He hit the ground twenty feet below the bridge, but the shock of the fall was absorbed by five feet of accumulated rubbish. He rolled down the bank and slid into a dense clump of papyrus. He lay there, half his face in the mud and detritus, panting for air, like a fish left high and dry by the tide. Then he began to pick up the sounds around him. He could hear the car sinking in the river, the water rushing in and the air bubbling out, the two meeting in a boiling confluence. He heard a car’s doors open and close. Footsteps on the bridge. Shouts. Excitement. He rolled onto his back and saw his surroundings for the first time. Somehow the car had thrown him clear and under the bridge as it spun into the water. The concrete sections of the bridge’s span filled his vision, obscured partially by the curtain of reeds and vegetation into which he had tumbled. He pulled himself onto his elbows, ignoring the stench from the nearby rubbish and the musty smell of the swamp. The BMW was all but submerged, with only its boot and part of the roof showing above the water.
There were more voices on the bridge now. He thought of shouting for help, but something stopped him. He lay still, out of sight. He heard a twig snap on the bank above him and the light curse of a man struggling through undergrowth to get to the water’s edge.
The last gasp from the car signalled its plunge to the river bed. Moments later, Girling recognized a voice on the bridge. The investigator shouted down to the man by the water.
‘Huwa maut,’ came the reply. He is dead.
‘Tayib,’ Al-Qadi said. Good.
Only then did Girling begin to edge towards the bridge’s concrete pillar and the sanctuary of the dark road beyond.
‘If they dredge the river tomorrow they’ll know I’m not dead. And this is the first place Al-Qadi will come looking. You don’t want to be here when that happens. The guy is out of control.’
‘Where will you go?’ Sharifa asked.
Girling could see from her eyes that she was still in shock.
‘I’m going south. If I get lucky, I should be back in thirty-six hours.’
He looked at his watch. There wasn’t a whole lot of time before the last train for Qena pulled out of Ramsis station.
She sat on the edge of her bed, watching as he exchanged his clothes for a tropical suit of Stansell’s. ‘You, meanwhile, are going to get some special protection.’
‘Who from?’
‘The Israelis.’
Girling wrote down Lazan’s address in Ibn Zanki Street and passed it to her. ‘Get to him as soon as you can, either at this, his home address, or the embassy. Lazan knows most of the story already. You’ll be safe with him.’
‘What’s happening, Tom? What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe Al-Qadi’s working for the Angels of Judgement, too. Or maybe he just decided to take the law into his own hands.’
‘This whole thing is getting out of control,’ she whispered. ‘Stansell knew the Sword. He’d written about him. In 1979.’
She produced the fax she had received from Dispatches’ circulation department, the office that dealt with back numbers.
Girling just stared at the sheet of paper. His mind tried to take in the words, but he never absorbed anything beyond the first paragraph. It was enough.
The report, datelined Kabul, bore Stansell’s byline. Guerrillas had attacked a government convoy with rockets on the Salang Highway leaving several trucks wrecked and a number of soldiers dead. No one group had claimed responsibility, but according to Mujahideen sources, Stansell filed, the attack had been carried out by a nascent organization whose leader was said to be known at varying times as Ibn Husam or Al-Saif. The Sword.
‘Jesus Christ,’ was the first and only thing Girling said.
CHAPTER 17
The train pulled into Qena a little after dawn. Girling disembarked, feeling rested after the over-night journey from Cairo. The air was cool, but he could feel the temperature rising already. Qena was two latitudes south of Cairo and it told.
He proceeded towards the town’s trading quarter, a short but brisk walk from the station. The market was well under way by the time he entered the maze of stalls and twisting passageways. It was dominated by two commodities: camels and pottery. He rounded a stall piled high with kullas, the large porous water jugs fashioned from the local clay, and spotted the camel auction, his goal.
He walked cautiously amongst the bedouin and their beasts. The camels’ front legs had been hobbled to prevent them wandering off. The smell of their excrement made his eyes water.
‘Ayiz hashish?’ a voice whispered.
Girling turned to see a middle-aged man whose bulk was conspicuous despite his flowing grey jellaba. He wore a tatty black baseball cap sporting the logo of an American petroleum company.
‘Hashish?’ the bedouin asked again, his eyes darting nervously around him.
Girling shook his head. ‘La. Mish ayiz hashish.’ He reached into his pocket and produced a handful of notes and coins.
The bedouin’s eyes shone. ‘Ayiz gamal?’ He patted the behind of his nearest beast and guffawed.
Girling fought for the Arabic. He enunciated the words slowly, conscious that this man spoke a differ-ent dialect from his sketchy Cairene. ‘I need a man of resource and courage who can take me into the desert, to the place where the Army keeps the ta’iraat.’ The things that fly. It was ponderous, but it was the best he could do. No one had ever taught him the Arabic for helicopter.
For a moment, the bedouin’s face creased. ‘The ta’iraat of Wadi Qena? Why?’
‘That is my business, my friend.’
‘So be it,’ the bedouin said. ‘Inter majnoon, ya sidiqi.’ You are mad, my friend. ‘Such a trip will cost you dearly.’
‘Money, I have,’ Girling said, pressing a wad of notes into the badou’s hand. ‘Do you have the courage, my friend?’
The nomad snorted.
Girling handed over more money, the equivalent of twenty-five dollars. He explained there would be another wad if the bedouin could get him into the air base. They haggled for a while, but finally shook on a price of one hundred and thirty Egyptian pounds.
The bedouin clapped Girling on the back. ‘My name is Abdullah,’ he said.
‘And mine is Tom.’
The bedouin laughed heartily. ‘Al-majnoon is better, I think, ya Tom.’
Girling smiled. The Crazy One. ‘So be it,’ he said.
Ulm spotted Shabanov outside an anti-blast shelter away from the main complex of buildings that the Spetsnaz and the Pathfinders had turned into their operations centre. The Russian was staring at a pile of junk dumped unceremoniously on the tarmac. There was little that was immediately recognizable of the Mi-24J.
As Ulm crossed the last stretch of sand-blown runway to where Shabanov was standing, a Hind lifted off behind the wreckage of its sibling. Looking like a malevolent insect, it clawed its way slowly into the dawn sky, before picking up speed across the desert, the sound of its engines and rotors dwindling to a dull, asynchronous buzz. The pilot was heading for the crash site to carry out one last search for wreckage. Throughout the previous day, the Soviets had been shuttling pieces back to Wadi Qena, the larger portions of the twisted remains carried in underslung nets. As soon as the An-124 Condors arrived to take them home, Shabanov wanted to make sure that all the pieces of the helicopter went with them.
‘Had they been with your unit long?’ Ulm asked.
Shabanov half-turned towards the American. ‘I didn’t know you were back, Elliot. How was Cairo?’
‘A disappointment.’ He paused. ‘I’d always imagined it differently.’
Shabanov nicked over a piece of main rotor with his foot. ‘Evgeny Pavlovich had been with us five years. He was an experienced pilot. And Gennady Georg’evich, the gunner, even longer, from the beginning.’