They rode on.
Many times, Caleb looked up and searched for the danger. There was not a cloud in the brilliant blue of the sky. He gazed up till his eyes ached, saw nothing and heard nothing.
They made a straggling line, their tracks covered by the wind's shift of the sand. Rashid was out in front. On a bull camel, already laden with two crates, was the body of Fahd. Further back was Hosni, then Caleb, then another bull. Last in the line was the boy, Ghaffur. Caleb had not seen them, but left beyond the horizon were the carcasses of Fahd's animal and one that had carried crates and one that had carried food.
He thought of Fahd, the zealot, who had insisted that they stop each time for the necessary prayers, thought of the man who had not had an encouraging word for him, for any of them… His eyes had watered but now had no more moisture to secrete, and there was agony in them each time he lifted his head and tried to scan the sky, to search into its blue depths.
The wind dragged at Caleb's robe and tore at the headcloth that covered his mouth, his scalp and his ears. He did not know whether Fahd had been taken by the first explosion or the second, whether he had had a moment to think on Paradise. Had he – for one second or two, or for the half-minute that had separated the explosions – considered the Garden of Paradise? All of the Arabs in the 055 Brigade swore on their Faith that they believed in the Garden where martyrs went, where cool streams ran, where baskets of fresh fruit lay, where girls waited for them. He could see Fahd's corpse, its feet hanging on one side of the camel's flanks, and the head on the other. The back of Fahd's head was gone, but the blood from it and the brain tissue had fallen out long ago and had been trampled into the sand by the following camels. Caleb had looked into the skies, into the clearness of the blue, as the Beautiful One had lumbered through the last of the blood and brain that had dropped from the opened skull. Had Fahd, in the last seconds of his life, welcomed death? Had he believed in the Garden of Paradise? Caleb did not, could not, know. Caleb had crossed the chasm into his old world, rejected before, which muddied the certainty of the Garden of Paradise. Rolling on his saddle, gazing up, Caleb felt a sadness that the last he would remember of Fahd was the anger in the Saudi's face and the screams of his voice… The man had been his family too.
He tightened the hold on his reins and he bent and his voice whispered soft words in the ear of the Beautiful One. He slowed her step, and the sight of Fahd's head and feet drifted further away. The sand disturbed by Hosni's camel was no longer lifted into his face, and the pack bull passed him. Caleb waited for the boy to reach him.
'Will you talk to me?'
'My father says that to talk is to waste strength.'
'Does your father also say that to be alone is to be frightened?'
'We are never alone in the Sands. God is with us, my father says.'
'Were you frightened, Ghaffur?'
'No.' The boy shook his head.
He remembered himself at Ghaffur's age, and the kids he'd messed with. Caleb would have been, they would have been, terrified when the flames had come down, fireballs, from the sky, which was clear, blue and empty. He believed the boy.
'Tell me.'
'My father says it is an aircraft without a pilot. It is flown by commands -I do not understand how – that are given it by men who sit far away. They could be a week's camel ride from it, or more. My father heard about it from the Bedouin of the Yemen. There was a man from the town of Marib, he was Qaed Sunian al-Harthi and he was hunted by the Americans, but he was in the desert and he thought himself safe, and he rode in a vehicle towards an oil well where Americans worked. He had made a bomb… He was betrayed. They knew when he would move and in what vehicle.
There was no warning. He was hit from the sky. My father says there are cameras in the aircraft, and the Americans would have watched the vehicle he rode in. He was killed from the sky, and all the men with him. The Bedouin would have believed that the bomb he carried had exploded, but the police told the Bedouin that the Americans had boasted about their aircraft in the sky… You were frightened?'
Caleb bit at his lip, and the sand stuck at his teeth. 'I hope I am not a coward -1 admit I was frightened… Does your father say how we can run from it?'
'Only with God's help, and He gives us the wind.'
'If the wind is too strong?'
'If that is what He wishes,' the boy said solemnly. 'God spared you
– He has a great purpose for you.'
It came in against the gale. From her window, Beth had seen it make the first attempt to land, but that was failure.
