‘My favourite bloody place,’ Jonah replied through gritted teeth, rubbing the backs of his legs to rid them of cramp.
‘Come on, get in the car,’ Tariq said.
They drove for several hours on a narrow strip of blacktop across a bleak and unremitting landscape filled with clouds of ochre-coloured dust and the wreckage of abandoned vehicles. On the outskirts of a town they turned off the road and pulled up alongside a beaten-up Land Cruiser parked next to a petrol pump. Tariq jumped out of the car and Jonah followed. Tariq gripped Jonah by the upper arm and steered him towards the Land Cruiser. There were several men inside: the driver and another in the passenger seat beside him; two more Iraqis were squatting on a pile of wooden crates in the back. They were covered in dust. All had their features obscured by scarves.
‘Get in,’ Tariq said, and slid in along the bench seat beside him. The driver turned the key in the ignition and the engine started with a throaty growl. They drove off, abandoning Tariq’s car.
The man in the passenger seat unwrapped the scarf that disguised his features and turned to look at Jonah. By the light filtering through the dust-encrusted windows, Jonah recognised the harrowed beauty and numinous stare of his oldest friend.
‘Hello, Jonah,’ he said.
‘Hello, Nor.’
Iraq was a place of barren desert and swirling dust, and endless potholed roads, desiccated orchards and drab, empty settlements. The only sign of the occupation was the Apache helicopters, sleek as hunting wasps, which skimmed along the distant horizon.
They were racing south. Jonah was wedged in the bench seat between Tariq and another Iraqi with a Kalashnikov between his knees.
‘Why would you willingly walk into a trap?’
Nor glanced back at him. ‘What makes you think that I haven’t worked that into my calculations?’
‘They’ll stop you long before you present a real danger,’ Jonah said. ‘You won’t get within a mile of the Thames Barrier.’
‘Maybe I don’t need to,’ Nor said, his cold eyes roaming the desert outside. ‘The other side may be strong but they are not strong in all things and our side may be weak but we are not weak in all things. This is what I tell my people: we are small and agile and we have surprise on our side. We create our own superiority. I say it is up to us to identify and exploit our enemy’s key vulnerabilities. I say, when you are trying to create the edge, the first thing you need is an imbalance, an asymmetry.’
A mobile phone on the dashboard began to vibrate. Nor snatched it up and listened briefly before cutting the connection. He sat up, took a water bottle from between the seats, poured water over his hand and slapped it on his face. He was energised again.
‘We’re going to see a man about a map.’
The convoy was pulled over by the side of the highway. Three armoured black Humvees, two of them with .50-calibre machine guns on top. The top cover gunners were wearing black body armour over their fire-retardant Nomex jackets and helmets that made them seem bulbous headed and insect-like. Greysteel was written in white lettering on the side of each vehicle.
The Land Cruiser pulled alongside the middle Humvee, close enough for Nor to speak to its passenger, an American with a buzz cut, sunglasses and a T-shirt with a logo just above the left breast of a wolf’s head in a rifle’s cross hairs. Jonah had seen the logo before but he couldn’t remember when. The American passed over two packages. One was bulky and the other was flat.
‘You’ll receive the balance on completion of the task,’ the American told him.
‘Jolly good,’ Nor told him with a mocking smile, and winked at Jonah. He nodded to the driver and they drove off. He tossed the larger package to Tariq in the back and ripped open the flat one. Inside was a map. Nor unfolded the map on the dashboard and Jonah saw that it was an Iraqi pipeline schematic printed by the American company Halliburton.
Beside him on the seat, Tariq opened the larger package and removed several bundles of hundred-dollar bills held together with rubber bands. He grinned broadly and held them up for all to see.
‘From the Christians, Emir. Gifts …’
‘An attack on systems can magnify the effect of a small attack into a major event,’ Nor explained, his fingers tracing lines across the map. ‘Provided that we can identify a key enemy weakness, a small cell like ours, with minimal costs, can accomplish an attack that generates a rate of return that is out of all proportion to the initial investment. Take the next left.’
The driver glanced across at him, his teeth bright white in the sunlight. ‘Yes, Emir!’
