by Andy McNab
I had no idea what we'd find when we got there. I had to hope that Mansour's line about Layla and Lesser wasn't just another king-size helping of bullshit.
All along, I'd operated on the assumption that the Chinese pigtails had been Lesser's signature, but if Layla had taught him, then Layla was the connection to the bomb under my car. Ghosts didn't make bombs. If Layla was real, she'd either be the bomb-maker, or know where I could find him. Then I'd keep following the trail until I knew who'd set us up.
If, if and when.
I checked the fuel gauge as another filling station loomed out of the desert. Masses; no need to stop. A BMW 4x4 sat by the pumps. We weren't the only gas-guzzler in this neck of the woods.
Mansour eyed the vehicle. He was probably reassuring himself he'd made the right choice in the Q7. He shifted in his seat and turned to face Lynn. 'Al-Inn, I would like you to share something with me . . . in the spirit of cooperation and friendship that exists between us.'
Lynn nodded. 'Shukran, ya siddiqi.'
'Afwan, y'effendi.'
In the spirit of cooperation and friendship that existed between me and Mansour, I offered my own little contribution.
'No fucking Arabic!'
They both shrugged.
Then Mansour kicked off again. 'There are certain things I would like to clarify to enable us, you and me, to move forward, Al-Inn . . .'
I glanced at the Libyan, distrusting him more by the minute.
'Prison gives you a lot of time to think. The Bahiti operation was watertight. I know: I set up the whole thing. After the Eksund compromise, we were especially careful. I say we – but in truth there was no "we"; it was all down to me. In the Istikhbarat al-Askaria, we did things very differently. Security came first for me – always. The Soviets taught me the value of compartmentalization – people knowing only what they needed to know. MI6, the CIA, the GRU . . . I had studied them all. Gaddafi expected the very best; he put his trust in me, and I swore I would not let him down. So many things in life come down to trust, wouldn't you say, Al-Inn?'
I looked in the mirror. Lynn shifted uncomfortably. 'Yes, I suppose so, Mansour.'
The old alarm bell started to ring somewhere in my head.
Mansour pressed on. 'For the Bahiti operation, I was the only person in Libya who possessed all the pieces of the puzzle: the contents of the shipment, the date of sailing, the identity of the crew, the route – everything. We knew you'd have our transmissions and codes covered. But there are advantages to working in a country that the West considers backward. Sometimes, simplest is best. No word of the operation was ever transmitted by any form of electronic medium.
'I was the only person who could have betrayed the operation – and I didn't. But the Great Leader had become so used to betrayal he assumed that the Bahiti had been compromised from within. When I heard the mission had failed, I knew it would only be a matter of time before they arrested me.'
I made to look in the rear-view to clock Lynn's reaction to all this, but Mansour swept his hand across the road ahead, as if the desert held all the answers. 'In my cell, by the Will of God, I knew that as the traitor wasn't Libyan, there was only one place we'd find him.'
The alarm bell in my head started to get a whole lot louder.
By now, Mansour was in full flow. 'But this raised another set of questions, Al-Inn. I knew, for example, that the Bahiti shipment, like the Eksund before it, had been planned by a small handful of men within the Provisional IRA's senior command structure. So who stood to gain from such a betrayal? I knew these men. They were all loyal, trusted Republicans. If this was a betrayal, it was not driven by the usual impulses. No one was being blackmailed. No one had been bought. I was looking at an infinitely more complex, infinitely subtler scenario. But subtlety, of course, is a British speciality, isn't it?
'I re-examined the events either side of the Bahiti and I noticed something interesting. In May, the IRA received one of its biggest military setbacks when eight members of the East Tyrone Brigade, several of them highly experienced, were killed in an SAS ambush when they tried to attack an RUC station at Loughgall.
'The Provisional IRA always maintained it had been betrayed; something the British denied, of course – the line MI6 takes to this day is that Loughgall was a result of communications intercepts.
'And that would be a very reasonable thing for the world to believe were it not for the Eksund and the Bahiti. These three events on their own, coming in rapid succession, were almost enough to cripple the IRA. But not quite . . .'
He paused.
'The IRA delivered the coup de grâce themselves.'
102
I'd had enough of this.
'You know what? I don't remember PIRA saying "enough" in '87. Enniskillen happened between the Eksund and the Bahiti – eleven dead; the biggest loss of civilian life in a single incident. PIRA wasn't exactly rolling over.'
Mansour's eyes sparkled. 'I was just coming to Enniskillen. What happened after the massacre? The entire world expressed its revulsion for what PIRA had done.
