Andy McNab - Brute force

As I reached the junction, Lazy-Eye rounded a bend in the alley, but I could hear the sound of his heels. He was no more than ten metres away.

I glanced to the left. Lynn was making his way steadily towards me. There was no one behind him. The street was still free of people – as empty as it was ever going to be. It was time to close this thing down.

I rounded the corner. Something made Lazy-Eye turn and he looked right at me. For a moment, he was frozen to the spot. Then he turned and ran.

He was never going to outrun me in those heels. The day sack bounced up and down on my sweaty back as I closed in on him, and I caught him before the next intersection. I grabbed his shoulders, pulled him hard up against the brick wall, clamped one hand across his mouth and pressed the flat of the knife against the skin under his right ear with the other. He needed to see the blade as well as feel it.

The good eye stared right at me, big and wide; the other swivelled in its socket like a compass in a magnet factory. I could smell the smoke on his clothes and the rancid odour of his skin.

'English? You speak English?'

I could feel Lazy-Eye's heart thumping against his ribcage as the weight of my body clamped him in place. He wasn't even going to shake his head too much to tell me he didn't.

An interpreter would be handy. Where the fuck was Lynn?

The good eye bulged and looked like it would jump right out of its socket. The bad one was in freefall. It looked like a fruit-machine wheel that wouldn't stop spinning.

Lynn strode into view at last. He took a few moments to tune in – and he didn't seem to like what he saw.

'Tell him what I'm going to do unless he complies.'

Lynn spoke to him low and fast. I watched for signs that the Arab was taking it in, but his body remained as stiff as a board.

Lynn gave him more hubba-hubba and Lazy-Eye spat into my hand in his rush to say yes. His good eye shuttled between me and Lynn. The blade moved a little as he did so, to give him an even better view.

The alley was still clear, but there would be unseen eyes. There always are. Somebody, somewhere might already be calling the cops or rustling up a lynch mob.

Lynn gobbed off again. Then, taking my knife-hand, he pulled it clear of the Arab's face. I felt Lazy-Eye's body give a little.

'You can take your hand away from his mouth, Nick, and start walking towards the main street. He won't give us any trouble.'

'How do you know?'

'Because he has information for us. He wants to do business. He was looking for us…'

'You established all that in thirty seconds?'

'Start walking, Nick, or somebody is going to round that corner and we're screwed.'

I pocketed the knife, but kept a sound grip on the handle.

I gave Lazy-Eye a shove in the back and pointed him in the direction of Sharia Hara Kebir. As the heels started to click, Lynn fell into step beside him. I took up position behind.

I just hoped we looked like two dickhead tourists accompanying a Libyan on our way to the market to buy a dodgy watch.

There were still plenty of people on the main street as we hit Sharia Hara Kebir and made a left.

Lynn leant towards Lazy-Eye and asked him something.

Lazy-Eye made an uncertain gesture with his hand and muttered a reply.

Lynn asked more questions for a good ten minutes and they kept waffling between themselves.

'What the fuck's he on about?'

'I asked him if he speaks English. He said a little, so you can take that basically as a no – Arabs hate to lose face. Yes means no, no means yes and a little means next to nothing. His name is Fawad. Fawad Al-Waddan. You need to listen to his story.'

I glanced between Lynn and Fawad. Lynn looked at Fawad and seemed to be asking for the Libyan's permission to continue. Fawad gave an almost imperceptible nod.

'There's an Arab word – 'ayb – that's difficult to translate into English. I suppose the closest approximation is "disgrace" – but it's much, much more than that. It's to do with shame and it's to do with the family. Remember, family and tribe are everything here.

'The idea that you can get on in life by succeeding is not a concept that's readily understood here. Despite all Gaddafi's reforms, blood is still thicker than water and probably always will be. It's not what you do in the Colonel's Libya, it's who you are and, far more importantly, who your father is – or was – that determines what you will be. Which is what made our man Mansour all the more remarkable.'

He was talking as if the 'who you are' system only worked here. I doubted if Lynn had ever been to a job centre.

'When Gaddafi grabbed power in 1969, the Al-Waddan tribe was not a part of the elite, his power base – they were outsiders. But then Mansour came along. He was refined, cultured, educated and exceptionally smart. He knew how to broker arms deals, he knew how to deal with the Soviets, he knew how to handle groups like PIRA; he even managed to keep the Libyans one step ahead of us and the CIA. Let's not forget he was the man who put together the whole Bahiti package.'

I checked Fawad's face to see if any of this was registering with him as he stumbled along beside us, but either the guy was up for an Oscar or his English was as good as my Arabic.

'So what?'

'So, on his own merits, Mansour rose to become part of the power elite. And as he gained Gaddafi's favour, so did the Al- Waddan tribe. My bet is that this guy' – Lynn jabbed a finger at Fawad – 'was twiddling his thumbs and minding his own business, when one day somebody told him he'd won the jackpot – that he'd landed a job in some ministry or other in Tripoli with a five-figure salary and an apartment chucked in. Not only that, but his brothers and cousins and uncles were all coming with him and they all had jobs, five-figure salaries and apartments too. And I bet some of them could barely even read or write…

'This is what Mansour did for them. It was like winning the lottery. Every member of the Al-Waddan tribe ended up with a winning ticket.

'Mansour also bought them the one thing that money couldn't buy: he bought the tribe the respect that it craved. He brought them into the Gaddafi elite.

'So you can imagine how they all felt, when – having tasted what it was like, having tasted the high life – the Bahiti operation went pear-shaped. Mansour was thrown into jail and everything was taken away from them. You see, Mansour brought 'ayb upon the whole Al-Waddan tribe. He literally cast them back into the desert. It's clear that Fawad hates his cousin's guts.'

'He's Mansour's cousin?'

'Fawad's father is the brother of Mansour's father. He wants to help – and some cash reward at the end of it all, of course.'

Of course. We kept walking, away from the arch, edging ever closer to our point of entry into the Medina: Green Square.

Lynn and Fawad carried on walking and talking. It was as if they had known each other for years. The only words I understood were 'aiwa' – 'yes' – and 'la' – 'no' – which batted back and forth between them.

Eventually, Lynn seemed satisfied. He turned to me. 'After the Bahiti operation, Fawad and his family were woken in the middle of the night and taken to a detention centre at the edge of the city. Fawad was separated from his wife and children and he was tortured. If there's a cock-up the suspicion is always that it's deliberate, orchestrated in some way – a conspiracy; a conspiracy by the Al-Waddans against the Supreme Guide…

'By the time they were released, Fawad had lost the sight in his right eye. His wife had been raped. Because of the 'ayb on the entire tribe, it meant, too, that picking up work in the city was difficult, if not impossible. As a result, Fawad has relied almost entirely on charity for his and his family's survival for the past twenty-odd years. He's a proud man. You can imagine what it's done to him.'