‘Interesting way to run a war,’ Masters observed. ‘You’re headed north anyway. It’s not like you’re doing us a favour.’
‘Oh really? Well, then, I’d keep that way of thinking to yourself, ma’am, if you want the ride. Robear has a coweye waiting for him at Balad, and hanging around playing taxi driver to you is keeping him from her.’
‘A coweye?’ she asked.
‘A woman with dark eyes, ma’am, as he calls ’em. And just so that you’re abreast of all the terms and conditions, this is a one-way ticket, okay?’ the flight sergeant continued. ‘As I said, we’re heading up to Balad Air Base, so you’ll have to catch a train back.’
‘A train?’
‘Of the camel variety,’ replied the Brit, smiling over his devilish cleverness.
‘What about Christie?’ Masters asked.
‘If you’re still out there this afternoon, he’ll come get you.’
‘Dickwad,’ said Masters under her breath.
I smiled to myself.
We’d been expecting a Land Rover or two, but a Lynx was better. Once airborne, it’d do the leg in six minutes. Putting up with Flight Sergeant Jerkoff here was a small price to pay. The flight sergeant, the chopper’s loadmaster, was accompanied by a couple of British riflemen, one of whom was behind the wheel. The corporal swerved the Land Rover through the streets of Kumayt, dodging humans, dogs, chickens, donkeys and other vehicles, the place having come alive with the passing of the storm.
‘So what do you think you’ll find out there in the desert besides train shit?’ the flight sergeant asked, patently enjoying the sound of his own voice.
‘You asking questions about our mission, sergeant?’ I replied. Or, in other words, ‘Mind your own damn business, Mac.’
It took fifteen minutes to reach the patch of dirt being used by the Lynx as a helipad, and another fifteen for flight checks before we lifted into the blue-grey, mid-morning haze on a cushion of dust. Flight Lieutenant Robear levelled off at 2000 feet. Far off to the north, the rear end of the storm was flinging spikes of dust high into the air. Down on the ground, it was the usual moonscape.
After what seemed like minutes, because it was, Robear called back to us from the cockpit. ‘Okay, we’re coming up on your coordinates now, Special Agents. You like us to do a little scouting around at a hundred feet – help you get the lie of the land?’
‘Thanks, Flight Lieutenant, appreciate it,’ said Masters.
We peered out of the Lynx’s open side as the helo banked hard over.
‘There’s plenty of razor wire down there,’ Robear noted.
Masters and I picked it up a couple of seconds later – a twelve-foot-high double razor-wire fence, just like the one circling Kawthar al Deen. The helo overflew the coords a couple of times from different directions, but there didn’t seem to be anything on the ground – only dirt and wadis surrounded by a square half-mile of razor wire that didn’t even appear to have an entrance gate at any point. Odd.
Robear’s voice came over the headset. ‘I’ll put you down inside, close to the fence. That okay?’
I gave him a thumbs up, then fitted my eye goggles and scarf in place.
The Lynx went into a flare, bringing the nose up and filling the cabin with swirling grit that stung like birdshot as we touched down. Masters and I climbed out, stayed low, and ran at a crouch beyond the arc of the main rotor. We kept our backs to the aircraft as it lifted off, holding the scarves tight against our mouths. The noise of the helo quickly receded and the loud silence of the desert rushed in to fill the void.
‘Well,’ Masters said, stretching her scarf and then slapping the dust and dirt out of it, ‘here we are.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why the fence?’
‘Maybe they’re keeping some vicious wadis here,’ I suggested. I sucked some water from the bladder in my backpack and it turned to mud in my mouth. I spat it out and sucked some more. ‘Let’s walk the fence. There has to be a gate somewhere.’
Half an hour later, we’d found it. The road in, which was really little more than a track, had been covered by sand, keeping it hidden from the air. Separate lengths of cable and chain and a couple of seriously heavy locks secured the gate, which was caked with dust and looked from a distance like any other length of the fence.
‘Wave,’ I said, motioning at the small, covert surveillance cameras covering the gate.
