Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus

by Charlie Flowers

  ‘Jailhouse Rock. Let’s go!’

  We ran to the open Exit Two and out onto the airbase. All over the base sirens and harsh yellow lights were starting up. Hundreds of prisoners were bomb-bursting out of the exits and colliding with ANA troops. To our left an army truck screeched to a halt and disgorged troops who ran past us, oblivious, into the prison. Shots began to crack and zip all over the facility. I grabbed Mo and Bang-Bang and hustled them to the safety of a revetment. Bang-Bang’s two little retainers had also tagged along with us and she was scolding them in Pashto. She kissed them both and then they grinned and ran down the fenceline.

  She turned to us. ‘They’re safer going the other way. They’ll get out, they’ll be OK.’

  We huddled and waited. In the distance the runway lights started flashing bizarre patterns. FlameLite was here and directing planes into each other. Without warning a taxiing USAF C17 ran into an Italian Air Force Aermacchi and blew up, turning the night into a blinding hellish day and throwing flickering shadows everywhere. Fragments hit the flightline of ISAF F16s and the first two exploded. Debris pattered around us in a patina of dust. All over the base prisoners and black-clad Afghan military police were boiling out of doors and gates and turning the place into a floodlit riot. As I watched, a star shell whooshed into the air and detonated, throwing this whole side of the base into a wobbly magnesium glare.

  Bang-Bang lit her homemade cigarette and took a long drag. She didn’t offer it around so it obviously had to be full of smack. She glanced at both of us. ‘Next time we go on holiday can we go somewhere safer, like the Congo?’

  We all cracked up. I looked down and checked we still had the kitbags with the uniforms. We did. I looked left. ‘Holly. Ambulance line. Let’s move.’

  She nodded. ‘Straight up this fenceline and right at that hangar.’

  I whacked Mo on the shoulder. We ran for the ambulance park. Two hundred metres later we were rounding the hangar. Bang-Bang skidded to a halt and put her hands on her head.

  ‘What’s the matter babe, I see a nice lovely line of ambulances?’

  She pointed at a line of shipping containers opposite. ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘What’s gone?’

  ‘That container. That Nazi container full of GUNS! It’s gone…’

  Sure enough, like a gap in a line of teeth, was an empty space in the line of containers. Just sand and dirt.

  I patted her arm. ‘Nothing we can do about it for now- let’s get an ambo started. C’mon.’

  I jogged to the nearest one. One thing I did know about the standard operational procedures at US detention facilities was that emergency vehicles could not be detained at the outer gates. We had a chance. Our noise was covered by a roar of a Chigo air conditioner set in the Portakabin by the trucks. I looked the vehicle over. It was a Unimog truck, in khaki with big red crescents on the side. This was a turnup. In my misspent teenage years I’d once stolen one of these to order, for a ‘Mog enthusiast. I thought I remembered how to start and drive one of these. Hopefully.

  I called to Mo. ‘Dude! Jump in the back and see if you can find any tools for me.’

  ‘On it.’

  The main cab was unlocked. I climbed in the driver’s side and Bang-Bang got in the other. We put the medic greens on over our clothes. I turned an interior light on and studied the spartan dashboard.

  Bang-Bang was rooting in the storage bins. She produced some water bottles and a Michelin map and grinned at me. She then grinned even more widely and produced the compass from her prayer mat. This was also, hopefully, a start. Mo reappeared by my opened door with a kitbag full of tools. ‘Waddya need Riz?’

  ‘Biggest hammer you got and maybe a screwdriver or a blade.’

  He rummaged in it and handed me a lumphammer and a set of wirestrippers. OK. Time to go to work. First I reached under my seat and flicked the battery master switch on. Then I half-stood in the cab and whacked the ignition switch with the hammer until it fell off. I reached inside the hole and yanked out all the wires I could. Now instinct and a short career in joyriding took over. I selected the correct wires and stripped the ends with the wirestrippers. The engine began to crank, then died.

  ‘Shit.’ What had I forgotten? Bang-Bang was in a world of her own, perusing the map with her tongue sticking out of her mouth. She still had that massive nosering and attendant chain running to her ear, bold as brass. Mo had disappeared into the back under his own initiative to play at being the rendered POW. Outside on the airstrip the chatter of automatic weapons fire seemed to be growing.

