I flew from Queen Alia International to Frankfurt, courtesy of Lufthansa. From there it was straight home. That night I was back in the UK at Midlands International and clearing customs.
28
‘Brother. We’ve been waiting.’
I’d got the taxi to drop me off where they’d said, a hundred metres beyond the railway station by a wall. Two people carriers were parked up, engines running, and a loose group of casually-dressed Asian men stood around them, watching me with interest. I’d taken a short cab ride to here, Derby station. All I had was cash, the clothes I stood up in, and a daysack. In a slit in my belt were the last four of my 500 Euro notes. In my wallet was about £70 and I had some loose change in my pocket. That was it.
I walked forward, and one of the men split from the group and came to meet me. I had nothing electronic on me. No phones, no tablet, no tracking device, not even a digital watch. I was totally ghost, in the parlance, off the grid. It had to be this way but God it made me nervous. In the old spy movies our hero could always make a break for a phonebox but that wasn’t looking too likely round here. My stomach was one big ball of ice. If any of them, by some crazy chance, recognised me from the old days, now would be the moment and I would be dead. I was now five feet from them. They all stood and gazed at my face. The lead guy spoke.
‘Rizwan Natha. The guy that took out the Syrian tank. We’ve been watching your videos.’
Question? Statement? I shrugged.
‘Fisabilillah, you know the coup.’
The lead guy came forward and hugged me.
The moment passed and it seemed the traffic started moving again.
‘I’m Jawad. Welcome to Derby.’
So this was Jawad, the emir the girls had set me up with. He stood back, held me for a bit in an arms-out grip, then let go and slapped my arm.
‘C’mon bro, we got things to do. We fly out tonight.’
‘Fly? Tonight?’
‘Yeah bro. We’re going to Estonia.’
A chuckle went round the gang.
‘Rizwan. Show me your passport, bro.’
I got it out and presented it. He flicked through it and nodded. It was what he’d been expecting.
‘Good. Great name. Got you to Jordan and back?’
‘Yeah.’
He handed another passport to me. It read “ Comunidad Andina / Republica Bolivariana de Venezuela ”. What the hell? I opened it. There was a photo of me. They must have taken it off of Skype.
‘You’re now Juan Alejandro.’
I pocketed it.
‘What are we doing in Estonia?’
The gang laughed even harder.
‘We’ll just call it adventurous training. Come on.’
29
‘Gentlemen! Welcome to Baltic Heat! You are now in two teams carrying simunition rounds in your weapons. Blue team is security forces, Red team is insurgents. You have twenty minutes from when I start this stopwatch to attain your targets or neutralise your opponents. Stand by … go!’
We were about sixty klicks east of Tallinn in a complex of old farm buildings and knocked-up walls. We’d gone straight back to East Midlands International and got onto Eastern Airways flights to Tallin. Redeye express stuff. Straight off the planes and into some cheap hotels in town populated by stag parties from Newcastle. Us Asian lads blended in quite well, actually. My brain was racing like the wheels on a car that had gone off a cliff. There were obviously some cool, calm heads behind this venture. Someone who’d assembled the finances to muster fake Venezuelan passports for a bunch of guys and then fly that bunch of guys, in staggered groups, split up on several planes, into stag-party central. Good cover. I tried to stop my brain whirring about the passports. Maybe Andy Miller had sourced them. Maybe they’d just asked Hugo Chavez, who knew? He’d been big on supporting Hizbollah and Iran recently. Anything was possible. The far-left never lost an opportunity to dive into bed with anything remotely “anti-imperialist”.
The next morning we’d hired some taxis and gone out to the Baltic Heat complex.
A classic close-quarter battle range. I was impressed. They’d given me an M21 AK variant converted to fire the marking cartridges, with four more mags in a chest rig, and a P99 pistol converted to fire similar marker rounds. My jihadi gang had a similar loadout. We were up against some clueless stag party of city brokers from London. There were about thirty of them, and only ten of us, but we had a slight advantage, as Jawad, sorry, Ernesto, had kitted all of us out with earphones and pay-as-you-go push-to-talk mobiles, so we could communicate with each other from our rolling start line.