She had thought it extraordinary that the aircraft should have flown in those conditions. It had been fifty feet or so above the extreme end of the runway and had seemed to be lifted up, as if by an unseen hand, then thrown sideways. The regular flight from Riyadh had not come in that morning, and that would have been a Hoeing 737, heavy and stable. This aircraft was tiny in comparison, lightweight toy. It had climbed, shaking, as if it was punched, and while it had come round for the second attempt, Beth had gone out on to the patio. It made no sense to her that they should be flying, for evaluation and mapping, in such weather.
It had lined up again over the landing guide lights that were in the sand beyond the perimeter fence. Everything in Beth Jenkins's life, before these last several days, had been based on certainty. She clung to the trunk of the palm, and she saw what was different. There were no tubes under the wings. There had been tubes under the wings the last time she had seen the aircraft lift off.
She was confused, knew no answers, heard only the questions.
It rolled with the wind. It was over the runway, seemed to stop like the hovering shahin her patron flew. It lurched clumsily – she remembered the grace of its take-off. A wing went down, its balance was lost. In bad weather, her patron would not have risked the lives of his prized shahin or his hurr. He had paid – and had told her the money was well spent – a hundred and ten thousand dollars for the trained peregrine, and eighty thousand dollars for the saker falcon, and she thought this bird must have been valued at many millions of dollars.
Why would they risk it? It made no sense. Beth thought it was past the point of return, had to come down.
The right wing came up, it levelled, was a crippled bird and fragile. The left wing dipped.
No pilot. The only life in danger was that of the bird itself. The left wing-tip scraped on the Tarmac. It ran on, stopped, then turned. It taxied down the runway and, as if its engine was cut, came to a slow and hesitant halt. A jeep came from the little camp and sped towards it.
She went back into the bungalow and started to work again on her report on the ejecta field, but she could not concentrate… Nothing was certain, doubt ruled. He was with her. 'You never met me, I was never here… You never saw my face.' She hit the laptop's keys, but demons danced and she could not lose them. Beth could not make the link between the aircraft and him, but sensed it existed.
She wanted to cry out, to yell a warning, could not and the silence dripped around her.
He saw a man who was tall, athletically built, tanned, and not dressed for that morning's English weather.
Michael Lovejoy strode forward, not with a springing step because the legacy of the winter was increasing pain in his hip joints. The man had Lovejoy's name in big letters on a sheet of paper and held it up. The flight was in early and Lovejoy was late. The man wore heavy shoes, suede, and faded jeans with a brightly checked cotton shirt. There was a grip bag at his feet as he gazed around him, a frown of impatience writ large on a sunburned forehead. Lovejoy played at charm.
'Mr Dietrich – Mr Jed Dietrich? I'm Lovejoy, I was asked to meet you. Sincere apologies for keeping you hanging round. The traffic was awful.'
'Pleased to meet you. I was just beginning to wonder…'
His handshake crunched Lovejoy's fingers. 'I'm sure you were.
Anyway, all's well that ends well, don't you know? God, this place is a nightmare. Car's outside, bit of a walk, I'm afraid.'
Lovejoy rarely met Americans. Those he did were from the embassy's legal department. They were Federal Bureau of Investigation, men with cropped scalps, polished shoes and bow-ties, or women with flat chests, trouser suits and bobbed hair. As a breed, he was innately suspicious of them. When they came on to his territory it always seemed they expected his immediate and un-divided attention, and when he went on to their ground it always seemed they were busy and uninterested. He was not late because of awful traffic but because Mercy and he had lingered over breakfast.
He had brought his own car, a six-year-old Volvo estate that was good for ferrying the grandchildren.
In the multi-storey car park, after walking as fast as his hip joints permitted him, he unlocked the vehicle. He expected the American to comment on the child seats in the back. The cousins from across the water, both sexes, usually liked to talk kids and produce photographs from their wallets. There was no remark on the seats, or on the kids' clutter in the front from the school run Mercy had done the previous week. They pulled out.
'I see you've been in the sunshine, Mr Dietrich. You won't find much of that here… So, you've come in from Florida. Is that your workplace, or the end of a vacation?'
There had been no holiday that year for Michael and Mercy Lovejoy. The new conservatory at the back of their home had gulped the spare cash. Lack of funds had denied them the usual two weeks in a rented Cornish cottage and his summer leave had been spent decorating the dining room and the sitting room. When Lovejoy referred to other people's holidays there was often a barb in his tone.
The reply was crisp. 'I work at Guantanamo Bay.'
