In Which Sarge Describes the Shadows He Saw That Night...

Cpl.,

When I left you last, I was chewing gum, holed up in the junior efficiency apartment of Aglionby, the French money launderer and saboteur who, as you might remember, was behind the failed explosions at Harbour Grace a few years back. I was in Tallinn with the snow just starting to fall. Earlier I had found a few bottles and some lighter fluid, as I said, Aglionby was not naive. With those two bottles beneath the window I also had a rifle and a coffee cup half-full of bullets, and I was digging through them, feeling their cool smoothness roll across my fingers, waiting for the shadows to become men; I also had my knife but I wished for more. The shadows would form up, I knew, it was just a matter of time. I figured seven to twelve men, probably locals, former army, led, perhaps, by a worthwhile kill or two.

Time passes slowly but goes quickly, one of those contradictions we get used to until we're leaned up against a scarred wall in the Balkans wondering where the death is. I didn't dare turn on a light, the darkness grew and the street emptied. I looked out the window and tried to listen for signs of a gathering. Would they give me the night? Twilight is brief this time of year, this far north. Then I thought about it, there was absolutely no movement and hadn't been for the last four or five minutes. From one end of the street I could see construction signs set up, blinking a slow beat against the reflecting snow. Odd.

Odd and disturbing. I chanced a closer look, trying not to silouette myself in the window. Everything I did was slow. I rolled under the window, silently thanking Aglionby's professionalism; he had chosen a stone construction, one of the few in Tallinn. There was only one accessible entrance into the building, and I had a good vantage point of anyone trying to enter. There were only eight apartments spread across the six floors. This fifth floor shared an apartment but it had been empty since I first made my entrance there earlier in the day.

I knew they would make an appearance, and if I was kept busy it would only take a few of them to make my life miserable. At this point in the game I stopped thinking of death and fate, I thought of my training, back in Banff and then across the globe, instinct took over and I felt as smooth as the bullet I earlier rubbed between my fingers. I thought about what I must do. The time was now, soon there would only be the essence of things; I had that clarity of vision one only seems to find in combat. It is the opposite of the junk, but it is its equal at least. Both highs sometime play for keeps, I could not let this night be that play: that double zero. The wheel was turning now.

I finally saw movement, two men, so where were the others? I waited. Why let them know they were right yet? I wanted to instill some doubt that I was, in fact, at Aglionby's before I revealed myself. My rifle was ready, Aglionby's body filled the air with stink and with the radiators coming on, the smell almost doubled, there was also the stink of my near-failure to accompany it: the twisted spoon lay under an end table. The apartment smelled like some Moscow den of iniquity; down the street the men's movements were slow and deliberate. Always covering each other, always keeping to the shadows. I saw another pair of men on the near side of the street coming from the other end; they were covering the other group and they were good. Everybody was covering everybody else and I leaned against the wall under a picture of some saint and just waited. They set up zones of fire and made hand gestures at each other. I understood that they too, were also waiting. The sky was dark, the snow, heavier now, fell around them in great swirls.

An SUV pulled up directly in front of the building, undoubtedly plated. The time for subtlety was over on both sides and it was time to even the odds on mine. Carefully I selected a target, the most exposed, the easiest; they would come out of the shadows with his death. It was quick. My bullet returned ten others and the apartment exploded with sound; a bullet slammed into the corpse with a thud and Aglionby jerked a danse macabre as two others followed. With Aglionby, two dead. Automatic fire cut through the night. Christmases along the avenue were being ruined, the apartment disintegrated around me, Aglionby lay there, torn up by bullets. I stayed low, the window was gone. I had another good shot and took it. He had gotten careless and it cost him. Was it time to move yet? This celebration of birth had turned into a feast of death, I readied one of the molotovs.

