Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

  They were between the dunes and the fence of close mesh, topped with razor wire.

  The fence ran parallel to the beach and behind it were the bunkers and silos of the missile batteries. Above it were three watchtowers and arc-lights. The ground they crossed was bare dirt with no scrub bushes. It was serrated with gullies and short, slight ravines where years of rainfall had fashioned shallow drains. More flares were fired, but not the machine-gun, and for close to a kilometre it was possible for them to scurry forward, using the gullies for cover. Twice they had been fired at from the missile batteries' watchtowers, but the weapons used had been short-range assault rifles. Bent double, hustling, they hugged the ground. When a gully petered out they would go in a crabbed crawl out of it, then scramble, then drop down into the next. Wickso was in front. Ham could hear the blistered breathing of Lofty close behind him. The ground, carved with the natural trench lines, gave them a chance—a small chance.

  One of Ham's hands clung to the Skorpion machine pistol, the other was buried in the sodden material of Ferret's shirt. He had as little feeling for the weapon as for the package. Emotion had always come hard to Ham Protheroe. No feelings of affection for the men he had trekked and trained with in the Squadron. No feelings of love for his parents, who had now shut him out of their lives. No feelings of sympathy for the widows and divorcées who had bought him dinners and fine wines, who had welcomed him into their beds, and who had lost their credit cards. The emotions of affection, love, sympathy were all alien to him. His mind was a vacuum, emptied and cleansed.

  In front of them was more scrub. With the scrub they would lose the hiding-places and sunken gullies. The clouds of mist had now shrunk to isolated pockets. They would be exposed. When they broke into the scrub and no longer had the gullies for cover, they must dance from cloud to cloud or they would be exposed. It was best for Ham that he had no emotion, and a short horizon, as he propelled Ferret forward.

  The flares came faster and the cover was more difficult to find. For the first time, Ham loosed his hold on Ferret's shirt and let him run alone.

  'Tell me—because I am ignorant—how you fire.'

  He lay behind the machine-gun. The voice was a whisper. The words were sweet honey and lulled the conscript. He did not realize it, but loyalty was passed. Only Captain, second rank, Viktor Archenko had ever spoken to him with the same respect. His father, when Igor had lived at home, had not shown him respect, and did not now when he returned home for annual leave; his father still talked to him as if he were a child and not a champion shot with the NSV heavy machine-gun. His platoon sergeant and the instructors on the range had shown him neither respect nor friendship, and others had tried to drown him when he had protested at the theft of the weapon that was his. The officer who supervised the range, and the men in the armoury, had not shown him respect, even when they had known that he was chosen to represent the Baltic Fleet in championships, nor had the conscripts with whom he lived in the barracks dormitory. He did not think of Viktor Archenko, who had followed his triumphs, who had talked to him of the castle at Malbork, who had requested he drive the car on occasion into Kaliningrad. He was captivated by the new friendship offered him, and by the respect. In those night hours, loyalty was transferred.

  A simple boy, Igor Vasiliev would not have understood that he was a marionette in the subtle, sensitive fingers of a master puppeteer.

  'I shoot well because I am fit, strong.'

  'Most men would have their shoulder broken by the recoil?'

  'It comes back not as a blow to the shoulder but with the impact of a heavy push, but you must have the strength to hold it so that your aim is not lost.'

  There were four flares in the air, coming down like steps on a ladder. When he had last seen them, four men and not five, they had moved like fleeing rabbits, darting and weaving over a short space of ground, then going down. The last time he had had them and the sight's crosshairs had wavered over them, he had thought he had the opportunity to shoot, but then had lost it. Each time he went to the firing range he saw that ground over which they ran. He knew the ground close to the firing range as well as he knew the end of the street in Volgograd, Ulitsa Lenina, where his parents lived. So many journeys to the range, bumping in the back of lorry transport, had meant he knew the ground in front of the missile batteries. He knew the sunken rain gullies, and as loyalty had passed he had told the man, who now lay beside him and held the ammunition belt, where the scrub began again and at what range the flares should be fired. He concentrated.

