The Untouchable

by Gerald Seymour

  He knew everything of the man who stood ahead of him with the arms out: when he ate, when he showered, when he had sex, when he cleaned his shoes. He knew the cartwheel of his organization, the pitch of his voice, the gait of his walk, and the assets secreted away that made Mister first among equals.

  Only Joey knew what had brought the fear to Mister's mind and had crushed him. At the Custom House, if they had seen Mister naked and holding out his arms in surrender, they would be launching the piss-up to end all binges. Joey alone owned the moment. He felt no elation, but a simple flat lack of satisfaction. No thrill, no triumph. He had gone to the end of the road, followed where it had led him, and the vista was empty.

  He did not look down.

  Joey reached the Eagle's body. He smelt it, and the dog sniffed at it. He swung to his left and started out on a wide half-circle that would bring him face to face with Mister. The dusk gathered around him. The dog, close to Joey, growled softly and bared its teeth as they skirted Mister's buttocks, then his hip, then his groin.

  In the half-light gloom, Mister cut a pathetic and pitiful figure, but compassion had long ago been sluiced from Joey. He saw the pleading in Mister's eyes and knew that he had won. He faced Mister.

  He could not reach into the future.

  He would lead his prisoner to the trees, take him up the path and past the skeleton, up to the crest of the hill, and he would permit him to dress except for his shoes and his socks, and would sit the dog down near to his prisoner. In the morning, when the vehicles came, he would commandeer - beg or borrow - a ride to Sarajevo's airport, and he would fly back to Heathrow. There he would hand his prisoner into the custody of the SQG team, and he would go back to the bed-sit on the top floor of the house in Tooting Bec, and he would sleep. He did not think he would ever again return to the Custom House. He had left the uniform behind, he was not a part of the culture. It was the price he paid - the taking of Mister did not come cheap - he would be shut out. He looked over Mister's body. There was no power, no threat. He had no sight of the future.

  Joey went forward to take Mister's arm and to bring him out.

  His first step was onto matted grass, and a thistle stem that broke under his trainer shoe. His second was on to a patch of ground that was bare. He was looking into Mister's face. His third step was snagged.

  Joey felt the restraint, and kicked his foot forward to break the snag.

  Barnaby kept the mines on a shelf in his prefabricated office in the Marshal Tito barracks - and when he had visitors, potential donors to the mine clearance programme, he always lifted them down and explained, without emotion, their mechanisms.

  'This is the anti-personnel bounding fragmentation mine, which is proven as the most deadly of all those used in the Bosnian war. It has either a trip-wire or a pressure-activated role, but it is more usual in the trip-wire mode. We call it PROM. As you see, ladies and gentlemen, it has a bottle-shaped body, steel, and the fuse is in the bottle's neck. The inside of the bottle has internal grooving, which better aids the shrapnel spread, fragmentation. But this is a clever mine. On a trip, or pressure, its first reaction is to fire a small black powder charge that throws upwards the main charge, held by a tether, a further twenty-five centimetres. That's the "bounding" factor. It carries nine hundred grams of explosive and the main charge detonates - not at ankle level - to cause maximum damage to upper thighs, genitalia, and the vital organs of the lower stomach. The lethal radius is twenty-five metres; the PROM has caused more casualties to our personnel than any other mine.

  This evening, in your hotel, when you order a good little Slovenian red, look at the bottle the waiter brings, and remember the other bottle I've shown you, the PROM, exactly the same size, but a killer.'

  Barnaby put the deactivated mine back on the shelf.

  The faces of his audience, as he would have predicted, were limp. He doubted many would order wine that evening with their dinner.

  A woman visitor paused at the door and looked back at the shelf. He asked her if she would like to handle the PROM. A little shudder crossed her face, but she nodded. He took it down and passed it to her.

  She held it as though unconvinced that it had been made safe.

  He said quietly, because dispassionate factual description worked better with potential donors than melodrama, 'The tether mechanism, the jump before scattering the shrapnel, is what makes it particularly effective. When it's on a trip-wire it only takes a three-kilo pull to fire it. If your foot snags the wire, you'd hardly feel it.'

