They went for their briefing; it was close to midnight in New Mexico, but ten hours on in the Marib Governorate. Strange, Casper thought, to be fighting a war across a date line. He noted Xavier was subdued and that the cheerfulness he’d put on for the commander was faked. The briefing was about weather in the area they would patrol, if they were able to fly. Second point, big issue, there would be funerals, involving convoys and processions. Better not to hit a funeral because collateral was awkward. Casper could have said to the briefer – a woman and smartly dressed in uniform – that the chances were that HVTs would be at a funeral. High Value Targets needed to be seen when the bodies, bits of bodies, of fighters, were buried. But he didn’t say it and laboriously wrote down what she told them. That was not his problem: he was just a pilot, the guy who sat in an armchair for his shift.
They walked towards the booth they flew from; each carried a plastic bag containing their meal and bottled water. The wives always did better sandwiches than came out of the vending machines. It took skill to fly the Predator, because of the problems of winds and weather and the lightweight construction of the aircraft – pity so few guys realised that. They might get lucky again, that day, or might not, and he wanted to believe in his luck.
It had crossed the Emir’s mind many times that each day he stayed safe from the drones – unfound and unharmed – was a success for the movement of which he was a principal part. He walked in the village with his wife at his side. Sometimes he used a stick when he walked, sometimes not. Around him, but not close, were his bodyguards. Many village leaders in the places where he flitted in and out of safe-houses offered their daughters as wives, but he declined such offers with great politeness. Only one woman was permitted to share his life: she washed for him and cooked for him and soothed his anxieties.
The Emir had not personally witnessed the explosion the previous day, but he had listened to a report and was pleased that the money he had spent on the purchase of the donkey had been put to good use. The suffering of the animal before its death was of no consequence to him: a man in his position, with his dedication, had little interest in the pain inflicted on any beast, any human. And there would be more pain in the coming hours because he had called forward the security team and they now roamed in the villages outside Marib, searching for a traitor. He went, with his wife a half-pace behind him, to see the small collection of potential and willing ‘martyrs’ who had been recruited, were fed good meals, lectured in certain well-chosen verses of the Book, and who would be used when a target was sighted. His wife spoke to him as they walked, soothing words, but he heard few of them. He was a veteran. He had fled with his leader across the Tora Bora mountains when the ‘daisy cutter’ bombs, as the Americans had called them, had been dropped to destroy the caves in which they took refuge as they headed for the North-West Frontier of Pakistan. His hearing had been the casualty. She had been with him each step on the high tracks, had never complained, would have died alongside him. He went to see the martyrs because they alone could take the war forward.
The price placed on his head – for the supply of information that would lead to his killing or to his being taken alive – was five million American dollars. Amongst the people he mixed with, and whose homes he used, a thousandth part of that sum would have been life-changing. Leaflets had been dropped fourteen months before and again eight months previously and his name was underneath an artist’s impression of his appearance, and they had begged for anyone, dazzled by the size of the reward, to come forward. None had, not yet. There was no certainty in life, only God’s will. Those who wished to be martyrs, suhada, who wished to die an heroic death, istishhad, were kept apart from the fighters and from the tactical experts he gathered around him. They were quarantined, because what they would do, and the commitment they must show, meant they could not be contaminated by contact with those who strived to live. They were a powerful weapon, but to be used with care, not wasted. A bombmaker of note, one of the best, but now almost matched by the Ghost for ingenuity, had used his own younger brother as a mule, the device stuffed up his rectum to attack a hated Saudi prince. His wife would not tolerate one of her own children, their children, carrying a device. She was adamant, and he accepted that.
Vehicles were leaving for the funerals, the men packed close inside the cabs of the Toyotas and Nissans, where lenses would not identify them. In the backs, open to the cameras hovering high overhead, were women and many children. He saw the one they called Towfik, the most interesting boy, who had come to them by a long and circuitous route, and who had survived each security check thrown at him. The Emir approached the compound where the martyrs were housed and were taught – he thought that Towfik al-Dhakir had the potential to be as valuable to him as the bag of jewels and precious metals carried in the caravan of the great queen, Sheba, when she had journeyed to Jerusalem. He lived among the fighters, not with these kids who dreamed of glorious death. He was British-born, a crusader by birth, a convert, a fighter in Syria, but had not believed that the war there was sufficiently in the interests of Islam. He had made the long trek to Yemen, the refuge. Of course he had been checked, his story dissected, and his interrogations had been exhausting: not even when the young man slumped on a concrete floor in tiredness, half dead for lack of sleep, had he ever failed to hold to his story. He was trusted. The Emir had barely spoken to him, but the time would come, quite soon, when Towfik al-Dhakir, One Who Remembers God, would be of the greatest value.
