He thought of rain, cooling, healing and sweet, spattering on to the panes of windows.
That last night he had slept, had not dreamed, woken as exhausted as when he had lain down on the sand. In the morning they had set out again. Twice, a bull camel loaded with two of the boxes had slopped, had refused to go forward, and each time Rashid had come back from the front of them, had taken the bull's head in his hands, had put his own face close to it, stroked and soothed its bellowing, and whispered to it. Twice, the bull camel had responded to the kindness of the guide, had shown its loyalty to him, had started again to walk into the strength of the wind.
It was late in the afternoon when they had halted, not to pitch camp. The guide said they would stop for a short time, then go on.
Caleb sat against the body of the kneeling Beautiful One and felt the rhythmic panting of the beast against his back.
If he went where his memory took him, he would have stood with his arms outstretched, his head thrown back and his shirt unbuttoned, and he would have let the rain cascade on to him. When it had drenched him, and his clothes had clung to him, he would have danced and sung, gloried in it. He would not have huddled like the woman who pushed her baby in a buggy on the pavement or cringed from it like the man on the towpath who dragged his tiny ratting dog on a lead. He yearned for the rain that would have cooled the heat burning him and soothed the blister sores, that would have dribbled sweet on his lips.
The guide had poured water from the neck of a water bag into a metal mug that Fahd had held. Fahd had carried the mug to Hosni.
Perhaps Hosni did not see the mug clearly. Perhaps his eyesight failed him, perhaps he was too confused by exhaustion, by sunstroke. Hosni reached out, snatched at the mug, missed it and caught Fahd's wrist, twisted it. The mug toppled. Water fell from it, like rain.
The water drops from the mug sparkled, jerked Caleb from his fantasy.
'Idiot… fool,' Fahd screamed.
Hosni whimpered.
'You wasted water – imbecile.'
Hosni had the mug in his thin claw fingers and tugged for it. More water slurped over the rim. When Fahd released his hold on the mug and Hosni sagged back, more water spilled.
'I bring you water. What do you do? You throw it in the sand.'
Caleb watched, said nothing. The mug would have been a third full when Fahd had offered it to Hosni's stretched-out hands. Now there would only be a wetness at the mug's bottom.
'You don't get any more. You waste water, you go without,' Fahd yelled in his fury and his body quivered. 'We should never have brought you.'
He saw Hosni tilt the mug so that the last drops would run into his mouth, and then run his tongue round the sides and the base of it.
Hosni's wet watery eyes seemed to plead with Fahd as he prised the mug back from the fingers.
'There is no more water for you. I am not sharing my water with you.'
Fahd took away the mug. Caleb saw Hosni, his head bent, scrape the film of sand off the place where the water had fallen to retrieve the sand that was darkened. He cupped it into his hands, gobbled it into his mouth, then choked. The guide poured out Fahd's measure and Fahd drank it to the final drop.
'You will learn it for the next time, you do not throw away water,'
Fahd shouted.
Without water, they died. The camels could go a maximum of eighteen days without water, the boy had said, then they would die
– Caleb had long ago lost count of how many days they had been in the Sands. The men could not go eighteen hours without water. The bags on the Beautiful One were all empty. Caleb was not sure how many bags remained, filled, on the guide's camel; one or two, he hoped… Water went again into the mug, and Fahd brought it to him. Caleb took the mug.
He looked down into the water. It was green-coloured, dead. He felt the dryness of his throat, the roughness inside his mouth.
He remembered the rain, and the comfort of it. He held the mug carefully as he stood and walked across to Hosni.
He put his finger into Hosni's mouth, worked it round his tongue and the recesses of the man's throat, took out the sand and smeared it on his robe. Then, Caleb held the mug at Hosni's lips and tipped it.
When it was empty he carried the mug back to Rashid.
'We are carrying two fools,' Fahd snarled at Caleb, his face contorted with anger.
The heat burning them and burning the sand, and the sky that was clear, blue and without pity, the expanse of the desert, destroyed them. Caleb knew it.
They mounted up, rode away, and the windblown sand covered any trace of their passing.
Another lunchtime, another lecture. The crossword on the back page of Michael Lovejoy's newspaper had not yet been started. The folded page lay across his knee and the pencil was in his hand, but he had read no more than the first question, one across: A woman who strives to he like a man lacks… (Graffito, NY) eight letters. Lovejoy had his usual seat at the back of the room. He'd come down early, when he'd finished a mid-morning meeting, and had left the newspaper on the favoured chair. Just as well. They were sitting on the aisle steps and standing inside the door.
