We hit a main road.
‘What did you tell ‘em?’
‘I told them we had a Taleb with AIDS in the back.’
‘Good work. OK. Babe. Left or right?’
Bang-Bang perused the map. ‘Where d’you think your derelict car is?’
I leant over and looked. ‘Swallow told me it’s two kilometres southeast of the southern fenceline, 155 degrees west-south-west of this corner, so… about here.’
I circled somewhere nondescript on the map.
She looked at the road markings. She placed her compass on the map and let it orient itself. Then she did the thing we’d always had drummed into us in al-Qaeda. Orient The Map.
‘OK… we go left.’
We went left. I turned the blues and twos off and we left the Bagram to its meltdown.
20
The great thing about Unimog trucks was that they could go where only camels and goats can go. After about forty minutes of me cursing the crash gearbox and the dried irrigation ditches, and me and Bang-Bang arguing as only couples can about directions, we alighted on the same ditch me and the SAS team had followed the other night. I started to recognise landmarks. I drove alongside the ditch, and presently we had the distant wreck of the car before us in our headlights.
I turned the headlights to half-beam and waited. Then I turned them off. I killed the engine. Night settled again. Around us, crickets chirped and our eyes adjusted to the cloudy moonlight. Nothing. Good. I reached back and rapped on the cabin wall to alert Mo in the back. Presently I heard the rear doors open and Mo came to my door.
‘Y’alright you two?’
‘Perfick, akhi. You know we have to love you and leave you here Mo? Me and the missus have some Mission Impossible shit going on.’
He shrugged. ‘No probs like. I can get back.’
‘Mo – stick around for a few minutes though mate, I’ll get you some folding green from my cache to ease you on your way. You get me?’
He grinned. He got me.
‘OK. Now we go forward to the cache. But you two, please stay by the truck for now. I have to disarm the booby trap.’
I went forward, with a rather rubbish Soviet army torch we’d found in the cab. It kept going off and I kept having to jiggle it. Right. Here was the rear of the shell of the car. I hunkered down and shone the light around. There was the fishing line and hook. I took it out then dug in the soil until I found the ringpull detonator. Very carefully, holding the line slack, I pulled it out into the night air and laid it to one side. The PETN should now be inert. I retrieved it and walked several paces and placed it on the ground. I whistled softly. Bang-Bang and Mo joined me.
I started digging in earnest and after a minute, I pulled go-bag one out. I unzipped it, rummaged in the spare clothes and medical packs, and pulled out some bricks of good old US
dollars for Mo. He placed his hand on his chest in the traditional Salafi gesture of gratitude. He hugged me, and then bowed to Bang-Bang.
She spoke. ‘When you get back, Mo, look me up on Facebook. I’m the only Holly Kirpachi on there. You can also find dipstick there as my other half. Go.’
He nodded. ‘I owe you both. See you back ‘ome.’
And he left, walking away across the moonlit fields, carrying Bang-Bang’s compass and the maps.
‘Right’, I said, hauling out the other kitbag, ‘Babes, if you shine that light down here I’ll lay the kit out.’
She stood to one side and aimed the torch down onto the dirt behind the wrecked car. In the light I began to lay out the contents of a Secret Intelligence Service Packet Foxtrot. Another set of Afghan clothing for me, and an Afghan passport and national ID. Foil-packed rations, which I discarded. A wad of Afghanis, the national currency. Several more wads of stained dollar bills. An old, worn Afghan belt, with some 500-Euro notes secreted inside. Two locally-bought mobile phones with Roshan network SIM cards preloaded. Some Gizi Maps of the area, also suitably folded and stained. A Russian night-vision scope. A Garmin handset loaded with the latest, restricted TOPO maps of the country. A loaded Walther pistol with ankle holster. This was standard issue to RAF aircrew and SAS. They called it the Disco Pistol.
Bang-Bang was watching all this curiously. ‘Where’s my stuff, babes?’
