Still talking, a murmur in the old language, but weaker. He no longer saw the guide. He did not know that Rashid sat apart from him, that he was alone under an awning spread between two kneeling camels.
'I was nothing before I met the Chechen – nobody. A man looks at you, strips you, reads right through you. You know he's judging you.
Are you shit or are you useful? To anybody else who'd ever looked at me, I was shit. Not looking at me like I was a piece of meat, and hung up, but like I was a person. I went up that hill, it was all live rounds they fired. It was his test. If I had failed it, I'd have been on that plane home the next day – and I'd be back in that shit-heap, and I'd be nobody.'
He had not the strength to swipe away the flies at his leg wound, or to push himself up and see the darker flesh ringing the wound.
'The Chechen's a fighter. He didn't tell me but I heard it – he was one of those who lay in trenches and let the tanks come over the trench, then came out, was behind them where they were soft and broke the tracks with grenades, or put grenades down the hatches.
He did that – bloody tanks. He was under tanks, fifty tons of them, and he wasn't scared. He was my hero, and he cared about me – like he was my father.'
On his back, the flies buzzing about him, he did not know that the guide had sent his son – his only son – out into the desert to bring help. He was beyond that corner of his memory.
'The Chechen made me someone. Back in that crap-heap. "You want to come down the canal? You got enough for the chipper? Heh, you met that bird out of Prince's Road, who'll do you a suck for a fiver? Get your arse moving, 'cos there's a Beemer in the station park and the radio's a Blaupunkt – you want it?" There, they never knew a man like the Chechen. He made me feel important, no one else ever had… wanted.'
He did not know that, in the heat and with his blood oozing away, he was on the road to death.
'Among those kids – none of them'd ever met anyone like the Chechen, because they live in a crap-heap. I owe everything to him.
I make you a promise, Chechen – you won't ever regret picking me.
But you're dead, aren't you? Out in all that fucking dirt, you're buried… Can you hear me, Chechen, can you? I'm your man…
God, it bloody hurts, Chechen.'
Still talking, but fading.
In the slack dawn light, the spread cloud of dust reached the settlement. He approached, Bart thought, the back end of nowhere – the only stop for food or fuel on the only track running south into the desert. On his map, 'nowhere' was given the name of Bir Faysal.
Back up north – at Al Kharj, and again at Harad – where there was still a metalled road, he had pulled into the side and had used his mobile. In both towns, high in the darkness of the night, there were antennae on towers to relay his signal, but there had still been no answer from either of Wroughton's phones, both switched off. Three times, in seven hours of driving on the track after Harad, he had had to swerve on to the bedded stones at the verge to avoid collision with lorries – bastards, coming straight at him, not giving way to him, using the centre of the track – and once he had gone right off the track and the stones, nodding off to sleep, and had manoeuvred his way back on to the track by crossing packed sand. To keep himself awake, he had found a station on the radio, but it had static across it.
No phone signal, no radio – only his thoughts to keep him company.
Excited thoughts. Thoughts of liberation. Freedom to go to the airport, with his cat box, in the knowledge that he had paid his debt and that the files were shredded. Thoughts of what he would tell Eddie bloody Wroughton.
The tyres of the Mitsubishi threw up a dustcloud behind him.
Scattered grey concrete buildings were in front of him. He slowed.
He had not thought, alone in his vehicle and struggling with tiredness, of what he had – by his own volition – edged himself into. Now he did. The thought clamoured in his mind as he drove carefully past the building over which a flag hung limply against its post. In front of the police station, one man in khaki drill lounged on a chair and watched him go by. It would have taken some wriggling if the policeman had been alert, had jumped up from his chair, had waved him down, would have taken a bloody good story. After the police station he came to a fuel forecourt, then a cluster of low buildings surrounded by thorn hedges… The policeman might not have been, but Bart was alert. He had his window down, the air-conditioner switched off, and he heard clearly the bleat of goats behind the hedges. The desert was ahead. Where was she? He went past the last of the buildings. A woman in scalp-to-toe black ducked away and a child waved enthusiastically and… the flashed headlights caught the side of his Mitsubishi.
It was madness.
The lights speared into his face from a gully beyond the last building.
It would not have been madness if he had been able to speak to the landline phone or to the mobile. He had not spoken to Eddie bloody Wroughton. Perhaps he should never have started out from his compound.
He saw the Land Rover come up from the gully, straining for traction. She drove. There was a boy beside her. She came past him, spewing sand, then he saw the wave of her hand, the instruction that he follow. Like a damned hired hand, wasn't he? He followed her for a mile, until the settlement was lost behind them, then she braked the Land Rover and pulled on to the stones He stopped behind her. Her door snapped open and she walked towards him. What to tell her?