  C’mon, Riz, I chided myself. Think.

  Of course. The choke. I touched the wires again and pulled the choke out, then pushed the black starter button. The engine rumbled, hacked, and then roared into life as I revved it. Choke off. I slammed my door shut, turned the interior light off and said ‘People, we are go.’

  I wrestled the crash gearbox into first and we headed out right and onto the road that parallelled the runway.

  All around us the detention facility was in meltdown. As we drove south to the American end we passed line upon line of every kind of emergency vehicle speeding north and troops of all description crashing out to deal with the riot. I searched on the dashboard, found the switches for the lights and sirens and hit them. I ground through three more gears and went for the main gate.

  We roared past a line of burning A10 Thunderbolts, ammunition cooking off into the sky, and a sign saying ‘USO Bagram presents Mortal Kombat 9 Tournament’. Me and Bang-Bang both looked at each other with a “what?” expression.

  I drove, I hit that pedal and raced down the flightline as behind us the night turned into day and plane after plane blew up and ammunition spattered into the sky.

  Beside me Bang-Bang took a last drag on her heroin-fag, flicked the butt out of the window and readied her ID pass.

  We screeched to a halt at the massive inner and outer main gate zone in a cloud of dust and sirens and blue flashing lights. The mixed ANA and US troops were preoccupied in either fussing over the gates, which had naturally stuck open, or watching the chaos taking over the base and talking on their radios. The red and white barrier was still down though. An Afghan soldier came to Bang-Bang’s window and she pushed her ID into his face and started yelling at him in Pashto. He recoiled as though confronted by a snake and flapped his arm. The barrier went up. I gunned the engine and left in a roostertail of dirt.

  We hit a main road.

  ‘What did you tell ‘em?’

  ‘I told them we had a Taleb with AIDS in the back.’

  ‘Good work. OK. Babe. Left or right?’

  Bang-Bang perused the map. ‘Where d’you think your derelict car is?’

  I leant over and looked. ‘Swallow told me it’s two kilometres southeast of the southern fenceline, 155 degrees west-south-west of this corner, so… about here.’

  I circled somewhere nondescript on the map.

  She looked at the road markings. She placed her compass on the map and let it orient itself. Then she did the thing we’d always had drummed into us in al-Qaeda. Orient The Map.

  ‘OK… we go left.’

  We went left. I turned the blues and twos off and we left the Bagram to its meltdown.

  20

  The great thing about Unimog trucks was that they could go where only camels and goats can go. After about forty minutes of me cursing the crash gearbox and the dried irrigation ditches, and me and Bang-Bang arguing as only couples can about directions, we alighted on the same ditch me and the SAS team had followed the other night. I started to recognise landmarks. I drove alongside the ditch, and presently we had the distant wreck of the car before us in our headlights.

  I turned the headlights to half-beam and waited. Then I turned them off. I killed the engine. Night settled again. Around us, crickets chirped and our eyes adjusted to the cloudy moonlight. Nothing. Good. I reached back and rapped on the cabin wall to alert Mo in the back. Presently I heard the rear doors open and Mo cam
e to my door.

  ‘Y’alright you two?’

  ‘Perfick, akhi. You know we have to love you and leave you here Mo? Me and the missus have some Mission Impossible shit going on.’

  He shrugged. ‘No probs like. I can get back.’

  ‘Mo – stick around for a few minutes though mate, I’ll get you some folding green from my cache to ease you on your way. You get me?’

  He grinned. He got me.

  ‘OK. Now we go forward to the cache. But you two, please stay by the truck for now. I have to disarm the booby trap.’

  I went forward, with a rather rubbish Soviet army torch we’d found in the cab. It kept going off and I kept having to jiggle it. Right. Here was the rear of the shell of the car. I hunkered down and shone the light around. There was the fishing line and hook. I took it out then dug in the soil until I found the ringpull detonator. Very carefully, holding the line slack, I pulled it out into the night air and laid it to one side. The PETN should now be inert. I retrieved it and walked several paces and placed it on the ground. I whistled softly. Bang-Bang and Mo joined me.

