They were close to the severed shape of the submarine’s conning tower. Gaz reckoned she spent time here, thinking about her father. She would have learned to hate by staring at the tower, and knowing that authority had condemned those in the crew who lived through the first explosion. Known the grievances of the families whose men were abandoned in darkness, breathing toxic fumes, oily water steadily rising, the cold sapping them, and abandoned because if foreigners rescued them then national face was lost. Gaz’s resolve hardened.
“Where do we go?”
“We go to our home. Leave you with his father. Timofey and I go out.”
“Go out?”
“We go to get the gun. We do not have a gun ourselves. Only gangsters have a gun, the Chechens do. Guns cost money in Murmansk. Don’t have one, don’t buy one, go to find one…”
“You can find one?”
“Of course. Come on, you are slow.”
They went up a track that climbed above the conning tower and a block loomed above them. The people that Knacker worked for, the ‘suits’ in the huge building by the Thames – not that Gaz had ever been inside because people at his level in the pecking order did not get invitations – would have to pay big for a gun ‘found’ at two hours’ notice, maximum three. He had stumbled but she had jerked him back to his feet. They came out of the bushes on the hillside and in front of them was a walkway of decayed concrete. Went along it, then into the dimly lit entrance of the block.
“Are you too tired for the stairs?” she mocked, giving his hand a squeeze.
“I am not.”
He would have liked to have broken the grip she had on him, but did not think she would allow it. An old man came down the flight of stairs and they almost lurched into him but they avoided the collision; he looked at them and ducked his head away: would have recognised her and thought she brought a client home. Almost what he was, a client. One who would pay well for a quick-delivery firearm. They went up the five flights of stairs and he was reeling when she turned off into a high-ceilinged lobby. He thought she had made him walk up as an entertainment to her. She rapped on a door, used a code drumbeat.
They were let in and the smell hit Gaz. A few words and he was elbowed aside and they were gone, clattering down the stairwell, and her laugh was loud, and he closed the door.
“Just as it would have been,” said the engineer to the skipper. “The old men, gone and at rest now, would understand what we face. We look at the clock in the wheelhouse, and the faces of our watches, and the time does not help us. They had the schedule for the Bus back to Shetland, and waiting for a hunted agent to get to the pick-up. Perhaps the snow had closed a road, or he’s punctured or there was a roadblock, but he is delayed, and the sailing schedule says the crew cannot wait long for him. A little but not much. Minutes, not hours. Perhaps he comes on foot. I liked him. I am allowed to say that? Probably resourceful, but I thought him also naive, without the killer instinct. A decent man. But… but… I cannot contemplate losing the slot and waiting too long for him. I won’t do it. What if we leave without him? I never asked him if he had a secondary plan to get clear, anything else that is possible. I liked him well enough to promise. Will be sorry if we leave without him.”
The skipper had no answer, and together they watched the gate and the security hut beside it and the guards under the street light, brilliant and sharp, and the empty road.
He sat at the table in the kitchen of the safe house. No hobbies cluttered Knacker’s waking hours, nor was he obstructed by the rigours of crosswords and brain-teasers. Books rarely amused him unless they fortified his prodigious knowledge of the workings and personalities of the Russian Federation.
Usually when he was alone and with quiet around him, except for distant night sounds from the town, and the gentle contented snores from the second bedroom, he relied on summoning up ‘problems’ to relax him. And relaxed well because ‘problems’ always came past him. The hitters topped his list. Three who would have gone over the frontier in a week’s time and were now, with their facilitator, not required. It would take a charter flight to take them out, and fly them direct to a European hub… Might need deceit to get them on board, dollops of it. Might demand brazen lies because he was told all three were ready to chew carpet tacks for the chance to confront the officer in that atrocity village. Get them on a plane, and somewhere high in the distant void let them discover they were in fact down in Stockholm or Copenhagen, and in time to connect with the Amman leg, or to Beirut, and leave them to rant and shout, and stuff cash into their pockets and… It was a problem but people who mattered would be well clear, and the boy back in his island refuge.
The boy, of course, was also a problem. He did not know the detail of the sailing time for the fishing boat but worked on the principle of ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’. He assumed the boat would delay its departure for long enough, and the boy would get himself into position, wait for his moment, confront the officer as the man lugged his case out through the front door, line up on him – club him with an angle iron, whatever was available, and leg it, use the sleepers to do the ferrying, and get to the docks and on board, head for the open sea… But it all seemed to Knacker that the problem might have ‘potential’. Murphy’s Law was old, tested, never seemed to come up short. It was a perverse rule, and it burdened him too often and the only safeguard that Knacker knew of when confronted with Murphy was simplicity. Was it dutifully simple? A man into Murmansk, a sleeper to help him, stand back-stop for him. A change of plan but a military man on the ground and one used to taking decisions for himself. A weapon, club or firearm, whatever… To Knacker it could not be simpler.
A simple plan and a simple man to execute it. He disliked complication, and was wary of intellect. Thought the damaged individual he had recruited on that Orkney island was ‘simple’ to the point of boredom, and yet… It was the way with the agents put over frontiers and dumped over borders and wandering, lost souls, in Smolensk or Saratov, in Novgorod or Archangel, in any of those hideous cities into which the oligarchs had not yet invested their loot, that locals would put their necks on the block to help. Useful idiots. His man, Gaz, would now be muddling through alongside the usual misfits and malcontents that seemed always to have a place on the mission expense sheet. But, Knacker was unsettled and a pencil snapped between his fingers. Before his time as a Sixer, before his birth, a politician had been respectfully asked what he feared most in life in government and had replied, ‘Events, dear boy, events’. Good enough for Knacker. Could have done with more coffee, for a clearer head – and the snoring was firmer, but regular – and was about to fill the kettle. His personal phone rang softly.