I was astonished. ‘Really? All of that? We went to the basketball court but I didn’t realise there was all this extra stuff…’
‘Really babe. Now look at the perimeter. ANA hangar and guardhouse. Fenceline. Main runway. Ambulances. And here… are the containers.’
She pointed to sketched rectangular boxes opposite the ambulance park. ‘Third one along is where the Nazi soldiers are hiding captured weapons.’
A girl in a hijab put her head round the corner and rattled off what sounded like some questions. Bang-Bang replied and handed her some clothing and some scraps of cloth. The girl said “Jazaak allahu Khair” and left.
‘How d’you know it’s the third container along?’
‘Because that girl you just saw, who just came in, is related to a guard on the northern perimeter. Everyone knows someone who knows someone here in the north, darling.’
Bang-Bang pointed at the sliding gates to her cell with a trackmarked arm. ‘See these gates? They’re broken. We can’t shut them. And get this. When the power fails in this facility… every door opens.’
‘All of them?’
She nodded. ‘All of them. All the way to the outside. They’ve been trying to fix it for months but nothing seems to stick. That’s why I’m interested in these power outages. They don’t last long, only a few minutes, but when the next one happens, we could be down the tunnel, out to the outer perimeter, and just hit the back door like our name was Carl Lewis.’
Suddenly there was a rattling noise from the bottom of the shaft. We went to look. Below us, some kind of tray on wheels banged in from the right with a small sack of earth suspended on it. Bang-Bang clapped her hands. ‘Ah. There’s the 8.15.’
I looked at her. ‘You’ve got this automated?’
‘You betcha. That’s the shuttle robot bringing the soil and sand back from the digger, regular as clockwork every half hour.’
She pulled on a rope pulley and heaved the sack of debris up to ground level, and then called out behind her in what I assumed had to be Pashto, in a high, bird-like trill. After a few minutes her two little helpers appeared and made off with the sack.
She looked back at me. ‘It’s what I learned from that film, cuz. The POWs spread the soil bit by bit, from the bottoms of their trousers, and the Germans never cottoned on. And neither are this lot. All those missing pillow cases… we’re nearly there.’
I had to look at the work so far. ‘Babe. I have to see this.’
‘Be my guest.’ She stroked my shoulder and handed me a flashlight and some goggles.
I went down the rope ladder, checked the light and went forward over the soil retrieval machine and down the tunnel. I cast the light around me. The tunnel was about four feet high and wide and shored up by the missing bedding planks and the now-infamous missing industrial Heinz bean cans, bashed out and flattened. I kitten-crawled forward past the odd Christmas fairy light and a ventilation pipe made from some old PC wire tubing. From within the nearest pipe, I could hear the asthmatic whir of a fan. The floor was made from those same bedding planks. There were small black rails, for the various machines, I assumed.
After twenty minutes crouching and crawling, I came to a slight bend where the tunnel traversed a steel I-beam. That would have to be part of the hangar foundations. Rounding it, I shone my flashlight on the strangest contraption. It looked like a cement mixer on wheels, on the end of a thick electrical cable, with the drum stripped away and some Moulinexes affixed to the front, and it was chugging away at the soil. A taped Maglite torch was boresighted to show where it was going. Nearly ninety degrees vertical as far as I could tell. It was kicking up dust and vibrating like a dog with its teeth stuck in a bear. I turned over on my arse and made my way back.
Twenty minutes later I emerged into Bang-Bang’s cell with the flashlight between my teeth.‘It’s a boy!’ she said and giggled vacantly. ‘Did you like it?’
‘Holly… it’s genius. It really is.’
‘Thankyou doll.’ She smiled and checked her watch again. ‘Right. Time for some curry, courtesy of our lovely dinner ladies onsite. I’m taking you to dinner. And then, we have a show on.’
‘A show on? You have got to be kidding.’
‘I ain’t. But first. Riz luv. I’m a junkie. And I need to get clean.’
Her pupils were pinpricks. She was shivering again. This was not going to be easy. ‘You know how this goes…’
I did.
‘I’m going to shoot up. And reduce the dose. It’s not going to be pretty… remind me when we’re getting married again?’
