Locke walked. The trees were close around him and the light fell.
He had gone towards the beach and seen the track over the dunes blocked by a sleek BMW 7-series, in which a man sat. Caution had taken him into the undergrowth bordering the dunes, away from where Alice had found the grave. He had seen Jerry the Pole with a fisherman and a man in a mohair overcoat on the beach; he had heard little guttural whoops of excitement, and had seen a fish pulled in. He had gone on a path to the east, towards the watchtower.
He walked and his loneliness bruised him. He followed a rough track. It was insignificant when he came to it, and it told him nothing. The forest was pine and birch and the grass was a lush carpet. The fence wound down from the higher ground at the centre of the peninsula and straddled the track. Not more than four feet high and of chain-link, it would have proved a hindrance only to rabbits. The fence dipped away between the trees and fell towards the shore. The rain dripped on him. There were no wheelmarks, but the fence was broken across the track by a single red- and white-painted bar and a sign prohibited him going further. It told him nothing because this was the Polish fence. The main fence, the barricade, would be five hundred metres deeper into the trees, where the watchtower was. He stopped, alone, by the barrier. He heard the spatter of the rain and the call of the songbirds. This was Mowbray's world, not his. Mowbray was a creature of the times when fences cut across Europe, made a curtain from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, but those bloody times were gone—except here. He shuddered. The quiet frightened him.
He began to run, away from the fence. His knees were up and his breath spurted.
Locke came back to the cottage where the roses grew. He burst into the kitchen. She sat beside the radio console and he could barely see her in the gloom. He panted, sweated, supported himself against the sink.
'Where've you been?'
'I went to the fence—the border. I went to the border.'
'What's there?'
'Just a fence.'
'The way you're looking, Gabriel, there might at least have been an infantry division and an armoured brigade.'
'You can't see anything at the fence—what's behind it.'
The mocking was in her voice. 'Would you go through it?'
Her face was turned away from him, but it filled Locke's mind, the prettiness of it on the dunes when the wind had blustered her hair. 'I'm not trained for… Why?'
'Would you go through the fence for a man's liberty?'
He snarled, 'For a bloody symbol, a tatty old symbol of yesterday, geriatric's games? No.'
'For a man's liberty?'
He thought of the computer codes in the console on the table, the procedures for transmission, the call-signs—any bloody thing. He could not escape her. 'So that Rupert Mowbray can swagger in London? No.'
'For liberty?'
'I'm not trained… No.'
The candle's flame hovered above the pool of wax.
A rap on the door. It opened, but the door was beyond the candle's light. He heard the scrape of something pushed inside, then the door closed.
Bikov crawled away.
Viktor could no longer remember what he had said, where he had been led.
Bikov placed a plate of soup and a spoon beside the candle.
'Is it for you or for me?'
'For both of us, Viktor. We are together, we share.'
... Chapter Fourteen
Q. In Communist times where was the largest area of the Soviet Union that was a closed military enclave?
A. Kaliningrad.
There was one bowl and one spoon. Viktor thanked Bikov each time the spoon was passed to him. He took it and crouched, his weight forward, his head lowered, dipped the spoon into the thin stock and fished for meat or potato or a scrap of cabbage leaf, then lifted it to his mouth. His hand shook from the weakness of exhaustion and hunger, and much of the soup spilled from the spoon before reaching his lips. After he had taken what he could, a single dip for the boiled water, the pieces of meat, potato, cabbage, and had sucked it clean, he solemnly passed the spoon back to Bikov, and each time he was thanked with a quiet courtesy. The spoon went backwards and forwards between them and the bowl gradually emptied. His mind now was too confused to realize the game played with him. They were together, they shared, they bonded. The candle threw low light over them, still bold but dimming. He thought, as his mind addled, that it was kind of Bikov to share a single bowl of stew and a single spoon with him. He felt a growing gratitude to the man on the far side of the candle.
