Brute Force

by Andy McNab

  Lynn kept going, talking as he walked. He kept his voice low. 'Went there every day. Military intelligence, the Istikhbarat, maintained a small office just off Sharia an-Nasr, about half a kilometre from here. It was from that office that Mansour ran the PIRA operation. We had it under surveillance. There wasn't much about the people who worked there that we didn't know.'

  I thought about the images of Gaddafi I'd just seen. It was easy to rubbish these people as self-inflated; easier still to dismiss them as incompetent. But in Mansour the Libyans had found someone who had successfully given PIRA the ability to carry on its war.

  'Every day, at about eleven, Mansour used to walk from that office, pretty much taking the route we just have. He'd take an outside table if the weather was fine, order himself a glass of shay and a nargileh, and chill out, as my children would say.

  'Libya is very tribal and Osman's is – or, at least, was – a popular hangout for members of the Al-Waddan tribe. Mansour could let his hair down there. He didn't need to look constantly over his shoulder, which is more than you could say for the offices of the Istikhbarat. The walls there had ears and they'd shop you for looking at Gaddafi's portrait the wrong way.'

  'Got a plan for when we get there?'

  I never liked being in somebody else's control, but until we found Mansour this was Lynn's world.

  'I haven't thought beyond just waiting for him to turn up.'

  If I'd had a better suggestion, I would have made it. I had no idea how long it would be before Gary and Electra were picked up, but, worst-case, I reckoned, was twenty-four hours – maybe thirty-six if we were lucky – before some bright spark at Vauxhall Cross or wherever put two and two together and realized where we'd been headed in the Predator. It wasn't much of a window, and if Mansour didn't turn up because he was needed to schmooze Britain's Foreign Secretary, there wasn't a Plan B.

  We carried on, dodging traffic and people. The sun was bright by now and glared back at me off the tall white buildings each side of the street. I rounded a corner and turned to ask Lynn how much further we had to go, but he wasn't there. My gaze flitted in and out of the sea of faces around me. No sign of him. Smoke drifting from a kebab stall blew into my eyes and I lost another second or two.

  Then I saw him – leaning against a wall, staring at something over my shoulder.

  I doubled back, angry enough to give him a bollocking no matter who was watching us. He spotted me and must have read my face. He held up his hand. 'I know, Nick. I'm sorry. But it really does take the breath away, doesn't it?'

  I looked back over my shoulder. 'What?'

  'The Arch of Marcus Aurelius – the last intact remnant of the Romans' city. Legend has it that if anybody removes so much as a stone from the arch they'll be cursed for all eternity. That's why it's so beautifully preserved. You won't find a finer triumphal arch . . .'

  I shook my head. 'How much further?'

  'To Osman's?' Lynn looked surprised. 'We're here.'

  He nodded in the direction of the smoke. Shimmering heat and smoke rose from red-hot coals in an oil drum, split down the middle and folded out, with a grill on top. A kid of about fourteen in a grease-smeared gelabaya was turning a chunk of what looked like goat meat on a spit. A group of people jostled around the makeshift barbecue, trying to attract the boy's attention. A few tables had been spread out behind them, along a narrow shop front. Its metal shutter had only been pulled halfway up, providing a glimpse of more people sitting at tables, smoking and talking in the cool, dark interior.

  All in all, Osman's looked to me like a complete shit-hole.

  82

  Lynn ducked under the shutter and went in first. A scabby-kneed kid came and hauled the shutter open as I followed, allowing sunlight to spill inside.

  I grabbed the table closest to the pavement and sat down with my back against the wall. From here I could watch the street as well as what was going on inside.

  There were about twenty tables under cover and five outside. Approximate head-count: fifty males. No women.

  The low murmur of conversation dropped still further as Lynn approached the bar.

  The kid who'd opened the shutter came to take my order. I pointed at myself and Lynn. 'Shay.'

  I gave the whole area the once-over. There wasn't much to take in, unless you were the health inspector: an antique orange-presser on the bar counter that looked like it had squeezed its last around the time the Romans left, and a giant copper pot, tea-stained and beaten out of shape. A row of Turkish coffee pots bubbled away on a gas stove.

  An old guy with a white handlebar moustache shooed flies away from a plate. He looked like he should have been flying Lancaster bombers over Nazi Germany. On the plate sat what looked like an over-sized haggis. I remembered they called this osban – a sheep's stomach filled with rice, herbs, liver, kidneys and other meats, then boiled. And the Jocks think they have a monopoly on all the delicacies.

  Lynn started waffling away to the Wing Commander. A moment later, they shook hands.

  The clientele, seeing this, visibly relaxed. People went back to doing what they'd been doing – smoking their hubble-bubbles, sipping shay, reading papers, playing draughts, talking.

