Osama Page 9

  He stood up, his eyes burning.

  ‘Get out of my way,’ he whispered. His voice trembled.

  Fletcher didn’t move. ‘You need to calm down, Mansfield.’ His voice was as low as Joe’s. He was clearly aware – as was Joe himself – that their argument was being observed.

  The OC couldn’t have said anything worse. Joe pushed past him and, ignoring the sharp looks from the twenty-odd support personnel in the hangar, he stormed towards the exit.

  And there he stopped.

  The broad-shouldered American commander was standing in his way. He was fully bald, highly tanned and wore a superior expression that only made the rage inside Joe burn more fiercely. ‘Say, Sergeant Mansfield, maybe it’s time for you and me to have a little summit.’

  ‘Maybe it’s time,’ Joe breathed, ‘for you to get out of my way.’

  Joe noticed a couple of Yanks immediately drawing close to their boss, flanking him on either side. Joe sized up the fucking cavalry. They were a metre behind their boss and were both thickset, with crewcuts and aviator shades on their foreheads.

  ‘Same goes for Dumb and Dumber,’ Joe added.

  The American commander’s face gave no sign of irritation or offence. His voice, though, was threatening. ‘Let’s get this straight, soldier. This is an American air base . . .’

  The Yanks flanking him started grinning in a stupid, arrogant way, clearly enjoying the show. The two intelligence officers Joe had seen on his way in had also joined the little party. Standing a couple of metres apart from Joe, they glanced at each other in amusement.

  ‘. . . and on an American air base you—’

  The commander didn’t finish his sentence.

  There was nothing subtle about Joe’s attack. He just raised his knee hard into the American’s bollocks. The Yank doubled over in pain, at which point Joe shoved the heel of his right hand into his nose. The big man fell backwards. Blood spattered from his nose over the clothes of the two intelligence guys. His body clattered against the door of the hangar. It rattled and echoed, and anyone who hadn’t had their eyes on Joe sure as hell did now.

  Joe looked at his palm. It was smeared with blood. For an instant, the gruesome image of the chunk of Ricky’s flesh he’d pushed out of the way in the minefield flashed into his mind. And then another vision: the dead body in the courtyard of the compound in Abbottabad, staring blindly at Joe as he hid in his OP of rubble.

  And then hands – strong, forceful hands – pulling him back, away from the confrontation. The two Yanks shouting at him, telling him to cool it. One of them had allowed his shades to fall onto his face. Joe caught sight of himself and was shocked by the look on his face.

  He struggled. He was screaming something, but he didn’t even know what. He realized that one of the men holding him back was JJ, whose expression was more alarmed than anything else. He wrestled himself free of his mate and the other two Regiment guys who were trying to hold him back just as the American, his face bloody and standing at a safe distance of about three metres, roared some kind of instruction that Joe barely heard.

  More men. Yanks. Five of them swarmed round him and hustled him to the floor. He felt a crack in the bottom of his ribcage as one of them kicked him hard; the heel of a second boot was raised, ready to stamp into his face . . .

  But then JJ and the others were there, pulling the Americans away. He saw his mate raising a fist, clearly ready to do one of the Yanks some damage, but a voice stopped him from doing it.

  ‘Enough!’

  Fletcher’s voice rang across the hangar. Looking up, Joe saw him bearing down on the Americans, his eyes furious.

  ‘Get the hell out of my hangar!’ Fletcher was shouting. ‘Get the hell out!’

  Commotion. Bustle. Joe felt himself being pulled up to his feet. He saw that the Americans had left, but now he was faced with the full fury of his OC. ‘What’s fucking wrong with you, Mansfield?’ Everyone else in the hangar had fallen silent.

  ‘I told you: I quit.’

  ‘And I told you it’s not an option.’

  ‘Then there’s going to be a load more Yanks with broken noses over the next few days.’

  A pause.

  ‘Fine,’ said Fletcher. ‘You want to spend your days stacking shelves in Tesco’s and reading bedtime stories, be my fucking guest.’

  Joe felt his cheek twitch, but he didn’t say anything.

  Fletcher had turned his back on him and started pacing. Joe could see his shoulders rising as he took deep breaths to calm himself. When he turned and spoke again, his eyes still flashed, but his voice had calmed down a bit.

