Jericho's War

by Gerald Seymour

  Neither of the museum men had come with her. One had pleaded fatigue and one said that he had grit in his eye and the journey would aggravate the inflammation. Abandoned by them, too – join the fucking queue. What left the ship? The rats did. She’d been abandoned by other archaeologists as well. Henry slumped in self-pity on the back seat and was driven at a formal pace towards some ruins further up the road. She hoped there to regain the neutrality that she’d once owned.

  It was a flat road and ran through featureless countryside. There were places where culverts were planned and initial digging had taken place, the concrete piping brought up, but these had been left uncompleted, and other places where pylon poles had been dumped and never raised, cables slung under them. A track to the right led towards the next village, which was on a steep-sided hill, with narrow gaps between the homes, high buildings and steep shadows. A ruined vehicle, toppled on its side and burned out, lay beside the road a mile short of the turning: it had been there as long as Henry had, a relic of one of the first drone strikes. Four had been killed, and she thought it stayed there as a reminder to men always to be wary. She was not supposed to be a participant, but had been ‘volunteered’, the shilling pressed hard into the palm of her hand.

  They passed two women leading donkeys: it looked like the kind of simple, charming scene that tourists – if there had been any, and there were not – would have wanted to photograph, but the drivers swerved and hurried by. The machine-gunner in the second vehicle pivoted to cover the women with the weapon’s barrel: the panniers on the flanks of the beasts were loaded heavily with vegetables, where explosives could be hidden. Some outing, she snorted to herself. Some escape from ‘cabin fever’ ravages.

  But good to get out, away – even if it was not an escape.

  The major had manufactured a reason for the journey, and had invited himself to the garrison camp at Marib. He started out with his usual escort. He would go to Marib, would report and flatter a little, ingratiate himself, and then would return to his own base – after a small diversion.

  The weapons were armed as they left the track leading to his camp. On the far side of the main Sana’a to Marib road was the twenty-eight centuries-old wall, marking where a civilisation of great sophistication had flourished, and where now dust and dirt settled and lizards had their homes. The mortar holding those well-cut stones had crumbled and would never be repaired. Across his lap was a British-made infantry rifle, a prestigious weapon presented to him by trainers at a course in Taiz. The diversion would take him off the main route from Marib, as he returned, and on to the track leading to the isolated tents and ditches where the woman was.

  A little more of the Bramshill experience, and what he had learned there, excited him. A group of them would gather most evenings in the college bar, late, when the ‘scholars’ on the course had gone to their beds. Two from the northwest of England, one from the south Midlands, a Scotsman, an Irishman from Belfast, a Sri Lankan and himself – the sole Yemeni going after that diploma. All male. Talk was of women. Extraordinary to the Arab. Vigorous talk of women, conquests, success, and one voice louder than the rest – a ‘bluff’ called, as the expression went. The target chosen was a short-term catering manageress – ‘here today and gone tomorrow’ – and with a face that mirrored the frosts on the Jabal Haraz as winter came, every button fastened and a wedding ring – it was rumoured that her husband was a tax inspector, and aloof to them and brisk. The south Midlands man was from Leamington Spa, and specialised in online fraud. Not a chance, not a possibility, no hope there, and it had been a Tuesday night, and the course had finished on the Friday afternoon. They’d laid bets, thinking he’d ‘throw in the towel’ and confess failure – he had not been in the bar, or seen on the Wednesday or the Thursday evening. The secret was out at breakfast on the Friday morning. She had appeared, her eyes down and her walk hesitant, and the bite mark at her neck should have been better hidden, and there was a defiance in her face: the men called it the look of a ‘well-shagged bird’. Cash was handed over on production of a pair of knickers, and the officer had smelled faintly, as he’d scoffed the full breakfast, of aftershave. The secret – he’d said – was in the scent and in the flattery and in the fact, his voice dropped, that ‘they all like it, like it and want it’.

