Dimitriy had been approaching the cellar when he heard the voices. His first thought had been to go for help, but logic told him these men wouldn’t be here if Yuri and the rest of his shift were still free. Still he could have turned and walked away, but this was what he was paid for. He pulled the gun from its holster, checked the ammunition and flicked off the safety catch.
‘Halt! Stay where you are or I shoot.’
The shout and the beam from the powerful torch froze the men in place. ‘Shit,’ the leader muttered beneath his breath. He squinted into the glare past his black-suited subordinates and saw a fat man in an ill-fitting blue security guard’s uniform standing by the cellar entrance pointing a gun in his direction. Black patches of sweat stained the armpits of the tunic and the guard was breathing hard, but he held the pistol steady and from here the mouth of the barrel looked like a cannon.
‘Take it easy, friend. Nobody needs to get hurt here,’ the leader called. The pistol swung towards him. In a whisper, he ordered, ‘Get ready.’
Dimitriy was angry. The night-vision goggles puzzled him, but the dark boiler suits and ski masks told him only one thing. He had watched and wept when the Moscow theatre siege ended in explosions, clouds of poisoned gas and gunfire. He had no doubt the rescuers had been incompetent, but the reason 129 innocents had died was because men like these brought terror into his country. ‘Move and I shoot,’ he warned and he meant it. The torch moved between the three men, the light magnified and eyeball-scorching in the lens of the goggles, but the leader saw his opportunity. The armourer partly shielded the mercenary carrying the other end of the crate. ‘Hit him when you get a clear shot,’ he said calmly in English.
‘What did you say?’ Dimitriy demanded. ‘You—’ He didn’t have the opportunity to finish the sentence. The man in the centre of the trio moved faster than he’d ever seen a man move and he flinched at the muzzle flash before the bullet from the GSh-18 hit him low in the belly. Despite being half-blinded by the torch the soldier had had a clear aim and he believed to his last heartbeat that he’d fired a killing shot. But Dimitriy wasn’t just a fat man in a bad suit. He had once been a thin man wearing the uniform of the Guards Airborne Assault Brigade among the super-heated rocks of the Panshir Valley and as his body absorbed the energy of the bullet he got off a round that took the other man in the right eye and dropped him in a spray of blood and brains. Dimitriy knew the damage the bullet had done to his insides but, even with his strength failing, he tried to raise the gun for a second shot just as the armourer fired his first. The 9mm parabellum round left the barrel at a muzzle velocity of 1,100 feet per second and hit the cylinder of Dimitriy’s Kobalt revolver. It struck at an angle which made the grotesquely misshapen bullet ricochet upward with a force that blew off most of Dimitriy’s lower jaw and part of his left cheekbone before hurling his body off the door jamb into the cellar.
‘Fuck,’ the leader cursed, now struggling to hold the crate on his own. He willed himself to be calm. Everything had turned to shit, but that was nothing new in his world. The key was to keep a lid on it and to get the fuck out before things got worse. He shouted an order to the armourer. ‘Make sure of that bastard and get back to help me with this.’ But before the man was halfway to the cellar door he took another glance at his watch. They had just over one minute before the lights came back on. The clock was ticking, their timings out. ‘Belay that. He’s dead or close enough. We need to move now.’
Abandoning their comrade’s body they struggled up the stairs and through the museum. The others were waiting in the van as the leader and the armourer pushed the packing case into the rear. They didn’t ask where the third man was, they didn’t have to.
‘Drive,’ the leader shouted into his throat mike.
Inside the cellar Dimitriy was only vaguely aware of his terrible wounds. His world came and went in alternating waves of trauma-induced shock and agonizing pain. He still had eyes though, and his conscious mind identified a sight that had been common enough in the Russian-occupied rear area of Afghanistan. The object in front of him was certainly a TM-57 anti-tank mine. Normally it would take the weight of a large vehicle to detonate it, but he noted the wire leading from it to the contraption in the centre of the floor. He knew the damage it would do. Dimitriy began to claw his way towards the trigger mechanism.