Viktor knew of the gulag camps, and of the zeks who had inhabited them. They were written about in the modern Russia. There were huts of thin wooden planks deep in the forests rooted in permafrost, surrounded by wire and guards, where the denounced enemies of the old regime had been sent to rot and to die. They would have eaten, shivering, the same bowl of stew that he now shared with Bikov. He had refused Bikov's sweater, and wished he had accepted it. The cold cut into him. Where he had been at school, at a base near Novosibirsk, before the family had moved to the experimental station at Totskoye, there had been an old woman who cleaned the classrooms, the pupils' lavatories and the canteen where they ate. She had had dead eyes and a death pallor below and around them, and it was whispered that she had been in the camps as a young woman, had survived, and the pupils had been frightened to speak to her. What he remembered of her was her savage criticism of any pupil who left food on a plate when she came to lift it off the table. Only when he had read of the conditions in the gulag had he understood. The water and the scraps rumbled in his stomach, seemed to make his hunger worse, and his head rocked with tiredness.
When there was only tasteless water left, Viktor thought of the plates of meat, potato and cabbage served in the senior officers' mess, piled high, and the beer brought by stewards. It seemed to Viktor that Bikov looked away and into the darkness. He slipped the spoon, a fast but clumsy movement, back into the bowl and dredged it again. He craved to eat, then sleep, and to be warm. The spoon scraped the bottom of the bowl.
'Go on, Viktor, you finish it.'
He crumpled. He did not think he had been seen when he broke the rules of sharing. The voice was kindness. Bikov had made a sacrifice for him, had gone without because his, Viktor's, need was greater. The woman who had cleaned in the school and had taken the plates with food left on them from the table of the pupils' canteen would not have shared: she would have scratched the eyes from any woman in the gulag who had eaten more than her share.
'It's all right, Viktor, it's for you.'
He dropped the spoon on to the concrete floor. He trembled as he reached, with both hands, for the bowl and lifted it. He tilted it. Lukewarm water ran into his mouth and he felt the remaining meat fibres, the potato pulp and the wafer pieces of cabbage stick between his teeth. He cursed that some of the water dribbled from his mouth and was lost. He licked the bowl. His tongue wiped it, caressed it, cleaned it. He licked it until the bottom of the bowl was bare and the only taste in his mouth was that of the plastic. He knew he had cheapened himself and a wave of regret splashed him.
'Thank you—I am sorry, but…thank you.'
'For nothing, Viktor. We are friends.'
There had been other friends, but too long ago. Because of those friends, forgotten, he had run on the beach and had made the chalk marks on the wrecked fishing-boat, and he had seen the friends' answer—and a friend had been in the zoo park, had brushed him, and he had followed the friend, had seen the open door of the waiting car. They were gone. And Mowbray, who had hugged him, was gone…and Alice who had loved him. He thanked his friend and was humbled because he had cheated him.
'I should not have done that, taken your food. I am ashamed.'
'No cause for shame, Viktor. You are tired and cold and hungry most of all you are tired and want to sleep. Soon, Viktor, you will sleep…'
The candle's flame glistened a reflection on the wax pool.
'A little more, Viktor, and then you sleep.'
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The stock pressured on his shoulder as he fired the last bullets of the last belt.
The last bullet was a skimming red dot, tracer, that left the barrel at a velocity of 850 metres a second. He saw it go, his eyes clung to its trajectory. It was on target then seemed to dip late in its flight of two and one-third seconds, and its bright red flame, alive in the rain mist, ducked below the illuminated target. Perhaps the shudder of firing had dug the tripod legs deeper into the mud, perhaps his arm had flicked against the distance dial on the sight mounted over the breech. Perhaps his soul was not locked to the concentration required to fire the heavy machine-gun at the maximum of its effective range.
The rain fell on him.
He wiped his forehead. Away in front of him the light was shining up at the target. Without his sight to magnify it, the target was little larger than the red dot that had dropped short. He had missed food back at the base, he would get nothing hot. If he was lucky he might successfully plead in the cookhouse for a loaf end, and an apple if he was luckier. He must be back by midnight because that night 8 Platoon, 3rd company—from midnight—was duty platoon. He stood, stretched, then heaved a tarpaulin over the weapon. Igor Vasiliev was young and he was stubborn. Captain Archenko had said to him that if he wanted to achieve excellence he must always be dedicated. Vasiliev did not accept that he was stubborn, but the thought of dedication gave him warmth. He could not comprehend the arrest of Captain Archenko, would not have believed it if he had not seen it, but he remembered what he had been told.
