Rashid, the guide, was at the front and walked beside the lead camel.
The Egyptian, the Saudi and the Iraqi rode, then came the baggage camels with the tents and the water, and they were followed by the three camels that each carried two of the boxes. At the back, walking, were Caleb and the boy, Ghaffur.
It was the third day since they had entered the desert.
The sun beat down on him. The heat pierced the ghutrah that wrapped his head and wound round his mouth and jaw. It burned his exposed cheeks and nose, and the reflected brightness devilled in his eyes… and the boy talked. In his ears was the soft singing of a light wind, the muffled strike of the camels' hoofs in the sand and the groaning murmurs of the Saudi. They left behind them a trail of broken sand, indented with hoofmarks and footprints, but even the gentle wind had the strength to shift loose sand into the little pits they had made. When he looked back, as far as he could see, their trail was already covered, lost. The boy questioned him as thoroughly as had any of the interrogators at X-Ray or Delta. Ahead of them, what he saw, through squinted eyes, was an endless sandscape to the horizon. Caleb set himself the target of. each horizon, a dune ridge that met a sky that was without a single cloud, and when that horizon and ridge was reached another faced them. The treble pitch of the questions was like a fly's attention, distracting but not irritating, and he ignored it as he would have ignored a fly at his nose.
Who was he? Where had he come from? What was his purpose?
Why did he travel? They might have been the questions of interrogators. Then he had hung his head and had quietly repeated the life story of the taxi-driver. Now he swatted the questions away with a smile or a grin that was hidden by his ghutrah. They skirted the higher dunes where they could but some were so vast that they could not be avoided and then Caleb and the boy helped to drag the stumbling, sliding animals up the lee side where it was steepest, and on the way down they would let the camels loose so that their angled legs danced awkward steps as they careered down. On top of each dune, driven by the winds, were razor ridges that made slight avalanches when broken. Mostly Caleb looked at his feet because then he did not see the horizon and had less sense of the pitiful slowness of their progress and the distance to the next dune's top… It was only the beginning. Last evening they had stopped at a well, and the camels had been allowed to drink their fill, and he had heard the guide, Rashid, tell the Egyptian that this was the last well on their route. That morning, after prayers, before the sun's heat had gathered, they had left the well, which was merely a little box of mud bricks with a dead wood beam across it and a rope stretching down to a hanging bucket – the water had been brackish, stale, foul: he knew because he had sipped it, then spat it out. His own questions played in his mind and mirrored the boy's. Who was he? Where did he come from? What was his purpose? Why did he travel? He could not have answered them.
They halted in the middle of the day – not for food or to drink, but to pray. They had eaten and drunk before they had left the well and would not do so again until they stopped and pitched tents. By walking at the back of the caravan, with the boy, Caleb had distanced himself from his unchosen companions. The last evening, before they slept, Fahd had told him briefly, with a sneer, of the disaster to Iraq, the fall of the regime, that American tanks had driven at leisure through the wide avenues of Baghdad. Then Tommy's glance had settled on Fahd and the story had been left unfinished… In front of him, astride the camels and perched on the humps, they all suffered.
The Saudi would yell out his pain, and twice the Egyptian had tumbled into the sand. Rashid had lifted him up without sympathy, then thwacked the camel's back to get it moving again. He sensed, constant in his mind, the resentment they held for him because they had waited twelve days for his arrival.
They climbed, scrambled, descended, and each in his own way would have prayed for another of the salt-crusted flats that made plateaux before the next line of dunes, and the heat was unforgiving
… and it was only the start. The questions had started again, the piping voice demanded answers.
'No,' Caleb said. 'You shall answer me.'
'What?'
He saw the triumph on the boy's face: a response had been won.
'How long do we travel?'
Mischief lit the boy's face. He grinned. 'How fast can you go? And the others? I think we go slowly.'
'How many days?'
'The camels drank this morning.'
'How many days can the camels travel after they have drunk?'
'For eighteen days.'
'Is eighteen days enough time?'
'How fast will you go?'
'What happens after eighteen days?'
'The camels die,' the boy, Ghaffur, said, and his eyes sparkled. 'But we must have water.'
'How many days can we live without water?'
'Two days, then we die.' The boy's smile wreathed his face.
'Has your father been on this route before?'
'I do not think so. Not with me. He has not said it.'
More questions bounced in Caleb's mind. All had the same core.