I had to laugh. That laugh died as she got the works out and began cooking up. She got the tourniquet on her arm.
‘It ain’t gonna be easy, it ain’t gonna be…’
And that was the second time I’d seen tears in her eyes. She shuddered and gathered herself and placed the syringe on the table. ‘I am going to beat this.’
17
We convened in the southern hangar gym hall. We did indeed have a show on. That letter had got me and Bang-Bang back into the mens’ section with no problems at all. I sat down the front with the English guys. Mo nodded at me. I looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
‘So now we’ve got a Gang Show?’
He grinned.
‘Yep. We’re thinking of calling this Taliban’s Got Talent.’
Bang-Bang came out from stage left. She looked pale, but more alive, and stood for ten seconds, time enough for the southern Talebs to get annoyed, and then launched into the classic song Paan Khaye Saiyan Hamaro and the place went absolutely mental. They even had a small band sitting down the front. Someone had replaced Bang-Bang’s nosering with one twice as big, complete with the traditional chain to her left earring. As the applause died down and the house band started playing Tu Bulale, she winked at me and came over to whisper in my ear and nodded in Mo’s direction. ‘That Brummie Taleb. When we break out, he’s coming out with us. You OK with that?’
‘Of course, he’s a good lad. Agreed.’
18
An hour later we were all playing cards. The southern Taliban were ahead on points. They refused to play for money, as that would be “proper gambling”. Mo was dealing in and Bang-Bang was sitting back and serenely, surreptitiously watching a pager in her right hand. She’d used some boot polish to paint a black nose and whiskers on her face. ‘Keeps the natives happy’ she’d explained. Her left hand was holding my wrist. Her hand had been on mine for the last half an hour and I knew something was about to go down. Suddenly the pager beeped.
She squeezed my wrist and looked at me. ‘We’re go.’
We left for the womens’ section, checked behind us, and went to her cell. We pulled the carpet to one side and clambered down the rope ladder. Bang-Bang was ahead of me. We both had flashlights, wrapped with insulating tape, gripped in our teeth and we made use of the fairy lights on the tunnel walls. After twenty minutes we were at the end of the excavation. Bang-Bang produced some screwdrivers and dismantled the tunnelling machine and passed the various components back to me. I laid them on the tunnel floor.
She looked back at me and nodded. Above her seemed to be a loose collection of dirt and some plasterboard. This was it. She took a deep breath and hit it. It broke upwards. Into light.
We seemed to be under a desk. We clambered up and out. Into a deserted office. It was the American base pharmacy.
I looked at Bang-Bang. Bang-Bang looked at me. After a few seconds she went ‘Erm…’
I went ballistic.
‘Erm? Is that all you have to say! Darling doll, you’ve tunnelled in exactly the wrong direction!’
Bang-Bang swore and picked up a telephone handset and flung it at the wall. She scooped up all the pens on a desk and flung them the other way, cursing in Urdu. Then she grabbed a tray of surgical instruments, with murder in her eyes. She threw it at a partition window with an almighty crash.
I grabbed her shoulder. She was trembling, fizzing, with rage. ‘Hey. Dol
l. We’re here. Let’s make the most of it. They don’t know we’re in here. Let’s grab what we can.’
She blinked and looked at me. The painted-on nose and whiskers made her look slightly ridiculous. She shook her head and spoke. ‘Well, babe, I hope you’ve got a plan forming in yer’ ‘ead, because I’m all out.’
I hugged her. ‘I have. Watch.’
Her eyes cleared. ‘You have?’
‘I have. Look around. What do you see?’
She looked around her. ‘Ahem. OK. I see… medical stuff… OK we’re having that. Oh yes we’re having that. And them.’
I could see the life coming back into her. She pointed at a rack of… I spoke. ‘Uniforms... Stethoscopes. Magazines. You see?’
She nodded at me and grinned. ‘I see.’
And we both scrambled to get as much as we could grab. She was off like a rocket. She grabbed some IDs and a set of ANA uniforms. She rattled through a clothes rack and after a while, held a uniform to her and grinned.
