'It is wrong,' Caleb said. 'We have to change.'
He challenged the guide.
Through the dawn, the thought had formed in his mind, as they had started out again, and in the morning's first hours. When the sun was high, convinced that Rashid was wrong, he had pushed the exhausted Beautiful One forward, faster. They had been in a long line, the guide far in front and the boy far to the back. He had come to the guide's shoulder. The Beautiful One stumbled from the effort.
'It is wrong because we make too big a target. We have to change.'
He spoke in the language he had learned from the Arabs in the 055
Brigade – what he had learned when they laughed and when they shouted in anger and when they cried in fear. He had been with them in good times, and in the hell when the bombers had been over them.
'We have to believe that it fired, then was recalled because of the wind. The wind has gone. We have to believe it will return to search for us.'
He could not have counted how many days it was since the great storm and the girl, and since Tommy had gone down into the sand.
In all of those days it was the first time he had ridden at the head of the caravan, been beside the guide.
'If we are so spread out we make it easier for them, for the camera, to see one man or one camel, than to see us all.'
The desert had changed, the formations were now small hills of reddened sand. Some were twice his height as he rode the Beautiful One. Here, the wind had made perfect circles of the hills, and between them were the flat areas where sand had been scraped away.
But the formation of the caravan had concerned him. In all the days, uncounted, he had not thought to challenge the guide.
'We have to close up, be tight together. We have to make the smallest target possible. We have to make it hard for them.'
Now the guide turned. He had not spoken, had not used his rein to slow his camel. His face was a loose, uncut beard, thin lips that were dried and cracked, a strong, jutted nose, narrowed eyes that gleamed, and the deep cuts of the lines at his forehead. He was a man to fear. At his waist was the curved sheath and the dulled worn handle of his knife. Close to his hands, which held the camel reins, fastened to his saddle, was the rifle. The brightness shone in his eyes.
'If they go over us, they have five chances of seeing us, or six. We should make it one chance only.'
Caleb had spoken quietly, with patience. But his mind was made up, the decision was taken. He had led a section of the 055 Brigade.
The decision was as clear to him as when he had squatted in the cages of X-Ray and Delta and had promised himself that he would fight. The Chechen, with the dead eye behind the patch, had seen the quality of a leader – the interrogators, guards and escorts had not. If he had needed it, the proof of his ability to think on his feet was on his wrist: the plastic bracelet with the reference number: US8AF-000593DR He did not discuss, did not talk it through with the guide, did not ask the guide's opinion. He spoke it as if he were giving an Older, but did so with politeness. He would not argue, he would lead.
'You will say that if we are close and they find us that one missile lulls us all. I say if we are close the chance of them finding us is . mailer. I respect you as my brother, but please do it.'
Caleb showed his patience. He dropped back and for half an hour he rode alongside the leading bull camel. He could read the batch number of the manufacturer, the stencilled name of the factory from which it had come, and the designation of the weapon, in the language he had thought he had lost, on the wooden crate it carried.
In half an hour, the guide rose on his saddle and waved for Hosni to come forward, for his son too, for them to bring the camels close.
They were together. The heat burned them. The sun's light, reflected up from the sands, was cruel in their eyes. The shadows were tiny beneath the lumbering hoofs. Caleb did not look up. To search the skies would have brought a weakening of his determination. Each could touch the other. He was strong.
Bart spoke and Wroughton listened.
'The pilots are all right, that's what he's saying. The pilots are fine, very professional, but they're not trusted. They know it and resent it.
Of course they know it, and it hurts. Morale is poor throughout the Air Force, he says, but especially so among the pilots. He was told – one of them spilled it all out for him – that the lack of trust stems from their training. They go to California or Arizona, they're off to the land of the free where they get their introduction to what I think is called "fast jets". They live among Americans and that marks them down, in the regime's eyes, as potential for contamination. They are beyond the reach of the great theocratic state during the training, are exposed to influences. Good pilots, yes – but how reliable? Is this useful?'
Wroughton nodded, but Bart thought his attention was far away.
They were on familiar territory, on the low seats behind the palms in the corner of the hotel lobby. Normally Wroughton varied their meeting-place, did not create a pattern, and it had puzzled Bart when this location was named. It was the first time Bart had ever reported on the Air Force and he'd expected a keener reaction… it was the first time that Bart had seen Wroughton appear haggard – tired, drawn, his tie not over his collar button, and his shoes not immaculately polished.
'Useful, but I think we've heard all this before.'