‘What?’
‘You might as well. There’s no way we can avoid them.’
‘There’s nothing here. Why would anyone bother keeping this area under surveillance? I still don’t get it,’ said Masters. ‘Let’s go stand on those coordinates.’
I pulled the GPS from a thigh pocket. ‘Three hundred yards that-away,’ I told her, pointing towards what would have been the centre of this mystery compound, and started walking.
Above the last of the suspended dust, the sky was blue with a few wisps of high cirrus cloud bringing up the storm’s rear. The air felt cool and dry but the sun had a bite. I sucked some more water, which was now warm. We walked up to the edge of a drop-away. Spreading out below it was a deep, wide wadi. I took a few steps down into it and stopped when I caught the movement: a large shiny black snake, coiled in the sun, had felt our vibrations through the ground and was making a lazy retreat. It disappeared into a rock fissure obscured by weathered rubble as we continued down into the wadi.
I stopped for another drink and a bearings check on the GPS. The device told me I was standing on the X marking the spot.
‘Still nothing,’ Masters observed.
I offered her a drink from my camelback tube, which she declined.
‘So, what now?’ she continued, hands on her hips, walking a small circle, eyes scanning the sloping walls of the wadi.
‘Split up,’ I said. ‘I’ll head left. Looks like this valley might come to a dead end up there. You go right. Meet back here in, say, half an hour, unless you find something, in which case let me know. We’re going to walk every inch of this place.’ I wound up the volume on my brick and adjusted the squelch. Masters did likewise.
I repositioned my body armour and the weight of my backpack to give my rib some relief and headed off. I could see that the walls of the wadi actually became quite steep further along, more canyon-like. Perhaps whatever there was to be found was where the shadows lengthened. I turned and saw Masters disappear behind a boulder.
Masters’ voice suddenly burst from the radio handset clipped to my shoulder. ‘Vin, come quick. You gotta see this.’
I jogged back, kicking up sand and dust, and as I came around the boulder, the one Masters had disappeared behind, I was in time to see something that tied my brain in a knot. It was Masters. She’d hoisted a rock that would have weighed maybe ten tons over the top of her head. As I watched, she tossed it aside.
‘Huh?’
For an encore, Masters tugged at a face of the wadi itself and it came away like netting. Jesus, it was netting.
I ran closer as she ducked under the camouflage and disappeared from view. A cave was hidden behind the camouflage. I stopped at the entrance and pulled out my side-arm. Fluorescent tube lights set in the ceiling blinked on as I stepped inside. Masters closed a small steel cupboard on the wall that contained a number of switches, circuit breakers and fuses. ‘Scratch the surface . . .’ she said.
I glanced around and holstered the Beretta. It was obvious no one was home, but I could see where they’d been. An empty water bottle and several crushed drink cans lay scattered around on the concrete floor, as well as chocolate and cracker wrappers. Two large Caterpillar bulldozers, a massive John Deere backhoe and a much smaller version sat side by side in what appeared to be a large garage. Various items were collected here and there, hanging on hooks or leaning against walls: jackhammers, 55-gallon drums, shovels, heavy steel spikes, overalls, hard hats, shower stalls. The air smelt of diesel fuel and rock. A heavy layer of dust blanketed everything.
‘What do you make
of this?’ Masters asked as she walked between the bulldozers, scooping sand off a track guard.
‘Stuff to dig with,’ I said.
A red steel door built into the rock wall at the rear of the cave had caught my attention. It was secured with a heavy padlock and chain. I took a sledgehammer to the links and got nowhere, so I smashed its hinges, then levered it open with one of the heavy spikes. It was a small room, well ventilated with ducts in the ceiling. Stacked on the floor were a number of drums of varying size – some plastic, some steel. I opened one of the plastic drums, reached in and grabbed a handful of pellets that reminded me of chicken feed and smelt like chicken shit. They were ammonium nitrate prills. I guessed the steel drums contained fuel oil, which a quick inspection confirmed. ANFO – ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, beloved of terrorists the world over, was also the most common explosive used in mining. A locked case caught my eye. I made short work of the lock. Inside, blasting caps.