The speaker had the appearance of an old-fashioned preparatory-school teacher. He was as mild-looking a man as could be imagined wispy grey hair that had not been combed, a checked shirt with the collar curled up, a woven tie that was not pulled tight, a jacket with leather at the elbows, trousers that hadn't been pressed, and shoes that were scuffed. The man who had filled the lecture room in Thames House, on the north embankment of the river, came with a reputation. Officers from every branch of the Security Service had cut lunch to hear the scientist who was said to be better-informed on his specialized subject than any other man or woman in the United Kingdom. The subject was 'Dirty Bombs'.
'I don't consider there to be a great risk from either microbiological or chemical sources. An explosion that scatters anthrax or smallpox spores or that spreads a nerve gas in aerosol form would have little effect, even in the confined space of an underground-railway system.
The evidence from the United States of America, anthrax, and from Japan, nerve gas such as Sarin, tells me the result is bigger in instant headlines than in the reality of damage caused. No, it is the real Dirty Bomb that concerns me, the radioactive bomb. Let us consider, first, the availability of the necessary materials for that bomb… '
There was a grated cough from the assistant director of C Branch, otherwise nervous silence. Lovejoy had read the assessments, but the slightness and mildness of the speaker, and the quietness of his voice, gave his message a uniquely chilling quality. He was known to many of his younger colleagues – when they were polite about him – as a
'veteran'. A veteran of the Cold War counter-intelligence work, and the days of the Marxists in the trade unions, and a veteran of the twenty years of Irish guerrilla warfare, he had also learned the earlier history of the Security Service. Already, he thought this the bleakest lecture of a nightmare future he had heard since he had enrolled from Army service. In fact, and his mind roved, the only comparable moment would have been when the Service was told, sixty-four years earlier, of the imminence of a German invasion.
'We start with a suitcase. Any suitcase of a size that a man or woman uses for a week's stay in a hotel. Stand at Heathrow airport, at the arrivals gates of any of the terminals, and you will see passengers flooding through with suitcases of such a size. The wires and timing devices are available at any hardware and electronics shops. The terrorist will need ten pounds of Semtex or military explosives or what's used in quarrying operations, and he'll need detonators – everything so far is readily available. Sadly, and I urge you to believe me, the necessary radioactive material can be found without difficulty. Caesium chloride would be suitable. Vast quantities of it litter the countryside and farm buildings of the former Soviet Union. It was used to blast seeds, in powder form, at high pressure, therefore making them more productive once sown. We do not have to go to the agricultural industries of Belarus or the Ukraine. Radioactive materials govern X-rays. Medical instruments for the treatment of cervical cancer use caesium. The radio isotope caesium 137, which if spilled has a contamination life of thirty years, is widely used in radiotherapy. We are awash with it, but I am going to stay with caesium chloride, what you could hold in one hand, no more – bought in lethal quantities for next to nothing. The caesium chloride is packed round the explosives, and is covered with clothes, books, washing-bags, presents, and only the most awake security man at an airport, monitoring check-in and fresh off a meal break, will see anything suspicious.'
All of them in the room were supposed to be the last line of defence for the tax-payers who coughed up their salaries. He did not know where that defence line could be drawn, and the hushed quiet in the room told him that none of the others, newcomers or old-timers, had a bloody clue… and he remembered the young Russian from last week, and the psychologist from the week before, and their messages. He would go home that night to his wife, Mercy, and not stop at the pub – where they thought he worked for Social Security – and he'd talk it through with her, because she was the only shoulder for crying on that he had.
'A man walks with this suitcase, not an onerous burden, into London's Trafalgar Square or New York's Times Square or he approaches a major intersection in central Paris. He puts down the suitcase and walks away, and before the alarm is raised, the suitcase explodes. A big, big bang. On that night's television news, we see burning cars, damaged buildings – all very obvious – and we are told that three people have been killed and thirty injured. We do not see or hear the cloud, the particles of caesium chloride. The cloud climbs in air heated by the detonation, then it moves on the wind. The speed is extraordinary – half a mile in one minute, five miles in thirty minutes. The particles reach cooler air, further from the bomb site, and they drop. They fall on grass, into gardens, on to buildings that are residential and that house thousands of office workers, and they seep into drains and through the air-intake ducts of the underground's ventilation system. Twenty-four hours later, the terrorists use a Middle East originating website to announce that the bomb is dirty, the city is contaminated. Then, ladies and gentlemen, what do you do?'
Go and live in a cave in mid-Wales. Go and rent a farmhouse in the Yorkshire dales. There were no names, no faces, on the files in Library, and Lovejoy doubted that the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation held anything of value. They groped in the dark. He sensed, in the room, a pent-up desire to be out and looking, hunting, and a matching frustration that there was no target to search for.
