The lorry had gone, with crates of fruit and vegetables stowed on it, heading towards Marib. The woman was still working in the ditches she had dug, and he thought it impressive that she had managed to build an impossible bridge: she had military protection and was accepted by the AQ and treated their families and injured fighters. A Mercedes car, with a pick-up escort, took away the older man he had seen scrubbing his hands and arms in a tin bucket.
A youth was brought from the houses by three men, two in front and another at the back, fielding any escape attempt. Belcher had seen it before and would see it again. Familiar from when he had arrived in Syria long before his recruitment and the facilitated journey to Yemen. Belcher would not be able to fathom the offence. A young man condemned, but not yet realising what awaited him. He would be disposed of in the same way as rubbish was, taken outside and thrown into the rocks where the crows gathered, or kites. He could not be guilty of what Belcher would have called an exemplary crime – treachery, betrayal, taking American money – because, if he had been, his killing would have been in public, an example set. The youth was being taken beyond the sight of the village houses and Belcher could no longer see the little procession – then a single shot. A youth of no further use, not even worth making an example of. The escort had reversed their steps and were talking amongst themselves. There was no sign that they were either troubled or elated – or that a life had been taken.
The security men had reached the nearer of the villages. Belcher ducked his head and used the binoculars tucked close to his eyes and hoped that the rim of the straw hat hid them; the sunlight was still grudging and unlikely to make a reflective flash. He was not sure if there were four or five of them. They wore dark clothing and all had their faces covered, which was not what the fighters in Yemen did, but was the style practised in Syria. A pair of them talked to men and children, another couple were in the houses. It was a matter of grave importance to the leadership, betrayal. To order homes to be searched, to interrogate both villagers and fighters, would damage the good relations achieved with such effort. The military would have reached the pick-up that had been hit on the main route between Marib and Sana’a, and their people would have removed any bug from the burned-out wreckage before the security team could get there under cover of last night’s darkness – if there had been one. Beside him, quiet and dozing, was the young man from Sudan. He wondered how many people this boy had spoken to, how many others, of his wish to leave and return to his family.
Others came to relieve them. Belcher set off, the Sudanese loping after him, back to the village, where the security team screened all the men and children. The atmosphere was tense and threatening. Belcher did not know how long he could last: with his three names and three identities, and only supreme arrogance could harness and control the fear.
‘What’s the protection?’ Corrie asked straight out, eyes hooked on to George’s.
The senior man looked sharply right, to Lizzie, but she had half twisted and was gazing through the glass and down at the river. He looked to Farouk for support, but his attention was on his hand-held screen. George said, firmly, ‘It’s good. High quality.’
‘I’m assuming there’s a helicopter casevac, for if one of us gets hit, and a rescue team, because we’ll be up front and where it’s personal. Yes?’
‘It’s whatever’s available, Corrie, and what’s possible.’
His lip twisted; he tried to make an issue of it and probably failed. ‘Nothing from Hereford, or from Poole?’
‘Two very good men with you. Experienced, competent, and we’re lucky to have them. Special Forces, in my opinion, are often over rated; spend too much time on self-promotion. Jericho will organise helicopter lifts to you. Not something to lose sleep over.’
‘And getting there, with my “experienced, competent” colleagues, how?’
‘All in Jericho’s good hands.’
‘I’m trying, George, to put a full picture in place.’
A twitch of irritation from the senior. ‘Quite straightforward. A meeting is about to take place. Don’t know where. Belcher will know when it is about to happen, will pass that information to our little archaeologist – a great coup of Jericho’s in getting her on side. You will be in close contact with her, will get information about the vehicles in which their leadership are moving, that’s from Belcher then passed to her. We estimate the meeting will brief their senior people on a potential strike – it won’t be for the riff-raff, foot-soldiers. You have two options: either call in a drone strike, courtesy of our gallant allies on identified vehicles, or – better – do the job yourselves. Being very frank, Corrie, I’d like us to serve up one of those heads on a silver platter as a surprise at top table. Do you want chapter and verse on the shit the “gallant allies” drop on us? It’s not hand-to-mouth, “Operation Crannog”, but a well-resourced venture – it’s about bearding these people in their own safe havens and doing them damage. You’re not getting cold feet, Corrie, are you? Late in the day, but you’re perfectly free to back out.’
