He walked - sandalled feet scraping the ground but held up - a dozen paces, then was stopped in his tracks. He felt the weight of the hands pressing him down —not so that he should lie prostrate but so that he should kneel. His weight pressed down on the skin of his knees, the voices were stilled and he heard the silence.
The dream slipped back in time, but Bart did not wake.
Departures at the airport of Riyadh. He stood in the queue.
Around him there were families, adults grumbling and complaining, children sulking and whining. He edged towards the desk and used his toe to push forward his bag. The flight non-stop home was fully booked, and Bart queued for the KLM aircraft to Amsterdam. He thought only of escape, and the slow progress of the line towards the desk fuelled his fear and impatience. A woman behind him, bowed down by a lifestyle of bags, tried to tell him how her servants had wept before she'd left for the airport, but he ignored her. The desk came imperceptibly closer, and beyond the desk was the departure gate, then the lounge, the walkway, the aircraft cabin's door. He was sweating, could not hide the mounting fear . . . It was almost a relief.
Men came behind him. Nasally, in accented English, he was asked his name, and hands lifted up his bag, other hands were at his arms.
He was out of the queue. He was gone. The escape had failed.
The dream was without mercy.
He cringed. There was the slither of feet on the concrete of the corridor floor beyond the steel-faced door. Low sun threw from the barred window dark shadows the length of the cell. They always came for him in the early evening. When the sun went down, the beatings began. They were late for him: already he could hear screams that pierced his head. He had seen a man, two days before, through an open door as he was led to his own interrogation, suspended from a pole by his wrists and ankles - like a pig on a spit
- and had heard the man shriek as he was hustled further down the corridor. The door opened. Bart was taken down the corridor, but not to an interrogation room. A brightly lit room with easy chairs and a polished desk, and Eddie bloody Wroughton: 'You confessed, nothing we can do, you told them everything. You went down into the desert. You made your own bed, Bart, and now there's nothing we can do to stop you lying on it. They'll try you, closed court, condemn you, and then they'll execute you. You're beyond our help.
When it comes to the end, try to put up a good show, try to walk tall, try to have a bit of dignity . . . It'll be quick. What I don't understand, Bart, is why you were so incredibly stupid.' Taken back to his cell, and listening to the screams and shrieks of others.
' The dream was a circle that was routed from the square to the airport concourse, to the cell block, and back to the square.
.
He knelt in the silence. He imagined that a thousand throats gasped in anticipation. He smelt the fresh sawdust. He seemed to see the machine that shredded wood and made the sawdust that spilled from the machine into a sack's mouth. He could not see the sack but the scent of the sawdust was in his nose. He hunched. The sun and a gentle breeze were on the skin at the back of his neck. He tried to make the space, the skin between the back of his head and the top of his shoulders, so small that the executioner would find no place that his sword could strike. He buried his neck in his shoulders. He had not slept in the night. The dawn had come after an endless wait.
Before he had been walked to the black van, he had been stripped of his prison uniform and dressed in a robe that was stiff from many washings and, in spite of them, was stained. The back of his head nestled against the top of his shoulders and he made no target for the executioner. He felt the pinprick at the base of his spine, where it merged with his buttocks. The prick was sharp pain, the executioner's trick with the sword point. Bart could not help himself.
He jerked forward. His neck extended.
The dream ended.
He was not on the seats of the Mitsubishi but on the floor, his face squashed against the accelerator and brake pedals.
Above him, the chrome lit by the moon, the keys were in the ignition.
Bart could have pushed himself up, could have sat in his seat, wiped the sweat off his face and from his eyes, could - in one movement -
have turned the ignition key and driven away into the sand in the hope of finding the track, might have been back in Riyadh by the late afternoon. Possibly, he would have lifted a telephone, have said: 'Mr Wroughton, it's Bart here, I've something really rather extraordinary to tell you. When and where can we meet?' Should have saved himself.
'Fuck you,' Bart murmured. 'Fuck you all. I hope he, whoever he is and whatever he does, hurts you.'
Bart looked at his watch. Three more hours of night before the next injection.
He had purged the dream. He slept.
It was a risk, but necessary.
First Caleb slotted the battery coolant unit into the grip stock, then
.
he depressed the impulse-generator switch - as the manual told him to. He was in darkness, could not see, could only feel and hear. The manual said - he had read it and memorized it - that 6000 PSI pressurized argon gas coolant . . . He did not have to remember a scientist's jargon, but had to listen and watch. The whine grew, but the red light winked at him. The manual said that a red light's sporadic winking indicated low battery power. When it was exhausted the red light would be continuous. The manual recom-mended that the battery coolant unit be recharged or replaced when the red light winked - only in circumstances of exceptional combat conditions should an attempt be made to fire a Stinger at a hostile target when the red light was winking. He killed the switch, the whine faded and the red light died. Caleb might have used the last of the battery's power when he made the test: the final chance of firing might have gone.
He fell back, the launcher resting on his body.
It all depended on the boy, on the freshness and youth of Ghaffur's ears. Without his hearing - if the Predator's eye was above him - he would not succeed in the last leg of his journey back to his family.