  ‘You’re on the next flight out of here,’ he said. ‘But it’s temporary. You even think about shaving that beard off, I’ll throw you to the fucking dogs. Do whatever you need to do to get your head sorted out.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my head,’ Joe murmured, but he knew he didn’t sound convincing.

  Only now did Fletcher turn round to look at him. ‘That wasn’t a piece of friendly advice, Mansfield. That was an order. Follow it. Get back to your bunk while I sort this shit out, unless you want me to book a room at one of the Yanks’ facilities. I’m sure they’d love to entertain you for a couple of hours.’ He headed towards the exit, but stopped when he was almost at the doors, turned and called back: ‘Think about the rest of us when you’re down the Dog and fucking Duck, won’t you?’

  The OC stormed out. Joe could feel the eyes of everybody in the hangar staring at him. He could also feel his hand shaking again. About ten metres to his left, he saw JJ approaching warily. He didn’t want to talk. Not to JJ, or anyone. He followed the OC’s lead and strode out of the hangar.

  Thirty seconds later he found himself half walking, half running through the maze of bunkhouses, not knowing where he was heading for, his mind spinning.

  And thirty seconds after that, he realized he was sitting on the ground, his head bowed and buried in his hands. He didn’t remember dropping down there, but that hardly mattered. It was all he could do to concentrate on breathing slowly and deeply. On getting air into his parched and dust-filled lungs.

  SIX

  Bristol, UK. The following day, 0900 hours.

  ‘Bastard Coke’s gone flat.’

  ‘I can’t believe you want to drink Coke first thing in the morning, man,’ said a drowsy voice, barely awake. ‘That’s sick, you know? Sick, man.’

  ‘Who left the top off ? Was it you, Rak? It was you! I can’t believe you left the bastard top off.’ Narinder Kalil, whose yellow teeth made him look like his mother had lactated Coke, slammed the two-litre bottle down on the grubby carpet by his camp bed, emerged fully dressed out of his sleeping bag, sat up and looked around the room.

  It was gloomy in the first-floor bedroom. The thick curtains were drawn, and only a little light peeped through from a tiny triangle where the corners met the rail. It shone a beam onto the table in the middle of the room and last night’s KFC Bargain Bucket – Narinder, Rakesh and Adi could put one of those away in a matter of minutes. Next to it was Adi’s pot of aqueous cream that he rubbed into the eczema on his neck half a dozen times an hour, and enough orange Semtex to turn not only this one but all the terraced houses in the street into a pile of rubble. Narinder stood up and glanced hopefully into the KFC bucket. Nothing but a mess of chicken bones, soiled napkins and empty ketchup sachets. He’d finished the Cheerios yesterday morning, and nobody had been to the shops since. ‘I’m going for a cigarette,’ he announced. No reply from Rak or Adi. ‘Bastard lazy, you two,’ he muttered as he walked to the door. And then, a little more loudly: ‘Don’t touch the shit, OK? OK?’

  Snores. Narinder shook his head in disgust and left the room.

  The three of them had been living in this house for just two days, and had met for the first time the day before that. None of them knew who owned the place, only that the key Narinder had received at his gran’s house had fitted the lock, and that the sea of pizza delivery slips behind th
e door suggested nobody had been here for some weeks. It had the air of rented accommodation: threadbare carpets, no furniture except the old brown sofa downstairs and the table and three camp beds in their room, a cooker that didn’t work and a kettle that tripped the fusebox for the whole house if you tried to make a cup of tea.

  The door of the only other bedroom upstairs was locked. They’d tried to look through the keyhole, but someone had stuck a piece of tape over the other side, and something told them it wouldn’t be a good idea to puncture it with a pencil – which had been Rakesh’s first suggestion. Now Narinder padded downstairs in bare feet, opened the front door and sat down on the step before rolling a cigarette and lighting up. Of the three of them, he was the only one who smoked, but he hadn’t left the bedroom out of consideration. He’d left it because although he didn’t think a flick of cigarette ash could detonate the plastic explosive, he wasn’t sure and this was not, he decided, a good area for experimentation.

