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  ‘Come on, let’s get something to eat. He’ll find us. It’s not like there’s anywhere else to go, is it?’

  31

  He didn’t want to move but I steered him through and grabbed a table by the window. After a minute a waitress appeared, or maybe the cook; her apron was grubby and she had a hair net. Maybe she was both.

  I asked for a menu in Russian.

  Stedman was wrong-footed. ‘I didn’t know you spoke—’

  ‘You didn’t ask.’

  The waitress replied in English, without even a flicker of a smile. ‘No menu. Pork.’

  ‘Two porks, then.’ I gave her a grin, which did nothing to warm her spirits. ‘Please …’

  She pointed at the bolt-action, which I’d put on the floor. ‘In foyer. Behind desk.’

  As I returned and pulled back my chair, the foyer filled with the sound of surprisingly cheerful men. Stedman looked round and, for a moment, I entertained myself by imagining that the mine management would appear en masse, thank him effusively for securing their drills, and the deal would be done with a kiss and a cuddle. But the group exited through the main doors and a few seconds later I heard the UAZ chunter into life.

  We sat and waited. The pork was a long time coming.

  ‘So, how did you lose it?’

  He glanced at what was left of his arm, as if he was still surprised it wasn’t there. ‘Helmand. On patrol. Our Husky took three RPGs in one go and brewed up. I was about ten metres away, about to get on board, and took a big piece of the blast. But you know when events just take over, and you don’t feel anything? My three lads were still in the wagon.’

  The waitress reappeared carrying a tray with a plate of black bread and two large bowls of what looked like stew. ‘You want beer?’

  I leaped in before Stedman had the chance to order some Dutch courage. ‘Two Cokes, please.’ I nodded at him, not wanting to break the flow. It was getting difficult for him.

  ‘I managed to drag the two in the rear seats out. They were badly burned, still on fire but breathing. Young Jez, the driver, couldn’t move. His legs were fucked, so I had to go in and get him. But the flames … I couldn’t …’ He paused. ‘I thought I was going to be OK – it was just, you know, trauma in the arm, secondary missiles in my chest and a load of second degree. But infection set in while I was in hospital back in the UK. The bacteria got into the wound and that was it, necrosis.’

  She returned with two small glasses of what had once been fizzy Fanta.

  Stedman shifted in his seat and took two deep gulps before continuing. ‘So the arm had to go and the lung was fucked, but I was the lucky one. None of the rest made it. Shit, the eldest was only twenty-three.’

  It had probably made him all the more determined to go for it and fuck the consequences, crashing into things, hoping his WTF bravado would somehow see him through.

  He peered down at the bowl of whatever it was. ‘I’m not very hungry.’

  ‘Can’t blame you for that, but the fillet steak is off, and who knows how long this is going to take?’

  It was hot and greasy and I didn’t give a shit. The ride, the fall and the cold had burned every free calorie.

  We’d just got started when two men appeared, one tall and slim, the other chunky and squat. The slim one had designer trackies under a black parka and a sweatshirt with a Love Moschino logo. He was wearing a TAG Heuer Aquaracer, which he presumably slipped off and put in a velvet case before he went on his mining shift. He didn’t look like a Khorek. His face was broad and bearded, and even under the layers I could see that he’d done some work to keep in shape.

  The squat one, on the other hand, hadn’t seen the inside of a gym in his life. He hung back while Watch Man glided to our table and helped himself to a chair. The only sound in the room came from beside the door: rapid wheezy breaths suggesting that the Chunk was in the grip of early-onset emphysema.

  Stedman spoke first. This was his gig after all, and I had some stew to demolish. ‘Khorek?’

  It was only now I realized he’d never set eyes on the guy before.

  There was a beat before our new best mate answered. ‘Who is this?’ His watch glittered as he flicked a hand my way.

  ‘This is Nick. My driver.’ He indicated his lack of a second arm. ‘You’re Khorek?’

  ‘We see him when I want to see him.’ Watch Man sucked his teeth. ‘Go ahead. Eat.’

