Wesley looked at me a moment, uncertain, then he, too, grinned.
‘Fuck off, you,’ he said.
We watched the video for the next hour or so. Wesley, it turned out, had shot it himself, using a brand-new VHS camera he’d been given by Aldridge. It was 1989. The Iran-Iraq war was over and in Baghdad it was business as usual. To mark his birthday, Saddam Hussein had decided to organize a party. He called it a trade fair and he invited all his Western friends. Wesley had covered the show as a journalist working for Defence Week, and taking the video camera had been Aldridge’s idea. The trade fan-had attracted the biggest names in the arms business and Aldridge wanted a permanent record for the file.
The video opened with fuzzy shots through the window of a 747. Wesley clearly hadn’t read the instructions properly and was waving the camera about all over the place. There was a lot of muttered cursing on the soundtrack, and when the view finally steadied, it turned out to be a piece of Baghad Airport. Then the shot changed and we were somewhere else, another airport, tents everywhere, pavilions of some kind, men in uniform, heads tilted upwards, pointing fingers.
In the hotel room, I was sitting on the floor, my back against the foot of the bed. Wesley was up above me on the bed itself, a blanket wrapped round him. He had the remote-control unit for the video machine and he froze the picture on the screen. He sounded, at last, excited.
‘Watch this,’ he told me. ‘Bloody incredible.’
He waved the remote controller at the screen and the picture came to life again. For a moment nothing happened, the camera looking down the runway, scanning left and right. Then a tiny dot appeared. On the soundtrack, above the general hum of the crowd, I could hear snatches of a foreign language, Arabic maybe. The dot grew bigger and bigger and then resolved itself into a small jet fighter. The wheels were down and the nose was up, and the pilot was obviously trying for a landing.
‘Alpha Jet,’ Wesley grunted, ‘Egyptian Air Force.’
By now, you could hear the jet, a high-pitched whine, softer than you might expect. The plane disappeared behind a row of heads and the camera wavered for a moment, not quite sure where to go. Then there was a roar from the engine and the plane appeared again, climbing for height, the undercarriage tucking up inside the fuselage, the pilot banking sharply away at the end of the runway.
‘Overshoot,’ Wesley muttered. ‘Guy fucked up.’
I nodded, not really understanding, still watching the screen. Wesley was using the zoom now on his new camera, the plane getting bigger. Then, abruptly, there was a crackle of gunfire, a distant pop-popping, and the plane was caged in dirty black puffs of smoke. Bits started falling off. There was an explosion of some kind near the tail. Then the little jet seemed to stop dead in the air, one wing dipping, the nose going down, the canopy disintegrating, two black shapes blasting upwards. The camera went with them for a second or two, parachutes blossoming from the ejector seats, then it panned down again, trying to find the aircraft, and we had a brief glimpse of the falling wreckage before it disappeared behind the forest of pointing fingers, and there was a dull, heavy, crumping sound, followed by a series of explosions and a column of thick, black smoke.
The screen went fuzzy. Wesley stopped the tape. I was still looking at the screen, still blinking.
‘What happened?’ I said blankly.
‘Guy turned off the flight path. He was heading for the Presidential Palace. They have anti-aircraft guns up on the roof, serious triple-A. They shot him to pieces.’
‘At an airshow?’
‘Sure.’ Wesley shrugged. ‘They thought he was about to bomb them.’
‘But what happened? To the plane?’
‘History.’ Wesley paused a moment. ‘Twenty people killed on the ground.’ He shook his head. ‘Crazy place.’
I glanced up at him, recognizing the expression on his face, the huge eyes, the wagging head, the astonishment and delight that life should have dished up so extraordinary a scene.
‘Must have wrecked the party,’ I murmured.
‘Yeah … real downer.’
‘Seriously.’
‘Seriously?’ Wesley looked at me. ‘They loved it. You know what one guy said to me? One guy who saw it?’
‘No.’
‘He said it was all pre-planned. Swore blind.’
‘Why? Who by?’
‘The Swiss.’
‘The Swiss? Why?’
