A soldier murmured at Henry, in his own language, ‘There was nothing we could have done, ma’am, they would have killed us, then him. There was no threat to you, and you are our responsibility, you alone. You are not a part of this. I am sorry, ma’am.’
She thought he was sorry, at what she had seen, and thought him absolutely correct. She should not take one side against the other, that was the reason she was permitted to stay in the camp on the outskirts of Marib, but she was a woman steeped in deceit.
The shots became desultory. Smoke climbed.
Henry started to run. The soldiers hesitated: they would not have known how to stop her, could not have grappled with her or clutched at her clothing. She was past them and away from the fashioned stone and her knees came up and her stride lengthened. She was, she recognised it, a participant, and also had limited training in triage. It was her instinct to go forward; she did not know what she would find when she rounded the road’s bend, but she ran hard anyway.
Belcher fired. He thought it would be his last shot.
Not much left to aim at that was worth another bullet. One policeman had gone down the slight hill that came out of the tight valley where the ambush had been, but he had been followed and the sounds of shots said, clearly, that his escape had foundered. Another had tried to sprint up the hill and away, but the machine-gun had taken him below the hip and he had fallen: Belcher could not shoot at him to finish the job – or end the agony – because one of his own was chasing hard towards him.
His final shot went where all the others had gone. Eighteen times he had squeezed on the trigger, finger tightening on the bar, aiming at the engine block of the escort jeep. He had not killed, had not claimed a hit – was a changed man. If the ambush had been in the days before the sweet-talk of the agent had severed his commitment, he would have fired to kill and each time shouted an exhortation to God, then aimed again. He had targeted the engine and it had exploded, fire engulfing it.
The lead jeep, the principal target’s, was not ablaze, though the main body of it was a twisted mess of metal. It was where the major was. Dead? Perhaps. Fatally injured? Might have been. Without hope of survival? No possibility of it. The major’s legs were trapped in the body of the jeep but his body and arms hung free, his head against the road surface. When the others shouted, Belcher aped them, a flawless imitation of a fighter’s joy when killing. Peculiar, but an old face came back to him. Darren’s. Top boy in their group, and he’d stayed free because there had been no CCTV that mattered and because the kid from Colenso Street had not snitched on him. Darren would have dreamed of a moment such as this – power, the thud of a rifle butt in the shoulder joint on firing, the dead and the injured; belonging. Darren would have rated it.
Belcher saw a policeman move near to the rear wheel of the lead jeep. He was mostly hidden, his snub-barrelled machine pistol working slowly around so that its aim was relevant. His uniform was ripped and his skin scorched; the smoke from the vehicle burning near him must be half choking him. Belcher could have shot him. Instead he watched him. The policeman, not long to live, struggled to find a target, to sell his life at a price.
His ma had come to Holme House on his release day. Back on the cell wing, the Yemenis had blessed him, hugged and kissed him, and told him where he should be and when, and they had grinned at him and protested jealousy. An officer had said, ‘Keep your nose clean, lad, and remember you don’t owe them anything, walk away from them. If you don’t, then the spooks will be after you and, believe me, can make life difficult . . . Good luck.’ He had his few bits of clothing and possessions in a bin liner, and they’d hardly spoken as they’d made their way into Hartlepool by bus. He had not told her where he was going, what he was doing, and they were strangers. She’d peeled off, back to her job at the brewery, and he’d trudged home to Colenso, dumped his bag, checked his watch, and slept for a couple of hours on his bed, the noise of doors slamming and keys rattling and chains clanking and shouts and screams finally gone.
