Exit wound ns-12

by Andy McNab

  His eyes lit up. ‘It would be a pleasure. What time do you need to be there?’

  ‘Soon as it opens.’

  73

  We ate dinner cross-legged on the carpet – a meal that Aisha had prepared that was a cross between soup, and potato, tomato, chickpea and mutton stew. She was a busy girl. As well as looking after these two she was a medical student at the university, and had joined Mousavi’s green movement for reform. She had the wristband to prove it.

  Ali was munching away like a good ’un, his pockets stuffed with the wad of oners I’d just given him.

  Aisha, however, didn’t seem too pleased to have the extra income in the house. She was almost ignoring me. Ali was either too blind to see it or chose not to notice.

  Every so often one of them would get up to check on their dad, but the Naloxone had worked its magic and he was no longer in any danger. It wasn’t the first time he’d overdosed, Ali said. He’d done it so many times, in fact, that when their mother left and they were just kids, they had become experts on what to do. Some days, the two of them would come home to their dad crying in a corner of the bathroom, clutching his knees, shaking with fear – or just throwing a wobbler and smashing the place up.

  ‘Have you two heard of post-traumatic stress disorder?’

  They looked at each other for any recognition.

  ‘It’s an illness that some people can develop after having experienced one or more traumatic events – like fighting a war, like getting blown up, like seeing fourteen-year-old boys being blown to bits beside you. It affects some people hard. There’s no telling who. Maybe your dad…’

  Aisha acknowledged me at last. Well, sort of. At least she was listening.

  ‘Guys with PTSD can have problems with alcohol and drugs. Sometimes they can’t communicate with family and can get violent against them.’

  They both stopped eating and listened. ‘Does he have nightmares – you know, shout out in his sleep?’

  Aisha stifled a sob, which I took as a yes. ‘It’s OK, he can be helped. Your dad needs treatment.’

  Ali comforted her as she cried into his shoulder. I tried to lighten it up a bit. ‘Even the great Satan has a general who suffers from it because of his time in Iraq. Can you imagine that?’

  Aisha pulled herself off Ali, her hair now pasted to her face. ‘How do we help him? What does the American general’s family do?’

  It was a tough one. I wasn’t sure Iran was known for its mental-health record. ‘He needs to see someone who can treat psychiatric conditions, someone who understands what he’s going through and knows how to help. Tell them you think he may have PTSD – look it up online. He doesn’t have to be like this.’

  74

  Wednesday, 6 May

  0555 hrs

  The muezzin had sounded like he was right outside my window when he started calling the faithful to prayer half an hour ago. I’d spent the night on the floor in Ali’s room. I didn’t get much sleep. His dad woke me several times as he cried into his sheets. Aisha had plodded past our door to tend him.

  Ali was in the kitchen. Incredibly, he looked as bright as a button. Maybe it was the thought of going to Air Geek City. ‘Would you like something to eat, Jim?’ He was tucking into a pitta-bread sandwich that had bits of salad hanging out of it.

  I nodded away and looked for a kettle or teapot. Ali got the idea. ‘Chay? Or ghahve?’

  ‘Ghahve would be great.’

  Ali poured some into a cup while I threw some goat’s cheese and lettuce into some bread.

  Aisha walked in. She had never got out of her jeans and Bono T-shirt, and her hair didn’t look so perfect after her intensive-care night-shift. She acknowledged me with a nod, then spoke to Ali in Farsi as she poured herself a coffee as well.

  Ali picked up another cup and followed suit. ‘I will go and check on Father.’

  When he’d left the room, she placed the fifteen hundred dollars on the table in front of me. I gave my full attention to the remains of my sandwich. ‘Mr Manley – thank you, but we do not need charity.’

  ‘It’s payment for your brother’s pictures and the time I’ve spent with him. He drove me from the airport and he’s driving me for the next two days. Thinking about it, maybe it isn’t enough.’

