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
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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.
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'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
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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
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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?'
The Unknown Soldier Page 39