Exit wound

On my way out, I broke open the USB stick and swallowed the memory. If these lads had spent years putting shredded bits of paper back together, finding out what was on a smashed stick would be a piece of piss.

Stefan Wissenbach would be making sure his people, not DieWelt, knew what we both did. They, too, had people out there. If an Apache or fast jet was taken out, we could no longer assume control of the air. Worse still, if a C-130 full of troops got dropped, the people back home would go ape-shit. It could all be over by Christmas. Then the dramas would really start to kick off.

I powered up my local mobile as I walked towards the exit. ‘Hello, mate. You get the car parked up where I showed you?’

I didn’t want Ali to have a call from my sat mobile registered on his. Better to use local – and how much more local could you get than his dad’s machine? It wasn’t as if he’d need it today, unless he had an urgent appointment with his dealer.

77

We sat in the front of the taxi in what looked like a bus lay-by but had become an overstuffed car park. Anywhere vehicles could stop in this town, they did.

IranEx was just under a hundred away, right in front of us. That was why we were here, to have a trigger on the entrance and wait for the Merc. With baseball caps tilted over our eyes and leaning well back in our seats we looked like loads of others, just getting our heads down for a moment or two before grappling with the challenges of the day.

I’d told Ali I was doing an M3C story. I was going to follow the management, find out where they were staying and try for an interview. They’d turned me down yesterday, but that wasn’t unusual in our neck of the woods.

He nodded as if it all made sense, but I could almost hear that mind of his ticking over. He was going along with it because I seemed to be offering him a future.

Ali stared through the windscreen, concentrating on the traffic as I watched the entrance. People and vehicles streamed in and out.

‘Jim, you will email me about the job when you get back to England? Do you think your editor will like my work?’

I couldn’t work out if he was questioning his own capabilities or doubting me.

‘I will take classes to become a good journalist. Will you tell your editor that? I will work very hard.’

‘I will, mate, don’t worry. I’m sure everything will be OK.’

Now I was doing the worrying. Giving a guy a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel only to snatch it away was an arsehole’s trick. I knew what it felt like, waiting on a promise that never came good. My step-dad was always promising us a trip to Margate or to the fun fair. I’d wait for the day to arrive, my heart racing, excited to be doing stuff that other kids did all the time, but nothing ever happened. I’d start to doubt myself, checking I had the right day, waiting for him to come back from the pub, but he never did.

‘Highway To The Danger Zone’, the theme tune to Top Gun, erupted beside me. Ali flushed pink with embarrassment. ‘Sorry, Jim – I cannot seem to erase it.’ He flipped open his mobile. He sounded guarded at first, but there was a rapid thaw. He was soon waffling away. Whoever it was, they’d called with good news.

I spotted the wrestler’s vehicle, held in traffic, trying to cut across the road to IranEx. Majid was up front and looking very pissed off. He, too, was waffling away at warp speed into his mobile. His spare hand jabbed into space, as though he wanted to hit whoever was on the other end.

Ali closed down. ‘Qasim and Adel. They say the Dassault is back, Jim. It’s just landed.’

‘Let’s head towards the airport. Can they get any pictures?’

On second thoughts, that would be a mistake. ‘No, no, don’t ask them.’ I didn’t want to get them thinking too hard. ‘You’re all mates again, are you?’

He tucked his phone into his pocket. ‘It is good that it has come back, Jim, no?’

‘Very good, mate. They’ll call if something happens?’

We could be anything up to two hours away.

We were fighting through the southbound traffic when Top Gun kicked off again.

‘Salam?’ He listened, jabbered away for a few seconds, then turned to me. ‘The Dassault has been met by a car. A black Mercedes. It has already left.’

78

The taxi sat in the shadow of a small avenue of trees on the city outskirts. Behind us, a scrapyard was surrounded by a rusty barbed-wire fence. Piles of old cars were stacked on top of each other next to mountains of worn-out tyres. Either the place was abandoned or the people who worked there had decided to stay out of the sun. Even the dogs were lying low. The birds chirping in the branches above us were the only sign of life. A couple had taken a dump on our car’s windscreen.

Ahead of us the heat haze shimmered over the only road into Tehran from IKIA.

I sat behind the wheel, with Ali’s ball cap still on my head and his aeroplane-geek binos on my lap. My eyes were glued to the steady stream of cars heading north.