Hard Rain

Forty-three

‘That crack about there being copies — I don’t think he trusted us.’

‘Can’t say I blame him,’ I said, tightening the lap restraint. The air quality had improved. Outside it was now like LA on a bad day. The sudden absence of wind had allowed much of the choking dust to settle. And it had settled over everything, a grey blanket of ultra-fine powder that boiled into mini mushroom clouds around every footfall.

‘You can thank Mr Christie,’ said the English flight sergeant over the front seat of the Land Rover we were travelling in. ‘The chief pilot, Flight Lieutenant Robear, owed him a box of Scotch, a debt your Dragoon mate was prepared to waive if we gave you a ride. So now you’ll take over the chit, I suspect.’

‘Interesting way to run a war,’ Masters observed. ‘You’re headed north anyway. It’s not like you’re doing us a favour.’

‘Oh really? Well, then, I’d keep that way of thinking to yourself, ma’am, if you want the ride. Robear has a coweye waiting for him at Balad, and hanging around playing taxi driver to you is keeping him from her.’

‘A coweye?’ she asked.

‘A woman with dark eyes, ma’am, as he calls ’em. And just so that you’re abreast of all the terms and conditions, this is a one-way ticket, okay?’ the flight sergeant continued. ‘As I said, we’re heading up to Balad Air Base, so you’ll have to catch a train back.’

‘A train?’

‘Of the camel variety,’ replied the Brit, smiling over his devilish cleverness.

‘What about Christie?’ Masters asked.

‘If you’re still out there this afternoon, he’ll come get you.’

‘Dickwad,’ said Masters under her breath.

I smiled to myself.

We’d been expecting a Land Rover or two, but a Lynx was better. Once airborne, it’d do the leg in six minutes. Putting up with Flight Sergeant Jerkoff here was a small price to pay. The flight sergeant, the chopper’s loadmaster, was accompanied by a couple of British riflemen, one of whom was behind the wheel. The corporal swerved the Land Rover through the streets of Kumayt, dodging humans, dogs, chickens, donkeys and other vehicles, the place having come alive with the passing of the storm.

‘So what do you think you’ll find out there in the desert besides train shit?’ the flight sergeant asked, patently enjoying the sound of his own voice.

‘You asking questions about our mission, sergeant?’ I replied. Or, in other words, ‘Mind your own damn business, Mac.’

It took fifteen minutes to reach the patch of dirt being used by the Lynx as a helipad, and another fifteen for flight checks before we lifted into the blue-grey, mid-morning haze on a cushion of dust. Flight Lieutenant Robear levelled off at 2000 feet. Far off to the north, the rear end of the storm was flinging spikes of dust high into the air. Down on the ground, it was the usual moonscape.

After what seemed like minutes, because it was, Robear called back to us from the cockpit. ‘Okay, we’re coming up on your coordinates now, Special Agents. You like us to do a little scouting around at a hundred feet — help you get the lie of the land?’

‘Thanks, Flight Lieutenant, appreciate it,’ said Masters.

We peered out of the Lynx’s open side as the helo banked hard over.

‘There’s plenty of razor wire down there,’ Robear noted.

Masters and I picked it up a couple of seconds later — a twelve-foot-high double razor-wire fence, just like the one circling Kawthar al Deen. The helo overflew the coords a couple of times from different directions, but there didn’t seem to be anything on the ground — only dirt and wadis surrounded by a square half-mile of razor wire that didn’t even appear to have an entrance gate at any point. Odd.

Robear’s voice came over the headset. ‘I’ll put you down inside, close to the fence. That okay?’

I gave him a thumbs up, then fitted my eye goggles and scarf in place.

The Lynx went into a flare, bringing the nose up and filling the cabin with swirling grit that stung like birdshot as we touched down. Masters and I climbed out, stayed low, and ran at a crouch beyond the arc of the main rotor. We kept our backs to the aircraft as it lifted off, holding the scarves tight against our mouths. The noise of the helo quickly receded and the loud silence of the desert rushed in to fill the void.