My phone hissed and clicked. Ernesto spoke in our ears.
‘Move out.’
We started moving, staggered line, scanning for targets. Our only protection against the marker rounds were our boiler suits and eye goggles. The blood was singing in my veins. I hadn’t done this since Pakistan and it was bloody great. To my right, Raheel grinned at me and I nodded back.
‘CONTACT FRONT!’
Rounds slapped into the shack to our right. Raheel put his AK into the shoulder and returned fire and I broke left for cover. There he was. One fat broker. I aimed. Fire.
Three simunition rounds thwacked into him. He was now tagged with dots of waxy blue paint.
‘X-Ray down.’
Laughter cascaded on the net.
‘We’re the X-Rays!’
I spoke.
‘Yeah guys, can we just clear them out? Juan going forward, follow me.’
‘With you bro.’
We ran down the lane, heading for the main building. This Venezualan stuff was beginning to grate. It was hard enough remembering your new name, but in a firefight simulation? We’d all settled on just using initials. I shouted.
‘Guys - take left and right, quick as you can - go!’
Rounds started coming down the street. Raheel took two rounds of red marker and stopped, wiping at himself in disgust.
‘Bollocks.’
The umpire ruled him out and he slouched off.
The rest of us reached the cover of the wall and edged to the left corner. I looked at my section. Almost automatically, half of them had formed up on me. When I was in the al-Qaeda camp in Pakistan, I’d been told I was a born leader. I hadn’t believed it then, but I had to believe it now. No getting out of it. I looked at them.
‘Check your rounds, lads.’
They checked. Best drill was to unclip your semi-used mag and drop it down your boiler suit for the moment, replacing it with a fresh one.
‘OK. We work round the back and we smoke them out. Who’s got the stun and smokes?’
Ali stuck his hand up.
‘Great. A, you’re first in.’
Ali’s face was priceless. The rest of my section were looking at me like mongs. I poked my head round the corner. Most of Jawad’s section had managed to do a great recreation of Saving Private Ryan’s opening scene and were wandering around marked dead. The rest of them had sought cover over the way.
Time for my Henry V speech. I turned to look at my ragged line of guys slammed up against the wall.
‘Brothers. We’ve come a long way, and we are a long way from home. Are we going to let a bunch of fat gora stockbrokers own us? No. We are not. Our families will think ill of us if we fade. We will go forward, for the sake of Simon Bolivar …’
They all cracked up. OK, I’d brought the morale back.
‘… and our families will revere our names. Are you ready?’
That got their attention.
‘Check your weapons, check your positioning, form up, and let’s go!’
‘Yeeeeeehah!’
That was more like it.
Jawad spoke in my ear.
‘Where are you bro?’
‘Back of Building One with my lot. You?’
‘Across the street, front right with what’s left of mine. You’re doing good.’
‘We’re moving in sixty seconds with stun and smoke.’
‘Copy that. When you pop smoke we move. See you inside.’
I liked his style. I looked back at Rashad, who carried the Minimi squad machine gun.
‘R, when we break for that back door, I want you to light that building up. You got me?’ I chopped my hand at the building windows.
He nodded.
‘Stand by, stand by … GO!’
We charged out.
Rashad broke left and loosed off half a belt from the Minimi, spattering Building One’s brickwork and windows. That got their heads down. We ran under the supporting fire to the main stairwell and Ali threw in the first stun grenade. BANG. I took a purple smoke off Ali and threw it down the alley. I shouted.
‘In in in, on A!’
I scrambled for the doorway and got on the headset.
‘Move your section we’re on purple!’
‘Copy.’
The front of the building lit up with bangs and screams, Jawad’s lot were coming in the front door. We ran in in a crocodile formation, guys behind me aiming left and right over my shoulder. A man ran out of a door and I dropped him with a three-round burst, I went to control him, and my team swarmed behind me to get to the other floors. Gunshots and the muffled pops of grenades were ringing out all over the building. Jawad walked in through the front with his team in a loose crocodile behind him.
