A Damned Serious Business

by Gerald Seymour

  They did not know what they were looking for. An incident had been reported in the city a hundred klicks up the road, but no explanation.

  Heavy on the strap around his neck was an old AK. A grand one. The Kalashnikov assault rifle was more than eighteen years old, had been in many hands, but had been Pyotr’s all the time that he had been listed on the reserve for the militia. The date coincided with the start of increasing tension along the closed security zone between the town of Kingisepp and the Narva, the border with the NATO territory of Estonia, against which it was necessary, as the President said, to show great vigilance. This weapon was always assigned him, the younger men wanted a newer, cleaner version. Pyotr loved the rifle, treated it with as great a respect as he did his Stihl chain-saw, had fired it for real only once when he had dropped a boar, as wild as the forest it lived in, seventy kilos, seen it grazing beside the road on the way back from duty down on the Peipis Lake. So much better than shooting at targets; the foresight locked on the beast’s flank, behind the shoulder, one shot and barely a twitch. A wonderful weapon . . . He was grappling for the strap, trying to free the weapon from his collar. Pyotr was not a man who was used to acting at speed, liked time to work through the process of what confronted him. He did not have time. A vehicle came into the light, and he heard – with the blast of crude music – the shriek of tyres as it began to swerve among the drums, and heard the scream from Vladdy who stumbled backwards. He realised that there was a second car on its rear wheels, no lights, coming at the same lethal speed. The rifle was off his shoulder and he groped for the arming lever.

  Merc followed the tail. Stayed close, two hands strong on the wheel. The music serenaded him. The boys went through the first bends; he was slower. He hit a drum and was flung to the side and the Polo lost traction, was on two wheels and then lurched back.

  His leg was held, tight as a tourniquet, and he thought her fingernails would penetrate his trousers and puncture his skin. It was as if he were the only safety she knew. Her head was down and she would not have seen the next drum rush towards the near side, and then another buffeting collision and the brightness of sparks leaping, dying, and metal lifting away, and he went through.

  He could count shots, and differentiate them. Three from the pistol. He did not think them aimed. Just fired from the moving car and the bullets would have gone high and clear, and anyway the targets were crouching or falling, or ducking and weaving, and he went into the last section of the chicane. Then the burst, semi-automatic. A finger on a trigger, releasing it, then immediately after it had slipped back into position, pressuring it, and repeating. The fiercer, stronger sound of an automatic rifle . . . Knew enough about them. Might have felt that the Kalashnikov, in its various models and with refinements, had followed him for half his adult life. Had known them all over, the primitive ones and the most advanced, and all of the damn things worked well, did not jam, were consistent with high rates of killing. The noise, with the background chorus of Mercury and May, was shrill in his ear. Also, the whiplash crack of the round going overhead, and a ricochet’s whine off the tarmac or the side of a drum. She was down on the floor and had contorted herself so that most of her body was folded away in the foot space, and her head was buried, and her arms gripped his legs.

  The car ahead went through. For the last yards it was swinging and manoeuvring, as if a drunk drove it, a fairground-ride. He hit the back of the car, saw Kristjan thrown aside on the impact, and saw the pistol in his hand. And bullets hit their car, and his. Not organised shooting, not how it would have been if he had been behind one of the AKs, and not deadly as it would have been if Rob or Brad had been firing, or the big fellow who had been stopped in the wire on Hill 425 . . . But they hit and each time he felt the impact into the body of the car, and into the engine block. They kept going, and there were more shots fired from the back seat . . . Queen had died.

  They were pulling clear. The steering was wrecked, tried to lock. Merc needed his strength to wrench at the steering and keep the wheels from aiming into the barrier on the side of the bridge. They were out of the pools of light. He thought their best chance was to have created enough panic, confusion, something beyond anything experienced by the goons who’d manned the block, and hope it had destroyed clear thinking, logic, the discipline of training, and to get on down the road. More shots. More whiplash and more whines, more sparks.

