Jericho's War

by Gerald Seymour

  He caught the boy’s eye. Belcher looked away. The boy was easy for the security team to handle. There was no fight left in him. They didn’t struggle, not as the end approached. Belcher had seen men put to death by the bullet and by the knife in Iraq and in Syria. He had not actually participated, but been close, had witnessed the final moments: had not felt bad before first meeting the Englishman held in the garage alongside the villa near to Aleppo, but he felt bad now.

  He looked away because it would have been dangerous to his own safety if their eyes had locked. The Sudanese might then have called out to him, a drowning man with his lungs filling, crying for help. A ‘possibility of association’, of sympathy, of brotherhood, would have been enough to alert security. Belcher was well regarded by the leadership and would have a part to play when he was cleaned and shaved and dressed. He would have – with his skin and his language and his right-to-be-there – access. But no man, on a Yemeni plain or a Marib Governorate village, was immune from suspicion. He looked away, dropped his eyes to his feet. There was nothing he could have done. Anything he did, or said, would not change the inevitability. It hurt.

  There was an increasing rumble of voices around Belcher. Shrill from the kids, screams from the women, guttural from the men. The boy from Sudan, once a joyous recruit and in love with his God, was now despised, an enemy. Not on his way to Paradise as he would once have craved to be. There, he would have believed what the imam told him, that after martyrdom he would be greeted by seventy virgins, ‘gazelle-eyed and of modest gaze’. He would not be believing it now, as he walked and tripped and his shadow was thrown forward and he was almost at the base of the cross made for him. No fight left in him. Nor would he have believed that a friend stood near him. That, too, was denied. Belcher could not turn away, and he could not vomit. If he was discovered, and the truth known, this was what would happen to him, though it might be a blessed release after the interrogation.

  They took the boy to the stepladder. The accusation had been read, now the sentence. It was done with the aid of a bull-horn. The sun would soon, within a few minutes, be swallowed by the clouds, and the shadow would die. It was hard to hear the words spoken, even with amplification, because the wind had lifted and it sang against the shape of the cross. If the wind blew and the cloud was constant, then the drones would not fly and the death of an innocent would not be curtailed. Everyone there knew that a drone would not be overhead, peering down at them and swivelling its lenses for a closer view. The Sudanese boy was lifted up. Some held his legs and some gripped his waist and the binding at his wrists was undone and his arms were extended along what had been a water pipe. The new knots were tight, amply strong enough to hold his weight. Belcher thought the boy’s face had a solemn expression; maybe he was past caring. The crowd below him bellowed derision, pushing closer and being held back by the guys in the black overalls and black balaclavas. Both arms were in place, and the guy came down the ladder. The ones who had held him up let the load go, and it would fucking near have taken his arms out of the shoulder joints, dislocated them, the agony coursing through him.

  Belcher hoped it would be quick: could not hope for more. And hoped it would be quick if it were him that was suspended, and quicker if it were the archaeologist – he had thought of her when he couldn’t sleep, her fingers on his face when she had examined his perfect tooth. The kids would be first to be allowed to throw stones at him; they’d be stones that were graded and not heavy because security would not want the man to be too soon on the road to whichever God he prayed to. Belcher assumed that all the security men who had interrogated the Sudanese boy, who had beaten and kicked and slapped him, would have understood that he carried no guilt, but that it was a show, and a good show, and it had solidified power. It was not likely that the Sudanese would be out of his misery before dusk, long hours away.

  Belcher went to find bread and coffee. It would happen to him, and to Henry, and he shivered and did not look behind him, and he could not shake her from his mind.

  Henry woke.

  She heard her name called, in a soft, high pitched, voice as if it were being sung. A mug of tea – Henry’s little joke was that the hardest part of her life, in a tent and with an escort of troops, was getting the woman, Lamya, to make a decent cup of tea. Lamya added milk from the small fridge powered by the camp generator, and a spoonful of sugar, a little luxury. Henry had slept late and it was light, and she swung her legs fast off the camp bed and took the tea and thanked Lamya. She wrapped her robe tight around her, and thrust a scarf over her head, and was about to pull back the flap, go for her shower, leaving the woman to make her bed and tidy her quarters, but a hand brushed her arm.

  ‘Yes, what?’ They had a common language, a patois of classical Arabic and the dialect spoken by Yemenis.

  She should not leave the camp that day.

  ‘Why? I am going to Marib.’

  The woman was insistent. She should not leave the camp at any time that day and should not travel on the road past the two villages between the dig site and Marib.

  ‘I have business there, not for long. In and out.’