‘Aha!’ With a David Blaine flourish, I opened a bag to reveal the AKS-74U carbine she’d taken from Iqeel al-Afghani. She whooped and took it from me to check the magazine and safety. I then opened the other packet to reveal a passport, money, internal ID and a bright blue Afghan burkha. She growled. ‘If you think I am putting…that…on, you can think again.’
She gripped the AKS-74U and glared at me in the light of the high moon.
I held my hands up. ‘OK babes, it was…just an idea.’
‘Hmmph.’
She turned away to check the perimeter.
I reached for the final package in the bag. The Dagger System. This had been invented by the CIA in the Cold War, and improved upon until it literally looked like a magic trick. I whistled at Bang-Bang.
‘Doll? Come and watch this.’
She glared back at me and eventually came over and sat down in the dirt, cross-legged, to watch. She started to roll another evil cigarette. ‘OK fiancé, impress me.’
I turned away from her and started putting the various pieces on, grinning to myself. I stopped grinning as the mouthpiece went in and started drooling. Couldn’t be helped. I put the glovesleeves on. I donned the turban with its nest of real hair. And I turned to her and went ‘TADA!’
Bang-Bang flung her fag away in shock and scrambled backwards.‘Jesus Christ what is that?’
‘It’thhh a Datther Thythtem babesh!’
‘What?’
She was standing now and pointing her carbine at me, the car, any threat. I pulled the mask off and took the prosthetic out of my mouth.
‘It’s a Dagger System. To you or the outside world, I look like a Pashtun farmer with a hare lip. They modelled it on my face using lasers and latex and all sorts. Just like in Mission Impossible but real.’
She laughed and lowered the carbine. ‘Bloody hell, you had me going there. That is TOO realistic.’
‘Damn right. And it’s going to help us get into Kabul and the Embassy. I’m going to be a messed-up local, and you’re going to be my wife doing the Pashtun talking. Ready?’
‘Always.’
‘Cool. Anyway, we can’t stick around here, sooner or later someone’s going to notice the missing ambulance and then they’ll put the helicopters up. Let’s go hijack a car.’
We gathered up our kit, I hid the Packet Foxtrot bags under the car, and we moved out.
21
We walked for an hour or so under the moon and the scudding clouds, slowly and carefully, not wanting to sprain an ankle in a hole. In the northern distance light flickered from the direction of the airbase as the flightline cooked. Bang-Bang held my sleeve and followed the GPS display, directing us west towards what looked to be a good, metalled road. Every hundred paces we stopped and I gave the horizon a scan with the night vision scope. In the scope, under the moon and starlight, I had a picture as bright as day. I gave the blazing area of the airbase a good look. Mostly I was looking for the tell-tale glare of any illuminators. Firefly infrared strobes, chemlights, infrared laser designators, they all showed up on night vision. Even when I’d been an impressionable kid doing my al-Qaeda training, it had been drilled into us that any digital camera with a night setting could pick this kind of thing up. But, not tonight. After several minutes I could see nothing and we moved again. ‘With any luck,’ said Bang-Bang, ‘FlameLite will have turned off all the air-traffic control and rerouted all the base communications to China. They’ll be out of action for days.’
We skirted a farm and some outlying sheds. A dog barked distantly. Suddenly there was an incline upwards and we came upon the road on the maps. We checked our weapons and hunkered down in the dirt in the lee and shadow of a low stone wall. I listened for helicopters. Nothing yet.
While we waited I looked at our documents in the shielded light of our torch, and took some dollar bills and placed them inside the ID card wallets. ‘Grease’, I remarked to Bang-Bang and she nodded and went back to watching the road south.
I looked up. The moon was scudding in the clearing clouds and the stars were out in force. It was a breathtaking view. Something suddenly occurred to me. Something bad.
‘Holly, did they biometric you when you were in there?’
‘Wot, you mean fingerprints and retina and all that?’
‘Yep.’
‘Yes, they did.’
‘You see they didn’t manage to retina scan me ‘cause the machine broke, and these Dagger gloves here have their own fingerprints, but…you’re on the system. So if we get stopped at a
checkpoint and they have a scanner, and it lights up with “Holly Kirpachi is an escaped High-Value Detainee”…’
‘Yeah. We’ll just have to kill all of them.’
