The Ghost went now to inspect a donkey.
His ears seemed to pick up a faint hum in the air, but there were no wasps or bees close by only sand and rock. A few miles away was a slight escarpment. Another village was nestled at the foot of the cliff, and it was from there that the donkey had been brought that morning. He was aware that the Emir himself had purchased the donkey, paid money for it. Ridiculous and unnecessary for a great and important man to busy himself with such trivial detail, and he doubted that the leader would have comprehended the physics and chemistry of what was required in the choice of the donkey. An animal with some fat on it.
He reached the lean-to where the beast was roped to a post, and paced up and down in the shade. The animal stank and brayed pitifully. Its water had been tipped over and had not been replaced. The Ghost had no knowledge of donkeys or goats or camels: he had been reared in towns and cities. His father, north across the Saudi border and in Riyadh, was a clerk in a ministry. His whole family had joined together to raise the money for a university education for a bright child, the first among them to have the brains, aptitude, for higher education. Much in his psychological make-up had been missed by the adults who had doted on him – he had been thirteen years old when the planes had been flown into the twin towers, and marvelled at the bravery of the martyrs. At eighteen years old he was at university, threading his way into a radicalised group who talked in whispers of the betrayal of the Kingdom by the royal family and who were disgusted by the American presence on Saudi territory and inside the country of their brothers, Iraq – and twenty years old when the group was identified and all were arrested, and every one of them tortured in the police holding cells, and the eldest of them executed by the sword. At twenty-three years old he had been freed and he had headed south to what he had learned was a place of refuge, had crossed the mountains and the desert, had come to Yemen, and had brought skills with him.
Great skills, skills in chemistry and physics and electronics, but he needed help in the areas, at this time vital to him, of medicine and of engineering. A surgeon had come in the night from Sana’a, from the Al Thawra hospital on the Musayk Road; it had links with the defence ministry and the surgeon had good cover. At the Ghost’s feet was a coolbox; the device was surrounded by what ice they could make in a generator-powered refrigerator. He had that, and had the beast, and had the surgeon, but he did not have the load on the lorry that was said to be making progress, but slowly, on the highway, first from Aden to Sana’a, and then from the capital into the Marib governorate. He must wait.
His vigil was not interrupted. The Ghost was held in awe by those that knew a little of him. He was quiet, did not invite company, was seldom if ever known to laugh, even to smile. They had looked for a donkey with spare flesh on it, hard to find in that corner of Yemen, and he was, himself, as thin as the donkey purchased for him. His hair was sparse and his beard straggly; it was tugged persistently while he thought, turning over the problems that confronted him and looking for answers. He had no possessions in the world except for one change of clothes and sandals. Because the lorry was late, three men had gone up the road a half-hour before to check if there were roadblocks on the Sana’a route. Always better to go and look for themselves than to use a phone to call up the men who watched the road.
He thought he had heard the drone, but it might just have been the murmur of the wind in his ears. He had been beaten in the holding cells and his hearing had suffered damage. He had never drunk so much as a drop of alcohol in his life, nor had ever smoked a cigarette, and he did not chew qat in the afternoons as most of the village men did. He had never been with a woman, or with a girl. It was possible that his life would end soon, as a prime target for the drone pilots, before he ever succumbed to such weaknesses. The Ghost had dedicated his life to his work.
He was becoming more annoyed. His schedule was being affected; he was supposed to move again that evening to a new safe-house, and there was going to be a meeting of all the men vital to his project for which he wanted to prepare. He lived by a rigorous timetable, now threatened because a lorry was late arriving. He lived also with the sound of the drones, imagined or real, and if he were identified, or if a traitor named him and his vehicle, he would be killed.
He could not think. The donkey’s braying hammered at him. The surgeon was in shade but was nervous and wanted to be gone. He dabbed his forehead and glanced ostentatiously at his watch, his leather bag clamped ready between his feet. Most precious to the Ghost was time in which he could think, without the clamour of duties, disciplines.
He had been told that a newspaper in Kuwait had published a picture of the outline of a man’s head. The caption under it referred to the Ghost, loose but hunted in Yemen, and the headline over the blank image had spoken of the ‘The Most Dangerous Man in the World’. It was a good title, but he had not smiled; he had just gone back to his work. The lorry had still not come, and the sun was at its peak, the donkey grew more frantic and he could not be certain whether he heard the hum of an engine above him. If they knew where he was, he was dead. He did not eat or drink, but waited.
One of them sat in the cab. His two companions were away from the vehicle. They were off the road; they had driven over stones and caked sand and down into a gully and could not be seen by the traffic on the Sana’a to Marib road. The man in the cab slept, but the other two had found an indentation where they could watch the road and see if the military patrolled it, while remaining hidden, except from above. They were a little more than two miles from the village where they had started out, and more than ten miles from the town of Marib. They waited, and heard and saw nothing that disturbed them, except that a mouse a dozen feet from them was stalked by a small snake, which was brief entertainment. The two men shared bread and looked for a lorry or a sign that there was a military alert up the road. The sun was already beyond its peak, and there was a soft, soothing sound in their ears.