Dedication meant that he should walk 2000 metres in the driving rain, to examine the target butts. He should find the pattern of his failed shooting. It was an obligation to him.
He started out on the long trudge along the track beside the range. He had to know the pattern of his failure.
Into a little scooped hole, Ham dropped the four clingfilm-wrapped bundles of faeces, then scraped earth and pine needles over them.
Billy checked his watch, watched the circling second hand, then peered at each of them to satisfy himself that their faces and hands were well enough smeared with camouflage cream. He felt each buckle in their webbing to satisfy himself that they were wrapped and would not scrape together.
The kit that they would come back for was piled by Lofty at the entrance to the basher, to be collected on the way to the beach.
Wickso's hand, as it had a half-dozen times before, felt against the chest pockets of his tunic as if he needed to reassure himself again that the morphine syringes and the additional field dressings were in place.
They moved out…and, thank Christ, the machine-gun had stopped firing.
Lofty made the sign, and they armed their weapons. The sounds of metal on metal seemed to fill the tree canopy above them.
They slipped, ghosts, between the trees. Lofty led. He was the one with the greatest confidence. None of them, back in the days with the Squadron, would have hesitated about going forward in darkness, but that was too long ago. Billy could have done it, but Lofty had pushed himself forward. Lofty didn't need an image-intensifier, preferred to let his eyes acclimatize to the wet murk of the early night, and he went first. Billy was close behind, then Ham, and Wickso was back marker. Lofty had Billy's plastic shreds to guide him. He weighed each footfall as he walked, and he felt with his outstretched hand ahead of him for snags when he crawled. He took them close to the skull in the helmet that Billy had found, and through the network of old trenches and around two bunkers. It was where men had died half a century before, but that did not faze Lofty. He was the right man to lead.
For Lofty, it was like moving between the stones at Tyne Cot cemetery. When he came to each plastic piece, left by Billy at fifty metre intervals, he stopped and crouched and the team halted behind him, and he listened. He heard nothing beyond the pattering drip of the rain down through the pine branches.
He led the team towards the rendezvous.
Ahead, the trees thinned.
It was not the 'scope sight, not the tripod legs. He could blame no one but himself. The well-used white canvas of the target, three metres high, had former hits covered with white-painted adhesive tape. He had found new holes in the outer area of the target, beyond the largest of the concentric circles, and a few inside the outer ring, and precious few within the inner circles close to the black bull. At least half of the shots he had fired had missed the target completely. In the brick-reinforced area where the spotters waited during the firing, Vasiliev switched off the lights that had lit the target. Obstinacy had brought him there, and was rewarded with the confirmation that his shooting had been pathetic, that of a recruit without talent. He slipped on the mud, regained his balance, then staggered towards the track and the start of the long walk back to where he had left the machine-gun. He hoped to get a ride back on a patrol vehicle to the ferry for the canal crossing.
They had closed up. Between them and the track was the last line of trees and then a few metres of waist-high scrub—where birches had been cut back and their roots had sprouted. Lofty had a good view of the track and could identify the stone, forty paces away, that was the kilometre marker.
Billy murmured, 'He's not here.'
Wickso whispered, 'It's early.'
Billy muttered, 'It's only two minutes early—and he's not here, shit.'
They had done the last fifty metres to the edge of the trees on their stomachs, going forward in the crawl. Lofty stood. He worked his body against a pine's trunk and made no outline. They'd rely on him, on the quality of his eyesight, he'd always been the best of them in darkness, and on the quality of his hearing. He was looking down the track, away towards the dull glow of distant lights that threw a faint orange sheen on the clouds where Ferret would come from. All the weapons were cocked, had been since they left the basher, and both Lofty's hands were on the grenade launcher. He'd been tailed the last time, Ferret had. Billy had the job to watch right, Ham to the left, and Wickso took responsibility for behind them and the escape route. Lofty's firing finger lay on the trigger guard. He heard the movement, to the right. He felt Billy stiffen, muscles tightening. Lofty heard the slithering of feet in mud. He should have been coming quietly, but the feet weren't careful.
