A Damned Serious Business

by Gerald Seymour

  The boys had set off for the rendezvous, had avoided Soviet troops and local police, had waited at the edge of a reed bed, then seen the shielded light to guide them out and up to their waists, had been hauled into a dinghy that had sped away to the mother ship. On board an E-boat, formerly of the German navy, now a prize of war and under the control of the British, they had been taken – too fast for Soviet radar and interception – out into international waters, then had headed west across the Baltic Sea for the old harbour city of Lubeck, near the West German/Danish border.

  While the boys trained in armed and unarmed combat and the dark arts of espionage, the girls’ bellies swelled, and they threw up in the early mornings. The boys were familiarised with weapons and explosives and demolition, and would be a part – when they returned to Estonia – of Operation Jungle, and would join up with the Forest Brothers, and all three were as innocent as the girls had been. None had considered that Jungle was infiltrated by British traitors, was flawed at the summit. They had come back. The same E-boat, German crewed, had run the gauntlet – or so it had seemed – of the Soviet defences, and the boys had been put ashore from the dinghy and they waded together, bowed by equipment, into the shallow reed beds. Then the flares had been fired and the shooting had started.

  No one who lived in Haapsalu would have heard the bubbled wheezing cries of the one hit just short of dry land, then drowning. No one who had walked past the KGB building on Pikk in Tallinn and heard the screams and pleas of another who lay on the floor of a cell with a window at ankle height on to the pavement, would have slowed their step, and gone closer. No one would have raised their head if they had been trudging across the bridge that spanned the Narva and had heard frantic banging on the inside of the steel frame of a prison van as it headed east for the more sophisticated interrogators in Leningrad.

  Two years later, and forty-five agents’ lives thrown away, Operation Jungle – regarded as a fiasco, but the traitors left unpunished – was suspended. By then, pregnancies had gone full term and babies had been born and three girls, older and wiser, had been taken to camps far into the steppes of the Soviet Union.

  Jungle had relevance, and Daff knew the facts. Harry’s turn, to contribute and influence a Director’s decision. Needed to be clear, unequivocal, and foolhardy or, perhaps, brave.

  ‘If an agency were minded to hit them, the sort of painful kick that would confuse, disrupt, now is as good a time as any to utilise strike back. Our experience is that they continually upgrade their defences, are harder to locate and identify, are more secretive, take more precautions to avoid identification and the cast-iron evidence required before countermeasures. They believe that disguising their ownership, particularly through the use of proxies, renders them safe from the use of force – what we are now advocating. I quote from an interview I read, apposite: “They don’t want that trail of breadcrumbs to lead right up to the Kremlin.” This is an extraordinary moment because Boot has produced the whistle blower. We have an insider, have the date and time of a meeting where a whole gang of them will be sitting round and receiving a briefing on state-sponsored targets and that is manna and did not fall from Heaven. The best kit we have can sometimes put the hacktivist into a district, sometimes – rarely – into an estate of perhaps half a dozen tower blocks. Cannot put it into a particular bedroom, nor can it identify an ordinary building in an ordinary industrial plot and behind an ordinary window. That is HumInt, and that is what we have. I am not privy to what is intended, but can state, categorically, that I would not take a crystal ball and say when another opportunity like this might beckon. I have the freedom to say this, talk retaliation, but we are supposed to think outside the loop. It is what Boot wants to hear. It is an opportunity for violence . . . Cannot believe I said that. But I did.’

  Harry’s fists were closed, the knuckles white, and he squeezed his eyes shut, and absorbed what he had called for.

  The Maid did logistics.

