The face above Caleb was impassive. He saw it above the manual held tight in his hands. He tried to read. To read, he thought, was to escape from the pain and – what was worse than the pain – his dependence on the doctor.
He read of the launcher assembly with a missile, the grip stock, the IFF interrogator and the argon gas battery coolant unit. Words played across his eyes, which blurred. Target adaptive guidance circuit, azimuth coverage… it was their world. Their technology, their skill, their power… He was a man who had fought from ditches and trenches, from caves and scraped holes in the dirt, from the cages of a cell block. Their technology, their skill dwarfed him, and their power could crush him. The face hovered over him, and the pain sought out each nerve in his body. He could only fight, nothing more was left to him: fight or die, fight or be forgotten. His eyes, watering, fastened on the caption line: 'Engagement Procedure'. The moisture in his eyes blinded him and he looked away from the page.
The last thing he had read, before the mist closed on his vision, was
'Training requires 136 hours of instruction before weapon qualification is given.' He did not have the hours, did not have the instructor, did not have the knowledge. He looked up.
'What is your name?'
'Samuel Bartholomew – I would not claim to have friends, but acquaintances call me Bart. Won't be long, the Lignocaine works quickly.'
'Have you looked long enough at my face to remember it?'
He saw the doctor flinch.
'I never remember a face – whatever that bloody book is, just read it.'
Behind the doctor, squatting at the edge of the awning's shade, the woman bit her lip. He understood so little, not why the doctor had come, not why she had cared enough to bring him. They were no part of him, either of them.
'Can you wipe my eyes?'
She did.
Caleb read again. First the system was shouldered, then the battery coolant unit was slotted into the grip stock, then the IFF antenna was unfolded. The target, if visible, was interrogated by the AN-PPX-1 system. The IFF switch is depressed and locks on the target. Depress the impulse-generator switch, and 6000 PSI pressurized argon gas flows to the IR detector. Did it bloody matter?
Did it matter to him how their technology worked? What mattered was whether the bloody thing fired. Again he stared into the doctor's face. 'What am I to you?'
He saw a slow smile settle at the doctor's mouth.
A third time, the needle was raised. The manual was all he had. If the aircraft came back – hunted for them and found them – and the boy heard it, he must use the weapon and know the manual's procedures. He started again to read the close print below the caption – shoulder the system, insert the battery coolant unit, unfold the IFF antenna, depress the impulse-generator switch, listen for the audio signal telling of target acquisition. He felt the growing deadness in his leg and the dulling of the pain. Chubby white fingers gripped the syringe, held it poised.
He could see, beyond the doctor, beyond her and behind the guide, that the boy sat alone, his head cocked. He thought the boy listened: he was cross-legged with his back straight and his chin raised. If the aircraft hunted for them and found them, the boy was the first line of defence. If Caleb was to reach his family, he needed the boy as much as he depended on the doctor. .
Caleb did not know if the weapon would fire, if it had passed its shelf life. His family waited for him. In a single-storey building of concrete blocks, or in a cave, they waited. He seemed to see men rise up and their arms were outstretched and they held him and hugged him; they gave him the welcome that was the heart of a family. He tried to cry out, as if to tell his family that he came, but had no voice
… He walked away from the family that he cared for, that he was a part of. He wore a suit and a clean shirt, with a tie, and his shoes were polished, and he came through a great concourse of people – none of them saw him as they flowed around him – and he carried a suitcase or a grip or had a traveller's rucksack hitched on his shoulder, and he yearned for the praise of his family, and he prayed to hear the screamed terror of those his family hated.
He read the pages, memorized them. The needle came down. The woman tried to hold his hand but it would not free itself from the manual's pages. He felt the pain of the needle.
The total dose of local anaesthetic, split between three injections, was
– and Bart had carefully measured it – twenty millilitres of one per cent of Lignocaine.
He could, so easily, have killed him.
As a rabid dog was shot, so Bart could have ended the life of the man whose face he had looked into, whose name he did not know.
