The cloth against his head was wet and cold. It stank with stale odour. The voice said, 'Do not try to speak.' With great gentleness, the cloth was wiped on his forehead, round his eyes and on his cheeks. A little of the dribble from it rested on his lips – it stung his eyes.
He tried to move, to shift the weight on his back, but the effort brought the pain – he gasped – and for a moment the cloth was across his mouth.
'You must not cry out.'
How long he had been unconscious, asleep, dead, he did not know.
The pain was in his leg and at the side of his head. When he tried to shift, the pain was agony in his leg and his head throbbed.
'If you are seen, heard, it will have been for nothing. You must not be found.'
The cloth over his face calmed him.
His eyes moved, not his head.
The night was around them. Rashid crouched over him, laid the cloth in a bucket, lifted it, squeezed the water from it, then spread it, cool and bringing life back, across his throat and his upper chest. He lay on the same sacks that had made the litter and in his nose was the smell of shit and urine – his. Flies buzzed him. Close to him were the hoofs of the camels. As if she were alerted by his faint movements, or the guide's murmured voice, the Beautiful One arched her neck down and her nostrils nudged against him. Beyond the camels, fires burned. He heard roaming voices, laughter and the scrape of harnesses. He smelt cooking meat, carried on the wind, and spices mixed with boiling rice, could recognize them through the stench of the camels and his own excreta. He squinted to see better, and shadows passed across the fires – when a shadow approached closer to them, Rashid reached for his rifle and was alert, but the shadow ignored them and went on. They were separated by thornbushes from a great gathering of men and animals. When it reached his lips and he sucked at it, the water was foul, old. He retched, could not bring anything up, and the choking in his throat and gut brought back the agony in his leg and the hammer in his head. Rashid cradled him.
' I thought you were dead, I praise God.' The voice guttered in his ear. 'For three days and three nights, I thought you were the scrape of a fingernail from death. Only God could have saved you… I sent Chaffur for help. I asked him to go alone into the Sands, and his life is with God… All the water we had was for you, and one day back, and one night, it was finished. Now we are at a well-head. It is bad water, it has not rained here for many years, but it is the water that God has given us. If you are found here there will be people who will see your wounds and will know you are an Outsider to the Sands, and they will seek to sell you to the government, or they will kill you and lake your head to the government and ask money for it. We came in the night and we will leave in the night, with God's protection.. You should rest. Death is still close to you. If God forgets you then you are dead.'
The words croaked in Caleb's throat. 'You sent your son?'
'I sent my son into the Sands, that you might live. We are just two men That we are alive is because of the Egyptian. He rode away from us. He took the eye in the sky from us. The eye went after him.
I heard the explosion as we fled. He gave his life for us, for you. You have to live, it is owed to him.'
And to your son…'
His eyes closed. His hold on what was around him slackened. So tired, so weak. He did not have the strength to think of the wound in his leg or the wound in the side of his head. He drifted. He was by the canal, on the pavement close to the black-painted door, was kicking the ball in the yard and aiming at the glass in the hatch of the overturned washing-machine… He was nothing, nobody. He lost the pain, lost the cool, healing touch of the wet cloth. He lost the image of the boy, his bright mischief eyes, sent by his father and alone in the Sands.
In the Hummer, they played Willie Nelson loud. Will drove and Pete did the satellite navigation. 'Help Me Make It Through The Night' came out of the CD system. Two more Hummers, with the Arabs, followed them. Will never trusted an Arab to drive him, and Pete never reckoned anyone else but himself could do better on navigation. Both rated the Hummer, the civilian version of the Army's Humvee, as the best there was on wheels, and capable of taking them where a helicopter – screwed up with the density altitude barrier from the heat – could not. They were the same age, had been through the same Galveston education line, lived on adjacent plots in the Houston suburbs, and did the same work. They were two gas-extraction field surveyors. Blood brothers. The trip, never a snide word between them, had already taken them across in excess of six hundred miles of sand – but the mapping now was complete. That night, if the Hummer with three tonnes loaded on her held up – and the Hummers with the Arabs behind them – they would be on a late plane back to Riyadh. They were on the Exxon-Mobil books, earned good money – and the world, because of where they were, owed them it.