A pause. Manufactured. The explanation had sounded to Corrie to be as idiotically ill-constructed as the idea of inserting a trained operative into a party of aid workers, gaining their confidence and hearing their tales, and inveigling them into being the eyes and ears of an espionage factory. It had all seemed to work well till the one bad day. He had a hunger to be outside the perimeter lines, to have that confidence that came from walking beyond the reach of the Golden Hour, those sixty minutes within which a casualty was guaranteed he’d be reached by a full triage team. It was a sort of madness, and loneliness compounded it. Barney and Aisha, Floor Two West, had done their briefing. He’d recognised that it was little more than a Foreign and Commonwealth warning against tourist travel, and he’d kept noticing that they never met his glances and kept notes in front of them to dip into when he’d looked for honesty from them. Could he back down? Not really. And he quite liked the idea of doing work that was usually passed to the Americans. Could he go back next week to the pub in his mother’s village and join in a darts game and look at the cat in front of the fire and know he should not have been there? Not really.
‘No cold feet . . . I assume it’s all cleared, clean.’
‘I’ve already addressed that: by the people that matter. Plenty of enthusiasm from them. I appreciate it might not seem so, but actually the support you’ll have is of the highest calibre. All you need is on the ground and with you.’
‘Of course I’m going,’ Corrie said.
‘You’ll be fine and, I emphasise, very able people will be watching over you.’
‘We got a job, Slime, quite a good earner,’ Rat had said.
He’d asked how long it was for.
‘A few days, I’m told, not more than two weeks. I’ve signed you up.’
Had he? Slime had cursed. It was Gwen’s thirtieth in five days’ time, and the same day he was due to put down the deposit on the one-bed flat in East Street, with a fine view of the cathedral – he was driving back to the place he and Gwen rented to tell her. It all seemed like a shout from the past, but he pondered that he and Rat were both from days gone by.
‘Where is it? What’s it about?’
‘A bit off the beaten track, hot-weather kit. Watching the backside of a principal, and we’ll have our gear with us. Sorry, Slime, but it’s an open phone.’
Thirteen years before he had been accepted into the Intelligence Corps. They wore berets that were coloured ‘cypress green’, and enough people had described that as the colour of duck-ponds, so the name ‘Green Slime’ had stuck. Rat had always addressed him as ‘Slime’, had done ever since he had been dragged to his feet – shocked, shaken, with his legs half gone – out of a storm ditch clogged with camel shit and leaked diesel fuel in Basra. And he’d needed dragging out. Rat had been back-marker on the section stick, last man. All the rest had gone by and not seen him, and either the crowd he’d been with hadn’t noticed he wasn’t with them, or had yomped a long wa
y and decided against turning back to search for him. He had not been able to take any more: he had seen hostile faces peering at him and the gnarled hands of old men that would have happily strangled him, and darkened windows where a rifle might be, and a bin liner that might hold an improvised explosive device. He had crumpled, gone down into the ditch, and had lain there, mouse-still. If they’d found him they might have strangled him, hanged him, cut off his privates, stubbed out their cigarettes on him. He had not been able to move out of the ditch and grab up his rifle, and run like the devils of Hell were after him, and head to where he thought his patrol had gone. He had been twenty years old, three months in the Corps; it was his third week in Basra and the second time he had been sent out with a fighting unit. It would have been the last time if Rat had not spotted him.