  The hubbub gradually filled the room again.

  Lynn said something else to the Wing Commander. He nodded and produced a calculator from the folds of his gelabaya. The handlebars twitched alarmingly as he punched in some numbers and handed the calculator to Lynn. Lynn looked at the screen, muttered a couple of words and passed it back again. This charade continued for a minute or so, then the Wing Commander gave a big nod and they shook again.

  Lynn handed over some dollars and got a fistful of local in return.

  He waited a minute, then, above the background noise, I overheard him mention Mansour's name.

  There wasn't a flicker of acknowledgement from the Wing Commander as he poured coffees from their little copper pots into some shot-glasses.

  Lynn said it again, this time giving the full name – 'Mansour Al-Waddan?'

  The Wing Commander shrugged and carried on pouring.

  Lynn got to his feet. He clapped his hands and the conversation subsided. Then he started giving hubba-hubba to everyone in the room. Lynn's tone was apologetic and yet determined – I guessed that he was saying sorry for disturbing the peace, but had we seen his old mate?

  The boy brought over our tea and Lynn carried on. At the mention of Mansour's name, I expected some kind of a reaction – something like the way the conversation had died when we'd entered the teahouse. But once everybody had got used to a foreigner talking to them in their native tongue, they just went back to what they'd been doing.

  Lynn turned back to the bar, downed his coffee, put some money on the counter and walked over to me.

  'Come on. I've paid for everything. We're leaving.'

  I got up and followed him onto the street. We melted into the crowd on Sharia Hara Kebir. Lynn took a second to get his bearings, then motioned me to a table in front of an equally minging teahouse in the shadow of Marcus Aurelius's arch.

  Lynn gave me the ghost of a smile. 'Let's see what that produces, shall we?'

  As I sat down, I noticed that we had a perfect view of Osman's.

  A waiter appeared. Lynn ordered shay and stretched back in his chair.

  'Do you know the origin of the word Tripoli, Nick? It's named after the ancient Roman province of Tripolitania: from the Greek – 'the land of the three cities'. There was Oea, Greek originally, then Roman – its ruins actually lie beneath our feet. Then there was Sabratha to the west of Tripoli and, of course, Leptis Magna to the east. Don't worry about what I did back there. Think about it: what choice do we have?'

  The waiter arrived and placed our tea on the table. Lynn turned to me. 'Breakfast? I don't know about you, but I'm absolutely starving. I'm also betting on the fact that we may have a bit of a wait ahead of us.'

  As he gabbled his order, I kept my eyes on the entrance to Osman's. Behind the ac
tivity around the barbecue, the teahouse was as we'd left it.

  I took a sip of the very sweet mint tea instead of ripping into him for putting the message out over the tannoy. It wasn't the way I would have done things.

  I didn't have a contingency plan, but we were going to have to think of one. 'Nobody in there had ever heard of Mansour, had they? We're going to have to find a telephone directory or something, or—'

  'No.' Lynn shook his head. 'Like I told you, Osman's is Al-Waddan. The old boy behind the counter has worked there all his life. I asked him. Seventy years, man and boy. He is also Al-Waddan. And yet, did you see how he completely blanked me? It was like Mansour never even existed.'

  'Or they're too shit scared to admit knowing him.'

  Lynn's eyes played over the arch. 'Perhaps you couldn't see it from where you were sitting, but there was a chap in the corner, rather funny-looking. He was smoking a nargileh and had a lazy eye.'

  The waiter arrived with bread. Lynn tore off a chunk. 'Of all the people in the room, Lazy-Eye was the only one who kept listening.' He put the bread in his mouth but kept talking. 'He knows, Nick. And I made sure everyone saw me doing my money-changing routine, so he also knows I've got cash. He's not going to be in a hurry. It might be an hour or it might be two or three – he won't want anyone to make the connection with us. But when he makes his move, he'll either go straight to Mansour, in which case we'll follow him, or he'll be out here, looking for us. You'll see; I know these people.'

  83

  Lazy-Eye made his move shortly after 1 p.m., when I was halfway through my fifth or sixth glass.

  Lynn nudged me and pointed through the arch at a tall, thin man standing on the edge of the pavement outside Osman's. He was dressed in the worst mix-and-match combo I had ever seen, even by local standards – a cherry-red shirt, light green trousers and cowboy boots the orange side of tan.

  Lazy-Eye glanced at his watch and peered anxiously up and down the street. Finally, he stepped off the pavement and joined a throng of people heading away from the arch down Sharia Hara Kebir.

  Lynn slapped some coins on the table and we joined them, hanging back but close enough for me to cut him off if he had second thoughts.

  We followed him for several hundred metres down the main thoroughfare, then left into the maze of alleys. The ground was dry; the sun had done its stuff.

