by Nick Cook
He gathered his things. As he closed the door the phone began to ring, but Girling ignored it, locked up and headed for the lift.
Girling kept his foot down as he left University Bridge and headed north along Shari’a Al-Nil. A flash rainstorm had left the streets slippery and shiny under the bright city lights. He checked his mirror and saw a car pulling away from the junction behind him. The Mukhabarat were back on his tail.
Half a mile ahead, he could see the lights of the Sheraton reflecting off the oil-black water of the river. He glanced to his right at a barge sailing silently, almost invisibly, downstream towards Alexandria, its wake chopping the river’s surface. The vessel would be laden with cotton, cane, or potatoes. As he slowed and the barge ploughed on, Girling found himself staring at the Meridien Hotel on the opposite bank and realized that he was at the point where Stansell’s body had been recovered from the river. He pulled the BMW into the side of the road and a hundred yards away the driver of the Fiat followed suit. As he stepped onto the pavement, Girling gave the second car a glance, but the Mukhabarat were staying put, invisible behind their lights. He stepped onto a low wall and stared down at the dross floating on the river’s surface. The ripples from the barge’s wake lapped against the small stretch of beach, depositing the water’s jetsam in miniature tide lines on the fine silt. It was a lonely place to wind up dead. As he stared across the river Girling saw the lights of fishing boats bobbing up and down on the water, some of them quite close by. For all the myriad noises that made up the background hum of the big city the sound of their oars dipping in the Nile was crisp and clear in the night.
Girling shivered and he headed back towards the car. He did not want to keep Sharifa waiting any longer.
He gunned the engine and pushed on, past the Sheraton and the Cairo Tower, through the bright lights of the Gezira Club and into the gloomier tracts of Al-Aguza, keeping a tributary of the river on his right. As he took the slip road that led to the 26th of July Bridge, which would take him back to Zamalek and Sharifa’s apartment, Girling lost sight of the Mukhabarat. It was only when he glanced from the rear-view to the off-side wing-mirror that he saw the Fiat, very close and slightly behind, sticking like glue to his blind spot. There was a sharp crack, as if his tyres had kicked up a pebble. Everything seemed to happen so slowly that Girling found himself almost observing what followed. His eyes moved down to the speedometer. Accelerating up the ramp, he’d allowed the car to get up to eighty-seven kilometres per hour. The steering wheel suddenly went slack in his hands as the tyre blew instantaneously. There was a demonic shriek as the bare metal rim scraped across the road. And then he lost control.
The BMW careered across the slip road and smashed into the thin metal railings lining the pedestrian walkway. Girling caught a fleeting glimpse of the brown, turgid waters of the river below him as the BMW up-ended and plunged over the side of the bridge. He was thrown against the door with such force he thought it would fly open, but it didn’t; it held. His hand felt behind him, latched onto a handle and pulled. It seemed to stick. Girling shut his eyes and prepared for the impact.
And then he was free, falling through space, images of his tumbling world imprinted at random on the back of his mind. He saw the bridge above him, the car spinning, the water and the trees...
He hit the ground twenty feet below the bridge, but the shock of the fall was absorbed by five feet of accumulated rubbish. He rolled down the bank and slid into a dense clump of papyrus. He lay there, half his face in the mud and detritus, panting for air, like a fish left high and dry by the tide. Then he began to pick up the sounds around him. He could hear the car sinking in the river, the water rushing in and the air bubbling out, the two meeting in a boiling confluence. He heard a car’s doors open and close. Footsteps on the bridge. Shouts. Excitement. He rolled onto his back and saw his surroundings for the first time. Somehow the car had thrown him clear and under the bridge as it spun into the water. The concrete sections of the bridge’s span filled his vision, obscured partially by the curtain of reeds and vegetation into which he had tumbled. He pulled himself onto his elbows, ignoring the stench from the nearby rubbish and the musty smell of the swamp. The BMW was all but submerged, with only its boot and part of the roof showing above the water.
