A Wild Justice

by Craig Thomas

  Marfa said: ‘I’m just the driver — taking someone out to the airport. Gas company business.’ She managed the sentences as if they were in a foreign language, awkwardly but with a stiff, correct fluency. They might just believe her.

  ‘Who’s your passenger?’

  He’d told her the name on the last of the passports. Paul Evans. She was hesitating, as if searching her memory for something long forgotten. Quickly, he wound down the window. He hadn’t wanted to antagonise them, but ‘What’s the hold-up, fella?’ he asked, his accent broadly Texan, his tone impatient. ‘Let’s get going, uh?’ he added to Marfa, making shooing gestures the two soldiers would clearly see. ‘Jesus, these guys in uniform.’ It was added quietly but the contempt would carry, even if they didn’t speak English.

  The corporal snapped in Russian at Marfa.

  ‘How can you stand driving this prat around?’

  ‘What’s he saying, honey?’ Lock enquired.

  The corporal smirked, catching the tone that indicated a lack of Russian. Then he spat into the snow beside the car and said:

  ‘OK, Yankee!’ His accent was thick but the English was decipherable.

  ‘You gel out now — quick!’

  ‘I’m not stepping out in a snowstorm for some jumped-up asshole in a uniform!’ Lock replied in assumed outrage. ‘You want to see my papers, fine! Anything else, forget it!’

  The corporal’s rifle nudged above the door sill. It was held casually at his hip. The barrel gleamed wet in the diffused glow of the overhead lights. He had successfully distracted them away from Marfa. The corporal’s face was eagerly angry. He wanted to take this Yankee inside the hut, humiliate him.

  There hadn’t been anything else he could do. Which was no comfort: ‘Out!’ the corporal ordered, and the rifle waggled, a baton waved merely to attract attention. ‘Mr American — out.’ He stepped back, expecting instant obedience.

  Lock snorted loudly and clambered out into the storm. There was an officer in the doorway of the trailer now, watching the small drama.

  ‘What is it, fella — your haemorrhoids giving you problems?

  You got a nasty temper on you — ‘ Lock’s breath was driven from his body as the rifle’s muzzle was jabbed into his stomach. He raised his hands. ‘What’s gotten into you people?’ he demanded.

  ‘Listen, fella, I’m an executive with’

  ‘Inside!’

  He was shunted towards the steps of the trailer. He glimpsed Marfa’s worried features and his left hand gestured her to silence. Then his foot slipped on the steps and the corpora] helped unbalance him by a prod in the back with the rifle. The officer had already retreated to his foldaway desk halfway down the cramped, harshly lit interior. Fuggy, heady with warmth.

  He’d seen two other armed GRU soldiers outside and there was a sergeant at a smaller desk. He and the officer watched him with the anticipation lechers might have extended to a young woman. Lock clamped his nerves, held them still.

  ‘You’re the head honcho, right?’ he drawled angrily. ‘You got the say-so — so what is this? Some kind of stick-up? A frame? I got business to attend to out at ‘

  ‘Sit down!’ The officer indicated a hard chair placed before the desk. With obvious but abashed reluctance. Lock sat. ‘Good.’

  ‘Look, Captain, what gives? There ain’t usually roadblocks on the edge of town ‘

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then, what’s the problem?’

  ‘We are looking for an American.’ The captain’s manner was theatrically pleasant, his English expressed in a slight American twang.

  ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘Perhaps I get you?’ The officer smiled, offered a cigarette which Lock declined, then lit one for himself. Marlboro.

  The? Look, Captain, here’s my US passport. That ought to be good enough.’ He handed the passport over. ‘See. Paul Evans ‘

  ‘And who is he?’

  The.’

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘What?’ He forced the anger as if from a small waterhole of confidence, one rapidly evaporating. ‘Oh, yeah. I’m the guy in charge of shipments, materiel…? Equipment coming in. For SibQuest, the oil-gas company.’ He managed to grin. ‘We’re small but we’re sure growing!’ SibQuest had Americans and Canadians as well as Europeans working for them, even though they were a Qatari company with Australian partners. As yet, they weren’t important in the Siberian gasfields.