He remembered the brightness in her face at the party, its lustre in his surgery, and it was all gone. She was drawn, pale, and she seemed to rock as though exhaustion was near to beating her. The sand coated her, was in her hair, on her face and round her eyes; it lay on her blouse and across her trousers. He framed in his mind what he would say.
She leaned on his door. 'Thank you for coming. Thank you very much.'
He had intended a response of cutting sarcasm. Then he saw the genuineness of the gratitude on her face, and in her eyes, reddened by tiredness, strain and sand grit. Oh, God, that sort of genuineness came from one source, one alone. Bloody hell, that was love. The world threw up enough problems in Bart's life without the intrusion of love
… a lucky man he'd be, the subject of her love.
He said, matter-of-fact, 'Good morning, Miss Jenkins – it looks like you're about to spill a load of trouble on to my shoes.'
'Probably, I have…'
It was another of the moments, fleeting, when he could have – should have – turned back.
'Did you bring your gear?'
'Yes… If it's not presumptuous, who is my mystery patient who has suffered injuries in military action?'
'I don't know. Honestly, I don't know his name or where he's come from or where he's going to. That's the truth.'
He believed her. It was the last time he could have turned back. At the end of the day he would have been in Riyadh, and in his compound. And he would not have forgiven himself. He looked into her face. It was all madness. Bart's life was a story of being trapped and never turning.
'Right, then, we'd better get moving.'
She told him to follow her. She said the Bedouin boy with her would guide them. She walked away, lurched back to her Land Rover.
He kept close to her. She led him another mile down the track, then swung right and went west. He went down off the track and the wheels ground on the chip stones, then sagged on to sand. He used the low gears for cross-country. He had never driven on sand before.
He sensed that the boy – who had stared back at him from the Land Rover, his face riddled with suspicion – guided her. Many times they stopped and the sand in front of the Land Rover and Bart's Mitsubishi seemed without features, endless ochre hillocks that had no bushes, no trees, no cliffs, nothing to Bart that was recognizable or could be caught by memory; they would halt for a few seconds, then veer to the right or the left. He found his steering was sluggish and unresponsive. No one that Bart knew, back in Riyadh, went into the desert, even with their vast four-by-fours. The wildlife park, a few kilometres beyond the city limits, was enough. A trip by tarmacadam road cutting into a desert on the way to Jedda or Ad Dammam was sufficient for anyone he knew to believe they had experienced a survival ordeal. Other than the straining engines of the Land Rover and the Mitsubishi there was silence around them. He saw nothing that lived. By the end of the second hour, off the track and twenty-eight miles covered, he felt a crawling fear. He could not turn back: he had lost his sense of direction. Wouldn't have known whether he drove towards the safety of the track, went parallel to it or away from i t
… worse than fear, and he sweated. His mind played games with him, mocked him. He remembered a school play. His father and mother in the audience. Its setting was a First World War dug-out. He was the coward among the officers waiting for the Big Push. The hero asked, musing, whether a worm knew, when it tunnelled in the earth, whether it was going up or down and speculated on the worm's bad luck if it went down when it thought it was coming up.
His father had said that he should not have allowed himself to be cast as a coward. He clung to the tyremarks left by the Land Rover, and he saw that, behind him from the mirror, the brisk wind lifted the sand and covered the tyres' ruts. The fear made him shiver.
It looked at first, through the haze thrown up by the Land Rover, like a stunted needle. At the start of the third hour, Bart realized their larget was a column of stone, weathered and sculpted by the wind, with a sharpened tip.
Beth watched.
'He's pretty far down the road.'
Behind Beth, the boy squatted beside his father, whose hands loosely held a rifle across his lap.
'I think I'm just in time but I can't promise anything. By rights he should have died yesterday. Extraordinary resilience.' The doctor spoke as if a commentary were needed from him. The needle was in a forearm vein, and he was hooking the bag, connected by a tube to the needle, on to the cross-rope that supported the awning. Then he crouched over the leg wound. 'First things first. Do the dehydration, get as much from an intravenous drip into him as quickly as possible, saline. You see, there's a big blood loss. It's all about liquids in the body. First, to counter dehydration loss, the body steals from the blood supply, then from extra-cellular space, and the last reserve is from intra-cellular space. When that's exhausted it's death by dehydration. I'm surprised he's still with us.'
She wanted to throw up. The doctor took the other arm, without the drip in it, and firmly pinched the skin just above a bandage of dirty cloth on the wrist. When his fingers let go, the pinched flesh still stood erect.
'It would have gone down, where I pinched, if there was enough liquid in the body. It hasn't fallen back because there's no liquid there. It's an old trick.'