  She made Boot’s travel arrangements, and planned how the ‘incomer’ would journey and what weight of baggage he would need, and where a package from an industrial estate in west London might be collected. She would remain at VBX as long as Boot was employed there, had an affection and respect for him that were greater even than she gave to her parrot. He was, she would have said, a rarity in the community of the Service: had resisted the vanities of promotion in order to remain at the level of a field officer – operating at the front line of operations, making decisions where responsibility could not be dumped in the lap of a sub-committee, adjacent to danger, not buried under welters of analysis, expenses dockets, leave charts, minutiae – and clever enough to have gone for better paid consultancy in one of many sprouting risk companies. Intelligent enough to have earned big money in the City of London, fresh enough in attitude and stamina not to have coasted towards a retirement pension . . . He was, God forbid it was ever admitted, her hero.

  This mission – still short of a name – caused her anxiety. It had none of the usual comfort of thorough planning. Done at speed and without the rigour of a Lucifer’s Advocate to challenge concepts, create difficulties, real or imagined, but that needed consideration. The Maid could manage a fierce tongue when appropriate. She might have said to the parrot: ‘It’s not amateur dramatics, for God’s sake, it’s not enough to hope it’ll be all right on the night. You need luck, but luck is always earned.’ Was Boot too old to be doing this, taking the responsibility for the success of an operation, for the survival of the men and women he sent forward? Would he not be better sticking to those weekends in the Belgian countryside, winter or summer, rain or shine, and being where cavalry had charged and cannon had boomed and the squares had held fast? It would be down to her, not his wife, to pack the bag for him. He seemed not to notice her, but she knew that the seeming lack of appreciation was bogus. She had a box of chocolates each Christmas, probably wrapped by his wife, her handwriting on the tag, and never a cheek pecked on the evening before the start of the festive holiday, but needed nothing more. She was fearful, would admit to it, and across the room was Daff – different to herself in many ways, but also wearing the crinkle lines of anxiety.

  A greater fear, in the Maid’s life, was reaching the day after his retirement and her gone with him, when her ID would no longer be registered at the entry point into the building. Their voices played the telephones, their fingers tapped keys and, watching them from through Boot’s open door, was the Duke, sprouting from his boot, and with a small smile ‘A Damned Serious Business’, yes, indeed.

  Daff’s printer spouted out maps and aerial photographs and road reports, along with images of a building with a glistening flat roof where overnight ice would have melted and light specks flickered off what would have been the barbs of a perimeter fence wire. And she had close-up pictures of a supermarket’s car-park . . . All clear, straightforward, easy for her to produce. It was what was taken on trust that caused her difficulty, knitted the frown on her tanned forehead.

  She was less successful than the Maid at disguising worry. The bloody four-minute warning could have been sounded on the roof sirens and the Maid would have looked up from her screen, shrugged, then carried on typing so that the message she wrote could be received somewhere in the post-Armageddon society. Once, the wail blasting through the building, Daff would have thought she’d have been sprinting down the corridor and hunting down the first available male, and maybe doing it right there beside the coffee machine. Now, she just fretted. All about trust. The boys were on ‘trust’. How they would be, Martin and Toomas and Kristjan, was uncertain. The Polish sister service had been fast with the recommendation, the Latvians had had nothing, nor the Finns, and fluent Russian speakers with reason to detest the régime and with practical if brief experience were hard to find. She sent them the message detailing where they should be for the rendezvous and when she would meet them. Their money was in transit – important because they’d want the assurance of where they were going, what was inte
nded of them.

  And Merc – Gideon Francis Hawkins – was also taken on trust. She concentrated on her screen, kept her eye-line clear of the photograph of him from the file, the slight smile playing at his mouth, widening his lips, lifting his nostrils; he seemed to mock her. She did not know how he would be . . . Those years before, hammering down Route Irish, she’d noticed that his hands had no tremor as they held the weapon that poked from the front passenger window. So calm, and none of the giveaway signs of ’phet abuse. Also remembered seeing him at the pool, and her in a skimpy bikini, and other girls from the personal assistant ranks at the embassy drooling, but she had not shagged him, and afterwards had told herself the fault lay with her, she hadn’t tried hard enough. Had seen him once when he was convoy driving on the northern reaches of the Kyber, had missed him when he was on escort along the Salang tunnel road, and one more meeting – business and starchy and in company – at the embassy in Ankara before he had left Turkey for the ‘wild west’ of Erbil. In the years since, she had seen his reports concise, bare-bone stuff, and better HumInt than most of the young men and women on the second and third floors of? VBX managed. But, Daff could not say how

  he would be and what the toll of the battlefield had done to him. She had talked him up, and Boot had accepted her judgement. It weighed heavily on her that Merc was taken on trust.