How did the guide, Rashid, know where he was going? What markers did he use? What pointers guided him? They were un-spoken. They had barely started, it was only the beginning… On every camel goats' stomach skins bulged with drinking water. Two days after that water was exhausted, they would die of thirst, and after eighteen days the camels would die. Caleb had not seen anything that told him men and beasts had gone this way before. The sands were pure. There were no tramped trails where hoofs or feet had been, and he did not think there was any possibility, however remote, that a vehicle could have ploughed through the soft, shifting sands of the dunes. Twice, in that morning's march, the guide had stopped and looked ahead, had seemed to sniff at the air, and his concentration had been total. The first time he had veered towards the right, a sharp, angled turn, and the second he had gone to the left, a softer turn. But the boy said his father had never been here before.
He realized it: their lives depended on the instincts of the guide who strode ahead of them, led them further into the sand wilderness.
Caleb asked, 'Does anyone come here?'
'God is here.'
He walked faster. The straps of his sandals were making blisters on his heels. He saw nothing that supported life, only the dunes – no track, no bush or dead wood, no trail. If he had not been important then the challenge of crossing the wilderness would not have been given him, but he did not know why he was important… He walked faster but his legs were leaden and his mouth cried out for water. The boy gambolled beside him, mocked him.
He staggered. The boy caught his arm, but Caleb angrily pushed him away, and the horizon was blurred by the sweat in his eyes. He seemed to see, in his mind, the bones of the dead who had exhausted their water, and the bones were stripped white by the sand and the wind. He blinked, then wiped the sweat savagely from his eyes. He had stared into a trap of self-pity, as men had done at X-Ray and Delta.
He screamed and the sound of it soaked into the dunes' walls and the cloudless sky.
He checked his list for the day – three interrogations.
They would all be dross. The Bureau and the Agency ruled in Joint Task Force 170, and the DIA ran a poor third, bottom of the heap. In his cubicle, Jed had scanned his overnight emails – nothing that couldn't wait – then turned to the files of the three men. The Bureau and the Agency worked the prisoners who stared at the ceiling and soundlessly repeated Holy Qur'an verses, or fed out the disinformation snippets, or gazed back at the questioner with silent contempt. The Bureau and the Agency had the big-time game of trying to break into the silence or the lies, and that was good, stimulating work. The men given to the DIA were the no-hopers, the unfortunates on the edge of nervous collapse. In the morning he would see a Kuwaiti, who said he was an aid worker in Jalalabad. In the afternoon, an Afghan would be brought in who said his father had given offence to a tribal chief in Paktia province and the chief had therefore denounced him. In the early evening, across the desk there would be a German passport holder from Tunisia who claimed the Pakistanis had handed him over when he was only an Arabic language student. It was pitiful.
By now, any benefit of Jed Dietrich's vacation was eroded. He wouldn't have told his father, Arnie Senior, but the work at Guantanamo bored him. A few times, he felt compulsive anger towards his targets, the men he faced, but the army's interrogation manual was clear cut on the boundaries he must not cross: he was permitted to use 'psychological ploys, verbal trickery, or other non-violent and non-coercive ruses'; he was warned that 'the interrogator must have an exceptional degree of self-control to avoid displays of genuine anger'; and absolutely forbidden was the 'use of force, mental torture, threats, insults or exposure to unpleasant or inhumane treatment'. Maybe if he had responded to that anger and kicked shit out of them, life at Guantanamo might not have been so dreary. It would not happen… He supposed that what kept him sane, what kept a man buying a lottery ticket, or what kept a guy out on a rainy day walking mud fields with a metal detector, was that something – one day – might just turn up. He started to read the case notes of the Kuwaiti who claimed to have been doing charity work in Jalalabad.
A clerk brought the signal to him.
He signed for it, watched the clerk close the door, and read it. He hadn't really the time to ponder on it, not if he were to get the Kuwaiti done in the morning. He read it a second time. He bit at his lower lip and dug his fingernails into his palms, but couldn't beat the frustration.
From: Lebed, Karen. DIA, Bagram.
To: Dietrich, Jed. DIA, Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay.
Subject: Fawzi al-Ateh. Ref. US8AF-000593DP.
Hope the sun's shining and the swimming's good. Concerning the above individual – no can help. Afghan national Fawzi al-Ateh did a runner (exclaimer). He escaped from USMC escort en route Bagram-Kabul. A mess (double exclaimer). Subject should have been collected by Afghan Security (yeah****yeah****) but incoming flight was delayed and they'd gone home – believe me. Subject pleaded nature call and was allowed out of transport, but didn't drop his trousers, just ran.
Anyway, ivhy the query? Wasn't subject cleared for release? Subject's home village is not accessible to us unless in battalion strength, bandit country. Low priority means follow-up assessment is not possible. OK, OK, so he wenr home early. Wishing you a happy day.
