Exit Wound (18 page)

61

I rushed outside the exhibition centre and flagged down a knackered eighties Peugeot taxi, one of the yellow metered ones Majid had gone on about. ‘Airport, mate – the airport. You understand?’

The driver wore a dirty T-shirt and dragged on a cigarette as we crawled down the road. A curtain of brown haze hung across the city. I inhaled a lungful of diesel and chemicals the moment I wound down the grime-covered window to scan for the Merc’s VDM. At least Altun, wherever he was heading, would be stuck in the same mid-afternoon traffic. Limo or not, it didn’t matter – Tehran’s jams didn’t discriminate.

I tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him I’d pay double if he got me to IKIA fast.

He shrugged his shoulders and pushed his hands towards the nightmare outside.

He spoke basic English and was determined to tell me about Tehran’s night life. ‘You want plenty drink, my friend. You like to party, mister?’

I looked up and caught his expression in the mirror. I was a breath away from being offered his daughter. I got out my mobile and checked the pictures.

‘Signal very bad Tehran, my friend, very bad. Ahmadinejad very bad. Mullahs very bad.’ He drew a finger, knife-style, across his neck.

They were crap: too distant and too dark. The mobile went back into my sock and Majid’s went out of the window.

By the time we got out of the city and the traffic began to thin, I’d learnt more than I’d ever wanted to know about what this man got up to on his nights off. And still no Merc.

Anyone caught with alcohol was looking at a public flogging or a prison sentence so they drank at private parties. ‘You like come my house tonight, mister, for drinking and girls?’ By now, we were on a long, straight dual carriageway that cut through the sand-salt desert towards the airport.

I shielded my eyes against the glare, searching in vain for any sign of a black vehicle ahead. The surface reflected the sunlight like a mirror. The temperature in the back of the taxi was unbearable, even with the window open.

Fifteen minutes later, I caught sight of the control tower in the haze. Ten minutes after that, we entered the airport perimeter. I looked at my watch. It had taken two hours to get there. The Merc would have warp-speeded it as soon as it was out of the city, but there was still a chance – unless the aircraft had been on the pan, engines turning. Unless he’d gone somewhere else entirely.

I reached for my cash and prepared to hand over a ten-dollar bill. Then I remembered it wasn’t my money but Julian’s and doubled it. My friend, the pimp, thanked me over and over as I jumped out of the Peugeot and looked up to the sound of aircraft engines crackling in the late-afternoon sky.

A white Falcon was climbing like a rocket, banking towards Tehran and, half masked by its pollution, those fucking Alborz Mountains where it would disappear from sight.

62

I tracked the Dassault until I lost it in the heat haze. Part of me was thinking about the phone call I’d have to make to Julian; part of me was wondering what I’d tell Red Ken and Dex when we met up at the final RV.

‘You very late, my friend?’

I glanced down. The pimp was watching me in the rear-view mirror.

‘We go Tehran, yes?’ Having seen the colour of my money, he clearly thought he must be on to a good thing.

Going back to Tehran to regroup, get a bollocking from Majid and probably get binned from the country seemed like a good idea. I’d get Julian to task me to carry on with the job and find him the Falcon’s destination.

But then I saw something glint on the roof of the multi-storey ahead of us. Somebody was up there with a pair of binoculars. I shook my head. ‘Nah, I’ll wait here.’

The driver shrugged, giving me the universal sign for whatever, and drove off.

I slung my day-sack onto my back and headed for the multi-storey. The sun burnt my face and I had to squint. A gust of wind blew in from the airfield, bringing with it the smell of jet fuel. I was dripping with sweat and my shirt was soaked.

It was a lot cooler in the stairwell – and, like the rest of the airport, the multi-storey was over-specified and under-used. Only one in ten parking spaces on the ground floor of this polished concrete building were occupied.

I began climbing the stairs. The sound of my footsteps was drowned by the roar of another aircraft taking off. The smell of aviation fuel was rapidly replaced by the stink of urine from a men’s toilet on the second floor. Busy or not, car parks are the same the world over.

The stairs finally led to a door on the fifth level. I waited for the sound of the aircraft to recede, then put my ear against it. I heard the murmur of young voices on the other side. I turned the handle and pushed.

The roof level didn’t have a single car parked on it – at least, none that was visible from my viewpoint. Half a kilometre beyond a waist-high wall around the edge of the building, the metal-and-glass roof of the airport terminal shimmered in the heat. To the right of it, I could make out the control tower and a revolving radar dish.

I could also hear the male voices very clearly now.

I stepped out onto the roof and closed the door behind me. Pressing my back against the wall of the stairwell, I stuck my head slowly around the corner.

There were three of them leaning on the wall, their backs to me. One was pointing across the airfield. Another was listening to a radio. The third guy was using a pair of binoculars to track whatever the first lad was pointing at. They were dressed in jeans, T-shirts and, despite the heat, thin windcheaters from the Ahmadinejad spring collection.

What I’d taken yesterday to be a military-style hat on the head of the guy with the binos, I now realized was nothing more than a baseball cap. He gobbed off excitedly to his mates, giving a running commentary of what he could see.

