The Drop

‘Even Finney,’ he continued, ‘I mean, he was a cunt and everything but he didn’t deserve that. It’s no way to go is it?’
    ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s no way to go.’
    I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about anything. Soon we’d be at the farm house.
    What is it about certain nationalities and drinking? I mean, Geordies like a drink as much as the next man but they don’t go about it with the fervour of some countries. It’s not their religion. If they have one at all it’s football not drink. The Irish are different. They sink booze like they are trying to fill a deep, despairing void in their lives.
    With the Russians, I’d always assumed they drank because there was sod all to do under the communists but they’ve been free of them for years, so it has to be something deeper than that, otherwise they’d have stopped when the wall came down and everyone got cable. It’s more like a national pastime to them. I dated a Russian girl once. She taught me a phrase ‘Do Dna’. The Russians say it to each other when they raise a glass. It means ‘to the bottom’. No half measures with these guys.
    So it was no great surprise to me when Palmer reported back, ‘they make party,’ he said in a joke Russian accent, ‘slugging back the vodka. Guess they thought with Bobby and Finney out of the way, it was all over.’
    ‘Then we’ll leave them to it,’ I said, ‘until the morning, nice and early.’
    I’d always known it would be handy having an ex-special forces guy on our team. I don’t know anyone else who would have calmly climbed from his car and walked across the fields in the pitch darkness to that farmhouse, watching close enough to see those sickos glugging back their vodka, then cheerfully reported back to me.
    We left while it was still dark, Palmer leading the way, crouched low and moving silently across the fields to the farm house. The rest of us followed on behind, me wincing at every sound we made. By now I could have sworn Vitaly and his mates were capable of hearing every blade of grass we trampled.
    There wasn’t much moon but if they’d bothered with sentries they’d have seen dark shapes breaking the horizon behind us and we would never have got close enough. Luckily for us, they must have thought their job was all but done. I never took my eyes off that farmhouse as it gradually drew nearer, its slate-grey walls growing bigger with every step.
    We had to resist the temptation to run, knowing we needed to be silent. Instead we followed Palmer’s lead, walking slowly and fanning out, so we didn’t make one big, easy target.
    The last thirty yards or so were the worst, out in the open with no cover to dive behind, knowing all it would take was some pissed-up Ivan stumbling out of the farmhouse for a piss or a cig and it would all be over. As soon as his mates heard him screaming blue murder, we wouldn’t have a chance in the open.
    I could hear my own breathing, which sounded incredibly loud to me in my overwrought state, my breath coming out in plumes of white in front of me against the cold air. My heart was thumping in my chest again. What if I had messed this up? What if Palmer wasn’t half as good as we both thought he was and the Russians were better? We’d be dead that’s what - and if we were really lucky it would be quick. But if we weren’t… Christ I was scared.
    We made it to the relative cover of the hedge and stopped, hunching down low. Palmer held up his hand and we all froze, quiet as we could be, while he had a listen. The farmhouse was silent. Maybe they were asleep already. Was it too much to hope that they’d all passed out drunk in there? Probably.
    Palmer patted Danny quietly on the shoulder and pointed to a gap in the bushes a few yards along from where we were. Danny nodded and moved silently away towards his firing point. I’d never seen him so alert before.
    Kinane and his boys knew what to do. Palmer had given them their instructions and, thankfully, the big man had deferred to the former soldier’s experience in these matters. Kinane and his sons got to their feet and walked round the hedge into the open farmyard. I watched them make their way with exaggerated care across the wide open space. Christ, this was worse than crossing the field. A little sliver of light coming out of the farmhouse illuminated a section of the land they were forced to cross. They were moving like children playing a game of Simon Says,