Andy McNab - Exit wound

I pulled my holdall from the boot, and the day-sack containing my Nikon, laptop and briefing notes.

Julian held out his hand.

It was the first time I’d ever shaken any of my bosses by the hand and meant it. They normally coerced me into this shit. But this time? I wanted to go.

‘Will you recognize him again?’

‘With my mates’ blood still wet on his shoes? He could have body doubles, plastic surgery or spent the last few days shoving Mars bars down his neck to become a fat fuck, but nothing will disguise his eyes, Jules. That’s what’ll tell me I’ve got him.’

I didn’t tell him that for me this wasn’t just about taking Altun’s picture and sharpening up his CV. But I didn’t think he’d be particularly surprised. I headed into the terminal.

I’d put on the jokey fucking-about act for Julian’s benefit because I didn’t want him to stand me down from the job. I wanted him to use me. I wanted him to think that I was being practical about the situation.

Truth was, there was a bit more to this than revenge. I needed to square away my guilt. I couldn’t help feeling that I should have done more for Red Ken and Dex. Maybe I could have tried harder to talk them out of it. Maybe I could have been closer to them on the airstrip. That way, I might have reacted quicker. I knew the two of them would have called me a dickhead for thinking it, but they would also have understood.

They would also have expected me to get payback, and I wouldn’t let them down.

The terminal was its normal over-packed nightmare. I dodged the trolleys and manic wheelie-case runners as late passengers ran for their gates.

I wasn’t going to stitch up Julian. Why would I do that to the only friend I now had? I allowed myself a rueful smile. I must be going soft. Friendship was an accolade I didn’t hand out easily. Especially when I’d only known someone a few weeks.

I’d do what he wanted because there was stuff there that he needed to know. But after that I’d kill as many of the fuckers as I could get my hands on. I knew that wasn’t going to save the world but it would make me – and, if they were still keeping an eye on things, Red Ken and Dex – feel a whole lot better.

We hit some turbulence as we crossed the Persian Gulf, some rough stuff that toppled the Iranian businessman in the seat next to me headlong into my lap and prompted the lads in the row behind us to grab their Korans and start asking the all-merciful one to give the pilot a helping hand.

I manhandled the Iranian back into his all-too-narrow economy-class seat and got busy with Kettle’s crib-sheets – as you do when you’re off to work not knowing anything about the subject.

I knew all too well that if the Revolutionary Guards really wanted to grill me on what I ought to know after five years as a defence journalist, I’d be seriously in the shit – unless they were prepared to let me ask the audience or, better still, phone a friend.

The Iranian nuclear issue had demonstrated just how keen they were to stand on their own two feet and trade punches with the big boys. The list of countries suspected of helping Tehran with its reactors, enrichment sites and isotope separation plants was a long one. There wasn’t much point in building a nuclear bomb if you didn’t have the means to deliver it and the mullahs had been hard at work on that front too.

In 1985, they’d secretly funded North Korea to develop a long-range version of the Scud missile that Saddam had fired at Tel Aviv during the 1991 Gulf War. In exchange for the cash, North Korea gave Iran full access to the technology. Iran had had a long-range version of the Scud by the early nineties, but they had needed something even bigger. By 1998, with a lot of help from the Russians, the North Koreans and some key pieces of Chinese kit, they’d had the Shahab-3, capable of lobbing a 1,000-kilo warhead 1,300 kilometres – far enough not only to hit Israel but also Ankara, capital of NATO-aligned Turkey.

In spite of UN sanctions against companies in Russia, China and North Korea, the missile-building technology had continued to flow into Iran. By 2008, the Shahab-3’s range had increased to 2,000 kilometres, enough to threaten much of southern Europe. As Kettle had said, when it came to developing hardware, these guys had it in their blood. They weren’t just a bunch of goatherds who’d wandered out of the desert.

What the Iranians had achieved with their nuclear- and ballistic-missile programmes they’d repeated across other parts of their defence industry. The US had even given them a helping hand. In 1985, Oliver North had hopped on a plane to Tehran and cut a covert deal to supply spare parts for Iranian HAWK and TOW missile systems via Israeli intermediaries in return for a good few suitcases full of readies and the release of US hostages in Lebanon. The cash helped fund another illegal CIA operation – against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The Iran-Contra scandal worked its way into the press the following year. If Julian’s intel was right, it was what had given Altun his first taste of international power and money-broking. He’d been one of the young bloods in the background, learning everything he could – not only from his Iranian bosses, but from the Pentagon as well.

Once the Iranians had worked out how to build spare parts for their inventory of US fighter jets and missiles, they’d then set about creating their own platforms. Within the past five years they’d unveiled their own domestically produced combat aircraft, helicopters, tanks and submarines. These lads really were the region’s superpower.

I glanced at the guy now slobbering away happily in the next-door seat, and tried to square what I saw with what I read. I decided that whatever shortcomings he might have on the etiquette front, these people were on a roll.

I picked up the M3C file again and started to leaf through it.

The conglomerate’s breadth of capabilities was huge. It was literally a one-stop shop for any weapon you could think of.

In 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s state-owned weapons industry had been made up of multiple companies, many of which were competing against each other for the same business at home and abroad. This state of affairs clearly made no sense at all, but had continued – for almost two decades – until a couple of years ago when an ex-KGB oligarch who’d developed interests right across the sector had persuaded his government to put the nation’s entire missile industry under one roof. His roof, naturally.

Even the Russian state media, which almost always toed the party line, had cried foul. Not that it had made any difference. Every oligarch knew his continued wellbeing depended on two things: where he happened to be sitting when the Soviet Union reverted to good old Mother Russia; and who he happened to know in the corridors of power.

Like most of his oligarch mates, this particular boy had been in the right place at the right time in 1991 – so much so that after the initial flurry of interest in the deal, the Russian media gave him and his business projects a wide berth. There wasn’t even a name check or picture of him.

M3C had offices in Moscow and production facilities along the river Volga between Moscow and Rybinsk. It also had its own weapons proving ground, a closed-off area inside a military training ground the size of Wales, to the east of a place called Vologda, about five hundred K to the north-east.

My next-door neighbour started to fart like a trooper. I reached up and adjusted the air-conditioner.

The Airbus’s first encounter with the Imam Khomeini International Airport runway wasn’t its last – it continued to bounce for several hundred metres before the pilot slammed on the reverse thrust. The fun and games were all lost on my neighbour. He jolted awake with a final snort, shot to his feet before the plane had even turned off the runway and started rummaging around in the overhead locker.