With the window gone the toss was easy, and with the explosion the street seemed to dance in the night. I fired into the explosion and the building seemed to shake with return fire but at least no RPGs. Perhaps they had some insane idea they would take me alive, but my cyanide pill allayed any fears of that. It was kill or be killed, the kind of fight that brings out tooth and claw. I would use the last molotov to cover my escape, I hoped to ignite one of the parked cars. I fired randomly a few bullets and rolling again under the window, looked above and saw where my aim must be true. While I was looking I thought about the syringe that I had discarded when I threw the spoon to the floor. Had that been less than an hour ago? Well less. Quickly I tried to see if I could find the syringe in the gathering night, an occasional bullet crashed into the walls around me. They thought they had me now.

There it was, among the splinters of glass, rock and wood, a broken lamp next to it.

I would fill it with bleach, one last weapon for hand to hand if it came to that, then I would throw the molotov, grab the corpse and push my way into the hall wishing for a prayer. There had been better plans but in Tallinn I always ended up clawing to survive. Briefly I thought of her face, I thought of the last time, afterwards. The light on the ceiling from outside.

They put spotlights outside trying to blind me and illuminate me. They felt comfortable waiting, after all, I would run out of bullets first and then they had me every way. I let myself sweat for a second.

Then I fired a couple blind shots to give them something to think about and picked my way to Aglionby's sink. They didn't bother responding. I was a little worried about that, but I wanted to let them know it wasn't time to get any wild ideas about the front door just yet. My hands were shaking as I worked the bleach from below the sink into the syringe. To a junkie, bleach is the closest thing, sometimes, to a hospital as there is to get. Otherwise it's blue. Had that been us? Her? I leaned back up against the wall for just a second, gathering myself, the next two minutes would determine whether I ever saw the sun again. Perhaps I prayed, a brief vision of the Virgin surrounded by bloody penitents full of fool games begging for a worthwhile life somewhere done in stained glass and then I let fly with the bottle toward an old Zapor and fired into the car with five bullets and made a run for it. I heard the car explode and then screaming, bullets ripped the apartment in an onslaught and there was crashing and falling around me as I grabbed the bleeding lump of Aglionby that was to be my shield when I forced my way into the hall and stairwell.

What kind of shield was that? I just hoped if Aglionby had to stop a bullet there might be bone between me and it. He would stop a knife well if there were someone waiting right inside the stair doors, which I thought there might be. I kicked the door out with one kick, and moved crouched into the hall listening to the bullets whine about the apartment breaking what was broken yet again and again. It was like Africa.

The hall was empty, broken lights flickered, from above I could hear a man yelling and cursing his luck, but there would be no ambulance, a few bribes had seen to that. The yelling stopped, as if he too understood that now, and there were whimpers mixed with curses and pleas in the clumsy Estonian of Tallinn, polluted as it is by its many visiters. By the time I reached the door to the stairwell, there was silence, Aglionby was slick against me, my sweat mingled with his caked blood and I readied the rifle and held the body a little away from me, crouching beneath the stiffening body so that my face and chest lay nestled against the ribs and pelvis of the man I had killed. The building was silent. I knew they were in the stairwell, and they knew I knew it. But I had no choice, with the other ones on the street waiting for me like a second team. I thought of those servants I had read about years ago in some history class; they would gather from the river the dishes the masters threw into it after eating so they could do it all again the next day. It struck me as funny and I let myself laugh as I pushed the corpse up against the door, twisted the knob and more fell into the stair case.

Immediately two shots, from above and below, rang out. I felt the reverberation as Aglionby's face was obliterated and there was a second, a second I exploited for all it was worth, as I clutched the body and jumped over the stairwell at the man below me who perhaps only saw a leaping, headless corpse before Aglionby and I fell onto him and I put my knife into the mercenary's gut although I think his back was already broken. I rolled off the corpses and picked up my rifle which had fallen when I reached for my knife and shot down and then up; in my adrenalin I squeezed off seven or eight rounds which irritated me. But I killed another and could hear the man above me wailing, that made five down, perhaps seven more, perhaps only two more, which would mean the building was clear but I wasn't counting on it. The stairwell was quiet, but I was still on the third floor, with all kinds of opportunities to meet a careless death. I only had a few bullets left at this point but I didn't want to reach for the dead man's gun, from where he was, if the man above was only badly wounded, he could put one in me if I moved toward the gun. I edged my way down. There was silence.