'Have you now? Well, what about this? Armaments. I suppose it follows on from what I told you I'd had from the National Guard man – you remember, the chap training them in riot control, yes? If they do practice bomb runs, then they fly up north. Up north, they load the bombs, but they have fuel restrictions. They don't carry enough fuel to fly back down to Riyadh with a bomb, only to get to the range and let it go. Then they have to land again, but up north.'
'I expect our air attache would have known that.'
'Would he? I can only offer, Mr Wroughton, what I'm told. When they are flying within range of the palaces they are not armed. Sorry if you already knew that. The fear, of course, is that a pilot may have been poisoned psychologically while training in America. Two sorts of poison, my patient says. Could be that exposure to America, its culture – McDonald's, Coca-Cola and pornography – has driven him into the fundamentalists' arms… Could be that he realizes the Kingdom is backward, living in an aged mind-set and that a bomb down the chimney of the King's palace would get the place going forward. Whichever, no armaments.'
'As I said, nothing there that's new.'
Wroughton had eased up from his seat. Bart wondered what had happened in the bastard's life. He was pleased he'd come, delayed two appointments, and had seen his tormentor fazed. Wroughton dropped a banknote on the bill.
'I just try to help, Mr Wroughton,'
'Keep in touch.'
Left alone, Bart finished his juice, gulped down what Wroughton had left, then sauntered across the lobby. At the swing doors, he realized that the banknote left to cover the price of their two juices would have paid for five and a handsome tip. Extraordinary, through the doors, he stood on the step and looked for his driver. A red Toyota saloon was parked in front of him, its engine idling and a European at the wheel. Wroughton drove out fast in his Discovery with the CD plates, and – Bart would have sworn to it – the red saloon accelerated, followed him out, then nestled into a lane two vehicles behind Wroughton. It could have overtaken and did not. bloody hell, a tail on Eddie bloody Wroughton. Bart was certain of it.
In Bart's past there had been briefings on how to recognize surveillance and a tail.
Al Maz'an village, near Jenin, Occupied West Bank.
God, if only there were more people like you Bart. If only.'
He walked at the end of the little column into the central square. She was Austrian. She would only be in Al Maz'an for twenty minutes, en route between Jenin and Nablus. The column was peopled by these representatives of a Munich-based medical charity and their Palestinian escorts. When Bart had heard that they were to come to Jenin for a morning's study, then drive on to Nablus, he had suggested to the organizing committee that a visit to the village, however brief, would be welcome.
'I do what I can. Sadly, I can do very little.'
'Tell me again what are the principal complaints of your patients?'
'Well, their overwhelming complaint is the savagery of the military occupation. All the hardship stems from it. Obstruction at every turn by the Israeli Defence Force, refusal to allow the entry of medical supplies, harassment of doctors and nurses and ambulance crews, even me… but that is not what you meant.'
She was pretty, earnest, and her face was a study of concern. Two Palestinian doctors were behind them, within earshot. An official of the Palestine Authority was in front. Her colleagues in the delegation were further ahead, fanning out into the square.
'I have here rampant bacterial diseases. E. coli, salmonella, typhoid, the constant threat of a cholera outbreak – you name it. I treat amoebic dysentery and toxoplasmosis. There is hepatitis A and B. Then I have the insect-vectored illnesses that you will have been told about in Jenin – dengue fever, filariasis and a particularly powerful strain of schistosomiasis where the parasites settle in the bowels, rectum and liver. Here, in the Occupied West Bank, Miss Hardenberger, we're looking at what your ancestors would have encountered in fifteenth-century Vienna. It is so unnecessary. Without the brutality of the Occupation all of them woidd be eradicated.'
Every word he said was heard, was meant to be. The scaffolding was still up. In the seven weeks that had passed he had not seen again the woman whose son had been hanged from that upper cross pole. In the seven weeks he had been three times to the hut at the checkpoint and had played out his charade of abusing the troops who searched his car. He had had nothing to report to Joseph and had sensed, the last time, a frisson of impatience.
'I don't think I know, Dr Bartholomew, about schistosomiasis – I specialize in midwifery. You understand?'
'Of course, of course. All I am trying to say to you, Miss Hardenberger, is that when you get back to Vienna, please, stand on a rooftop and let the whole of that city know what you have seen. Please do that.'
'I will. God's truth, I will.'
It happened quickly. He was looking into her face, a little taken by the scrubbed cleanliness of her skin, no cosmetics, when the car came by. It was driven fast and the two men behind them, the doctors, quite roughly, with urgency, pushed Bart and the Austrian woman from the middle of the street.
