A Damned Serious Business

by Gerald Seymour

  In the pit he had dug it might have been the last shovel of dirt he’d throw over his shoulder. ‘I doubt, at that level, they’d have information that justified this collusion, and . . .’

  She chucked her cigarette into the wind and allowed it to spiral away. His peevishness might be the indicator that his time as a frontier watcher, waiting, was playing out.

  She bored back at him. ‘Can we start with some basics? We have no protection here. To get their grubby fingers on you, you, Boot, would be a considerable coup for the other side. You and me, we wouldn’t know what had hit us if they did. They have that history – snatching, fast and quick – then, Boot, you might learn first hand what you have been asking other men and women to risk. Now, moving on to what those guys behind us offer. Their people have picked up traffic from St Petersburg. Seems two FSB colonels have been suspended from duty, escorted from their offices, and the intelligence is that both men are linked to crime groups. You understand? They have bought into the legend. Nastiness inside the gang scene. Almost there, that’s what I’m saying – there except for getting the boys home, Merc and the others.’

  He watched the river, watched the bridge, thought himself bowed by responsibility. He was unfamiliar with the protocol of apologies.

  The militiaman tried the phone. They watched each other.

  Dialled the number and checked it with what was written on the palm of his hand, heard it ring out. Almost a game, but Merc did not yet know whether the game was his to win, his to lose. Would have heard it cut to an answering voice and the request that a message be left. It was the fourth time the man had failed to get through. But the eyes were never off him. A hiss of breath, and then an oath.

  A brief message was snarled into the phone. Merc liked what he saw. Each time the call was made and not answered, he reckoned the anger of the militiaman grew. He had begun to hope . . . would Rob and Brad have hoped? Assumed that anyone with a fighting background always believed that something would turn up, a chance. But they would have been together, like two hunting dogs working in tandem, and one might feign sleep and one might plead stomach pain and . . . Merc was alone. Then the eye contact was broken. Quite sudden, no warning, and he sensed the skill of the man with the rifle and whose eyes penetrated but had a dullness. Merc might have exploited any of them – and Rob and Brad would have made an art-form of using them for advantage – but he saw no passion, no charity, no hate, nothing that would make the man’s actions irrational. The contact was broken as the man moved to his left and away from the river towards the tree line, then followed the trees. Merc could no longer see him.

  The moment he was shot? He did not think so. Bet his shirt on it? Could have. No need to shoot him in the back of the head when the front of his skull, between the eyes, was as available. He had thought he played a good game, had kept calm and watched the man’s eyes half of the time and the barrel end of the rifle, where the attachment was that killed flash, the other half of the time. He realised the man would have gone behind him to check out what was hidden – the board and the suit. Not a killer moment. like air released from a tyre, Merc relaxed, and felt the numbing weight of the blow to the back of his head.

  Had not anticipated it.

  Merc slumped, was going down, was hit again. Darkness closed on him. His face was in the mud and snow. He could not have fought. Fast movements, and his arms were wrenched back and the wrists heaved together and lay in the pit of his back, then the restrainers were around them and tight, and it was done and he sensed the man had moved back, could now regard him. Game over . . . No contest . . . Match lost. He was tied, as helpless as the old Christmas goose who would have heard the blade on the grindstone. The chance was lost. Would not have been lost by either Rob or Brad. He had been hit, the rifle had been put down, two hands used to fasten his wrists. Out-thought, out-manoeuvred, and not supposed to happen to him . . . not since his father’s death such a sensation of despair.

  His mind cleared . . . He seemed to see her face, the curl of the lip and the contempt at his failure and would not then have slapped her backside because her head was too high above the parapet, or was slow with the reload on the machine-gun’s heavy belt. Would not have slapped it because she lay on it as they’d bared her chest and stomach to get at the entry wound. Merc heard the call made again, and another message left. A curt and pointed message of which he understood the meaning, not the language. It would be the militiaman’s commander who was either out of a signal area, or had the phone switched off, did not check it, too busy.

