untouchable. When he took the S-bahn train home, and when he bought a newspaper, he could read of the murderous feuds for territory. They could be envied often but rarely crossed. The newspapers carried photographs of those who crossed them, and the blood in the gutters. And he had never seen one of them carrying a fishing rod.
But he was not in Berlin. The fish was at his feet, and Roman knelt, ripped the hook from it and threw it casually into the darkness, into the bucket. He was on the Mierzeja Wislana, on a spit, two kilometres from the Russian border. Boris, the mafiya man, had been given ten successive casts by the fisherman. Jerry the Pole had had one cast. Roman took the line from Jerry's hand and gave it to the Russian, then skewered a shrimp on to the hook. The boldness came from his annoyance.
'So, Boris Chelbia, why do you wish to meet me?'
'I had a reason when I came—but I believe, at this moment, another reason makes it more valuable that we met. Do I talk in a riddle? Sufficient for you, I do import and export, into and out of Kaliningrad.' By now the Russian could throw his own cast. 'Now I am fishing…that is my business, my only business…I like fishing.'
The Russian turned and shouted into the wind and the rain. They were lit. A car's headlights blazed a cone down on to the beach and it caught them, threw their shadows across the sand and into the surf. Jerry the Pole thought it strange, amazing, incomprehensible, that he—the 'bottle-washer' of the Secret Intelligence Service of the United Kingdom, with no pension—should be out and exposed on a foul night fishing by hand-line with a local and a principal of the mafiya from Kaliningrad. He could see the lights of the buoys, tossing and winking, that marked the map line between Poland's and Russia's territorial waters. He did not know the plan that Mr Rupert Mowbray had made, had not been trusted with it. He had no pension, no income, he survived on the frugal handouts of the German government. Soon, when the developers came with the architects, he would be turfed on to the street from his room across the Glienicker bridge. He sidled close to the Russian. Fuck the Princess Rose, whose lights rolled far out in the sea to the east, and fuck Mr Rupert Mowbray, who did not trust him, and double-fuck Mr Locke, who would not speak up for him in London about his pension.
'I am not, of course, a smuggler, but what an interesting place we are at. No fences and no Customs…to a smuggler it would be a place of great interest.'
The marker stone was a dull blur beside the track.
'Five minutes more,' Billy whispered.
Lofty heard Wickso's murmur: 'Five minutes only, then out.'
'You OK, Lofty?'
'Five minutes, then we quit. He's not coming. I'm OK.'
For near to an hour it had been unspoken. Nothing moved on the track. Lofty didn't need night-vision goggles to tell him that nothing, nobody, was coming. Four times Billy had called, used the owl's screech, and had won no response from the rain and the thickening mist. Billy's call had reverberated into the darkness and its shrill note had bounced back from the cloud ceiling, then dissipated into the mist—and nothing, nobody, came.
They sagged again into silence. Maybe they all thought—Billy, Wickso and Lofty—of the kid left behind with Ham. The short strand had gone to the right hand, Ham's, no problem. Ham would do it with a knife, or would throttle him, or would take him down into the water and drown him. Ham didn't do mercy.
Billy said he'd try one last time. The cry of the owl beat against the rain, the cloud and the mist, and was answered.
The cry came back, like a cock answered a hen. They were all taut, and Lofty stifled his breath. The answer came again, a low-pitched shriek—but behind them.
They were twisting in the scrub. The track in front of them was empty. They faced into the trees.
The shriek came again, and Billy called back.
Ham reached them. Crawling, free, behind Ham was the kid.
Lofty gaped.
Ham said, 'Don't fucking interrupt me, guys, just listen. I was going to do him, slit his bloody throat. He couldn't scream, his voice was just a little whimper. He'd pissed himself and shit himself. I tell you, don't get upwind of him, not if you haven't a peg on your nose. We'd used the name, hadn't we—Viktor? I had, Billy had. The kid heard it and he began babbling. This is the gist: he knows Viktor, says he is Viktor's friend. Viktor has been arrested. What's most important, I think, the car that took him didn't shift towards the main gate and out, but away past the senior officers' mess, and that's the natural route. He's very exact—Viktor was taken to the FSB's place…so, it's the heavy mob. The kid told me this and he was blubbering. He didn't act it. I'd put my life on it, I mean it. Viktor Archenko is banged up with the spooks. That's where we are, guys. He even drew me a map—I believe every word he told me.'
'Where does that leave us?' Wickso hissed.
'Up the creek, no pole,' Billy said.
'Time to get on the radio,' Ham murmured.
It hurt Lofty bad. Maybe of all of them redemption mattered most to him. Billy would make the call on the radio, and would talk failure. The relay was Locke, and Alice. Alice would know that they had been too late, too slow—no one's fault—and that they had lost their man. The message would go to Mowbray on the ship. Mowbray would call London, and London would rubber-stamp the obvious. Abort, out, quit. Back at Tyne Cot by the end of the week. Sweeping leaves, tidying the beds, cutting grass, scrubbing the lichen off the stones, making the place fit for the families of the veterans on Remembrance Day, and the chance of exorcizing the guilt for ever gone.
Lofty heard Billy ask, 'And what do we do with him?'
Ham answered, 'Turn him loose—he won't cough on us, I'm certain of it.'
'No harm in it.'
Wickso chipped in, 'Why did he draw the map?'
Ham said, 'So we could go and get him.'
Lofty had never heard, before, Ham speak like that, so serious, so lacking in cut and crap and sarcasm. 'So we could go and get Viktor out.'
'Tell him to fuck off,' Billy said.
Ham bent and whispered, Russian, in the kid's ear. He was gone. Another of Lofty's ghosts, the kid went up to the track, never looked back at them, never waved, and then the cloud caught him, and the rain and the mist. Twenty paces down the track and they'd lost sight of him. Billy was fiddling with the radio strapped to his chest, a
nd Ham helped him. Wickso passed Lofty a stick of gum.
'Thanks. We were too late.' Hope died.
Rupert Mowbray took the signal relayed to him by Locke. It was staccato, brief and without soul, and it wounded: 'Havoc 1 to Havoc 2. Ferret No Show. Delta 1 reports confused, Ferret arrested and held by FSB on base. Confirm Delta team should abort soonest. Out.'
A prize had slipped from his fingers. He sat at the table in the master's cabin and the radio slid as the Princess Rose bucked.
He responded. His voice quavered as he spoke into the microphone. 'The boys on the ground, do they think there's anything they can do? Out?'
A brittle laugh answered him. 'Havoc 1 to Havoc 2. Are we ignoring standard radio procedures? I'll pass your query to Delta 1. Straw-clutching, aren't you? Nothing can be done. I say again, we should abort soonest. Out.'
He slumped.
Lofty crouched to hear Billy, and felt a sense of joy.
'What you have to remember, guys, is that Who Dares Wins, the Hereford Gun Club, and By Strength and by Guile, the Poole regatta people, found all this was too dangerous. They copped out. Mowbray said, when we still had the chance to walk away, "He is one of the bravest men I have been privileged to know, and I—and you—are going to save that man's life." Is my life fucked up? Yes…I put paint on bits of paper, and I live where people can't find me. That's a life that's fucked. How's your life, Ham?'
'I've not a pressing appointment, not one that can't wait.'
'You fucked, Wickso, or are you in good shape?'
'Reckon that if I'm not back tomorrow they'll have to close A&E, 'cause they can't do without me. But they'll have to, till the weekend.'
Gerald Seymour Page 33