At that moment, as the car – a rusted lime-green Fiat – passed them, the back-seat passenger looked their way. A face from a photograph.
'Tell me, Dr Bartholomew, because your commitment and dedication humble me, what did you give up back in England to come here?'
His mind wandered. All of the photographs were good. They were not standard police photographs, front and profile, but unguarded surveillance pictures. They had a naturalness, were recognizable. In Joseph's hut, the photographs were ranked in order of sensitivity and the most sensitive were shown to him most often. He knew the face of the man in the back seat of the Fiat. The car sped across the square.
'A normal practice.' Bart grinned. 'You know, hernias and hips, pregnancy and prostates.'
'You gave up so much.'
'I tell you, Miss Hardenberger, if you are here and you are tempted to drift into self-pity, you have only to look around you. Here, self-pity is not an option.'
'I hope God watches over you,' she said softly.
He smiled at her… More importantly, he thought, did the rapid-reaction unit stationed up on the hill at the checkpoint watch over him? Everything he said was listened to. They went past the scaffolding where children waited in line to give flowers to the delegation, and there was a shout from the front that they must hurry if they were to visit the medical centre, a Portakabin shed.
He let her go ahead, said something about not wanting to hog her. She walked with the man from the Palestine Authority. Alone, without the distraction of her chatter, he could look better for another sighting of the Fiat.
He saw it down a side alley, barely wide enough for it to have parked and for another vehicle to pass. The alley was on the right-hand side of the wider street that led to the medical centre in the yard of the village school.
Opposite the alley he spotted a good marker, a collapsed telephone pole, felled by a manoeuvring tank months earlier and not raised again.
Back at their vehicles, as the delegation loaded up, the Austrian woman came to Bart, stretched up on her toes and kissed his cheek. He coidd smell the soft scent of the flowers she held.
Two hours later, in the hut at the checkpoint, over a mug of coffee and a sweet seed cake, he told Joseph of the lime-green Fiat, and the photograph was on the second page – at the top – among the most sensitive fugitives, and he described the flattened telephone pole at the top of the alley.
'You are sure?'
'Certain.'
'There is no possibility of an error?'
'None.'
Joseph said, T think to utilize this we have little time. Not time enough to make a complicated separation of you from the target. 1 don't wish to frighten you – be very careful, be exceptionally careful.'
Bart drove home. He fed the cat. He sat in his favourite chair, the sun beat on the windoivs and he shivered.
The class finished.
'Shu-ismak?' What is your name?
'Min wayn inta?' Where are you from?
That morning of the week, the last before the lunch-break, Beth had her biggest class. No history, no literature, and not the detailed language of the petroleum-extraction manuals. It was for basics.
'Ana af-ham.' I understand.
'Ureed mutarjem.' I want an interpreter.
The class catered for workers from every section of the Shaybah complex, was always full. Each time she read out the Arabic phrase, there followed a choir of voices struggling with the English translation.
'Mish mushkila.' No problem.
'Wayn al-funduq?' Where is the hotel?
In any other week she would have enjoyed the class for its enthusiasm. She did not think that any of them, as she spoke the Arabic and they replied in English, had realized that her heart was not with them, her concentration was gone. The class drifted towards the door with a cacophony of conversation and scraped chairs. One of the last to leave, gathering up the photocopied sheets she gave them for private study, was the head of Security. She was wiping clean her blackboard.
She called his name. She asked, please, if he could stay a moment.
The room cleared.
'Yes, Miss Bethany?'
She hesitated, then blurted, 'There is something I do not understand.'
'If I can be of help.'
She felt stupid. She should have backed off – but she never did. It was not her way. She tried to master a fraudulent casualness in her question. 'Someone told me that the Rub' al Khali around us is a place of danger. Is that true?'
He glanced down at his watch, as if unwilling to be delayed. 'True, and you know that. Extreme heat, dehydration, remoteness, it is very harsh.'
'Sorry, I don't explain myself – danger because of the people who move in the Sands.'
'False.' Again his eye slipped to his watch and a puzzled frown settled over his eyes. 'In your language you call it the Empty Quarter.
That is what it is. Only the Bedouin are there. An old culture of trading has given them the knowledge of the Sands. They can survive there, nobody else. The Bedouin are not thieves, they have a tradition of kindness and generosity. I know you go into the Sands, Miss Bethany, when you search for the meteorites, and you should be fearful of the conditions of nature, but not of criminals. Only the Bedouin are there, no other man can survive such a place. A stranger who tries to walk in the Sands, he condemns himself – he is dead.'