I started towards them, a big smile on my face, one hand up in a wave and the other shielding my eyes. ‘Hello, any of you guys speak English?’

The one with the radio turned and stared dumbly, then nudged his two mates in the ribs.

63

Foreigners weren’t a common sight for these lads – even at what was supposed to pass for an international airport. The guy with the baseball cap was the only one who sparked up – he seemed generally more confident than his mates.

‘Hello, who are you?’ He spoke, of course, with a slight American accent. They were all around the same age; somewhere in their early twenties.

I told them the truth – well, sort of. I flashed my IranEx badge at them. ‘James Manley, British aerospace and defence journal –
Aerospace and Defence Technology Monthly
.’ They exchanged doubtful glances with each other until I handed over my business card.

The guy with the baseball cap studied it, then looked at me. ‘You work for
ADTM
?’

‘You know it?’

‘Sure.’ He took a step forward and shook my hand.

I missed the names of his mates, but I caught his loud and clear.

‘Ali.’

Under the peak were two very clear and excited brown eyes. He kept smiling, like he was waiting for something from me as he held onto my hand and kept shaking. ‘Iranianmetalbird.net, you know it, yes? That is why you are here?’

One of Ali’s mates, a beanpole around six-four, spoke to him in rapid-fire Farsi. He didn’t like me at all.

‘There a problem?’

‘He wants to know what a foreign-defence reporter is doing at IKIA – a civilian airport.’

‘Not entirely civilian.’ I pointed to the military-transport aircraft I’d seen alongside the northern perimeter fence when I landed. I could still see them there, way in the distance. As a piece of point-scoring, it wasn’t up to much but it bought me a few seconds. ‘I came here to find you.’

He took a step backwards. ‘Me?’

‘Your website. It’s pretty well known in defence publishing circles back home. My magazine has been meaning to approach you for a while. IranEx gave me the opportunity to look you up. I take it that you’d be happy, Ali, if we could agree the right terms, for us to reprint some of the pictures that you post on the web, maybe even write some articles for the magazine?’

Ali looked at his mates, then at me. ‘You are offering me a job?’

‘A contract, possibly. But let’s see how good you are.’ I gave him a smile. It wasn’t going to be much of a test. ‘An aircraft, white private jet, took off from here a short while ago. Do you know what make it was?’

I liked his enthusiasm a lot more than the scowling glances I got from his mates.

‘Sure. A Dassault Falcon 7X.’

‘What can you tell me about it? Does it have a history here?’

Again, the beanpole interrupted him. This time, the conversation between the three got heated. Whatever was being said, Ali was clearly in the minority.

‘Is there another problem?’

Ali pulled a face.

I pointed at the beanpole. ‘What’s up with him?’

‘He wants to know why a foreign-defence journalist is interested in a commercial aircraft. A corporate jet, of all things. This has nothing to do with the military, he says. Perhaps he is right.’

‘I’m interested because it’s registered to a Russian aerospace company that’s exhibiting at the show – at IranEx.’

Ali smiled. ‘You mean, a Russian
missile
company that’s exhibiting at IranEx.’

‘You know about this company?’

‘There’s not much I don’t know about the aerospace business, Mr Manley.’ He beamed. ‘It’s my hobby. You could say it’s my life. Why else would I be up here?’ He flung his arm around the expanse of tarmac and desert as another 747 rumbled down the runway.

He stopped playing helicopters and pointed towards a low building faintly visible through the dust of the construction work on the other side of the airport; the building I’d seen the Dassault parked in front of when I’d touched down yesterday. ‘That’s M3C’s own private terminal. From the air-traffic movements of its corporate jet fleet, it is very obvious to us that M3C is doing a lot of business with my country. We are not stupid. If we posted the movements of M3C aircraft on our website, we’d find ourselves in a lot of trouble.’

‘You have data?’

He smiled. ‘We see everything that flies in and out of this country.’

The other two shifted uncomfortably.

‘I’m doing a story on this company, Ali. Aircraft and the weapons that can take them out the sky, that sort of thing. I need to know where that jet has been over the past few days. It gives the article a bit of excitement – you know, international company jetting around the world, that sort of thing. Did you see any of the people who boarded the plane?’

Ali shook his head slowly. ‘No, it was on a pan the other side of their terminal.’ His voice went up an octave. ‘But isn’t the 7X a great bird? It only entered service in 2007. This is the very first one we have seen in Iran.’

It was still as hot as an oven and we’d been standing out here long enough.

‘Ali, I’d like you to show me everything you’ve got on that jet.’

‘I can show you its flight paths on my computer at home.’

‘Let’s go, then. Where do you live? The magazine will pay you, of course.’

He smiled again. ‘That’s good, Mr Manley, because I drive for a living. And, to be honest, it’s not much of a living right now.’

64

He lived in a southern district of Tehran; a journey, he said, that would take us around an hour from the airport. We drove there in his sparkling white Paykan. He told me proudly that it was nearly fifteen years old, but it looked almost new. His father had lovingly maintained it. The taxi really belonged to his dad, but now he was ill and Ali had had to interrupt his studies at Tehran University to drive it and help make ends meet.

