Fearless ; The Smoke Child

by Lee Stone

  Charlie Lockhart was a man of integrity, but not in a pompous Etonian way. He liked to do right by the people around him. He believed in karma. He wasn’t a soldier, and he didn’t have to slavishly follow orders. The desire to rip open the mysterious blue blocks in the back of the Mastiff was becoming stronger. It wouldn’t be long.

  As he swallowed, he considered his options. The first sip from the bottle always tasted best. A red LED glowed on the side of the oversized walkie talkie on the passenger seat, and his unofficial comms crackled into life again. It was Barr sounding more urgent now. Never a moment’s peace.

  Lockhart reached into the back of the Mastiff and tore away at the corner of one of the bales. As the blue plastic skin stretched and gave way, Lockhart caught the smell of fresh ink and paper. New bank notes. Thousands of them, millions possibly. The denominations were high, too.

  Lockhart considered his situation. Nobody knew he was alive. The pilots would report the ambush to Kandahar. He had a truck full of a serious amount of cash, which serious people would want returned. He couldn’t drive back to Kandahar without arousing suspicion, but anyone taking delivery of that much money wouldn’t want to be traced. They’d be sure to kill him when he arrived in Herat. Lockhart realized that they had chosen him for the job because he was anonymous and expendable.

  So: Take the money and run, leave the money and run, or deliver the money to someone who would almost definitely kill him? Lockhart ruled out option three.

  He put the Mastiff into gear and drove out of the smoke. As he edged around the burning crater where the jeeps had been moments ago, he threw the walkie talkie into the flames and began to drive on towards Herat. Easier to run when you’re rich, he thought.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Front Gate, Kandahar Airfield.

  “Instant Karma’s gonna get you, If I don’t get you first.”

  – U2, I Believe in Love.

  David Barr’s office was silent and dusty. The light was fading in the courtyard outside his window, and the only thing which broke the silence was the constant hum of the air conditioning unit.

  Suddenly, the door slammed open and the huge Warrant Officer poured himself through the doorway with his hands high, ready to strike at anyone he found in the room. General Lang walked calmly in behind him.

  His eyes shot around the room. Barr had not answered his phone when they had called from the other side of the Airfield. It was risky to be anywhere near the front gate during their private operation, but Lang had felt that with so much riding on the shipment they should come over and ensure that Barr had come good on the job.

  The phone was on the desk, and the office looked the same as it had done last time they had visited. There were maps and charts tacked on the walls along with a walkie talkie charging unit.

  Ten minutes earlier, Barr had been sitting at the desk, trying to contact Lockhart on the radio. The front gate had been warned that an incident had occurred outside the Airfield, and that insurgents had ambushed an ISAF Mastiff on the Herat Road. The pilots had requested information about any vehicles that had recently left the camp because a single vehicle on the road by itself seemed highly irregular. The reports were unclear about whether the vehicle had survived.

  Barr knew that there was three hundred million dollars of cash inside the Mastiff, and that losing the shipment was not an option. He was ruined. If the Mastiff had survived, he would have to explain how it had passed out of the front gate with the cash. If it had been destroyed, General Lang would undoubtedly hold him responsible. As he had discovered over the last few weeks, the General was not a reasonable man.

  Lang’s gaze fell on the picture frame on the desk. It was empty. Never a good sign.

  “He’s gone,” he called to Tyler. “Get after him.”

  Both of the men in Barr’s office had made more money from Afghanistan than they could make in a lifetime back home, but even so they could feel their biggest pay check slipping away. Burning to ashes on the Herat road.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Qal’eh Mir Da’ud, Herat.

  “You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table; there’ll be time enough for counting once the dealing’s done.”

  – Kenny Rogers, The Gambler.

  Lockhart had thrown caution to the wind and was speeding along the road towards Herat. Watching the jeeps being obliterated in front of him had been his third brush with death in three days. He felt like he was getting used to it.