Lofty saw him.
Behind Lofty, Ham stifled a sneeze.
He was out to the right, moving at snail's pace towards the track. The shape was blurred, the arms and legs indistinct. Lofty strained to see him better. His heart pounded. Deep down in his guts, Lofty had not believed that Ferret would come…and he was there, and reached the track.
Again, behind Lofty, Ham gulped on his sneeze. Lofty slipped his hand from the launcher's trigger guard, reached back and found Ham's head, then his ear, then his cheek, and clamped the hand over Ham's mouth. Maybe the sound from Ham had not reached Ferret, maybe Ferret only sensed their presence. The shape, the figure—Ferret—paused in the centre of the track. He seemed to stand, irresolute, alone, and Lofty watched him, struggled to see him better. His hand slid from Ham's mouth and down to his tunic collar. Lofty held the collar tight in his fist and eased Ham up beside him. He could not see Ferret's face, only the black figure of the man in the middle of the track. The man seemed to turn, to study the trees ahead of him and the track behind him, the path along which he had come. Then he swung his whole body to face the sea and the beach. If he had thought he was followed Ferret would have crouched down or would have come into the trees, or would have found a ditch to lie in or an old trench, but he stood in the centre of the track.
Alongside Lofty, Billy's mouth was against Ham's ear. They passed Lofty. Neither was as skilled as Lofty at moving in forest or across scrubland. A branch snapped, a scrub sprig whipped back. They were bent low as they halved the distance to the track.
Frozen, unable to will himself to move, Vasiliev heard a deer, a fox or a badger—some creature—coming close to him…not a patrol. When he was on patrol in the peninsula's forest they smoked and talked. The call came, and he sucked at air in aston
ishment.
In Russian, a strange distorted accent, 'Viktor, this way. Quickly, Viktor. Come to us.'
He should have run, did not. Fear, now, bled the strength from him. His legs were locked.
'Viktor, it's us, from Alice. Get to us. We cover your back. Come…'
Lofty heard the hissed whisper command Ham gave. Ferret was beside the marker, on the track, on schedule. He did not move. Too frightened to run, poor bastard. Lofty had the weapon up to his shoulder and his finger was back on the trigger guard. Wickso panted beside him.
Billy moved. Ham followed him. Billy exploded in a sprint through the scrub and Ham followed him.
They reached Ferret. Lofty watched. They had him. The turn and the run back across the scrub and into the trees. No shouts, no instructions, no commands—only movement, speed. Disregard for noise, pace counted. When they came to him, Lofty peeled away from the tree-trunk that had sheltered him and led the charge. He sensed that Ferret had seized up, would have been the shock and the relief—and they dragged him like he was handicapped and useless. It was reckless chaos, and without Lofty leading them they would have charged into trees, fallen into the trenches, tripped on the old bunker roofs. It was the best moment in his life that Lofty could think of, the most fulfilment. Better than when he had been awarded the green beret at Lympstone and better than when he had passed the swimmer-canoeist course for entry into the Squadron, the best moment. They ran. Once Billy and Lofty, with Ferret between them, fell into a trench, but they were the living, not the dead who had gone to unknown graves there. They had the route out, the sunken dinghy. Lofty went past the basher, took the animal's path away from the fallen pine roots. Wickso would bring the kit from the basher—the inflatable bags, and the wetsuits.
The trees broke open in front of Lofty. The rain doused him and the wind carrying it caught at his tunic. He dropped down in the loose sand of the dunes. A way out, across the popple of the waves, were the red and green blinking lights of the Princess Rose. Lofty pulled from his pocket the beacon box that would guide the swimmer, Billy, to the dinghy, down on the seabed. He had the pencil torch in his hand.
Gerald Seymour Page 32
