Casper did not know the enemy. It was the spook’s province. He was uncertain who they were searching for. Names were given them at weekly seminars but they held little importance for him. Flying was his skill and passion; it had been increasingly challenging in the wind that came off the sands of the deserts stretching into Saudi territory. Others had, but Casper had not had clearance to position the Predator over a home, a compound, or a vehicle, so that a Hellfire could be let go. He had practised it in training and had seen the real thing on video, but not done it himself.
It was likely the bird would stay up, if the weather did not further deteriorate, another hour, and then it would be flown back to the King Khalid base, in the north and over the Saudi border. He and Xavier punched fists without enthusiasm, a gesture that had become habit, and went their own ways. He had a shopping list in his overall pocket of items that Louella had asked him to buy on the way home. He supposed he had flown a sort of combat mission, and he was a willing cog in the War on Terror, but there would be little to tell his family when they ate their meal together of how it had been in Yemen where it was now night. Louella had said the side door of the garage was sticking and he might have a look at that. He left the building and took a shuttle to the car park.
He would be back on duty in nine hours. It was a fierce schedule, relentless, and it would have been hard to say that the war was going well – but that was not Casper’s problem. The Hellfire weapon cost $110,000 per shot, and carried eighteen pounds of explosives, fragmentation mode, but he was away from his stick and the panel of dials and his cubicle now, and could focus on the shopping list, mostly salad things.
He wore that night a seemingly ludicrous blazer. It made a statement, Jericho hoped. The blazer’s colours were red, black and gold, in vertical stripes, and he’d tell anyone who showed an interest that it represented the I Zingari amateur cricket club – also known as the Gypsies, a translation from the Italian. The club had been founded 160 or so years before, by old boys of Harrow School. The blazer attracted attention and led to judgements about the character of its owner. He knew people would be saying that this man, well-known in the expatriate community of Muscat, who called himself pompously by the single name of Jericho, was a vainglorious idiot, which suited him very well. His mobile rang.
He was in the darkened bar of one of the city’s premier hotels, in earnest conversation with the cabin crew of an Emirates flight, and the subject under discussion was the quality of various curry houses and the menus offered. It was good for Jericho to be with employees of certain airlines. Others in the bar would have classified him as a useless fool who seemed not to realise his voice boomed over the tables and his laughter was shrill. His stomach was held in place by the straining buttons of a shirt that clashed with the blazer. His tie, also pointed out to the girls and their purser, was from a sporting charity, the Lords Taverners; it was clumsily tied and showed his top shirt button. His slacks were crumpled, held up on a fifty-inch waist by braces, also in the charity’s red, blue and green, and yellow socks were inside a pair of old leather sandals. From time to time Jericho dragged a large polka-dot handkerchief from a pocket, mopped his forehead and complained that the air-conditioning system was turned too low.
In a moment of quiet, one of the stewardesses slipped a tiny plastic container into the gaudy side pocket of Jericho’s blazer. He acknowledged the gift. There was usually a moment, when an aircraft was near to the end of its flight and was banking, and the passengers were in their seats and their belts fastened, when a cabin-crew member who had been well briefed could be at the rear door of the plane and would have – through a porthole window – a fair view of the harbour at Bandar Abbas, and in particular the northern part of the docks where the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps moored their fast patrol craft. In the plastic box was a camera’s memory card. It was important in his work to know what forces the IRGC had deployed in waters close to the Strait of Hormuz, through which the great tankers from the Gulf and Kuwait and Iraq carried the crude to international markets. The satellite pictures were good, but customers always appreciated an image taken from a thousand feet, as the wheels came down, rather than from a hundred miles away. Jericho was known, in a small and most select circle, for being able to keep customers yearning for more. He knew crews who did the flights from Dubai into Bandar Abbas, and when they did another shift down to Muscat, he would take delivery of their photography – and he knew many of the men who took the cargo dhows into the Gulf of Oman and traded with Iran, and he knew businessmen who provided cash credit for the black-market purchases of the Iranian ruling elite – and all achieved under a cover of ‘import and export, you know, a bit of this and bit of that’.
