Danger Close (9 page)

16

‘Check it out, darling dollface!’

Bang-Bang pulled a section of Persian rug away from the corner of her cell wall to reveal…  a rectangular hole. Straight down into the floor and the dirt. I peered in. It was lit by a chain of those lights you get at Christmas, and seemed to go down a good four feet. I could see tubes and hear a fan whirring. A rope ladder went down into the gloom, and to the left, three black truck batteries were sitting there nice as pie with cables running from them. Obviously these were the famous missing Humvee batteries.

‘Holly. The General asked me to ask you to stop it, by the way.’

‘Did he now? Bit late for that.’

‘How did you drill down? Isn’t it poured concrete flooring?’

‘Not in this block, it’s all prefab. I stamped my foot one day trying to kill a cockroach and put it right through the plasterboard. And when I looked, it looked like an old access pipe or drainage, from when the Russians ran the base I guess. Anyway – I’m tunnelling along the pipe and widening it. See them batteries? 24 volt, they are. I had to build my own 12 volt converter for them after I’d blown up two sewing machines and a Moulinex…’

She trailed off and checked the battery leads and nodded to herself. ‘While we’re waiting, let me show you round my MTV Crib. OK… bunkbed. Quran. Prayer mat, with compass. That bit made me laugh, babe. Sewing kit. Henna. Steel bog I’m sorry, I mean toilet. No telly. Lots of gear though.’

She meant the syringes and the needles and the bag of white powder sitting on the table. Above it hung her old Phoenix Program t-shirt, now even more artfully distressed by a bullet hole and bloodstains. I promised myself that if it was the last thing I ever did, I would get her out of here and off that smack.

Bang-Bang was hanging up some washing on a line on the other side of her cell. She spoke distractedly over her shoulder. Her voice sounded slurry, like a tape recorder with low batteries.

‘Doll, if you look in the top drawer, there’s some bits of A4 paper on which I’ve sketched as much as I could gather of the layout of this place. Have a look.’

I looked in the drawer. Two sheets of A4. I laid them on the surface and tried to orient them and commit as much as possible to memory. Bang-Bang came over to my shoulder and started tapping out points on the sketches. ‘Ok, from the left. This is hangar one and two. Intake booth. Airlock. Mens’ section. Library… tailoring shop… canteen.’

Her hand trailed to the second page. ‘Womens’ section. Creche… sewing room. Literacy classroom. OK, now outside. Basketball court. Kids’ playground.’

I was astonished. ‘Really? All of that? We went to the basketball court but I didn’t realise there was all this extra stuff…’

‘Really babe. Now look at the perimeter. ANA hangar and guardhouse. Fenceline. Main runway. Ambulances. And here… are the containers.’

She pointed to sketched rectangular boxes opposite the ambulance park. ‘Third one along is where the Nazi soldiers are hiding captured weapons.’

A girl in a hijab put her head round the corner and rattled off what sounded like some questions. Bang-Bang replied and handed her some clothing and some scraps of cloth. The girl said “Jazaak allahu Khair” and left.

‘How d’you know it’s the third container along?’

‘Because that girl you just saw, who just came in, is related to a guard on the northern perimeter. Everyone knows someone who knows someone here in the north, darling.’

Bang-Bang pointed at the sliding gates to her cell with a trackmarked arm. ‘See these gates? They’re broken. We can’t shut them. And get this. When the power fails in this facility… every door opens.’

‘All of them?’

She nodded. ‘All of them. All the way to the outside. They’ve been trying to fix it for months but nothing seems to stick. That’s why I’m interested in these power outages. They don’t last long, only a few minutes, but when the next one happens, we could be down the tunnel, out to the outer perimeter, and just hit the back door like our name was Carl Lewis.’

Suddenly there was a rattling noise from the bottom of the shaft. We went to look. Below us, some kind of tray on wheels banged in from the right with a small sack of earth suspended on it. Bang-Bang clapped her hands. ‘Ah. There’s the 8.15.’

I looked at her. ‘You’ve got this automated?’

‘You betcha. That’s the shuttle robot bringing the soil and sand back from the digger, regular as clockwork every half hour.’