  I started digging in earnest and after a minute, I pulled go-bag one out. I unzipped it, rummaged in the spare clothes and medical packs, and pulled out some bricks of good old US dollars for Mo. He placed his hand on his chest in the traditional Salafi gesture of gratitude. He hugged me, and then bowed to Bang-Bang.

  She spoke. ‘When you get back, Mo, look me up on Facebook. I’m the only Holly Kirpachi on there. You can also find dipstick there as my other half. Go.’

  He nodded. ‘I owe you both. See you back ‘ome.’

  And he left, walking away across the moonlit fields, carrying Bang-Bang’s compass and the maps.

  ‘Right’, I said, hauling out the other kitbag, ‘Babes, if you shine that light down here I’ll lay the kit out.’

  She stood to one side and aimed the torch down onto the dirt behind the wrecked car. In the light I began to lay out the contents of a Secret Intelligence Service Packet Foxtrot. Another set of Afghan clothing for me, and an Afghan passport and national ID. Foil-packed rations, which I discarded. A wad of Afghanis, the national currency. Several more wads of stained dollar bills. An old, worn Afghan belt, with some 500-Euro notes secreted inside. Two locally-bought mobile phones with Roshan network SIM cards preloaded. Some Gizi Maps of the area, also suitably folded and stained. A Russian night-vision scope. A Garmin handset loaded with the latest, restricted TOPO maps of the country. A loaded Walther pistol with ankle holster. This was standard issue to RAF aircrew and SAS. They called it the Disco Pistol.

  Bang-Bang was watching all this curiously. ‘Where’s my stuff, babes?’

  ‘Aha!’ With a David Blaine flourish, I opened a bag to reveal the AKS-74U carbine she’d taken from Iqeel al-Afghani. She whooped and took it from me to check the magazine and safety. I then opened the other packet to reveal a passport, money, internal ID and a bright blue Afghan burkha. She growled. ‘If you think I am putting…that…on, you can think again.’

  She gripped the AKS-74U and glared at me in the light of the high moon.

  I held my hands up. ‘OK babes, it was…just an idea.’

  ‘Hmmph.’

  She turned away to check the perimeter.

  I reached for the final package in the bag. The Dagger System. This had been invented by the CIA in the Cold War, and improved upon until it literally looked like a magic trick. I whistled at Bang-Bang.

  ‘Doll? Come and watch this.’

  She glared back at me and eventually came over and sat down in the dirt, cross-legged, to watch. She started to roll another evil cigarette. ‘OK fiancé, impress me.’

  I turned away from her and started putting the various pieces on, grinning to myself. I stopped grinning as the mouthpiece went in and started drooling. Couldn’t be helped. I put the glovesleeves on. I donned the turban with its nest of real hair. And I turned to her and went ‘TADA!’

  Bang-Bang flung her fag away in shock and scrambled backwards.‘Jesus Christ what is that?’

  ‘It’thhh a Datther Thythtem babesh!’

  ‘What?’

  She was standing now and pointing her carbine at me, the car, any threat. I pulled the mask off and took the prosthetic out of my mouth.

  ‘It’s a Dagger System. To you or the outside world, I look like a Pashtun farmer with a hare lip. They modelled it on my face using lasers and latex and all sorts. Just like in Mission Impossible but real.’

  She laughed and lowered the carbine. ‘Bloody hell, you had me going there. That is TOO realistic.’

  ‘Damn right. And it’s going to help us get into Kabul and the Embassy. I’m going to be a messed-up local, and you’re going to be my wife doing the Pashtun talking. Ready?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Cool. Anyway, we can’t stick around here, sooner or later someone’s going to notice the missing ambulance and then they’ll put the helicopters up. Let’s go hijack a car.’

  We gathered up our kit, I hid the Packet Foxtrot bags under the car, and we moved out.

