by Andy McNab
Right now I didn’t exist to them. It wasn’t the time to push them for what I wanted. I shut up and looked out over the broken rooftops, cluttered terraces, telephone wires and washing-lines stretching away into the middle distance. There was a thick forest of TV aerials and satellite dishes as far as the eye could see. The dishes weren’t allowed by law, but this was Iran. Another contradiction – and I bet there were plenty of viewers sitting down in front of their TV with a plate of kebabs to watch the BBC.
It was fifteen minutes or so since we’d stepped into the apartment and the Naloxone was doing what it said on the tin. Some colour had returned to their father’s skin. His breathing was stable.
The girl looked at her brother and gave him a faltering smile. The danger appeared to be over – for now.
Ali got to his feet. ‘Jim, this is my sister, Aisha. Aisha, this is James Manley, an English journalist here for the defence exhibition.’
She got to her feet. She brushed her dark hair away from her eyes. ‘Mr Manley…’ Like Ali, she spoke excellent English with a trace of an American accent, and a tone that betrayed the fact she wasn’t too pleased to see me.
Ali beckoned me towards the door. ‘We will need to keep my father under close observation for the next two to three hours. After that, God willing, he should make a full recovery. Aisha will watch first. You and I, meanwhile, can talk.’ He gestured towards the bedroom door. ‘Please…’
68
I followed Ali through the room and out onto a balcony. The sun had just slipped below the horizon. Night was falling fast and with it came the chorus of wailing. We seemed to be hemmed in on all sides by minarets.
Ali leant on the balustrade and stared at the street below. ‘I’m sorry you had to see my father like this. He is a good man, but he suffers.’
‘What happened to him – the scars? The war?’ That type of shrapnel injury does things to a man. I’d seen it.
‘Would you like a drink? I don’t drink myself, but my father always has whisky – black market.’
‘No, mate, I’m all right.’
‘Aisha will bring us something. Some chay, perhaps – tea.’
I asked him again.
He shrugged. ‘When Aisha and I were little, we used to ask him about the scars. He always used to tell us that he’d fought off a fire-breathing dragon.’ He gave a bad dragon roar and then a smile. ‘He used to breathe on us just like that, holding his hands up like claws, and making this noise – the noise that the dragon made when it breathed fire at him. We used to run away, squealing and laughing…’ His voice tailed away.
‘What happened to him, Ali? In the war?’
Ali beckoned me to a carved table in the corner of the balcony and invited me to sit down. He pulled up a chair next to me. For a moment, he stared out over the rooftops, a faraway look in his eyes. Then he reached into his pocket. He produced an object wrapped in an ornate, gold-embroidered cloth, the kind of thing I’d been dodging during my walk through the market. He started to unwrap it, but was disturbed by a noise inside the apartment – the sound of a door closing. He rewrapped it quickly and placed it back in his pocket just as Aisha walked in. He smiled at her. ‘How is Father?’
Out of some kind of respect thing for me, perhaps, he spoke in English.
‘Resting.’
While there was something childlike and innocent about Ali, Aisha was every inch the big sister. She still wasn’t impressed with me.
I held her gaze. ‘How often does this happen, Aisha?’
‘Often enough, Mr Manley. But we will cope, we need no help.’
Fair one, keep my nose out. It was clear she didn’t want me here. Except that I’d been dragged headlong into the apartment of an overdosing heroin addict, it was none of my business.
‘Would you like some tea, Mr Manley?’
‘Tea would be good.’
As soon as she had left the room, Ali retrieved the object from his pocket. He set it on the table and unwrapped it again. ‘I am sorry, Jim, but my sister doesn’t like me talking about certain things, things that interest me, but are of no interest to her – and especially in front of strangers. But, if you will allow me to say so, you do not feel like a stranger to me. I have always wanted to do what you are doing – writing about military technology, aircraft… hardware, I think you call it. And that you were looking for me is such a compliment. I feel very privileged.’
With a final flourish, he unfolded the cloth and produced a military medal inscribed in Farsi.
69
He passed it to me. ‘My father joined a Basij Battalion – a volunteer battalion. They ended up in a village in the desert somewhere west of Khorramabad.’
The decoration was thin and tinny, but those things didn’t matter to any soldier from any country the world over.
‘The Iraqis attacked and our forces counter-attacked. The village changed hands many times. My father was a lieutenant, in charge of a platoon of young Basij. Most of them were just fourteen or fifteen.’
I passed the medal back and he polished it with the rag.
‘My father was ordered to carry out a first-wave assault on the village. They had to attack across the minefields, using their own bodies in the name of jihad to clear them so that the main force of Revolutionary Guards could follow through and wipe out the Iraqis. He did not hesitate. He and his men assaulted the enemy across the minefield. That was when my father was injured. A mine blew him up, but he and his soldiers who survived the minefield still fought on and took the village. The Revolutionary Guard were not needed. And he received this for his bravery.’ He held up the newly gleaming disc. ‘A martyrdom medal. The highest award you could receive. The Supreme Leader himself presented it. War is a terrible thing, James, but for my father to have been decorated in this way, for what he did, is a very big honour. It is one of the many reasons I love my father so… and why I forgive him for what he has done.’ He wrapped the medal back in the rag.
