A Damned Serious Business

by Gerald Seymour

  Merc went into the water. And sank.

  The board slid away from under him and dipped and swivelled and tossed him off and he had to grope for it, holding his breath. He clung to its edge, and the folded bike had gone. He surfaced and shook and coughed and chucked up river water. The flow was hard against him and tugged at the board. Not possible for Daff to shine a torch for him, help him. He heard a sharp choke in her throat.

  He hissed, ‘No bike. Too heavy. We were wrong on the buoyancy. Going for it again.’

  Instead of cycling he would have to run. Instead of finding a loggers’ track and fixing a compass route and going through the forest on wheels towards the E-20, he would have to jog and maintain his speed. The rucksack was on his back, and the laptop shell that had been retrieved from the steel-sided case was wrapped in decent plastic and knotted at the neck, and another bag held his clothing. Murphy’s Law, they called it. Good guys for gallows humour, Rob and Brad, said something always went wrong despite Murphy’s best laid plans. He could hear, far away, the impact of the detonations and there were screams as rockets soared, and over the trees there were moments when the base of the clouds was lit up.

  Nothing about ‘good luck’ or ‘safe back’ from her. Not a murmur of ‘hope it all goes well – and the bloody thing works’ from Daff. His ‘Going for it again’ were his last words to her. She was up to her knees in the water and had hold of the end of the board and seemed to steady it, and he’d manoeuvred himself until he was flat along it, and his wetsuit seemed to slither on its surface, and she gave the thing more than a nudge, propelled him out and into the start of the flow. He was gone, and to Merc she was history . . . He seemed for a moment to see the girl on the floor of the Emergency Reception area and the blood and the gleam, only a moment – and paddled with his hands.

  He went further out from the bank. Had the nightmare moment. Darkness behind him and darkness ahead of him, and the force of the current pushing against the board and no light to guide him, only a dulled memory of what the far side had looked like, in daylight, where the deer had stood and the heron fished. Felt a great weight on his shoulders, swung hard with each outstretched hand to get leverage in the water, and spray bounced into his face and eyes. The nightmare was that he would paddle and push himself through pain barriers and seem to get across and would beach and would then see the lights of a car and hear a speeding engine through the bank’s scrub bushes and know that he was on the same side as he had started from. Perhaps, then, Merc would yell, but no one would have heard him. A few more of the fireworks exploded upstream, and that – he realised – gave him the clue required, told him the direction to take. The flow tugged him and the wind lifted wavelets across him, and the rain pattered on him, and he rocked and swayed and twice he thought he had lost his grip and that the board would slide away from under him. Much of the time the board was an inch under water, but the wetsuit, filled with air and bulging, kept him afloat. Easier options? Could have sat in the car with three guys that Daff rated as ‘crap’ and be subject to incompetence or treachery when they went through the most difficult of the checks – the block at the end of the bridge. Could have been entering the Control Zone and having a live device on the floor between his feet, and not speaking a word of Russian, and having bogus documents, and not being able to answer a question. No ‘easier options’ existed, his opinion – and Daff’s and Boot’s. Merc felt the ache in his shoulders from the paddling. He no longer heard the firework barrage but sensed a soft singing sound and a riffling and could not place it and thought he was hemmed in with obstructions at the sides . . . Then was pitched off the board, and went into the water, and scrabbled frantically to try to keep himself afloat and realised he thrashed at mud. He crawled forward. The singing had been the wind catching the tips of the reeds and blowing them back. He had gone into a gap through the reeds and was ashore. He lay on the mud – thought it the place familiar to the deer and the heron.

  The force of the wind was around him and the rain beat on his face and on the wetsuit. He gave himself the luxury of a short rest and the chance to draw air deep down inside him. He was on the far side and beyond help, reliant on himself, no back-up in place, and not many cared enough to lose sleep when they had a Gun for Hire over a far frontier . . . He thought that Daff, if she had any sense, would go back to the apartment in Narva and rustle up hot water from the shower and stand under it, and hold a drink in her hand, and maybe call Boot.

  ‘How did it go, Daff?’

  ‘Don’t really know, Boot, but he was all right leaving me.’

  Merc stripped out of the wetsuit, untied the neck of the bag in the rucksack and the clothes inside were dry. He dressed fast. Then he opened the second sack and let his fingers linger on the laptop shell: no water had penetrated. He listened, heard only the wind and the rustle of the trees and the choral sounds of the reeds. Looked back once and saw only darkness. Had his boots laced tight. He slid the board into the undergrowth, and the wetsuit in the clothes bag after it, then covered both with pine cones and needles and the flotsam that the river had deposited after the last season’s flooding. Last, he ripped a handkerchief in half and tied it to a branch. It would be his marker.

  He did a compass reckoning, then loped away. An owl called at him. Might have shouted back, ‘Hold the Line, the Pioneers’ but did not. Went into the night, put the river behind him.

  Chapter 8

  If he had not had an arm across his face, Merc’s cheeks would have been lacerated.