  The major would go there, to the tent camp. Not, of course, into her tent. Not to undress her, and touch her. Not to go further than, perhaps, to flirt a little.

  It had been a wonderful experience at Bramshill and, though he would not follow the triumph of the scam investigator to its full conclusion, he would pass the time, enjoy the experience, make light flash in her eyes, and hear her laugh. It would be good to see her.

  The passenger would be diabetic.

  The man would carry all the necessary documentation: certificates from a hospital in London and verification that he was undergoing treatment. He would take with him a packet of syringes, and the airline would already have been notified of the passenger, and there would be needle holes in the body, presumably in the upper arms to show the daily usage, and the packet of needles would be opened as if already in use. The bottom item in the package would not contain insulin, but instead the detonation chemical he was still working on. He was close to success.

  The Ghost had now decided he would require 200 grams of PETN explosive. The pentaerythritol tetranitrate was in the form of granulated crystals. That amount – sometimes his mind worked in metric and sometimes in pounds and ounces – could be inside a sterilised condom and inserted near to the skin of the body, not deep inside, and the syringe needle would easily find it. He believed it best to instruct the ‘martyr’ to go to the aircraft toilet and open his shirt, bare his skin, then to manoeuvre himself against the wall of the fuselage so the maximum amount of blast would be funnelled that way.

  The nurse would be back the next day and the place for the incision would be agreed, and the time needed for convalescence, so that the courier – a dry smile slipped across the usually humourless face – could walk without showing discomfort from the departure concourse and through checks and via the privileged lounge and along the travelator and on to the aircraft and to his seat. That was the plan.

  The Emir would not overrule him. Sole responsibility rested with him, and all the facilities he needed would be found. He had been offered great power and great trust.

  He would have liked to have gone outside and to have sat in the warmth and felt the wind on his face and been alone, the quiet brushing against him. He assumed, but did not know, that rumours of his work had reached the Americans and the Europeans. It was possible, but he did not know, that the area where he lived and hid had been identified. The chance existed that his enemies – crusaders, infidels, cross-carriers – were sufficiently familiar with his talents to have traced his life back to the time that he had stood in the interrogation block of the Saudi kingdom’s mabahith and been photographed full face and in profile, but he did not know. He could not walk outside if there was little or broken cloud cover, and there were days in the full summer months, when the heat burned the ground and the wind had dropped, when he could go out only if his face was wrapped and he disguised his walk. He stayed in the room given him, and the day trickled by, and nothing happened, except that the woman of the house cooked in her kitchen and the inside area was cleaned by the daughter who now sat against the step that led down into the room allocated him. Her eyes never left him. He could have gone to the door and closed it, could also have gone to her father and demanded the child should be kept apart from him, but why? On the pretence that it was impertinent to allow her to be so close to a man who was trying to solve complex puzzles. He did not speak to her, nor she to him. Later that same day, he had been assured, a generator would arrive in the village and the house would have its own supply of uninterrupted electricity.

  He felt at ease here; he would stay for as long as the security people, who governed where he slept and when he moved, permitted it. The courier w
ould be a diabetic, and it would be what he was told the Americans called an SIIED – Surgically Implanted Improvised Explosive Device – and the 200 grams, 7 ounces, would be compacted together and squeezed into a plastic holder, ideally a condom. He was getting so near to the conclusion, near enough to touch. He could have demanded that the woman working in her kitchen was quieter, and that the child was shifted . . . often he looked at her then away if she saw his glance. She studied him, never wavered from it.

  There would be a meeting soon with himself, the Emir, and the nurse who was trusted enough to supervise the Emir’s health (the surgeon brought up for the donkey’s death had disappointed them, might already be dead because of the disappointment), and the men tasked with the logistics – choosing the right airport and right flight and right timing – and with the ‘courier’ who sought istishhad, an heroic death.

  They were positioned. The ambush was set.

  Belcher listened, heard only a crow’s call.

