Ultimate Weapon (39 page)

‘Incoming strike,’ snapped Nick. ‘Run for your bloody lives.’

Jed looked up. You couldn’t see it yet, but Nick was
right. The night air was buzzing with the squealing, hissing sound of an incoming cruise missile. The sirens had already started to blast, and the few soldiers left trying to put out the flames licking up around the edges of the main palace building were already running for cover.

‘Move it,’ hissed Jed, as he bundled Wilmington forward.

He could see the fear etched into the man’s face as all three of them started to run. Jed was pushing himself as hard as he could, hurling himself down the stairway and across the hard concrete of the courtyard. It was two hundred yards or so to the perimeter wall, and the exit that would take them back on to the street. The sirens were getting louder, blasting into Jed’s eardrums. He ran harder, and harder, aware that Wilmington was becoming short of breath. A hundred yards. He could hear the hissing sound of the missile coming closer and closer: something like an incoming jet, but much lower, and faster. ‘Move it,’ he snapped, turning round to yell at Wilmington as he sensed him falling further and further behind.

‘I can’t,’ screamed Wilmington.

The man was doubled over in pain, clutching his stomach. Jed took two strides back, glancing anxiously around him, but he quickly realised he didn’t have to worry about anyone hearing him speaking in English. The courtyard was already empty – all the soldiers had taken cover. The buggers know what’s coming, thought Jed. It’s only us madmen left out here.

‘Move, you fucker,’ he screamed at Wilmington. ‘We’re all going to bloody die.’

‘I can’t.’ Wilmington was panting. His face was red and strained, like a man about to have a heart attack. ‘I can’t, I tell you,’ he repeated.

Jed bent down. He grabbed Wilmington, and with one swift movement hoisted him up on to his shoulders. The man weighed at least twelve stone. Ignore the pain, Jed told himself as he felt the load pressing down into his shoulder blade. He started to jog, pushing himself to move as fast as possible. A hundred yards, then fifty. He could see the exit drawing closer to him: an empty, abandoned guard post getting tantalisingly nearer by the second.

I can make it, he told himself, repeating the phrase over and over.
Maybe …

The explosion struck two, maybe three hundred yards behind him. Jed wasn’t looking. You could feel the heat on your back first, as the air burnt all around you. Then you could feel the ground rumble and shake beneath your feet as the missile dug like a scalpel into the ground, cutting and splitting it open. Then you could hear the first deafening roar as the hundreds of pounds of high explosives packed into its tip exploded in a fraction of a second.

Jed pushed himself on, running desperately towards the exit. Whether Wilmington was conscious or not it was impossible to say: he was silent, and had the weight and stillness of a corpse. Nick was already through to the other side, flinging aside the flimsy wooden barrier
the guards had left behind. Jed ran out on to the street, following Nick as he rushed round the first corner leading away from the palace. As he reached the spot, Jed collapsed to the ground, tossing the professor down behind him. Blood and sweat was streaming down the side of his face, and every muscle in his body felt like it had been punched.

‘Bugger it,’ said Nick, sitting at his side and trying to get some air back into his lungs. ‘Last time I promised I was never going back into that hellhole. But this time I really mean it.’

Nick threw a bucket of water into Wilmington’s face. ‘Welcome back to the land of the living,’ he said, looking down into Wilmington’s scared and frightened eyes. ‘Now, if you want to stay in it for more than another minute, I have a simple piece of advice for you. Tell us what we want to fucking know, and tell us right now.’

‘Where am I?’ said Wilmington, looking around desperately.

He was lying on the floor of the workshop where Nick and Jed had hidden earlier. By the time they had made their way out of the Republican Palace, Wilmington had already been unconscious, and there had been no choice but to carry the guy the few hundred yards back to their hiding place. The ferocity of the attacks on the city meant the streets were empty. Even the cockroaches were leaving, Jed had reflected as they’d hurried through the shattered, dark streets. The workshop was still empty – no chance of anyone clocking in tonight. With Wilmington still out cold, they took some biscuits and water from their kitbags, then took it in turns to get some kip. No point trying to do any
more tonight, Jed told himself as he shut his eyes.
We’re lucky enough just to be alive.