Best,
Lebed, Karen
He winced. Ever since his supervisor had told him of the taxi-driver's release, the irritation had come to him in spasms. It was not a tidy wrap-up. He could go back in his mind to the first day of the vacation, up in the cabin by the lake, when the faces across his desk had been clear, clean images. He had identified something enigmatic about that subject: a tall young man, softly spoken, never shaken in his story. All the others who pleaded innocence, as the taxi-driver had, had tried to prove their non-association with Al Qaeda by naming men they'd 'met' or men they'd 'heard of' who were in the 055 Brigade, or men they'd 'seen'. This one, the taxi-driver, had never met an Al Qaeda member, never heard of one, had never seen one. It was such a small point, so trivial, and by the second day on the Wisconsin lake he'd forgotten it. It would not have resurrected in his mind if the Bureau and the Agency had not walked, in big boots, over his supervisor… It had made a niggling suspicion. He filed the signal.
He went to work. He walked between the block where his office was and the block used for interrogation. He could see the beach. The wind came off it. It should have been a place of beauty, but it wasn't.
It was a place of fences and cages, of howled misery and failure. He'd complained, more than five months back, to Arnie Senior about the numbing tedium of the interrogation sessions – but Arnie Senior had done his draft time in the Central Highlands of Vietnam where questioning was 'robust': 'Take 'em up in a chopper, three of them, get up to a thousand feet, make two take a hike and then ask the third some questions. Never fails.' Arnie Senior's eyes had glazed over, sort of manic, and Jed had never again talked about his work to his father.
The translator was from Pittsburgh, second generation American, Syrian stock, and Jed disliked him, didn't trust him. The translator lounged and pared his nails. The chair opposite the desk was empty; they waited for the Kuwaiti to be brought in. Jed had talked three times to the taxi-driver, sitting in that same chair. He had found him co-operative and word-perfect on his story. Each time he'd done the oldest of tricks, what they taught at the training of interrogators, go back suddenly over a fact given an hour before, but every time the taxi-driver's story had matched and the trick hadn't caught him.
Truthful, and he wouldn't have admitted it – not even to Brigitte he'd rather liked the young man, and the story of the family's death from the bombers had kind of hit him… He looked up.
The chained prisoner, between the guards, was shuffled into the room. His thoughts of the taxi-driver – where he was and what ground he walked – were shut from his mind.
He looked into the pleading face of the Kuwaiti.
The birds soared.
She flew the peregrine, the shahin, he flew the saker falcon, the hurr. They were high, specks in the sky.
Beth and her host, the deputy governor, were out for a day's sport, with four vehicles and a retinue of drivers, falcon-minders, and servants to pitch an awning when they broke for the picnic; there were bodyguards with rifles, and a tracker from the Murra tribe to bring them back to Shaybah if the GPS system failed. She would have preferred just her and him, one four-wheel drive and the two birds.
It could not be: the deputy governor, a prince of the Kingdom, required such a following as a symbol of his rank.
The birds, high enough over them to make her arch her neck and struggle to follow their flight, searched for prey.
Had they been alone, two persons in the wilderness of sand, she would have experienced what she loved: the solitude, the quiet and the serenity. The desert captivated her. Lawrence had written, three-quarters of a century before, that 'this cruel land can cast a spell', and she understood him. She was captivated by the emptiness and the infinity of the horizons. Its imprint, she knew, would mark her mind for the rest of her days.
She watched for the diving stoop of the peregrine, waited for it to spy out a bustard that would be condemned.
They were a dozen miles off the road running to the north alongside the pipeline; the meteorite impact site of Wabar was a hundred and twenty miles to the west. The deputy governor would have been apoplectic had he known that she went alone to the ejecta field, had found a route for her Land Rover. He believed she only travelled there when he authorized drivers, a back-up vehicle and servants for the camp she must have, with a cook, a tribesman from the Murra, and troops from the Border Guard; with that crowd she felt con-stricted and watched, unfree. She had no fear of the desert that Lawrence had called 'cruel'. Once a month, Beth slipped away on her own to walk among the black glass and the white stones, to map and examine them, and once every second month she took the deputy governor's deputed escort. She had been told by a Bedouin trader who had come to Shaybah of another place, south of Wabar, where the glass and stones had fallen from the heavens, and had been given landmarks, perhaps a place where no human foot had ever been. She would be there, alone, with the quiet – if her Land Rover could get her there.
The birds searched, had not yet found a prey below.