Nor took a GPS from the pocket of his jacket and switched it on. ‘The optimal size of an autonomous cell is between five and eight. Nine is the limit that I am prepared to work with, any more and we’d show up on the radar.’ He turned around and leant over the back of the seat, so that he was face to face with Jonah. ‘Our small size is compensated for by the overall size of the market. The market behaves like a bazaar: people trade, haggle and share. For specific skills we outsource to freelancers in the bazaar. For instance, for a vehicle-borne IED we buy in a hollowed-out car from a chop shop and a stack of artillery shells from a local insurgent group. We aim for simple attacks that have immediate and far-reaching effects. Our actions are designed to provoke copycat attacks, as other networks in the bazaar innovate from our original plans and swarm on identified weaknesses. At the same time they create protective system noise that masks our identity.’
‘What were you doing in Pakistan?’ Jonah asked.
‘Sourcing expertise,’ Nor explained.
‘Explosives-trained combat divers for whatever you are planning in the Thames Estuary?’
Nor grinned and turned back in his seat. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’
‘You know I don’t. I never have.’
‘That way,’ Nor said, pointing. They veered off the road and raced across the desert.
‘Stop!’ Nor jumped out of the car and took several steps with the GPS in his hand. He stopped and scuffed the sand with his heel.
‘Here,’ he shouted cheerily. ‘X marks the spot.’
They all got out of the car. Tariq removed a spade from the trunk and Nor took it from him. Nor and Jonah stood opposite each other on the sand.
‘About six foot down,’ Nor told him, before handing him the spade. He put on a pair of shades with small round lenses. They reminded Jonah of coins placed on the eyes of a corpse. ‘Dig.’
Jonah began to dig. It must have been forty degrees. Within seconds, he was sodden with sweat. Tariq took the video camera from the car and started to film him.
‘Brother Ishmael,’ Nor said, ‘tell me this: what gets larger the more you take away?’
Jonah continued digging.
‘A hole!’
‘Am I digging my own grave?’ Jonah asked.
‘Don’t be melodramatic,’ Nor said. ‘You’re digging for oil.’
Jonah threw the spade down. ‘What the fuck are you up to?’ he demanded.
‘I’m getting even,’ Nor told him, ‘for every insult, for every slight. I’m getting my own back.’
‘This is about revenge?’
Nor produced a pistol from the back of his waistband and pointed it at Jonah.
‘Dig!’
Jonah resumed digging.
Nor shook his head wistfully and tucked the gun back in his waistband. ‘Look at the mess you are in.’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’ Jonah demanded.
‘It means that your ridiculous sense of loyalty is going to be everyone’s undoing. You should have killed me when you had the chance. Think of all the lives you would have saved.’
‘There’s still time to stop you,’ Jonah said as he dumped another spadeful over his shoulder.
‘No there isn’t. Not for you.’ Nor looked away at the horizon and for a moment he seemed profoundly sad. Then he forced a smile. ‘It’s ironic really, the unforeseen consequences of what was set in motion on 9/11. The Sheikh’s intention was to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would bleed the United States financially, cut it off from its allies, and cause the Islamic world to rise up against it. His error was to think that the place where this would happen was Afghanistan and not Iraq. Bush and Blair gave us more than we could have hoped for. When I first started working with these people, just after the invasion, all it would have taken to put down their weapons was for the occupiers to leave. But now, if you ask them what they would do if the occupiers leave, they say that they must follow them wherever they go.’
Jonah paused with his foot on the spade. ‘They know you’re coming.’
‘Of course they do. I told them. I announced it to the world on YouTube. How else can I make the world sit up and listen? Keep digging.’
After a few more minutes of digging, Jonah’s spade struck metal.
‘Hey presto,’ said Nor, standing on the lip of the hole.
‘What is it?’ Jonah asked.
‘It’s a forty-eight-inch high-pressure pipeline. Out you come.’
Jonah climbed out of the hole and slumped on the sand with the sweat pouring off his forehead. One of the Iraqis carried a wooden crate from the Land Cruiser and set it down next to the hole. A second put an olive-drab ammunition box beside it.
‘You’re going to blow it?’
‘Of course I am,’ Nor replied. ‘Identify and attack key enemy vulnerabilities. That’s what I’ve been talking about. That’s what I do. I blow things up. I fuck with the system. I spend a lot of time thinking up new ways to do it.’
