Arkhangel : A Novel (2020) Read online

  James Brabazon

  * * *

  ARKHANGEL

  Contents

  Prologue: Appointment in Arkhangel

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue: Appointment in Arklow

  About the Author

  James Brabazon is an award-winning frontline journalist and documentary filmmaker. Based in London, he is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir My Friend the Mercenary and the thriller The Break Line. Arkhangel is his second novel.

  By the same author

  MAX MCLEAN NOVELS:

  The Break Line

  Arkhangel

  NON-FICTION:

  My Friend the Mercenary

  For Bella

  This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be.

  Alan Turing

  Prologue: Appointment in Arkhangel

  Sunday 27 January 1991

  ‘So, tell me,’ she said. ‘How does it start?’

  ‘Where all stories do,’ I said. ‘At the beginning.’

  ‘And where’s that?’

  ‘In Moscow. A long time ago. There was a merchant there, you see, very rich and very powerful. And one morning this merchant, he sent his servant to the market to buy food. In a little while the servant came back, empty handed. The master was about to punish him, but he saw that the man was terrified. He was white and trembling, and could hardly talk. So, once he’d calmed his nerves …’

  ‘With vodka?’

  ‘Of course! It’s Russia. Always with vodka. So, once he’d calmed his nerves, the merchant asked him what was wrong. And he said, “Master, just now, when I was in the marketplace, I was jostled by a woman in the crowd. I turned around to look at her, and when I did, I saw it was Death who jostled me.”’

  ‘What did she say, Max?’

  ‘Nothing. She just looked at him and raised her old, bony finger, like this.’ I unfolded my right index finger and beckoned her with it. She shuddered, and pulled herself closer to me. ‘The servant was scared out of his wits, of course,’ I continued, ‘and asked the merchant to lend him his horse so he could ride away from the city and avoid his fate. “I’ll ride all day and all night and go to your house in Arkhangel,” he said. “Death will not find me there.”’

  ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘Well, the merchant lent him his horse and the servant climbed up into the saddle.’

  ‘What kind of horse was it? You have to tell me all the details. Was it a stallion, or a gelding?’

  ‘No, it was a mare. A pale mare, sleek and beautiful and fast as an arrow.’

  ‘Could it have jumped the old fence at O’Byrne’s farm?’

  I smiled and wrapped her fingers in mine.

  ‘Oh, yes. And then some. She’d have taken the Aughrim River at Woodenbridge with a single stride.’

  ‘That’s some horse he has there, Max Mac Ghill’ean.’

  ‘Do you want to hear the story, or what do you want?’

  ‘Well I would if you’d ever get on with it,’ she laughed.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘the servant got up on her and dug his spurs in the mare’s flanks and they lit off at a gallop, as fast as they could. The merchant watched them go and he was well pleased because he liked the servant and wanted him to be safe. But now he had no food in the house, so he went to the marketplace himself and sure enough he saw Death standing in the crowd. He went over to her, bold as you like, and said, “Why did you threaten my servant this morning?” But Death said to the merchant, “I didn’t threaten him. He startled me. You see, I was surprised to see him here in Moscow.” “And why is that?” asked the merchant. “Because,” Death replied, “I have an appointment with him tonight in Arkhangel.”’

  1

  Monday 8 January 2018

  It was an easy kill.

  He was trapped, hemmed in by the Atlantic and the wild country of Donegal. No road. No telephone. Nowhere to run.

  On the seventh night I pulled the plug on the skiff tied up on the beach by his cottage. I settled into a gully a hundred and fifty metres from the front door and waited: a black shadow dripping rainwater in a muddy ditch. The moon was hidden by banks of cloud that rolled in across the ocean from Iceland. Thick, fast squalls cut visibility and drowned out everything except the waves ripping up the bay.

  The tide had turned. Conditions were perfect.

  He was alone. He went nowhere, did nothing, saw no one. He was scared. Or stupid. Or both. I didn’t know who he was, or what he’d done – but, at seventy-five, he’d either forgotten how to run, or didn’t think he had to any more. Maybe he just wasn’t thinking at all. Desperate men live only in the present. That much I did know. For ten months I’d anticipated nothing beyond sunset. Since I was sixteen I’d seen no further than the end of a barrel. The future was another country explored one day at a time. Interred in his thatched stone casket, he was waiting for someone or something. But whatever he was expecting, he wasn’t expecting me.

  He’d already been inside for two days before I arrived. I watched the house for a week from a holiday park across the bay. Our lives ground down to the same rhythm.

  Each morning he rose at seven thirty.

  He lit an oil lamp and kept the windows covered. Candle grease smeared the panes. Only the faintest of shadows cast on the age-browned curtains allowed me to track him from the living room to the bedroom and back again. No smoke leaked from the chimney. The rooms would be damp and cold and half-heated by Calor gas. There was no electricity. If he cooked at all, it would have been in the living room. There were only two proper rooms, and a wooden washhouse tacked on the back – an ancient extension, perhaps once an elderly relative’s bedroom. Maybe it covered a well head. Maybe he drank his whiskey neat. Either way, he’d need to resupply before long.

