No one came. Igor slept on. She heard nothing.
Above the river, on the old Swedish-built cannon emplacement, with uninterrupted views of the bridge, Boot kept his vigil . . . Going through the front door at home, extracting the Yale key from the lock, dumping his bag and shrugging out of his overcoat, and turning off the outside light.
He did not have to be watching the bridge, could have been in bed, asleep, and allowing events to play out; here, he had no influence on them.
‘Hi, darling, good trip?’ Gloria’s voice singing out from the kitchen, an extension of the three-bedroom home he shared with her, pebble-dash and mock-Tudor beams on the front façade and London brick on the rest, and a shared driveway with the Fentons on the right, and a common wall with the Turners on the left, and 150 feet of garden at the rear. They rarely used the dining-room, seldom sat in the ‘front room’, the lounge. Most nights that he was at home, and she, they shared the principal bedroom, but not if either were late and the other already asleep, and the third bedroom stayed empty because Boot did not like to have visitors overnight with them. He’d have answered, ‘Not bad, all right.’ She’d have told him that there was a cauliflower cheese, or a lasagne, something easy, ready for the microwave, and he’d have come in and bent over her and given her a perfunctory kiss – a measure of his deep-rooted affection. She’d not have asked if he had successfully wrecked anything, damaged anybody, done anything life changing and bad for them. Would have asked, ‘Decent food where you were?’ She might have looked up from her catalogues, antique furniture and sales rooms and new chemicals for treating wet rot, dry rot, infestations. ‘Sorry, darling, where was it you were? Silly me.’ He’d have smiled, retrieved his supper, brought it to the table, and she’d have cleared a space for him, and he’d have said, ‘Oh, you know, somewhere and nowhere.’ Then smiled again . . . he would not have queried whether customers had been sold dubious Jacobean or unproven Georgian tables, desks, porcelain . . . He did not have to be there.
Cold enough – as Ollie Compton might have said at the Glienicke – ‘to freeze the tail off a brass monkey’, and he shivered and the wind came between the great castles and skipped over the bridge and swept across the bastion. He could have been at home for all the use he was on the matter of Copenhagen. Would not have gone to bed, but would have sat through half the night on the stairs and Gloria would not have called to him, would have allowed him the time to brood, or suffer.
Boot could not have said from where the hunger came . . . He’d remembered Ollie Compton’s last day before compulsory retirement, and a party had been arranged down in the atrium with a free bar and complimentary cava or prosecco, and the Director expected for a brief speech of appreciation, and the presentation of a carriage clock or a crystal glass decanter, and they had waited, and waited, and . . . the old bugger hadn’t shown. Ollie Compton lived in a bed-sit in Ealing, near the High Street, and was almost sad. Out of character, but a brief affair with slow horses that came in expensively late, immature investments in the markets, had run up surprising debts, and much of his generous pension went to the creditors and he lived – existed – in near penury. A lesson there for Boot, and it told him always to do his work, but always, also, to have reserves in his knapsack.
No vehicle came from the east on to the bridge, he’d noted that. The vehicles from his side, the west, were held in a long queue that stretched almost the length of the bridge. He need not have been there but would have felt ashamed to turn his back on his people . . . and he had reserves.
Might have been enjoying a good meal at the farmhouse, just off the road from Quatre Bras to Belle Alliance, and the talk would be of dispositions made and forces placed where the Emperor or the Duke believed them most valuable. A discussion concerning the precursor to crisis: the conversation mostly from Boot, the farmer’s wife long gone to bed, and the dogs asleep, and the good man humouring his paying guest and listening, and the virtual monologue in adequate French. Always an important moment in Boot’s visit because it marked the time when a commander started to lose control of the field, and would cede authority to lesser men . . . A few junior officers and alert NCOs would have sought out a farmhouse, had done so with the one where he was billeted, and liberated cellars where wine was stored, or brandy, and perhaps found a choice ham hanging in a larder, but were the minority. He liked to think of them, ordinary men and similar to himself, bivouacked in the open, and with a hot and heavy day’s marching done, an empty stomach and a dry throat, and no cover, and the first spots of summer rain. Wondered how he would have been, and would talk in the night until the farmer gave up on the struggle and let his head sag down to the table. It was a grand routine, and the visits to the fields of Waterloo were much loved, and valued. Occasional pedestrians crossed but the vehicles, all shapes and all sizes, were fixed, and he seemed to hear the drums beating, mournful and dispiriting, and he watched the barrier at the far end.
Daff was at his shoulder. She had been in the warm, smoking, with the surveillance people.
‘A big bang. Blocks up the road. Shooting. Not much else that’s clear . . . Nothing to do but wait . . . you all right?’
Boot said he was fine.
‘Just that you looked a bit peaky.’
He was fine and his tone had an edge and she’d stepped back.
It had to be ‘deniable’. If evidence was left in the gutters and its source was transparent, then the mission would be dubbed, rightly, as flawed. If none were taken and if the crime was ‘clean’ then it would be an occasion for a choral hallelujah, a brass band playing, and bubbles spilling. The loneliness of command – gone unshared by the Duke, and not spoken of by Boot.