Last thing before leaving home for the drive to the airport, as Mercy had kissed his cheek, Lovejoy had told her: 'God knows what their Defense Intelligence Agency want from us. What I've always understood, they're the "eternal flames" – you know, never go out.
Spend their days stuck in bunkers trying to make sense of radio traffic and – I suppose – looking over aerial pix with a magnifying-glass and searching for an oil drum of anthrax in suburban Baghdad.
Feel for me, darling, it's going to be grim.' He was a safe pair of hands. More important, as the trail of Al Qaeda funding grew colder, was iced over, in the City of London, his absence from his desk would matter little. Mercy had grimaced, had kissed him again.
'I am an interrogator at Camp Delta.'
'Oh, are you? Well, that's a rather interesting place.' He hoped the little intake of breath, sharp, went unnoticed. At Thames House there was a desk on the third floor that dealt with Guantanamo Bay and the eight Britons detained there. Five visits had been made to Camps X-Ray and Delta but he had never seen anything remotely relevant coming back, or not, at least, across his desk. He knew that High Court judges refused to denounce the detention without charge and trial of the Britons as illegal under international law; he knew also that the relevant government ministers obdurately declined to make a noise, or waves. The Britons were, as Lovejoy understood it, in a Black Hole.
The whole working life of Michael Lovejoy, twenty-eight years an intelligence officer with the Security Service and before that his fifteen years as an Army officer with the Green Jackets, had been governed by the Bible of Need to Know. Since marriage, only Mercy had needed to know – not the people he met in the pub or other guests at dinner parties and, often enough, not colleagues. Himself, if he had just come off a flight in New York or Washington, Lovejoy would have guarded his secrets closely, said what was necessary and not a damned word more. He listened.
'The only thing fascinating about Camp Delta is that it is bogged down in a rut – that is, one hell of a rut, like a tractor wheel makes in mud. We're just going through the motions. Not even a dozen times in two years – after the first splash of intelligence – have we learned anything new or important. We go to work, we talk to people, we read back the transcripts, and we fall asleep. We don't learn anything. Then it happens, and we're shaking. It happens.'
'Out of a clear blue sky is, I believe, the cliche.'
'Out of that clear blue sky comes a thunderbolt. Got me? We released a man. We're under heavy pressure to find a few innocents and ship them back with a fanfare, the full shebang. We released a man whom we believed to be a taxi-driver, from Afghanistan… '
Lovejoy waited – he was rarely impatient.
'I was on holiday, up in Wisconsin with my wife and kid and getting in some fishing before the winter came down. The taxi-driver, he made my list – I wasn't there when they decided to shift him.
We have the Joint Task Force 170, which is Bureau, Agency and us, but the Bureau, the Agency run it, we're country cousins. They made that decision. He was flown out. He was being driven into Kabul, asked for a comfort stop and did a runner. If he was just a taxi-driver, who cares?'
'You care.' A further talent of Lovejoy was his ability, with apparent sincerity, to flatter. Sandwiched among the lorries and vans, he drove at a steady pace, anxious always to relax his informant…
God, what would he do when he retired? What sort of man would he be? He dreaded the day. 'So, you came back from leave and found the taxi-driver gone.'
'I had a Brit in with me. Some creep, a nobody. I asked the questions I was supposed to ask – last week. You know how it is, that gut feeling. You get a match. It was his accent… I was a Cold War specialist when I started, then I went to the Balkan desks, now I do Guantanamo. I've heard every goddamn accent there is – Russian, Polish, North Korean, Serb, Bosnian and Croat, Yemeni, Egyptian, Saudi and Kuwaiti. I got accents coming out of my ass. The Brit I had in, he spoke with the same accent as the taxi-driver.'
'Did he now?'
'To me, it was the same accent – then I got sort of scared at what I was looking at…'
With good cause. Lovejoy's hands had tightened on the wheel.
Little parts of three lunchtime lectures seeped into his mind. A psychologist had said: 'I urge you to look elsewhere. Where? For quality, for ability, for the best – because it is those young men that the lieutenants of bin Laden search for.' A Russian counter-intelligence officer had said: 'Somewhere, in his psyche or his experience, there will be a source of hatred. He hates you and me and the society that we serve.' A scientist had said: 'We start with a suitcase. Any suitcase of a size that a man or woman uses for a week's stay in a hotel…' Scared with good cause. He remembered the stunned quiet in that room at Thames House, the day before. A man who had the skill to defeat the interrogation process was a man who was owed respect… Funny thing, respect. It was often churned out for an old enemy – respect for a Rommel, or for a Vo Nguyen Giap, or for the Argentine pilots in the south Atlantic – but he had never heard respect given to the new enemy. On any floor of Thames House he would not have expected to hear of respect for a suicide bomber, or for a fighter in the new order's army. If an enemy was not shown respect – given only the status of a pest – that enemy presented increasing danger.
