'This time you shoot, Igor.'
'Yes, sir.'
'I am not "sir". I am your friend. I am Yuri. This time you shoot, Igor.'
'Yes. This time I shoot, Yuri.'
'Because you are the best—and I know nothing—tell me how you shoot.'
The voice soothed in his ear. He lay behind the machine-gun, and the butt was tight against his shoulder and his left fist clamped on the grip of the butt; his right hand's trigger finger rested against the guard. The voice massaged in his ear.
He recited: 'The rounds are 12.7mm calibre. There are fifty rounds in the belt, and each ten are made up of one that is armour-piercing, seven that are ball and two that are tracer. I have to shoot, for accuracy, in short bursts, a double tap on the trigger, because this is a suppression weapon, and after the first aimed round then it is impossible to hold the sights on the target. The muzzle velocity of the round is eight hundred and forty-five metres per second and—'
'How do you feel, Igor, when you shoot?' The voice was soft silk.
'I feel like I am dreaming,' he said quietly. 'A dream of happiness.'
The colonel whistled sharply. He heard the crack of the mortar firing. At full elevation, the 82mm mortar threw the shell a distance of 1100 metres. It exploded, the flare burst, the parachute opened at an altitude of 400 metres. With the parachute restraining its fall, the flare would be in the air for a minimum of four minutes. When it lit the skies, the mist under it seemed to shrivel and it bathed the ground in increasing white light.
This time Lofty hadn't bothered to turn. At last they were going well. It was the eighth flare that had been fired, and for the first two the team had thrown themselves on to their stomachs—Ham and Wickso had lain over Ferret's body—and they'd watched the speck of light climb, had seen it burst, realized its light would fall wide of them, and hurried on. When the third flare had been fired they had settled to a crouch, then Billy had cursed at the wasted time, and they'd started out again on their shambling run. For the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh flares, they had kept going, and Billy's judgement was vindicated because the flares lit the beach and the sea.
Lofty looked up, shouldn't have done—the light blinded him. The flare had burst directly above him, and hung over him. He blinked, ducked his head, rooted. When he looked around, they—like him—were stock still, as if caught in a photograph: he could see the wrinkles in their wetsuits, Ferret's clinging shirt, the stitching of the webbing, and the blood over Ferret's feet. Then Billy hit Wickso, a downward chop, Ham threw Ferret to the ground, then Ham and Wickso had hold of the knees of Lofty's suit and dragged him down. After the report of the burst a great silence lay over them, and the light squeezed away the mist that each of them had thought was their protector. It mocked them, seemed not to move away from them. It hovered, an eye, over them.
They were on sand, stone and grass tufts, among the low scrub bushes, and Lofty knew that the schedule ticked.
He was on his stomach and lay half across Ferret. He could feel the man's shivering. 'What we going to do, Billy?' he pleaded.
'What's its range—how far's it back?'
'A thousand at least—I can't touch it.'
Billy murmured, 'And maybe they can't touch us.'
'We got to run, Billy, we can't stay down. We—'
Billy snarled, 'Don't tell me what we can't fucking do. Right, we run…Jesus—'
They pushed back up on to their feet, and the poor bastard—Ferret—had his feet straight into stone shards. One foot was bloodily ripped and on the other the sock was shredded. Ham and Wickso held him up like he was a casualty. The three stumbled into Billy, who hadn't moved, and Lofty saw how Ham elbowed Billy aside and he half fell. Lofty caught him. He could see, from the light above them, the froth in Billy's mouth and the spittle on his lips. 'You good, Billy?'
'Course, I'm good. Don't I look it? I'm doing back marker. Move.'
Lofty had always done what Billy told him. He moved. Billy had been the sergeant, Billy was the leader. It was his role. Billy had told him to hold the man's head under the water and Billy had told him what to say to the Crime Squad detectives. He moved because Billy told him to.
'You're good, Billy.'
'Just doing back marker, be right behind you.'
