Crossfire (25 page)

The troops were diverting traffic to the right, out
of town. The tailback had formed because everybody
wanted to go left.

The area had been cordoned off big-time.
Hundreds of shoppers and stall-holders were
being herded away from the city side of the
market.

The Yes Man's mobile kicked off again just as I
saw our target raise his to his ear. I let it vibrate.

The street was wide and long, with a concrete
central divide. Both sides were lined with what
might one day be two-storey shops. Steel reinforcing
rods stuck out of the first storey, like
there was some Greek-style building tax dodge
going on. Dead animals hung outside one, waiting
to be skinned. Sparkling alloy wheels were
piled outside another. The next down sold chip
rolls.

Two helicopters circled our side of TV Hill.
Police and military with white lollipops
swarmed everywhere, marshalling the traffic like
airport ground controllers.

The Mazda was only three ahead, but with so
many orange-and-whites in the queue we
blended in fine.

I checked the map again. Once we'd passed the
hill, the diversion had to start heading south
soon or we'd be up in the mountains.

We came to a spot where armoured vehicles
had shifted the concrete blocks that divided the
lanes. A cop in a drunken-sailor hat fed himself a
chip roll with one hand and directed the traffic
with the other. Sure enough, we headed south.
We'd soon be in Khushal Mena, Basma's part of
town.

It cost me another ten dollars. I tried five, but it
seemed to make something go wrong with the
throttle cable. At least he'd learnt one word of
English. As I gave him the money he beamed.
'Matey! Matey!'

More armoured vehicles and Italians loomed.
Their .50 cals kept the slow-moving wagon train
channelled on the southbound road. A handpainted
sign pointed to the former king's palace.

The mobile kicked off once more and this time
I opened it up.

'Never cut me off again! What's happening?'

'I'm following a possible.' I didn't need to
tell him where I was. He had the phone tagged.

'Who is he? What is he?'

'Don't know, but looking local.'

I could see farmland through the gaps between
the bombed-out buildings. The rusting wreck of
a Russian armoured personnel carrier lay
stranded in a field. Wizened old men shepherded
brown woolly sheep against the distant backdrop
of snow-capped mountains.

'Where is he going?'

'Don't know. That's why I'm following him.
Soon as I do, you will too.'

The traffic was picking up speed. On cue,
Matey developed accelerator problems. I threw
him another ten. Only fight the battles you can
win.

It wasn't long before I was seeing what was left
of the palace on the southern extreme of the city.
It looked like Dresden after Bomber Harris had
done his stuff. There was no way of telling which
lot of liberators could take the credit: the
Russians, the Taliban or the B52s.

Further down the road we had the makings of
a military convention. Troops sat tightly inside
their armoured vehicles and Humvees, body-armoured
up, all the party gear pointing out at
the traffic.

I could see why. About a K away on the plain
to my right lay what had to be ISAFville:
row upon row of 200-metre-long tented
accommodation, vehicle compounds, HESCOs,
razor wire, satellite dishes, the full Monty. They
probably battened down their area like this every
time a bomb went off.

The target was now just two ahead but the
traffic had spread out as we finally headed back
towards town. I knew where we were the
moment we passed the Russian embassy. I
wondered if I'd see the Jock carrying bodies out
to the bins, still clearing up after last night.

We were soon at the river and the diversion
lifted. It took a twenty this time to keep him
moving. He must have sensed the end was in
sight.

We stayed behind the Mazda as it approached
the market, finishing up only about five hundred
metres from where we'd started. The crowd was
still being held back and had turned hostile. The
Italians eyed them warily from behind their
sunglasses.

The Mazda stopped. I squeezed the bony
shoulder. 'Stop here, matey.'

Eyes on the Mazda, I grabbed my Bergen and
shoved him one last ten. He could probably
afford to drive straight home and begin his retirement.

I watched the target get out and skirt the
crowd. It wasn't difficult: his cowpat was still a
mile above the rest. He wasn't fucking around.
He knew where he was going.

I followed, head down, eyes up, locking on to
the back of his hat.

We reached a large car park among the cluster
of flat-roofed, baked-mud dwellings that spread
on up the hill.

He put his hands into his waistcoat pockets.
He was searching for something. Keys . . .

Fuck
.