  Branches whipped him. He had careered into a tree’s trunk, and had tripped on a fallen log, sprawling full length. The faint scent of wood-smoke guided him. His balaclava, of thick black cotton, had first been ripped, the threads hanging loose, then it had been torn off him. He kept going, had realised that the forest of close-set pines was not crossed with tracks, and had found the saplings growing under the canopy could flick with deadly force. Was it better to use a torch or to blunder against the trees and the scrub? His decision was that the noise he made could have been from a small bear or a deer.

  He would get back, would round up Rob and Brad, have done his terse greeting at the hospital, placing another bouquet without ceremony on the bedside table, then been with the guys. He’d tell them about what a shit place it was, joshed with them that they’d not have lasted there ten minutes, called in on the satphone and demanded a heli-ride out – and would have won guffaws of laughter. Merc was sorry that they were not with him: only those two guys, not others. Neither spoke a word of Russian . . . he knew that because some days the big radios berthed in the command bunker were hooked on to the wavebands the Russian military used, when their special forces called in coordinates for the air force to start bombing. He’d tell Rob and Brad about the forest, the ditches, the fallen trees, about how his heart had damn near stopped when a creature had bullocked away from him: it would have been a wild pig. And there might have been wolves, a small pack, and possibly a lynx. If Merc had said to Rob and Brad that he was going through a forest, in total darkness, a storm blowing in the trees, just a compass to guide him, then it was certain one of them would have told a story about a lynx and how it hunted, sitting on a branch and jumping down on to the shoulders of its prey, a deer or a small pig. They would have liked to tell a story and try to frighten him. Not much did. Truth was that he was unnerved by the forest and its sounds, the crack of branches above him, and the wind’s whistle. There could have been patrols in the forest, a track that a vehicle could negotiate and where the goons would cut the engine and listen, or they could have been on foot. Merc did not know.

  He had all the hours of the night, would be at the lay-by before first light. He edged between trees, and he was wet and did not go fast enough to warm his body and had long miles yet to cover. The burning wood scent was his first target, as good as a light in the darkness, and guiding him.

  A big bird clattered clear of his approach – would have been an owl. A furious wing-beat and the feathers risking d
amage against the branches. Merc looked up and saw nothing, only heard the effort to get away from an intruder, and was careless, and fell. Crawled and tried to find a branch to cling to, to get upright, and did not find one. He crawled farther, and started to slip lower. He was pressing down with his hands, attempting to lever himself up, and the mud was loose and sliding between his fingers. He had no purchase; the bog had closed over his knees, engulfing his boots. Rare for Merc to get even close to panic. He flailed with his arms to find something to hang on to. He heaved to raise his knees and draw up his boots from the saturated mud of the bog hole and he arched his back to make a greater resistance to the pit that seemed in that moment – as the degree of panic spread – to have limitless depth.

  Anyone would have felt the fear. Even Rob and Brad who had been through the rigours of regiment selection, and even Cinar. And his nan as she fed the sparrows in the backyard, and the bank manager who would go home in the evenings and tell his wife about this strange ‘little beggar’ with a nest egg maturing and a tan to die for, but with fearsome scars. Anyone would have felt fear, and the verge of uncontrolled terror . . . Might be where it all ended.

  A forest that nobody came to. A victim that could not be declared missing. A body slid under, down into a sinkhole. A failed mission, and a bomb lost. No service held. Not in the big church in the Kennington Lane, St Peter’s, where Daff said they did quality recitals at lunch-times, and not in the Cathedral of St Joseph that was out on the road to Erbil’s airport. She would not know, nor Boot, and not his nan. After a year or two, the bank manager would consult with seniors as to what to do with a dormant account, and a room would be cleared and back issues of AutoTrader and Exchange and Mart would be binned.

  ‘A good guy, but distant . . . Useful at what he did, selling his trade of fighting, and earning what he was paid . . . never saw under his skin, kept himself private . . . nervous of friendship, I reckon, and frightened of women . . . what he always needed and never had, a good woman . . . must have made enough money to have quit but that sort never do, quit . . . couldn’t let go, one contract too many.’

  Merc had a sunken root in his hand and tugged on it, dragged himself, inch by inch, from the hole, and came clear. He heard the mud give a belch, a gurgle as it released him.

  The smell of the burning wood seemed stronger. Merc headed for it.

  The girl giggled, told Martin his accent was ‘funny’ and his Russian old-fashioned, what a schoolteacher spoke, and his hand was on her thigh and she had not shifted it.

  Across the table was Toomas, drinking. And over Toomas’s shoulder was Kristjan’s back and Martin could see the roulette table. He did not know what stakes Kristjan played for, how much he had won – a snort of derision – and how much he had lost. Nor did he know how many vodka shots Toomas had downed, and how many chasers of bottled Baltika. Nor did he know how much longer the girl would sit close to him and let his hand stay on her leg before the heavy guys by the door came over and suggested that he might care to pay up or get the fuck out. She laughed at the way he spoke, and then her make-up seemed to crack in lines away from her mouth. Kristjan turned and he caught his eye. He supposed, because he drove, that they looked to him as their boss, would do what he said. Precious few people in Haapsalu did. He yawned, and the girl bored him and he wasn’t going to have her that night in the back of the car, while the rain pelted down and the wind blew hard. He needed the money from the Brazilian security firm, needed it when he returned to the coast. Lights strobed and music blared, and there were few drinkers and few gamblers in the casino on the road out of Ivangorod. They should have eaten. Asked to describe himself he had told the girl that he was a travelling salesman, trading in vacuum cleaners. If asked to describe himself to himself he would have used one of the many Russian slang words for ‘arsehole’.

