along its length.
‘This is it.’
Dull light rose from behind the wall, but the trees blotted out what illumination came from the moon, which was obscured anyway for the most part by clouds. They fitted on the night vision goggles. They were fairly basic first generation pieces of equipment, providing amplification of ambient light up to about two hundred times, too crude for precision work such as sniper activity but enough to show up the presence of an enemy in the vicinity, and portable as well.
They flattened themselves against the wall and moved along it towards the gate, Purkiss in front. As he crept nearer he heard a cough, saw the glow of a cigarette tip beyond the gate just as the smoke reached his nostrils.
‘Other way,’ he whispered.
They retraced their path along the wall until they came to the corner at which they had started, then followed the wall to the right. The forest had been cut back from the wall far enough that no branches were within leaping distance from the top. Purkiss chose a particularly stout looking fir tree and began to climb up the trunk, Kendrick following suit on the other side. They reached eye level with the top of the wall and hauled themselves a couple of metres higher and peered across.
As the Google Earth images had shown, the farmhouse lay at the end of the drive sweeping down from the gate. The windows of the farmhouse were lit up and the brightness shifted with movement inside. Smaller lights burned here and there in the yard.
‘What the hell’s that?’ said Kendrick.
Some distance behind the farmhouse was a huge wooden building, a great sprawling barn of some kind, floodlights rigged to illuminate its front and men, four or five, moving back and forth through its doors. Their voices were too low and distant to be made out in any detail.
‘It wasn’t in the pictures.’
‘No.’ Purkiss muttered down the line to Abby, describing what they were looking at.
In a moment she said, ‘Checked again. It’s definitely not on Google Earth. Must be new, or newish. As I said, the pictures can be up to three years out of date.’
They clambered down and set off along the wall once more. Further down they shimmied up another tree. They had come a longer distance than Purkiss had estimated and the buildings were behind them now, the view directly across the wall one of fields and copses.
Kendrick was tapping his arm and when he looked he noticed it. Just visible within the perimeter, thirty metres away, a man’s shape was making its way on foot along the wall. Before he disappeared from view Purkiss saw he was carrying something in both hands, pointing downwards: a rifle.
Unless the man had some kind of night-vision viewing capability himself he wouldn’t have seen them. They climbed down anyway. Faintly, from the other side of the wall, they heard the rasp of static from a walkie-talkie, a low murmur in reply fading as the man moved on.
So there were guards patrolling the perimeter, perhaps more of them at the rear where the tree cover was dense inside and outside the wall and intruders would be likeliest to attempt entry. As silently as they could Purkiss and Kendrick continued along the wall, eventually reaching the next corner and turning in so that they were following the rear wall.
Again they crept up a tree and looked over. On the other side was a copse, the gleam of the farmhouse and the barn barely visible in the distance through the layers of fir. Purkiss scanned from left to right and back with the goggles. No signs of life. He indicated with two fingers and Kendrick nodded. To Abby he murmured, ‘We’re going over the wall.’
There was no reply and he glanced at the screen again. The signal was gone.
The wall was of varying height, the ground uneven along its length. At its lowest it was perhaps three metres high. Kendrick squatted and interlocked his fingers. Purkiss used it as a step and pistoned himself up so that his hands grappled with the top of the wall. His toes found a purchase and he hauled himself to the top and looked down. No movement on the other side. He braced himself and reached down for Kendrick’s hand and helped pull him up. They dropped on to the carpet of fir needles at the foot of the wall.
Moving apart a little they passed between the trees at a crouch. From far ahead beyond where the fields sloped upwards they heard the voices of the men moving in and out of the barn, the words still unintelligible. The wind had come up and overhead the clouds were being dragged free of the moon until it loomed, three-quarters full, bathing the fields in pale yellow light.
They’d be plainly visible if they tried to cross directly over the fields. On the other hand, the wall was painted light grey on its inner aspect, almost white, and they would stand out if they traced the perimeter. Purkiss held up a hand. They would wait in the copse until the cloud cover was back in place before making their way across the fields, using the low stone walls between the fields to duck beside when the moon emerged again.
‘We’re waiting for a bit of darkness, then heading up to the barn,’ he said to Abby. He shook his head when there was no reply.
At his elbow Kendrick muttered, ‘That’s weird. My phone says I’ve got a signal.’
Purkiss glanced at the display on Kendrick’s phone, then at his own. It showed the same, a strong signal, three bars.
He said, ‘Abby?’
Venedikt was alone at the kitchen table, finishing a hasty meal and a mug of tea, all he was permitting himself that night, when his phone rang. The rustic-looking clock on the wall said it was ten past ten. His work was done and he needed to get some rest. The men were applying the final touches in the barn, most of which involved cleaning and polishing, and there was nothing left that he could contribute. Still, he knew he would sleep very little that night. He had considered going home but decided to use one of the bedrooms in the farmhouse instead, wanting to be near his acquisition as if it were a loved one, his own limb.
He looked at the caller ID, said: ‘Yes?’
‘We have a problem. Purkiss is somewhere on the grounds of the farm.’
Venedikt took a moment to react, disorientated. ‘Here?’
‘If you’re on the farm now, yes. He’s said he’s just waiting for darkness and is then going to head for the barn.’
‘How do you know — ’
‘I heard him say it a minute ago. You need to get on top of this, Kuznetsov.’
Venedikt rose slowly, eyes straining to see through the window into the darkness. ‘No problem.’
‘And forget non-lethal force. It’s beyond that. You have to — ’
‘I don’t need you to tell me that.’ He was reaching for his shoulder holster and pistol even as the phone was dropping into his pocket.
There was no shouting, very little noise at all to begin with, just the almost surreal sight of dark humanoid figures emerging and massing quietly in the yard between the farmhouse and the barn. Ten men, a dozen perhaps. As Purkiss and Kendrick ducked lower between the trees, the silence on either side of them began to be punctured by static stabs from walkie talkies. Black apparitions peeled away from distant points along the wall and broke into trots, each one carrying something slung low before it.
Then the relative quiet was torn to shreds. Purkiss felt coldness fill his chest and spill through his limbs as there rose towards the naked moon like smoke from a sacrificial fire the manic baying of dogs.
Twenty-Two
There were four, Purkiss noticed, in the instant after blind panic had immobilised him. Four small shapes, coloured green by the goggles, hurtling across the fields like ground-hugging guided missiles, yelping and screaming in harmonies that broke and formed and broke again. The rectangle of the farm was at its longest from north to south, from the gate end to the rear wall, which meant five hundred metres or so between Purkiss and Kendrick on