‘The drugs? That could happen to-’
‘No, Jim. My mother, he was a terrible man to her. He beat her – sometimes I would come home from school and she would be lying just there.’ He pointed under my chair. ‘In her own blood. My father would then cry and beg forgiveness, and she would give it.’ He stood up and put the martyrdom medal back into his jeans. ‘I keep it with me. Always.’
‘You should be very proud, Ali.’
He stood up. ‘I am, Jim – very much. Now let me show you what I know about the Falcon.’
70
I’d never been able to understand what made grown men stand at railway stations or airports writing down numbers – or play golf, come to that.
Ali’s bedroom shelves were lined with books, some in English. There were hefty volumes on engineering and reference books by the yard on all kinds of aircraft. Maybe this subject and this room were where he’d retreated when the trouble started at home.
Ali opened an antique desk. Inside was a laptop. He fired it up, snatching the odd glance at his father through the adjoining door as he waited for it to come online. I sat and got on with my glass of very sweet black tea. Through the open door, I had a good view of his dad. He was sleeping soundly now, as the fan battered his bedding once more.
Ali kept his voice low. ‘First, I need to log on to iranianmetalbird.net to see if there have been any unusual movements…’ He tapped some keys and his home page came up. He traced his finger across a table. ‘Both main airports, Jim – IKIA and Mehrabad. From this time column I can see which aircraft have landed and departed.’
‘In real time?’
‘Let me show you.’
He typed in further instructions and the screen changed. This time a digital map of the entire Gulf region appeared. Moving across it were hundreds of letters, numbers and what I’d always known as ‘tracks’ – dotted lines that charted an aircraft’s speed and heading.
I checked the time in the corner of the screen against my watch. Everything was happening live. �
��How do you get into data like this?’
He looked at me and smiled because he knew something Mr Manley didn’t. ‘IKIA is my country’s pride and joy. The government bills it as a modern airport comparable with the best in the world – Singapore, Dubai, Denver… It’s not, of course, but one of the things they upgraded at the time they built the airport was an air-traffic reporting centre for the Tehran region and, unlike the airport itself, it’s pretty good.’
‘You hack into the air-traffic-control computer?’
Ali was now in full-on geek mode. ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. A commercial aircraft, as I’m sure you know, Jim, will transmit a constant stream of data to centres like these – where it is, where it’s heading, lots of different information. The data is transmitted essentially in the form of an email. The emails are encoded into radio signals, and if you have a good scanner, you can intercept and receive those signals.’
His smile turned into a big grin. ‘A member of our group has a scanner linked to his laptop and some decoding software that allows him to see the position and heading of any aircraft in the region. What you are looking at is the result. We post it on a secure site to which a handful of us have access. In any other country, this wouldn’t be illegal – in fact, the scanner and the software are standard equipment for spotters in most parts of the world. But this, my friend, is Iran. We have to exercise some care…’
He hit some more keys and the screen changed. I checked the digital clock. This time, we were looking at a representation of the air-traffic picture as seen by a controller at the Tehran reporting centre a little after five o’clock local time – pretty much the moment at which the Falcon climbed away towards the mountains.
Ali peered at the screen. ‘Now, let’s see…’ He used the tip of a biro to point at a dot that was slowly tracking away from Tehran.
I got into geek mode too. ‘That’s our bird?’
He nodded.
‘What can you tell me about it?’
He hit the keys again and a small panel appeared next to the slowly tracking dot. ‘This tells me almost everything I need to know. Type of aircraft: Dassault Falcon 7X. Fuel status: full. Destination: Quetta, Pakistan…’
‘Does it give a passenger manifest?’
‘It flew out empty. There were no passengers.’
I looked at him to check he wasn’t taking the piss. ‘You’re sure no one was on board?’
He was busy on the keyboard. ‘Sure, the catering company only delivered meals for the pilots.’ He pointed at the screen. ‘See? It says so right there. Two different menus in case one man gets food poisoning. Just two sets of meals, Jim. It’s going to Quetta empty. Maybe to pick someone up or something. Who knows?’
‘Are you able to track back?’
He gave another of his little smiles. ‘You mean, review the historical air-traffic picture? Sure. How far do you want to go?’
‘I’d like to know the aircraft’s status when it first flew into IKIA.’
‘Two days ago, correct?’
I nodded.
Ali started to type. A few seconds later, the screen changed. He leant forward, said something under his breath, and rekeyed the data.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. You don’t often see this…’
‘See what?’
‘The aircraft did not file a flight plan. Do you know where it flew in from?’
‘The UAE.’
He flicked open a notepad and leafed through. When he found the page he needed he ran his finger down a set of letters and numbers next to the margin.
‘What are those?’
‘Registration numbers.’ He flicked to another page and typed in some more data. He leant forward. ‘Ah, OK…’
‘What?’
‘I made the mistake of thinking that this is a commercially owned aircraft. It isn’t.’
‘No, it’s an RF registration. It’s almost a military aircraft.’
