Fearless ; The Smoke Child Read online

  The system reminded him of the “nothing to declare” lane at a seaport customs check. Everyone would be scrutinized enough to make the most virtuous souls feel guilty. Even so, he was looking forward to the process for two reasons. First, it would be in stark contrast to the last few hours of queuing, and secondly because it would be the last stage before he could get out, stretch his legs, and find out what Kandahar Airfield offered.

  Lockhart rounded the tight bend and entered a wide sandy courtyard, overlooked by two guard towers and policed on the ground by about 40 ANA personnel. Suddenly, the guard was not waving his AK-47 but pointing it straight at his cab. Pointing and shouting. Lockhart wanted to comply with his instructions, but it was impossible to understand what the man was saying.

  He thought about what Ajmal had told him to do at checkpoints; go slowly, take your time, dip your headlights, keep your hands in view. He did these things, but the soldier still yelled. Others began to take an interest in his truck. The Afghan soldier was shouting instructions to him, but he didn’t understand. He came to a dead stop.

  All the soldiers hit the floor. With several soldiers now pointing their weapons at him, including the teams in the guard tower, Lockhart put his hands in the air. As he did so, the soldier who had originally ushered him into the courtyard beckoned him out of his cab.

  When lots of people are pointing guns at you, the sensible thing is to do everything slowly and deliberately. Lockhart knew that. He leaned out of his window and opened the cab door from the outside rather than risk getting shot by a twitchy Afghan soldier as he fumbled by his side for the door handle. The handle clunked, and the door swung open. Carefully, he placed his boot onto the footplate and eased himself out of the truck.

  The guard had retreated somewhat and was poking his head round the end of the nearest blast wall, frantically beckoning Lockhart towards him. Lockhart was happy to move away from the truck and out of the sightline of at least some of the soldiers.

  As he reached the blast wall, three Afghan soldiers grabbed him and pinned him to the ground. They looked nervous. A higher-ranking US soldier had joined them from a nearby building and was speaking directly to him as the others searched him roughly, jostling him about in an undignified manner. He acquiesced. Not that he really had a choice.

  The three Afghans were angry. They were pointing at the truck and demanding some sort of answer, from what Lockhart could gather.

  When he turned and looked at the truck, he understood at once what had happened. His lucky escape during the ambush at Mandi Sar had been luckier than he knew. The RPG, which had mysteriously clunked against the side of his truck, had just reappeared. It was stuck in the side of the truck that Lockhart had been driving for the last sixty miles.

  The US soldier who had joined them had the two stripes of a captain showing on his uniform. He was in his late twenties and had a capable air about him. Like every other soldier in the front gate holding area, the captain wore a sandy-colored flak jacket and helmet and dark glasses which protected his eyes from the sun and the constant dust. They also offered him a sense of reassurance in combat situations and a sense of detachment when he was interrogating suspicious drivers.

  The soldier saw the man in front of him as something of an enigma. He was too white to be an Afghan, too well nourished to be a vagrant, and his hair was too long for him to be a soldier. In fact, his hair was too long, period.

  “Do you speak English?” he asked. His tone was neither aggressive nor friendly.

  “I am English,” replied Lockhart, picking himself up and dusting off the motorbike salesman's baseball cap which had fallen off during his brief tussle. “Welcome to Kandahar, eh?”

  “The trouble is that you seem to have driven into the holding area with an RPG attached to your vehicle,” explained the captain in unequivocally simple terms.

  “Yes, but these guys have proven beyond doubt that I don’t have another one strapped to my body so maybe you could assume that I didn’t put it there deliberately?”

  The stranger was assertive, but not aggressive, the soldier noted. He also made a fair point. He was pretty composed for someone who had just been taken from his cab at gunpoint and rolled about in the dust by three guards.

