Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  Matthew Bentinick stood at Jocelyn’s door. He chuckled.

  ‘All the players are moving into place. You know any of the old Afghan sayings? I don’t suppose you do. Try this one. “A pashtun can wait his entire life for his revenge, then curse himself for his impatience.” Good, isn’t it? Apposite. It’ll come for him out of a clear blue sky – or, rather, come from the moon’s beams. All up to speed?’

  She said that the last reports on the link had put them at the edge of the base, about to enter old territory. She told him what had been readied in anticipation of a conclusion, and where, and that unequivocal directions should soon reach Gabrielle Davies.

  ‘It’s as clear as mother’s ruin. She can’t dispute it. We just have to wait and hope. Wait, hope and trust that the unexpected doesn’t shove its oar in. It never applied to me, but my mother used to say that men in Maternity were a nuisance and best in the pub, out of sight and mind. You might try it.’

  A maid wanted to replace the towels. There was a smell. A master key was used. The body was found. The police were called.

  Karol Pilar said, ‘We’re about to enter the perimeter line of the camp. Go back three decades. There were continuous fences with tumbler wires for alarms and razor wire at the top. It made a continuous encirclement of the whole complex. It would have been patrolled by armed troops and dogs. And the area close to it, where we are now, was a closed zone. Local people could be arrested and shot for entering it. It was the central command headquarters for the Soviet forces: they numbered fifty-five thousand. It was a place of huge significance in the Cold War and would have been a prized intelligence target to your agencies, the Americans or the Germans. The principal operations room is deep underground, with reinforced concrete roofing and walls. From there the start or end of the Third World War would have been directed. There were squadrons of tanks here, artillery experts and the Soviet Union’s finest attack aircraft. Tactical nukes were stored here. The equipment was first class and for European battle conditions it was at least as good as that of the Americans, maybe better. It came at a price. The civilian population, at home in the Motherland, was left in penury while resources went to the military. There was a joke, a Russian one. ‘‘In 2020 we’re going to put a man on the moon. In 2050 we’ll put a man on Mars. In 2100, we’ll provide boots for everyone.’’ The cost buckled the regime. They went home, took what they could carry and left the rest to be looted by my people. Inside and on the walls of a building, there’s a slogan, ‘‘The Soviet Union for ever, and it will never be Different.’’ I don’t laugh. My mother liked poetry, and in particular that of the British nineteenth century. She used to read to me, and I remember everything.

  ‘ “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’’

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

  ‘I did it well, yes? For Ozymandias you can name Brezhnev and Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev, and all of those defence ministers who had medals on their chests. Their work mocks them. Finished, gone, now a wilderness. Except that a new Soviet Union has arisen. The president and his siloviki asset-strip the country and protect themselves with repression. They have new gulags for opponents and use the taps on the gas pipelines to do the work of armoured divisions. That is the new world, and this is the old version of it. Today Timofey Simonov wears a uniform. It is pressed and clean, and I saw it when he came out of his villa. The new Russian has a love for the old days. I don’t laugh. It is no joke to me. I think he comes here often, remembers the noises and marches with ghosts and feels he is part of a great power. He yearns for it again. He is a good target, the best. It will give me sublime pleasure to take him – at whatever cost to myself. He struts and recalls the might of long ago. He is a target of high value and—’

  ‘The high-value target is not the Russian creep. He’s in second place—’ She broke off and groped in her coat pocket.

  She pulled out her phone. The screen threw light on her face, which showed her growing disbelief. Danny Curnow watched. When he stretched up he could see past Karol Pilar and over Bravo’s shoulder. The road stretched to a short horizon. The headlights were off and the driver, Alpha, had the van’s sidelights to guide him. He was hunched forward and when he went into the potholes he swore. There were lights ahead. Too many bends for Danny to see the tail of the Mercedes, but the lights would have bounced high enough to catch the tops of trees. The last of the three in the black overalls, Charlie, had been working on the weapons as Pilar had talked, seemed satisfied that all were armed and made safe. He had checked the spare magazines, and seemed to have the little cans ready – gas or flash-and-bang. There was a medical box too, and a camera. Everything was checked and cleared.

