Thunder (36 page)

This alley is deserted.

Jack stops and lounges nonchalantly against one of the walls. I move and take up a similar stance alongside him. “There’s no point in trying to look anything other than western,” he’d explained in the car. “The best we can do is look nonmilitary. If we get challenged we’ll make out we’re with the Red Cross on humanitarian duties.” He’s clutching a battered and dirty old linen bag with a miscellany of fruit and vegetables visible at its brim. In his other hand he clutches a tattered but glossy Lonely Planet style guidebook. It has a folded paper map obviously sticking out from amongst the tightly gripped folio. “Props,” he’d explained.

He leans toward me. “Go to the end, there,” he whispers, and nods along the alley to where it ends in a rust-brown, brick enclosed, shadowy T-junction, “and keep an eye out.”

I head away and reach up to activate my hidden earpiece and microphone. “You there?” I mutter, as I amble toward the junction.

~~~~~

“Copy that,” Jack said quietly, as he watched Nick proceed away from him.

From where he was, he could see through to where they’d entered this side street so, keeping one eye on the entrance, he stooped and rummaged around in the fruit and vegetables. The PDA concealed in his palm blinked on and he waited, holding it face downwards for a few seconds, while it worked out where it was.

“Is anyone coming?” he whispered.

“Clear,” said Nick.

He flicked the device over and studied it carefully. Ebrahimi’s marker appeared to be further along one of few slightly wider streets. Not far away. Either on the street he’d just diverted them off, or another close by.

They’d need to lay up somewhere closer and discretely try to get a better fix.

“Nick,” he whispered. “Follow me.”

~~~~~

Jack leads us, back the way we came, and waits at the junction for me to catch him up.

“The marker is further along this street,” he explains standing with his back to the direction he’s suggesting. I look past him, as if disinterested in his conversation, and gaze randomly beyond a couple of nearby merchants’ stalls.

“There’s a tea shop ahead,” I say. “At the next junction. Looks like it’s got a veranda out front.” Veranda is something of an overstatement. The wooden structure is canted to one side and looks more likely to fall down than stay standing.

I casually move ahead of him, then pause and turn back. He has lifted the guidebook up and is studiously flicking through it whilst he glances beyond me.

“Too close for comfort,” he mutters. He shakes his head dramatically and gesticulates back down the street toward the distant minarets of the tomb; just like a lost tourist might. “We’ll come back after dark,” he says.

~~~~~

Sergei tossed his battered physics textbook to one side, pushed himself up from his thin and uncomfortable bedroll, and scratched absently at his backside as he walked across the safe house’s open-plan first storey room. He seemed to have a small lump under his skin. He’d not noticed it before, and now there was no way of seeing it. There weren’t any mirrors in this place. The latrine he was heading for was an awful stinking pit, in a shared shed-like structure, out the back.

‘It’s probably just a spot,’ he thought to himself as he made his way across the simple sleeping area. The walls of the room were made of unfinished breeze blocks with a pair of roughly glazed windows in each of its front and back walls. These afforded more light than downstairs and his bedroll lay spread on the rough timber floorboards beneath one of them. He could read there.

Two prayer mats were laid out, facing south, in the open space in the centre of the room and a row of old wooden packing cases provided some scant screening between his and Nagpal’s bedroll – which Sergei knew lay as an untidy, unoccupied, sprawl in the opposite corner.

The other man was spending most of the daytimes away in the city somewhere; presumably networking and scheming the next phases of whatever genius plan he was now concocting. Sergei didn’t mind. He was happy that Nagpal wasn’t around very much, and being instructed to stay and guard the house had been a welcomed assignment.

On one side of the room, a gaping hole emptied itself into a simple flight of sturdy, roughhewn, wooden stairs. These led down into the gloomy ground floor area.

Downstairs, the space was split into two rooms: a living area, containing two rickety chairs and one rickety table; and a kitchen area, containing a single wall of ill-fitting and unmatched kitchen cabinets. On top of these waist-high cabinets stood the sink – a large steel bowl and a chipped crock jug.

An ancient electric hot-plate cooker propped itself precariously in the shadows of the far corner. It might originally have been white – once – sometime last century – but nowadays it presented little evidence of its original condition. It certainly wasn’t white any more.

The ground floor had two tiny windows and two doors: one door and window to the front, another to the back of the property. The rear door led to a small courtyard which was little more than a sixty square-metre handkerchief of stranded desert. It was completely enclosed between the rear walls of the neighbouring houses and contained the single, shared, soak away, latrine which serviced all of the properties. For a building to have its own ‘squat’, shared between only a half dozen families, was a luxury round here...

Sergei grimaced, took a couple of deep breaths and headed toward the stinking shed.