When the assault team reached the outskirts of the city, the leader ordered the driver to stop the van. He nodded to the armourer, and the bomb maker retrieved a mobile phone from the breast pocket of his overall. By now the men had removed their masks and they leaned forward in anticipation as the armourer punched in the number. When the signal reached the phone it would complete a circuit which would mix the two explosive liquids and send an electric charge to the anti-tank mines.
Dimitriy studied the mechanism with the bemused concentration of a drunk man peering at a keyhole. He was lying in a pool of his own blood and his vision had begun to fade. He knew he hadn’t got long. He looked at the mobile phone. It was of a type more familiar to his son, but some instinct told him to remove the battery. He reached out towards it. Maybe now they would give him a raise.
The leader opened the van door and listened for the familiar muted thunder of the explosion. After two or three anxious minutes he turned accusingly to the armourer.
‘I can go back . . .’ the man offered.
The leader shook his head. The helicopter would be at the rendezvous and they could be in Finland and home free within the hour. He banged on the partition between the rear and the driver’s seat and the van took off.
‘We’ve got what we came for.’
IV
IN HIS OLD Bond Street office, four storeys above the well-heeled shoppers who could afford to buy from the expensive shops he walked past every day, Jamie cleared a space for the maroon pay book and the journal among the auction catalogues and art history books piled haphazardly on the desk.
He hesitated, torn between the fascination of the journal’s ruled pages and the pay book, which he knew would give him an immediate insight into the grandfather he had never truly known. The journal must once have been an expensive purchase and was of a type he guessed had been used to record the meetings of exclusive gentlemen’s dining clubs. It was three-quarters of an inch thick, A5-sized and bound in what had once been fine quality blue leather, now scuffed and faded with age. There had been a clasp to hold it shut, but that had long since disappeared and the book was now held closed by a piece of tightly knotted silver cord. The pages appeared well-thumbed, but something told him it hadn’t been opened for many years.
Reluctantly, he laid it aside and opened the little maroon pay book.
The first page came as a surprise. Jamie knew that most soldiers who served in the Second World War had been volunteers or conscripts, civilians in uniform who reluctantly stepped forward to serve their country against the Nazis. He had expected his grandfather to be one of them, but Matthew George Sinclair had signed up with the Royal Berkshire Regiment on August 17 1937 at the age of nineteen. The pay book recorded his height as 6 feet, his chest expansion as 40 inches and his weight as a 180 pounds. His appearance was described as – eyes: green; hair: dark; no distinguishing marks. Jamie felt a slight shiver as he recognized himself in his second year at university as a member of the Officer’s Training Corps. On graduation, he’d had an offer from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and he had almost completed the selection process before his mind had rebelled against the lifetime of discipline he was letting himself in for.
Other dog-eared pages contained information on Matthew’s pay and allowances, deductions, training received and courses taken (rifle shooting/rated sniper) and his commission with the rank of lieutenant in September 1939. But the most interesting was ‘Record of Specialist Employment Whilst Serving’. Here was revealed the mystery of the awards he’d found in the metal box. The African Star and clasp, the France and Germany Star, the 1939–45 Star, the Defence Medal and the War Medal, a
ll dated and initialled by his commanding officers. And finally, the Military Cross for ‘acts of gallantry in the area of Augsburg, south Germany’.
But who was the man behind the medals?
Only now did he feel able to pick up the journal and work with his fingers at the knot holding it closed. He opened the book at the first page. Each entry was preceded by a date and laid out in the neat copper-plate writing he remembered from the few letters and cards he had received from his grandfather while at university. Some of the wording and phraseology seemed quaint to him, as if it had been written in Victorian times. The first few entries were dated in the days just after Matthew’s promotion, when war was declared in the late summer of 1939, and reflected the gung-ho enthusiasm of a young man on the brink of his greatest challenge; along with a frankly stated unease about letting ‘the men’ down. How would he be affected by fear? Matthew was reticent about his horror of being maimed, but death appeared to hold no terrors for him. There was also a tacit acknowledgement that keeping such a journal was frowned upon and that the writer would have to suspend it when he went overseas, which seemed imminent. But it quickly became clear that Matthew Sinclair had become so involved in recording his thoughts that he had ignored the restriction, risking reprimand or even court martial, an act of rebellion that revealed something else Jamie hadn’t known about his grandfather.
