Bolt Action

by Charlie Charters

  Cue Lamayette, who pushes off from the bank and lets the river take him in her grasp. The dimensions are straightforward. High-school trig with Mr Hindle. The triangle is thirty yards across, and fifty downstream. The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the other two sides. He’d had the best part of six hours to work this out: there are fifty-eight yards to the target if he manages to drift in a straight line.

  With his arms by his sides and his hands fanning the water, he gently pilots himself across the flow of current.

  Thirty yards now, and closing. He can feel the water tugging at him, pulling on his salwar kameez. His fingers almost senseless. He remembers to keep his mouth shut . . .

  Just after seven o’clock this morning, Pir Durbar had made his first appearance. With four guards, each one modelling that timeless classic Pashtun look. Semi-automatic assault rifle and bandolier. Angry eyes. Wild hair and dirty dishdasha. Lamayette knew, even with the element of surprise, he couldn’t handle four guards, every one triggerhappy.

  The old man had hurried them all the way to the river’s edge with an unexplained urgency. (This was the point at which Lamayette had slid into the water for the first time; the water was even colder then, and the shock was so great he found himself panting like a puppy.) The reason for the guards’ scowling was soon apparent. Pir Durbar unwrapped himself, reversed, and took hold of a pair of supporting arms to squat over a little rock pool, for a serious bowel movement.

  Hence the closed mouth as Lamayette paddles onward again. There had to be other holy men upstream, doing their bit for the nitrogen cycle, giving the River Swat the Good Word.

  But now, at this moment of impending drama, the holy man is resting, fully immersed, lying on his back. Head and toes exposed. Shaggy silvery hair with a jet-black topknot. His body just below the water surface. Only twenty yards paddling to go. And a big grin spreads over Lamayette’s face . . .

  When you join the CIA you seem to spend the first year doing little but filling out forms so that the Agency can get at your darkest and most mundane secrets. At least that’s the way it was in 1987 when Bill Lamayette enrolled. Behind closed doors, his answers would have been pored over, cross-referenced with an assortment of psych profiles on a clunky old IBM with disco lights and a golfball printer. Working out whether they wanted a man who still ate Cap’n Crunch for breakfast and never slept with a pillow.

  One of the questions had been Favourite Film. In his uncomplicated way, Lamayette had answered Rambo: First Blood Part II. He even put in brackets the year of release: 1985. He wouldn’t do so now, of course, that would be putting too much on the table, besides which profiling had become so monolithic he had long since learned how to fake the answers to beat the system. But, hell, it was 1987 and he was a newbie. Reagan was still in office, and at the time there still wasn’t a day he didn’t wake up and think about his brother dying at the hands of that amped-up Islamic suicide bomber. Dear God. How meekly the US had pulled out of Beirut, with nobody brought to book for all those dead Marines.

  That’s why, as he porpoises towards Pir Durbar, Lamayette finds himself transported into a parallel, celluloid world. Perhaps it’s the cold, perhaps nicotine-induced dementia, but repeatedly playing through his mind is his all-time favourite scene from that screenplay. The CIA chief as Sylvester Stallone, on the run in the jungle from Soviet and Vietnamese forces but expertly picking off his pursuers one by one.

  Shot of featureless matted vines and wall of mud. Suddenly A PAIR OF EYES SNAP OPEN.

  SHOT OF THE GUARD, kneeling over dead Vietnamese soldier in the foreground. Behind him there is silent movement among the gnarled roots and vines in a muddy embankment. Blending flawlessly with the mudbank, Rambo’s mud-encrusted figure has been in PLAIN VIEW, YET CONCEALED, until he opened his eyes and moved. He emerges noiselessly and moves up behind the guard, looming above him . . .

  Lamayette fills his lungs one last time. Takes his bearings and eases underwater. The sun shines brightly as he slides through those final yards. The current tugs on long strands of green weed and the river is awash with colour, like stained glass on a bright day. The holy man is blissfully unaware. Through the blur of water, Lamayette can make out the bony ridges of his shoulders.

  Then . . .

  Blending flawlessly with the river, Lamayette’s figure, which has been IN PLAIN VIEW, YET CONCEALED, emerges noiselessly and moves up behind Pir Durbar. Looming over him.

