A Damned Serious Business

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘Usually a bit left over. We had a load brought out from Syria only a couple of months ago, and detonators, so it’ll all be good and up-to-date Russian stock. Generally comes in handy. And basic stuff for the mechanism. Assume it won’t be a trained operative with a finger on the button? Take it as read. And the delivery? A laptop, yes?’

  The tea was foul, but the Menace seemed to thrive on it and showed mild offence that Boot had not drunk more. They did a brief handshake, a caveman grip that crushed Boot’s fist, and the dogs leapt at him and he was gone. Another man had been roped into the conspiracy and would not know to what purpose his work was put; many others would soon be corralled and have joined the periphery of the matter. Some Boot might hear of and of many he would be in ignorance. As it had been from the start of his career and under the tutelage of Oliver Compton, and he’d not lose sleep over it. Never looked back at the detritus left behind and had never waxed emotional. A good day, so far, but it was merely the beginning, and the prime brick was not yet in place. The clock ticked, as it would have done for the Duke.

  ‘If I don’t have some “air” we’re going to lose . . .’ Merc yelled into the handset.

  The shooting had died – as if the guns were exhausted and needed to rest – but it would be temporary. A few minutes, deep breaths from the attackers and a surge of faith or confidence or hatred, and then they would come again. They were closer, hard up against the wire, and had brought planks from the rear. He was less certain, if they came again – as they would – that the line behind the sandbagged parapets would hold . . . Merc knew an answer to a question he might have posed. He could have shouted to his right and down the line where three of his people were, ‘If we bug out and give it to them, then survival is assured. Do we go back?’ Could then have looked to the left, where the machine-gun was, with a couple of short belts ready to go, and where Cinar stood, poking her head up for a better view of the wire and the soft slope beyond it that led down to the track where the pick-ups brought more men for the next push. ‘It’s only a corner of dirt and goat shit, and its loss isn’t going to lose a war, and we’ve made the price of it heavy to them, and we’d have our honour – whatever that means – if we went back out of here. Any takers?’ Didn’t bother. He would have cheapened himself and broken their trust. They were tottering, having to lean on the sandbagged walls or they’d have fallen, and they had caked blood on them from handling the casualties and from their own scratch wounds.

  ‘Without “air” we cannot hold Four Two Five. Is that understood? Over . . .’

  If he had, turned away from the wire and slipped off, crouched low along the length of the communication trench, he would have gone alone. They would not have followed him. A voice came into his ear, seemed loud because of the sudden quiet, and it dripped the reasonableness of a staff-man safe in a concrete bunker and well to the rear of the sharp end of the defence line. As things stood, no ‘air’ was available, but the situation was under ‘constant review’, and if ‘circumstances altered’, and there was ‘availability’ then ‘air deployment’ to the Hill would get ‘fullest consideration’ – a pause, then ‘Good luck to you, friend, and we’re all rooting for you and if you feel it necessary to withdraw then your action will be well understood. Out.’

  Merc saw a shadow moving at a languid speed across the wire and loitered for a moment. It might have been an eagle or could have been the shadow of a vulture – both were regular scavengers on the front line. Suddenly, a sparrow was perching on a strand of broken wire. His grandmother had liked them, and scattered crumbs for them. Nothing as majestic as the eagle and the vulture, able to soar and then dive, but a humble little thing; he had not seen it there before, and wondered why it had come and what it would find and . . . A grenade looped past it, and the sparrow flew off. Merc yelled the warning. Their machine-gun started up.

  The dark figures, could have been twenty of them, were up and off the ground and planks were hurled at the wire, and there were more grenades, and more screams as the machine-gun scored. Merc could see their faces, and the gaps where teeth had been dislodged and the brilliance of their eyes. Heard the shouts, some in praise of God and some familiar insults about screwing the defenders’ mothers. The sparrow was gone, and the big predator that had looked to feed and would now have to wait, and the memories of grandparents. Merc cleared his mind and had the rifle’s butt hard against his shoulder, and tried to compensate for the hunger and the thirst, and the tiredness, and to aim straight, pick targets for the cross-hairs. His own grenade was against his chest, the hook latched on to the webbing.