‘Yeah.’
A silence fell. We both knew that if we hit a checkpoint and it went noisy, we were going to die.
‘Up for playing scissors paper stone?’ asked Bang-Bang.
‘In the dark? How’s that gonna work?’
She bumped my fist with hers, ‘One, two, three, stone!’ In the shadow of the overhanging wall, I couldn’t see much. I just said ‘Paper. Paper wraps stone.’
‘Oh. You’re right. It’s not gonna work.’
Above us the dark azure night hung under the moon, a little bright pea. Bang-Bang started singing to herself, softly under her breath.
We waited at the roadside for half an hour. Every five minutes I gave the horizon a scan with the night vision scope. Finally, some lights appeared. A saloon car. A battered taxi painted yellow and white. The fare light flicked on. I checked my pistol. To my right, Bang-Bang readied her carbine, racking the bolt back with its distinctive “ring-ching” sound. The car pulled in, obviously thinking we were an extra fare. Out here in Afghanistan, everyone would cram in. The taxi screeched to a halt in a cloud of dust. We ran for the doors and yanked them open. Left-hand drive. Shit. I’d forgotten. Bang-Bang was screaming at the driver and hauling him across the dirt with the AKS-74U jammed into his ear. He was flapping his arms and shouting back. All good. I flung the rear door open and pointed the pistol in at the two passengers.
‘Get out! Go!’ They went, rapidly. We had a car. We both piled in the front. Then we stopped and looked at each other. We were sitting in the wrong seats. I had to ask. ‘You driving to the Embassy babe?’
‘Possibly not.’
We dashed out of the car, ran round and swapped. I floored it.
We drove south on the metalled road at a steady sixty miles per hour. It was a Toyota, and automatic, which was nice after the Unimog. There were your standard bead covers on the front seats and a plethora of things hanging from the rearview mirror. Bang-Bang was watching the Garmin display intently. She’d already tapped in “British Embassy” and we had a nice red route on the 3D display, into Kabul and 15th Street Roundabout Wazir. I fished out the locally-bought Nokia and handed it to her. ‘Can you dial the number on the sticker on the back luv?’
She nodded. ‘OK. Ringing.’
I took the phone back and listened.
‘Hello Consular Section.’
‘Hello. This is Riz, can you put me through to Brigadier Howes please? Op name is DEADBIRD, repeat DEADBIRD.’
Bang-Bang started laughing. ‘Dead Bird?’ she mouthed at me with an incredulous look. I shrugged and tried to concentrate on listening in and not running off the road. Any minute now I’d forget to drive on the right.
‘Howes for Riz. Can you talk?’
I swerved to avoid a massive pothole and veered across the carriageway. I wrestled the taxi back onto the right hand lane. ‘Evening sir. Yep, just about. Can you inform Colonel Mahoney that me and Holly are out, and can you let the guardroom know we’re driving in in a yellow cab, and we should be at the gate within two hours?’
‘Got that.’
‘Thankyou. Be advised that I’ll be wearing a Dagger system, so you won’t recognise me. You could tell the guardhouse to phone up for a photo of Holly.’
‘We’re ahead of you on that one. Your office sent over photos of both of you from your Afghan IDs, so we know what you’ll look like. See you there.’
I silently thanked Toots and the Colonel for being on the ball.
‘That’s a relief. See you soon.’
I closed the phone down and took the battery out. Bang-Bang clocked what I was doing and did the same. Then I took the sticker with the Embassy phone number off the phone, rolled it into a ball and ate it.
‘You nutter.’
I just chewed and grinned at her.
She shook her head, stowed her carbine under her seat, and tuned the radio into something cheesy and Arabic-sounding.
An hour and a half later we were in northern Kabul. I’d stopped just outside the city limits to put the Dagger disguise on, so now I was an old handicapped Pashtun with his young, headscarved wife. What I hadn’t been expecting was the sheer volume of night-time traffic. Our three-lane road had backed up and we were stop-starting between lines of concrete and the odd street-vendor. Up ahead, over the palm trees, were buildings lit by in blue and red
neon. It was like some half-arse Vegas. Bang-Bang was navigating and I thanked the stars they’d put the military-spec TOPO database in the GPS, as commercial stuff would have been useless. There were no postcodes, no street names, no numbers. Just roundabouts, donkey carts, police cars and chaos. We were trying to keep the windows up as the dust and fumes were ridiculous.