He opened the driver's door of a battered
black flatbed.

I spun round and broke into a run. Matey was
still trying to turn round. I jumped in front of his
bonnet, brandishing a twenty. His grin was
bigger than ever.

As I jumped in, the black pickup had reached the
last stretch of tarmac before the hill. Both of us
soon hit the dirt road and started snaking
through the shanty town.

We climbed steeply, past small, square, flat-roofed
shacks. The cab lurched across ruts and
potholes. The other wagon kicked up a dustcloud
a couple of hundred metres ahead. The city
was soon below us.

As we got higher, a few brick and concrete
houses jutted out of the hillside. Boys played
football with bare feet. Women sat in groups on
terraces carved out of the slope. Every hundred
metres or so, we hit a hairpin. The cab was just
inches from a sheer drop down into the valley.
The road must have been built as access to the
antennae farms, and these families had piggybacked
off it. There was no planning permission
needed. It looked like they'd just scraped out a
terrace with picks and shovels and used the spoil
to build with.

I'd seen rougher and dirtier shanties than this
in India and South America. At least some of the
kids here were running round in school uniform,
the boys in blue shirts, the girls in white headscarves.
And the packed mud was swept
scrupulously clean. It seemed there was a whole
lot more civic pride up here than I'd ever seen
down in the valley.

A rusting Soviet hulk, ripped apart by the muj,
overshadowed the next bend. It might have been
picked clean by the buzzards. We lost sight of the
black pickup for a moment, then found it again
as we completed a sharp left-hander.

It was parked up alongside a two-storey
rectangular house that was set back from the
track by about ten metres on higher ground. It
had three windows on the upper floor at the
front, and one each side of the front door below.
All were boarded up. No smoke curled from the
chimney. No electricity cables ran in from
the road and there was nobody in sight.

The next three hundred metres cost me another
ten dollars, but there were no turns, just
more dead Russian armour. We crested the
hill on the saddle, alongside a group of old guys
sitting cross-legged in a huddle round a
cooking-pot. They gave us a look and got straight
back to the business of cooking up dinner.

The track forked left up to one of the antennae
farms, and right to the other. The driver stopped,
turned in his seat, and gave me a triumphant but
toothless smile. I gave him a final ten. 'I'll get out
here, matey.'

As he embarked on a many-point turn behind
me, I walked towards the barbed-wire fence
round the installation immediately above the
target, but not so purposefully that it might rattle
the AK-toting guards hanging out by its gate.
Both antennae farms were key locations; they
needed to be protected. The big green circular
ISAF signs told everyone that.

Kabul was so far below me it looked like a
map. I walked along the saddle. The Serena and
most of the embassies were to the north, down to
my right. To my left were the Jock's bar,
the Russian embassy and, out on a limb at the
southern edge of town, ISAF.

I stopped and admired the view until the taxi
was out of sight. Then I went and sat by the
wreck of a Russian communications truck,
surrounded by artillery-shell casings and ammo
boxes like big sardine cans with the tops peeled
back.

I pulled out the Yes Man's mobile and looked
south, towards the Kabul river. I wasn't going to
have any problems with a signal up here. I
couldn't move for satellite dishes.

The phone rang twice. The Yes Man came
straight on. 'Have you found Condratowicz?
Have you got him?'

'I've just housed a possible, that's all.'

'Where is he?'

One of the old guys left the crowd with a can
in his hand and went through the motions of
washing himself ready for prayer.

'Ali Abad mountain. They call it TV Hill.'

'Where on the hill? Any idea yet if our man's
inside?'

'No. Have you got access to anything in the
air? I need you to keep a trigger on it and see
what happens down there.'

'Nick, I cannot involve any other agency.' His
response came with several degrees of frost.

I didn't give a shit. 'Do you want him or not? I
need help, and you've got it on tap. I don't know
yet if the fucker's in there so find me an airborne
Predator. The Americans are bound to have one
or two up there. Don't worry about compromise.
They do this shit all the time. Just say it's an antiterrorist
op, for fuck's sake. You're the boss,
aren't you? Think of something.'

One of the guards sauntered out on to the road.
He had his weapon over his shoulder but wanted
to take a closer look at the local gobbing off on his
mobile.

The Yes Man said nothing.