  The car ahead had its lights back on. Intelligent and sensible. Full headlights, no dipping. A man in uniform in the centre of the road, daring to stand there with his AK at his shoulder, and he could not see because the brilliance blinded his vision. He fired, his shoulder sagging from the recoil each time, then he jumped sideways. Merc thought that the boys’ front passenger side had clipped him, might have been at the hip or on the upper thigh, and the man screamed, and was lifted momentarily and then fell against the barrier at the end of the bridge.

  Merc thought that with those last shots, the guy had ignored the blindness from the lights, had kept a degree of control, had fired low and straight, had probably cleared his magazine, and had done damage.

  She was good, did not howl or swear, was still, but held him. He would have known if she had been hit. Enough times in his life there had been ‘incoming’ and it had dawned, never fast, that he had not been hit. Unlikely odds that he could have sat behind the wheel, upright and exposed . . . could not see well now because the windscreen was fogged, and he needed to punch it, do it full force, to break it . . . and not taken a bullet. A brave guy, but a stupid one, had fired aimed shots, weapon at the shoulder, had used the last moments before leaping for his life, and being clipped, but had done damage. The steering was going. The engine was coughing and becoming less responsive to his stamping on the pedal . . . They were off the bridge.

  A last flurry. A volley of fire that might have been a dozen rounds or fifteen. They came over and past him. The best was saved for the end, always the way at the fairground.

  Merc had seen the militia faces as he had come through, and their performance had been poor. He reckoned they had been challenged for the first time in their lives. But nothing for Merc to take pleasure from. There was one last burst of firing, targeting the back of their car. Aim poor, height wrong, no casualties. But . . .

  The tyre went down fast. The steering was close to impossible. The engine power was sluggish, diminishing. Merc reached down, grabbed her collar and heaved her up. She was caught between the glove compartment and the edge of the seat. He yanked her clear. He told her what she should do. She was kneeling on the seat, looking through the back window, and told him that – what she could see – there was no one pursuing. She did not need to tell him that the tyre was shredding and that they were driving on the metal of the wheel. Did not need to tell him that the car was filling with foul engine fumes . . . He had thought they had come through well.

  Ahead, there were no lights to guide him and he had lost the boys after the last brief flash of their brakes. Merc needed another ten minutes from the Polo. Needed another ten minutes to carry them five miles. Needed it before the pursuit was organised. A helicopter with image intensifier, cordons and dogs. Ahead of them was the river, in flood and bone-chillingly cold.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Almost a laugh. ‘Been better.’

  The wind came at them, and rain splattered in off the Polo’s bonnet and was funnelled into the hole he had punched in the windscreen. The noise from the wheel was raucous, and more sparks flew and he struggled to keep the car moving, to keep up the speed. He pushed the pedal on to the floor, and the cold was fierce and they listened, as best they could, and did not hear sirens. Nor did he see the boys. Merc knew them well, those times that went slow.

  She said, ‘Did we do well?’

  Merc said, ‘We’ve not started.’

  They were going west, the way ahead clear. They were in the black dog hours of the night, and the trees of the forest seemed to press close to the road and funnel them forward
.

  Toomas was silent.

  Martin drove. The rain had eased off and might have stopped. Cold wind chased the clouds, and with the clearing skies would come a fast, bitter frost. He had to strain to see through the windscreen because of the fog that spurted up from the engine and was thrown back against the glass. The dials in front of him were banging at their limits and red lights winked messages. He did not know if the engine would explode, or would simply cough, choke, and expire. He was exhausted, his arms were rigid, his hands locked on the wheel, and his mind raced. If they went into the trees and the engine failed, then they must push it far and deep, must cover up the tyre tracks and take off the plates. All of that went though his mind, and he struggled to see the road and keep to it, and he might not have the strength, but Toomas would. The wind came in and he shivered and he thought their speed was slackening.

  Kristjan was nestled down on the back seat, the pistol in his hand – it would have taken pliers to take it from him – and had said nothing. He looked into the void where the rear window had been smashed by three shots; the fragments were on him and plastered against the backs of the front seats. He thought he had done well and had fired almost the whole of the magazine. Though neither Martin nor ?Toomas would say it to his face, the firing from the militia had been haphazard, chaotic, and they’d have done even better had – no fault of Kristjan – the big fucker not stood in the road and aimed straight at the engine. Much farther? He did not think so, not from the engine sounds, with smoke spilling out, and the smell of scorching. They would not say it, so he would.

