by A P Bateman
“Do you believe in fate?” he asked.
“Sort of,” she replied. “I suppose there’s a case for it.”
King nodded. “Do you believe it catches up with you?”
“What, like cheating death?”
“I suppose,” he said. “The cards get dealt. I’ve known some of the best operators in the field catch an unlucky bullet. I’ve seen rebels with no training, discipline or skill fight and live through hell on the battlefield. Sometimes it just boils down to fate.”
“You’re sounding distinctly profound tonight,” she said, digging him the ribs with her elbow. “Are you worried I cheated fate? Worried that my true destiny lies in Georgia?”
King smiled. “No. I think you’ll take care of yourself.”
She edged a little closer, rested her head on her shoulder and watched the television. The Russian president’s plane was nearing the end of its taxi to the runway. A picture of him appeared in the top righthand corner, the ticker-tape relaying his position on the discovery of biological nerve agents that killed the two Russian KGB defectors.
“So, tell me more of this sabbatical idea,” she said softly.
“I thought I’d go to Russia,” he said.
“Russia?”
King nodded. “I hear it’s a beautiful country,” he said. “Might be worth it.”
“I guess so,” Caroline paused. “But don’t go worrying about fate. I don’t think you can change it anyway. When your time is up, your time is up.”
King knew that was all too true. But he had commanded a degree of fate. He had served it up to many people over the years. Some deserving; others less so. Maybe you couldn’t beat fate, but you could guide it towards others.
“I agree.” King stared at the picture of the Russian president on the screen, before picking up the remote and switching off the television.
“You can’t beat The Reaper,” said Caroline.
“No,” King agreed. “You most certainly can’t.”
Stormbound
By
A P Bateman
1
Lapland
Five miles from the tripoint of Norway, Finland and Russia
The air was so dry and cold that it had started to freeze his lungs, crystallising and ripping him inside as each ice crystal stuck to one another. It was inevitable. Exertion should have been avoided at all costs. The Sami - the natives of Northern Finland - were not runners for good reason. They paced themselves, breathed through a shroud of folded cotton on the coldest days. And today was cold. As cold as he thought possible on this earth.
With the exertion his breathing rate raised considerably. The frigid air chilled his lungs, and with each exhalation, the lungs emptied of air and stuck together. The freezing air rushed back inside, cooled them further. The effect was like licking a metal pole in the sub-zero temperatures. Only each time his lungs stuck together, there were no pain receptors to warn him, and when they refilled with freezing air, the wet lining peeled away from the frozen layer and bled even more. Not that it would ultimately make a difference to him breathing, it was nothing more than a natural and uncontrollable reflex, but he did not know the damage he was doing to himself inside, and he never would. The damage had already been done. He was slowly drowning in his own blood.
He wiped his sleeve across his mouth, glanced at the blood. His breathing was laboured, becoming wet and thick. The lack of useable air was thinning the oxygen levels in his bloodstream. He didn’t know it yet, but he was already dying slowly through hypoxia.
He could hear the incessant motors of the snowmobiles getting closer. He had earlier tried to cover his tracks, take a devious route, but when he had realised how quickly they were catching him, he had made a break for it and broken cover. His efforts had been poor, and although he had once learned about escape and evasion, those scenarios spent on the Brecon Beacons one weekend now seemed trite. Nothing could have prepared a man for this climate. This extreme environment. And he was a deskman now, years after his basic training, he had lost his edge, dulled in reactions. It wouldn’t have made a difference though, he had simply run out of time.
The snowmobiles went silent. He ducked down behind a ledge of ice, a series of ridges which had been blown into waves like a frozen sea. The arctic wind, an irresistible force of nature.
He hunkered down, aware that his clothing afforded him no camouflage qualities in the monochrome landscape. His heart pounded, his breathing tearing his lungs apart within him.
A gunshot rang out across the clearing, cracking the heavy, freezing air and sounding like a canon in the stillness. A solid mist of frozen snow dusted into the air just a few inches from his feet. He pulled his feet up, then broke cover and dodged to a wispy pine. He moved laboriously, partly because of the lack of oxygen in his bloodstream, and partly because of the multiple layers that were both bulky and stiff from the cold. He felt a cumbersome, inelegant beast. But worse; he felt like prey. It was a poor tactical move, too. The tree was far narrower than himself, but more solid than the icy ridge and the crusty layer of frozen snow at his feet. The trees were thinner this far north. They only grew for a few months of the year and the forest was both widely spaced and looked like five-year-old plantations of pine, rather than centuries old forest.
He grimaced, the pain working its way up his throat like bringing up gravel. He coughed, but it only made it worse and he started to retch uncontrollably, blood and sputum dotting the snow at his feet.
Another gunshot. The high-velocity crack ringing through the valley. Part of the tree trunk was blown away and the bullet ricocheted into the forest. The tree was frozen as solid as everything else in this landscape and the soft-nosed hunting round merely chipped off the bark, when it could well have travelled through, had they been a thousand miles further to the south.
