The Silent War

by Andreas Norman

  He looks down at the ground and says nothing. She is giving the orders now. Continue the relationship. Don’t do anything to make her suspicious. He should behave as he usually does towards Heather. Otherwise she may realise she has been exposed. Stockholm wants to question her, she explains. But the Brits mustn’t smell a rat, otherwise they will send her back to England and she will vanish. Does he understand?

  Fredrik nods, anxious and submissive.

  ‘Have you arranged to see each other again?’

  ‘Yes, the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Three o’clock.’

  ‘So you’ll see her. Sunday at three o’clock.’

  Fredrik glares at her with timid fascination. It strikes her that he has never seen her like this before, as a professional, as Head of the Section. She is talking to him like an employee. Funny that at the moment they are furthest apart they are working together for the first time.

  ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’

  ‘Do what you usually do,’ she says. ‘Use your charm.’

  It feels so good not to be the only one feeling terrible – there is comfort in his suffering. Perhaps even a certain degree of revenge. Yes, she thinks, looking at him sitting on the garden chair and anxiously clasping his hands. Of course revenge alleviates the pain – anyone who claims otherwise has never been betrayed.

  17

  Rolling fields, dry yellow and filled with root vegetables, pass by the car window. The piercing sunlight causes him to screw up his eyes. It is like travelling into a memory. He can see the mountains now. The van rattles, reminding him of the zinc coffins in which dead soldiers are repatriated.

  The fact that he and Kate have been here is an unreal feeling. When they lived in Damascus, they would take the car up through Syria in the summers and visit Palmyra, Aleppo and even sometimes over the border to visit the city they are now approaching: Antakya. That was how he found the House.

  The noise makes it difficult to talk and Hakan is sitting quietly in the front at the wheel. He seems reliable, calm and thorough – a typical fixer. They leave the main road at a large crossroads and join another road heading across this flat landscape, straight as an arrow. They pass warehouses and low rows of houses, which didn’t use to be here. Then he recognises where they are. He sees the typical mansard roof and the square shape of the house in the middle of the fields.

  After all these years he is standing outside the House again. The heavy door is just as he remembers. Hakan carries his bag inside before saying that he will return later this evening, then disappearing into the white heat of the blazing sunshine.

  He stands in the cool darkness of the hall. The slightly sweet smell of scented cleaning fluid makes him stop and close his eyes. He has spent so long trying to persuade himself that he bears no guilt. But now it is as if that voice within him had fallen silent.

  He used to stand in the hall, there in the corner, or out in the yard, and see everything through the doorway. Why don’t you help? Robert used to wonder. As if it were just a sofa. Then he became accustomed. Yes, he got stuck in like everyone else.

  He reaches out with his left hand and fumbles; there is the handrail. Touching the familiar, cold cast iron sends what feels like an electric shock through his arm, and he reels backwards. ‘Hold the rail so that you don’t fall,’ Robert used to remind him. ‘In case they struggle.’ Robert was helpful when it came to things like that. Easy-going, merry almost. He remembers the details now. The ties around the wrists. The clients had to lie down, face to the ground, bodies one metre apart in rows.

  He helped to take them down into the basement. It was heavy work – some were compliant, while others offered resistance. When he said he didn’t want to do it, he was tasked with preparing for interrogations instead. Ensuring that everything they needed was to hand.

  He finds the light switch. A bare light bulb illuminates the walls. There is the basement door. The same worn, verdigris-green door as before. It absorbed all sounds; almost all of them.

  At the time they were using the House, he was convinced – he knew – that they were doing the right thing. They crossed a line of blood and piss, but he never thought it would take him years before he found his way back across that line.

  He pushes the door open. The handle is welded straight to the metal door; he feels the familiar, grating surface on the palm of his hand. He peers into the darkness. There are the stairs.

  The darkness in the hall is interrupted. He jumps and quickly closes the basement door.

  ‘Welcome, sir.’

  He nods.

  ‘May I take your bag, sir?’

  ‘I can look after it,’ he mutters.

  But the soldier bends forward and picks up the bag.

  Leaving the dark hall, they enter a flagged courtyard. He squints in the harsh daylight. It is strange to find everything the same. The large flagstones in the yard, roughcast white façades and windows with dark frames facing onto the square courtyard. He follows the soldier up the wooden steps to the upper floor.

  They have given him the biggest room. The only furnishings are a bed, a cupboard and a desk, just as before. Everything is the same.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says to the soldier. ‘Leave the bag there.’

  He looks down onto the courtyard. It is as if they were all bewitched, he thinks. What happened in the House was separated from the rest of the world. As if they were adhering to a different form of gravity that ignored all other laws. The bodies had no inherent value, only the information that they contained, the truth to be found within them; only that. They were to peel the truth from each body. The grimness was necessary. He became someone else – or that is how he wants to remember it.

  He hears voices downstairs. Someone laughs.

  He steps into the courtyard and shades his eyes with his hand. Under the overhanging roof at the other end of the yard are four men sitting and smoking. When they notice him they get up, as if taken by surprise, and step forward to greet him. The only one to give his name is a wiry, tall man with arms like grained dark wood.