  At dusk he lit the lamp again.

  He extinguished it at ten.

  And rose at seven thirty.

  Moss grew in the roof. Weeds tangled the kitchen garden. Garden trash was piled against the back door. The cottage was desolate, but not derelict – one of the few surviving remnants of a lost landscape of thatched poverty. Americans thought they were quaint. I thought they were more like millstones than monuments, tying us to a past that had got us where, exactly?

  Here. Exactly.

  I flexed my palm around the grip of the semi-automatic and focused on the rain-roar berating the headland.

  The nearest house was five hundred metres to the north-east. It had been empty for a year – an unwanted holiday home languishing in negative equity. The track to its front door wound off to the main road four hundred metres further on. Seven hundred metres to the south-east a couple from Birmingham gazed out over Ulster in the midst of their retirement. Good luck with that. Drongawn Lough lay due south. Every
where else was just rough sea or sodden turf.

  I spent twelve hours in the gully. Out of habit I clicked a little pebble I’d picked off the beach against the back of my teeth. I didn’t need it: the rainwater kept my throat moist and my head clear.

  It was a two-man job. But, as usual, I was flying solo: the details – and the consequences – were on me alone. While I’d snatched moments of sleep a night vision camera picked out in electric green the whitewashed walls of his self-imposed prison.

  A week-long reconnaissance was just enough to establish a pattern of life, and short enough not to cause suspicion by hanging around: the target was secluded – no bystanders in the way and none to threaten the operation; the holiday park owners were glad to take a week’s rent out of season and asked no questions. If it blew up, there were only two people at risk: me and him.

  Colonel Ellard – who’d drilled me hard as a new recruit – had been fond of reminding me that the enemy has a vote. ‘He won’t do what you expect him to just because you want him to.’ That was day two of training and a lifetime ago. But Ellard would have agreed there was no point figuring out what this target’s plan was. He’d made a choice, and he was going to have to live with it, however briefly. The fact that he’d chosen to come here, now, was the only certainty, the only fact to consider. I assumed he was armed, and that the doors might be rigged. But only one of us was going to leave the cottage, and on the current balance of probabilities that was going to be me. ‘Surprise,’ concluded the colonel, ‘neutralizes ignorance. Briefly.’

  But Ellard didn’t send me on jobs. Commander Frank Knight did. And Frank had been clear about two things: the kill had to be verified and the cottage had to be swept. I didn’t know what, exactly, I was looking for. And neither, I suspected, did Frank.

  This was a rare target of opportunity – the sort I hardly ever dealt with. No prep, no briefing, no one in Whitehall pretending they couldn’t remember my name – just another bloody love letter from Frank to his dagger man. Maybe it was personal. Maybe I should have asked. But questions had got me into a lot of trouble in the past. For better or worse, if I was in it again, I was in it for good.

  No ifs. No buts. No questions.

  Zero six thirty.

  Dirt fouled my black kit; my face filthy with bog grime. I left the balaclava rolled in my pocket. There was only a dead man to see me, after all. The inside edges of the tiny window frames, which in an hour would glow gold with lamplight, were still solid black: ancient beams as tough as prison bars. I could no more get in through them than he could get out of them.

  I press-checked the SIG – a silenced .45. Ten rounds in the magazine and one up the spout. I’d chosen custom-made semi-wadcutters: thick lead rounds with a flat nose and no jacket, hand-loaded into spent brass picked up in Derry twenty years ago. Whoever got the blame for this would already be enjoying his Good Friday amnesty.

  Zero seven hundred.

  The sky lightened over the limestone ridges that cut between the cottage and the village at Cashel Glebe. People would be stirring: children dressing for school; farmers already at their herds. The glare of car headlights flickered on the low cloud over the lough.

  In the past I’d liked these last moments; cherished them, even, for their clarity, their sense of purpose: before the green light the world drew into focus. At first I had imagined it a trick of the rifle scope. But I found the same simplicity of vision glinted off a knife blade, too, or gleamed on the tight wire of a garrotte.

  Now I just went over the exfil details step by step, over and over. I turned the job around and upside down and shook it until it shed its secrets. Any idiot can get in anywhere on earth. The trick is getting out again.

  He might have trapped himself – but he’d given me an exit. It was two and a half klicks to the jetty at Altaheeran on the west side of the lough mouth. I’d run the skiff down on the flood tide and then pull hard across to the opposite shore. No need for an outboard. If she sank, I’d swim to the quay. I’d left a Kia rental and a change of clothes there and was wearing a base layer of neoprene skins. It was too risky to head towards Belfast and the barracks at Raven Hill; and, as old man Ellard said, ‘A rabbit never bolts straight for the burrow.’ Frank would let me know where and when we’d debrief. Knowing Frank it would be in a pub in Mayo. And if not in Mayo, then in a pub for sure.

  I rolled my shoulders and turned my face to the west. The squall blew through and a little of the old clarity seeped back.

  Zero seven thirty.

  H-hour.