Time had slipped away, two and a half weeks of it. For eighteen days they had driven, camped, worked in the Empty Quarter, without sight of human company other than the Arabs who travelled behind them; top temperature out there was a confirmed 124°
Fahrenheit. The Hummer took them anywhere they fancied going, up dunes and down them, through loose sand.
'Well, well, lookey-here…'
Will was imagining the juicy burger he'd have on their return to the Riyadh hotel.
'Hey, no foolin', take a look.'
Will said, 'Well, I'll be. You got some hawk eyes on you. I'd have driven right on by.'
'I don't reckon we should. Look it, he's just a kid.'
A hundred yards, a little more, to the right of where they came down off the dune, were a child and a camel. The camel stood and the boy sat in its shade. At that distance, through the sealed sand-sprayed windows, they could see, each of them, the gaunt resignation on the boy's face. The camel, dead on its feet, didn't even turn towards them as they edged closer.
'Like they're jus' waitin' to die.'
'This is one evil fucking place.'
'I reckon the camel's just stopped, won't go another step. You're gonna go and git yourself a rosette, Pete, that's one good deed for the day.'
Fifteen minutes later, they moved on. The kid was stowed on top of the luggage mountain on the second Hummer. The camel was dead, shot with a bullet to the head by their camp manager. They were two hard men, away from home in Houston for eight months of every year, played hard and drove themselves hard. Neither spoke. Pete had a wet eye and Will would have choked on any words. The kid had held the camel, soft hands round its neck as the rifle barrel had gone against its head, and the big dopey brown eyes had been on the kid. Blood had spattered when the bullet had been fired – new blood on old across the kid's robe. Old caked blood covered the kid's robe… He wouldn't talk of it. The camp manager had tried, hadn't gotten an answer – it wasn't the kid's blood. What the kid said, translated by the camp manager, he had to get to Miss Bethany at Shaybah, and nothin' else.
Will thought of the fruit machines he played when he could find them – thought he had a better chance of a once-a-year jackpot than the kid had had of being spotted out there in the sand.
Pete reckoned that Someone, up there in the clear blue sky, must have cared for the kid, must have watched out for him, because if he'd come down the dunes heading left they'd never have seen him.
The Hummer powered towards Shaybah, the late-night flight out and burgers in Riyadh.
*
The deputy governor was ushered out by Gennifer.
Before the outer door had closed, the ambassador had the internal phone against his face.
'Gonsalves, that you? The ambassador here. Get yourself down to me, please, with a degree of urgency.'
He reflected. Power had shifted from his desk. The evacuation of military personnel from the big airbase south of the capital had grievously wounded his status. The war in Iraq had further damaged it. The pending lawsuits – where legal men back in New York talked billions of dollars in prohibitive damages on behalf of the victims of the Twin Towers – against members of the ruling elite, the Royal Family, had caused a breakdown in precious trust. The compound attacks in Riyadh had been a coffin nail. Before the evacuation, the war, the filed suit, and the suicide bombers' assault, he would have told – with exquisite politeness – the deputy governor to go stuff himself. The world marched on, and the Kingdom was no longer his fiefdom. Another year and he would be teaching at Yale.
The door opened after a knock, and Gennifer showed the Agency man inside.
He launched: 'Gonsalves, this is not a criticism. I have no complaint about the liaison you have had with me. You told me, and I acknowledge it, that you were bringing a Predator team into the Shaybah Field base for, as I remember it, surveillance of the Rub' al Khali – under a pretence of mapping and also the testing of performance in extreme heat. Well, we have a problem.'
The ambassador was a man for whom personal appearances mattered. He changed his shirt twice in a day, and three times if he had an important evening function. He always wore a tie, never dragged the knot down or loosened his collar button. Opposite him, lounging and appearing at the edge of sleep Gonsalves wore jeans, a grubby vest and an open shirt. His face was stubbled, his hair uncombed, like some damned Fed in deep cover in Little Italy, the right gear for lamp-post leaning.
