Danger Close Read online

  The interior was more stripped-pine and modern than I’d been expecting. I’d been bracing myself for a stained red carpet and a rubbish fruit machine, but it didn’t look too bad.

  The barman was gazing enquiringly at me. OK, I needed to blend, so no soft drinks. I didn’t want to set the “Oh my God the Muslims are here” alarm bells ringing so I asked him for a half of Guinness. Hardly anyone in society realised that a lot of us lot drank, and now this would work in my favour. Tonight, I was playing friendly Asian but non-Muslim journalist from That London.

  To that end, I got out my wallet and riffled through the business cards I collected from people. This was classic tradecraft, and very easy. I made a habit of getting as many trade or business cards from all walks of life as I could, as they were a quick and easy way of backing up a cover. I found two ITN cards. One was for a guy called Steve Singh, and he’d have to do. The other one was Angus Walker’s, and there was no way I could pull off being called Angus Walker.

  I smiled and showed it to the barman. ‘Hi. I’m Steve Singh from ITN News, can I ask you something?’

  Of course I could. His face brightened. People just loved talking to telly people.

  ‘Sure. What’s the story? My name’s Stu by the way.’

  ‘Stu, hi. The newsroom’s sent me up here to chase a lead about secret CIA flights from airfields in the area? There was lot of funny stuff going on on September 13th, lots of conspiracy theories. Any angles?’

  Stu opened his mouth but at that exact moment a voice behind me said ‘They were at RAF Barford St. John, just up the road.’

  I turned to look. A punky-looking guy was sitting at a table, with an open laptop and an empty pint before him.

  I grinned. ‘Buy you another pint?’

  My new best mate was called Joe Sab. I guessed he was early twenties, maybe Bang-Bang’s age. I cut that thought out. He took his new pint of IPA and saluted me. I nursed my half. Under the table I’d texted Fuzz ‘RAF Barford St John get here asap’.

  ‘I’m Steve, ITN News. So, Joe, what have you heard?’

  The trick here was to guide without overtly pushing.

  ‘It was obvious. Both nights after September 13th the whole far end of the airfield was full of vans and lights. And then on the Sunday, we heard a plane. No lights, mind, just the antenna mast lights. But a plane came in the small hours, and left straight away. I live on Bloxham Road and I heard it.’

  ‘That’s great. What’s your interest, Joe?’

  He beamed with pride. ‘Me and my friends watch the base. They call it an RAF base, but it’s not. It’s a secret CIA base. We also track the rendition flights. Look.’

  He turned the laptop so I could see the screen. A website called Flightrader24 was running, showing a map of England and Northern Europe, and dozens of little yellow planes.

  ‘That’s really cool, Joe. Can you see what was in the air here on Sunday night?’

  ‘Course.’

  He tapped at the keys and the touchpad. He hit ‘Playback’ and entered ‘2012-09-16’, and then ‘Time-UTC 0200’.

  Just over Abingdon, a yellow plane symbol appeared with the reference N6161K. It was the only thing in the sky. It was heading Southwest. Joe enlarged the symbol, and we could see a box. It read-

  N6161K

  One Leasing

  Altitude: 5225 ft (1593 m)

  Track: 51 degrees

  Squawk 5331

  ‘Brilliant, Joe - can I take a snapshot?’

  He shrugged. ‘Sure, buddy.’

  I took a photo with my BlackBerry.

  On the TV above the bar, Channel 4 News had a graph with the new death toll from the Liverpool Street bombing and the Westfield attacks. The total death toll from Black Thursday was now 613. We both turned to look at it, along with the rest of the bar. Someone at the bar said ‘Fucking Muslims. Scum.’

  Time to go.

  I turned to Joe. ‘Coming outside for a fag?’

  He smiled. ‘Sure.’

  We stood outside near the trestle tables and I lit cigarettes for him and myself. Couple of quick drags of this and was heading up to Barford St. John. On my BlackBerry I quickly pulled up a Google map satellite overview of where I was, for backup when I reached the airfield. Beside me Joe spoke. ‘You know all that Black Thursday stuff is false-flag, right?’

  I looked at him. Oh, here we go.

  ‘Yeah, bud. Muslims are being set up as scapegoats by the Government. I talk to some Muslims on the internet all the time. It’s all an inside job, buddy, just like 7/7 and 9/11.’