The Emir did not enter the compound. His eyes were old and tired and he often had to blink to clear his vision, not from emotion but from strain. The Martyrs were sitting on the dirt in the tight shape of a crescent moon. They carried on their faces the look of serene pleasure: he wondered whether his own children, if called forward, would show that same love for the prospect of martyrdom. He could not have said. They sat and recited. The chant was soft and rhythmic, like the distant drumming of horses in full gallop, and their tutor walked around them at a steady pace. They could be used in Yemen against one of the great embassies, perhaps when an important diplomat was in residence, or to take the life of a security official in Sana’a, or one might be chosen to go abroad and strike against a building valued by the states of Western Europe. One would be chosen above all others, fed until he was fat enough that a surgeon could insert the device, and that one would walk through an airport’s concourse, and go into the area where the detectors were, and past guards who might be vigilant and might not. His eyes roved over their faces. The tutor would select three, and of them the Emir would pick one. The beauty of it was that the aircraft would plunge into an abyss, and no one would know how the bomb had been taken on board, so it could be repeated. The second- or third-choice martyrs might still face the surgeon and his knife. He prayed often that it would happen before his own death, and the role of the One Who Remembers God was crucial in his plans.
His attention was distracted by a bustle away to his right. The masked security men swooped. A dark-skinned boy was being held by them, and others were scattering, as if the youth were stricken by plague – he had no supporters, no friends. There had to be a response to three deaths from a drone. He turned away. For a few more moments he watched the recitation of the suhada, then walked on, his wife close to him. He saw Towfik helped up and crammed into the cab of an accelerating Toyota. They would go back together to their barren room in the safe-house, and she would make him a lemonade. He needed that boy who had gone in the Toyota, and who would guide them as a man with one good eye can lead the blind.
Crushed in the cab, Belcher sensed the atmosphere. They were boys from many nationalities, and older men who had fought the long campaign in Iraq. They would all have been obsessed by the need to conjure up an image of themselves, in pieces, after the drone strike. There, but for the mercy of their God, went all of them, any of them. They were quiet but seethed. A big matter tilted in his mind. Three funerals for Belcher to go to but, who or what had killed three men of no particular significance in
the movement? And why? Were they killed because they made a target, or killed because an agent had tagged the vehicle? He couldn’t imagine that a second operative was working alongside him, unknown, and he had believed the target vehicle would have been carrying the Emir or the Ghost, or another important man. He could not, and did not want to believe that.
He had seen the Sudanese boy, from a village outside of Omdurman, losing motivation and wanting to be back with his mother and sisters, working in a maize field. He had seen the dark-skinned youth with the willowy body sitting with others and waiting his turn for a ride to the funerals. Then he had seen the masked and black-clothed men of the security team fan out and encircle the group, then dive in and take one out and hustle him away. Belcher, the true agent, could not believe that the Sudanese boy had the wit, the strength, anything of what was required to live the double life. Belcher knew all about being arrested, the suddenness and trauma of it. That had been the biggest step on his journey, first to Aleppo and then to Marib Governorate. That day and that night were fastened in his mind.
It would be a step up from pilfering in Middleton Grange Shopping Centre and then doing the sprint on to Victory Square and getting lost on the far side of the plaza, and better than the vandalism in the graveyard or knocking out the glass panes in the allotments. They had been in Shades bar, four of them. He was the only one nominally in education but hadn’t clocked in that week at Hartlepool sixth-form college. Twice he had been threatened with a young-offenders stretch but his ma had paid the fine. He hated traipsing to the court with his ma, the hood up on his fleecy top, feeling a pillock and sensing people watching him, knowing she was on her way to cough up for a tearaway’s damage. ‘Yeah and what are you effing looking at?’ he’d shouted at a guy, an old guy, and he’d seen tears streaming down his ma’s face, but that had been two months before. In Shades, Darren had eased away and was now deep in conversation with an older man, smartly dressed, good hair. Darren ran them, and negotiated for them. There had been something about ‘teaching a lesson’ and ‘not taking any shit’, and they’d piled out, and there would be good money for them. College staff had told him to his face that he had potential, didn’t have to drift into the gutter, but he had ignored them.
