Cold

by John Sweeney

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Accreditation, please?’ The officer’s manner was entirely unlike that of the pirate-rebel army. She handed over her rebel press pass; he studied it carefully, then took out his phone and took a picture of it.

  ‘Passport?’ asked the officer. She handed that over, too, and Gennady saw from its cover that she was a French citizen. The officer examined it and took another photograph.

  ‘Did you take any pictures of the machine on the low-loader?’ asked the officer. His tone was polite but firm. Gennady hadn’t been quite sure before, but now it was beyond doubt: the officer was no local. He had a Moscow accent.

  ‘Non, non. I were at deathbed this afternoon – sorry, this morning. The deathbed of the womans killed by the bombings.’ Her Russian, thought Gennady, was atrocious.

  ‘You mean the funeral this morning?’ said the officer. ‘May I have a look at your camera, just to double-check?’

  She and the officer looked at the monitor, going through the images she had taken that morning – a coffin being lowered into the ground, a priest officiating, an old woman sobbing, the crowd solemn – and pictures from before that, scenes from the local hospital, of a child with an amputated leg, an old man crying, a ward full of young soldiers, a single shot of a soldier with a shock of white hair, his eyes bandaged.

  Satisfied, the army officer nodded. Ahead, the machine on tank tracks turned a corner and disappeared. He returned her press card and passport, said thank you and got in the jeep, which sped off in the direction of the machine.

  ‘What was that thing – a Grad launcher?’ she asked Gennady.

  ‘No,’ said Gennady. ‘It was a BUK-M1 anti-aircraft missile launcher.’

  His Russian was too fast for her; she looked nonplussed. He mimed a plane flying, his hands outstretched like wings, and then he pointed up and went ‘BOOM!’

  ‘Oh, I get it,’ she said. ‘How do you knew?’

  Gennady’s French was rusty, but her Russian was so bad it was painful. ‘J’étais un général dans l’armée soviétique.’

  They switched to French.

  ‘That officer, he was local?’ she asked.

  ‘No, from Moscow.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive. Around here they say their aitches funny. He talked like a proper Muscovite.’

  ‘So the crew of that thing—’

  ‘The BUK-M1 anti-aircraft missile launcher.’

  ‘They’re not local, they’re Russian army?’

  Gennady nodded.

  ‘What would they use it for?’ she asked.

  ‘The rebels don’t have an air force, there’s no way they can defend themselves from the danger from the air. So the BUK – it means “beech” in Russian – is our reply. Under the netting are four rockets that can fly at Mach 2. The crew point one at the sky and it chases what is up there, doesn’t hit the target directly but runs alongside it. When the missile blows up, its shrapnel peppers the fuselage of the target and the kinetic energy of a jet fighter or transport plane does the rest. It can hit anything, up to eighty thousand feet.’

  ‘Only military planes?’

  ‘Theoretically, yes.’

  She swept a stray coil of hair out of her eyes and studied him more closely.

  ‘Theoretically, yes. But practically?’

  ‘In practice, in war, people make stupid mistakes. In 1983 we shot a Korean jet out of the sky. We thought it was a spy plane. It wasn’t. The dead? Almost three hundred. In 1988 the Americans had a warship in the Gulf, making sure the Iranians were behaving themselves. The American sailors saw something in the sky, flying towards them fast, they got panicky and they fired. It was a passenger jet flying from Tehran to Dubai. Almost three hundred people dead. The army sent me to Iran, to lead our investigation.’

  He stopped and stared at the sky.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The small coffins . . . I’d never seen so many small coffins before. Sixty-six of the dead were children. So I hope those guys with the BUK, I hope they know what they’re doing.’

  ‘Can I ask you something personal, General?’

  ‘I used to be a general. Now I’m just Gennady.’

  ‘I’m Marie. What are you doing here?’

  He hesitated. ‘Helping out.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  He shook his head, signalling the end of that line of conversation. ‘Marie, may I ask you for a favour?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You went to the local hospital today, is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I have a look at the pictures you took?’

  She handed over the camera and Gennady clicked through the images until he found what he was looking for, thanked her and returned the camera.