Then I was on the second floor, with the second team waiting below and maybe a man moving behind me from above, unless the wounded man was the only one there. There was no door here, just a short hall leading to an apartment. My veins pushed adrenalin through my body and I fought to think through the rush. In the early evening I fought the endless night. They wouldn't wait in the lobby when they could wait outside with grenades. There was no need to be subtle now.

At that moment, for some reason, I thought of the time Ranger and I had first confronted Deseilligny. He must have been on my mind because of the last communique I'd had with Ranger, but I remembered it had been in Ulan Bator, we thought we'd flagged down one of the many unmarked taxis and instead Ulan Bator had its first known drive-by. It had been a joke even among enemies. I had laughed about it once, a year or so later with Deseilligny when we called each other names in that Freetown hardware store, and I laughed now. What absurdity, this! If Death waited, I would have stories for it; above I heard the squawk of a radio go unanswered, outside they must have been marking the living and the dead which perhaps meant that nobody had checked in. Or it meant that someone had and they were trying to decoy me. Regardless, I had to get to the street now and I was out of brilliant ideas. Through the lobby there was no hope, through the second floor living room window offered perhaps even less. Silence settled in like a jeer. They had me alright, but perhaps there would be something in the second floor apartment. It was a better bet than the lobby. I picked the lock and moved in.

Now, I was a shadow.

Nobody wanted to give away anything, I looked out into the street. The apartment had been empty, from the look of it, somebody was visiting mother in the country for Christmas. I was happy there were no terrified locals to give away my position. A few things had gone right now, I could count on no more. The shadows and the night had fully bled into each other now, the falling snow picked up a few tendrils of ambient light and then I heard the slightest echo of a sound from the front door I had closed behind me. A jiggling of tumblers already unlocked. I readied my knife and moved toward the noise, becoming the man's fate. As he slowly entered I brought him down with a knee and a hand to the mouth. I pressed my face close to his, creating the odd intimacy between vanquished and vanquisher.

"Tell me," I whispered, "and you will die from lightning, otherwise, it will be the cat and the mouse."

"How many of you?"

Slowly I started to remove my hand from his mouth, my knee reached up under his throat.

"Eight. Eight! Please I want to live! Please!" A local.

More than willing to kill for a new car, or a trip to the Black Sea resorts, but I took pity.

"Who?"

"What? I don't..."

"Oh, come on," I took my knife out, "Who?" The whisper now perilously soft.

"I do not know, a man. A man with red hair! A very thin man! Very tall!" He spoke Estonian with a kirderanniku accent, from further to the north and east. A sailor's son maybe.

He continued in a sigh, "10,000 kroons." It was still silent outside, I felt his jacket vibrate, still I was rooted to the spot.

It couldn't be.

Toynbee?

"Answer it," I told him.

He spoke softly into the radio. Would he chance a distress code? He checked in, said he was still looking through the apartments on the third floor. There was a short curse and the radio broke off. I told him I had to hurt him, that I would let him live and knocked him out with a cuff to the head. Quickly I secured him with a sheet and a pillowcase and grabbed the radio. I threw him in a closet next to the front door. Nobody else was in the building, I had perhaps two minutes before they would realize I was no longer in the building but I needed to get the prize. Where was the prize waiting? One of them would know. Clearly they would send the least important into the building.

I ran to the roof. The wind had picked up since the morning. The spotlights shone up past me and I jumped from one roof to another, until I felt the radio vibrate, I found a drainpipe and slipped to the street down past where they waited for me. I began to double back, it was my only chance. The explosions surprised me. They brought bigger toys than I expected and I wondered idly if my prisoner had lived and if so, how much of him had? I never found out.

I spotted them quickly now and took aim, I would have to kill one and hope the other lived. I shot for the head first but it went wide, the next bullet traced into one of the men's guts and before the other could fire I had put one in his left knee and his gun had flown from his hands. A lucky shot. Cautiously I advanced with my knife drawn, my adrenalin pounding so that my heart felt bathed in powerlines.