Wesley paused a second, savouring the moment, and I suddenly realized he’d been through this scene before, probably dozens of times, his very own home movie, his party piece. He was still looking at me, demanding my full attention.
‘Obvious,’ he said at last, ‘they made the fucking triple-A in the first place. Nothing like the real thing to flog a few more.’
I offered him a thin smile, chilled by the joke, then I turned away, hearing the seagulls outside the window and the sigh of the wind in the trees across the road. Evil, I thought again, evil.
We spooled on through the video, an agonizingly slow tour of the trade fair. We stopped at each display, each pavilion, Wesley’s voice on the soundtrack supplying a running commentary. Wherever we went, wherever Wesley took us, there was more hardware on display. The components, quite obviously, were Western, often British, and there was rarely any attempt to disguise their origin. However loud the noises back home, all the parliamentary handwringing about ‘responsibility’ and ‘restraint’, here was the raw evidence of what we’d really been up to. Thousands of jobs. Millions of pounds’ worth of export orders. All bound for Iraq. Winners and losers, I thought, watching the images drifting in and out of focus. Peter Devlin. And poor Clive Alloway.
Finally, inside yet another pavilion, we got to the point of the tour. Mounted on a long table was a model I didn’t for a moment recognize. It was composed of lengths of pipe, bolted together, with what looked like an enormous open breech at one end. The whole assembly was mounted on a length of railway track, and tiny model figures dotted here and there gave an idea of scale. The camera panned down the object, pipe by pipe, and then drew back. On the soundtrack, in a state of some excitement, I heard Wesley mutter something I didn’t quite catch.
‘What?’ I queried, looking up.
‘Supergun,’ Wesley said. ‘More Brit engineering.’
I looked again, recognizing it now, the huge project the Iraqis had commissioned from British factories, the scandal that had made headlines around the world. After all the handwringing in Whitehall, and the arrests of the key businessmen, the episode had never got as far as the courts, and I’d often tapped into Registry files, looking for some clue to why the government had mysteriously dropped all charges. But the electronic cupboards had always been bare, just the terse note ‘ED’, Executive Deletion, sure confirmation that the records had been weeded at the highest level.
Now I looked up, puzzled. ‘Why Supergun?’ I said. ‘What’s that got to do with us?’
Wesley was still looking at the screen. ‘Watch,’ he said. ‘Watch what happens next.’
I returned to the screen. The camera was off on its travels again, swinging round, pulling out, revealing a group of four or five people on the other side of the display. They were facing the camera and their faces were all clearly visible. They were deep in discussion, looking at the model, pointing at this feature or that, nodding and agreeing. Finally, one of them glanced at his watch and patted the man beside him on the back. There was the sound of laughter and the man with the watch began to turn away. As he did so, Wesley froze the picture. It hung on the television screen, juddering slightly. I peered at it again, recognizing the savage crewcut, the hooded eyes, the thick neck. No doubt about it. Harold Beckermann.
It was mid-afternoon. I’d coaxed Wesley out of the hotel, both of us suddenly back in a world where it paid to be careful about conversation. We’d taken a drive along the beach road into the docks and parked the other side of a narrow swing bridge. The area around the dock was derelict. A Une of wooden cha
lets between the dock and the sea had recently been demolished. There was timber and rubble everywhere, lots of empty space, not a soul in sight. I bumped the camper up on to the hardstanding and switched off the engine. Yachts swung at their moorings. Across the river, miles away, I could see a train. I looked at Wesley.
‘Go on,’ I said.
Wesley glanced across at me. His recall was far from perfect, but there was no question about the effort he was making. The man beside Beckermann on the video had been François Ghattan, the name McGrath had given me in Washington, ‘Mogul’s’ first owner. According to Wesley, Ghattan was a near legend in the arms business, a Lebanese trader who’d specialized in selling stuff into Iraq. He had the ear of the Al-Tikritis, Saddam Hussein’s extended family. They trusted him completely and he’d made a fortune by marrying their grander plans to sources of Western credit. But by 1989, said Wesley, Ghattan was sick. He had a chronic heart complaint and sooner or later it would kill him.