  She saw a desperation in the woman’s eyes, as if she did not know how to further emphasise the advice: she should not go to Marib. Lamya, and the name meant that she would always have respect, was ten years older than Henry. She had a son aged nineteen who lived with her parents in Sana’a; she was widowed. She would have been carefully chosen by those who had given permission for Henry to continue with her archaeological work and had authorised the small military detachment to watch over her safety. In truth, the ‘safety’ was governed by an unwritten and unspoken understanding between personalities on opposite sides of the war smouldering across the length and breadth of the governorate. For one side she brought prestige with her discoveries, for the other she provided primitive Accident and Emergency care. She wanted to go to Marib, to the hotel – not to eat or swim in their pool, or to shop in the almost empty boutique – but to access the internet and key in ‘Faraday Fracture’. Henry had slept late, had not nodded off until the small hours, and had thought there were the sounds of a distant helicopter but was not sure – not unusual as supplies were often brought to the oil camp on the far side of Marib, some kilometres beyond the town. She should not go to Marib today.

  ‘And it is good OK for me to go to Marib tomorrow; it’s only today I should not go?’

  It sounded cheap, almost a sneer. She reached out, on instinct, and held the woman in her arms, felt the thinness of the body and the angles of the bones. Felt also a degree of love and compassion, and hoped the gesture was sufficient apology – it had been so long since she had held another living and warm body close to herself. Loneliness now dogged her; it had done since Belcher had come in the dark and told the story about having toothache and had handed her a message of sufficient importance that she had made a gruelling twenty-hour round-trip to meet a man for fifteen minutes who played the buffoon but was not. Abject loneliness was something that was new to her. She had no comforter, only the sharp shape of the woman she could barely communicate with, her servant.

  ‘I will not go to Marib today.’

  Relief fluttered on the woman’s face. Henry loosed her. She thought her loneliness was that of a spy. She prepared to go for her shower, no skin showing other than her face, her hair discreet, the robe’s hem brushing the tent’s ground sheet. She did not know when Belcher would return, nor what effect the message she had taken had had on Jericho. This horrible loneliness – and she had put at risk her work, the most precious gift she had received. She gulped the tea, tightened the belt of her robe.

  ‘Will you tell me why, Lamya?’

  First she was asked what she would like to have for her lunch, and what for her dinner, then she saw the sadness on the face, old before its time. Lamya was widowed. Her husband had been a sergeant in the Yemen Army and had been caught by the militants when a checkpoint was overrun. He had been shot dead and she had to work becaus
e the government of her country only paid widows’ pensions when an officer was killed. There was an execution scheduled for that day in a village on the way to Marib, and the death would take many hours; she explained. Three young men had been ‘martyred’ – Lamya used that word without sincerity – and the condemned had been accused of giving the information that had guided the drone against them. He was a traitor. He had spied for the Americans and taken rewards.

  ‘Thank you, Lamya. Whatever you wish for my lunch and for my dinner.’

  A spy would be put to death, and without mercy, and would not deserve otherwise.

  She went to shower. Henry Wilson did not know when she would next play the part of a spy; she would scrub hard at her body as the cold water dribbled over her.

  They were not flying today.

  Casper read a magazine on holidays – hiking and cabins in Yosemite.

  A visual feed was linked to the King Khalid base and the Predator, NJB-3, was half backed into its hanger. It was fuelled, loaded up, and the lenses polished to perfection, and there was little wind across the runway; the sock hung limp. Xavier talked medical matters on a mobile phone with his wife: they were nearing her optimum moment of fertility. His wife liked to talk about it and Xavier played along; if they flew he did not have to field her calls. The winds had strengthened over the area they were deployed to cover, and there was heavy cloud. Their mission was routine surveillance; they weren’t hunting for a particular target, but looking for opportunity. They had had that, taken three lives, and not felt bad, and seen naked envy among other crews. It had worked well, and the video had been watched by their commander, who had called it ‘textbook’. Later they would have their sandwiches; it was near to midnight. Casper did not think they would fly any time soon, and the intelligence analyst had abandoned them and retired to his own area. It would be daylight there, but the meteorological people were adamant that the cloud would not break imminently, nor the wind lessen, so one of them planned a holiday while the other planned a family. Target hunting was postponed. Both were glad of the break in the routine. It had been a big funeral, what they’d seen of it.

  There were two ways of teaching him. Corrie must have had his backside stuck up like a camel’s hump, so Rat had whacked him, with a closed fist, at the base of his spine, and then he must have lifted it again. Slime had murmured advice to him.

  ‘What we call “leopard crawl”, Boss – you scrape your balls on the ground. Don’t want your arse in the air.’

  He kept it down. The map had served them well, and the pilot had read it skilfully. They were on a ridge, and in front was a steep incline that led down to the flat spaces of the plain. Not much grass grew on it and there were few scrub bushes to break it up; they had no large stones to cling to, just shale and pebble and loose dirt. Where they were, near to the rim, there was no cover. Small, sharp stones jagged at Corrie’s stomach and he thought that his knees and elbows would already be bloodstained. Rat was ahead with the guide, Jamil, and Slime lay alongside Corrie.

  Slime said, in the same whisper but with a nervous crackle in it, ‘It’s going to be a bit like Bognor on a bank Holiday, Boss. I’m used to it with him, not with a crowd. We’ll be that close and squashed up.’