‘Well,’ Masters said, stretching her scarf and then slapping the dust and dirt out of it, ‘here we are.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why the fence?’

‘Maybe they’re keeping some vicious wadis here,’ I suggested. I sucked some water from the bladder in my backpack and it turned to mud in my mouth. I spat it out and sucked some more. ‘Let’s walk the fence. There has to be a gate somewhere.’

Half an hour later, we’d found it. The road in, which was really little more than a track, had been covered by sand, keeping it hidden from the air. Separate lengths of cable and chain and a couple of seriously heavy locks secured the gate, which was caked with dust and looked from a distance like any other length of the fence.

‘Wave,’ I said, motioning at the small, covert surveillance cameras covering the gate.

‘What?’

‘You might as well. There’s no way we can avoid them.’

‘There’s nothing here. Why would anyone bother keeping this area under surveillance? I still don’t get it,’ said Masters. ‘Let’s go stand on those coordinates.’

I pulled the GPS from a thigh pocket. ‘Three hundred yards that-away,’ I told her, pointing towards what would have been the centre of this mystery compound, and started walking.

Above the last of the suspended dust, the sky was blue with a few wisps of high cirrus cloud bringing up the storm’s rear. The air felt cool and dry but the sun had a bite. I sucked some more water, which was now warm. We walked up to the edge of a drop-away. Spreading out below it was a deep, wide wadi. I took a few steps down into it and stopped when I caught the movement: a large shiny black snake, coiled in the sun, had felt our vibrations through the ground and was making a lazy retreat. It disappeared into a rock fissure obscured by weathered rubble as we continued down into the wadi.

I stopped for another drink and a bearings check on the GPS. The device told me I was standing on the X marking the spot.

‘Still nothing,’ Masters observed.

I offered her a drink from my camelback tube, which she declined.

‘So, what now?’ she continued, hands on her hips, walking a small circle, eyes scanning the sloping walls of the wadi.

‘Split up,’ I said. ‘I’ll head left. Looks like this valley might come to a dead end up there. You go right. Meet back here in, say, half an hour, unless you find something, in which case let me know. We’re going to walk every inch of this place.’ I wound up the volume on my brick and adjusted the squelch. Masters did likewise.

I repositioned my body armour and the weight of my backpack to give my rib some relief and headed off. I could see that the walls of the wadi actually became quite steep further along, more canyon-like. Perhaps whatever there was to be found was where the shadows lengthened. I turned and saw Masters disappear behind a boulder.

Masters’ voice suddenly burst from the radio handset clipped to my shoulder. ‘Vin, come quick. You gotta see this.’

I jogged back, kicking up sand and dust, and as I came around the boulder, the one Masters had disappeared behind, I was in time to see something that tied my brain in a knot. It was Masters. She’d hoisted a rock that would have weighed maybe ten tons over the top of her head. As I watched, she tossed it aside.

‘Huh?’

For an encore, Masters tugged at a face of the wadi itself and it came away like netting. Jesus, it was netting.

I ran closer as she ducked under the camouflage and disappeared from view. A cave was hidden behind the camouflage. I stopped at the entrance and pulled out my side-arm. Fluorescent tube lights set in the ceiling blinked on as I stepped inside. Masters closed a small steel cupboard on the wall that contained a number of switches, circuit breakers and fuses. ‘Scratch the surface…’ she said.

I glanced around and holstered the Beretta. It was obvious no one was home, but I could see where they’d been. An empty water bottle and several crushed drink cans lay scattered around on the concrete floor, as well as chocolate and cracker wrappers. Two large Caterpillar bulldozers, a massive John Deere backhoe and a much smaller version sat side by side in what appeared to be a large garage. Various items were collected here and there, hanging on hooks or leaning against walls: jackhammers, 55-gallon drums, shovels, heavy steel spikes, overalls, hard hats, shower stalls. The air smelt of diesel fuel and rock. A heavy layer of dust blanketed everything.