He could have said that the brute was a violent fanatic, raging with a desire to murder. He eased the needle into the left side flesh of the wound, where the blackened gangrene had taken deepest hold. A total dose of forty millilitres of two per cent Lignocaine would have put down the rabid brute. The dog would have gone into spasm, then been on the irreversible process towards death. Instead, Bart had measured out what was necessary to spare the dog pain. Too many had walked over Bart. He was not their servant. He thought the young man handsome. There was a quality about him, Bart thought, that the stubble on his face, the tangle of hair above his eyes, their brightness, and the dirt encrusted round his mouth did not mask. Flitting into his mind was his own boy. The boy who loved his mother, loved Ann. The boy who had taken the owner of the Saab franchise to be a proxy father. The boy who had never looked into his face after the dawn visit of the police. He could justify himself. .
He used the cleaning agent, Cetrimide, slopped it into the wound, and began to dab with the lint. 'This is going to hurt, going to hurt worse as I go on. I've used all the painkiller that's possible.'
He sensed that the head nodded behind the manual. He did not think that the man would cry out. Perhaps an intake of hissed breath, maybe a gasp, stifled… He cut deeper into the wound pit, poured more of the Cetrimide into it, swabbed, then manoeuvred the forceps over the first pieces of grit and stone, and took them out. The woman's hand was over the man's fist but his eyes never left the printed page. Bart went deeper. He cut, swabbed, retrieved. He knelt beside his patient and the sweat slaked off him. He thought it extraordinary that the man did not cry out, but had known he would not.
She held the hand tight. Bart could have told her she served no purpose, that the man did not need her as comforter. He found the pieces of cotton, embedded, and lifted each of them out, had to cut again to find their root. Any other man that Bart had known would have fainted. Himself, probably his heart would have stopped…
Debridement was from the battlefield surgery of the Napoleonic wars, with patients either insensible from shock or dosed with brandy or biting on a peg of wood or leather. No gasp, no hiss for breath. He searched for more cotton fibre, stone, grit, a fragment of I he missile, and heard the rustle of a page turned. No man that Bart had ever met could have endured it without protest. Bart had reckoned he might have to kneel on his patient's ankles and have the woman hold down one arm and the older Bedouin the other arm, grip him so that he could not struggle as the scalpel went in and the lorceps probed. Not necessary.
'You're doing well,' he murmured. 'We're getting there.' He was sodden with sweat.
He went to work on the gangrene. It was neither pretty nor delicate work. Not at medical school, certainly not in the practice at Torquay, not even in the villages around Jenin had he performed such primitive surgery before. He was guided by old memories of books read long ago, and his instincts. Bart sliced at the flesh, cut slivers from it, then flicked the scalpel blade to the side, ditched it behind him. The woman flushed. A section of flesh, poorly discarded, had fallen on to her ankle. Her eyes were screwed up at the sight of it. She would have felt its diseased wetness on her skin. He cut again. Still there was no cry and no hiss of breath. Closest to the wound the flesh was black. Away from the wound it was darkened.
Layer upon layer of it he sliced away. He reached out, took the piece from her ankle and threw it further. The flesh, scattered behind him, brought flies in a feeding frenzy. He cut to pink, rosy flesh, and to clean skin.
He was weak when he finished. 'Well done.'
The whispered response through clenched teeth: 'I didn't do anything.'
'Well done for not thrashing around.'
'Would have made it slower, more pain for me and more difficult for you.'
Bart did what was forbidden, looked into the face. It was ravaged.
The eyes stared out, great lines furrowed the forehead and the muscles bulged on the neck. He thought that whatever this man, terrorist, rabid dog or freedom-fighter, set out to achieve he would succeed in it.
'I can't give you any more Lignocaine because that would kill you.
I'm going to close it up, not totally. Superficial sutures to hold the skin's edges, but it has to be open so that any further pus can get clear. Later we'll do an antibiotic injection, and if the pain is un-manageable by this evening I'll try a morphine jab.'
'Why am I still alive?'
Bart grimaced. 'Why indeed… '
Al Maz'an village, near Jenin, Occupied West Bank.
The helicopter belched the rocket. It had made one pass, a slow circle above the village, then steadied and fired. The flame creased behind the rocket, was vivid against the cloud. He had been locking his vehicle when he heard and saw it. He had watched its circle and known what would folloiv. The flame speared towards the village roofs.
Bart could not see its target, but knew it. The rocket – then another, then a third – dived, exploded, devastated, and threw up a mushroom cloud of dirt, dust and rubble.
He ran. It was expected of him that he should run. His cover demanded of him that he run.