He pointed to the dots and tracks criss-crossing the Persian Gulf, before picking one of them out with the tip of his biro and following it – a track heading north out of Dubai.
‘The software “sees” all commercial air traffic along with all the details of a particular flight. Take this one, for example. From the data on the screen I know that it’s an Emirates flight out of Dubai, that its registration number is A6-ZDA, that it’s en route to London and that it’s at fifteen thousand feet and climbing.’ He then pointed to some untagged dots within Iranian airspace. ‘You see these? These are all uncorrelated tracks. The system registers their presence – it has to know where they are for it to operate safely – but the tracks themselves carry little if any data. Some do not even carry call-signs.’
‘And those are military flights?’
‘Yes. The Falcon effectively fell into this category when it flew out of UAE two days ago, but reverted to a civilian mode of operation inside Iran. That is very odd. They must have been keen to hide something.’
He geeked about the screen a bit more. ‘Would you like to see the photographs?’
I couldn’t help sitting upright.
‘I told you, Jim. Nothing flies in and out of the country that we don’t know about. We had never seen a Falcon 7X before. It is a very rare bird. When it was on the ground we photographed it from every angle we could.’
‘Yeah, OK, then. Let’s have a look. Why weren’t they on your website?’
‘I have to work, Jim. I haven’t had time to unload.’
I didn’t want to sound too full-on about it. ‘If they’re any good, I’ll buy them right now.’
71
‘Even though it’s a big jet, the Falcon has a short take-off and landing capability.’ He scrolled down a list of files. ‘It was one of the few large corporate aircraft to have been cleared for service at London City – as you know, Jim, an airport that’s renowned for stringent regulations governing the aircraft that use it.’
I nodded. If you needed STOL capability to get you in and out of London City, the airstrip RV would have been a piece of piss. That was why it had been used. It could carry the weight, get in and out, and didn’t look military.
He opened a file and up came hundreds of aircraft thumbnails. ‘Found them.’
The first few were of the Falcon coming in, nose high, flaps dangling, over the perimeter fence at IKIA just hours after Red Ken and Dex got dropped. I wondered if their bodies were on board, or whether they’d been burnt or cut up and fed to animals – anything to ensure they’d never be seen again. There was a good picture of the Falcon as it hit the tarmac – you could see little puffs of white smoke coming up from the wheels. There were several of it taxiing and many more of it parked up in front of M3C’s very own terminal, the building tucked away on the far side of the airport.
We were getting closer to what I hoped was going to be gravy time. With his long lens, Ali had snapped several clear pictures of the aircraft’s passengers as they disembarked. First off was Tattoo, still wearing the clothes he’d had on when he’d dropped Dex: short-sleeved blue shirt, tail hanging out over jeans. One snap had him putting his sun-gigs on, exposing his ink-covered arms.
And then, in the next shot, there was my target: standing at the top of the air-stairs, sniffing the breeze. The picture was an improvement on the black-and-white, but not by much.
‘You know who any of these people are?’
‘Just M3C people, I suppose.’
There was another shot of Altun as he made his way down the steps and then, finally, the money shot: staring out over the airport, his face turned to the camera, almost as if he was posing, one hand smoothing back hair that had been ruffled by the wind…
‘Ali, they’re excellent. The magazine will love them.’
‘Really? You are sure these are good enough for you?’ He was a happy man.
‘More than sure, Ali. I’ll take all of them. I’m sure my editor would agree for me to pay, say, a thousand dollars.’ I didn’t want
to fuck about. That would have been more than he made in a couple of months behind the wheel of the Paykan. And the three of them could do with it. I would have liked to give them more, but I still had a job to do and no idea what it would end up costing.
‘I have more!’ His fingers darted across the keyboard.
I found myself staring at several good clear shots of a forklift truck offloading the wooden crates. The second loadie from the airstrip was in charge. There was nothing that looked like a couple of freshly wrapped bodies.
72
I needed to get them out of my possession and into Julian’s as fast as I could. Majid would be going ape and I might find myself hung upside down and searched with rubber gloves.
I couldn’t send them from Ali’s apartment: Vevak would pick it up. I didn’t want this rebounding on him or his family.
There were internet cafes, of course, but they were definitely monitored.
There was the press-centre at IranEx. In among the images of boring take-offs and landings, people standing next to an undercarriage wheel and all that shit, my editor would be getting the Falcon, the gold and the faces that accompanied it. By the time Vevak cottoned on to what I’d sent – if they ever did – I would be away from IranEx and hiding in the city, trying to find Altun and the loadies. With the Falcon now in Pakistan, I only had one known location for Altun and that was IranEx. There were two more days of the exhibition, so that was where I’d wait. I still had more to do for Julian, then for Red Ken and Dex.
I checked my watch. It was already past midnight. Majid would have staked out the room after searching it, and getting his lads to check for me in all the Western hotspots.
‘Ali, any chance of me staying the night? It’s a waste of time going back to the hotel now. And if you want a job in that taxi of yours, you could take me to IranEx in the morning and work with me for the next couple of days. I’ll pay you another five hundred.’