Lofty went past Billy. Ahead of them was a shadowy line, like the mark of the tide. The edge of the flare's pool was their goal. They were running. Ferret's stride matched Ham's and Wickso's, and Lofty was close behind them. He fancied the flare was dying, that the pool of light shrank and the shadow seemed to come to meet them. The darkness beyond the shadow was the target. In the light, the mist was reduced to small summer's day clouds. He was close up to Ham and Wickso, and he caught Ferret's trouser waist. They pulled Ferret and he pushed him. The shadow and the darkness past it were almost within their reach. The light had gone to dusk. They were past the end of the runway, and dusk turned to daylight the moment after another flare climbed, spilt its light, hung there. The little knot of them around Ferret ran, and Lofty—in that sunlight—realized he no longer heard Billy's wheeze, his boots, the cursing.
Then, far behind him, 'Get on, you bastards. Run. Go, keep going.'
'In your own time, Igor, shoot in your own time.'
'But not Viktor, not Captain Archenko?'
He could see the white light on the white shirt, and the shirt bobbed between three men. His vision was good, above average, but the magnification of the sight ensured that he saw also the back of Viktor's head. Twice it was thrown back as if in a spasm of pain. He thought Viktor would have been unable to run, but the men around him pressured him on, and held him up. Behind them, a fourth man dropped steadily back…
Igor Vasiliev, in his twenty-second year, the son of a taxi-driver from Volgograd, had never experienced combat. His father had urged him to volunteer for his conscription into the units of Naval Infantry. Naval Infantry were not sent to Chechnya. Anything was better than being posted to Chechnya. Igor Vasiliev had never fired his chosen weapon at a human target. He steadied himself. The target in the crosshairs of the sight was dropped now from the group that supported his friend. His voice, soundlessly, recited the detail of the firing mechanism of the gun, as if that process would further calm him. 'Gas-operated, belt-fed and air-cooled, with horizontal sliding wedge breech block…unfinned barrel with conical flash suppressor…ammunition fed into the breech in non-disintegrating belts…capable of penetrating 16mm of armour at five hundred metres…' His target was at 1150 metres, without protection, and was now twenty paces adrift of the group. He had only ever fired on the range, at stationary raised targets. The back of the man, broadened by the wetsuit, filled the crossing point of the hairs. The target fell, then picked itself up, tried to run again. His finger rested on the trigger. He hesitated.
'So that I can know you are the best, Igor, and I can be proud of you—shoot.'
To kill a man, he squeezed the trigger gently.
The tracer went past them, bright flying light at waist height, with a whip's crack. Another round was at knee level and spattered on a stone. The third seemed deadened, lifeless. They ran on.
Then Billy screamed.
One cry, short, cut…Billy's scream stifled. One more double tap, then only the sound of their running and the battering of their magazine pouches on the webbing. He knew what he would see. As he ran, Lofty twisted his head and looked back into the flare's pool of light. He howled into the sunshine of the flare's daylight, 'Billy's down—hit—fucked.'
He turned. More shots hissed past him. A weight collided with Lofty, smacked him down. Wickso, bent low, cleared him and scurried towards where Billy had fallen. Lofty lifted the launcher towards the light that dropped on them and fired, reloaded and fired again. Away beyond the pool of light were explosions, twenty seconds apart, and way short of a target.
He crawled to them.
Wickso was crouched over Billy. Lofty saw the raised hand and in the fingers was a syringe. Lofty heard Billy's moan.
Then he saw Billy's right leg. It was off above the knee. He knew that what had come past them were the bullets from a heavy machine-gun, but he hadn't before seen the damage they made—a raw, amputated leg, and the black of the wetsuit was hacked to shreds. He could see the blood and the flesh and splintered bone. The amber stone, wrapped in adhesive tape, heaved on Billy's chest. Two more bursts came over them, but they were high and he thought they were aimed at Ham and Ferret who would be running for the new shadow line as the flare fell lower.
'Get them off him,' Wickso shouted.
Lofty's hands were in the webbing pouches of Billy's harness. He saw Billy's eyes, open but gone someplace else. He groped for the grenades in the pouches.
'Is he all right?'
'Don't be daft, Lofty.' Wickso was savagely quiet, like he was the professional. "Is he all right?" It's taken his fucking leg off. No, he's not fucking "all right", and not likely to be.'