‘Done good, Juan.’
I couldn’t deny it.
‘Che, my team is on the curve.’
He smiled.
‘Great, because we’re booked in every day for the next week, and tomorrow we start mocking up the target.’
OK. Something to think about. In front of us, a bunch of city boys had appeared with their hands in the air. I nodded to Rashad. He spattered them with the rest of the belt of simunition. Both our teams burst out laughing.
The day after we all went back, this time kitted out with AKs and Glocks firing live rounds. We had the place to ourselves. The backyard was laid out in a very spooky fashion. It looked like a shopping mall. We ran our fire-and-manoeuvre drills through it. It freaked me out. It had mannequins, bollards, placards. It reminded me of a place I’d seen in England but it escaped me. Lakeside? I wasn’t sure. As I ran my team through it, and we got better and better, and faster and faster, I wondered. But there was no way I could ask questions about any of this - the Venezuelan passports, who Chacha was, what the target was - without arousing suspicion. I’d just have to keep my eyes and ears open.
My fire team ran through the setup like a dose of salts. The mannequins dropped. They were now dressed like police and emergency services.
This was not good.
Three days and nights later we took Brussels Airlines flights back to Birmingham, via Brussels. Jawad sat next to me on my flight.
‘Heard you did good in al-Qaeda bro.’
I nodded. Couldn’t lie.
‘Well in that case, great. Tomorrow night we take you to the bomb factory.’
30
‘What d’you think?’
Ali stepped back and admired his handiwork, and looked enquiringly at me. I had to admit it was good. We were looking at a large-scale diorama of a mega-mall. Ali had built it from styrofoam, cardboard, railway modelling gear, and all sorts. He was especially proud of the way you could take each level away to see into the architecture, and even prouder of all the little people and vehicles.
We were in a corner of the Golden Boy warehouse in Osmaston Park industrial estate, away from all the mixing gear and warehouse paraphernalia. Behind us, Jawad’s team were on. They were mixing and grinding the raw materials that made ANFO. Jawad was driving a forklift loaded with drums of red diesel, no doubt sourced by the late Andy Miller. The place smelt of oil and powder.
Me and Ali were busy manoeuvring a toy fire engine and a police car to markers marked 1 and 2 when we heard a voice behind us.
‘Fucking good work, brothers. Fucking good work.’
We turned. Johnny Devlin was standing not three feet from me. The devil himself. My blood turned to Slush Puppy. I’d never even heard him approach. He nodded at the diorama.
‘Good, innit? Recognise it yet? It’s Westfield Shepherd’s Bush. And that’s the attack I’m going to lead. Your two teams will follow me in and those pigs won’t know what hit them. We start at the bottom levels and drive them before us, all the way to the top. Blood and fire, boys.’
His nasty little raisin eyes swivelled. ‘Riz Natha.’
I nodded and placed my hand to my chest. ‘Salaam aleikum.’
He shook my hand.
‘Waleikum salaam, brother, I’m honoured. Killer of kuffar. How is Iqeel al-Afghani by the way, he good?’
I laughed. ‘Oh, he’s dead on his feet, mate.’
Devlin laughed back in a vacant way and nodded again at the model. ‘Soon as Emir Chacha gets the cop thing sorted, we hit it. Your men ready?’
Me and Ali nodded in unison.
Jawad called from the forklift. ‘Guys…guys! Give us a hand on the bomb stuff and we’ll clean up and get some takeouts. Come on, I’m starving like Marvin!’
We got to it. In short, the cell’s template for building the two bombs sitting in component parts on the warehouse floor was the Oklahoma City bomb and the mix used by Anders Breivik. The design was relatively simple, with redundant components, and it worked. Boy had it worked. It had been sub-nuclear. We squeezed pairs of latex gloves on, de rigeur for working with such explosives, and walked around the pallets. Jawad cocked an enquiring glance at me.
‘You’re the veteran, Riz. How do they look?’
I nodded. ‘They look very good, bro.’