'Depending on the proximity to the explosion, the particles could be harmful to human life for up to two hundred years – which is, to most of us, for ever. The risk of fast-developing cancer is small, but in the long-term that risk increases. In theory millions, born and unborn, face the nightmare of being cut down by hideous tumours.
In reality, the greater problem for government is the spread of panic.
Panic. An ugly word for an ugly image. The creation of panic is the terrorist's principal aim, and I guarantee to you that he will have succeeded. Consider the psychological impact, so much worse than the recent SARS outbreak, then imagine panic on a scale never seen before by our western societies, and a commercial shut-down that is unprecedented. You see, ladies and gentlemen, civilians under the weight of the German blitz or the Anglo-American bombing of Hamburg, Berlin or Dresden could see, feel, touch, hear those attacks
– but this cloud moves invisibly, at speed, silently. Panic would be total. What response can government make?'
Precious little – it would come out of a clear blue sky. The explosion, the panic would tumble from that sky, probably without warning. And the lead to the identity of such a man who carried a suitcase, that also would come out of the same cloudless sky The good old clear blue sky was both the hell and the heaven of counter-intelligence officers.
'The clean-up after the spill of one fistful of radioactive material in a Brazilian city, not scattered by explosives and not riding on the wind, necessitated the removal of three and a half thousand cubic metres of earth and rubble. My scenario is a bomb in the heart of a city, and the impossibility of stripping out buildings, tunnels, gardens and parks. It would take years, not months – and where then do you dump this Himalayan heap of dirtied material? The cost would be prohibitive. I venture that the answer is mass evacuation, then the abandonment of an inner city… The panic caused would initiate a new Dark Age. I can offer only one fractionally small area of comfort to you.'
Lovejoy decided on the answer to one across.
'If the man who carried the suitcase into that crowded city centre never opened it, never touched the caesium chloride, and was well clear when it exploded, he would survive. I cannot say the same for the bomb-maker. I would estimate that the bomb-maker's un-avoidable contact with the powder would limit his life to a few weeks after the completion of the device. He would die a slow and most unpleasant death. That is the only comfort I can offer you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your attention.'
There was 110 titter of relieved laughter at the fate of a bomb architect, and no applause when the scientist stepped back from the lectern. No chair moved. Lovejoy wrote: Ambition. 'A woman who strives to be like a man lacks ambition'. It would give him a start for three, five and six down. For a moment, the crossword was protection for Michael Lovejoy against the awfulness of the message.
When he reached his office, and his sandwich, there was a note on his desk from his Branch director.
Mikey,
Arriving tomorrow, American Airlines 061, from Florida, is Jed Dietrich (Defense Intelligence Agency). His people coy/shy about reason for his travel to UK, but they request co-operation. You, please, meet, escort and wet-nurse.
Boris.
A clear blue sky – not bloody likely. He looked from his window, out over the Thames. The cloud was low, ashen and carried rain.
The voice was quiet, calm, and eased into Marty's headphones. 'This is Oscar Golf. We appreciate that conditions are adverse, but we think we – you, sorry – are doing well. You have good control and we like what you're doing.'
He acknowledged curtly.
'Unless there is a major deterioration in upper-air wind strength, we believe that we – sorry again – you should keep the bird up.
That's the bottom line. We have complete confidence in you, Marty, but if you get too tired, need to rest, then we will take over. We are monitoring all output while Lizzy-Jo sleeps, everything is A number one. This is quality flying in that wind strength, and we go to the range limit. Oscar Golf, out.'
Lizzy-Jo had all the floor space behind him. She had brought in her sleeping-bag, used it as a mattress. Her head was close to a wall and her feet were by the door. George had been in during the afternoon and had driven them both insane with the banging of his hammer and the scrape of his spanner, but he hadn't succeeded in getting the air-conditioning motor going. She wore short shorts and had her blouse unbuttoned, right down. His mother, back in California, would have turned up her lip and said it wasn't decent. If he turned, Marty could see a deep brown birthmark on the white skin of her lower stomach, Lizzy-Jo's breasts and the squashed-down nipples. Back in Langley, where Oscar Golf was, they did Lizzy-Jo's work and monitored the real-time camera images. He wasn't happy with her sleeping. Oscar Golf, and his crowd, were not tuned to the desert – not like she was. Ten more minutes, he'd give her. He sat very still in his chair, only his fingers moving with the joystick. He wondered whether she dreamed of her daughter, and of her husband who sold insurance in North Carolina. The few times he looked at her, Marty thought Lizzy-Jo looked good.