  “What’s your story?” the captain asked. His keen eye noticed that the driver’s cap had the faintest outline of the letters N Y C on the front. The fabric was darker where the sewn-on letters had prevented it bleaching in the sun. Maybe the man understood local sentiment towards the US and had removed the letters for his own safety. In which case, he wasn’t dealing with a complete idiot, at least.

  “We were ambushed at Marni Sar,” replied Lockhart.

  From behind the blast wall, he could see several soldiers walking past in a hurry, sweating with sandbags, securing the side of the truck that was carrying the unexploded RPG. Others were instructing the nearest trucks to reverse back out of the holding area. The routine was well rehearsed.

  “I’ll need some details,” said the captain. “Follow me, but stay low. The grenade on the side of your truck has a kill distance of about ten meters.”

  Lockhart was not a soldier, didn’t follow orders, and had never been fond of people who told him what to do. Having just been rolled ignominiously through the dust, he planned to walk away from the scene with as much dignity as he could.

  He drew himself up to his full height. The soldier didn’t look like he gave a shit either way.

  “Just so you know,” he said, “the kill radius is ten meters, but if that grenade goes off I’d say you’re still in the ‘fuck you up pretty badly zone’ at the moment.”

  Then he moved on at quite a pace, probably compensating for his limp. Making a point. They navigated through a maze of blast walls until they arrived at the front gate complex; a series of prefabricated buildings incorporating a small canteen, an armory and a central briefing room. As they pushed through the side door into the air conditioning the temperature dropped by about twenty degrees, and it took a moment for their eyes to re-adjust to the shade.

  Lockhart followed the soldier through the main briefing room and both men removed their shades so that they could better navigate the various desks. Maps on the wall showed the complex layout of the front gate and the holding areas, the sink and the rejection lane.

  A cabinet on the wall contained about two hundred mobile phones which had been confiscated from local drivers on their way into the Airfield. They had been tagged and stored ready for collection by the drivers when they left the camp.

  The office was almost empty - half finished cardboard cups of coffee sat cooling on the desks. Everyone was outside, dealing with the grenade that the fearless Westerner had inadvertently bought into their midst. The captain swept through the office, slaloming the desks deftly despite his limp. Through another set of doors, they headed into a smaller interrogation room, and beyond that into his own private office.

  Inside there was a simple desk and a plastic chair. On the walls were more plans of the main gate and another map that marked the main layout of the Airfield. A window looked into a small courtyard on the opposite side of the building from the holding area. There was an air conditioning unit behind the desk, and a rack of walkie talkies were charging in a large black plastic wall unit. There was a framed picture on the desk, a girl wearing a green dress and a woman with auburn hair gazing out at them.

  Next to the desk was a recycling tub, three quarters full with blue water bottle lids. There were similar bins all over the camp. The soldiers were getting through more than a hundred million dollars' worth of bottled water each year, and Lockhart wondered what happened to all the little blue caps that were collected up. War is an industry he thought.

  The soldier indicated that the driver should take a chair in front of the desk. Time to talk. Lockhart sat down and the solider did the same. Then he gave a loud sigh, pulled off his leg, and placed it on the desk in front of him with a thud.

  He rubbed the sore flesh below h
is knee and ran his hands through his closely cropped hair. He leaned back on his plastic chair as his cornflower blue eyes studied his enigmatic guest.

  “Sir, my name is David Barr and I am a Captain with the US Army. Welcome to Kandahar Airfield.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Main Gate, Kandahar Air Field.

  “Deputy Sheriff said to me Tell me what you come here for, boy.

  You better get your bags and flee.

  You're in trouble boy, And now you're heading into more.”

  – Simon and Garfunkel, Keep the Customer Satisfied

  As they sat in the clean office at the front of the airfield, Captain Barr considered the man in front of him. His picture matched his passport, but it was hard to believe that he was a tourist who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  All sorts of strange people turned up at the front gate of the military base. Local villagers would arrive with the sick and wounded regularly. When possible, the military hospital would treat them, but this year the trauma bays had seemed to be almost constantly filled.