  He looked towards the kitchen and the waitress burst through the swing doors and scuttled across, like George Clooney had just walked in. Watch Man quashed her excitement with a bark. ‘Vodka dlya nashikh posetiteley.’ Vodka for our visitors.

  I held up a finger. ‘Another Coke for me.’

  Watch Man’s brow furrowed.

  ‘Ya na lekarstva. I’m on medication.’

  He didn’t seem too offended by my abstinence. His manner was remote but focused. Stedman eyed him cautiously. I’d met Russian police who behaved more like gangsters and Russian gangsters who behaved more like police, so just because Watch Man presented himself like a small-town pimp didn’t mean he wasn’t a hot-shot mining engineer. Another sidekick came in and joined the Chunk. He was a bigger model, half man, half bear, in a thick coat and enormous work boots that dribbled slush all over the floor.

  Watch Man peered at Stedman and frowned. It was what Russians did, even at weddings. ‘You and Khorek, family?’

  Stedman shot me an anxious glance. ‘No – my … he’s my girlfriend’s cousin. I mean, we’re engaged, sort of.’

  Watch Man nodded. ‘Ah, so like family.’

  Stedman’s face was reddening. I could practically see the blood pulsing round it. He blinked rapidly and avoided my gaze. Watch Man reached into his parka, pulled out a state-of-the-art iridium sat phone that made mine look steam-powered and presented it to us to admire. Then he bent over it and punched in a number.

  The waitress arrived with a bottle of vodka, two shot glasses and a tumbler of flat orange. Stedman downed his shot without so much as a Nostrovya, like he needed it badly. Watch Man muttered, ‘Pyat minut,’ into his phone, then killed the call and got to his feet.

  Five minutes till what?

  ‘OK, we go.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Khorek.’

  On the way out I headed for my Mauser, but Watch Man waved me away from it. ‘Is OK. No bears.’

  What was happening in Stedman’s head now he knew the weapon was staying at the hotel wasn’t clear. The cogs were turning but they weren’t meshing. Then, without any warning, he came to a halt. He stood, legs apart, his one hand on his hip and raised his voice again, like an exasperated headmaster. ‘I want to see Khorek here. Right here. That was the arrangement. At the hotel.’

  I was also concerned that the weapon wasn’t coming with us. It was always good to have protection from everything, including bears, but this time, not even old habits were enough to stop me leaving. The objective of this fuck-about was to get to Khorek and collect the money. If the bolt-action made Watch Man nervous about taking us, I’d leave it. This still didn’t feel right, but then again, what had these last two days?

  Stedman’s speech made no impact on Watch Man. ‘We go to him. He expects you.’

  Stedman flushed. He had no power to make anyone do anything. Maybe it had dawned on him what a twat he was being. But it hadn’t. He swallowed, straightened up and pulled himself together, like he was preparing to lead his men over the top.

  Watch Man was waiting.

  I gripped Stedman’s elbow and pushed him forward. ‘Don’t be a dickhead. Let’s go.’

  The cloud cover had turned a dark cobalt blue and a sharper, more persistent gale was advancing on us from the north. Watch Man, Chunk and Half Bear walked three abreast, slowly, despite the cold, like they’d been studying Reservoir Dogs. The two who were looking at our snowmobile remained in position, oblivious of the cold. I glimpsed the UAZ minibus moving tentatively away from us before turning a corner and disappearing completely.<
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  We crossed the square, went down some steps and followed a path towards a long, low building set apart from the rest. Further to the east, the rotors of two or three helicopters were visible above the rooftops.

  We turned sharp left down a less-trampled path of ice between two empty, partly demolished corrugated-iron sheds. Watch Man knocked sharply on a metal door. It was unlocked from inside and opened with a ferocious shriek. We stepped into a decaying concrete room lit by a single paraffin lamp. If this was Khorek’s place, he needed to pay much more attention to Homes & Gardens.

  32

  The room was freezing cold and windowless. On the rusted steel desk was an ancient laptop, lid closed. The man in the metal chair behind it had a face so thin and ferret-like there was no need for an introduction.

