Danger Close

by Charlie Flowers

  Mo whispered in my ear. ‘These are the staff, the backbone of everything here, really. They do the laundry, cooking, sewing… they run the place. They’re Uzbekis.’

  We shuffled forward as the Uzbeki ladies went into the brightly-lit hangar, chattering like birds as they went. As we watched, another set of women came out of the hangar carrying a shrouded body on a stretcher. Mo shrugged. ‘Overdose or a suicide. We have a lot of them.’

  Finally we reached the head of the queue. CCTV cameras watched us. Mo talked to one of the guards and indicated that I should show him the letter. I did.

  The other guard came over to look. He spoke two words to Mo. ‘Pa rekhteya?’

  Mo just said ‘Pa rekhteya.’

  The guard nodded towards the hangar. I was in.

  ‘Mo, what does this letter say?’

  ‘It’s a note from the General. It says anyone carrying this letter is allowed access to either hangar in Parwan for the next 72 hours, from this date and by his order.’

  Then he clapped me on the shoulder and said ‘See ya in a bit then akhi!’ and left the way we’d arrived.

  I walked into the hangar. It seemed to be less of a circus than the mens’ section, but still a muddle. The paint theme here was scuffed and flaked lime green. Everywhere I looked, women were haggling, arguing, hurrying off on some engagement. I smelled cooking on the air. Proper cooking, not the slop we got in our section. My stomach started to grumble. Focus, Riz, I told myself.

  Now, if I was Bang-Bang, where would I be, I asked myself. Easy. She’d be teaching a class somewhere. I started to pace the cinderblock corridors, looking for classrooms or signs I could understand. I walked past a blank-eyed Uzbek girl lazily pushing a mop. I looked down. She was swabbing at a large slick of blood and some used needles. The dark red slick got larger and the needles just swam around in the blood. God. I started praying under my breath, almost without a thought. C’mon Holly, where are you babe…

  All the room and cell doors seemed to be open, and as I neared the end of the hangar, I came to a T-junction. To my right was a scrum of women, and some boys, craning to see into a doorway. I made for the doorway and pushed my way through.

  The crowd parted reluctantly and there she was. There she was, flicking cards down onto a trestle table. To either side of her sat two boys, neither of whom could have been more than twelve or thirteen. Hard to tell. She was wearing a grubby salwar kameez and a loose hijab over her hair…really loosely. I chuckled to myself at the rebel headscarf and my naivety in thinking she’d be teaching, rather than running a card school. I then stopped as I realised how pale and thin she was, and spotted the livid bruise on her cheekbone and the dried blood where someone had torn her nose-ring out. She’d been in the wars.

  ‘Aaaand, house collects! Biennnnvenidos a la vidaaa locaaaa, compadres…’

  Bang-Bang was drawling in Spanish and the ladies of Uzbekistan and Afghanistan weren’t getting it. Once a Blackeye, always a Blackeye. Her two little helpers raked in the dollar notes and she swigged from a bottle of water, then resumed shuffling and dealing. The game looked to be Texas Hold ‘Em.

  I pushed forward until I was sitting in the inner circle. Without looking up Bang-Bang flicked a pair of cards down and spoke to me in what I assumed was Pashto as the card players took their deals. I’d forgotten that all her Dad’s side of the family spoke it. How stupid of me.

  I replied ‘Sorry luv, I only speak Quack Quack and Durka Durka.’

  Bang-Bang looked up and her eyes widened and her hand flew to her mouth.

  And she rapidly composed herself and grinned back. A rustle went round the crowd. She spoke to them and they laughed, and she patted a space next to her as boy number one went off on an errand.

  We hugged, and time seemed to go away for a short break. I’d found her. She was shaking and clung to me like a limpet. She seemed so skinny, and didn’t smell too good. But then, neither did I, I supposed.

  Time came back. We acted normal. The crowd was watching us for a cue. Bang-Bang leant into me and put her head on my shoulder. She smiled.

  ‘I knew you’d find me. I knew.’

  ‘Always. But on a less bright note, we’re now BOTH in an Afghan prison.’

  We laughed at the absurdity of the situation. She looked up at me. The pupils in her eyes were like pinpricks.

  ‘Yeah. But I’m tunnelling out. Haven’t you heard?’

  ‘Yes, we got a lecture from the commandant about several thousand missing industrial-sized cans of beans.’

  Her shoulders shook again, but this time with quiet amusement. ‘Did he mention the potato peeling machine? I’ll show you what we’ve been up to with it all in a bit.’

  She checked her watch. They let them keep their watches here? ‘In fact, fiancé of mine, by eleven tonight, the machine should have hit the outer perimeter.’

  ‘This I MUST see. And may I enquire, oh darling fiancée, where you learned about tunnelling?’

  Bang-Bang raised her eyebrows. ‘OK. What is my Dad’s favourite film apart from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon?’

  Of course. ‘You got me. It’s The Great Escape.’

  ‘In one. I had to watch the damn thing every other weekend when Mum was at bingo.’

  She looked sharply at me. ‘How are me Mum and Dad? How are the girls? And how’s the Colonel? Still building his Death Star?’

  I grinned. ‘Your parents, the girls, and the Colonel, miss you and need you back. All hell is about to break loose back home. How did you get set up here? Any dramas?’

  ‘Not much. On day two the second-in-command ANA guy came in and tried to rape me in front me of everyone here. Mister Big Shot. Unfortunately for ANA guy, I’d kept a shard of window glass from over there…’ she waved left… ‘I’d wrapped some electrical tape round the shard and I hacked his throat open with it. I lost my nosering in the fight but he died. Badly. Hooah. The Americans had to send the Forced Cell Move Team in to drag his body out. This end of the prison and every person in it has thought I’m brilliant ever since.’