  Her fingers trembled as she gave it back to him.

  October 2001

  Dougie Gough wrote the name in his notepad: Dragan Kovac. He poised his pen and waited for the translation.

  ' I am a retired sergeant of police and so I am familiar with the style of statement that an esteemed gentleman such as yourself would expect . . . The memory of that day is very clear to me . . . I now know that the older man was called Packer, and the younger man was Cann. The man, Packer, had stripped off his clothes, he had surrendered. The combat between the two was over. Packer had submitted. It was last light.

  Cann came with a dog to bring him out of the minefield - that he came into the field was the final marker of his victory. Packer was naked and the dog was near him, guarding him, and Cann set off the mine. It was a PROM, with a trip-wire. Cann went down. I had a fine view of it from the porch of my house. Packer snatched up some of his clothes and ran, as if he had a sense of liberty. He ran for the river. When Packer was nearly at the river, the dog caught him. I went from my house, down the track to the riverbank and called the dog - I am familiar with police dogs. I had with me my long-handled axe. It was becoming dark but there was light enough for me to see that the dog was injured by some of the shrapnel the mine had thrown, and that the dog had bitten Packer's arm. I took them, Packer and the dog, back to my house. The dog guarded him, and 1 had my axe and I waited for help to come. Then he cried out, Cann did, in the field.

  The dog heard it. It limped away, went back into the field. I was left with the prisoner. I had the axe but I am an old man, I have been retired many years.

  I could not keep the prisoner - I was not to blame for his escape. The dog went back into the field and from the time it reached Cann he did not cry out again. You should believe me, I could not have kept the prisoner.'

  He was retired now, had 'gone early'. But a telephone call had come to the bungalow on the outskirts of Kilchoan, the chief investigation officer himself, and the request had been made that he should attend the small ceremony as the Custom House representative. A young diplomat, Hearn, had met him at the airport and had driven him to the valley. He had not been able to understand the speeches and he had wandered off. It had been his wife who had suggested he should take his walking-boots. He had sat on the riverbank and changed from his brogues to his boots then used the highest stones to cross the river. He had walked across a ploughed field, newly turned but not yet sown, and across a grazing field where his advance had scattered goats, sheep and two dry cows.

  He had passed the skeletons. He did not have to be told where to go. The target that drew him forward was a waist-high cairn of stones. It was similar country and he felt comfortable, small fields, wooded slopes and distant mountains, to that which bounded the road approaching his home on the Ardnamurchan peninsula. He stood quietly by the stones and soaked the place of its images, and he'd said the same quiet prayer that he spoke in his mind each Sunday in the quiet of the chapel at Kilchoan. When the ceremony was over, a drifting procession had followed him to the cairn. The diplomat translated the words of the rugged, bluff, self-serving man who wore an old uniform greatcoat and a policeman's cap. He knew he must play the part of a sponge to their stories. There was an official report, which had been drawn up by the embassy half a year earlier, but it had carried no sense of soul in its typed pages. The retired policeman saluted him and stepped back. An old man, his cheeks nicked from the shave to mark the importance of the ceremony
in the village, came forward to take Kovac's place, and beside him, hobbling with him, was a German shepherd dog with its left front leg off at the knee.

  He wrote the next name: Husein Bekir (farmer).

  ' I came from my home and I waded over the ford, and I thought I would be swept away, and then I went up the track past Kovac's house - the old fool was whining that it was not his fault that the prisoner had escaped from him - and I followed the de-miners who had been called out. We went on a path they had made between their tape and the trees at the far side of my fields. They had big lamps with them. They worked as fast as they dared to make a corridor across the field. When they had gone half-way the light from the lamps showed him. I had been told he was called Joey a silly name. He was on the ground, on his side. He was alive then. They went faster, I think they took great risks. They found one mine, a small one like the mine that has crippled my wife, and a trip-wire but it had become disconnected from the PROM or the PMR2, and then they stopped. Why? Because of the dog. The dog was beside Joey. It guarded him.

