Vagabond (56 page)

‘ “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

‘I did it well, yes? For Ozymandias you can name Brezhnev and Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev, and all of those defence ministers who had medals on their chests. Their work mocks them. Finished, gone, now a wilderness. Except that a new Soviet Union has arisen. The president and his
siloviki
asset-strip the country and protect themselves with repression. They have new gulags for opponents and use the taps on the gas pipelines to do the work of armoured divisions. That is the new world, and this is the old version of it. Today Timofey Simonov wears a uniform. It is pressed and clean, and I saw it when he came out of his villa. The new Russian has a love for the old days. I don’t laugh. It is no joke to me. I think he comes here often, remembers the noises and marches with ghosts and feels he is part of a great power. He yearns for it again. He is a good target, the best. It will give me sublime pleasure to take him – at whatever cost to myself. He struts and recalls the might of long ago. He is a target of high value and—’

‘The high-value target is not the Russian creep. He’s in second place—’ She broke off and groped in her coat pocket.

She pulled out her phone. The screen threw light on her face, which showed her growing disbelief. Danny Curnow watched. When he stretched up he could see past Karol Pilar and over Bravo’s shoulder. The road stretched to a short horizon. The headlights were off and the driver, Alpha, had the van’s sidelights to guide him. He was hunched forward and when he went into the potholes he swore. There were lights ahead. Too many bends for Danny to see the tail of the Mercedes, but the lights would have bounced high enough to catch the tops of trees. The last of the three in the black overalls, Charlie, had been working on the weapons as Pilar had talked, seemed satisfied that all were armed and made safe. He had checked the spare magazines, and seemed to have the little cans ready – gas or flash-and-bang. There was a medical box too, and a camera. Everything was checked and cleared.

She must have read her screen three times. He waited, not long.

‘I don’t believe it.’

What did she not believe? He stayed quiet.

‘This is ridiculous, beyond belief.’

He stayed silent.

‘Look at this.’

Her phone was shoved under his face. She gave him time to read and scrolled down. The target was designated as Timofey Simonov. She had the job of gold commander. She had no concern for the arrest of Malachy Riordan but evidence linking him to further weapons sales was to be recorded. The Czech, Pilar, had details of the exfiltration procedure. She was wished luck. The authorisation for the taking of Timofey Simonov was from Matthew Bentinick. The sender was Jocelyn. She rounded on him. ‘Did you know this?’

He saw no reason to lie. He nodded.

‘You let me make an idiot of myself. What am I supposed to do?’

Danny Curnow said, ‘It’s the end of an operation. We have webs that lead us to the spider and we must follow them. One element was Malachy Riordan, and he took us part of the way. A stronger line came from Ralph Exton. He took us another hike forward. The spider, the bad bastard, is Timofey in his fancy dress. He’s the target the big people have chosen. I just try to do my job and not think too much.’

‘Ours not to reason why?’

‘Do the job as best you can – without getting damaged.’

Her hand went onto Danny’s. Warm, gentle. Karol Pilar said they were going now into the base. The van slipped off the road and began to crawl forward. Her hand had gone. He had no place there, and knew nowhere else to be.

Chapter 18

It was the entry to a labyrinth.

He had been in the great camps at Tidworth or Larkhill, at Catterick, and knew the maze of side roads that led between the office blocks, the administration areas, the training teams’ locations, the armouries and arsenals. This one was the size of all of them put together. No signposts, little that was recognisable because of the height that the trees had grown to in more than twenty years. If they had not had the glow of the lights to follow, in the top branches of the trees, they would have had no chance of doing the tail. There were guard posts where the barbed-wire barriers, rusted and sagging, had been dragged aside, and buildings where the windows were broken and the doors hung askew.

Beyond the guard posts, set back among the new forests, there were single-storey offices. Once the tarmac would have been lined with whitewashed stones to prevent wayward drivers going onto mown grass. All gone. He wondered if Nature was a wrecker or whether it laughed at the pygmy efforts of man to create an artificial grooming. He saw the squat entrances to air-raid shelters. Little was clear.

The lights of the Mercedes were far ahead, and he thought the driver travelled slowly to preserve its tyres and chassis. Their own transport was typical of a vehicle pool – army or police – and would have had basic maintenance only, not what he and Dusty gave the minibus. In low gear it coughed and spat. An extraordinary place.

Karol Pilar gave them brief facts: ‘The activity here is for the people who come from abroad and want to drive a tank. A company offers that chance. Men come, get drunk in the Old City in Prague, then the next morning are here to drive a tank . . .

‘For eighty euros you may buy fifteen minutes as a passenger in a BMP personnel carrier. To be at the controls you have to pay three hundred. To be in a T-55 main battle tank you pay two hundred euros for a ten-minute ride. To drive the T-55 you pay even more . . .

‘They have built a camp, away to the west of the site, and it is a replica of a fire base for the Americans in Vietnam. You can pay and be dressed like the Viet Cong, black pyjamas, or in American fatigues, and you fight with bullets of soft plastic.

‘In the Communist days, the Czechoslovak Army had three and a half thousand tanks of its own. Now, the new Czech Republic has thirty-five tanks of its own. At Milovice, the entrepreneur has five tanks that belong to him and an MI-24 attack helicopter, but without an engine. There are other collectors. Together they have more tanks than our government. Crazy . . .