  The captain was looking up the name on a typed list in a folder of stiff polythene sheets. His finger ran along his lower lip with the regularity of a typewriter carriage. What if he had the names of the executives-? How could he? The captain looked up.

  ‘You expect shipments to arrive in this weather?’

  Lock shrugged.

  ‘No. But some came in before the weather changed. I’ve only just gotten around to them.’ He grinned.

  ‘It seems a very early time of the day to be troubling yourself and your driver,’ the captain mused, his eyes straying to the window. In a clear patch in the porthole-like window. Lock saw Marfa’s shadow within the car and two of the GRU soldiers leaning down to the driver’s window. He hoped fervently their interest was sexual. And that Marfa’s nerve would hold up.

  ‘Sure.’ He gestured expansively with his hands, appeared shamefaced. ‘OK, so someone higher up, a V-P, kicked ass. I have to get out there on the double. My job might be on the line.’

  The military contempt for the chicanery of civilian life was evident, like a bruise on the captain’s features. This disorderly application of pressure, authority, made him contemptuous of the man Lock was assumed to be.

  ‘Can I get going?’ Lock asked tentatively.

  The captain toyed with the passport, opening and closing it, his dark features narrowed in concentration. How much did he know? He didn’t have descriptions, maybe, but he knew an American was involved. The cramped interior of the trailer seemed hotter, almost stifling, the storm very distant despite the occasional quivering of the vehicle in the wind’s buffets.

  Lock felt the seconds elongate, as if time dripped like a faulty tap.

  Then the captain threw the passport onto the desk.

  ‘Very well, Mr Evans. You may continue with the work of saving your career. Sergeant, show the gentleman out.’

  Thanks.’

  Lock stood up and made for the door. The sergeant intercepted him, tugging on a parka and pulling the hood over his head as he did so. Then he came down the steps behind Lock, following him to the car. The two soldiers rose to slouched attention beside it.

  ‘She’s your driver, yes?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  They stood beside the car. Maria’s features were small with cold and tension.

  ‘You’re in a hurry?’

  ‘Yes’

  The sergeant was inspecting the car. He bent by the rear wheel and took the tyre valve between his fingers. Then he looked up, his broad, thick-nosed face jntent, greedy.

  ‘OK, so how much?’ Lock asked, then remembered to protest;

  ‘The captain know you play this game every time there’s a roadblock?’

  ‘You will tell him?’

  ‘This place is corrupt as hell!’ Lock protested.

  ‘And everyone in it,’ the sergeant added philosophically.

  Lock got out his wallet and took two ten-dollar bills from it.

  The sergeant shook his head. He took out another ten. The sergeant, snow epauletting his shoulders, rose to his feet and took the bills, slipping them at once into his pocket.

  ‘A good remainder to your journey,” he said, smiling. Then he held the door of the car open like a hotel porter.

  Lock collapsed into the rear seat and the door was shut behind him. The windows instantly clouded. His heart thudded in his chest as he said: ‘Pull away slowly — slowly.’ The sergeant’s arm was raised and the barrier imitated his gesture, sliding upwards towards the two giraffe-necked lights. The rear wheels skidded. />
  ‘Slowly, dammit!’ he growled, his own tension uppermost.

  The car wobbled beneath the upraised barrier. Gradually, as Lock turned in his seat, the glare of the lights diminished back down the road, the snow pouring more and more thickly behind the Cadillac.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Sorry.’

  The girl said nothing. Lock felt no relief, no anticipation, only an exhausted weariness — and a sense of foreboding.

  FOURTEEN

  Blue Remembered Hills

  Even in. Afghanistan, at the height of a winter snowstorm, the mountains had periodically and reassuringly loomed out of the blizzard and driving sleet; implacable and familiar. Here, he realised, there was nothing. There just wasn’t a landscape, hardly even a shadowy clump of stunted firs. The tundra stretched flat and empty all the way to the Gulf of Oh and the Kara Sea; and began at the perimeter fence of Novyy Urengoy’s airport.

  Lock shuddered in the rear of the old Cadillac. The heater was little more than a futile protest against the weather that enveloped them. Marfa sat blowing on her woollen-gloved hands in the driving seat. Dmitri’s mobile phone — or was it the Major’s? — was pressed against Lock’s cold cheek, so that the stubble rasped. Beyond the fence against which Marfa had parked the car, aircraft looked as small and lost as gulls sitting out a storm on unmoving pack ice.

