Aged fourteen, or fifteen, and with a willowy-thin body, the kid watched the goats as they searched for something edible between the stones and dirt. Belcher could not hear a drone, but it could be high in the sky, or the wind could be drowning out the light throb of the engine powering it. They were on a state of maximum alert after the Hellfire strike of the previous day.
They had been instructed, when they’d moved into Yemeni villages, always to be polite and treat their hosts with respect, and to show no arrogance, only humility. So, when Belcher wanted to move and gain a different, or better, vantage point, he had to suggest or request that they shift. He kept close to the kid and the goats, that way, if they were spotted by the drone’s lens and the zoom was activated, the watchers would find only the herd and the kid and two older men who were squatting and might be chewing qat. Their rifles were hidden under their jackets. It was strange and exhausting to maintain the play-acting when there was no visible audience. He thought of himself as Belcher, although he should not have done. Towfik al-Dhakir was secondary, and had been since he had activated the contact, gone to see the girl at the archaeological site. Tobias Darke was far back, but not altogather lost from sight. He and the kid mounted a guard on the western approaches to their village, and the goatherd was the grandson of the village’s headman. Belcher wore a straw hat with a wide brim, the front chewed at by a hungry dog. He used pocket-sized binoculars, expensive and made by Zeiss: the binoculars would not show up if he kept them clamped under the brim of the hat. They were on a hillock of sharp rocks and dirt and had a decent enough view of the place where the woman was, some two miles away, and of the main road that led towards Sana’a.
The lorry came painfully slowly. The road it travelled on was metalled, built a decade before by Chinese engineers. The lorry was old, loaded heavily with crates of fruit and vegetables. It was expected, and its lateness had caused the delay of ‘something’ that he did not know about. The lorry was part of an event, but at Belcher’s level the significance was not shared. He had a good view of the lorry; he was confused as to why he had been told it would come past him and go to the next village in the chain that ringed the town of Marib – he had not asked. To query anything was to invite suspicion. Belcher raised his binoculars. He could see the woman, blurred and small, his view of her distorted by the heat haze rising from the ground. She stood above a pit, her hands loose on her hips. She seemed to have total control of what happened around her. He thought her exceptional, and held the focus tight.
Beside him, the Sudanese coughed and spat and smiled vacantly. He was probably planning when next he could lay out his mat and do prayers. Belcher had enough Arabic, picked up in the time since his conversion and journey away from Hartlepool, and the Sudanese had some English, so when they did sentry duty together they practised languages. Belcher never talked of his past, but the Sudanese did. He spoke of his home, a village outside Omdurman, and of his family. He seemed to yearn for them, and the call of the jihadi war might have lost its resonance, which was dangerous – it was always dangerous to express such doubt. The Sudanese thought of Belcher as a friend. It would have been easy for Belcher to offer a confidence in return, but disastrous for his survival: he soaked up the complaints of the Sudanese to whom he was Towfik al-Dhakir, English born but a committed Islamist.
He noted that clouds had built over the hills towards Sana’a and seemed to chase behind the lorry. Where they were, the sun was still fierce. The clouds didn’t seem heavy with rain, but they were dense, and the wind hurried them and they threw down shadows. They all loved cloud. When there was cloud cover he could stand and stretch his back and use his binoculars with freedom, but not yet. He scanned the landscape, watched the woman again and the progress of the lorry, and ranged on towards a further village and saw – tiny but visible with the quality of optics – a man in a white coat, bending over a metal bucket and washing his hands vigorously. Near him, straining at a halter, was a donkey. The cloud bank chased after them.
He lived a lie.
More than Towfik al-Dhakir, and more than Belcher, he was Tobias Darke. He was the kid who would sit on the stones of the sea wall and watch the tankers edging towards the terminals at Billingham to the south, or the freighters heading up towards Newcastle in the north. He would go to the bar, Shades, to meet his mates: it was his favourite haunt, licensed till four in the morning. He had thought more about Shades, and it’s part in his long walk, since he had sent the message to Jericho. Like he had had something precious, his freedom and the trust of others, and had thrown them off that wall and into the foam of the waves. The cloud moved in a brisk line.