He had four more grenades, and Wickso plunged the syringe of morphine into Billy's stomach through the gap he had made by wrenching apart the flaps of the wetsuit.
'Don't you do a tourniquet?'
'No, just bloody grenades—get the bloody boots.'
'What for, a tourniquet?'
'They'll shoot him anyway. The boots are for Ferret.'
Wickso held Billy's hand. Billy couldn't speak. The lustre had gone from his eyes. Lofty heard the revving of a distant engine and, far away, there were headlights that fell well short of them. He pulled the boot off Billy's right foot, wanted to apologize but couldn't find the words, jerked at it till it came away. The second boot was off to the side. He reached for it, gripped the wetsuit leg, and blood dribbled on him. He closed his eyes, did it by touch, took the second boot. On its parachute the flare sank to the ground and guttered.
He saw Wickso, with the indelible pen, write the single letter on Billy's forehead, M—morphine. Lofty fired one more grenade towards the advancing vehicle, and knew it was wasted. The vehicle tracked them and would always be beyond the range of the launcher.
Wickso ran well, and Lofty could match him, but the ground was open and the vehicle pursued them. They caught Ham and Ferret.
Ham had Ferret's weight and was going slowly. Fingers fumbled with the laces of the boots. The boots went on to Ferret's feet, over the wounds and the blood. Ham asked for Billy as the laces were dragged tight. Wickso said that Billy was dead. Lofty knew time had gone—time they could not spare—and that the schedule was wrecked. Lofty reckoned it a good lie—it was against the ethic of the Squadron to leave a man, wounded, in the field. It was right to lie—and Ham seemed satisfied. As they ran, faster than before, Ferret striding with them, Ham sent the signal. As he sent it, Wickso tripped on a jutting root and pitched forward, swore and nearly brought Ferret down with him. Lofty realized it, then: Ferret had not spoken a single word since they had lifted him out of the bare room—not a syllable, a word, a phrase, a sentence—but he would have known they were being hunted to their deaths. Behind them, the vehicle's engine was clear in the night. Would there be a stone for Billy, or for any of them? If there were one for Billy, Portland stone, a mason might carve on it: 'He was deniable.' Like the rest of them.
To stretch his stride, Lofty punched Ferret's back.
Alice relayed the signal. She recognized Ham's voice, and the gasp for air. Then there was a curse, and she thought that was Wickso's because there was the West London whine in the oath—and she strained for Viktor's voice, but it was not there. She sent the signal, brutal and short, to Mowbray on the Princess Rose. Stripped of the call sign and the signature—'Delta 2 down, proceeding to RV. ETA one hour'—the signal was a pickaxe blow into her stomach. It would be dawn in an hour.
... Chapter Eighteen
Q. Where did a spy report, in the summer of 2000, the redeployment of Tochka missiles, nuclear warheads fitted, with the capability of targeting NATO bases in Europe?
A. Kaliningrad.
The beach was lit to an ochre glow. The daylight fell on it beyond the point where the fence came from the trees. The colour softened on the dunes. Roman stared through the gap between Chelbia's turned shoulders and the hunched silhouette of the Pole who had come home, and he thought the beach up the peninsula was tarnished gold. With his good eyes and his good hearing, Roman watched the gradual descent of the flares and the firefly-red specks of the tracer and listened to the faint clatter of the machine-gun.
Out of the side of his mouth, Chelbia asked, without turning, 'Is it normal for them to exercise at night?'
'No, it is not normal.'
Chelbia persisted, 'On occasions, do they exercise at night?'
'A few times—what is normal is that they do not have the ammunition or the fuel to exercise either at day or night. What is more normal is that the soldiers go to pick potatoes or turnips from the fields.'
Chelbia shrugged. 'Then I do not understand what is happening.'
'Look, look…there you have your answer.'