'The local authorities here are increasingly suspicious of us. There is growing obstruction. It comes down to a desire to derail us. Just out of my office is the deputy governor, the province that includes that big block of sand, and Shaybah. We are not welcome. No longer are Predator aircraft welcome at Shaybah. We have little prying eyes watching us, you'd know that better than me, seeking to flex long-unused muscles. I suppose there's other places you can go – Djibouti or Dohar – but the door at Shaybah is closed. Two alternatives: ship out and smile, cut them in and tell them what you're doing… I know which I would go for. Personally, I would not trust the last live rat in the Kingdom with detail of any anti-Al Qaeda operation of sensitivity. I think you should talk to your people. I bought you some time, probably about three days, but no more.'
Not too many clouds passed over the Riyadh sun. A cloud flitted across Gonsalves' face. He was up and heading for the door, like he'd a bayonet under his backside.
'It was surveillance, wasn't it, Gonsalves? Just surveillance?' from the door, a child's smile spread across the Agency man's face. 'Yes, we were watching them. Right down to the time the Hellfires hit. We watched them when the secondary explosions, ordnance, blew. If you ever get tired of TV movies just call me, and I'll send you down a video.'
'Three days.'
The smile was gone. 'It's a prime route to where they are.'
It was like they were wary of each other.
There were areas that were off-limits.
The light had gone out for him, Lizzy-Jo thought.
Three days and three nights back, George had thrown a bucket of water on to the Ground Control steps but there were still scrapes on the treads of his dried-out vomit. He'd brought her in, had made a good landing for First Lady, then had gone to his tent. He had not studied the video the morning after, not like the first time, had not seen a second time the zoomed lens image of the old man bent across the camel's neck. He had not gone out to see the handiwork of George on the fuselage of First Lady, the new skull-and-crossbones stencil. Had not eaten with her, had not talked with her. What did he think it was all for? A teen game in an arcade? Staying in for computer warfare because it was raining outside? There hadn't been fun between them, or laughter.
Three days and three nights. That was enough.
She looked away from her screen, flipped off the switch that gave voice contact to Oscar Golf. 'OK, so he looked like your damn granpa
– so what? You think Al Qaeda pensions them out, don't do granpas?
Don't be a wuss – you're a kid who wants to play with the big boys' toys. Grow up. Next time you want to go soft I'm making certain the whole world's going to hear and you'll be dead in a junkyard.'
She slipped the switch back, regained voice contact with Langley.
The sand slipped across her screen as it had done for most of the hours of three days and three nights, all the time that First Lady had flown. When they landed her, seven more hours and into the night, she would be grounded for maintenance. The next day they would take up Carnival Girl, the old lady. She was beginning to hate the fucking sand.
On the screen it was empty, had been in all their flying hours spread over three days and three nights, and the real-time camera in the day and the electro-optic/infra-red in the darkness had shown up nothing.
The teleprinter started up.
They were on new boxes. They'd circled where the old man had been, lying across the kneeling camel, before the Hellfire pulverized him, and they'd stayed up there on station till the smoke dust had cleared. When the cloud had gone, after they'd seen the small crater, he'd brought her back over the first hit and the larger crater. Then they'd gone searching. Four camels, no riders, in the screen. Four camels tied together, no men, followed for a half-hour, then allowed to go on. If they'd searched again, hard enough, she thought they'd have found one camel down and the rest standing and unable to drag themselves clear, or two camels down… dying in the sand, under the sun.
Best that they'd been given a new set of boxes to work over.
Lizzy-Jo tore the sheet off the teleprinter. She felt bad at the verbal abuse she'd given him but did not know an alternative.
'Listen,' she said. 'Just less than seventy hours and we're out of here. The Saudis have closed us down. If that's what Bagram is, we're going home. Hey, you shoot, you score – we wiped out bad people, and their granpa, wasted them.'
He came out of the supermarket. He loathed the place, a little corner of London or New York, but it was fast and quick. Faster and quicker because so many of the expatriates it was designed to serve had checked out from the Kingdom, gone back where they'd come from.
He would have liked to browse in a street market, buy what was local, but the security situation forbade it.
In two plastic bags Eddie Wroughton carried a sliced loaf of bread, two litres of milk and three chilled meals-for-one that would go into his microwave, a kilo of New Zealand-grown apples and two containers of water allegedly bottled in Scotland. That evening, had it been normal – but it was not – he should have eaten at the Gonsalves' kitchen table, then chucked a Softball in their backyard.
