He gazed out a last time, then glanced at his watch and reckoned the taxi was either there or near, and slowly trudged away from the wall and the ruin of Mile Castle 35. It would be good to be up to speed, running, starting out on the mission – not, of course that Knacker would be setting foot into barbarian territory.
The kids did business.
Natacha accosted. Timofey carried the stock in a shoulder-bag and took the money. Both reckoned themselves good at personal security, and both would have said they had learned lessons from the last time, when she was caught and he’d legged it into the pitch darkness. There was supposed to be, this time, a fast bug-out route to take them away from the selling pitch and up a steep slope, through a jungle of bushes and small trees, across a road and then into the warren of lanes inside the housing complex. This was not where they had been busted, at the railway station, and where the buses and coaches parked.
Each of them had a good view of the steps leading to the monument. The walkway was wide and open and it would have been hard for the police to approach them unseen, difficult even for the FSB people who sometimes took over from the police. It had been the FSB who had arrested Natacha: he had evaded them and she was close to it but had slipped and gone over on an ankle and that had given the bastards the chance to dive on her.
At the edge of a wide space of concrete, backing on to the undergrowth and the high apartments, was a peculiar black shape, curved in a half-circle, five or six metres high and seeming to have small covered windows that were similar to those in a pilot’s cockpit. On the front of it was a gold-coloured eagle mounted on a pristine scarlet base. The monument was important to Natacha because of the plaque set into brickwork at the back which carried the names of more than 100 men lost in a submarine disaster. Natacha’s father’s name should have been there but was not… should have been, because of the loss of that vessel, the monstrous Kursk – sunk with no survivors in August 2000 out in the icy Barents Sea. Her father’s name was not there, should have been, and he was as dead as any of the men, who had sailed in her. Natacha liked to work close to the conning tower of the submarine, recovered from the bottom of the Barents, along with the bodies, and the rust scraped off it, and new paint applied, and a permanent memorial to those sailors of the Northern Fleet, as her father had been.
It was bold of them to trade in daytime, but it was a part of Murmansk – poor housing, poor pay for those in work, poor expectations – where money could be taken. Customers did not expect to hang around. Service on the nail was wanted. They had their regulars, men and women and boys and girls. In fine rain, buyers shuffled close to them. The city had a name for hard drugs, and Murmansk had as high a number of HIV addicts as any town in the Russian Federation. A new customer sidled close. The Italian.
“I have a flight in an hour.”
“We will get our money? The extra money they will pay us?”
Timofey reckoned the Italian despised him. Had no reason to believe this, but he seemed to look across the open concrete and towards the section of the conning tower and to linger on Natacha’s legs. He gazed at the Italian. Was told with a disinterested shrug that ‘money’ was the affair of others but he assumed obligations and promises would be kept. A slip of paper was passed to him, pocketed.
The Italian said, “Where you have to be, and at what time. You meet this man and you do what is asked, and you will find his employers grateful. I came here after visiting your father. Your father was drunk. Your father told me you would be here… I would like to warn, dear friend, that these people for whom you work, who have woken you, are most trustworthy. Rewards for completing the task they give you. Quite unpleasant vengeance if they are betrayed. Easy to understand. Be there, do as you are asked.”
He was gone. Striding quickly, and he would have had to work hard to have thrown off the inevitable tail that local FSB would have placed on a known diplomat travelling to Murmansk from the capital, and slipping away from whatever legitimate business had brought him so far north. They went on selling and the rain had come on heavier and the mist settled low above the apartments and customers came and went and the slip of paper was crumpled in Timofey’s pocket… He would do what was asked of him but only for the promised money.
He could not see Zhukov but knew he was close. He could not hear Zhukov but believed he was watched.
He was at the back of his cabin where he had dug and hoed the scant soil to plant summer vegetables. He had potatoes and carrots and cabbages growing. Near the cabin were dense dwarf birches and he should have been able to see a creature as large as the bear. And there were sufficient fallen twigs and dried leaves to mark where it moved.
Jasha was not a man easily unnerved.
He was military by training. He was now in his middle sixties, and a wound received in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, had halted his ability to run. He had learned to swing his hips and bend his back and scurry at speed. Ugly but effective, and what mattered to him was nothing to do with a parade ground and everything to do with a degree of agility. His leg hurt him but he accepted the levels of pain and was thankful his own fragmented muscle caused him less agony than the wire would have done that had dug deep in Zhukov’s leg. He could accept pain. In midwinter, a tooth had broken and the pain had run in rivers and it was when the track was blocked by snow so he had removed the tooth stump and its root with a pair of old pliers, and had survived. Pain he understood and reckoned to cope with, but he was uneasy about the hidden presence of the bear. Jasha had never established, enough to take a liberty with it, whether the creature regarded him as a benefactor or an enemy. He abandoned his vegetable patch.
He stood by the door of his cabin, strained his eyes, his ears. The old dog lay on its bed of hessian sacks… He had seen the sacks outside a store in Murmansk, piled in a basket, and had thought they might have a use, had picked out a couple and thrown them in his pick-up and driven off; had felt remorse, had paid for them on his next visit to the city. Jasha was a confused man, and sometimes he chuckled at the thought of it – not that day. The dog was too old to accompany him when he hunted for a full day, went after the Arctic fox or the lynx, but it guarded his cabin. The dog growled. Not loud, but soft, like a light flashed to show an alarm. An intruder was close. He was unnerved. Jasha had faced ferocious tribesmen in combat, but always they would show themselves as they edged closer, looked for a killing shot or, better for them, the opportunity to take a prisoner. The dog showed its teeth and sunk low on its sack bed.
He would have liked to talk with the bear, with Zhukov… What he knew of combat was that a tracker followed an enemy and waited for a sign of weakness. He had his rifle with him: had taken, in the last several days, to having the weapon with him when he went to dig in his garden or to clear back dwarf birch saplings, or to empty the bucket that he used inside the cabin. He went inside. In two days’ time he had an appointment in the city for the sale of pelts, now well dried, and for the heads of two foxes which would fetch a good price, and he would have to leave the dog to fend for itself for a few hours.