There they were, a lump of shadows against the snow covered ground. One groaned, he was tough I could tell, the other convulsed. It is never pretty, but the ugliness of pain always surprises me. I had tossed my rifle away, it was empty, and my right arm hung loose with the knife, I advanced slowly. They were both still now, having seen me or heard me.

"Tell me," I said, "where can I thank your employer for his gift of bullets?" The one I had shot in the belly laughed derisively, I recognized he was Libet, one of Mercerier's foot soldiers, I put my knife into his throat, cutting his laugh short.

"Now tell me," I repeated to the one still alive, "where can I find your employer?"

"Aller se faire voir chez les grecs," he said, and lunged at me with a knife of his own. I turned him aside but my knife caught in a strap of his pack and flew off and he came back at me with curses. Without thinking, I reached into my pocket as he jumped from his one good leg at me and I plunged the syringe into his neck and pushed in the bleach as I knocked him aside. He lay quickly dead, and the snow fell heavier, already beginning to cover them as I made my way down the street with the sound of sirens from far away approaching closer.

This is how I came to leave Tallinn with the idea Toynbee might be the mole. I have no proof save perhaps the voice of a man alive or dead, I do not know. I must go back briefly to Tallinn to see her, and I will make then some final disruptions of the French shell game here, but then I must clear my name. I wonder what Ottawa thinks of all this? It used to be that I knew things like that.

*** **********

Smitty does have talent with the goose, it's good to hear he's finally started to move on; Cordula affected him greatly and her death was truly a sad one. As for the photographs, turn your eyes away from Deseilligny’s remains, perhaps there is something that eludes us there in the periphery. Or perhaps we are missing something in its absence. Deseilligny truly had no equal as a fighter, his willingness to claw, bite and tear during hand to hand combat made him a nightmare, and a worthy enemy.

I am tired now, Cpl., and must close my eyes a bit. Once again I finish a missive on a train. Perhaps in years to come, instead of dreaming about the faces of the dead and the scars of the earth, I will dream of trains.

with best wishes in the new year,

Sarge

In Which Sarge Traces the Bullet...

Cpl.,

Again Estonia: the old sow of a country full of guns and the smell of its occupiers, from the Swedes and the Poles to the Nazis and the Soviets. I made it into Virtsu looking over my shoulder and I knew Tallinn was next. Tallinn of the dreams and the doubts, a fog in my imagination out of which I could conjure the wonders and the terrors of what I have known. It is in the oddest places that we stash our hopes and fears, and while there is little anymore of faith, what faith there is, why does it end up where it does?

From Virtsu, its corrupted shores slick with industrial ooze and the sky above coughing with smoke, I took an afternoon train to Tallinn so I could get in before the shadows I feared, before they might meld with the night. Cpl., I tell you now, I did not want to be there but we go where the trail is. And it is the only way, after all, nobody wants to be where we end up, but we want to be the ones who go there. Ranger himself ends up in the jungles of one continent and you and I in the sewers of another. This whole time though, I feel weighted down by the oppression of a conscience that doubts I can be the tool of a righteous cause. I long now for the relative stability of my life in Africa, where Nwargo was always sure to take measure of my moods and find ways of placating me. I am over the edge here and of course, SHE is here. Well, she had to be somewhere but I thought I would be safe in Riga. That somehow in this desperate scramble, the one place I wouldn't end up was that place I dream of when I don't dream of Africa. Fate mocks however, and I'm sure the sound most of us will hear at our deaths is a soft rustle of laughter: here I am, in Tallinn.

I avoided Tallinn, looked for anywhere else I could make my way to the truth, but that time is over. The old city, the dignified port with it's twisting and cobbled roads, the undercurrent everywhere of the idea that anything here could happen. All the nations come to Tallinn, though they would like to pretend they are of other, larger, more sophisticated locales - when the fights break out at the bars near the wharves the business of nations is settled there; Tallinn itself is concerned with larger matters, and right now there are a lot of guns in Tallinn. Where there are guns, there is money, and where there are both, there are the French Separatists.

