Crossfire

by Andy McNab

  The next three hundred metres cost me another ten dollars, but there were no turns, just more dead Russian armour. We crested the hill on the saddle, alongside a group of old guys sitting cross-legged in a huddle round a cooking-pot. They gave us a look and got straight back to the business of cooking up dinner.

  The track forked left up to one of the antennae farms, and right to the other. The driver stopped, turned in his seat, and gave me a triumphant but toothless smile. I gave him a final ten. 'I'll get out here, matey.'

  As he embarked on a many-point turn behind me, I walked towards the barbed-wire fence round the installation immediately above the target, but not so purposefully that it might rattle the AK-toting guards hanging out by its gate. Both antennae farms were key locations; they needed to be protected. The big green circular ISAF signs told everyone that.

  Kabul was so far below me it looked like a map. I walked along the saddle. The Serena and most of the embassies were to the north, down to my right. To my left were the Jock's bar, the Russian embassy and, out on a limb at the southern edge of town, ISAF.

  I stopped and admired the view until the taxi was out of sight. Then I went and sat by the wreck of a Russian communications truck, surrounded by artillery-shell casings and ammo boxes like big sardine cans with the tops peeled back.

  I pulled out the Yes Man's mobile and looked south, towards the Kabul river. I wasn't going to have any problems with a signal up here. I couldn't move for satellite dishes.

  The phone rang twice. The Yes Man came straight on. 'Have you found Condratowicz? Have you got him?'

  'I've just housed a possible, that's all.'

  'Where is he?'

  One of the old guys left the crowd with a can in his hand and went through the motions of washing himself ready for prayer.

  'Ali Abad mountain. They call it TV Hill.'

  'Where on the hill? Any idea yet if our man's inside?'

  'No. Have you got access to anything in the air? I need you to keep a trigger on it and see what happens down there.'

  'Nick, I cannot involve any other agency.' His response came with several degrees of frost.

  I didn't give a shit. 'Do you want him or not? I need help, and you've got it on tap. I don't know yet if the fucker's in there so find me an airborne Predator. The Americans are bound to have one or two up there. Don't worry about compromise. They do this shit all the time. Just say it's an antiterrorist op, for fuck's sake. You're the boss, aren't you? Think of something.'

  One of the guards sauntered out on to the road. He had his weapon over his shoulder but wanted to take a closer look at the local gobbing off on his mobile.

  The Yes Man said nothing.

  'Just tap into whatever they have up there that covers the north side of the hill. Then get the operator to stand by. When I do a walk-past I can ID the exact building for them. If Dom's in there, this isn't going to be some fucking shoot-'em-up. I want to get in there, try and find him, then get us both out alive – and not get shot by ISAF in the process. And some of their boys are a stone's throw away from me at the top of this poxy hill. So fucking think of something.'

  'OK, wait out.'

  He cut off and, for the first time in a while, I did what he said. The old guy had finished splashing his face, neck and arms and was now getting down to a serious chat with Allah. I watched him touch his forehead to the ground, then stand and pray over the city.

  Another guard joined the first, and they both headed down the road towards me.

  They were Turks. Their national flag filled the top half of the arms that were busy waving me away.

  70

  I moved back towards the saddle, past yet another pile of old artillery casings. Those two hills had been Russian strongholds. If you dominated the high ground there, you dominated Kabul. And that was exactly why a guy in blue body armour was climbing the south side of the hill, probing the ground with what looked like a row of kitchen knives. If you were in the mood to build there, I guessed you decided which bit of slope you wanted to carve out, then got a guy in body armour from the council to come and dig up the mines for you.

  The old guys were just dragging whatever they'd been cooking out of the pot. I couldn't see the target. It was down to my left somewhere, but the angle was too steep. What I did see were the scorched remains of a blue burqa. So much for liberation.

  The mobile vibrated in my hand.

  'You got something up there for me?'

  'Yes, we have one tasked. It's overhead.'

  I looked up, even though I knew I was wasting my time. The Predator's video cameras and forward-looking infrared (FLIR) thermal imaging would be doing their stuff from fifty thousand feet. The ground crew would be able to see me, big-time. Even through cloud they could read a newspaper at a bus stop. To a Predator, it was always a bright sunny day.

  Once they had imagery, it could be bounced anywhere, including to my laptop in the Serena. Down in Helmand and the south, they circled 24/7. They watched and waited for the Taliban to come out of their caves, jump on their flatbeds and scream across the plains. The operator, hundreds of miles north in the ISAF camp, just marked the target with a laser beam and kicked off a couple of the Hellfires strapped to its wings.