'Do you have the tapes of the interrogations, the Brit and the taxi-driver?'
He saw the head nod.
'How long have you got, Mr Dietrich?'
'I got till yesterday – and please call me Jed.'
The rain on the windscreen had come on heavier. 'You travelled light – have you brought winter clothes?'
'I got authorization, and I went out of Gitrno, like a bat out of hell.
I know if the Bureau and the Agency had gotten their act together, I'd have been called back. This could bring down empires, could wreck big careers… but, for the moment, it's mine and I'm keeping it. I'm going to the end of the road, Mr Lovejoy, and -'
'Michael, please.'
'- and if I'm wrong, I will be fed to the crows. And if I'm right, probably the same. I will not win a popularity contest. I don't give a fuck.'
Lovejoy took his mobile from his suit jacket and rang Mercy. She would have been upstairs, making the beds for the kids, coming that night. He told her he would be away, apologized, then asked her to dig out the sweater his daughter-in-law had given him two Christmases back, a size too large and never worn, and the old green waxed waterproof coat he hadn't used for five years. He said he'd be by for them in an hour, but would not be stopping. Then, steering with one hand and locking the wheel with his knees when he changed gear, he thumbed through the contacts book that was filled with names and numbers. He tapped out the digits on the phone and made the appointment he needed.
After two hearings, the professor of phonetics at King's College, London University said, 'Well, you're wrong. I'm sorry to disabuse you. It's not a matter of argument, but a fact. The accents are not from the same place. What you have called Tape Alpha, the Briton reading Pashto, is quite different to a trained ear from Tape Bravo. I regret any disappointment that may cause you, but facts are facts. Tape Alpha is Birmingham, with only marginal similarities to Tape Bravo.
Tape Bravo is the Black Country. Now, you'll have to excuse me, I have a tutorial.'
They were out on the street, hurrying through the sluicing rain across the car park, and the American was struggling into the old waxed waterproof coat.
Lovejoy said, 'Don't look so bloody miserable. The Black Country is not at Kandahar, or Peshawar, or in the Yemen. Forget that pedantic buffoon. The Black Country is on the immediate north-west boundary of the city of Birmingham. You did well. Fifteen miles from Birmingham, maximum. You did very well.'
He stood in the doorway, had pressed the bell and waited for it to be answered.
The maid, a Filipina, faced him.
Eddie Wroughton walked past her, went into the sitting room. The Belgian woman was watching a video in her housecoat and painting her nails in a cerise that matched the lipstick.
He went into the kitchen and poured himself a juice from the fridge. For a man who was rated clever, intelligent and cunning, he had taken a giant risk in returning to the villa in daylight, when spying neighbours and gossiping servants would see him. Three times he had tried to ring Juan Gonsalves and three times he had been told that Mr Gonsalves was 'in a meeting', and would get back to him.
Wroughton's mobile had not rung.
From the kitchen, he heard the shopping instructions being given to the maid. There was an officer serving in Riga, Penny, who had his photograph beside her bed. She had told him of the photograph in one of her many unanswered letters. He had no thoughts of Riga, or of the risk, only of the agronomist's wife. He heard the front door close.
If his friend, Gonsalves, had returned his calls Wroughton would not have been in the agronomist's kitchen, would not have been frustrated into taking the risk. He wondered whether the paint on her nails was dry, whether the lipstick on her mouth would smudge and run. His name was called, not from the living room but from the bedroom.
He craved to erase the humiliation of the lobby below the Agency's floor.
His shoes and clothes were scattered over the tiled floors of the kitchen and the living room and he was naked when he reached the bedroom, except for his tinted glasses. He hated his eyes to be seen: they might betray his humiliation.
Between patients, the receptionist brought Bart a printout of the extension contract offered him by the real-estate company.
He had won.
The offer was for an eighteen per cent reduction in monthly payments.