When he’d woken, he’d changed his socks and left a one-line note on the table. He had walked down to the sea and had sat on the wall and the wind had been brisk and sometimes spray had bounced up and over him and he had sucked in the air and the tang of it and felt the cold of the water and had been alone except for old people walking small dogs beside the wall. Drenched, and with a purpose, he had walked back into Hartlepool and towards the centre and had stopped off at Shades. The bar, his old haunt and where Darren might have been, had the windows covered with plywood screens. The doors were locked and weeds grew through where the walls met against the pavement, and there was a For Sale sign. He’d checked his watch – wondered if he would ever again see the wall and the lighthouse and the old fort where they kept artillery pieces and which the German ships had shelled, and where the monkey had been hanged as a spy. He had gone to the town’s railway station and the man was waiting for him, as they’d said he would be. An envelope was passed to him, fast, and the man was gone: a passport with a picture that was a good enough likeness but a changed name; a train ticket to London, another for the airport and an evening flight to Bucharest. He was on his way to join people who cared for him, wanted him. There was another ticket from Bucharest to the Turkish border with Syria. He thought Darren probably still rotted in Hartlepool, but would have liked to have seen him and humiliate the bastard.
Belcher saw the wounded policeman find his target. He tried to hold the barrel steady, grimacing from the pain, and attempted to aim.
A shot fired. A scream. Shouting. A volley of gunfire and the policeman dead, and the scream was from the Kashmiri.
It was over and they had relaxed. The Kashmiri, a decent enough boy and in love with his God, but slow to learn, had risen from his position in cover and had started to walk forward, had exposed himself: he talked about war with Indian troops on a demarcation line and about apple orchards where his father farmed. Now he shrieked.
Belcher saw Henry.
The guys on the road, who had followed the Kashmiri, knew her. Who didn’t? Most did – any man who had an injury and who couldn’t go to the hospital in Marib and see a doctor there, and any villager whose wife or child was sick. She was known, was tolerated, and was ushered forward. She had nothing, no small bag of bandages or wound pads or disinfectants or sterilisers, only her hands. She was on her knees beside the Kashmiri and had quietened him. The commander had a short-bladed knife and she showed him that he must cut away the material of the trousers, and the way she knelt allowed the Kashmiri’s head to rest against her thighs. Belcher emerged from cover and went forward. He saw the wound, exposed, and the blood the Kashmiri was losing too quickly, and she had snapped her fingers, hard, noisily, and pointed at a scarf worn by one of the men. She took the knife from the commander’s hand, did not ask for it but took it, and slashed the scarf, and then tore it noisily and made a tourniquet.
Belcher was close to her. Would the tourniquet be good enough? Belcher and she both knew that was unlikely. She shrugged as she saw him. No greeting, nothing with her eyes, no toss of her head. It was difficult to hear her Arabic, crude and colloquial, but Belcher thought the drift was that he needed surgery and there was nothing she could do on a roadside. Belcher thought her wonderful – in charge on a narrow Yemeni road where men lay dead and another was dying and where vehicles were broken or were burning and amongst fighters who accepted her as a non-combatant and had made, fucking ridiculous, an honorary bloke of her. She was extraordinary and wonderful and different to any woman he had known, touched, met. But she looked through him as if he were not there, seeing only the stones and dirt and the few bushes that were rooted deep in dry soil. The sun shone on her gold hair and her scarf had slipped.
Henry went close to the major, and bent down.
She thought he lived, just, and thought he saw her, remembered her.
His face was blank, no expression. She felt a hand on her shoulder. A light touch and not intrusive, polite and yet firm. She
looked up, away from the major who might have recognised her. The commander – the man in charge – gestured with his head that she should step back. She did, it was important to show submission at the correct moments or her position of privilege would be gone, water into sand. He held a pistol in his hand. She rose up and felt a great and numbing tiredness – she was not a battlefield nurse. She was an academic lost in a world of history and she dug holes in the ground and looked for evidence of the people who had lived millennia before, and she might have been just about fucking irrelevant except that Jericho had recruited her. She walked away and heard the scrape, metal on metal, as the pistol was armed. She froze the indifference on her face, let none of them – including Belcher – strip it off her; she had gone ten paces when the single shot was fired, and she kept on walking.