Thank you.' She dropped her head.
He lightened. 'Now, I understand… You have heard, Miss Bethany, the rumours – what they would gossip about in a camel market – of terrorists in the Sands. No, no. Those people are in Riyadh, Jedda and Ad Dammam, not in the desert. They would die there. Excuse me, please.'
She was left in the emptied room.
She wiped out the last lines on her blackboard. Min wayn intal and shu-ismak? She smeared out the chalked words.
Where are you from? Who are you?
In the boxes are the Stinger missiles. Do you know about the Stinger missiles?' Hosni was laid across the neck of his camel and his voice was a reedy, frail whisper.
Caleb crouched in his saddle to hear him. 'Once I saw one, but not close.'
'They are old. We do not know whether they are affected by the age. But they are important.'
They moved in a tightened knot, man close to man, camel brushing against camel, and he smelt the sweat on the guide and the boy, on the Egyptian and himself, the foul breath panted by the camels.
His knee bumped against a box's edge on the flank of a pack bull.
'I saw one when we tried to hold a line beyond Kabul, but the bombers were too high,' Caleb said. 'It was not fired.'
'The Stinger turned the war for us against the Soviets. The Soviets had a great fear of them.' Hosni coughed, tried to spit, as if the old memory of an enemy required it.
'I was never taught to fire one.'
'We bring them across the desert, deliver them, then they will be moved on, taken to where there is a target… but we do not know whether they will operate. Tommy opened the boxes, and there were manuals inside. They were written for Americans and Tommy could not read American.'
'Should we leave them behind?' Caleb had changed the order of the march. He expected to be listened to. 'Will the weight of them kill the camels?'
'You are the Outsider to us. I am told to escort you. I am told to bring you to the heart of the family. I do not know where you have come from, who you were. I do not ask. Two are already lost, but four remain. If I ask whether you can read the American manual of the Stinger, then you tell me something of yourself. My ignorance is your protection.'
'I am asking you, is their weight worth the life of the camels, do they slow us? What is more important? You and me or the Stingers?'
He knew the answer, expected to be told what he knew. 'Tell me.'
He did not know what the pale, watering eyes saw, but they speared at him and the voice grew in its pitch. 'I think you show ignorance. Perhaps it is only the Stingers, if they work, that will get us, you and me, through to those who wait for us.'
'The next time we stop, I will open a box, take the manual…'
'And read it?'
'… and read it. I will, because of my importance,' Caleb said.
For a moment, Hosni struggled to rise in his saddle, but the pinions held him. Caleb saw the man who had fought the Soviets, who had given his life to the struggle of the Emir General, saw the controlled anger.
'I warn you, ignorance you will learn from – vanity will destroy you. With vanity comes arrogance, with arrogance comes failure…
Imagine. Caravans move, columns of men move, mule trains move.
Men struggle not only through this desert but through mountains, through passes, through streets and through the alleyways of souks, they come from the doorways of mosques and from the entrances to caves. You are only one man. Do you believe the organization of the Emir General depends on one man, whose past gives him importance? We are many. A hundred men move – some will be slopped, some captured, some will be killed – and they will be replaced by another thousand. In an engine, you are one tooth in one cog. I ask of you, never again show me your vanity,'
Caleb flinched. The boy close behind him would have heard the attack, and the guide in front. It was as if he had been struck. He felt small, a pygmy dwarfed by this needle-thin old man whose hand he had kissed in love.
'The next time we stop I will read the manual.'
A dozen men and women sat in two lines, divided by computers.
Two lines of six, facing each other, separated by the screens and keyboards.
The raindrops, from their run between the car park and the Libtary entrance, were on the shoulders of Lovejoy's coat and the waxed waterproof loaned to the American. The skies outside were ashen and the forecast was for rain all day, then an unsettled week no clear blue skies on the horizon.
He spoke quietly to the chief librarian. He'd telephoned her in the morning and been told at what time the Internet class was scheduled to finish. He didn't do tourist trips. They'd stayed in a hotel just outside the centre of Wolverhampton, gone early to bed because the American seemed exhausted from his overnight flight. Over breakfast Lovejoy had made his calls, which had culminated in a less than frank conversation with the chief librarian. This was the first step. He had not taken the American for a drive round the sights of Wolverhampton, but had killed time in the hotel lobby. The first step always made Michael Lovejoy nervous, and his justification for going to the Library had been brief and terse.