  And the kid who was Nikki . . . Boot had grimaced and had remarked that any youngster in the 95th Rifles, after three days’ march along the road to Waterloo, would have smelt as sharply. She knew the story of the battle, as did the Maid – it went with the job. Nikki was taken on trust. Nikki, little hacker scumbag, might by now have been telling an ingratiating story to any FSB major who’d listen, jabbing a finger on a map where a supermarket was marked, and a car-park, and talking of a meeting – trying to save the skin on his back, attempting a deal of immunity. In the code of MICE – money ideology compromise ego – the compromised people were always the least reliable and the kid might have a greater fear of his own security people than of an older man of mild appearance, who was Boot. She took Boot on trust and he took her on the same basis, and neither would know how the other would perform at the frontier.

  A rare moment for her, an aberration of indulgence, Daff scrawled the words on her pad: Taken on Trust. Looked at her watch, squealed, grabbed her bag, and ran. The plane would be starting to drop, not yet on final descent but beginning to come down. Ran hard and with a tail of fair hair flying after her and feet clattering along the corridor.

  ‘Have to give it to her,’ Arthur said. ‘A great little mover – and knows it.’

  He and Roy were near the end of their shift. She’d not skirted them where they stood at the principal gate into VBX, and they hadn’t backed off, and she had been precious near to impaling herself on the foresight of Roy’s Heckler & Koch. They had watched her run through the traffic, not looking right or left, and then bury herself in a saloon parked by the station entrance. It powered away.

  Rob said, ‘She’s one of Boot’s, right?’

  ‘And him out all day, gone at sparrow fart. Arthur, know what I’m thinking?’

  ‘Thinking, my old cocker, that there’s a show on. Bet the housekeeping on it.’

  ‘Too right, a proper show. A show that matters – Boot’s. Spot on.’

  And they grinned and felt a little of the elation that did not come often. The weapons were heavy on their necks and flak vests, and Arthur sniffed – like it was danger he could smell. They saw plenty at the gate, it was like a top seat in the stalls.

  Leanne had never met the Director, imagined rather a jaundiced stereotype, but her quirk of mischief suggested he might want to be liberated from the straitjacket of conventional retaliation. Not her role to offer up the cautions of his staff officers; there’d be enough of them queuing up to urge a turned cheek in the face of severe provocation. She’d give it hard, and rather enjoy the exercise.

  ‘Let us put the situation into context. I get told most days of most weeks that terrorism is now on a back burner, just simmering in a pot, and that cyber has gone up and past it in threat terms. Top of the tree is Russia, more so than the Chinese, North Koreans and the kids in Iran. Russia has the infrastructure to put bums on seats, do it cleverly and outstrip the competition. We can talk – this is what comes across my desk – about a catastrophe on the scale of cyber’s Nine Eleven. Not necessarily deaths, but assuredly the destabilisation of our societies. Think of the Trojan Horse . . . Where’s the threat? Cannot see it. Victimless? I don’t think so. The malware is inside our energy distribution and our telecoms and our finances and our whole range of logistics. We are talking about Sourface and Eviltoss and Chopstick and Jabber Zeus malware. Millions, hundreds of millions, of personal details that have been siphoned, which is the unimportant bit for a state-sponsored operation. Anything that damages this march towards domination is welcome. In our language we are not permitted to refer to an enemy, only to an adversary. The adversary is better than us and we are throwing billions at the problem and are not yet matching with parity. They are not bound by rules, have not heard of old Queensberry – but we are, libraries of them – and we have to consider the dangers of a vigilante defence which is illegal. In the private sector, the Christmas present that everyone wants, the defenders against the aggression, is a nicely wrapped up, pink ribbons, “nuke from orbit” button, but it doesn’t seem to get put in our stockings. Sorry, and all that, but things are actually quite bleak. If we can hit, have that chance, then we should.’