Suspicion had grown in their village; it always did after a strike. It was a risky time. It could have been that the drone pilots had just gotten lucky, or could have been that the three casualties had been betrayed from inside. Over the mountains towards Sana’a, the light was lifting. The drones would become visibile again and he might hear them and might not.
The stencil was removed from the silver fuselage of NJB-3 while the paint dried. It was a simple enough image, an assault rifle – the Kalashnikov, with a red line across it. Two technicians who did maintenance on the Predators at the King Khalid air base in the extreme southwest of Saudi Arabia, United States Air Force personnel assigned to the work, stood back to admire their handiwork, the marker for a ‘kill’. The guys out here took a pride in their work and had a nodding acquaintance, via Facebook and Twitter, with the crews who ‘flew’ the fragile birds. Every time a missile was fired and wasted enemy combatants, under the grand title of A Terrorist Attack Disruption Strike, a stencil was put on the fuselage. They had seen it come in the previous evening, had been in their jeep at the end of the runway and watched it yaw through the dusk, and the landing had been quality in spite of the brisk crosswind. It had taxied and almost reached its apron when the guys had seen the gap where a weapons pod hung empty: a missing Hellfire, a Fire and Forget gone. Cheers and high fives. And overnight NJB-3’s engine had been serviced and the quality lenses had been sprayed and polished, and tyres checked, and a new missile had been loaded into the empty pod.
Morning now and the boys posed in front of the little bird, made certain that they were directly beneath the symbol of a strike. At the base, they didn’t get to watch the screens that showed ‘Kill-TV’. But they knew the names of the men in the distant armchair cockpits and would often get reports of flight problems – what difficulties a pilot had experienced, how the gear was standing up to the ‘relentless’ pressure of flying against AQAP. The image would go to Casper, copied to Xavier. They were all stressed, the people with the Predator fleet, because the weather was on a slow dip, which meant thicker cloud and occasional rain and stronger turbulence at the height the birds were. About all that stopped them was weather, and then the maintenance boys had time on their hands and watched movies and checked forecasts. The weather would allow another take-off that day, but further deterioration was predicted. Getting the ‘hit marker’ on to the fuselage of the bird seemed a good enough start to any day, and she’d be gone within the hour, out hunting, doing what a Predator did, looking for prey. What a hawk did with a rat – what good guys did with bad guys. It was a small war. The issues seemed simple to the technicians based at this remote Saudi strip, and very simple when the bird came back and a Hellfire was missing. Then it was time for breakfast and then maybe a gym workout, and an opportunity to get poolside and a day to lose before the birds homed back in late at night and they’d be in their jeep, scanning under the wings. Simple days.
‘Crannog. I’d like to call it Crannog,’ Corrie said.
‘Not sure where you’re coming from . . .’ George frowned. He shouldn’t have; he had nothing to complain of.
There had never been a chance, not a cat in Hell’s one, that Corrie would refuse. He might have cited all the long list of committees that could be relied on to hit a project far into uncut grass, but to have refused George would have been – in Corrie’s
mind – tantamount to drafting a letter of resignation. Once a hero, always a hero. They’d move on later to the need to give something back to the American agencies, the requirement to fashion little coups, noticeable triumphs that were independent of the big brother. Corrie had always assumed there was an office tucked away in the basement floor, no natural light, where a couple of biddies, last job before they collected their carriage clock, thought up operation titles: Fresco, Buzzard and Condor, Fingal and Veritas were the sort that surfaced.
‘I’d like it to be Crannog,’ Corrie said.
A sweet smile from George, gracious. ‘If that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll have. Not a problem.’
Lizzie had read him. Something in his insistence would have told her there was history there, and history should always be checked. ‘Why Crannog? It’s about a refuge, yes? A safe-house? Neolithic times and protection from danger. Sounds good, is that your off-the-cuff reading of Yemen? Not a bad one.’