  Other than himself, he hadn’t another target for blame. Had stayed around too long, and should have used his last visit back to UK better. Done it when he was on the trip to Stoke Poges and asked the bank manager how much he had in his account. After getting a property if there’d be sufficient for him to hustle down to the showroom and do the test drive. Had let the ‘sometime’ drift in front of him, had not snatched at it. Merc lay in the mud, had let ‘sometime’ go past him and had not quit when ahead . . . Was now at back-marker, far behind.

  Kat went forward. A snail would have gone faster. In the wet season before the real cold came, when the walls of the apartment ran with damp, snails would emerge and they’d poke their noses out of their shells and advance up the wall, between the fading prints. Would go slowly, as she did.

  She copied what she had seen on the TV, films of military exercises, what they did in the Caucasus region when they closed on a target, stayed silent, disturbed nothing. So slow. The commentary said it was a ‘leopard crawl’, and also on the TV were wildlife films from Africa where the cheetah stalked prey, crept close . . . She could not see the target, her prey, but had heard the voice. She moved on her elbows and knees and stayed in the tree line and under the lower branches of the pines. Periodically, the voice guided her. Each time it was easier to hear: she was closer, and, more important, the voice betrayed a greater irritation and was louder.

  She thought that the rats in the barn where she had loved him could not have moved with more stealth. Long past, the moment she had nakedly betrayed her country’s régime. Easy to understand: ‘Will you, sir, respond to my message, answer me. Call me immediately. Just call me. It is where you should be . . . Call me, sir. (Pause) For fuck’s sake, just do it.’ Kat believed herself intelligent and gifted, enough to succeed as a concert pianist wherever she found herself, sharp enough to know the meaning of impatience, spoken in a peasant’s dialect, a coarse accent. She went nearer. Much of her life was not sensible, nor Nikki’s, but she thought of the man she had loved, who had loved her. Would not lose him. She slid forward on her stomach.

  He ran towards the dinghy. He had the chance to be ahead of his pursuers.

  The water sloshed in Martin’s shoes. Two men were yelling at him. They had their rods in the dinghy, but had brought the outboard motor to the picnic table outside a wood cabin. They would have been friends, enjoying their pensions, and the fishing would have been, sunshine or snow, their valued recreation. They shouted abuse at him; they realised he would outstrip them to the dinghy, loosely tied against a willow sapling, and in shallow water. Behind him were militiamen, half a dozen of them, and some were fitter and faster than others and the nearest were now within a hundred metres. They had been after him for more than half an hour, almost from the time that he and Kristjan had split.

  He had seen the dinghy but the anglers had seen him. He’d thought he was close to losing his followers but the two old bastards had spotted him, yelled in anger, and now guided the men who’d tracked him when he had left the forest . . . No hug with Kristjan, or talk of which bar it would be near the square in Narva where the taxis parked. He heard the piercing sound of a siren. It slowed him to look back but he did. The snow had stopped, replaced by light rain that slanted on to him, and it was easy to see the brilliance of the blue lights through the trees and closing, and he could make out the camouflage uniforms of the militiamen following him . . . It was a small dinghy, big enough, just, f
or the two men to sit in, not more than two metres in length, and not much more than a metre in width. To get to the dinghy he had to wade the width of a small bay, and the water was nearly up to his waist, and the shock to his body was horrific.

  Kristjan had gone his own way. What would happen to Kristjan, where would he go, and how would he attempt to get across? Martin neither knew nor cared. He splashed towards the dinghy and the shouting was muffled and the siren incoherent, and he was the man who was trapped in the past by the death of a grandfather. He had wanted to be an accountant, and respected, and had failed, and had wanted to be loved by women and was not, and had succeeded only in a trade of painting and decorating in the town of Haapsalu where, somewhere and without a marker stone, his grandfather was buried. He thrashed in the water. The cloud was breaking and the rain slackening but the wind stayed constant and beyond the narrow bay, where there was a gap in the reeds, he could see rough water.

