‘I think we might be of a bygone age.’
The British spook, Doris, was hosting this week and provided a New Zealand white. Her German colleague, Oskar, would have preferred a drop from the Rhine vineyards, and Hector, the American, was pleading an ulcer and stayed with mineral water. It was late at night, far into the small hours, and they met again to swap a little and to commiserate over much. The Germans had a fine embassy building and the Americans had built a fortress on the hill to the west of old Sana’a, but when Doris entertained they were cramped into a converted cargo container. Oskar had brought her flowers, Hector had not. Maybe because she didn’t bother over her appearance, she had the ability to draw confidences out – and all three were isolated and far from home.
‘It has been made clear enough to me that the Yemen station is down-prioritised, dropping fast, and getting to be more irrelevant by the day.’
Oskar said, ‘I am nagged every week from Berlin. When will I produce material that my customer wants? How the fuck – excuse me, Doris – do I know?’
She was bright and had once been considered a high-flier. Her teenage children were at school there and her husband taught at a local college. She had been in Beirut and Baghdad and the time might be fast approaching when she would quit, apply for a consultancy in a security company, and give VBX a stiff raised finger. The truth was, she knew nothing. She ran no minor agents, and her sources were limited to meetings with army officers and ministry people. ‘I am asked for savings, am also asked for more frequent briefing papers. I don’t know what the hell is going on.’ A little laugh. ‘Tell me, Hector, that you don’t have an agent running loose in Abyan Governorate, Shabwah, Marib. I’ll tell you for nothing, I don’t.’
The American said, ‘My folk are beefing up Syria and Iraq. Yemen is too inactive for them to notice bad shit and they reckon the drones will keep it quiet, whatever it is.’
The German said, ‘I have not reported anything that I considered “classified” this month. It was so much more attractive when we had the Wall to concern us, even Baader and Meinhof who were pygmies but interesting. But we languish here – fill me up, Doris, please.’
Emails from her husband, Finlay, had become less regular. The boys often said he was ‘out’ and they didn’t know when he’d be ‘back’. She assumed there was a woman lurking in the college where he taught computer sciences. The American was talking. Would she care if another woman was bedding her bloke? A bit – damaged pride – but not greatly. She had three assistants and two were barely out of recruitment, and one was already designated for recall. Hector poked her, a sharp finger, with a flicker of irritation. Did they matter, any of them? Achieve anything? Would it be worse if they were not there? ‘Yes, sorry, Hector.’
‘A bygone age, Dorrie, doing things the old way, aren’t your people still stuck there?’
The German, Oskar, would have noted the tone, the acrimony, looked away and focused on the bottle, poured for himself.
‘Not entirely following you, Hector.’
They did it often, harped back to former glories, certainties, a role in the sunshine doing ‘sandy jobs’.
‘You’ve still that throwback down the coast. That Jericho figure, the comic paper chap. What’s he doing? How does he justify his existence? We have a small enough footprint on his doorstep, but we are there. Our people never see him. Here, we try to share a little because this is a crap awful place. He does not. What do you get, Dorrie, from your Jericho? A Christmas card? He is so “bygone” that it is vaudeville. You know he’s hired fixed wing and helicopter lifts these last few days and they’ve gone east, been away a while. You in on that picture?’
It was against the rules of these evenings to ask direct questions of colleagues. ‘Are you currently screwing my wife? Or my ambassador’s wife?’ Not appropriate. Inflection and nuance were acceptable, but this was a full volley in her face.
She hesitated, gave herself time to think. Oskar watched her. The German had been in Muscat three months before, had tried to meet Jericho, had been granted an appointment with a pot of tea on a hotel patio, had reckoned him an ‘actor of skill’ and an ‘operator of resource’ and had learned nothing of what assets he possessed.
‘I didn’t know.’
‘On the same side and with the same aims. A difficult place – that’s a mild estimation – and helpful if we are in step together. If you were running a show, Dorrie, and we were outside of any loop you drew, then it would be regarded as harmful to relations between us – and I don’t think Oskar would feel differently. You did not know?’
‘No I didn’t.’
A blight on the late evening. They left, went their separate ways in their separate armour-plated cavalcades. She hardly knew Jericho. She had seen him twice in London and once he had waddled down a corridor and she had thought he would be lining himself up for a coronary if he did not do something about his weight, and once she had shared an elevator with him and reckoned he’d shed two stones, and there had been a smile and an effusive handshake that she had found insincere, and he’d been described by another officer as having ‘ears in high places’. They would not mount something on her territory without advance warning, would they? Surely not. She attacked the bottle. They wouldn’t let Jericho trample across her. Would they?
He slept. Jericho snored like a purring cat. He was not a man kept awake by tension or stress.