She pulled on a rope pulley and heaved the sack of debris up to ground level, and then called out behind her in what I assumed had to be Pashto, in a high, bird-like trill. After a few minutes her two little helpers appeared and made off with the sack.

She looked back at me. ‘It’s what I learned from that film, cuz. The POWs spread the soil bit by bit, from the bottoms of their trousers, and the Germans never cottoned on. And neither are this lot. All those missing pillow cases… we’re nearly there.’

I had to look at the work so far. ‘Babe. I have to see this.’

‘Be my guest.’ She stroked my shoulder and handed me a flashlight and some goggles.

I went down the rope ladder, checked the light and went forward over the soil retrieval machine and down the tunnel. I cast the light around me. The tunnel was about four feet high and wide and shored up by the missing bedding planks and the now-infamous missing industrial Heinz bean cans, bashed out and flattened. I kitten-crawled forward past the odd Christmas fairy light and a ventilation pipe made from some old PC wire tubing. From within the nearest pipe, I could hear the asthmatic whir of a fan. The floor was made from those same bedding planks. There were small black rails, for the various machines, I assumed.

After twenty minutes crouching and crawling, I came to a slight bend where the tunnel traversed a steel I-beam. That would have to be part of the hangar foundations. Rounding it, I shone my flashlight on the strangest contraption. It looked like a cement mixer on wheels, on the end of a thick electrical cable, with the drum stripped away and some Moulinexes affixed to the front, and it was chugging away at the soil. A taped Maglite torch was boresighted to show where it was going. Nearly ninety degrees vertical as far as I could tell. It was kicking up dust and vibrating like a dog with its teeth stuck in a bear. I turned over on my arse and made my way back.

Twenty minutes later I emerged into Bang-Bang’s cell with the flashlight between my teeth.‘It’s a boy!’ she said and giggled vacantly. ‘Did you like it?’

‘Holly… it’s genius. It really is.’

‘Thankyou doll.’ She smiled and checked her watch again. ‘Right. Time for some curry, courtesy of our lovely dinner ladies onsite. I’m taking you to dinner. And then, we have a show on.’

‘A show on? You have
got
to be kidding.’

‘I ain’t. But first. Riz luv. I’m a junkie. And I need to get clean.’

Her pupils were pinpricks. She was shivering again. This was
not
going to be easy. ‘You know how this goes…’

I did.

‘I’m going to shoot up. And reduce the dose. It’s not going to be pretty… remind me when we’re getting married again?’

I had to laugh. That laugh died as she got the works out and began cooking up. She got the tourniquet on her arm.

‘It ain’t gonna be easy, it ain’t gonna be…’

And that was the second time I’d seen tears in her eyes. She shuddered and gathered herself and placed the syringe on the table. ‘I am
going
to beat this.’

17

We convened in the southern hangar gym hall. We did indeed have a show on. That letter had got me and Bang-Bang back into the mens’ section with no problems at all. I sat down the front with the English guys. Mo nodded at me. I looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

‘So now we’ve got a Gang Show?’

He grinned.

‘Yep. We’re thinking of calling this Taliban’s Got Talent.’

Bang-Bang came out from stage left. She looked pale, but more alive, and stood for ten seconds, time enough for the southern Talebs to get annoyed, and then launched into the classic song Paan Khaye Saiyan Hamaro and the place went absolutely mental. They even had a small band sitting down the front. Someone had replaced Bang-Bang’s nosering with one twice as big, complete with the traditional chain to her left earring. As the applause died down and the house band started playing Tu Bulale, she winked at me and came over to whisper in my ear and nodded in Mo’s direction. ‘That Brummie Taleb. When we break out, he’s coming out with us. You OK with that?’

‘Of course, he’s a good lad. Agreed.’

18

An hour later we were all playing cards. The southern Taliban were ahead on points. They refused to play for money, as that would be “proper gambling”. Mo was dealing in and Bang-Bang was sitting back and serenely, surreptitiously watching a pager in her right hand. She’d used some boot polish to paint a black nose and whiskers on her face. ‘Keeps the natives happy’ she’d explained. Her left hand was holding my wrist. Her hand had been on mine for the last half an hour and I knew something was about to go down. Suddenly the pager beeped.

She squeezed my wrist and looked at me. ‘We’re go.’

