A Damned Serious Business

by Gerald Seymour

  He climbed out. He did not look back but heard her swing the Polo in a tight circle, the frosted ground crunching under the tyres. He went to the gate. They knew him. He did not know their names, but their appearance was the same: steroid-built shoulders, shaven heads and huge ham fists. They would do the beating and the kicking, start up the chipper, or drag on the firing cord to get the chain saw going. He was supposed to produce an ID card for the men to inspect, but it was back in the apartment that he shared with Kat. He pushed on the gate. He heard the little Polo fade down the track. One of the guards held it shut. He felt a moment of blinding obstinacy . . . no pleading about them seeing him every day and he’d left it behind that morning and . . . Nikki sat down. He sat in the mud and the slush from the frost, and others were behind him now and he stayed put. There was no room for the short queue to step over him or to get round him. He stayed silent. The gate was opened. He stood, wiped his sleeve on his wet backside and walked through.

  In the past he would have thought of himself as a ‘free spirit’, an ‘adventurer’. He travelled through trapdoors and put Trojan Horses in place, and let the viruses run free. Hacked savings accounts and penetrated the great corporations of the western world where technology blueprints were stored, and travelled inside foreign government ministries. Good times, but gone. He was no longer free. He had given the Englishman the location and timing and explanation of the meeting’s importance, and had expected to see him blink, swallow hard, grin as if something special had been offered him. The reward had been the blank and seeming disinterest in the face . . . a lie. A lie because he had the rendezvous in the supermarket car-park. He entered the building, nodded to the girl at the desk, was recognised and given a small wave.

  He might, that day, fillet accounts in a Credit Union in Brussels, or he might go back to a target of the afternoon before he had flown to Sweden and go inside a Ministry of Defence contracts unit in Santiago, but was not certain where that city was, or even which continent. But he was no longer free. He pressed the elevator button, felt the power in the machine, wondered who they would send, but felt no guilt, never had done – hated them all.

  He would go to Chile . . . icons lit his screen . . . it was a state-authorised hack and the aim was to learn the terms the Americans offered to the local army for the purchase of armoured cars. Russia’s government was in competition for the contract and would undercut on a sales pitch. He settled in his chair and neither of the boys across the room acknowledged him, nor did he greet them. An office in that ministry on the far side of the world was the work place for the men and women responsible for defining the purchase order; he had their names and the hours they were at their desk. This vulnerability was exploited, and their firewalls were no more capable of stopping his progress than a condom blocked transmitted disease. Very soon it would be the nominated ‘zero day’ when the necessary and identified e-mail train was exfiltrated, and it would go to the men from FSB who hovered close to the building, and who came on Thursdays to collect the required material. The keyboard on the laptop he used was worn, the symbols barely visible, and his fingers moved across them and his eyes were fixed on the screen. Nikki’s world.

  The wriggling snake he controlled went deeper, explored, sifted and rejected and twisted in a different direction. The memory of a meeting in a hotel room, and the treachery of what he had done, slipped from his mind.

  They left the building in Pimlico, separately. In the preparation of their document, three pages of supposed wisdom, between nit-picking over language each had queried what their work might be used for. Bob, Harry, Leanne and Dunc had all failed to put together a decent reason for their effort. But Leanne had further confused them as, the last of the biscuits scoffed, she had taken a call from their employer, Boot. ‘See you all again tomorrow . . . He didn’t seem to me to be the sort of man who’d gratuitously fritter our time. There’ll be a reason, decent or not, but we won’t be told it.’ She’d laughed, the first time in the day any of them had.

  A grenade came diagonally over Merc’s head. He could not see the man who had thrown it. It went high, dark against the pale blue sky. The mist had cleared but the smoke clouds from the explosions still lay on the wire. It flew, like a clumsy pigeon, and reached the top of its arc, hesitated, and then its momentum slackened; it rolled, wavered, came down lazily. It might have a six-second fuse, from the time a finger had ripped out the pin, an arm had extended, then the suck of breath and the swing, and the thing was launched.

