Henry Porter - Empire State

The helicopter’s engine was producing a more laboured note. He saw it pop into view above, climb rapidly and drop away to his left. He caught another noise – the unmistakable sound of automatic weapons firing and a heavy machine gun, or even a cannon.

He scrambled up to the rock and put his head above the parapet. About two hundred yards away he saw a group of men moving into the open from an old stone shelter. They didn’t seem to be in the least concerned about the presence of the helicopter sitting above a cliff some distance away, and were moving without haste up the scree towards a cleft in the mountains. Several packhorses or mules followed them.

He realised these must be the insurgents he’d heard about from the Bulgarian truck driver who had brought them all the way from Eastern Turkey and left them near the town of Tetovo, West of Skopje. It was a long way from the agreed drop-off point and they had missed their connection, so the driver had got out a road map and showed them that they were south of the place where the borders of Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania meet. He told them there was a lot of trouble because the men from the north crossed into Macedonian territory and stirred up trouble with the local Albanian population. He had been forced to change his route countless times by the Macedonian patrols. Khan had only half-believed him, but here were the men he had spoken about and they might well provide a means of getting over the border.

Shading his eyes from the light, he peered down the mountain to look for the soldiers. At first there was no sign of them but then he noticed that the sheep which had scattered into the pine plantation were now bolting from cover. He saw a figure flash across a patch of light and realised that the soldiers were nearly in range. They would reach him in minutes. He had a choice. He could try to conceal himself but risk being discovered, or he could warn the men above him about the size of the approaching force. He opted for the latter, and jumped up, letting off a burst in the air to gain their attention, then loosed a full magazine into the trees without hope or desire of hitting the soldiers. They rose to the bait and returned his fire and so announced their presence. He turned and raced across the plateau towards the men, shouting and waving, praying they understood he was one of them; at least that he had earned an audience.

This performance brought them to a halt and even now they seemed to have time to exchange looks and rest their hands on each other’s shoulders and point at the man tearing across the bare plateau. He reached them almost incapable of speech, but gestured down the mountain and said the word soldier in as many languages as came to mind. The men stared back at him. They were all quite short with dusty hair and faces. Beneath the grime was two or three days of stubble and without exception a look of undisguised suspicion. One of them gestured he should fall in behind the column and then they moved off again. A hundred feet up, Khan saw why they were so confident. Hidden behind a wall of boulders was a heavy six-barrelled American machine gun, known as a Sixpak. As soon as they passed the gun, a young man of no more than eighteen years, with eyebrows that met in the middle of his face and the solemn concentration of the truly insane, opened fire, strafing the ground immediately in front of the rock shelf and kicking up an impressive spray of pebbles and dust. Still firing, he swung the weapon in an arc towards the helicopter and pumped rounds in its direction, causing the pilot to rise and feint to the left. He kept up intermittent bursts until the men and mules passed through the opening of the rock, at which point he gathered up the gun and ammunition belts and ran to join them.

‘Albania,’ said the man who was evidently their leader. ‘This Albania. Albania is shit. And you? Who you are?’

‘Mujahadin,’ replied Khan, thinking that this was his only recognisable credential, but at the same time regretting that he had resorted to his past. His name was Karim Khan now.

‘Mujahadin is shit also,’ said the man.

It seemed to Herrick that life continued with bright, feverish simplicity. The Saturday papers learned that Norquist had been travelling in the Prime Minister’s car and concluded that the events of May 14 could only be read as an attempt on the Prime Minister’s life. No one seemed to take any notice of the reports in the International Herald Tribune that asked how the terrorists knew Norquist’s travel plans when his own secretary hadn’t been told. It also questioned the nature of the information that the British had been acting on. Was it a tip-off or the result of secret surveillance? The most important issue, said a columnist from the Herald Tribune, was how the Pakistani assassins mistook the President’s old ally for the British Prime Minister. The two men could not be more dissimilar, even in the reportedly wild conditions on the M4 that day.

After finishing the papers, Herrick did a couple of hours impatient shopping, which produced two new suits, a pair of blue jeans and a white shirt. She dumped the clothes without looking at them again at her house in West Kensington and returned to Heathrow, this time on an entirely unofficial basis. What had hardened in her mind was the absolute need to link the identity switch with the operation against Norquist. But the contrast between the care and timing of the switch and the haphazard nature of the hit, which had apparently only succeeded because of a stray police bullet, suggested that different minds were behind them – unless the disparity had been planned.

At Heathrow, she went to the viewing terrace and began asking the plane spotters tucked away in a shelter whether they had seen anyone acting unusually in the last week or so. They were unsurprised by the question because the police, for which she read Special Branch, had already been to talk to them and they had provided a description of a man in his late thirties. He had Mediterranean looks, was overweight by twenty or so pounds and spoke fluent English with an Arab accent. His knowledge of aircraft was good but he seemed a lot more interested in the carriers than their planes. Referring to their notes from May 14, one or two were able to place him in the context of planes arriving and leaving and claimed to remember him making a remark about two Russian planes. No one could remember seeing him after that day.

She took the description to the incident room at Hounslow police station, where she had arranged to meet a Chief Superintendent Lovett who was leading the investigation into the fire at the home of the washroom attendant. The policeman was cagey but eventually agreed that the washroom attendant Ahmad Ahktar had associated with a man who more or less fitted this description. He had made contact at the mosque in central London which Ahmad had attended when his work allowed him. They were treating the case as multiple murder because the injuries on Ahmad’s head and back could not have been sustained by the roof collapsing. There was another, more telling clue: the youngest child was found to have high levels of Tamazepam in her body. The remains of the other members of the family were being tested and there was some hope of retrieving enough tissue for analysis.

Herrick had all she needed. The Ahktar family had been murdered to stop Ahmad talking about the identity switch and it was possible that the man who had watched the planes come in was responsible for this. But the important fact was that her line of inquiry had already been followed by Special Branch. They had made the connection between the man on the viewing terrace and the fire in Heston. In other words, someone was acting on the memo and the medley of CCTV clips she had sent.