Crossfire

by Andy McNab

  Basma helped me get Dom out of the wagon.

  'Yeah – close the gate!'

  She looked around but there were no pepper-pots to delegate to. They'd scattered to the main house or outbuildings. Washing hung from lines. Smoke curled from holes in the roofs.

  Basma caught up with us again as we staggered up the path. There wasn't a stick of furniture in the entrance hall. The cracked and crumbling walls were bare. A naked bulb hung from the ceiling.

  Frightened voices echoed further inside the house. Basma left us. 'Poor girls – I must tell them everything's OK.'

  The first door on the right was open. 'In here, Nick.'

  The bed in the corner had a lumpy mattress covered by a furry nylon blanket with pictures of lions. The old pillow didn't have a case and was stained yellow and brown. The light was fuzzy. The sun had to fight its way through a thick square of muslin over the window.

  Dom dropped to his knees and tried to pull up one of the floorboards. His hands scrabbled but his fingers couldn't grip. I grabbed him, sat him on the bed and draped the green sleeping-bag round his shoulders. 'Just concentrate on keeping warm, mate. This board, yeah?'

  I worked my fingers into the gap. The board lifted. Beneath it was a black nylon holdall. I lifted it out and took it to the bed.

  I had to unzip it for him.

  'The laptop, Nick.'

  It was among the clothes and overnight stuff.

  Basma struggled in with a bowl of water and rags in one hand, a small suitcase in the other. 'This is all I can do until the girls get some more heated up for a bath. We've got antiseptic cream but no antibiotics. The hospital can't give us any – they ran out weeks ago. The Americans have stopped supplies.'

  She tried to dab at Dom's wounds, but he was too busy sparking up the laptop.

  'What happened, Dominik? How did Noah find you?'

  His eyes never left the screen. 'They set me up. I thought I was going to meet the Taliban. I fell for it.'

  She looked up at me hopefully. 'Is Noah dead?'

  'All of them.'

  She didn't bother to hide her smile. 'Good.'

  I turned to Dom. 'Basma told me you were looking for the guy in the Taliban who supplies the Brits with the gear. But which Brits?'

  He fished around and pulled out a washbag. Among the kit was a plastic carrier-bag. 'This one . . .'

  He unfolded it and produced a memory stick.

  The clip kicked off outside what looked like the front door of 10 Downing Street. A tall, good-looking young guy with long blond hair went in with bags of shopping.

  Dom's finger hovered over the image. 'Finbar.' He almost choked as he said the word.

  I watched as the camera panned up to the top window. An older man in a white shirt stood with his back to the lens. Finbar walked into the room. The older man held him in his arms and they kissed. A few moments later, they moved out of shot.

  Dom pressed the soft screen so hard where the older man had last been that the picture blurred. The film cut and zeroed in again on the large black door. It opened. Both of them stood just back from the threshold, talking. The older one had an overnight bag at his feet.

  Dom's voice grated with sadness. 'Finbar had come out to us when he was seventeen. Then, after about a year, he was getting into drugs.'

  He looked down. 'We tried to get him to rehab, but he just pushed us away. He took to disappearing for days on end. Eventually he told us he was moving in with a friend.'

  My eyes hadn't left the screen. Whoever the older man was, Finbar was kissing him again.

  'He wouldn't tell us who the friend was, even where he was living. Siobhan was out of her mind. She needed to know he wasn't killing himself.'

  He was breathing heavily. 'We eventually found him.' He pressed the screen again. 'Here, in St Stephen's Green. We just wanted to keep contact, try and help him . . . Can you imagine how Siobhan felt? Seeing her son smacked up like that . . .'

  He pulled at his blood-matted hair. 'Finbar finally said his friend was a businessman who came to the city a couple of times a month. Said he was in property development, a firm from London.' His eyes blazed. 'I wanted to see his face, this arsehole property developer from London who supplies young boys with drugs so he can . . . so he can . . .' He shook his head helplessly.

  'You got Pete to film?'

  'Yes. He said he was coming on Friday, for the weekend.'

  'And who was it?'

  'I don't know. That's the bizarre thing, Nick. I had his photograph, but even with all the resources at my disposal I couldn't get anyone to put a name to the face.'

  He pressed pause. 'Nick, if I don't make it out of here, I want you at least to have seen his face. I don't know who he is, but I found out he's an immensely powerful man. Maybe you can trace him. I got started before, well, before . . .'