‘Where am I?’ Wilmington repeated.

‘The cemetery, mate,’ snapped Jed. ‘Or one step away from it, anyway.’

There was a wild, frightened look in his eye, like a whipped dog. Jed leant forward, gripping him by the scruff of his torn shirt. The water was still dripping from his matted, dirty hair, and soot was still clinging to his skin, making his face almost black. I don’t know what they did to you in there, mate, thought Jed, but it doesn’t look like you enjoyed it much.
And you aren’t about to enjoy what happens next either.

‘Are … are we still in Baghdad?’ said Wilmington.

Jed nodded. ‘For now.’

‘Where’s Sarah?’ said Nick, kneeling down so that his eyes were level with Wilmington’s.

‘I need some water,’ said Wilmington, his tone hoarse and dry. ‘And something to eat. I’ve had nothing for days.’

Jed reached across for a couple of biscuits and a bottle of water. ‘You going to talk?’ he said, holding the food in front of him. Wilmington nodded. His eyes were fixed on the biscuits. Jed handed them over. He stuffed the first one into his mouth, but his lips were so dry it just crumbled into dust. He took the water, swigging it back, then scooped up the crumbs, forcing them down his dry throat.

‘Where’s Sarah?’ Nick repeated.

Wilmington glanced from one man to the next. ‘Tikrit,’ he said flatly.

‘What the fuck is she doing there?’ said Nick.

‘They took her yesterday,’ said Wilmington. ‘We’d spent two days down in the cells of the palace. The guards came in yesterday morning and took Sarah away.’

‘Did they say where she was going?’ said Nick.

Wilmington shook his head.

‘Then how the hell do you know?’

‘The main scientific research laboratory for the whole of Iraq is in Tikrit,’ said Wilmington. ‘It’s the heartland of Saddam’s regime.’

‘Why are they shunting her around?’ said Nick.

‘They need her to produce a successful cold-fusion experiment,’ said Wilmington. ‘That’s what this is all about. After the original plant was hit, and this place came under attack, they had to take her somewhere she could finish her work.’

‘The war’s already started,’ said Jed. ‘What difference does it make to them now?’

Wilmington took a sip from his bottle of water. ‘With a successful cold-fusion system, Saddam can blackmail all the countries in the Arab world to stop supporting the Americans and the British. You’d be thrown out of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in an instant.’

He paused, stuffing another biscuit hungrily into his mouth. ‘It’s their one chance of saving themselves,’ said Wilmington coldly. ‘And they aren’t about to let it slip through their fingers now.’

After leaving the hiding place, the three of them walked for twenty minutes, until Jed spotted an ancient Renault
21. Jed ran up to the car, his gun drawn, and pointed it straight at the driver, telling him to piss off. He didn’t need any more persuading. The three of them climbed into the vehicle, then drove it straight out of town. They had changed out of the army uniforms into their civilian clothes so they didn’t look like deserting soliders. Highway 1 snaked out of the city, heading due north, following the path of the Tigris, first to Tikrit then on towards Mosul. It was like the M1 on a bank holiday afternoon, Jed thought as they hit the road. Only a hundred times worse. By the time they had got their hands on the car, and got out of the city, it was already after three in the afternoon. It was two hundred miles to Tikrit, and the Renault wasn’t going to get above fifty or sixty miles an hour at best. That’s if you could work up that kind of speed. Half of Baghdad appeared to be trying to get as far north of the city as possible. Saddam’s regime might be pumping out propaganda about how they were winning the war, but nobody believed it. Baghdad was coming under nightly missile attack, and everybody expected the Americans to be assaulting the city from the ground in weeks if not days. They were getting as far away as possible. The car had three-quarters of a tank of petrol in it, but Jed was prepared to take another car if they ran out: there was no way you were going find a petrol station open in this place.

