Bolt Action (16 page)

1347 Islamabad time, 0847 UK time

B
ill Lamayette is colder than he’s ever been in his life. So cold, even, he has no idea where his cock is, let alone his balls. They packed up and left town a while back. Cold enough that he doesn’t have the brainpower to care any more.

He’d tried thinking about various honeymoons with various ex-wives. Girlfriends. One-night stands. Ambassador Zoh on the Great Seal rug in her office, long legs all akimbo like the outstretched wings of the Bald Eagle. Even that State Department chickadee Kirsten Ackerman and her laughing breasts. But, try as hard as he can to think positive, to think happy, smiley, that bastard Pir Durbar keeps intruding.
Wrap my fucking hands round his scrawny neck . . .

Half an hour ago Lamayette had eased into the river, leaving the relative warmth and safety of the embankment and the latticework of exposed tree roots that had been hiding him. The CIA didn’t run courses on trees of the world, but Lamayette thinks he’d been balled up under some kind of flame tree. A dramatic overhanging thing, whose proud position on a dogleg of this Swat river tributary had almost, but not quite, been undercut by the fast-moving churn that flowed past the madrasa. From behind the cover of its thicket of support, he had slid into the frozen waters, anchored himself in position with his arm looped over a root that was as blanched and smooth as highly polished bone.

He had done this because Pir Durbar, at last, had made another appearance on the facing bank, overlooking the river.
His second of the day as far as Lamayette could tell. The holy man had started with a little prayer-job in the direction of Mecca, then moved on to callisthenics, shaded by the stand of olive and pine trees that separated him from the school farther back. He was giving himself the full Indian-rubber-man workout. The whole shebang.

Thirty long and exceedingly cold minutes later he is finally finished . . . while Lamayette’s brain and body have become deep-chilled by the water bubbling around his mostly submerged body. This is ice-melt straight off the Himalayas.

Pir Durbar is finished, though looking a little wrung out as he heads for a bracing dip. All alone. No security this time. Lamayette watches as the old man lollops from one smooth rock to another. Heading towards him, heading towards the water’s edge on the far side.

Only the top half of Lamayette’s bald skull is poking out over the water as he watches. Breathing through his nose.

On the far side of the river, and fifty yards downstream from him, Pir Durbar starts unwrapping his Gandhi togs. Last item are his wood-frame glasses. Once naked, he steps gingerly, wincingly, over the smaller, sharper rocks and into the shallows. Bath time. He is tiny, rake thin, his limbs looking like twigs of cinnamon. He crouches to splash water over his body and through his thick white half-moon beard. Then looks down into the frozen water. Willing himself to jump in.

Upstream Lamayette hears a little hoot of shock as his target emerges from his first full immersion.

Cue Lamayette, who pushes off from the bank and lets the river take him in her grasp. The dimensions are straightforward. High-school trig with Mr Hindle. The triangle is thirty yards across, and fifty downstream.
The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the other two sides.
He’d had the best part of six hours to work this out: there are fifty-eight yards to the target if he manages to drift in a straight line.

With his arms by his sides and his hands fanning the water, he gently pilots himself across the flow of current.

Thirty yards now, and closing. He can feel the water tugging at him, pulling on his salwar kameez
.
His fingers almost senseless. He remembers to keep his mouth shut . . .

Just after seven o’clock this morning, Pir Durbar had made his first appearance. With four guards, each one modelling that timeless classic Pashtun look. Semi-automatic assault rifle and bandolier. Angry eyes. Wild hair and dirty dishdasha. Lamayette knew, even with the element of surprise, he couldn’t handle four guards, every one triggerhappy.

The old man had hurried them all the way to the river’s edge with an unexplained urgency. (This was the point at which Lamayette had slid into the water for the first time; the water was even colder then, and the shock was so great he found himself panting like a puppy.) The reason for the guards’ scowling was soon apparent. Pir Durbar unwrapped himself, reversed, and took hold of a pair of supporting arms to squat over a little rock pool, for a serious bowel movement.

Hence the closed mouth as Lamayette paddles onward again. There had to be other holy men upstream, doing their bit for the nitrogen cycle, giving the River Swat the Good Word.

But now, at this moment of impending drama, the holy man is resting, fully immersed, lying on his back. Head and toes exposed. Shaggy silvery hair with a jet-black topknot. His body just below the water surface. Only twenty yards paddling to go. And a big grin spreads over Lamayette’s face . . .