'Here, even our Great Guide declared his sympathy for the bereaved and his contempt for those who had perpetrated such a wanton, callous act.
'Despite their denials then and since, you can wager it was approved at the very highest level of the Provisionals' leadership. The most devastating blow to the Republican movement and it was approved from within . . .'
Mansour looked me right in the eye. 'Who in their right mind would have done this? Surely it could only have been an Irishman intent on bringing the reign of the bomb and the Armalite to an end . . .'
I said nothing. Lynn said nothing. Over the water, I'd just been a squaddie at the sharp end. But Lynn had occupied a privileged position within the intelligence community. He'd have been in a position to know.
Something clicked into place.
The car bomb. Ireland. Leptis . . .
When I turned up at Lynn's farm, convinced that the only organization with the means and the motive to kill me was the Firm, it had only been a gut-level assumption based on events stemming from the death of the Yes Man, and then fuelled by the instruction to seek out Leptis – the man with the answers. But Lynn's first and only thought was that it must have been the Firm that was going for me – that was going for us. He'd been expecting this to happen . . .
Why?
When I replayed what Mansour had just told us, the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle started to tumble into place.
After Enniskillen, PIRA went into meltdown. Very soon afterwards, the leadership entered into secret talks with Downing Street.
Six years later, the culmination of those talks, PIRA announced a ceasefire and everyone gave everyone else a hug.
Four years after that the ink was drying on the Good Friday Agreement. PIRA disbanded. Apart from the odd bout of sectarian score-settling, the Troubles were over and there were even more hugs. An organization that had sworn never to give up the armed struggle until Ireland was 'free' had put its faith in negotiation with their sworn enemies. Looking back, it was little short of a miracle.
But miracles and PIRA didn't rub shoulders – not in my experience.
Mansour was watching me intently. He knew he was fucking with my head. 'You see now what I saw in my prison cell, Nick? An Irishman, a senior member of the IRA's leadership, did a deal with the devil – with the British government – because he knew that the armed struggle would never, ever amount to a solution. But he realized, too, that that simple concept – that there might be a peaceful way out of the Troubles – would never be accepted by his warmongering peers. So he set out single-handedly to show them that there was no hope in continuing what they were doing, that all their ventures were doomed to failure . . .'
Loughgall. The Eksund. The Bahiti. Each a large, compartmentalized PIRA operation, each a fuck-up and PR disaster. And that was because each phase was betrayed . . .
I glanced in the mirror. Lynn knew all this. He'd lived with this knowle
dge for years.
Mansour rubbed his hands. 'So, Al-Inn. I have shared a little. Now, please, it is your turn. Tell me, for old times' sake, about the Bahiti and why Lesser and his Palestinian whore are so important to you twenty years after the event.'
This time, not even Mansour's extravagant gestures could keep my eyes from the rear-view. But I never got as far as Lynn. My vision was too full of the vehicle sitting about half a K behind us.
Now I knew why the alarm had rung in my head.
It was the BMW 4x4 from the last filling station, and my subconscious had been trying to tell me that it had been on our tail ever since.
And each time I had moved to check my rear-view Mansour had done his best to distract me.
The fucker knew it was there . . . the fucker had made a phone call . . .
As I turned my eyes back to the road ahead, I saw that whatever problem we had developing behind us, it was nothing compared to the one that lay ahead.
103
The road was blocked by a JCB and a giant boulder that seemed to have fallen from its bucket.
I couldn't just head off-piste to avoid them. The road straddled a huge wadi with steep banks. The BMW was still about half a K away, but closing. No time to debate if this was a deliberate roadblock or a construction vehicle that had spilled its load.
I braked to a halt, simultaneously throwing the gearshift into reverse.
I accelerated back towards the BMW and kept the power on. Then I came off the power, transferred the weight to the back of the car, and threw the wheel hard right. The front of the car swung momentarily. Midway through, with the front wheels parallel to the road, I hammered the brake and clutch and wrenched the steering back the other way. As the car spun, I whipped the gearshift into first, came off the brake, applied some right foot and released the clutch. We'd done a complete 180 and were pointing back towards Tripoli. I put my foot down and accelerated hard.
The BMW driver was doing it the hard way, and was halfway through a three-point turn to get out of my way. I got a good view of him and his passenger as we closed. They were both wearing black leather jackets and definitely weren't locals. Then, while we were still about 100 metres apart, the passenger powered down his window and I caught a glimpse of an AK47.