They loitered. A ‘signature footprint’ would justify firing the missile. A triangle of communication lines now decided whether Xavier, sergeant in the United States Air Force, would attempt by Fire and Forget to take the lives of three men. The potential target was next to a metalled road in central Yemen. The Cuban extraction Latino-American was the systems man, and if the instruction came for the launch of a Hellfire it would be him who did the tit-press and fired it. He had much to worry about that morning because he and Maria were trying for a baby, had been for ever, and she had another appointment with the specialist who came a day a week to the Cannon base. Xavier had not slept well. Behind them was the intelligence analyst who discussed with Casper what angle they wanted for the verification, and who could vary the focus and zoom, and the analyst – it was the first day they’d had him, Bart, in their cubicle – was linked for target evaluation to Hurlburt Fields, which was three thousand miles from them, by the east coast.
He heard little grunts from Casper and realised he was finding it hard to keep a steady platform in the winds that took the lightweight Predator – as if it had been a hunting bird – and tossed and tipped it. The screen showed them that the gook in the cab had his legs out of the open door, and one of the other two was crouching to piss and his friend was scratching hard at his armpit. They both had assault rifles, but the one who scratched carried as a further decoration an RPG-7 launcher. It was not Xavier’s job to distinguish whether these were armed combatants, or merely tribal guys with the usual hardware that went with the locality. And not for him to consider whether the signature strike was justified. Nor was it for Xavier to decide whether the drone, and its Hellfire load, constituted an ‘acceptable level of violence’. The customer called the shots, was always right.
It had never happened before for Xavier, not with Casper or with any of the other pilots. The analyst was listening intently to what would have been a babble of information and instruction coming out of the Florida base, Hurlburt. That was where the decision was taken. He knew what he would be told next. Fire a
nd Forget meant that he would lock, push the button and – if the real business was similar to the test firings on the ranges in southern Arizona – he’d see a shaft of bright light going down. He loved the baby, his Predator, had a romance with it, like men for old cars, except he had never been within eight thousand miles of the craft. Its call sign was November Juliet Bravo 3, and the technicians – as a favour to him – had sent a photograph of it from the King Khalid base. NJB-3 was on the narrow, pinched fuselage, and the Hellfire was on the wing pod in the foreground. The picture was mounted and in a frame on the table in the hall of his married quarters. The excitement he felt rose: it had built since they had come on duty and seen the pick-up pull off. If Casper felt the same then he was better at disguising it, but his breathing came fast.
The analyst, Bart, said, ‘We have a “go”, guys. In your own time, lock and shoot.’
They all knew the statistics.
Through a network of villages ringing the town of Marib, there were men and women and children who heard the roar of the diving missile as it travelled at a thousand miles an hour and homed. The warhead would strike the designated target by utilising a ‘semi-active laser homing millimeter wave radar seeker’, and in it would be eighteen pounds of shaped charge blast fragmentation. It would be one of 24,000 ordered by the US Department of Defense, paid for at a rate of $110,000 for each weapon fired. The villagers knew all there was to know about these missiles, as did the Al-Qaeda Arabian Peninsula militants. The noise would soon die. Everyone then, as silence pushed aside the din of the explosion, would look for the tell-tale sign of where the hit had been. It came slowly at first, a long coiled wisp of smoke which then darkened and thickened, became acrid and dark and finally billowed upwards.
The Ghost hugged the shade under the lean-to roof as the donkey lashed out with its hind hooves and strained on its tether. He reflected that it was the way his own life would be ended.
The Emir, drinking water in his safe-house, heard it explode but did not get up or look out of the door. If it had been him who’d been hit, then the news would very soon be flashed up by the international media.
The soldiers in a tent camp alongside an archaeological site listened and gazed at the smoke pall over the horizon. Many thanked their God that it was far away from where Miss Henry would be travelling.
All lived under the drones. Men cursed them, children shrank from the sound of explosions, and women wept, and in a while the smoke died.
He had been asleep. When he slept he was Belcher or Tobias Darke. He started awake. He recognised that the moments of maximum danger to him – to any man living on a diet of deceit – were when he slept. He could have called out in English and given code names or contact identities or rendezvous places. When he woke, he could not for several seconds place where or who he was, why he was there, what he was achieving, and when would he be pulled out and given back his freedom.
He had been, in dreams, at his home, dead to the world around him, as he lay on a straw-filled mattress and flies crawled across his face. For a full minute after he had woken there was confusion, men running and jabbering voices. It calmed, but slowly. He had learned in both Syria and Yemen that it was not his place to ask questions. He waited to be told. He did not know who had been hit, only that if men had been killed then their fate was not at his door. His sleep had been light, but deep enough to dream. His father had gone and the money with him. His mother had worked longer hours at the brewery. He was a latchkey kid, as were others in Colenso Road. He had seen himself – half awake and half asleep – drifting down the street and into an empty house. What to do? Go with other kids and do what they did. It had started with tipping over bins and daubing walls with spray paint and breaking glass in the allotments’ greenhouses, and had progressed to pilfering from the shopping centre, where there were enough exits on the ground floor for the gang to outsprint security. The sea was special to him. When he was not with the gang of kids, doing daft bits, he would sit on his own, facing out into the North Sea and seeing the scud of the low clouds and the burst of the white caps and the roll of the navigation buoys and the crash of the spray on the walls. The only times he had been almost happy, as Tobias Darke, was when he was by the sea. Long ago . . . But it was bad for him to dream because that was the way cover was undermined, the route to a mistake, and the consequence of a mistake was . . . He shivered.