She was there because she had written the letter to the Saudi Embassy in London, and had requested a visa for scientific research of meteorite impact sites. She had, of course, exaggerated her academic qualifications and egged-up her field experience. Her mother and father had lectured her that the Kingdom was not responsive to foreigners, intruders. Three months later she had whooped when a positive response had dropped through the letter-box, signed in person by the deputy governor, instructing her to go to the embassy where a visa would be issued to her. Everyone she knew in London said it was a miracle that she had won admission to follow her studies.
The birds came down, but not in the dive to strike.
Their flight back to the cluster of vehicles was frantic and in fear.
Above them, distinct and threatening, an eagle hovered. The sport was finished: no bustard would be taken. The peregrine and the saker falcon would not fly again if an eagle dominated the sky. The picnic was laid out and the birds shivered in fear in their cages. She watched the eagle, felt its presence, a killer over the sands, danger where before there had been none.
He followed the example of the guide, Rashid, and the boy.
He must have the respect of Rashid. Caleb had seen, looking up the length of the caravan, that when Rashid glanced back there was no respect on his features for the men who rode the camels.
He stopped, bent, and unfastened the buckles of his heavy sandals. He let his bare feet sink into the sand, then hitched the sandals' straps to his waist. He took the first step. He must have respect, he was driven to find it. The heat of the sand scorched the flesh on the soles of his feet, the grains clogged between his toes.
The second step, and then he was climbing a dune's lee slope and each step set fire to the skin under his feet, which was pink and protected between the calluses and the new blisters, but his grip was better than it was with the sandals; his toes dug into the loose sand and he did not fall. The burning ran from his feet to his ankles and up to his thighs. Caleb gasped. His teeth locked on his lip. He would not cry out. They tumbled down the dune's reverse slope. He fell but did not scream as the pain surged.
The boy, Ghaffur, was gone. Caleb was alone, abandoned by the caravan's stampede down the reverse slope. He scrambled to his feet.
He saw the boy sprint, sure-footed, past the pack camels and past the camels on which Fahd, Hosni and Tommy clung, as if for their lives.
He plodded after them, the gap growing and the pain burning. The boy reached his father at the head of the caravan and tugged at his father's sleeve. Rashid seemed to listen to his son, then turned. Tears welled in Caleb's eyes. His bare feet gouged into the sand. He saw, through misted eyes, the moment of disinterested contempt on Rashid's face, heard faintly the cough and the spit, then Rashid resumed his march at the caravan's head.
The next dune line was at least a mile in front. It was as if bull-dozers had scraped off the sand bed, scalped it down to a surface of grit and chipped stones. Rashid led the camels on to the new ground.
The boy waited for him.
Each step on the burned grit and the sharp stones was rich agony The boy waited and watched him.
Caleb's own craving for respect made him hang the sandals at his waist. If, now, he dropped the sandals to the ground, slipped his feet into them and refastened the buckles, he could not win respect. The vista stretched ahead of him, and he started to count numbers to divert his mind from the shoots of pain.
The boy's gaze wavered between Caleb's wet eyes and his feet. He thought the boy understood. The boy's feet were hardened as old leather and Ghaffur stood and waited for him. Caleb counted each step. He came closer to the boy – and the distance to the end of the caravan and the last bull camel carrying two of the boxes had widened. He reached the boy, still counting, and passed him and kept on walking and each step hurt worse.
'What do you say?' the voice piped.
'I am counting.'
'What are you counting?'
Caleb grunted, 'I am counting each step I take.'
'I have never heard of such numbers,' the boy said, and shook his head.
He counted the next number… and realized. The pain and the heat, the grit and stones under his feet had pushed him beyond the chasm that was the limit of his memory. He cursed softly. An old language had seeped into his mind, his past. He stamped on the memory and walked on.
Caleb endured.
At the base of the next dune line, where there would be soft sand, Rashid had called a halt. Fahd prayed, but the Egyptian and the Iraqi squatted in the shade of their kneeling camels. Caleb reached them.
Tommy sneered, 'What do you wish to be, a soldier or a peasant?'
When the Saudi's prayers were complete, they went on. The boy stayed close to him, eyes never off him, because the boy had heard the evidence that the life of the Outsider among them was a lie. Who was he? The boy's question had, almost, been answered. Caleb was able to hold the pace that Rashid set.
The traffic was fierce.
Lunatics hurled cars, vans and lorries around Bart's chauffeured saloon. His driver, a favourite with the expatriates at the compound, was slow to anger and seldom treated the roads as if they were stock-car circuits, manoeuvred among the hazards with caution, was a byword for calm, and therefore was in demand. They had just left the supermarket, on the northern edge of central Riyadh, where Bart had filled a trolley with meals-for-one. It was always a risk for an expatriate to drive himself: a foreigner was inevitably considered to be in the wrong at an accident scene. A European foreigner could be milked for rich pickings if a Saudi was injured or his car dented: no access to a lawyer, and no help from the embassy. He sat in the back of the Chevrolet, believed the company's sales pitch on the strength of the vehicle, and was relaxed.