  He jerked a thumb back towards the bar. ‘That stuff on telly… those people in Westfield weren’t Muslims, they were an undercover army unit. Al-Qaeda? No such thing. The army had a black helicopter on the day. Dropped ‘em in.’

  He took a drag on his fag.

  I really, really felt like telling him who he was standing next to, what I’d been doing on Black Thursday, and why I was in his sleepy village. Oh yeah, Joe insider-knowledge, the truth would really bake your noodle. These people did my head in. They thought they were helping but all they were doing was spreading an infection in popular culture. For a few seconds I entertained what would happen if the real black helicopter pilot from the day, who just happened to be Fuzz Shaheen, encountered this no-mark. He’d never leave his house again.

  I cut away. Time to go. Anyway, hark at me, I’d been entertaining conspiracies about Airey Neave a few days back. I bade my goodbyes, thanked him profusely, reminded him to watch ITN, and went to the car.

  And I thought, as I drove away…Sunshine, buddy, you will never know…

  8

  The satnav led me west out of Deddington, through the darkened villages of Barford St Michael and then Barford St John. I couldn’t see anything. The villages looked completely battened down. I’d never seen anything like this. No pubs, no shops, nothing. Maybe I’d driven too far in the dusk? As I drove, I craned my neck over the fields looking for something, anything.

  And then, finally, I saw it. Standing in the field like a gantry was a strangely-shaped antenna with a solitary red light on the top. I braked. Ah. There was a red-rimmed MOD sign pointing to the gate of RAF Barford St John. I turned right and found myself come to a halt before a massive set of gates with the usual sign. “MOD Property – Keep Out.”

  I got out of the car. That would be fine, I had my MOD pass. But as I neared the gate I realised they’d been chained and padlocked shut. From the outside. I looked through, away across the airfield to a large, maybe T-shaped building with a massive radio mast on top. There were a few sodium lights but no movement. None at all. More washing-line type antennae marched away across the base, into the distance. This place was big. You could hide a lot here. I went to the car boot, popped it, and had a dig about in the go-bags. Here was what I was after. A VIPIR2+ thermal imaging sight. I turned it on and walked back to the gate. I gave the entire airfield a slow, thorough scan from left to right. No heat. Nothing.

  Time to get in there then. I got back in the car and drove back the way I came, round the outer perimeter. Within a minute on my left I found an entrance and a farmers’ gate. I pulled in and parked, retrieving the second go-bag from the boot. I vaulted the low metal fence, stopped and looked around. Some black bedraggled sheep were regarding me curiously. I nodded back. ‘Evening ladies.’

  I started walking up the dirt path as I checked over the kit in the bag. Bang-Bang’s old boltcutters, some wire snippers, some flashlights and portable RAC striplights. Off to the north of the base was another set of blockhouses in standard RAF configuration. If I was going to hide someone I’d do it there. I started jogging.

  After a few minutes I came to a second chainlink fence that surrounded the building complex. The buildings reminded me of the ones at the RAF Museum at Hendon. Big. Generic. And all the double doors looked to be shut and padlocked. I stood for a few minutes and let myself tune into the surroundings. All was quiet. The waxing moon was hanging, ghostly and fat, in th
e clouds. I looked up at the darkening sky and the fading vapour trails.

  Right next to me a woman’s voice spoke.

  ‘If you’re looking at them, bhai, you’re looking in the wrong place. The people we’re after fly lower than that.’

  I jumped. Farzana Shaheen was standing next to me. She grinned at me with that famous broken-teethed grin.

  I regained my composure.‘Hello Fuzz. And please tell me how you managed to sneak up on me.’

  She pointed to the hand that held her diamante sandals and then pointed down to her bare feet.‘Old Gujrati trick, bhai.’

  She jingled an ankle chain.

  ‘These only make a noise if you move quickly. So, we’ve found the airfield. Says it’s MOD property but it’s a US airfield, isn’t it. From my maps, it’s a CIA Mystic Star signals site. You gonna cut this fence?’

  ‘But of course, ukhti.’

  I readied the wire snippers and selected an area nearest a fence post. We were going in via the most remote corner. Fuzz laughed quietly. ‘Looks like fun.’