  21

  We walked for an hour or so under the moon and the scudding clouds, slowly and carefully, not wanting to sprain an ankle in a hole. In the northern distance light flickered from the direction of the airbase as the flightline cooked. Bang-Bang held my sleeve and followed the GPS display, directing us west towards what looked to be a good, metalled road. Every hundred paces we stopped and I gave the horizon a scan with the night vision scope. In the scope, under the moon and starlight, I had a picture as bright as day. I gave the blazing area of the airbase a good look. Mostly I was looking for the tell-tale glare of any illuminators. Firefly infrared strobes, chemlights, infrared laser designators, they all showed up on night vision. Even when I’d been an impressionable kid doing my al-Qaeda training, it had been drilled into us that any digital camera with a night setting could pick this kind of thing up. But, not tonight. After several minutes I could see nothing and we moved again. ‘With any luck,’ said Bang-Bang, ‘FlameLite will have turned off all the air-traffic control and rerouted all the base communications to China. They’ll be out of action for days.’

  We skirted a farm and some outlying sheds. A dog barked distantly. Suddenly there was an incline upwards and we came upon the road on the maps. We checked our weapons and hunkered down in the dirt in the lee and shadow of a low stone wall. I listened for helicopters. Nothing yet.

  While we waited I looked at our documents in the shielded light of our torch, and took some dollar bills and placed them inside the ID card wallets. ‘Grease’, I remarked to Bang-Bang and she nodded and went back to watching the road south.

  I looked up. The moon was scudding in the clearing clouds and the stars were out in force. It was a breathtaking view. Something suddenly occurred to me. Something bad.

  ‘Holly, did they biometric you when you were in there?’

  ‘Wot, you mean fingerprints and retina and all that?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Yes, they did.’

  ‘You see they didn’t manage to retina scan me ‘cause the machine broke, and these Dagger gloves here have their own fingerprints, but…you’re on the system. So if we get stopped at a checkpoint and they have a scanner, and it lights up with “Holly Kirpachi is an escaped High-Value Detainee”…’

  ‘Yeah. We’ll just have to kill all of them.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  A silence fell. We both knew that if we hit a checkpoint and it went noisy, we were going to die.

  ‘Up for playing scissors paper stone?’ asked Bang-Bang.

  ‘In the dark? How’s that gonna work?’

  She bumped my fist with hers, ‘One, two, three, stone!’ In the shadow of the overhanging wall, I couldn’t see much. I just said ‘Paper. Paper wraps stone.’

  ‘Oh. You’re right. It’s not gonna work.’

  Above us the dark azure night hung under the moon, a little bright pea. Bang-Bang started singing to herself, softly under her breath.<
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  We waited at the roadside for half an hour. Every five minutes I gave the horizon a scan with the night vision scope. Finally, some lights appeared. A saloon car. A battered taxi painted yellow and white. The fare light flicked on. I checked my pistol. To my right, Bang-Bang readied her carbine, racking the bolt back with its distinctive “ring-ching” sound. The car pulled in, obviously thinking we were an extra fare. Out here in Afghanistan, everyone would cram in. The taxi screeched to a halt in a cloud of dust. We ran for the doors and yanked them open. Left-hand drive. Shit. I’d forgotten. Bang-Bang was screaming at the driver and hauling him across the dirt with the AKS-74U jammed into his ear. He was flapping his arms and shouting back. All good. I flung the rear door open and pointed the pistol in at the two passengers.

  ‘Get out! Go!’ They went, rapidly. We had a car. We both piled in the front. Then we stopped and looked at each other. We were sitting in the wrong seats. I had to ask. ‘You driving to the Embassy babe?’

  ‘Possibly not.’

  We dashed out of the car, ran round and swapped. I floored it.

  We drove south on the metalled road at a steady sixty miles per hour. It was a Toyota, and automatic, which was nice after the Unimog. There were your standard bead covers on the front seats and a plethora of things hanging from the rearview mirror. Bang-Bang was watching the Garmin display intently. She’d already tapped in “British Embassy” and we had a nice red route on the 3D display, into Kabul and 15th Street Roundabout Wazir. I fished out the locally-bought Nokia and handed it to her. ‘Can you dial the number on the sticker on the back luv?’

  She nodded. ‘OK. Ringing.’

  I took the phone back and listened.

  ‘Hello Consular Section.’

  ‘Hello. This is Riz, can you put me through to Brigadier Howes please? Op name is DEADBIRD, repeat DEADBIRD.’

  Bang-Bang started laughing. ‘Dead Bird?’ she mouthed at me with an incredulous look. I shrugged and tried to concentrate on listening in and not running off the road. Any minute now I’d forget to drive on the right.