  The lamp lit up the window. I cocked the hammer and spat out the stone.

  Good to go.

  I made my way along the gully and emerged at an oblique angle to the front of the cottage. If he bolted out the back I’d hear him first and then see him run. Then he’d have to choose between me and the sea. It was just light enough to step foot safely, briskly. The soles of my boots trampled the ragged winter grass, cutting a trail to his door. I covered the distance gun up, ready.

  Nothing, no one moved. So far, so good.

  I put the silenced muzzle of the .45 to the keyhole. The slugs could take the lock out of a door, and the heart out of a man. I held my breath and squeezed the old latch with my thumb and pushed gently. Unlocked. No wires. Exhaling, I pushed harder. Nothing went bang. The door opened and inched into the gloom.

  And then, immediately, the stench of rotting meat. I stepped in, the door still opening. He was there in his hearth chair, sitting with his back to me, the unthatched pate of his skull cresting the antimacassar. I fired immediately. The top of his head vaporized. A shower of brain and bone went up as the slow, heavy bullet tore on unchecked, shearing a lump of masonry from the fireplace.

  I circled around him quickly, taking in the room. Oil paintings dotted the walls: above the mantelpiece a pale mare galloped across the fields; on the opposite wall the sun set in oils over Drongawn Lough. By the window a stopped clock hung above a stuffed and mounted woodcock. It was bitterly cold and my breath fogged the foul, stinking air. A hurricane lamp by the window raked the room with thick, juddering shadows. The door to the bedroom was closed. Bolt upright, the target had hardly moved. Only his head had slumped forward. There was an open leather bag between his feet. I kept the SIG on him and kept moving. The front door banged to, muffling the rush of wind and waves. I faced him then.

  I hadn’t killed him.

  But he was dead all right.

  Six-four, a hundred and seventy pounds and in good shape. The top of his head was missing, but his face was intact, eyes open, staring down into the hearth. His skin was blackening, cadaverous. And in the middle of his chest a dark ring alive with maggots spread out from the bullet to the heart that had finished him.

  Held loosely between the fingers of his left hand was a folded slip of paper. I bent down and pulled at it, keeping the SIG at the ready. His hand fell away and left me clutching a hundred-dollar bill. As the body moved, I gagged. The smell was almost overpowering. He hadn’t lit the lamp that morning. He’d been dead for at least a week.

  For the last seven days it was not his shadow I’d tracked from room to room, dawn to dusk, but his killer’s.

  And then all hell broke loose.

  2

  ‘So what happened?’

  Commander Frank Knight sipped his Guinness and pinched the foam from his lip. Then he settled his glass and looked directly at me, evaluating the clues staring at him from across the table. I looked away and sank into the chair.

  ‘What didn’t happen?’

  No matter how much I bit down on it, I was obviously in pain. I’d rubbed just enough fentanyl into my gums to make the drive bearable. As it wore off I could feel my muscles going into spasm.

  ‘Have a drink,’ Frank urged, and pushed my untouched pint towards me. His tone was encouraging and relaxed – which was a warning, because Frank was never relaxed. He was either for you or against you, and there was no neutral ground. His anxieties – rages, sometimes –
kept mine in check: two sides of the same bad penny that cropped up in the pocket change of every off-the-books job the Brits had cashed in for over two decades. Since we’d first met on the firing line at Raven Hill back in the mid-nineties, he’d engaged me in nearly every kind of killing there was to be done, nearly everywhere on earth. In the process we’d propped each other up as guarantors of our mutual survival.

  But things had changed. My perspective on his hall of mirrors had shifted.

  The last job Frank sent me on – a virtual suicide mission in Sierra Leone – had unravelled badly enough for him to question the appetite of his once willing executioner. Groping for an exit that wasn’t there, I’d come back from West Africa and gone into hiding: at first in self-imposed exile as my body purged itself of the memory of the jungle; and then wherever a day’s walk would take me. I’d surfaced in the only place I could call home: the base at Raven Hill outside Belfast. Old Colonel Ellard was still running the place – his retirement postponed indefinitely after I’d declined to fill his shoes. He took me back in and put me to work on the ranges to keep me busy.

  Two months later and there I was being debriefed in a pub with Frank.

  It was a relief of sorts to be sitting at that table in the front room of Doherty’s – a locals’ boozer on the main drag in Ballina, a stone-skip from the salmon-torn waters of the River Moy. Behind us rows of blue and yellow flies with faded price tags gathered dust alongside unsold reels and old cane rods. The windows were half-shuttered in precaution against the prying eyes of passing wives. We both faced the door. Old habits die hard.

  I’d come full circle – except that now I looked to my own defence, and, as a result, Frank to his. Sierra Leone had proved what every job had always promised: that one man is always expendable. To know that – to have lived it – and to have decided to keep at it, anyway, was neither normal nor reasonable. We both knew it. And I guessed in Frank’s eyes that made me as useful as it did dangerous. It was a fine balance, too, because no matter how dedicated the disciple, disillusionment breeds disloyalty – and Frank didn’t allow his gamekeepers to turn poacher.