There were more voices on the bridge now. He thought of shouting for help, but something stopped him. He lay still, out of sight. He heard a twig snap on the bank above him and the light curse of a man struggling through undergrowth to get to the water’s edge.
The last gasp from the car signalled its plunge to the river bed. Moments later, Girling recognized a voice on the bridge. The investigator shouted down to the man by the water.
‘Huwa maut,’ came the reply. He is dead.
‘Tayib,’ Al-Qadi said. Good.
Only then did Girling begin to edge towards the bridge’s concrete pillar and the sanctuary of the dark road beyond.
‘If they dredge the river tomorrow they’ll know I’m not dead. And this is the first place Al-Qadi will come looking. You don’t want to be here when that happens. The guy is out of control.’
‘Where will you go?’ Sharifa asked.
Girling could see from her eyes that she was still in shock.
‘I’m going south. If I get lucky, I should be back in thirty-six hours.’
He looked at his watch. There wasn’t a whole lot of time before the last train for Qena pulled out of Ramsis station.
She sat on the edge of her bed, watching as he exchanged his clothes for a tropical suit of Stansell’s. ‘You, meanwhile, are going to get some special protection.’
‘Who from?’
‘The Israelis.’
Girling wrote down Lazan’s address in Ibn Zanki Street and passed it to her. ‘Get to him as soon as you can, either at this, his home address, or the embassy. Lazan knows most of the story already. You’ll be safe with him.’
‘What’s happening, Tom? What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe Al-Qadi’s working for the Angels of Judgement, too. Or maybe he just decided to take the law into his own hands.’
‘This whole thing is getting out of control,’ she whispered. ‘Stansell knew the Sword. He’d written about him. In 1979.’
She produced the fax she had received from Dispatches’ circulation department, the office that dealt with back numbers.
Girling just stared at the sheet of paper. His mind tried to take in the words, but he never absorbed anything beyond the first paragraph. It was enough.
The report, datelined Kabul, bore Stansell’s byline. Guerrillas had attacked a government convoy with rockets on the Salang Highway leaving several trucks wrecked and a number of soldiers dead. No one group had claimed responsibility, but according to Mujahideen sources, Stansell filed, the attack had been carried out by a nascent organization whose leader was said to be known at varying times as Ibn Husam or Al-Saif. The Sword.
‘Jesus Christ,’ was the first and only thing Girling said.
CHAPTER 17
The train pulled into Qena a little after dawn. Girling disembarked, feeling rested after the over-night journey from Cairo. The air was cool, but he could feel the temperature rising already. Qena was two latitudes south of Cairo and it told.
He proceeded towards the town’s trading quarter, a short but brisk walk from the station. The market was well under way by the time he entered the maze of stalls and twisting passageways. It was dominated by two commodities: camels and pottery. He rounded a stall piled high with kullas, the large porous water jugs fashioned from the local clay, and spotted the camel auction, his goal.
He walked cautiously amongst the bedouin and their beasts. The camels’ front legs had been hobbled to prevent them wandering off. The smell of their excrement made his eyes water.
‘Ayiz hashish?’ a voice whispered.
Girling turned to see a middle-aged man whose bulk was conspicuous despite his flowing grey jellaba. He wore a tatty black baseball cap spo
rting the logo of an American petroleum company.
‘Hashish?’ the bedouin asked again, his eyes darting nervously around him.
Girling shook his head. ‘La. Mish ayiz hashish.’ He reached into his pocket and produced a handful of notes and coins.
The bedouin’s eyes shone. ‘Ayiz gamal?’ He patted the behind of his nearest beast and guffawed.
Girling fought for the Arabic. He enunciated the words slowly, conscious that this man spoke a differ-ent dialect from his sketchy Cairene. ‘I need a man of resource and courage who can take me into the desert, to the place where the Army keeps the ta’iraat.’ The things that fly. It was ponderous, but it was the best he could do. No one had ever taught him the Arabic for helicopter.
For a moment, the bedouin’s face creased. ‘The ta’iraat of Wadi Qena? Why?’
‘That is my business, my friend.’
