“I hear you. What is the Jew’s name, what is his number?… I will call him, I will meet the Jew.”
His father, the brigadier general, clenched his fist, clubbed Lavrenti on the shoulder, which was as far as his affection reached.
Arthur Jennings pursued his goal, quietly, held the attention of the man he briefed, and who might – just might – pull the rug from the enterprise.
“We put a man in there who watched Lavrenti Volkov through a bestial and long day. He makes the positive identification and that is all we want of him. Stands across a street in Murmansk and is brought there by a sleeper that we have woken. He’s useless but the family are on the books and have been bleeding our resources for five decades, unable to get us decent military stuff from the dockyards, but he can chauffeur our man. What do we get, Dickie, that is attractive? Try this: the friendship of the community when it starts a life again in that place, and perhaps more than friendship – could be devotion, gratitude. Which leads to a small and unremarkable oasis of support for our aims, a warehouse of intelligence on that road, in that area, eyes and ears for the foreseeable future. It’s long-term and will pay dividends, cheap at the price and so much more useful than an ‘eye in the sky’ or some turned clerk in their internal ministry. Above that, we gain a useful location into which to insert special forces or returning regime defectors in the future. A short-term bed-and-breakfast. It’s very worthwhile, Dickie, and we’ll get our man in just as soon as the planning gets done. He’s a good fellow, was with Special Reconnaissance Regiment when he was the witness through a long day. Then invalided out, then identified with that wretched PTSD thing, but we’re satisfied he can manage what’s asked of him. Knacker told him that we’d be doing him a favour, giving him back self-esteem, but then Knacker always had a way with words. Get him in and get him out, and…”
“Sorry, Arthur, but isn’t Murmansk quite an unfriendly place, stiff with security and suspicion? And won’t this Lavrenti whatever have a concept of personal protection? Arthur, is it not dangerous?”
“Probably you don’t want to know more than the bones of the business… Except that it’s a big prize, and Knacker’s confident – as always.”
Sitting on a stone and swatting away the horseflies that hovered close, ready to snap at him, Knacker looked out towards the north.
He was alone, not a problem for him. He often felt his own company was preferred to anyone else’s, with the exception sometimes of his wife, Maude. No hurry, and the evening light was good and the view stretched far into the distance. Maude was an amateur archaeologist and currently scraped and scratched at mud and clay and stones at a site down the road towards Hexham, and was not yet ready for his appearance and would eke out a few more hours of work, and not take interruption kindly.
Before sitting, close to cattle who watched him as they lay chewing on the grass, he had walked down a slope and reached the temple to Mithras, first dedicated to that all-powerful Roman empire god in the third century. Quite a senior officer had done the honours, the commander of the First Cohort of Batavians, and those troops had looked for divine help when faced with a resourceful, dangerous – and ruthless – enemy. He supposed that it was reasonable for him to assume that such a man who honoured the Charioteer of the Sun would have had a rank and status similar to Knacker’s own. He had spent quarter of an hour there and had squatted on the stone parapets of the building, until he had seen a hiking party approaching which had seemed the correct time to begin a more important vigil, the one that cleansed his mind. This was a place he came to each time that Maude was active with her excavation team and when he had worries clogging his clear thinking. He had climbed the slope, left the clean scoured walls of the temple behind him, and had taken a viewpoint where a ridge facilitated a grand expanse of open countryside, and the low light enhanced the distance as far as he could see.
The seat of his trousers would be damp, and the flies would become steadily more aggressive, but this place – between Turret 33b and Turret 29a – along the Wall built with the driving will and perseverance of the Emperor Hadrian, gave Knacker a sense of perspective for his efforts that day, and yesterday and tomorrow. He was above the outer limit of the fort, Brocolitia, where the grasslands still covered the ruins of a great civilisation. The Wall itself, ten feet high and with turrets set along its entire length and with forts built to house garrisons of legionaries and auxiliaries, was a few feet in front of him. The cattle eyed him, would have been cautious of him had he come closer. In front were layers of differing colours and then a growing mist and then a deepening shadow, then a narrowing stretch where the ground merged with the sky and he could see no farther… which would have been the problem faced each day, every day, each week and every week, by the officer leading that cohort of Batavian troops. He had a frontier to defend. Facing him, somewhere in dead ground, beyond hills and beyond sight, was his enemy, and Knacker sympathised.
Since he had left the ‘bandit country’ of the Province, Knacker’s existence had seemed to have him peering over the border fences of his opponent – Russia, always, Russia, fucking Russia always – and never knowing what was beyond his knowledge. It would have been the ongoing worry of the commander of a cohort of regular troops recruited from an area of what was today northern Germany and running into the Netherlands. The troops would have been trained, to the highest standards of fitness, and motivated to fight… but, what if familiarity with the guard duties had sapped their alertness, and what if the best men were drawn away from this part of the Wall and sent farther west where more trouble lurked, and what if the auxiliaries given him as replacements were less efficient? He assumed such concerns nagged in the mind of an FSB commander controlling border troops with a headquarters unit in Murmansk and a line of guard posts and roadblocks watching over a closed frontier zone. How good was the commander of the cohort, and how good at his job was the FSB senior officer in Murmansk? The two men would have a single matter in common and would not have doubted its truth. Both would have understood the threat. Always a commander’s fear: the threat becoming reality on his watch.
The flies were bothering. The cattle were quiet. A hen harrier was working the ground in the middle distance. A fine looking creature, a predator, and it flew low. Had it been spooked and flown off shrieking, then it would have meant that an intruder, crawling on his belly, was approaching. Would have been a fox in the time the cohort watched this sector, and might in today’s territory have been Gaz who had the reputation in his field that many envied. His wife, Maude, might have looked up from the rim of the pit she was working in and might have clucked cheerfully at the sight of it, and pointed it out to her neighbour and they’d have enjoyed the spectacle of it. He supposed himself to be the archetypal intelligence officer, and the cohort’s commander would have had one, and it was necessary for him to attune his mind to the business in hand… getting a man in and getting him out. There was no safety in walls or fences or deep man-made ditches. Knacker could barely imagine the degree of effort, and the cost, of producing this Wall running from the west coast of England to the east, and could hardly have conceived the outlay of the little east German statelet that had tried to build a barrier preventing escape from its sad, malnourished country.
Healthy reflections, Knacker thought. He comforted himself. However great the wall, fence or ditch, it was only as strong as its weakest link. A useful cliché in Knacker’s trade. The guard who was reeking with a summer cold or convulsed in winter flu, or dreaming of his centurion’s daughter, any of them could be on guard duty in a turret and not see the threat materialising from the gloom, his mind far away before a knife crossed his throat.