Outside, he stood at the edge of a small group and gazed out. The smoke seemed spent, wafting with the winds. It might have been a convoy that had been hit, or a wedding party that just looked like a convoy. It could have been one of the big men of the movement that had welcomed him as a believer, a friend, and a person with individual talents to be used, or it could have been a foot soldier. There was a routine after each drone strike if the casualties were theirs: a security detail would come and would search for evidence and look for a man or woman to accuse. His experience of the detail, as it had been in Syria, was that they were thorough and methodical and they produced results that justified their existence.
Not as Belcher, not as Tobias Darke, but as Towfik al-Dhakir, he was one of them. His loyalty and commitment were assumed. Guys waved him forward and hands reached for him and he was hoisted up and into the back of a pick-up and he sprawled among legs and on to the ribbed floor as the vehicle picked up speed. With him were two Saudis, an Iraqi and a Sudanese boy, but he was the prime figure among them – not that he would ever abuse such a position and arouse resentment. He was white skinned and his hair was fairish, and with an appropriate passport he could travel wherever the movement wanted him to reach. Their personal weapons were behind their feet, wrapped loosely in sacking. He was told which village the martyrs had come from. They and their commanders were scattered through communities, and they could provide protection when the principals came and visited and moved between safe-houses. They lived with village people and ate with them, goat meat and rice and flat bread, millet and sorgum and wheat, and paid for it in full, and when they moved on they would be blessed by the men of the house for their humility and piety and they would take some of the younger men away for military training and for further education in the writings of the Koran.
They left that village. It was not a good time to travel because the skies, where the light had started to fade, were clear. Thick cloud cover was best, high winds were good, and the combination of heavy rain, which was rare, and gales was best. They went fast. The driver had to presume that he was watched by a Predator’s lens and so must do nothing to draw suspicion, could not weave on the road and could not accelerate and then slow in any attempt to fool the electronics of the firing system. They went past two more villages and saw crowds of men, their women separate from them. All stared up the road and towards the smoke, faint now. He could reflect as he sat on the floor of the pick-up that the drama of a Hellfire strike, whether with casualties or without, did not last longer than a few minutes.
The tents of the archaeological site were to their left. He saw troops: one was washing in a bucket and one stood with a rifle, beside two oil drums either side of a stone track that had a pole balanced across them. He couldn’t see any activity in the trenches – if she were there she would be digging. He assumed she was still couriering his message to Jericho. He shook, and considered his error, and what an error could do to him if picked up by the security detail. He winced and screwed up his face, pointing to his mouth as the others looked at him. He took a pad of tablets from his pocket and swallowed two, reaching for the plastic bottle of water on the floor and swigging from it. He had forgotten that he had had toothache the night before – it was always dangerous to forget. If they had wanted to, the leaders could have given an instruction, and one pick-up would have gone to where the sentry stood, a sergeant called forward and told he was no longer welcome. Not a shot would have been fired, and the tents would have been struck and the excavations abandoned. It had not happened . . . He screwed his eyes shut as if the pain had come again in a second
wave, and the Sudanese boy laid delicate fingers on his arm in sympathy.
The last of the smoke drifted away. An ambulance was already there and a goatherd and some women who had been out looking for withered branches among the rocks. A HiLux had brought other fighters. There were no tears, no shouted exhortations to continue the war, no beating of chests and breasts; but the loathing was there for all to see and the desire for revenge. This was why he was important, was valued. He saw two corpses, dismembered, among the rocks, and charred legs protruding from the vehicle’s cab. An eagle circled high up, a pair of kites wheeling below it. Maybe the Predator was still there, waiting and watching and eking out its flight time. The birds would be down when the ambulance took away the bodies, and would look for what had been missed – flesh best and bones next if the gristle had been torn off by the blast. The intelligence he had supplied to the young woman had not prompted this. What to do? Nothing. In his old life, people would gather on the pavements to watch the aftermath of an accident on Belle Vue Way or Marina Way, play no part other than to stand and to stare.
He had played no part in those three deaths. He would act out a role in future deaths, was certain of it – and was certain that the security detail would now be moving amongst them and searching for a man who could be accused of treachery. He told the Sudanese boy that his tooth was generally better, and thanked him for his concern – and cursed a mistake. He had for a while forgotten the supposed ‘agony’ of his decaying tooth, his sole reason for visiting the young woman and being given the tablets. The message he had sent via Henry had been the first time he had broken silence. He was not thanked for what he did, never had been. He bowed his head in gratitude for the boy’s interest, wincing again slightly as he did so, and wondered how his message would be received, what reaction it would trigger.
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