She was around the corner, where the valley bent to the left, when the pick-up came past her. She was in the centre of the road and its driver had to swerve fast, tyres squealing on the chip stones at the edge, to miss her. They had their casualty, and what they did with him – hospital or death in a village home on a litter piled with blankets and without painkillers – was their concern, but he’d have Paradise to look forward to – and the world was cruel. Henry did not know what Paradise was, nor believe it was there, beckoning her.
As she walked she waited for the question in her mind to be answered. Would the soldiers she had left down the road confront the fighting men? The pick-up went past them, slowed so as not to hurt any of them, and she understood that ‘arrangements’ were more easily made than enmities. Belcher had been in the pick-up and had not looked at her. If it had been her own safety at stake, her own life on the line, they would not have raised their rifles and stood firm to defend her. There had once been a private military contractor in a hotel in Muscat, and he’d been with a diplomat and she’d been invited to dinner and he’d told her that he was in protection but didn’t call himself a ‘bodyguard’, and most certainly was not a ‘bullet-catcher’. He’d expected her in his room on the Fifth Floor and would have been flexing his muscles and celebrating his success while she was in the taxi going to her own hotel. That man, smug and well dressed, was not going to jump in front of his diplomat if danger surged, nor were these boys, and she could think of no reason why they should have. They’d melt. So, she had helped the side that was winning, had done it in public view.
She reached her own people, looked back and saw that the smoke had thinned, almost died, and saw a speck high up in the skies and knew it was not a drone but a vulture. She wondered if they would have had time enough to gather in numbers before an armoured column came from the Marib garrison camp; whether they would have settled on the corpses before the bags came and the mess was cleared.
She did not wish to be a part of it and yet she did not know how to quit.
Out from under the scrim net, Corrie lay on his stomach.
He had no need for binoculars.
Combat sounds had their own resonance and carried well. An explosion that could have been a detonated mine or a mortar shell landing or an RPG’s missile had been followed by shooting from rifles and a machine-gun. It had been one-sided, not lasted long enough for an exchange of fire as in a fully fledged contact. The pick-up came back, racing down the centre of the road, and a van took to the hard shoulder and the edge of a ditch to avoid it, kids scattering and the women behind them dragging donkeys off the road. He thought it was the one in which Belcher had travelled. Corrie Rankin rarely stood in judgement. If the guy played the part of a fighter then he had to fight; if he took the role of a killer for God, then he must kill.
Waiting was the hardest. Always had been. They’d had lectures by the veterans of the Cold War who reckoned the best years of their lives were at the checkpoints in divided Berlin or on the inner German border of fences and minefields and attack dogs and armed guards. Their hope had been that a Joe would come through, and they might wait all night and listen all the hours for a volley of shots or the pandemonium of the dogs barking, or for the sirens – and might wait through the next day and the next night. They might have a paperback to read while they waited, or an old copy of a Times crossword . . . and all of them as they waited would have felt that shit feeling of responsibility that stroked their self-esteem. Could not escape it, like a damn shadow at sunset. There were probably young people now, shivering up inside the Arctic Circle, on Finnish territory, waiting for a Joe to come in from Russia. Corrie was in Yemen, where his life was forfeit, as were Rat’s and Slime’s and Belcher’s, and that of the girl with the silly name and the water on her face, and he must not and could not hurry the process. Had to wait.
She came back. Two army jeeps, a radio antennae wobbling on the second one. She sat alone, small on the back seat of the first. As they came close to the tent camp, a convoy was coming the other way at speed, from Marib. Three personnel carriers and two ambulances, and her little convoy ducked off the road and allowed them through. He could not imagine why she had wanted to go up the road. Corrie wanted to protect her, Henry, and did not know how.
