Gerald Seymour

by Traitor's Kiss (b) (epub)

  'You arrogant shite, you're fucking useless!' The petty officer crouched close to him.

  They were going down to the water. He had to wait. 'Regain control of breathing,' the instructors said. His heart pounded. He made another click on the 'scope sight. He breathed hard, twice.

  'Where did it come from?'

  'Just shoot—pretty boy.'

  'I don't know,' the murmur answered him. The hand gently moved on his shoulder. 'In your own time…I don't know.'

  He stared into the sight. He had the breathing. Finger to the trigger bar. They were at the water. He thought it was the sun, not the flares. Where the sea came to the shore, where the waves ran to their limit, the light was silver and reflected back. The brilliance burned his eye. The light danced on the crests and he saw the splash as they hit the waterline. He could not look into the sight, but he fired.

  He thought they were in the water.

  Locke had blasted off the grenade, but it had fallen far short of the source of the tracer.

  He did not understand why the firing that had brought Lofty down had been short bursts, but the firing aimed at them on the beach had been a never-ending cacophony of rounds…and he had not understood why there had then been the delay. They had reached the water. He crawled forward. The scrub tore at his coat and his trousers, and scarred the hands that held the launcher. The blast of the machine-gun had started again. He must get forward.

  They still held each other's hands.

  The spray leaped around them. Wickso held his hand until the shelving of the beach had the water at their knees, and they could no longer run. Out beyond them, the sun playing on the hull's rust, was the Princess Rose, and closing with it was the bow wave. The bursts were wild—once they had been so accurate. Wickso did not know why they now spattered the sea in a great arc around them.

  Wickso shouted, 'There's no other way.'

  'Never was.'

  'We go for it.'

  'We are brothers.'

  'Stay with me.'

  The bleep rang in Wickso's ear. He loosed Viktor's hand. Together they dived at the wave breaking ahead of them. The tracers seemed to ignite the water. It was twelve years since he had swum hard…with Billy, Ham and Lofty, in rough winter seas, off a beach of grey pebble, into Murlough Bay off the Antrim coast on an away-day from the Ballykinler camp. Flippers, then. The flippers were discarded, were back in the treeline. He could not have run in them across the dunes, could not have stopped at the shore to ease them over his boots. He swam crawl and only his arms and the tip of his head made a target. He did not look back. There was more firing, but with the seawater in his ears he no longer heard the impact of rounds into the water or the shockwave as they went overhead. But the bleeper, prised off Lofty's webbing, was close and the ringing tone was ever shorter. He was far away from the beach, he glided away from Billy and Ham, and the memory of Lofty's eyes staring up at him, mute and pleading, on the dunes. They had gone past Lofty, almost tripped on him, and Lofty's hands had been on his stomach and the hole was big enough for an orange to have settled in, and he hadn't stopped to feed him morphine, only to snatch the bleeper. A burst hit the water ahead of him. He didn't know whether Viktor was labouring behind him, or was a carcass on the tide. The bleeps came together, and he sucked the air into his lungs.

  He dived.

  Something worked. The bleeper was good. His hands groped into sand, then a rock, then he saw the shape of the deflated dinghy. His first touch was against the engine, and he clung to it, then began to feel along the side of the sunken shape. The breath bubbles careered past his eyes. He found the bottles, broke them. The dinghy corkscrewed as it inflated. The engine's propellers smacked his knees and the side came up hard under his chin. He was dazed, hurt, and he kicked out and up.

  Wickso broke the surface. The salt of the water was in his mouth, and he spat. The dinghy floated away from him. He flailed with his arms, lashed with his feet. A dozen years ago, as a member of a Squadron, he would have been rolling over the dinghy's smooth side with an otter's agility. He struggled for a grip on the rounded side, clawed it, then slowly heaved himself up, over, and into it. He felt the strength ebb from his body. He floundered, gasping.

  He threw the switch. The cough of the engine was reluctant, then it caught.

  He saw the bobbing fair hair and the white shirt. The head and the body had drifted a full forty metres past where the dinghy had surfaced. The head and the shirt floated and there was no beat in the arms.