  She must have read her screen three times. He waited, not long.

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  What did she not believe? He stayed quiet.

  ‘This is ridiculous, beyond belief.’

  He stayed silent.

  ‘Look at this.’

  Her phone was shoved under his face. She gave him time to read and scrolled down. The target was designated as Timofey Simonov. She had the job of gold commander. She had no concern for the arrest of Malachy Riordan but evidence linking him to further weapons sales was to be recorded. The Czech, Pilar, had details of the exfiltration procedure. She was wished luck. The authorisation for the taking of Timofey Simonov was from Matthew Bentinick. The sender was Jocelyn. She rounded on him. ‘Did you know this?’

  He saw no reason to lie. He nodded.

  ‘You let me make an idiot of myself. What am I supposed to do?’

  Danny Curnow said, ‘It’s the end of an operation. We have webs that lead us to the spider and we must follow them. One element was Malachy Riordan, and he took us part of the way. A stronger line came from Ralph Exton. He took us another hike forward. The spider, the bad bastard, is Timofey in his fancy dress. He’s the target the big people have chosen. I just try to do my job and not think too much.’

  ‘Ours not to reason why?’

  ‘Do the job as best you can – without getting damaged.’

  Her hand went onto Danny’s. Warm, gentle. Karol Pilar said they were going now into the base. The van slipped off the road and began to crawl forward. Her hand had gone. He had no place there, and knew nowhere else to be.

  Chapter 18

  It was the entry to a labyrinth.

  He had been in the great camps at Tidworth or Larkhill, at Catterick, and knew the maze of side roads that led between the office blocks, the administration areas, the training teams’ locations, the armouries and arsenals. This one was the size of all of them put together. No signposts, little that was recognisable because of the height that the trees had grown to in more than twenty years. If they had not had the glow of the lights to follow, in the top branches of the trees, they would have had no chance of doing the tail. There were guard posts where the barbed-wire barriers, rusted and sagging, had been dragged aside, and buildings where the windows were broken and the doors hung askew.

  Beyond the guard posts, set back among the new forests, there were single-storey offices. Once the tarmac would have been lined with whitewashed stones to prevent wayward drivers going onto mown grass. All gone. He wondered if Nature was a wrecker or whether it laughed at the pygmy efforts of man to create an artificial grooming. He saw the squat entrances to air-raid shelters. Little was clear.

  The lights of the Mercedes were far ahead, and he thought the driver travelled slowly to preserve its tyres and chassis. Their own transport was typical of a vehicle pool – army or police – and would have had basic maintenance only, not what he and Dusty gave the minibus. In low gear it coughed and spat. An extraordinary place.

  Karol Pilar gave them brief facts: ‘The activity here is for the people who come from abroad and want to drive a tank. A co
mpany offers that chance. Men come, get drunk in the Old City in Prague, then the next morning are here to drive a tank . . .

  ‘For eighty euros you may buy fifteen minutes as a passenger in a BMP personnel carrier. To be at the controls you have to pay three hundred. To be in a T-55 main battle tank you pay two hundred euros for a ten-minute ride. To drive the T-55 you pay even more . . .

  ‘They have built a camp, away to the west of the site, and it is a replica of a fire base for the Americans in Vietnam. You can pay and be dressed like the Viet Cong, black pyjamas, or in American fatigues, and you fight with bullets of soft plastic.

  ‘In the Communist days, the Czechoslovak Army had three and a half thousand tanks of its own. Now, the new Czech Republic has thirty-five tanks of its own. At Milovice, the entrepreneur has five tanks that belong to him and an MI-24 attack helicopter, but without an engine. There are other collectors. Together they have more tanks than our government. Crazy . . .

  ‘Why do people get satisfaction from travelling in a war machine, and pretending to fight? Why not go to Afghanistan and fight for a day, a week or a month? I do not understand. Would it be a good financial venture to buy a bank building and have people pay to pretend to rob it? Do you think—’

  He stopped short. The driver had braked hard and doused the side-lights. The Mercedes had shown them a control tower with the skeleton shape of window frames on the roof where the observers would have managed air movements. They had passed great reinforced hangars where the aircraft had been protected behind huge steel doors, and there had been the open space of the runway, the taxi strip and the aprons. There was a moon but it was not full. The Mercedes had killed its headlights. Ahead was an open space, four or five hundred metres across. Gaby was close to him and stretching to see for herself. The engine ticked over. They would have been against the background of the tree-line but couldn’t follow.