  ‘You think that’s feasible?’ Lock asked, breathless at the proposition.

  Perhaps his encounter with the GRU in their trailer had unnerved him more than he suspected or admitted. He could not be certain — maybe it was the narrowing perspective Vorontsyev’s plan offered, the run up the blind alley. There’s no way out, once we do that.’

  ‘It’s the only way,’ Vorontsyev explained patiently. ‘We then won’t have to confront Bakunin’s troops. We got here an hour ago. Lubin’s been scouting. He counted three APCs, a half-dozen UAZs, even a piece of medium artillery, parked behind a commissary truck. That means as many as fifty GRU troops in the immediate area. I suggest we avoid the airport buildings, Lock.’

  There was a pained, cynical irony in his tone.

  ‘OK, OK!’ Lock blurted in irritation. ‘I’m just saying there’s no way out of your locale, none at all.’

  ‘It hinges on Turgenev. If he’s there, then we can use him to get us out. At least, keep us alive. If we can’t take off … It is a damn aircraft. Lock, in case you’d forgotten!’

  ‘So, Bakunin lets us fly out, no problem?’

  ‘Bakunin takes his money, power and orders from Turgenev.

  Once we have Turgenev, we have checkmate, //you let Turgenev remain alive, Lock. Dmitri, Lubin, Marfa — ‘ The girl’s head twitched at the sound of her name, as the car rocked in a buffet of the wind.’- and myself, would be trusting you with our lives, once we got aboard the aircraft. Can we do that, Lock?’

  It was absurdly simple, even if he didn’t like it. He had to agree to let Turgenev live, or effectively kill them all. There was no other way of gaining Vorontsyev’s vaunted proof. He clenched his free hand into a fist beside his thigh, grinding the knuckles into the denim-clad muscle. It was that, above all, thai he did not want — Turgenev as a hostage, Turgenev continuing to breathe … and being taken to Moscow or somewhere else where he would have influence, connections, powers of bribery and escape. He would, he knew, be letting Turgenev make a home run. Beth’s murder would never be avenged.

  ‘Lock? Well, what’s your answer, Lock?’

  ‘He’ll get off, scot free!’ he protested in a wailing voice that startled the girl upright in her seat.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. He’ll be stopped. Lock. Isn’t that what you want?’

  ‘I want him dead,’ he admitted.

  ‘And us, in that case,’ Vorontsyev replied gloomily, almost as if he accepted the implacability of Lock’s hatred.

  Vorontsyev was parked inside the airport perimeter, near the cargo hangars. Even with night-glasses, Lock would not have been able to see that far through the flying, pre-dawn murk. He could see only dim, retreating lights that seemed to be swallowed by the storm and the darkness, and a short length of the fence in either direction. And a solitary clump of twisted, snow-laden firs.

  ‘OK,’ he offered eventually in a choked, reluctant voice. Then more strongly, ‘OK. I agree. It’s the only way.’

  ‘Good,’ The relief was apparent, even in the pinched, maidenish voice given him by the mobile phone connection. Lock even heard the sigh of his next breath. ‘That’s good. You’d better come in.’

  It was as if they had barred his membership to something, leaving him uninitiated and an outsider.

  ‘You think the gate will swallow my story one more time?’ he asked. ‘Do I risk it?’

  ‘They’re relaxed, confident,’ Vorontsyev reported. ‘But, if you don’t want to try, rip out a length of the perimeter fence and walk here-‘ He paused, listening to someone, either Dmitri or Lubin. Lock could vaguely hear another voice, then, more closely, Vorontsyev’s agreement. ‘Maybe you should walk. Just in case. Marfa knows the airport layout. We’re next to a line of fuel bowsers.’

  ‘Turgenev has to be with them, Vorontsyev.’

  ‘Of course. We’re behind the Russair cargo hangar. Don’t keep us waiting.’

  Lock switched off the humming phone and tapped the girl on the shoulder. ‘You OK?’ he asked solicitously, even though his mouth was sour with what he could only regard as defeat.