  A hand, as big as a ham, clasps over the old man’s mouth. And pushes underwater. Deep. With barely a splash. The holy man wriggles and claws but Lamayette is motionless. Holding him down. Waterboarding without the board. He casts around quickly. His eyes taking in every part of the facing bank, the whitewashed tops of the madrasa just beyond the treeline. The ramshackle guardhouse to the right. No movement. Not a peep of sound.

  He tightens his grip, twists the old man’s neck hard to the left. Bubbles break to the surface, big mushroom bubbles of air. That and the swishing of legs the only sound of disturbance. Life and fight slowly eke out of the old man’s body.

  Welcome to my world, holy man . . .

  Manchester Airport

  Monday – 0911 UK time, 1411 Islamabad time

  At Gate 206 the pilots who will fly this morning’s PIA Boeing 777 service to New York are at work. Setting up and primping the computer systems that will manage the flight across the Atlantic. Systems so competent and sophisticated as to make their jobs almost irrelevant. In fact there are two captains today, Iqbal Hussain and Imtiyaz Jamal. The latter, sitting in the left-hand seat, will actually command the flight. By complete chance the crew roster has thrown up two veterans who could not be more alike. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Both are heavy and round shouldered and for each their first order of business had been to crank out the maximum seat adjustment so they could see over the instrument glare-shield and down the line of the nose. Hussain and Jamal are ex-Pakistan Air Force officers, having served with 12 Squadron and flown VIP transport in Boeing 707s and 737s before joining the national airline. Both are also proud, very proud, of their facial hair: Captain Jamal has a dark, spade-shaped beard which almost reaches to his chest, while Hussain has a broad, thick silvery moustache that curls over his top lip and almost, but not quite, tickles at his gums.

  Behind them, in one of two sheepskinned jump seats, is Captain Saeed Harry Salahuddin. Very much not hard at work. He’s relaxing with a copy of the Daily Telegraph, the tabloid-sized sports section, digesting county cricket batting and bowling averages. Salahuddin should have been under a hot shower by now but is, instead, dead-legging to New York, replacing a sick pilot who was due to command Wednesday’s return flight to London. Of course, there’d be a seat for him up in the first-class section. In the meantime all he needs, while the passengers are boarding, is a cup of tea, the Telegraph and a chance to grumble quietly to himself.

  There’s a smooth, relaxed air of informality in the cockpit. The three captains are on friendly speaking terms, a pleasure not always guaranteed. These are good people, Salahuddin notes to himself, and good airmen too. No tension from nervy first and second officers, over-prepared or under-confident.

  The two pilots, Jamal and Hussain, process through their prep work, reading off a computerised list displayed between them on a console screen just fore of the two engine throttles. Jamal calls out the task, Hussain responds, and as the on-board computer recognises each action, the item turns from white – to do – into green – accomplished, and it scrolls on to the next task.

  Most important is setting up the inertial navigation system (INS), the primary navigation tool, which drives all of the inputs into the various automatic pilot, fuel and engine control systems. The plane’s flight management system will constantly cross-reference with other on-board positioning data, everything from the modern satellite-based Global Positioning System to old-school VHF Omnidirectional Range (VOR), which relies on intersecting radio beams. But INS is the mother ship system. Once the pilot
s tell the plane’s computers where she is in the world, the exact location down to the nearest degree, minute, second and decimalised fraction of a second, the INS uses onboard gyroscopes to measure turn and accelerometers to gauge speed and calculates the plane’s position accordingly. Simple . . .

  Next up to input are the four mid-Atlantic waypoints, the simple longitude and latitude markers that the automatic pilot will direct the flight towards on the journey across the Big Pond.

  Normally there are five North Atlantic Tracks offered to pilots. Alpha, the most northern pathway, through to Echo, the most southerly. The specific path of the corridor is computed twice daily by the Gander/Shanwick Oceanic Flight Region, which controls all airspace from one side of the Atlantic to another and between forty-five and sixty degrees North.

  Captains Jamal and Hussein have opted – as most westbound flights do – for track Charlie, the middle of the five choices, which generally has the least unfavourable winds.