The first time that he’d sensed violence might be on tap, and they’d gone up into the town centre and past the courts and on to York Road. Darren seemed to know where they were headed. There was something about drugs sales, and a late payment that was still due. A man was inveigled out of a bar on York Road, a bar near to his home and where his ma was. And Darren had hit the guy and he’d gone down on the pavement, had gone down fast, had cracked his head against a lamp-post as he’d toppled. A bit of kicking then, with none of them realising how badly he was hurt – it just happened that a patrol car had come by, so they’d turned to split and run. Trouble was that Tobias had tripped, gone on his face – almost on top of the guy who was being taught a lesson, and the handcuffs had clicked into place. No kid-gloves stuff because he was still a teenager. Straight in the back of the car, and a blue light and a siren, and him into the basement cells, and the guy from whom he was not to take any shit was on his way to hospital. What screwed him was that the other three had made it away and the police only had him, and the guy in Accident and Emergency was in a bad way.
It might have helped him if – late that night – when CID had him in an interview room, kitted out in a paper suit, he had named Darren and the others. But he hadn’t. So different from when he had been in a room with his ma beside him, and a woman officer in uniform doing the box-ticking, and the excuses for his actions tripping off Ma’s tongue. He had stuck at refusing to name the three boys with him, and had refused to say where they had been before pitching up on York Road, so they had trawled through CCTV images from all over the town, not that the detective seemed that bothered. After a stuck gramophone record of ‘No Comment’ from Tobias Darke, and after the tape had been switched off, and while they were waiting for his ma to come down from Colenso Street and for the duty solicitor to get out of bed and dress and drive to the police station, the detective had said, ‘Not my problem, youngster, not giving me any grief; you’ll be the one who regrets playing in the big boys’ league’.
His ma had come and he knew she would have walked, trotted, from Colenso and down Elwick and on to York, and probably she’d have gone by the taped-off area and might have seen the stain of dried blood on the pavement. With her was a solicitor, a middle-aged man wearing a crumpled shirt and a badly knotted tie, who seemed anxious not to demonstrate total contempt for the client, but hid it poorly. What was different this time was that his ma didn’t say a word and the solicitor didn’t offer the usual advice – ‘I really do suggest, Tobias, that you make a clean breast of this. Show remorse and say you fell in with bad company but are determined to get back into education and make a fresh start.’ He didn’t ask why he was being held in custody overnight, and grimaced when Ma had asked what would happen to him. She hadn’t tried to peck his cheek, or even touch his arm, when she and the solicitor had left. They’d escorted him back to the cells, and he’d listened for Darren or the others shouting, but hadn’t heard them, and knew he was alone. They’d taken his belt and his trainer laces, as if he was at risk of topping himself. In the cell he had smelled shit and urine and the heavy disinfectant that they’d have sloshed on the walls and floor. He never smelt the sea, which seemed to matter.
The convoy was slow to set off and there was shouting around the driver: did they have enough women and kids in the back, was it obvious this was a funeral procession, would they attract drones? He could picture that moment of wide-eyed astonishment on the Sudanese boy’s face. They’d want an accused. They needed guilt. They would make a show.
He too was different. He was European and a convert. The time would come when he’d be seated in a chair and sharpened scissors would snip off his full beard, and he would be clean-shaven. They would find him a businessman’s suit from a tailor in Aden, or kit him out in tourist guise with shorts and T-shirts from Muscat. Into his hand would go new documents and a false identity. On their behalf, he would be expected to walk through airports, into buildings of public importance, to be free on the streets of great cities. He was different because he was exceptional, and because of the lie he lived. But the Sudanese was different because he wanted to go home, talking in a soft voice and with hints of natural poetry in his language, of his family and the maize fields which fed them. The Sudanese had lost, as water slipped into sand, the dedication, the love of God, that was demanded. He supposed it inevitable that if one had to be chosen it would be the Sudanese boy. He pondered on loyalty.
‘No comment’.
