Exit wound

He towered over me, and had that world-weary look of been-there-done-it about him. Sixty-odd years ago that square jaw and mass of hair would have been sticking out of the turret of a panzer. He was here for Die Welt, according to his badge, but no way was Stefan Wissenbach a reporter for any German weekly. Maybe he’d come in my direction because he could smell a fellow fraud.

He took a sip of his brew and still didn’t like it black. He offered it to me. ‘Never one to say no to a brew, so thanks.’ I glanced at my mobile. Nothing yet from Julian. I took a sip. I quite liked instant.

As we leant against the Portakabin, Stefan rubbed the couple of days’ growth on his chin. ‘Just the same old stage-managed bullshit?’ He had a clipped German accent.

‘It’s my first.’

He laughed, then stretched and yawned at the same time. ‘Well, you won’t have another press conference like yesterday’s. Anna had fire in her belly yesterday, for sure. She is one Hitzkopfig, that girl.’

That bit of German wasn’t in my squaddie vocab. It certainly didn’t sound like food or beer. ‘The blonde one, going on about missiles?’

His eyes darted about, sizing up a couple of good-looking women who’d come past us to lay out trays of dodgy sandwiches for the morning media frenzy. ‘The new SA-16M – probably the only thing worth coming here to see.’

There had been quite a buzz about these things. The Brits, Iranians, Russians, and now Germans. Maybe they were the new must-have.

I checked my mobile again. Still nothing. I wondered about Majid picking up the email and knowing where I was. Not even GCHQ was that quick. It would take a couple of days. ‘The guy at the M3C stand told me they can defeat dark flares. That explains the rumour the missile had a fault. It didn’t. They were redeveloping it to defeat the flares.’

His eyes shot from the women to me. I suddenly had his full and undivided attention.

76

‘But, like I said, this is my first time. What are they?’

He laughed. ‘You Brits!’ A heavy hand slapped my back and pushed the bottom half of the coffee from the cup. ‘You invented them.’

‘I’m more an infantry-weapon guy.’

His hand left my back with a smile that said he had smelt a little more about me. ‘I’m sure you are.’ Both hands went up into the air, as if he was framing something up there. ‘When an aircraft is targeted, it could be by using laser or radar. So the aircraft has countermeasures to stop that happening. But with a handheld SAM, the system for detecting the target is best described as a passive device that emits no signal. These things…’ He turned to me and pulled down his lower right eyelid. ‘The Mark 1 Eyeball.’

He paused. ‘You with me so far?’

I knew the theory. These things were just like a Stinger. I let Stefan waffle on as I checked the phone.

‘It’s the same with the missile itself. It has a passive seeker that homes on heat – the engine, usually – and so, traditionally, the first time you ever know you have a missile coming up at you is when it hits.

‘You remember the order for all NATO aircraft to stay above fifteen thousand feet during the Kosovo conflict because the low-level threat from the handheld SAM was too great? Were you there?’

I nodded.

‘Me, too. Fucking slaughter.’

He took a couple of seconds as his head churned up whatever nightmare he’d been part of.

Julian was back. He’d got them. I closed down.

‘It is the same today. If you want to stay alive when you go low-level, then you need to chuck out flares – lots of them. But you can’t dispense flares all the time. You don’t have enough of them.

‘Since the Balkans, the Russians have designed a missile able to discriminate between the flares that aircraft dispense and the heat-source – the engine. Instead of being seduced away from the aircraft towards the flare, the missile examines the flare, rejects it, and looks for a darker heat-source, if you like, less intense – the aircraft itself.’

Stefan’s hands were up in the air once more.

‘The missile literally climbs a “ladder”, rejecting flares, locking back onto the aircraft, rejecting another flare and so on – until it hits the aircraft. That’s why the black flare was developed.’

‘So they burst out of the aircraft a different colour?’

‘No, they look the same as normal flares, but they have a different temperature range – they don’t burn like magnesium flares, they mimic the heat signature of an aircraft much more accurately. So now, when the missile rejects the regular flare and goes looking for the darker heat-source, it sees the black flare and goes for that instead.’

‘Could it take down an Apache?’

He knew where I meant. His hands were down and the smile had disappeared. ‘If they weren’t bullshitting you, it would be able to take down anything that is out there below ten thousand feet.’

‘Nice talking with you, mate.’

We shook.

Ali and the Paykan were waiting for me outside.