  Martin reached the side of the dinghy and struggled to get a leg up and over the inflated side, and fell back and fought for a better grip – then was into it and sprawled over the wooden slats on its floor. He fumbled for the rope and its loose knot. How long did he have? Might have half a minute. The rope went slack, and the dinghy started to drift, and the wind caught it and started to push it out of the bay between the reeds. No paddle, but the wind was his friend. He put his hand into the chillingly cold water at the side and levered it and might have achieved some traction, but the wind did more.

  The river, here, was wider than at the bridge linking Ivangorod to the Estonian town of Narva, and the waves were high as they often were on the Baltic beach of his home. The tourist strands of Haapsalu, where the Finns came in droves for the summer, would be empty now, been beaten by surging waves. He realised that he went faster, because of the wind, than he could have paddled. Martin could see across the water, and there were small lights, pinpricks, in the streets, and cars went slowly far in front of him. No one stopped. No one stood on the far shore and watched for him. He heard a shout but could not make it out. Not the yelling of the anglers, nor the bellowing commands of the militiamen who had followed him. The shout had authority, but he could not make out the words. Very soon he would be halfway across.

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘You are sure, Major?’ From the sergeant who held the rifle at his shoulder.

  ‘An order. Shoot.’

  ‘Him or the boat, Major?’

  ‘The boat. Put him in the water.’

  ‘He will drown, Major, if he goes into the water.’ From the lieutenant who stood beside him, gazed at him and clutched a handkerchief in her fist.

  ‘Shoot. Now.’

  The Major watched the dinghy heading towards the main flow of the river and the navigation buoys that designated the frontier. He had no doubt in the justification of the order he had given. A quiet fell. The anglers no longer yelled and the militiamen who had tracked the man on foot stood, gasping for breath. The Major had never seen a man who chased after freedom and was stopped only by a rifle bullet. A faint whistle of air between the teeth of the lieutenant, who would have been on many FSB firing ranges but would not have seen it done for real. He saw that the man in the dinghy, at the last edges of his strength, making frantic attempts with his hands to paddle. In a handful of seconds the dinghy would have passed the buoys. The Major could see, nudging away from the far side, off a wooden quay, what he assumed was a patrol boat. What distance? Could have been a hundred metres . . . The Major was not a good shot, not on field exercises and not on a practice range. He preferred to fish. He thought he could have managed a hit and . . . The quiet was broken. The shot fired. It belted in his ears. He watched, did not flinch from the noise of it.

  The dinghy bucked, seemed to rise clear of the water and then toppled, and the man was thrown clear from it. The dinghy had lost shape and he imagined that the rubber side had been ripped by the bullet’s impact and that the air fled it. He did not know if the man had the ability to swim; there was splashing in the water and his view was of the head and upper body only and a single arm gripped the side of the craft but it seemed to sink under his weight. For a few seconds he could see the bobbing head then it went under, came up again. On the far side, beyond the markers, a launch pulled away from the quay but he knew it would not cross the line that separated two power blocks, two cultures, divided by a sporadic line of orange buoys. Waves were whipped higher and debris from the anglers’ boat rose and fell, and the Major realised he could no longer see the head.

  He queried with a local man, from the militia, where would a body come ashore. Was told it might fetch up on the grille protecting the inflow to the hydro electricity plant downstream, or might take the secondary channel and go under the railway bridge, then the second one that was called the Friendship Bridge. The Major was about to look at his phone, turn away from the water, when more news was fed him . . . A man had gone into the casino, was reported by management. He was described . . . What should be done? He answered.

  The sergeant drove him. The lieutenant had once, only once, wiped her cheek. They went towards Ivangorod and headed for the garish lighting of the casino.

  He was alone except for the croupier girl. Kristjan played. He’d be at the table until the euros in his hip pocket were exhausted.