He slid down the trunk and slumped onto the frozen ground. The snow had frozen, the temperature now -30°C, and was as hard as concrete. He knew he was finished. He had no fight left in him and had reached as far as he could go. He wiped more blood from his lips, marvelled at how it had already frozen on his sleeve. He closed his eyes for a moment, willed images of his wife and son to come into his thoughts. He wanted to be with them as he died, take solace in the warmth of family memories. But then he snapped too. Remembered his training. Hazy days, twenty-years ago.
Another world. Another lifetime. The tough Scot instructor shouting at him. Keep moving forward! Or; if you’re dying, you can still be useful…
He raised a hand, bit down on the crusty tip of a gloved finger and pulled it free. Another shot rang out. He was aware of a zing in the air as the bullet ricocheted, but he did not falter. Could not care less anymore. His hand felt cold and numb as soon as it met the frigid air. He feebly unzipped a chest pocket, dug his fingers inside and took out a small, orange-coloured lozenge, approximately half the length of his finger. He reached behind him, dug into the frozen snow. He worked away at the crust, his fingers losing all feeling and making the task near-impossible. He broke the crust, found the snow looser a few inches deeper. He tucked the lozenge into the shallow hole, swept the icy granules on top. He raised his hand, saw the blood freezing to his skin. His fingertips were white. He had ripped out two nails in his efforts, but they barely bled. He tried to squeeze his hand into a fist, but his digits had frozen solid. He lolled his head back against the tree. There were tears in his eyes, but they welled and solidified on his cheeks, pointing downwards like stalactites.
There were crunches on the snow behind him. Multiple footsteps. He looked up as two men rounded the tree. He recognised one of the men, shook his head at the indignity of him being there at the end. The man removed the glove from his right hand and held it out in front of him. He looked up at him, tried to stand, but he struggled too much and rested his back onto the ice.
He was beaten and had accepted it.
A smaller man with dark, leathery skin - who the man would have thought looked like an Eskimo, or Inu
it before he knew about the native Sami – laid his old and battered hunting rifle on the ground and took off his pair of reindeer skin gloves and bent down, ripped the man’s Gortex jacket open, and pushed the man’s hands back down as he weakly resisted. The Sami rifled through the man’s pockets, then gave up and ripped the man’s jacket over his head and went through the pockets one by one. The man shivered, practically bouncing off the ground as he shuddered. The Sami found a fold of paper, dropped the jacket on the ground as he handed the paper to the taller man, who like the man dying at their feet, wore modern ski-wear and thick double-lined boots.
“Is this it?” The taller man read the paper, folded it and placed it in his inside pocket. “Is this all that was taken?”
The man swallowed, but the action looked as painful as swallowing half a brick. He thought of his contact. The asset. The young man whose body lay ten miles south from here, wrought and stiff in the snow. He had veered off course, missed their rendezvous by twenty-hours. He had almost made it but died in the savage night. So close, yet so far. A waste of life. But the asset had got something out. And now he had given his own life for the same cause.
Resigned to his fate, he looked up and beckoned the man to bend down closer. He murmured something incoherent and the tall man straightened back up. He looked down at the man on the ground, saw that he was drowsy – almost out of it completely. He was hypothermic. The cold would kill him, but they needed the wilderness to claim him. He nodded to the Sami and the man reached under the bulk of his reindeer skin coat and pulled out a knife.
The man could see the dull-coloured blade. Not polished, but tarnished and grey. A thin silver line along the blade, which ran from haft to tip, indicated a wickedly sharpened edge. The handle was made from antler. It was a stubby, curved blade. He tensed as the Sami sliced through the fleece under-coat, dug the blade through the muscle wall and opened him up from his navel to his chest. He could hear the blade cutting through the muscle and fat, felt a tugging sensation, but he did not feel the pain of the cut, he was almost too far gone for that. But he did feel the pleasant warmth on his skin as his blood and entrails spilled and steamed in the icy air. The Sami placed the knife on the ground and dug his hands inside. He lifted out the man’s entrails and let them trail on the frozen ground. The man looked up at both men, tried to mutter something, but he closed his eyes and took his last breath, the faces of his wife and son finally coming into his thoughts as he breathed for the final time.
The Sami cleaned his hands on the man’s jacket, then wiped the blade of the knife on the man’s leg, sheathed his weapon once more and put on his gloves. Between them, the two men pulled the body out from the tree and laid it out on the snow. The entrails had stuck to the ice and unwound further as they had dragged the body away. The Sami swung the rifle over his shoulder and adjusted the sling so that it rode over the crude seam in his reindeer skin coat. He nodded to the taller man and they trudged back across the snow. When they were fifty-metres clear of the steaming body, the Sami removed a glove, cupped his hand to his mouth and howled like a wolf. To the other man’s bemusement, it was if a wolf stood next to him. The Sami howled for close to a minute. When a reply came, chilling and distant, the Sami smiled and nodded silently, and the two men trudged back up the slope to the east.
