“It has been – much of our work – free of justifiable scrutiny, piratical. Seems to me and others, to have been out of control. There will be changes.”
“I hope not to be around to see them.”
“First, right at the very top, will be the immediate closing down of the la-la-land world of these Round Table geriatrics. They’ll go in the bin, with all their childish rituals. No place for them. Rather nurtured it, haven’t you? I trust demolition will be easy.”
“Easy to destroy, difficult to build, I used to be told.”
“You’ll be out of the building when I circulate the instruction. No further resources will be committed to that Round Table. They’ll be reined in. If they don’t like it then they can go away quietly or noisily and whine or rant, but they are finished. I expect to run a tight ship, one with ethics and accountability. I wish you well. Yes, all of us do, but time for change and the extirpation of self-congratulatory people who are not team players. Good day.”
Gone, none of the croissants as much as nibbled, and the coffee pot still full. Impossible to have even begun to explain the addictive quality of plans such as those brought to him in the name of Knacker; the risks were intoxicating and the triumphs blessed and the failures heartbreaking… All madness, yet he could never refuse Knacker.
The Director-General, still holding that position by a thread, asked his PA to get Arthur Jennings on the phone.
The old woman saw them, or at least recognised the shapes of their heads.
Early on that day of the week she went to the market, always early and always the same day. The black saloon car, German, was parked close to the front entrance of the block: she always recognised a German car and sometimes – making certain she was not seen – spat against a tyre. Her father had been on the forward defence lines of Leningrad during the siege and she had been brought up to loathe all things German… But she did not spit that morning because the two minders were in the car.
The windows were misted because there was still a chill in the air. The forecast on the TV was for sunshine in the Arctic area. She did not know why the officer, only a major, had two lackeys who drove him, walked with him, opened doors for him. They slept, lolling against each other. She could hear their snoring.
She had never before seen the two men asleep in the car. And making a noise, she’d have said, that would wake a cadaver in a morgue. Asleep in the car and drunk. She was not a fooclass="underline" few were in that district of Murmansk, where you needed to be tough and hard and self-sufficient. She remembered the girl… remembered her questions. She glanced at her watch, wondered what part she might have played in any event to be staged that morning, shivered, hurried her shuffling step. She had no affection for that officer, could not recall one greeting for her, one moment of consideration, but… She went across the dirt path and on to the pavement and crossed the street.
A small car pulled up ahead of her. She recognised the girl… looked away, went as fast as old legs would take her.
Delta Alpha Sierra, the twelfth hour
Gaz studied the girl’s goats.
Discomfort and hunger had beaten their fear of the noise below in the village. That is where the goats should have been; it was long past the time they were usually milked and they would have been hungry because they had not foraged well.
The girl had not spoken again in her halting English nor in her own Arabic dialect, was still sitting with her knees against her chest and her arms wrapped round them, and the two dogs had now given up on the goat herd and their heads were on her ankles.
The weather was as bad as anything he had known. They had just taken the first big lightning flash. A sheet lit the village and the football pitch where the bodies still lay by the goal, and the gully where women and men and the teenagers had been taken to be killed. Lit it up like it was a technicolour movie frame. Then thunder. Crashes of noise as if artillery were concentrated on the place. The girl did not flinch. The rain came harder, and still one small group of women and children were held inside a wall of bayonet points. There had been rain and wind before, but with the lightning and thunder came torrential rain. Gaz was not supposed to intervene, was supposed to do his reconnaissance work, forge no friendships, have no obligations to those he spied on. He was huddled inside his hiding place and the rain did not reach him. The girl was drenched but seemed no longer to shiver.
He did not need to restrain her. Her dogs kept close to her, their eyes watching hers, and their ears were against their heads as if listening for further disaster. But the goats had started to break away. It started with the kids crying and the older animals no longer nudging them to be quiet, but crying themselves and stamping; the dogs ignored them and cared only to guard the girl.
Gaz watched the Russian officer. To watch him was within his remit. Watching the goats – sweet, gentle, pretty and skittish – was not part of his work, not in the way that the Russian was. The man seemed to have neither plan nor purpose, seemed to have no recognised part to play in the savagery of the day, but yet was willing to join what was being done. He had killed, had shouted instructions, had gone into the gully where the women were taken, and might have fiddled with his belt and his flies as he emerged. The rain had dulled the flames of the burning buildings and the smoke thrown up was thicker. Now the flames guttered and the smoke hung in a pall, too heavy to be sucked away by the wind. At the second or third of the lightning strikes, when the village was illuminated, the officer’s face had been turned towards Gaz. As bright as if he stood in clean sunshine, every pore on his face visible, and the stubble and the dried narrow lips, and the cut along the side of his face, washed clean by the rain, only the line remaining. The officer stared around him. The Iranian commander was now busy at interrogation. Huddled drenched wretches, blindfolded, some still in their nightshirts, were dragged before him. The killing lust lingered and the guarded huddle diminished. Resistance had died and no more insults were chucked at the Iranians. Maybe all of them were now resigned to death. Gaz saw nothing in the officer’s face to indicate disgust with what was happening around him. The goons followed the officer, matched each step, and held their weapons ready, were as much witnesses as was Gaz.
The intensity of the storm was spooking the goats. Some sounded a trumpet call. Some bleated. Thunder still pealing, and still occasional lightning, and the day at its close was as grey as the buildings.
A militiaman at the edge of the cordon round the village, below where Gaz hid, where the girl was with her dogs and her goats, looked up. Turned away from those he guarded and tilted his head. He would have been staring directly into the teeth of the wind that whipped across the plateau and swept down the slope. He had heard the clamour from the goats. He was a sentry, at the bottom of any military food-chain, the guy stuck out on the perimeter and who had, as yet, killed no one, had stood there as duty dictated and had been a voyeur. He shouted for his NCO, and pointed up the hill, and the noise of the beasts grew louder. Gaz thought that the militiaman could have been a country boy, perhaps taken into military service from a village far from city civilisation. Could have been a boy with little combat sense but who understood the desert and the life of remote communities. Shouted for his NCO but the wind would have wafted away his call; no one came, so he did his own thing.
The militiaman edged away from his point in the perimeter line. If he was a country boy, he would have known about goats, would have realised that where there were goats there was a herder, a teenage boy or a girl or a young woman – a witness. Would have known that the killings were not yet completed, would have realised that the buildings would be razed and that all the villagers were to be killed. Would have realised, also, that one witness was sufficient to annul the anonymity of what was being done. The militiaman started up the slope. At first he slid back on the mud and was on his hands and knees, then he climbed again and toppled and used the butt of his rifle to steady himself, then slipped and slithered on to his stomach. But he was a plucky boy and tried again – and was seen and his NCO was cupping his hands over his mouth to channel his shouting.