When you join the CIA you seem to spend the first year doing little but filling out forms so that the Agency can get at your darkest and most mundane secrets. At least that’s the way it was in 1987 when Bill Lamayette enrolled. Behind closed doors, his answers would have been pored over, cross-referenced with an assortment of psych profiles on a clunky old IBM with disco lights and a golfball printer. Working out whether they wanted a man who still ate Cap’n Crunch for breakfast and never slept with a pillow.

One of the questions had been Favourite Film. In his
uncomplicated way, Lamayette had answered
Rambo: First Blood Part II.
He even put in brackets the year of release: 1985. He wouldn’t do so now, of course, that would be putting too much on the table, besides which profiling had become so monolithic he had long since learned how to fake the answers to beat the system. But, hell, it was 1987 and he was a newbie. Reagan was still in office, and at the time there still wasn’t a day he didn’t wake up and think about his brother dying at the hands of that amped-up Islamic suicide bomber. Dear God. How meekly the US had pulled out of Beirut, with nobody brought to book for all those dead Marines.

That’s why, as he porpoises towards Pir Durbar, Lamayette finds himself transported into a parallel, celluloid world. Perhaps it’s the cold, perhaps nicotine-induced dementia, but repeatedly playing through his mind is his all-time favourite scene from that screenplay. The CIA chief as Sylvester Stallone, on the run in the jungle from Soviet and Vietnamese forces but expertly picking off his pursuers one by one.

Shot of featureless matted vines and wall of mud. Suddenly A PAIR OF EYES
SNAP OPEN
.

SHOT OF THE GUARD,
kneeling over dead Vietnamese soldier in the foreground. Behind him there is silent movement among the gnarled roots and vines in a muddy embankment. Blending flawlessly with the mudbank, Rambo’s mud-encrusted figure has been in PLAIN VIEW, YET CONCEALED, until he opened his eyes and moved. He emerges noiselessly and moves up behind the guard, looming above him . . .

Lamayette fills his lungs one last time. Takes his bearings and eases underwater. The sun shines brightly as he slides through those final yards. The current tugs on long strands of green weed and the river is awash with colour, like stained glass on a bright day. The holy man is blissfully unaware. Through the blur of water, Lamayette can make out the bony ridges of his shoulders.

Then . . .

Blending flawlessly with the river, Lamayette’s figure, which has been IN PLAIN VIEW, YET CONCEALED, emerges noiselessly and moves up behind Pir Durbar. Looming over him.

A hand, as big as a ham, clasps over the old man’s mouth. And pushes underwater. Deep. With barely a splash. The holy man wriggles and claws but Lamayette is motionless. Holding him down. Waterboarding without the board. He casts around quickly. His eyes taking in every part of the facing bank, the whitewashed tops of the madrasa just beyond the treeline. The ramshackle guardhouse to the right. No movement. Not a peep of sound.

He tightens his grip, twists the old man’s neck hard to the left. Bubbles break to the surface, big mushroom bubbles of air. That and the swishing of legs the only sound of disturbance. Life and fight slowly eke out of the old man’s body.

Welcome to
my
world, holy man . . .

Manchester Airport

Monday – 0911 UK time, 1411 Islamabad time

A
t Gate 206 the pilots who will fly this morning’s PIA Boeing 777 service to New York are at work. Setting up and primping the computer systems that will manage the flight across the Atlantic. Systems so competent and sophisticated as to make their jobs almost irrelevant. In fact there are two captains today, Iqbal Hussain and Imtiyaz Jamal. The latter, sitting in the left-hand seat, will actually command the flight. By complete chance the crew roster has thrown up two veterans who could not be more alike. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Both are heavy and round shouldered and for each their first order of business had been to crank out the maximum seat adjustment so they could see over the instrument glare-shield and down the line of the nose. Hussain and Jamal are ex-Pakistan Air Force officers, having served with 12 Squadron and flown VIP transport in Boeing 707s and 737s before joining the national airline. Both are also proud, very proud, of their facial hair: Captain Jamal has a dark, spade-shaped beard which almost reaches to his chest, while Hussain has a broad, thick silvery moustache that curls over his top lip and almost, but not quite, tickles at his gums.

Behind them, in one of two sheepskinned jump seats, is Captain Saeed Harry Salahuddin. Very much not hard at work. He’s relaxing with a copy of the
Daily Telegraph
, the tabloid-sized sports section, digesting county cricket batting and bowling averages. Salahuddin should have been under a hot shower by
now but is, instead, dead-legging to New York, replacing a sick pilot who was due to command Wednesday’s return flight to London. Of course, there’d be a seat for him up in the first-class section. In the meantime all he needs, while the passengers are boarding, is a cup of tea, the
Telegraph
and a chance to grumble quietly to himself.