He ran across the square and into a wide street, went towards the medical centre in the yard of the village's school. He knew what he would find in the alley, opposite the collapsed telephone pole. He did not look up, did not see the helicopter turn away. He would find a hole that smoked and burned, and around it would be collapsed rubble. The hole would be like the black gap when a tooth fell out. The rockets from the helicopter were always fired with precision. The crowd spilled from the alley, a wasp storm. A fist, where the crowd was densest, held up a mobile telephone. The scream of the crowd reached him. He saw her… tens of arms held her and snatched at her. She was supine and did not struggle. He thought of her as thirtyish, no more than forty. The hands had dislodged the scarf from her head. He did not know whether she was an agent, of lesser importance than himself, or whether she was merely an innocent who had used her mobile telephone while the helicopter had made its first circling pass. An agent or an innocent, she was doomed. Hysteria would kill her. He did not know whether she was a wife, a mother. She went with the crowd and Bart was pushed aside, half crushed into a doorway. She was taken towards the square. Bart saw her eyes. She was condemned but her eyes had peace. He thanked his God for it. He thought the shock of her capture had destroyed the fear. The moment that their eyes met was a split second, then she was gone, at the core of the baying crowd.
He went on.
At the collapsed telephone pole, Bart turned into the alley. The missing tooth had been a home, was now a crater, and the two floors of the homes on either side of it were exposed. Sleeping rooms were opened up. Beds hung angled over the crater, and more rubble had fallen in the alley. Dust had coated the lime-green Fiat. Men dug and crawled in the crater. He heard the low, keening moan and knew there was no work for a doctor here.
First two children were carried out.
A woman's corpse followed them.
With reverence, a man's body was lifted clear.
He saw the frozen face of the man who had sat in the rear seat of the Fiat.
It had been on the second page, at the top rank, of the most sensitive fugitives. Now the face was like a circus clown's, coated with the white dust of the plaster of the interior walls. The dust made a mask for the face and death had distorted none of the features. No wound disturbed it: strength was written on it, and he fancied there was honesty. Bart turned away, and pressed his hand against his throat to suppress vomit.
He did not dare to walk back through the square. He had not the courage to go past the scaffolding erected in front of the square's principal building.
An hour later, Bart sagged from the chair.
He went down on to the hut floor and the coffee he'd held spilled on to the boards.
He wept.
Only Joseph saw him.
On his knees and on his elbows, his body quivering from the tears, he heard the beat of Joseph's words. 'You did well. For us you are a jewel. A man who was a murderer was liquidated because of your bravery. You are responsible for the saving of many lives. Listen, Bart, we regret the deaths of two children and a woman in the house. We regret also that a lynch mob has killed a woman they believe guilty of treachery to their society. Two children and two women are set on the scales against the lives of many. You are a hero to us. I tell you, Bart, beside Jerusalem's Mount Herzl is the Yad Vashem memorial where we remember our own and their suffering, and also remembered there are the honoured foreigners who have helped our survival, and your name-'
'I don't want that fucking crap,' Bart sobbed. 7 am gone. I'm finished.'
T thank you for what you have done.'
Back at his home, he packed. One suitcase for his clothes, a medical bag, a cardboard box for the cat and a plastic bag of tinned food for it. He wrote the note and pinned it to the door. 'Mother seriously ill in England.
Returning there. God watch over you. Your friend, Samuel Bartholomew.'
He had arrived on an untruth, had lived on an untruth, and left on an untruth. He was gone before dusk fell on the village, driving with wet eyes, and two patrol vehicles discreetly escorted him down tracks and along roads and he was only clear of them when he had gone through the checkpoint. All the way to Tel Aviv, blazoned in his mind, was the image of the dust-coated face, at peace, of the fighter he had killed.
The book dropped from his hands. Beth saw the pain break over him.
She looked around. If he had cried out it would have helped her, yet he did not. He lay on his back and gasped. At a distance, beside the knelt camels, the guide watched, and close to him was the broken-open crate from which the manual had been retrieved. The face was in shadow and she could not see the eyes or the mouth and did not know what he thought. If a spotlight had been shone on his face she doubted she would know what he thought. Further back, erect and statue still, was the boy. .
Did it matter what anyone thought? Beth, as teenager and adult, had never cared for advice, counsel, guidance. She knew her mind: it did not tax her if a road or a street flowed past her and mouthed disapproval, if the crowds of a town, a city, condemned her judgement.