He crossed the car park. There were high lights, sufficient to show him his own vehicle, but they threw down shadows. He did not see the red Toyota, or the man who loitered close to it. The lights fell, for a moment, on his linen suit and his laundered white shirt; the silk of his tie glistened and made stars on the darkness of his glasses. His mind unravelled an old memory. The family Sunday lunch, and the next day he was going to Century House for the start of his recruits' induction course. His father there, his grandfather and his great-uncle – old warriors of intelligence – and the talk had gone on from how he should conduct himself with his examiners and had eddied to comfortable nostalgia. Old campaigns refought – and port passed, cigars lit, and the bone had been the favourite one for chewing… the Americans.
'Never trust them, Eddie, never ever.'
'The greatest sin for an American is to lose – don't forget that, Eddie, don't. Make certain you're on a different planet if they're losing, don't be up close.'
' A chap once said: "America is a big happy dog in a small room, and each time it wags its tail it breaks something." They don't even notice, Eddie, the damage they do. Be your own man, not their poodle.'
He had thought Juan Gonsalves was his friend… He reached his vehicle, zapped his lock, then the shadow was across him. He opened the back door, to dump the bags.
Is that Mr Wroughton, Mr Eddie Wroughton?' the voice, English language and foreign accent, whined.
He turned. The man came from the shadows, tall and wiry, middle aged, with a sharpness in his eyes.
He said curtly, 'Yes, that's me.'
Is that the bastard who fucks my wife?'
Nowhere to back off to. His vehicle was behind him. The man was in front of him. From the high lights, he saw the clenched fists and the stone-bruised, sand-scraped boots, and the loathing at the mouth.
Wroughton stiffened, felt the deadness in his legs and arms, couldn't have run. Could have shouted out, could have yelled for Security at the main doors, but his throat had tightened: nothing would have come from it. He saw the right boot swing back. The kick came into his shin, against the bone and the pain ran rivers. He crumpled. His head went down and the clenched fist hit him on the side of the jaw, the edge of his cheek. More kicks, some on the thigh and the target was his groin. More fist blows and his head was a punchball. He was down. Men from the Royal Military Police came to the fort on the south coast – outside Portsmouth – and taught self-defence. Last time he'd been on the course was seven years back, before the posting to Riga. He tried to protect his head – could not protect head and testicles. One or the other. It was done cold. Iced venom. Not frantic or flailing. It was the attack of a street-fighter. Where had a bloody Belgian agronomist learned the tactics of a street-fighter? Nothing said, not a word. The man did not even pant. Wroughton felt the blood in his mouth. He was not going to die, he knew that. The man was too calm to kill him, intended only to humiliate. The tinted spectacles had gone and he heard the crunch of the boot on them, then a hand snatched at his tie, grasped the silk and pulled up his head with it. Twice, as he choked on the tightened knot, the fist hit his face, once the lower lip, once the bridge of his nose. The man spat in his face.
The tie was let go. Wroughton fell back. The shadow moved away from him. The blood was on his chin and in his mouth. It washed round his teeth and ran in his throat. As the clatter of the boots left him, he managed in a supreme effort to lift himself on one elbow.
Through a spew of blood, Wroughton shouted, 'Pity you couldn't satisfy her – she said you were a lousy screw.'
The boots went away, the stride never breaking.
He pulled himself up, using the door-handle, and sagged into the seat, then drove out of the car park.
Wroughton knew enough of personal medicine to realize that if any of his ribs had been broken, or his wrist or his jaw, the pain would have been too great for him to drive. What was hurt was his pride. He went through deserted streets. What was kicked and punched, blown away, was his prized self-esteem. He reached the compound and held up his ID for the guard to see, his face turned away.
Inside, he stripped off his clothes, moaning at the struggle to loosen the belt, the zip and the buttons. His linen suit was torn at the knees and elbows and smeared with the car park's dirt; his shirt was blood-stained. When he had binned the suit, shirt, socks, shoes and underclothes, he crawled across the floor, dragged out the telephone plug, then switched off his mobile. Eddie Wroughton could not face the world. Naked, he sat in his chair and let the darkened room close around him.