The phone rang at the other end of the desk and Gail, his secretary, answered. ‘Saintclair Fine Arts, may I help you?’ She listened for a few seconds, before placing her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘A call from a hospital in the Midlands. Can you take it?’
Reluctantly, he laid the journal aside and accepted the phone. ‘Jamie Saintclair.’
‘Is this the grandson of the late Reverend Matthew Sinclair?’ a serious female voice demanded.
‘That’s correct.’
‘Only the names confused me.’
‘They often do.’ Jamie smiled wryly. ‘How can I help you?’
‘My name is Carol O’Connor. I’m a nurse at the St Cross Hospital in Rugby. I’m sorry to bother you, but one of our long-term patients says he knew your grandfather and is very keen to talk to you.’
Jamie raised his eyebrows and Gail smiled. ‘I’m pretty busy at the moment. But put him on the line. It’s always nice to speak to one of my grandfather’s former parishioners.’
Carol O’Connor’s tone turned apologetic. ‘I’m afraid that, like many of our elderly clients, Stan is very strong-willed. He will only talk to you face to face.’
Jamie sighed. ‘I don’t think—’
‘And he isn’t one of your grandfather’s parishioners. He says he served with a Matthew Sinclair during the war.’
Jamie’s heart gave a little flutter. ‘What did you say his name was?’
‘Stan. Stanislaus Kozlowski.’
* * *
‘I read ’bout Matthew Sinclair’s det in The Times newspaper and I tink, maybe this is same Matt Sinclair from vor. Carol she a good girl, do anytink for us inmates. She check wit’ undertaker and now you are here.’ Sixty-eight years in Britain had failed to take the edge off Stan Kozlowski’s Polish accent; indeed it had added a nasal West Midlands twang that made his words barely comprehensible at first hearing. Jamie suspected it was an old man’s indulgence and about as authentic as Stan’s hair, which swept back from a wide brow, an unlikely crow-black helmet that gleamed like a guardsman’s toecap. Shrunken and plainly exhausted, the old man lay back in the tentacled embrace of a kidney dialysis machine, surrounded by coils of tubing which pulsed to the rhythm of a beeping monitor. The Pole saw Jamie’s look. ‘Four hour a day. Real pain in de ass, eh? But worth it. You comes back later, maybe Stan take you dancing?’ A shaking hand reached into the top pocket of his pyjamas and pulled out a faded black-and-white photograph. ‘See, me and Matt. Late ’forty-four. Maybe ’forty-five?’ Jamie accepted the picture. Two soldiers in camouflage jump smocks standing beside a jeep. Stan was instantly recognizable as the bare-headed young man on the right: short, dark and with a fierce scowl on his pinched, unshaven face. The tall, rangy lieutenant in the paratrooper’s pot helmet could have been Jamie’s twin brother. ‘Me and Matt, ve lose touch after ve comes back from vor, but Matt, he tells me had enough of fighting. He go into Church.’ The old man laughed. ‘Me, I can’t go back Poland cos Reds vill shoot me, so I go into car factory in Solihull. One minute officer and gentleman and genuine heroic Polish ally, next minute job-stealing Polish bastard, eh?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jamie apologized. ‘I’ve heard that Polish soldiers weren’t treated particularly well after the war.’
Stan laughed again, a raking cough that sounded painful to the ear. ‘Dat lizus Churchill, he sell us down river. But you don’t feel sorry for Stan. Had good life. Lots of whisky. Lots of girls.’ The old man’s voice faded and he lay back, breathing noisily through his nose, but after a few moments he opened his eyes again. ‘How Matt die?’
Jamie told him about the accident. ‘Look, Mr Kozlowski – Stan – I’m tiring you. Maybe I should come back later, or tomorrow?’