‘And Beckermann?’
‘A good friend.’ He paused. ‘No question.’
‘And Supergun? The arms fair? That scene you shot?’
Wesley reached for another cigarette, his second of the day. I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was a good sign or not.
‘Beckermann,’ he said carefully, ‘had lots of interests.’
‘Had?’
‘Has. He’s based in Dallas, as you know. A lot of what he plays with is oil money, reinvested in the weapons business. The piece you saw, the piece I showed you, they were discussing a forward steel contract, no question.’
‘For another gun? A second gun?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You know that?’
‘Yeah.’ He paused. ‘The Supergun’s 1000-mm calibre. Saddam wanted a slightly smaller version, 600 mm, still a monster. A gun like that could throw a shell nearly five hundred miles. The steel you use to build the thing is highly specialized. There’s a firm in Texas makes it. Saddam wanted to buy the firm.’
‘From Beckermann?’
‘No. Beckermann was just the front man. Representing Texan interests. There’s a little club of top Americans on the Iraqi circuit. Industrialists mostly. Beckermann’s one of them.’ He frowned. ‘That’s not the point, though.’
‘No?’
‘No. The point is Ghattan. Ghattan had the ear of the Iraqis. They trusted him. They liked him. He took them places they’d never otherwise go. Same with the Americans. You saw the pictures. He’s Beckermann’s favourite Arab. The classic middleman. A foot in both camps.’
I nodded, wondering now where Wesley was headed. Across the river, the other side of the tidal stream, a single cormorant was diving for fish. He disappeared for a long time. When he came up again, he’d got nothing. I looked at Wesley.
‘Tell me something,’ I said slowly.
‘What?’
I smiled. Wesley’s old expression was back. Deep mistrust. I glanced at the river, looking for the cormorant again, not finding it.
‘Grant Wallace,’ I began, ‘those notes of his on Beckermann … for the book he was doing…’
‘What about them?’
I sat back, closing my eyes, smelling the old Wesley smell, spindly roll-ups, shag tobacco. ‘He ever show you,’ I said softly, ‘any of that stuff?’
I opened one eye. Wesley was concentrating very hard on a small black beetle making its way along the dashboard. For a moment, it occurred to me I’d lost him again. Then he nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘The whole lot? Including the research he’d done recently?’ I paused, remembering the empty drawer in Grant’s filing cabinet, the way his mother had described the body, the gun dangling from his dead hand, the single black hole in his temple. ‘The stuff about Beckermann’s recent life? The last year or two? What he was up to? Where he’d been?’
Wesley gave up on the beetle, and looked me in the eye. To my relief, he understood exactly what I meant. Even better, he was smiling.
‘Yes,’ he said again, ‘even that.’
26
Several days later, we were still talking about the contents of Grant’s files on Beckermann.
I’d managed to borrow a wheelchair from Eileen and for the second afternoon in a row I pushed Wesley along the empty seafront, a two-mile walk that took us as far as the end of the beach. Overnight, Wesley had developed a hacking cough. I didn’t know whether it was the shag tobacco or something more sinister, but the weather was lovely, if cold, and I told myself that the air must be good for him.
At the end of a line of sand dunes, we stopped and I peered down at Wesley. His nose was running, his eyes, too. I fumbled for a Kleenex, and gave it to him.
‘That crash,’ I said again, ‘the Beirut plane.’
Wesley buried his nose in the Kleenex. When he’d finished, he motioned me to sit beside him. He hadn’t the breath left to raise his voice and there was no way he could compete with the wind. There was a low wall beside the wheelchair. I sat down, glad of the shelter.
‘You’re sure about the date?’ I said. ‘June? This year?’
‘Yeah.’