  The minders watched him from behind. No other players joined him as the wheel turned and the ball bounced . . . He had come out of the forest, had split from Martin, and had walked down the hill and into the town, then had crossed the main road in sight of the bridge, but had ducked away and had pushed the doors aside and gone in. And the ball settled, and the slot was wrong and the colour was wrong, and he was brought – not requested – another big measure of Scotch whisky, no ice and no water, and did not realise the staff were at pains to keep him there. His fingers trembled and his hand shook from the cold, and the heat inside could not thaw him. Rock music played loud. His clothing hung sodden on him, his hair was plastered down and stuck sweetly on his scalp and he had left a wet trail across the deep carpet and some drips still fell from him as he perched precariously on a stool. The bank notes flickered in his hand. He put more money down, and the number chosen was nineteen because that was the age of his grandfather, and the colour was black. The girl in front of him wore a scarlet dress that was low on her chest and was slit at the sides almost to her hip, and her hair was wedged in place with lacquer and her face was expressionless. He thought she read him as doomed, and would have read him well. One more throw after this . . . Irrelevant if he won or if he lost again, more irrelevant if he broke the bank . . . There were mirrors inside, set in a wall behind the girl who was spinning the wheel and then let the ball go. He raised his glass and drank and felt the burn of the alcohol in his throat and lifted his head and tilted the glass so that he would drain it, and he saw the reflection of blue lights mounted on two jeeps, and the lights were cut and a gaggle of men stepped clear of them. He saw it, then watched the number he had chosen and the ball started to dance.

  On duty at the gate, or on ‘stag’ as they liked to call it, they’d had the briefing from the pair they relieved. Dennie had been sent home so the Big Boss was again on the couch. No sniff of Boot, and his office woman had been out with a carrier bag and had come back with another microwave supper, and a wrapped picture safe in a sheath of protective plastic.

  Arthur murmured. ‘Has to be tonight, doesn’t it? I mean it has to be.’

  Roy said ‘Should have been wrapped by now, Arthur, and isn’t.’

  Arthur said, and scratched his backside, behind where his Glock was holstered. ‘I feel good, as if I’m supporting them. A comic, a Yank said, “We can’t all be heroes because someone has to stand on the kerb and clap as they go by.” Reckon he was talking about us.’

  They stood at the main gate, well wrapped against the cold, and dry and well armed in case of threat, and would have revelled at what they believed to be their insights.

  The paper from the Brains T
rust, all five pages of it, dropped from his fingers. The Big Boss, master of all he surveyed, had called three floors below and demanded that a junior employee, the Maid from Boot’s office, attend him. He was in need of an audience, of company, a presence with whom to share the isolation of a decision-taker. He had read her much of the paper in a detached and hesitant way, now addressed her.

  ‘Can’t tell it to the Young Turks that bustle round me, would not have a clue what I’m yammering about . . . You lose sight of what it was for. Now, at this moment, all we can think about is whether that team is coming home, together, or is going to fall at the final fence. One prisoner, and we will regard that as abject failure. The whole gang rounded up and paraded for the flashlights and I’m spending time snipping roses. Easy to lose sight of the goal. Why I had the Brains Trust knock me up another paper. It was about hackers, sending them a discreet message to stop fucking in our backyard, to knock them off balance, done with discretion, but make it as if they feel they’ve a boil between their collective cheeks. It’s the new warfare. Not aircraft carriers and tank divisions, even chemical-tipped artillery shells, or dogfights between fighters and interceptors that each cost, excess of, a hundred and twenty million smackers, and I fancy all those expensive toys will prove obsolete, ready for the knacker’s yard because of the pimply-faced kids and the keyboards. That is the big picture, not some damn frontier and poor devils running for their lives. We are into retaliation, strike back – totally illegal in the eyes of our courts, judges, that apparatus – against an enemy’s war machine that threatens to overwhelm us. It’s not tanks on our lawns or bombs raining down on our cities, but in terms of destabilising our nation then the threat is every bit as great . . . I regret nothing, nothing. Let me show you this, this picture. It is their command bunker for planning future attacks, not buried under a nuclear bomb-proof layer of reinforced concrete, but a building in a dreary suburb of their second city – and we hit it. They had funerals today of the kids we took down, each as important as a Special Forces company. There have been arrests and I venture to say our mischief-making has worked well – so far. Thank you for giving me a shoulder and an ear . . . That is all.’