~~~~~

Having returned to the car, we use the rest of the evening productively.

First we move the Toyota into a better location – still near the tomb, but now out of sight, and tucked in amongst some half-built house shells. From there we cautiously scout routes into and out of the alleyways. Jack wants us to avoid being seen, and there are far fewer locals in the backstreet mazes.

Jack also pings a message from the EMT terminal:
‘41 – 17 – 83’
.

Then we eat a cold meal together, sitting in the car, watching as the sun slowly sets and the towering cube of the Tomb of Agha fades slowly into the pitch blackness of an unlit city night.

~~~~~

London

“What is Tin saying?” asked Greere.

Ellard looked over the partition. “They’re in Herat – as if we didn’t know – but haven’t located Ebrahimi yet and are going off-line for up to six hours. I’d guess they’re going to use darkness to scout the immediate vicinity.”

Greere raised his eyebrows at his subordinate. “They seem to be doing their damnedest to disappoint you, Ellard,” he said pointedly. “Them behaving like professionals and all that...”

Ellard grunted dismissively.

“If they’re going dark for a while, I’m going to head over and brief Sentinel in person.” Greere stood up and started pulling on his jacket. “Call me if anything changes.”

Ellard nodded without looking away from his screen. “Yes, sir,” he acknowledged indifferently.

~~~~~

Herat

I’m half dozing, with my head propped against the passenger door window, when the noise of the other door handle being jerked upwards startles me, and in a blink of an eye I’m awake and pointing the long barrel of my silenced pistol toward the opening door.

“It’s me,” says Jack from the darkness and slips into the driver’s seat, dragging with him a gust of chillingly cold night air.

He’s swapped his Mujahideen Cap for a long, dark brown, Dupatta scarf which winds round his head so that only a narrow strip of green-eyed face is visible. He reaches up with one arm and starts to unwind it.

“I’ve found the house,” he reports. “It’s about a hundred metres up the street from that tea house. There are two or three locations we can observe it from at street level and, even better, a couple of rooftops.”

“See anyone,” I grunt.

He shakes his head. “No-one. If they’re there, they must be asleep inside. We should do the same. You sleep. I’ll keep watch for a while, then you can take over. We need to monitor the place for other occupants tomorrow.”

“No nasty surprises this time?” I ask.