  We cut the wire and went forward to the concrete blockhouse. I ran to the first set of big black doors. Padlocked. I cut the hasp with the boltcutters. Knife through butter. We opened the doors and went in. We turned our flashlights on and swept them around the interior.

  ‘Ya allah.’

  Fuzz wasn’t happy. Neither was I.

  The interior was a huge, hollowed-out warehouse with Portakabins and haphazardly-placed levels. Way off in the murk, we could just about make out another cinderblock wall.

  Fuzz spoke. ‘We could be here all night. OK, you take the left…’

  We searched from bottom to top and all we found was dust and a few bits of furniture. After twenty minutes we’d reached the far end of the block. We shone our lights around and saw a wall blocked by a large sheet of plywood. We looked at each other. We got to shifting it. It fell with a rattle and we both cringed. We waited but there was no sound from outside. The dust swirled. We looked back to see what the plywood sheet had hidden.

  There was another set of doors. These were also padlocked but painted bright red, and bore a sign and crest saying ‘United States Air Force Medical Service’.

  Again, I cut the padlock. I swung the doors open. We shone our flashlights in. Transparent plastic sheets hung from the ceiling. We pushed through them.

  Before us was a disused mortuary. Sinks, drains, and…four tables and four dark green bodybags on the tables. They looked like they had bodies in them. Oh fuck. I turned to Farzana.

  ‘Fuzz. I can’t do this.’

  She nodded and went forward. I faced away.

  I waited.

  After a while came a laugh.

  ‘Riz bhai, dekho na!’

  All the bodybags contained mannequins. I sagged in relief and waved at Fuzz to keep looking. I searched at the opposite end. Here was another room, no door. There were transparent strips in place on the doorway, the kind you found in warehouses. I pushed through and placed one of the RAC striplights on the floor and turned it on. No dust here. The room contained a hospital gurney and mattress and the floor was strewn with medical kit wrappings and detritus. There was a mobile drip stand and a folding chair, but not much else. Fuzz came in through the strips and looked at the floor, then began inspecting the gurney. I lifted the mattress. Nothing underneath. Under the gurney was a used disposable blood type testing kit.

  ‘Remember what clothes she was wearing on the day, Fuzz?’

  ‘Of course. That manky Phoenix Program t-shirt and pedal pusher jeans.’

  ‘Yeah. And those horrible old deck shoes that I was always trying to dump.’

  I noticed there was a small shelf-type bed in the corner. We went to have a look at that. Fuzz carried on looking up and down. She started inspecting the bed frame. I went to look at the plug points next to it. They were badly scratched.

  Two minutes later Fuzz whistled a bird-trill and pointed at a bloodstain on the wood of the bed frame. I went back to have a look.

  Scratched into the bottom of the frame below the bloodstain were some words in Urdu. They were upside down. We both craned our heads ridiculously to read the scrawl. My eyes watered. Fuzz was ahead of me. ‘Mangetar, mein marri hui nahi hoon.’

  And then Fuzz whooped and hugged me. We fell to the floor in a heap and started laughing. I knew Bang-Bang would do it. So long as she was alive, she’d have scratched that in any place available. It meant ‘fiancé, I’m not dead.’

  I got on the phone to the Colonel. Behind me Fuzz was dancing round and singing an obscure Bollywood song.

  Two rings. ‘Riz. What do you have?’

  ‘We’re at RAF Barford St John and she’s left a message. She’s left a message!’

  ‘Son, we’re go. I’ll call Swallow and the lads now.’

  ‘Yeah but we don’t know if she’s definitely in Kabul ye-’

  He’d hung up.

  Fuzz had walked outside to the airstrip. I walked to her side. She was looking at tyre marks on the concrete in the light of her flashlight, and seemed lost in thought.

  Presently I asked her. ‘Thoughts, Fuzz?’

  She looked at me. ‘Probably a propeller-driven plane landing. Difficult to get a jet in here. And they look relatively recent. Say within the last week.’

  She took a photo on her phone with the flash on. She stopped and ran it through her mind and then paced the distance between the rubber smears.

  ‘That looks the size of something like a twin-prop. Something with the range to get to Frankfurt, like an Aviocar or a Skytruck. CIA and US Special Ops have a few. They dogleg at Frankfurt to get to places like Cyprus or the Middle East.’

