The Network - Jason Elliot [140]
We drive to the valley floor and then ascend again, winding up through the dust until, beyond the final bend, the fort looms suddenly above us. The walls are about fifty feet high and broken only by a giant pair of wooden doors, within which a smaller door the size of a man is framed. Aref and Sher Del walk to it, rattle the heavy iron loops and exchange some words with a voice on the far side. The small door opens and a turbanned armed man emerges. After a few minutes he goes back inside and the two main doors swing open. We drive in.
A double storey of dilapidated rooms runs around the wide central courtyard. Above them the turrets are linked by a narrow earthen parapet. It’s strange to think that in London we’ve seen a satellite photograph of this very place. The two guards are local men, who tell us they’ve kept watch over the place for the past month. They both have AKs, and when H asks what other weapons they have they point to a PK light machine gun in one of the turrets and an RPG-7 grenade launcher in a corner of the courtyard, beside which lie several bulbous rounds.
The two guards ask whether, now that we’re here, they can leave. For a small sum we persuade them to stay a little longer.
‘Get one of them on stag up there,’ says H, pointing to one of the turrets. ‘We don’t want to be interrupted. Then get the others to turn the vehicles around and tell them to come and help.’
One of the guards leads us to a door and unlocks the padlock that secures it. Inside it’s about the size of a double garage, and is half-filled with a brooding mound covered in dusty tarpaulins. We pull them off, throwing up a bright slanting wall of dust made suddenly luminous by the sunlight. There’s an assortment of crates and black boxes, which we stand before in silence. I can’t really believe it’s them. Ten million dollars’ worth of missiles, give or take.
‘We could go into business with this lot,’ says H. ‘Come on.’
With the second guard we work in pairs, hauling everything from the room and laying it out in the courtyard like bodies in a morgue. Some of the missiles are in their original plastic weatherproof cases; others are in wooden crates; and some are wrapped up in sacking which we have to cut through. There are a few surprises. Three of the missiles are British-made Blowpipes, and there are half a dozen Soviet surface-to-air missiles. There’s also a Soviet 82-millimetre mortar with several boxes of ammunition.
‘Good piece of kit, that,’ says H, rubbing the stubble on his chin. ‘Seems a shame to blow it up.’
H and I work from opposite ends, photographing the serial numbers and logging the condition of the battery units in our notebooks. One by one our men return them to the room and pile them around a central open space. It takes us more than two hours. Then, as they look on, brushing the dust from their clothes, we unload the explosives from the G.
The layout of the explosives takes the form of a chain of two circuits, linked together. In the unlikely event that the primary circuit fails to detonate, the secondary will fire, detonating the first in the process by the power of the blast. Detcord firing systems with detcord priming are the safest, so we lay a long circular length of the bright orange cable over the pile for a ring main, and tie on six shorter lengths as branch lines leading to the individual charges. The plastic explosive is toxic so we leave the blocks in their paper covering, wrap each one with several turns of detcord and place them among the missiles. One of them will go into the central space that we’ve left open for the purpose. It’s probably not necessary but reassures us. The process reminds me faintly of arranging Christmas lights on a tree.
Then we repeat the same system, using the detonators, which we tape to the six ends of each branch line. Then we make a cut into each block of plastic so as to enclose the detonators in cosy beds of high explosive.
‘They call this the direct insertion method,