  She cupped her mug with both hands and brought it up to hide her smile. She slowly shook her head. ‘You know it is a small fortune. And now I am embarrassed.’ She took a sip then pulled a pack of Camel from her pocket. She offered me one.

  My turn to shake my head. ‘The money is yours. He’s earned it.’

  I pushed the notes back at her but she focused on lighting her cigarette. She took the smoke down deep. ‘Thank you for explaining about my father. I have been online most of the night. I think I have found someone who understands these things, a doctor at the university.’

  ‘That’s great, Aisha. I’m sure everything will work out.’ There must have been millions here suffering after that war. No wonder the place had become Heroin Central.

  Aisha sank into one of the three knackered wooden chairs, her cigarette held high so I didn’t get a face full of it as I sat down opposite her. I watched her as I sipped my coffee, so sweet it was almost sticky. There was a lot more going on in that head of hers.

  ‘Ali…’ She finally broke the silence. ‘He is a dreamer. He always has been. He idolizes his father. They have a special bond. Ali does not think about himself, so I have to, Mr Manley. You know, if he could ask for any job, any job in the world, it would be yours. Do you really think you will be able to get him work from your magazine?’

  I hated this part of the job when it involved real people. But it had to be done. I still needed Ali. ‘I can’t promise anything. I have to talk to my editor. But, yes, of course. I think he’d be excellent.’

  ‘I understand, but please do that, Mr Manley. And maybe ask him if Ali could come to England and work. That would be good, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘But what about you and your dad?’

  She blew another cloud of smoke into the air and showed me her wrist. ‘Do you know what this means?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I will work with the party to bring reform to our country, Mr Manley, our green movement, our green revolution. Looking after my father will be easy compared to looking after my country. Ahmadinejad will win no matter how many votes he gets, and that means there will be blood on the streets after the election.’

  She took another drag and picked some tobacco from her lips. She spent more time than was necessary removing it from her fingertip.

  ‘We students, the young, we need to show our people that we can change, but still be a Muslim country. I do not know if our green revolution will end like the Berlin Wall coming down, or with a slaughter like Tiananmen Square.’

  She drank and then smoked, her eyes burning into mine so I understood the seriousness of what she was saying.

  ‘But it is a struggle that I do not want Ali to be part of. He deserves better. I am going to make sure he gets it.’

  Ali was coming back down the corridor.

  As if I didn’t feel enough of an arsehole already, she pushed the money back at me. ‘Here is his airfare. Please, look after him, won’t you?’

  He reappeared with an empty cup and a big smile as I shoved the notes into my pocket.

  ‘We should leave now, Jim.’

  ‘Can you get me a mobile in the market? You know, just a cheap pay-as-you-go?’

  75

  It was too early for any but the local press to be up and about, and I was able to take my pick of the desktops in the media centre. I worked quickly. Nobody paid me any attention. There was no sign of Majid. I had left $3,500 in the drawer next to the Naloxone, somewhere they were sure to find it. I’d been hoping it would make me feel better about bullshitting Ali and Aisha, but it hadn’t. In fact, it had made me feel worse. They were real people, who deserved much better than crossing paths with the likes of me.

  I’d kept the la
st $1,500 for myself. I wasn’t out of the country yet and might need some in-the-shit money. The cash would still come in useful in Dubai. I planned to stay there a while. There was a Suburban at the airport that needed attention.

  I opened up the file and hit the email option. I typed in my editor’s address, shoved in the USB stick Ali had downloaded the pictures onto, attached them along with some others to disguise them a bit, and hit send.

  Then I dragged the mobile out of my sock and went just outside the door to get a signal from whoever’s satellite was up there. The two bars were enough for a call to my editor.

  ‘Morning, mate. I’ve sent some photos for the next edition. Can you text me to say you’ve got them?’

  It was four and a half hours earlier where he was but Julian was a very happy boy.

  ‘Will do. Any movement on Altun? Found out where he lives, his contacts – anything?’