He seemed like a decent enough lad. As we left the airport behind, I apologized for the trouble I’d caused him with his mates. They’d gone one way in the car park and we’d gone another. When they’d parted, you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife.

As we drove through the desert on the southern approaches to Tehran the rift still seemed to hang in the air like smog.

After a long silence, Ali finally sparked up. ‘Do not feel bad, Mr Manley. The thing that unites us is our mutual interest – planes, aerospace, technology. We get on, but they are not like me. There are – how do I say? – differences between us.’

‘You’re all geeks like the rest of us, aren’t you? What’s not to like?’

‘I am a Kurd, Mr Manley.’

‘A Kurd and so a Sunni, eh?’

With both hands on the wheel he shrugged and smiled.

‘Not much going for you here, is there?’

He shook his head slowly. ‘A minority in my own country, Mr Manley. Qasim and Adel, on the roof, do not feel this way themselves, but their families certainly do. Their fathers do not like them to spend time with me.’

‘Know the feeling, mate.’

‘I do not feel Kurdish. I consider myself an Iranian, a proud Iranian. But not everyone looks on me the same way.’

‘Know that feeling too, Ali. Almost like being invisible sometimes, yeah? They want to get in your taxi because they want a lift, but don’t really want to be seen with you . . .’

We passed another poster of Bush with vampire teeth. Ali kept his eyes on the road, glancing occasionally in the rear-view. ‘Do you believe Iran will go to war with the West?’

It was already, but in a cleverer way than he was thinking. ‘Dunno, mate. You?’

‘Our economy, Mr Manley, is deteriorating and unemployment is a disease. I believe it is one of the key reasons why our rulers are spoiling for a fight with the West. When your world is falling apart, it is always preferable, is it not, to blame someone else? Especially Great Britain.’ He looked across to me for some encouragement.

‘Always. It’s what people do.’

He liked that. ‘My father always says that if you trip over a stone you can be sure the British man put it in your way.’

It was a fair one. The Brits had been the main colonial power in the region for two hundred years. There was bound to be a lot of resentment. I’d be pissed off too.

‘My father says that you are more cunning than the Americans and you use them as glove puppets. That’s why Bush is on all posters and no British man.’

‘I don’t think we’re that clever, mate.’

‘Maybe, but I believe that our government is determined to have a war with the West and that there is very little that ordinary Iranians can do about it.’

‘Sounds like you’re not much of a fan.’

‘We Iranians lost over six hundred thousand people in eight years of war with Iraq, and millions more were injured. The war was not started by Iran – it was Saddam Hussein. He invaded Khuzestan province. In the name of Allah, in the name of Holy War, the mullahs sent millions of Iranians to the front.

‘I studied history at university, Mr Manley. I know about conflict – trench warfare, poison gas, wave upon wave of young men cut down by machine-gun fire. So I think Iranians should have had enough of it, but the lessons of the past are easily forgotten. I am not afraid of you, Mr Manley, but Qasim and Adel are. They believe what they are told – that Israel and the West want Iran’s destruction. When they see a foreigner, it frightens them. They think foreigners bring trouble for them. You’re not going to bring trouble for us, are you?’ He turned to me.

‘No, mate. I’ve got enough of my own.’

He smiled. ‘That’s good, Mr Manley, because my father was a warrior in the war and I would fight also for my country. I may not be a fan of my government but I would never do anything to hurt Iran.’

‘Call me Jim.’

We pulled off a main drag and manoeuvred our way down a cobbled alleyway, narrowly avoiding the people walking on both sides of us. This wasn’t the London-, New York- or Paris-priced part of town. There was no pavement. Waste water ran in an open channel along the middle of the street. Tall houses with shuttered windows cut out most of the light.

It was coming up to six o’clock. The modern supermarkets and malls I’d seen in the north of the city had been replaced by holes in the wall – dark, dingy shops that seemed to sell everything from car batteries to carpets.

The people we passed were dressed more traditionally than the Iranians I’d seen in the central and northern part of the city. There were lots of turbans and women in
chadors
. But I wasn’t getting the stares I’d expected. Just like the housing estate I’d lived on as a kid, it didn’t matter what colour you were or where you came from. The one thing that bonded people here was that we were all in the shit.

‘Where are we?’

‘Bazaar Mahfouz. It is part of the Tehran bazaar. It has ten kilometres of covered stores and alleyways. It is, I believe, what you call a maze and where we live is just a tiny part of it. Jim, you have nothing to fear.’

I wasn’t worried. I felt quite at home in any low-rent area.

He smiled and turned into a narrow cul-de-sac. He parked alongside a wall and switched off the engine. ‘From here, we walk.’ He opened the boot and removed a canvas cover for the Paykan. ‘This is the Kurdish-Sunni part of town. Everyone leaves us alone here.’

That made my day. With luck it would keep Majid off my back.

I helped him pull the cover over the roof, then followed him out of the cul-de-sac and into a covered alleyway lined with yet more shops.