  'You got coverage?'

  'I'm looking at pictures now.'

  'Tell the operator to focus on the saddle between the two antennae farms. I'm on my own, facing north.'

  I stood there like a dickhead while the Yes Man steered the operator on target.

  'They want to confirm it's you.'

  'I'll walk down the road on their go. Tell them I'm in local dress and I have a rucksack on my back. Apart from their boys with the guns, I'm the only fucker up here who's standing. The rest of them are sitting and eating.'

  'He's ready.'

  'I'm walking.' I headed down the track. A couple of the old guys waved at me as I passed. I kept my head down, mobile to my ear. 'That's a hundred and fifty short of the target. White rectangular, two storeys, flat roof.'

  'We have you, Nick.'

  'Fifty short. On my left, building about ten metres back from the road. There's a black four-by-four parked to the left of the target.'

  'I can see a white building ahead of you now, Nick.'

  'That's it. I'm about twenty short.'

  'There's movement!' His voice shot up an octave. 'Movement from the back. Someone's heading towards the four-by-four.'

  I swivelled my eyes under the shemag. A massive body appeared from the back of the house and opened the wagon's hatch.

  He was no more than five metres away. I heard him mutter to himself as he sniffed and chugged up the contents of his lungs.

  He bent forward slightly from the waist, as if his massive frame was weighing him down. His head was down, maybe to hide his scabbed-up face, but he looked aware. Both hands were stuck inside his clothing. One would be gripping a weapon.

  His gingery beard was almost as big as the wizard's last night. He could be local. There were plenty of big Afghans running around here, even ginger ones with blue eyes.

  He lifted out a case of bottled water and dropped it on to his sandalled feet. 'Fucking goddamn fucking shit!'

  So, not a local, then.

  A few more paces and he was unsighted. I heard the rear hatch slam shut behind me.

  'He's going back to the rear of the house, Nick. He's opening the back door. He's now inside.'

  'It's no longer a possible,' I said. 'That's the target.'

  71

  Serena Hotel

  1834 hrs

  I came out of the shower still honking of Marmite but wearing a nice bathrobe. My arm was red and sore. My fault, I'd kept scratching.

  The TV was tuned to an Iranian station. No need to buy any of those street-market DVDs of Americans getting blown to shit by IEDs. You could watch it all on state-sponsored news. I picked up the remote and flicked. It was all the normal shit. CNN, fuzzy HBO, some Russian channels, hundreds of Indian ones. I settled on some girl
s in bikinis playing beach cricket in Australia. I wondered what the boys up in the hills would make of it.

  The Yes Man's mobile bounced across the desk where it was busy recharging next to my personal one.

  'The latest imagery is with you. If he's in there, get him down into the city and away from ISAF before contacting me. I will arrange pickup and fly you both out within the hour.'

  I fired up the laptop with my left hand. 'You need to make sure the unmanned aerial vehicle is retasked and not covering the hill. Neither of us would want anything recorded.'

  'Agreed.'

  The mobile cut and I powered it down. I picked up the personal one and tried Magreb. It just rang and rang. Maybe he was at a crucial stage with the stir-fry.

  The downloads finished. I was looking at a series of black-and-white thermal images. The hotter the source, the whiter it showed. A live human, even fully clothed, would show as a precise silhouette.

  The 4x4 glowed with varying intensities of white. The bonnet was bright. The exposed bit of exhaust pipe was incandescent.

  Scaled against the 4x4, the target looked about twenty metres by ten. There were no power lines going in, not even at the back, and the steeply sloping ground at the rear wasn't enclosed.

  I scrolled down. Two pathways led from the rear door. One went left, towards where the wagon was parked. The other branched off right, meandering round the contours of the high ground to the other houses, thirty to thirty-five away.

  There were no windows or doors in the side walls, and no heat signature leaked from the windows at the rear. Either they were boarded up as securely as the front ones, or nothing was being generated.

  The last picture showed a body – too small to be Noah – taking a piss near the back door. The bright liquid ran back towards the house.

  The UAV hadn't done much to help, except to tell me there were at least two people in the house. I was going to have to recce the target close up. I needed to find a way to make covert entry, and if Dom was there, get him out without compromise. Like I'd told the Yes Man, this wasn't a shoot-'em-up and drag-him-out job. That one, I might just lose – especially when those Turks came legging it down the road to investigate.

