Cold (32 page)

The bulk of the convoy headed farther west towards Donetsk, but Gennady’s rear section peeled off into a small town that had seen a lot of fighting. Their police escorts led the trucks through a series of side streets, past a great crater where a house had once stood – now filled with a sump of dirty brown water – to what had been, before the war, a soft-drinks warehouse.

Once inside the warehouse, out of sight of the Ukrainian Air Force, the ammunition boxes and Grad missiles were shifted by forklift trucks onto smaller lorries. Gennady’s truck was resprayed military green and got new, rebel number plates. It was staying. The ‘aid’ convoy commander paid him five hundred dollars in roubles, thanked him for his good work and suggested that he should return to Rostov and do the same thing again.

‘But the front, it’s too dangerous for an old man like you,’ he added.

Gennady smiled. This commander had been having his nappy changed when Gennady was catching haji bullets in his teeth and spitting them back in Jalalabad. But he said nothing, pocketed the roubles, nodded politely and went for a walk around town.

A stick of bombs had fallen on a long block of flats, carving two great holes, from roof to basement, in what had once been people’s homes. The rigid verticality of the holes told Gennady that this wasn’t artillery or tank fire – they would have come in at an angle – but from the sky. The rebels didn’t have an air force, so the civilians here had been killed by the Ukrainian-government side.

At the bottom of the biggest heap of rubble, an impromptu shrine had been created: candles and photos of the dead – old, young, one child; notes in ink, already blurred by the sleet and rain; some flowers, now soggy and bedraggled. The shock waves from the bombs had caused the weak, concrete front panels of flats, otherwise unaffected, to pop out and fall, exposing the innards of people’s lives to one and all, as if a giant hand had taken off the front of a doll’s house.

There was something both fascinating and obscene about being able to look at the entire sanitary system of a block of flats, exposed like an engine block in a museum, cut in half –
there’s a cistern, there’s a waste pipe, there’s a bathtub hanging perilously over a cliff of broken concrete
.

The wind blew in hard from Siberia, and Gennady screwed up his eyes to protect them from the dust. The last of the gust blew a large sheet of paper out from the flats; it corkscrewed down, edging this way and that, landing on some rubble near Gennady’s feet. A child’s drawing of the otherness of war: tanks crayoned in black firing red blotches; men in green dying, spewing blood; planes overhead dropping bombs. He glanced up at where the drawing had come from and walked back into the road to get a better view: a toilet, a half-filled bookcase, a children’s bedroom with a block of concrete the size of a beach ball in a cot, a kitchen table with a vase of red roses, a Batman poster, all on show; next to them, thin air.

‘The hohols, look what they did to us!’ yelled one man, the worse for wear from alcohol. He moved off, muttering to himself.

Another man, with a worrier’s face, somehow picked up on Gennady’s intelligent interest in what had happened.

‘Not just the hohols,’ the worrier whispered, and nodded towards a square, officious-looking building down the street and on the other side of the road – perhaps the town’s Communist Party headquarters in the old days. Gennady examined it briefly and saw his convoy commander leave it, going in the opposite direction, away from Gennady, along with three other men in green military uniforms but no evident insignia. Half a dozen rebel soldiers filed into the entrance that his commander had just left, then another dozen followed them.

‘The hohols were aiming at that,’ hissed the worrier through his teeth. ‘It’s the rebel military HQ – the big one, the biggest one in this part of the zone. But they missed. I was with these jokers to begin with. I don’t want to be ruled by a bunch of fascists from Kiev. But they’re thieves, scum, the worst of us. I used to drive a petrol tanker. Big money, sure, but a necessity for the whole community. They stole my tanker. I complained to the top commander in there. They locked me up, threatened to kill me, rape my wife. I went all the way to Donetsk, to City Hall. A whole day I spent in the anteroom, waiting to get to see the prime minister. Thing is, everybody else in the room, they had a Moscow accent. I waited all day and then eventually I got to see some guy in a suit, not the prime minister, and he told me to piss off.’

Gennady grunted an acknowledgement and moved away. He was here to find news of his daughter, not to fight a war – not even to listen to why fighting that war might be more complicated than what Russian TV told you.

