Andy McNab - Exit wound

‘Highway To The Danger Zone’, the theme tune to Top Gun , erupted beside me. Ali flushed pink with embarrassment. ‘Sorry, Jim – I cannot seem to erase it.’ He flipped open his mobile. He sounded guarded at first, but there was a rapid thaw. He was soon waffling away. Whoever it was, they’d called with good news.

I spotted the wrestler’s vehicle, held in traffic, trying to cut across the road to IranEx. Majid was up front and looking very pissed off. He, too, was waffling away at warp speed into his mobile. His spare hand jabbed into space, as though he wanted to hit whoever was on the other end.

Ali closed down. ‘Qasim and Adel. They say the Dassault is back, Jim. It’s just landed.’

‘Let’s head towards the airport. Can they get any pictures?’

On second thoughts, that would be a mistake. ‘No, no, don’t ask them.’ I didn’t want to get them thinking too hard. ‘You’re all mates again, are you?’

He tucked his phone into his pocket. ‘It is good that it has come back, Jim, no?’

‘Very good, mate. They’ll call if something happens?’

We could be anything up to two hours away.

We were fighting through the southbound traffic when Top Gun kicked off again.

‘ Salam? ’ He listened, jabbered away for a few seconds, then turned to me. ‘The Dassault has been met by a car. A black Mercedes. It has already left.’

The taxi sat in the shadow of a small avenue of trees on the city outskirts. Behind us, a scrapyard was surrounded by a rusty barbed-wire fence. Piles of old cars were stacked on top of each other next to mountains of worn-out tyres. Either the place was abandoned or the people who worked there had decided to stay out of the sun. Even the dogs were lying low. The birds chirping in the branches above us were the only sign of life. A couple had taken a dump on our car’s windscreen.

Ahead of us the heat haze shimmered over the only road into Tehran from IKIA.

I sat behind the wheel, with Ali’s ball cap still on my head and his aeroplane-geek binos on my lap. My eyes were glued to the steady stream of cars heading north.

The contrast between the bright, reflected sunlight on the white desert sand and the shade beneath the trees made it almost impossible to see us from the road. It was the perfect trigger point.

Ali sat beside me, flapping but not saying so. He now knew for sure that this wasn’t anything to do with journalism.

‘It’s not just about taking pictures of planes. It’s about finding out what people are doing with them.’

He nodded, but I could see last night’s dreams fading and fear taking their place. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll show you the ropes. My editor already knows I couldn’t crack this story without you.’ I studied another blob of black coming our way.

The less he knew the better, for his own good. He was staying with me for now anyway, whether he liked it or not. I needed him and his car. If he sparked up and said he didn’t like it, he was going to spend the next few hours in the boot.

Gold, Altun, M3C, dark flares and now something, or more likely someone, arriving from Pakistan. I didn’t know what these fuckers were up to yet, but it looked increasingly like it had to do with Brit, US and even German blood staining the Afghan desert.

I adjusted the focus. The black blob had become a Merc. Its side windows were blacked out. ‘Here we go, mate. I got a possible.’

I fired up the engine. The Merc was two up in front, both with gigs on. I couldn’t make out who they were, just the silhouettes and shades.

As it drove past the trees, I prepared to follow. ‘Got it. That’s ours.’

I slid my sun-gigs on and pulled out.

The Paykan’s wheels hit the tarmac and I pushed my foot down as far as the fifteen-year-old pedal would let me. There was no reason to talk to Ali. I had more important things to do now.

The traffic slowed and thickened as we entered the city. I could see the Merc four vehicles in front. Its green curtains and bent mobile antenna were as clearly in view as they had been in the binos.

We juddered up the road. Traffic-lights somewhere up ahead were letting no more than three cars through at a time. Mopeds whizzed in and out through the smallest of gaps.

With vehicles between us and his rear-view blocked by the chintzy green curtains, we were hidden. We’d have a problem if he turned and I was held, but that’s just how it goes. I was more concerned right now about keeping my head down to help the ball cap and gigs do their job – hiding my face.

We edged forward. The jam wasn’t a problem for me. Out on the open road with just four gears and an old Paykan engine would have been far worse.

Up ahead, the traffic went from bunched to more or less gridlocked. Horns honking, engines revving, it moved forward a few feet, then ground to a halt again for minutes on end. Cars peeled off left and right to try their luck down side roads. I gradually ended up right behind the Merc.

I eased forward until I was just about kissing his boot. If I couldn’t see his wing mirrors, then the driver couldn’t see me.

Ali strained forward in his seat. ‘Bobby Sands must be a very important man in the UK, yes?’

‘Bobby Sands?’

‘My father said the Supreme Leader changed the name of this street in his honour.’

‘What did it used to be called?’

‘Winston Churchill.’

‘Death to America’ and ‘Burn the US Den of Espionage’ were scrawled across the only stretch of wall that hadn’t been covered by Mousavi’s green revolution posters.

About a hundred beyond the long-abandoned US embassy, the Merc took a sudden left, no indicators. I couldn’t go with him. It would be too obvious. They would ping me immediately.

‘Jim, he has turned…’

‘Can I get down the next left?’ It was approaching fast. ‘Hurry up, Ali, think – can I go down? Is it a dead end?’

Too late; I turned.

I kept checking the junction about seventy ahead and pressed the pedal to the metal. No Merc had crossed it left to right by the time I got up there.

‘Jim, it is lost. I think I should drive now and-’

‘Shut up.’

I stopped at the junction and checked left. No sign of it moving away from me or parked. It must have gone straight on. Swinging the car left, I hit the gas. I needed to make distance before turning into the target’s road.

‘Jim, please. My father’s car! Please, Jim, we will get into a lot of trouble. I want to go home.’

I slowed to turn right. I had to take it calmly on the corner in case the Merc had parked up just past it.

No sign of it.

‘Jim, please – I really, really want to go home.’

I carried on down the road, avoiding the swarm of wheel-barrow-pushing construction workers buzzing around the concrete skeleton to my right. I checked each junction. The Merc must have parked. It had to have done, unless he’d pinged me. Why else would it come down here?

‘Jim-’

‘Shut up and check down the roads your side.’

At the far end, about two hundred further on, we emerged into a square. Stalinesque concrete office buildings were ranged round a patch of dusty ground with a couple of park benches and a moth-eaten palm tree in the middle.

The Merc nosed into view on the far side.

I watched the green curtain and bent antenna pull up at a set of iron gates set into an archway. The driver lowered his window and stuck out his ink-covered arm to punch some numbers into an entry-pad.

I carried on around the square as the gates swung closed behind the target. I took the first road out of sight and pulled over. I leant across and opened his door for him. ‘Go and see if the Merc comes out again. Walk around the square, just act normal. Don’t look directly at the house, or the Merc, the driver, anything, anyone. Just walk…’