A Damned Serious Business

by Gerald Seymour

  The Major lectured his Operations Group. He had long ago succeeded in overwhelming any sense of mistrust among FSB officers in St Petersburg after his transfer from what they would have regarded as the primitive world of Belarus. Had done it with professionalism and with rigorous honesty, but he did not stray into areas that would provide conflict with the senior men who provided the well-rewarded roofs for the gangs.

  He had the photograph of her taken in the police station, and others from surveillance teams, and could justify the commitment of manpower and logistics on the grounds that – sure as snow each winter and the freezing of the Neva – she would lead them to more important players, above the level of deluded kids. He had called his wife, told her not to expect him for the family dinner they valued each evening, had arranged for a part of the cell block to be freed up. He called her by her given name when he talked of her to his subordinates. He made no mention of her brother, or who employed him, or who provided the roof, the krysha, for that GangMaster and whose immunity guarantor was on the floor above the briefing room where the Major did his presentation. He used the given name because he knew that the juniors he would send out into the night responded better when they were more easily able to identify with a target. He stressed that Yekaterina – thin, wan, pale-faced, a stubbornness evident in her flashing eyes, hair askew – was not an important adversary in herself, but was like a pollen-gathering bee who would lead them to the queen. The young men and women who would make the arrests were patriotic, detested their targets, and worshipped the great man

  on the TV each evening who gave them pride in their Motherland, who was to blame for nothing, who was surrounded by enemies, who understood the value of their work.

  ‘It will be a useful evening – and important dissidents and those who flout the laws of our society will be taken into custody.’

  The principal photograph stayed on the screen.

  She might have been a pretty girl, but made no effort. They always liked to have new girls in their groups, fodder for the appetite of the old men who led them. He was well known in the Big House for the diligence with which he hunted down protesters, anarchy-makers. She would be followed that evening and he felt sure that her tradecraft in searching out tails would be inferior to that of most of those she consorted with. A pretty girl, a silly girl and a useful girl and, the Major thought, an interesting girl.

  His bag was packed, courtesy of the Maid, and contained clothing suitable for the extreme north. His wife had been telephoned at her work, and told he’d be away for a few days; he’d text her from the airport. Daff was fussing with her own kit, waterproof trousers and a heavy-duty anorak, and pepper sprays along with flash-and-bang grenades – banned from the upper floors, but drawn from a basement store. The Maid had turned to paperwork, what Boot needed and what Daff would carry, and the title under which they would travel. Copenhagen. A flicker of the Maid’s eyebrows, like an alarm clock squawking, enough to tell Boot to be off and into the territory of the Big Boss.

  Daff followed him, lugging both their bags. They took the elevator.

  He had not needed a last look at his poster cartoon of the Duke. Had it clear in his mind. He had adjusted himself to a timetable of affairs, where he would be, and what stage his operation would have reached, and it ran alongside the schedule of Waterloo, the battle. Oddly comforting. He knew so little, and his intelligence capability was limited, and how it would be when confrontation occurred was beyond his comprehension. He could put his assets on the ground and hope – or pray. As it would have been for the Duke on that equivalent day. No location for that great heaving, shuffling groaning force that was his enemy, hidden from him and no agent in place to speed detail to him by a fast chain of thoroughbred horses. In the darkness . . . as Boot was.

  In his hand were three pages, large print. The Big Boss disliked flicking electronically through reports, wanted paper. Daff was held at the outer door, would stay in the corridor. He was admitted to the inner office. Boot did not sit. He was launching that evening. It was Copenhagen, a good title and accepted, and the briefing notes – easy to absorb – were on the desk. The complaint, lodged formally by Plimsoll, was acknowledged, dismissed, chuckled over without humour, then the tie was loosened at the collar and the hands came together as if in prayer and the shirt-sleeved elbows rested on the desk.

  ‘I’m backing you, Boot – I hope I should be.’