Rat was a sergeant, had not made a fuss, had not called him a ‘fucking disgrace’ nor had told him that he stank worse than a sewage farm. Rat had checked his rifle, had handed it back to him, had said that he should ‘stay close and watch my back, Slime.’ No big deal. They had moved on, a gentle trot to rejoin Rat’s people. The sergeant had carried a long-barrelled rifle that had a heavy telescopic sight clamped down on top of the stock. Slime had known nothing of snipers and sniping; what he did know was that he owed his life to that man seeing him in the ditch, and pulling him out, and refusing to make a big deal of it. They were a team from that day, and Slime could not imagine anything different – except that there was Gwen, and the ring on her finger had set him back plenty, and there was the property deposit. He drove to see her at work. Slime was two years out of the military. He had lasted a month longer than Rat. Rat had gone and the two-man team had been broken up. A vacuum beckoned. Slime had put his papers in. They did stuff together for a private military contractor operating out of the back of a trading estate on the north side of Hereford. Not for Slime to query what Rat had told him. Rat did the fixing, had the contacts, and Rat led – which was what a sniper did.
‘It’s not an easy time, Rat.’ A trace of a whine.
‘Is Gwen going to throw a spanner at it? Sensible girl, that one. Tell her what I said, “quite a good earner”. I’ll call you later. Slime, hear me – the only thing worse than being asked to get soonest into a dark and nasty corner is not being asked to get there, and to sit and wait for the phone to ring when it doesn’t. It’ll be good.’
‘Yes, Rat, if you say so.’
Truth was that the link was stretched, the old bond loose. He was starting to think about a life away from Rat and what Rat did, but he had not said it, not said that he would not go – wherever it was. He’d smooth it over with Gwen, stir some decent bromide into his description of the mission, put her mind at rest. Trouble was, the company that employed them didn’t hire out a team like him and Rat, short notice and obviously covert, and pay them the roof unless it was seriously dark, seriously nasty, in that corner. He pulled up at the school where his fiancée was a teaching assistant. It was break-time and he saw hordes of small kids running, heard the yells of exuberance. A big breath, and Slime went to tell Gwen the little he knew.
The resident senior spooks met in Sana’a on a Friday for a late buffet lunch, breaking open a bottle and chewing the fat: it was all off the record. The degree of co-operation and frankness was rare in their trade. Oskar, the German, was hosting. He always did a good lunch with a fine bottle of Alsace, better than the American, Hector, who relied on sandwiches, and far better than Doris, battling for the United Kingdom, who fancied herself as a curry maker. The French had never been invited, which rankled, and likely never would be. This week they were discussing a drone strike.
It had been a quiet week since Hector had welcomed them to his sizeable Agency quarters for the previous meeting. It was good to talk when in Sana’a because the place was a pit and they were confined behind their fortified perimeters by the security situation. The chance of slipping out and travelling safely in the company of an escort, kitted out with machine guns and body armour, was minimal. Doris had done Beirut and Baghdad, but said that here was the worst. They shared trifles – the drone strike, three dead, was suitable.
Hector said, ‘I’d like to claim, too right, that we had removed the Emir or the Ghost or a senior local commander, but we did three lesser low-lives, as I hear.’
Oskar said, ‘I’ve seen the names and we have no trace on any of them.’
Doris said, ‘For them it looks like ‘‘wrong place at the wrong time’’. Yes?’
From Hector: ‘The beef is perfect . . . what I am saying is that this was not targeted by HumInt or ElInt. I think the guys and girls over at Stateside saw those kids and their weapons, may have been having a quiet day, and let a firework go at a target of opportunity.’
From Oskar: ‘Yes, the beef is excellent, from Bavaria. There was no “collateral”, no children, no women – and no indication that any of us had an agent in place and had zapped a tag on the vehicle. They will hunt for a traitor, and may find one, because they don’t like a wasted search.’
Doris remarked. ‘We had nothing to do with it. The only positive thing I can say is about the aftermath. I think they are neurotic about your drone hits, Hector. They create intense internal suspicion and each man looks at his friend and wonders. Not all bad. And the wine, not all bad.”