  ‘I tell you it for nothing, I did good.’

  Martin answered him, quiet, distracted. ‘You were the hero of the hour.’

  ‘Is that sarcasm?’

  ‘Take it as a compliment or take it as shit – being a hero.’

  Another question, like a dam had broken. ‘Is that what we expected? That number of guns? And now, we do not just turn up at the bridge at Ivangorod, flash some passports, get waved through and ride over the bridge in a car that’s holed, a kitchen sieve. Can’t be done . . . Did we know how it would be? Who told me?’

  Martin said, not turning, ‘I did not know. The scene, a gang feud. Why a reinforced road-block a hundred kilometres down the road? I do not know. I know nothing. What does Toomas know?’

  Kristjan chimed, ‘Toomas, fuck you, man, what did you know?’

  A moment of stillness in the car, and the smoke seemed to thicken in front of Martin, and the juddering of the engine shook Kristjan and the glass crystals jumped with the motion, and Toomas was upright but did not speak.

  One hand off the wheel, Martin reached for him, shook his arm, felt the wet, let out a small oath . . . The only light to guide them was off the dashboard dials. The breathing was regular but the touch of their hands must have stirred something in Toomas’s chest, because the first froth and bubbles appeared at his mouth and blood had soaked through his clothing, and still came, oozed . . . He was their friend, and should have taught at Tartu College or at the university in Tallinn, taught at any fucking place. They had dislodged him, and his head rolled. He was going under, like the car’s engine.

  ‘Sorry, boys,’ Toomas murmured. ‘Not good, sorry. A gang feud, what you said . . . and some bright shit reckons otherwise, not just a mafiya fight . . . sorry.’

  Shouting clamoured down the corridor of the Big House.

  The building, at night, was a cemetery, quiet and the first cleaners not yet there, the offices dark and locked. The Major was at his desk and had the sergeant to help him, and the lieutenant who had come off duty at two o’clock in the Operations Room had joined him. They were enough; he could manage. He assumed that, on the floor above, the general kept a vigil in his own section, but he did not interfere and gave him free rein.

  The yelling was fierce, bitter, angry.

  He had ordered that the forensic team from scenes of crime get into the building with the firemen to escort them so he could match the seating plan to the critical item of intelligence: the centre point of the explosion. Where had the device been? In what was it carried into the room? Detail was the necessity. He had the names around the table. He had biographies of the young men. Nothing was clear to him, everything fogged, no direction obvious. The success of his career, not in ranking but in status as an investigator – he maintained – was based on his refusal to carry prejudice, preconception, in his back pack. The obvious was seldom satisfactory . . . The noise annoyed him.

  Uncontrolled and furious, as if blows were about to be landed, punches thrown.

  The Major had glanced at the message from his wife: some injuries at the hospital were of desperate severity. Of course, Nikki was there. The brother of little Yekaterina had a place on the chart that put him halfway down the table, with a doorway behind him into the corridor to the staircase. He had the identities of some of those admitted to the hospitals, and several of those who were already declared dead and had been named and were unmarked. A peculiarity of bomb detonations was that some victims were dismembered, some were hideously disfigured by fire and shrapnel and might live and might die, but there were always some who carried no wounds and seemed at peace, asleep, and were dead. He thought the rescue teams had showed extraordinary bravery in getting to the first floor and retrieving those still alive, and those who were clearly dead. It would take longer to bring down the body parts, but they would show better where the device had detonated.

  Other than Nikki, he knew of none of them. The Major did not stray into the world of cyber crime and knew little of the hackers beyond that each organisation employing them was given an expensive ‘roof’ as protection. His investigations probed only infrequently into areas dominated by Organised Crime . . . but all of it now was confusing to him . . . And the noise of two men, voices incoherent, came into his office and distracted him. He went out of his door to confront them. He was not noticed by either of them.