We left for the womens’ section, checked behind us, and went to her cell. We pulled the carpet to one side and clambered down the rope ladder. Bang-Bang was ahead of me. We both had flashlights, wrapped with insulating tape, gripped in our teeth and we made use of the fairy lights on the tunnel walls. After twenty minutes we were at the end of the excavation. Bang-Bang produced some screwdrivers and dismantled the tunnelling machine and passed the various components back to me. I laid them on the tunnel floor.

She looked back at me and nodded. Above her seemed to be a loose collection of dirt and some plasterboard. This was it. She took a deep breath and hit it. It broke upwards. Into light.

We seemed to be under a desk. We clambered up and out. Into a deserted office. It was the American base pharmacy.

I looked at Bang-Bang. Bang-Bang looked at me. After a few seconds she went ‘Erm…’

I went ballistic.

‘Erm? Is that all you have to say! Darling doll, you’ve tunnelled in exactly the wrong direction!’

Bang-Bang swore and picked up a telephone handset and flung it at the wall. She scooped up all the pens on a desk and flung them the other way, cursing in Urdu. Then she grabbed a tray of surgical instruments, with murder in her eyes. She threw it at a partition window with an almighty crash.

I grabbed her shoulder. She was trembling, fizzing, with rage. ‘Hey. Doll. We’re
here
. Let’s make the most of it. They don’t know we’re in here. Let’s grab what we can.’

She blinked and looked at me. The painted-on nose and whiskers made her look slightly ridiculous. She shook her head and spoke. ‘Well, babe, I hope you’ve got a plan forming in yer’ ‘ead, because I’m all out.’

I hugged her. ‘I have. Watch.’

Her eyes cleared. ‘You have?’

‘I have. Look around. What do you see?’

She looked around her. ‘Ahem. OK. I see… medical stuff… OK we’re having that. Oh yes we’re having that. And them.’

I could see the life coming back into her. She pointed at a rack of… I spoke. ‘Uniforms... Stethoscopes. Magazines. You see?’

She nodded at me and grinned. ‘I see.’

And we both scrambled to get as much as we could grab. She was off like a rocket. She grabbed some IDs and a set of ANA uniforms. She rattled through a clothes rack and after a while, held a uniform to her and grinned.

‘Waddya reckon?’

I had to agree. The uniforms would fit or could be taken in, and no-one really looked at the photo on an ID when there was a distraction. ‘It’s a go, babes.’

Then her gaze settled on the computers.

‘Oh no. No freaking way. We are not getting those back down the tunnel.’

She pouted and did that fluttery-eyelash thing.

‘Holly. NO.’

‘I’ve been off the internet for about thirteen days…’

‘HOLLY. NO.’

She shrugged and went back to scooping up uniforms.

I cleared up the mess and took a quick look through the office windows. No-one about. For now. I gathered a pile of magazines. I wanted to know what was going on in the outside world. All intel was useful. I checked on the desktops and the wallboard for anything else. There was a prominent flyer from the USO, saying fifteen lucky participants in this month’s survey would receive a $500 Visa gift card in the Sound Off Sweepstakes drawing on October 15th…

And here was what looked like a security circular from INSCOM. I grabbed it. Bang-Bang was disappearing back into the hole under the desk with her haul. I whistled and she stopped.

‘What?’

I was thinking. ‘Wait one sec, doll. I’ve got an idea as to how to cause a diversion.’

I started rooting through the drawers. I needed a book of some sort. Ah. Perfect. In a bottom drawer, of all things, was a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. I turned and brandished it triumphantly, and then placed it in a metal wastepaper basket. I topped the basket off with a pile of dressings and a bottle of surgical alcohol. Belatedly I noticed two holdalls stencilled “AMEDD”. I flung everything into one holdall and carried both back to our hole. The empty holdall would have to do to disguise our unwarranted entry through the office floor. It wasn’t much but hopefully it would hold up.

Bang-Bang had hoisted herself halfway back out of the hole and was watching me in puzzlement.

‘Babe, Fifty Shades may be a crap read but how is going to cause…’

Sudden realisation dawned on her face. I grinned back at her.

‘Oh Riz, you wicked boy. Yep, that’ll work alright.’