On his stomach, Corrie could smell the earth. He watched her come back to the tent camp and felt the emptiness around him, and there were only ant columns to entertain him. Like competing teams, one crowd of them were black and the other red, more sinister somehow, and they were on a collision course until they were about to get into combat, but the black ants chickened out and veered away and the red ants kept straight on until he thought they were about to swarm over him. He rolled on to his side and then on to his back, shielding his eyes against the sun, and then rolled again and gave them space to go by, and he heard the ‘weak link’ – it wasn’t shameful to be wrong in Corrie’s book, but shameful not to admit it. He had slept, the guide had not. He was warned, handed binoculars. Corrie, with his own eyes, would not have seen a dust disturbance far to the left of them on the plateau. He crawled underneath the scrim net. In a few minutes he saw the camel train, a biblical caravan, far away and hazy, moving at the same steady and reliable speed as the column of red-backed ants.
He waited, and wondered how she was and whether she had washed yet or would wait for the sun to slip. It would come fast when it came, too fast, the time for a killing.
Chapter 10
Corrie watched the sunset, no longer caring where the ants went, what route they’d taken.
He thought there was something majestic about the sun dipping far to the west, first perching on the summits of mountains and then sliding, disappearing, all the time throwing out blood-red light across the foothills and the flatness of the plain. In the moments before it sank from sight there seemed to be a rush of cold, and they were – the four of them – alone on this land roof that gave them a view down to a tent camp and a village built like a fortress, and another village where a traitor was living. As his mentor and tutor Clive Martin had told him, poetry tended to escape Corrie; the nearest he had known to the beauty of the sun going down would have been beside the freshwater loch on the island, a pearl of the Hebrides. There they had huddled under canvas on four of the evenings as the rain had lashed down but, on a rare dry evening, just before the edge of darkness, the eagles had flown down the loch’s south side and headed for their night perches. A moment of beauty, and this. Now he was losing the line of the road and no longer saw the boy who minded goats, who had survived because he had run from a poisonous snake. In the villages, smoke rose, diffuse against the collapsing light.
He knew little enough of Arab nights, how fast they came.
Night and day had barely been different inside the garage in the weeks when his reputation had been forged. And there’d been little sign of day or night when the hood had been placed over his head and he’d been taken out of the garage and to the room where they interrogated him, perched on a chair or dropped on a concrete floor, had burned and beaten him to learn more, to discover what price they should ask for him. Total blackness in the garage when the boy from the northeast came back to se
e him, had kept coming. And every day his leg hurt a little more and every day they would refuse to entertain a repeat visit by the doctor, and Corrie would be awake while the others slept and then the boy would come, and the whole building was quiet.
He sat outside the scrim net as the light fell. Jamil was close beside him, and Corrie said what they would do later when the camp slept. He did not ask for the guide’s advice but told him what would happen.
He had not rushed it with his captor. He had learned his name. Then he had learned where he came from, and his age. He’d been told of the conversion and recruitment. He had not pushed the boy so his tale gushed out, but had gradually teased it out of him. Had heard about the Shades bar and the wall by the sea where it was good to sit and watch the big waves, and about Darren and stealing things from the shopping centre by Victory Square. It was all one-way traffic, questions never asked of him. He sensed the solitariness of the boy, and how the excitement of recruitment had palled. Did not suggest that the boy should switch allegiance, but merely learn. He controlled him. At any point the boy could have called him out on his questioning, then it would have been goodbye and goodnight. Might have been, Sorry, mate, but why all the questions about me?, could have been, You’re pushing your luck and just for talking to you I could get shot. I’m not coming back . . . But he had never said so. He’d brought extra water and some tablets and had wanted to talk, and Corrie had come to know him: he was Tobias Darke and had become Towfik al-Dhakir, and then he earned the name of Belcher from Corrie. He had worked the boy over as a boxer might, steadily and craftily, destroyed an opponent with an accurate left jab, and the counter never came. His only problem was to ensure he broke the boy before they sold Corrie on, moved him to worse people.
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