  ‘Could not have done otherwise. It’s to your credit.’

  ‘A good plan and all in place?’

  ‘Pretty solid.’

  ‘And your man, a heap of trust given to him, Boot. Worth it?’

  ‘First class. Tell you one factor I particularly enjoyed. He does not cherry-pick. No question of it. Does not labour a point of justification. We want it done, good enough for him. I’m very confident. You know that Burke quote? Of course you do. People sleep safely in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us. I take it as having the same weight as a bible tract.’

  ‘?“Rough men” visiting, a solid justification for what you propose. God speed, friend.’

  Boot left the presence. He felt weak, as if he might stumble, but cleared the door.

  He breathed deeply when he got back to his office, watched curiously by Daff. Was he all right? Yes, he was fine.

  ‘Actually, very fine. Now, let’s hit the beast.’

  The boys gathered. Regarded themselves as ‘boys’, and disregarded their ages.

  They came in to the border town of Narva in the late afternoon. In their mid-forties now, it would be the sort of reunion where time was reckoned to have stood still, and the passing of the years ignored. ‘How are things?’ ‘Things are good – excellent – things are going well.’ They’d lie, and badly. What tied them together was their grandfathers, a street on the coast and the betrayal of trust, and of the mission that had sent the three of them across a defended frontier into the Russian territory of Kaliningrad. Since then life had not been good, and it showed.

  Rumour and what purported to be intelligence had swirled but stayed unproven. The President had denounced the allegations as ‘rubbish’. The mayor of Kaliningrad oblast had stated the claims were a ‘dangerous joke’. The allegations and the dangerous joke said Russia had moved tactical nuclear weapons into the enclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania, the home of the Baltic fleet. There was supposed to be an understanding that short-range missiles with nuclear warheads would not be deployed there. The Pentagon said they had. The Poles, in the front line, wanted to know where they were, and sent three men, merchant seamen as the cover, put inside the enclave from a drifting fishing boat with ‘mechanical problems’ and landed on the sand spit running south towards Polish territory. The chosen trio were expendable, deniable and cheap, and the year was 2002. They had remained on the books of the Polish Service, not assigned again, until a message – frantic because of a short-scale window of time – from that pretty girl in London: the one that all who met her wanted to bed. Three names. She’d seemed grateful.

  Toomas travelled to Narva by motorcycle, through sleet storms carried by gales.

  Long years before, they had gone into the Russian city, reached the base where the fleet was moored, and had trekked around it. Had looked like three guys with hangovers meandering in search of the fresh air that might swill the alcohol out of them. Had gone inland, had quartered the small territory and looked for road-blocks or areas that were surrounded by new barbed wire, had gone to the gates of a barracks towards the Lithuanian border, had pleaded they were lost and needed directions and had assumed that any camp where nuclear battlefield missiles were stored would have increased security, but had not found it.

  Martin had used the train, borrowed the fare from a neighbour. He had promised, mother’s life and all that crap, that he’d an opportunity to earn and would repay within two weeks.

  They had started well in Kaliningrad. Had stayed inside the limits of the trad
ecraft taught them – had been waiting for a ship that was due to dock in ten days. The ship would be under the Finnish flag; they had its name and documentation. Toomas had drunk vodka and had a fight. Martin had fancied the ‘fiancée’ of a mobster, doing well from shipping heroin, transiting through Russia. Knives had been shown them and they had run into the night, run until they could barely breathe and no longer heard the patter of following feet. Kristjan had lost most of the subsistence cash given them, passed over the cash counter in the casino on Prospekt Mira, close to the Cosmonaut monument. They had finished badly. They had come out across the land border and into Polish territory, had run through the woods, and used bolt cutters on the fence and would have been clear by the time that tumbler wires identified their breakout’s location and militia came with dogs and flares and helicopters. The flight, and the pursuit, added to the veracity of their report: prepared to take risks, go the extra kilometre. They had not located launch pads. Had not identified the heavy transport required to shift the missiles. Were able to recount the conversations with a Russian soldier, tipsy and indiscreet, who was almost certain he had seen them. Repeated gossip heard in a bar patronised by smuggling gangs, of the nights when their cargo was delayed because of military movements that broke the usual patterns and were believed to be the shipment of ‘big hardware’. Had overheard, in a casino, an officer telling a naval colleague that he would be going home to Irkutsk as soon as ‘my little babies, little but with the big bite, are safely tucked away in their new homes’. They had been told they had done well, had been thanked, had been paid, had not been given other work. Had stayed together, close, for the first years. Jobbing employment in Gdansk, then in Hamburg, and loitering in the old Cold War haunts where the officers of the various Services were supposed to come, like pimps hunting out girls, then had returned to Estonia.