He was going shopping. The supermarket had merely been his first call, and his last call would be the English-language bookstore, but next in line was the Pakistani-staffed men's clothes emporium.
There, at least, he would be treated with courtesy, made to feel valued – and so, at their prices, he damn well ought to be. Little luxuries had come late in life to Samuel Bartholomew: none at home as a child, none at school where pocket-money allowances were grudgingly paid by his father, none as a student in London. He was looking for a couple of ties, silk, and a couple of shirts, best Egyptian cotton.
Bart's student years and the pre-qualification studies had been an endless miserly existence. Nine years in all, and always his wallet had been light. Through pre-clinical and clinical, through his pre-registration year with six months as a hospital house physician and six more months as house surgeon, and during the final three working as junior scrote at a general practitioner's surgery in east London and back again into a south London hospital, he had suffered un-relenting penury. The legacy of it was that today's purchase of shirts and ties had importance. Being able to shop when the mood took him was, even now, a small sign of personal achievement.
The traffic wove and schemed around them. The blast of horns and the roar of speeding engines was filtered in the air-conditioned interior.
Ahead, over the driver's shoulder, he saw a Land Rover Discovery pull up to the kerb. A blonde woman, quite young and European, stepped out and kids spilled from the back.
He could see the nape of a young man's neck tilted back against the driver's headrest. An Arab, holding a plastic bag, paused by the near side door, hesitated on the pavement.
His own driver was slowing: the traffic-lights in front were against them. Around his car he heard the scream of brakes. God, worse than castration for these people would be the loss of their vehicle's horn.
The Arab crouched, was hidden by the Discovery, and when he stood again he no longer held the plastic bag.
The lights changed, and suddenly the Arab was running.
The driver saw nothing, concentrated on the surge of the traffic towards the junction. The plastic bag was half under the rear door of the Discovery. There was a waft of cigarette smoke through the front window on which a tanned elbow rested.
Bart knew. Every three months, in batches, expatriates were summoned to the embassy for sessions with the security officer, and Eddie Wroughton would usually slope in, unannounced and without introductions, and stand at the back as the security officer briefed the audience of bankers, accountants, surveyors and defence-equipment engineers on precautions that should be taken, where the no-go areas were and the dangers. During the war, when Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV had pumped out, twenty-four/seven, images of destruction and mutilation in Iraq, expatriates had been advised to stay at home, keep off the streets and boycott work. Now the families were back, but 'Care should at all times be exercised', the security officer had said, at the last briefing Bart had attended. Usual routes should be varied and vehicles should not be left on the street; it was sensible to check under a car each morning. Bart understood what he had seen. He sat rigidly upright in the back of the car.
They passed the Discovery.
He said nothing. He saw the young man lounging, relaxed, in the driver's seat, waiting while the wife and kids browsed in a jeweller's shop. Through the plate-glass front of the shop, he saw a flash of the young mother's hair and the kids beside her. His own driver accelerated. Then they passed the Arab, sprinting, and his thobe billowed against his legs as he ran. His face was close to Bart. He seemed to be reciting, his lips moved as if in prayer, his eyes were behind spectacles, his cheeks were clean and his moustache trimmed
– he was like any other of the young men who paraded the pavements and hospital corridors, and sat behind ministry desks. His driver was picking up speed. The Arab was lost from Bart's view. He had swivelled in the back seat, inside the constraint of the belt, and looked back at the Discovery, could just see the young man's face: first posting abroad, making the sort of money he could not hope to match back home, living in a villa with servants and a pool for the kids, and… The Discovery was a hundred yards behind them. They went through the junction.
He could have turned his head away, looked instead over his own driver's shoulder, but did not.
He saw the flash, its blinding light.
He saw a door come off and cannon across the pavement into the glass of the jeweller's window. Then a bonnet. The Discovery seemed to be lifted up, and when it came down the duststorm gathered round it. There was the thunder. His driver braked. Every vehicle around them braked. They were spewed across the road, jamming it.