‘Waddya reckon?’
I had to agree. The uniforms would fit or could be taken in, and no-one really looked at the photo on an ID when there was a distraction. ‘It’s a go, babes.’
Then her gaze settled on the computers.
‘Oh no. No freaking way. We are not getting those back down the tunnel.’
She pouted and did that fluttery-eyelash thing.
‘Holly. NO.’
‘I’ve been off the internet for about thirteen days…’
‘HOLLY. NO.’
She shrugged and went back to scooping up uniforms.
I cleared up the mess and took a quick look through the office windows. No-one about. For now. I gathered a pile of magazines. I wanted to know what was going on in the outside world. All intel was useful. I checked on the desktops and the wallboard for anything else. There was a prominent flyer from the USO, saying fifteen lucky participants in this month’s survey would receive a $500 Visa gift card in the Sound Off Sweepstakes drawing on October 15th…
And here was what looked like a security circular from INSCOM. I grabbed it. Bang-Bang was disappearing back into the hole under the desk with her haul. I whistled and she stopped.
‘What?’
I was thinking. ‘Wait one sec, doll. I’ve got an idea as to how to cause a diversion.’
I started rooting through the drawers. I needed a book of some sort. Ah. Perfect. In a bottom drawer, of all things, was a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. I turned and brandished it triumphantly, and then placed it in a metal wastepaper basket. I topped the basket off with a pile of dressings and a bottle of surgical alcohol. Belatedly I noticed two holdalls stencilled “AMEDD”. I flung everything into one holdall and carried both back to our hole. The empty holdall would have to do to disguise our unwarranted entry through the office floor. It wasn’t much but hopefully it would hold up.
Bang-Bang had hoisted herself halfway back out of the hole and was watching me in puzzlement.
‘Babe, Fifty Shades may be a crap read but how is going to cause…’
Sudden realisation dawned on her face. I grinned back at her.
‘Oh Riz, you wicked boy. Yep, that’ll work alright.’
19
By nine next evening we were all in the main canteen. The place was packed to the rafters and the tension was palpable. Everyone knew something was about to happen.
I sat with Mo on my left and Bang-Bang on my right. Mo was wearing dowdy old local clothes over his jumpsuit. Bang-Bang’s two little helpers were off to one side. Tucked below me was the wastepaper basket, containing the dressings, the book, the bottle of surgical alcohol, and now, a lighter provided by Mo.
Mo spoke into my left ear. ‘Talk me through it.’
‘OK. Two things are going to happen. Any minute now, the FlameLite virus, which has been looking all over the world for my darling fiancée here, is going to descend and turn the power off. When it does, the emergency power will go on but all the gates will open. At that point, I will set fire to this crap book in this bucket and say it’s a Qur’aan…’
I nodded at the bucket between my feet.
‘And you know the effect that will have.’
He did. ‘I was here when those US troops actually did that. They threw some Qura’aans in the burn pit by the flightline. I thought the world was going to end.’
‘Right. So just hang on, and follow me and Holly.’
I leant right into Bang-Bang’s ear. ‘Remind me how you say it again.’
She murmured back. ‘Da kufer banchodan Qur’an sharif oswazaydo. “The Infidel bastards have burnt a Quran”. Say it back to me a few times.’
I repeated it back to her and after four attempts she nodded.
‘OK. Good. Now we wait for the power to go out.’
We waited. I studied the INSCOM circular. Item three was about the fabled power outages. There was a map and a graph showing how the outages seemed to be making their way north, from the capital to here, over a period of six days.
I leafed through the various magazines I’d filched from the pharmacy. Here was September’s copy of Wired with a picture of Steve Jobs and why he’d been a jerk. I looked in the articles section and a chill went over me. There was a two-page spread about “the strange phenomenom of the Web Raccoons”. Apparently they’d been seen in every social media site and several online virtual communities. I nudged Bang-Bang. She was handrolling a particularly evil-looking fag. She put it down, speed-read the first few paragraphs and showed her teeth in pleasure. ‘Can I borrow that off you a sec?’