  He remembered the old chesterfield in the tea shop and the time he had taken to drink his mint tea, deciding which road to take. He had chosen to come into Afghanistan, and now he had to live with the consequences. Now, he had to find a way out.

  As far as he could work out, he didn’t have any friends in the country. He had let the Americans think he was dead, and he was driving a military Mastiff which would not make him any new friends among the locals in Herat. On the plus side, he couldn’t even imagine how much money he was hauling behind him. Lockhart knew that the people who tell you that money can’t buy you friends are usually poor and lonely themselves. The money would help him escape. All he needed was a plan.

  He mulled the situation over. He would need to change vehicle at some point. The Mastiff was fairly resistant to roadside bombs because it was well armored. On the other hand, an American vehicle driving around on its own was likely to be a magnet for trouble. He would need to change his clothes too. During his travels, he had weathered a bit, but he still looked painfully western. Something local and scruffy would help him blend in, at least from a distance.

  He would stock up on food and water at Herat, hopefully in one hit, and then he’d head for the border. The closest border would be Iran where there would be fewer bullets and bombs, but he wouldn’t be extended a warm welcome. Lockhart planned instead to continue north through Herat and up into Turkmenistan.

  Checkpoints would be a problem, because they’d want to search his truck. He would have to keep a stack of dollars up front, to bribe a quick passage through.

  Lockhart felt that the plan was taking shape by the time he arrived on the outskirts of Herat. Then saw something remarkable. On the horizon, a few hundred yards from the Herat road, was a Russian tank. It was old and rusted, covered with a shiny, cheap looking paint, something between green and mustard yellow. It looked putrid compared to the refined hues of the modern ISAF forces.

  As Lockhart drove closer to the tank, another appeared and another. Then an army of dark green missile launchers, their cabs and their silos painted in a dark green that would have been better suited to northern Europe. They had all been driven to this place and then left behind when Gorbachev had come to power and ordered the Russian withdraw.

  There was something spooky about the deserted machinery, and Lockhart imagined what they would have looked like when their diesel engines were fired up in anger.

  Afghanistan had been a cold war playground. These Russian tanks had rumbled over the border in 1979 to help the failing left-wing Afghan government. Nearly half of all Afghans were displaced to neighboring Iran or Pakistan. In response, conservative Islamist factions had come together to form the mujahedeen, dedicated to fighting the Soviet forces. Funding poured in from the US, China, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

  The brief history lesson that David Barr had given to Lockhart on his first night at Kandahar was running through his head. These missile silos were for launching stingers, the same sort which the CIA had provided to the mujahedeen to help shoot down Soviet helicopters. The same sort that was now threatening US aircraft.

  Even during the Cold War, superpowers were gentlemen, choosing to have their conflicts in Godforsaken countries in the middle of nowhere. The Americans armed one side, the Russians the other. Locals died, but the world’s press didn’t dig deeply enough to unravel the story. Besides, their readers had no idea where Afghanistan was. Chickens and eggs. Now they were home to roost.

  Lockhart could see about two h
undred tanks and a hundred missile trucks. There were also piles of spent munitions and beyond the military graveyard there were a thousand used cars and trucks waiting to be stripped for parts. Although his Mastiff was newer and better than anything else in the graveyard, it would still be a brilliant hiding place.

  As he drove into the midst of the old tanks, a scrawny man in a dark blue shalwar kameez came running up to him, waving an AK47 and looking hopping mad. Brave guy, thought Lockhart. Although he wasn’t carrying a weapon himself, most people would assume that anyone in a Mastiff would be armed to the teeth. Lockhart ignored the angry-looking guy and chose a parking spot. Then he turned off the engine and waited for the man to catch him up.

  By the time the angry guy caught up, Lockhart was already out of the Mastiff. His plan was to make the Afghan believe that he had several well-armed friends in the back of his transport. It seemed to work because the guy lowered his gun and began to speak in more reasonable tones. He pulled off the scarf which had been keeping the dust out of his face and asked Lockhart what he wanted.

