The Network - Jason Elliot [122]
On the Monday I take a taxi to a suburb in the south of the city called Deh Qalandar and walk the final stretch alone to the ruined palace. The giant rooms have long ago been stripped of their furniture and fittings and are strewn with smashed masonry, plaster and glass. I wait an hour, but no one comes. I return again at the same time the following day. There are a few children playing in the rubble, but there is no one to meet me. Realising how slim the chances are of re-establishing contact with Manny in this way, and dwelling on the many factors that make it unlikely, my sense of expectation begins to waver.
‘Don’t let it get to you,’ says H, who spent a good deal of his time in Northern Ireland waiting in unmarked cars for informers who never showed up. He knows I’m hoping to meet a source useful to London, but he knows nothing of my history with Manny and can’t know how disappointed I am.
On the Thursday a message comes from Mr Raouf. Our supplies are ready, which means it’s time to get the operation underway. We drive to the trust’s headquarters, where Mr Raouf is waiting for us, beaming mischieviously. He leads us to a storeroom and throws aside a dusty tarpaulin to reveal several metal trunks.
‘Befarmaid.’ He grins, stretching out his hand. ‘Be my guest.’
We unpack the trunks with a feeling of awe. There are several wooden boxes of plastic explosive, each containing half a dozen blocks the size of small bricks wrapped in brown waterproof paper to keep out moisture. I recognise the type. It’s Iranian Composition 4, C4 for short, made from the high explosive RDX with a small percentage of non-explosive plasticiser which allows it to be cut or shaped. It has a detonation velocity of nearly 30,000 feet per second, which makes it more powerful than dynamite and an ideal demolition charge.
There’s a long roll of waterproof blasting fuse resembling thin black rope, which H calls time fuse. The design hasn’t changed much since Guy Fawkes’ time. It’s a modified form of gunpowder, wrapped in a waterproof fabric sheath to enable it to burn underwater if necessary. It’s this that will give us our time delay, though we’ll have to test its burning rate to see what length we’ll eventually need.
H lifts out what look like two rolls of bright orange electrical extension lead. It’s detonating cord, filled with the high explosive PETN and sealed in plastic. There are different strengths of detcord but a six-inch length has about the same power as a military blasting cap and a few turns will sever a telephone pole when detonated. We’ll use it to link the charges so that they detonate simultaneously. Then there’s a further box of lesser but essential accessories: masking tape for securing detonators to the detcord, a pair of crimping tools, some old-fashioned time-delay explosive pencils and non-electric ignitors. H takes out a block of the plastic, sniffs and squeezes it, and fits it back into its box.
‘Let’s see the dets,’ he says to Mr Raouf.
For safety, detonators are always stored separately from the charges they will eventually initiate. Mr Raouf has put them in a safe in his office, from which he returns bearing a small red metal case with a black and yellow sticker on the front depicting a skull and crossbones. There are twelve cigarette-sized detonators inside, six in each half of the case, separated by individual clips. H nods approvingly.
‘We can blow up a small town with this lot,’ he says. ‘You need to thank your mate. What about the other stuff?’
Mr Raouf leads us across the storeroom to another pile of equipment. There are some camping supplies and tarpaulins, several military-looking sleeping bags, a length of steel towing cable and half a dozen jerrycans for our extra