Beth thought the doctor talked because of his fear.
He reached for the cloth on the wrist and started to unravel it.
'We're hardly going to make a sterile area, but at least we can try – let's get shot of this filth for starters.'
Beth saw the plastic bracelet. In the sand, in the night, she had found it, had tried to examine it. His strength had prevented her. She saw the doctor peer down at it. She leaned closer and made out the printed reference number. The photograph was clear to her. Alongside it, under the number and the filled-in spaces for height and weight, below sex, was 'Issued by: Delta'. She gagged.
The doctor turned to her. 'Did you know about this?'
'No, I didn't. No.'
'Do you know what Delta is?'
'I think so.'
'Think, Miss Jenkins? Can't you do better than think? Let me help you. Delta is the name of the camp at Guantanamo Bay, the camp for terrorists. Good God, what have I got into?'
'I didn't know.'
The doctor seemed to gasp, to drag in a great gulp of air. 'For helping this man, I – and you, Miss Jenkins – could go to Chop Chop Square. May I assume your ignorance stops short of not knowing what Chop Chop Square is?'
She seemed to shudder, could not help herself. 'I know what Chop Chop Square is.'
The doctor went on – as if he had cut the square and the ritual of public execution after Friday prayers from his mind – in a flat monotone. 'You see, his tongue, and his mouth, they'll be dried out.
It's not a worry because the drip will fix that. He will have had an extreme shock from the effect of the missile detonation and that will have surged his adrenaline, further aggravating the dehydration process. First appearances, the head wound will have caused severe concussion but not much else. The leg is the greater problem, and the resulting blood loss. There are ten pints of blood in the body and it is my estimate that-'
'Are you going to save him?'
'My estimate is that he's lost at least two pints – I make no promises. There is blood loss and there are signs of advancing gangrene. Do you want him saved?'
She looked down. He lay on old sacks. His eyes were closed and his breathing was a slow, shallow struggle. The head wound was a long slice, below his forehead and above his right ear, and the hair had been cut back from it by the guide. As soon as they had arrived, the doctor had barked questions to her, for translation: What had been done for him? What, if anything, had he been given? What had been the patient's reaction? The guide had used a knife to cut away hair from the head wound, then had anointed it. He had wiped the gum from murr on to the wound's edges. Beth translated this as
'myrrh', and the doctor had muttered, 'Commiphora molmol', and had not criticized the Bedouin's use of the ancient healing resin. She saw the first drip bag draining steadily into his arm. A cloth lay across his groin. The leg wound was on the left side – there were flies around it. It was shorter in length than that on the skull, but wider, deeper, and the flesh around it had already blackened. He did not look, to Beth, like a threat. He seemed to her to rest in exhausted peace. She crawled closer to him and took his hand, both fists covering his fingers.
The doctor made room for her, then stood and changed the drip hag. 'I can't do anything about the leg until he has more strength. It's the leg that worries me. Maybe in an hour I can start on it.'
What did she want of him? Everything. How far would she go to help him? To the end of the road, to the square. What did she know of him? Nothing.
She sat and held his hand. The father and son stared at her, eyes never off her. A camel pushed its head against her arm, competed with her to touch him. The doctor now knelt at his bags and packages and checked an inventory. She did not look into his leg wound, but at his face. Never before had Beth held a man's hand with such caring softness. The drip worked. She thought of a dried-out flower that was watered and straightened. She felt his fingers stir in her grip. The breathing quickened. The doctor broke off, came closer.
Lips moved. The doctor crouched to listen. The eyes opened. She saw the eyes fastening on the doctor's as he strained to listen.
The voice came weak but clear: 'Don't look into my face, don't.'
The fingers tightened in her fists. 'Don't see my face, don't ever.' He seemed to sink back. 'Don't…'
She reeled, clung to his fingers but shook.
'That's all I bloody need,' the doctor wheezed beside her. 'He's English – as English as you or me. He spoke English like I do, like you. Well done, Miss Jenkins – this just keeps getting better and better.'
'You can stand there as long as you like but until I see identification you're not coming in,' Eric Perkins had said. He'd been behind his door, opened to the extent that the security chain would permit, and his wife had been behind him. 'You can stay on my step all the hours that God gives but you're not coming in till I see who you are.'
The retired maths teacher was wizened, small, and his cheek was cut from shaving, but he seemed to have the obstinacy that came with age and bloodymindedness, and he had been behind his front door, as if it was the portcullis of his castle. The door had been closed on them, and for ten minutes the rain had dripped on them. It went against Lovejoy's grain to show his card. He'd rung the bell again.