The Library was three miles south-west of Wolverhampton, nine miles north-east of the Birmingham city plazas. After eight phone calls, Lovejoy had spoken to the chief librarian and had heard what he wanted. She was a middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Aggie, who was careful in her appearance and had the brightness of enthusiasm. To her, Lovejoy was a lecturer from the University of Birmingham. The American, a complication to the cover story, was not introduced, had been told not to speak, just smile.
'Right, well done, everybody, the hour's up… ' Aggie's voice boomed in the Library's quiet.
It reflected her endeavour. The interior was bright, cheerful and clean. It had a section at the far end for magazine reading, and the newspapers. There was an annexe for children, surrounded by shelved picture books and boxes of toys. Away, against the end wall, was the double bank of computers. She might have been speaking to juveniles, but those she addressed were in their twilight years: 'If you could, please, switch off, close down. You're making great progress, I'm very pleased.'
Lovejoy held the audio-cassette player, and the American had the tape in his pocket.
'I'm going to ask you to meet Michael – he's from Birmingham University and he's needing some guinea-pigs for a social-awareness project.' She spoke slowly as if she might not be understood, and loudly because the majority of them wore hearing-aids. She'd explained on the phone earlier that her Internet Familiarization class for Senior Citizens, starting at eleven, offered him a chance to meet older community members in a group. That day, and he'd checked it out, there was no specified gathering of the elderly at either the working-men's club or at the British Legion. It was, in his opinion, the best chance of meeting men and women whose lives were embedded in the area, born and reared there, worked and retired there. They looked up at him, tired eyes magnified by spectacles, and he thought he saw an expectation of interest after the struggle to master the computers' intricacies, and the Internet that was now forced on them. 'I ask you to listen very thoroughly to what Michael says, and then help him. He's relying on you.'
She waved for them to leave their blank screens and follow her to the chairs in the magazine reading section. They straggled after her, live men and seven women, all ethnic white, all with pale, aged faces; two used wooden walking-sticks and one had a metal hospital slick. She arranged the chairs so they made a half-circle behind a table, and they sat. Lovejoy put the cassette player on the table and reached out for the American to pass him the tape; he slotted it into the player. He sensed the scepticism of the American behind him.
They hadn't spoken much so far. It was a long journey from the Caribbean sunshine of Guantanamo Bay to a public library three miles south-west of Wolverhampton.
He lifted his voice: 'Ladies and gentlemen, I'm very grateful for your time. You are the experts and you can help me. Aggie tells me that all of you have lived here all your lives. You'll know accents, you'll be able to place one. For my social-awareness project, I need to test your knowledge of where an accent comes from, which community it originates from. I'm going to play you a tape. You won't understand the language used on the tape, and that must not bother you, but I want to see if you recognize from what area that voice comes. Please, don't guess. I need you to be certain.'
He used his winning smile. Mercy Lovejoy liked to say that that smile, cultivated over more than two decades as a counter-intelligence officer, would calm an enraged bull in a china shop, would allow him access into the secrets of any life. The smile, deprecating and almost shy, always charmed.
'You will hear a voice in American, ignore it – then a voice, a woman's, in a language you won't understand, ignore that as well, then you will hear a male voice, and that's the one my project is interested in.'
His finger hovered over the 'play' button. Only very rarely did Michael Lovejoy, officer of the Security Service charged with Defence of the the Realm – the safety of these elderly men and women and their children and their grandchildren – meet ordinary people. His work days were spent roving in the electronic and cyber world of National Health Service records, National Insurance contribution numbers and the statistics of personal bank accounts. To confront ordinary people, who knew nothing of his world, challenged his mettle. He felt a small shiver of excitement. He pressed the 'play' button.
The American's voice was muffled, as if distant from the microphone.
'The people in your village, Fawzi, what do they think about Americans?' the voice of the man behind him drawled, bored.
Lovejoy had been told the tape was from one of the last interrogations, when hope of live intelligence was dead, fulfilling a schedule that said prisoners must be questioned once a month. 'Can you tell me how the people in your village regard Americans?'
In a pretty poor light, Lovejoy thought. He had read the file in his room last night, and the file said that the family of Fawzi al-Ateh, taxi-driver, had supposedly been pulverized by the bombs from a B-52 aircraft… except that the taxi-driver was bogus and came not from a God-forsaken village in Afghanistan but from here. The woman's translation was similarly distorted.