‘Why do people get satisfaction from travelling in a war machine, and pretending to fight? Why not go to Afghanistan and fight for a day, a week or a month? I do not understand. Would it be a good financial venture to buy a bank building and have people pay to pretend to rob it? Do you think—’

He stopped short. The driver had braked hard and doused the side-lights. The Mercedes had shown them a control tower with the skeleton shape of window frames on the roof where the observers would have managed air movements. They had passed great reinforced hangars where the aircraft had been protected behind huge steel doors, and there had been the open space of the runway, the taxi strip and the aprons. There was a moon but it was not full. The Mercedes had killed its headlights. Ahead was an open space, four or five hundred metres across. Gaby was close to him and stretching to see for herself. The engine ticked over. They would have been against the background of the tree-line but couldn’t follow.

They couldn’t go forward, and had no light ahead to guide them.

There was a gusting wind that blistered off the van’s roof. No one spoke. Danny thought, kept it to himself, that they were short-handed. It was cheap-skate. They might have had a dozen men and four vehicles, but they would still have been under-resourced for tracking a target in such a location. Not his call.

Alpha was beside the driver and had a monocular with night-vision capability. It was passed from Alpha to Charlie, from Charlie to Bravo, from Bravo to Karol Pilar. The sounds were of the wind, the rattle of tree branches and the squeak of movements on the metal flooring. Pilar passed it to Danny, but Gaby intercepted it. It was her call, not Danny’s, and she had the right to look through the thing before him. He was just a passenger, making up the numbers and knowing his place. The hard man required to whip an informer into shape – gain necessary co-operation – was redundant. She elbowed him. He reached out in the darkness and her fingers found his hand. A moment of calm amid the chaos? Dream on, Danny. The monocular was in his grip. It was a poor view. He would have had the worst eyes of all of them, clapped-out vision.

The Mercedes, a blurred shape, was in the middle of the far runway. Beyond it there was a line of hangars, great doors pushed shut and grass growing over the curved roofs. The Mercedes waited, blacked out. They must have lights to guide them. If the Mercedes pulled away, didn’t use head- or side-lights, and they had only the rear lights to guide them, they’d lose it at the first bend. He couldn’t know whether they had shown out or if this was merely a sensible precaution against a tail.

And if the blame game kicked in, and they had shown out, he wondered who would field it. Himself? Just tell them to get lost. Gaby Davies? She could say, with justification, that she had been excluded from the planning stages, and would walk away. Karol Pilar? He would say he had done nothing beyond the instructions given him by a superior officer. Alpha, Bravo and Charlie? They had done as they were told. He scratched in his memory. He seemed to recall an avalanche of missed meetings, lost tails, the frustration of getting back late to Gough, faces of thunder, and the sharpness of colleagues who had not fouled up.

It went forward. Pilar had the night-sight gear. Danny Curnow saw nothing, but the whisper was that the Mercedes had eased away and come off the far side of the runway onto an old concrete apron, then into the tree line. No lights.

Danny Curnow said, ‘We depend on you, Karol. Your judgement. How far and how close? Your call.’

If Gaby had interrupted him, made an issue of command and control, he might have slapped her. She didn’t. They started off across the width of the runway and were without cover. They had to cross it. He asked Pilar if there was any sign of it having been a piss-stop for the Mercedes. He was answered briskly: no one had emerged from the vehicle. It had been a precaution, professional procedure.

He said, ‘An old boss of mine used to say, “If life were easy it wouldn’t be worth doing.” Sort of about perspective.’

His arm was hit, hard, by Karol Pilar’s closed fist. They nudged across the concrete. With no lights to follow, they might already have lost the target.

They had driven a hundred yards, Ralph Exton estimated, had taken a left, then another, and a right. Denisov had switched on the headlights and they went faster. Buildings loomed out of the trees, and a fox crossed the track. It broke its stride, stopped to stare balefully at them, then scooted. He liked foxes. They fitted well with Ralph Exton’s image of himself: hunted, persecuted, a survivor, relying on his wits to see the next dawn. He shared the back seat with the Irishman. They hadn’t spoken.

It would have been difficult. They could have talked about the smell of burning skin or the danger of cigarette smoking to health, or the amazing performance of the modern cordless drill. They could have discussed the weather on that mountain and whether it was usually blanketed by fog. He had nothing to say to the man. He smelt rank. He had seen little of Malachy Riordan’s face, only glimpsed the scratches on his cheek. He had seen the lip, though, and there were small indents near the chin that he assumed were from a bite. He was practised at ‘not my business’ and avoiding involvement. He was happy trafficking cigarettes to the North of Ireland and was not burdened with thoughts as to where the money raised from the sales went and what it did.

The big question was about the procurement of weapons: a business opportunity. He saw pictures of funerals on TV. If they were from Ireland no one in the pub turned to the screen. If they were from Iraq or Afghanistan, the room went quiet and there were the usual meaningless statements about ‘heroes one and all’. Ralph Exton did not relate the deals from which he took a good cut to the Irish hearses. He wore blinkers. Ralph Exton was well versed in concentrating on what mattered to him. He ignored what did not. He understood about the lights. He wondered where Gaby Davies was, how far back, and assumed she was with the handler, a cold bastard who had read him like the proverbial open book. There was something lovely about her, something rough, honest and vulnerable. She wasn’t worldly. A deliberation faced him, but not that evening. Home to the little woman who sometimes shared his bed, his local pub and dodgy contacts book, or off with the officer? God alone knew where it would lead and whether she’d nag the rough edges off him. Gaby Davies would be behind him, with the handler, and they’d probably have back-up. There would be hoods with dungarees, balaclavas and high-velocity firepower.