by Adam Thorpe
Ed Trimble repeated these words to every new boy. Then he’d always say, ‘Listen, why does Africa exist? To let white guys make bucks round the clock. Same with Asia, only there it’s more the Asians making money round the clock. You get in the way of that process, you get in trouble. Oh, now where’s so-and-so gone? Nobody knows. Nobody ever will know. We’re not talking Staffordshire; we’re talking wildness. Pure wildness.’ He had white cropped hair and a thin gold chain round his neck, had started his working life as a quarry man in Mozambique. He was their loadmaster, knew exactly where to shift crates in the bay to the nearest centimetre, or so it seemed. Their life was in his hands, as they generally flew very near to maximums. Being nose-heavy in a fog over the Congo, looking for a badly maintained strip, would have been a one-way headache.
Just over two years back, Bob had ignored Ed Trimble’s advice. There was a direct link between that moment of inattention and the current emergency getting the ice ringing in his Scotch. It was The Deal, the one that had hit him like a stepped-on rake: partly his fault, partly the fault of whoever had placed it there, and partly because Olivia wouldn’t have him back. That was why he’d been inattentive.
He’d called on her in the shop. Apart from anything else, he wanted his old aeronautical charts, lit by laser-like spots on the stripped-back eighteenth-century brick between the gesturing dummies and racks of unbought clothes. The shop had been on a downward curve since the crisis, Olivia claiming she wasn’t so much sick of it as the other way round.
‘You used a gun.’
‘I shot at the clouds. A farewell signal.’
‘So you say. I thought you’d killed him. It was dreadful. He said you threatened to blow his brains out. He’d twisted his ankle.’
‘There’s a whole universe between using and not using a gun on someone, Olivia.’
A woman entered, a customer. Olivia signalled to him to leave as if he was a pocket of dust and turned her back. She had cheated on him, and he was the one being booted out – or rather, not being allowed back. It meant that his concentration on the job in hand, a few weeks later, was muddied by a fierce undertow of rage.
He had carried all sorts before, including atomic equipment, to many strange places, mostly out of Ostend or Bratislava in the old days, but he had always kept as wise as the three monkeys. Mostly it was stuff like tinned pineapple or bandages or baby milk or spare parts for the oil industry. This time round it was meant to be medical supplies: there’d been a serious earthquake in southern Turkey, and they would be flying into Istanbul out of Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
He never suspected anything else, and anyway it was, following Ed’s rules, none of his business. The only reason he was alone in the 727’s cargo bay, checking out the crates, was because he’d taken a weekend break in Norfolk after twenty days’ flying for an ad hoc charter in lieu of another stand-off on the gravelled drive with Olivia. He had jogged along the beach barefoot, and got a cut toe: not even dead-flat Norfolk was without its dangers.
He was looking for antibiotics, as the small cut was now infected. The top of his foot was flushed and a touch swollen. He knew this little infection could turn into cellulitis, and he’d been in Africa enough to know how swiftly it could all deteriorate: infected cut to cellulitis to septicaemia to coffin. He also knew exactly which antibiotic to take, and that it was as likely to be in a consignment for earthquake victims as it was unlikely to be available on a wintry Sunday night in Plovdiv International.
So there he was in the dimly lit hold, prising open the lid of a crate with MEDICAL and SAVE THE CHILDREN FUND stencilled on it, when he was suddenly looking not at bandages and bottles but at naughty green boxes. Lots of them. Less to his surprise, these contained brand-new AK-47 assault rifles and their ammo in plastic bags. The crates stretched away in the dim bay, as useless to him as a piss hole in the snow.
He disguised his intrusion with a tarp and went off to find the boss, or rather the anonymous boss’s agent, a fattish young chap called Lennie with straggly flaxen hair and a cut-glass English drawl, although he claimed he was Swedish – full name Lennart. He was due to come on-board with Team Bob, and perhaps out of nerves he was drinking beer after beer in the airport bar. Maybe he was an uneasy flyer. He asked Bob why he was limping. ‘I’ve limped since I crashed some years ago, but now I’m limping on both legs. It’s just more obvious. Talking of which, can I be reassured that our final destination is Istanbul?’
‘Of course. Why?’
‘I’ve a feeling the equipment we’re carrying might not be very medical.’
‘Sorry?’