  He should not have stayed in Haapsalu. Martin, back from the Kaliningrad venture, was shunned by respectable company. It was a society that dripped a self-satisfied comfort that came from the tourist season. Shunned because of his grandfather. Old people had known him, and younger people had been told the stories. His grandfather had left an under-age girl pregnant, had gone on a madcap adventure. The girl had been shipped to Russia. Old people in Haapsalu did not regard his grandfather as a hero, a freedom fighter against Soviet post-war occupation. The ‘resistance’ in the countryside had been known as the Forest Brothers, but it was claimed – with new certainty – that many of then were criminals, thieves and extortionists, sadistic lovers of violence and lawlessness. Said that if a bus with Soviet troops on board was blown up by explosives then the driver would have been Estonian and innocent. As Martin understood it, most people in the town had co-existed alongside the Soviets. There was a generation of kids who had Russian fathers, then another generation with German fathers, and then another – like strata in a rock face – who had Russians bedding their mothers . . . all accepted, understood. Their men had gone to camps, fascist or communist, and the women found comfort in the arms of the occupiers, and fed well on it. Martin’s grandfather had been disowned. Martin had been marked out at school. His mother was the bastard child of a terrorist. He had gone on the mission for the Poles and thought he had done something to avenge the cruelty visited on her, and it had been a dream. He had come back to the seaside town and had lived there as a stranger. Should not have stayed and did not know how to leave.

  Toomas was waving to the waiter, gesticulating with another fifty-euro note from the diminishing wad in his hip pocket. Kristjan had heaved back his chair and was starting towards the grilled hatch where tokens were bought for cash. Martin’s hand came off the girl’s thigh. He stood.

  He jerked the note out of Toomas’s hand and shoved it in a pocket. He dragged on Kristjan’s collar. He said they were to stay close, make a wedge, and the guys on the door hesitated, and they were through. Martin could have screwed the girl and Toomas could have had another drink, and Kristjan could have won big time on the spinning wheel – and pigs might fly.

  They crossed the car-park and rain spattered on them. Martin said, ‘I just called myself an arsehole, and nobody disagreed . . . We hate these people, so let’s go hurt them.’

  Had he had a good day? He had, the Major told his wife. Had she had a good day?

  And she had. He kissed her cheek, was led through to the kitchen.

  The dish was knish, a favourite from Minsk, and made by Jews there. Mashed potato covered in dough and baked, and was quick and could easily be heated again for him when he was late home. Both liked Jewish cooking. Close to midnight and the block was quiet. It was a building where many of the more junior officers of the police and militia and FSB lived. Teenagers were kept in check and it had a faded respectability, and was what the Major and Julia could afford. She poured him a beer. Told him of new funding for her weekly clinic in the hospital for dealing with teenage disease, and the money came from a ‘businessman’ and he snorted derision when she named him – called him mafiya – and she said the devil in hell could make cash available and she’d take it, and there was a child who’d had meningitis B symptoms and was improving, and she had chaired a meeting of her speciality subject, dermatology. Yes, a busy day. And his? A shrug.

  ‘You achieved something? Of course you did, always something. What?’

  Old habits died hard. The radio was always on when he confided in her, the volume high, or the television, or they would be in open parkland, or in the centre of the Mikhailovsky Garden, or – best – on a punt together, on a lake near Minsk. A game show played raucously around them.

  He told her of an offer, named the colonel. ‘A villa would be available for us in Sochi, by the sea and close to a beach, a week in the school holiday period, for next Easter.’

  ‘You would never take anything that is “free”.’ She grimaced, mock resignation at the chance of a vacation week gone begging.

  ‘The price was interesting. I turned it down, of course.’

  ‘What did they w
ant from you?’ She took his empty plate, scraped out the bowl in which she had cooked, gave it back to him.

  ‘They required the freeing of a troubled girl. Troubled because she is confused, also troubled because she is thought to have a talent in music but prefers to run alongside the dissidents, believes she has a place with them. I can charge her with “conspiracy” with “association” . . . It is my job to confuse them, and to defend the law. She has a brother.’

  ‘Who has influence? Who has a roof?’

  ‘The brother is a cyber criminal. They say, if there is another war, a big war and not a surrogate clash, that the front line will be defended by geeks, the children with the religion of the computer. He is a criminal and on the permanent payroll of the crime chief of the Kupchino clan. He must be important because a colonel comes and smears soft soap on me and asks, as a favour, for the release of this girl in order that her brother is not distracted from important work. They flit, the best of the hackers, between two masters: the clan, and the colonel who brings with him protection and also a shopping list. An important list for it to be necessary to massage the discomfort of this boy.’