  COUNTY DONEGAL

  Reilly abandoned ship first. As the SleepEasy got within a fair distance of the stone quay, the dog leapt, almost misjudged it, and had to scrabble up some steps. Once on solid ground, he rocketed up and down the quay, tail swishing to and fro, to and fro.

  Katya was the next to jump, forgoing her signature daintiness and landing with a thump on terra firma. From the cockpit, Joe cried out in complaint: ‘Hey, will neither of youse help me tie her up?’

  The dog had found the bones of a dead seagull and had forgotten all about the boat. Katya shook her head violently and spat in the general direction of the sea. ‘Flying? They rip you off. Airports stink of plastic and the lights are too bright, the shops are full of shit and everything costs too much. They make you take most of your clothes off because of that bastard Bin Laden, you queue up and then you are squeezed into a little box for hours with only fat people either side of you. I fucking love flying. I will never be rude about flying ever again.’

  With that, she walked off to examine some lobster pots.

  So Joe had to do it all himself: reversing the engine thrust so the SleepEasy gently nudged into the quay, then securing her aft, then running forwards and tying the bowline to a ring on the quay. He ducked into the cabin, emerged with a bag containing all of their possessions, and stepped off the boat.

  The SleepEasy was in a sorry state. Her mainmast had been so twisted out of shape it best resembled a crooked tree in the magic forest in Walt Disney’s Snow White; the Plexiglas windscreen shielding the wheelhouse had cracked from side to side; the nylon fabric covering the cockpit and the sides of the SleepEasy was tattered shreds, as was the mainsail; the foam benches had vanished overboard; the rubber dinghy forward had also disappeared and there was a concavity in the foredeck the size of a large sofa.

  He bowed low and said a silent thank you to the SleepEasy for getting them safely to Ireland, then hopped onto the quay, knelt down, kissed the stone, crossed himself and closed his eyes in prayer.

  When he opened them, he realised Katya was standing very close, her face a study of perplexed amusement.

  ‘I didn’t know you were religious,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Then I must be seeing things.’

  ‘When the boat keeled over ninety degrees, I said to myself, if we get through this alive, I’ll say a prayer. So I did.’

  ‘Simple on the outside, Mr Tiplady, but on the inside you are full of secrets.’

  He stood hurriedly, picked up the bags and walked off. Katya ran after him, caught his arm, pulled him round and said, ‘I know nothing of the sea but I think I and your stupid dog owe our lives to you.’ And she reached out her hands and brought down his head and kissed him passionately on the lips. Reilly got bored with the dead seagull and lolloped over and jumped up, one paw on him and one paw on her, and Joe said, ‘You stupid dog!’ and they laughed until it hurt.

  ‘I will never go in a stupid boat again. So long as I shall live,’ Katya said.

  ‘Me neither,’ said Joe.

  ‘Before . . .’ she struggled to find the correct words to express the power of the emotion running through her. ‘Before, I thought I wanted to kill myself. On this
boat, in the storm, I discovered something. I don’t want to die at all. I want to live.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Joe.

  The quay was not much more than a stone extension of a natural rock outcrop protecting half a dozen fishing boats from the fierceness of the Atlantic rollers. Above it stretched a line of cottages painted daffodil, peach, bright green, and scarlet. The vividness of the colours made up for the bleakness of the day, foul-tempered rain squalling in from the west. The rigging on the fishing boats howled and whistled; waves slapped noisily inside the harbour. It was late afternoon, but the sky was already dark and getting darker by the minute. A hefty man in tweeds and a peaked cap left the scarlet house and approached them.

  ‘You sailed through that? You’re a braver man than I.’

  Joe nodded and started speaking in a language that, to Katya’s ear, was gibberish – soft and sweet to the ear, with a real lilt to it, but gibberish nevertheless. The two men chatted until, conversation over, they shook hands and Joe led the way up the hill.

  ‘Was that Gaelic?’ Joe nodded. ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘I told him he could sell what works on the boat and then he should take it out to sea and sink it. In return, he didn’t see us, we weren’t here. Not me, not you, not the dog.’