  Sometimes the gate turned up someone unusual, but never tourists. Barr had been on duty for one such arrival last year. A crazy English guy had arrived at the gate announcing that he wanted to join the SAS. He thought if he walked through Afghanistan, it would prove that he was tough enough to join up. He was beyond dumb. When he arrived, he was badly burned and dehydrated. Barr had instructed the Afghan authorities to detain him on mental health grounds and then deport him back to Europe.

  However, the guy in front of Barr seemed much more sensible. Likeable even. They had been talking for about an hour while Barr decided what to do with him. The man seemed keen to learn about the history of Afghanistan, explaining that he was a tourist and that he hadn’t originally planned to come into the country.

  No shit, thought Barr.

  Barr told him about the Americans and the British, and the Russians, and the Pakistanis and the Chinese and the CIA and the Mujahidin. The tourist had seemed interested and intelligent. Barr figured that the guy was brave too, judging by the way he had conducted himself at the gate. Weighed against all of that, he was unregistered and anonymous. Potentially, the stranger could prove a very useful combination.

  Barr was the gatekeeper to the Camp, which was an important job. He took his responsibility of keeping the camp safe seriously, but he was also running a few deals on the side. In the right circles, he was known as the camp’s fixer. If you needed something that you couldn’t get through the stores, Barr could usually find it. What’s more, he had the ability to smuggle it through the camp’s security.

  Barr did well out of the illegal side lines, earning a bit of pin money here and there. The camp was officially dry, but Barr made sure there was enough alcohol seeping in to keep people sane. The extra cash meant more generous gifts for his wife and daughter when he got home. But now he had been tasked with something huge; Something bigger than he wanted to get involved with. Smuggling into the camp had become routine, but a couple of men had approached him about transporting some cargo out of the camp up to Herat, in the North.

  They were serious guys. One was an Air Force one-star General. His name was Ben Lang. The other a muscular Warrant Officer who didn’t do much of the talking. They were careful not to mention what the cargo was, and Barr was smart enough not to ask. They had offered him a hundred thousand dollars to drive the shipment out of the camp and up to a contact at Herat. From there, it would be helicoptered out of the theater of war. That, he was told, was all he needed to know.

  The money sounded good, besides which these guys weren’t the kind of people he could say no to. But trying to navigate to Herat in the dark through Afghanistan was suicide. Even if he made it, the odds of him getting back without being spotted were almost zero. Which meant that the man in front of him could be useful. Very useful, in fact.

  “So, Charlie Lockhart,” said Barr, looking up from Lockhart’s passport. “You’re brave or you’re stupid. Which is it?”

  “Who knows?” Lockhart shrugged. He wasn’t sure himself. “Some of the drivers called me Fearless, but I felt pretty scared during the grenade attack.”

  “That name will stick,” said Barr, evaluating Lockhart. “You drive into Afghanistan for fun, get hit by a grenade, rolled over by the ANA in the sink, and then you just stroll along with me and drink my coffee without your hands even shaking.”

  Lockhart didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure whether it was a compliment or an accusation. It was true that his hand was steady.

  “I think the name suits you,” continued Barr. “Fearless.”

  A compliment then.

  Barr explained to Lockhart that as he was not military personnel he had no right to stay on the Airfield, but offered to find him a room for a few nights while he worked out his next move. Lockhart didn’t have a better offer, and he thanked the captain for his help.

  So, Barr processed Lockhart’s paperwork and then filed it away in a draw in his office. Then he handed him an ISAF badge on a lanyard.

  “Stick this round your neck,” he said. “It’s a standard contractor’s ID and will let you stroll around the non-restricted parts of the camp. Stay away from the flight-line though. Nobody likes civilians staring at their aircraft.”

  Barr told him to report back in a few hours to find out where he was sleeping, and that he could swipe the card in the dining facilities to get fed.

  “I’ll pick up the tab,” he added congenially. “You can leave your bag here while you grab some food.”