He had had to know that the missile would fire, would eject from the launch tube, would seek out a target.
Caleb lay on his spine. The exertion of lifting the Stinger's tube had brought back the throbbing pain to his leg.
He rested, was relaxed. What had disturbed him was not what he would do in the morning after the light came when he would stand and hobble to the guide, Rashid, and take his rifle: what had churned in his mind was that the battery powering the Stinger had lost its life.
They had Carnival Girl up over the track that ran north to south. On the map boxes, she would fly from Al Ubayiah at the northern point and down above Bir Faysal and At Turayqa to Qalamat Khawr al luhaysh in the south.
Because they tracked a lorry they were both awake. Marty brought Carnival Girl down to the low limits of loiter speed and they kept pace with the lorry and its trailer. The infra-red real-time picture had the lorry as a clean dark shape on the screen. They might have been ready to doze, might have needed more caffeine to keep them upright, but the lorry diverted them from drooping. It wasn't the first
.
lorry on the track, but all of the others had been going south to north, which was pretty much a straight line running through the centre of the map boxes. What was a lorry with a trailer carrying?
Marty said, 'It's refrigerated and it's got a load of iced root beer.'
'I wish.'
'Or it's got Big Macs, and ketchup and chillies and fries.'
'Dumb-ass.'
Marty said, 'My last go, it's got fans and air-conditioning units.'
'I tell you what it's got,' Lizzy-Jo chuckled, 'it's got sand. There's not enough sand here so they're hauling it down from the north -
what you think?'
In the dulled light inside the Ground Control - easier to see the screens - George's entry was not noticed. They were both laughing: Lizzy-Jo thought they needed laughter as a distraction to stay awake, keep working.
George said, 'W
hat you got is a visitor.'
He told them. The laughter went cold. She snapped upright, listened to all of it, then she called up Langley. Oscar Golf was on the headsets. George hadn't the authority to challenge a visitor. Marty was flying Carnival Girl. Lizzy-Jo said she'd do it, the challenge, and Oscar Golf would take over the sensor operator's controls via the satellite link. Effortless transition. Oscar Golf told her to take the guy on the perimeter-gate bar with her.
'Lizzy-Jo, go careful. Don't start a war, and don't give a yard.'
'Hearing you, Oscar Golf. Out.'
She took a swig from the water bottle, did up a couple of the lower buttons of her blouse and followed George down the steps, into the night. He'd been working on First Lady. The wings were off, and the engine was being stripped, the camera units already taken out.
By the time it was daylight, First Lady would be ready for her coffin.
The transport plane was due in at ten hundred and was scheduled for lift-off at twelve ten hours, and for Carnival Girl to be stashed and loaded in time for lift-off, then her sister craft had to be packed and crated in the coffin. George's people swarmed round First Lady.
George left her when they reached the armourer, who had a stubby rifle hanging across his spine from a strap, but his hand was hooked back and had hold of it.
The armourer pointed up past the gate in the razor wire, then handed Lizzy-Jo his night-sights. The binoculars were heavy in her hand, and she took a moment to get the focus right. A Mercedes was parked two hundred yards up from the gate bar, with a chair by the front passenger door. On it sat an Arab. He was middle-aged, had an austere, thin face and trimmed moustache, wore a dark outer robe, an under-robe of white brilliant enough to flood her glasses, and a headcloth held in place with woven rope. Around his neck, hanging from straps, were his own binoculars. Behind his chair the Mercedes'
rear doors were open and three men stood close to the body of it. She gave the night-sight glasses back to the armourer.
'You reckon they've got hardware?'
'In the back - yes, Miss. An arm's reach away.'
'What you got?'
'An M4A1. We call it a close-quarters battle weapon, Miss. It uses ball ammunition and it has an attached M203 grenade launcher. And I g o t - '
'Jesus, is this going to be fucking Dodge City?'
'It's their call, Miss, what it gets to be.'
'Where are you going to stand?'
'I'll be, Miss, right behind you.'
'Don't mind me saying it, but I'd prefer you a yard to the right or lo the left. Wouldn't want to be in the way of a close-quarters battle weapon,' Lizzy-Jo said, dry.
The armourer lifted the bar for her. She walked forward. Lizzy-Jo was a sensor operator, not a diplomat, a negotiator or a soldier. She felt the cool of the night air, a little wafting wind, on her bared thighs and shins, on her arms and face. The man stood as she approached and the guys with him seemed to inch closer to the open doors. She heard, against the tread of her footsteps, very soft, the click of oiled metal behind her and knew the armourer's weapon was armed. The man moved a little aside from his chair and motioned that she should sit.
'No, thank you, sir.'
'Would you like water?'
'Sir, no, thank you. What I would like to know is why, at seventeen minutes past three in the morning, you have binoculars on us.'
'You should button your blouse. In the night cold it is possible to contract influenza or a headeold if one is insufficiently covered. I am a prince of the Kingdom, I am the deputy governor of this province.
Each time I am in Shaybah, since you came, I watch you, but before from a distance. I have a question for you too: why are you flying at seventeen minutes past three in the morning?'
She said, parrot-like, 'We're doing mapping and evaluation of flying performance over desert lands, as we stated when permission was granted us.'