The voice played in the hushed area of the library. They strained to hear it. They leaned forward, and one reached inside his jacket to tweak the control of his hearing-aid. He thought them all humble, decent, generous people. Their new clothes would have come from charity shops and their old clothes would have been repaired with needle and thread. He depended on them. The voice was the target of the microphone, was sharp. One woman, deep in fierce concentration, reached out over the table and made a twisting gesture, and Lovejoy turned up the volume dial. Camp Delta swamped the section of the library. The voice died away.
The question came. 'Before the accident, Fawzi, and we very much regret accidents – accidents are inevitable in modern high-technology warfare – did your village people welcome the intervention of the United States against the repression of the Taliban, and against the terrorism of Al Qaeda? Did t h e y…?' He switched off the machine, had been concentrating on the faces and had not intended the tape should run into the second question.
'Ladies and gentlemen, that's a first playing and I can play it as many times as you want. Where's he from? Where's that young man from?'
Some were certain of where he was not from.
'He's not from Moxley.'
' 'Tisn't Ocker, I'd swear on that.'
'Not from Dudley.'
'And I'll tell you something else – he's speaking Asian, but he isn't.
May speak Asian, but he's not.'
'Right, Alf – Asians can't do the V, can't get their tongues round it.
Asians say "wehicles", they say "wery", can't do V… And it isn't Tipton, or Upper Gornal.'
'Not Lower Gornal, neither – you're right about what Asians can't say, Alf.'
'But it's south from Wolverhampton.'
Lovejoy, so quietly that it was barely noticed, intervened. He'd reckoned – taken the gamble that he was not wasting his morning – that the elderly whose lives were lived south-west of Wolverhampton, stuck in the concrete of their streets, immured in their communities, would have a knife-sharp recognition of strangers. They would know where the stranger came from. He interrupted: 'Let me play it again to you. Can you tell me where you think he comes from?'
They listened, transfixed, to the voice, and he sensed the start of recognition.
'It's more like Deepfield.'
'Don't you mean Woodcross?'
'I think it's sort of Ettingshall.'
What about Lanesfield? What you reckon, Alf?'
There was always a leader in any group. In the Internet Familarization group, the leader was Alf. A heavy man, bald, his trousers held under his gut by a broad leather belt. 'It's not Ettingshall and not Lanesfield, but that's close. I'm reckoning it's up Spin Road from Coseley, but not as far as Ettingshall. It's where your cousin is, Edna, the one with the pigeons.'
Wonderful birds, champions – ever so many rosettes.'
He doesn't want to know about pigeons, Edna. He wants to know where that young chappie's from. I'm saying he's from between Coseley and Ettingshall.'
'I think you're right, Alf, between Coseley and Ettingshall.'
'You've got it, Alf – funny, him speaking Asian but not being. that's it, between Coseley and Ettingshall. Definite.'
Lovejoy picked up the cassette player, took out the tape and passed it to the American. He smiled his thanks, then told them how much they had helped his project. He shook Aggie's hand, and left them chattering happily about Edna's cousin's racing pigeons.
The American trailed after him and out into the car park. They ran in the rain, dived into the Volvo, and Lovejoy snatched the newly purchased map from the glove-box and began to spill through the pages.
'Was that scientific?'
'No,' Lovejoy said. 'It was better than science could give you. If they say it, I believe it. White and not Asian.'
'Which is going to blow the roof off Delta – Jesus Christ.'
Lovejoy's finger found the page, then pointed to and rapped down on the names. 'Ettingshall and Coseley, about a mile and a half apart.
That's where your man's from. Bet your pension on it.'
'I can only tell you, Eddie, what he told me.' Teresa leaned against the door and two of her kids, the youngest, hung from her skirt. The other two were shouting inside. 'He wasn't proud of it, you getting the turnaround in the lobby, but there were things – what he told me
– that were too grand to cut you in on.'
'I see.'
'For God's sake, Eddie, surely there are things you wouldn't share with the Agency, even with Juan.'
'Maybe.'
'He's sleeping down there. Nathan, his sidekick, came round for his spares. When Juan rings, shall I tell him you called by?'
Wroughton said evenly, 'I wouldn't want to bother him, wouldn't want to disturb him.'
She couldn't see behind his tinted glasses but she fancied his eyes would have blazed. 'Come on, Eddie, you know what it's like.'
He seemed not to hear her, had already turned his back. She watched him walk briskly away across the lawn and past the Pakistani garden boy. She was not prepared to incubate a feud so she stayed in the doorway and waved to him, to a friend, as he drove off, aggressively fast. She was still in the doorway when he went through the guarded entrance gates and pulled out into the traffic. She saw a red Toyota car come up behind him, brake, then follow him away. She watched and waved until Eddie was gone.