This is where the deals go down, and where I thought I might be happy one day.

Those days are no more, but there it is. From Riga I knew it would be to Tallinn because everybody there wanted to pretend it wasn't so. The informants were saying the Black Sea and the agents who sell are still insisting on Moscow. Moscow? That haunt of overripe discos and the paunches of 30 year old billionaires retreating into the infantile antics of the supremely pampered with their private armies like so many Tybalts and not a Mercutio among them? I have nothing but disgust for anybody who could convince me there is anything of value for me there at all. In the back of their voices I found the whisperings of Tallinn that, in their chatter, they desperately tried to mask, but finally, one night, by a fountain in Riga I found the one person who told me that what I heard was not my own fears and hesitancies in those whispers, but the almost indistinguishable sound of truth. To hesitate any longer, the informant said, meant discovery of my actual identity with those who could bring death. I had trusted this particular informant for years though he had never given me much in the way of usable information. I cultivated the relationship out of respect and out of hope, and now there was the pay-off, he knew I had no friends now anywhere near: he was it. No place that was not out in the cold, and he knew too the Canadians and the French both, being himself a lonely Spaniard. He is a captain of a freightor that knows its way too well around places like Vladivostick, Murmansk and the Orkneys, and of course he, like me, knows the fever of Africa.

He told me Calrissian was being filled with doubts by some of the politicos at Ottawa, particularly one, meanwhile the French are angry I disrupted the pipelines they had established in Chad that stretched out through Sierra Leone, the Côte d'Ivoire and Liberia and are working hard to pay their respects. Now, was the time, he advised, to enter into the den of the lions. It was how I found myself on a train trying to pretend it was the most natural thing in the world to look for death, and also, that it was the most natural thing in the world for a Commando, battle-tested as I was, to be tracing my tears onto the begrimed windows of a slow-moving train.

With all this information of the Spanish captain's to digest, I thought instead of an afternoon not so long ago really, spent wandering the shores and then the forests just outside Tallinn with her. I fell into sentimental reveries of what might have been, these last few weeks on the edge of my thoughts like so many darker clouds that the fog of my reverie kept momentarily at bay. Perhaps I allowed myself, in that brief moment, to grieve for the self that was lost to this calling, to this training, and finally to my own weaknesses which drive me and push me more than they should.

I never got used to the plosive sounds of the Russian-made rails though, and along the way I was finally jarred from my wandering thoughts, and now I am here in Tallinn, already the whisperings I am hearing tell me this is where I needed to be all the time. Slowly I feel the confidence of the professional, doing what he must do, returning to me. It has been a busy evening.

Tell Calrissian this, though he won't believe you yet, there is a mole. Deep and trusted, a comfortable mole but one not complacent. Tell him I am in Asia if you can. I know it is risky to you, but we risk for each other my friend. And the favor I ask now might well save both of us.

If you don't hear from me in the next week, make sure what I have enclosed here makes it to Nwargo, who besides you, is my most trusted confidant. Tell also, to Ranger, that Mercerier has a weakness for rare editions of Molière and the French Symbolists, especially Verlaine.

Wasn't it Verlaine who wrote of the autumn song? It is winter now, and my heart must steel itself, for the buffeting of fate has begun, and though I progress well and have some optimism, I know too the furies are about: my own, and theirs. My misgivings keep me in a state of sleeplessness, and I fear what mistakes in judgment I have already made.

All about us the clocks are against us, but we have been in tighter spots, and if the time for zeroes is now, the game has been a good one, and I think more than fair to me.

Cpl., I remain

your most trusting servant,

Sarge

In Which Sarge Berates the Unknown and Asks What Is It?...