But he didn't look often.
It was hard flying. If it had not been for the order from Langley, Carnival Girl would not have been up. He was pressured. Refusal was not an option. In good weather conditions, without upper-air wind speeds that were at the limit or beyond, Oscar Golf and his people could have had control. In good weather, with what the instrumentation told them, Carnival Girl could have been flown from Langley, all commands transmitted from – whatever it was – six thousand miles' distance. But the weather was miserable.
And because the weather was miserable, with the high winds, Marty had done that rare thing, had imposed his will on George.
Carnival Girl would fly, not First Lady. The clapped-out, raddled Predator would be up, not the better aircraft. First Lady was too valuable to go down, hit by those winds, a dragonfly with broken wings. He thought that since they'd moved from Bagram he had learned more about adverse-weather flying in a week, or ten days, than he had known in years of piloting before. His hands ached on the little joystick, but he held her steady and she ate the ground and beamed the pictures. Soon the night would come, then they'd go from the real-time camera to the infra-red images… No fucking way would he permit Oscar Golf to take over control of Carnival Girl. She was his, if she went down it would be his fault, no other asshole's.
He flew her over the emptiness of the sand.
She woke. He heard the floor creak. He felt her hands on his rigid shoulders, on the tightness of the muscles.
She had the sleep still in her voice. 'How is it up there?'
'Like shit,' Marty said.
'Wind still bad?'
'Getting worse – moved to south-south-west, forty knots.'
'What's acceptable?'
'Gone beyond acceptable, the manual says we're grounded…
We're on the edge.'
She slipped back into her seat. She told Oscar Golf that she was 'on station'. Her blouse still hung open, like that wasn't important. There was a line of sweat dribbling from between her breasts and down to her navel. He could feel, through his fingers on the joystick, the force of the gale winds that hit Carnival Girl… Then the Predator bounced, and fell. The dial needles jerked in slashed movements.
Lights winked. There was a warning howl. She plunged. Lizzy-Jo stayed quiet. Marty had to let her go. She seemed to plummet and the real-time camera's image brought the desert sand leaping up at them. It was what they trained for in the simulator at Nellis, the air pocket – low-air density. He felt, through his fingers, the strain on the wings, already burdened by the Hellfires. She fell for a minute and twelve seconds, and all the time Marty kept the nose cone down and prayed she would not go to tail down and corkscrew. She seemed to hit a floor of air, then he had control. For three land miles he took her on level flight and checked every piece of instrumentation for damage, then climbed her back up and returned into the high thermal winds. Marty sighed. Lizzy-Jo's hand was on his arm, and she squeezed, like that was the way to tell him he'd done well. He was calculating how much fuel had been used in the engine thrust to hold her as she was going down, and how much more had gone with the climb to cruise altitude, and how much flight time had been lost.
She said, face set and jaw jutted, 'We'll get them – whoever they are and wherever – I have the feeling that we'll get them.'
Lizzy-Jo had not done up her blouse and he didn't think she was going to.
The light was failing.
Bart had no alternative. A braver man would have walked away long ago – he was not brave and accepted it. Never had been, never would be – had never stood up to his father, or to his wife. He sat that evening in the outer office of the real-estate rental company, and waited for the little prig inside to be so kind as to see him. He had been punctual for the appointment, the prig wasn't.
His business there was to seek an extension to his rental agreement for the villa. In that past week he had failed, again, to stand up to Eddie bloody Wroughton. 'You leave when I say so. Files go walkabout when I decide it – and that's not now. You are going, Bart, nowhere.' And
'going nowhere' necessitated an extension to the tenancy contract.
The only way that he would win his freedom from Eddie bloody Wroughton was when he produced information of such value that it trivialized all the gossip, rumour and innuendo that was the stock-in-trade he peddled. Then he could quit, run for the damned airport.
Nor had he stood up to Ariel. At least Ariel had made him feel wanted, not threatened. One evening in the Dan Hotel on the beach-front, one day shared between a car and an office in Jerusalem, one morning walking in the central streets of Tel Aviv. Ariel had courted him, had been assiduous. For the evening, Ariel had talked of the threat to peace in the whole region that was the work of the three organizations, Hamas, the Al-Aqsa Brigade and Hizbollah. 'They hate peace, they make war on peace,' Ariel had said. He had been driven in Jerusalem by Ariel to a fruit and vegetable market and to a bus station, and he had been told where the suicide bombers had detonated their waistcoats, and he had tried to imagine the carnage at the locations now rebuilt. 'The zealots kill many, but hundreds more who have survived, or have buried their loved ones, will be scarred for the rest of their days by the fanaticism of these murderers,' Ariel had told him. In a bare office, in a building that had no nameplate by the door, he had been shown the books of photographs of the immediate aftermath of the explosions, and he had seen men carrying from the smoke and fire the debris of severed arms, legs, torsos, heads of men, women and children. 'The ones who plan and recruit, then arm the kids with explosives and send them to their deaths are the men we target – they do not "sacrifice" themselves, they do not look to be martyrs, they hide behind the delusions of the kids. They are the murderers who destroy the chance of peace.