He'd shown the identification card that gained entry through the electronic barriers at Thames House, and the American had shown what was good enough for Camp Delta, far away on Cuba.
'Eh, wasn't so difficult, was it?' Eric Perkins had said, then had turned. 'Violet, love, we have visitors from the Security Service in London and what's called the Defense Intelligence Agency in America – and they're half drowned, not that it's my fault. They'd like a cup of tea, love, and I think some cake might see them right.'
The chain had come off the lock. Their coats had been hung in the ball and yesterday's newspaper was under them to protect the carpet.
They sat in the front room.
Maybe, Lovejoy thought, they should have taken off their shoes.
The room was pristine. Perkins held up the photograph in front of his face. He'd demanded to hold it, handle it, and Dietrich bad shown ill-concealed reluctance to pass it to him. Dietrich had covered the top of the head and the whole of the body with his hands, but the retired teacher had insisted.
Perkins chuckled. The photograph was close to his eyes. The prisoner's camp reference number was stamped at the bottom. He chuckled till he coughed. The light of his eyes danced. 'I used to do mathematics. The basis of mathematics is solving problems. I'm wondering if your problem, gentlemen, that needs solving, is that you don't know who he is.'
'I don't think you need explanations, sir,' Dietrich said sourly. 'We . are merely investigating background to-'
The wife, Violet, was in the doorway, holding the tray. Her husband's arm was up, like an old-time traffic policeman's. 'Sorry, love, waste of your time and effort. They won't be staying. They don't trust me, love.'
Lovejoy playing his winning smile, and said, 'Just so we have no misunderstandings, and I remind you, Mr Perkins, of the strictures of the Official Secrets Act, this man was a prisoner, designated as an unlawful combatant in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo Bay. He was released, because the authorities there thought him a taxi-driver from Herat in that country. While he was being transferred from the airbase to Kabul, he ran away. We don't know who he is, but believe him to be from this area. If he is from here he would most likely have gone to Adelaide Comprehensive. Mr Perkins, we are looking for your help.'
His face had lit as each morsel of trust was given him, and he'd laughed till his cheeks flushed.
'I was wrong again, Violet, they're staying. A late run for the post, getting by on the rails. Tell Violet whether you'd like sugar, gentlemen. Yes, I know him.'
Tea was poured and cakes were passed.
'Not that he was any good at mathematics. If I was judging him solely by the ability to multiply and divide, add and subtract, I'd have little to say. I digress. Most of the boys going through my final-year classes would have competency to add up profits from drug-pushing, or to subtract the days of a sentence remaining to be served in a young offenders' institution. That's about it. Adelaide Comprehensive isn't a school known for its shining successes but, over my time, I did have a couple of them. For this lad, well, I was able to provide something – call it motivation. Yes, there are little victories to be won, even at Adelaide Comprehensive.'
He broke off. He called to the kitchen to thank his wife for the tea.
Lovejoy saw the impatience building in the American: the shaking hands rattled the cup and saucer and the cake on the plate on his knees had gone untouched. He caught him with a glance: bide your time, man.
'There was a boy who was being bullied, an Asian child. There were two problems with the boy: a stutter and a wealthy father, cash in the child's hip pocket. You'll have learned a little of the area from which the school draws pupils. The money and the speech impediment made this pupil a predictable target – that's the real world. I induced your man here to become the pupil's friend. He did, and no doubt was paid for it, and the bullying was a thing of the past. The motivation was more complex. He sided naturally with the minority.
He went against the majority – not, I fancy, for any altruistic reason, not for any defence of the handicapped in a cruel world, but because it gave him pleasure to run against the tide. Are you with me? Are you beginning to see him?'
'Just getting a glimpse,' Lovejoy said drily.
'Second time around was more interesting. Our then esteemed headteacher, before he fled to the quieter world of local-education-authority inspections, wanted a competition launched for public recitation. Pupils standing on a stage and declaiming to their peers, such was the headteacher's plan. Most of the males could barely communicate, other than to demand their rights in a police station on a Friday night. The headteacher was very keen. I was given the job of organizing it. Was it a fiasco? It was not. Why not? Because this boy agreed to participate. What did I choose for him? I'd been to a funeral that week, in West Bromwich. There had been a reading from the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, chapter fifteen, starting at verse fifty-four. Do you know it, gentlemen?'
Lovejoy did not, but he saw beside him the American's lips move.
They kept time with the recitation.
'He stood on the stage, in front of the school, and he silenced the chatter, stilled the movement. "So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in Victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" He did it, did it well. You see, by doing it he showed he could stand alone. It was nothing to do with the spirituality of the words, their uniqueness. Again, he just needed to run against the tide
… Would you like more tea, or another cake?'
