Exit wound

When we finally arrived Majid came good. The area around the conference centre was chaotic. We glided through the crowd and past Registration with little more than a wave of his papers. A giant white banner ahead of us didn’t fuck around. It announced in two-foot-high red letters: ‘IranEx 2009 – The Achievements of the Islamic Republic that Will Make America Suffer a Severe Defeat’.

The tools of my new trade were proudly on display and I looked the part. My name badge was pinned to my shirt, my Nikon hung round my neck, and I had my laptop, tons of reading material and three thousand dollars in cash in my day-sack. The war on terror and the US trade embargo meant credit cards were a no-no.

I had another two thousand in fifty- and hundred-dollar bills and my Samsung satellite phone, all tucked far enough down both my Timberlands for me to fold the tops of my socks over them. An ordinary mobile was out of the question. I needed something secure to call Julian on, and to yell for help if I was in the shit. Anything but a satellite phone would be tracked and listened in to, which was why the Iranians wouldn’t allow them into the country. I’d only use it when I had to. The Iranians wouldn’t be able to listen in, but they would still see its transmission footprint. They’d come looking to find out who was using it and why.

Finally, my passport was in a neck wallet where it should be, around my neck. If I had to drop everything and run, I had the important stuff physically attached to me.

A few metres further on, surrounded by a crowd of admirers, were a tank and a fighter aircraft. The plane was set on a giant plinth; the tank on a mound of plastic rock. Both had been sprinkled with flower petals. The Third World War had collided with the Chelsea Flower Show.

Majid was looking at the aircraft the way most of the young guys I’d come across studied Zoo and Nuts. ‘You will know, of course, what this aircraft is – a Saegheh 80. “Saegheh” means thunderbolt, Mr Munley. As you can imagine, we are very proud of this achievement, because it is living proof that Iran can stand on her own two feet.’

I’d never given a whole lot of thought to aircraft, other than when I’d been jumping out of them or measuring the threat they represented. But I’d done my homework on the flight and recognized Iran’s first attempt to build an indigenous combat jet. I decided not to tell him that it was little more than a halfarsed improvement of the F-5E, an American fighter designed in the 1950s that had been supplied in quantity to the Iranian Air Force during the reign of the Shah.

Majid droned on as we circled the plinth. For the first time since I’d arrived in Iran, I saw something above the crowd that could only have been worn by a Westerner. Who else would walk about in a green floppy jungle hat covered with badges? As we got closer a tall guy with wavy light brown hair and a matching safari vest came into view. He was armed with a notepad and an impressive camera and set about photographing the Thunderbolt from every angle. He looked more spook than journalist. The other onlookers included an Iranian cleric and, judging by the medals and scrambled egg on display, a North Korean Army mega-general.

‘The Saegheh 80 is a joint project between the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force and the Iranian Ministry of Defence. The first prototype flew in 2004 and the first production variant entered service two years later. It is a multi-role fighter, every bit as good as the F-15 or the F/A-18 built in America…’

I nodded enthusiastically and took a few polite pictures before we moved on to a large exhibition hall that had been transformed into a one-stop shop for Armageddon. Most of the stands were given over to Iranian companies displaying models of aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles – Iranian copies of the drones the Americans used to hunt for bin Laden on the Af-Pak border – and every kind of weapon imaginable.

Majid stood with his hands on his hips gazing at the hardware. ‘Well, Mr Munley, what do you think? So much to see and so little time. It must be hard for someone like yourself to know where to begin.’

It was, though not for the reasons he suspected. I had to play the game for a while to bed myself in before trying to move on from the Iranian gear to the Russian. M3C was all I cared about. It was my only link to Altun.

I needed to remain as far as possible on ground Mr Munley was familiar with. ‘I’d like to see what Iran is doing in my field – surface-to-air missile systems.’