  The man in the cap watched the big blond man, the woman and the dog walk off to the south, then stepped gingerly on board the SleepEasy. The first thing he did was inspect the locator beacon. After a quick fiddle, he reconnected the battery and a red light started to blink.

  At least, he thought, I can make a wee bit of money out of that.

  LANGLEY

  Crocuses were beginning to punch through the soil and wood ducks fussed about the Potomac’s snowy banks, but there was no sign of the coming of spring inside the executive boardroom of the Central Intelligence Agency. Only the Stars and Stripes and the shield of the Agency provided colour against the greyness of the walls; apart from human voices, the only sound was the soft hiss of air conditioning.

  The possible location of the head of ISIS, al-Baghdadi, the latest intercepts from Pyongyang, and a paper on how to combat the Chinese cyberthreat were all thrashed around, then put to bed. A thickset man with grey bristling hair and a deep voice, seeped in authority, called the meeting to a close but concluded: ‘Deputies Crone and Weaver, could you stay behind a moment, please?’

  ‘Certainly, Director Rinder,’ said Crone, always the more forceful of the two men in public – and in private. Weaver smiled thinly. The three men waited until the rest of the meeting attendees had left the room and the door had sealed behind them.

  ‘What’s on your mind, Mike?’ said Crone.

  ‘How is getting our technician back from Moscow going, Jed?’

  ‘We’re experiencing some difficulty.’ Crone nodded twice, agreeing with his own assessment. ‘We thought we had a trade with the Russians. They’re interested in two nobodies. The idea was they would get them, and in return we would have our technician.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. We think the British helped the nobodies disappear. They’ve vanished off-grid, and that couldn’t happen unless they had expert help. We’ve offered the Russians a series of other trades, but they’re interested only in these two.’

  ‘The two the Russians want, they are what?’ asked Rinder.

  ‘One Irish, male. One Chechen, female. Nobodies.’

  ‘And they’ve gone off-grid?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘How much money have we spent on the grid? Billions of dollars, the most sophisticated hunting dogs in the history of humanity, and we’re nowhere. Jed, tell me, how could that happen?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mike. I don’t know.’

  ‘This thing in Manaus – a cardinal dead. Has that got anything to do with our operation to find these two?’

  Crone looked at Weaver, who offered the open palms of his hands, signalling that he had nothing to offer.

  ‘No,’ said Crone. ‘Not as far as we know.’

  ‘OK, good. Keep on it. We want our technician back in our custody. He has betrayed us and we wish to send a signal that if you are one of us, you wrong the Agency at your peril. That is understood – Jed? Dave?’

  ‘Absolutely, Mike,’ said Crone.

  ‘Yes sir,’ said Weaver.

  ‘Good, we’re done.’ Rinder stood up and walked towards his own executive door, which led to his office. He opened the door, was halfway through, when he turned his head and said, ‘Oh, one more thing. I reckon that this will be fine and pan out well in the next few weeks. If it doesn’t, I think we should bring in a consultant – one of us, obviously – to kick the tyres, just to check that you haven’t missed anything. He’ll have to have full run of all the files, all your email traffic and telephone calls, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally,’ agreed Crone. Weaver nodded.

  ‘Good, that’s settled then.’

  ‘The consultant,’ said Crone. ‘Who do have you in mind?’

  ‘Ezekiel Chandler,’ said Rinder, and disappeared behind his door.

  ‘We need that pansy Mormon like a hole in the head,’ said Crone softly. Weaver said nothing but twitched once, then twice again.

  COUNTY DONEGAL

  The Atlantic smashed against the rocks of Donegal, the spray phosphorescent, soaring into the sky until it melted into the darkness. They stood in a bus shelter, one hundred yards from Maguire’s Bar, waiting for the last customers to leave, Joe holding Reilly by his string, the spray and the rain pattering down, relentless, swishing down the drainpipes, puddling the road. Then the fiddler ran out of tunes and hurried out into the rain, followed by two barmaids, who called out goodnight, turning up their coat collars against the weather. A few minutes later the very last drinker staggered out of the pub. Joe and Katya waited another few minutes before walking slowly towards the bar. It was past four o’clock in the morning.