Lovejoy shook his head patiently, and the American followed suit.
'I liked him enough to make a small effort to find him work when he left us – a garage, Harrison's Auto Repair Unit, on the industrial estate behind the high street. I don't know whether he lasted there.
Sometimes I see pupils I taught, on the street and hanging about, sometimes I read their names in the paper, remanded in custody or remanded on bail. I haven't seen him since the day he left school.
What was different about him was a desperate, unsatisfied restlessness, and nothing here that could satisfy it, and the response to my trivial efforts was a minimal answer to the symptoms. I have to believe, because you have come to see me, that he is now considered a danger to society. I suppose trained men will seek to kill him before he can kill others – and I'd not argue with that. Where would he have learned the hate? Probably from your camp at Guantanamo Bay, Mr American. No, I won't argue with you, nor will I cheer you on – I rather liked the boy. You'll have to excuse me because Violet has a dentist's appointment.'
He stood. He looked a last time at the photograph. 'Oh, yes. What you came for. His name. I presume that with his name it will be easier to find and kill him.'
The American said, 'It will be easier to find him and stop him in his tracks before he can murder innocents.'
'Of course, of course… He's from that estate near the school, by the canal. Perhaps I sell him short, perhaps he's more than I've . painted him.' His jaw jutted and his fists clenched. 'Always interesting to hear how former pupils have progressed. He is Caleb Hunt.'
Caleb did not know that a third bag dripped saline solution through the tube and the needle into his arm.
'They'll hear my name, won't they? The bastards'll hear it. Hear it loud. They're walking dead, got nothing – all they got is radios out of Beemers and sucks and smokes, got nothing. They're not really living. I live. Everyone will hear my name.'
Caleb did not know that Beth stared bleak-faced at him.
'Guys, where are you? What you doing? I did something else.
You'll live, fucking die, no one will know, you're nothing. What you got? You got fuck-all.'
Caleb did not know as he rambled, as the drip gave him strength, that Bart prepared a scalpel, scissors, clips, forceps and sterile swabs, and listened, or that Beth bit her lip.
'It's the biggest desert in the world, it's got worse heat than anywhere in the world. I'm walking in it. I'm barefoot in it. You wouldn't have lasted in it a day, not half a day. I'm going through it because my family's waiting for me… That's a proper family. I belong to my family.'
Bart loaded a syringe with Lignocaine, the local anaesthetic.
'When you hear my name, all of you bastards, it'll be because I've done what my family wants of me. Anything…'
Caleb exposed his mind, made his mind as bare as the wound on his leg.
Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay.
'This is him?'
'This is al-Ateh, the taxi-driver.'
'Have we done him?'
'No, the Agency haven't interrogated him. The Bureau have hut not for eight months. The DIA done him since eight months back. These are their transcripts.'
He stood with his head bowed in docility. In front of him were two men he had not seen before. He had learned well to give no sign that he understood what they said.
'Who did him last, from the DIA, which of those creeps?'
'Dietrich. You know Dietrich, Jed Dietrich?'
T know him. What does he say, Harry?'
'He doesn't say anything – he's on vacation. And won't say anything – not back till after the due date, if this jerk goes.'
The chain manacles bit at his wrist, and the shackles at his ankles. He stared at the floor, made a target of his feet and did not watch them as they shuffled paper between them. The interpreter stood beside them, an Arab, and his respect for them told Caleb of their importance.
'It's the quota, that's what matters. Two old guys, a middle-aged guy and a young guy to make up a quota minimum of four – if they're clean.'
'Too many of them are clean.'
'I hear you, Wallace. Try not to think about i t… You going to the club tonight, that concert?'
'Marine brass band – woiddn't miss… OK, let's go process this guy.'
The interpreter translated. The one called Harry told him that the United States of America had no grievance against the innocent, the United States of America valued the freedom of the individual, the United States of America was committed only to rooting out the guilty. The one called Wallace told him that he was going home, back to Afghanistan, to his family then had checked as if a paragraph in the file about the iviping out of the family by B-52 bomber had been, for a moment, forgotten. He was going back to the chance of making a new life with his taxi.
Through the interpreter, Harry asked, T hope, young man, back in Afghanistan you won't come out with any lies about torture?'
The meek answer. 'No, sir. I am grateful, sir.'
Through the interpreter, Wallace queried, 'You have no complaints about your treatment here?'
'No, sir. I have been treated well, sir.'
Through the interpreter, both of them: 'You take good care, young man, of the opportunity given you… You help to build a new Afghanistan…
Good luck… Yes, good luck.'
The guards' hands were on his arms, and the waist chain was tugged back.