  Wickso gunned the engine.

  He was too far back, but the desperation trapped him. He lay on his stomach and laid out in front of him were all the grenades he had.

  Locke had not come close enough, and knew it, but he tilted the barrel up.

  'The dinghy. Take the dinghy, Igor.'

  The gases burst into Bikov's face, and the cartridge cases spilled out in front of him. The noise reverberated in his ears. He fed the belt and followed the line of the tracers.

  He saw the small black figure in the dinghy lifted up, as though on an elasticated rope, then keel over. Perhaps the man had fallen on the rudder arm, because the dinghy now careered in pointless tight turns, and each turn took it further from the scrap of white that stood out on the sea's growing colour.

  Grenades exploded near them. Bikov ignored them.

  'Well done, Igor. It is proven. You are the best.'

  'I know it. It was not my fault that the round was damaged, that the weapon jammed.'

  The grenades sighed as they flew, like stones thrown by kids. They cracked, like little fireworks that carried no danger. He thought they were fired at full elevation and some were beside them and some cleared them. He wondered why one man had stayed behind, and made a futile sacrifice by firing without skill, with no purpose.

  He loathed the boy.

  'Igor, did Captain, second rank, Archenko tell you about Malbork Castle?'

  'He did.'

  'Igor, did Captain Archenko encourage your skill with the machine-gun?'

  'Yes.'

  'Igor, it is what I heard—did Captain Archenko go into the water of the docks to save your life, and did you thank him?'

  'But I did not know the truth of him.'

  He hated the boy. It was rare for Yuri Bikov to hate. Too many, in his opinion, interrogators hated—despised—the men they were tasked to question. Hate seldom came to him. He did not hate his wife who bled money from him and who denied him access to his daughter. He had not hated Ibn ul Attab whom he had tricked and deceived in a Chechen cave. He did not hate Archenko with whom he had shared a plate of food, by candlelight. Hatred, he would have said, demeaned him…but he hated this boy.

  No more grenades were fired. For a moment he imagined one man bunkered like a rat in a hole with the launcher useless in his hand, and a pouch or a pocket empty. In a moment, a minute—a few minutes—he would order the infantry line behind him to move forward to flush out the man. It puzzled him, briefly, that the gesture of sacrifice had been so futile, not pressed home. He pondered it. Looking up he saw the speck that was Viktor Archenko's head, rising and falling in the water, and he thought that, very slowly, the man edged towards the dinghy as it surged on its futile course.

  'Igor, what should happen to Captain Archenko?'

  'For his treachery, Colonel, he should die.'

  'Igor—at your hand?'

  'I have his head in my sights. It would be a difficult shot, across water and with so small a target, at that range. I could do it…but I think it better not to.'

  'Igor, why is that?'

  'To drown is slower.'

  'Igor, shoot the fucking dinghy.'

  He held the belt and was ready to feed. He heard the sucking-in of breath. Speeded thoughts. The conscript would be a celebrity, and famous for an hour, given a medal, and when his service had expired and he went back to a shithole existence in fucking Volgograd he would boast of his skill, boast till he bored everyone around him. Traitors became heroes. Rehabilita
tion was the Russian way. What then the future of the celebrity executioner? Seen from a grimy window in the Lubyanka, an old man shuffled in the square in carpet slippers, grey-haired and needing a stick to support him—the executioner retired from claiming victims. He worked with two buckets beside him. One had eau-de-Cologne to hide the smell and the other was filled with vodka. All he stopped for on a busy day was to reload his pistol and to drink the vodka. He would have been a celebrity, then a bore, then forgotten.

  Two bursts, double tap and short.

  'Is it sunk?'

  'He is alone in the water, Colonel. When he tires he will drown. I correct myself—he is already tired, he will drown soon.'

