A Damned Serious Business Read online

  He would be known to them. His reputation had put a bounty on his head of at least $150,000. For that pay-out they would take their time in his despatch and it would make one of the better videos. But if they were overrun, none of them would survive. No Convention counted here. They would all fight and would, at the end, drag the pin from the grenade that they all carried strapped to their chests – and the women would be a big prize.

  But his fate, and his value, was not uppermost in Merc’s mind.

  Holding the position mattered to him. He was a Gun for Hire, called Merc as an abbreviation of taking money for his chosen trade, for being a mercenary. Not much money, but it went into an account in a bank in a small town in leafy England. One of his boys had the big machine-gun and one of the girls organised the belt, kept it not too tense, not too slack, and fed it. Merc had an AK, and had only to reach a hand out behind him, like a runner receiving a relay baton, and would feel a fresh magazine slapped into his palm. The boy who did the loading had taken an incoming in his thigh in the first probe of the day, when the light was a dulled grey, and there was no possibility of evacuation. None of Merc’s little army could be spared to lug a wounded man back down the hill, so the boy had stayed and he was useful, reloading ammunition into magazines.

  Corpses were spreadeagled on the wire – coiled razor – near to the position, while the living flapped arms and legs and tried to break free of the entanglement, and howled or cried, and failed.

  The other girl would have thought it demeaned her as a fighter merely to feed a belt. She was Cinar and had a good arm for hurling grenades. Merc watched over her and should not have treated her differently to any of the others under his command, but he did and if their eyes met she would glare at him and break the contact.

  They came closer. There were small pockets of dead ground under the wire and among the mines, and when the attackers reached them they could catch breath, renew their faith, and come again. There was a big man to the right of Merc’s vision and he had a strong voice and carried a rifle in one hand and had an RPG launcher slung from a chest strap. It was not usual for Merc to miss. He always did single shots and never had the catch on automatic for a spray job. But the big man was charmed. He had a straggling dark beard and wore charcoal-coloured overalls, and the strength of his voice seemed to drag others forward. If the big man cleared the parapet and got into the trench or appeared at the sunken entrance of the bunker, then Merc and his people were lost. The ground they held was Hill 425 on the military maps that the command used in Irbil. It was the culmination of a finger of territory held with difficulty by Merc’s paymasters, the Kurds, and was more of a symbol than a place of strategic importance. Merc would not give it up. Could have done. Could have called up on the radio, could have said that they were exhausted, had done their share.

  The big man’s voice boomed out, and in a few moments they would come again and try the last forty- or fifty-yard sprint. Some would throw themselves at the wire and others would come and leap on them, boots stamping into the small of a back or on the neck and use the bodies as stepping stones. He had fired three times at the big man and each time had missed the kill. The last time his bullet had danced away, diverted after striking a cast-iron pole to which the wire was fastened.

  Could have called up on the radio, not made a request, but given a statement. ‘Enough, enough, coming back.’ Either the place would be abandoned or fresh militia would relieve them. Might have given the Command an opportunity to rotate, or to decide that Hill 425 was not worth the pain and the steady dribble of casualties. Had not done it. Had used the radio instead to call for air support and had been told that priorities would be assessed. Had known that ‘priorities’ meant the push south of the city of Mosul farther up the front line. His force, so small and insignificant, were all idiots. The biggest fool was himself. Idiots led by a fool. None of them had the stomach to turn their backs on the position and creep out under cover of darkness, abandon it. In the last month, nine had been killed defending it, and fourteen had been injured. The colonel in charge of the sector had declined to add to their numbers, and no air strikes had been made available. A little private war. Same on the other side, and their dead, bloated from the sun of several days, stank and rotted. More had joined them that morning. They had no stomach, any of them, least of all the girls who fed the belt and chucked grenades, to ease out from the trenches and let others take their place, or permit the men from down the hill to raise their black flag over the bunker. A depraved, mad obstinacy. Merc could have done with air strikes, could have done with close artillery support, but did not register as a priority.

