Andy McNab - Exit wound

‘Sorry, mate, got to go.’

I jumped out of my seat and ran up the steps. Majid called my name, but I wasn’t stopping for anyone.

As I reached the back of the auditorium, I collided with Agnetha. Two plain-clothes security men were dragging her out, kicking and shouting. I pushed back at her. ‘Out the fucking way.’

The security men stumbled back a pace, and I was gone.

I burst outside and raced around to the alleyway.

The gate was padlocked and the sentry had gone.

No time to stop and think. I had two known locations for him. Locations where I knew he’d been.

The first was M3C’s chalet.

I ran back to the avenue. My throat was dry and sore as I pushed through the crowds. Sweat streamed down my face and stuck my shirt to my back under the day-sack.

I looked right. No Merc.

Gulping air, I showed my press pass to the heavies at the M3C door and told the girl I was there to interview Paul (not Pavel), the media guy.

She was ice-cold, unsmiling. ‘Everyone has gone for all day. You are Mr…?’

But I was already running again, back towards the auditorium. What now? Back to Majid to get a bollocking for not being able to control my bladder, and lose the target? Or just fuck him off and keep looking?

It was an easy choice. The target was more important than Majid’s annual report.

The second known location was the Falcon, and I’d need the Nikon if I was going to do my bit for Julian.

I rushed outside the exhibition centre and flagged down a knackered eighties Peugeot taxi, one of the yellow metered ones Majid had gone on about. ‘Airport, mate – the airport. You understand?’

The driver wore a dirty T-shirt and dragged on a cigarette as we crawled down the road. A curtain of brown haze hung across the city. I inhaled a lungful of diesel and chemicals the moment I wound down the grime-covered window to scan for the Merc’s VDM. At least Altun, wherever he was heading, would be stuck in the same mid-afternoon traffic. Limo or not, it didn’t matter – Tehran’s jams didn’t discriminate.

I tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him I’d pay double if he got me to IKIA fast.

He shrugged his shoulders and pushed his hands towards the nightmare outside.

He spoke basic English and was determined to tell me about Tehran’s night life. ‘You want plenty drink, my friend. You like to party, mister?’

I looked up and caught his expression in the mirror. I was a breath away from being offered his daughter. I got out my mobile and checked the pictures.

‘Signal very bad Tehran, my friend, very bad. Ahmadinejad very bad. Mullahs very bad.’ He drew a finger, knife-style, across his neck.

They were crap: too distant and too dark. The mobile went back into my sock and Majid’s went out of the window.

By the time we got out of the city and the traffic began to thin, I’d learnt more than I’d ever wanted to know about what this man got up to on his nights off. And still no Merc.

Anyone caught with alcohol was looking at a public flogging or a prison sentence so they drank at private parties. ‘You like come my house tonight, mister, for drinking and girls?’ By now, we were on a long, straight dual carriageway that cut through the sand-salt desert towards the airport.

I shielded my eyes against the glare, searching in vain for any sign of a black vehicle ahead. The surface reflected the sunlight like a mirror. The temperature in the back of the taxi was unbearable, even with the window open.

Fifteen minutes later, I caught sight of the control tower in the haze. Ten minutes after that, we entered the airport perimeter. I looked at my watch. It had taken two hours to get there. The Merc would have warp-speeded it as soon as it was out of the city, but there was still a chance – unless the aircraft had been on the pan, engines turning. Unless he’d gone somewhere else entirely.

I reached for my cash and prepared to hand over a ten-dollar bill. Then I remembered it wasn’t my money but Julian’s and doubled it. My friend, the pimp, thanked me over and over as I jumped out of the Peugeot and looked up to the sound of aircraft engines crackling in the late-afternoon sky.

A white Falcon was climbing like a rocket, banking towards Tehran and, half masked by its pollution, those fucking Alborz Mountains where it would disappear from sight.

I tracked the Dassault until I lost it in the heat haze. Part of me was thinking about the phone call I’d have to make to Julian; part of me was wondering what I’d tell Red Ken and Dex when we met up at the final RV.

‘You very late, my friend?’

I glanced down. The pimp was watching me in the rear-view mirror.

‘We go Tehran, yes?’ Having seen the colour of my money, he clearly thought he must be on to a good thing.

Going back to Tehran to regroup, get a bollocking from Majid and probably get binned from the country seemed like a good idea. I’d get Julian to task me to carry on with the job and find him the Falcon’s destination.

But then I saw something glint on the roof of the multi-storey ahead of us. Somebody was up there with a pair of binoculars. I shook my head. ‘Nah, I’ll wait here.’

The driver shrugged, giving me the universal sign for whatever, and drove off.

I slung my day-sack onto my back and headed for the multi-storey. The sun burnt my face and I had to squint. A gust of wind blew in from the airfield, bringing with it the smell of jet fuel. I was dripping with sweat and my shirt was soaked.

It was a lot cooler in the stairwell – and, like the rest of the airport, the multi-storey was over-specified and under-used. Only one in ten parking spaces on the ground floor of this polished concrete building were occupied.

I began climbing the stairs. The sound of my footsteps was drowned by the roar of another aircraft taking off. The smell of aviation fuel was rapidly replaced by the stink of urine from a men’s toilet on the second floor. Busy or not, car parks are the same the world over.

The stairs finally led to a door on the fifth level. I waited for the sound of the aircraft to recede, then put my ear against it. I heard the murmur of young voices on the other side. I turned the handle and pushed.

The roof level didn’t have a single car parked on it – at least, none that was visible from my viewpoint. Half a kilometre beyond a waist-high wall around the edge of the building, the metal-and-glass roof of the airport terminal shimmered in the heat. To the right of it, I could make out the control tower and a revolving radar dish.

I could also hear the male voices very clearly now.

I stepped out onto the roof and closed the door behind me. Pressing my back against the wall of the stairwell, I stuck my head slowly around the corner.

There were three of them leaning on the wall, their backs to me. One was pointing across the airfield. Another was listening to a radio. The third guy was using a pair of binoculars to track whatever the first lad was pointing at. They were dressed in jeans, T-shirts and, despite the heat, thin windcheaters from the Ahmadinejad spring collection.

What I’d taken yesterday to be a military-style hat on the head of the guy with the binos, I now realized was nothing more than a baseball cap. He gobbed off excitedly to his mates, giving a running commentary of what he could see.

I started towards them, a big smile on my face, one hand up in a wave and the other shielding my eyes. ‘Hello, any of you guys speak English?’

The one with the radio turned and stared dumbly, then nudged his two mates in the ribs.

Foreigners weren’t a common sight for these lads – even at what was supposed to pass for an international airport. The guy with the baseball cap was the only one who sparked up – he seemed generally more confident than his mates.