'Just tap into whatever they have up there that
covers the north side of the hill. Then get the
operator to stand by. When I do a walk-past I can
ID the exact building for them. If Dom's in there,
this isn't going to be some fucking shoot-'em-up.
I want to get in there, try and find him, then get
us both out alive – and not get shot by ISAF in the
process. And some of their boys are a stone's
throw away from me at the top of this poxy hill.
So fucking think of something.'

'OK, wait out.'

He cut off and, for the first time in a while, I
did what he said. The old guy had finished
splashing his face, neck and arms and was now
getting down to a serious chat with Allah. I
watched him touch his forehead to the ground,
then stand and pray over the city.

Another guard joined the first, and they both
headed down the road towards me.

They were Turks. Their national flag filled the
top half of the arms that were busy waving me
away.

I moved back towards the saddle, past yet
another pile of old artillery casings. Those two
hills had been Russian strongholds. If you dominated
the high ground there, you dominated
Kabul. And that was exactly why a guy in blue
body armour was climbing the south side of the
hill, probing the ground with what looked like a
row of kitchen knives. If you were in the mood to
build there, I guessed you decided which bit of
slope you wanted to carve out, then got a guy in
body armour from the council to come and dig
up the mines for you.

The old guys were just dragging whatever
they'd been cooking out of the pot. I couldn't see
the target. It was down to my left somewhere,
but the angle was too steep. What I did see were
the scorched remains of a blue burqa. So much
for liberation.

The mobile vibrated in my hand.

'You got something up there for me?'

'Yes, we have one tasked. It's overhead.'

I looked up, even though I knew I was wasting
my time. The Predator's video cameras and
forward-looking infrared (FLIR) thermal imaging
would be doing their stuff from fifty thousand
feet. The ground crew would be able to see me,
big-time. Even through cloud they could read a
newspaper at a bus stop. To a Predator, it was
always a bright sunny day.

Once they had imagery, it could be bounced
anywhere, including to my laptop in the Serena.
Down in Helmand and the south, they circled
24/7. They watched and waited for the Taliban to
come out of their caves, jump on their flatbeds
and scream across the plains. The operator,
hundreds of miles north in the ISAF camp, just
marked the target with a laser beam and kicked
off a couple of the Hellfires strapped to its wings.

'You got coverage?'

'I'm looking at pictures now.'

'Tell the operator to focus on the saddle
between the two antennae farms. I'm on my own,
facing north.'

I stood there like a dickhead while the Yes Man
steered the operator on target.

'They want to confirm it's you.'

'I'll walk down the road on their go. Tell them
I'm in local dress and I have a rucksack on my
back. Apart from their boys with the guns, I'm
the only fucker up here who's standing. The rest
of them are sitting and eating.'

'He's ready.'

'I'm walking.' I headed down the track. A
couple of the old guys waved at me as I passed. I
kept my head down, mobile to my ear. 'That's a
hundred and fifty short of the target. White
rectangular, two storeys, flat roof.'

'We have you, Nick.'

'Fifty short. On my left, building about ten
metres back from the road. There's a black four-by-four
parked to the left of the target.'

'I can see a white building ahead of you now,
Nick.'

'That's it. I'm about twenty short.'

'There's movement!' His voice shot up an
octave. 'Movement from the back. Someone's
heading towards the four-by-four.'

I swivelled my eyes under the
shemag
. A
massive body appeared from the back of the
house and opened the wagon's hatch.

He was no more than five metres away. I heard
him mutter to himself as he sniffed and chugged
up the contents of his lungs.

He bent forward slightly from the waist, as if his
massive frame was weighing him down. His head
was down, maybe to hide his scabbed-up face, but
he looked aware. Both hands were stuck inside his
clothing. One would be gripping a weapon.

His gingery beard was almost as big as the
wizard's last night. He could be local. There were
plenty of big Afghans running around here, even
ginger ones with blue eyes.

He lifted out a case of bottled water and
dropped it on to his sandalled feet. 'Fucking goddamn
fucking shit!'

So, not a local, then.

A few more paces and he was unsighted. I
heard the rear hatch slam shut behind me.

'He's going back to the rear of the house, Nick.
He's opening the back door. He's now inside.'

'It's no longer a possible,' I said. 'That's the
target.'