The master said, 'I am now three nautical miles off shore. They are too late. We did what we could. It is not our fault, Mr Mowbray. We are a coastal cargo ship, not a boat for war. In four minutes, a maximum of five, we must turn. In four minutes, or five, the Nanuchka is with us. We have to turn and plead our ignorance, our stupidity, a further problem with the propeller drive, and we have to hope we are believed—or we will be boarded. We will stay as long as we can, Mr Mowbray, but I do not see them on the beach. What can I do?' /
He felt aged, wearied. There wouldn't be a car at the airport. No bands, no alarms, no welcoming line of greeters. Felicity would meet him. He would go home and empty the dirty clothes out of his bag and while the washing-machine thundered in the kitchen he would pour himself Scotch, and tell her if 'they' phoned she should tell 'them' that he had gone to the common to walk…not that they would phone. Without fuss, the process barely visible, he would be airbrushed from the memory of the Service. He would never again be called upon to lecture at the Fort; he would never receive the invitation to an old farts' reunion, he would be removed from the mailing list of the former officers' news sheet, his lifetime's work would be undone. A letter would come from the vice chancellor, signed by a secretary, three lines at most, relegating his chair in strategic studies to the bin. So unfair…
The dawn was settling on the tarpaulin covers of the holds filled with fertilizer sacks. The flares were still pitched high over the beach, but the clarity of their light was lessened by the slow sunrise behind the forests' trees. He could see the detail now of the approaching patrol-boat's bow wave. Maybe five minutes were left, perhaps six, and then it was doomed. Who could he blame? 'They' would blame him—who would he blame? Locke, of course. Locke would be the scapegoat of his personal bitterness.
'You should do what you can,' Mowbray said brusquely. 'Do what is honourable.'
He was relaxed. The colonel's hand soothed his shoulder. He had shown he was the best and he would show it again. Vasiliev lay behind the heavy machine-gun and waited for the last of them to break cover. In his mind, across the dunes and the sand and the sea, he created beaten zones within which the bullets would have killing accuracy.
Viktor said, 'It is too many minutes.'
Locke heard Wickso say, 'Nearly there, nearly'
He asked, 'How do you use the launcher?'
He thought Viktor was now at the edge of control, as if he stood on a pit's edge and looked down and saw only the darkness of the abyss. Locke watched Viktor reach out to take both of Wickso's hands and pressure them together, to give the man strength. He thought Viktor had good hands, powerful, and they enveloped Wickso's and killed the trembling. To Locke, it was as though Viktor had woken from a sleep, and the morning light showed him reality.
Viktor said, 'We have two choices—we run and take the chance, or we surrender and take that chance. I cannot surrender.'
Scorn in Wickso's response. 'You can't do it, you wouldn't know how. Have to dive, have to break the compressed air bottles, have to get the engine going. You couldn't…'
Locke asked, 'What's the firing procedure for the launcher?' Quite a handsome man, he thought, and not flattered by the photograph in the file or by the picture that Alice had shown the team. Locke never, in the normal times of his life, looked at another man and was taken by his appearance: it would have denigrated him. Viktor was, to him, fine-looking. The jaw, mud-spattered, jutted at an angle of defiance. Alice loved the man…he had kissed Alice. Alice and Viktor would remember him.
'How do you fire the grenades from the launcher?'
Viktor said, 'I am going for the water. You stay if you want to, take the chance with them. For me, fast death or slow—I choose fast. We have no more time.'
'I hear you,' Wickso said.
'How many grenades do we have, and what is their range?'
In his inside pocket were the four letters. He should have given them up, he had not. The envelopes were nestled against his chest. Wickso gave no answer to Viktor. The light broadened in front of them and the flares had less power and Locke could see the silhouette of the Princess Rose and the white V-wave coming closer to it. He knew what he would do. He heard the murmur from Wickso about retrieving the bleeper from Lofty—God, had they only one of them? Pathetic. He saw Wickso lift himself up from his stomach, then the fist tightened on the snub machine pistol Wickso held, then the discarded Skorpion was given to Viktor. Wickso was on his feet, and Viktor was beside him. The dunes stretched away from them, and the beach and the sea.