  They couldn’t go forward, and had no light ahead to guide them.

  There was a gusting wind that blistered off the van’s roof. No one spoke. Danny thought, kept it to himself, that they were short-handed. It was cheap-skate. They might have had a dozen men and four vehicles, but they would still have been under-resourced for tracking a target in such a location. Not his call.

  Alpha was beside the driver and had a monocular with night-vision capability. It was passed from Alpha to Charlie, from Charlie to Bravo, from Bravo to Karol Pilar. The sounds were of the wind, the rattle of tree branches and the squeak of movements on the metal flooring. Pilar passed it to Danny, but Gaby intercepted it. It was her call, not Danny’s, and she had the right to look through the thing before him. He was just a passenger, making up the numbers and knowing his place. The hard man required to whip an informer into shape – gain necessary co-operation – was redundant. She elbowed him. He reached out in the darkness and her fingers found his hand. A moment of calm amid the chaos? Dream on, Danny. The monocular was in his grip. It was a poor view. He would have had the worst eyes of all of them, clapped-out vision.

  The Mercedes, a blurred shape, was in the middle of the far runway. Beyond it there was a line of hangars, great doors pushed shut and grass growing over the curved roofs. The Mercedes waited, blacked out. They must have lights to guide them. If the Mercedes pulled away, didn’t use head- or side-lights, and they had only the rear lights to guide them, they’d lose it at the first bend. He couldn’t know whether they had shown out or if this was merely a sensible precaution against a tail.

  And if the blame game kicked in, and they had shown out, he wondered who would field it. Himself? Just tell them to get lost. Gaby Davies? She could say, with justification, that she had been excluded from the planning stages, and would walk away. Karol Pilar? He would say he had done nothing beyond the instructions given him by a superior officer. Alpha, Bravo and Charlie? They had done as they were told. He scratched in his memory. He seemed to recall an avalanche of missed meetings, lost tails, the frustration of getting back late to Gough, faces of thunder, and the sharpness of colleagues who had not fouled up.

  It went forward. Pilar had the night-sight gear. Danny Curnow saw nothing, but the whisper was that the Mercedes had eased away and come off the far side of the runway onto an old concrete apron, then into the tree line. No lights.

  Danny Curnow said, ‘We depend on you, Karol. Your judgement. How far and how close? Your call.’

  If Gaby had interrupted him, made an issue of command and control, he might have slapped her. She didn’t. They started off across the width of the runway and were without cover. They had to cross it. He asked Pilar if there was any sign of it having been a piss-stop for the Mercedes. He was answered briskly: no one had emerged from the vehicle. It had been a precaution, professional procedure.

  He said, ‘An old boss of mine used to say, “If life were easy it wouldn’t be worth doing.” Sort of about perspective.’

  His arm was hit, hard, by Karol Pilar’s closed fist. They nudged across the concrete. With no lights to follow, they might already have lost the target.

  They had driven a hundred yards, Ralph Exton estimated, had taken a left, then another, and a right. Denisov had switched on the headlights and they went faster. Buildings loomed out of the trees, and a fox crossed the track. It broke its stride, stopped to stare balefully at them, then scooted. He liked foxes. They fitted well with Ralph Exton’s image of himself: hunted, persecuted, a survivor, relying on his wits to see the next dawn. He shared the back seat with the Irishman. They hadn’t spoken.

  It would have been difficult. They could have talked about the smell of burning skin or the danger of cigarette smoking to health, or the amazing performance of the modern cordless drill. They could have discussed the weather on that mountain and whether it was usually blanketed by fog. He had nothing to say to the man. He smelt rank. He had seen little of Malachy Riordan’s face, only glimpsed the scratches on his cheek. He had seen the lip, though, and there were small indents near the chin that he assumed were from a bite. He was practised at ‘not my business’ and avoiding involvement. He was happy trafficking cigarettes to the North of Ireland and was not burdened with thoughts as to where the money raised from the sales went and what it did.