He answered his phone, heard a faraway voice, faint and distorted, and a message was given, then repeated. Jericho switched off the phone. Easy to memorise what he had been told. Belcher was here. At Golf X-Ray Foxtrot at ten a.m. tomorrow. H. And that was substance. Forget the Guard Corps and their missile-mounted launches and the corruption of the elite in Tehran, real business was when he spun on a heel and faced west and not east, and looked to Yemen. H was Henry and she was a jewel in his collection. Golf X-Ray Foxtrot was GXF and the call-sign of the airfield at Sayun. He knew the hookers who serviced prominent Saudi businessmen, and the barmen who poured their drinks or took the champagne to their rooms, which was useful, but Henry was the prize that had only one superior. Better than Henry was Belcher.
Jericho wore padding under his shirt and against his stomach: there was no actual problem with the air-conditioning, but the stuff that he wore to increase his apparent obesity caused him to sweat profusely. Image was everything, and Jericho needed to seem fat and stupid; he succeeded and heard sneering laughter from other tables. His real name? Few were privy to it. Jericho, aged fifty-three, was regarded by veterans in the profession as a living legend in the officer ranks of VBX. He had been accepted into the Secret Intelligence Service in 1986 and all his contemporaries were gone: sacked, had looked elsewhere for better paid employment, or had buckled under the strain of the work. He had done Cold War before Mid-East, but reckoned that Yemen provided greater challenges than anything else he had worked at.
Henry would be driving, under cover of night, across both metalled roads and unmade tracks, some two hundred miles, and she’d have cooked up an excuse for the journey and would take a driver and a minimal escort and it would be country where no law existed unless handed down by the commanders of Al-Qaeda Arabian Peninsula, and she must do it because she carried a message from a diamond, the most precious of any of the men he handled.
He pushed himself up, played at making a great effort to shift the roll of his belly, and waddled towards the toilets. He would seem partially inebriated, except that the bar staff in the establishment never put gin with his tonic, kept cold tea to play the part of the alcohol in a brandy-sour. He called the airfield office. Jericho was the pilot’s best customer – always available. It would be a three-hour flight to the Yemeni strip in a Cessna 421, the model called Golden Eagle, and the cost of the trip was immaterial because the value of Belcher in the field was too great for any parsimonious accountant to be allowed within spitting distance of the budget. He texted – they would leave at 06.30 – and then he went back to the bar and the conversation was again puerile, raucous, and later he would call his driver and then phone his Woman Friday, Penelope. Any message from Belcher was too important to be entrusted to a courier or to be transmitted in the sort of equipment that Henry could be entrusted with. That he had Belcher was because of Corrie Rankin: it was not information to be shared freely in the corridors and canteens of Vauxhall Bridge Cross, but just about as amazing as anything he knew of in his time with the Dirty Raincoat Crowd. A prisoner facing a certain unpleasant future, but finding the time not only to soften up a jihadist oik from the wastelands of northeast England, but actually to recruit the little beggar and turn him from a potential cut-throat into that diamond – and an investment had
been made, big bucks – and all down to Corrie Rankin. God, they should shout that man’s name from the pulpit of St Peter’s Anglican Church in Kennington Lane, and have the choir sing Hallelujahs. It would have been two years and a few months since he had picked up the half-dead, half-delirious Corrie Rankin from the Turkish hospital and heard the bullet-points of the story. Top of the list was the recruitment of Belcher. Extraordinary.
Lizzie saw him to his door in Vauxhall Street.
Corrie could have invited her in for a coffee after a ‘difficult evening, handled well’. The terraced houses, in London brick, were around a century old, but not yet gentrified. Around them were big Housing Association blocks. It was said to be one of the poorest, per-capita income, areas of the capital – in official-speak that meant single mothers, ethnic minorities, debt and unemployment. He liked it. Lizzie was from up the river, Pimlico, and her mouth seemed to curl at the dim-lit street that the driver had turned into. She might have wanted the invite – could have looked for a touch of slap and a bit of tickle, or a late drink; might just have been another of the Service’s people who lived a lonely, unaccompanied life; or might have wanted the chance to run the rule over him, to see, up close, how he coped. He thanked her and turned away. When the key was in the door and he pushed it open, the car pulled away. He was alone again, as usual.