Inside, the kids' shouting had become screaming. She closed the front door and went into the kitchen to play peacemaker – it upset her that there was not peace between her husband and his best friend, and she did not know what was too critical for sharing between them.
He heard the voice in his headphones, like it caressed him. 'No better time than the present. At your own pace, guys. Oscar Golf, out.'
It was fourteen minutes since the camera slung to the belly of First Lady had found them. Inside the Ground Control the heat baked them. The desultory conversations between Marty and Lizzy-Jo had died. George was behind them with the water. The screens were in front. of them and their focus was on the central picture beamed down to them.
The tactic of the target had changed.
From an altitude of twenty-three thousand feet and a ground speed of seventy-one knots, the picture was transmitted to the middle screen, the largest. Marty held her steady – optimum weather conditions – on figure-eight passes over the target, and she went through the programmes that changed surveillance to target acquisition, The water George had poured on to his head, which ran down his back and stomach, had cooled him. He felt good, had the right to.
Marly could stand alongside the former Air Force pilots who flew for the Agency out of Bagram. Because he had killed, he thought himself a veteran.
She had not spoken about the sex, hadn't touched him, hadn't brushed against him – like she'd distanced herself from him. Her Mouse was undone again to her waist and he'd seen the water run down to the flesh folds of her stomach… She had the target on camera, followed it and never let it go while he made the figure-eight passes and thought she seemed older than before, more clinical than he'd known her.
When you going to go?'
'Next pass,' she said. 'I don't have a problem.'
His fingers were softer on the joystick than the last time. Then he had had the wind to fight. She had it on the wide angle. The camera caught the target as it moved, a little wriggling beetle, over the expanse of sand. What had changed, the target was closed up. It was now the ninth hour since he had taken First Lady up. Two hours into the flight they had circled over the first missile strike and he had seen the twin blackened craters and the carcass of the camel, and then they had started to hunt. He had taken First Lady on a criss-cross of patterns over the desert floor. A pursuit that was relentless after fugitives who could have no hope, that was what he'd thought.
Inevitable. He had not doubted that Lizzy-Jo's camera would find them. Nothing shrill in her voice when she had, no blurt of excitement – only the gesture of her hand, then the finger pointing to the right upper quarter of the screen. She'd worked the camera and the target had gone to the screen's centre. Fourteen minutes later he brought First Lady back on the figure-eight curves, and Lizzy-Jo was going through the procedures for firing.
The beetle moved so slowly. They were tight together. He wondered whether they searched the skies, gazed up at the sun and burned out their eyes. They would fail. The heat haze came up off the sand round them, distorted the picture, but it remained clear enough for him to see them, to watch their crawling progress. He saw four men. He did not know them, they had no identity for him. He remembered what Gonsalves had said. It echoed in his mind: 'The hardest man, the strongest. The man they need. The man that can hurt us most. A man without fear.' He saw four men, saw no threat, no danger, no chance of risk – four men, on camels, in the desert.
She said, 'When you turn behind them, I'm launching.'
Marty wished he knew them, wished he saw the threat, the danger they made.
'What are they thinking?'
She darted a glance at him. 'God, I don't know.'
'Doesn't that matter – what they're thinking?'
'Thinking about water, about chow, thinking about a shower – I don't know. Thinking about us.'
'What are they thinking about us?'
'Whether we've found them, I suppose – how the hell should I know? – whether we're over them.'
He saw them on the screen, worked the joystick and banked First Lady so that she would line up behind them for the strike. 'That's not an answer – what do they think about us?'
'About hating us, about having contempt for us… you want to be their shrink, Marty? Forget it. Think of your duty to our country and do your job. Forget that shit – I don't know what they're thinking and I don't care.'
Marty said softly, 'We are flying west-north-west, wind speed eight knots, our air speed is-'
'I got all that… Going in five.'
He did not know about them and that hurt in his mind.
The whisper, 'Port side gone.'
His fingers tightened on the joystick and he compensated for the luch of First Lady. She was thrown up at an angle, starboard side dipping. He heard the little gasp of annoyance from beside him: he'd been slow in making the commands that held her steady On the central screen, the fireball seemed to loiter before it started to race away on its guided descent. He had her steady, and he waited for the next leap of First Lady – which didn't come.
' You shooting?'