2
The car was a ten-year-old Volvo estate. Battered, but well-maintained. An inconspicuous vehicle barely worth a second glance. Its front wheels wore snow chains and had carved a path here on a crust of foot-deep frozen snow. The municipal snowplough had been through the day before, but it had not snowed here in weeks. The wind was cutting through across the northernmost tip of Norway, bringing the cold, salty air straight down from the Arctic Ocean and through the belt of wispy forest making up the extremities of Lapland.
The heater was on full power, maximum temperature. It had been for six hours. The car was a petrol engine model. Diesel struggled at these temperatures, turned to gel on the coldest days. The idling engine was going through the petrol at an alarming rate, but he needed the heater on full. A quarter tank of fuel had gone in the time spent on tick-over alone.
He checked his watch. He would have to call it. He had a hundred-mile drive ahead of him and the going would be slow. By his calculations, he had enough fuel to make it, but not if he encountered a problem or diversion. He had taken it to the limit and was already cursing having not called it a full hour ago. He would have had a comfortable buffer for his journey.
There were fifty-mile-an-hour winds heading south, a precursor to the arctic storm threatening to swoop down from the North Pole within the next week. The forecasters had pronounced it imminent and unavoidable. They were certain that it would not deviate. He had used a narrow enough window, and he did not want to chance blizzard conditions on the drive back. He was not a young man any longer, hadn’t been for some time. No, he was calling it and that was that. He wiped the windows around him for the hundredth time, cleared his vision for the dull monochrome hue outside. It was only daylight between eleven and three, and the Volvo’s headlights were both yellow and weak. Still, better than being blinded in the snow by halogen LEDs on modern vehicles. He took the Walther PPK pistol out from between his legs, placed it back in the glovebox and put the car into second gear for a gentle rolling start on the icy crust.
There was no phone signal out here and he would have to call from the car when he escaped the blackspot thirty miles further south. He had struggled making calls for the past two-weeks, before realising his phone would freeze and switch off after three or four minutes exposed to the temperature. There was a landline back at his lodge. Normally he would call the secure line, and his call would be routed through GCHQ and to River House, or what people would more widely know as the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, London. Personally, he’d always called it Legoland.
He had worked there for many years. He had done things he’d rather forget, seen things he didn’t want to remember. He had seen the best agents come and go. And now, he was out in the field again. The wrong side of sixty, but worn and weary. Older than his years.
But still sharp.
Because the man he was to meet tonight had called that same number when he realised he was in trouble. And that man had not made his rendezvous.
And he would not be making the same mistake.
3
Ministry of Defence (MOD)
Whitehall, London
Amherst watched the woman from hospitality services pour the tea, dutifully position the plate of biscuits closer to them, and step back from the table.
“That will be all,” Villiers said curtly. “Thank you.” He did not look at her as he dismissed her, and he poured in his own milk and stirred the cup thoughtfully.
Amherst picked up the milk jug. “So, we’re agreed?” he said.
“Yes.”
“No need for our American friends to know?”
“Absolutely not. The less, the better. That goon in the White House won’t keep his mouth shut anyway, most likely send a Tweet and tip them off.”
Villiers shook his head. “What a world we live in, eh?”
Amherst glanced at his watch. He had known the chief of MI6 for as long as he’d held his own post of that of Director of MI5, or as it was officially known - the Security Service. His opposite number was a cautious man, and one never really knew how the man ticked. Amherst didn’t dislike the man on a professional level but wouldn’t be inviting him down to the country anytime soon. He never fully felt at ease in the man’s company, unsure how much to divulge, or nip at the bait he so often dangled in front of him. It was eleven-AM and the COBRA meeting had finished. Villiers had asked if he could have a word with Amherst on an unrelated matter. Amherst had proceeded with caution.
“What can I help you with, James?”
Villiers sipped some tea, placed it back down on the thick porcelain saucer. In MI5 they used white mugs, similar in quality to most motorway service stations. In Whitehall, the
y were afforded cups and saucers, but they were utilitarian destined for chain hotels with buffet breakfasts and airport drop-offs every twenty-minutes. In Downing Street, it was fine bone china.
Hierarchy and budget.
“The Russian president.”
“Nice fellow.”
“Aren’t they all?” Villiers said sarcastically and smiled. “Haven’t had much of a chance to assess this one yet.”
“No doubt.”
“The death of his predecessor was, well, sudden.”
“Certainly unexpected.”
Villiers murmured as he sipped his tea. “If you say so,” he said.
Amherst was a liar. He was paid to lie. Half of his personnel were taught how to. Even so, his neck bristled. “Meaning?”
“Your kidnapped agent last year,” he said nonchalantly. “Some people of mine did some digging. An agent in our South African station filled in a few gaps. Unwillingly, I might add. But things sort of caught up with him. A wicked little web he weaved for himself. Thought he could handle it personally. A right old pickle it was too. Missing agents, unsanctioned hits, misappropriation of government funds…”