  Lockhart felt like the comment about his bag was more of an instruction than a request. Barr was a gentleman, and after an hour of conversation and coffee, it felt rude to rummage through the guy’s bag. But rules were rules, and it needed to be done. Barr had one last instruction for Lockhart as he headed off to dinner.

  “Hey Charlie,” he called after him. “I’m the only person who knows that name, and it would be better for all of us if it stayed that way, ok? Keep your passport to yourself and I’ll smooth everything else out.”

  Lockhart looked down at his ISAF badge and laughed at the name Barr had written on the front:

  Fearless.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Custom hotel, LAX. December, 2010.

  “Now the ground shifts beneath my feet

  The faces that I greet never know my name.”

  - Badly Drawn Boy, Pissing in the Wind

  The lobby of the Custom Hotel was unusual, with a flock of full-sized stuffed sheep grazing in one corner, and a hanging cage of stuffed birds singing in the other.

  The girl on the front desk had long blond hair and pale skin and wore an elegant dark suit which emphasized her slight figure. She had the ability to look busy while still being approachable, and she kept a careful eye on the comings and goings of the hotel.

  She was polite to the guests, but to keep herself amused she would imagine what they did for a living. Sometimes it was easy. At the moment she was certain that she had three sets of air crews staying and a group of Mexican baggage handlers. There were also a group of open-source software geeks who were easy to spot.

  Usually the receptionist was discreet, but as the man in the black jacket swept past her, she couldn’t help but stare. His stride was purposeful, but it was the sheer size of him that was entrancing. He was well over seven feet tall and looked athletic. He had arrived two nights ago with no luggage, but his clothes looked immaculate. His hair was cropped short, and he was freshly shaven. The receptionist assumed he was a seasoned hotel bum who found it easy to travel light. According to his passport, his name was Jason Tyler. The document told her he was French, but his accent told her different.

  There was something about his manner she found unnerving. He didn’t acknowledge other guests, and he never stopped to take in the view. He had walked through the lobby four times while she had been on the desk, and he hadn’t caught her eye once. It was midnight, and she had noticed him arrive in a taxi about ten
minutes earlier. He was heading for the poolside bar. He was in luck, thought the receptionist. The bar was staying open late because the large TV had been showing the Lakers match all night. They had just won the play-off final and there was a party atmosphere by the pool.

  The underwater lighting was throwing up subtle undulating shadows; its shimmering blues and greens were in sharp contrast to the warm orange tones of the mood lighting at the tables surrounding the water. The television was still showing highlights of the game, and the scrolling headlines were reporting a suicide near the Staples Center.

  The bar was well stocked, and the staff were smart. Tyler ordered bourbon over ice, which they served quickly and with a smile. The girl who fixed his drink was pretty, and he considered sitting at the bar for a while, but it had been a long day and instead he moved to a sofa in the shadows. There were questions that he would have liked to have asked David Barr before he fell from the roof, but at least it was done. Easier all round for everyone.

  Tyler was sure now that Barr hadn’t stolen the money, but there was no question he had been part of the fuck-up. So there had to be some retribution. Rules are rules. The US Army might have been relaxed about three hundred million dollars disappearing, but his boss wasn’t.

  Tyler had expected Barr to be a dead end. He had made no contact with his family since he returned from Afghanistan. Hadn't contacted anyone else either. The trail had run cold, and killing him had only been a matter of tidying up.

  But just as the end had come, everything had changed. According to Tyler’s boss, Barr should have had a tattoo. All of their information said that Fearless had a tattoo, but when he checked, David Barr’s wrist had been clean. No ink. No tell-tale laser removal scars. Nothing.

  And why had Barr called out a name as he fell? What did it mean? Another bluff? It was possible that Fearless had been Barr's cover story. Possible he had never existed. But with Barr plunging to the ground, what did he stand to gain by revealing a name? It was perplexing and irritating.