He heard Harry say, 'Pathetic, aren't they, these jerks? He's lucky to be out. I reckon the lid's going to come off this place.'
He was being led out through the door. Wallace said, 'Too right – discipline's cracking, more suicide tries and more defiance. When the . tribunals start up and when that execution chamber comes on line, the lid could come off big-time. What time is the concert?'
He was shuffled away, the chains clanking on his ankles.
He had contempt of them, had beaten them. He would hear them scream, wherever he was. When he had returned to his family, he would hear them scream in shrill terror.
'I think I'm going to ask you to help me.'
'Of course.'
'And it's best if I educate you to my equipment.'
'Yes.'
She followed Bart out from under the low awning, stretched and stood tall. 'What should I know?'
He hissed, 'Not what you should know, what about me knowing something? When did you realize this man was a fully fledged terrorist, and British? May we begin there?'
'What do you want? A confessional?'
'The truth would help.'
'What he is and what I knew, does that determine what treatment you give him?'
'My decision, Miss Jenkins, not yours.'
She told him, haltingly, what had brought her to this unmapped corner of the greatest desert in the world and what she owed this man. He thought, himself, he owed nothing. 'That's it – are you going to walk away?'
Whatever he was, Bart was not an idiot. If he walked away, went back to the awning, collected up his boxes and packages, carted them to the Mitsubishi and loaded them, the rifle on the older Bedouin's lap would be up to the shoulder and would be aimed. The eye behind the sight would be brilliant with hatred, and he'd hear the clatter of it arming; he would die in the sand. He pondered on all those who had wrecked his life, had walked over him.
'In about half an hour,' Bart said, 'I'll start to work on the leg wound.'
'I trust you.'
From the sky, the heat cascaded on him, and the sweat ran on his body and collected in the folds of his stomach. 'That's good, because you have to.'
*
Gonsalves rang the bell.
Wroughton checked him in the spy-hole then opened the door. He held his hands across his privates.
Gonsalves walked inside, had half skirted the black bin-bag, then stopped at it, put down his briefcase and tipped the bloodstained clothes on to the floor.
'Your people, when I called them, they said you had a flu dose.
When I asked if a remedy for flu was taking a phone off the hook, your people didn't know.'
Wroughton said, 'It seemed easier to say flu than that I'd walked into a door.'
He hadn't washed. The bruises on his body, thickest at his groin, were a technicolour parade of black, mauve and yellow. The blood had dried around his nose and at the split in his lower lip. He dropped his hands away from his privates, away from where he was shrivelled up, because modesty didn't seem to matter.
'You could help me, Eddie, you could tell me where to look on your face for an imprint of a door handle, because I don't see it. Did the door handle have a wife?'
'I'm not expecting flowers or an apology – my father used to tell me, never explain and never apologize – but I expect to be cut in/
'Where's your maid?'
'When she came to the door I told her to get lost.'
'I'll make some tea.'
Gonsalves went to the kitchen and Wroughton slumped into his chair. The voice boomed through the rattle of the mugs and the opening and closing of cupboard doors. 'I think I heard you right. "Cut in?" You hear me. You are a junior partner in our endeavour. We use you when we need you, we ignore you when we don't. Did you get big ideas because Teresa does pizza for you, and you're Uncle Eddie to the kids? Shouldn't have done. It's a tough world out there. You're a taker, Eddie, but you don't have much to give. It's why I cut you out. We were running a secure operation down in the Rub' al Khali.'
'I think you told me you had "big boys' toys" there,'
'In the Rub' al Khali we had something special going, and -'
'And I told you – "not much to give", I'm sure – about a caravan going out of Oman and a direction route.' and we had Predator UAVs up, with Hellfires loaded. And we'd done a con-job on the Saudis – which is why it was secure and why you weren't cut in, and-'
'Fuck you.'
'That what the door handle said? We did two hits and we couldn't keep it secure and now the Saudis have chucked us out. We got a day and a half left in there, then fatter cats than me have to decide whether to fly UAVs out of Yemen, Djibouti or Dohar and take the risk of violating Saudi air space. We're out in a day and a half.'
Gonsalves carried in the tray, put it down, poured tea, gave a mug to Wroughton.
When he'd sipped his tea, Gonsalves reached into his briefcase.
'Want to see the tricks the "big boys' toys" can do?'
'I don't beg, not a damn poodle and dribbling.'
'Why I love you, Eddie…' Gonsalves had a file of photographs in his hand and spread them over the coffee table around Wroughton's mug.
He couldn't help himself, felt his excitement quicken. Three pictures, colour, eight-by-six, showed black-circled craters in the ochre sand. They were the raw, only dreamed-of currency of an intelligence officer. Centred on one was a dead, keeled-over camel.