She was her own person and the innate stubbornness of character brooked no criticism. She was beside a killer whose eyes had closed.
She slipped away from him, out from under the awning, and went towards the drone of the snoring.
At his vehicle, where the doctor lay on the seat depressed to its full extent, she snapped open the door. His mouth was open, gaped wide, and the snoring brought spittle to his mouth. The shirt clung to his body and on his lap was a chocolate-bar wrapping, not shared with the rest of them. She punched his arm. He snorted, convulsed and then was awake.
'God – what did you do that for?'
'He's in pain,' Beth said.
The arm smeared the sweat off his face. 'Of course he's in pain. A bloody great hole like that, the flesh I took out of it and its depth what do you expect if not pain?'
'You talked about morphine.'
'Talked about morphine this evening. My experience, Miss Jenkins, pain seldom kills. Morphine does, often.'
'He doesn't cry out,' she said, a trill of bewilderment.
'And further experience tells me, Miss Jenkins, that the reaction to pain explains more about the patient than about the injury.'
'I don't understand what you're saying.' She was unsure, her voice was small, her guard was down.
He attacked. 'That's rich – like my favourite Christmas present. I am introduced by you to a war casualty who talks in delirium and confusion about mass murder. By you, I am nagged to save this creature's life. And you don't know who he is, don't know what mayhem he plans to inflict – don't know anything except you've an itch you want to scratch. What do you think he's going to do when Icve got him up on his feet and hobbling forward? Is he going to give you a loving kiss? Get you to wrap your thighs round his neck? Or walk away from you like you never existed?'
She trembled. 'How much morphine would you give him?'
He clutched her hand and she felt the slithering wet of his palm. .
'None, if I can get away with it. If I decide that he must sleep, cannot because of the pain, then I will inject between ten and twenty milligrams.'
'Not more, if the pain's bad?'
'It's an equation, Miss Jenkins – it's about getting the sums right.
Too little, and the pain continues. Too much, and respiration is fatally slowed and the myocardium, that's the heart muscle, is depressed, ceases to operate and death follows.'
'Yes.'
'It is not my intention to overdose him on morphine.'
'No.'
'If it's not a problem to you, I would like to resume my rest.'
His eyes had closed and his head was averted, his chin sagged and his mouth opened. She left him. She went past the boy, who did not look at her, stayed intent on his concentration. She looked up and saw only the clearness of the sky, blue, and she raked it till her eyes burned on the sun. The boy's father ducked out from under the awning, but did not meet her gaze. She realized it: she was alone. She skirted the camels and bent to go under the awning. He was propped up and had the pieces on his lap, and the manual. When he saw her, he waved her away – like she was flotsam.
He had the manual and the pieces. Across his lap was the launch tube with a missile inserted, and the battery coolant unit; he looked for the slot into which it would be inserted. Beside him, on the sacking, was the beltpack that housed the IFF interrogator unit, and next he would find the plug in the grip stock where its cable went.
He beat the pain.
The wound oozed but did not bleed.
He had seen the disappointment cloud her face. He had no interest in her. He did not see where she went, where she sat. He had no need of her.
When Caleb had found the slot and the plug socket, he rehearsed the firing procedure. His eyes flitted between the grip stock and the manual.
His finger rested on the impulse-generator switch, then the button controlling the seeker uncage bar. Then it rested gently on the trigger.
He read of the less-than-two-second response time between the trigger pull and the missile's launch. He imagined the fire flash and the lurched first stage of the missile's ejection from the tube, then the blast of the second stage, then the climbing hunt for the target.
Again and again, his pain controlled and his finger steady, Caleb rehearsed the preparations for firing. Without the missile he would not reach his family… but he did not know whether its time wrapped in an oiled covering had decayed it.
Getting to his family was his goal, his reason for survival.
The courier had been and had gone. The sentry, low down in the rocks in front of the cave's entrance, scanned the desert's expanse.
The courier had reached the cave after the first prayers at dawn and had left before the prayers at midday. He had brought with him a sealed, lead-encased container – the size of a water bucket – and had taken away with him finely rolled cigarette papers on which coded messages were written in minute script.
The heat shimmered the sands in front of the sentry, but he squinted, looked ahead and watched for them.
For midday prayers, men had emerged blinking from the cave, and one had held up the compass so that the direction of Makkah would be exact and not an estimation. They had prayed, then returned to the dark recesses.