‘What do you make of this?’ Masters asked as she walked between the bulldozers, scooping sand off a track guard.

‘Stuff to dig with,’ I said.

A red steel door built into the rock wall at the rear of the cave had caught my attention. It was secured with a heavy padlock and chain. I took a sledgehammer to the links and got nowhere, so I smashed its hinges, then levered it open with one of the heavy spikes. It was a small room, well ventilated with ducts in the ceiling. Stacked on the floor were a number of drums of varying size — some plastic, some steel. I opened one of the plastic drums, reached in and grabbed a handful of pellets that reminded me of chicken feed and smelt like chicken shit. They were ammonium nitrate prills. I guessed the steel drums contained fuel oil, which a quick inspection confirmed. ANFO — ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, beloved of terrorists the world over, was also the most common explosive used in mining. A locked case caught my eye. I made short work of the lock. Inside, blasting caps.

‘Look what I found,’ Masters called through the broken doorway, making me glance up. ‘Nuclear biological chemical suits,’ she said, holding one up. ‘What do you suppose they need these for?’

I gave her a pair of raised eyebrows. NBCs. Interesting.

‘Y’know, it doesn’t look to me like this place has seen a lot of use lately,’ Masters continued.

I left the bang room and wandered over to the machinery. She was right, though the layer of dust on the backhoes didn’t appear to be as thick as the one blanketing everything else. Maybe they were more multipurpose items than the dozers.

I found a screwdriver and climbed up into the driver’s seat of the smaller one. Using the screwdriver, I dug out the ignition lock and joined the hot wires. I went through the starting routine illustrated by a decal on the dashboard and the motor fired without hesitation. The fuel gauge indicated that the tank was half full or half empty, depending on your disposition. I killed the ignition and climbed down.

‘Somewhere round here,’ I said, ‘there’s gonna be a big hole in the ground. Let’s go find it.’

The midday sunshine was now fearsome overhead, packing a hint of the summer to come. The GPS informed us that we were now 120 yards from the coords provided by Tawal’s battered employee. We followed the course of the wadi anyway as it meandered through the surrounding sand and rock.

We both saw it at the same time. The trick with the entrance to the garage had been repeated on the ground. Camouflage netting covered with fine gauze and light rubber rocks, mimicking the surroundings, covered the wadi bed for a distance of half a football field. I lifted back a corner. A steel framework supported the camouflage roof. Simple, but effective. We’d flown over this very spot a few times in the Lynx and seen nothing other than a continuation of the usual monotone landscape.

Somewhere there was probably a switch that made the netting retract like the awning over a veranda. Masters found the edge of the netting on the other side of the wadi and rolled it back, revealing a pit that disappeared into darkness.

‘A pair of headlights would really help here,’ I said.

Masters caught my drift. ‘What is it with guys and power tools?’ she replied.

I jogged back up the wadi, retracing our steps to the garage. A couple of minutes later I was driving to the pit in the larger backhoe, which was also easily hotwired. I took it around to the far side of the netting to a point opposite Masters, hopped down and hooked the camouflage onto the trench-digger’s tines. After climbing back up, I gave it some gas and pulled the netting away from the supporting framework.

Sunlight revealed that the pit was maybe a hundred feet deep, an access road cut into the near-vertical wall descending into it corkscrew-like. This was a pretty serious feat of excavation. But I figured that the people who’d dug this hole — Tawal’s people — probably had a lot of experience in engineering those deep wells for brine storage.

I drove around and picked up Masters, who took a seat on the steel guard over the rear wheel.

‘It’s nice in here,’ she said.

‘Climate controlled air,’ I said.

‘Got an MP3 player?’

We descended into the hole, the headlights cutting into the gloom. After several complete turns, the road flattened out and became the base of the pit, which was smooth earth and cool rock. We climbed down off the machine. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find, but finding absolutely nothing didn’t exactly top the list.