  He spoke decent English and Lockhart asked him how much it would cost to buy one of the old trucks. He produced a wad of new dollars to help with the negotiating. The man looked crestfallen.

  “No trucks,” he said. “But I have a very good four by four.”

  The blue bales of cash would never fit in the back of a jeep. No truck, no deal. The man looked around his scrapyard, keen to make some decent money. He did not understand why a guy with an armored Mastiff would want to buy an old truck, but he was sure that the soldier had plenty of money so he wasn’t arguing. He also wanted to get the deal done quickly, before village tongues started wagging. It wasn’t a good idea to do deals with soldiers.

  Lockhart looked around the graveyard for the biggest thing he could see. He spotted a beaten-up old coach. It was yellow and looked like it might have been a school bus in a previous life. He pointed it out to the owner.

  “Does it work?”

  The man nodded and smiled. Apparently, it worked very well and was a very good price. Car salesmen were the same the world over. Lockhart was not convinced. The vehicle was parked towards the back of the graveyard, almost half a mile away.

  “If you can drive it over to me without breaking down, I’ll take it.” offered Lockhart. “Park it alongside, between me and the road.”

  Within twenty minutes, the man was back, proudly sitting at the wheel of the coach. It was about thirty years old, but it had started first time and had had no dramas on the way across the graveyard. Several of the red velvet seats had collapsed, but the driver’s chair was comfortable enough. A dusty plastic fan stuck on the windscreen told him that the air con wouldn’t work. No real surprise. Outside, it looked fairly roadworthy. The electrics worked, and there was nothing hanging off the bottom.

  Lockhart didn’t haggle too hard, and they agreed a price of eight thousand dollars, as long as the man could fill the tank before he left. He offered to up the price to ten thousand dollars if he could provide a crate of bottled water and thirty suitcases before sunset. The man looked confused, but he said he could manage it.

  Lockhart kept the keys to the Mastiff, in case the man came back with anything or anyone other than the suitcases. Within an hour, he returned in a pickup truck with an assortment of tatty old cases strapped precariously to the back. He was alone.

  The man had found him a stack of water bottles, the seals of which were unbroken. He also handed him a set of shalwar kameez and a woolen pakol hat like his own. There was a scarf to cover his face from the dust and to keep him from being recognized. Ten thousand dollars was a lot of money and the salesman didn’t want to see his best customer being kidnapped before he came back to buy more trucks.

  “If you are staying long, grow your beard,” he advised the stranger. Lockhart thought it was good advice, but he was already planning to leave Afghanistan that night.

  When the salesman left the graveyard, Lockhart spent the next hour loading up his coach. There were thirty shrink-wrapped bundles of cash like the one he had opened. Each fitted snuggly inside a suitcase with little room to spare. He cased them up, and slung some of them in the luggage compartments and others in the overhead lockers on his coach. He jammed the open bale underneath the driver’s seat and then covered it with a dusty rug he had found at the back of the coach.

  The ten thousand dollars had made no dent in the cash under his seat, and Lockhart couldn’t even work out how much money he was sitting on top of as he bumped and hissed his way out of the graveyard and back onto the road to Herat.

  Lockhart’s best guess was that Kandahar was a distribution point for contractors’ wages and US funds for rebuilding the country’s roads, schools, and hospitals. He guessed that the money had been creamed off from the huge amount which was flowing through the Airfield until they had a gigantic haul, and then they had tasked David Barr to smuggled it out. If Barr had any sense, he’d be running as fast as Lockhart was. If Barr had any sense, he’d have a plan too.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Mary, Turkmenistan.

  “Will the wind ever remember, The names it has blown in the past?”

  - Jimi Hendrix, The Wind Cries Mary.

  Charlie Lockhart had driven solidly through the heat of the day and now the light was fading. By the middle of the morning he had crossed the border into Turkmenistan, and the roads had become better as the day had progressed.