The sentry had watched the courier in, had watched him out and away over the emptiness of the sands, and had not prayed. He had stayed hidden among the rocks with the rifle always in his hand and with the machine-gun, loaded with belt ammunition, close against his knee. During prayers, an eagle had wheeled high over the escarpment where the cave was. The sentry's eyes ached as he looked for a sign of their coming.
If they came in daylight he would have long warning of them.
He would see a speck of movement, then the shape of a small caravan would materialize. If they came in darkness he would see them, from three or four kilometres away, on the night vision glasses, Russian military, that hung from his neck. They were late.
They were late by four days.
But four days mattered little to the sentry and to the men inside the cave whom he guarded. The war was without end. He did not doubt that they would come, but he hoped fervently that they would come during his long watch, not after he was relieved. His eyes scraped over the sands and little images danced in his mind, small hallucinations, but he did not see the caravan. Their importance was to be measured by the ordeal they endured, crossing the Empty Quarter for secrecy and the preservation of their security. He wanted to be the first to greet and welcome them.
He watched for them, as he had watched for each of the four days since they had been due. He searched the sands that were without limit for the caravan. But he saw only the desert and the dunes, heard only the silence… They would come, he was sure of it. Their importance, in the war without end was too great for them to fail the journey.. . and the one of greatest importance, he had heard it whispered while he rested in the cave's depths, was the one who would carry the suitcase when it was loaded with the content of the container the courier had brought that morning. That was a man to be greeted and welcomed.
Billy Boy said, 'He was all right when the boss brought him in. He was OK then, but he changed. Then he was shit. When he changed he hadn't the time of day for us. Don't expect me to care, not if Caleb Hunt's got trouble on his doorstep.'
Half a pace behind Lovejoy, Jed stood and absorbed. Lovejoy's way, as lectured in the Volvo, was to begin at the bottom and work up. It was the explanation as to why they were not knocking at a front door and interviewing a family, but instead were in the workshop of a grimy car-repair business. He had seen a derelict gasworks to the right side of the complex built in a passed-over factory, and a once-fine church on the left side with graffiti sprayed over the plywood covering the windows. Jed thought the place reeked of failure.
But flesh now stretched on the skeleton that was Caleb Hunt – and on the taxi-driver, Fawzi al-Ateh, who had sat across a table from him at Delta, in his interrogation room, and who had screwed him.
Vinnie said, 'We helped him when he started. When he didn't know a carburettor from a clutch, we covered for him and treated him like he was one of us. He was learning, he was good, then it all went sour. One day he was fine, then it was like we weren't good enough for him.'
They came forward in turn, called out from under a bodywork . chassis and from the examination pit, and they talked with what he believed to be utter honesty – and confusion – and almost a trace of sadness. It was as if they had been rejected and still wore the marks of it. Each, his name called, came and shuffled awkwardly and spoke of the man who had duped Camp Delta's finest, and him. It made hard listening for Jed.
Wayne said, 'He told us, at the end, the day he left, that the work bored him and that the boss bored him, and that we bored him. You know, I'd shared sandwiches with him and my towel, shared bloody everything with him, but we were crap – we were beneath him. He let us know, not laughing at us but arrogant-like, we were second-rate and he wasn't.'
They moved into the inner office. Files and worksheets were dumped off chairs for them. He remembered the docile, humble young man – light skinned, but so were many Afghans – who had been a taxi-driver and he thought it remarkable that the lie had been sustained against all the pressure that Camp Delta had thrown at him. Jed had never before been on a field investigation: his life had been spent behind a desk, a suspect in front of him or a computer screen. He admired the quietly spoken expertise of Lovejoy, who started men talking and never interrupted them. A kettle whistled, instant coffee was doled into mugs, the water was poured and milk added from a bottle. Jed knew flesh on the skeleton would now become features.
The boss said, 'I gave him the chance because Perkins asked it of me. Perkins taught me and my wife and taught our girl. Perkins got him the chance. It's not the top of the tree, but it's a start. If a lad wants to work, and to learn, then I'll give him a damn good apprenticeship. Won't pay him much, but a start's a start, and a trained engine mechanic is in work for life. For two and a half years he was good as gold and it had got to the stage where I'd give him my best customers, my regulars, for services and MOTs, and he'd do all God's hours… Don't quote me, but I was going to put him in charge of that lot. He had what it takes, the leadership thing. He could take responsibility, seemed to enjoy it. Good with customers.