That was victory.
When she'd gone out, as he waited for the next patient, Bart surprised himself: clumsily, he danced a little jig. He hopped from foot to foot, in tune to the whistle from his lips. He had won the victory by his boldness – Christ! He thought, as he skipped, of the many who had walked over him: in particular, Eddie bloody Wroughton – not that he would gain his freedom from Wroughton, but the victory was a moment of success to be savoured.
The German patient spoke shamefacedly of snoring problems; Bart spoke of lymph-node complications, the patient's wife spoke of the disturbance in her night's sleep; Bart spoke of a consultant who was a very decent Greek at the ear, nose and throat section of the King Fahd Medical City. They were relieved and grateful.
'I'll make the appointment, Mr Seitz, I'll take care of everything.
Leave it to me. You didn't tell me your business in the Kingdom.'
'I took early retirement from the Luftwaffe. Now, I train air-traffic controllers for the Saudi Air Force.'
Bart wrote up his notes. 'Do you now? That must be fascinating.'
'Complete chaos, it blows my mind.'
Never looking up from the notes, with studied casualness, Bart asked, 'What in particular do you find stressful about your work?'
He was a worm at the core of an apple – victory on his rent or not, he was still Eddie bloody Wroughton's man.
Caleb rode with Hosni. He sensed the wind slackened, but the smell was worse. Fahd's body was bloated by the sun's heat, and the wind carried to him the stench, sweet and sickly. He remembered the smell of the bodies in the trenches after the big bombers had gone over.
The sand grains were plastered round the old Egyptian's eyes.
They were dulled as if the life was going from them, and Hosni's head never turned to him. He rode with him for kindness. He thought of how it must have been when the missiles had come down.
And how it would have been, in a half-light, when the camels had scattered, when Hosni's own had stampeded, its passenger strapped on, shaken, jolted, deafened, and not knowing. From a past life, a memory surfaced… There had been an old man who walked beside the canal, sunshine or rain, with a stick, and the kids had shouted at him and he had flailed the stick around him, but had not seen them.
Caleb had been one of the kids. He had thought of the old man beside the canal, his stick and the jeers, and he rode with Hosni.
Hosni was so frail, so weak, and Caleb thought his courage was an inspiration.
'What, Hosni, can you see?'
'I see what I need to see. I see the sand, I see the sun.'
'Is there something a doctor can do?'
'A year ago, perhaps there was something. Two years ago, for certain a doctor could do something. We were hunted, first in the Tor a Bora, then in caves on the border. I could not go to Quetta or to Kandahar to find a doctor. I was with the Emir General. If I had gone to find a doctor and been taken… I knew too much to go to Quetta or Kandahar. In Oman I saw a doctor.'
'Was there nothing he could do?'
The head came up and the smile cracked the face; the caked sand spilled down from it. 'He could do something. He could tell me. I have from the doctor a diagnosis. It cannot be treated, it is not reversible, it deteriorates.'
'What?'
'Maybe I washed in dirty water. Maybe I waded a stream that was polluted. It could have been long ago, right back in the days when we fought the Soviets and I was beside the Emir General. The doctor had a fine name for the condition, onchocerciasis, and a finer name for the parasite, Onchocerca volvulus. The doctor in Oman was a very educated and well-read man. The parasite is a worm that can live for fourteen years in the body. The female enters the body through any lesion, a scraped knee or cut foot, as you go through dirty and polluted water, and it breeds larvae. Soon your body is the home of many millions of worms and they roam through you. Some, it does not need to be many, make the long journey to the backs of your eyes.
They live there, the little worms, eat there and breed there. The diagnosis is eventual blindness.'
'How much time do you have?'
'I have enough time to do what I wish to do. Do not be frightened for me.'
'Tell me.'
'I will not live to go blind.'
'Explain.'
'There is a suitcase or a bag that a brother prepares. In the bag are materials. I handle them, I work with them. I have said I will do it.
To touch the materials is to walk away from life. When the bag or case is sealed it can be carried in safety. I dream of it. The dream sustains me in this hell. And I dream of the young man who will carry the case or the bag, and he is my friend.'
'I am your friend, Hosni.'
'Do you hate enough?'
The smell of Fahd's body played in his nose. The noise of the thunder was in Caleb's ears, and he saw the fire exhaust from the missile streaming down from the sky.