  I could hear him rushing about now, probably heading for his computer. It was OK for him to use clear speech as he didn’t have bodies walking past every couple of seconds.

  ‘Not yet, but working on it. Soon as I have anything for you, I’ll call.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  Behind me, just inside the door, I was aware of an argument kicking off.

  ‘All right, mate, see you soon.’

  I cut the call and turned to see the big German guy in the jungle hat leaning over the reception desk, clutching a steaming cup of whatever and having a go at the girl about the milk. Our eyes met and he wandered through the door. ‘Morning.’ He checked my badge. ‘James.’ He held out a tanned hand.

  I checked his. ‘Morning, Stefan.’

  He towered over me, and had that world-weary look of been-there-done-it about him. Sixty-odd years ago that square jaw and mass of hair would have been sticking out of the turret of a panzer. He was here for Die Welt, according to his badge, but no way was Stefan Wissenbach a reporter for any German weekly. Maybe he’d come in my direction because he could smell a fellow fraud.

  He took a sip of his brew and still didn’t like it black. He offered it to me. ‘Never one to say no to a brew, so thanks.’ I glanced at my mobile. Nothing yet from Julian. I took a sip. I quite liked instant.

  As we leant against the Portakabin, Stefan rubbed the couple of days’ growth on his chin. ‘Just the same old stage-managed bullshit?’ He had a clipped German accent.

  ‘It’s my first.’

  He laughed, then stretched and yawned at the same time. ‘Well, you won’t have another press conference like yesterday’s. Anna had fire in her belly yesterday, for sure. She is one Hitzkopfig, that girl.’

  That bit of German wasn’t in my squaddie vocab. It certainly didn’t sound like food or beer. ‘The blonde one, going on about missiles?’

  His eyes darted about, sizing up a couple of good-looking women who’d come past us to lay out trays of dodgy sandwiches for the morning media frenzy. ‘The new SA-16M – probably the only thing worth coming here to see.’

  There had been quite a buzz about these things. The Brits, Iranians, Russians, and now Germans. Maybe they were the new must-have.

  I checked my mobile again. Still nothing. I wondered about Majid picking up the email and knowing where I was. Not even GCHQ was that quick. It would take a couple of days. ‘The guy at the M3C stand told me they can defeat dark flares. That explains the rumour the missile had a fault. It didn’t. They were redeveloping it to defeat the flares.’

  His eyes shot from the women to me. I suddenly had his full and undivided attention.

  76

  ‘But, like I said, this is my first time. What are they?’

  He laughed. ‘You Brits!’ A heavy hand slapped my back and pushed the bottom half of the coffee from the cup. ‘You invented them.’

  ‘I’m more an infantry-weapon guy.’

  His hand left my back with a smile that said he had smelt a little more about me. ‘I’m sure you are.’ Both hands went up into the air, as if he was framing something up there. ‘When an aircraft is targeted, it could be by using laser or radar. So the aircraft has countermeasures to stop that happening. But with a handheld SAM, the system for detecting the target is best described as a passive device that emits no signal. These things…’ He turned to me and pulled down his lower right eyelid. ‘The Mark 1 Eyeball.’

  He paused. ‘You with me so far?’

  I knew the theory. These things were just like a Stinger. I let Stefan waffle on as I checked the phone.

  ‘It’s the same with the missile itself. It has a passive seeker that homes on heat – the engine, usually – and so, traditionally, the first time you ever know you have a missile coming up at you is when it hits.

  ‘You remember the order for all NATO aircraft to stay above fifteen thousand feet during the Kosovo conflict because the low-level threat from the handheld SAM was too great? Were you there?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Me, too. Fucking slaughter.’

  He took a couple of seconds as his head churned up whatever nightmare he’d been part of.

  Julian was back. He’d got them. I closed down.

  ‘It is the same today. If you want to stay alive when you go low-level, then you need to chuck out flares – lots of them. But you can’t dispense flares all the time. You don’t have enough of them.