  He bit at a scab on his lip. 'Siobhan's father made his fortune in the property boom. You saw our house? His wedding present to us. There's not much he doesn't know about Dublin property. As one line of enquiry, he got his guys to do some digging. The Land Registry showed the flat was owned by a legit UK company, but then there was all kinds of smoke and mirrors with offshore trusts and stuff in the Caymans, Panama, you name it. Everything was shielded behind nominees and God knows what else. They hit a brick wall.

  'I had other irons in the fire. I talked to a contact at the Inland Revenue. He came back promptly and said a very strange thing. They said it was unwise to keep digging, it was a government matter. A government matter? What's the government got to do with offshore trusts and property companies?

  'Then the wheels really started to come off. Moira sent us to Iraq, and I had to do everything by phone and email. We'd only been there a couple of days and I got word that the FCO had something for me. Remember when I thought they were going to give me an interview?

  'I went to the compound. Basically, the shit hit the fan. I was told my enquiries in Dublin and Kabul had to stop. The whole drugs thing, off the agenda. Just like that. I told them they had no right to tell me what to do. Next thing I knew, those two Irish bastards were in the room. They told me to do as I was told or else.

  'The following day I spoke to Siobhan and she said Finbar had gone walkabout again. She was contacting drug outreach programmes, hospitals. Nothing. He'd vanished into thin air.'

  His voice trailed off. He was exhausted. It seemed to take everything he had just to hit play again.

  I watched as Finbar and the property developer kissed once more, then the older man picked up his overnight bag and walked out on to the street.

  He walked towards the camera, until he nearly filled the screen.

  It was then that I realized who he was.

  93

  So much now made sense, and the little that didn't could wait.

  We had to get moving.

  'Basma, that red estate of yours – it still work?'

  Dom jumped in before she could answer. 'Where are you going? To dump the body?'

  'No, mate. The Gandamack.'

  He made as if to stand, but the old guys outside the war-victims hospital would have got off their benches quicker. He sat down again and started ransacking his bag for clothes. 'I'm coming with you.'

  'No. You're fucked. Look at the state of you.'

  'Been past a mirror yourself lately?' He grabbed a pair of brown cargoes and shook them out. Basma pulled them over his feet. 'You going to upload the film to him from there?'

  'The film? Why the fuck would I want to do that?'

  'In exchange for Finbar's life. It's not such a bad deal . . .'

  I shook my head. 'That's not the way it works, mate. It's not just the film that's the problem. It's everything that Finbar, you and Siobhan know. To them, Finbar's just a volatile, unreliable junkie. You're a journalist on a crusade. And Siobhan joins the dots. Will he let any of you, or me, stay alive? Will he fuck. It has to end here. Basma – the keys.'

  Dom wetted his hair and tried to push it back. He cou
ld have had a full day at Champneys and it wouldn't have made much difference. He wasn't going to be back on the cover of Polish Hello! any day soon.

  I splashed my face with water and tried to sort myself out. The Gandamack wasn't the Serena, but the way we looked we wouldn't even get past the gate.

  I pulled a blue shirt from his bag and dumped the fleece. 'OK, Big Boy, if you're in, you do what I say when I say to do it, OK?'

  He looked at me for a long time, then nodded.

  I went to the rickety old wardrobe in the corner and opened the door. There weren't any clothes on the two or three wire coat-hangers that hung from the single wooden bar, but I wasn't after a coat.

  I had to shield my eyes against the sunlight as I hit the yard. I looked up and gave the Predator the finger.

  Dom wasn't too light on his feet but he was moving quicker down the path than he had when we'd come up it. I helped him into the back of the estate as Basma reappeared with an armful of maps. 'I'm coming too. You might need Pashtun. You'll have to drive, though. This country might have a new set of liberators, but we women still can't sit in the driver's seat. The police would pull us over. Everyone would stare. The older ones would throw stones. I'll sit in the back.'

  I lifted a hand. 'Basma, you must stay here. I need you to make waves. I need you to put the word round that Dominik Condratowicz is going to expose corruption and drug-trafficking at the highest level. And we need you to keep Dom's laptop safe. We'll take the memory stick, but if anything goes wrong, if you don't hear from one of us within seven days, I want you to contact Kate at Dom's office and get the film to her. Email it, whatever she says. Tell her everything.

  'And there's one other thing. The guy in the GMC . . .'

  She smiled. 'My girls have already taken care of him. There's no shortage of willing hands round here when it comes to dumping men in holes in the ground.'

  'Right here?'

  'We have a cemetery round the back. We collect suicide victims from the hospitals and villages and give them a decent burial. We're the only ones who seem to care . . .'

  I took the keys from her as two pepper-pots hurtled past us. As they swung the gates open I climbed into the wreck of a car and rolled down the window. 'Basma, thank you. But you're wrong about one thing. You're not the only ones . . .'