He smiles ruefully.

~~~~~

We creep out from the car, a few short hours later, before dawn, and Jack leads the way through dark and deserted alleyways, then up and across a series of flat rooftops before depositing me here, where I am right now.

“Stay put,” he’d whispered before heading off on his own. “Don’t move unless I tell you to. I’ll be over there.” He’d pointed to another rooftop across the street. “Cover yourself with this,” he’d handed me a tightly bundled camouflage sheet. “Watch the house front, and keep an eye on my position to make sure no-one can approach me unawares. I’ll do the same for you from over there.” I glance up briefly at the underside of my sheet with its abstract grey, brown and beige patterning. I’m glad of what small relief it has provided from the afternoon glare and once again am amazed at how effective it is at fooling the eye. Even though I know where he is, I can barely make out where Jack is hiding on the other side of the road. “We’ll withdraw back to the car, after dark,” he’d concluded and tapped his earpiece as he vanished silently into the predawn darkness.

I edge forward slightly, mainly to shift position – this rooftop is hard and uncomfortable and I’ve been sprawled on it for several hours – and return my attention to the nondescript house front I’ve been staring at all day. It’s a rough breeze block cube, two floors high, with three square windows and a doorway in its front wall. The upper floor windows are bigger than the one on the ground floor. The door, barely describable as planking, stands gaping like it has all day long. Murat Nagpal left it like that, when he dragged it open and stepped out at sometime around nine o’clock this morning.

I remember the flush of adrenalin I’d felt when I saw him come out. He’s grown a beard since whenever the photos we’ve studied were taken, but it was definitely him: short, overweight, and with a face that looks too small for his head. He looked very ordinary, very unexciting, very unlike how you’d imagine a premeditated mass-murderer to appear. It’s hard to think that someone like him could have orchestrated such atrocity.

I had then watched with mounting frustration and anger as this monster ambled casually away toward the city. Why should he be breathing, living, existing, when you are gone? My fury almost got the better of me. I could have shot him, right there and then but one thing stopped me: there are two of them...

The final two...

And we want them both.

Ebrahimi has not appeared. At least not from the front door.

From time to time, I catch glimpses of a man passing behind the upper floor windows. It looks like he’s standing and stretching. Sometimes with an open book dangling loosely from one of his hands.

There have been no other visitors, no other gangs of local hoodlums going in or coming out, and Nagpal has not returned.

My earpiece hisses with static and I glance across at Jack’s position on the other rooftop. He can’t see the house front, but can see the approaches and, if he moves position, he could also see down to the rear of the property. I can see him shifting stealthily now.

“Stay alert,” his voice hisses quietly in my ear. “Tango One is back. Entering tea house.”

I click my transmit key once to acknowledge his transmission.

Nagpal has reappeared.

~~~~~

Murat Nagpal could see that Gulyar bin Imraan was sitting at a table in the corner of the veranda. He strode along the street and purposefully up the two planking steps, then made his way across the rickety decking to join him. His friend seemed to be looking pleased with himself.

~~~~~

Another burst of static. “He’s meeting someone,” Jack whispers.

~~~~~

Gulyar rose from his seat and stepped out from the table to embrace his former comrade.

“So why the urgent summons?” asked Murat as they seated themselves. “I had much planned for this afternoon.”

Gulyar smiled, “God is great, Murat. I have good news. Well worth a short diversion. Fate has delivered the object you wanted much earlier than I’d expected. It is like you were meant to get it quickly!”

Murat’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “That
is
good news.”

~~~~~

“I don’t recognise the other man,” Jack’s voice mutters in my ear.

~~~~~

On the opposite rooftop, Jack carefully powered up his compact digital camera. The sun was behind him so there was little chance of lens flash, nonetheless he moved very slowly until he could see the distant tea shop in the device’s view finder.

He zoomed in on the men.

Nagpal was facing toward him, so Jack took two quick shots of his recently bearded countenance.

The stranger was facing away. At the moment he could only see the back of his head.

He waited.

~~~~~

London

Greere snatched up his cellphone. “What can I do for you, sir?” he asked, as he pressed it to his ear. He was on his own in the office. Ellard was away grabbing some sleep in one of the rest rooms scattered here and there throughout the building’s labyrinthine complex. Round the clock working was normal for all of the occupants of the surrounding corridors. Sleeping facilities were as common as washrooms.

“I’ve just picked up something from my ‘channels’,” said Sentinel, his booming tone bullying the cellphone’s tiny speaker. “Might be relevant.”

“Yes, sir,” said Greere. He suspected his boss was only trying to make himself feel useful.

“The Afghan military has reported, to the Americans, that they’ve lost one of their latest spec KRX9000 series scanner units from a small border unit in Badghis Province.”

Greere’s brows furrowed sharply. Badghis Province neighboured the Herat District on its eastern side.

Sentinel continued. “The American’s are rightly pissed at the news. The unit was one of a few similar devices, on loan for field trials, following manufacturer language upgrades etcetera. The Afghans seem to be quite embarrassed by the incident, and have reported they’ve identified the offending soldier and are interrogating him.”