'I'm holding… Look at them, Marty, look at them run.' t)n the big screen, the central one, the beetle below the fireball broke up.
'bastards.'
Marty saw the panic scattering of the camels. They went in crazy lines, like they'd broken the knot that held them.
At that height, and with the oblique firing angle, the Hellfire would fly for seventeen seconds… Half-way down… He saw, from the fireball, the little adjustments she made as she guided it, and he watched the camels career together and apart. He watched their panic. lie was the voyeur. He was the hard-breathing youth in the shadows of the car park above the ocean where the university students brought their girls. He rubbernecked the stampede of the camels. The missile went into the sand.
The Hellfire was for a tank. Firing a Hellfire at Nellis, the sensor operator should get an armour-piercing warhead up against a tank turret from twenty-four thousand feet, should get a hit on the range within one yard of the aimed point. Instructors liked to reckon they could hit within half a foot on a stationary tank turret… Nobody at Nellis had ever thought of a target of running camels for an impact of a fragmentation warhead. The dustcloud rose.
The cloud came up towards the camera lens. Marty lost the camels, did not know whether they were under it, or had escaped it. There was a darkness at the core of the cloud, then a fire flash in its heart.
Red flame blossomed from the cloud. They had hit ordnance. The new fire burst through the cloud and climbed, then guttered. Smoke, dark and poisonous black, replaced the fire.
The voice came in his ear, massaged him like her fingers had.
'Good work, guys. Secondary explosions would prove you've hit gold. Please look at your screens, extreme left. I see empty camels on the right side, ten o'clock, but you should be looking extreme left, four o'clock. Centre on that target, and take it. Oscar Golf, out.'
Alone in the desert, a single camel ran. Marty had been to ten o'clock, four camels together – like they were tied – no riders. Then Lizzy-Jo was raking the picture across, going to four o'clock, and zooming. The picture was tugged to close-up, and she tweaked the lost focus. A single camel ran in the sand, wove between the hills.
Marty came over it. The camel stumbled, like it had no more running left in it, tried again, then stopped. The screen was filled with the camel. It stopped, like its spirit was broken. It sank. The knees went from under it. The technology that Marty watched, that Lizzy-Jo worked, showed a camel run to exhaustion and crumpling. He saw the weight that the camel could no longer run with.
The vomit was in his throat.
He was the representative of a master race. Four point five four – recurring – miles below the camera an old man was laid out on the back of the camel.
Beside him, Lizzy-Jo trilled amazement. 'This is just wonderful gear, incredible – like he's just down under us.'
Eight million dollars of Predator, at factory-gate prices, circled an old man on a camel and lining up against him was a hundred thousand dollars of Hellfire with a fragmentation warhead. He could see the old man's face and a blur of greying hair, and the old man seemed to twist his head and look up, and he would have seen nothing and would have heard nothing. Marty did not know why the old man had not jumped clear of the knelt camel, why he had not gone away from it. He was stretched across the camel from the hump to the neck. Did he know? Must have. His arm came up. First, Marty thought it was like a salute. Wrong. The arm was outstretched, pointed upwards towards First Lady: 'Fuck you.' He thought the arm, raised, said, 'Fuck you,' to him.
Lizzy-Jo let the second Hellfire go.
For a dozen of the sixteen seconds of its fireball flight, Marty watched the screen, then turned away, his eyes closed. He did not watch its hit.
He spun his chair and ripped off his headset. He pushed away George's hand and went to the door. He heard Lizzy-Jo murmur to her mouth microphone that her pilot had gone off station. He stood in the door, above the steps.
The vomit cascaded from his bowed head.
When he was conscious, he could feel the warm wetness of the blood. But Caleb drifted.
When he came back to consciousness, he could feel the pain. It was deep waves.
Conscious, he did not know how they had made the litter, and how they clung to the undersides of the camel's bellies, hanging from the hidden saddle straps.
The litter, three sacks, was suspended low down between the Beautiful One and Rashid's camel. He was belted by the animal's legs and rocked from the motion of their walk. On the far side of him was the boy. Father and son, gasping, held themselves against the stomachs of the camels, and behind them was the last of the bulls.
When the pain came, and the scent of the blood, he could remember. The boy had howled the warning. The fire had come down on them. The blow, with the hot wind and the clap of the thunder, had felled him. They had snatched him up, father and son.
He was hidden, as were Rashid and Ghaffur.
The last sight he had seen was the one camel, Hosni strapped . across it, fleeing from them.
He prayed to sleep, to lose the pain.