Exit wound

Julian looked at his watch. ‘I’ll leave you two to get to know each other. We don’t have much time and you have quite a lot to talk about.’ He paused by the door. ‘Call me as soon as you’re through and be as quick as you can. There’s a lot more to do before tomorrow.’

Kettle turned and gave me a look like I’d just run over his dog.

43

‘Listen, mate.’

There was nothing matey about his tone. The room temperature had dropped several degrees as soon as Julian closed the door. Fair one – in his shoes I’d have been pissed off too.

‘There’s nothing unusual about DIS posing as a freelance defence journalist. It happens all the time. The Russians know it happens. We know it happens. Bet you a penny to a pound, the Iranians know it happens, too. Defence exhibitions, no matter where they are, end up crawling with spooks. So, mate, whoever you are, at least you’ve got that going for you.’

Kettle had known better than to ask my name and I hadn’t volunteered it. I still hadn’t shaken his hand. The only good things were that I no longer noticed the smell and he hadn’t offered me a bite of his sandwich.

‘Right, so you want the one-oh-one on the fledgling Iranian missile industry so you can be James Manley, eh?’ He looked at the clock on the wall. ‘How long have we got?’

I hated briefings. And I hated government buildings – especially dust-filled places like this one. They brought back too many bad memories of too many bollockings. Besides, I just needed enough to make my cover story sound like I knew what I was on about. I was there for something more important than geeking up. I couldn’t wait to get out.

‘No more than two hours.’

Kettle went over to the filing cabinet and pulled open a drawer. He riffled through it, yanking out sheets of paper as he went. They turned out to be magazine articles.

‘Take them with you. Don’t worry, they’re all open-source – some recent pieces from Jane’s Defence Weekly and Aviation Week on the state of the Iranians’ air defences. You can bone up on it at your leisure, but here’s the short version. Don’t make the mistake of dismissing them as a bunch of no-hope, clueless Islamofascist rag-heads – they’re not. Since the Shah got deposed, they’ve built up an incredibly successful aerospace and defence industry. It’s in their blood. They’ve had to, given all the arms embargoes that have been imposed upon them over the years.’

I glanced at the articles. From everything I’d read, the embargoes had proved about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike. ‘They’ve been getting technical assistance from everyone on Baby Bush’s axis-of-evil list, haven’t they?’

Kettle shut one drawer and opened another. ‘Plus some that aren’t even on the list yet. But then again, necessity is the mother of invention.’

‘So what invention shit have they been up to?’

‘No need for that.’ He clearly wasn’t a big fan of profanity. Maybe it was because it was Sunday. He threw some more homework my way. ‘Take their air-defence network. It’s a mish-mash of old Soviet stuff and missiles that the Americans abandoned when the Shah left in a hurry. The Iranians have watched and learnt. They’ve not only reverse-engineered spare parts but, where necessary, they’ve improved upon the actual hardware. For the past decade or two, this has been sufficient to ward off any threats they might face, but with the Israelis and the Americans back in sabre-rattling mode, they need something a little more effective. Which is where IranEx enters the equation. Or would have. For me, I mean.’

Kettle gathered a few more articles into an envelope, scrawled ‘Russia’ across it, and chucked it onto his desk. ‘Technology transfer between Russia and Iran has been particularly active – albeit at a covert level. In 1998, UN sanctions were issued against a number of Russian organizations – state research facilities as well as companies – that had supplied technical expertise to Iran’s ballistic-missile effort. Not unnaturally, that’s where most of the world’s attention has been focused. After all, it’s the ballistic missiles that will carry the weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and otherwise, that threaten the West. But we know that Russian co-operation with the Iranian state weapons industry goes way beyond that.’

I had a long night ahead of me. ‘What do you know about M3C?’

‘Moscow Missile Manufacturing Complex. They Anglicized it to M3C. Less of a mouthful on the international circuit, where they compete against the big boys from the US and Europe. M3C used to be three different Soviet-era weapons entities until somebody, somewhere, read a book on market economics and decided it was better to lump all Russia’s missile expertise under one roof, like every other country does.