‘Just a word I like.’
She’d have known that he was guarding the truth. Not their business where Crannog fitted for him. His mother had worked for the Carter family. Their boy had gone to Harrow school, and Corrie to a comprehensive in Oxfordshire, but his talent had been spotted and he’d been awarded a place at a respectable red-brick university: to read Modern History at Reading.
In the summer break between school and college, his private tutor – Clive Martin – had taken a minibus full of favoured clients off to the wilds of northwest Scotland. They had camped for five nights on the shores of a freshwater loch and had caught trout on worm baits and had fended off the midge swarms as best they could, and had looked out on a crannog: a man-made island, jutting up from the water, a loose heap of stones, perhaps a dozen yards across and eight yards in length. A solitary thorn tree grew on it and ducks now used it as a place of safety. Each night a couple of them would – off the cuff – recite stories about the families that had found protection there, up to five thousand years before. They’d swum out to it and sunbathed there and endured a downpour on a biblical scale and while they were there the loch’s water level had risen alarmingly. But it symbolised a refuge, as it had been for millennia, and a sort of freedom existed there. An interesting man, Clive Martin, with a past he did not share, but when he stripped off his shirt to swim, there was a puckered hole below his right shoulder and an exit wound lower on his back: never discussed and never explained. They had been, Bobby Carter and Clive Martin, talent spotters, and a path had been ordained for Corrie. After a year of history he had transferred to Arabic Studies, and a path had been smoothed for him. Had Bobby Carter slept with Corrie’s mother? Might have done, or might not. Not important. A route had been devised for Corrie Rankin into the Secret Intelligence Service. There had never been a chance to back out – not then, not now.
‘Crannog it is – would that all of life were as easy. You know Barney and Aisha, Floor Two West, they’re good on that corner, but aren’t need-to-know on Operation Crannog: they’ll get you up to speed on a general situation. Lizzy’ll take you down, then back here for nuts and bolts and security matters – it’s going to be a very good one, Corrie, an excellent one. I’m feeling very confident.’
George’s smile was wider, infectious, the sort that encouraged kids at the start of a cross-country race. Could not be otherwise. Corrie was taken to his briefing. He assumed that Yemen today was filled with cruelty and brutality, if a line was crossed, but they didn’t need to talk about that. Hadn’t done before he went to Syria, as if it was ‘bad form’, or just too fucking obvious.
The cloud came over the village.
Men scanned the skies, evaluated its density. The cloud seemed solid, satisfactory. Orders were given.
The crates of vegetables and fruit were pulled roughly off the lorry and dumped carelessly. The main cargo, prominent under them, had been concealed and tied to prevent it rolling. It had come from the scrub ground to the side of a runway at Aden: crosswind gusts had toppled it over and one engine had caught fire and twenty-two passengers and the crew had escaped with their lives. It had lain as a reminder of the dangers of air travel for two years, then been cut up. The Ghost, through a commercial agent, had bought a length of fuselage, some fifteen feet long, a section from floor to mid-ceiling, above the passengers’ bag lockers. The fuselage section was taken down; the Ghost supervised the men who hurried it to the place he had chosen. At his direction it was propped against the stone wall of a derelict home. The wall was barely higher than the aircraft section. What he knew was that the aircraft, built in a German factory, had been capable of reaching an altitude requiring full pressurisation. It was enough for him. The Ghost had only been in an aircraft once himself, taken in restraints on a military transport between the scene of his arrest and the location of the political holding centre, and the torture cells of the Saudi counter-terrorism forces.
The donkey was dragged, whining, towards the internal wall of the fuselage, and marked, behind its shoulder, with a cross of red paint spray.
The surgeon from Sana’a stumbled towards it carrying a medical bag. Behind the Ghost came a youth – gangling and thin, with a high forehead and thick glasses – who brought the cold box, and was important because he stood inside the knowledge loop.
