Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

But in the end the lawyers got it done, and I received an undramatic phone call saying the house was ours. So we picked up the key and drove over and walked around with pages from the inspection report in our hands and worried expressions on our faces—which I thought of as setting the stage. The jackhammer had to be explicable. And the neighbours were nosy as hell. They were peering out and coming over and introducing themselves in droves. They brought old Mrs. McKenna’s sister, who claimed to remember the baby being born, which set off a whole lot of tutting and clucking among her audience. More people came. As a result we waited two days before we rented the jackhammer. Easier than right away, we thought. I knew how to operate it. I had taken lessons, from a crew repairing Langley’s secure staff lot.

The living room floor was indeed concrete, under some kind of asphalt screed, which was under a foam-backed carpet so old it had gone flat and crusty. We tore it up and saw a patch of screed that was different than the rest. It was the right size too. I smiled. Gerald McCann, taking care of business.

I asked, “What actually happened to McCann?”

The Special Branch guy said, “Murdered.”

“Who by?”

“Us.”

“When?”

“Before he could use this, obviously, whatever it is.”

And after that, conversation was impossible, because I got the hammer started. After which the job went fast. The concrete was long on sand and short on cement. Same the world over. Concrete is a dirty business. But even so, the pit was pretty deep. More than just secure temporary storage. It felt kind of permanent. But we got to the bottom eventually, and we pulled the thing out.

It was wrapped in heavy plastic, but it was immediately recognisable. A reinforced canvas cylinder, olive green, like a half-size oil drum, with straps and buckles all over it, to keep it closed up tight, and to make it man-portable, like a backpack. A big backpack. A big, heavy backpack.

The guy from Special Branch went very quiet, and then he said, “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yes, it’s what you think it is.”

“Jesus Christ on a bike.”

“Don’t worry. The warhead is a dummy. Because our boy in uniform wasn’t.”

Carter said, “Warhead? What is it?”

I said nothing.

The guy from Special Branch explained, “It’s an SADM. A W54 in an H-912 transport container.”

“Which is what?”

“A Strategic Atomic Demolition Munition. A W54 missile warhead, which was the baby of the family, adapted to use as an explosive charge. Strap that thing to a bridge pier, and it’s like dropping a thousand tons of TNT on it.”

“It’s nuclear?”

I said, “It weighs just over fifty pounds. Less than the bag you take on vacation. It’s the nearest thing to a suitcase nuke ever built.”

The guy from Special Branch said, “It is a suitcase nuke, never mind the nearest thing.”

Carter said, “I never heard about them.”

I said, “Developed in the 1950s. Obsolete by 1970. Paratroops were trained to jump with them, behind the lines, to blow up power stations and dams.”

“With nuclear bombs?”

“They had mechanical timers. The paratroops might have gotten away.”

“Might have?”

“It was a tough world back then.”

“But this warhead is fake?”

“Open it up and take a look.”

“I wouldn’t know the difference.”

“Good point,” I said. “Gerald McCann obviously didn’t.”

The guy from Special Branch said, “I can see why my new friend wants the trail cleaned up. Selling nuclear weapons to foreign paramilitary groups? He couldn’t survive that, whoever he is.”

* * *

We put the thing in the trunk of a rented car, and drove to a quiet corner of Belfast International Airport, to a gate marked General Aviation , which meant private jets, and we found ours, which was a Gulfstream IV, painted grey and unmarked except for a tail number. The guy from Special Branch looked a little jealous.

“Borrowed,” I said. “Mostly it’s used for renditions.”

Now he looked a little worried.

I said, “I’m sure they hosed the blood out.”

We loaded the munition on board ourselves, because there was no spare crew to help us. There was one pilot and no steward. Standard practice, in the rendition business. Better deniability. We figured the munition was about the size of a fat guy, so we strapped it upright in a seat of its own. Then we all three sat down, as far from it as we could get.

* * *

Ninety minutes out I went to the bathroom, and after that I steered the conversation back to rendition. I said, “These planes are modified, you know. They have some of the electronic interlocks taken out. You can open the door while you’re flying, for instance. Low and slow, over the water. They threaten to throw the prisoner out. All part of softening him up ahead of time.”

Then I said, “Actually, sometimes they do throw the prisoner out. On the way home, usually, after he’s spilled the beans. Too much trouble to do anything else, really.”

Then I said, “Which is what we’re going to do with the munition. We have to. We have no way of destroying it before we land, and we can’t let it suddenly reappear in the US, like it just escaped from the museum. And this is the perfect setup for corroboration. Because there’s three of us. Because we’re going to get questions. He needs to know for sure. So this way I can swear I saw you two drop it out the door, and you two can swear you saw it hit the water, and you can swear I was watching you do it. We can back each other up three ways.”

Which all made sense, so we went low and slow and I opened the door. Salt air howled in, freezing cold, and the plane rocked and juddered. I stepped back, and the guy from Special Branch came first, sidewinding down the aisle, with one of the transport container’s straps hefted in his nicked and scarred left hand, and then came the munition itself, heavy, bobbing like a fat man in a hammock, and then came Carter, a strap in his right hand, shuffling sideways.

They got lined up side by side at the open door, their backs to me, each with a forearm up on the bulkhead to steady himself, the munition swinging slackly and bumping the floor between them. I said, “On three,” and I started counting the numbers out, and they hoisted the cylinder and began swinging it, and on three they opened their hands and the canvas straps jerked free and the cylinder sailed out in the air and was instantly whipped away by the slipstream. They kept their forearms on the bulkhead, looking out, craning, staring down, waiting for the splash, and I took out the gun I had collected from the bathroom and shot the guy from Special Branch in the lower back, not because of any sadistic tendency, but because of simple ballistics. If the slug went through-and-through, I wanted it to carry on into thin air, not hit the airframe.

I don’t think the bullet killed the guy. But the shock changed his day. He went all weak, and his forearm gave way, and he half fell and half got sucked out into the void. No sound. Just a blurred pinwheel as the currents caught him, and then a dot that got smaller, and then a tiny splash in the blue below, indistinguishable from a million white-crested waves.

I stepped up and helped Carter wrestle the door shut. He said, “I guess he knew too much.”

I said, “Way too much.”

We sat down, knee to knee.

* * *

Carter figured it out less than an hour later. He was not a dumb guy. He said, “If the warhead was a dummy, he could spin it like entrapment, like taking a major opponent out of the game. Or like economic warfare. Like a Robin Hood thing. He took a lot of bad money out of circulation, in exchange for a useless piece of junk. He could be the secret hero. The super-modest man.”