He had a part of the house, the top floor. The owner, who was behind with running repairs and damp prevention, was doing a stint in Ho Chi Minh, and had said that he was pleased to have a body inhabiting the place: that officer’s wife was teaching in an English-language crammer for ambitious Vietnamese, and their children were at school in Singapore. Without them, Corrie rattled around in the house. He went up the stairs. The lower part was full of their lives. Hockey sticks and cycles and winter coats in the hall, Hogarth prints on the walls; in the living room faded sofas and an old TV, and a long dining table where revolution could be plotted. In the bedrooms upstairs, where he kept the heating on at a minimum in the depth of winter, bookcases bulged and shelves were littered with family photographs. There were more prints on the walls; it was one of those chaotic family homes that categorise people. Up a last flight, and into Corrie Rankin’s territory. Not really a home for a hero – some had said that’s what he was.
George had, and the Deputy DG when he’d been wheeled in for a sherry at the end of Corrie’s first day back. George had gushed it, but the DDG had seemed embarrassed to give that accolade, as if the Service was loath to be associated with anything other than careful analysis. He had been away a few days more than six months, out of contact, and the word was that they had no proof – concrete or rumoured through that half-year – that he was still alive. He had come out, was a hero, and had signed up an agent in place, was a true hero, but he did not live in a home fit for one.
He was at the top of the stairs and the carpet was threadbare, and his feet had clattered in the darkness behind him, and his leg hurt; it had been uncomfortable in the car. It often hurt – there had been two operations after he’d come back. The first had failed and the second had been only marginally more successful. He had been taken to the first hospital and seen a young specialist who had known nothing of him, what his work was, who employed him, where he’d been. An examination of X-rays and a cursory barbed comment: ‘Left it a bit long haven’t you? You one of those people that gets a bang and thinks they can walk it off? Should have come, swallowed your ego, and had it seen to – oh, and a bit of sunburn. I suppose getting medical treatment would have interfered with a sunshine holiday. Anyway, let’s have a look.’ An answer: ‘Just get on with your fucking job.’ He did not need a stick now but the break point still ached when he sat or was confined and the skin, scraped off when he had dragged himself on his stomach, had never properly healed.
He had been in the top-floor rooms for a month before he had gone away, taken on an aid worker’s identity. When he had come back he had cleansed it. No pictures, no flowers, no photographs, and – of course – her clothes had already gone from chests and coat hooks and drawers. And what he’d had at her place had been left in a plastic bag; he’d long ago dumped that. A small safe bolted to the boards on the floor near to the bed held the only personal items that might have identified Corrie; no one came into the sitting room or the bedroom in that part of the house that he occupied. It was what he had said – when he had relived his experience, economically, to the audience that evening: I don’t do trust well . . . trust would be the casualty. It had seemed trite the moment he’d said it, he regretted it, but nobody came past his door and nothing of him was shared.
He poured himself a glass of water and might later make a sandwich, and then he’d take himself to bed. Not easily explainable but he could still feel, he thought, the chain on his wrists, and still believed passionately and privately that a paper clip was as good a piece of kit as any man could want for. A dull day was ahead of him, and a drive in the evening to his mother’s home.
From the window on the front, his sitting room, he could see the back of the building, VBX, its upper walls floodlit. Antennae and satellite dishes glittered on the roof. He could have said that evening of the moment when he’d fled, left the others behind, that he could justify it: ‘I reckoned it better to be shot in the sand than have to kneel and have my head jerked back and see the blade and have my throat exposed. Anyone telling me I was wrong?’ But he hadn’t said it. Nor had he justified the bludgeoning of a goatherd, a teenage boy. He was alone, felt good. He had no need to trust when alone.