‘I did flasks,’ she said. ‘Coffee or tea?’
‘That would be good, either . . . We’ve handed it over to them, they’re as strong as the weakest link. Cold to be out and running. Dodgy old game, Daff, but we knew that.’
‘I can’t do it,’ Merc said. ‘Can’t stay with you.’
Two cars. Two fires that seemed to overlap. A smell that was pungent, choking, but all of them off the road and up to their ankles in thick, clinging mud.
‘What do we do?’ Kristjan’s response, bordering on hysteria.
They were a hundred yards into the trees. It was the hope that the density of the pines would mask the fire. The wind helped them.
‘I think I understand,’ Martin said. ‘Did we ask you to stay with us?’
‘You did not.’
‘And we are better on our own, without you?’
‘I think so, it’s how it has to be . . .’ Merc was paid to fight and paid to lead and paid to be the man that others wanted to follow. It did not go easy for him, was against every instinct. He had not needed them and they had not needed him, and a small bond had developed. Kristjan was jabbering beside Martin who had kept cool, and on the ground – and alive – was the third of them. ‘. . . Do our own. I don’t know how you go. I don’t know how I go.’
He had been nursing the Polo, had almost reached the lay-by where – twenty-four hours before, a flicker of time – he had been picked up, and she had spotted them. He had missed them with the fog fumes from the engine across his holed windscreen. They were into the tree line and pushing the car deeper on an old loggers’ track, and in darkness and chaos. He had wrenched the wheel and found their tyre marks and had come up against their vehicle and had nudged and shoved, shunted it another forty, fifty, yards. Then his own engine had died, and smoke was billowing. Bare-handed, he and she, and two of the boys, had manhandled both cars farther in, and had fallen, had slipped, and sworn. Again she was the first to see what was relevant. Merc had not missed the boy who dressed up as a Teutonic knight to pay his bills, buy his beer and bread.
Toomas was on the ground and Martin and Merc had given their coats to warm him.
Kat had no medical experience, she said. Martin and Kristjan said they had basics from the training before they went into Kaliningrad, but that was fifteen years
ago. Merc knew what to look for, expected to find a messy entry wound, that would have carried clothing and fragments of the car into a hole that had no exit. Merc reckoned him lucky, perhaps not, still to be alive. Contractors, former military that Merc had known in Kabul and Baghdad, usually well dosed on steroids and laden with more equipment than they had hands to use, and they’d had the USMC logo on their socks and their underpants and tattooed on their arms and arses along with Semper Fidelis and The Few, The Proud and Devildogs, and had them on their stomachs and their shaved scalps: one constant message from them that reflected the fear because they were no longer in the Corps but were civilian wage earners. The fear was of a wound. From the wound came the knowledge they had become a burden. The other guys, unharmed, might have a chance to leg it out, but not if they carried a casualty. Had they been in the Corps, the ethic said that a wounded man was never left, would be brought out whatever it took – helicopters, fast jets, Rangers on foot. A wounded guy was never abandoned.
Martin said, ‘What happens to him? They hurt him, keep him alive, needle drugs into him, hurt him some more, lie to him. He tells it – they are good at that work. Tells about me and about Kristjan, and about her, and tells them about you. My grandfather was lucky, was killed at the start. He died in the cells at the HQ in Tallinn after interrogation. Worse was Kristjan’s who they took back to their camps and would have had days to work on him, or months. It is a bad outlook. He needs treatment, and care, and drugs, and—’
‘I cannot take him and I cannot take you.’
‘And what your people fear most is that one or more are taken.’
Merc said, ‘May your God keep you safe.’
Martin said, ‘If He is minded to.’
‘We should have a beer on the far side – tomorrow night, whenever.’
She knelt – might have been recognised and might have been remembered – and kissed the cheek of Toomas, then held his hand, stroked his arm. Then stood, tucked her fist under Merc’s arm, and pulled at him. There were sirens on the road, loud and threatening, but darkness would be their friend. Darkness would help, while it lasted.
Chapter 14
Martin called after Merc. ‘What we’ve done, did it have any purpose?’
‘No idea.’
‘Was it a disaster?’
‘Most of what they organise from behind a desk are usually disasters. Doesn’t stop them . . . I’ll buy the first beer.’
‘We’ll go south, get round the town, find a boat.’
‘Good luck to you.’
‘You’ll go the way you came?’
‘Perhaps.’
It was one of those dumb bits of talking that neither wanted, and neither would forego. No help to Merc to know how they were going, and bad for them to know how he had come across the river and how he hoped to return . . . Unfinished business. He took her hand off his arm, strode back. Merc had learned that anything important, a job that mattered, was best done by himself. The flames in the cars had slackened but were still alive and the smoke would have choked him if he had inhaled. He kicked at the two registration plates, and they were burned enough to fracture, then he went to the front and lashed again with his boot and dislodged the plates there. They were as reliable as a calling card. He could have asked Martin, or Kristjan, to bury them . . . should have remembered before . . . and they would have promised. The Polo was traceable from the plates, and the hire car – easy enough for their people across in Narva to trace a hire car, and get copies of the paperwork. Best done by himself. He lifted up the plates, held them in his gloved hands and blundered away into the dense wall of low branches, bent and pushed. He sank in mud, and kicked with his heel, and made a shallow grave for them, and used the toes of his boots to bury them. He went back to them, and all the farewells and good luck wishes were already done. Nothing more to be said. Kristjan shone a small pencil torch on Toomas’s face. The pallor of the near dead; might last a day, or an hour . . . Would be blessed to reach an appropriate hospital – and stay deniable – within an hour or a day.