He enjoyed the sleep of the righteous: had done what he could. It had been, in a phrase he used often – ‘all right leaving me’. Had he been awake, he could have mused that he had an officer in place, with a protection escort, and a courier, and an agent who was at the heart of a conspiracy that would take lives, hundreds of them. But he did not dream of the personnel, nor of a crowded concourse of the ignorant and the innocent, nor of the smooth sand-scape at the bottom of the dark depths of the fracture and the trough and the basin. He slept well, and the quality of the steak, and of the bottle that had gone with it, and the brandy that had set the seal on the evening, aided him. Had he dreamed about the threat of recall, then it would have been the prospect of ending up in a room in one of the backpacker hotels close to his aunt’s pint-sized apartment that would have bothered him, and a sort of poverty, but above all a feeling that he ‘no longer mattered’. But, such considerations did not afflict him, and he was dead to the world, and would be until Woman Friday came with his cup of tea, Earl Grey, one sugar. He liked to say that rest should always be taken when available during an operational countdown. The next night, or the night after, sleep might evade him.
Crannog was near to fulfilment; it had to be because his boys could not survive indefinitely on hostile ground. Had he turned it over in his mind, which he did not, he could have trumpeted his role in bringing the turncoat Belcher to Yemen, and letting him wait for a moment of importance. Close to that opening window, and it would be a triumph, one recorded in the hidden archives of VBX, and would be his. He’d not forgotten the words that Malvolio addressed to Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, still lodged in his mind from his schooldays. They often drifted into his consciousness, Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em. They could argue when it was over, back in the building by the Thames, which most applied to himself. He was asleep and his mind was blanked, and Belcher did not trouble him.
Belcher’s mouth seemed to be ablaze. The cavity was an aching well and the pills did little to ease the pain. He tossed on his bed. That night he shared a room with two others. He had not been told whether there was an additional problem with billeting new fighters moved from other villages, or whether these had been put in there, close, to watch over him.
He could not have stood it, the work with the pliers, if it had been one of the security men. He would have shouted and fought to get off the chair and not cared whether the fucking tooth was diseased or was good and healthy, but she had done it. She had rammed her body against his, and flexed her arm mu
scles, had pulled, and had locked her eyes on him, had seemed to will him through it, and might have saved his life, might have allayed any suspicion that had built around him. The other two grunted and rolled in their sleep. His hands were behind his head and he could press a wrist against the tooth wound and sometimes that diverted the pain. Belcher thought Henry the most important woman he had known; she was from a different world. And when they came to the run-in, the last hours, he would get back to her for the chaotic flight and – God alone knew how – but he would be beside her.
There had been no one beside him when he had arrived in Syria, dumped into a holding camp. No welcome and no line of guys to slap his back and thank him for coming and sharing their danger, and no officer on a parade ground to hand him a beret and put a rifle in his hands. Within a week he had seen the poverty and destruction that came in the wake of combat: kids too traumatised to cry, old people sat numbed and starving to death because they had lost the will to live, and the misery of bereavement. Streets flattened, shops torched, where the coalition had bombed and there was still a stench of death. The fighters with the greatest certainty were those from far to the south, Sudan and Somalia, and from Chechnya. And he had seen the women: teenage girls, tiny figures in all-black robes and face veils. They sat in classrooms – if one could be found that still had chairs and tables and windows – and absorbed the Book’s teachings. Two Brits from Birmingham had spoken to him in secrecy – they’d have been beaten if found – and they had been virgins and now did sex for front-line fighters. They had seemed to think they’d be rolling bandages and working in a soup kitchen. And there had been a firing squad.
He had not seen a beheading, but had watched a firing squad dispose of a dozen guys who the week before had been their fighting friends, comrades. The dozen were deserters. The squad who would shoot to kill had fought alongside them. Lined up, some had cried and some had been stoic, and behind them had been a view to savour. Flat, green, with a big sky, and a lone tractor still working at clearing a ditch, and a pit already dug for the boys facing the rifles. He had had to watch. The country behind, where any overflying bullets would land, was like that between Sedgefield and Trimdon, inland from his home town. He’d seen them jump from the impact then spill down. He had been the only ethnic white boy there and within three months he was singled out. Better food, good clothing, a girl if he wanted her and a job for him.
A smuggler’s group had captured aid workers. What were they worth? The price was half a million American dollars each. His task was to get familiar with them, find out what price was acceptable to the kidnappers for them. He thought the group were like the boys in Shades bar, chancers, but he was not going to get shot there, or have a leg blown off, or get a girl-child from the Midlands or East London chucked at him, howling for her sisters and the period she’d missed. He’d been dropped at a villa near to Aleppo. This was a good number and he wouldn’t be hurrying to leave. This was better than being under the bombers in the fighting zone.
Because he could not sleep, he thought of her, of Henry.
Dawn came on, and the first stirrings and voices and orders and coughing in the camp, and Henry heard the vehicle engine.