The traffic concertinaed to a stop again underneath a massive billboard for a local phone provider called Me2U, as far as I could work out.
‘One klick, babes. Nearly there’ said Bang-Bang and looked around nervously. Next to my door a hand-pushed icecream cart was belting out a crap electronic version of My Heart Will Go On through a plastic megaphone held together with packing tape. He was grinning at me. I mentally willed the vendor to fuck off, but no dice.
The traffic jerked forward and I saw the reason for the stoppage. A police checkpoint. Three men in grey uniforms, with fluorescent batons and AKs. She looked at me. ‘Talk or shoot?’
I tried to say “talk” but it came out wrong and she laughed.
‘I
think
you just said “talk”. OK. Here goes. If I see a biometric scanner I’m shooting.’
We wound down our windows as we came level with the cops. Flashlights were shone in.
The cop on my side said something. I drooled a smile and produced my I.D. Bang-Bang leant over and said something back. He responded with a question. She replied and he laughed as she handed over her I.D.
We waited.
He handed the I.D.s back and patted the taxi roof.
The traffic cleared ahead of us. We drove away, and waited a good minute before we both breathed a sigh of relief.
Bang-Bang glanced my way. ‘I don’t know whether he understood me but he certainly understood the twenty-dollar bill in the I.D, as it seems to have disappeared. And so has the bill in your I.D. How strange.’
We drove along a line of parked Humvees and melded with more traffic. It was smoother now. Bang-Bang consulted the GPS. ‘OK. This looks to be called “Forty-Metre Road”. Straight over the next two roundabouts and the Embassy is on the right.’
This was going to be tricky. There was a small army of tooled-up Nepalese G4S contractors inside the embassy, never mind the regular British Army and UK Special Forces. One wrong move…
I navigated my way round the final roundabout and there it was. Concrete blocks, watchtowers, sandbags, machine-gun emplacements. “Welcome home” I thought to myself and brought the taxi off the road and to a sedate stop by some massive steel gates under the glare of floodlights. I felt eyes on me. We stayed in our seats. From my position I could see at least five Nepalese guys in Osprey body armour, armed with AKs. And those AKs were all pointing at the car.
Bang-Bang murmured out of the corner of her mouth ‘Maybe we should have just checked in at the Sheraton?’
Before I could attempt a reply a squaddie jogged up to the car and tapped on my window. He too, had a rifle, a fully-tricked out SA80 with an underslung grenade launcher. I wound my window down and gave him my patent harelip grin. He looked at two photo printouts and back at us.
He turned to the watchtower and called up. ‘It’s OK, it’s them, lads.’
He turned back to us. ‘Evening you two. If you’d like to leave the car here and follow me? With the keys in the ignition if you don’t mind?’
Bang-Bang nodded and replied ‘You do know we’re both carrying, yeah?’
‘I do, and that’s fine. Let’s be quick though.’
We got out, retrieved our gear and followed him to what looked like a corrugated shed with a satellite dish on top. Bang-Bang held her carbine to one side, trying to be inconspicuous. Behind us, someone had jumped in the car and fishtailed it out onto the main road and away.
We came to a door and the squaddie rapped on it. A small poster of Lord Kitchener was stuck on it. He was sternly reminding us to carry our passes at all times. A slot opened in the door. The squaddie said ‘Op DEADBIRD, two pax.’
The slot closed and the door rattled open. We were ushered into the shed and our Afghan I.D.s were looked at. Without any further ado I removed the elements of the Dagger disguise and breathed a sigh of relief. As did everyone else in the shack.
A second door was opened and we were finally inside the compound. Brigadier Howes was standing before us. I recognised him from a photo I’d been shown at the office.
He smiled. ‘Welcome back to Blighty.’