We target them to kill them,' Ariel had murmured in his ear, as he turned the pages of the books. He had been walked in Tel Aviv down Ben Yehuda and along the seafront, and had seen restaurants, cafes and discotheques with guards outside them. 'If we are lucky, at the last moment, as the bomber hesitates and steels himself, or creates suspicion because he wears a coat to hide his bomb and it is hot, the guard may intervene in time, but we need great luck – if we know the bomb planner, and his movements, and his factory, if we strike him then we do not need luck. More highly than luck, we value intelligence. If you help us, Dr Bartholomew, you would be a proud servant of peace, and honoured,' Ariel had whispered in his ear, as they had threaded between the pavement crowds. He was not a brave man, not then and not now.
When he was called in, forty minutes after the time of his appointment, he did not meet his landlord. The villa was owned by a prince of the blood, and the tacky work of negotiation was done by a hireling, the prig in the white robe and red-checked ghutrah who pared his nails with a chrome file and waved him casually to a chair.
That evening Bart surprised himself.
Not bravery but bloody-mindedness ruled. Everything they preached at the embassy and the Chamber of Commerce about patience was abandoned. He launched in with a blatant untruth: 'I don't mind sitting in the waiting room for forty wasted minutes, but my patients mind. I am late for home calls to two patients who are unwell, who need my attention. You are dealing with a busy man.
Now, I seek an extension to my tenancy of six months. I note that five of the villas in my compound are currently empty because of the security situation. If a sixth villa is not to join them, bringing in no rent, then I require a discount of twenty per cent for that half-year. I believe that should be acceptable or I will go elsewhere.'
He leaned forward. His expression, carefully nurtured and fraudulent, was of concern and anxiety. 'Have you seen a doctor recently?
Your neck looks a bit swollen to me. Had any pain in the glands in your neck, pains or aches? I'm not saying you should be worried, but I really do advise that you book an appointment with your doctor and get him to give you a run-over. Nasty things, when they go wrong, glands. Best caught early.'
Masterful, and the little prig had blanched. His fingers were under the hang of the ghutrah and were massaging a naturally plump neck.
'Right, I've two appointments to cover, so I'll be on my way. I'm looking at a six-month extension with a twenty per cent reduction in rent – and, of course, my sincere best wishes to His Royal Highness.
I can see myself out.'
He went out into the evening. A harsh wind snatched at his trousers. The chauffeur flashed the headlights. As Bart walked to the waiting vehicle, he reflected that – at long last – he had stood his corner… not on anything that mattered, but he felt better for it.
There was a spring in his step. The bloody wind caught his tie, snaked it over his shoulder.
Beth heard the wind beat on the windows. Outside, the palm trees' fronds shuddered. She held up the book. 'Everyone got it, Sonnet Eight? I'll start, first two lines, then each of you, to a stop or a colon, from the right. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate." N e x t… '
In front of her, hanging on her words, were her four most advanced pupils. Shakespeare for them, not the technical language of petroleum extraction. Her finger wavered towards the chemist from Pakistan.
It was risque for her to have chosen a sonnet of love: it was at the limit of religious correctness. One day, when she had her flight out booked, confirmed, she might just get round to The Merchant of Venice, give them Shylock's lament. For now, love was challenge enough, and taught by a woman.
She cued in the pipeline engineer. The man read and stuttered to a halt. 'Miss Bethany, I do not understand it.'
The men laughed, she grinned. She could have done Lear with them, or the speeches at Agincourt, or given them Coriolanus.
She had chosen love. A nun, a permanent virgin, at the convent school had made the class learn the sonnet by heart. Not a full hour of the day had gone by when she had not thought of him… and the wind outside now whipped the sand and she wondered where he sheltered, huddled, and how hard it went for him.
'You will, when we're through it. OK, on we go…' She pointed to the airfield manager.
He had not left her. He had been with her in the shower in the morning, no time for a bath, and as she'd gulped down her breakfast.
He was with her now. She heard the beat of his breath as he had dug with the shovel. She saw him stare out the men who would have killed her. His voice was with her, as he had gone away with the boy:
'You never met me, I was never here… You never saw my face.' He was never away from her.