  Khorek stared blankly at us. His eyes bulged, maybe from spending a lot of time underground. They were also moist and red-rimmed, and his face was swollen, red and blotchy. Some of that could have been put down to bad diet and a lack of grooming but, in spite of the cold, sweat beads were hatching around the tufts of receding hair on his forehead. He had been fucked up, but he wasn’t flapping.

  Whatever I might have been expecting, this wasn’t it. Khorek’s gaze shifted to Watch Man, who stepped up to the desk and looked down at him. No question who was in charge here.

  So that was problem number one. The man we had come to see was not the man. Problem number two was the third man in the room, who must have been keeping Khorek company while we were getting pork down us. He grinned when he recognized me: Ponytail, whom I’d persuaded to fuck off out of the bar last night. If only I’d known, I could have brought back his little knife for him.

  The door was closed behind me, leaving just the five of us in the room.

  Problem number three was on a metal table against the wall, the two-square-metre reinforced-plywood crate with Skyship labelling. The seals had been broken and the lid prised off. So that bit of Stedman’s story checked out: the shipment had gone through to Barentsburg, and maybe the sight of it gave him a last vestige of hope that he was going to get his cash.

  The crate had been partly unpacked. The grey plastic bundles that lay stacked beside it didn’t look much like they contained drill bits. They looked a lot more like shrink-wrapped bricks. Heroin or cocaine, it didn’t matter to me what they contained: it was their shape that meant trouble.

  I took a step towards them to get a better look but Ponytail moved out from behind Khorek clutching a brand new blade in his fist. It was perfectly clean and I wanted it to stay that way. I stepped back.

  Stedman sparked up: ‘Well, I see you got the shipment.’ But he was talking to Khorek, who was the monkey, not the organ grinder.

  I pointed to Watch Man. ‘He’s your man now.’

  ‘Can we get on with the transfer?’

  His instruction had no impact. No one moved or spoke. He waved his good arm at the product stacked on the table. ‘We had a deal, for fuck’s sake. Let’s close it.’

  Watch Man wiped a hand over his beard. ‘Barentsburg is small place, poor place. Life here very hard. We help each other. When we don’t, is trouble.’ He looked down at the Ferret. ‘Too small for competition.’

  Khorek’s grasp of English might not have been up there with Watch Man’s but he was catching the drift.

  I was too. Things had just gone downhill fast. Watch Man was the go-to guy. And Khorek had been stupid enough to try to muscle in on his business. The gear in Stedman’s container, coming via his brother’s rich friends, might be an improvement on what Watch Man was hawking. If his regular supply came through Russia or Ukraine it had probably been cut with all manner of adulterants along the way, not to mention a blast of hairspray to stop the inferior-quality bricks crumbling. Still, Watch Man had the trade sewn up. You didn’t simply turn up and set out your stall. Not if you wanted to see the spring, whenever that was. I was beginning to regret leaving the Mauser behind.

  Beyoncé started singing ‘Halo’ very loudly from Watch Man’s mobile. From the look of things, it was the closest he was ever going to get to one.

  He turned away, phone to ear and spare hand covering it, Japanese style. I watched Khorek’s eyes dart between Stedman and Watch Man. He was even more out of his depth than my one-armed passenger. The two deserved each other – chancers who thought they could make a fast buck without thinking through the consequences. Anyone with two brain cells wouldn’t set up a burger stall without finding out who dominated the local pitches – unless he wanted to see the thing going up in flames. I knew that for a fact. My stepdad had had just the one when he’d taken the fast-food industry by storm outside Millwall football ground.

  This was going to spiral down into a pile of shit if nothing was done. One of us needed to try to smooth over the cracks if we wanted to get out of there in one piece.

  Watch Man finished the call. His head jerked up. ‘In Barentsburg, we don’t want trouble with foreigners. Trouble bring Norwegian government policemen and more problems. Mining business right now very bad, mine maybe sold. We want to keep our jobs if that happen. So, no trouble with foreigners.’

  A gleam of stupidity or hope, I couldn’t work out which, had found its way into Stedman’s head.

  ‘Well, we don’t want any trouble either. I just need the money and we’ll be out of here.’