  Bikov looked up. He gazed out on to the sea. The sunlight had replaced the flares. The ship, even at that distance filthy and humble, had slowed and the patrol-boat circled it. He thought it had been a plan of daring, or of desperation. A boat off-shore, a team landed in darkness for a snatch, a race back to an embarkation point, a sunken dinghy, departure from territorial waters before dawn. Time had beaten them. Why would they have done it? He shook his head, almost with a sense of sadness. Yuri Bikov, colonel in military counterintelligence, had no friends that he would have risked his life for. It had been idiocy. What confused him most: Archenko was nothing, was of minimal importance, Archenko was not worth the price of it.

  He went to the petty officer and ordered that the extended line of infantry should come forward, should be alert, should look for a single man—probably without ammunition—and they should rout him out. The petty officer slouched away. He remembered the Argun gorge, where he had been to save the life of a man he had not met. He felt humility, and understood.

  Then Bikov sat on the dunes sand beside the tripod legs and felt the sun's early warmth on his face, and sometimes he watched the lines of ants that moved past his boots, and sometimes he watched the faraway fair pinhead of an exhausted man who would drown. He smiled at the conscript. 'Igor, would you like to drink vodka?'

  In his deadened ears he heard the surprise from the boy he hated. 'No, Colonel. Why do you ask? Thank you, no.'

  He loaded the last grenade. It had the markings of phosphorus. Locke felt a sense of shame. He had not sufficiently pushed home his attack.

  The grenades had been launched from too far back. They had fallen randomly, had failed to break the aim of the machine-gunner. He had not gone close. In a frenzy, he had reloaded. He had spilled the grenades from his pockets, had laid them out in front of him and, hands trembling, had forced them down the barrel and fired, and fired again.

  His name would not be spoken. He thought himself too late, but he crawled forward. Flies buzzed him, the sun snatched on his skin. The dinghy was sunk, Wickso was lost. He had looked back once, had seen the fair hair and the white shirt in the water. Viktor lived, but it was too late.

  His father would have known about revenge, would have put down poison for the rats if they came into the chicken coop behind the kitchen and ate eggs, would have thought nothing of the rats' death agonies.

  He had hoped to save Viktor, but he had not pushed forward far enough. It was about revenge. A set book at school, text to be learned for examinations, the same sunlight in the classroom, the words of Shakespeare's merchant Jew: '…revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.' But he had only one grenade, phosphorus, left. As he slithered forward, the snake, Locke could see the light glint on the barrel of the machine-gun and the two men close to it.

  It had sunk from his sight. With the dinghy was Wickso.

  He was alone. He felt the burn of the sun on his face. He could manage only little movements of his hands and stunted kicks with his feet, but that was sufficient to keep him afloat. The waves lifted and dropped him, but the ebb tide's current carried him further from the shore. From his eyeline, with the spray breaking in his eyes, he could see the ship and he thought it had stopped, or if it had not stopped it had slowed.

  Alone, as his grandmother had been when his father was born. Alone, as his father had been when he had obeyed his orders and had flown into the spread of the mushroom cloud. Alone, as he had been at the dead-drop site at Malbork Castle, and alone as when he had turned away from the fence in the zoo park. He would float out to sea, until he could fight no longer, then he would drown.

  He tried to cry out, and had no voice, and Billy, Ham, Lofty and Wickso could not hear him. He gave them his silent thanks. And he tried to shout to the shore that they should finish him, show him mercy, but the words lay in his throat with the salt taste.

  Viktor drifted.

  The patrol-boat came round them again, and the voice distorted by the loudspeaker instructed that they turn or they would be rammed. Then it turned towards them and foam blossomed from the Nanuchka's propeller screws. Its sharp bow lined up on them.

  The master shouted from the bridge, 'If I could do anything I would. I cannot.'

  Rupert Mowbray stood at that point on the deck, against the rail, where the impact would come, and he held out his arms wide and challenged them, made a target for them. The mate was at the base of the accommodation block, below the bridge, and he had brought up an armful of the white china plates from their mess room and he threw them in futile anger, one at a time, into the path of the patrol-boat.

  The engineer, framed in his hatch and above his ladder into the depths of the ship, bit on his lip and clutched an ugly spanner.

  A madness caught them all. From each of them was an inane gesture of defiance.