  Even where I stood in the trees behind the tape I could hear - and I have bad hearing - the growling of the dog. The men were more I l ightened of the dog than of the mines. Each metre they advanced in their corridor, before they stopped, the growl of the dog was more threatening. They said they would go no further unless the dog was shot, and one of them was sent to the village of Ljul to find a gun to kill the dog - the Serbs have many guns, they have not changed. I have worked with dogs all my life, a good dog is as important in my life as my children or my wife. I went down the corridor to where the men were with the lamps and their iron sticks. I talked to the dog. A rifle was brought from Ljut, but I gave my word that the dog would not hurt the de-miners. I saved the dog. We reached him. The dog was beside him and Joey had his arm over it, he held the coat of the dog. It is a good dog. It is of little use for work, but it is a friend . . . There should be a celebration tonight, because of the certificate, we should drink brandy until we can no longer stand - there will be no celebration. We are all honoured, sir, that you came.'

  The farmer shook his hand, walked away with the dog, and was replaced at the queue's front.

  He could not catch the name, so he wrote: Foreman (de-miner).

  'He had lost most of his stomach and one of his arms and his right leg was very seriously injured.

  There had been trauma and a great loss of blood. If we had been able to retrieve him quickly, within thirty minutes, then we might have saved his life, but he would still have required the amputation of his leg. I think, also, he may have been blinded but I have not seen any autopsy report . .. He confused me. Earlier that day I had met him and I had refused to move towards the man who was trapped in the field and had explained all of the dangers, and he had listened to everything I had said. Why did he then go into the field? Why did he wait until we had all gone, and it was dark, before he went into the field? I cannot say what drove him into the field . . . His life had gone when we reached him. We made this pile of stones where he was.'

  At the ceremony, before he had abandoned it and had headed for the field and the cairn of stones, a certification of area cleared had been handed by the de-miner foreman to Kovac and Bekir, and the diplomat had murmured in his ear that the certification was good for ten centimetres in depth - enough for now. The couple presented themselves to him. He remembered her from the airport: 'With the kindergarten, am I?' she'd asked. Either she had aged or she did not wear the cosmetic blanket he had last seen employed, and four local policemen stood sombrely behind them.

  He jotted the two names: PC Frank Williams (South Wales Constabulary), Margaret Bolton (surveillance consultant, SWC).

  'We felt we had to come. We were a part of it, you see, a part of what he did here. And we found each other here, Maggie and me. We walked out on him, and we'll carry that to our graves. I said to him, at the end, that we were disgusted at what he was doing. I called him arrogant. I'm with the armed-response vehicles now. I do my shift, I check my weapons back into the armoury at the end of my duty, and I go home, but I don't take my work with me. I don't talk about winning and losing, as he did. Did he achieve anything, did he win?'

  'Do you know, Mr Gough, what were his last words to Frank, when Frank ditched him? They were "Give Maggie my love" . . . If I'd been here, if I'd stayed, if I'd had to bloody well sit on him, I'd have stopped him walking into the field, but I didn't stay. I'm a consultant now. I lecture on surveillance practices and develop equipment, then I go home to Frank and we have a little meal and we don't talk about what happened here. But he's with us. I see those damn great stupid spectacles, and his kid's grin . . . What's the worst, he didn't want us to stay with him .. . We were just in the way. It was personal, it was between the two of them. I'm glad it was here, in a rather lovely place.'

  The man who marched forward had irritation on his face as if not used to standing patiently in a queue

  . . . He felt he was the bereaved relative at the chapel gate. He sensed that this was a mourner who had travelled from Sarajevo more because of a slack day's diary than a degree of loss. The name was rapped at him. Was he supposed to know it? He did not. He wrote: Benjamin Curwin (SIS, attached to United Nations Mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina).