She lay on the stone patio. She thought of love.
Far in the distance, below the bungalow, she heard the high-pitched roar of a powered engine.
For Bethany Jenkins, love was alive.
Infatuation, no. Lust, no. Love, yes – damnit. It consumed her. Love was the skin, could be pinched, scratched, scraped, but could not be shed – the hard skin on her legs and arms, the soft skin below the hair on her thighs, the tanned skin on her face. She could not forget him.
Her mother had said to her once, on a third gin and Italian, that she'd seen her father across a crowded box at Newbury races – before they'd met, before they'd spoken – and known, when their eyes had met, through the shoulders and between the heads, that he was the man with whom she would live her life.
Love was not, as Beth reckoned it, the product of introductions made by grandmothers, aunts and best friends. Wasn't about bloody suitability. Love was not sensible. Love happened, and fuck the consequences.
Love was the chance meeting on the upper deck of a late-night London bus, in a carriage on a train out of King's Cross going north
… Love was not about earning prospects in the City, nor about decent families and fat inheritances.
It was beyond control. Did not have an agenda. A rifle was raised, a knife was grasped, and a man held her life in his hand. She didn't know him, he didn't know her. He had put aside the rifle, had shielded her from the knife – had protected her. She had not believed him. She'd said: 'Are you going to try to rape me… are you going to kill me?' She'd held the little opened penknife with the two-inch blade. He'd said: 'No… I am going to dig you out.' He had. And she had loved him.
'Well, I can't bloody help it,' she said to the moths. 'It's not my fault, blame the bloody hormones.'
The beams came up the track towards her bungalow.
Beth would have said that she remembered him with more clarity now, on the patio, than an hour after he had disappeared over the crest of the dune… Would her mother understand? It would take more than three gin and Italians – if Beth ever met him again – for her mother to take her daughter into her arms and gush, 'Oh, that's wonderful, darling, I'm so happy for you.' Love came out of a sky that was clear blue…
The big vehicle stopped on the track in front of her small green watered garden and more moths danced in its headlights. A window lowered.
A voice called to her, 'Is this the residence of Miss Bethany? Are you Miss Bethany, ma'am?'
'It is. I am.'
The door nearest her opened. She saw the bundle lifted with big hands over the passenger's body, like it had been over the gear lever, then it was dropped down. She saw the boy.
Blood was caked on his robe.
'You'll forgive the intrusion, ma'am. We found him out in the Sands. His camel was finished and he was damned near gone. We filled him up with water. He gave us your name. Where he's come from, I don't know. I don't have time to play with, ma'am, we've a plane to catch. He's not hurt. Nothing wrong with him, 'cept his tongue. All I know is, he gave your name. So, I can take him back to Security at the gate and dump him, or I can leave him here – and we're running late for our plane. Ma'am, it's your decision.'
'Leave him here,' she said.
The boy was part of him. She remembered the boy's whistle, sharp, through the fingers at the small mouth, telling him it was time to leave her. She saw the dark bloodstain on his robe, and the lighter spatter that surrounded it. She felt so bloody weak.
The boy came from him, she knew it, and she knew the dark bloodstain was his.
'Don't you ever listen, Mum? Don't you ever care about what I'm saying, what I want? What's it to you?'
He did not hear his own voice, its anger.
'It's only money. I want the money for the fare and the money for spending. Is that such a big deal? I want money, got it? I want money to get out of this shit-hole. It's crap here, crap. It's the end of the bloody world here. All my life, do you want me here? Bloody wonderful life living here – oh, yes, oh, yes. Top of the bloody world, isn't it? What's the boundaries of the world? Ettingshall and Coseley, Woodcross and Bradley? Rookery Road and bloody Daisy Street? Is that as far as the world goes? Don't go over the railway line, best not to cross the canal bridge – might bloody fall off the end of the world.
I want more in my life than this heap of shit's got. I mean, what is there here? Bingo, chips and work, cinema and last bus, girls who want to be hairdressers – what is there here? I want some excitement, I want to bloody live – not locked up here, not in this bloody cage.'
He did not know, as he cried out the anger of it, that the old language ruled, had come back from across the chasm.