  The big question was about the procurement of weapons: a business opportunity. He saw pictures of funerals on TV. If they were from Ireland no one in the pub turned to the screen. If they were from Iraq or Afghanistan, the room went quiet and there were the usual meaningless statements about ‘heroes one and all’. Ralph Exton did not relate the deals from which he took a good cut to the Irish hearses. He wore blinkers. Ralph Exton was well versed in concentrating on what mattered to him. He ignored what did not. He understood about the lights. He wondered where Gaby Davies was, how far back, and assumed she was with the handler, a cold bastard who had read him like the proverbial open book. There was something lovely about her, something rough, honest and vulnerable. She wasn’t worldly. A deliberation faced him, but not that evening. Home to the little woman who sometimes shared his bed, his local pub and dodgy contacts book, or off with the officer? God alone knew where it would lead and whether she’d nag the rough edges off him. Gaby Davies would be behind him, with the handler, and they’d probably have back-up. There would be hoods with dungarees, balaclavas and high-velocity firepower.

  They came into a clearing and the headlights caught a closed truck. A man stood close to it, dragged on a cigarette and swore at them because the light was in his eyes. Timofey Simonov was out first.

  He was told, ‘Over there, Ralph. That building – you see it? There is an iron door in the end of the wall. I used to go through it to work each morning. It was the command bunker. Thirty-six steps down and proof against even tactical nuclear strikes. My desk was there. And Brigadier Denisov was my senior officer. It is our place, our territory, and a disgrace that it is treated as a rubbish dump. It is where we have the weapons and where your business associate can shoot. It is good, Ralph?’

  Good or bad, it was where
they were. He climbed out. The wind whipped him, ruffling his hair and bugging at his coat. An owl hooted in the darkness. He stayed back, looking longingly for shadows and cover.

  ‘It is a pity your friend did not come.’

  Malachy Riordan said nothing. He allowed himself to have his arm held, as if he was from Spain or Italy where men touched, and was taken to the back of the truck. A finger was flicked: an impatient instruction.

  The cigarette was thrown down, the butt stamped on, and the flap lowered. It clattered, metal on metal, and he flinched at the noise. There was laughter at his reaction. He was told by Timofey Simonov that there would be no ears, eyes or mouth to report anything within five kilometres of where they stood. The boxes were lifted out. The man who had brought them helped the brigadier. The headlights of the truck and the Mercedes lit the open space and the track up which they had come, probing further back into the darkness and making more shadows. He heard an owl. Malachy Riordan knew about owls. He was a night creature, seldom out on the business of war in daylight. He knew owls because they valued the quiet of the mountain.

  The boxes were piled up, light chains and padlocks round each. Malachy was invited forward. He felt in his hands the hardness of her throat. First she had taunted him, then he had hit her and gone for her neck. The moment before she had realised he would end her life she had started to struggle. She had split his lip, bitten him and scratched his face.

  He was given a small hand torch and a sheet of paper on which were written the items purchased, the quantities and the prices.

  Businesslike but not taken from a computer, where it would have left a trace. He shut her from his mind.

  He was shown on the list what he had purchased, and the items were checked against the paper. There were rifles, assault and the Dragunov sniper version. He saw rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and the larger boxes that would contain the broken-down pieces of the DSkH heavy machine-gun and the lighter PK7.62mm. There were grenades, and some boxes contained ammunition. The torch was aimed towards a last box and he was told that it held the new Semtex stocks. It was what men in the armed struggle dreamed of: not the quantities that had come from Libya thirty-five years back – so great an amount that it could not be hidden satisfactorily or used because too few men were trained for it – but sufficient to set alight East Tyrone and the Mid-Ulster area. Enough to bring off their arses the men who had said they would fight ‘one day but not today’. The boxes were laid out in a line, like coffins when the aftermath of an atrocity was on the television and the dead were waiting to be buried: Syria or Lebanon.