Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (41 page)

Lynch
wandered over to the small, rusty lorry and unhooked the dirty pipe
from its side, dragging it over to the Alouette. He found the fuel
tank and was trying to snap the red handle of the feeder pipe to
the notched tank-mouth when Nimr returned with a pallet
truck.

‘
Here, let
me.’ Nimr took the metal fitment and twisted it with a single
practised movement, the two pieces snicking together smoothly. He
handed Lynch a pair of keys on a plastic fob. ‘Start her up and hit
the green button on the dash.’

The engine of
the bowser kicked into action after a few coughs. Lynch found the
green button and listened to the pump kicking in. He dropped down
from the cab and went back to the Alouette. ‘How do I know when
it’s full?’

Nimr was
stretched underneath the body of the aircraft, wrenching a complex
assembly to the fuselage. ‘When it’s full.’

‘
What’s
that?’

Nimr grunted
as he tightened the wrench, sliding out on the trolley under his
back. He blinked as the wintry sunlight caught his brown eyes.
‘Mind your own business.’

There was a
snapping sound and the pump cut off. Nimr grinned. ‘Full.
Disconnect it and I’ll put this junk away.’

Lynch eyed
the fuel pipe distastefully. ‘That didn’t seem worth
it.’

‘
This baby’s got a 350 klick range. You never know when you
might need that last thirty or so. Best fly full when you
can,
kapisch
?
Unclip it, man, we need to get going.’

Lynch did as
he was told. Within a few minutes they were sitting back in harness
and Nimr hit the starter. The Alouette’s engine coughed and roared
into life.

They rose
vertically above the blue warehouse, the sheer face of the valley
in front of them dropping away under them as if they were going up
in a lift, the Alouette steadied by Nimr’s sure rudder-work, his
legs flexing. They breasted the valley, skimming over the
snow-whitened, rocky land to another valley beyond, the road below
clinging to the steep, far side of the valley, snaking between the
dark trees in the wintry landscape. They rose farther, leaving the
valley and then banking right to follow a steep ravine.

‘
This is
Bcharre. People up here are real headbangers. Khalil Gibran came
from here. Over there are the famous Cedars of God. You heard of
them, right?’

Lynch
laughed. ‘Marwan, I first came to Lebanon in my twenties. I
remember The War. I told you already, you can keep the
patter.’

‘
Fuck me for
being helpful.’

‘
Fuck you
anyway. How far now?’

‘
Just ’round
the corner, few minutes. I’ll take us up over the top,
yeah?’

‘
Sounds good.
Can we approach it from the sea as well?’

‘
Sure, no
problem. Two passes is about it, though. Those Freij boys can get
itchy, know what I mean?’

Banking left
above Bcharre, they floated in blue sky above white folds of barren
mountain, the land below shining with the glare of the light
reflecting from the snow. Lynch grinned with the sheer liberating
delight of skimming untrammelled above the peaks, his heart racing
with the thrill even as the anticipation of danger ahead made his
gut tighten. He reached for the camera bag and dug out the high
speed camera, cleaning the 28-300mm zoom.

Nimr’s voice
was edgy. ‘Okay, we’re about forty-five seconds from the
edge.’

He tilted the
Alouette to give Lynch clear shots as they flew over the edge of
the high, snowy escarpment Deir Na’ee was nestled against, the
snowy rocks falling away from them in a vertiginous curving tumble.
Lynch spotted a grouping of outbuildings, snapping away as they
passed by. Nimr brought the Alouette round for another run. They
had agreed on an approach that would allow the complex to be
accurately waymarked and the manoeuvre took them up over the cliff
edge again, the whump of the rotors echoing back at them as they
rose up the rock face.

‘
What’s that
over there?’ Lynch pointed to the left as they climbed over the
edge of the escarpment, a long double strip of black etched on the
mountainside lost as they breasted the ragged top. Nimr took the
Alouette around and left, sliding back over the escarpment with
consummate skill and giving Lynch a clear series of shots of the
runway below them, a double line of tarmac airstrip and a cluster
of buildings to the southern end, a road dropping directly down
from the airstrip to the Deir Na’ee site. An Ilyushin 76 sat to the
side of the apron, the big Russian freighter dwarfing the executive
jet next to it.