  But the master swung the wheel and the Princess Rose turned. The patrol-boat came past them. Its fenders scraped the hull of the condemned cargo tramper. They lurched from the scraping blow. The master wept. Mowbray spat. The last of the mate's plates shattered beside the forward gun crew. The engineer dropped the spanner and it clattered to the deck by his feet. They looked far back. They could see, all of them, the little bobbing head in the water.

  Mowbray intoned, 'Dammit, gentlemen, the end of an old man's dream and the end of a young man's life do not make for a pretty sight.'

  The patrol-boat was alongside them. Ahead of them was the open horizon of the Baltic Sea.

  Her binoculars dropped from her face.

  She turned on the crowd. 'He's in the water. What are you going to do?'

  Alice saw the uncomprehending faces. She went to Jerry the Pole, who looked away. She kicked his shin. 'Tell them—he's in the water. What are they going to do for him?'

  Jerry the Pole limped away from her, then shrugged. 'They know he is in the water. What do you expect them to do?'

  She rasped, 'Tell them, and ask them.'

  They were told, they were asked.

  The fisherman grimaced and shrugged, nothing could be done. The Russian waved his hands, and the light caught the jewel on his finger ring: nothing was possible. Of the villagers, men and women, some laughed and some were sombre and some turned from her gaze. She had the burned hand of Jerry the Pole in her fist and she led him from the fisherman and the Russian, made him stand in front of each man and each woman and repeat her demand: What are you going to do? A woman, big-bellied and big bosomed, who would have recognized emotion, romance, love, helplessness, tried to comfort her and hold Alice close, but she was pushed away.

  She rounded on them, 'If he were one of yours, what would you do? Leave him, turn your backs on him?'

  Alice was beside a boat. It was sturdy, pulled up high on the sand, one among many. She put her weight against it and heaved. Her feet slipped away in the soft sand, and she could not move it. No one helped her. She looked up. The crowd had made a half-circle around her but were too far back for her to reach them and pull them forward to help. They watched. She strained and the boat did not move, was bedded in the sand. She heard the scream of gulls. She dropped her shoulder against the boat's planks. She panted, gasped. She heard the voice, and a murmur of response, then the sharper reply.

  Alice did not have the language a
nd did not understand. Then the priest was beside her, his shoulder against hers, his weight with hers. Then the fisherman's shoulder, then the Russian's weight.

  Jerry the Pole told her, 'The Father says we should launch. They say there is a machine-gun. The Father is a man of great learning. He spoke words of Latin to them, as on a Sunday's mass. They will launch.'

  The boat moved. All the men's shoulders, and the women's, were against it. It scraped the sand, gathered momentum.

  'Ask him,' Alice demanded of Jerry the Pole, 'ask him what he said.' It was relayed. The Father grunted beside her, 'Quern Dei diligunt, adolescens moritur.'

  Jerry the Pole said, 'It is what he told the village last year when a fisherman was lost at sea. It is from the words of Plautus…'

  She was a convent girl. Alice said softly, 'I understand what he says. "Whom the gods love die young." He speaks a truth.'

  'They will face the machine-gun.'

  The boat skidded down into the water and the crowd pushed it until they were waist deep. The fisherman was in it first, then the Russian, then Jerry the Pole. Then Alice scrambled up and over the side. The engine rattled, dark smoke coughed, it surged.

  The crowd was on the beach. The priest stood in front of them, stern, his hands tight across his chest, but she saw him break the hold and he made the sign of the cross. The boat, on full power, crashed the waves' crests.

  Locke heard the popping of gunfire.

  He was the snake in the grass. He had left the scrub and was now on the dunes, and he slithered a path on the sand between the grass tufts. The sand was in his mouth and nose and he blinked to keep it from his eyes. It was in his shirt, his trousers and shoes, but he kept the launcher's barrel clear of it. He wriggled forward on his stomach. There must be no sand in the barrel for the last grenade—white phosphorus. Each little contorted movement took him further from the gunfire, and nearer to them. With the gunfire, merged with it, were their voices.