  Rat’s hand lifted, fingers clicking for Corrie’s attention, then a beckoning flick. He went forward. Again, his back was smacked down. Corrie would have said that his silhouette was minimal and his profile tight against the ground; would also have said that the blow was gratuitous, to make a point. The guide whispered in Rat’s ear, and jabbed with a finger at features in front of them. They did not know – why should they? – that Corrie Rankin had been alone, moving in hostile territory. Rat spat on his hands, scooped up dust into the palms, rubbed them together and smeared his face again, thickening the camouflage. The guide, with delicate fingers, helped him. Had it been just four evenings ago that he had stood in front of the solemn faces in the lecture hall? Rat and Slime had both broken a golden rule – Corrie had seen their wallets opened on the plane. No ID, no credit cards, no business contacts, but in Rat’s was an inch-square picture, from a photograph booth, of a middle-aged woman with neat hair and a thin smile. She would be the woman who waited for Rat. Slime’s had a photo of a girl who stared shyly at the lens. Neither should have brought pictures of women who were important to them. Corrie had not carried a snapshot of a woman for more than two years.

  They checked the ground, Rat and Jamil, and he had to wait his turn with the binoculars. It was an incredible position, a great vantage point, brilliant even with the naked eye. He was offered the binoculars. A scrim net of camouflage colours was draped over his head. He was sharing with Rat. He found the focus and began in the far distance, as Jamil’s commentary played in his ear.

  On a far skyline, Corrie saw the buildings of a town, dun-coloured but for an orange windsock against a sand background: Marib. Nearer were shapes of ruins. In former times, there would have been flashes of light on the windscreens of tourist buses parked close to the ancient pillars, but they did not come any more. Jamil’s finger showed him where to look. He saw ditches and tents and a rough wire perimeter fence and a sandbagged guard post. He searched for the woman but couldn’t see her. He thought, as he looked at the tents, that her work would probably be remembered for many years, be the subject of learned papers, and if a plane did not go down in the mid-Atlantic, then no one would know. He saw the lethargy of the few troops who ambled around near the site entrance, and understood that an ‘accommodation’ was in place.

  He looked at the surrounding villages. In Syria and Libya there had been well-built homes and good agriculture and light industries and school buildings; the infrastructure might have been broken by bombs and rocket launchers, but there had obviously been affluence once. Here the villages, magnified by the glasses, appeared from the Stone Age (or baked mud age). He could make out narrow alleyways between buildings, and labyrinthine paths in and out of the houses, and he understood the mentality of the Crannog and the trust placed in the heap of stones that he had seen, long ago, in the freshwater lake of the Hebridean island. He wondered which village Belcher was in, and how he survived and kept up the deceit, hour after hour, day after day. Not his concern. He would go to the tent camp that night that was easy to decide and . . . Corrie handed back the binoculars that were under the scrim net, but Rat did not take them. Instead, he indicated another village that was further from the road running between the mountains. Corrie raised the binoculars to his eyes again and aimed them at the last village. He saw men and women and children on the move, and a boy with a dog, carrying a stick and driving goats. There were women at the back of their homes, washing clothes in zinc buckets, and men gathered around a well. A few sat in the shadow of buildings and smoked, but there was a crowd beyond the village.

  A stone was thrown. Corrie tilted his view, followed it and found the cross, the body slung from it, convulsing. He saw fists raised in anger but could not hear, at that distance, the shouts. He felt detached from it. A man was hanging by his arms from a cross, and stones were being thrown at him and his face bled and was swollen, but he had dark skin – was of African origin – was not Belcher. A man would be crucified as an apostate for any offence against God, but the slow killing had most likely been ordered because the condemned had been accused of spying. He supposed that older people considered a ‘good death’ would be one in the night, asleep in one’s own bed. A ‘bad death’ would be in the hands of an unforgiving enemy, having the process eked out as a spectacle. He’d thought about that every evening of his weeks in captivity, when he had considered each night might be his last. Jericho had not mentioned there was a spy in the villages. If there was one – other than Belcher – it would be extremely significant. Perhaps he was a spy and perhaps he was not – but his death on the cross was a certainty. Corrie handed back the binoculars. Rat said they would make a scrape, because there was no cover, and drape more scrim over it, and they’d have a day to kill. The man
might live that long, might not. It would be a long day – they always were behind the lines.

  Chapter 6

  A lingering death. Corrie watched it.

  Beside him was Rat with the rifle that had been test-fired on the range; it was precious enough to have special packaging. The cross, and the victim, were far away, beyond the weapon’s range. Corrie couldn’t read Rat well, but didn’t think the long death of the dark-skinned man, and his body’s occasional movements, interested the marksman particularly. He reckoned Rat to be a cold beggar, focused. Which could, pretty much, have been a description of himself by Human Resources, or any of those who sat alongside him in the work area overlooking the Thames. Some would have declared their wish to have one chance, one shot, to put the man on the cross out of his misery, and to cheat those who had put him there. But he was not Corrie’s problem, and it did not seem as if he were Rat’s either.