  She leant in through the window and kissed us both on the cheek. 'May Allah protect you. He always makes sure the tank is full, so that's a good start.'

  I fired up the protesting engine. 'Yeah, well, let's just hope the Taliban weren't watching, eh? That peck on the cheek could get you stoned to death.'

  We started moving.

  'And make sure you dump that wagon somewhere, preferably tonight.'

  We rolled out on to the street, turned left and headed for the main.

  94

  Down by the market, the traffic was still paying no attention to the boys in the drunken-sailor hats, and they were still going berserk.

  Dom was fighting the urge to nod off beside me.

  We passed the woodstacks. We turned our heads in unison to stare at the little shack where Sundance and Trainers had caught up with us. I knew we were thinking the same thing. Magreb's wife faced a bleak future. In Afghanistan, widows are the lowest of the low. Those medical careers were going to be a long time coming.

  Dom sighed heavily, and a tear rolled down his cheek. 'I've been so stupid . . . Peter, Magreb, Finbar . . . God knows who else . . . All because of my stupid bloody personal crusade . . .'

  I concentrated hard on the road. 'He was never going to stop until he had the film. Once he'd destroyed that, it was always going to be your turn next.'

  Dom stared miserably ahead. 'I thought it would solve everything. When the Irish guys said they wanted it, I bluffed and Peter played along. I said I didn't have it – not with me, anyway. That was when they dragged us out into the desert and shot Peter dead, right there in front of me.' He turned. 'And I still thought I could steal a march on them. Baz's girls had heard rumours about some big drugs deal going down between the Taliban and some Brits. I knew they must be the same Brits the FCO were trying to stop me investigating. I thought if I could make contact, find proof, whatever, I could put everything right . . .'

  'And then Noah and his mate snapped you up and decided to skim themselves a nice little earner on the Dublin property market.' I put a hand on his shoulder.

  Gym Tonic was coming up on our left. I took a few more twists and turns until we came to a crossroads. On the far side there was a high wall topped with razor wire. To the right I could see TV Hill.

  I negotiated the junction and headed left. Moments later, we were passing the computer shop. I waited for a couple of workmen carrying buckets of rubble to get out of our way, then pulled up outside the pedestrian door to the right of the Gandamack gates.

  'Stay here, mate. I won't be long. Ten minutes max. Any longer than that, take the car and get yourself back to Basma's. If I don't show up by tomorrow, get on the first plane out. You'll have to do it all on your own.'

  I gave the gate a couple of punches. The slide was pulled back and a set of fiery Afghan eyes wanted to know what the fuck I wanted.

  95

  I gave Mr Winter Warfare a big smile, and as the door swung open I got a big row of brown teeth back. He was still dressed in the thick black polo-neck jumper, with even thicker stripy tank top. Five or six dusty 4x4s were jammed against each other in the courtyard. I followed the gravel path across the garden to the concrete steps.

  I was hoping the reception desk would be unmanned, but the lad in the white shirt was right behind it, all smiles, a model of efficiency. I walked past the rack of Martini-Henrys. 'Hello, mate – everything good?'

  'Yes, thank you, sir.'

  'I'm looking for a guy I did some business with a few nights ago. Local, mid-thirties, clean-shaven, dresses quite Western – polo shirt and jeans. He was wearing a navy ball cap . . .'

  His face lit up. 'Kellogg, Brown and Root?'

  'That's the one. Could you do me a favour? Go and check if he's here? I said I'd meet him in the Hare and Hound, but I'm expecting a call and I don't get a signal down there.'

  'Certainly, sir. Two minutes.'

  'As long as it takes, mate.'

  He headed past the weapon racks and back outside towards the steps that led to the basement.

  If the fixer really was there, I'd consider taking him with us. A Pashtun speaker might come in handy. If I'd been on my own, I would have driven as close to the border as I could get without having to go through any checkpoints or controls, dumped the car and taken off on foot. I knew these mountains – not as well as the muj or the Taliban, perhaps – because I'd crossed them many times. But I had a semi-cripple in tow, and a seriously ticking clock. We had to get to an airport in Pakistan as quickly as we could. We didn't have any time to play with.

  I'd become the world's greatest Martini-Henry admirer all over again. I went to the rack and almost caressed them as I pulled the coat-hanger from my pocket and straightened it out.

  I checked the corridor for bodies and CCTV before realizing my bootlaces needed retying. I bent down, slid the wire behind the rack and fished. The slim bundle was where I'd left it. I grabbed my Nick Stone passport and ten hundred-dollar bills.