The Ghost watched, was almost sick, and had to stand tall and swallow hard. An iron stake was hammered into the ground, close to the inner fuselage wall. The donkey was tethered tight to the stake. The surgeon took the syringe and plunged it into the animal: the man had whinged excuses, claiming he had no veterinary experiences, no idea what kind of dose would be required to anaesthetise such a beast. The Ghost could have called up a dozen potential ‘martyrs’ who could have been ‘put to sleep’, but he had considered, for this first time, an animal was more suitable. The donkey went rigid and it sagged.
The man, the surgeon, looked as if he might faint. If he did, he would not wake up. The Ghost barked at him to continue. The surgeon slopped water into his mouth, rinsed, spat, took the scalpel from his bag. It shone dully in the reduced light beneath the thickened cloud. He raised it, cut into the beast. The Ghost felt his knees knock together. He had never exhibited, at first hand, violence. He opened the box, fumbled at the catch and took out the long, narrow item cased in plastic. He handed it to the surgeon and it was rammed without ceremony into the hole he had made. They could see muscle quivering and then blood enveloped it. Next the electrical circuit, part of a coronary pacemaker kit, was inserted, and the two were linked.
The Ghost had developed both pieces of kit himself. He regarded them as more sophisticated than anything tried before by Ibrahim Asiri, a former master of the craft of bomb building. A nod of his head.
The surgeon worked fast, crudely stapled the incision. The donkey was still alive. It was propped against the interior of the fuselage and froth blew from its mouth. Sacks, old clothing, and a blanket were now tossed on to the donkey, possibly simulating the clothing and shape of a passenger sitting in a central seat, not against the window. Men hurried back.
The Ghost crouched, and the youth he had brought would not have known that his career in physics, chemistry, engineering, would only have a few more hours to run. He was expendable and had performed useful tasks, but now knew too much, and the Ghost did not have time to establish how loyal he was. The bomb now buried in the donkey had been built by the Ghost in a series of different safe-houses between which he moved regularly. In each of those safe-houses he had a workbench, an area that could be sterilised and small pieces of equipment suitable for circuit-board building and macro-engineering, and also in each he had the quiet necessary to ponder and to dream. The Emir regarded him as most precious, a jewel. They could use the equivalent of a basic TV remote to send the pulse to the pacemaker. The pacemaker, in turn, would detonate the bomb. He nodded to the boy. The boy meant nothing emotionally to him – nobody, since he had left his mother and gone to the university, had been important to the Ghost. It was fired.
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br /> The explosion was powered by 200 grams of PETN explosive. The draped clothing and debris lifted into the air; after that came a shower of blood and flesh and bone. It landed, spattered the ground short of them. The Ghost went forward. He stepped with care amongst the stained, daubed wreckage and silence clung around him, and he bent, peered close, his neck stretched over the cavity where the donkey had been tied, and the fuselage was holed and a porthole window blown out – most important, there was a clear break in the fuselage wall and he could see the wreckage of the wall behind.
He did not have to make a speech, or field congratulations. He flicked dirt from his clothing and walked away. The surgeon would survive because he would know that if he talked he would die, along with his wife and all of his children. The youth had no future. There were others who could fulfil his role; he would be dead in an hour.
There were security men in the villages because of the previous day’s drone strike, and security men there who were charged with his protection. To one of them, a Sudanese and a veteran, he gave an imperceptible nod. Enough. He had the power of life and death over those who knew him and those who had never heard his name or seen his photograph, who had no knowledge of fractures and troughs and basins – and soon the cloud that had given them cover from the lenses mounted on the Predator’s belly would have moved on. He was pleased as poor weather was expected across the governorate in the coming days, and a meeting was scheduled for when winds and rain were confirmed. One day, the drones would locate him, he was certain. He prayed to his God that he would be given time to finesse the device, particularly the firing mechanism. The youth smiled at him, as if grateful to have been a part of the success, but he did not acknowledge it.
He went inside to sleep and think.
A cot was visible with the help of the binoculars.
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