The cool airflow coming through the vents held the tang of mud and something else I couldn’t identify.

‘What’s that smell?’ Masters asked.

‘Not me,’ I said.

The walls of the pit were solid rock. ‘There’s a lot of earth down here. I’m going to dig a hole.’

‘Like I said, men and their power tools…’ Masters climbed down from the cabin and walked across to the access road, which she followed for half a turn up the side of the pit until a view was provided of the backhoe action below.

Meanwhile, I reversed the machine into the centre of the pit, lowered the stabilisers until the rear wheels lifted clear of the earth, then engaged the digger’s hydraulics. It took a few moments of uncontrolled operation before I had it squared away. The narrow bucket buried its tines into the earth and scooped up a load of reddish grey soil, which I tipped off to one side. This went on until I happened to glance up and see Masters with her hands on her hips, head on a tilt and a frown on her face — the combination every man in the universe recognises as impatience. I backed off on the revs as Masters motioned at me to open the cabin door.

‘Vin, you’ll strike China any time now,’ she called out. ‘It’s a dead end.’

I thought, no one bothers hiding stuff that doesn’t need to be hidden. And we were given these coordinates for a reason. I gave her the shorthand version: ‘Give it another ten.’

Masters shrugged. I shifted the digging site a little and went to work. Five loads later, something came up with the earth. Masters stood, then walked down the road for a better look. I hung out of the cabin doorway.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Looks like a piece of steel.’ It was six inches long, slightly concave, and one side appeared to have a rusted iron liner. It exuded that unusual chemical smell. I coughed. ‘There’s corrosion of some type on it.’

‘Bring up some more,’ Masters suggested.

‘Now, there’s an idea,’ I said, giving her suggestion the smile it deserved.

I hopped back behind the controls, deposited the load off to one side, and went back for another. The bucket sunk into the trench, the tines bit and the machine began to baulk and tug at something with a lot less give than the earth. The arm shook and jolted, and whatever was causing the resistance suddenly broke free. I pulled it up. Another chunk of steel similar to the last piece, only much larger. And from what I could see, this stuff had numbers — a code — stencilled on it. I set the throttle to idle and climbed down for a closer inspection. I wiped the earth away from the stencilling while Masters trotted down the road again and picked her way across the tailings.

The flat snarl of a big chopper suddenly filled the sky overhead. I looked up and wondered why Robear and his Lynx had returned.

‘What have we got?’ she asked.

More corroded concave steel with an unidentified smell. And then a thought hit me. I jumped up onto the backhoe and pulled down my backpack. I dug around until I found what I was looking for and wrenched it out — a yellow box the size of a house brick.

‘Oh, shit.’ It suddenly hit Masters, too. ‘That smell — it has to be uranyl fluoride and hydrogen fluoride. That’s a HEX storage cylinder down here.’

I flicked the on switch and the little yellow box borrowed from the old guy back in the Grand Bazaar went nuts. I tossed Masters my pack and said, ‘The camera. We need a record of that serial number.’

I walked the floor of the pit like it was a crime scene, looking for the hot spots.

Masters’ camera flashed half-a-dozen times.

The hottest spot in the entire area turned out to be the soles of my boots. ‘We need a sample of this mud,’ I told her.

‘Use your camelback,’ Masters suggested.

It was nearly out of water anyway. I unscrewed the lid and used it to ladle a few pounds of wet earth into the bladder. ‘How radioactive is this stuff?’ I asked.

‘It’s not the radioactivity we have to worry about. It’s the toxicity. We’re okay, but we’ll need to shower.’

‘Together?’

BANG!

Masters and I ducked. A chunk of the sky had fallen and hit the backhoe’s steel roof. It slid off, bumped into the backhoe’s arm and slumped into the fresh hole I’d just dug.