  The brightness in his voice didn’t match the hollow look in his eyes.

  Watch Man gazed at him with a mixture of amusement and pity. He hadn’t lured Stedman all the way to Barentsburg so he could pay for something he had already stolen, or to tell him the merger of their two business empires had hit the buffers.

  Stedman’s desperation bubbled up now. ‘I want my money or—’

  Fuck knows how he would have finished the sentence, but Watch Man’s finger on his chest cut him short. ‘No, I want my money. I want money so there is no trouble.’

  Stedman’s mouth opened but nothing came out. He needed to do this more often, so he could get into the habit of saying the third thing that came into his head instead of the first.

  Watch Man turned back to Khorek, who was somehow still defiant. ‘Khorek very good family man, very loyal to family. Even now he not help us.’ He leaned forward, flipped open Khorek’s laptop and started to tap away at the keyboard. He glanced up at Stedman, his eyes gleaming in the glow of the screen. ‘But I think you help instead …’

  He tapped the lid. ‘This tell me Khorek has number to send. And you, Stedman, you also give ID code to finish transfer.’

  An Ethernet cable snaked out and disappeared through a hole in the wall. I guessed it would continue along the street to wherever it could grab a connection. Watch Man had it all worked out, and he was about to read Stedman his horoscope.

  ‘So, now you make Khorek give number and you give number. You transfer money to me, then no trouble for you, for Khorek. No trouble for no one.’

  Stedman stepped forward and slammed his hand down on the surface of the table, like he was showing a full house. I pulled him back. He didn’t understand the world he had just walked into. It was one I constantly – and mostly unsuccessfully – tried to avoid.

  ‘Don’t you get it? The deal isn’t going to happen. Lesson learned. Do what he says and let’s get out of here. If we can.’

  ‘No.’

  Watch Man started to mutter as he got busy again with his index fingers. ‘You people stupid, so stupid. Why you people …’ His voice tailed off as he found what he needed and turned the screen towards us. The soundtrack and the Skype image juddered, but its message was clear. Leila’s face was streaked with tears and mascara. The shadows in the background suggested there were two of them with her and the wallpaper behind them was familiar. They were in the Radisson. She cried out as someone grabbed her neck and pushed her closer to the camera.

  ‘Stedman … you there? Please … you … Khorek, you must pay them or … Help me, Stedman, please you must … Khorek …’

  It was a
pitiful sight but the one family member in the room was unmoved. I glanced at Khorek.

  ‘She nothing to me. She ublyudok … shlak.’

  My Russian definitely stretched to ‘bastard’ and ‘slag’.

  They were the first words we had heard from Ferret. He made a fist with the thumb thrust between the index and second finger, which roughly translated as You’re getting nothing from me. Then he slammed his fist hard on the metal desk so the noise reverberated around the room.

  Watch Man was clued up, but had he planned for this? He didn’t keep me waiting for an answer. He hit Khorek with a wide swing of an open hand that was nearly the size of the laptop. Khorek went down with a scream, along with the computer. Watch Man’s boot immediately made contact with the body, and didn’t stop there. All I could see from our side of the desk was an eerie kaleidoscope of shadow and light. Ponytail watched the drama, unmoved. I got the impression that he’d seen this episode before.

  I ran out of time to think of a way out as Watch Man left Khorek to his latest helping of pain and headed towards us.

  33

  I swung my eyes towards Stedman. The zipped pocket on the left side of his chest suddenly became my whole world.

  I charged towards him at ramming speed. Words were superfluous: he would have had to understand what I wanted, and then do what I wanted, and there wasn’t a nanosecond to spare.

  I crashed into him and carried on going until he hit the wall. I knew there would be noise and movement behind me, but I didn’t hear it because I didn’t need to. I had no control of what was happening there, only of what was in front of me.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  I pushed my left shoulder into his right one, keeping him pinned. My eyes burned into that zip. Then I took half a step back, ripped it open with one hand, reached inside with the other and grasped the flare gun’s pistol grip. In the same fluid motion I collapsed to the floor and twisted around, pushing back the safety with my thumb, and fired into what was getting far too close.