  He shouted. Merc saw that the trajectory would take it down the trench from him to land close to the machine-gun and near the boy with the wound who filled magazines. They would expect the grenade to explode and hope that the defenders around Merc were, for a few moments, stunned, incapable; that they would charge and try to break through the wire and would hurl themselves into the trench line . . . and if they were there then it was curtains. It hit the top of the parapet, where the line of sandbags was hammered down to give proof against the power of a high-velocity round, and it wobbled, seemed to roll, and Merc could not know whether it would fall into the trench, before coming to rest. He watched it.

  Nobody owned Merc. He was not subject to company discipline and was not moved around a chequer board at their convenience. Could have been said that he barely owned himself. He was a junkie for it, an addict. The syringe was the whine of the bullets and the crack of the firing and the thunder blast of the missile launcher, and with them came the screams and the shrieks and the cries – of fear and courage and pain – and there was the camaraderie of the kids he was with, and it was about the adrenaline that pulsed in him, and trust given him . . . Those with only a transitory view of Merc might have reckoned that he carried responsibilities easily. The boys and girls with him had a duty to have rifles at their shoulders and use them well because it was their land, their countryside, that was at risk.

  Merc had been reared by his grandparents in a narrow, shabby street off the Oxford Road in the Thames Valley town of Reading, and those elderly people were not threatened by this distant enemy. He was there because it was beyond his powers to walk away. The money was interesting, but not important, and the dream in his life was that he would go ‘sometime’ but he did not know when. What he did know was that the grenade had trickled to a stop, wobbled and then moved, swinging its weight towards the trench, before loitering for a last time. Then it dropped.

  Time seemed to freeze. He wanted to shout the warning again, but for once his voice was stifled, in lock-down deep in his throat. The grenade bounced, might have travelled six inches, then nestled on the dirt. There had been no rain, not for days, so there was no mud for it to slide into, to minimise its blast. It was close to the feet of the machine-gunner, beside those of the girl who fed the belt. Ten paces from Merc, five paces from Cinar, and within an arm stretch of the wounded boy. Merc twisted his head away and closed his eyes, and heaved his body against the wall of sandbags. The hot air blasted against his body, and the shock wave, and the wet.

  He heard nothing. The cloud enveloping him was dust, stone particles and thick, but clearing, and the wet dribbled on his face and when his arm brushed it, blood stained dark on his tunic and fresh red appeared on the back of his hand and it tickled as it wriggled down his vest and on to his stomach, but he had no wounds, felt no pain, and the strength was not draining from him. The girl who fed the belt was crouched and her body heaved as if she was trying to scream, but Merc did not hear her, and there was blood across the shoulder of the boy with the machine-gun. Merc understood.

  The magazines, filled and empty, were littered near the dismembered body. Merc felt shame. He had not witnessed it. At the moment when the wounded boy had crawled the few paces required, looked down at the thing then, consciously, had dropped on to it, hidden it, one breath or two – not more – Merc had been bent low and had protected himself and had expected to feel the lacerations of the shrapnel. Greater love hath no man . . . What many of the private military contractor
s obsessed with. To give a life for another – would they do that? For whom? For their best mate, or for a kid from a village up a mountain who had only flip-flops on his feet? Much of the boy’s stomach had left his body and a leg was severed, and the head was unrecognisable.

  Merc steeled himself. Unless he took control, they would be gone in two or three minutes. He started to aim, shoot. He bawled at the machine-gunner to keep firing, and aiming, and at the girl to hold the belt at the necessary angle and feed – and yelled for Cinar to get among the magazines and to keep filling them, and keep passing them – and saw the savagery in her face as if loading bullets into AK magazines was not her work, but she did. Merc knew the name of the boy who had given his life, but little more, and he had been with them only four days and was their most recent reinforcement and should have been at the rear and receiving treatment except that they had no spare hands to carry him back. The black-clothed bodies were rising among the wire.