The warning of the deputy governor was wrong, she decided. She would not accept it. He had said that illegal and dangerous men travelled in the Sands. She had lied, she had said she met no one, saw no one. But the warning was a saw's blade on a plank nail, and she could not escape it.
'Right, excellent – questions.'
The pipeline engineer asked, 'It is very fine, Miss Bethany, but what is Shakespeare writing of? Is it lust? Is it infatuation? Is it love?
How can we read Shakespeare's mind? Is it about love?'
'Read it to your wife when you are next at home, and ask her,' Beth said. 'For myself, I think it is not infatuation or lust. No, it is about love.'
The wind outside was worse, fiercer – where he was.
They were in darkness. Only a thin light washed down from the moon. He thought, was not certain of it, that the route of the march was no longer straight but that it curved along the line of a crescent.
His eyes were slitted against the sand the wind pelted him with, and sometimes – against the strongest gusts – he lifted the cloth that covered his mouth and protected his eyes. When he went blind, or when he peered ahead, he could only make out the rump of Ghaffur's camel in front of him. He could not see Rashid, but he sensed that the guide took them on great lengths of quarter-circles, then corrected, then took another curved course.
Was the guide lost?
He thought Fahd slept, and Hosni. Both men were tied to their saddles. Three times, after they had restarted the march, when the moon was highest, Caleb had lost sight of Ghaffur and the boy had gone forward and must have talked with his father, but each time he had dropped back and taken a place again in front of Caleb, and then
– each time – the route had swung into another gentle long and arching turn.
What if they were lost?
The guide had no map, no instruments, and in the darkness he could not see the features of the greater dunes – if there were any.
His mind had drifted back into his memory. He had seen a room.
There was a bed, unmade, and a green coverlet was crumpled on the floor. The carpet was thin and pale brown and magazines tossed down shared it with the coverlet. Motorcycles and cars were the photographs on the opened magazines. Girls – big hips, small swim-suit bottoms, big breasts – were on the walls. The room was gone from Caleb's mind.
He tried to remember from what direction the sand hit him, didn't know, was too confused, too tired, too thirsty, hungry and bruised by the day's heat, and now chilled by the night. Each of the Beautiful One's strides dragged her closer to collapse. He had set in his mind that they were lost, that they had doubled back on sand covered the previous day, or the day before. He croaked the question: 'Does he know where he's going, Ghaffur, does your father know?'
The boy seemed to hiss for him to be quiet.
'Has your father been here before, ever before?'
The hiss was louder, sharper.
'It is madness to move in darkness…'
The hiss whistled at him, cut him.
He could see, faintly, that Ghaffur was high on his saddle. His head was raised. The wind tore at the boy's robe. It was natural to ride into the wind with the body bent low and the target for the wind minimized. It was as though Ghaffur sniffed the wind, or listened.
He strained to see the boy better, could not. 'Ghaffur, tell me – are we lost?'
'My father knows where he is, where we go. He knows everything of the Sands.'
'Why do we not go straight, in a straight line?'
'Only God knows more about the Sands. My father is responsible for you. He decides the route and you follow.'
'Why do you go forward and talk to him, and then each time we turn?'
The boy called back to him, a slight voice beaten by the wind,
'Because of what I hear.'
'I hear nothing.'
'My ears are the best, my father says they are the ears of a leopard, one that lives in the mountains. It is an engine's noise. A long way off, but I thought I heard it.'
'What sort of engine? On the air or on the ground? Where was it?'
'I do not know. Each time you talk I cannot listen.'
Caleb heard only the footfall of the camels, the snoring of Fahd and Hosni, and the darkness closed round him and the wind speared against him.
In the night the wind swerved to come from the north, and greater ferocity came with the change.
In the sands of the Rub' al Khali, men lay against their camels' bodies to find shelter, and only their guide knew the value of the wind.
Above the sands, rocked, tossed and shaken, a Predator flew and hunted, in secrecy and silence, and under each wing was a Hellfire missile.
The dawn's light nestled on the wings of the Predator and caught the sandcoated backs of the camels.
'In words of one syllable, or two, stop fucking me about.'
'I am sorry, Mr Wroughton, sir, but I do not have authority to admit you.'
'Young man, I am expected.'
'I don't think so, Mr Wroughton, sir.'
'I had a meeting fixed up.'
'Yes, sir, but not here.'
In the half-light, as the city woke, Wroughton had left the bed of an agronomist's wife – Belgian, large and not entirely pretty, but experienced – and had driven to the Gonsalves' compound.