‘Look what I found,’ Masters called through the broken doorway, making me glance up. ‘Nuclear biological chemical suits,’ she said, holding one up. ‘What do you suppose they need these for?’
I gave her a pair of raised eyebrows. NBCs. Interesting.
‘Y’know, it doesn’t look to me like this place has seen a lot of use lately,’ Masters continued.
I left the bang room and wandered over to the machinery. She was right, though the layer of dust on the backhoes didn’t appear to be as thick as the one blanketing everything else. Maybe they were more multipurpose items than the dozers.
I found a screwdriver and climbed up into the driver’s seat of the smaller one. Using the screwdriver, I dug out the ignition lock and joined the hot wires. I went through the starting routine illustrated by a decal on the dashboard and the motor fired without hesitation. The fuel gauge indicated that the tank was half full or half empty, depending on your disposition. I killed the ignition and climbed down.
‘Somewhere round here,’ I said, ‘there’s gonna be a big hole in the ground. Let’s go find it.’
The midday sunshine was now fearsome overhead, packing a hint of the summer to come. The GPS informed us that we were now 120 yards from the coords provided by Tawal’s battered employee. We followed the course of the wadi anyway as it meandered through the surrounding sand and rock.
We both saw it at the same time. The trick with the entrance to the garage had been repeated on the ground. Camouflage netting covered with fine gauze and light rubber rocks, mimicking the surroundings, covered the wadi bed for a distance of half a football field. I lifted back a corner. A steel framework supported the camouflage roof. Simple, but effective. We’d flown over this very spot a few times in the Lynx and seen nothing other than a continuation of the usual monotone landscape.
Somewhere there was probably a switch that made the netting retract like the awning over a veranda. Masters found the edge of the netting on the other side of the wadi and rolled it back, revealing a pit that disappeared into darkness.
‘A pair of headlights would really help here,’ I said.
Masters caught my drift. ‘What is it with guys and power tools?’ she replied.
I jogged back up the wadi, retracing our steps to the garage. A couple of minutes later I was driving to the pit in the larger backhoe, which was also easily hotwired. I took it around to the far side of the netting to a point opposite Masters, hopped down and hooked the camouflage onto the trench-digger’s tines. After climbing back up, I gave it some gas and pulled the netting away from the supporting framework.
Sunlight revealed that the pit was maybe a hundred feet deep, an access road cut into the near-vertical wall descending into it corkscrew-like. This was a pretty serious feat of excavation. But I figured that the people who’d dug this hole – Tawal’s people – probably had a lot of experience in engineering those deep wells for brine storage.
I drove around and picked up Masters, who took a seat on the steel guard over the rear wheel.
‘It’s nice in here,’ she said.
‘Climate controlled air,’ I said.
‘Got an MP3 player?’
We descended into the hole, the headlights cutting into the gloom. After several complete turns, the road flattened out and became the base of the pit, which was smooth earth and cool rock. We climbed down off the machine. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find, but finding absolutely nothing didn’t exactly top the list.
The cool airflow coming through the vents held the tang of mud and something else I couldn’t identify.
‘What’s that smell?’ Masters asked.
‘Not me,’ I said.
The walls of the pit were solid rock. ‘There’s a lot of earth down here. I’m going to dig a hole.’
‘Like I said, men and their power tools . . .’ Masters climbed down from the cabin and walked across to the access road, which she followed for half a turn up the side of the pit until a view was provided of the backhoe action below.
Meanwhile, I reversed the machine into the centre of the pit, lowered the stabilisers until the rear wheels lifted clear of the earth, then engaged the digger’s hydraulics. It took a few moments of uncontrolled operation before I had it squared away. The narrow bucket buried its tines into the earth and scooped up a load of reddish grey soil, which I tipped off to one side. This went on until I happened to glance up and see Masters with her hands on her hips, head on a tilt and a frown on her face – the combination every man in the universe recognises as impatience. I backed off on the revs as Masters motioned at me to open the cabin door.
