Exit Wound (21 page)

75

It was too early for any but the local press to be up and about, and I was able to take my pick of the desktops in the media centre. I worked quickly. Nobody paid me any attention. There was no sign of Majid. I had left $3,500 in the drawer next to the Naloxone, somewhere they were sure to find it. I’d been hoping it would make me feel better about bullshitting Ali and Aisha, but it hadn’t. In fact, it had made me feel worse. They were real people, who deserved much better than crossing paths with the likes of me.

I’d kept the last $1,500 for myself. I wasn’t out of the country yet and might need some in-the-shit money. The cash would still come in useful in Dubai. I planned to stay there a while. There was a Suburban at the airport that needed attention.

I opened up the file and hit the email option. I typed in my editor’s address, shoved in the USB stick Ali had downloaded the pictures onto, attached them along with some others to disguise them a bit, and hit send.

Then I dragged the mobile out of my sock and went just outside the door to get a signal from whoever’s satellite was up there. The two bars were enough for a call to my editor.

‘Morning, mate. I’ve sent some photos for the next edition. Can you text me to say you’ve got them?’

It was four and a half hours earlier where he was but Julian was a very happy boy.

‘Will do. Any movement on Altun? Found out where he lives, his contacts – anything?’

I could hear him rushing about now, probably heading for his computer. It was OK for him to use clear speech as he didn’t have bodies walking past every couple of seconds.

‘Not yet, but working on it. Soon as I have anything for you, I’ll call.’

‘Excellent.’

Behind me, just inside the door, I was aware of an argument kicking off.

‘All right, mate, see you soon.’

I cut the call and turned to see the big German guy in the jungle hat leaning over the reception desk, clutching a steaming cup of whatever and having a go at the girl about the milk. Our eyes met and he wandered through the door. ‘Morning.’ He checked my badge. ‘James.’ He held out a tanned hand.

I checked his. ‘Morning, Stefan.’

He towered over me, and had that world-weary look of been-there-done-it about him. Sixty-odd years ago that square jaw and mass of hair would have been sticking out of the turret of a panzer. He was here for
Die Welt
, according to his badge, but no way was Stefan Wissenbach a reporter for any German weekly. Maybe he’d come in my direction because he could smell a fellow fraud.

He took a sip of his brew and still didn’t like it black. He offered it to me. ‘Never one to say no to a brew, so thanks.’ I glanced at my mobile. Nothing yet from Julian. I took a sip. I quite liked instant.

As we leant against the Portakabin, Stefan rubbed the couple of days’ growth on his chin. ‘Just the same old stage-managed bullshit?’ He had a clipped German accent.

‘It’s my first.’

He laughed, then stretched and yawned at the same time. ‘Well, you won’t have another press conference like yesterday’s. Anna had fire in her belly yesterday, for sure. She is one
Hitzkopfig
, that girl.’

That bit of German wasn’t in my squaddie vocab. It certainly didn’t sound like food or beer. ‘The blonde one, going on about missiles?’

His eyes darted about, sizing up a couple of good-looking women who’d come past us to lay out trays of dodgy sandwiches for the morning media frenzy. ‘The new SA-16M – probably the only thing worth coming here to see.’

There had been quite a buzz about these things. The Brits, Iranians, Russians, and now Germans. Maybe they were the new must-have.

I checked my mobile again. Still nothing. I wondered about Majid picking up the email and knowing where I was. Not even GCHQ was that quick. It would take a couple of days. ‘The guy at the M3C stand told me they can defeat dark flares. That explains the rumour the missile had a fault. It didn’t. They were redeveloping it to defeat the flares.’

His eyes shot from the women to me. I suddenly had his full and undivided attention.

76

‘But, like I said, this is my first time. What are they?’

He laughed. ‘You Brits!’ A heavy hand slapped my back and pushed the bottom half of the coffee from the cup. ‘You invented them.’

‘I’m more an infantry-weapon guy.’

His hand left my back with a smile that said he had smelt a little more about me. ‘I’m sure you are.’ Both hands went up into the air, as if he was framing something up there. ‘When an aircraft is targeted, it could be by using laser or radar. So the aircraft has countermeasures to stop that happening. But with a handheld SAM, the system for detecting the target is best described as a passive device that emits no signal. These things . . .’ He turned to me and pulled down his lower right eyelid. ‘The Mark 1 Eyeball.’

He paused. ‘You with me so far?’

I knew the theory. These things were just like a Stinger. I let Stefan waffle on as I checked the phone.

‘It’s the same with the missile itself. It has a passive seeker that homes on heat – the engine, usually – and so, traditionally, the first time you ever know you have a missile coming up at you is when it hits.

‘You remember the order for all NATO aircraft to stay above fifteen thousand feet during the Kosovo conflict because the low-level threat from the handheld SAM was too great? Were you there?’

I nodded.

‘Me, too. Fucking slaughter.’

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.’