  The sun was hot, and the ground in front of him stank from the bloated dead, and clouds of flies swarmed over the wire.

  What was he doing here? How long would he be here? Not easy to predict. Where else had it been as bad? Not possible to think of anywhere. When would he call it a day, assuming it was his decision? Sometime, just ‘sometime’ . . . Only one thing Merc was certain of, with the recoil hammering his shoulder and targets dropping, and more coming, there would be no ‘air’ soon, not in time to save Hill 425, nor a small force marooned on its summit.

  Chapter 3

  He was about to fire.

  Merc had the target in the V and the needle, and was squeezing and did the breath control that he had been taught years ago doing the Pioneers’ basic marksmanship. He had a full frontal of the guy and the aim would be into the chest while the man struggled in the wire. Squeezed on the trigger – it would have been a fraction of a second before the bullet was fired – and jerked off the aim, sucking breath deep down.

  The sparrow was on an iron pole that held the wire close to the parapet. All the shit flying, incoming and outgoing, and the yelling of abuse from both sides – Cinar’s voice as loud and as hoarse as any – and the crying of those who had been hit and had lost the numbness of the initial impact and wound. Merc saw his grandmother peering through her kitchen window into the yard, watching a sparrow picking bread scraps from the bird table. That sparrow brought peace to an older woman’s life, one not blessed with comfort, nor much satisfaction: the sparrow in the yard lived for ever because if one died or disappeared another took its place. His grandmother’s sparrow had immortality. He fired. Merc didn’t know whether he’d had a hit or whether the fighter had ducked.

  The machine-gun had gone quiet. Not the curses of the pair who crewed it. The gear they had to fight with was rubbish. The machine-gun was old, a 12.7mm calibre DShK; they were trying to get the bar up and it was locked. There would have been a round stuck in the breach. The weapon jammed regularly. Probably had gone into the Iraqi military arms dumps in the late eighties, courtesy of the Soviet Union in its last tottering days. Might have had an airing in the first Gulf War, and might have been dragged out and dusted down in the second scrap, and been handed to its rabble by the Baghdad pretend régime in the hope of fighting off the IS mob: they’d run, so the IS would have owned it, then realised it was crap, and ditched it . . . The people who Merc fought with now were beggars and did not choose; they’d have captured it on a rare success against their enemy, and it was again in service – and was again jammed. He cared for his own weapon with meticulous attention and he pleaded, or shouted, that maintenance was crucial, and they smiled, shrugged. It was Merc who had to clear jams, and would have to now. The machine-gun was the lynchpin of the defence position on the top of Hill 425. Without it the time would come for pulling the pins on the grenades that hung on the webbing close to their heads and throats and vital bits. He had to do it. No one else would.

  Merc was shouting that he had to be covered, and the weapon protected. He heard Cinar, taunting them beyond the wire. The worst thing that could happen to an IS guy, whether he was local or from Chechnya or from Canning Town, was to stop a bullet fired by a woman from the Kurdish force; he’d get no welcome from the Paradise virgins, so they gave the women a hard time if they captured them, as hard as was imaginable. He heard her voice and saw her face, her chin juttin
g, eyes blazing, and the tunic of camouflage colours bulged on her chest. She wore no helmet, no vest. Merc had limited command of the Kurmanji dialect she used, but it was foul and would have whipped up their fury as they came into the wire, and might have made them better targets as she sapped their self-discipline. Merc abandoned his place at the parapet and went to the machine-gun.

  He elbowed the two young soldiers aside, and grabbed the weapon. Merc knew that the great powers talked big at conferences on the issue of supply – but the hardware did not arrive. No anti-tank, no field rockets, no short-range missiles, and few night-vision binoculars or personnel mines. His head would have made a target but he needed the height. The thing would not shift, and the volume of firing told him that the attack was edging closer and that – Murphy’s Law – one of the grenades being lobbed towards them was going to come into the trench. The machine-gun was their prime weapon, and the attackers must have realised that it was screwed. The boys and the girls who fought with him – up on the parapet, blasting and frightened – would have known that the big gun, the DShK, was silenced.