Stan shook his head. ‘Is OK. Not a bad way to go, eh? Just one snap and you’re in heaven. Better than this. I know. Broke lots of necks during war, me and Matt.’ Jamie opened his mouth to protest, but the Pole spat words like three-second bursts of automatic fire. ‘Quick and clean.’ He raised his hands as if he held a head between them, and twisted with a single sharp movement, at the same time making a distinct tick through his teeth. ‘Old Stan he still got it, eh? I remember the first time . . .’ Without warning, his eyes dropped and he began to speak softly in a confused mix of Polish and English. Jamie could make out enough to understand that he was hearing the story of Poland’s fall. After a few minutes the voice faded again and he realized Stan had fallen into a doze. Half an hour later, the old man was still asleep, and Jamie watched his body twitch and jerk as he refought the war.
A nurse inspected the monitors before rearranging the old soldier’s blanket, tucking it around his neck and shoulders.
‘Stan’s a bit restless today, I’m afraid. I’m Carol, Mr Saintclair, we spoke on the phone.’ She offered him her hand and he shook it. She was tiny, but heavy breasted, with strawberry-blonde curls and that confident, unflappable air the best nurses cultivate. ‘I should have warned you about this, but he was very keen to see you. Morning is a much better time for him.’
‘I’m glad I came.’ Jamie hid his frustration behind a smile. ‘But I think I’ve tired him enough for one day. Maybe I can come back again another time?’
‘Of course, we always encourage visitors and Stan doesn’t have anyone nearby. His children both emigrated to Australia, I think. He’s a remarkable man. You’re seeing him at his worst. The machine takes a lot out of him, but he still insists on a walk along the stream every morning and he plans to march in the parade on Armistice Day.’
Jamie thanked her and picked up his coat. A drowsy voice interrupted his departure.
‘You come back tomorrow, then ve talk about Matt, eh? I tell you what I told other guy. About last mission with the szkopi. Goddam disaster. Brass called it Operation Equity, but Matt he had other name for it. Operation Doomsday.’
V
ON HIS WAY back to the train, Jamie debated whether to bother coming back the next day. He had plenty of other things he should be doing and the Polish veteran’s ramblings, though interesting, were sometimes ludicrous. What was that stuff about Matthew breaking necks, for God’s sake? Still, he wouldn’t decide immediately. Once he was settled in his seat he opened the journal at the page where he’d left off.
As the rampaging Wehrmacht finished off the scattered remnants of Poland’s destroyed army and the Soviet Union joined in, feasting on the defeated nation’s carcass, the Royal Berkshires had embarked for France along with 150,000 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force. The initial overseas entries, as the battalion deployed inland, leapfrogged erratically between the wide-eyed wonder of a youthful touris
t and the excitement of a professional soldier desperate to get to grips with his enemy. Lieutenant Matthew Sinclair also had a touching regard for his soldiers’ welfare. His relationship with his sergeant, Anderson, a man old enough to be his father, seemed to have been particularly close. The cosy, confessional tone of the diaries ceased on 10 May 1940 when the Wehrmacht attacked France and Belgium. Matthew Sinclair was about to get his baptism of fire. His Berkshires were part of the 2nd Infantry Division and on the far right of the British line, south-east of Lille, defending the flatlands around the River Dyle and in the direct line of General Erich Hoepner’s rampaging XVI Panzer Corps.
The first entry of the shooting war was almost comically indignant.
My initial experience of battle was entirely farcical as we weren’t allowed to move to our positions in Belgium until the Germans attacked first. As a consequence we were quite ill-prepared for them. Nevertheless, I feel very excited because this is what IT has all been for. First bombs fell during afternoon stand down.
But the horrors that followed chilled Jamie’s blood. The bombs fell so frequently in the following days that Matthew stopped recording them. Meanwhile, the tone of the diary became ever more disjointed and frenetic. Jamie imagined the brief sentences being scribbled in the dark as the writer lay cowering in some water-filled ditch with his ears tuned for the slightest sound of an approaching enemy. Snatches of personal shorthand recorded what may have been momentous happenings, but were forever unintelligible. These pages were torn and mud-spattered and some were missing altogether. On one, Jamie noticed a fine spray of what could only have been blood. Within six days, the BEF was surrounded and fighting for its very survival. The Berkshires were ordered to fall back towards the Channel ports, and Lieutenant Sinclair tersely recorded the disintegration of his battalion as it was chewed to pieces by the panzers, entire platoons and companies wiped out in savage minor engagements that would never appear in the history books.
The Doomsday Testament Page 4