  Had to do it. Had to turn his eyes from the wire and the movement and the targets, and look down at his feet and past the gouts of blood and the pieces of salmon-pink flesh and drag the radio/phone from the ledge in the sandbagged recess, and hammer it on and shout his codename, and get into a command post, and call for air support, and give it to them straight, no varnish, yell it at them.

  ‘Almost gone. Almost overrun. Must have air. Got to. Or four two five will be lost. Get the air here.’ Merc’s request would be evaluated. The communication was cut.

  More grenades came, but none fell into the trench, and shrapnel whined over them and there was the song of ricocheting shots, but loudest were the shouts of the enemy. Sometimes the sun flickered on the knives that they carried. Eyes peered anxiously at him. If Merc failed them, then they were dead, and the Hill was lost, and it had all been for nothing. He fired, and fired again, and slung an empty magazine behind him and loaded another, and spat at Cinar that he needed replacements and she should be faster, and her anger was molten. He looked for the ‘air’, and did not see the fast jets or the Apaches. Sounds were seeping back into his head, but he did not hear the engines. And they came at him again, and seemed to have identified him as their principal target, because he was the Gun for Hire, the rock on which they foundered.

  It was about survival, who wanted it most – him or them. Merc aimed and fired, aimed again and fired again, and had hits, but more came, and the big man was half naked and his black clothing was ripped and his skin was laced with bloody cuts, but still he came.

  Chapter 2

  The skies stayed clear. No strike aircraft and no helicopter gunships. No clouds. An emptiness.

  Around Merc, the line held. They had pushed back three surges in the last hour, but at a cost. Two more casualties lay prone in the trench. Neither would have had the strength to load magazines: one was quiet and had dulled acceptance in his eyes and his breath had a soft and bubbled spittle between his lips; the other had lapsed into unconsciousness and carried a head wound. Merc and his little army could not treat them, reinforcements troops or medics would not make the hazardous journey up a communications trench – and he had called again for air support. He wondered why the guy at the other end of the radio link assumed Merc gave a damn for the priorities of the push south of Mosul, or for a situation developing four kilometres to the west where the main defence line was buckling: if ‘air’ became available, down the line would have first call after Mosul. More of the enemy were coming up from their rear. Merc had seen the dust trails of the pick-up trucks that ferried them, the vehicles all sprouting black flags. Merc had his binoculars on them and wondered who had come from south-east London, and who from the suburbs of Birmingham, and if a few might be from Chechnya, the worst for cruelty. An air-strike or a fixed wing jet screaming along the length of the convoy would have devastated them, but no planes came, no gunships.

  The others looked at him and to him, searching for a sign of his confidence. All of them were frightened and some showed it. Even Cinar was biting her lip, but turning away if Merc’s glance settled on her. The pick-ups had gone, and the new men moved forward. When they came to the wire they would start to crawl and begin calling to their God. When the battle was over it would barely count – victory or defeat or stalemate – not even a minor statistic. As if Hill 425 no longer mattered.

  They could give up and pull back, and try to take the wounded with them – or leave them with grenade rings hooked to their fingers – and get to the rear end of the slight salient they had defended, and there would be a shrug from the Kurd major and he’d call up again on his command net. Back in the main bunker, where the fans pushed around freshened air and the computers chattered quietly, they might be relieved not to have the mercenary yelling for bombing support. That was where the Special Forces were, the Hereford crowd. They were rarely permitted to be ‘boots on the ground’ – they were supposed to train, offer guidance, but from the rear. Merc had a good relationship with them, he reckoned, but not good enough to make eyes wet if Hill 425 was lost. They regarded him as ‘peculiar’ or ‘unhinged’. They were taking big money and he was not, and they were safe and back from the firing line, and he was at the sharp end. They were tactically aware and he wasn’t.