'You got the money. What do you have to do? Just get yourself down to the building society, draw it. What's money for? "For a rainy day, Caleb." It rains here every bloody day. I want something to remember. I don't want to grow old in this bloody place, no bloody excitement. When else am I going to get that sort of a chance? Look at this place, it's full of the walking dead. When did you last hear anyone laugh? I want laughter and sunshine and, Mum, I want excitement. I want to breathe… I'm dying here, I'm going to be walking dead… I have this chance and I have to take it.'
He did not see that a Bedouin guide crouched over him and used a wet cloth to try to still the confused rambling.
'They're good guys. They get away, out of here, every two years.
They're my best mates. It's a proper invitation, Mum. All I have to do is find the fare. You got anything against them, my best mates? So they're Pakis – is that your problem, Mum? My best mates are Pakistanis. Well, it's where you bloody live, isn't it? You – we – live among Asians. That's your choice. They're all right, doing a bloody sight better than us. Farooq and Amin are my best mates. They'll look after me. I'll be with their families… Just once, two weeks, I'll get to a place I've never been. And I'll get some bloody excitement.
Cop on, Mum. Please.'
He did not feel the cool of the cloth or the heat of the fever that caught him.
'Get me straight, Mum, I'm going. I want it. Mum, if I have to take you down to the building society, half break your bloody arm doing it, I will. I'm going. It'll be like freedom, two weeks of being bloody free, shot of this place. You going to miss me, Mum? You going to cry on your pillow, Mum? Are you fuck. No, you'll go to the bingo.
Mum, have you ever heard of the Khyber Pass? It's history. You ever heard of the North West Frontier? I was down the library, it's fantastic. I want to be there, breathe it, feel it… Then I'll be home, and the bloody door'll lock behind me. Mum, don't cry. Mum, 1 hate it when you bloody cry… You shouldn't have said that, shouldn't have. I'm not arrogant, greedy. Don't ever say that again, Mum. I want to have been somewhere. I want to be someone.'
He did not taste the cloth over his mouth, but it quietened him.
She felt strangely calmed. She had the telephone in her hand, had dialled, and she heard it ring out. An age before it was answered.
'Yes?' She heard a stifled yawn. 'Samuel Bartholomew – who's that?'
She swallowed hard. 'You may remember me, Beth Jenkins.'
'I remember you – fit as a flea.'
'Sorry about the time.'
'Not a problem. What can I do for you?'
A line was drawn in front of her. The boy was behind her, gorged with food and water from her fridge. She had questioned him, a mix of brusque interrogation and of gentle probing. She knew what had happened and that he was wounded… The boy had described a gash to the head and a slashed leg, and the blood of proof was on the boy's robe. With simplicity, the boy had described the injuries, the weakness, the loss of consciousness. He might already be dead.
Lost and gone, dead. And the boy had described a track, and she had taken the big-scale map down from a shelf above her desk, spread it on the tiled floor and knelt beside it with the telephone. The line was drawn in front of her. It was like the deep indentation made by the tyres of an earth-moving Caterpillar tractor. It could not be missed, or avoided. It stretched, either way, in front of her. The line blocked her. She recognized the moment, did not delude herself: the moment would define her life. She could step over it, she could turn her back on it.
'Are you still there? I asked what I can do for you, Miss Jenkins.'
She did not know who else she could have turned to, only this slug-fat man at the end of a long-distance phone line – not the doctor at the Shaybah clinic, from the Emirates… She took the step, crossed the line.
'I need you down here, in the desert.'
'Excuse me, but I'm in Riyadh. Don't you have medical staff where you are?'
'I need you, I'm afraid.'
'I think it reasonable of me, Miss Jenkins, to request an explanation.'
He was the only doctor she could have called.
'It's a friend… '
'Yes.'
'… who is hurt out in the Sands.'
'Then get a helicopter, Miss Jenkins. Get a helicopter to lift him out.'
'That is not possible,' she said, and the calm had not deserted her.
'I'm not following you. What's he done – turned his vehicle over?'
She sensed the boy standing motionless behind her, eyes on her, not understanding her. The boy had been in the desert for three days and three nights. He had hazarded his life to come to her.
