Fulminate of mercury demands respect and care, and the weary soldier in trying to force the fuse that it contained had lacked those qualities at that particular moment. It had gone off, setting off the explosive in the main body of the grenade.
“Should I have hung around to make sure he did it properly, sir?”
Colin turned and waved to the rest of the fatigue party, calling them over before he answered.
“No Corporal, they were trained soldiers not recruits, it wasn’t your fault, ok?”
Bethers did not look relieved, but nodded in acceptance of his platoon commanders words.
After five minutes hard work in trying to stabilize the horribly wounded young man, the MO finally stopped what he was doing and used a scalpel to cut free the I.D tags hung about Robertson’s neck and handed them to Oz, who left the bloody dressing he had been applying and wiped the gore from the metal discs, before picking up his own SLR and walking back to the trench he shared with Colin. He didn’t look around or speak to anyone; he just left the scene of tragic death, not trusting himself to do anything else for a while.
Arnie Moore watched him go, then turned on his heel and headed for the next platoon location. The only way to curb the carelessness that had started to creep in was not with happy-clappy, beanbag sessions, but by some old fashioned, down to earth discipline. It was the job of the NCOs to lay into their blokes whenever they witnessed it, and that wasn’t happening so Arnie was off to kick some ass, and ensure it started.
Robertson had been taken away by stretcher, and Colin was supervising the removal of Aldridge and the scattered body parts when Ray Tessler, 1 Company’s CSM arrived. All the company commanders were at the COs O Group so he was holding the fort. By rights the company should have had a captain as the 2 i/c, but their last one was now OC of 3 Company and therefore Ray Tessler was mister two-hats.
There had been too many casualties and too few replacements coming in, resulting in the next man in line taking over as the command structure was thinned out by enemy action.
One of the platoons in 4 Company had only two lance corporals remaining of its NCO compliment, and one of those was now the acting platoon commander. He wouldn’t hold the post for very long, only until the CO had reshuffled his remaining officers, warrant officers and senior NCOs to fill the slots. Which was one of the items on the agenda at today’s O Group.
Colin had liked both Robertson and Aldridge, two young men so typical of the Geordies and Yorkshiremen that made up the Coldstream Guards, but he now filed away not so much their memories, as their personalities. If he lived to see another Remembrance Sunday then he would allow them out, the two youngsters who had fantasised over hot tub orgies with lovely pop stars whilst they awaited the war to come to them. They would be allowed out with the others Colin had once soldiered with, shared a pint with, food and laughter, along with the good and bad times that went with army life, both on or off operations. For now though, they were shut away as he and Ray retrieved their weapons, ammunition and equipment, ready for collection by the company quartermaster sergeant to clean and re-issue. Their personal effects would be separated and then passed down the line to RHQ in London, for onward transmission to the young men’s families.
The man who emerged from the doorway of a small hotel in Rue Des Abesses, in the Montmartre area of the French capital, was someone who was an almost unknown outside of the military circles in his own country, and he looked slightly uncomfortable wearing local civilian attire. As he disappeared into the crowds a man and a woman stepped from the same hotel entrance and immediately separated, each taking a different direction.
Over a period of twenty minutes a total of thirteen individuals left the one star hotel, but only one of these was a French national.
It went unnoticed by the local police or SDECE, the French Intelligence Service, and there were no longer any tourists to accidentally snap them as they disappeared as surreptitiously as they had arrived six hours before.
Udi’s day had been fairly crappy on the whole. The workday started with his section head almost giving him a heart attack by summonsing him to his office. Udi had barely arrived and was in the act of removing his topcoat when the tap on the shoulder had come.
Fearing the worst and desperately trying to formulate a speech in his head to explain his failing to report the jamming that night, he had knocked on the office door.
He had almost laughed when he was told the reason for his presence in the office, the head of department’s birthday was approaching and his boss had elected Udi to organise a collection amongst his colleagues, and then to purchase a suitable gift.
His shift had passed by slowly, with the weary Udi clock watching the whole time. There were no surveillance devices for him to plant that day and so he monitored those that were already in place.
When the minute hand reached the hour he had joined the rest of his shift in a restrained scramble for coats and headed home.
The running program was the first thing he checked after reaching his flat and locking the door behind him.
The program for the section of the hallway and stairs had been cleaned up in the preceding hours he had been at work, and it also seemed that he might have sound for this segment also.
Udi removed his coat and tossed it toward an armchair before sitting before the terminal and playing the segment. The first thirty seconds showed him nothing that had not been present before the jamming had begun, and then he heard the dachas door open. Having psyched himself up for the appearance of a man he was surprised when a female appeared.
The surveillance device was sited close to the power cables that served the outside light over the dachas main door, a position where the magnetic field given off by the cable would run interference with any counter surveillance device during a casual sweep. As such he could see only the back of the woman who did not turn as she closed the door, shutting it instead with a backward shove of a hand. That simple act is one associated with familiarity, the act of someone who had been to that dacha on more than a few occasions, but the tired Udi did not pick up on that fact.
He had not noticed the ‘post it’ on the banister rail until the female peeled it off to read it, and Udi stopped the segment to take a still, a vidcap of the moment when it was square on. He paused the program there in order to enlarge and enhance the note, but was disappointed to see it merely read ‘Spare room’.
The innocuous content failed to elude to the purpose of the gathering, and the simple instruction also failed to register on him that this was no stranger to them there parts, this person knew where the room was. But even had Udi cottoned on, what happened next would have taken its place in his brains list of priorities.
The woman climbed the stairs as instructed and opened the first door at the top of the stairs, disappearing inside, the door being closed firmly behind her with an ominous bang.
For several minutes Udi sat motionless before the terminal, and then his shoulders began to shake with laughter tinged by frayed nerves, before turning to self-pitying sobs. There was no evidence yet of a secret meeting, no conspiracy and no covert plot to justify his actions. The data at the centre from that night, data that still bore the man-made interference, would be blamed on him and that would be the end of Udi Timoskova.