And was answered. “I seem to remember this morning that Knacker called it ‘strategic policy advantage’, what we’d be after. Doing harm to this fellow, this Major Lavrenti Volkov, nailing him down, and banking a dividend from it. Why we need this Orkney recluse… I mean, we’ll not get any moralistic crap out of Knacker. It’s for advantage, beginning and end – and what else?”
“Our guy did a runner, ‘getting away from it all’, that stuff. A sick man…”
Fee shrugged. They had done well, located a website far to the north and close to a sensitive Russian border and had queried a hack, and been economical with who needed to know and why. A picture had been sent, and a name and a rank and a location where this officer currently served. A file was up on Fee’s screen. Where the two women were, so far, the business seemed just the area of trade that Knacker was known for, and relished.
“Yes, I heard he was sick, our guy. He has to do the ID, get the eyeball, but we’d not trust him to do the heavy lifting, kill the bastard. Likely would funk it… and there are attractions in using Syrian cowboys. What a strike for them, right into Kremlin land. Imagine word of it sneaking into all those sullen refugee skulls in the camps for dispossessed: be a time for trumpet and tympany. What an encouragement for all those poor beggars who reckon they are losers… and could be, the ultimate aim, the start of the quagmire involvement of the Russians just when they are getting packed up and ready – mission accomplished – to go home. It is attractive and can be done, but right at the start the lad has to do the identification. In and out.”
“Makes sense.” Alice grinned.
He stayed motionless. Gaz had his knees up and his arms hooked around them and struggled to keep his breathing steady. Had no need of a forecast, had sufficient experience of the storms to know that it would rise to a crescendo that evening, then break and be gone. During the night it would hammer in. And the black dog would come snorting at his ankles. He stayed in the tomb-like hall of the castle and little light penetrated the small sockets where the wind funnelled and the rain spat. The islands were about history.
If he had not accepted that events long gone dominated the islands then he could not have settled on Westray. History, to Gaz, was relevant because it gave him insights into the pecking order of importance, where his own life stood – and where he had been and what he had done, had witnessed – and not done, while clinging to his loaded rifle. Had not done anything that marked him out and was no longer a player in the shaping of events. Might one day say something along that tack to Aggie. Might try to breathe into her ear a little of a philosophy he hoped would protect him from the dog.
History was the lifeblood of the Orkney islands. Men and women had lived their lives, brought up children, buried their parents, on the wind-scraped land since the peeling back of the Ice Age. Skara Brae, a settlement of 5000 years before, had been exposed when waves had hit the shore and washed away the sand that had hidden a civilisation. The Ring of Brodger and the Ness of Brodger were rated unique in Europe, and walls there had been built forty-five centuries before to a thickness of fifteen feet. Christians had come 1400 years before Gaz’s arrival, and the sites of a long-gone and disciplined people had been reactivated by Vikings who had scratched the name of a woman on a wall in a burial chamber, dubbing her ‘most beautiful’, and a saint had been murdered by axe blows on the orders of Earl Hakon 900 years ago, and his name “Magnus” given to the cathedral in Kirkwall. Mediaeval disasters had come and gone, and in more modern times naval catastrophes had wounded the prestige of the Royal Navy and the supposed safe anchorage of Scapa Flow… the sinking of the Royal Oak from a German submarine’s torpedoes eight decades before, and 1200 men on board and two in three drowned… Gaz knew the marker buoy and knew the location of the grave of the saint, and the last resting place of so many whose lives had barely scratched on history but who still had outstripped him, Corporal Gary Baldwin, Special Reconnaissance Regiment, (Discharged Medically Unfit for Duty). Behind him was an arch and scratched in the stone was the message from many hundreds of years before: When I see the blood I will pass over you in the night. The history of the islands swamped him, but Aggie cared not a damn for it. Nor did the religion’s carved words impress her, and she’d have rejected that promise of protection, and a message on a haven.
