6
Nobody talked as I drove the Pajero away from the airport perimeter. You could cut the atmosphere with a gollock. I drove; Bastard was next to me in the passenger seat. He knew I had a pistol tucked between my legs out of his reach but within mine, and that Charlie had another behind him, but there was no knowing what he might do if he saw an opportunity to escape. If I was him, I’d be gone the first chance I got.
I pushed the heater to full blast, to get rid of the condensation. It had only been a short walk back to the 4x4, but we’d all got drenched.
I’d given Bastard a physical search when we got in, but he didn’t have the passports on him. Charlie was emptying his carry-on across the back seat.
I flicked the wipers from steady to rapid and threw Charlie a map from the side pocket. ‘Which way?’
He opened it out. ‘This is a fucking sight better than the one in the one-ten. Looks like just over two hundred Ks to the Turkish border.’
‘Four or five hours, maybe, as long as we don’t have to go off-road?’
He shook his head. ‘As the crow flies. But I reckon the best route’s south until we hit the pipeline, then follow it south-west.’
It was good thinking. What could be more normal than three Westerners mooching along that route — especially with official government accreditation in Mr Bastendorf’s wallet? It looked like someone had gone mad with a rubber stamp, then added, in Paperclip and English, that he was a welcome guest in their country, and should be given every assistance in carrying out his important work for the government. The added bonus was the $450 he had tucked away to go supersize when he hit Vienna airport.
I felt safer now I was in a vehicle, but I knew it was an illusion. If we hit a checkpoint we’d still have to bluff it big-time and bank on Bastard getting us through. Our two pistols should help persuade him to do that. Besides, he might be the world’s biggest arsehole, but he wasn’t a fool. He was a survivor.
Bastard coughed up a mouthful of phlegm, and started unwinding his window. He gobbed it out through the two-inch gap.
‘I don’t remember saying you could do that.’ My hand reached for the pistol. ‘Don’t make another move unless I say so, you understand?’
Bastard scoffed. ‘You think that’s scaring me? My mama done better.’
I concentrated on the road, barely visible through a near-solid curtain of rain.
My guess was, Bastard wasn’t in the FBI any more — or at least, he certainly didn’t carry any ID to say he was.
Charlie finished checking the carry-on. ‘No mobile here either.’
Bastard stared straight ahead. ‘I said I didn’t have one. Why the fuck would I need one now? The local things don’t work stateside, do they?’
‘Heading home, were you? What happened to the dream of the dusky senoritas?’
‘Go fuck.’
Even dog-legging it, we’d probably still get to the border well before last light, which would give us time to find a decent crossing point. I wasn’t going to tell him yet, but Bastard was coming with us. Georgia was in the good lads’ club with the USA these days, and probably had all sorts of pooling arrangements between police forces. Following Bush’s ‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us’ doctrine, any enemy of Georgia’s would be an enemy of America’s, and right now I seemed to be top of Tbilisi’s Most Wanted.
We skirted the city to the west and soon swapped the shiny new dual carriageway for a more familiar, knackered metalled road. Old guys sat behind tables at the verge, sheltering from the rain under trees and bits of plastic, trying to sell jugs and bottles of ancient engine oil.
Bastard scoffed. ‘Fucking stuff’s been through every truck in sight about sixteen times.’
Charlie and I didn’t respond. Bastard was trying to draw us in. He’d tried aggression, and now he was trying to lighten the mood and get all chummy.
The road ahead was flanked by giant cubes of grey concrete. Rusting steel skeletons jutted through their flaking skin. There had been no pink or orange facelift around here. Washing hung from the windows, getting a second rinse.
Bastard tried again. ‘I guess this particular boulevard didn’t make it onto the presidential route.’
We continued to ignore him. If he thought we were going to be sharing toothbrushes by the end of this trip, he was receiving on the wrong frequency.
I zigzagged round puddles for a kilometre or two, then we hit a sign for Borjomi, 151 km.
That cheered me up; the pipeline ran through Borjomi.
Dark cloud blanketed the high ground and I flicked on the lights. We weren’t the only vehicle on the road, and we were all competing in the giant pothole slalom. It could only be a matter of time before there was a pile-up in the gloom.
Puddles the size of bomb craters had claimed a couple of dilapidated Ladas. They still had exposed spark plugs, Charlie Clever Bollocks had explained to me, and flaked out nineteen to the dozen once they encountered a bit of moisture.
I glanced back at Charlie again. He seemed all right, no shakes, just sitting there, staring out of the window. Four or five hours from now, I could get him and his disco hands on a plane home.
7
The air con was still doing its stuff to keep the windscreen clear on the inside. We were well out of the suburbs, up in the high ground and shrouded in mist, when the tarmac stopped abruptly and we hit a wide gravel track.
Charlie sparked up from the back. ‘How are Hari and Kunzru?’
Bastard shrugged. ‘How the fuck should I know? I got the call; at least one of them was still breathing. I was heading back there when I saw you guys on the road. Anyway, fuck ’em. Welfare ain’t my responsibility.’
The mist cleared as we wound down the side of the mountain. A wide, fast-flowing river sparkled in the sunlight below us. Apart from the vivid brown scar that cut across the lush green of the valley floor, we were back in
Bastard jerked his thumb towards the point at which the line of freshly turned earth cut back towards us and started to run level with the road. ‘There’s your pipeline.’
‘Where’s the metalwork?’ I’d been expecting to see something above ground, as I had in the Middle East.
‘They’ve buried it. Makes it a whole lot tougher to blow up.’
Charlie leaned between us. ‘Our old mates the militants?’
‘Militants, Kurdish separatists, Muslim extremists, Russian assholes, you name it. They all either want a piece of the action, or to use the thing as a bargaining counter.
‘The Kurds wanna split from the Turks: you give us our country, we don’t fuck with your pipeline.
‘The Russians, well, they just want to fuck the pipeline up, period. Perestroika, my ass; the cold war never ended for those guys.
‘And closer to home, there’s the Georgian politicos, doing side deals with whoever comes within reach — and charging the oil companies a fucking fortune to give the pipeline house room in the first place.’
Charlie nodded. ‘And we have a few bits of paper tucked away explaining where our late lamented friend Mr Bazgadze fitted into all this.’
Bastard glowered at him. ‘Don’t count on it, asshole.’
The rain started again. I flicked the wipers back into overdrive, but still had to press my face against the windscreen to see where we were going.