  ‘Because of your fucking jealousy.’

  ‘I did nothing.’

  ‘Your fucking jealousy and your fucking greed.’

  ‘Wrong, and you take that lie back.’

  ‘Jealousy, greed. The contract was for my people, and you could not stand the fucking rejection of your useless people.’

  ‘You accuse me of the explosion? Bastard . . .’

  ‘Accuse you? I do!’ Jealousy and greed. My contract, my contacts, my intelligence. You put in a bomb . . . You will fucking pay.’

  One in the remains of a suit. The other dressed for a restaurant on the Nevsky Prospekt, with prices far beyond the declared earning power of an FSB colonel. The suit had lost a jacket sleeve, and the lower right trouser leg. The other wore designer jeans and a foreign shirt and a fancy sweater and had a shoulder-bag of Italian leather. One was blood stained and had cuts and slashes on his skin that had been cursorily cleaned, and the other was immaculate, except that now a congealing dribble ran from the side of his mouth. They had been standing but then had wrestled, then had fallen, and now rolled on the carpet and once down were unable to land the big kicks, punches, head butting, that both struggled to inflict. He understood. It was about the ‘roof’. The one provided the roof under which the Kupchino avtoritet sheltered and in return for handsome remuneration was supposed to offer high-grade protection. The other offered the roof for the organisation that ran the airport and the cargo scams and was accused of permitting the attack on the premises of a competitor. That competitor had done well, had pulled in a lucrative government contract, had been attacked. The motives for such failure to provide protection were ‘greed’ and ‘jealousy’. Both men lived well, had fine apartments inside the city limits, had substantial country homes in the forests, and both were linked closely to Organised Crime gangs, and they were fighting in the Big House. The Major thought it disgusting and turned back towards his office. Past four in the morning, and colonels fighting. He reflected . . . Few certainties existed. Was a vendetta a satisfactory reason for an act of internal war
, a bomb to blow up a rival’s headquarters? Would such blood-letting be permitted by the ‘roof’ for the reasons of greed and jealousy? They crawled to their feet and one staggered and the other used the wall as a support until he could stand, swaying.

  The Major offered no explanations to his sergeant and the young woman lieutenant. He needed facts; without them was as his blind as two brawling superiors.

  She was awake, he was not.

  Igor snored softly, lay on his back, did not touch her. Marika sensed the rain had finished and through the drawn curtains saw the moon’s trace. She listened.

  She had heard the dogs stretch and roll on the rug in front of the fire, and the wind against the eaves, and had shivered and pulled the rugs closer over her body, and knew it would be colder that night and that the frost would gather and . . . She had taken an ironware dish out to the barn in the late evening, and he had been with her with his shotgun, and she had laid it prominently inside, and a bottle of beer and that he had jibbed at. She listened and the dogs were not alerted, did not growl, and the animals in the barn were not disturbed by an intruder. The clothing she had washed and pressed had not been moved.

  The guttering on their home was plastic. Their friend, Pyotr, had installed it because the original ironwork had rusted and collapsed. Plastic guttering contracted and expanded when the temperatures dipped or rose, and creaked as it did so. She thought the cold would gather on them and would freeze their breath on the windows. But no one came, and the dogs did not warn her of a stranger’s approach, nor did she hear any restless movement from the beasts in the barn.

  What she did hear, other than the gutter’s motion, was the big owl’s call, which she thought reassuring. And needed to be. Little in the life of Marika, or of Igor, had been safe. Great armies had trampled over their lives, pausing only briefly in their fighting, then moving on, and officials had come and had threatened, and had tried to take them by train deep into Siberia and far to the east . . . She thought the stranger had trusted her, and had left his clothing, filthy and damp which meant he had come across the river, and she believed him to be a friend. She had not heard him come but twice a deer had passed by the front of their home, provoking a low growl from the dogs. She had looked out and the moon’s light had bathed the open ground, but she had not seen the stranger, and the dogs had soon settled. She would not tell Pyotr that she had put food out for a stranger. Pyotr always preached them a message of caution, said these were changing and dangerous times, but she had ignored his warnings.