  The entry point for today’s transatlantic corridor, the one designated Charlie, starts at way station SUNOT and exits at way station SCROD. But what the system really wants to know is what happens in between. From SUNOT, where does the plane fly to, out there, when she’s long gone over the horizon, where, for thousands of miles, there are only the unforgiving, slate-hard waters of the Atlantic?

  Hussain reads out the coordinates of the four oceanic waypoints for Jamal to enter into his system. When the plane reaches these waypoints, the crew call up the Shanwick or Gander controllers. Or alternatively, if the headwinds make things particularly slow, they report in every forty-five minutes, whichever is the shorter. Position reporting is key to the system working. The flying is way beyond the range of land-based navigation aids and communication relays . . . you can build a mini-robot the size of a pinhead but not a radar that works in the middle of the Atlantic.

  So. If the pilots don’t call in on time, the alarm is quickly raised. At that point the working assumption has to be simple: that a plane full of passengers is in distress somewhere over the mid-Atlantic. In a world of trouble, and far beyond reach.

  The short-stay car park

  Manchester Airport

  Four minutes later

  Tristie checks herself in the flip-down mirror of the front passenger seat. Nothing astray. The dark wig is an effect nobody in the rented Volvo estate has seen before. Piglet, the driver, and Button and Whiffler in the back, can’t help but stare. It’s as if there’s a stranger sitting with them.

  ‘We’ve got plenty of time,’ she reassures them. ‘Relax.’

  Next job, the mascara, and Tristie gets to work, her mouth widening and pouting, as she starts at the base of her lashes and works out to the tips. The heavy-lid look.

  Button bites at his bottom lip, an irritation snagging his thoughts. ‘Why can’t we go BA, Virgin or even United, for Chrissakes. Something that’s not this airline?’

  Tristie stops for a moment, to consider her work so far. ‘Because I think that’s too great a risk.’

  Whiffler readjusts himself in the back seat, a tremor of alarm in his voice. ‘You mean they might be looking for us?’

  ‘Of course they’re not, otherwise we wouldn’t have made it out of the farmhouse.’

  Whiffler looks nervously towards the terminal. ‘I thought this airline check-in will be crawling with MI5 and Special Branch surveillance.’

  ‘That’s true, but they’re not looking for us. For the three of us, you understand? They’re looking for people on their watch-lists.’ And Tristie resumes with the mascara wand, working at the inner corners. ‘It’s about playing the odds. On a Pakistan International Airlines flight to New York, a through flight from Islamabad, we’re less likely to see somebody who knows us, a friend or an old enemy perhaps . . . somebody you served with, maybe an officer, maybe one of those hooligans from Hereford, someone who might, however haphazardly, think to put two and two together and come up with Ward 13.

  ‘I know we’re talking tiny odds here . . .’ Tristie is dabbing at the outer corners now, her voice hushed ‘. . . but we’ve got more than three hundred million riding on us getting safely and anonymously to America. There’s no point taking chances we don’t have to.’

  Monday – 1427 Islamabad time, 0927 UK time

  The landscape of the Swat Valley has an exciting geologic history. Across it, primeval batholiths and basalts sprouted in abundance, all with different and hard-to-explain isotopic compositions.

  One such geological burp is the massive fist of granite that in its distant liquid-magma past bubbled its way up through the surrounding landscape. It formed a steep-sided island mountain, slightly smaller but just as incongruous as Ayer’s Rock. It’s up this that CIA station chief Bill Lamayette is pounding. Short, jolting steps, water sploshing off his clothes. Over his back is the naked body of holy man Pir Durbar. Almost drowned, but not quite, Lamayette being something of an expert on dancing that particular fine line. The Pakistani whines quietly, venting a stringy vomit of river water down the soaked back of the American.

  Lamayette had first noted this place when they’d surveilled Hamza, scum-bucket son of General Khan. From high ground, Lamayette and Jahanghir had watched through top-of-the-range binoculars as the younger Khan’s plush Range Rover nosed its way around the myriad of dusty tracks, before the turn into the madrasa. As Lamayette had looked down the valley, this singular rock, a piece of timeless solidity, rose almost above them, off to his left. Four miles downstream from the madrasa.