  He had heard men in Syria, after the escape and when he had joined a fighting unit, and when he’d been accepted and his loyalty no longer questioned, saying that the Americans and the Europeans believed the jihadis to be a rabble of peasants, incapable of coordinated tactical strikes. The commander of a small operation, minuscule in the grander scale – the death of a middle-ranking police officer whose presence on their territory would not be tolerated – had dictated to them how it would happen, and now his plan was in place. Where a low stone wall had been built, a hundred yards from the road, a man now aimed the RPG-7 rocket-launcher: he was Saudi. Forward of him, and facing back up the road along which the major would come, was a machine-gunner who had a Chinese-made Type 67 with a filled 100-round belt container and lightweight tripod, and he would bring down the suppression fire, halt the jeep, create the opportunity for the man with the rocket-launcher. Alongside the machine-gun was a fighter, Kashmiri, with an assault rifle, and another beside the rocket-launcher, and Belcher himself was up the road, behind the ambush. His task was to blast any of the escort who fled from the initial contact back up the road. The lines of fire were good, all determined beforehand, and the map drawn in the dirt was accurate, and the informant in the police camp had promised that the major would either be leaving at this time, or a few minutes before.

  Belcher reflected that he could not have called himself any less deceitful than a policeman who earned a miserable pittance in the service of his country. Given the shambles the country was in, he might not even be paid. They had performed the Dhuhr prayer, and might need to scramble through the Asr prayer before the ambush was sprung. Belcher could remember how he had recited, learned and been a good student in his prison days, swallowing what had been given him. An officer had warned, Just be very careful, young man, of what you get yourself into. All right in here, keeping your nice little body from a rapist’s dick, but nothing is forever. Ditch it when the gate closes behind you. My advice.

  He waited and listened. The first shot would be fired from the Type 67, where their commander was. The intention was to kill each and every man in the detail, not just the officer. It was a level of deceit, betrayal, that Belcher understood. He might bring in – from the information he gave – a drone strike, or a fixed-wing fast-jet strike on the men among whom he lived. He might see them packed off to Paradise, and might himself hear the ordnance explode as he scampered to safety, and he would not shed a tear.

  He let minutes slip by, and listened, and thought of her, Henry; when her picture was in his mind he felt stronger. They were close to danger but had achieved so little that mattered as yet: he did not have the targets, nor the killing ground, and the window through which they had crawled was open only for a limited time. The sun had broken through, and it was as pleasant an afternoon as was to be found in that part of Yemen, with good warmth and a light wind, and quiet – and he thought nothing was as it seemed, not ever.

  Slime came back, eased under the rim of the scrim net. The Boss was under it, asleep. They had swapped over positions an hour before and Slime had felt the edge between the Boss and Rat. The Boss had crawled away and Slime had settled beside Rat and they had started again on the scans of the ground below the slope, and where Rat might find a shooting position, and where the goatherd was with his flock and his dog. Now, time for food, and that brought Slime to their second position, where the Bergens were.

  ‘How was it?’ he’d asked.

  ‘We were lucky,’ Rat had answered.

  ‘You always say that luck is earned – lucky how?’

  ‘There was a snake, poisonous, asleep in the sunshine, curled up. The kid was coming towards us and the goats were spooked and the dog knew something was there, and he’d the weapon ready. Maybe two paces and maybe two seconds – we were near screwed. Our man reached forward and took the snake by its neck and threw it towards the kid and his goats and his dog and the luck was that the snake didn’t have time to whack him with some juice. I’d say that was lucky.’

  ‘You serious, threw a snake . . .?’

  And they’d done some more scanning with the scope and the binoculars and Slime realised that Rat had done his talking and there wasn’t going to be a eulogy. Might have acknowledged that it was a big decision to grab a snake by the neck and lob it, but it did not mean that Rat liked him or had offered him any sort of friendship.