That had been loyalty of a sort, but Belcher had learned much since then. He had not stood alongside the two boys who had been in the kitchen near to the garage of the villa close to Aleppo, eating and listening to music or watching TV, who were blameless. They had been shot that evening, had knelt blindfolded and bound and had been shot. One had soiled his trousers when the pistol had been cocked behind him and the other had cried for his mother. Belcher had escaped suspicion. He had not spoken up, had not been in their corner, had been in the crowd that had watched – stony faced, no compassion shown – as they were brought out of a shed, pushed down, and killed. He had already been recruited, had made that decision to turn his back on his fellow fighters, betray them, and yet he had said nothing when the Canadian and the Austrian had been sold on within the week – along with the Italian, for whom a ransom would be paid. Would he speak up for the Sudanese boy? Would pigs fly?
They reached the cemetery, the women and the children spread amongst them. The litters – frames of wood with a zigzag of thin rope to make a base on which the bodies were secure – were carried forward, and prayers were said. He sensed the mourners’ hatred for their common enemy, those who owned the drones and those who flew them.
He would not speak for the Sudanese boy. He had an excuse – he
needed to go back to the archaeologist so she could examine his tooth again. He tried to look cold, as if he did not care about the fate of the boy who would never again see a maize field close to Omdurman. He wondered how they would respond to the message he had brought the woman, Henry Wilson. A smile almost flitted across his face – a woman with a boy’s name – but he wiped it fast because the second body, the bits of it, were being laid in the shallow grave, and men around him shouted for revenge. He felt the pressure build on him and didn’t know if he could support it. He had to wait, and he didn’t know how to stop the trembling in his hands.
No one had seen Rat off from the airport. No hugs, no kisses.
His wife was Bethany. Bethany had her own small pet-food business, and was stocktaking that evening at the warehouse she used. Her business was solvent, but not by much of a margin, and it took all the hours God sent to keep it afloat. He’d been in the bathroom when she’d gone out and he’d heard her call something about ‘good luck’, and he couldn’t remember what he’d answered. He hadn’t told her where in Yemen he was headed for, or why he was going, and had been vague on when he’d be back, too. He’d picked Slime up. Gwen had clung to Slime, as if he was going off to war: might have been. They were down. He didn’t think any of them had slept.
Slime hadn’t, and Rat had not been able to escape images of sand and scrub and little plastic bags caught on thorn bushes and whipped by crosswinds, and pick-up vehicles and targets. Targets stayed with him. He could remember each target on whom, sight locked and trigger squeezing, he had performed: he never talked of it to Bethany, and certainly not to Bryony and Clara, his daughters, who were going through school while he was lining up on targets, watching them, learning their habits and seeing them with their kids. One shot usually, rarely two, and seldom under eight hundred yards’ range. The principal, whom they called a ‘desk hugger’, hadn’t slept, but had gazed through the window, little blind up, nothing but a navigation light and distant stars to see. It had been important, Rat believed, to maintain his position in the pecking order. It was the way the military worked, the oil in the cogs. He had reached warrant officer and it had been his life until his sight deteriorated and a filled Bergen pack on his shoulders had begun to cause him grief. The chief executive officer of the company in Hereford had thought this an important enough contract to drive Slime and Rat up to Heathrow himself. The talk in the car had been unsatisfactory and economical, except for the answer to his question: ‘This trip, does it matter?’ The boss had snapped back, ‘For fuck’s sake, Rat, nobody would go near that place if it didn’t matter. You know that old boy who lives outside of Hereford, Jonty, in Stretton Sugwas, cleans cars for us. He was about yesterday after their call came, so I asked him about Yemen. When he was in the Regiment and deployed there, a couple of mates were cut off in the arse end of the Radfan Mountains. Their heads were put on spikes at the gates of Taiz. I doubt attitudes have changed that much. You know it’s a shit place – don’t need me and don’t need Jonty to tell you. Old fruit, just take good care. Why aren’t the Regiment there? Fuck only knows . . . They’ve come to me, and I’ve told them I’ve just the lad. That’s you, Rat – and the money is great. Among the Cobras, you are held in awe, and you and Slime are a hell of a team. There’s heavy work to be done, and there’s no one better.’ He knew Jonty and Jonty loved to talk, but Rat didn’t think he’d told many ‘porkies’ that time. Rat hadn’t told Slime what he’d said.
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