  ‘Help,’ Pir Durbar gurgles in Urdu. ‘Help me. In the name of Allah the Merciful . . .’

  Lamayette feels the strain in his thighs, and the moisture in his eyes is no longer river water but sweat. Not a good time to ask for help. ‘I’ve got two words for you, Fuckface: Qissa Khawani.’ Speaking over his shoulder, Lamayette takes a fresh grip on the wet of the man’s bony ankles, looks up the track. Hundred yards to go, straight up . . . he powers on, the body swinging from side to side.

  For the first time, the American senses the holy man coming fully to life. Trying to straighten up, to regain some semblance of control, as if he’s only just realised this is serious now. Pir Durbar machine-guns his next words, panicky. ‘You must not torture me. I forbid it. It is absolutely forbidden. I have rights. I am citizen of a sovereign country. With rights. Do you understand?’

  ‘You can kiss my ass with your rights.’

  Lamayette leans into his stride, feeding off the stinging burn in his muscles, the quick-fire bounce of his shoulders making it impossible for Pir Durbar to speak further. Counting off the paces in his head. Five . . . Six . . . Seven . . . Lamayette allows himself a little burst of breath as he says each number.

  The reward for reaching the top is the most insanely cooling breeze.

  He drops Pir Durbar off his shoulder, making sure the old man’s head impacts with a particularly nobbly cushion of granite; his cry of pain thins into nothingness like a talking doll running out of battery. EEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeee. A dazed Pakistani whose slick-wet hair and beard might make him look like Father Christmas, but whose brain, the CIA chief is betting his life, is filled with the worst kind of secrets . . . no doubt triple-locked and burglar-proofed against all usual forms of coercion.

  But this is going to be different. So different.

  Lamayette tests the strength of a triangular rack he’d created before capturing the old man. He had come across the thinned-out spinney of Chir pines as he crabbed across the fields near the madrasa after the early morning light had broken. The meatiest lengths of pine had already been chainsawed into firewood by the locals, but Lamayette was after the offcuts and had gathered what he needed, poking around the matted debris of sawdust. Two lengths about eight foot and another of about five. The wood is a warm yellow, the colour of ripe bananas.

  He had humped his three branches to the top of the hill and was lashing them together, just as the sun rose above the quiet of the sleeping valley. Binding it all together, he’d had
to use strips from his shemagh headdress.

  He felt like Grizzly Adams. A frontiersman. Not a freakin’ CIA station chief. Correction: ex-chief. Thinking this reminds him of how consumed by doubt he really is, not least because he had not one piece of technical equipment with him. Except the mobile phone. He kept the battery and phone separated so nothing could give away his position. But even the mobile offers no consolation.

  Last time he checked, it blinked back at him the same miserable answer: only one bar of battery charge left.

  Two minutes later . . . There are six madrasa guards. Each as confused as the next. Each in turn using the snout of their semi-automatic rifles to nose through the holy man’s clothes at the water’s edge. Six proddings of the same spot still reveal nothing more than various short lengths of cotton, Pir Durbar’s dusty, worn-out sandals and his expensive spectacles. Not a stitch of evidence to show where he is, or what has happened.

  A big problem: no Pir Durbar, no madrasa. The terribleness of this begins to dawn. Despite the guns and the fierce demeanour, there is not an ounce of natural leadership or courage to be had between them.

  Blame and the avoidance of blame become the next obvious tasks. They shuffle uneasily from foot to foot, each taking his turn to make clear in convoluted and dramatic language where they were and what they were doing when the holy man disappeared. Whitewashing the walls, tilling the fields, collecting firewood . . .

  Now, with each of their stories secure, the eldest of them tugs on his beard apprehensively, speaking in Pashto to the five others circled around. ‘It’s like he disappeared into thin air.’ Good for a couple more minutes of wild exclamation.

  Eventually some kind of plan falls into shape. Five of them will head downstream, the obvious direction in which an ailing old man might have floated. The sixth, lame-footed and slightly deaf, will head upstream, in the unlikely event something has taken their holy man in that direction.