She heard the mockery in his voice. 'With a military aircraft?'
Lizzy-Jo might have been a corporate recorded message. 'The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator has dual purpose military or civilian use.'
'For mapping and for evaluation of performance do you need to carry, without the Kingdom's authorization, air-to-ground missiles?'
In the darkness he would not have seen her rock. 'I think you must have mistaken the additional fuel tanks carried under the wings for missiles.'
'When you came the fuselages of your two aircraft were without markings. Yet the one being dismantled now carries a skull-and-crossbones - once the symbol of a pirate, now a warning of death or danger - on the forward fuselage. I ask, why would such a symbol be on an aircraft preparing maps and evaluations?'
'Sir, I can only refer you to our embassy in Riyadh.'
'Of course.'
'And I am sure that, inside office hours, any query you have will be answered. Actually, sir, we will be gone in less than nine hours.'
'With your mapping finished, your performance evaluation completed?'
'No, sir,' Lizzy-Jo flared - should not have done, but did. 'Not completed - because some jerk shoved his nose in, and screwed things for us.'
He stared at her. She heard the hiss of his breath between his lips.
In the darkness, his body seemed to shake.
The words were chill. 'Maybe you are from the Air Force, maybe from Defense Intelligence, maybe from the Central Intelligence -
maybe you were never taught to dress with correctness and decency, were never drilled in the virtues of truthfulness and the values of humility . .. but you are American, and how could it be different?
You lie to us because you do not trust us. You have no humility because you believe in your superiority over us. When you have been expelled, in less than nine hours, take this message back. We fight terrorism. Al Qaeda is our enemy. We are not the wet-nurse to the fanaticism of bin Laden. Together, and with trust, you would have been able to fulfil your mission. Your arrogance destroys that possibility. It is why you are hated and why you are despised, and why your money cannot buy affection or respect. Take that message home with you.'
She bit her lip. Anyone who knew Lizzy-Jo - knew her in New York or at Bagram base - would not have believed that she could resist a response. She turned on her heel. She walked back to the armourer and kept going. She went past George and his team, who were struggling to crate the engine of First Lady, and past her tent, which was now folded with her possessions stacked, and past Marty's tent - and past the boxes of the Hellfires that would not now be needed. Alone untouched, because Carnival Girl still flew, were the Ground Control and the trailer attached to it that carried the satellite dish. She climbed the steps.
Flopped beside Marty, she called Oscar Golf. 'Lizzy-Jo here. It was just some local rubbernecker, it was nothing. I'm taking over, but thanks for helping out.'
Marty said, smiling, 'I got bored watching that lorry. Wasn't sand it was carrying. I reckon it was pretzels.'
She snapped, 'Just watch your fucking screen - watch it till we finish.'
It was as if he was building a wall of information. Eddie Wroughton's way, when trying to make sense of intelligence, was always to pretend that he was building a wall of coloured bricks. He sat cross-legged on the floor, had pushed aside the rug to give himself a firm surface and spread out sheets of paper. He had used his highlighter pens to ring each of the sheets - red and green, white and blue, and yellow.
He had started to build the wall.
In the red brick was the telephone number that had called Bartholomew's home. The number's code identified it as coming from the extreme south-east of the Kingdom, and his assistant's unpraised work had found that it was listed in the name of Bethany
.
. Jenkins. He remembered her from a party - tall, a picture of healthy endeavour, well muscled, tanned - and from a casual meeting at the embassy. Something about meteorites and something about the oil-extraction plant at Shaybah. She had called Bartholomew late in the evening, and he'd gone, disappeared
.
He had run the fine dark sand granules across the indented sheet that he had taken from Bartholomew's notepad beside the phone.
Pretty basic, what they taught on the recruits' induction courses, about as sophisticated as invisible ink pens - and they still lectured on the use of them. Scribbled words came to life after the granules were tipped from the indent marks. 'Military action . . . missile attack
. .. head wound and a leg wound . .. Highway 513. Route 10. Harad, south. To Bir Faysal (petrol station).' That was the green brick.
The white brick was Shaybah, from where Gonsalves' people flew Predator unmanned aerial vehicles that were armed with twin pods for Hellfire missiles.
The blue brick built the wall higher. Wroughton reached behind him for the photographs taken by the Predator's real-time camera.
With a magnifying-glass - could have done it on the computer with the zoom, but preferred old ways and trusted practices - he studied those who were identified as dead, and the one who was not accounted for. A young man, head up and erect, and the magnifying-glass - at the blurred edge of its power - seemed to show a strong chin. He laid the photographs on the blue sheet.
Two and two did not make five. The worst sin of an intelligence officer was to leap to untested conclusions. Conclusions must always have foundations, his father used to say, as any wall must. What he knew . . . Bethany Jenkins had rung Samuel Bartholomew from Shaybah. At Shaybah there was an Agency search-and-destroy operation, which had searched and destroyed, but there was a target still not accounted for. Bartholomew had driven away in the night, with fuel and medical supplies, after being told of a patient injured in 'military action'. The stupidity of the woman - Jenkins -
The Unknown Soldier Page 41