It started up, revved hard; there might have been a light frost in the night. More voices came – men shouting goodbyes to each other – and then the engine sound faded. She covered her hair, slipped on her robe, took a gulp of water, then opened the tent flap.
The car was at the barrier. A hand reached out either side, the two guards were clasped, and one leaned forward to have his cheek kissed. As the car accelerated, dust blew up behind it and obscured her view. The boys were from the museum. They would have regarded themselves as privileged to have been in her company on a dig. She had cursed them and later apologised, but they had still left. If it had been the violence down the road when the police major was assassinated, they would have come to her, eyes dropped, and mumbled that they did not feel there was sufficient security in the camp. But they had not. Henry could not blame them. They were nice boys, educated, and if they’d been in the Gulf would have gone to Western chain hotels and drunk German or Italian beer and watched big movies from Hollywood. They should have been her friends – but they quit on her before the sun had been fully risen. No farewell, no goodbye, nothing to express gratitude for the time she had given to them. Rats leaving the ship. She was alone now but for her maid, had no radio link and no internet connection. She waited for her tea to be brought.
The sky, lightening, was clear. It would be a good day – and she did not think she would be there for many more of them. She had to believe in the promises made to her, but didn’t know if they were empty. She knew nothing, only that, after they’d left, she felt more isolated, and trembled and ground her fingernails hard into the palms of her hands. She went inside to dress.
Jamil was a creature of the night, most at ease when the sun had gone and the moon thin. The leopard moved in silence, as Jamil did.
The women and the children of the village were inside.
It was past the time the men spat out the last of the chewed qat leaves; they would still have the sense of dreamy pleasure that the drug gave. He would sit beside a couple of them, and prompt with his reedy voice, like a songbird’s call, and absorb their responses. He did not take the qat himself, nor had his father. He listened and watched. He heard the cries of two goats, and went close to where they were held on short halters, fat with meat, and men in black and wearing face masks passed him, carrying rifles and grenade-launchers. He was a mirage and moved on before anyone asked a question of him, up steep alleyways and through darkened yards and across the sewer ditches.
He stayed long enough to confirm all he had expected to find, and more. He had heard talk of a funeral and gossip about a wedding – and thought he had justified Mr Jericho’s faith in him, and went away into the darkness. He had not been seen; a leopard would barely have noticed him. He went out of the village as the grey light grew, slowly, and down the hill and around the roadblock, then loped away and towards the distant tent camp, and towards the goat path and on towards the plateau.
A betrayal hurt. Corrie Rankin had humoured the guide, Jamil. He had talked about leopards with him. He couldn’t give a flying fuck about leopards, but he had done the chat, showed interest, and all for nothing. He had been left in the wire, might still have been there, might have been wrestling to free himself, attracting more barbs. It hurt, and he shook with anger because the guide had left him.
What hurt him most, it was clear that Jamil, amid the talk of leopards, had planned to slip away, dump him as being of secondary rank, and instead to scout for Rat. He lay inside the scrape and the scrim covered him. In his life there had been one act of extreme violence. He had beaten, with a stone, the skull of a goatherd, had split and had broken it, had done it for survival, not out of hatred or anger. He considered which of the two of them he hated most, which of them fuelled the keenest anger – Jamil or Rat. Then he thought about the woman. He thought that Henry respected him, could grow fond of him, would want to spend time with him, would walk on a hillside with him where there was gorse and heather not yet in flower and where old bracken lay. The hate had gone, and the anger, and the dream soaked over him. She bent over him as he lay on his back and her breath was clean and her hair flopped across his face and the lips were poised over his and he reached for her. The dream broke.
Slime’s voice. ‘Rat wants a meeting, Boss. Where we’re going from here, how it’ll pan out. Wants you up front. The boy’s back, Jamil, good guy and he’s done well.’
Chapter 12
It was about control, or the loss of it.
Slime was waiting for him, down on his haunches. Jamil, with a bent back, scurried forward from the other scrape, where Rat was. Slime stayed to escort him towards the rim. Corrie could almost hear the grated whisper from the one-time army sergeant: ‘Bring him back here, Slime. Now and not at his convenience.’
Corrie could have argu
ed, refused, but there was a big problem. Neither an argument or a refusal would help him regain what he had lost. He crawled out from under the scrim, sat on his backside and fastened his bootlaces tighter, knotted them: he took time out to get his boots right, then realised that the gesture was small-minded. In his own time? Hardly. Corrie could have spat a complaint to Jamil that he had gone from the waiting place with no explanation, left Corrie to get under the barbed wire, but he did not. He pushed himself up and went past the guide as if he was not there. Jamil did not blink but stared back at him. Could have been on the edge of impertinence, or a simple recognition that times had passed, moved on like the baton in a relay – the guide would stick with the person he reckoned would bring him through. Corrie moved on and Slime scurried past him.
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