‘It makes no difference to me, I’m just the pilot. I’m not involved in anything other than getting us from A to B, but I do need to know for fuel reasons. I don’t want you telling me to take a sharp left or right when I’m thinking to go straight on and finding my maximums are maxed out somewhere over fucking Libya.’
Posh Boy reassured Bob that they would certainly be landing in Istanbul, and reached into his briefcase to flourish the relevant documents, including a flight plan, an export licence, an end-user certificate and a letter from Save the Children which, if Bob had studied it properly, would no doubt have revealed itself as a fiction full of spelling mistakes.
He was as good as his word. The plane left Plovdiv at midnight with a touch of snow on the runway, and the usual 727 shake-it-about on take-off had Posh Boy gripping his shoulder harness.
‘A piece of cake,’ Bob told him. ‘The wings were bolted on in Seattle, not Shanghai.’
The flight engineer gave a throaty chuckle. This was, as usual, Hugh ‘Al’ McAllister. Bob had known Al for years and looked on him as a friend, even a good one. ‘But the tail was made in fucking Aberdeen,’ he growled.
They touched down in Istanbul after an uneventful few hours peppered by reminiscences of Eton; the lad had been sent there by his millionaire dad, who ran a company near Stockholm making industrial refrigerators. Bob had no doubt that the Swede was an old-fashioned adventurer – money certainly wasn’t the object. If Bob had known something about Eton he might have quizzed a bit more; instead he admitted going to several very minor public schools, none of which had wanted him for long, ending up in a sixth-form college where he was moderately well received.
‘Which university?’ asked Posh Boy, leaning forward in the jump seat, his beery breath filling the cockpit.
‘The university of life,’ Bob replied.
‘The best, the best,’ said Al. ‘The dog has always eaten your homework.’
‘And what about yourself, Lennie?’
‘Christ Church Oxford,’ he announced. The co-pilot – ex-Swissair – looked impressed. The man’s a liar, Bob thought. A consummate liar. He had to tell him to shut up as they began the landing check at 1,500 feet over the Bosphorus.
He expected the cargo to be unloaded, no doubt intended for use by or against the Turkish Kurds; instead, once the cargo high loader was operating, the space in the plane’s hold was filled by a jeep and a couple more containers. Then a refuelling truck rolled up. They were on one of Atatürk’s remoter aprons next to a curved Nissen-like hut, one of those corrugated relics of a bygone age you find in the unglamorous parts of most airports. Dawn was rising in inverse proportion to his heart, which was most definitely sinking.
He stood shivering on the tarmac (it was winter even in Turkey) looking distinctly grumpy. He repaired with Lennart to the hut and Bob said he needed to sleep. ‘A few more hours and you’ll all be $90,000 happier,’ said the Swede.
Bob tried not to show his delight. Reluctance would put the price up even more.
‘Where are we going? Angola’s peaceful these days.’
‘Turkmenistan.’
‘Bigger earthquake, was it?’
Posh Boy smiled wanly. ‘There’s a lot of bucks in it.’
‘Eton old boys don’t say bucks. They say small change. Which airport? Krasnovodsk?’
‘Is that the same as Turkmenbashi?’
; ‘Everything’s Turkmen-something, I believe. You inspire great confidence in me, but then you did go to Oxford.’ Bob sat down at the plywood table on an unstable metal chair with a splintery plywood back, folded his hands and rested his chin on them. Posh Boy avoided his eyes as Bob spoke. ‘Look, I’ve landed there a couple of times. A very smelly place. All rocks and rusting pipelines and little black pools and not a blade of grass. Crude oil. Much smellier than kerosene. It takes ages to get the smell out of the cockpit, in fact. And this operation smells. It would smell less if you’d given me an honest flight plan. The type of cargo’s neither here nor there, it just annoys me when the flight plan’s hidden from the pilot. That’s unusual. I’m not happy with it.’
Posh Boy looked around as if the response lay somewhere in the hut. Its interior was a time warp: there was a telex machine covered in dust on the table and a yellowed Vickers Viscount flight manual on the shelf. A BOAC calendar girl with bright red lips and a woollen bikini grinned from the wall, next to a Brylcreem’d and ageless Atatürk. Bob guessed the place had been padlocked for years and they’d lost the key. The only modern item was the other man’s mobile, sitting between them and faintly illuminating his hairless chin.