‘
Shit. A
whole private airport.’

‘
Coming
around now to give you that approach from the sea.’

‘
Nice and
slow now.’

‘
We can’t go
too slow. I told you, man, these guys are headbangers up here. This
is tribal country, they’re armed to the teeth and they’ll shoot at
shit.’

Lynch was
snapping on auto, the high-resolution camera struggling to keep
saving the bursts despite its unusually advanced specification,
each shot a triple-play of 28mm, halfway and then a 300mm zoom of
the relevant feature. A high-pitched alarm sounded.

‘
Fuck!’ Nimr
wrenched the cyclic and rammed the Alouette right. Lynch was flung
against his harness, the camera flying from his hands, the precious
shots and expensive body saved by the strap wrapped around his
wrist. Nimr shouted, ‘Radar. We got radar lock, man.’

Nimr gunned
the engine, taking them fast towards the escarpment. He slapped his
hand on a mushroom switch to the right of his dash. Lynch caught
the flashes pulsing behind them. Nimr was releasing flares as they
sped towards the rock wall.

Lynch looked
down. Flashes lit the ground. ‘SAMs.’

‘
Seen ’em.
Trust me, man.’

‘
Fuck all
else I can—’ Lynch could see individual stones on the rock wall in
front of them, stark in the bursts of light from the flares behind
them. Nimr clutched the cyclic to his gut to bring the Alouette
vertical to the cliff, blowing a cloud of snow from the rocks. The
helicopter’s turboshaft engine screamed. They scraped up the rock
face and careened over the escarpment edge in an explosion of
powdery snow. The missiles struck below, the concussion wave
flipping the Alouette over. A hail of rock flew from the roiling
core of the explosions. Nimr fought to bring the bucking chopper
back under control. They rolled, the throttle cut as Lynch pushed
back as deeply as he could into his seat, his legs scrabbling. He
clutched the camera and gulped sweet life from the cold air. He was
snivelling and fought for control, gasping for breath and
reasserting himself. The violent movements calmed as Nimr righted
the Alouette. He switched off the flares. The fingerless glove on
his right hand was shredded, blood streaming down the ball of his
thumb.

‘
Shit man,
fuckin’ cyclic bit me again.’

Lynch
unwrapped the strap tied on his wrist, the flesh rubbed raw. His
shoulders felt bruised from the harness. ‘That was
close.’

Nimr
shrugged. ‘Told you they were headbangers, man.’ He leaned forward
and banged his fist against the display. ‘Crap.’

‘
What?’

Nimr’s voice
on the intercom was matter of fact. ‘We got trouble. Fuel tank’s
hit.’

THIRTY-THREE

Nimr was
jabbering in Arabic on his radio, negotiating by the sound of it.
Lynch craned to peer at the fuel gauge. It was showing empty.
Nimr’s voice rose an octave and he started to gesture with his left
hand. The sea was spread far beyond, the land below swathed in
green vegetation. They were still climbing.

‘
Okay, we’re
going to land at Hamat. It’s a disused military base. I got some
guys coming out to meet us.’

Lynch’s
response was lost in the sound of the engine coughing and then
dying in a slow, whining wheeze. He froze, consumed by a sudden
rush of absolute fear, a cold sweat breaking out all over his body.
The rotors whooshed in the silence.

Nimr pulled
on the lever to the side of his seat, using the pitch of the blades
and guiding the cyclic between his legs back and forth. They
started the descent towards the runway shimmering into sight ahead
of them. Nimr guided the Alouette with skilful touches of the
controls. Lynch, once again recovering from staring death in the
face, stuttered.

‘
What the the
the—’

Nimr glanced
at him, grinning, his hands working the controls of the Alouette.
‘Autorotation, man. Only a fuckin’ idiot crashes a chopper. This
beauty’s gonna land like a fuckin’ sycamore leaf on a baby’s belly.
You gotta control her careful, but the rotors slow us down with
updraft if you pitch ’em right. We’re going to glide down,
see?’