And they moved on because Oskar had met with the director of the Public Security Organisation, and Doris with the president’s principal secretary, and Hector had been to see field exercises by the local special forces troops – ‘an “elite” unit of fighting men who are fucking useless, my Marine Corps advisor chum tells me’. The drone strike was passed over, as none could claim credit for it – none of them had an agent in place.
It had no lustre to it, no shine. Henry Wilson flicked a lightweight brush over it one more time, then rummaged in her long-sleeved overalls and took a worn-down toothbrush from a pocket. She wanted to shout with delight.
It would have lain there for three thousand years, or more. It was in the shape of a man, a chubby little figure. An immediate estimate: twenty centimetres from the crown of the head to the ankle. The dusty clay and sand melted off its shape.
She called and men came running, along with the woman who tidied her tent and did her washing and cooked for her. They came fast, had recognised the excitement and urgency in her voice. Three millennia it had lain undisturbed, untroubled, a precious item that would have been factored by a skilled craftsman, and likely paid for with the dues charged by the prominent people of Marib, permitting caravans to cross their territory and go north to what was now Israel and the Gaza Strip. She had on her plastic gloves and held the object up so that the woman and her workers and the soldiers could see it clearly. She said it was Sabean bronze, from near the time of the great queen, Sheba. While she held it she worked with firm but gentle strokes of the toothbrush, cleaning it bit by bit. Her audience watched her, fascinated, hanging on each gesture and word. Simple people; only the pair of museum workers had received an education of sorts. She had captivated them as she had entranced herself. Fingers came gingerly forward and sought to touch the dirt that caked the figure, but in a few places the bronze was clear to see and her fingertips could feel the workmanship.
It was a moment of the kind she lived for.
It was not the best that she had found since the other foreign experts had loaded up their minibus and roared away into the heat of the day, leaving a diminishing dustcloud behind them. Anything better was in the vaults of the museum in Sana’a, but this was the best-preserved and most flawless object she had retrieved that year. Was it a tear or was it sweat that ran down her cheek? She allowed herself a moment of amusement. Not a tear, no indication that she was descending into sentimentality. Henry’s wrist smeared the moisture off her skin. Her eyes blazed sheer pleasure and her smile was wide, and some of the soldiers had put down their rifles so that two hands were free to clap her. It was her world and the find was the justification of it. She took photographs –
when the museum workers rotated and went back to Sana’a they would take the memory tab and the pictures would be processed and copies sent to those who backed her – not that she needed great financial support. But that was a distraction. Holding this work was a better thrill for her than any she had been exposed to in months.
Henry worked alone. She accepted the isolation, but she had no shoulder to lean on, no confidant to bounce problems off, and had no back and no stomach – warm or cold – to lie against when she fretted. The digging in the trenches outside Marib was company for her and she pursued it with dogged determination. She had nothing else, wanted nothing more. The opportunity to be in this place, free to work among these sites, should have given her life a degree of perfection. So privileged, but now she clung to an old world that seemed to spin and change as an axis shifted. Jericho had summoned her, the man Belcher had arrived in darkness at her tent with a cover story, and she had heard an explosion, distant and muffled, that day. Could it be taken from her, the paradise she had made? She held the figure up one last time for them to enjoy, then cocooned it with bubble wrap.
Henry’s world, where she kept her own company, had been infiltrated, and strangers were trampling on her. It would not be possible to drive them away – perhaps the moisture had been a tear, after all.
The buffoon, the barfly, who was something in import-and-export, worked hard at his desk in the secure office above the travel agency. There was much for Jericho to concentrate on as an air-conditioner thundered in his ear, and Penelope, Woman Friday, was at his side, prompting him. She was one of two women in his life and the other was a maiden aunt who lived in a Housing Association block in west London. He thought of Penelope as his Woman Friday, but had more than enough wit to understand the debt he owed her for her competence, calm, and for her ability to steer him away from rocks – on which he could have been holed, and sunk. He never admitted it to her, but he owed her much.
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