  ‘Yes!’ she snapped.

  ‘Don’t bite my head off, lady. I just wanted to know whether you could handle this or not.’

  ‘I can handle it.’ She turned in her seat. The windscreen beyond her was blank with snow. ‘I’m all right. Really, I’m all right.’

  ‘Sure,’ he replied without irony. ‘OK, let’s go.’

  ‘What about the car?’

  ‘It’s just a shape against the fence — leave it where it is.’

  He opened the door and clambered out into the blizzard, staring around him in the darkness. No murky dawn was yet rivalling the dim glow of the perimeter lights. He turned up his collar and thrust his gloved hands into the pockets of his topcoat.

  Hunched into himself, he began to trudge along the fence, looking for a gap, a torn piece of mesh, the girl plodding behind him.

  There’d be plenty of breaks in the wire, the small-scale smugglers would have made them over the months and years of cigarette and hashish illegalities.

  The weight of a sense of betrayal strengthened, bowing his shoulders. Beth’s murder was to go unrequited, Turgenev was going to get away with it. The taste of that was colder than the snow on his tongue. God damn it to hell, he cursed. God damn it all to hell …

  His interior landscape, stretching into the future, was as empty and featureless as the tundra that reached away around him on every side.

  Hamid was standing beside the grey Mercedes like a chauffeur, but that was not the image that came back to him as he was shrugged into his topcoat by one of the servants. Instead, he heard his mother’s voice, her annoyance with him merely her fear of displeasing his father. Pyotr, the car is waiting for you Pyotr!

  The last more as a plea than an injunction.

  As a boy, he had stepped out of the main door of the block of flats in Moscow on many snowy pre-dawn mornings like this, and a man clapping his hands together for warmth would have been standing beside a battered minibus, his face pinched and angry at the delay. It had not been a car, whatever his mother’s affectations beyond the pretensions of middle-ranking Party membership. His schoolfellows’ faces would be peering through the fugged and iced row of windows, some of them smirking. You’ll be late for school ~ again … So would run the litany of her peculiar orthodoxy of obedience — to his father, the Party, the Kremlin; to everybody she knew to be superior in status to herself and her husband. And his mother had known, with the nicety and obsession of a stamp collector, every minute gradation of office, income, accommodation among the various circles of the Inferno that had been t
he Secretariat of the Soviet Communist Party, its civil service.

  He donned his fur hat. Glanced at the murky sky, still more lit by rig flames and the glow of the town than by the dawn.

  But the snow was easing, he was certain, and the wind, though it remained forceful in its gusts, was more fitful, coquettish almost after the directness of the blizzard. The weather window would open and Hamid and the scientists would be gone …

  He became aware of the reason for the memory. It did not lie in his irritation with Hamid, or the Iranian’s pose beside the limousine. It was that the scientists, all six of them, were seated in a minibus parked behind the Mercedes. It had arrived at the lodge only minutes earlier. The windows were tinted and he could not see their faces. But that vehicle had evoked his childhood in Moscow. He smiled, but with lingering bitterness. The memory of his stifling, orthodox, unquestioning home had never been rendered neutral by the solution of time. It remained acidic, stinging. He remembered Leonid Turgenev’s gratitude for his Party card and his menial promotions and millimetric measurements of financial improvement, his ruthless driving of his only son to succeed in just the same manner as himself … his disappointments at the young Pyotr’s love of sport, his laziness at school, his poor reports, his indiscipline. The beatings, the harangues, the lectures, the instilling of creeping, blackmailing guilt … then his irrational pride when his son became a trainee officer in the KGB 1st Directorate School.

  He had hated his father. Towards his mother, the cipher, the imprint of her husband, he had felt the smallest tenderness and the greatest irritation. They were both dead now. He grinned as he approached the car, so that the Iranian was puzzled by the expression of humour. Wouldn’t that be a simple, even simplistic explanation for his joy in capitalism? The antithesis, the complete refutation, of his father’s crabbed, servile ideological loyalty, his puritanism, his utter lack of hedonism.

  He slapped Hamid on the shoulder, surprising the man.

  ‘In two hours, my friend, you’ll be above the clouds and on your way to Tehran. Don’t look so damn gloomy!’ he laughed.