Exit wound, p.20
Exit Wound, page 20
He took a couple of seconds as his head churned up whatever nightmare he’d been part of.
Julian was back. He’d got them. I closed down.
‘It is the same today. If you want to stay alive when you go low-level, then you need to chuck out flares – lots of them. But you can’t dispense flares all the time. You don’t have enough of them.
‘Since the Balkans, the Russians have designed a missile able to discriminate between the flares that aircraft dispense and the heat-source – the engine. Instead of being seduced away from the aircraft towards the flare, the missile examines the flare, rejects it, and looks for a darker heat-source, if you like, less intense – the aircraft itself.’
Stefan’s hands were up in the air once more.
‘The missile literally climbs a “ladder”, rejecting flares, locking back onto the aircraft, rejecting another flare and so on – until it hits the aircraft. That’s why the black flare was developed.’
‘So they burst out of the aircraft a different colour?’
‘No, they look the same as normal flares, but they have a different temperature range – they don’t burn like magnesium flares, they mimic the heat signature of an aircraft much more accurately. So now, when the missile rejects the regular flare and goes looking for the darker heat-source, it sees the black flare and goes for that instead.’
‘Could it take down an Apache?’
He knew where I meant. His hands were down and the smile had disappeared. ‘If they weren’t bullshitting you, it would be able to take down anything that is out there below ten thousand feet.’
‘Nice talking with you, mate.’
We shook.
Ali and the Paykan were waiting for me outside.
On my way out, I broke open the USB stick and swallowed the memory. If these lads had spent years putting shredded bits of paper back together, finding out what was on a smashed stick would be a piece of piss.
Stefan Wissenbach would be making sure his people, not DieWelt, knew what we both did. They, too, had people out there. If an Apache or fast jet was taken out, we could no longer assume control of the air. Worse still, if a C-130 full of troops got dropped, the people back home would go ape-shit. It could all be over by Christmas. Then the dramas would really start to kick off.
I powered up my local mobile as I walked towards the exit. ‘Hello, mate. You get the car parked up where I showed you?’
I didn’t want Ali to have a call from my sat mobile registered on his. Better to use local – and how much more local could you get than his dad’s machine? It wasn’t as if he’d need it today, unless he had an urgent appointment with his dealer.
77
We sat in the front of the taxi in what looked like a bus lay-by but had become an overstuffed car park. Anywhere vehicles could stop in this town, they did.
IranEx was just under a hundred away, right in front of us. That was why we were here, to have a trigger on the entrance and wait for the Merc. With baseball caps tilted over our eyes and leaning well back in our seats we looked like loads of others, just getting our heads down for a moment or two before grappling with the challenges of the day.
I’d told Ali I was doing an M3C story. I was going to follow the management, find out where they were staying and try for an interview. They’d turned me down yesterday, but that wasn’t unusual in our neck of the woods.
He nodded as if it all made sense, but I could almost hear that mind of his ticking over. He was going along with it because I seemed to be offering him a future.
Ali stared through the windscreen, concentrating on the traffic as I watched the entrance. People and vehicles streamed in and out.
‘Jim, you will email me about the job when you get back to England? Do you think your editor will like my work?’
I couldn’t work out if he was questioning his own capabilities or doubting me.
‘I will take classes to become a good journalist. Will you tell your editor that? I will work very hard.’
‘I will, mate, don’t worry. I’m sure everything will be OK.’
Now I was doing the worrying. Giving a guy a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel only to snatch it away was an arsehole’s trick. I knew what it felt like, waiting on a promise that never came good. My step-dad was always promising us a trip to Margate or to the fun fair. I’d wait for the day to arrive, my heart racing, excited to be doing stuff that other kids did all the time, but nothing ever happened. I’d start to doubt myself, checking I had the right day, waiting for him to come back from the pub, but he never did.
‘Highway To The Danger Zone’, the theme tune to Top Gun, erupted beside me. Ali flushed pink with embarrassment. ‘Sorry, Jim – I cannot seem to erase it.’ He flipped open his mobile. He sounded guarded at first, but there was a rapid thaw. He was soon waffling away. Whoever it was, they’d called with good news.
I spotted the wrestler’s vehicle, held in traffic, trying to cut across the road to IranEx. Majid was up front and looking very pissed off. He, too, was waffling away at warp speed into his mobile. His spare hand jabbed into space, as though he wanted to hit whoever was on the other end.
Ali closed down. ‘Qasim and Adel. They say the Dassault is back, Jim. It’s just landed.’
‘Let’s head towards the airport. Can they get any pictures?’
On second thoughts, that would be a mistake. ‘No, no, don’t ask them.’ I didn’t want to get them thinking too hard. ‘You’re all mates again, are you?’
He tucked his phone into his pocket. ‘It is good that it has come back, Jim, no?’
‘Very good, mate. They’ll call if something happens?’
We could be anything up to two hours away.
We were fighting through the southbound traffic when Top Gun kicked off again.
‘Salam?’ He listened, jabbered away for a few seconds, then turned to me. ‘The Dassault has been met by a car. A black Mercedes. It has already left.’