  The voice, a murmur with the wind, did not disturb him. He knew they must break cover and waited for them. 'I could not do it. I would panic when I saw the target—how do you control the breathing?'

  In his own words he could not have explained it. It was natural to him, his given gift. He used the language of the instructors: 'You must always stay calm. The breathing must be controlled. When you shoot you have an exhilaration, an excitement, and that can destroy your aim. You must not gulp your breath, then try to hold it in full lungs, or the exhilaration will make your head pound, your brain split. You exhale, and you pause to shoot—not hold the breath, but pause. It is a difference. You must always keep your mouth open when you shoot because if your mouth is closed the noise of the discharge will destroy your hearing.'

  'I understand, Igor. There.'

  The men broke cover.

  The flares were above them. The diamond shape was smaller. One was ahead. In the width of the diamond was his friend, the white shirt clear to see, and another black-suited figure was running close to him but not near to him. The fourth man at the back was behind his friend. The loyalty ebbed but had not died. The crosshairs wavered off the man behind, and his friend, and he eased the butt's grip fractionally, and they snatched at the target running alongside his friend…caught it…lost it when it ducked, then wove, found it again.

  He held the target. It was his skill that the crosshairs were locked on the magnified spine of his target. His finger slid from the guard to the trigger bar.

  Ham ran.

  A flare came down in front of him, the parachute sagged and the charge burned its last light. He skipped to avoid it. The parachute's cords were clear in the daylight from the three flares still floating above him.

  The moment he cleared the cords that hung—a frosted spider's web—from a scrub bush, Ham was at his full height. Instinct then, in his next stride, made him duck.

  Some men, under fire, wove. Some ran tall and believed in immunity. Some ducked as if to make a smaller target. Ham ducked, and did not know that the crosshairs leaped from the width of his body by the lower spine to the back of his head.

  Ham heard nothing, knew nothing of the shot that killed him.

  Ham did not hear its report travelling far behind the bullet. He saw nothing of the ground and the scrub that rushed to break his fall. Ham knew nothing of the blood, tissue, brain parts, bone fragments that spattered in an arc.

  Lofty fired twice back behind him. Wickso unhooked the radio from Ham's body. They sprinted towards where Ferret crouched, and they wove, ducked, went doubled, and when they reached Ferret they snatched him up. They cleared the line of the missile batteries' fence. The formation of the diamond was broken.

  She sent the signal on.

  She knew the tang of Wickso's voice. Different from Ham's. Ham's was quieter, less snapped, the vowels better formed. There was something bored in Ham's voice.

  The signal—'Delta 1 down, proceeding to RV. ETA 25 minutes'—was transmitted to the Princess Rose.

  As if she drowned, her life seemed to slide before her.

  She was Albert and Ros North's 'little angel'. She was the spoiled girl-child and the apple of their eye. She was the kid who expressed no gratitude, the kid whose ambition was to break from them and make her own way. She was the girl who slipped from them, but never so far as to be without the safety-net of a trust fund. She was creeping towards middle age and, after Rupert Mowbray's retirement, her care
er had plateaued.

  Other single women of her age, at Vauxhall Bridge Cross, schemed their way into the lives, and the hotel bedrooms, of senior executive grade officers and were available when the divorces came through. The senior men searched for women who understood the constraints of security. She'd heard it said often enough that the requirements of secrecy destroyed every marriage fashioned in heaven, but outside the confines of Vauxhall Bridge Cross she had kept away from all invitations to a quick restaurant meal and a hotel fling. She had the memory of Viktor, and an amber stone at her neck. She had nothing. She felt the love drain away from her, lost on a sand spit in Eastern Europe.

  She thought them—Wickso and Lofty, who ran with Viktor, Ham and Billy—the best men she had known. She sat at the table in the holiday-house kitchen, the console in front of her, and dreaded hearing the bleeping that would alert her to the next transmission and the red winking light. The worst man she thought she had known was Gabriel Locke. Her fist clenched, she hit the table.