  The yellow bus had served him well so far, but it had rattled like hell along the dust roads outside Herat. As the roads had improved, the deafening juddering which had accompanied each mile had slowly subsided, and the ride had become more relaxing. Sixty miles an hour was about as much as the bus could do before the metalwork started to complain and bits of the coachwork threatened to fall off.

  At lunchtime, he had stopped at a town called Shark. There was a serene-looking lake nearby, and the place was packed with intricately carved buildings and sun cracked silver trees. Lockhart took time to look around; it felt good to be a tourist again.

  Turkmenistan was arid, and dust kicked up behind his bus as he drove further into the country. Things were changing though, and grass had started to spring up either side of the road.

  It felt good to be out of Afghanistan. The country had a rich and beautiful history, but war had ravaged it. Locked it down. The Afghanistan that Lockhart had seen was little more than a flat packed America, reconstructed in the middle of a desert, surrounded by razor wire, flooded in fluorescent light. Filled with Pizza Huts and TGI Fridays and cocooned from the reality beyond its perimeter.

  By the time he arrived in Mary, Lockhart knew that he was two hundred miles away from Afghanistan. He felt two hundred miles safer, but the money was already becoming a problem. It was weighing on his mind. There was no way that Lockhart could keep it. It should build hospitals and schools, but it was sitting in blue bundles in suitcases at the back of his bus. Lockhart promised himself that he would use what he needed to get home safely, and the rest would end up where it belonged.

  Mary itself was originally an oasis town on the Silk Road, but the modern city was grim. The British Machine Gunners and Bolsheviks had clashed here in the early part of the last century, blowing chunks out of the place. Now Mary lived off cotton and gas, and consequently it was industrial and ugly. It was a great place to disappear for the night.

  The bus had been easy to drive along the wide straight desert roads, but as the city streets became tighter, Lockhart had to concentrate more and more as he maneuvered round corners. It wasn’t fun, and he pulled off into the courtyard of a shabby-looking motel at the first opportunity.

  The guy on the front desk looked suspicious of a Westerner turning up in an old bus with no passengers. He spoke very little English and was short-tempered. Most of his neck was red raw. Either his razor was old and blunt or his washing powder was cheap and scratchy. Or both. He kept rubbing away at the skin absent-mindedly while he demanded to see some ide
ntification from the stranger before him. Lockhart kept his passport to himself. There was no reason to make it easy for anyone who came looking for him.

  The motel owner seemed lost in thought as he continued to rub at his neck. Probably planning how to part the tourist in front of him from a few extra dollars. Lockhart pulled out a wad of notes he had removed from the open blue bale under his seat. The motel owner’s eyes widened. They were fifties, and Lockhart could have hired the room for a fortnight for just two of them, but he peeled off four and handed them to the guy behind the desk. From that moment on, the passport was forgotten, and the motel owner couldn’t do enough to help. He took Lockhart’s keys and parked the bus out of harm’s way, turning it around, ready for departure the next day. Lockhart made sure he locked the luggage compartments and went to check out his room.

  There were thirty rooms in the motel, and the owner showed Lockhart to the best of them, stooping and bowing along as if he were welcoming royalty. Lockhart began to regret his generosity when the man insisted on presenting the room to him, turning on each tap and pointing proudly at the water flowing from it, next the shower, then an explanation of the buttons on the remote control for the air conditioning. By the time the owner had flicked through the satellite TV channels, Lockhart was ready to physically eject him from the room.

  When the man finally bowed and scraped his way backwards out of the door, Lockhart sat down on the bed and had a look around the room. It was a perfectly good room, clean but dull. A framed print of Genghis Khan was nailed to the wall. He had apparently visited the ancient city in 1221. The motel was about ten years old and had probably never been beautiful. It was already showing signs of wear and tear. But it was a good place to stay for the night; Discrete and anonymous. As a tourist, Lockhart had learned never to stay in the best hotel in town. The best hotel was always a magnet for tourists, terrorists, pickpockets and beggars. You always sleep well in the third best hotel in town.