Chapter 2
He had a five-or six-minute walk – depending on the state of the leg – from his home in Vauxhall Street to the entrance of his workplace. Often he was in by seven, but not that morning; he had slept poorly after his speech, tossing and turning over what he’d given them. His breakfast was toast stuffed down his throat and a fierce coffee to wash it away. He met an avalanche of kids heading for the technical college; he’d seen Clarice on the pavement, buxom, a cleaner in VBX, who lived in a Housing Association building. She’d have been finishing her stint and had given him a cheerful wave, even though it was strictly forbidden for staff, senior or at the bottom of the heap, to acknowledge each other outside the perimeters. He waved back – sod ’em. Clarice only had clearance for ‘corridors’ and never went into ‘work areas’.
He went up Tyers Terrace, past more apartment blocks, taking pleasure from the flash of colour in the pots on a ground-floor patio: geraniums. Often he’d have a conversation with the old boy who grew them. Corrie knew nothing about nurturing flowers, but it was his talent to be able to start a chat with anyone, about anything, and gain their friendship. He’d seen the old boy last Armistice Day, not wearing an unravelling wool pullover as he usually did, but a grey suit, and with his medals clanking on his chest, off to Whitehall. No heavy talk about what he’d fought for or what friends had died for, just a chat about rearing geraniums from seed.
On he went, into St James’s Gardens. The Security Service, across the river, had a small, manicured park where they could take coffee or sandwiches and smoke. The SIS’s open ground was, conversely, a wilderness, not patronised by colleagues. He neared the junction of roads and bridges and rail tracks. The staff at VBX were on a constantly speeding treadmill, a top-table berth never secure, not to be taken for granted.
He wore a suit and his raincoat was tucked over his arm, his rucksack was hitched on one shoulder. It contained a couple of magazines that reflected extreme views of left and right in UK politics, a length of French bread and a wrapped piece of cheese. He had forgotten the apple, and there was a plastic bottle he’d filled with tap water. Some were in Lycra and swerving forward on bicycles, and others had jogged to work, but most came from the mainline station or the Underground. There was a surge to be in place before nine, and armed and uniformed guards watched over Corrie Rankin and hundreds of others as IDs were flashed at sensors, bags carted through X-ray machines, and they scampered to get on with the day’s toil u
nder the corporate motto, Semper Occultus – Always Secret. A good slogan; it implied that ‘trust’ carried dangers and it appealed to him. It was his home. Pretty much the only one he had.
In through the big revolving doors, safe now behind high outer walls and spiked railings topped with razor wire. There was a defensive moat and reinforced walls and explosion-proof windows. A fortress, and the only place in the length and breadth of the country where he was secure, was comfortable. Across the central atrium area, and the worker ants spewed off in columns towards banks of lifts. Some went sideways and others up towards the clouds and the upper floors and many dived down and into a subterranean world where they would be, for the working day, well below the level of the bed of the Thames: it was where he used to see Maggie, before they lived together. She’d be heading off to Eastern Europe and he’d be on his way to the Middle East – they might linger over a coffee together. Then, when she had stayed over at his place, or taken the bus from where she had a bed-sit, they had walked in together and the guards on the gate had done fluttered eyebrows, always cheerier when a bit of a ‘relationship’ was in front of them, and there would be a little light touch of hands before splitting. There had not been many girls before, a rite of passage and ‘loss of innocence’ when a teenager, some at university, and flings at VBX but nothing serious. Maggie’s image had been with him when he’d flown to Turkey, and in the camp where the aid workers gathered and nervously swapped horror stories, and when the truck – low on the axles from the amount of food carried – had rolled across the frontier and into Syria, and during all the months he had been held – half a year, an eternity; and when his leg was busted, and when he had worked on the clean skin, twisting and contorting the bastard’s loyalties, and had invented Belcher. Had been the light in his mind when going out into the darkness and expecting all the time, each bloody moment, to hear the shout and then the cocking of the weapon. Had seen her when he brought the stone down on to a goatherd’s head, and she had been his justification. He had dreamed of her as the jet had flown fast and north. Had asked where she was when taken to the clinic, and when wheeled into surgery before drifting to sleep under anaesthetic.
Jericho's War Page 4