Sometimes he went there when Teresa was giving the kids their tea and waited for Juan's return, sometimes it was for breakfast before Juan drove to the embassy. The agronomist was due back in Riyadh from Layla, west of the big desert, that evening. If it had not been for his appointment with Juan, his friend, Wroughton would have enjoyed another three hours, or four if he could last it, in the agronomist's bed – inside the agronomist's wife; the man was down in Layla to examine the possibilities of growing a strawberry crop on the edge of the big desert – bloody fool. Teresa had said, in her night-dress and with the kids howling round her, that Juan had already gone down to the embassy, had been gone an hour.
'Just, please, get on the phone and tell him that I'm downstairs. .. or is that too bloody difficult?'
'He knows you are here, Mr Wroughton, sir.'
Teresa, at her front door, had yawned, then pulled a face and winked. 'Big flap, Eddie. Panic call. He was dressing as he was driving.' The marine on the embassy desk had rung through, and the young man had come down. Wroughton knew him as the number five out of five in the Agency's Riyadh pecking order. The meeting, over breakfast, round the kitchen table, was just routine and the chance to exchange snippets, but it was important for Wroughton.
That day of each month he started on his report, regular as his bowels, for Vauxhall Bridge Cross. Much, too much, of his monthly report came from the crumbs off Juan and Teresa's kitchen table. A big flap, a panic call, he needed to know the detail of that. He was blocked, and his temper rose.
Wroughton swung his fist towards the internal phone on the desk in front of the marine guard. 'Just get him on the phone – I'll speak to him.'
He thought this young man had a future in fielding customer complaints in a telephone or electricity company – so calm, and his voice never betrayed anger. 'He said you'd be round. He said, when you came round, I was to come down and tell you that he was too busy – some other time. He'd ring. That's what I was to tell you, Mr Wroughton, sir.'
The young man shrugged, then sidled away, went through the inner gate with a punch-number lock.
Wroughton turned, furious. What price the special fucking relationship? He stamped towards the swing doors where the marines watched him impassively. A big flap, a panic call, and Eddie Wroughton was shut out. He would not have believed it, not of the special relationship, not of his friend. He could still smell the Belgian woman on him, and he went home to change his shirt… and his whole damned world was upside-down, was tossed aside.
'How much more time, for God's sake, do they need?'
For five minutes more than an hour, Juan Gonsalves had been watching the screen. He wore a bar microphone and the headset was clamped in his uncombed hair. He paced in the communications area. His shirt hung out of his trousers and his vest had the hand-prints of last night's kids' food – but his eyes, bloodshot and tired, never left the screen. Not often did he show raw stress.
He was not permitted a direct link with the Ground Control at Shaybah. The raised hut on the trailer down at the end of the runway, beside the perimeter fence, was off-limits to Gonsalves. Too fraught down there, he'd been told. What it meant, they didn't need a rubber-necker over their shoulder. Close to him, leaning against the closed door, was Nathan, the new guy out from Langley, and he'd had the signal from the young man that the visitor in the lobby had been sent away. There were things that Gonsalves would share, and things he would not. A live image from four and a half miles over the Rub' al Khali – with a target – was not to be shared.
The feed on the screen, real time, rolled and bucked, went soft focus, reclaimed the target, lost it, found it again. Nathan had moved to the coffee dispenser. Over the headset, Gonsalves heard the reassurance of Langley and the increasing tension of the guys down at Shaybah. The talk was coded, technical, and Gonsalves could understand only trifles. Why the hell did they not strike? The picture on the screen, beamed off the Predator, wavered off and on to a drawn-out camel train. The effort of the sensor operator was to get clear images of the cargo carried by three of the camels. More times than he had counted, the zoom had gone down on the camels, blurred with magnification, but then the picture had been lost. He had seen the men, five of them, spread out over a length that might have been as much as two hundred metres. They went slowly in long arcs. The camera tried, one more time, to go close-up on a cargo box, but the focus failed. The angle changed. Gonsalves imagined, high above the caravan, kicked by the gale winds, that the Predator circled.
Nathan gave him coffee. He drank, didn't notice the taste. He flung the beaker towards the trash can, missed, and coffee dribbled on to the floor. He picked up off the table the photocopied picture of a crate box, olive green, that could hold a Stinger, the man-portable surface-to-air missile system. He knew the wind had reached new levels at the altitude of the Predator and at the level of the desert, because the picture rocked more severely and there seemed to be a mist over the camels and the men, which he thought to be from driven sand. In his working life, Juan Gonsalves had not known a stress level so high. He depressed the speech button on his headset.
'How much longer – when can we go?'