  He waited. They all did. They heard the shouting that threatened them, that appealed to a God that would reward martyrdom. The intensity of the shooting had slackened. They might have another minute before the next surge towards their position. The sunlight was clear behind them and the ground was well lit and brightness played on the curled mess of the wire and reflected off the blades of the razors. Easier to fight than to wait.

  Some called him Merc because he was paid to fight. Others gave him that name because of a great love in his life. Stowed inside the bunker, beside the radio and along with the cases of ammunition and grenades and smoke canisters, was his Bergen rucksack. Under the stinking socks and soiled underpants was a wad of well-thumbed magazines. They reflected his dream. Mercedes Benz cars. When the front line was quiet, not often, he would sit with them, would talk to his army about the qualities of the brand, and which one he would buy. When? Sometime. When was sometime? A shrug. Beautiful cars, polished and scented, with leather upholstery, and priced in American dollars, or in euros, or in pounds. A dream.

  The shouting grew. He murmured that the boys and the two girls should hold steady, wait, not fire before they had targets, and wait some more. Merc had no rank that counted on Hill 425. He was not addressed with the subservience of juniors. His word was followed and his instructions carried out because each of them, the boys and the girls who fought alongside him, recognised that his word was backed by nothing more and nothing less than their welfare. They knew that, should they decide to pull back, he would not come with them. They stayed, all of them, and waited for the next attack. The boy who had the thigh wound had worked hard as the combat slackened and had made a good pile of filled magazines, and the grenade sacks were bulging. They believed in him, and that was a burden that Merc carried. His hands shook and he clenched his fists on the stock of his AK, and the others would have seen only the whites of his knuckles and nothing of the tremors.

  The voices grew in pitch. He waited, and knew that the surge would come soon – and knew it would be a long time until ‘sometime’, when he could walk into the big Mercedes showroom near his bank with a fold of high-denomination notes in his hip pocket and do a test drive and . . . He was able to keep his voice soft, just loud enough only for his boys and the two girls to hear him. Their trust brought him, many nights, to a point of near collapse: never shown. He looked around and lit on Cinar and should not have cared for her safety any more than for that of the other girl and the boys – or more than he cared for his own survival . . . would not make it easy for the bad boys hidden in the holes below the wire to claim a sack of dollars as reward.

  And they came. No more thought of anything beyond rounds in the magazine and where was his bag with the grenades, and what part of his little fortress was the target of the big man; and no artillery to support them, and not a chance of an air-strike because they were not a priority. Movement and shouting, and the spatter of the incoming rounds and grenades arcing in the air, towards them and away from them, and hard fighting. They came without fear towards the trenches. He could not have said whether there would ever be ‘sometime’, and all for a small hill, a pimple on a landscape otherwise flat and featureless, only valued by those who wanted it and those who would not give it up. Maybe he would live and maybe he would not. The firing, the shouting and the explosions deafened him, and they came cl
oser. The voice behind him stuttered with fear. Merc had reached out for a new magazine.

  ‘Can we hold them, Merc? Can we?’

  He smiled, the smile that made people trust him. The cold magazine casing was in his hand, then his fingers were gripped by the wounded man’s. He could see the movements, wriggling figures edging closer. Merc dropped his voice.

  ‘Well, we have to, don’t we? Can we? Yes, probably.’

  Bob called it a ‘brains trust’, Harry said it was a ‘barnstorm’ session, Leanne had it as ‘clear water’ thinking time, and Dunc had put it in his diary as a ‘punch-bag’ opportunity with ‘nothing off the agenda’.