Roman pointed, not to the distant daylight that made a bogus dawn but at the yellowed sand where the fence came down to the sea. He saw the ant-sized soldiers and the tiny shapes of lorries whose headlights shone on to the dunes. Then more light came because the searchlight from the tower roved over the beach. Only once, fourteen years before, had Roman seen soldiers on the beach, lorries' lights, the searchlight shining down from the tower, and flares fired beyond the fence, and had heard the rippling crack of gunfire. A week later he had been in Krynica Morska to ask the garage there for help in the repair of the engine for his boat. A police sergeant had been at the garage because the tyres of his car needed replacing. While the plugs and washers on the engine had been changed and the tyres fitted, the police sergeant had told Roman of an emergency in the closed military area across the border. A sailor had bludgeoned his officer, then fled towards the fence. He had been captured—and the police sergeant had not known his fate, but had smirked at the thought of it. From the north and the south there had been a closing cordon, and to the west there had been the sea and to the east there had been the lagoon. Roman had often thought, in fourteen years, of the blundering flight of the sailor, and of the dragnet that had scooped him up.
Chelbia gazed into the night, at the dropping flares that made dusk come over the beach. 'What are you telling me, Roman?'
Living in Piaski village, fishing and minding his own business, never concerned with the riots of Gdansk down the coastline, never offering an opinion on politics, never drawing attention to himself or being in trouble, Roman had found it impossible to place himself in the mind of that fleeing sailor. But in his jeans hip pocket there was now a roll of American dollars, given to him by Chelbia who was a criminal.
His voice was hoarse. 'A man runs, is hunted—that is what I am telling you.'
Chelbia nodded, as if the answer satisfied him. Roman saw him take Jerzy Kwasniewski's hand, the burned one, and heard him say quietly, 'A man runs, is hunted—would that be Archenko?'
Roman felt the pain, himself, as the fist took the burned hand. The Pole squealed, then said falteringly, 'Archenko was to be brought out in the evening, eight or nine hours ago.'
Chelbia let the hand drop away, mused, 'When I met him I thought he was a lion. He came to me with a hand grenade. He said he would kill me if I did not obey him. How many people make a threat on my life? Very few, I tell you. And I believed him. I believed he would kill me. Did he want money, as you do? I had brought a lorry full of weapons from the base, for export? No. He came to me and threatened to kill me, and would have. What he wanted was the return of one weapon from the hundreds that had been loaded on to the lorry. One. Why did he want one machine-gun from so many? He had the determination of a lion, and its arrogance. I gave him the one weapon, and I offered him an arrangement that would have made him a wealthy man. He refused me. I offer you an arrangement, and you gobble it, because you are greedy. He runs, and is hunted. Let us stay to watch his fate.'
In the last light of the dis
tant flares, before they died, Roman saw the smile on Chelbia's face.
The Pole blurted, ingratiating, 'You can see the lights of the ship. The ship waits for Archenko. It is hoped to bring him off the beach to the ship.'
'I tell you something, Kwasniewski…' Again, Chelbia took the burned hand, but his fist must have been tighter on it because the scream was shrill in the night air. '…should you betray me as you betray Archenko and the people who help him, if I ever thought you betrayed me, having taken my money, I would break your spine with a sledgehammer—and, believe me, I would enjoy doing it.'
Around the car on the dunes a crowd was gathering, faint shapes against the trees. Roman heard his wife call his name. He answered her. She stumbled down from the dunes and strode at him across the beach. Gulls scattered. He saw her in the light of the fire. She scolded him. She had been to sleep, she had woken, her bed had been empty, she had thought him dead, hurt, washed out to sea. She had come with an escort of neighbours and fishermen, dragged from their homes in the emergency. Her voice pealing and warming to the a tack, she shouted at him. She wore her heavy boots and her wool robe, and the hem of her nightdress peeped below it. Her words cudgelled him, and he heard the titter of his neighbours and his fishing friends. He reeled from her assault.
'My fault,' Chelbia said softly. 'Boris Chelbia, madam, apologizes. I detained your husband. Sincere apologies.'
She buckled. A flask of fresh coffee was opened, and it was passed first to Chelbia. He held them in his hand, all of them. Roman watched for the next flare to be fired, and he listened for the next burst of the machine-gun. A man ran and was hunted, a ship out at sea waited, and the cold bit into Roman's body.
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