  A machine-gun’s bullet took off an arm and a leg or pushed the bowels out through an exit wound by a broken spine, or decapitated a man; it lifted the morale of the defenders and dipped the confidence of attackers.

  The obvious option now was to get out his short-barrel rifle, the Kalashnikov assault job. He looked after it, it was important to him, it was the one he held on the ride down Route Irish, and on convoy duty in Afghan. He raised it like a club, and brought it down like he was a demolition man on the bar above the bullet belt. He swung again, and hit harder, gasping from the effort, and from frustration. The bar swung clear. He had his hands on the cocking lever, and dragged it back, and the cartridge flew clear. He replaced the belt, and clamped down the bar. A big guy – black trousers, black tunic, black scarf wrapped tight around his head, and a thick ginger beard – was pulling clear of the last of the wire coils, a grenade in his hands. The DShK was wrested from Merc’s fists, and was fired. The fighter was cut in two: might have come from Mogadishu or Morocco or from an inner Manchester housing estate; the beard colouring might have been from a bottle or might have matched his mother’s hair. The body fell apart, there was a fraction of silence and then the grenade exploded in his hand and his blood and body parts sprayed over them.

  What did Merc know? Knew that an AK was a piece of genius engineering. It fired. He had clubbed with it, and it still fired. A ragged green flag still flew from a pole rooted into the ground beside the bunker entrance.

  Merc saw Cinar. She stood on an upturned orange box and no longer fired aimed shots but had her Kalashnikov level with her hips. She blasted and screamed obscenities at the attackers, and some must have heard her and identified her. Merc was behind her and could not have said how the bullets missed her. She had good shoulders, and decent hips, and a head that was well proportioned. Her hair had come loose from its fastening, and flapped, ebony-black, and she snarled at them. He hit her, whacking his open palm against her butt, feeling the flesh and the shape of the bone and the tight curve, and belted her again.

  Merc yelled, ‘Not much good if you’re dead . . . If you want to quit, go, go and roll bandages. If you want to fight then keep your fucking head down . . . see if I care.’

  Reinforcements were spilling out of two more pick-ups and coming up the hill. His little army were all firing, every weapon on the hill, and there was the thud of the big machine-gun, but more were coming up towards the wire . . . Cinar’s lip was bleeding from where she had chewed on it, and the blood looked good on her jaw, and she was aiming and was trying to kill . . . They all were, had to be, or they would lose and if they lost they were dead.

  The sand from a punctured bag blew into Merc’s face and briefly blinded him. He wiped his eyes and went on shooting, suppressive fire – 7.62 ball going from the barrel at a velocity of 2400 feet per second, and 1000 feet effective killing range, and the targets were close enough, 150 feet, to see them, recognise them, and hurt them . . . He never considered the ‘sensible’ option to withdraw. He did not think they would survive the dusk. The low sun was in their eyes. Another of them went down and no one could abandon the parapet to comfort the flailing shadow of a man, or stifle his screaming.

  With the skills, instincts and purpose of a ferret seeking its prey in a labyrinthine rabbit warren, the Maid hunted him down.

  She would not have considered putting down her phone, getting the screen save picture of the parrot – a Rainbow Lory from Indonesia that was a foot tall and had cost her £400 – and announcing she had failed to find him, that Gideon Francis Hawkins was out of her reach. The Middle East sections in VBX claimed no record of him; the Station Officer based in Erbil was home on leave and said to be wilderness-hiking; the Ministry of Defence denied knowledge of him; and the private military contractor who nominally employed him said they had lost touch . . . Follow the money. Close to Erbil was a front line more than a hundred miles long, and scattered along it were the riff-raff of volunteers, wannabe heroes and cordite addicts. Somewhere there would be a bunk bed with a table beside it, and on the table would be a Will and Testament in a grubby sealed envelope. The Americans would have done it on some damn great search engine. By following the money, the Maid came upon a bank in rural Buckinghamshire and roused a junior manager from the late afternoon job of closing shop. A call to head office; a suggestion that compliance was advisable: a PO Box address in Erbil, the Kurdish-controlled sector of northern Iraq, and a barracks where the envelope would be. The search was narrowed further by a conversation with the Adjutant’s office in the Hereford camp, and a call-sign given for personnel who would know of him in that small and clannish society of foreign fighters.