‘I can arrange for a bit more,’ he said.
‘I’ll need to talk to the crew. I don’t like the look of this. It’s got all the appearance of an illicit arms transfer. If the hardware had been for His Esteemed Turkmen-Highness, no need to hide it.’
‘Hardware?’
‘All those medical supplies, complete with ammo. And now a jeep and maybe Christ knows what else. It’s dangerous goods. They don’t appear on the Loadsheet and you didn’t notify the captain. That’s me. I need to know their loading positions, I need to sign the NOTOC, in case of emergencies. Or the so-called aspirin could give us all a fatal headache.’
The Swede smiled, in the way a kid does when caught fibbing, but his eyes were anxious. ‘Please, Captain. Just take it there, pocket the money, and fly back empty. Like you’ve always done, notification or no notification.’
‘Not always. Sometimes I’ve not liked the look of it. There are wars in Africa, and people need guns like they need medical kit, but there’s no war in Turkmenistan.’ As no answer came back, Bob gave it to him: ‘There is, however, a big war next door. So why not fly straight to Kabul or Bagram? I’ve done that quite a few times. Field hospitals, tents, even military stuff. There’s no embargo. As long as it’s not, of course, the Taliban.’
The reaction Bob had deliberately wished to trigger was unexpected, but it imparted the same message: the young man laughed. Not a laugh of derision, but a high yelp-like thing of embarrassment. He looked up at the ceiling, its askew panels defying the forces of gravity. ‘Well, it’s an awful mess,’ he sighed. ‘No one knows where anything ends up, really.’
‘Mess is the operative word,’ Bob said. ‘I have two golden rules in this job: no flights to Libya, not since Lockerbie, and don’t touch the Taliban. For a start, they burn down schools, which despite my scholarly record is not something I approve of.’
‘There’s worse in Africa,’ said Posh Boy. ‘Joseph H. Kenley, for example?’
Bob glanced at him: the young man’s stare was meaningful. The eye pouches seemed to have grown suddenly, adding ten years to the pallid area under the straggly flax.
‘I was a charter pilot,’ Bob said, ‘doing my job. Standard operations, in and out of the bush. Short hauls, an hour each way. But you had to know what you were about. Real aviation.’ He reiterated that he’d said no once or twice, when it was not to his liking.
And that was true: Bob Winrush had said no to some very unpleasant so-called rebel colonels, who’d end up shouting a lot too close to his face so he could smell the drink. But he would stick to his guns, despite losing money. ‘And as for Kenley,’ he said, and paused. ‘There was a war on. You don’t know who the stuff’s intended for. It’s on the tarmac. You load it, you fly, you unload it. Equipment or men. This business is different.’ He brushed the table’s dust from his uniform sleeves, folded his arms and sat back. ‘This has critical alert flashing all over it. I know what I’m talking about. And my foot’s infected. I need to get to a doctor immediately.’
Lennart reached into his briefcase once more and produced the flight plan and a plastic folder with the relevant flight charts, approach plates and so on. He removed the charts and flattened them out. Most of the route was over water: the Black Sea, the Caspian. As for the flight plan, it was a new one: it started at Plovdiv, but its destination was marked as Turkmenbashi. All signed and above board, Bob noticed. Not that anyone in Turkmenistan could have cared a hoot.
‘I said we’d fly into Istanbul, Captain, and we did. Our return to Bulgaria is rerouted due to bad weather,’ he added jokily.
‘Yes, we did fly into Istanbul. And I’ll bet you went to Eton, too – on a day trip with your very minor public school. Or comprehensive, even. Forget it. Find another skipper. I’m off to the doctor’s.’
Bob stood up, swigged the last dregs of the coffee he’d somehow brought out with him to the shed, and limped slightly dramatically to the door. Posh Boy started to talk in Swedish, which Bob thought was silly until he realised the man was, without picking it up, addressing his mobile. No doubt it had been relaying the entire conversation. As if in sympathy with its owner’s feelings, Bob’s foot drew attention to its condition with a needle-sharp stab of pain. But the man hadn’t wanted to hear about the foot. Clearly, when millions of Tali-dollars are at stake, sourced probably from the limitless wells of Saudi Arabia, a pilot’s minor medical ailment does not count for much. This piqued the pilot more than anything.