Beth said crisply, 'I can't send for a helicopter, I cannot use a local doctor. My friend has been wounded in military action.'
'God! Military action? Am I really hearing this?'
'From a missile attack, Dr Bartholomew, my friend has a head wound and a leg wound. I think he has very little time.'
'Do you have any comprehension of what you're asking of me?'
'I do – because I'm asking it of myself.'
'An enemy of the regime, is that your friend?'
'He is just my friend.'
'I lead an easy life, Miss Jenkins – what you request is-'
She heard only the wheeze of his breathing. She thought of him in turmoil and the sweat running on his neck. She was across the line.
She waited, did not help him. She let the silence hang.
'God help me – why am I doing this? Where did you say you were? Where do I come to?'
When she'd told him, when she'd ended the call, Beth took the boy out on to her patio. She pointed. She showed him the distant lights in the compound. Under one awning, brightly lit, were the fuselage and the extended wings of an aircraft, but the space under the nearer awning was empty. The boy called it the 'eye in the sky'. He told her of the Predator, which carried two missiles, could not be heard, could not be seen and had found them twice. She had her hand on the boy's shoulder and it rested on the darker bloodstain. Mapping.
Evaluation of performance under conditions of extreme heat. The bitch.
The lying bitch.
She went inside, the boy following her, and she emptied cupboards of what she would need to take.
'I don't think I'm going to be able to help you.' The headteacher leaned back in his swivel chair. Jed watched him. 'Don't get me wrong, Mr Lovejoy, I'm not being obstructive here. Of course, I will do everything I can to help, everything within my ability – and I quite understand that, on a matter of national security, you are vague to the point of opacity on the reasons for your visit – but, and I don't wish to obstruct, I am just not able to help.'
Beside Jed's feet was a bucket into which leaking rainwater dripped with monotony every fifteen seconds. The walls were damp, too, and posters peeled off them. He did not think that the headteacher, his face pale from the drudgery of work, lied. The photograph he had brought from Guantanamo lay on the cluttered desk.
'You'll deserve an explanation for my negative response. You believe the man whose photograph you have shown me is approxi-mately twenty-four years old, and therefore left the Adelaide a minimum of six years ago. I have been here two years, and I doubt you'll find a single member of my staff who has taught here for more than four years. Put brutally, we don't last. Adelaide Comprehensive is a sink school. Believe me, it's hard work. It sucks the enthusiasm from you – I'm not ashamed to say it. We burn out here, and quickly.
If we're lucky, we move on somewhere else where the stress is Jess acute. If we're unlucky we sign on with a doctor and accept our failure. We try to prepare our students for adult life, to give them a smattering of education – occasionally we even hit the heights of an exam pass – but the future of the majority is car theft, petty burglary, drug-dealing, under-age pregnancy, vandalism… The truth is, youthful ambition – other than for criminality – is rare indeed.'
Jed saw a sudden smile crease the headteacher's face.
'I have to say that the vision of a past pupil of Adelaide Comprehensive rising to be a serious player against the security of the state appears to me to be almost ludicrous. Ambition is rare, boredom is endemic, fatalism is contagious. They see no hope. What do they look for, the ultimate? Good benefits, a hotted-up car with anti-social speakers at full blast, not the destruction of the United Kingdom. Look, this area from which my school feeds is listed in the dozen most deprived parts of Britain.'
Jed took the cue. Lovejoy had stood and picked up the photograph. The headteacher shrugged. There was nothing more to be said.
They saw themselves out, left the beaten man behind them.
The rain still fell. Not a cleansing rain, Jed thought, but a dirtied, contaminating rain. He had taken Michael Lovejoy on trust. All of the elation he had felt at unravelling a God Almighty-sized error at Guantanamo was being scrubbed out of him in the English rain.
Behind them was an avenue of closed classrooms, now darkened, where nothing had been learned that day or would be learned the next. They were at the Volvo, in the black evening, when he heard the piped shout.
Water ran on the shirtsleeved shoulders of the headteacher and on the sheet of paper he held.
'I was wrong. We might just be able to help you. Try Eric Parsons.
He's retired, but a bit of an icon at the Adelaide. He went two years before I arrived but – don't ask me how – he lasted sixteen years here.