'I hate enough. I will carry a case or a bag.'
Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay.
Exercise day… Another week gone by. Exercise, then his shower.
He was escorted into the dirt yard. It was the second time that he had been led into the exercise yard and had seen the new goalposts.
His hands were manacled. A chain led from the manacles to his waist, circled by another chain. More chain link hung down from his waist and reached the shackles on his ankles. The guards let go of his arms. 'Off you go, kid – go get your circuits in.'
The football pitch was in the centre of the yard, with white lines marked out across the dried mud. Around the pitch, a line of men shuffled the circuit, each twenty paces apart, their steps restricted by the length of chain between the shackled ankles, and listened to the shouts from the pitch where twenty or twenty-five prisoners chased a football. The most recent edict at Delta had invited prisoners to apply for extra exercise. Caleb had been confused by it. He had not known whether he should volunteer, whether it would help the deceit, or whether it would compromise him. If he had taken up the invitation would he then be expected to inform on fellow prisoners?
He had not put his name forward. He had fifteen minutes of exercise ahead of him, but the football-players had an hour of chasing the ball.
A big American, tracksuited, ruled the pitch with a whistle. He loathed them, all of them, loathed them whether they wore a tracksuit and praised, whether they wore the bright sun shirts and interrogated, whether they had the camouflage uniform and the key bars to the manacles and shackles.
He did his circuits. When a goal was scored, the American blasted his whistle and applauded. He looked at the players, dancing because the ball was in the back netting, and tried to remember the faces. If any were moved to the cell next to his, he would be more careful, would guard against the smallest mistake.
At the end of his last circuit, his escort gestured for him.
His arms were held as he was led out of the yard. He would not exercise for another week.
'You could be doing that, kid, playing soccer. You've only got to ask.'
He did not understand. He smiled nervously at the guard. He had learned his part.
He was taken to the shower block.
With the loathing was contempt. He felt superior to the men who escorted him, unmanacled and unshackled him, who watched him undress, who saw him into the cubicle where the water sluiced down on him. He did not come cheap. They would not turn him with the offer of a game of football. He deceived them. The certainty of his superiority gave him strength.
A towel was thrown to him.
Marty lay on his back on the camp bed. Beside it, propped against the chair on which his clothes hung, was the picture, his only valued possession. Behind the glass, spattered with sand grains and misted with condensation, was Marty's hero; the hero at Gundamuck who had wrapped round his chest the colours of the 44th Regiment.
Lieutenant Souter, a hundred and sixty-two years before, had survived the last stand of his troops and gone home, feted.
Marty aspired to heroism, and did not know how he would achieve it.
If he had still been at Bagram, Marty would now have been in the Officers' Club. He would have been a centre of attention. The beers would have kept coming. The Agency people would have been round him, pilots, sensor operators, interrogators and analysts, and the cans would have kept coming for free. He had done a launch, seen the Hellfires go, watched the cloud mushroom up. It would have been his party time, his moment of heroics, if he had been at Bagram.
But he was not, he was in this shit-hole.
At Bagram Marty would have had an audience, with supervisors and ranking agents doing cheer-leading. His praises would have been sung. And the talk would have moved on to him bringing Carnival Girl home, with the tanks showing empty and the wind plucking at her as she touched down. He was a goddamn hero but no one was around to tell him.
The wind battered at the tent's sides. The sand came in between the flaps and the ground sheet, and the roof billowed. A solitary beer, given him by George, was half hidden on the chair by his clothes, which were hitched on the back. Marty hadn't pulled the can's ring.
The last thing he'd heard from Oscar Golf was a demand for
'soonest' information on potential damage to the port-side wing-tip of Carnival Girl in the touch-down. There had been no hero-gram out of Langley, no congratulation from goddamn Gonsalves, nothing. He had staggered out of the Ground Control, had been close to spilling himself on to the sand at the foot of the trailer steps, and George had given him the beer, which hadn't come from an icebox.
George had gone off in the jeep to tow the bird off the runway. Lizzy-Jo had been slumped, dead to the world, over her end of the workbench. He should have slept, but he could not. Again and again, searing in his mind, he saw the lurch of the platform when the first Hellfire went away from Carnival Girl, the ball of fire going down, and the camels breaking their line of march, then the cloud – and the second missile going into that cloud. Could not sleep.