‘So be it,’ the bedouin said. ‘Inter majnoon, ya sidiqi.’ You are mad, my friend. ‘Such a trip will cost you dearly.’
‘Money, I have,’ Girling said, pressing a wad of notes into the badou’s hand. ‘Do you have the courage, my friend?’
The nomad snorted.
Girling handed over more money, the equivalent of twenty-five dollars. He explained there would be another wad if the bedouin could get him into the air base. They haggled for a while, but finally shook on a price of one hundred and thirty Egyptian pounds.
The bedouin clapped Girling on the back. ‘My name is Abdullah,’ he said.
‘And mine is Tom.’
The bedouin laughed heartily. ‘Al-majnoon is better, I think, ya Tom.’
Girling smiled. The Crazy One. ‘So be it,’ he said.
Ulm spotted Shabanov outside an anti-blast shelter away from the main complex of buildings that the Spetsnaz and the Pathfinders had turned into their operations centre. The Russian was staring at a pile of junk dumped unceremoniously on the tarmac. There was little that was immediately recognizable of the Mi-24J.
As Ulm crossed the last stretch of sand-blown runway to where Shabanov was standing, a Hind lifted off behind the wreckage of its sibling. Looking like a malevolent insect, it clawed its way slowly into the dawn sky, before picking up speed across the desert, the sound of its engines and rotors dwindling to a dull, asynchronous buzz. The pilot was heading for the crash site to carry out one last search for wreckage. Throughout the previous day, the Soviets had been shuttling pieces back to Wadi Qena, the larger portions of the twisted remains carried in underslung nets. As soon as the An-124 Condors arrived to take them home, Shabanov wanted to make sure that all the pieces of the helicopter went with them.
‘Had they been with your unit long?’ Ulm asked.
Shabanov half-turned towards the American. ‘I didn’t know you were back, Elliot. How was Cairo?’
‘A disappointment.’ He paused. ‘I’d always imagined it differently.’
Shabanov nicked over a piece of main rotor with his foot. ‘Evgeny Pavlovich had been with us five years. He was an experienced pilot. And Gennady Georg’evich, the gunner, even longer, from the beginning.’
‘They buzzed one of my helicopters.’
‘It was part of the training.’
‘Well, no one told me about it.’
‘There has to be an element of surprise in everything we do, Elliot.’
Ulm didn’t doubt it. ‘Do you believe all that talk about sabotage?’
‘No, Elliot. It’s just the mood of the men. Tempers are strained. They want to get on with it.’
‘So do we. What’s the word from Moscow?’
‘Provided the dress-rehearsal goes well tomorrow morning we go any time after that.’
‘The dummy camp, it’s ready?’
‘Yes. Have you ever seen a caravanserai, Elliot?’
‘I can’t say I have.’
‘It is a place of beauty, strangely enough. You will see pictures of it at the briefing tonight. We gather the men at twenty-two hundred hours.’
Shabanov left Ulm to stare at the shattered carcass of the Hind.
An hour after Girling and Abdullah left the alluvial plain behind the lush richness of its crops and vegetation still shimmered across the desert like a mirage. They headed due north, the bedouin’s camel maintaining a dead-straight course, without encouragement or correction. Girling’s, on the other hand, seeming to sense the discomfort of its rider, kept wandering off-track. Only through sharp tugs of the rough hemp reins would it maintain direction.
Girling’s jellaba and headdress, purchased in the market, made him indistinguishable from the bedouin of the region. Abdullah had assured him that the meagre defences of the base would enable them to slip unnoticed onto the site. He raised his eyes to the horizon and announced that they would be at the outer perimeter in an hour.
The sun was directly over their heads, its heat pulsing down in waves. It seemed as if it had been hanging in the same position for all of the five hours they had been on the move. Girling glanced across to Abdullah, ten yards to his right, and wondered how the man could maintain an expression of complete uninterest when his brains were being fried through the flimsy cloth of his hat. Girling took his cue resolutely from the bedouin, stopping when he stopped, drinking when he drank. If he couldn’t buy his respect, he knew he’d have to earn it. He needed Abdullah on his side, especially if things got rough.
