‘Wait here,’ said Hassad, as they all climbed out of the Unimog.
Porter stood for a moment next to the vehicle. The wounded man was already being taken towards one of the mineshafts, but the other men stayed behind next to Porter, all of them cradling their AK-47s in their chests. Porter was sure he could smell some wild flowers in the night air, and there was a musty, metallic aroma that came from the piles of broken ore scattered around the crater. Copper, Porter reckoned. He’d had a mate who’d been a plumber once, and whenever you met the bloke for drink, he always had the same smell of burnt copper clinging to his skin after a day’s work.
Hassad had returned to the vehicle and was looking straight at Porter. ‘Are you here to kill us?’
Porter didn’t so much as blink. ‘We just want a discussion.’
‘Then come,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk inside.’
Porter followed him across the crater. It was a walk of about thirty metres to the mineshaft, and they completed it in silence. As he walked, Porter was trying to make a mental recce of the layout of the place. Alongside the Mercedes, there were two other vehicles: a small Skoda Felicia, and a big Honda CR-V that had a couple of dents in its side. Close by, he saw a small, diesel-powered electricity generator that was obviously powering the place. He’d already seen a few men go in and out of the mineshaft, so he calculated there must be a whole platoon of Hezbollah fighters here. How many? I’m probably about to find out.
Hassad pushed open the doorway. The entrance to the mine opened up into a small, low room, with a single electric lamp at one side. The walls were composed of a sandy, stained rock, cut into deep grooves where the mineshaft had been sunk. Directly in front of them was a metal cage lift. Hassad slung the wire door open, and instructed Porter to step inside before he followed and pulled the lever. The lift started to drop: Porter judged they’d descended at least twenty-five or thirty metres into the ground before the lift came to a juddering halt.
As Porter stepped out, he could see a corridor leading into the interior of the abandoned quarry. Single-bulb electric lights were slung up on the low ceiling every twenty metres, but they did no more than cast a pale, murky light through the space. Hassad unhooked a gas lamp from the wall, turning up its light, and then starting to descend a rickety flight of wooden steps. Porter counted thirty steps down, twisting through a narrow channel carved into the rock. Glimpses of the copper could just about be seen in the walls. At the bottom, the space widened out into a cave, with six different tunnels leading off in different directions. In the centre, there was some broken and rusty machinery that must once have been used to cut out the ore and lift it up to the surface, but from the state of it Porter guessed it must have been years since the mine was worked. Some water was dripping through the roof. Hassad took the first tunnel, a sharp left from the bottom of the staircase.
The passageway was narrow, no more than four feet across, and only six feet high: it had been carved out of the rock to ferry the miners deep into the ground, and there was no room for more than one man to pass at the same time. One bloke with an assault rifle could hold this place against an army of men, Porter reflected grimly. They had chosen it with care. Even if the British did find out where Katie Dartmouth was being held, they could send in a whole battalion and still not have much chance of getting her out.
Not alive anyway.
Hassad led him into a small room. It measured ten feet by six, there was a straw bed in one corner, and some coffee was brewing on a stove made from hot bricks. There was a sweet, sticky smell to the air that Porter found nauseating. In one corner, there was a lamp, but there was a cloth thrown across it, as if Hassad didn’t like the light too much. He poured some coffee into two small white cups, and handed one to Porter. ‘So now we can talk,’ he said flatly.
Porter took a hit of the coffee. It was thick and black, with a sludge of grounds at the bottom. He could feel it hitting his veins, washing aside some the exhaustion that had afflicted him since he’d touched down in this country. He had thought about this moment for the last few days, but now it was here, he realised you couldn’t plan a deal like this one. Sometimes a man had to be guided by his wits and his instincts alone. If they weren’t good enough to get him through, then it was no use imagining anything else would.
‘You know who they were, don’t you?’
‘Who?’ said Hassad.
‘The bastards who took me.’
Hassad drained the last of his coffee and grabbed a handful of cashew nuts from a bowl next to the coffee pot. In the semi-darkness of the room, you could hardly see the deformity around his mouth. You could see the tiredness, however. This was a man who spent his life living underground, and only emerged blinking into the daylight for the occasional fierce firefight.
‘I went to the café to find you,’ said Hassad. ‘It was as I had arranged it. When I arrived, you weren’t there, but I spoke to the barman, and he said that you had been led away by two men.’
‘They had the password.’
‘Then you were betrayed,’ said Hassad. ‘The British can’t be trusted. That won’t come as news to anyone down here.’
‘Who says it wasn’t one of your people who betrayed me?’ said Porter. ‘There could be plenty of people who didn’t want me to come here.’
‘Everyone here is loyal to me, and loyal to the cause,’ said Hassad. ‘There are no traitors within Hezbollah.’ A thin smile twisted up his deformed mouth. ‘Betrayal is a British speciality.’
‘The bastards who took me looked like Arabs to me.’
‘They are, but they work for a company called Connaught Security Services,’ said Hassad. There was no emotion in his voice. Porter realised he was in the company of a soldier: a man who killed people when he had to, but who always respected his enemy.
‘It’s a British private security firm, with offices throughout the Middle East. They are in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and out here as well. They work for whoever pays them. Mining companies, oil companies, airlines. And the British government as well when it suits them.’
But why the hell did they take me? Porter asked himself. Who were they working for?
‘We have contacts inside their organisation, which was how we found out that they had taken you, and where,’ said Hassad. ‘Once we knew that, we had no choice but to come and get you. Three of my men died, however.’ He looked sternly at Porter. ‘Your life doesn’t come cheap, Mr Porter. Now it is time to tell me why you are here.’
‘To bring Katie Dartmouth home,’ said Porter.
Hassad listened to the statement without a flicker of reaction.
‘You have details, I suppose, of your government’s willingness to bring its troops home from Iraq,’ he said flatly. ‘We have already said the woman will be released so long as this one simple condition is met.’
Porter took a step forward. ‘Is she here?’
Hassad nodded.
‘I want to see her.’
There was a flicker of doubt across Hassad’s face, but then the twisted mouth turned up into a smile.
‘Of course,’ he replied.
He started to walk from the room. Porter followed him, out into the corridor, and back along to the main meeting point at the bottom of the staircase. Hassad took another tunnel. It stretched for thirty metres, although Porter quickly realised the lamp wasn’t powerful enough to illuminate it to the end. They had walked for ten metres along its length when Hassad suddenly stopped. Right in front of him there was a solid steel door built into the side of the rock. Two men were standing outside, both of them dressed in black, and with AK-47s strapped to their chests. Hassad nodded to them, and they nodded back, but neither of them spoke. Hassad pushed the door open, then stepped inside. ‘This way,’ he said, glancing back.