Not electronic intercepts, not analysis of radio traffic pulled down by the dishes. He snatched up the crucial picture, peered at it and lingered over it.
'Don't get a hard-on, Eddie – do me a favour. OK, it's before the first strike. Three men travelling. Two guides leading them. Three pack camels carrying crates, and Stingers is as good a guess as any.
Now, look at the close-ups on the three… Is this not as sexy as it gets?'
Wroughton held the three photographs, felt in awe of the technology that had magnified them to a point of recognition from four miles of altitude.
'That one.' Gonsalves' finger stabbed at a photograph. 'We identify him as Gibran al-Wafa, aged twenty-seven, involved in the Riyadh compound bombs, Saudi citizen.' The finger moved on. 'Him, he is Muhammad Sherif, aged fifty-nine, was in Afghanistan in the Soviet war, with bin Laden in the Sudan exile, with him back in Kabul, but disappeared before Enduring Freedom, now a strategist. Egyptian national and sentenced to death in his absence.' The finger loitered.
'This one, we don't have him. The computers can't chuck anything up.'
Wroughton gazed at the photograph. He saw the body of the young man upright on the camel, the head high. He strained to make out the features, but the pixels confused him. He thought he saw a strong chin but… 'So what? Isn't he dead?'
Gonsalves said that the sensor operator had aimed twice for specific and individual targets as the camels had scattered. The two targets in the two strikes had been the Saudi and the Egyptian.
'So, you may have missed him, for all your damn technology…
And I get cut in because you don't know who he is, right?'
'Succinctly put, Eddie. I'll see you.'
After Gonsalves had gone, Eddie Wroughton sat in his chair, held the photograph in front of him, and tried to read the face.
Lizzy-Jo cursed. George's message was pithy, without embellishment. The needs of maintenance ruled his life. Maintenance was obligatory, not optional. The Predator, First Lady, was now beyond all limits set for maintenance. Flying hours in optimum conditions had been exceeded, but she had also been up in worst-status conditions.
She was grounded – no argument – confirmation of what he'd said the afternoon before. She needed a sanitized hangar for the necessary maintenance, and the only sanitized hangar she would see was back at Bagram. He went out of the Ground Control, went heavily down the steps, as if unsettled by Lizzy-Jo's curse.
Beside her, Marty flew Carnival Girl, did the new boxes. When they'd brought her back in the small hours, while she and Marty had stolen sleep, the bird's tanks had been filled so that fuel had spilled out.
Carnival Girl, the old warhorse, the fighter from Bosnia and Kosovo, from Afghanistan – with a first skull-and-crossbones stencilled on her fuselage – had gone up twenty minutes after midday for her final run out of Shaybah, not her prettiest chase down the runway, with the fuel load and the burden of the Hellfires under the wings.
The boxes on the map were on the east side of a track. They had tasked themselves, and Oscar Golf had not argued it over the link, to . have her up for the full twenty-four hours of her endurance at four miles altitude and at loiter speed. Late on in the flight, tomorrow, they would do a small section of the map boxes on the west side of the track. They had not yet reached the track, but it would be good when they did, would make a diversion from watching goddamn sand.
He was hunched over the joystick. She had tried to jolt him, but he spoke when he had to, not otherwise. She had wanted to bring the life back to him. He flew Carnival Girl without error but as if he sleep-walked.
She lied…
Lizzy-Jo said, 'Last time I was in New York, I was in a bar – been to see my mom and was going down to North Carolina for the last spat, but had time to kill. The bar was behind Fifth Avenue. I was alone, this guy was alone. What did I do? Wasn't much of a chat-up line. I was in Afghanistan. Was I hurting those bastards? Real venom in his question. I was trying. He told me why he hoped I was.'
She had gone straight from her mom's apartment, in a taxi, out to the airport for the flight. She had never been in a bar behind Fifth Avenue.
'His partner worked up high in the North Tower. It was a day like any other. Nothing different about the eleventh of September.
Himself, he didn't go to work because of an optician's appointment.
He was in the waiting room, was next in line to be called. The TV was on. Where his partner worked was above the hit point of the American Airlines plane. It was all on the TV in front of him, and he could see the window nearest to his partner's desk. I listened.'
She talked without emotion, didn't play to a gallery, watched her screens.
'Twenty minutes later, as he sees it on TV, the United plane goes into the South Tower. What he's telling me, he's not watching the South Tower, only the North Tower and the window nearest his partner's desk. You know what he sees – there's smoke and fire. You want to know what he sees from the window nearest his partner's desk? They jump. People start to jump. They got the fire coming up under them and they got nowhere to go, and some of them jump.