He had been to Hereford, had been given the demonstration of close-quarters fire-power in the 'killing house': trussed up, gagged, blindfolded, they had played at hostages, as the stun grenades and gas and the live rounds had blasted, wafted and cracked around them—his memory was of the silence in the room, then the shattering noise and speed of the assault. In the afternoon they had been shown the use of explosive charges, then had been sent on their way. What he could recall was the strutted contempt of the Special Forces officers for them, because they were mere civilians. Words were few. The language of their bodies was explicit enough. He remembered the liaison man, at the meeting at Vauxhall Bridge Cross: 'I don't think my people would be that keen on a trip in there, not to Kaliningrad.' He was there, the men who had stormed the 'killing house' were not. He felt no arrogance because conceit was long ago purged from him. He was there, had chosen to be, as they had chosen not to be.
'I lead,' Wickso said. 'Run zigzag, head down, run like the goddamn wind. In the water you dive, keep down, the dinghy's a hundred metres…'
He felt calm. 'How do you fire the bloody thing?'
Locke groped at the pouches on Wickso's webbing and snatched out the grenades. He filled his pockets with them. He stood. In the far distance he could hear the cordon moving forward from the frontier fence. They had used up too much time. The flares hung in a lighter sky. Too much time.
'Count to fifty, then go. Give me fifty.' He started to run.
Locke heard Wickso's hiss, 'You get left, you know you get left behind.'
He didn't turn, didn't wave a last time. Locke heard Wickso's shout, 'It's loaded. Just use the under-trigger. Fires a blank bullet into the grenade. Reload it down the barrel, tilt the barrel and let it slide in. Maximum range is four hundred metres, that's top. Burst radius is five metres, fuse delay is four seconds or contact. The ones marked phosphorus are best, better than explosive. The bolt action on the launcher puts the next blank in the breech. Go close, go in on top of them. Phosphorus will burn them…'
The shout faded.
He ran the zigzag, as they would, and he felt the cold of the morning on his face. She saw them, two not three.
A chattering excitement broke around Alice. The crowd edged away from the fire: it gazed up the beach and over the fence that ran down to the waterline, over the military vehicles and the soldiers on the sand, past the more distant line of troops.
Two men ran on the dunes. Alice held the small binoculars hard against her eyes. She could see them clearly because the flares, in descending height, were over them, and because the low pulse of the sunlight caught the ground on which they ran. They were good binoculars—not Service issue, but a present from her father. Everything from her father was the best. With ten times magnification, and sunshine daylight to look into, it was easy for her to see them both. A few minutes earlier, a lifetime gone by since, she had seen—as had the crowd—a single figure, black-suited, break from the trees. In the circle of the lenses, the angry red tracer had surged to meet him. She had seen him go down. No movement for a moment, then a hand raised…and dropped. After that there had been no more tracer dots, but she fancied she heard, on the wind, muffled cheers from the cordon that merged with the sea's beat.
They were so small, so far from her, but she could make out through the lenses the leading man, black, and the figure a pace, or three, behind. She saw the white shirt and the pinhead of blond hair. She could not see Locke. The lenses held the
two of them: around them was the expanse of the dunes and ahead the open beach and the sea. There was no cover. She had thought it was the big boy, Lofty, who had gone down. She thought it was Wickso and Viktor who came in haphazard angled lines across the dunes, towards where he'd fallen.
It seemed to Alice as if the crowd watched it like it was vaudeville, a show. She had been to Rome, last year at the convent school, with her parents. The second day they had 'done' the Colosseum. Her father had been interested in the logistics of building the place, her mother had seen only the multitude of stray cats living there, and the teenage Alice had been quietened by the thought of a great multitude revelling in the excitement of watching death. When the one she thought was Lofty had gone down, the crowd had indulged itself with a noisy sigh—it was only a show, an acrobat's fall from a high wire. If she continued to watch with her binoculars she would see the tracer come, and the white shirt might drop and the pinhead of fair hair might fall.
Where was Locke?