  I grabbed Lynn's arm. 'You stay with him and I'll parallel and try to cut him off.'

  I picked up my pace, walking another thirty metres along Sharia Hara Kebir before taking the next left turn. There were no shops here, only houses – I was back in the labyrinthine streets with the whitewashed facades and interior courtyards we'd passed by earlier.

  Off the main drag, there were fewer people around, too – in winter, Arabs tend to finish working at 1 p.m., then go home for a siesta, returning to work at four and finishing for the day at around six thirty.

  With no one behind or in front of me, I quickened my pace down the alley until I picked up the first junction. I took a right – no one there either – and ran down it. As I approached the alley where I'd left Lynn and Lazy-Eye, I slowed to walking pace, took some deep gulps of oxygen, regulated my breathing and listened.

  Sure enough, there were footsteps ahead – the distinctive clip-clop of Cuban heels echoing off cobbles. They were coming from the alley that cut across mine.

  Darting into a doorway, I shrugged off my day sack and unzipped the side pocket. I reached in and pulled out the knife, then peered around the brickwork just as Lazy-Eye's cherry-red shirt moved across my line of sight. I put the knife in the pocket of my cargoes and hooked the bag back over my shoulders.

  As I reached the junction, Lazy-Eye rounded a bend in the alley, but I could hear the sound of his heels. He was no more than ten metres away.

  I glanced to the left. Lynn was making his way steadily towards me. There was no one behind him. The street was still free of people – as empty as it was ever going to be. It was time to close this thing down.

  I rounded the corner. Something made Lazy-Eye turn and he looked right at me. For a moment, he was frozen to the spot. Then he turned and ran.

  He was never going to outrun me in those heels. The day sack bounced up and down on my sweaty back as I closed in on him, and I caught him before the next intersection. I grabbed his shoulders, pulled him hard up against the brick wall, clamped one hand across his mouth and pressed the flat of the knife against the skin under his right ear with the other. He needed to see the blade as well as feel it.

  The good eye stared right at me, big and wide; the other swivelled in its socket like a compass in a magnet factory. I could smell the smoke on his clothes and the rancid odour of his skin.

  'English? You speak English?'

  I could feel Lazy-Eye's heart thumping against his ribcage as the weight of my body clamped him in place. He wasn't even going to shake his head too much to tell me he didn't.

  An interpreter would be handy. Where the fuck was Lynn?

  The good eye bulged and looked like it would jump right out of its socket. The bad one was in freefall. It looked like a fruit-machine wheel that wouldn't stop spinning.

  Lynn strode into view at last. He took a few moments to tune in – and he didn't seem to like what he saw.

  'Tell him what I'm going to do unless he complies.'

  Lynn spoke to him low and fast. I watched for signs that the Arab was taking it in, but his body remained as stiff as a board.

  Lynn gave him more hubba-hubba and Lazy-Eye spat into my hand in his rush to say yes. His good eye shuttled between me and Lynn. The blade moved a little as he did so, to give him an even better view.

  The alley was still clear, but there would be unseen eyes. There always are. Somebody, somewhere might already be calling the cops or rustling up a lynch mob.

  Lynn gobbed off again. Then, taking my knife-hand, he pulled it clear of the Arab's face. I felt Lazy-Eye's body give a little.

  'You can take your hand away from his mouth, Nick, and start walking towards the main street. He won't give us any trouble.'

  'How do you know?'

  'Because he has information for us. He wants to do business. He was looking for us . . .'

  'You established all that in thirty seconds?'

  'Start walking, Nick, or somebody is going to round that corner and we're screwed.'

  I pocketed the knife, but kept a sound grip on the handle.

  I gave Lazy-Eye a shove in the back and pointed him in the direction of Sharia Hara Kebir. As the heels started to click, Lynn fell into step beside him. I took up position behind.

  I just hoped we looked like two dickhead tourists accompanying a Libyan on our way to the market to buy a dodgy watch.

  84

  There were still plenty of people on the main street as we hit Sharia Hara Kebir and made a left.

  Lynn leant towards Lazy-Eye and asked him something.

  Lazy-Eye made an uncertain gesture with his hand and muttered a reply.

  Lynn asked more questions for a good ten minutes and they kept waffling between themselves.

  'What the fuck's he on about?'

  'I asked him if he speaks English. He said a little, so you can take that basically as a no – Arabs hate to lose face. Yes means no, no means yes and a little means next to nothing. His name is Fawad. Fawad Al-Waddan. You need to listen to his story.'

  I glanced between Lynn and Fawad. Lynn looked at Fawad and seemed to be asking for the Libyan's permission to continue. Fawad gave an almost imperceptible nod.