Police and army checks were cursory. So far as Jed could see, law and order had broken down completely. The police had fled, and the army – or that section of
it that hadn’t already deserted – had been sent south to meet the invaders. The roads were swarming with cars, all of them piled high with people and possessions. Dozens of vehicles were breaking down, filling one whole lane of the three-lane highway. On the rest, progress was sluggish. Sometimes you could pick up some speed, but then a car would lose power, and everyone would brake as the driver pushed it stutteringly into the slow lane. Waiting for what, wondered Jed, as he looked at the succession of miserable, desperate families in their broken-down vehicles. The AA isn’t going to come for you here.
The best you can hope for is that you are still alive when the Red Cross comes along to clear up the mess left by the soldiers.

As the drive progressed, they learnt something of Wilmington’s story. He’d been born in Kurdistan in northern Iraq in the early 1950s, but his father had smuggled him out of the country, across the border into Turkey, and then into Britain when he was seven. He could remember almost nothing of Kurdistan, except that some of his family was still there: his mother had died a year before his father made his escape, but there was a sister who had been left with his aunt, and six cousins from his mother’s side of the family as well. It wasn’t until he was sixteen that his father had even talked about the rest of his family that had been left behind. On arriving in Britain penniless, his father had applied for political asylum, and moved to Nottingham. He got a job as a librarian, and had stayed there ever since. The two of them lived very simply, and his father never
remarried. The family name was changed, and Wilmington went to Cambridge, then to Harvard, before returning to Cambridge six years ago as Professor of Physics.

‘So what happened then?’ said Jed. ‘How the hell did you get mixed up with the Iraqis again?’

‘In physics, the first thing we learn is that time is relative,’ said Wilmington. ‘It’s just one more dimension we pass though.’

‘What in the name of Christ does that mean?’ said Nick.

Wilmington was driving the car, and Jed was sitting in the front seat next to him. Nick had insisted the professor should drive. Any guards glancing towards the car would look at the driver first, and should they ask any questions then Wilmington would be able to answer in Arabic. He was a rubbish driver, Jed noted: hesitant, nervous, then bullying, with nothing in between. That didn’t matter. Out on this road, there was no space to pick up enough speed to do yourself any damage. And all the other Iraqis were just as bad at driving their clapped-out bangers as Wilmington was.

‘Eventually they caught up with me,’ said Wilmington.

‘Who?’ said Jed.

‘Saddam’s men,’ said Wilmington. You could still hear the shudder of fear in his voice as he mentioned the words. ‘They first came to see me about two years ago. Salek came first –’

‘The guy in your office,’ said Jed.

‘The same,’ said Wilmington.

On the side of the road, Jed could see two men fighting next to a broken-down van. A woman was trying to pull them apart, but was pushed roughly away. Fumes from the vehicles backing up along the highway were heavy in the air, and somewhere up in the sky Jed felt certain he could hear the drone of approaching bombers. He glanced back towards Wilmington. ‘Go on,’ he muttered.

‘He started offering me money for research, for myself, anything I wanted. I didn’t know who he was at first, but I found out pretty quickly. He’s a Kurd as well, but a bad one. The Kurds hate Saddam. He gassed our people back in the eighties, and has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of us to keep us in our place. Salek didn’t care about any of that. He just cared about the money he was being paid to do the regime’s dirty work.’

‘So why the hell did you take it?’ said Nick.

‘My family.’

‘You don’t trade one family for another,’ said Nick.

Wilmington turned round to look at him, taking his eyes off the road. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘And have you ever been in the position where you had to make that choice?’

‘Keep your eyes on the bloody road,’ snapped Jed. The Renault drew dangerously close to a truck that had braked ahead of it. A man was climbing out of it, and all around horns were starting to blast as the traffic ground to yet another halt.

‘Just tell us what happened,’ said Jed.

‘That first visit, I turned down their money, said I
wasn’t interested,’ said Wilmington, his voice strained and croaky as he stuttered through the words. ‘I’m a scientist, I can live simply, and I’m perfectly well paid by the university. Salek came back. He’s a mercenary, basically. He started out in the army, and he was one of the few Kurds who was willing to work with Saddam. He helped suppress his own people, then he became one of Saddam’s fixers, trading in oil and arms around the world. He came to me and said they had taken my sister prisoner. My cousins as well, and their children. They were going to be tortured to death unless I cooperated with them.’