  I had to laugh. ‘Holly. I fucking love you.’

  She laughed back and punched my arm. ‘And I fucking love you too Rizwan Sabir. Hey, check this out, wanna see my bullet scar?’

  She pulled her salwar kameez top down so I could see a professionally-stitched bullet wound just below her collarbone. To our right, a couple of Taliban ladies blushed and turned away from this brazen display of flesh.

  ‘Apparently they dug the round out in the ambulance. Grazed my left lung. I nearly bled out and flatlined, but they had loads of plasma and antibiotics. I was lucky. Relatively.’

  ‘You were lucky. Who told you about what they did?’

  ‘A US Air Force nurse. She was OK. The others weren’t.’

  ‘Holly, me and Fuzz went to the airbase. We worked out the who, the what, and the where. And then me and Swallow fell out of a perfectly good airplane and here we are.’

  She hugged me and smiled. We were quiet for a good long while. Eventually I couldn’t resist a windup and spoke.

  ‘But hey, check my gunshot wound out, it’s even better!’

  I showed her the bandaging on my ribs. She sucked her teeth with displeasure and touched my arm protectively. ‘Oh babe. My, we have both been battered about a bit, ‘int we?’

  Bang-Bang looked around for a bit and then whispered in my ear. ‘Right. Listen in. Wait till I tell you about the French and Belgian troops on the north of the airbase and what they’ve been stockpiling. Bare Nazis, some of them. I saw them walk through the outside gym a few days ago, bold as brass, nasty skinhead fuckers chatting in French.’

  One language I did know she knew was French. She’d studied hard for that GCSE, or so she’d told me on that prison visit, two hundred years ago.

  ‘Did you get what they were saying?’

  ‘Nah. They were too far away and it seemed to be very Parisian slang, les flics et les mecs if you get my drift. Alors, désolé, j’ai pas compris.’


  I didn’t have a clue. She carried on. ‘Something’s gonna go down. The Taleb lads said there’s a lorry container out near the ambulance station and they’re putting all the seized weapons in it. We need to get out of here.’

  I nodded. ‘OK. Darling. Show me your arms.’

  She pulled up a sleeve to reveal loads of trackmarks.

  Her eyes wobbled and focused on mine. ‘What did you expect hun? The CIA shot me full of it the minute they got me here and it’s all we’ve got for entertainment as they don’t have Sky Plus onsite.’

  ‘Astigfurallah! My babe is a smackhead!’

  ‘Hey, look on the bright side, at least I’m not on crack. I can kick it in days. Honest.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you can. OK, now what?’

  She looked around again. ‘I’m waiting for FlameLite to find me on site. Then we move. But we have to be ready to move quickly. Any ideas?’

  I did. I showed her the General’s letter. She read it and gave a low whoop. ‘So that’s how you got in here. This is good, this means you and me can go to and from either hangar… within reason.’

  I told her about her IMVU avatar and the strange raccoons that were not actually raccoons. She looked ceilingwards to the ever-present strip lights.

  After a moment she spoke. ‘OK, so it’s started. Nothing I can do now. FlameLite is self-aware. Hooah again. Maybe it’ll use a Java applet attack vector to get in…’

  I had no idea what she was talking about. She looked at me with those crazy eyes. ‘Wanna see the escape tunnel?’

  Of course I did.

  16

  ‘Check it out, darling dollface!’

  Bang-Bang pulled a section of Persian rug away from the corner of her cell wall to reveal… a rectangular hole. Straight down into the floor and the dirt. I peered in. It was lit by a chain of those lights you get at Christmas, and seemed to go down a good four feet. I could see tubes and hear a fan whirring. A rope ladder went down into the gloom, and to the left, three black truck batteries were sitting there nice as pie with cables running from them. Obviously these were the famous missing Humvee batteries.

  ‘Holly. The General asked me to ask you to stop it, by the way.’

  ‘Did he now? Bit late for that.’

  ‘How did you drill down? Isn’t it poured concrete flooring?’

  ‘Not in this block, it’s all prefab. I stamped my foot one day trying to kill a cockroach and put it right through the plasterboard. And when I looked, it looked like an old access pipe or drainage, from when the Russians ran the base I guess. Anyway – I’m tunnelling along the pipe and widening it. See them batteries? 24 volt, they are. I had to build my own 12 volt converter for them after I’d blown up two sewing machines and a Moulinex…’

  She trailed off and checked the battery leads and nodded to herself. ‘While we’re waiting, let me show you round my MTV Crib. OK… bunkbed. Quran. Prayer mat, with compass. That bit made me laugh, babe. Sewing kit. Henna. Steel bog I’m sorry, I mean toilet. No telly. Lots of gear though.’

  She meant the syringes and the needles and the bag of white powder sitting on the table. Above it hung her old Phoenix Program t-shirt, now even more artfully distressed by a bullet hole and bloodstains. I promised myself that if it was the last thing I ever did, I would get her out of here and off that smack.

  Bang-Bang was hanging up some washing on a line on the other side of her cell. She spoke distractedly over her shoulder. Her voice sounded slurry, like a tape recorder with low batteries.

  ‘Doll, if you look in the top drawer, there’s some bits of A4 paper on which I’ve sketched as much as I could gather of the layout of this place. Have a look.’

  I looked in the drawer. Two sheets of A4. I laid them on the surface and tried to orient them and commit as much as possible to memory. Bang-Bang came over to my shoulder and started tapping out points on the sketches. ‘Ok, from the left. This is hangar one and two. Intake booth. Airlock. Mens’ section. Library… tailoring shop… canteen.’

  Her hand trailed to the second page. ‘Womens’ section. Creche… sewing room. Literacy classroom. OK, now outside. Basketball court. Kids’ playground.’

  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?’