  Merc’s band of brothers and sisters were the only ones on their side of the fight who cared for the Hill . . . along with the enemy. So, he and his dwindling force, with ammunition stocks not desperate but low, with exhaustion growing and nerves fraying, waited for the next charge up the hill, into the wire, across the open ground after the obstructions, and on to the parapets of sandbags. It would happen, a bookie’s certainty, because they had brought up reinforcements, and he thought they would come again as soon as the new meat had reached the start line. Merc took a chance and moved down the length of trench, made sure that both the casualties had additional morphine, slapped shoulders and hugged the boys, tweaked the cheek of the girl who fed the belt, and then he went along to the southern end of the trench and did the same job. He didn’t touch Cinar, but was close to her back as she peered over open sights, and he whispered to her that her head was too high and made a target. The shouting was growing in front of him and the boys from the pick-ups jogged forward over open ground but Merc did not have a Dragunov sniper rifle with the big optics and could not have dropped one of them. Another sound mingled with the enthusiasm of fresh fighters – the sobs of the ones already on the wire, hooked fast and with bad wounds . . . No water, no comfort, and no prospect of imminent martyrdom, the virgins in Paradise put on hold.

  As a Gun for Hire, Merc had fought in some of the choicer corners of the region over the last decade. No medals issued, no citations offered, but his record would have been on file and there were a few who had cast an eye on it who would offer him respect. Not that respect, now, would make any difference. He had been in bad places. Had done the ‘arse pucker’ route from Baghdad International and down to the Green Zone, twelve klicks on Route Irish with a reputation – justified – of being the most dangerous highway in the world. Had done the convoys in Afghanistan, riding shotgun in among the loaded trucks that sluggishly brought food and building materials and gasoline to the outlying fortresses occupied by the Coalition guys and the spooks. He had been in Yemen where close-quarters combat was normal and twice he and the other guys on the payroll had fixed bayonets because the bullet count was so low. Now he was resident, temporary, in the Kurdish city of Erbil, had found a new war and a new cause. He thought of jacking it, and would do ‘sometime’, and go to the Mercedes dealer in the Thames Valley – but not that afternoon. The rest of them looked at him, believed he had special powers: just an ordinary guy whose fix was the sweet scent of cordite and gun oil.

  The military experience, as against a private military contractor’s, of Gideon Francis Hawkins stretched across twenty-three months of service with the Pioneers, 2005 to 2007. It had been about digging latrines and fortifying command bunkers and strengthening perimeter defences in Basra and in Helmand. It had been too regim
ented for him, the discipline seemed to choke him, and he’d quit, and had gone to one of those outfits that supplied bodyguards and protection and had signed up. As an ex-Pioneer – not a smart-arse from the Marines or Paratroops or from Hereford – he was given shit work to start him off, to let him know who mattered in his Baghdad world. He had picked up a blonde at the airport, had to escort her down to the UK embassy compound, and he was in the front passenger seat with the window down and the M-16’s barrel jutting out and some kids had taken a blast at them, and he had let rip – might have dropped two. A month later he was called to the pool-side café in the Zone, and she had been there, in a pretence of a two-piece, her skin still damp from swimming, and she’d signed him . . . on a retainer, and easy terms for him to accept.

  The guys from the pick-ups were vocal, in good heart and good voice, and were almost at the wire, and the shooting had gone heavy. What made them hard to beat was their apparent lack of fear, like they were merely on a road that was a diversion from the destination: fruit trees and meadow flowers and virgins with spread legs. Difficult to fight. No point in calling up again and demanding air support; no hope of the Special Forces troopers coming to the rescue with a bugle bawling and heavy fire power. The sun was high and the dead had swelled and the stench was bad. All of them holding Hill 425 knew the fate of prisoners. They would fight until they died, refuse to bug out from the position they had made their own and where blood had spilled . . . That fucking woman should keep her head down . . . The big man was up, scars dried on his skin and his voice hoarse with hatred, and the others followed him. No chance to think of ‘sometime’. He aimed shots, but the big man was charmed and the machine-gun missed him. Coming closer and the noise was deafening. The kids believed in him, and followed him, and had trust in him: a big cross to carry.