  Kristjan had left his quiet, empty apartment, had turned his back on a landlord demanding back rent, had said over his shoulder that he would settle in full by the end of the following week, and had pushed open the door of the café where they would meet.

  They went slowly, held up in traffic, victims of the homeward journey of thousands of workers. Boot had gone. They had stopped outside a tube station. He had stepped out quickly from the front passenger seat, had touched the driver’s arm with familiarity, and thanked him, then Daff had opened the boot and given him his bag. He had disappeared into the swirl entering the station’s forecourt, not a backward glance, not a farewell, no encouragement, not even a shrug and a mutter of ‘good luck, young man’. Merc appreciated the manner of his going.

  ‘Will I see him there, before the jump off?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so. You’ll see him when you’re back.’

  Daff stayed quiet, but flipped through sheets of paper, and sometimes let her fingers fall on the back of Merc’s hand, a kind of intimacy, and she used a small torch to focus on a piece of text or a detail in an aerial photograph. Merc liked the way of Boot’s going. He’d have despised any ‘band of brothers’ speech, and had never imitated his father’s call when they had fought to survive in the Forward Operating Base. Had few words at the best of times, and no words when they were not called for. He sat in near silence. He had learned its virtue, from when he was small. He had come in a taxi with his mother to his grandmother’s home. His mother had been ‘unwell’, he had been told, and the house had been sold after his father’s death. All his clothes and what possessions a three-year-old owned were in a small suitcase. The handover had been on the pavement, a fast hug and a fast kiss and tears, and the taxi had pulled away, and a moment later the front door had closed behind him. Cared for, yes. Loved, not as he’d noticed. He had heard, three or four years later, his mother referred to as ‘a silly cow’, and he had never seen her again, nor had sought her out. He had been good at silence as a child.

  They went past the civil section of the airfield and on to the military wing. No security checks for them. Daff led the way through an empty terminal on to the tarmac, carrying her bag and the steel box. He had what she had bought him. The same cockpit crew waited on them. A thin-lipped smile from the senior pilot, nothing more. They settled in their seats, either side of the aisle, and Merc noted that the cabin crew stewards were not on board. They fastened their belts, and the cockpit door was closed and the lights dimmed and the engines went to power, and they taxied.

  She rapped her fist gently on the box, and said, ‘As well they don’t know what’s in here, or they’d have a collective seizure. Just for your interest, I asked Boot whether the plan we have in place would win. His answer, “It doesn’t deserve to, but it might, might just win.” That’s where we are. Oh, and yes, I sent the flowers.’

  A comment was not required of him, so he didn’t give one. Boot was hardly going to use the F for ‘fail’ word. He would not disagree that the cockpit crew would be wary of flying with a live explosive device in the cabin, one that would detonate half an hour after an integral switch was thrown. There would be a Makarov PM 9mm in there, two full magazines and another twenty rounds, and an effective range of fifty metres.

  He thought she looked at him often enough, attempting to evaluate him, and had probably failed to in the Green Zone and every other place they’d met. Two and three-quarter hours was the flight time. Merc closed his eyes and edged further down in the seat, tilted it back, prepared to sleep.