  The Mini-Ero lay on the bed next to the mags. I'd emptied them to give the springs a rest so they'd have a better chance of pushing the rounds up. If things did go noisy, Plan B called for lots of speed, aggression and surprise. I'd have to get in there, grip him and get us out – whatever state he was in.

  I sat down as the girls changed ends or whatever they did in beach cricket, and started to load. I was going to use thirty rounds a mag instead of thirty-two. It was all about giving the springs a bit of leeway. I wished my forearm would give me some. It throbbed as I gripped the mag and fed in the nine-millimetre.

  As I was loading the last mag, the room phone rang.

  'Hello, Mr Nick. I see you call me, but the noise, I no hear it ring. I sorry. I worry about you in that place. I no want call you because you with your friend, maybe.'

  I kept loading with the phone jammed between my ear and shoulder. 'Don't worry about that, mate. Last night was fine. There was no drama and I even got a lift back with the man I was trying to make the reunion with.'

  'Very nice, Mr Nick. I go home very happy and wait for your call, maybe.'

  'Why don't you come up to the room right now and I'll pay you for tonight's standby? I was going to call you in an hour or so anyway to say don't wait up – just have your mobile next to your bed.'

  'OK, Mr Nick.'

  I finished the mag and packed the Bergen. The personal phone was clear of Magreb's, Basma's and Kate's numbers. It had to be sterile. I had been running Magreb's number in my head all evening. It was pointless remembering Basma's as well. I'd only fuck the numbers up and wouldn't be able to contact anyone. I knew where she lived. That was enough for now.

  I zipped it into the top flap, along with the hotel torch. My jeans and T-shirt went in too, along with the Mini-Ero. The Yes Man's mobile would be staying in the safe with the laptop. If I did find Dom, I was going to keep him to myself until I found out what the fuck was going on.

  It wasn't long before there was a knock on the door. I ushered Magreb in, but he clearly felt uncomfortable invading an employer's personal space.

  'Here you are, mate.'

  He took just one of the two hundred-dollar bills. 'No, thank you, Mr Nick. Tomorrow money tomorrow, maybe.'

  I almost had to force him to sit on one of the luxurious armchairs and drink some water. 'Whereabouts on the hill do you live, Magreb? You on that road that goes all the way up to the top?'

  He took a sip. 'Not all way. Halfway, maybe. Near United Nation school.' He beamed with pride. 'My children will go school there and be doctor.'

  I stood up to let him out and we shook hands. 'Have a great evening with your family, mate, and remember – keep that mobile with you.'

  He headed for the door and I jumped ahead to open it for him. He gave me a smile, and I couldn't help noticing that the school-fees savings fund obviously took precedence over a dental plan.

  He paused on the threshold. 'Mr Nick, you go where bad people are. But I know you not bad, you kind. I listening for your call, maybe.'

  It would have made my night a whole lot easier if I'd got him to drive me up the hill and back down again with Dom. But he was a real person, the sort who had a real job and a real family who loved him. I didn't want to be responsible for fucking that up.

  I'd walk from here to the target in local gear, then get changed.

  72

  TV Hill

  Saturday, 10 March

  0146 hrs

  The lights of the city twinkled below me. Above, the sky was clear and full of stars.

  The wind was starting to pick up. It chilled the sweat on my back. I was still in local gear, but hadn't bothered with the Marmite this time. The shemag covered my face and I walked with my head down. Kabul wasn't exactly swamped with street-lighting.

  A whole swathe of the city around the Gandamack was suddenly plunged into darkness. Even the embassies were affected. Then, one by one, lights came back on as their emergency generators kicked in.

  It was pitch black up here, excepting the odd glimmer from an oil lamp spilling under a door or past the sacks most houses used as curtains. A couple of dogs barked at each other in the distance. Apart from that there was no sign of life as the road wound upwards.

  I came across two knackered American school buses, painted white with UNHCR stencilling, parked on a tight hairpin. A stretch of hillside close by had been scooped out to make way for a big brick building. A blue board drilled into the concrete-block wall announced that I'd arrived at the UN school.

  Magreb's Hiace was tucked in by the wall. Any of the five or six nearby houses could have been his.

  I kept climbing, fingers crossed that his mobile was taped to his ear while he slept.

  It was another fifteen minutes before I came parallel with the target house. Not even a pinprick of light leaked from the boarded-up windows.

  The 4x4 was still outside, and didn't seem to have moved.

  I carried on past, until I was sure I was out of line of sight of both the house and the Turks on the summit. Either might be on stag and equipped with night-viewing aids.