They liked him because he told them it straight – you know, "Your motor's a wreck, sir, and us fixing it is just chucking good money after bad," or "No, we can do that, sir, do it over the weekend – I'll come in Saturday and Sunday and do it." People had started to ask for him. Whether it was an engine strip or knocking out a front-wing dent from a shunt, people used to say, "I'd like Caleb to do it." Then it all went pear-shaped. There was two lads started to hang around for him. First they'd be outside, then they used to drift in and sit around, talk to him while he was working. I should have told them to piss off, but I didn't – suppose I thought Caleb would walk out on me. Shouldn't have bothered. He did. They were Pakistani boys.
Don't go getting me wrong. I'm not a racial nut – plenty round here that are, but I'm not one of them. They had a hold on him. At the end, they'd show up and he'd just down tools – whatever he was doing – and he'd be gone. No more weekends and no more Sundays either, and half the Fridays he was gone. There was this Tuesday, and they came in for him. I was going to fire him that evening anyway, would have done it a month earlier if it hadn't been for old Perkins. They came in late morning, and he went off and wiped his hands – and we were busy as sin – and he told me, like my problems didn't matter to him, that he'd be gone for a couple of weeks. I told him he could be gone for a couple of months or a couple of years because there wouldn't be a job here when he came back. Both the Pakistanis were laughing at me, but not Caleb. I turned my back on him and I went in the office. He followed me. Nobody else saw it. He'd this spanner in his hand and his fingers were all white round it. God's my witness, I thought he was going to belt me, I reckoned he'd lost it – then he put the spanner down. You know what it was? I'd said he was sacked. He was not in control, and he couldn't take it. What I saw in his eyes, when he had that spanner, he'd have killed me and just walked like nothing had happened… I don't know why you're interested in Caleb Hunt, and don't suppose you'd tell me if I asked.
No, of course… Oh, the lads who used to come round for him, one's called Farooq, and his dad's got a restaurant down on their estate.
Amin is the name of the other one, don't know what he does. You see, there's very few white boys are close to Asians, but they all come from the same street. Sorry, gents, but I've got a business to run.'
They went outside where the sky seemed to merge with the grime of the old brickwork.
'It was the capital of the country's old engineering industry,'
Lovejoy said. .
'What have we got?' Jed asked.
'And it's all gone, the engineering industry. You know, just down the road from here they made the Titanic' s anchor chains… What have we got? I'd say we've got enough to lose sleep over.'
'Much sleep?'
'Persuasive leadership and pride, violence and vanity, commitment and courage – doesn't that stack up to a sleepless night? Come on, I'm hungry.'
They walked briskly towards the car, but Jed wasn't done. 'I can see him, clear as yesterday, in my room.'
'But he's not there, is he? He's lost and he needs killing. He's not in your room. Do you eat curry?'
Marty flew the map boxes. The chart on the work-surface lay between his joystick and her console keyboard. Each time they'd covered a box, she'd reach across with her Chinagraph pen and make a black cross on it. There were guys at Bagram who did mine clearance and they used map boxes, not of a mile square but of ten yards square, and they crossed out the sections of the map they believed they'd cleared. The guys said that the sections wouldn't be a place to take a picnic because they could never be certain they'd not missed one. It was like that with the boxes on the chart: they could have missed a target and flown on. Below the new line of black crosses were the red exclamation marks she'd made, four in two boxes, one mark for each firing of a Hellfire. He thought that when he brought Carnival Girl back for the last time – the late morning of tomorrow – he'd route her over the exclaimers and give himself a last look at the craters, freshen his memory of them before he climbed up into the big transport aircraft.
The wind made for good flying conditions; the one problem was the thermals coming up off the sand, which made Carnival Girl sluggish to commands. What he'd learned and what he'd tell them at the Bagram debrief, the heat from the ground killed the infra-red, but the real-time camera showed acceptable pictures for her to look at… They were alone.
For once, they did not have Langley with them. Two hours before, Oscar Golf had signed off, telling them he was going for a shower and food. Could they manage on their own? He'd seen Lizzy-Jo . smile and heard the clear rasp of her voice. Yes, they could manage on their own.
Maybe Marty's hand slipped, sweat on the joystick. Maybe his fingers were numbed from holding the stick. Carnival Girl's picture jolted, and she swore, and the picture dived.
