Steal the Lightning: A Field Ops Novel (Field Ops #3)(90)

“No?”

“Update your intelligence.” I put the glass down carefully in front of him. “One of us got older. I don’t suppose it looks much like me now at all.”





Chapter 2

Night Moves




At 3 a.m. Baghdad is almost quiet. The restaurants and cafés are in use, but nobody goes in or out. The doors stay shut. Diners who dropped in for an evening meal stay on till 5 a.m., when curfew lifts and everyone goes home. It’s like the world’s biggest lock-in. Equipped with papers and an escort, you can stand there in the dark and listen to the music drifting from a window twenty yards away. It’s dream-like, spooky . . . laughter on an empty street. Nighttime in the land of ghosts.

And then the trucks start up. Big engines grumble, big tires grinding in the dirt. Another US convoy setting out. They move at night, each night—but this time would be different. This time, we were going with them. Out of town, and then a few miles more. After which, the plan was, they’d head one way, and we—well. We’d be on our own.

It was just as Dayling had described it. One truck, retrieval gear stowed in the back. A local guide named Nouri, chain-smoking his PX Marlboros, occasionally remembering to blow the smoke out of the window. Carl was the driver. Heavy forearms mottled with tattoos, accent probably Glaswegian; the most I’d had from Carl so far had been a quick, obligatory, “All right?” when we’d shaken hands. After that, it was all business. He seemed sharp, confident, experienced. Somehow that didn’t altogether calm my nerves.

We drove with windows down. I could smell petrol fumes. A dog barked somewhere. Then, astonishingly, children’s cries. It was the middle of the night, but on a half-cleared bomb site in the ruins of the city, kids were playing soccer. They paused to watch us pass, ready to run if need be. Instead we waved to them, and someone in the Humvee up in front yelled, “Go Colts!” and the kids called back, “Beck-haaaam!” and the game went on.

Nouri clapped his hands.

“You see? Only the children now are brave.”

“How’s that then, Nour?” asked Carl.

“Because the rest of us,” said Nouri, “we lock ourselves away. We say, yes sir, no sir. But the children, they don’t care for stupid rules. They do as they please!”

“They’ll care if they get shot,” said Carl.

“No one likes getting shot, I can be damn sure. Especially by interfering foreign squaddies like yourself, eh? No offense,” he added, amiably.

“Ah, none taken, pal. None taken.”



Nouri was watching me.

“You are worried, friend.”

“I’m fine.”

“He’s worried,” said Carl.

“I’m cool.”

“Worried.”

I stared into the night, my head filling with visions, daydreams, near hallucinations: some crazed gunman charging at us from the dark, some nutter with a grudge and a Kalashnikov, or else some mad old woman strapped with gelignite— “No,” I said. “It’s going to be an easy job, I think. Once we’re there I’ll do a survey, and then we’ll know—”

“The job. Aye. Right.”

“OK.” I looked from one of them to the other. “I’m worried. That suit you? Shit scared, if you want to know. How’s that?”

“Only a fool,” said Nouri, “isn’t worried.”

“I don’t do this. Places like this. Jesus—”

“Aye. And you can tell your boss, your Mr. Dayling, we don’t bloody do it, either. Not without some preparation and the full security, no way. Still,” Carl said, “here we are. So I guess we do do it, after all. And so do you.” He sucked air between his teeth. Then he said, “Want lessons?”

“Lessons?”

“Aye. Iraq 101. War for dummies. You want ’em?”

The whole time he’d been talking, he’d been looking at the road, the darkness either side, the country slipping near enough invisibly along beside us. He hadn’t once looked at me.

Maybe that was my first lesson.





Chapter 3

The Car Wreck




There was a strange effect, almost an optical illusion, which I noticed once we’d left the other vehicles and moved out into open country. The lights from the truck lit up a little of the roadside, giving the impression, not of flat land, but of two low walls running on either side of us. We seemed to be passing through some quiet residential suburb—the weird illusion I was still in England. For some reason, this soothed me, and in spite of my anxiety, I found myself starting to doze, drifting off into this dreamy little fiction.

Darkness peeled back slowly over palm trees, telegraph poles, little houses squat as pill boxes.

Then sunrise. The heat came almost instantly, like switching on an electric fire. Nouri blew cigarette smoke through a half-inch crack in the window. We passed a small boy leaning on a staff with goats all round him, like something from the Bible.

Mirages of lakes, water on the tarmac up ahead, folding into nothingness as we approached . . .

I nodded off awhile, dreaming of home. Then Carl shook me awake.

“Huh? What?”

He jerked his head to indicate.