  The house was in Easton, one of Bristol’s dingier inner districts. Narinder, who had lived in the city for all of his twenty-three years, had never been here. At first he’d worried that keeping the bedroom curtains closed day and night would attract attention, but you didn’t have to spend more than a few hours in Crown Street to realize that at least half the windows in the road were permanently covered. The house opposite was derelict, with boarded-up windows and a steel security door. The squatters had still got in, however. Narinder had realized this on the first night, when he’d seen light seeping from cracks in the boards, and he couldn’t help wondering why the house he and his companions were in hadn’t been taken over. Maybe the squatters knew something about the person who owned it. Certainly nobody had given Narinder any aggro. Apart from an old lady who walked past three times a day with a shopping trolley, everyone else he had seen had been black or Asian. That suited him fine. It meant he, Rak and Adi were just three more faces. Nobody even questioned their presence.

  It took him no more than a minute to suck down his first roll-up, stub it out under his Reeboks and roll a second. It was just as he was licking the Rizla that he noticed he was being watched.

  He started, and jumped up to his feet. A tall man with a slight stoop was standing three metres away, where the pavement met the litter-strewn front yard. He wore a waxed green raincoat – the sort of garment, Narinder thought, that an English country gentleman might put on for a day’s shooting. But this was no English gent. He had dark skin and thin, floppy black hair. He was staring at Narinder with an expression that was impossible to read.

  ‘Who the bastard hell are you?’ Narinder demanded, silently cursing himself for taking a step backwards.

  A frown of disapproval flickered across the stranger’s face. Narinder found himself stammering. ‘I mean . . . who . . . who are . . . ’

  ‘You must be Narinder,’ said the stranger. He opened the gate and started walking towards the door. ‘You’ve made yourself at home, I hope?’

  Narinder nodded.

  ‘I’m pleased.’

  He stopped. Narinder didn’t move.

  ‘Well?’ said the stranger. He was standing just half a metre away. ‘Are you going to let me in, Narinder? It’s a crisp morning, and I’d rather not spend it standing outside.’

  Narinder shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I ain’t supposed to let anyone . . .’

  The stranger smiled. ‘Your grandmother is in good health?’

  Narinder’s eyes widened as he recognized the pass phrase by which he would know the man they were waiting for. He nodded, as though the newcomer was really interested in the well-being of his relations, hastily shoved his unlit roll-up behind his ear, and kicked the door open with his heel before standing aside to let him enter. Once he was inside, Narinder walked in too and closed the door behind him. He followed the man along the hallway, suddenly full of questions. ‘What’s your name, mister? This your place, is it? I don’t want to make a fuss or nothing, but you could have left us some bog roll. We had to use the Daily Mirror first day we got here.’ They were walking up the stairs now, Narinder three steps behind the man. ‘They’re still asleep, Rakesh and Adi. Bastard lazy, them two. Dunno where you found them, mister. What you say your name was again?’

  They had reached the landing now. The older man stopped and turned. He had a patient look on his face. ‘My name is Mr Ashe,’ he said quietly. ‘Narinder, have you and the others started work?’

  ‘Course. We’ve been here three days.’

  ‘So you have.’ He glanced towards the door of the locked bedroom. ‘You’ll excuse me, I hope? I’ll be pleased to meet the others when they’ve caught up on their well-deserved sleep.’ He turned and, pulling a key from the pocket of his coat, approached the door. ‘You’re happy with their abilities? Rakesh and Adi, I mean.’

  Narinder was surprised by the question. ‘I guess,’ he said. He gave a grin that Mr Ashe couldn’t see with his back to him. ‘Y’know, bastard lazy and everything . . .’

  ‘If you have any concerns, you’ll come to me? I need good people like you that I can trust, Narinder.’

  ‘Er, yeah. Course.’ He stood on the landing while Mr Ashe let himself into the room and closed the door.

