At first glance tit looked impregnable: a huge, squat, featureless building devoid of windows, surrounded by a high chainlink frence topped by barbed wire. Four armed guards patrolled the fence with dogs. A gatehouse by the main entrance was manned by more guards and crested with a pair of video cameras. Bright lights – searchlights, really – illuminated the entire property, and the dozens of cars, vans and buses parked inside the fence.
We instructed Ahmed to drive right around the property twice. While he did so, wearing what seemed to me a polite but incredulous these-people-are-crazy expression, Jesse aimed his Android phone through the open window at the dense mass of the factory, beaming video straight back to LoTek in the Burj al-Arab. This was a recon mission. Our hope was to find some chink in its armour.
We had almost finished our circumnavigation when a big blue dragonfly buzzed through the open window into the Rolls-Royce. I made a halfhearted attempt to shoo it back out, but it took up residence in an upper corner, and I gave up. Jesse closed the window and told Ahmed to stop the car a moment. Ahmed, who behind his discreet mask was clearly both puzzled and curious, pulled over next to the immense construction site across from the Greenwood factory.
“What now?” Lisa asked.
Jesse shrugged. “Wait for LoTek.”
Sophie said, “I’d like to go back and analyze that footage myself.”
“Or, we could get another perspective,” I suggested. Sophie and Jesse looked at me with surprise. I pretended not to notice and craned my neck up at the two huge cranes that loomed above the construction site like origami colossi. “Anybody up for a little climbing?”
They were surprised, I supposed, because historically speaking I was never the one to make suggestions or take the initiative; they were the genius world-beaters, they took the lead. But I was sick of the role of sidekick, and having rescued both of them within the last 48 hours, I suddenly felt much less overawed and intimidated by the thought of taking charge.
Lisa grinned. “Beats sitting here doing nothing.”
Jesse and Sophie exchanged a dubious look. “Maybe later,” she said. “One step at a time. Iterate to a solution.”
He nodded. “We can always come back. No sense risking it now.”
Maybe they were right, but for a moment I wanted to yell at them to shut the fuck up and play along with what I wanted for once. I squelched the impulse violently. The stakes were too high.
We rode back to the Burj al-Arab in silence, except for the faint hum of the dragonfly in the corner. I wondered where it had come from: this was a desert country. We were near the Jebel Ali port, but they weren’t salt-water creatures.
Or were they? Now that I thought of it, we had seen one far offshore of Haiti, too, on board the Ark Royale, just before we were attacked.
…And come to think of it, I had also seen a big blue dragonfly, one very like the one currently resident in the Rolls-Royce, in that schoolroom in Colombia, only moments before the mortar attack began…
I started as if stabbed, as a revolutionary notion was birthed in my mind. “Stop!” I shouted. “Ahmed, stop the car!”
Chapter 77
To his credit he didn’t hesitate, braked us smoothly but quickly to a halt between two big assembly plants guarded by tall chainlink fences. My door was open even before we stopped moving. “Everyone out,” I ordered, “scatter, now!”
Jesse, Lisa and Sophie didn’t dispute or question my claim; my panic convinced them. Ahmed was slower to move. He didn’t understand the urgency, and was probably trained not to leave his vehicle. I solved that problem by opening his door, grabbing him, and physically pulling him out.
“Sir, I must request that you release me,” Ahmed pleaded as I dragged him across the wide road – and as an all too familiar whine began to tickle my eardrums, from directly above us.
His shock was just beginning to turn to anger when a gray blur fell from the sky into the Silver Ghost like a cormorant diving for fish. Death from above.
I threw myself and Ahmed to the ground just in time. We didn’t hear the crash, only the explosion. My eyes were squeezed shut, my whole body was turned away from the blast, but the light was so bright that for a fleeting moment I actually saw the world through my eyelids, like a lightning strike illuminating darkness. The pulse of heat was scalding. The shockwave rattled my bones like dice in a cup.
I got up wobbling and dazed and half-deaf; but I got up, and around me the others did the same, with varying degrees of alacrity, shaken but not broken by the explosion. I smelled my own scalded hair. I was grateful that carbon fibre tended to melt rather than turn to shrapnel, and that the bits of the Rolls-Royce had been driven downwards rather than horizontally.
“Merciful God,” Ahmed said beside me. He must have shouted it for me to hear him. His voice was full of awe and wonder, as if this had been a religious experience rather than an attempted slaughter. I supposed the line was fine.
We reassembled in the middle of the road, not far from the smoking carcass that had once been a luxury automobile. The ground within a thirty-foot radius had been transformed from smooth tarmac and sand into something that looked more like churned mud, pockmarked with bits of Rolls-Royce.
“Everyone OK?” Lisa asked.
We gave our uncertain assent. Sophie looked pale and on the verge of collapse. I reached out and put a steadying hand on her shoulder. It won me a grateful look.
A set of headlights appeared in the distance, coming our way, fast.
“Guys,” I said, “either the Dubai police respond with freaking inhuman speed, or we need to get out of here now.”
I matched action to word, turned and ran. Lisa was right behind me. When I glanced over my shoulder I saw Jesse and Sophie following a little further behind. Ahmed stood where he was, bewildered.
The explosion-harrowed earth acted as a huge speed bump, but wouldn’t buy us enough time to reach an intersection. The chainlink fences that walled both sides of the road extended for hundreds of metres in either direction, and were topped with overhanging strands of barbed wire; but about fifty metres away, some of that wire had wilted. I charged straight for that weak point.
When I reached the fence I leaped up it and climbed. Lisa started behind me, but reached the top first. She avoided the flaccid barbed wire with ease; I teetered dangerously as I negotiated my way past, but reached the horizontal pole atop the fence without getting hooked.
We turned to aid the others. Sophie, unused to bomb attacks and physical exertion, had fallen further behind, and Jesse had slowed to stay with her. They were not yet at the fence when the SUV cleared the patch of mangled pavement and leapt towards us with snarling engine. They had only just begun to climb when it screeched to a halt and men with guns, Slavic men in Arabic robes, emerged.
I was about to throw myself at them from above, to distract them, to give Sophie and Jesse a chance to get away. Then Lisa’s hand pulled me backwards. I fought for balance, lost, fell inside the fence and landed hard on gravel. I cried out from the pain, but it was only contusions, no broken bones. Lisa shimmied down the fence with a rattle and landed beside me.
For a moment all I could see was Sophie’s aghast and terrified face through the chainlink. Then they pulled her and Jesse off the fence, and Lisa yanked me up to my feet and shouted, “Run!”