The tent's entrance flap was lifted back. The wind came in behind her. The sand spewed round her, spraying on to his legs and body, and over his face.
She dropped the flap.
She sat on the bed. Her hips, in the tight short trousers, were against his knees. He could have covered himself, could have reached for the boxers or his singlet, but he did not. Too tired, too dead, too cheated to care. The bed bent under her weight.
'That's a fine sight,' Lizzy-Jo said, and winked. 'Might frighten a girl in the Carolinas – but not a New Yorker.'
She had not buttoned up her blouse. Her hand rested on the hairs of his chest.
'Did you sleep?'
'No. Tried to, didn't.'
'You want the news?'
Her fingers pulled at the hairs, teased them.
'What's the news?'
'You look like you need a lift-up…'
For months, Marty had worked with Lizzy-Jo, had shared a workbench with her. She'd been good, he was raw. The guys said, at Bagram, that she was assigned to mind him. Half the pilots at Bagram would have given a month's pay to work alongside Lizzy-Jo. He'd wondered often enough whether she'd complained about being put with him because he was new and given the dirty work, hadn't been an Air Force flier, had acne and fat-lensed glasses. He didn't know her – knew about Rick, who sold insurance, and about Clara, who was watched over by Rick's parents during the working day, knew about a marriage that had died, knew about her dedication… and nothing of her.
' Langley says that flight out of Shaybah was of the highest quality technical achievement, that it was pressed home in the most adverse conditions, that the video record of the flight and the missile firing will be used for training programmes in the future. It's what Langley said.'
He felt the blood pound in his cheeks.
She was bent over him, her breasts hanging close to his chest where her fingers played in the hairs. 'And Gonsalves came through from Riyadh. He said he was proud of us. If you'd stayed around in the trailer you'd have heard what he said.'
He blushed, felt like a kid. It was like when his high-school grades had come through – and he'd thought he'd flunked when he hadn't.
'I'd say it's party time.'
She leaned over him, reaching for the can. He did not know her, did not know what she felt for him… and her finger was into the ring and tugging it. The beer's foam sprayed over him, ran on his belly. She tilted the can for him to drink and the beer spilled from his mouth as he swallowed. He thought he'd drunk half the can, then she put it down. She licked the warm beer off his chest, took the hairs in her mouth, then her tongue was on his stomach.
'You good to party?'
Marty nodded, closed his eyes. She kicked off her flip-flops and wriggled out of the tight short trousers. Her face was serious, set – like the business was important – as she stood and pulled down her panties, then her weight was on him. The condom had been in her pocket, and she ripped the wrapping off with her teeth and peeled it over him.
He turned his head away so that he could not see her face… and he did not know why, what she needed from him, whether she had done it like this with the insurance salesman. The sweat ran in rivulets between her breasts and on to him, oiled them and fastened them together. The last time had been with a girl at Nellis, from the management of the base canteen, and she'd had thicker spectacles than him and had weighed more than a hundred and fifty pounds.
She'd hoped he'd marry her. Then he'd gone to Bagram and she'd never written.
He had killed. The reward for him, for killing, was to get laid twice in a half-hour. Maybe she had done it many times at Bagram, in her own prefabricated quarters or in a pilot's, but it did not matter to him. He gloried in the feel of her and squeezed deeper inside her the second time. He heard her shallow cries and the pace of her breathing, and he hung on to her as if in fear that it would finish. He did not see into her eyes, did not know her. He pushed his hips against hers. At the last moment, he yelled out, gasped, and sobbed his thanks to her. She squealed… He wondered how many of the technical guys or Maintenance heard her, if George did. He could go no deeper. His nails gouged her back and the sweat came off her and was in his mouth and he tasted the salt of it, with the beer.
Lizzy-Jo took the second one off him, knotted it, dropped it beside the bed.
She kissed his cheek, like she was his aunt.
She knelt on the bed over him and her head was cocked up. 'You know what's different?'
Marty panted, 'You and me, us? That was fantastic, it was-'
'You dumb ass,' she said, sharp. She showed no passion. Her face was the same, serious and set, as it had been when she'd zoomed the camera for the freeze-frame and when she'd launched. 'It's the wind.'
'I don't hear any wind.'
'You fool. That's what's different.'