  Far behind Locke, starting out from the border fence, was the cordon that had spilled off the lorries. He thought of home, his childhood. His mother, the women from the neighbouring farms and their children used to make a line high up on the bracken slopes above the grazing fields. They would beat through the bracken and over rock outcrops to drive the foxes down towards the hedgerows where the men made a second cordon, where his father was. The child, Locke, had hated it. The foxes were flushed out and driven down to the guns. The vixens, it was said, were worse than the dog foxes because they would take the lambs born in spring to feed their cubs. If it had been merely the culling of vermin Locke might have accepted it, might have acknowledged the necessity of it. It was the screaming of pleasure, the shouting of enjoyment, as the guns thundered, as the foxes keeled over that he had loathed. He had refused to be a part of it and on those Saturday mornings when the beaters and the guns had formed up, he had gone into the outbuildings or the barns and hidden. Their excitement at the chase and the thrill of it was something he despised in his parents and the kids off the neighbouring farms. He had seen, of course, what the foxes did to lambs and he had known that the alternative was the laying down of poison, but deep in him, carried into his manhood, was an elemental fear of a cordon driving a prey towards the guns. The line was behind him and ahead were the flares, which he saw through the pines, and the occasional cracked rumble of a heavy weapon.

  The forest was deep, close-set, around him. He blundered on towards the flares' light and the machine-gun.

  Now he was among the old trenches and the bunkers. He had no care for the old craters he stumbled into, or for the rough concrete angles of the sunken bunkers that scraped the skin off his shins. Low branches whipped his face and where there were thickets of thorn they tore at his jacket and ripped at his trousers. He thought of the men who had been here, down in their holes, in their trenches, in the bunkers, and two lines pressing them into an ever-diminishing sector. No escape. Had the men who had been there wanted to escape? Had they believed what they did, fighting from trench to trench, bunker to bunker, was worthwhile? Had they dreamed, in their last hours, that in half a century their names would still be spoken? When the flares ahead were highest, as they reached their zenith, slivers of light rained down between the pines. He had seen an anti-tank weapon half buried in the needles, and rifles, and a little pile of mortar shells still identifiable but richly coated in the forest lichen. He found two skeletons, entwined as if they copulated in death, arms hugging each other's white ribcages, and he thought of the comradeship of death. Gabriel Locke believed he walked, ran, stumbled in a Valhalla of heroes.

  His shoe kicked the skull. It rolled away from him. Still strapped into its helmet, it bounced against a tree-trunk and he felt the shock from his toes to his ankle and his knee. Was the name of the man who had lived in the skull still spoken by an old, infirm woman? He fell. He gasped for breath and steadied himself against a mess of tangled roots. The roots of the gale-destroyed pine towered over him, and the last flare fired threw a trellis of fine shadows on to his face. To gain better support he moved closer to the wall of roots and earth at the base of the toppled tree—and he fell. Branches collapsed under him. His arms thrashed…He had closed his eyes, in reflex, to protect them as he had gone down into the hole. Blinking, he groped his hands out so that he could push himself up. Softness under his fingers. The light showed him the bergen pack and the four envelopes laid on it. He picked them up, and slipped them into the inside pocket of his jacket.

  He crawled out of the hole. He knew he was close to them. The trees now thinned and the light was brighter. He stretched his stride and ran faster towards the bursting flares.

  Igor Vasiliev had seen one body, but only a snatched glimpse of it in the vehicle's headlights. They had pitched and lurched past it as the petty officer steered between the thickest of the scrub and the highest of the dunes. The petty officer braked the vehicle two metres short of the second body.

  The ground beside the body was a small knoll. It was the natural place for him to settle the tripod. He was out of the vehicle and Mikhail and Dmitri heaved the weight of the heavy machine-gun over the side of the open back of the vehicle and he caught it, dropped it down and pressed hard on the tripod legs to settle them. The colonel was beside him with the belts, and then the farm-boys were lifting out the mortar, and…Vasiliev looked at the body. Because he had never before fired in combat, he had never seen the crippling damage caused by a 12.7mm calibre bullet. He saw the throat and the chin and the lower jaw…nothing more. He dropped down behind the machine-gun. The upper jaw, the nose, cheeks, eyes and upper skull were gone.