  Chapter 6

  They taxied after a hard landing. The impact woke him.

  He looked across the aisle and saw Daff filing her nails. Bright, high lights showed a line of parked A10s, the tank busters that always raised a cheer from ground people when they flew over the front line west of Erbil then darted down to hit targets. After them were Typhoons – Merc could see the Luftwaffe symbol on the tails – and then there was a building that looked deserted. Merc did little history, less politics. Abruptly his face set and his lips might have thinned. A Gun for Hire had no requirement of small sophistications: why were the aircraft here? He was poor on exit strategy, did not know when the ‘sometime’ would rear up and be impossible to side-step. The planes they passed as they taxied to a pair of parked cars had no significance for his mission, only told him he was near to a front line, close but not at it. The evening played out with a curious choreography.

  He did not help her. She went first with her own bag and the steel-sided case. The senior pilot had the cockpit door open and worked the gear that put down the steps. Merc followed her, felt good, rested. The pilot looked hard at him, and Merc fancied that he did not take happily to performing chauffeur work. Merc did not thank him, or smile appreciation for the smooth flight over the western Baltic and a bit of Estonian airspace before the descent on to the Amari strip. Nor did the pilot offer to help Daff, would have known the gesture would be declined. The pilot probably wondered about the importance of a slightly built guy, around thirty years old, dressed first in filthy fatigues and now in High Street casuals, no swagger about him, lacking the presence of a decorated ‘war hero’, and just a couple of vehicles as the welcoming party. Could wonder until it hurt his head, contemplate it all the way home to Northolt. Merc was certain that if he came home, with a flute of champagne in his hand, or with the smell of failure on him, or on a CASEVAC with a nurse holding a drip over a wound, or in a bag in cargo, he would not be travelling on an executive jet. Wherever home was . . . Before he’d slept, Daff had talked him through the device inside the steel-cased box.

  A chill wind cut him at the top of the steps. He assumed that the line of tank busters and the wing of fast jets were not there as a circus turn. Nor was it part of a music hall act for him to go across an international frontier, carrying a device – detonator inserted – with a simple arming trigger. Built into the laptop was a sufficient weight of explosive, high-quality, military, Russian manufactured and liberated in Syria, to do more than cosmetic damage. That was restricted knowledge. A car door opened. A man climbed out, then reached back inside to stub out his cigarette, t
hen walked forward. They were off the steps, walking towards him, but Daff slowed and again she was close to him, lips against his ear: the locals here, she told him, had as good a counter-intelligence set-up as anywhere in Europe and if they had not declared then they would have been spotted, isolated, fucked around, expelled. She had a good walk, swung her hips. He heard the grind of the steps being raised behind him, did not look back and did not wave.

  ‘Welcome to Estonia,’ the man said softly.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘A good flight.’

  ‘A delightful flight,’ Daff replied.

  No handshakes. Only basic courtesies. One of the vehicles was a BMW off-road and the other was a household car, a Toyota estate, mud-coated, a dark shade of green under the dirt and utterly forgettable. The base was quiet and night had fallen. They drove past the terminal and workshops and hangars that would, thirty years ago, have housed Soviet aircraft, their technicians, and repair yards. Merc thought Daff was tense, as if realising she was operating above her level of competence. Took it casually because where he came from – inside any Fire Force Unit and heading west from Erbil – half of the guys and half of the girls would have been raw, why they came to depend on him. He hoped that the chrysanthemums would be in a glass vase by the bed. He was passed a bottle of water, sipped it, because where he came from water was precious. Scudding sleet was whacking on to the windscreen and the wipers had difficulty clearing it. They came to a fenced compound with a hut protected by the wire, were admitted. He thought that it had worked well, and that what he had asked for was in place, and told Daff that and was rewarded with a raised eyebrow, as if his praise was precious.