She took the binoculars from her eyes. She compressed them, dropped them into her pocket.
She heard the rattle as she loosed them. She could not watch. Her hand, in her pocket, felt the shape the binoculars had fallen against. She could not watch it. She took the mobile phone from her pocket. Not hers.
The excitement grew around her. She turned away.
Whose phone? Where had the phone come from? She had her back to the flares, but the machine-gun had not fired—the fucking machine-gun would wait till they were on the beach. She switched it on. It warbled, vibrated, and the screen lit. A text envelope was displayed. She clicked. The text would show her whose phone had been placed in her pocket. She knew. She had heard the message on the radio: Oh, and Locke showed up. She read the text.
GABRIEL, PROBLEM OUR END. POLISH POLICE ANXIOUS U HELP THEIR ENQUIRIES INTO DEATH OF RUSSIAN CONSUL GUY IN GDANSK. CAN U HELP QUERY. LIBBY.
She understood. She was only a General Service officer, not the full shilling, but she now knew why he had slept in the railway station at Gdansk, why he had kissed her, why he had walked out into the night, why he had showed up, why he did not run on the dunes.
Alice saw the crowd's faces. Titillated enjoyment, macabre pleasure, gallows-watching, the mob in the Colosseum. She took Jerry the Pole as her focal point. He was her target, and he alone would understand her language.
'You bastards. You poor, pathetic bastards. Get your kicks cheap, don't you? It's not fucking Saturday-night television—it's men's lives. Decent of them, right?—to make some bloody entertainment for you. You are sad. In the whole damn lot of you, there's not as much guts as in one of their little fingers. You are cowards…cowards…cowards. Enjoy the bloody show while it lasts—pity you won't ever see a show like this again. Bad bloody luck. Do something…'
The voice was accented English, soft-spoken. 'But what, my child? What is something? What do you want them to do?'
She turned. He had driven the car that had passed her, and he had waved to her. The wind pressed the priest's habit against his legs and tugged at the white of his hair.
'Something.'
'If there is something that can be done, it will be. Enough of profanity, my child—we are all in God's hand. They are simple people, but they are not cowards.'
'Just do something,' Alice said.
... Chapter Twenty
Q. Where do the lost graves lie?
A. Kaliningrad.
'When they are half-way, the middle of the beach,' Bikov murmured.
'I can't see the middle, I only have the sight—'
'The middle of the beach.'
'I only have the vision from the sight 'scope—where is the middle?' Vasiliev snapped. 'You tell me, you have to call it.'
'I'll call it.'
'It's all you fucking have to do, call it. Spot. Is that too much? Just tell me when to shoot. Which target?'
'Not yet, a moment.'
Now Vasiliev—the conscript from Volgograd—thought the colonel was shit. He, Vasiliev, had the machine-gun. He had the target in the crosshairs. He had the power. All that was asked of the colonel of Counterintelligence (Military) was to call the shot and spot, and he hesitated. Did he not understand the breathing pattern that was necessary? The caller, the spotter, the feeder of ammunition was a servant. He could have taken them on the dunes, two scrambling figures with the sand slipping loosely away under their feet. He could have fired when they slithered down the last slope from the dunes to the beach, each breaking their fall with their hands. But each time he could have taken them, fired, the murmur in his ear had been that he should wait.
They ran. For moments he had the two of them in the 'scope. Then it was none of them, then one. He thought they went slower, as if the impetus of the charge from the trees was slackened. He thought it was more from the sun than from the flares but pricks of light bounced from the beach and played in his eyes. He blinked. By closing, opening, squeezing shut, opening his eyes he lost the focus of the aim and the crosshairs showed him only the beach. He swore, edged the 'scope sight the fraction required. A cormorant fluttered in it. There was a colony of cormorants. Distraction, and he swore again. He had them. The black figure had stumbled, had slid to its knee, the white shirt checked, reached down and dragged the figure up. The moment was perfect.
'Do I fucking shoot?'
'A moment.'
'What do you wait for?'
'The middle.'