  ‘Sergeant Pepper.’

  Is he joking? He nods at the sergeant and decides to play along and gives his own cover name: George Bradswaithe.

  The other soldiers approach and greet him politely.

  Supplement is the dry designation for men like these. Supplements to people like himself. The terms have changed over the years, but they have always had the same dry, administrative tone that catches the attention of politicians and parliamentary committees: supplements, increments, extra resources, E-5.

  They peer at him with curiosity. To them, he is one of the strange grey eminences that appear, nameless, from the depths of a secret machinery.

  He notices that he has interrupted something. They are waiting for him to leave and he wanders off to the archway and towards the basement.

  He carefully opens the door and goes down the stairs.

  The narrow staircase; he remembers it, remembers every step. Then he reaches the large room with a vaulted ceiling, just as he remembers. There is the passageway leading to the cells.

  The air is cool. A chill that would slowly penetrate the body and make clients’ teeth chatter.

  ‘Close the door,’ they would shout. ‘Give me the towels. Put him there.’ They were knowledgeable and experienced, Robert and the others. He used to go out into the yard when he couldn’t deal with it. He remembers the broiling heat and the dull sensation of participating in violence so gratuitous that it was hidden from the entire world.

  In the years since, he has felt the dark gravitation of the House. He has never left it. Over the years, he has got used to the guilt, its weight. Yet he still feels dizzy standing there.

  He is lying on the bed in his room. The evening light is cast in wide strips onto the floor. He is warm, and the s
weat clings to him. He tries to think through the plan, everything he has read, everything they discussed at the last meeting, but he is too upset, and notices how he quickly begins to mix things up. The fear is a pungent and acidic odour present in his sweat. The difference between life and death is found in the details.

  It is impossible to stop the thought: that his familiar body, with its pale skin and reddish hair, liver spots on his back and freckles on his arms, lying there on the bed, will also become his corpse. A dead weight handled carelessly by strange hands, shipped home in a zinc coffin and kept in cold storage, before being buried, rotting and crumbling.

  Or not, he says to himself in an attempt to stave off anxiety. Perhaps he will soon be back in London, the victor. Pathfinder will lead them to the heart of IS, and they will use all their might to remove Hydra’s heads. Vauxhall Cross will see that he has dealt responsibly with the leak in Brussels. He knows that the leaked documents haven’t been sent on from the Jensen family computer or their mobiles. The surveillance of them in recent weeks has captured all traffic – there are no gaps. He is thorough, he is putting things right. He can picture Heather finding the external drive in the Jensen family home and eliminating the documents. Perhaps it has already been done; the thought makes him calm.

  Before they leave, he checks his equipment. He changes clothes and chooses carefully what to take. His hands are shaking. He wants to pray, but to whom?

  Down in the kitchen the soldiers are sitting around the large table. They are cleaning their weapons and listening attentively to the sergeant, who seems to be instructing them but falls silent when he appears.

  ‘Ah, here you are,’ he says.

  The men continue to quietly handle the parts of their weapons lying on the table. They work with experience, deftly cleaning and oiling. Then they eat dinner. The soldiers talk quietly with each other, glancing sideways at him at the end of the table. He understands their reservations; he is a stranger to them.

  After the meal, while the soldiers stow their kit in the car, he stays in his room. He can hear them shouting to each other in the courtyard. The sun has set when they leave for the border. Cool night air rushes through the open car windows. The soldiers are silent, absorbed in thought. Hakan drives without saying a word.

  As they approach the border, traffic gets heavier. They are close to a town. There are people moving along the verge in the darkness, appearing like dazzled animals in the beam of the car headlights.

  He has been here in the past, before the war. Back then, the town had been a place for large trucks and lively markets, with small stands along the sides of the roads. It is different now. People wander across the road holding plastic carrier bags, silent and resolute. The bombings have increased in recent weeks and the shadows moving along the verges are those who have managed to escape. The war is so close that he can hear it as a single dull rumble beyond the mountains. A Turkish military jeep passes by; a little later, an ambulance rushes past in the opposite direction.

  They roll on through the fields. Ahead of them, he perceives the dark silhouette of the mountain tops.

  The village is a dreary collection of houses, separated by potholed roads, tangled patches of waste ground and enclosures containing solitary goats. Not a person is to be seen. The village appears to be deserted, as if the inhabitants had withdrawn in the face of impending danger. But there is life: the dogs are barking like mad.

  Their guide turns out to be not one person but two. Two slight boys are standing in the courtyard of one of the houses on the outskirts of the village. They aren’t more than teenagers, he thinks to himself anxiously when he realises that they are to take them across the mountains. But the soldiers appear calm; the sergeant offers them cigarettes. Hakan interprets when the sergeant talks to the boys. Then he comes up to Jonathan and says he is leaving. Good luck.