  Fuzz tapped on her Android phone for a while. ‘Here we go… PZL M28 Skytruck… wheel track eleven feet… wheel base fourteen point three…’

  She paced it out again. Then she paced a point where there was one smear to the left. She came back and looked at me. ‘Yep. It was a Skytruck.’

  We looked around at the lines of antenna masts standing silently in the gloom, picked out by their red warning lights.

  I spoke. ‘Wouldn’t it be tricky getting a plane in and out among these masts?’

  Fuzz shrugged. ‘AFSOC pilots are among the best in the business. They’d use night-vision goggles and thermal imaging cameras. And the runway we’re standing on here, which we’ll call West North-South, has a good 1200 feet from the main blockhouses. A Skytruck can take off in that distance, easy.’

  ‘Better than you?’

  ‘They have their moments.’

  She looked around. ‘Hah. See? They may have packed up, but look. They left a vital piece of kit up.’

  I followed her gaze. Sure enough, there was a bright orange windsock on a high pole. It hung there like a hanged man.

  I shivered. It was eerie out here. The red lights in the gloom and the deserted base were giving me the creeps. I suddenly remembered the screenshot I had taken from Joe’s laptop. God, was my brain going with all the stress? Switch back on, Riz, I chided myself. I showed the photo to her.

  ‘One Leasing… Squawk 5331… I’ve heard of these guys. Spooky as heck.’

  She suddenly grabbed my shoulder.

  ‘RIZBHAI! I know where to go! I know exactly where to go to find the flight plans for this plane!’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Crawley, near Gatwick. I even know the boss there through work. He’ll be pleased to see me, too…’

  She grinned. ‘First thing tomorrow. Coming?’

  ‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Where you parked, Fuzz?’

  ‘Behind your car, where all the sheep are. Race you back.’

  9

  We both got back to my flat at around 9.30pm. Neither of us were in the mood to cook so I rang Perveen’s for a takeout. Fuzz went straight to her laptop and Skype and started calling in favours and hitting pilots’ forums. I scooped up my doormat mail and got the plates out for us. Busy morning ahead tomorrow. There was a post
card from Asma and Bambi, and a letter from St Andrews University terrorism studies course. I had to complete a module. I laughed inwardly. Oh the irony. I had fallen a bit behind lately, what with being shot at by everyone from the Syrian Army to mad wahaabis and then tied to a massive van-bomb. I was sure they’d understand.

  An hour or so later, me and Fuzz were deep into our various laptop excursions. The takeout had arrived. Behind us on my wall TV the Parliament Channel was showing George Galloway giving the other side an almighty bollocking about the last couple of months. Go on George, I thought to myself.

  Fuzz looked up. ‘Sorted. The main thing I’m doing tomorrow is looking at Iron Maiden’s Boeing loadout down in ATC Lasham. But before that, we have an appointment at Chrome Flightplan in Crawley.’

  I nodded back at her. ‘OK ukhti. By the way - how are the rest of the girls getting on?’

  Fuzz looked up again and seemed to be sorting through a mental Rolodex. After a minute she replied.‘Duckie was last heard of in a known Combat 18/Infidels pub in Stoke-on-Trent. That's a bit of a tightrope. Calamity and Sadie are on a sniper course in the States, down at the bloke from YouTube's range. What's his face, the guy you laugh at... Professional Russian? They're brushing up on the non-shooting bits. Y'know, sniper-as-reconnaissance.’

  I pulled her up on that.‘He's not actually Russian and hang on a minute... what? Has she still not dropped yet? Pregnant? In that heat? She's nuts.’

  ‘...And we got the mother of all bollockings from Maryam's mum. You can imagine the phone calls. Why was her daughter running around being shot when she should be doing her homework etc. she's so grounded etc.’

  ‘Where did she end up that night?’

  ‘We plonked her in UCL A and E. She wouldn't have said anything, she hates cops’, said Fuzz blithely.

  ‘Jesus, you are some tough chicas.’

  ‘Wouldn't have it any other way... ’

  ‘And Roadrunner?’

  ‘You'll like this. She put a plank on the accelerator of the fire appliance and launched it into the Thames.’