I looked away, doing the calculations. Desert Storm had ground to a halt at the end of February. According to Grant Wallace’s notes, March and April had found Harold Beckermann commuting between Dallas and the Gulf, signing a string of massive re-supply contracts with the Saudis and the Al-Sabahs. The latter, the Kuwaiti ruling family, evidently had the contracts ready and waiting, prices pre-agreed, delivery dates pre-agreed, even the date of the contract signature pre-typed at the foot of each page. This was part of the story Grant had originally told Wesley back in Geneva, the night they’d first met, Wesley’s first sight of the hare. At that point, Grant himself had been awestruck by the implications, though even then he’d been convinced that Beckermann himself was blameless, simply a willing contractor, only too pleased to play the State Department’s game. If Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon had been that certain about the war’s outcome, then so be it. With billions of dollars at stake, no one was asking too many questions.
Now I glanced back at Wesley. His nose was chafed and red. He was still thinking about the crash.
‘June the sixth,’ he confirmed, ‘mid-afternoon.’
I nodded. In June, the local Extec agent in the Lebanon had chartered a small, two-engined executive plane. The aircraft was to carry the agent, plus three other passengers, from Beirut to Sana’a in the Yemen. Ten minutes out from Beirut, somewhere east of the Litani River, the plane had disappeared from ATC radar screens. A day later, wreckage had been found, scattered over a rocky escarpment, about thirty miles west of Damascus. The aircraft had burned on impact. What little remained of the bodies on board was charred beyond recognition.
Beckermann, in Dallas at the time, had returned to the Middle East at once. Grant, said Wesley, had made a great deal of what happened next because he felt it showed his hero at his very best. Back in Beirut, taking command, he’d organized immediate payouts for the victims of the crash. The family of the Extec agent, himself Lebanese, had received, to Grant’s certain knowledge, a quarter of a million dollars. Relatives of the other three passengers, plus the pilot, had been given similar sums. In return, the grieving relations had preserved a discreet silence about the loss of their loved ones. No public handwringing. No drama. No demands for an inquiry.
Officially, the incident had provoked equally little curiosity. Weather in the area had been bad, visibility poor, winds gusting sixty knots. There’d been vague talk of an altimeter failure, or simple pilot error, or even some kind of interception by the neighbouring Israeli Air Force. The one word that no one appeared to have used was ‘bomb’.
Wesley voiced the thought now, peering out to sea, watching the gulls clouding around a small trawler.
‘Had to be,’ he said, ‘just had to be.’
‘Why?’
He glanced across at me. ‘The wreckage was everywhere. Big area. If the plane had hit the mountain, you wou
ldn’t find that. It would be tight. One place. Not scattered.’
‘So who’d plant the bomb? Who’d be the target?’
Wesley shrugged. ‘Dunno,’ he said.
‘Did Grant have a passenger list? Names we could check?’
‘No.’
‘Photographs?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Just notes he made at the time. Plus a couple of cuttings.’
I nodded, plucking a blade of grass from the dune, sucking it. Wesley had fallen silent again, brooding. Finally, he looked up.
‘Tell you who’d know more about it,’ he said reluctantly.
‘Who?’
‘Dickhead.’
‘Who?’
He looked at me a moment, still reluctant. ‘Aldridge,’ he said at last.
Back at the hotel, a tray of tea between us on the bedspread, I pressed him further. How much did Aldridge know? What had been his interest? Did he have photos? Names? Theories? Wesley met every question with the blankest of stares, volunteering nothing. When the tea was brewed, he asked me to pour.
‘Photographs,’ he said at last, watching me burn my fingers on the hot metal handle. ‘He has three or four photographs.’
‘You’ve seen them?’
‘Yes. But only briefly. They’re in the library at Defence Week. They’re definitely there. I was going to lift them. Before…’ he shrugged, ‘all this.’
I nodded, wrapping a napkin around the teapot handle.
‘And what did they show? These photographs?’
Wesley frowned, still far from eager to part with the information, and I hesitated, the teapot in mid-air, waiting for a reply.
‘There’s a group shot,’ he said at last. ‘The five of them on the tarmac with the plane behind. I think it was the agent’s birthday or something. Someone took it before they left.’
‘Did you recognize anyone?’
‘I can’t remember. I didn’t really look.’
‘But you could,’ I began to fill his cup, ‘if I got the photo?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said quietly, ‘maybe I could.’
Thunder in the Blood Page 34