‘Vin, you’ll strike China any time now,’ she called out. ‘It’s a dead end.’
I thought, no one bothers hiding stuff that doesn’t need to be hidden. And we were given these coordinates for a reason. I gave her the shorthand version: ‘Give it another ten.’
Masters shrugged. I shifted the digging site a little and went to work. Five loads later, something came up with the earth. Masters stood, then walked down the road for a better look. I hung out of the cabin doorway.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Looks like a piece of steel.’ It was six inches long, slightly concave, and one side appeared to have a rusted iron liner. It exuded that unusual chemical smell. I coughed. ‘There’s corrosion of some type on it.’
‘Bring up some more,’ Masters suggested.
‘Now, there’s an idea,’ I said, giving her suggestion the smile it deserved.
I hopped back behind the controls, deposited the load off to one side, and went back for another. The bucket sunk into the trench, the tines bit and the machine began to baulk and tug at something with a lot less give than the earth. The arm shook and jolted, and whatever was causing the resistance suddenly broke free. I pulled it up. Another chunk of steel similar to the last piece, only much larger. And from what I could see, this stuff had numbers – a code – stencilled on it. I set the throttle to idle and climbed down for a closer inspection. I wiped the earth away from the stencilling while Masters trotted down the road again and picked her way across the tailings.
The flat snarl of a big chopper suddenly filled the sky overhead. I looked up and wondered why Robear and his Lynx had returned.
‘What have we got?’ she asked.
More corroded concave steel with an unidentified smell. And then a thought hit me. I jumped up onto the backhoe and pulled down my backpack. I dug around until I found what I was looking for and wrenched it out – a yellow box the size of a house brick.
‘Oh, shit.’ It suddenly hit Masters, too. ‘That smell – it has to be uranyl fluoride and hydrogen fluoride. That’s a HEX storage cylinder down here.’
I flicked the on switch and the little yellow box borrowed from the old guy back in the Grand Bazaar went nuts. I tossed Masters my pack and said, ‘The camera. We need a record of that serial number.’
I walked the floor of the pit like it was a crime scene, looking for the hot spots.
Masters’ camera flashed half-a-dozen
times.
The hottest spot in the entire area turned out to be the soles of my boots. ‘We need a sample of this mud,’ I told her.
‘Use your camelback,’ Masters suggested.
It was nearly out of water anyway. I unscrewed the lid and used it to ladle a few pounds of wet earth into the bladder. ‘How radioactive is this stuff?’ I asked.
‘It’s not the radioactivity we have to worry about. It’s the toxicity. We’re okay, but we’ll need to shower.’
‘Together?’
BANG!
Masters and I ducked. A chunk of the sky had fallen and hit the backhoe’s steel roof. It slid off, bumped into the backhoe’s arm and slumped into the fresh hole I’d just dug.
‘Jesus! What –’ Masters exclaimed, shocked.
‘Shit!’ I added.
‘Who . . .? That’s, that’s the guy!’
Masters was right. It was the guy – the one who’d palmed us the coords for this place. He looked a lot better the last time I saw him, when both sides of his head were where they should be. In the interim, he’d apparently taken a soft-nosed round through his left earhole, not to mention a half twist with pike off a 160-foot diving board onto a plate of rigid quarter-inch steel.
The helicopter hovered overhead and slowly manoeuvred to one side of the hole. I got a good look at it this time. It wasn’t a Lynx. It banked hard over and suddenly the world was full of .50-calibre slugs sparking and ricocheting off the rock walls. Hot brass casings rained down around us and steamed on the moist earth.
The burst of fire stopped as the chopper repositioned itself for another crack at us.
‘That’s Tawal’s,’ Masters yelled as she went for cover behind the backhoe’s meaty, water-filled tyre. ‘It’s the helo we saw parked on the ramp, the Eurocopter.’
The sun flashing off its sparkling, virgin-white fuselage eliminated any doubt. Examining its profile, I noticed what appeared to be a large bulk attached to the machine gun’s barrel.
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