Cpl.,

Was Calrissian behind the debacle that has become Klaipėda? Hardly was Newfield's body cold, guts like torn snakes mixing marrow and sinew from the carved out hollow of his belly, my own ammunition expended and the awful silence and beauty of the world suddenly like a living postcard surrounding me, Newfield's face curiously preserved, his eyes registering nothing until I shut them that I wondered and I ask again: was Calrissian behind this? It was hours later then, the sun almost up, the night a hallucination of violence, despair and rage. What was I to make of this, that was deeper than failure yet not so artistic that it could be called tradgey? Closing his eyes to the rising sun, it was the final gesture of that night of blind swords.

How could "The Carpenter" know the watchword was "Tuesday" and where was Halliday when the noise went down? The weeks of silence have been difficult but I don't know who to trust and I won't lie, I skipped out of Kretinga and hid out in Petersburg for a week before making a trip to Prague to see about the latest from Mercerier. I am afraid he is somewhere in Mexico right now and has already been to Quebec twice this month. Armed with that knowledge I know I must continue to Riga once again, where the demons are and the dangers of the flesh are equal to those of the job. Still, I think the laundering operation has been compromised and if everything runs through Riga and we push there, well...it's only a matter of time before they make a real mistake and we can shake somebody higher on the tree than even Mercerier. The Canuck menace runs hard through the veins of Canada, and the terror that they can bring to bare is awesome to contemplate, but in Riga, in Riga I think we can make something happen.

But who can I trust?

When the longshoreman calling himself Pyotr suddenly ran off leaving Newfield and I alone on the empty piers surrounded by the warehouses of this Baltic waystation, right away it was obvious, but my pleas for back-up yielded only static, and though my guns made souls that night, and my knife marked one more, I could not save that rookie of Banff. That same night, in a fury, I burned four of their delis and though I knew that my lack of subtlety would let them know they had taken the field, I would not give them those platforms and over the following week, though half of Klaipėda sought to erase me, I killed four of the owners who had collaborated so baldly in their infernal schemes. I wanted to make the soft underbelly of the complicit clench and taste fear and pain the way Newfield had. I did not hear him die, the sheer number of guns made a cacophony drowning out that solemn moment, I knew only that suddenly instead of being pinned from the north, I was surrounded, and it was then that I simply chose a warehouse and began to run, several bullets grazed me and I have two new scars, one of which should fade, I used a flash grenade as a diversion and if I hadn't had that? I don't know, but thankfully, somehow, I stumbled upon a platform where I set up a nice field of fire, gained an opportunity to withdraw and since then have seen too much of Eastern Europe with the idea that I was mere minutes away from ambush and death, and from which side?

Am I betrayed from within? Where are Halliday and Stewart? Why has Calrissian tried to call me home through Tallinn when he knows that a strong push now might weaken them to the point of desperation? It's all his people there and none of my own contacts. Perhaps I am paranoid, but the way things stand, I cannot afford to trust him, nor anyone. I have ignored the signs and the commands. I am, as they say, off the grid and it is lonely here. I have grown a beard, my hair is long and I try to look American, wear Nikes and t-shirts that advertise places that don't exist; I take pictures of buildings and eat McDonald's. If I see Halliday and it doesn't look good, do I fire? What if he was drawn away by a feint from some other source? What don't I know? These are trying days my friend. I know you must also dance with the possibilities of betrayal and even now take up a job that offers little in the way of accomplishing what we must accomplish, but I know too a mole lurks, and I know also that what happened at Klaipėda was no slip on our part, but something more sinister. For one needle now I would beg the world, but it is easier to withstand the torment, because I know that if I was to taste bliss, I would be hunted down in a minute. I know if Calrissian or anybody near him is the mole, every supplier of the sweet elixer from Petersburg to Berlin down to Athens has my specifications and promises of rewards if I'm turned in. That they would die like me, like rats, I am sure they are blind to that!

Take care my friend, I am to Riga and there I will begin to make sense of this. That I will see her? Well, if we are to make the Canucks taste fear and desperation, we must make our own plunges, we must be desperate ourselves. Not all my demons come from the sharp edge of the needle...some are sharper than even that, and go much further than the vein!

with regards and brotherhood I am

yours,

Sarge