78
The taxi sat in the shadow of a small avenue of trees on the city outskirts. Behind us, a scrapyard was surrounded by a rusty barbed-wire fence. Piles of old cars were stacked on top of each other next to mountains of worn-out tyres. Either the place was abandoned or the people who worked there had decided to stay out of the sun. Even the dogs were lying low. The birds chirping in the branches above us were the only sign of life. A couple had taken a dump on our car’s windscreen.
Ahead of us the heat haze shimmered over the only road into Tehran from IKIA.
I sat behind the wheel, with Ali’s ball cap still on my head and his aeroplane-geek binos on my lap. My eyes were glued to the steady stream of cars heading north.
The contrast between the bright, reflected sunlight on the white desert sand and the shade beneath the trees made it almost impossible to see us from the road. It was the perfect trigger point.
Ali sat beside me, flapping but not saying so. He now knew for sure that this wasn’t anything to do with journalism.
‘It’s not just about taking pictures of planes. It’s about finding out what people are doing with them.’
He nodded, but I could see last night’s dreams fading and fear taking their place. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll show you the ropes. My editor already knows I couldn’t crack this story without you.’ I studied another blob of black coming our way.
The less he knew the better, for his own good. He was staying with me for now anyway, whether he liked it or not. I needed him and his car. If he sparked up and said he didn’t like it, he was going to spend the next few hours in the boot.
Gold, Altun, M3C, dark flares and now something, or more likely someone, arriving from Pakistan. I didn’t know what these fuckers were up to yet, but it looked increasingly like it had to do with Brit, US and even German blood staining the Afghan desert.
I adjusted the focus. The black blob had become a Merc. Its side windows were blacked out. ‘Here we go, mate. I got a possible.’
I fired up the engine. The Merc was two up in front, both with gigs on. I couldn’t make out who they were, just the silhouettes and shades.
As it drove past the trees, I prepared to follow. ‘Got it. That’s ours.’
I slid my sun-gigs on and pulled out.
The Paykan’s wheels hit the tarmac and I pushed my foot down as far as the fifteen-year-old pedal would let me. There was no reason to talk to Ali. I had more important things to do now.
The traffic slowed and thickened as we entered the city. I could see the Merc four vehicles in front. Its green curtains and bent mobile antenna were as clearly in view as they had been in the binos.
We juddered up the road. Traffic-lights somewhere up ahead were letting no more than three cars through at a time. Mopeds whizzed in and out through the smallest of gaps.
With vehicles between us and his rear-view blocked by the chintzy green curtains, we were hidden. We’d have a problem if he turned and I was held, but that’s just how it goes. I was more concerned right now about keeping my head down to help the ball cap and gigs do their job – hiding my face.
We edged forward. The jam wasn’t a problem for me. Out on the open road with just four gears and an old Paykan engine would have been far worse.
Up ahead, the traffic went from bunched to more or less gridlocked. Horns honking, engines revving, it moved forward a few feet, then ground to a halt again for minutes on end. Cars peeled off left and right to try their luck down side roads. I gradually ended up right behind the Merc.
I eased forward until I was just about kissing his boot. If I couldn’t see his wing mirrors, then the driver couldn’t see me.
Ali strained forward in his seat. ‘Bobby Sands must be a very important man in the UK, yes?’
‘Bobby Sands?’
‘My father said the Supreme Leader changed the name of this street in his honour.’
‘What did it used to be called?’
‘Winston Churchill.’
79
‘Death to America’ and ‘Burn the US Den of Espionage’ were scrawled across the only stretch of wall that hadn’t been covered by Mousavi’s green revolution posters.
About a hundred beyond the long-abandoned US embassy, the Merc took a sudden left, no indicators. I couldn’t go with him. It would be too obvious. They would ping me immediately.
‘Jim, he has turned . . .’
‘Can I get down the next left?’ It was approaching fast. ‘Hurry up, Ali, think – can I go down? Is it a dead end?’
Too late; I turned.
I kept checking the junction about seventy ahead and pressed the pedal to the metal. No Merc had crossed it left to right by the time I got up there.
‘Jim, it is lost. I think I should drive now and—’
‘Shut up.’
I stopped at the junction and checked left. No sign of it moving away from me or parked. It must have gone straight on. Swinging the car left, I hit the gas. I needed to make distance before turning into the target’s road.
‘Jim, please. My father’s car! Please, Jim, we will get into a lot of trouble. I want to go home.’
I slowed to turn right. I had to take it calmly on the corner in case the Merc had parked up just past it.
No sign of it.
‘Jim, please – I really, really want to go home.’
I carried on down the road, avoiding the swarm of wheel-barrow-pushing construction workers buzzing around the concrete skeleton to my right. I checked each junction. The Merc must have parked. It had to have done, unless he’d pinged me. Why else would it come down here?
‘Jim—’
‘Shut up and check down the roads your side.’
At the far end, about two hundred further on, we emerged into a square. Stalinesque concrete office buildings were ranged round a patch of dusty ground with a couple of park benches and a moth-eaten palm tree in the middle.
The Merc nosed into view on the far side.