Taught maths, but did the football team and drama. He might just be your man. I've his address and his number for you. Eric's worth a try'
The paper was given to Lovejoy.
In the Volvo, Lovejoy used his mobile. It rang until the answer-machine responded, a tinny voice: 'Eric and Violet cannot take your call, please leave a message after the tone.' He didn't, he cut it.
Jed slumped. 'Probably on vacation – God, just what I needed.
Damn… damn…'
Lovejoy said grimly, 'My wife always tells me that shouting at a kettle never made it boil faster.'
They drove out through heavy gates that were set in a high barricade of close-set steel posts with mesh slung between them and coils of barbed wire over the top. It didn't add up to Jed. They went away down streets lit by dull lights, where windows had plywood hammered over them, where the sodden grass was knee high in front gardens, where there were old industrial chimneys – silhouetted against the night – with no smoke and factories whose roofs had collapsed. It didn't add up – in the conventional thinking of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon – that this was where a fighter had come from who was clever enough to have fucked the system at Camps X-Ray and Delta. Jed Dietrich didn't know if he was capable of eccentric thinking but reckoned it was time to start trying.
'What are you thinking?'
Lovejoy said, eyes never off the road, and face in shadow, 'I'm thinking that our target fits a pattern – and the pattern makes him a headache.'
Unobtainable on the landline, and a voice message on the mobile.
Bart swore. He had never known Wroughton's twin phones, home and mobile, to be unobtainable and switched off. But he prepared himself to travel. A bag of intravenous drips, two multi-packs of lint field dressings, his suture kit, the plastic box that held the debridement gear of scalpels, scissors, clips, forceps and swabs, the wound-cleaning agents, the antibiotics and the local anaesthetics went into a neat pile on the floor. He checked each one off against his list. Last was the morphine, the painkiller.
When they were all laid out, he tried the numbers again. No answer.
For fuck's sake, it was his freedom, but the damn phones were unobtainable and on the answer-machine. He left no message. It was the damned big one. It was the chance to wipe all of the indifference off Eddie bloody Wroughton's face, to shove the sneer down his throat. It was the reason he had told the daft cow that he would drive through the night into the damn emptiness of the desert.
Bart went to the lock-up room off the utility room – where his maid washed and ironed his clothes and kept her buckets – for the big water bottles and the plastic petrol containers. All expatriates had such a supply had done since the attacks in the city. Water and fuel would be needed, if civil disturbance broke out and the airport was closed, for an escape north to Tabuk or Sakakah or Ar'ar and then on to the Jordanian frontier – eight hundred kilometres from Riyadh.
He ferried the medical bags, packets and boxes to the Mitsubishi outside, then the water and the fuel. Inside again, he studied the map. The journey would take him down the main highway, 513, to Al Kharj and on to the metalled road, Route 10, to Harad. Then he was directed to use the dirt surface track south into the Rub' al Khali.
It was the only way into the desert, and he would be on it for a minimum of three hundred and fifty kilometres… Bloody hell, madness.
But – perhaps – out of madness came freedom.
He tried a last time to call Wroughton. He yearned to tell his tormentor of a man wounded in the desert – close to death – by military action.
He picked up his cat, kissed it, put it into its quilted basket. He closed his front door behind him.
He thought he should be there by dawn, where she'd said she'd meet him.
They came up off the sand and crossed the raised track.
Because Rashid made the camels go fast, and the sack litter jolted him, Caleb saw the distant lights between the animal's legs. Half a dozen small lights as far away as he could see, as far as the horizon was. Then they were gone.
He rolled on the sack litter. The flies droned in his ears, made their circuits, came back to his head and his leg. Nothing to keep the flies off. Had no strength and could not swat them.
They were over the raised track, and headed away from the lights.
Caleb knew he was slipping. The heat, the flies and the dirt in the wounds doomed him. He knew it… He was back across the chasm, where he had come from and where he had not known of a God to pray to. The camels stank around him, but he had a new smell in his nose, meat that was decayed, flesh that rotted – where the flies laid the eggs. Himself.
Thanks to the water, and the fodder at the well-head, the camels' stride was faster now, and each jolt made Caleb slip further.
It was charity for him when he drifted, unconscious.