Lynch watched
the ground approach them, gripping his seat as the last few seconds
rushed past and the earth rose to meet them, the nose of the
Alouette tilting up and then the sliding impact as Nimr fought to
keep the aircraft stable. They careened to a standstill, the rotors
whirring silently. Lynch thumbed the catch and pulled apart the
harness, moving left to dismount. Nimr held him back. ‘Wait a
second, man,’ Nimr cackled. ‘I mean, like, shame to beat SAMs and
an autorotation landin’ then get fucked up by the blades when you
hit ground, no?’

Lynch nodded,
dumbly, grateful he hadn’t soiled himself. The long concrete runway
was blistered with craters, gouged and uneven. Weeds pushed through
the surface. The rotors slowed and he jumped down from the
Alouette, shocked at how weak his legs felt. He fumbled for his
mobile, dialling Nathalie.

Nathalie took
the call sitting at the dining table in Lynch’s apartment, her
screen displaying the scrolling repository of information streaming
in from the hack of Falcon Dynamics. She had been trying to make
sense of the metatagged datasets and follow leads through the
quagmire of information. Her teams in Beirut and Brussels were
struggling to download, process and tag the huge volumes of
unstructured data flowing in.

She had been
working for hours trying to build a picture of the events she and
Lynch had seen unfolding over past weeks. The task was complicated
by the richness of data – video, images, eyewitness reports,
intelligence updates and white papers, snippets of news that had
been catalogued and tagged into the files all jostled for
attention. Nathalie was silent, tight-lipped and fatigued as she
tried to make sense of the information streaming into the
feeds.

She held the
mobile under her cheek with her shoulder as she worked on the
screen. ‘Durand.’

‘
It’s me,
Gerald.’

‘
How’d it
go?’

‘
Ah sure, you
know yourself. We got shot down.’

She took the
mobile in her hand, standing. ‘You are kidding, right? Are you
okay?’

‘
Right as
rain. I’ve got the photos but it’ll be a while before I can get to
you, I’m at Hamat Airbase. Listen, There’s an airstrip up there at
Deir Na’ee, newly built from the look of it. There are two planes
there currently, an IL76 and an executive jet. The Ilyushin is
marked OD-256. I couldn’t see a marking on the small plane. Not
sure what make it is. I’m going to try to send you a photo from the
camera, but it’ll take time to upload. The Lebanese mobile networks
are pretty fucked up.’

‘
Okay, we’ll
try to look it up. I’m searching—’

‘
Sorry, got
to go. We’ve got company and they don’t look friendly. Let Dubois
know we’re here, yes?’

The line cut.
Nathalie closed her eyes and held the mobile to her forehead for a
second. She couldn’t bear to think of Lynch in danger, this man who
had made her feel alive again She shook her head to clear it. An
Ilyushin 76. She Googled it. A big plane, a freighter and
underpowered at that. Built to circumvent strategic arms limitation
treaties, they can be converted into bombers at the drop of a hat.
OD-256. A Lebanese aircraft ID, the plane registered in Tripoli,
Lebanon. She smiled. To Falcon Tourism and Logistics.

Nathalie
miskeyed the name in her haste. The links came back, the list
growing as the database scanned the product from Falcon’s servers.
Set up two years ago, Falcon Tourism and Logistics was a freight
forwarding company that also operated charter flights. Oddly, it
also linked to the files of the Near East Institute for
Oceanographic Research, an organisation that operated a marine
research facility in Santorini. Her lips moved as she scanned the
data, her eyes flickering over the links, her fingers flying on the
keyboard. Based on an island near Thira in Santorini. A lease from
the Governorate of Thira. She whistled. The lease had cost Falcon
five million dollars. She put in a request for OD-256’s flight log,
tapping the tabletop as she waited, the data confirming that OD-256
had been cleared for take-off from Santorini International Airport
that morning, cleared to fly to Beirut, carrying two containers of
United Nations aid supplies.

Nathalie
shuddered, her skin felt clammy. She whispered, just to make it
sound real, ‘They’re here already.’