  The weather was useful and they’d be trusting it to hold. It was warm and the wind had dropped, and Rat – Slime thought – would have rated his chances good of dropping a target at a thousand yards. A little of Slime was falling out of love with Rat, had been since they had come out of uniform, Rat shortly before Slime. Once they were back in UK, and living close to Hereford, the old bond had seemed to weaken: Slime, with Gwen, had a life to be getting on with, and Rat did not . . . basic point was that Slime acknowledged it but had not had the balls to say down the phone, Sorry, Rat, it’s been great but I’m not the man for it any longer. Great memories, and all that, much that I’m grateful for, but find someone else. He should have, but didn’t know how. And he didn’t think Rat had another friend, another name on his phone, anyone else he might have propositioned. But this was about a fucking aeroplane, and a fucking great expanse of sea, and about a fucking queue of passengers – they didn’t all have to be friends, did they? Just had to get a job done, and it would pay well and cover the deposit on the flat, and a new kitchen there – and he’d bloody near wet himself because of the kid with the dog and the goats and the rifle, while the guide had shaken like a leaf in the wind. It troubled him that the two people on whom he depended to get himself back to that flat, and Gwen, were so bitchy with each other.

  Slime would do them some food; they would not have to eat together. There were some military, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, who lovingly thought out each day’s menus: for Slime, food was for sustenance. He would not look at the description of contents. He hoped that had been sufficient excitement for one day, but Slime doubted it, and could almost sense the pace quickening.

  It usually did where there was silence, and a clear blue sky for all hell to drop from.

  She had stopped them short of Sirwah, and before they’d reached the junction where the road went north to Al Jawr. They were by the start of the road’s bends where it began to climb, and it was incredible to Henry that she had not noticed that particular stone before. The stone was faced.

  There were boulders around it, eroded from weather and perhaps from a long-dried-out riverbed, but this stone had been cut and the roughness smoothed by a craftsman. It was enough for her, and she sat beside the stone, enjoying a mouthful of water, and allowed herself to wonder – not whether the man from the hill above her camp would survive, and not whether the boy would escape the cross, or about passengers crowding to their seats, heaving bags into lockers above – but about the stone. She had bitten at her bottom lip, scraped her fingernails into the palms of her hands, pondered the artefact. What civilisation had brought it there, which men had laboured to shape i
t, and what architect had chosen it to hold fast the pieces of an outer wall. And what had been the fate of that building and of those people? Yes, she knew the history and could recite at speed the stories of the Sabean era – of its sophistication and of Sheba and the great caravans, and the destruction by rats of a dam on which prosperity relied. Where had it all gone? She brightened. The troops caught her mood and their faces seemed lighter, as if a weight had been lifted. Smiles spread. She would walk, like a hunting dog keeping its nose a half-inch from the ground, searching for scents, and she would look for the signs of homes or places of worship or fortifications or foundations, and she would be where no other archaeologist had been before. Euphoria caught her and she stood and stretched and smiled and turned away from the road and started her search.

  She heard the short burst of machine-gun fire from up the road where it bent into the defile.

  Next was the explosion. The noise sounded like a heavy steel box being hit hard with a sledgehammer.

  Then rifle fire, some single shots, and the repeating blast of automatic fire.

  The peace was snatched, the mood stolen.

  Away to the right, up the road and at the mouth of the defile, a policeman appeared. His uniform was torn and his face was blackened; he had already been hit because he couldn’t run, only hobbled. He would have seen the vehicles, recognised them as military. He made what Henry assumed to be his last effort, throwing what strength remained to him, into a final stagger towards them. The soldiers, her escort, had their rifles up. Two men followed the policeman, closing quickly on him, but did not fire. The policeman’s collapse seemed inevitable. He was sprawled in the centre of the road, perhaps twenty-five yards from the troops, and the two men came close to where the policeman lay. His body convulsed and blood dribbled from his mouth, wetting the road surface. He was shot at close range. She had meant to look away as the rifle barrel was lowered and aimed against his head, but she was not fast enough, and she saw that the head disintegrated; a low scream, a cry, was stifled in her throat. More shots were fired but out of sight.