Merc passed them, did not speak, did not offer another hug, or a hand clasp. He took the girl’s hand. Not from affection, but to lead her. He tugged, and she fell into step.
And he stumbled and went up to his knees in a ditch and she was chucked against him and levered him upright, and a dozen steps later she slid and he held her. They had reached the track along which the cars had been pushed. Merc did the best he could. His best was to snap off two branches and pass them to her, then another two for himself. The sky above was clear and the clouds had gone, blown to some horizon, and the dregs of the moon’s light gave them a milky trail, faint but possible, and the cold was bitter. He held the branches hard against the ground, and she copied and they broke the outlines of the ruts where the tyres had been, and softened the indentations from their boots and her trainers and he said it was something, not much. The wind was a friend and it came into their faces and pinioned their clothes and coursed along the path, and blew away the fumes from scorched paint and melted tyres and the plastic linings of the cars. He heard sirens. It was important for Merc to have purpose, cleaning the trail and leaving it less prominent . . . Never before had he walked out on comrades in a state of war. Did not like them, did not have to, shared nothing with them. Might as well, if he had had the means, have shot dead the three of them and left them. Achieved ‘deniability’ and moved on. Might as well, except that they were comrades, and had come back. He could not have helped them, and the excuse seemed feeble to him, shaming. They reached the road.
Merc, no explanation, pushed her down. They were on the rim of a ditch and vehicles came closer, then big headlights . . . How much did he know of her? So little. The section of road was long and straight, and the engines merged with the song of the wind in the trees and the crackle as frost formed. There was the cry of a lone bird, and lights approached. He knew so little of her, could not have sworn that she would not stand, wave down the vehicles, denounce him. He felt the warmth of her beside him and heard her breathing. Merc had promised to take her out.
Why was he there? He could not have said. What had he achieved? Precious little that he knew of.
Two jeeps cruised past. Their lights burned on the road and the trees and speared past them. In each, he saw two men in the front and two in the back, weapons readied. He thought that when daylight came and organisation had been reclaimed there would be cordons and dogs. The darkness was a good friend, not to be squandered. He led her out into the middle of the deserted road, assumed that a vehicle tailback was building to the west and another to the east where the bridge was and the block had been. Had to take a chance. Did not give an explanation. His grip was no longer on her hand, but at her wrist.
He ran, took her with him.
A white line lay down the centre of the road and the last of the moonlight held it and guided him. He was combat fit, and she was not. He dragged her, showed no kindness. They came past a junction that had been his target, and then were close to the lay-by. He’d a good stride, and she’d have fallen but for his hold. She sobbed for breath and he thought she tried to break the grip, and she’d have gone down if he had allowed it. He was near to the lay-by when the lights came, and he dived for the side and she came with him, and they plunged into a mess of low bare branches from birch trees, and crawled, then were into the pines. He looked back. Another patrol jeep went by. He thought he had used time well, and that the dawn would soon chase them.
Ice was forming on the puddles in the ditches.
She swore. He took no notice. She swore in her own language, and then in his. She was tugging harder, trying to halt him. It was her shoe. The shoe from her right foot. Where was it? Swallowed by the mud . . . If it had been Cinar, without a boot, and retreating under fire, what would he have done? Would have slapped her arse, and hard, with the flat of his hand, would have made her run until her foot bled, then some more? She was sobbing, might have been exhaustion, might have been anger. He ho
oked her on to his back, went forward, and branches scraped him and wind cut him, and sometimes the sirens were loud.
Merc let instinct guide him.
A single sheet of paper was on the Major’s desk. A little dribble came from the side of his mouth and fell, absorbed by the paper. Spoiled but still readable. The fighters had gone their separate ways, still snarling, towards opposite ends of the corridor. He had gone back to his office, had demanded the file on all that was known, had started to gut it, and had swilled down coffee. The first report was expected ‘soon’ from the explosion site, and ‘soon’ was of no use to him. Was needed ‘now’. He had gone back into the loose threads of the file and had added to it the report sent by the sergeant of a meeting in the supermarket car-park, down the E-20 from the city, had yawned hard, and slumped.
A bright morning and ferociously cold, and men and women on the pavements below hurried, well wrapped, and workmen scattered salt and grit, but he saw none of that, and the traffic of the day built, and the young woman fielded his calls. The sergeant and the lieutenant had agreed he should sleep until he had rested . . . until a crisis call came. The surveillance report, under the Major’s head, took second place to an event, linked, and with a genuine demand for crisis status.
A Damned Serious Business Page 34