Bart imagined… His own driver swung his body and lifted the medical bag – black leather and embossed with the initials S.A.L.B. – off the front seat and was passing it into the back… Bart imagined the blood spurting from severed arteries, legs amputated because they always were in a vehicle explosion, a head crushed against a shattered windscreen. Hardly turning from what he watched, Bart pushed away the medical bag. He imagined the young woman frozen in the jeweller's shop, cut by glass, and the kids clinging to her legs. He imagined the quiet groans of the young man in the Discovery, as the pallor settled on his face, because death from vehicle explosions always came later, in Accident and Emergency. He knew it because he had seen it when his life was a greater lie.
He faced his driver, who still clung to the medical bag, which held the morphine and syringes that killed pain when death was inevitable. What he should have done, what he had practised and become expert at before moving to the Kingdom, was debridement.
If there had been the smallest chance of saving life, there in the road while the patient groaned in shock and pain, he could have cut out the wounds and lifted clear with forceps – they were in his bag – the worst of the blast's debris: plastic from the dashboard, cloth material from the seating, clothing, old techniques developed by Napoleonic surgeons and still valid.
'Drive on/ Bart said.
Amazement and confusion wreathed the driver's face. Bart was a qualified medical doctor, had passed the exams and been inducted as a member of the Royal College of General Practitioners. He had sworn the oath named after the father of medicine, Hippocrates, to follow the ethics and duties required of him. He was, he knew it, dirt
… Did he care? So much of his life was betrayal. He did not care.
'Don't get involved, don't get caught up' was the mantra of expatriates in the Kingdom. 'Don't put your nose in because no one'll thank you and you'll get it bitten off instead'… Fuck the shirts, screw the ethics, fuck the ties and screw the duties… The oath had been sworn too long ago. He hated himself, and disgust squirmed in him.
'Where to, Doctor?' the driver asked.
'Back to the villa, I think. Thank you.'
When the traffic moved, when the sirens were in the road, they drove away.
Bart had justification to hate himself.
Al Maz'an village, near Jenin, Occupied West Bank.
The patient had acute diarrhoea.
He had been called by the patient's father. It was now four months since he had been embedded in the Palestinian community, and trust for him was growing.
Bart was escorted into the bedroom. In lozv light other members of the family ringed the walls, but only the mother was beside the bed where the girl lay. Four months before, the smell would have made Bart retch; he was used to it now. The mother held her daughter's hand and spoke soft, comforting words to her.
What astonished Bart was that the whole of the village was not laid out prostrate with acute diarrhoea. That part of the village was a shanty town of homes thrown together with corrugated iron, canvas and packing-case boards. No sanitation or running water. When he had left his car he had seen that this corner of the village used an open sewer.
The girl was pale and weak from dehydration. He had learned already that hospitalization was not an option for the shanty's community. At home – at what he still thought of as home – there would have been an express ambulance ride to the Royal Devon and Exeter. He was not at home, and l ikely never would be. Clean drinking water, care and love were the best that the girl could hope for. He had the water, and the parents would give the care and love. From the father's description of his daughter's symptoms, Bart had known what to expect, and had brought with him four tzvo-litre bottles of Evian water, and he told the mother how much should be given by spoon to the girl and how often; he made a point of urging her to wash the spoon in boiled water. There was a picture of Arafat on a wall and, near to it, another of a young man with doe dead eyes and a red cloth band tight round his forehead. Bart never talked politics in the village, never talked of the struggle of Arafat's people, never passed comment on the martyrdom of the suicide bombers. He did not have to. The whole village, the shanty area and the homes round the central square, knew of his bitter denunciation of the military at the roadblock outside the village. He was the worm in the apple's core. The door at the back of the room was open. Beyond it was a cooking lean-to with a table and bowls for washing, and a stove threw off the scent of damp, burning wood. It was not warm enough for rain, not cold enough for snow; the weather was driving wet sleet. What blankets they had were piled on the girl's bed, and he thought the other children and the parents would sleep cold that night, if they slept. The girl was a waif, reduced by the severity of the diarrhoea, but he smiled warmly and predicted she would be fine. At the back of the cooking area there was another door and from it came the draught.
The main door, behind Bart, which opened on to the mud alleyway where the open sewer ran, creaked open and the wind was carried inside. He saw the mother look up and flinch. Bart did not react. It was what they had told him: he should react to nothing, however minor and however major: to react was to betray himself, betrayal was death. He was saying when he would next visit, at what time the next evening. He heard the boots. The mother had flinched when the first man had entered, but her face lit with brief relief, traced with concern, at the sight of the second or the third. Bart saw a smile glimmer on the face of the sick child. Three young men crossed the room, and the last momentarily hugged the father and grinned at the girl; the third would have been the son, the brother. The face of the third young man was on the edge of Bart's vision: a good face, a strong face, a fighter's face. Bart talked about the next visit, and the need for quiet for the girl, as if that were possible in the shanty where the families were crushed together – refugees from the destruction of inner Jenin when the tanks had come in seven months before – and he had the mother's hand in his, as reassurance for her. The three young men went through the cooking area and outside into a small yard with a shed of nailed-together plywood and planks.