They are ninety floors up, and they jump. He sees people jump from that floor, from those windows. He sees tiny, ant figures falling. It's . all on the TV. Did his partner jump? There's a lot of people jumped.
Now, sudden but late, he starts to get active. Goes to the desk, rings his partner's phone. It's not picked up. He wants to think his partner jumped, that falling ninety floors, arms and legs out, was a quicker death than waiting for the fire to get up there – or the collapse. He said his partner was the only love of his life, and he thinks he saw his partner jump from ninety floors up… That's a horrible way to die.
That's bad people that make you die like that. I bought him a drink, and I told him we went hard as we could after the people that made his partner jump, to hurt them. Then I headed out to catch my flight.'
She saw, from the side of her eye, the tears stream from under Marty's spectacles and run on his cheeks. She had no shame for the saccharine emotion of the lie, daytime talk-show stuff. She went brusque. 'How's she doing?'
'She's doing well,' he choked. 'Carnival Girl's flying great. She's the bomb.'
Caleb felt the strength back in him, but the pain was agony and it rolled down in waves to his foot and came up through his hips and stomach. Lifting his right arm brought the pain in a torrent. He gestured for Rashid to come to him. When the guide was close to him, ear bent to mouth, Caleb whispered what he wanted brought to him. He heard other voices, indistinct – a man's and a woman's – but could not make out what they said. The camels chewed cud on either side of him and slung between them was the awning that made shade for him. A blow hammered down on metal. Wood screamed as it was broken and hinges whined. He was brought the manual.
The pages were grey, dry and crackled in his hand, and the large print on the cover had faded.
There was a needle attached to a tube that dangled over him, in his left arm, inserted immediately above the plastic bracelet, which was no longer covered. He tried to push himself up to look around, but that was beyond his strength.
The voice was in the old language. 'Don't do that – please, don't.
Now, let's set down the ground rules. I am a British-born doctor, sir, I am here at the request of your friend, Miss Jenkins. I do not speak Arabic, nor do I need to. When you were in, sir, a confused state – natural following the traumatic experience of your wounds – you talked English. You were incoherent and rambling, and I understood nothing of it. Got me? But as far as I am concerned you are as British as I am… I call you "sir" not as a mark of respect, but because neither Miss Jenkins nor I knows your identity, and we have no interest in it.'
On the cover page of the manual was printed: Raytheon Electronic Systems FIM-92 Stinger loiv-altitude surface-to-air system family. The man materialized above him.
A pudgy fat-filled face. A shirt stuck with sweat to a vest. Trousers held up by a narrow belt. He saw the man. The woman was behind the man.
'You should not have come,' Caleb said faintly.
'I said, remember it, "If it is ever possible, I will repay you." It was possible. I brought a doctor who is going-'
'Who saw my face.'
'Who is going to help you – don't be so damn stupid. He's a doctor, not a bloody policeman.'
'Why did you come?' Caleb grated.
'The boy was sent to find me. Why?'
'I had forgotten you – you should have forgotten me.'
He saw her head shake, as if in personal crisis. 'It doesn't matter why. I'm here and he's here. That'll have to be good enough.'
The doctor said, 'All very charming, but hardly relevant. I think we should get on with it, or I won't be cleaning your leg, sir, I'll be taking it off. Now, do you want me here or do you want me to bugger off?'
Caleb felt the smile wreathe his face and he heard his own soft-spoken voice: 'I'm very grateful to you. Don't look at my face. I thank you for coming. Lose my face from your mind. I appreciate what you do for me.'
'I'm going to talk you through it, each stage of it. Your head wound is clean, a direct shrapnel strike, but below your headcloth. Not so the leg wound. It is dirty, infected, with the early stages of gangrene.
In the wound is sand grit, probably small stones, maybe missile fragments, certainly pieces from your robe will be buried deep in it. It has to be cleaned and all of the detritus has to come out. I intend to use Cetrimide as a cleaning agent, and I will inject a local anaesthetic – .
Lignocaine – into the muscle around the wound. Its location is good, too low for nerve damage and the wrong side of your leg for the principal arteries, and the muscle has protected the bones from splintering. Later, when I've worked on the wound, I will inject you with antibiotics, Ampicillin is what I carry. I see you have reading material. I advise you to use it. In spite of the Lignocaine, this is going to hurt like hell. Are you ready?'
The question must have been in Caleb's eyes.
'What's worrying me most – not who or what you are, sir – is that bloody item up in the sky, hunting and searching. We've her vehicle and mine and no cover for them, which is a good enough reason for getting on with it. Do I make a start?'
Caleb nodded. He lifted the manual, the words on the page dancing in his eyes, and he felt the first needle plunge into his flesh. .