I floored the accelerator and aimed straight at him. The Audi ploughed into his offside wing. The BMW slewed to the edge of the road, teetered for a second, and then toppled and rolled down into the wadi.
I jammed on the brakes and reversed until we were alongside.
Lynn screamed from the back seat as the AK reappeared through a shattered window.
The muzzle flashed.
Lynn threw open his door at the same time as I did, his .38 at the ready. I grabbed at Mansour as rounds started to puncture the bodywork. 'Out the fucking car!'
Automatic fire punctuated the frenzied shouts that echoed amongst the dunes.
Mansour twisted and tore away from my grip. There was another burst and he screamed once and dropped to the tarmac.
Lynn was to my right, static and firing at the muzzle flashes. He was calm and controlled, taking slow, deliberate shots. I ran further to the right to blindside them. Rounds zinged off the tarmac around my feet.
I jumped down into the wadi and ran towards the rear of the wrecked car. Shots were still being fired at Lynn.
I dropped to one knee, aimed the Makarov into the tangled metal and loosed off half a dozen rounds.
'Cease fire!'
The shout came from Lynn.
The silence was deafening.
I stared at the twisted metal. The BMW was lying on its left side. The driver was virtually decapitated. The passenger was crushed against the rock.
I moved forward a few paces to feel about for his AK amongst the mangled flesh and steel. What I saw stopped me in my tracks.
104
In Russian prisons, your life story is tattooed on your body, and this boy's was pretty much an open book.
The initiation tattoo of a new gang member is usually on the chest. I opened the dead man's shirt. The first thing I saw was a rose. He was Russian mafia. The ace of clubs nearby represented a warrior's sword. I didn't need to rip off his Levis to know there'd be a small star on each kneecap to show he would never kneel before anyone.
The tattoos were blue and blurred. The ink must have been improvised from a mixture of soot and piss, and applied without proper instruments. It was often injected into the skin with a sharpened guitar string attached to an electric shaver.
I scanned the rest of the wreckage. Both of our assailants were dead.
I made my way back up the side of the wadi, and as I crested the ridge I heard a single shot.
Lynn was standing motionless over Mansour's body, .38 in hand.
'What the fuck did you do that for? I thought he was your friend. Old enemies, mutual respect . . .'
Lynn looked up at me. His voice was steel. 'He knew.'
'He knew what?'
'The identity of the source. The man who betrayed PIRA all those years ago . . .'
'Who was it?'
'Nick . . .'
I thought he was about to fuck me off with need-to-know. Instead, he shook his head incredulously. 'You listened to Mansour's little speech. He was spot on. There's only one man who made the transition from acknowledged member of the IRA Army Council to democratically elected politician . . .'
'Isham? Richard Isham turned informer?'
'Richard Isham is a hero. He should have got a Nobel prize. Without him, there would be no Good Friday Agreement, no peace in Northern Ireland . . .'
'And all along, you knew this was why the Firm was after you – after us. But you said fuck all!'
'There is no higher state secret I know of . . .'
I kicked Mansour. 'Is that why you killed him?'
'One of the reasons, yes. Hadn't we better get going?'
He was right. This could wait.
We climbed back into the Audi and I gunned it another half K towards Tripoli until the wadi petered out and I could drive onto the sand and scrub. I turned the car and paralleled the road until we were past the JCB and rejoined it soon afterwards as the sun began to sink towards the horizon.
Lynn's time bomb had been ticking away quietly for years – retirement must do that to some people. You work for decades, you make it your life, and then – boom – one day it all stops and you get out the stamp album and the jigsaws, or in his case the mushrooms, and realize this is it – a one-way ticket.
When Caroline killed herself, he became an outcast. He must have been riddled with guilt. Even his kids had binned him. This dirty little secret was all he had left.
PART NINE
105
The dying rays of the sun picked out the target as we approached. I parked the Audi in dead ground, some distance away from it.
The house was large, walled off and in the middle of nowhere, exactly where the sat nav had said it would be. Mansour had lied about needing to point it out. He'd just wanted to stall us until he could summon his black leather reinforcements.
The entire area was only accessible via rough tracks.
It looked as if we'd wandered onto a landfill site. Newspaper and old plastic bags blew around the Audi. We were surrounded by burned-out cars, old clothes, discarded mattresses and – even fifty metres from the sea – fist-sized chunks of tar. It wouldn't have picked up any golden beaches awards, but fuck it, I wasn't here for the sandcastle competition.