  The pub was quite dark, but they were haloed by a light on the lintel.

  ‘You can dye your hair blond but you’ve got a damned cheek coming here, Joe Tiplady,’ said a voice, the same accent as Joe’s, but harder, sourer in tone. A wheelchair slid into the light, bearing a man – as big as Joe, but older, bearded – in his hands a sawn-off shotgun.

  ‘Be less trouble to get one of the boys to do it for me. No one would know, no one would tell. But’ – he waved the shotgun – ‘all things considered, I’d rather do it meself.’

  ‘Seamus . . .’ said Joe and got no further.

  ‘He’s trying to help me,’ said Katya, running to the man in the wheelchair, ignoring the shotgun and kneeling down beside him. Shaking from the wet and the cold, from what they’d been through together, from what might be to come, her voice trembled with every word she uttered. ‘Your brother . . . I don’t know what happened between you, but he saved my life, once, twice, three times. If you kill him, you’ve got to kill me, too, because without him I am dead. But kill me first.’

  From the deadness in her voice, Seamus knew that this was not some artful trick, that she meant every word.

  Outside, they could hear the dripping of the gutters and the patter of the rain falling on the porch roof; farther off, the Atlantic surf battering against the rocks below. Seamus kept the gun trained on Joe, but his eyes were held by Katya, kneeling at his side. Eventually, he lowered the gun.

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ Seamus said.

  ‘Thank you,’ sobbed Katya. Joe said nothing but he felt a great weight being lifted from him. His brother may not have forgiven him, but he was not going to kill him.

  ‘You need to find some other place to hide. Ireland’s too small to hide the likes of Joe Tiplady. People have been looking for yous.’

  Katya said, ‘Who?’

  ‘Two men – one bald, kind of an albino, the other darker, handsome, a bit of madness in his eyes. They were first seen in West Belfast, then Cork, now here. Asking, asking, asking after him and a Russian woman and a little bl
ack dog. They are very particular about the dog.’

  Reilly shook his fur; Katya emitted a low moaning sound.

  ‘They’re camped out in a posh hotel twenty miles from this very spot,’ said Seamus. ‘They come every morning, leave around midnight. They don’t drink, they don’t seem to eat. They just sit in their big black car and wait. It’s creeping the bejaysus out of the whole village.

  ‘When they first came here, I sought them out and asked what was their business. They were trying to find you, the brother who brought shame on his family and got his older brother shot in the back. They left with the very clear understanding that I would shoot the traitor Joe Tiplady on sight.

  ‘Now the British, they would get that, and leave. But these boys, they listened to me, they lapped it all up, and then they went and sat in their big car until midnight. And then they were back just after dawn the next day. The same thing every day for a week. It’s as if they’re working for a madman, someone who just won’t take no for an answer.’

  ‘They are,’ said Katya. ‘We want to go to . . . to America.’ She held back ‘Utah’ for some reason. ‘We can’t fly. They can trace our passports. What shall we do?’

  Seamus thought for a moment. ‘I’ll try and work something out. In the meantime, I’ll take you to a place where you can wait, undisturbed.’

  He disappeared off to the kitchen and returned with a black bag sitting on his lap, then motioned for them to follow him. Starlight guided them down the road until they came to the tiny harbour, where waves lapped against three small crabbing boats. Seamus parked his wheelchair by a rubber dinghy, lifted himself out of the chair and slid into the dinghy in one smooth, practised movement.

  Beyond the harbour’s breakwater, the ocean still wrestled with the memory of the storm. Katya was barely able to pick out the deeper black of the seething sea against the black sky, but behind them, to the east, the darkness was thinning. Telephone wires sang, seagulls shivered in the lee of lobster pots. She shook her head.

  ‘I promised myself I would never go in a stupid boat again, and this one is tiny!’ she yelled into Joe’s ear. Joe nodded but remained silent. He’d said barely a word since they’d met his brother. Katya, Joe and Reilly got in, facing backwards. Seamus pulled on a cord and the dinghy’s outboard barked into life.