Here were the twin firing charges, initiated by old-style oven bulbs with the glass removed to expose the filaments. In each were ten very volatile grams of TATP. When I was in al-Qaeda we’d called it “Mother of Satan”. You made it from acetone, hydrogen peroxide, and hydrochloric acid. Anyone with a working knowledge of chemistry could do it, and we had, within two days. Here was the booster charge, made of a half-kilo of crystallised picric acid. This was obtained from a job-lot of crushed aspirin tablets filtered through sulphuric acid and left to dry out. We’d made the sulphuric acid by boiling car battery acid to get rid of the water. And here were the clear plastic bags containing the ammonium nitrate and diesel mixes, almost all done. They’d encountered one problem when making the blasting charge - modern ammonium nitrate fertiliser mix had added calcium and was milled to be less porous, to make it more difficult to initiate and more difficult to absorb fuel oil. We’d got round that by milling the pellets with a food waste disposal unit to get powder. The night’s work was then to sift that powder through pieces of screen into bags, and then add the seven percent diesel and let stand.
We started building the firing chain, combining the polythene bags of icing sugar placed around the main ANFO bags. At midnight we pronounced ourselves satisfied with the bomb assemblies. The firing and booster charges sat ready to be slotted into the centre of the bombs. For now they were kept to one side in Thermos cool bags. Everyone stood back and let me have the honour of wiring the TPUs, Timer and Power Units, to the bulbs. I checked the wooden dowelling pegs stood in the chain to prevent accidental detonation. I checked the nine-volt batteries were working and hooked them up. I looked at the lightbulb elements taped into the Yakult bottles full of TATP. Lastly, I looked at the rigged mobile phones that would send the timer signal. All good. We now had two one-tonne vehicle bombs. Each would have the explosive power of 1,200 kilos of TNT, the equivalent of a low-yield tactical demolition nuclear weapon.
I stretched and looked around. I was trying to act casual. Off to one side of the warehouse, behind the water troughs placed to deal with explosive mixes that started fizzing, stood four wooden crates with the lids crowbarred off. Wax-paper wrapped Kalashnikovs in all of them. Mags and boxes of 7.62 ammunition stood on a trestle table next to the crates. There were also batches of Aimpoint sights with AK mounting kits. Someone here was clued up. Adding thos
e sights put a whole new level of accuracy into the weapon. And finally, a bunch of pistols - Glocks, some Baikals, and a Sig or two, together with boxes of ammo.
I looked up. The extraction fans were going but that wouldn’t matter, we were in an industrial area under perfect cover. We were between two meat wholesalers that ran through the night.
In the corner a TV was running BBC News channel. Russia was kicking up a strop over Syria. Iran was refusing to allow IAEA inspectors in. In London, the Met’s firearms officers had all handed in their tickets for a week in protest at the suspension of the officers in the bungled Walthamstow raid. In Iraq, several bombs had gone off in Irkuk. An MP was fudging about some expenses they hadn’t or had declared.
Hang on a second. “Cop thing sorted”?
The entire time I’d been here I’d had no chance to get to a phone or do anything much out of sight. I would have liked to have swapped the batteries for dead ones but no chance had presented itself. Our lodgings were directly opposite, above a chicken takeaway. What the hell was I going to do now?
I made a decision. This would have to do. I wandered over to the rifles and picked one up. I looked at the markings and stampings. Generic AKMs. Ali came over and nodded.
‘They’re from Chechnya, mate. Took us a year to get them all here. But we did it eventually. The brothers on Silk Road did us proud.’
He punched my arm.
‘And the sights? Ebay.’
He laughed and walked back to the bombs. There was a series of bangs on the warehouse shutter. Jawad ran to our side and rapped a rhythm back. He got one more rap back. He opened the shutter. Outside, two Luton vans were waiting, engines running. We got them reversed in. They’d been bought for cash at a local used vehicles centre. Tomorrow’s work was to fit them with new plates and spray the sides with logos. The plates had to be correct and correspond to actual vehicles, but Ali had assured me his cousin worked in a store that specialised in such things. I believed him.
Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus Page 12