Just before he turned the corner onto the main square, he looked back once more at the bombed flats and saw, by chance, a Ukrainian fighter-bomber zoom past at roof height. Only after it had gone did he feel the pressure wave, a great juddering in his ears, and only after that the scream of the jet’s engines. A dozen of the pirate-rebels loosed off their AK47s at its vapour trail, a precious waste of the ammunition that he had just brought across the border.

The bar in the centre of town boasted furniture with fake zebra-skin upholstery, a barmaid wearing a frock covered in leopard spots, and a clientele dressed in gunman chic, complete with headscarves, grenades, and chains of heavy-machine-gun bullets draped across their chests. The moment Gennady, evidently a stranger, walked in, the hubbub died and every single person stared at him.

In the far corner of the bar was a small shrine to a young woman, something of a beauty by the look of her, a black stripe across her framed photograph, a single candle at its foot and a vase of red roses by its side. Gennady walked straight up to Leopard Spots and said in his deepest, most gravelly voice, ‘I am sorry for your loss. May I buy everybody a glass of vodka please?’

The wake continued as before. Amongst the mourners was a young woman with a camera with a fancy zoom lens around her neck. Some kind of journalist, Gennady reckoned – a foreigner by the look of her clothes. Gennady didn’t want to appear in photographs but she wasn’t taking any, just chatting to people.

He was in conversation with a soft-voiced, elderly man, plainly decent, plainly very angry with the Ukrainians for bombing civilians. He spoke about the dead woman whose funeral had taken place that morning. A mother, her poor five-year-old kid badly injured in hospital.

Gennady saw something pass the café on the road outside. He cadged a cigarette – Gennady hated smoking – and went outside into the crisp clear air for a better look. A low-loader pulled by, a white cab with a blue stripe, and halted in the main square, two hundred yards from the café. The low-loader’s red ramps were lowered and the engine of a squat, box-shaped vehicle on it was fired up, causing the square to be filled with a great puff of black diesel smoke. The squat box ran on its own tank tracks. They bit into and scarred the square’s cobblestones. On its roof was green camouflage netting covering four missiles.

Gennady was joined by the foreign woman with the camera, and the two watched with something approaching awe as the vehicle rattled past them, the pavement shuddering under its great weight. Immediately behind it were two army jeeps. The first stopped by them, and a young man in military fatigues, who carried himself like an officer but wore no insignia of rank, got out. Gennady took a long drag on his cigarette and inched back, keeping his distance from the woman with the camera.

The officer asked the woman: ‘Journalist?’

‘Yes.’

‘Accreditation, please?’ The officer’s manner was entirely unlike that of the pirate-rebel army. She handed over her rebel press pass; he studied it carefully, then took out his phone and took a picture of it.

‘Passport?’ asked the officer. She handed that over, too, and Gennady saw from its cover that she was a French citizen. The officer examined it and took another photograph.

‘Did you take any pictures of the machine on the low-loader?’ asked the officer. His tone was polite but firm. Gennady hadn’t been quite sure before, but now it was beyond doubt: the officer was no local. He had a Moscow accent.

‘
Non, non
. I were at deathbed this afternoon – sorry, this morning. The deathbed of the womans killed by the bombings.’ Her Russian, thought Gennady, was atrocious.

‘You mean the funeral this morning?’ said the officer. ‘May I have a look at your camera, just to double-check?’

She and the officer looked at the monitor, going through the images she had taken that morning – a coffin being lowered into the ground, a priest officiating, an old woman sobbing, the crowd solemn – and pictures from before that, scenes from the local hospital, of a child with an amputated leg, an old man crying, a ward full of young soldiers, a single shot of a soldier with a shock of white hair, his eyes bandaged.

Satisfied, the army officer nodded. Ahead, the machine on tank tracks turned a corner and disappeared. He returned her press card and passport, said thank you and got in the jeep, which sped off in the direction of the machine.

‘What was that thing – a Grad launcher?’ she asked Gennady.

‘No,’ said Gennady. ‘It was a BUK-M1 anti-aircraft missile launcher.’