  One of the soldiers hands him a helmet with night vision and a microphone, an earpiece, a tactical vest with a knife, compass, water bottle and ultraviolet torch neatly slotted into various pockets, all in case they are separated during their hike across the mountains. Jonathan is dressed for war and it makes him agitated. He becomes someone else: wearing the helmet with the night-vision set over one eye, a glittering green landscape opens up around him. The soldiers quickly test the radio frequency amongst themselves; he can hear them clearly in his ear. Then, tied together by technology, they are ready.

  The boys bound away rapidly into the field. The soldiers move in a kind of gliding double time. Years of training and battle lie behind the way they take formation. It is different for him. He is worried about losing them from his sight.

  A scattered white light is growing above the fields. Weak to begin with, then quickly blindingly strong, which is when the sound of crunching gravel and humming engines becomes audible. He throws himself down into the darkness. The tall dry grass stings his face, surrounding him with a dense and acid smell, warm soil. He pants, spitting grit out of his mouth, and waits. Then the patrol is gone.

  The mountain looks closer than it is, and it takes them over an hour before they start climbing. The incline is constantly increasing. Sometimes he has to climb on all fours to get up the rocky slope. His rucksack weighs him down, wanting to pull him out and backwards. If he loses his balance, he will tumble down and be smashed to smithereens on the rocks, so he pushes himself to the ground, pulling himself up and feeling his legs shaking. He manages to stop briefly to drink water, catching his breath as he lies in the grass with his feet resting on a large rock. The soldiers move quickly and deliberately in front of him. Carry on, he thinks. He can’t fall behind.

  He doesn’t know how long the steep climb lasts, but he is completely exhausted when they reach the summit and sink heavily to the ground. The long valley opens up before them.

  They have crossed the border.

  18

  They follow trails along the side of the mountain and down into the valley. Precipices gape like open shafts. The boys have led the group across the border and now they want to return. They speak briefly to the sergeant, pointing. Then they turn around and head up the slope. For a while, Jonathan is able to glimpse them between the rocks as pale green shapes in the darkness. Then they are gone.

  He loses sight of the soldiers. ‘Wait,’ he says in a low voice, but gets no answer in his earpiece. Then he sees the white dot of an infrared light shining a couple of hundred metres down the trail.

  He can’t see them. Then he slips, tumbling onto his knees in the grass. Flies swarm towards his face. He gets up, only managing to discern something of the swollen, putrefying mass of flesh lying in the mire. The stench hits him, dense and suffocating. He fumbles and falls to one side with a small cry.

  He finds them huddled in a dry irrigation channel. He slides down to them. They say nothing but he knows they are wondering why he has taken so long. One soldier has pulled his jacket over his head to form a small tent and turns on his infrared light to examine the map. The others crouch at the edge of the channel, training their weapons on the surrounding area.

  He pulls off his night-vision set and rubs his face. Sweat is making the straps moist and they scratch; in the end, the irritation is all he can think about. In the pitch darkness he can see neither the soldiers nor the ground or sky. The only things perceptible are the smell of dry grass and warm, dusty soil. He can hear the others breathing around him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ says a voice in his earpiece. He puts the night-vision set back on and there is the sergeant’s shimmering green face in front of him like in a strange dream.

  They follow the wind, trotting across open ground. He doesn’t know the infiltration route in detail, he has to trust the soldiers completely. He can’t fall behind again, but his rucksack weighs almost twenty-five kilos and makes him clumsy. The contents are clunking about and he is worried that things will come loose and start making a racket. Everything has to be f
irmly secured, everything must happen in absolute silence.

  The sergeant signals a halt.

  The soldiers have raised their weapons and are crouching, fanning out beside a plantation. What can they see? Small figures are running back and forth between the rows of bushy orange trees. He isn’t sure at first whether his eyes are deceiving him. They are children. Small children quietly gathering oranges in the middle of the night. They rush back and forth between the rows of trees collecting fruit in a wheelbarrow. There is no playfulness in their movements, they are working quietly and deliberately. It is an uncanny sight because they are not behaving like children but like miniature adults. Perhaps someone has sent them here to find food under cover of darkness; perhaps there is no adult looking after them any longer. He stares at them as they run around in their nocturnal kingdom of the dead.

  They jog for an hour until they reach a grove of cypress trees and take a break. He is so tired following the quick march that he simply lies down. The soldiers disappear into the trees.

  The plain is visible in the dark. A hammering salvo from an artillery cannon is audible above the valley, followed by two dull explosions.

  It is time. The sergeant appears, handing him a pair of binoculars and pointing. He can see individual houses. The terrain is so open – all he can think about is that they must be visible from a great distance. A good sniper would be able to pick them off one at a time. In the early grey dawn he sees a large house surrounded by a wall and a garden, barely five hundred metres away. The building is bigger than he had thought from the drone photo, but he recognises it and nods.

  He hears the soldiers speaking in low voices to each other.

  ‘Sergeant, what do we do?’ he asks.

  Their four blackened faces turn to him in the half-darkness.

  ‘You stay here. We go in and take them out,’ says the sergeant in a tone of voice indicating that he is wondering whether this man from MI6 has any idea why they are there. ‘And we collect the package.’