He should have been allowed to shoot in his own time. The machine-gunner was the principal. In infantry tactics, as taught him, the machine-gunner was free to fire as the best moment was presented. He knew his breathing was bad. He gulped air. His right hand clamped down on the guard above the iron frame of the butt, it was tight against his shoulder, but his left hand reached forward. He did not have to look to click the sight a notch further, to take in another hundred metres. They were no longer together in the sight. He wavered between them. Either the black figure or the white shirt. They were both targets, no more and no less. He had no emotion for the figure he did not know, or for the man who had been his friend. He made the click and his finger drifted back to the trigger guard.
'Which? Fuck you, which one?'
The petty officer's voice rang in his ear. 'Don't speak like that to a senior.'
'Fucking make your mind up.'
The petty officer's voice dropped. 'He's a good man, Colonel. Archenko is popular, well liked. I don't mean…'
The same murmur from Bikov. 'I respected him.'
'I don't mean to diminish his guilt. He has the best reputation of any officer—efficient, fair, we trusted him.'
'And strong, the best of officers.'
Vasiliev screamed, 'Which?'
The murmur had gone cold, like ice crusted it. 'In your own time. One or both.'
Vasiliev snatched his eye up from the 'scope sight. He gazed out, over the barrel. He saw the dunes and the width of the beach, and the two tiny figures of men, black and white, in the middle of the gilded beach. Without the magnification they seemed to move at snail's pace. His eye darted back to the sight. He saw empty sand. He twisted the sight to the right—saw only the beach space. To the left a blur, then sand and gulls. He made the adjustment. Vasiliev snatched in the air, filled his lungs. He held them. Beyond them, soft focus, was the shimmer of the sea. His finger went from the guard to the trigger bar. Mouth open, he allowed the breath to seep from his lips. He had them, he began to squeeze. He paused on his breath, gentle.
He heard the whistle of its approach.
The grenade exploded.
Vasiliev flinched.
The shrapnel sang.
By flinching, turning away his head, twisting his exposed shoulders, he jarred his aim. He saw sand, dirt, debris, hanging in a little cloud. It was not near him. His eye was back to the sight. He heard the petty officer spit, contempt. Where he looked for them there was only the cloud's mist. He fired. He could not see the beaten zone. The tracers beaded from the barrel, then
were lost in the cloud. The colonel fed the belt. The butt pressured his shoulder and the thunder of the weapon was buried in his ears. He kept his finger on the trigger—not double tap, not releasing. The cloud cleared. He still had his finger on the trigger bar, depressing it, all his strength on it, when the belt was exhausted, when the brass cases no longer flew to the side.
'Arsehole,' the petty officer snarled. 'So far away it would not even have cut your pretty-boy face. You missed.'
'A belt. Give me a belt.'
The petty officer grabbed the ammunition belt that hung from Bikov's neck. Vasiliev had the breech plate up. He snapped the first round of the belt into the breech, rearmed the machine-gun. They were near to the water's edge. His breathing was fast, uncontrolled. He raked the sight on to them. He saw his friend's head, and the white shirt. They were running, each holding the other's hand, the black arm and the white arm, each pulling the other along. He gasped to fill his lungs.
The petty officer scorned him: 'You said you were the best, and you fucking missed.'
Not a squeeze, a jerk. He had them both. His finger wrenched on the trigger bar. Both were in the crosshairs, would be in the beaten zone. Silence. Not the hammer blow but only the metal scrape of the working mechanism going forward. A jam. The breath sighed out of him. For a moment his mind blanked. It was empty. He heard the petty officer's shout, and the murmur of Bikov, but not their words. He scraped his mind for the answer. There was no instructor to help him. Not the calm of the firing range. He recocked. He squeezed the trigger. Silence. He lifted the breech plate and pulled the belt clear, but the first round was still wedged in the chamber. Fingers in. No feeling in them and clumsy movements as he prised the round out an armour-piercing round with the black-painted tip and the red ring on the cartridge rim, and if it had detonated as he'd reached his fingers into the breech it would have taken off his face. He freed it from the belt, dropped it. He laid the second round of the belt in the breech, whipped the plate down, and armed the weapon again.
Gerald Seymour Page 44