She would be with him early in the morning and then the storm would move on and he would be saved from the demons. He sucked deep breaths and sought to stifle the tremors… She had no respect for the history. Not the first time or the second, in his bed in the bungalow, but the third time they had been together. Her initiative and him wet with hesitancy, and nervous because stripping there was beyond the rules of his life, and her discarding and chucking fragments of clothing towards the cattle who came to watch the antics. Sex at the Knap of Howar, and her on top and him underneath and his body afterwards alive with the welts of nettle stings, and below them were the clean stone walls, sunken, of the homes built some 5,500 years before. Those who had lived there would not have exercised inhibition and Aggie had aped them, and brought him along with her, had taught and freed him, and he had imagined the smells of the fire and the scents of sweat and dirt, the tastes of their cooking, and the sea had burst on rocks below them. She had laughed and eased off him and taken the rubber, folded it, put it neatly in her bag for disposal and then had gone in search of her clothing and had dressed herself… There had been no other real love in his life. He’d thought their loving beside the settlement’s walls and doorways and stores was to test him, see whether she thought him worth pursuing, and had never told him how she rated him… He could picture each stone in the wall closest to him, could hear the cries of fulmars and terns, and could feel the shame of that long-ago day which bred despair. He had done nothing, in his hide above the village, had been a watcher.
It was a horrid storm that came to Westray off the Atlantic, and near as awful as the one that would have gathered strength over the uplands of the Jabal al-Ruwaq and above the headwaters of the Euphrates, but he believed himself safe and Aggie would soon be with him, and the pull of brutal history, recent and long gone but not lost, would be a little more behind him.
Delta Alpha Sierra, the second hour
The wind and the rain came towards Gaz.
It was just past dawn and he was dry, comfortable and fed, and ready to receive his usual visitor. Then he would sleep, then doze, then spend the last afternoon hours getting ready for dusk and the move forward in darkness to the wall where the camera was and would settle down to the intricate work of prising open the breeze-blocks and extracting the battery, replacing it… just about routine and he could have done it with his eyes closed and his mind dead. Except that he would not be sleeping, nor dozing and he had the feeling, strong, that a bad day beckoned.
He lay in his dug-out cavity and was sheltered behind a scrim net in which he had woven lengths of desiccated thorn. No sun had risen behind him but there was always a possibility that light might reflect off his binocular lenses. Gaz was careful, took precautions. Did not hurry when it was not required and followed all the basic laws for the preservation of his safety. He reckoned the detonations of ordnance were creeping closer, mortars and artillery, and sometimes he saw the vivid flashes of the explosions. He blamed the Special Forces people.
Because of the location of the village, Deir al-Siyarqi, the Hereford mobile teams had spent time here. The village was sited in naturally dead ground, hard for strangers to know of its existence. It ran alongside, but was out of sight of, a main highway. The village and its people offered a chance of quiet but comprehensive surveillance of the road. Not everything was done by electronics and satellite photography. The need still existed for a man to be down on his haunches, chewing grass and seemingly half asleep, counting armour moving along the road: see whether it was Russian armour or Iranian armour or Hezbollah armour or Syrian armour, and identify troops on the move. A man chewing on grass, or a camera built into a wall, did a fair job. The village had survived previous campaigns when ISIS had pushed back government troops and was best when it stayed anonymous and barely figuring on a military map. The Hereford heroes had brought some old weaponry and done some training with the kids, bored, then flattered and then pumped up with silly courage. They would – the village teenagers – have thought themselves invulnerable, had been taught tactics by one of the world’s talented units, would have thought themselves beyond and upward of the standard of bee’s bollocks… They would have gone down the road that night, Gaz’s bloody luck, and shot up the tent camp of the Iranians. The equivalent of taking a broom handle, finding a hedge with a hornet nest in it, and giving it a serious whack. Gaz had watched the manoeuvres of Russian troops and those from the Iranian units and the militia from Lebanon and the regular units of the Syrian government. His skill was to be motionless on a hillside, unseen, monitoring and recording and reporting: it was the work of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. He had a combat rifle and a cluster of grenades but did not expect to use them. He was there to replace a camera battery, supposed to arrive unseen, carry out his task, slip away.