There’s a smooth, relaxed air of informality in the cockpit. The three captains are on friendly speaking terms, a pleasure not always guaranteed. These are good people, Salahuddin notes to himself, and good airmen too. No tension from nervy first and second officers, over-prepared or under-confident.

The two pilots, Jamal and Hussain, process through their prep work, reading off a computerised list displayed between them on a console screen just fore of the two engine throttles. Jamal calls out the task, Hussain responds, and as the on-board computer recognises each action, the item turns from white –
to do
– into green –
accomplished
, and it scrolls on to the next task.

Most important is setting up the inertial navigation system (INS), the primary navigation tool, which drives all of the inputs into the various automatic pilot, fuel and engine control systems. The plane’s flight management system will constantly cross-reference with other on-board positioning data, everything from the modern satellite-based Global Positioning System to old-school VHF Omnidirectional Range (VOR), which relies on intersecting radio beams. But INS is the mother ship system. Once the pilots tell the plane’s computers where she is in the world, the exact location down to the nearest degree, minute, second and decimalised fraction of a second, the INS uses onboard gyroscopes to measure turn and accelerometers to gauge speed and calculates the plane’s position accordingly. Simple . . .

Next up to input are the four mid-Atlantic waypoints, the simple longitude and latitude markers that the automatic pilot will direct the flight towards on the journey across the Big Pond.

Normally there are five North Atlantic Tracks offered to pilots. Alpha, the most northern pathway, through to Echo, the
most southerly. The specific path of the corridor is computed twice daily by the Gander/Shanwick Oceanic Flight Region, which controls all airspace from one side of the Atlantic to another and between forty-five and sixty degrees North.

Captains Jamal and Hussein have opted – as most westbound flights do – for track Charlie, the middle of the five choices, which generally has the least unfavourable winds.

The entry point for today’s transatlantic corridor, the one designated Charlie, starts at way station SUNOT and exits at way station SCROD. But what the system really wants to know is what happens in between. From SUNOT, where does the plane fly to, out
there
, when she’s long gone over the horizon, where, for thousands of miles, there are only the unforgiving, slate-hard waters of the Atlantic?

Hussain reads out the coordinates of the four oceanic waypoints for Jamal to enter into his system. When the plane reaches these waypoints, the crew call up the Shanwick or Gander controllers. Or alternatively, if the headwinds make things particularly slow, they report in every forty-five minutes, whichever is the shorter. Position reporting is key to the system working. The flying is way beyond the range of land-based navigation aids and communication relays . . . you can build a mini-robot the size of a pinhead but not a radar that works in the middle of the Atlantic.

So. If the pilots don’t call in on time, the alarm is quickly raised. At that point the working assumption has to be simple: that a plane full of passengers is in distress somewhere over the mid-Atlantic. In a world of trouble, and far beyond reach.

The short-stay car park

Manchester Airport

Four minutes later

T
ristie checks herself in the flip-down mirror of the front passenger seat. Nothing astray. The dark wig is an effect nobody in the rented Volvo estate has seen before. Piglet, the driver, and Button and Whiffler in the back, can’t help but stare. It’s as if there’s a stranger sitting with them.

‘We’ve got plenty of time,’ she reassures them. ‘Relax.’

Next job, the mascara, and Tristie gets to work, her mouth widening and pouting, as she starts at the base of her lashes and works out to the tips. The heavy-lid look.

Button bites at his bottom lip, an irritation snagging his thoughts. ‘Why can’t we go BA, Virgin or even United, for Chrissakes. Something that’s not
this
airline?’

Tristie stops for a moment, to consider her work so far. ‘Because I think that’s too great a risk.’

Whiffler readjusts himself in the back seat, a tremor of alarm in his voice. ‘You mean they might be looking for us?’

‘Of course they’re not, otherwise we wouldn’t have made it out of the farmhouse.’

Whiffler looks nervously towards the terminal. ‘I thought this airline check-in will be crawling with MI5 and Special Branch surveillance.’

‘That’s true, but they’re not looking for us. For the three of us, you understand? They’re looking for people on their watch-lists.’ And Tristie resumes with the mascara wand, working at
the inner corners. ‘It’s about playing the odds. On a Pakistan International Airlines flight to New York, a through flight from Islamabad, we’re less likely to see somebody who knows us, a friend or an old enemy perhaps . . . somebody you served with, maybe an officer, maybe one of those hooligans from Hereford, someone who might, however haphazardly, think to put two and two together and come up with Ward 13.

‘I know we’re talking tiny odds here . . .’ Tristie is dabbing at the outer corners now, her voice hushed ‘. . . but we’ve got more than three hundred million riding on us getting safely and anonymously to America. There’s no point taking chances we don’t have to.’