  He stared, saucer eyes, at what was not there. As the vomit rose in his throat, he heard the snap of the colonel's order. The vehicle's headlights were killed, the body became another shape in the darkness. The arm was around his shoulder. The voice soothed, 'You are the best, Igor…'

  The vomit, foul-tasting, slid at his teeth and dribbled at his lips. He coughed it on to the ground. With his sleeve, he smeared it from his mouth. 'There are admirals and generals, commanders and brigadiers, captains and colonels. They are the great men, and they are helpless now. Because you are the best, and have the skill, you alone are important. You…'

  Vasiliev said, 'The barrel is warm now. I did well to get the first hit when it was cold. With a cold barrel, the bullet can fall short. The barrel shoots better when it is warm.'

  Locke saw them. He was in the last line of the trees. In front of him were a carnival's lights. It was like when the fair came at the Whit holiday to Haverfordwest where he had been taken as a child; like the fireworks over the Thames on Millennium Night when he had been alone on the Embankment with the crowds because everyone else he knew had already sealed their arrangements. The flares burned above them and the tracer rounds came past them and captivated him, as had the lasers over the river. The flares lit the ground and the tracers showered red sparks on impact.

  They were, he estimated, a little more than a half-mile from him, perhaps a thousand yards. Three flares were up and they were Locke's markers. The flares tagged them. To find them he had only to look where the light fell brightest. Darting figures, tiny at that distance, they came towards him. When they crossed the fiercest of the light's pools, he could see the white shirt—see it well. Harder to make out were the black-draped figures.

  Because he was exhausted, and getting breath into his lungs was an increasing struggle, it was difficult for Locke to count and to concentrate on what he saw. He had a long view of the white shirt and the spurts of progress it made, but he could never be certain of more than two of the dark shapes that scurried close to it. The tracer came in flat lines beside them or over them. Only two. He stood against the cover of the trees. They seemed to him to run twenty or thirty paces, then he would lose them, then they came on again: the white shirt and the two, where there should have been four.

  He had no sense of danger, no feeling of threat. It was
where he had wanted to be, had chosen to be. He had heard the crack of the last flare's detonation and the rumbled thud of the weapon firing. Far behind were the sounds of the cordon's beaters. But fear was gone from him. He pushed away from the last line of the trees. There was no going back, never had been that chance.

  Locke ran.

  Another cascade of flares was fired and more tracer came in scarlet lines. Together they guided him. He no longer stumbled, was light-footed, and didn't fall. He was a free spirit. The trenches were behind him, and the bunkers, and the old, abandoned weapons, and the skeletons and the skull. Beyond the point he aimed for he saw the pinpricks of headlights, and they wove a meandering way towards him. He did not feel the scrub tearing at his legs, cutting into his trousers, nor the grit stones wedged between his socks and the inner soles of his shoes. The darkness clawed at him.

  He heard them.

  Not voices, but the wheezing gasps of breath. For a moment they were outlined against the skies, then had gone, then were back. The gasps were closer.

  Locke called out, his voice thin in the night's air, 'This way, I'm here, it's Locke.'

  An answering coughing grunt from the darkness. 'Locke? Fucking hell—'

  'It's me, Locke.'

  'You got backup?'

  'Just me.'

  They were on him, came from among the scrub bushes and a black shape bounced into him, flattened him. A hand caught him and dragged him up. The white shirt veered past him. The hand freed him and the breath had been knocked from him. They'd gone on. For the first few of his strides after them, Locke thought he would not catch them. What had he expected? A bouquet of roses, a cup of tea from a Thermos, his hand shaken, his back slapped and thanks spoken? He tried to stretch his stride, legs heavy now, lungs emptied, pain in each muscle. The white shirt was a dozen paces ahead of him and the black shapes were alongside it, only two.