‘Jesus! What —’ Masters exclaimed, shocked.

‘Shit!’ I added.

‘Who…? That’s, that’s the guy!’

Masters was right. It was the guy — the one who’d palmed us the coords for this place. He looked a lot better the last time I saw him, when both sides of his head were where they should be. In the interim, he’d apparently taken a soft-nosed round through his left earhole, not to mention a half twist with pike off a 160-foot diving board onto a plate of rigid quarter-inch steel.

The helicopter hovered overhead and slowly manoeuvred to one side of the hole. I got a good look at it this time. It wasn’t a Lynx. It banked hard over and suddenly the world was full of .50-calibre slugs sparking and ricocheting off the rock walls. Hot brass casings rained down around us and steamed on the moist earth.

The burst of fire stopped as the chopper repositioned itself for another crack at us.

‘That’s Tawal’s,’ Masters yelled as she went for cover behind the backhoe’s meaty, water-filled tyre. ‘It’s the helo we saw parked on the ramp, the Eurocopter.’

The sun flashing off its sparkling, virgin-white fuselage eliminated any doubt. Examining its profile, I noticed what appeared to be a large bulk attached to the machine gun’s barrel.

‘Oh, shit — there’s a CROWS system up there,’ I said, pulling out my side-arm and checking the magazine.

‘That’s bad,’ Masters said.

‘Could be worse.’

‘How?’

‘Looks like whoever’s operating the gun can’t get the angle on the barrel depressed far enough. That Browning can’t get a clean shot at us.’

‘Jesus, Vin. What’s the difference between dying from a hit with a ricochet or a clean shot?’

‘Hell of a time for riddles, lady,’ I replied as we ran for cover beside the John Deere.

The pit filled with the roar of high-velocity lead smacking off the walls. The cabin above us exploded in a quick succession of bangs, showering us with granules of safety glass. A couple of ricochets tumbled too close for comfort past my head, warbling on their merry yet deadly way. The brass casings followed, tinkling musically as they bounced off the backhoe’s roof. A regular symphony. What to do? We could just wait this out, hope for Christie to turn up. But, for all we knew, the helo was merely the advance guard. Now that the thought occurred to me, I was sure Tawal would have a few Humvees on hand, manned by Jarred and his flunkies, itching to do something other than slope around air-conditioned corridors smiling at cameras.

Overhead, the helicopter moved in a lazy circle, hovering around the rim of the pit. It had to be difficult for the pilot and gunner to coordinate with each other and get the craft positioned just right for the kill. And we were presenting a static target. If we were mobile, keeping a bead on us might prove beyond pilot and gunner — at least until the barrel didn’t have to be depressed almost vertically downwards. Once we were clear of the pit, and within the CROWS’s operational limits, its advanced sensors and tracking would take over. I considered the options: stay put or go. On the move, we were ducks. But at least we weren’t sitting ducks.

I leapt back up into the driver’s seat and goosed the throttle. ‘C’mon. Time to go,’ I shouted. I retracted the backhoe’s support posts and secured the rear bucket as Masters climbed up and crouched in the space between the driver’s seat and the wheel guard.

‘By the way,’ she said, ‘I concur.’

‘What?’

‘I agree. We’re better off making a run for it. I’m just pleased you weren’t going to argue about it.’

‘Right…’

‘What about him?’ Masters asked, gesturing at the remains of the guy whose name we didn’t even know, who’d risked his life to blow the lid off Tawal’s multi-billion-dollar scam, and lost.

‘We’ll worry about him if we don’t end up joining him,’ I said, raising the machine’s bucket high overhead.

Fifty-calibre rounds zinged and fizzed around us, holing the guards and sparking off the engine’s crankcases. Water sprayed from the punctured rear tyres. Masters made herself as small as possible and buried her head under an arm. A round that missed my face by inches made a noise like a door buzzer. I tried not to think about what would happen if either of us was hit by a tumbling, misshapen .50-calibre round moving at close to the speed of sound.