  Screaming into their faces, making each of them squirm, was ‘state-sponsored’. Chasing that tail was ‘provenance’: stacking up evidence, putting it on paper, shoving it under the noses of the ‘Customers’ for whom they worked. Their mobile phones were locked in a lead-lined safe in the lobby three floors below, a blind was drawn on the room’s only window, a coffee machine bubbled. The title they worked under, once an eccentric called Boot had put them in place, was ‘S-S/RussiaFed-CyberAttack/2018’. Traffic noise from a street in London’s district of Pimlico seeped into the room. Customers, Boot had said, needed the truth, unvarnished, ungilded, and shoved up their nostrils. They had been together now for six months, meeting first once a fortnight, now more often; they were a high agenda topic and their reports went direct to the desks of the Director Generals at the security and intelligence agencies, and to Cabinet committees with the necessary clearance. They reported – each in their own way – on a new warfare, one of increased intensity. One that was not being won.

  From the Security Service was Bob, early twenties and with an outstanding academic degree. He said, ‘It’s today’s combat zone. The attack forces are all around us but the great and beautiful general citizen mass, busy making money to pay my salary, put their heads into sand, cannot cope with the complexity of the invasion. No tanks on our lawns, no fighter aircraft buzzing our airspace, no commandos coming ashore anywhere between Skegness and Clacton. A government-authorised raid with sophisticated malware precludes the need for nuclear weapons to be deployed by an enemy régime, and can do as much damage. Our problem: they are better in pretty much every degree at getting through our firewalls than we are of stopping them dead with our defences. As we make our “airgaps” wider so they ever more surely hop over the voids. The dangers are clear for us to see – but not the response we should be making, which is opaque, fogged. Someone said that the only light at the end of the tunnel was that on the train coming towards us, and fast. It is danger and we are sleep-walking towards it, and we cannot offer protection.’

  Boot was dropped outside Vauxhall railway station. It was a dank November morning, and the light wind barely moved the heaps of dead leaves that had gathered in the gutters. A spit of rain was carried in the air, and the forecast was for more of it later in the morning.

  He waved cheerfully to his driver and had a lively spring in his step as he set off across the wide road, ignoring the pedestrian crossing because it was too far down the pavement. His route towards the main gates took him into the heart of the traffic flow. Cars and vans and a double-decker bus wove around him. A few blared their horns and he acknowledged them with courtesy, but indifference. It was standard procedure that any officer arriving by a chauffeur-driven car at VBX used the station as a destination, not the guarded and barricaded entry into the building. Old friends were at the gate and he kept his smile fixed as he rummaged for his pass. He was amongst the mass of employees, many still in their Lycra from cycling to work, and some in athletic kit from jogging, and half of the girls looked a quarter asleep. The old friends were Arthur and Roy and they wore navy blue uniforms under bullet-proof vests and cradled Heckler and Koch machine pistols, loaded and cocked but with the safety applied, and had gas and pepper spray canisters on the webbing, and Tasers. A degree of familiarity was permissible, and his mood was good enough for him to wink at them and he was rewarded. Roy tapped a forefinger on his armament’s body in acknowledgement, and Arthur ducked his head, but only fractionally. He showed his card and headed past them.

  It had been their third meeting. He had been booked on the last flight out of Stockholm and the session was coming to an end. Nothing much seemed about to be spilled. The Swede had gone for a leak. Hatpin had leaned forward as if recognising that he was alone with the real power, the one who called the shots. He had a street name in an industrial park near St Petersburg airport, and the description of a two-storey warehouse and office space from which an organised crime group ran its affairs, and some identities. Good material but not earth moving. Nikki had leaned forward as if assuming the Swedes would have microphones, and had taken Boot’s hand, gently but with a persistent tug, and had taken him to the window, away from the furniture and the phone and the power socket where the bugs would have been, and had whispered a gaggle of words in his ear. A meeting. A gathering of the principal hack-people that the group paid, a discussion of a target and a drawing up of individual responsibilities, and there would be an officer from FSB in attendance. The best in the field, quality people. Something big, mouth-watering. Boot had asked when the last similar meeting had been held, and been told that there had not been one in Nikki’s time. When would it be, the meeting? Three days. Three nights. His mind had raced. He had thought of the think-tank meeting that morning, stuck in a routine and not going outside the bubble. He thought of the seminar he was due to attend at lunchtime, and thought of the problem of moving men and putting the kit in their hands, and doing the recruitment, sorting the logistics, and of winning authorisation, and of . . .