I handed it over and carried on looking at the other magazines. Newsweek had a large piece about the resurgent right in Britain and Europe. Things were coming to the boil and the Midlands was the focal point. The other leader was about tensions in France after the shootings in Nice, and the forthcoming NATO summits. I made a mental note to attend if and when I got out of here. On page ten was a short piece about Gregg’s the bakers doing a deal with NAAFI to serve sausage rolls in Afghanistan. Bang-Bang cast a cursory eye over it and muttered ‘as if the troops haven’t suffered enough.’
Five minutes later she nudged me again. ‘I think I’ve found the answer. Look at this piece.’
She indicated an article about a Shoreditch internet company that was making artificial lifeforms called Weavrs.
‘The day before we ended up in Stratford, I made one of these avatars, clones, dunno what you’d call it, tied it into my Twitter account and set it loose. I think these “raccoons” are being created by this thing somehow in combination with FlameLite and they’re exploring social media sites. They’ll learn as they rampage round the web.’
This was Martian to me. I shrugged and browsed through the last mag, a copy of Fortean Times. This too, among articles about MR James and zombie outbreaks, had a piece about the virtual raccoons entitled “Day of the Infomorphs”. They’d been spotted buying virtual cars and virtual small arms in Second Life and World of Warcraft. I gave up and put the magazines down.
Above us, almost subliminally, the striplights appeared to dim. I looked up, unsure whether I’d seen or felt that.
Suddenly Bang-Bang stood up and addressed the restive hordes in English.
‘HEAR ME, brothers and sisters.’
The entire block went silent.
‘I am Holly Kirpachi al-Ingleezi. Does Holly Kirpachi serve?’
Her two little helpers translated it into shouted Pashto.
As one the audience shouted a no.
She drew herself to her full height, all of five foot one.
‘I carry wounds, all got in battle!’
She gestured at her collarbone, her cheek and her nose.
‘I have killed many men, with my own hands, in battle. I scatter, I burn my enemy’s tents. I take their flocks and herds. I am paid a golden treasure and yet… I am poor. I am poor because…’
Beside Bang-Bang her two acolytes were translating at top speed and the audience was loving it. I had to laugh, a
s I knew she was amending Anthony Quinn’s speech from Lawrence of Arabia. Years of Saturday afternoon telly with her dad and it was working.
Bang-Bang cast a hand over the audience. Then she held that hand up. You could have heard a pin drop. ‘… And yet I am poor because I am a river to my people and I give it away. Are you with me?’
A great shout went up.
Without warning the overhead fluorescent lights began to flick in a random pattern. And then the strangest thing happened. The overhead PA speakers squalled into life and started playing... oh my God.
“PLEEEASSSSE RELEASE ME, LET MEEE GOOO…”
From across several decades and several thousand miles, Engelbert Humperdink filled the hangar. Beside me a prisoner howled in abject terror and dived under a table. It was the cheesiest music you could imagine. FlameLite had arrived in the complex’s servers. We were SO go.
She looked at me and winked. ‘Fiancé. My creation is here and ready to kick arse.’
And then all the power went out, we were plunged into darkness and all hell broke loose. And within seconds the red emergency lights had flared on but at the same time, every door and gate in the facility rattled and banged open and jammed stuck.
Bang-Bang twirled arms outstretched in the hellish red emergency lights and shouted ‘You are with me, and I am with you… because I am A RIVER FOR MY PEOPLE!’
And as one, everyone in the audience got to their feet and roared. There was an outbreak of chaotic yelling. I poured the surgical spirit onto the dressings and the copy of Fifty Shades of Grey, and dropped the lighter in. Whoomph. Up it went. I ran to the edge of the canteen holding the bucket in the emergency lighting. As I ran I started shouting-
‘Da kufer banchodan Qur’an sharif oswazaydo! DA KUFER BANCHODAN QUR’AN SHARIF OSWAZAYDO!’
I stopped. I jumped onto a table and held the bucket aloft. Smoke and flames curled from it, and then up it went, and I had my beacon.
The entire facility erupted. We had our riot. Bang-Bang and Mo ran to my side. She thumped my arm.
Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus Page 23