  She had spoken to Brad, faraway and faint. He had passed her to Rob, his soul mate. The Maid had stressed urgency, and already had an executive jet fuelled, with a flight plan filed, on the apron of the RAF’s Akrotiri base. She had said what she wanted, not for discussion but as an instruction. Had put down the phone, had revelled in the clout her status gave her, and had crowed across the little room towards Daff and clenched a fist.

  ‘Amazing, just like the old days and . . .’

  A dry grin. ‘The “good” old days.’

  ‘Taken as read. We’ll have him on board by the day’s end. Piece of cake . . . sitting around in some distant corner, with his feet up – we’ll be making his day.’

  The Maid went to brew a pot of tea, and Daff’s face lit up and she scribbled on her pad. Coming nicely together, and soon Boot would be back in the building, in time for the meeting on an upper floor, and the authorisation: a chuckle, ‘never in doubt’.

  She had a number. Had an address.

  A town she had not heard of. Daff pushed it up on her screen, and her interest went rampant. Her lip curled and her tongue clucked, and she zeroed in on the map. They were a trio, almost brothers, and with a shared heritage and a smidgeon of experience. Probably enough, because innocence might be of more value than a calculation of danger. She had two of them in place – Martin and Toomas – and now went after the third. She dialled.

  A man’s voice answered, in what she assumed was the Estonian language that she did not speak, and the tone was stressed, impatient and irritated. In English, she purred a greeting.

  Kristjan listened as an offer was made to him.

  The young woman worked round him, and had already filled two bin bags and was loading a third. He stood in the centre of the room, his phone at his ear and his back to the bedroom door. She had cleared the bed of the linen she’d brought to his apartment four months before, and the wardrobe doors were open and the rail and most of the shelves were bare. Now her attention was on the photographs she was taking with her, and the personal items she had said would make the two rooms more ‘lived in’ and she had ripped the poster of a summer view of the research town of Sillamae – Stalinist, glorious, the uranium centre – off the plaster, exposing the damp patch an
d the mould. There was the blast of a horn from the street below. The phone call came with an offer of work. Important for him. He had tried to keep her, but she cost too much. Her clothes purchases went far beyond what she earned waitressing and what he made from shelf stacking in the supermarket on the main road towards Tallinn. His debit card was registering ‘refusal’ at the ATMs, and he thought she’d found a new guy to milk, and he was late with the rent. It had been good for a couple of months and then the bickering had set in, then the shouting; he’d regret her going if only because, at his age, it was not easy to find a woman with blonde hair, natural, and a good waist, and . . . Could he speak? He could. Told what was wanted, what the remuneration would be. How did the caller know of him? How did a company based in São Paolo, hear of him? Would he be alone and. . .? With his friends, with a team leader of quality, and only for a few days, not more than a week – and very careful organisation.

  He agreed. Then realised that he had not seen her leave. He heard the block’s outer doors creaking and closing, then a car’s boot being slammed, then the engine starting up and the car pulling away. He went to the window, saw it turn on to the main road – and was alone. He was forty-three, and had – until the phone had rung – little to consider other than a partner walking out on him, taking most of the bed linen, half of the little that had been in the fridge, and all of the drink. He could see the ramparts of the twin castles, the one on the Estonian side and the one across the river on Russian territory, and he could see the far end of the bridge that spanned the Narva. His grandfather had been taken across an earlier bridge on the same site: would have been on the floor of a closed van, manacled and blindfolded and probably semi-conscious from the beatings. The other two who had come ashore with his grandfather would by then have been dead, but this prisoner had been driven to Leningrad, and then had disappeared. An unmarked grave, of course, after they had finished with him in a basement, and hosed down the floor; might have been a bullet that had sent him on his way, or might have been the scale of the injuries . . . He hated them . . . Because of his hatred, he had gone with Martin and Toomas to Kaliningrad. It would be good to be with them again, and to have money rattling in his pocket, and to remember what had been done to his grandfather.