Naturally, when Bob tried to open the door, he found it locked. He looked out of the grimy pane of glass that constituted the shed’s window and saw at least three burly men, the kind you know have halitosis, standing outside with shoulder holsters in evidence. He turned round.
‘Look,’ Posh Boy said, ‘you and I are in this together. I went to Eton, but I got expelled. You know, drugs, being too individual and all that.’
‘Who’s your boss?’
‘He’s not paying you. He’s just the client. You’ll be paid on landing.’
‘What, the mad mullahs are just going to come on board waving a brown envelope?’
‘Yes. Their representatives. In Western suits.’
‘Well, I hardly expected them to board in Taliban T-shirts,’ Bob said. ‘So who is your boss? Viktor Bout’s in prison, these days. Barrett-Jolley, too.’
Posh Boy switched his mobile off and looked thoughtful. Then he said a name, quietly. Bob got him to repeat it. The Swede didn’t want to, as if he’d had second thoughts on hearing himself say it. Bob actually refused to believe him. Ed’s advice was swept away.
‘Evron Bensoussan? It’s not possible. He’s an Israeli. Even Mr Bensoussan wouldn’t sell arms to the Taliban. Are the guns booby-trapped or something?’
‘It’s crazy, I know,’ Lennart said, turning pale. ‘But I’m just the agent. I’m not even Jewish. And, by the way, I didn’t lie: I never said delivery was in Istanbul.’ His pale blue eyes stared, but oddly unfocused, as if through the bottom of a glass.
Bob could either fly and risk a lot of trouble, or not fly and risk a lot of trouble. The payment was not just for doing it but to keep your mouth shut, after.
‘I see I’m free to make one choice,’ he said.
Posh Boy stood up and shook Bob’s hand. ‘I’ll get you more money. Another $20,000, just for you.’
‘No. Divided three ways. I can’t fly the beast on my own. But what about my foot? I may get delirious on the plane. In fact, I’m feeling pretty rough already.’ Lennart said they couldn’t hang about. ‘They’ve given us a slot?’ He nodded. ‘So what’s our CTOT?’ The agent said take-off was in four hours fifteen minutes, which seemed plenty to find a doctor, but he didn’t want Bob to find one. It would draw attention, lead to stamped documentation.
Bob expres
sed surprise that they were flying in daylight. ‘We’re freight,’ he enunciated, as if talking to an idiot, ‘and I believe it’s hot out there. It’s mostly desert.’
‘Actually,’ said Lennart, ‘deserts get pretty cold in the Caspian. Right now it’s under ten degrees. There’s a doctor in the airport here, emergencies. I’ll get it sorted. Go sit in the plane. What do you need?’ Bob scribbled out the name of the antibiotic on a slip of paper. It was almost illegible, like a real prescription. He did feel rough, but not just from his foot or lack of sleep; no man feels good when his marriage is disintegrating in mid-air, frame by frame.
He told the Swede that the identity of the boss was just between themselves, that he wouldn’t tell the crew that it was Bensoussan. Posh Boy didn’t seem to take it in, so Bob told him again. He dismissed the assurance with a wave of his hand and tapped on the door, which opened. He said something more in Swedish – or maybe it wasn’t Swedish, maybe it was Martian – and Bob was escorted back to the flight deck, his limp even more pronounced.
All Bob said to his crew was that there was twenty more grand, because their destination was a certain benighted country that stank of crude, felt a bit stony, and had not a tree nor a blade of grass, except maybe around the presidential palace. Five guesses.
‘Not fucking Iraq,’ said Al.
‘No way.’
‘Afghanistan?’ suggested ex-Swissair.
‘Close. Think the latter end of the alphabet. We fly from A to Z, as you know. It has a famously lousy airline.’
‘Ireland,’ joked Al. ‘And I don’t mean Aer Lingus.’
Ex-Swissair pointed out that Ireland had a lot of grass. This was getting silly so Bob told them. Al groaned. He’d once flown Turkmenistan Airlines to Birmingham out of Ashgabat as a passenger after his own plane was grounded. The toilets were flooded, the food was foul and the cabin crew had not a word of English between them. ‘But they’re pretty-looking planes,’ he added. Bob wondered whether to tell them who their clients were, remembered Al had done a few flights for Viktor Bout (no stranger to the Taliban, it was rumoured), and did so. They weren’t aware, of course, that the cargo and the cargo manifest did not join up.