He knelt beside the wooden crate and opened it. It was filled with rectangular packets of C4 explosive wrapped in plastic. He removed one, unpeeled the wrapping and kneaded the explosive into a ball in his hands.
‘We buy the C4 from the Iraqi army. It is generously provided to them by the Americans. That’s how asymmetric warfare works. We use their tools against them.’
He set the ball of explosive on the crate’s lid. Next he removed a loop of white detonating cord and unravelled it, measuring it out from hand to elbow. Satisfied, he cut it with a knife from his belt, making a diagonal slice across the cord. He bent one end of the cord back on itself and tied it in a knot. He then folded the ball around the knot so that it was deeply embedded in the explosive.
‘Tell me this, how come a private security contactor is paying you to blow up a pipeline?’
‘Think about it for a moment,’ Jonah replied. ‘Who benefits? This pipeline moves nearly four hundred thousand barrels of oil a day. Who gains the most from its destruction? Certainly not the Iraqis and definitely not the American taxpayer. I’ll tell you who benefits. Generally speaking, anybody who profits from a hike in the price of crude – obviously the contractor who rebuilds the pipe but specifically the private security company that secures the site. The daily rates for securing a rebuild like this are astronomical. In Iraq the post-war business boom is not oil. It is security.’
‘Winthrop works for Greysteel,’ Jonah said.
‘Of course he does.’
‘You knew that?’ Jonah asked, genuinely taken aback.
‘Sure.’
‘Will you work for anybody?’
‘Yes, if our interests coincide. Don’t look at me like that, like you’re outraged. Don’t be so fucking naive. We’re bleeding America dry and I’m enjoying the irony of getting paid by rich Americans to do it.’
He jumped into the hole with the detonating cord trailing behind him. Tariq advanced on the hole and filmed Nor as he placed the charge.
‘I spoke to your father,’ Jonah told him.
A flicker of irritation. ‘There’s nothing I can do for him.’
‘You could stop.’
‘It’s too late for that,’ Nor said, looking up at him from the hole. ‘I’ve told you already.’
‘You’ve identified the Thames Barrier as a key vulnerability. Well done. But so have we. And you’ve given away your game plan. You’ve lost the element of surprise. It doesn’t matter how well trained your combat divers are, you’re not going to get anywhere near the Barrier.’
Nor smiled as he got down on his hands and knees to earth himself; dissipating any static build-up before handling the detonators.
‘You have no idea,’ he said. He unlatched the lid on the ammo box. From it he carefully removed a small box of detonators and a length of safety fuse. He cut away a length of fuse the width of his outstretched hand and discarded it. Then he cut another length of a similar size and lit it with a box of matches from his pocket. The fuse hissed as it burned – a wisp of smoke travelling from one end to the other – while Nor consulted his watch to time the burn rate. Satisfied, he measured out two minutes’ worth of fuse.
‘People are expecting great things of me.’
‘Which people?’ Jonah asked.
‘Have you heard of Those Who Seek The End?’
‘Those Who Seek The End? The end of what?’
‘Forget it,’ Nor said. ‘It’s a joke.’
‘It’s very funny,’ Jonah said. ‘You’re not going to attack the Barrier, are you?’
Nor looked at him with sympathy and sadness. ‘Do you really think that I’m going to come clean with you? Do I look like I’m afflicted with a cinema villain’s brag reflex?’
‘The only way to negate the Barrier without taking control of it or sabotaging it is to overwhelm it. To do that you need a tidal wave that comes out of nowhere. How are you going to manufacture a tidal wave?’
‘Start the car,’ Nor said, and one of the Iraqis headed for the Land Cruiser and seconds later the engine rumbled into life.
Nor removed a small aluminium-cased detonator from its box and, holding it carefully between his thumb and forefinger, inserted one end of the safety fuse into the aperture.
‘You are going to blow something up in the Thames Estuary.’
Nor crimped the fuse in place using a set of pliers from the ammunition box. ‘You’re not making this any easier for yourself,’ he said.
‘You’re going to blow up a ship,’ Jonah said.
Nor grinned. In fact, he never could resist showing off. ‘Not just any ship. The biggest IED in history.’
‘You think they’re going to let you sail a ship full of explosives into the Thames Estuary?’
‘Maybe it’s already there,’ Nor told him, briskly. He used insulating tape from his pocket to attach the detonator to the cord.