Andy McNab - Exit wound

I checked his. ‘Morning, Stefan.’

He towered over me, and had that world-weary look of been-there-done-it about him. Sixty-odd years ago that square jaw and mass of hair would have been sticking out of the turret of a panzer. He was here for Die Welt , according to his badge, but no way was Stefan Wissenbach a reporter for any German weekly. Maybe he’d come in my direction because he could smell a fellow fraud.

He took a sip of his brew and still didn’t like it black. He offered it to me. ‘Never one to say no to a brew, so thanks.’ I glanced at my mobile. Nothing yet from Julian. I took a sip. I quite liked instant.

As we leant against the Portakabin, Stefan rubbed the couple of days’ growth on his chin. ‘Just the same old stage-managed bullshit?’ He had a clipped German accent.

‘It’s my first.’

He laughed, then stretched and yawned at the same time. ‘Well, you won’t have another press conference like yesterday’s. Anna had fire in her belly yesterday, for sure. She is one Hitzkopfig , that girl.’

That bit of German wasn’t in my squaddie vocab. It certainly didn’t sound like food or beer. ‘The blonde one, going on about missiles?’

His eyes darted about, sizing up a couple of good-looking women who’d come past us to lay out trays of dodgy sandwiches for the morning media frenzy. ‘The new SA-16M – probably the only thing worth coming here to see.’

There had been quite a buzz about these things. The Brits, Iranians, Russians, and now Germans. Maybe they were the new must-have.

I checked my mobile again. Still nothing. I wondered about Majid picking up the email and knowing where I was. Not even GCHQ was that quick. It would take a couple of days. ‘The guy at the M3C stand told me they can defeat dark flares. That explains the rumour the missile had a fault. It didn’t. They were redeveloping it to defeat the flares.’

His eyes shot from the women to me. I suddenly had his full and undivided attention.

‘But, like I said, this is my first time. What are they?’

He laughed. ‘You Brits!’ A heavy hand slapped my back and pushed the bottom half of the coffee from the cup. ‘You invented them.’

‘I’m more an infantry-weapon guy.’

His hand left my back with a smile that said he had smelt a little more about me. ‘I’m sure you are.’ Both hands went up into the air, as if he was framing something up there. ‘When an aircraft is targeted, it could be by using laser or radar. So the aircraft has countermeasures to stop that happening. But with a handheld SAM, the system for detecting the target is best described as a passive device that emits no signal. These things…’ He turned to me and pulled down his lower right eyelid. ‘The Mark 1 Eyeball.’

He paused. ‘You with me so far?’

I knew the theory. These things were just like a Stinger. I let Stefan waffle on as I checked the phone.

‘It’s the same with the missile itself. It has a passive seeker that homes on heat – the engine, usually – and so, traditionally, the first time you ever know you have a missile coming up at you is when it hits.

‘You remember the order for all NATO aircraft to stay above fifteen thousand feet during the Kosovo conflict because the low-level threat from the handheld SAM was too great? Were you there?’

I nodded.

‘Me, too. Fucking slaughter.’

He took a couple of seconds as his head churned up whatever nightmare he’d been part of.

Julian was back. He’d got them. I closed down.

‘It is the same today. If you want to stay alive when you go low-level, then you need to chuck out flares – lots of them. But you can’t dispense flares all the time. You don’t have enough of them.

‘Since the Balkans, the Russians have designed a missile able to discriminate between the flares that aircraft dispense and the heat-source – the engine. Instead of being seduced away from the aircraft towards the flare, the missile examines the flare, rejects it, and looks for a darker heat-source, if you like, less intense – the aircraft itself.’

Stefan’s hands were up in the air once more.

‘The missile literally climbs a “ladder”, rejecting flares, locking back onto the aircraft, rejecting another flare and so on – until it hits the aircraft. That’s why the black flare was developed.’

‘So they burst out of the aircraft a different colour?’

‘No, they look the same as normal flares, but they have a different temperature range – they don’t burn like magnesium flares, they mimic the heat signature of an aircraft much more accurately. So now, when the missile rejects the regular flare and goes looking for the darker heat-source, it sees the black flare and goes for that instead.’

‘Could it take down an Apache?’

He knew where I meant. His hands were down and the smile had disappeared. ‘If they weren’t bullshitting you, it would be able to take down anything that is out there below ten thousand feet.’

‘Nice talking with you, mate.’

We shook.

Ali and the Paykan were waiting for me outside.

On my way out, I broke open the USB stick and swallowed the memory. If these lads had spent years putting shredded bits of paper back together, finding out what was on a smashed stick would be a piece of piss.

Stefan Wissenbach would be making sure his people, not DieWelt , knew what we both did. They, too, had people out there. If an Apache or fast jet was taken out, we could no longer assume control of the air. Worse still, if a C-130 full of troops got dropped, the people back home would go ape-shit. It could all be over by Christmas. Then the dramas would really start to kick off.

I powered up my local mobile as I walked towards the exit. ‘Hello, mate. You get the car parked up where I showed you?’

I didn’t want Ali to have a call from my sat mobile registered on his. Better to use local – and how much more local could you get than his dad’s machine? It wasn’t as if he’d need it today, unless he had an urgent appointment with his dealer.

We sat in the front of the taxi in what looked like a bus lay-by but had become an overstuffed car park. Anywhere vehicles could stop in this town, they did.

IranEx was just under a hundred away, right in front of us. That was why we were here, to have a trigger on the entrance and wait for the Merc. With baseball caps tilted over our eyes and leaning well back in our seats we looked like loads of others, just getting our heads down for a moment or two before grappling with the challenges of the day.

I’d told Ali I was doing an M3C story. I was going to follow the management, find out where they were staying and try for an interview. They’d turned me down yesterday, but that wasn’t unusual in our neck of the woods.

He nodded as if it all made sense, but I could almost hear that mind of his ticking over. He was going along with it because I seemed to be offering him a future.

Ali stared through the windscreen, concentrating on the traffic as I watched the entrance. People and vehicles streamed in and out.

‘Jim, you will email me about the job when you get back to England? Do you think your editor will like my work?’

I couldn’t work out if he was questioning his own capabilities or doubting me.

‘I will take classes to become a good journalist. Will you tell your editor that? I will work very hard.’

‘I will, mate, don’t worry. I’m sure everything will be OK.’

Now I was doing the worrying. Giving a guy a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel only to snatch it away was an arsehole’s trick. I knew what it felt like, waiting on a promise that never came good. My step-dad was always promising us a trip to Margate or to the fun fair. I’d wait for the day to arrive, my heart racing, excited to be doing stuff that other kids did all the time, but nothing ever happened. I’d start to doubt myself, checking I had the right day, waiting for him to come back from the pub, but he never did.