They disappeared inside it. He recognized the face of the son, the brother. The last time he had seen it had been in a photograph album, front on and profile, monochrome, with a serial number written underneath it.
The mother clung to his hand. Did she believe him? Could the decline of her daughter be arrested?
He smiled back his best smile. 'Trust me.'
He left them.
Do nothing that creates suspicion, they had told him. 'If you make suspicion, Bart, you will be watched. If you make the smallest mistake when you are watched, you condemn yourself. A condemned man is a dead man,' they had told him. He had lingered at the outer door with the father, had held his arm tightly and had remembered the features of the face of the father's son. He had gone to another patient, who had the symptoms of hepatitis, an old woman, and to the home of a small child with post-traumatic stress syndrome, and then he had driven to the roadblock.
He shouted at the soldiers, Israelis the same age as the three young Palestinians, bawled at them as they ordered him out of his car. 'Oh, yes?
What are you looking for this time? The way you behave is criminal.'
He was quickly propelled into the hut – larger and warmer than the one in the yard of a home in the shanty part of the village. Joseph made him coffee.
When the coffee had warmed Bart, the album of photographs was retrieved from a safe. He had a good memory, excellent recall. Within five minutes, after eight pages, he had identified the young man. Joseph was expressionless, did not congratulate him and did not tell him what importance the young man was given. Did Joseph admire his agent, or did he consider him scum? Immaterial, really – neither the admiration nor the contempt of the Shin Beth officer would have freed Bart from the treadmill he walked on. Joseph took him to the door.
Back out in the street, Bart shouted, 'Just you wait, your time will come.
Justice will catch you. You are as much a criminal, in wilfully obstructing a doctor of medicine, as any of those Serbs at The Hague. I wonder, after what you do, how you can sleep at night – no decent man would sleep.'
He drove away through the chicane of concrete blocks, and the sullen eyes of soldiers tracked him.
*
Marty took First Lady up for the first time from Shaybah.
He could not see her as she sped along the runway: the windows of the Ground Control Station looked out over their tent camp.
The Predator, MQ-1, needed sixteen hundred metres of runway to get airborne. Lizzy-Jo called the variants of cross-wind, but they were inside what was manageable – hadn't been the day before.
The first flight since she'd been unloaded from her coffin and put back together would be an hour, not a lot more, but they'd get to the ceiling of altitude and go on maximum speed and loiter speed, and they'd run First Lady's cameras and infra-red systems, all the gear.
They'd check the satellite link to Langley and that the Agency floor in Riyadh had a real-time picture. The lift-off was fine. The forward camera showed the perimeter fence disappearing beneath them, and then there was the sand, only the sand. His place was in the Ground Control Station with the joystick in his hands and the screens in front of him, but where he'd like to have been was outside with his hand shading his eyes, watching her go. She was the most beautiful thing he knew. Back at Bagram, Marty had always wanted to know when the other Agency birds, or the USAF MQ-ls, were going up. Like a bird, such grace… Worst thing he'd known was a ride on a Black Hawk and seeing, below the helicopter, the wreckage of an Air Force Predator that had gone down with on-wing icing; a broken bird, shattered, scattered among rocks. His bird, First Lady, had a maximum operational radius of five hundred nautical miles and an operational endurance time of twenty-four hours, but for the first flight they'd do little more than an hour with close to seventy-five nautical miles covered.
Lizzy-Jo talked first to Langley. Yes, they read her well. Yes, the pictures were good. She switched to Riyadh.
They'd taken off away from the control tower, and away from the cluster of office buildings and accommodation blocks. The control tower had had to be informed of their presence and of all their flight movements: it had a vaguely worded sheet of paper from the Prince Sultan base up at Al Kharj: test-flying, evaluation of performance in extreme heat conditions – the bare minimum.
The zooms on the belly camera showed wide landscapes, then blurred till they refocused on the individual rims of dunes. Marty thought the place had beauty, but the pilot's talk still hurt him. The guy who'd parachuted down from the Navy's Hornet had done what was right, stayed by the wreckage and died of thirst and heat stroke. He reflected that beauty did not have to be kind: there could be dangerous beauty. She'd found a bush, a bush that was ten feet high and maybe six feet across, and he had First Lady at twelve thousand feet and climbing at a ground speed of seventy-three nautical miles per hour. Lizzy-Jo had a bush to show to Riyadh. On the screen, the bush was clear and all of its branches and most of what leaves it had.
