down their area like this every time a bomb went off.
The target was now just two ahead but the traffic had spread out as we finally headed back towards town. I knew where we were the moment we passed the Russian embassy. I wondered if I'd see the Jock carrying bodies out to the bins, still clearing up after last night.
We were soon at the river and the diversion lifted. It took a twenty this time to keep him moving. He must have sensed the end was in sight.
We stayed behind the Mazda as it approached the market, finishing up only about five hundred metres from where we'd started. The crowd was still being held back and had turned hostile. The Italians eyed them warily from behind their sunglasses.
The Mazda stopped. I squeezed the bony shoulder. 'Stop here, matey.'
Eyes on the Mazda, I grabbed my Bergen and shoved him one last ten. He could probably afford to drive straight home and begin his retirement.
I watched the target get out and skirt the crowd. It wasn't difficult: his cowpat was still a mile above the rest. He wasn't fucking around. He knew where he was going.
I followed, head down, eyes up, locking on to the back of his hat.
We reached a large car park among the cluster of flat-roofed, baked-mud dwellings that spread on up the hill.
He put his hands into his waistcoat pockets. He was searching for something. Keys . . .
Fuck.
He opened the driver's door of a battered black flatbed.
I spun round and broke into a run. Matey was still trying to turn round. I jumped in front of his bonnet, brandishing a twenty. His grin was bigger than ever.
69
As I jumped in, the black pickup had reached the last stretch of tarmac before the hill. Both of us soon hit the dirt road and started snaking through the shanty town.
We climbed steeply, past small, square, flat-roofed shacks. The cab lurched across ruts and potholes. The other wagon kicked up a dustcloud a couple of hundred metres ahead. The city was soon below us.
As we got higher, a few brick and concrete houses jutted out of the hillside. Boys played football with bare feet. Women sat in groups on terraces carved out of the slope. Every hundred metres or so, we hit a hairpin. The cab was just inches from a sheer drop down into the valley. The road must have been built as access to the antennae farms, and these families had piggybacked off it. There was no planning permission needed. It looked like they'd just scraped out a terrace with picks and shovels and used the spoil to build with.
I'd seen rougher and dirtier shanties than this in India and South America. At least some of the kids here were running round in school uniform, the boys in blue shirts, the girls in white headscarves. And the packed mud was swept scrupulously clean. It seemed there was a whole lot more civic pride up here than I'd ever seen down in the valley.
A rusting Soviet hulk, ripped apart by the muj, overshadowed the next bend. It might have been picked clean by the buzzards. We lost sight of the black pickup for a moment, then found it again as we completed a sharp left-hander.
It was parked up alongside a two-storey rectangular house that was set back from the track by about ten metres on higher ground. It had three windows on the upper floor at the front, and one each side of the front door below. All were boarded up. No smoke curled from the chimney. No electricity cables ran in from the road and there was nobody in sight.
The next three hundred metres cost me another ten dollars, but there were no turns, just more dead Russian armour. We crested the hill on the saddle, alongside a group of old guys sitting cross-legged in a huddle round a cooking-pot. They gave us a look and got straight back to the business of cooking up dinner.
The track forked left up to one of the antennae farms, and right to the other. The driver stopped, turned in his seat, and gave me a triumphant but toothless smile. I gave him a final ten. 'I'll get out here, matey.'
As he embarked on a many-point turn behind me, I walked towards the barbed-wire fence round the installation immediately above the target, but not so purposefully that it might rattle the AK-toting guards hanging out by its gate. Both antennae farms