  ‘That’s interesting, Nikki. Quite interesting. Might be able to play around with that. I believe I’d be prepared to demonstrate some sincere gratitude if we could see this one through . . .’ He had been asked what the value of that gratitude would be and for a moment his lips had pursed as if that were just one more difficulty piling high in his wheelbarrow. Boot had said quietly, ‘Could manage that, Nikki. Give me a gas station, a café, supermarket car-park where on Thursday, before the meeting starts, my people would meet with you.’ And had been given the supermarket and had written the name of the street on his hand, and a time. Had he been alone he would have punched the air. Instead he had murmured, ‘I am a man of my word, Nikki, and it will happen, what you ask for.’

  A quick coffee and the boy had been kicked out into the night. The Swede had asked him how useful the session had been and Boot had given his slight, self-effacing grin – another trademark. ‘Might be something I can play around with, and might not.’ In his mind was an hourglass, the sand running through it.

  As he walked across the atrium and towards the bank of elevators, he imagined what Arthur and Roy might have wisecracked to each other.

  Arthur: ‘What’s up with old Boot? Reckon he got his leg over last night?’

  Roy: ‘No chance. More like he’s back from Waterloo and the Duke pinned a medal on him. Loyalty and long service.’

  ‘Wrong, Roy, because he’s got his wellies with him when he’s been there, and hasn’t.’

  ‘Fair one, Arthur. Then it’s a show he’s doing, a good one from the look of him.’

  Boot always said that those two veterans of the front gate had a better idea of the principal operations that the Service launched, who was down in the world, and who was climbing the ladder, and who was bedding who, than anyone else on the payroll. He took the lift to the fourth flour, and the corridor was blocked by new office tables and chairs, wrapped in protective plastic sheeting. Appropriate because Russia Desk was an expanding world and back up, almost, to Cold War levels – not before time. He was attached to the Desk, but loosely; not subject to all its disciplines but able to call upon its resources. A major meeting was called, not an everyday affair, which meant trouble and pain, and barely time to scratch an armpit. Daff, his fixer girl, was already in, and the Maid who ran his office. They’d looked up and
seemed to quiz him and, with the door closed behind him, and his thick coat and the trilby on the hook, he said that it had been productive.

  ‘Before, I rated it as good. When we finished I thought it was better than good.’

  The Maid had a map opened across her desk. It covered the top end of the Baltic and was divided by a frontier line. Boot was seldom short of certainty and jabbed with his finger at a place, a few kilometres south of the coastline where the territories were divided by a river, and jabbed again. He dropped his bag. Later, when work eased, the Maid would take care of the contents, clean what needed to be cleaned, press what was crumpled, and return the bag, freshly filled, to the locked cupboard that held what he needed – clothing, money, passports – for any short-notice excursion – and there would surely be one in a few days’ time if a plan could be formulated and sanctioned. So little time . . .

  Boot had called in from the airport as he’d crossed the scrum of the early morning concourse, and said what he wanted, and was told where they were, what was arranged, where they chased, and at what time the Big Boss had rearranged his diary, and – a giggle – the French had been cancelled from the slot. He’d nodded and gone into his small room, with the view of the river, and rain dribbing on the darkened, strengthened glass. He slung his jacket on the back of the chair and felt – quite suddenly – a wave of exhaustion. The office was bare except for his chair and desk, and a small table on which, in a bone china ashtray, was a set of antique false teeth, dentures that had once been the height of technology. The only decoration on the wall was a framed print, the Duke’s head protruding from a boot, a popular cartoon view of the great man at the time of his triumph. Not much deflected Boot from his principal recreation: visits to the battlefield in Belgium and the chance to walk where the great man had walked. What he planned would be, as the Duke had said of the battle, ‘a damned serious business’.