'You OK?'
'I'm fine.'
'What I mean is, are you really OK?'
'I'm really fine.'
'No kidding?'
'I'm good and fine and I'm grateful – can't say more.'
She stretched, touched his hand on the joystick and her nails indented on the veins at the back of his hand, which shook a moment, and Carnival Girl plunged another two hundred feet. She was giggling like a girl and Marty felt the smile fill his face. He was grateful because he had blipped, grateful because she had kicked the blip hard. He owed her his thanks. It was between them. He had certainty that the collapse of his morale after he had flown in pursuit of the old man was a story she would never tell. And he would never tell that she had come to his tent and had bedded him on his cot. He would go back to Bagram and the coffins off the transporter would be unpacked and technicians and ground crew would stand around and admire the skull-and-crossbones symbols adorning First Lady and Carnival Girl, and his own crew and his own technicians would recite stories of the killing, wasting, of Al Qaeda men in the desert of the Rub' al Khali. He might even let them know, at Bagram, it had not been easy flying.
Languidly, that was how she flew. Carnival Girl climbed in response to the joystick's command, without enthusiasm. Alongside him, like she recognized he had come through the depression, she had the blouse unbuttoned and she hung loose, but he didn't look at her a lot, more at the screen above the stick. If he had found something in the Sands she would have alerted him and zoomed on it and he would have done a figure eight over it, but she didn't, and there was only the pure windblown shapes of the dunes on the screen, and the emptiness – utter emptiness. A couple of hours back, when Oscar Golf had gone for his shower and food, she'd asked him if he'd need a pill to keep him going till he brought Carnival Girl back the next midday. He hadn't wanted a pill, he could last.
He thought they might, because she was old and ancient, put Carnival Girl in a museum. Useful life gone, stripped of what was valuable but put on show. Schoolkids might come round her with teachers, and hold maps of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
The kids would gather at the forward fuselage, where the skull-and-crossbones was stencilled on it, and the teacher would talk about the men and women who defended the United States of America and about the hunting down of the country's enemies. He dreamed…
'So, are we flying or not?'
On the screen he saw the dive, and arrested it – then grimaced.
'Sorry.'
'Stop playing deadhead. I'm telling you, we're flying until the last hour, the last minute, of fuel. We're keeping her up all night and through tomorrow morning. We're going till the tanks are dry. It's the way it is. Always there's one more map box – it's Murphy's law, always the next box where the action is. We're with this until the end.'
'Got you.'
He thought of the man she had drunk with in the bar behind Fifth Avenue, and of the phone ringing out unanswered on the high floor of the North Tower, and of the bodies of the jumpers that seemed to float but came on down. Then he wiped his mind clear and flew Carnival Girl on towards the next map box. When the day died, they would reach the boxes alongside the track marked on the chart, do the east side of it in the night, and by dawn they would be over the track. Then time for the west side of it, and one last line of boxes over desert, before he turned her for home.
Far from him, but under his command, the Predator's lens ate the Sands.
He ad waited an hour in the car park, but the bastard hadn't shown.
It was the first time that the weasel, Bartholomew, had stood him up.
For an hour he had sat in his car, in the far corner of the car park, and the wait had been fruitless.
He had driven to the surgery, had stamped through an empty wailing room and confronted the receptionist. Where was he? There had been a message on the answerphone the previous morning . telling her to cancel all existing appointments for three days, but she had not known where he was. And, staring at the scars on his face, she had told him that he could either go in the book for three days' time, when there was a window, or she could give him the name of another doctor if his complaints were urgent. He had stormed out.
Never before had Bartholomew left town without warning.
His finger on the doorbell, Eddie Wroughton stood on the step at the villa's front door beside the empty carport. The maid came.
He pushed past her. A cat, obviously a stray, stood its ground in the hallway, arched its back and hissed defiance. He kicked at it, missed.
Where was he? The maid scowled, hostile as the cat, then shrugged. She did not know.
He was trained to check over a room, a villa. The maid followed him, but did not watch what he did – only stared at his face.
'Something wrong with me, is there?' Wroughton snarled.
She broke away, fled for the kitchen.
In his mind was an inventory, not of what he found but of what was not there.