  A damp and chill wind in the air, and the tang of the sea, and he needed hard advice, without varnish coating. The meeting place was a compromise. Boot had chosen Fort Monkton, on the coast west of Portsmouth. The sergeant had driven from Poole, farther west.

  ‘How to get in, my problem. The river’s three hundred yards wide, flushed up high from the rains, a fair speed on it. Going on his own. Others with better cover are already in place. It’s a frontier, so how to cross and how to get into their territory, and cold, first snow of the winter about to fall. How?’

  Wellington might have been here. The Fort had been completed two decades before Waterloo. It had been integral in the defences against Napoleonic invasion, and the old ramparts had been well maintained. The Service used it for the field training of recruits, and for pistol shooting and lectures in the arts of unarmed combat. Tucked away, discreet, and a good place to talk. He wanted to know if the river banks were patrolled, covered by electronic surveillance. The sergeant was a man of experience, could have risen to a higher rank in the Special Boat Squadron, but he’d never made the Officers’ Mess. He stayed at an acceptable level and had, it was claimed, limitless common sense. Wanted to know the age and physique of the man going across. Was told what the most recent files, sparse, had thrown up on the border’s security. Asked for detail of the terrain on the far side, Russian sovereign territory. Boot took his tablet from his briefcase. Daff had loaded it. He put up the images of the river and the deep forest on the far side, where few roads ran, and the loggers’ tracks were hard to see. They were absorbed.

  Cigarette smoke blew into Boot’s face and he would like to have reciprocated with a stuffed bowl of his clay pipe but it lay in his office. What was the time schedule? Assumed covert, were there bad consequences for capture? Boot gazed into the leathered face of the old warrior, veteran of Basra and Kandahar and Sierra Leone and others, and wished that the man could be added, temporarily, to the payroll, and gave his replies briskly. A certainty – if their boy were taken – that it would be Not Confirmed Not Denied – NCND – a major creed in his work. Not worth thinking of if he appeared in a lower court in Pskov or Novgorod, then was heaved off to a holding cell in St Petersburg, in that ghastly building overlooking the Neva. He’d be out on his neck, holed below the waterline, drowning, taking many with him because the collateral would be fearsome. If it worked, then a sherry and a chuckle with the Big Boss, and on to the next project. Would not have had it any
different.

  ‘Assessment of the chappie who’s going over?’

  Boot gave it him. ‘We think of him as special. He’s leading a team that is rubbish but it’s what we could put together in the time. He’s acting in concert with an irrational and unmotivated kid who we have our claws into and who will need prodding into place. We think of him as a leader, someone who others want to follow and will believe in. We’ve dragged him out of a combat situation where he is – to all intents – a mercenary, but the money is paltry and what I will pay him is not much more than loose change. It’s all cheapskate, how we live these days. He has no home, no close family or full-time relationship. He’s footloose, and probably we, the Service, are the most precious item he relates to. Which is like me and like the ladies in my office, all the people that are, in my opinion, worthwhile. I think highly enough of him to have ensured that air strikes destroyed a planned attack on a sector he had taken responsibility for. I twisted arms, kicked shins to get the aircraft up. I look upon him as remarkable, and what I am asking of him is quite unreasonable. But we have a one-off chance when we can act or sit on our hands and do nothing and wait for another twenty years to pass. It’s a meeting of high-value targets and the location is within range. Too much to hope those will be repeated factors. A leader makes things happen without fuss, no drama in a crisis . . . A good man. This is Tuesday, late morning – the opportunity for us to make a valued strike is on the afternoon of Thursday, and the location is one hundred and twenty klicks across that river, and it is a stampede and—’