Suddenly, Abdullah gave a whoop of satisfaction. Bobbing on the undulating waves of the heat haze, the perimeter fence of Wadi Qena air base stretched across the desert as far as the eye could see.
Sharifa had finished bundling some things into an overnight bag and was taking a last look around her apartment when the phone rang. It had gone several times during the morning, but each time she had ignored it, suspecting it was Kelso or Carey wanting to know where the hell Girling was. The truth was she no longer knew what to tell them. She paused by the door, glancing from the scrap of paper with Lazan’s address on it to the telephone, and back again.
A sudden thought that it might be Girling made her pick up the phone.
‘Miss Fateem?’
She did not recognize the voice. It sounded hesitant, almost nervous. ‘Yes.’
‘Is Mr Girling there, please?’
‘No. Who is this?’
A long pause.
‘I said-’
‘My name is Uthman. Dr Uthman. Mr Girling and I have a mutual friend in Mansour, the old man at Kareem’s coffee house. Mansour gave me this number. I am sorry, but I have only just received his message.’ Dr Uthman spoke in English, his accent precise.
‘Dr Uthman,’ she stammered. ‘I’m so sorry. For a moment, I didn’t-’ She composed herself. ‘Tom Girling isn’t here, Doctor. Perhaps I can help.’
‘Well, I don’t know. You see, it is a somewhat delicate matter.’
Sharifa bit her lip. ‘You said ‘delicate’, Dr Uthman.’
‘There is the small matter of payment.’
Sharifa thought fast. ‘Whatever Tom Girling promised, I’ll see that you get it. I presume the transaction is to be made through Mansour.’
‘Precisely. Thank you, Miss Fateem.’
‘Please continue, Doctor.’
‘Mr Girling was interested in some files relating to the death of his friend, the British journalist Stansell.’
‘That’s right. We both are.’
‘The fact is, Miss Fateem, there aren’t any.’
‘I’m sorry, Doctor?’
‘The files, there aren’t any. Oh, there were some. I know there were. You see, I wrote them. I carried out the autopsy.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘I wouldn’t like to say -’
‘I don’t suppose a certain Captain Al-Qadi had anything to do with their disappearance,’ she said.
Uthman coughed. ‘Really. I wouldn’t like to say.’
‘How was Stansell killed, Doctor?’
‘He was shot. Twice. Tom Girling knows this. I understand he was shown the body.�
�
She mused aloud. ‘Then, why would...? Was there anything particularly unusual about the case, Doctor?’
‘There were indications that he had been held in two different locations before he was killed and his body thrown in the river.’
‘Do you know their identity?’
‘We know one of them. The City of the Dead. It has a particularly distinctive type of soil.’
The mere thought of the necropolis chilled her.
‘I still don’t understand why anybody should want to lose that file, Doctor-’
Sharifa stopped. She smelled it distinctly. There was something alien in her apartment, something that had no place there at all.
‘Miss Fateem?’
‘I’m sorry, Doctor. I have to go.’
She replaced the receiver with a dreadful sense of foreboding. The smoke was being carried to her by a light, warm draught from the sitting-room. She thought about trying to escape out of the back, but the only way was through the bathroom window. And from there it was more than thirty feet to the ground.
She looked around for something, anything, with which to protect herself. All she could find was a small ivory paper-knife. She slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans and went into the next room.
The curtains were drawn to keep the apartment cool, so the room was dark but for a thin rectangle of light where the drapes met. All the same, Sharifa could see Al-Qadi by the whites of his eyes and the soft glow of his cigarette. She reached for the switch and flicked on the lights. He was lolling in an arm-chair in the middle of the room. A button had popped on his shirt, exposing his belly. For a moment, the thought of him alone amongst her things made her feel more angry than frightened.
She managed to keep her voice even. ‘How did you get in?’
Al-Qadi made an exaggerated show of studying his surroundings. ‘These old apartments are not particularly secure. I thought I’d come and look you up, Sharifa, see how you are. I was in the neighbourhood, feeling particularly good today and