  ‘Since the Balkans, the Russians have designed a missile able to discriminate between the flares that aircraft dispense and the heat-source – the engine. Instead of being seduced away from the aircraft towards the flare, the missile examines the flare, rejects it, and looks for a darker heat-source, if you like, less intense – the aircraft itself.’

  Stefan’s hands were up in the air once more.

  ‘The missile literally climbs a “ladder”, rejecting flares, locking back onto the aircraft, rejecting another flare and so on – until it hits the aircraft. That’s why the black flare was developed.’

  ‘So they burst out of the aircraft a different colour?’

  ‘No, they look the same as normal flares, but they have a different temperature range – they don’t burn like magnesium flares, they mimic the heat signature of an aircraft much more accurately. So now, when the missile rejects the regular flare and goes looking for the darker heat-source, it sees the black flare and goes for that instead.’

  ‘Could it take down an Apache?’

  He knew where I meant. His hands were down and the smile had disappeared. ‘If they weren’t bullshitting you, it would be able to take down anything that is out there below ten thousand feet.’

  ‘Nice talking with you, mate.’

  We shook.

  Ali and the Paykan were waiting for me outside.

  On my way out, I broke open the USB stick and swallowed the memory. If these lads had spent years putting shredded bits of paper back together, finding out what was on a smashed stick would be a piece of piss.

  Stefan Wissenbach would be making sure his people, not DieWelt, knew what we both did. They, too, had people out there. If an Apache or fast jet was taken out, we could no longer assume control of the air. Worse still, if a C-130 full of troops got dropped, the people back home would go ape-shit. It could all be over by Christmas. Then the dramas would really start to kick off.

  I powered up my local mobile as I walked towards the exit. ‘Hello, mate. You get the car parked up where I showed you?’

  I didn’t want Ali to have a call from my sat mobile registered on his. Better to use local – and how much more local could you get than his dad’s machine? It wasn’t as if he’d need it today, unless he had an urgent appointment with his dealer.

  77

  We sat in the front of the taxi in what looked like a bus lay-by but had become an overstuffed car park. Anywhere vehicles could stop in this town, they did.

  IranEx was just under a hundred away, right in front of us. That was why we were here, to have a trigger on the entrance and wait for the Merc. With baseball caps tilted over our eyes and leaning well b
ack in our seats we looked like loads of others, just getting our heads down for a moment or two before grappling with the challenges of the day.

  I’d told Ali I was doing an M3C story. I was going to follow the management, find out where they were staying and try for an interview. They’d turned me down yesterday, but that wasn’t unusual in our neck of the woods.

  He nodded as if it all made sense, but I could almost hear that mind of his ticking over. He was going along with it because I seemed to be offering him a future.

  Ali stared through the windscreen, concentrating on the traffic as I watched the entrance. People and vehicles streamed in and out.

  ‘Jim, you will email me about the job when you get back to England? Do you think your editor will like my work?’

  I couldn’t work out if he was questioning his own capabilities or doubting me.

  ‘I will take classes to become a good journalist. Will you tell your editor that? I will work very hard.’

  ‘I will, mate, don’t worry. I’m sure everything will be OK.’

  Now I was doing the worrying. Giving a guy a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel only to snatch it away was an arsehole’s trick. I knew what it felt like, waiting on a promise that never came good. My step-dad was always promising us a trip to Margate or to the fun fair. I’d wait for the day to arrive, my heart racing, excited to be doing stuff that other kids did all the time, but nothing ever happened. I’d start to doubt myself, checking I had the right day, waiting for him to come back from the pub, but he never did.

  ‘Highway To The Danger Zone’, the theme tune to Top Gun, erupted beside me. Ali flushed pink with embarrassment. ‘Sorry, Jim – I cannot seem to erase it.’ He flipped open his mobile. He sounded guarded at first, but there was a rapid thaw. He was soon waffling away. Whoever it was, they’d called with good news.