  ' I hear they booted you out after the fiasco. Well, it was all rather childish, wasn't it? I'd have thought an organization like yours would have known how to keep its people on a tighter rein . . . I told him he was, quote, "a fucking nuisance here", unquote, and interfering - I told him to do his investigation someplace else because he was upsetting the cart . . . Serif's empire still stands and his reputation is augmented by the rumours that he possesses NATO anti-tank weapons, and a communications system we can't decrypt. His tentacles still reach into the body politic, he still owns the government, but it's harder for us to track his dealings . . . Not all gloom. I was in London last week and heard the latest on your old target. Very far from gloom. You're out of the loop now, so you won't be up to speed. Packer reached Sarajevo, hijacking vehicles en route at gunpoint, then holed up there for a couple of days with some UN woman, before moving on - she treated some nasty dog bites on his arm. Now, he's living like a Trappist in northern Cyprus. I would have thought the Scrubs or Wandsworth would be preferable. We monitor him there. He's in a villa up a hill between Kyrenia and Ayios Amrovisios, courtesy of the Turkish Cypriots -

  the word is it's cost him five million to square them and that awful hood from the mainland, Fuat Selcuk.

  He's a busted flush. His wife came out to join him, stayed a month, then went home - she's now with her mother. They say his major subjects of conversation, when he can find anyone to talk to, are the price of tomatoes, the quality of the water supply and the frequency of the power-cuts. I heard he'd been ripped off rottenly by his new number cruncher . . . not all gloom. He's behind a big fence, sirens and electronics and lights - must feel quite like gaol. Don't get me wrong, I rather liked your man - a prig, but he had guts.'

  A hand was offered, for shaking, but he continued writing his notes, and didn't take it. He had feigned indifference when told of Albert Packer's situation.

  What he had learned since he had left the Church was that the highest and thickest wall imaginable separated serving officers from former officers. His status had gone with his identity card. He had received, in exchange for current reports and assessments, a carriage clock, a decanter set, and enough whip-round cash to purchase a ride-on mower. On his last day at the Custom House, before sherry with the CIO and the pub session with Sierra Quebec Golf, he had headed the meeting where the Crown Prosecution Service solicitor had pitched cold water on the prospect of a successful prosecution of 'Atkins' without the evidence of Joey Cann (deceased). The little queue had gone, and he put away his pad and capped his pen. He turned and laid his hand on the heap of stones. The diplomat had stepped back, as if understanding his mood. The funeral, down in the West Country, had been private; the family had requested that the Church di
d not attend, and it had not been disputed. There would be no plaque carrying SQG12's name and his dates in the lobby of the Custom House:

  'Clear defiance of instructions, can't have that . . .

  Broke all the rules in the book, made a mockery of the m a n u a l . . . Brought it, let's not muck about, down on his own head . . . Put up a memorial and we send a message to future generations that we sanction personnel operating outside legality . . . It was a vendetta, unacceptable behaviour.' There would only be the stones in the valley. He heard the approach of the car, and the diplomat touched his arm. A Mercedes limousine approached, hugging the hammered-down ruts dug by tractor wheels. The doors opened. A sleek elderly man helped a young woman into a wheelchair, and bumped the chair towards the cairn. He had not seen them at the village ceremony. She held a small posy of flowers. He felt a wearying sadness. A spit of rain was falling.

  He took out his notepad again, and wrote down their names: Judge Zenjil Delic, Jasmina Delic.

  'We had a choice to make, the present or the future.

  We chose to safeguard the future.'

  'He bought me flowers . . . Before we rejected him I showed him the old burial stones in Sarajevo. On one was written, "I stood, praying to God, meaning no evil, yet I was struck to death by lightning." It is good that they have put stones here, where the lightning struck . . . I return his flowers.'

  She gave him the posy of alive strident colours. He leaned forward, and down, kissed her cheek, then laid the flowers at the foot of the cairn. He stared at the heaped stones. Some had dried earth on them and some were covered with lichen. He heard the car drive away over the field. He felt a crushing weight of responsibility. They had all told him he was not responsible - the CIO had said it, and the team had clamoured it, and his wife had sought to persuade him of it - but he knew what he had done . . . Or had there been, in that valley, a young man's fulfilment?