I watched the green curtain and bent antenna pull up at a set of iron gates set into an archway. The driver lowered his window and stuck out his ink-covered arm to punch some numbers into an entry-pad.
I carried on around the square as the gates swung closed behind the target. I took the first road out of sight and pulled over. I leant across and opened his door for him. ‘Go and see if the Merc comes out again. Walk around the square, just act normal. Don’t look directly at the house, or the Merc, the driver, anything, anyone. Just walk . . .’
‘Jim, I don’t think . . .’
‘Just do it, Ali!’
He climbed out reluctantly onto the pavement.
‘Walk slowly past. Tell me what you see. Does the building have a name, a number, anything? I need to know if the Merc stays or leaves. I’ll meet you further down this road. Now go!’
I drove off, watching him walk back towards the square, shoulders down and scared. Fuck it, I’d had no choice. There’s no time for debate when this stuff happens. All you can do is grip the body and make it do what you want. Only afterwards can you give it a hug and make up.
I was able to turn back towards the square at the next junction and park up – a tactical bound, which meant the Paykan was out of line-of-sight from the square. I kept my head down and sun-gigs on.
I glanced at the construction site two hundred further down. A cloud of dust billowed around the base of some rickety scaffolding that framed a couple of minarets. They looked for a moment like a couple of missiles taking off.
Ten minutes later Ali slumped his way towards me. He couldn’t even look me in the eye as he got back in. ‘The car has gone. It was coming out as I got to the square. The building has no number or name.’
He collapsed into his seat, close to tears, as I hit the ignition. I needed to get a trigger on the target. I still had to find out who was inside that building, and why. ‘It’s all right, mate. You’ll get the car back and everything will be OK. Not long now.’
I knew he didn’t believe a word of it.
80
1905 hrs
Last light would be with us in less than an hour.
With the brown PVC seat of the Paykan tilted back, I could see straight through the windscreen towards the target. It was a two-floor, drab concrete cube, an office building, much like the rest around the patch of dirt and dust, surrounded by high walls. CCTV covered the gate, walls and even the building itself.
No one else had left or entered it since I’d stagged on. But there was at least one body inside. A couple of minutes after we’d moved into position, a ceiling fan had started to turn in a first-floor room. I’d scanned the place through Ali’s binos but couldn’t see who’d switched it on. With the wall so high and me so low, my perspective was limited.
There had been a great deal of coming and going. Trucks piled high with rubble had pulled out of the construction site every few minutes. The last one had left more than an hour ago. About fifteen others loaded with steel reinforcing rods were now parked up in the square. An old guy in a leather jerkin and flat Afghan-style hat had done his best to direct them but the drivers totally ignored him and did their own thing. Even Ali managed a smile as we watched them moving through the gate, oblivious to the old boy’s complaints, with their rolled-up blankets tucked beneath their arms.
Young women had paraded constantly through the square all afternoon. Some were in Western dress, some a mixture, some totally covered. Those in burqas had trainers and jeans on underneath.
The construction site had already achieved iconic significance for the local population. It was an extension of the campus for what the mullahs intended to become the Islamic world’s foremost seat of learning. Aisha studied medicine here; there were more mosques and classrooms on the far side of the plot.
The cicadas were going ape above the distant drone of traffic. A slight breeze rustled the dry leaves of the near-dead palms. I glanced across at Ali. He was feeling more of a prisoner now than a friend. He was scared of leaving his dad’s car with me, but even more scared of staying.
It was time to let him off the hook. ‘Listen, mate, you can go soon – and with the car. OK?’
He sat up slowly, eyes straight ahead, hardly daring to believe what I’d just said. ‘Thank you, Jim, thank you. I will not say anything to—’
‘It’s all right, mate. Listen, I need you to know something. I’m not going to bullshit you. I’ll do my best with the job. But it’s a long shot . . .’
He turned very slowly towards me. His eyes bored into me. ‘You are not a journalist, are you, Jim?’
‘No, mate. But you’ve helped me do something important. I’m not exactly sure where it’s going to lead yet, but we’re doing our best to stop what happened to your dad happening to a whole lot of others.’
He nodded, but I knew he was far from convinced.
‘I’m sorry, Ali.’
He raised his hands and slowly massaged his temples. It was some time before he spoke. ‘Can I go home now?’
‘Yes, mate.’ I paused. ‘But I need one last favour.’
81
This area didn’t have streetlighting. I wasn’t complaining – I always felt safer in the dark. I stood against the fence, trying to get some pitta bread down my neck. There was no curtain across the target window, and the fan kept going. Somebody had turned the light on but I still hadn’t been able to see who.
Another light came on, somewhere on the ground floor this time. Weak light spilled over the wall.
I now understood how difficult it must have been for the women in the Emirates food hall to hoover up their Big Macs. Getting anything through the hole in Ali’s mum’s old burqa was proving very difficult indeed. Most of it seemed to miss and tumble down the black material.
No way could I have got away with what I wanted to do tonight without some sort of cover. Burqa’d up, I passed for a very chunky university girl. If Arab men could cover up and get through airport security on their sisters’ passports, I should be able to mince about at night in this kit to my heart’s content. If not, I’d soon find out.