His Russian was too fast for her; she looked nonplussed. He mimed a plane flying, his hands outstretched like wings, and then he pointed up and went ‘BOOM!’

‘Oh, I get it,’ she said. ‘How do you knew?’

Gennady’s French was rusty, but her Russian was so bad it was painful. ‘
J’étais un général dans l’armée soviétique
.’

They switched to French.

‘That officer, he was local?’ she asked.

‘No, from Moscow.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive. Around here they say their aitches funny. He talked like a proper Muscovite.’

‘So the crew of that thing—’

‘The BUK-M1 anti-aircraft missile launcher.’

‘They’re not local, they’re Russian army?’

Gennady nodded.

‘What would they use it for?’ she asked.

‘The rebels don’t have an air force, there’s no way they can defend themselves from the danger from the air. So the BUK – it means “beech” in Russian – is our reply. Under the netting are four rockets that can fly at Mach 2. The crew point one at the sky and it chases what is up there, doesn’t hit the target directly but runs alongside it. When the missile blows up, its shrapnel peppers the fuselage of the target and the kinetic energy of a jet fighter or transport plane does the rest. It can hit anything, up to eighty thousand feet.’

‘Only military planes?’

‘Theoretically, yes.’

She swept a stray coil of hair out of her eyes and studied him more closely.

‘Theoretically, yes. But practically?’

‘In practice, in war, people make stupid mistakes. In 1983 we shot a Korean jet out of the sky. We thought it was a spy plane. It wasn’t. The dead? Almost three hundred. In 1988 the Americans had a warship in the Gulf, making sure the Iranians were behaving themselves. The American sailors saw something in the sky, flying towards them fast, they got panicky and they fired. It was a passenger jet flying from Tehran to Dubai. Almost three hundred people dead. The army sent me to Iran, to lead our investigation.’

He stopped and stared at the sky.

‘Go on.’

‘The small coffins . . . I’d never seen so many small coffins before. Sixty-six of the dead were children. So I hope those guys with the BUK, I hope they know what they’re doing.’

‘Can I ask you something personal, General?’

‘I used to be a general. Now I’m just Gennady.’

‘I’m Marie. What are you doing here?’

He hesitated. ‘Helping out.’

‘Doing what?’

He shook his head, signalling the end of that line of conversation. ‘Marie, may I ask you for a favour?’

‘Sure.’

‘You went to the local hospital today, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘May I have a look at the pictures you took?’

She handed over the camera and Gennady clicked through the images until he found what he was looking for, thanked her and returned the camera.

COUNTY DONEGAL

R
eilly abandoned ship first. As the
SleepEasy
got within a fair distance of the stone quay, the dog leapt, almost misjudged it, and had to scrabble up some steps. Once on solid ground, he rocketed up and down the quay, tail swishing to and fro, to and fro.

Katya was the next to jump, forgoing her signature daintiness and landing with a thump on terra firma. From the cockpit, Joe cried out in complaint: ‘Hey, will neither of youse help me tie her up?’

The dog had found the bones of a dead seagull and had forgotten all about the boat. Katya shook her head violently and spat in the general direction of the sea. ‘Flying? They rip you off. Airports stink of plastic and the lights are too bright, the shops are full of shit and everything costs too much. They make you take most of your clothes off because of that bastard Bin Laden, you queue up and then you are squeezed into a little box for hours with only fat people either side of you. I fucking love flying. I will never be rude about flying ever again.’

With that, she walked off to examine some lobster pots.

So Joe had to do it all himself: reversing the engine thrust so the
SleepEasy
gently nudged into the quay, then securing her aft, then running forwards and tying the bowline to a ring on the quay. He ducked into the cabin, emerged with a bag containing all of their possessions, and stepped off the boat.

The
SleepEasy
was in a sorry state. Her mainmast had been so twisted out of shape it best resembled a crooked tree in the magic forest in Walt Disney’s
Snow White
; the Plexiglas windscreen shielding the wheelhouse had cracked from side to side; the nylon fabric covering the cockpit and the sides of the
SleepEasy
was tattered shreds, as was the mainsail; the foam benches had vanished overboard; the rubber dinghy forward had also disappeared and there was a concavity in the foredeck the size of a large sofa.