He looked at the sides of the tent, then at its roof. The tent shook in the wind but not like it might collapse. He heard the sing of the wind but no longer its scream. She had her panties back on, was dragging up her short tight trousers and slipping on her blouse. The wind was down. Now it was not carrying sand under the flaps and on to the groundsheet. She bent over him and he tried to kiss her, but her face turned away and she only reached down to pick up the two knotted condoms, which went into her pocket… He did not understand anything of her. 'Why did you come here, to me?'
'I thought we deserved a party – didn't we?'
She went out through the flap and it dropped back. Marty kicked himself off the bed. He dressed slowly. A clean shirt, boxers and T-shirt from his bag, and the old jeans. His mother and father, up in the cabin overlooking Santa Barbara, had never asked him whether he had a girlfriend, seemed to expect that one day he'd turn up with one; he didn't know how they'd feel about a woman like Lizzy-Jo. He wrote to them once a month, was due to, but he would not tell them about his party. He drank the rest of the beer, stale and flat, and s; plashed water on his face. He did not go for a shower, did not want to take the smell of her off him.
Outside the tent, the sun hit him.
A small windsock flew from a pole on the far side of the satellite-dish trailer; it was out but not rigid.
A little knot of men worked around the port-side wing of Carnival Girl, and George and Lizzy-Jo blocked his view of the forward fuselage. He walked towards them. George faced him, stepped aside and made a mock bow of respect. It was black on the white of the fuselage. Marty gazed at the skull and the cross-bones under it, clenched his fist and raised it above his head. It was a confirmed kill.
Marty felt on top of the world.
She said impassively, like she'd shared nothing with him, 'We're going back up tomorrow. You look like you need some sleep. Take-off an hour before dawn. Get over the strike site, get a damage assessment, then go after any of the bastards we missed. Got it?'
Alive, the body had been thin. Dead, it was swollen and grotesque.
When they stopped in the dusk, as the sun sank, they did the burying before taking the share of water.
There were no stones for them to make a cairn to cover Fahd's corpse. Rashid, Ghaffur and Caleb scooped away sand with their fists, used their nails to dig, and made the hole. Hosni said the prayers.
With their feet, they pushed the sand back over him, covered what remained of his head.
After the sand had taken him, the stench of the body stayed with them. Caleb thought it clung to his robe. Then they drank their water, a quarter of a mug each, and moved on.
The wind only flapped their clothes, did not rip them. He knew the growing danger. They were hunted. The boy sat rigid and upright on his camel, rode and listened. The darkness settled on them, and the cool came.
Hosni said, 'I asked you – do you hate enough?'
Caleb whispered his answer. 'I told you, it has not changed -1 hate enough.'
'Without hate you will fail.'
'I have the hate. First there was excitement, then there was pride.
After the pride came the hate.'
'Explain to me.'
'When I went to Landi Khotal with my friends, everything was strange, was colour, was new. I was tested, then I was chosen. I had never known, where I came from, that excitement. I passed through the training camps, I was accepted into the 055 Brigade, I was made a squad leader. Of course there was pride – I had never been trained or accepted, had never led before. In the camps, X-Ray and Delta, there were two choices, two roads. I could have surrendered, as many have done, and submitted, or I could have fought them and hated them.'
'Where you come from, is there no love of that place?'
'None. All my love is for the family that I go back to at the end of this journey.'
The chuckle was low, choking, beside him. 'Bravely said. What would be your future if you had not gone to the wedding at Landi Khotal?'
'I would never have known excitement, pride and hate,' Caleb said simply, and quietly. 'I would be dead, and without love. I would have nothing. I would be choked to death by boredom… That I am alive is because I believe in the love of the family – you and Fahd, even Tommy, and the love of the people who helped me to reach you, and the love of those who wait for us.'
'Great trust is put in you, and what you can achieve.'
Caleb said, 'I hope not to fail that trust.'
'Tell me, those who were your friends, back at your old home, if you have achieved what we ask of you, what will they say of you?'
'They would not understand – they live without living, without love.'
'If they were to spit on your name?'
'They are forgotten, they are dead. I would not care.'
He felt the thin, bony hand touch his thigh. It seemed to crawl up it, then found his fist on the reins. It was held tight, as in a vice. This was his friend, not the boys from school or the kids on the canal towpath or the men in the garage. This was his family, not his mother. He lifted his fist. He kissed Hosni's hand.