I retracted the stabilisers, put the machine into second gear, gunned the throttle and dropped the clutch. The backhoe did a massive wheelie, the front axle pawing at the air, and accelerated towards the stone wall of the pit.

‘Shiiiit!’ Masters yelled.

With the engine revs nudging the red line, the beast was a handful to control. The rear bucket bounced off the dirt with a jarring crash and brought the front wheels back down into contact with the ground. Just in time. I wrenched the steering wheel, the front tyres bit into the dirt and the machine turned, following the road as it took us clockwise up towards the light. And the prowling spectre of Tawal’s gun platform.

I stamped on the gas again and the rear wheels lost traction with the massive torque pumped into them by the turbocharged diesel. I fed in the opposite lock and wrestled back some control. I checked the sky. As I’d hoped, the pilot was having trouble positioning the chopper and the Browning was on the wrong side to get off a burst, angled away from us. The helo pivoted in the air to bring the M2 around, but by then we’d moved to the far side of the pit and out of the gun’s sights. In fact, the Browning had not been fired since we started moving.

‘It’s working,’ Masters shouted.

I relaxed a little. Bad move. The rear wheels suddenly gained some extra unexpected traction, catching me by surprise. We were headed for the pit’s vertical rock wall. I swerved. The rear wheel came around like a pendulum and smashed into the rock, which bounced us towards the edge of the road and a drop-away that was now more than seventy feet. I swerved again in the opposite direction and somehow managed to avoid the edge of the road and a drop to certain death.

‘You want me to drive?’ Masters yelled.

I ignored her, fed in more throttle, and the backhoe stormed up the hill, gathering speed. ‘When we reach the lip of the pit, speed’s going to be our best friend,’ I said, thinking aloud. From the corner of my eye, I saw Masters’ knuckles whiten further as she renewed her grip on the machine.

The exit to the pit was fifty yards ahead. The road steepened and straightened a little. I red-lined the engine and shifted up a gear. The backhoe surged forward, water spraying from the tyres as if they were giant showerheads. I lowered the bucket to give the machine a little better balance. The helicopter passed low overhead as we roared out of the pit, launched into midair by the ramp. Ahead and below, a white Humvee with a roof-mounted CROWS had been positioned to block our escape. Through its windshield I caught a glimpse of Jarred’s eyes, wide and startled, a moment before we landed on the vehicle, crushing it.

The backhoe bounced off it and the thing bucked and skidded left and right as I fought the steering wheel. Jarred’s Humvee suddenly exploded in our wake, the heat and the blast wave rolling over us. No time to look.

‘Where’s the chopper?’ I shouted.

‘Coming up on our six o’clock. Don’t drive in a straight line.’

‘Thanks for the advice.’

‘Vin, there’s another Humvee… Two of them — up there.’ She released a handhold long enough to point them out.

They were tracking the edge of the wadi, heading in the opposite direction to us. At this point, the wadi’s sides were too steep and rocky for them to attempt a descent without the risk of a roll-over. The Humvees would have to go further down towards the pit and turn in there.

‘Are we going back to the cave?’ Masters screamed over the roar of our engine and the thump of the Eurocopter’s blades.

‘Unless you’ve got a better idea…’

More .50-calibre slugs began clanging into the backhoe’s trenching arm, which protected our backs. The gun platform was in a sideslip, coming up directly behind us, now with a clear line of sight.

‘I’ll hit the brakes and it’ll fly right by,’ I said. I stomped on the pedal and the whole machine shuddered. The wheels locked and slipped as the tyres fought for traction. At the last instant, I turned into the cave, the backhoe teetering on two wheels for a frightening instant before righting itself with a thump. It rolled forward slowly and came to a stop between the Caterpillars and the smaller backhoe. The rear tyres oozed water and the motor steamed. Hydraulic fluid dripped steadily onto the floor. It was like a half-dead animal.