'That's cute,' she said, into the bar microphone over her mouth.
'There you are, Mr Gonsalves – fantastic! Life is up and running in the Empty Quarter. Wow…'
The voice came back over Marty's headphones. 'Incredible, I've never seen that before. Extraordinary. You could recognize a man, one man. I am in awe…'
But the wind, at that altitude, caught First Lady and tossed her, like she was a child's model, and the bush was lost and the picture, for all the gyroscopic kit, rocked and wavered.
'Correction, I was in awe – is that the wind?'
Marty said, 'It was the wind, sir. Understand me, I'm not making excuses here, but this will not be an easy place to fly out of.'
'It's where we are, you are. Can't base in French Djibouti, too long a range. If it was at Prince Sultan, we're telling the world, a hostile one, where we are and what we're at… It's about security. You got to live with the wind. You got to learn to fly with the wind. Security is paramount. They have a saying here: "You want to send a message, then tell it – and swear her to secrecy – to your daughter-in-law." You don't talk to anyone outside your perimeter and, most certain, you do not permit anyone entry. You draw as little attention to yourselves as possible. It's like these people, who hate us, have their ears down on the railtracks. I tell you, believe it, security counts
… But you can fly there, no problem, right?'
Marty said, 'We can fly here.'
Lizzy-Jo muttered, 'I'm not about to promise how effective we'll be.'
Marty said, 'Don't worry. We'll get the show on the road.'
'I got a meeting – thanks, guys.'
Marty chipped, 'You didn't tell us when you were down here – if we get a target, what's the status?'
'You'll have Hellfire on the wings when you go operational. I'm running late for my meeting… If I'm right in what I'm predicting, and it's a courier route, then you track, but if you're at the end of your fuel load and can't stay and track, then a target is "shoot on sight". Adios, amigos.'
The static burst in Marty's headphones. He threw the switch and cut the link. He felt the excitement and looked at her. Lizzy-Jo winked a big brown eye at him. Shoot on sight.
They had all prayed, even Tommy.
Caleb thought it a mark of the brutality all around them that when they had reached the stop point of the day, with the light going down on the dunes, they had made a line and sunk to their knees. Then he and the boy had gone foraging, and left Rashid to build the night camp and hoist the tents.
It amazed him. On the whole of the day's march, he had seen no wood – nothing that lived and nothing that was even long dead. The pain had throbbed on the soles of his feet even as the sand had cooled and he had been self-absorbed by his discomfort and his pursuit of respect. Three times, where Caleb had only seen ochre sand the boy crouched and scrabbled with his hands like a burrowing rabbit and had triumphantly produced dried-out roots.
The roots were brought back, broken and lit. Rashid used the old ways – worked his hands under the smallest and narrowest of the stems, sliced a flint across the blade of his knife, again and again, until the spark made smoke and then flame. The fire darkened the desert beyond the small circle of its light and the outline of the tents.
Caleb watched. He had much to learn.
Where the fire flared, Rashid scooped a hole under the widening embers, not seeming to feel pain. He had a metal bowl filled with flour and he sprinkled salt on it, then sparingly poured water on to the flour and kneaded the mess to little shapes. When he'd worked them and was satisfied he put the shapes into the hole and pushed sand over them. Their eyes met.
Rashid, the guide, stared at Caleb's feet. Caleb tried to read him.
Was he impressed? Rashid had the face of a wolf. Under his headcloth, held loosely in place with rope, his forehead was lined and wrinkled, his narrow eyes savaged what they lighted on and his nose was as prominent as a hook. Thin lips were above and below yellowed, uneven teeth and around them a tangle of hairs made the moustache and beard. No comment was given. Rashid moved on, hid his feelings. There was no sign of respect.
When the sun had gone, before the moon was up and when the blackness cloaked them beyond the little fire's range, Ghaffur took the bread from the hole, shook off the sand and passed each of them two pieces. Rashid measured the water ration, poured a cupful. They ate the bread, drank from the cup and passed it back. Then they were given three dates. Caleb held them in his mouth and sucked until the stones had no more fruit on them.
He said quietly to the Egyptian, 'What are you doing here? Why are you with me? What is my importance?'
Hosni smiled and the shadows of the fire crackled across his face.
He blinked and Caleb saw the opaque gloss on his eyes.
'In the morning, perhaps…'
Inside the cool of the tent, the pain at last ebbed from Caleb's feet.
He knew so little. If the memories had crossed the chasm, he would have known more. He slept dreamlessly, his mind as dark as the night outside the tent.