He spoke only to the boy and the girl. Gaz did not look at the officer. They were frowning, and each seemed bewildered as if the definition of involvement – what he was prepared to do, was not prepared to do – was incomprehensible.
Gaz said, “I was an eyewitness to a war crime. I was there and I watched. Major Volkov was a party to what was done. He deserves punishment. I am simply a witness, will appear before a legally constituted court of international law. Will give my evidence and hope to see him convicted. I am not a hangman, I do not play with lives. Perhaps that is an honourable principle, worth upholding, and perhaps it is a coward’s way to avoid responsibility. Perhaps. But it is what I can live with. I will take him out of the country, will hand him into the custody of a lawful organisation.”
Natacha said, “I would have done it, if you were frightened.”
Timofey said, “We should have been better rewarded. You have cheated us.”
She said, “We took big risks for you – the pistol…”
He snapped across her. “He sits with a lawyer, tells them of us. We are taken, locked in a shit camp. Dead, and we are paid big money. Alive and it is us who are condemned.”
He did not argue, had neither the breath nor the strength, and thought they both spoke the truth. They were sleepers, had been woken, were unlikely to sleep again. Assets low on the food chain. He himself, in Knacker’s world, was merely an instrument of policy. They, to Knacker and his team, were irrelevant once the assignment was complete.
He opened the door and pushed his legs out, the pistol in his hand: reached in and caught the tunic of the major and yanked. The blindfold had slipped further and the man gazed at him and seemed to try to read him and failed and his lips moved but no words came. He stood the major against the car.
Timofey asked him, “If he is allowed to live, what sentence would he get?”
Gaz said, “Life, if convicted.”
Natacha said, “Then better dead than for ever… and we are sacrificed for your principle that is so valuable.”
Gaz said limply, “It’s how it is. I am not a killer and not a judge, just a witness.”
The officer stared at him, bit his lip, swallowed.
Delta Alpha Sierra, the fourteenth hour
There were few flames left to light the village homes, but the Iranians had fired up their transport, and worked off the headlights.
Gaz watched two of them. Had the glasses with the image intensifier facility alternately on the Russian and the country boy, as Gaz thought of him. Worried more about the boy – could see the outline of his body on the slope where the vehicle lights did not reach – than about the officer. The goats were scattered; the dogs had tried to round them up and bring them back to the girl but they had been spooked by the gas explosion, and had failed. They were back beside her. If he had tried to pull her into the cavity in the sand where he hid, his own Covert Rural Observation Post, there was a better than fair chance she would struggle and the dogs react. Enough eyes were below them that could glance upwards and see indistinct shapes struggling. They were digging a second pit because they wanted to hide everything they had done. If there had been a witness on the hillside they would come searching. He let her stay where she was.
Bodies were dumped in the twin pits. They were thrown in fast, in vague and distorted lines, landed hard and were manhandled to an available slot, and the work went slower because the men were hungry, had not stopped to drink, and the flush from the killings would have dissipated. The Russian had taken a shovel from the hands of a trooper, had started to dig at the far end of the second pit, to deepen and widen and lengthen it. His goons did not help, stood back. Gaz knew this was a country of mass graves. He had heard an UNHCR aid worker comment that ‘Pretty much anywhere in this country that you bat a tennis ball, where it comes down there will be a mass grave.’ Others said that no grass grew above where bodies decomposed, only weeds. The idea that the pits and replaced earth would hide the evidence of the killing for a day or a month or a year was infantile, but they dug and dumped. The officer seemed to regard it as a matter of pride that he should dig faster, throw up more soil, than any of the militiamen. When he turned or twisted and the headlight beams caught his face, Gaz could see that he was working as if demons overwhelmed him. Behind him, his goons smoked and chatted, and the commander from the IRGC shouted encouragement at his men.
The girl did not move. Her arms were around her knees, her head sunk low. Sometimes he heard her murmur, mostly she was silent. He rested his hand on her arm. The silence clung between them but they would both have heard clearly the shouts and barked orders from below.
He sent another message. Was hunkered down, could not move. Would come out when safe to do so. The airwaves of that country were alive with encoded signals and scrambled talk, and great dishes swept for traffic. Would not give a commentary and would not invite an intercept.
He watched the country boy. Trouble with him, probably used to minding cattle or sheep or goats, was that he’d have the keen eyesight to go with his work. Would not need image intensifiers, nor the lights from the personnel carriers and the trucks… Suddenly, a moment of horror. A body must have moaned or twitched and half a magazine was fired into the pit. Might have been wolves where the country boy came from, or big cats, and with his eyesight would come quality hearing. He was on the perimeter line and would have been positioned because both his vision and hearing were trusted. The country boy should have been watching what was done on the football pitch, but a goat had come to him. Gaz did not know about goats, but knew about sheep and reckoned them contrary, easily scared and wanting to be loved, and the boy’s head twisted and his eyes would have raked the slope.
Gaz thought the country boy had seen her. He stood, holding his rifle in one hand, cupping the other to his mouth and shouted below him. The officer stopped digging and listened, and the commander threw down his cigarette and listened, and a vehicle manoeuvred and its lights lit part of the slope and caught the goats in their glare.
It took Arthur Jennings no more than a cursory glance to realise the scale of the sea change. Little time taken for the new order to move in lock, stock and barrel. He would be the first one facing it, the barrel… The pictures so beloved by his friend were still in place but Jennings doubted they’d last until the evening, and the ornaments had not yet been binned, but the framed photographs of the Director-General with the American President and other, lesser, heads of government had been removed.
A quiet voice, with a squeak in it, like an oil change beckoned. “Good of you to come, Mr Jennings. Gather you had to interrupt one of your little sessions. Hope not too inconvenient… My predecessor, sadly, has health problems, is going under the knife in the next twenty-four hours, won’t be coming back, if he survives the ordeal – as we all hope he will – but can look forward to his retirement after distinguished service. The world moves on.”
No answer required and none given.
“I have no intention of faffing about during any interregnum. I expect sooner rather than later to be named as D-G, have the ‘acting’ scratched out. Am beginning as I mean to continue. Games of charades in a public house will cease to have any relevance to the actions of the Service. If a few of you, past retirement age or nearly there, wish to entertain yourselves with fabricated tales of the ‘good old days’, of course you are free to do so. But not with our support, not with our resources, not utilising any individual on the Service staff. Fanciful stories of legendary activities are ‘yesterday’, and the Service believes in ‘tomorrow’. Understood?”