  The house was silent again. Somewhere outside, in the distance, Narinder heard a police siren, but it faded away after five seconds. He took a step towards Mr Ashe’s door, raised one fist as though to knock, then thought better of it and returned to the bedroom he shared with the others. It was still dark in there, and they were still asleep. He flicked on the light – a pendant with a spherical paper shade that was covered in cobwebs and as yellow as his teeth. ‘Wake up,’ he said. ‘Mr Ashe is here. Told him you was bastard lazy. You’re lucky he sent me to wake you up.’ He walked round the table, first to Rak’s bed, then to Adi’s, kicking each one of them in turn. ‘You think these things are going to make themselves while you’re sleeping, do you? We got to get to work.’

  ‘Who’s Mr Ashe, man?’ Rakesh stood up. Like Narinder he was still wearing last night’s clothes, and he too cast a hopeful glance into the KFC bucket. ‘He give you the password?’

  ‘What you think I am? Stupid?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Rakesh said, as if it was an obvious answer to an obvious question.

  ‘You want to watch it, mate. Hey, Adi, man, you got to do that in front of us?’

  Adi had approached the table, opened his aqueous cream and was slathering it onto his neck. ‘Did you ask him?’ he said quietly.

  ‘Ask him what?’

  Adi wiped the surplus cream from his fingers onto his faded black jeans. ‘You know. Did you ask him?’

  Narinder did know, of course. The three of them had talked of little else. They had watched the news of the Lion’s death on the television like everybody else. Unlike most people, however, they had not rejoiced.

  Osama bin Laden – the Lion, the Sheikh al-Mujahid, the Director – had been in hiding for as long as these three young men had known who he was. And yet Narinder felt a strong bond with him, and he was sure Rakesh and Adi did too. It was a bond that had been forged when, in his early teens, he had looked up to the older kids at the mosque who talked openly about the evils of the Great Satan America, and Little Satan Britain. Who had hinted of their allegiance to, and recruitment by, Islamist cells. And of course there was one Islamist movement that they all wanted to be associated with. When Narinder was nineteen, and doing Islamic Studies at Thames Valley University, he was given the chance to travel to Pakistan. Nobody mentioned the name ‘Al-Qaeda’ until he was actually there, one of twenty men of a similar age, spending a summer at a training camp thirty miles south-west of Quetta where they learned how to strip down an AK-47, how to make a serviceable detonator, and how to hate – really hate – the West. If the War on Terror truly was a war, he learned, then it needed soldiers on both sides. When Narinder returned to the UK he didn’t look or sound any different, but he certainly felt it. On the outside, an unremarkable young man of Bri
tish-Asian descent. On the inside, a soldier waiting for the chance to fight.

  But what now? That was the question these three young Al-Qaeda recruits had been asking each other. The Lion was gone. What did it mean for Al-Qaeda? What did it mean for them? Had they backed the wrong horse? When the young men at the mosque who were affiliated to other groups – the Muslim Brotherhood or the Young Muslim Organization – gave them superior looks the day after the news broke, were they right to do so? Narinder, Rakesh and Adi knew they were waiting here for somebody who was much higher in the Al-Qaeda hierarchy than they were. Surely this Mr Ashe would be able to tell them what the future held.

  ‘No, I didn’t ask him,’ Narinder muttered. ‘He only just got here. Guy don’t want us—’

  ‘Ask me what?’

  Narinder, Rakesh and Adi looked suddenly round. None of them had heard the door open, nor seen Mr Ashe standing there. He was no longer wearing his raincoat, but an elegant grey suit.

  They blinked stupidly at him.

  ‘We was just, you know, thinking, Mr Ashe,’ said Narinder. ‘With the Director being, you know—’

  ‘Our struggle,’ Mr Ashe interrupted, ‘continues.’

  He looked at each of them in turn. His face, Narinder thought to himself, was much softer than those of the fiery-eyed teachers he’d had in Pakistan. But he had authority. No doubt about that.

  Mr Ashe stepped into the room. His gaze fell on the contents of the table, and he nodded appreciatively for a moment. ‘When this’ – he stretched out his arm to indicate the Semtex – ‘comes to fruition, they will understand that they cannot defeat us simply by killing one man.’ He smiled at them and pulled out a book from the pocket of his jacket. It was smaller than an ordinary book, bound in leather and fastened with a strap. Narinder caught sight of the words ‘Holy Koran’ written on the front cover in gold lettering. ‘We shall pray together,’ said Mr Ashe.