The voice was massaged, quiet: 'This is Oscar Golf. Interjections from what we regard as spectators interrupt and divert us. Briefly, we do not take out a target until it has been identified with certainty
– identification is in process. These are difficult conditions. We're right at the upper altitude where the UAV currently flies, and it's near impossible to get a stable platform. The weather is deteriorating and we are running low on fuel. So, please, no further interruptions.
Oscar Golf, out.'
He had been put down, felt like a scolded child. He watched the screen, saw the caravan moving steadily under the real-time camera.
He felt weak, sick.
'Four more minutes on station,' Marty said.
'After four more minutes we cannot bring Carnival Girl back,'
Lizzy-Jo said.
The voice of Oscar Golf came back, so calm. 'Reading you, hearing you.'
Marty worked the joystick, his decision, and brought Carnival Girl down a full six thousand feet of height. Each foot of descent made the camera platform less stable. He had backed her away, gone to the west, had lowered the lens angle. Lizzy-Jo followed him. They were like dancers in step. The camera raked along the straggling length of the caravan. He didn't need to speak to her. They moved together, better that day than any other. He ran Carnival Girl from the tail of the caravan and on towards the front of it. The computers did the calculations. George flitted at their backs and kept the bottles of water coming. Marty could not drink, did not dare to release his fingers from the joystick. It fascinated him that down below, on the camels, they did not know the eye of the lens watched them. He was half-way along the caravan, and Lizzy-Jo's finger stabbed at the digits playing at the base of the screen – two minutes and forty seconds.
Would they pull out, on Oscar Golf's orders, or would they sacrifice Carnival Girl and let her crash in the desert with her fuel tanks exhausted? The momentary image was of a big camel, loaded – then the voice in the headphones.
'We have a freeze – wait out. We are looking at a freeze frame.' No excitement in the voice, without passion.
Marty looked up, took in the screen on the right side of the main image. The freeze frame was like a still photograph. The picture held two camels. He saw the clear lines of the crate box. He The voice betrayed nothing, no thrill, like it was a machine. 'Hit them. Right now.'
He heard Lizzy-Jo's question. 'One strike or two?'
The answer. 'Give them both. Waste the fuckers.'
He came round, was head on towards the caravan. It was what they trained for, what they practised to achieve. Lizzy-Jo didn't have to tell him what she needed. It would be without warning. Down there, slow moving in the sand, they would have no warning. The cross-winds hammered Carnival Girl.
'Port side, missile gone,' Lizzy-Jo murmured.
On the screen, racing from it and diminishing, was the fireball.
Twelve seconds or thirteen, at that height, from firing to impact.
Again the camera shook at the weight loss.
'Starboard side, missile gone.'
Two concentrated flame masses, burning solid propellant, careered down. Each powered a missile with a warhead of twenty-live pounds weight of explosive, fragmentation quality, on impact fuses. He watched. Lizzy-Jo guided them and he heard little yelps whistle through her teeth. They were nearly down, he was counting silently, when the camels scattered. A few paces, the lens picked up the panic. They were turning, running, and then the flames cut in among them. He saw the camels break the line, then the cloud burst over them, and the fireflash. A ceiling of dust, sand, filled the screen image.
Marty said, flat, into his face microphone. 'I am out of flight time.
Do I bring her back or do I lose her?'
'Bring her back – and give her some good loving care. Nothing will live under that. Bring her home. Oscar Golf, out.'
Marty turned her, and the lens lost the cloud.
He heard nothing.
The boy was on a dune's rim, and his hands were cupped together across his mouth, his shoulders heaving with the effort of shouting.
Caleb could not hear him.
He did not know how long he had been alone in the Sands with the Beautiful One. She had stampeded in terrified flight. He had clung to her. She had bolted, had run in the few seconds of ear-splitting noise before the first explosion. She had been going at full stride at the moment of the second explosion. He had hung on to her neck. She had gone on until she could run no more, then had stopped, trembling. He did what he had learned from the guide. As he had seen Rashid do it, he snuggled his face against the Beautiful One's mouth, his nose against the foulness of her breath, and he had whispered sweetness to her. He had stilled the trembling. They had meandered on, alone and together. He had not known where he went – the camel had taken the course. His ears were dead and his mind was numbed, and the strength of the sun had grown.
In the distance, high on the dune, the wind made a canopy of the boy's robe. The ears of the Beautiful One lifted, pricked, as if she heard him when Caleb could not… They were all his family, the boy and the Beautiful One, and the men who waited for him at the end of his journey. He had no other family. The camel's pace quickened, closing on the boy who had searched for him and found him.