Bartholomew's medical bag – gone. He forced open the drugs cabinet in the bedroom – the lower shelf was half emptied. He broke into the cupboard beside the cabinet – no operating kit there, and the packets of lint and bandages had been rifled through, as if some had been taken hurriedly. From the kitchen, stepping over the treacherously wet floor that the maid had mopped, he went into the utility room; he remembered from the one time he had been to the villa that Bartholomew kept water and fuel there. No water canister and no fuel can.
Back in the living room, alongside the chair where the cat had taken refuge, Wroughton lifted the phone and dialled the call back.
The answer came in Arabic digits for the last number that had called.
He was about to write it on the pad beside the phone when he checked himself and scrawled it on the back of his hand around an abrasion that was now scabbed. He tore off the top sheet and slipped it carefully into the breast pocket of his last linen suit.
He rang his office in the embassy, gave his instructions to his assistant, told her the telephone number. Where had that call originated from?
Wroughton looked around him, saw the bareness of Bartholomew's life. Nothing there that was personal. Rented furniture, hired fittings – as if his soul had been eradicated. How could it have been different? It came to him like a jolting blow, as violent as any of the agronomist's kicks and punches: he himself had pulled his telephone plug from the wall socket, he had switched off his mobile while he had sat naked in his own room, among his own rented furniture and hired fittings.
On his way out of the living room, going past the settee beside the door, he lifted a cushion and threw it at the chair where the cat was, but when it landed the cat had gone.
Wroughton slammed the front door shut after him.
He asked, in the new language of his life, 'How long?' The dark had settled under the awning. He could barely see the doctor's face.
The voice from the shadowed mouth was crisp. 'Let's not fuck about. You speak the Queen's English as well as I do. I haven't the faintest idea what you're asking me. In your condition, and if you want my further help, I would suggest you end the charade. You're English – if you want answers you will speak in English. So, let's start again.'
Caleb shook. He thought the doctor knelt on the manual and that his thigh pressed the launcher against Caleb's good leg. As he remembered, he had last spoken English in the taxi on his way to the wedding. Through the dusty streets of Landi Khotal, bumping in the back of the taxi, squashed between his friends and nervous, he had spoken English – but not since.
As if he walked a new road, he spoke with soft hesitation: 'How long before I can move?'
"That's better, wasn't so difficult, eh? You spoke English when you were in extreme pain. How long? Depends what you want to achieve. If you want to get off these stinking unhygienic sacks and go have a piss, because you've drained out four saline drip bags, you could probably manage that now. I'm sure Miss Jenkins will support your arm while you do it.'
'How long before I can move away?'
'If you're going in Miss Jenkins's vehicle, I suppose you could move straight after you've had your piss.' .
'By camel?'
'Still the adventurer. I believe I could have you hobbling around in the morning. If it was imperative, and you've slept, you could mount up and head for where the sunset will be – yes, in the morning. .. Is the pain bad?'
'I accept the pain.'
'I can give you morphine for it.'
'No. When I spoke, what did I say?'
'If you're intent on riding a camel tomorrow I suggest I inject you now intravenously with Ampicillin, an antibiotic, then another dose at midnight, another at dawn and one more when you head off. In addition I will give you what syringes I have, because you should take four a day for three days.'
'What did I say?'
'After that, because your arm will be a pincushion, you can take it orally – again it's five hundred milligrams a dose, four times a day.'
'You saw my face?'
'Difficult not to have, young man, when I'm bent over you and scraping that crap out of your leg – difficult not to have seen your face, and difficult not to have heard what you said. Right, let's get it into you.'
His arm was lifted and the fingers held his wrist just below the plastic bracelet. He felt the cool damp of the swab, then saw the movement, felt the prick of the needle.
The needle was withdrawn. He heard the grunting as the man pushed himself heavily up.
'You have to sleep. I'll jab you again at midnight, but you must sleep through it. Sweet dreams, my nameless friend.'
Caleb heard his shoes scuff away in the sand. He would not sleep and would not dream. He did not know what he had said, knew only that the doctor had seen his face. He tossed and the pain in his leg surged. He remembered the men who had seen his face, and all were gone. To see his face was to die. And he remembered the old man who had ridden the donkey, who had brought him to the opium smugglers – who was blind and had not seen his face – and he thought the lifeless eyes might have saved the old man.
To have seen his face was to be condemned. The doctor had.
Caleb shuddered and the pain racked him. So had the woman.