Belcher knew it would be that night, what Jericho would have called an ‘end game’, but could not relay that to the others. It was as if he were gagged.
The caravan, going at the pace of the slowest camel, went past the refinery to the southwest of Marib. It would skirt the almost abandoned complex. Both the old man and his grandson were armed, but these were difficult times and so he did not mind taking a route that took them further but avoided contact with the militias and the local tribes. He did not know if they would find water for the animals. The last time they had come this way the well had been dry, and strangers had been camping there. They moved on. He had, for his age, a good loping stride, was as strong as the boy.
Rat was writing in his logbook. He had judged – to what he hoped was the perfection he sought – wind speeds and directions while they had been in the scrape at the top of the incline. He had drawn maps to show where there might be folds in the ground between the slope’s bottom and the road. The one he had chosen was, in his estimation (and he was rarely far wrong), 540 yards from what would be the firing position to the centre of the road. He was calm now. The man who liked to be called ‘Boss’ had gone back to the rear scrape and Slime was in position beside him, their hips snuggled. It was a good habit of Slime’s that he seldom spoke unless he thought there was something important that Rat should know. It would be a difficult shot against a moving vehicle, and probably in deep darkness, but he had not doubted, not even once, that he could make the hit. He trusted the weapon, and the ammunition was now against his chest and kept snug there, and the sun filtered through the net and gave some heat to the barrel, not as much as when the rifle was fired, but the best he could do. He had not needed a talk, an inspirational lecture, on the importance of taking down the target. He was a sniper and did not deal in verbose encouragement. He was a craftsman. The value of the target was irrelevant. Throughout his military career, he had not taken satisfaction from the act of killing, but pleasure from achieving success when failure seemed probable: difficult light, fierce winds, distance. The pursuit of perfection, as a justification for hitting targets, was not valued by his own family. His children had become more distant and his wife had become more independent, and they had seemed to shun him and he had not known how to break down barriers. In his own community he was regarded with suspicion, a little fascination. Not that Rat had ever spoken of his trade, but after his second Afghan tour he had brought back his ghillie suit, because it was personal and he’d included camouflage modifications, and it had stunk of his sweat and of Helmand drainage ditches, and it had gone though the washing machine, had near clogged the pipes, and it had been pegged out on the washing line across the back lawn of their home. A neighbour had seen it, and had known what it was.
The neighbour had told her neighbour, then gradually the whole estate knew – there were the films on TV about cold men who dealt out death. His family had suffered, but not Rat; in fact it was good to be back and on his stomach and with Slime beside him, and a plan in place. It would be a sort of fulfilment, likely to be for the final time, and he’d get it right – he was certain he would.
The last miss had been nine years before. The sun was going down and the wind had freshened and had created an advancing dirt storm, so visibility had closed down. The target had come by vehicle and Rat had waited three days for him to show and the range was a shade north of 900: by Rat’s standards it was a ‘miss’. The first swirls of the storm were across the ground, and the man had been half out of the passenger seat and his chest was exposed, and Rat had had to estimate where he would be in the full second of time between the trigger squeeze and impact. He’d fired, and he’d regarded it as a ‘miss’, because the bullet had struck his target’s shoulder, spun him on his heel like he was a kid’s top, and then he’d dropped. Rat had been dissatisfied with himself and his professionalism that evening. His last kill, in a different dirty corner of Helmand, had been four years back, just before he’d flown out. A thousand yards, and again the end of a day and the gloom descending, and another wind blustering and without a pattern, and there had been a recce section of Paras behind him, edging forward to be close and watch a master at work, and some would have barely seen the target come out of the doorway carrying an RPG-7 launcher. There had been fast and lively betting on his skill, pocket money to be made and lost. The bold ones said he would, the cautious ones didn’t rate it possible. The guy had gone down. He could remember the wind and the light and the way the target had crumpled, and the squeals of delight from those who’d backed him, but he could not remember the face of the man he’d killed. He thought himself blessed, lucky to have the opportunity to shoot one more time, and the target would be old and with a woman, and time would be precious and the planning would have to be exact. The rifle was close to him, comfortable against his shoulder and the scope gave him a fine view. He thought it’d go well, if the Sixer didn’t screw it.
Corrie saw the column of vehicles on the road.
The drone had moved on and he heard, faintly, their engines carried on the freshening wind. Cloud peeled up above the horizon, and Corrie had watched as his guide, Jamil, bent his back, stooped, then jogged towards Rat and Slime. He followed.
He had no tactical reason – after dusk – to trek towards the village and enter it. The guys and the girls on the Third Floor who sifted material sent in from overseas and had the radio intercepts from Cheltenham and the material the monitoring agencies produced, the digests of newspapers and periodicals, would not have dreamed of it – when their dusk followed they’d be into bloody Lycra and swinging legs across cycle seats and pedalling home, or off to the pretty bars they used. In the village pub, among the darts teams, he’d have been slated as certifiable. He was compelled, a driven man. He recognised it, and was a servant to a sort of insanity; he could justify everything with the need to see with his own eyes – was beyond reason, as if he needed to prove himself again in a hazardous situation.
Jamil was beside Rat. They talked softly and Corrie didn’t hear the words; he was not included. He was close to Slime, was passed binoculars. There was a girl, a young teenager, in the lead vehicle. She wore a pretty floral dress, and her hair was covered but not her face. Slime said she was a bride, on her way to the wedding – the deception – and the guide said that the wheels behind would be bringing the AQ leaders and their escorts, and the drones would not dare to hit a wedding party. They’d done that before and had been damned to hell for it. She was perched on a bench at the centre of the flat-bed of the first pick-up where she could be seen. The column went with fanfares, Toyota and Nissan horns, past the tent camp and along the road in front of them and towards the distant turning that led to a track that would reach the isolated village, the crannog, the fortress, raised from the plateau and defended.
Another column came after the first. More vehicles. It would have started nearer to Marib. With the binoculars, pinpoint sharp when he focused, Corrie could see the litter on the open platform and the face that was visible and white robes; another cortège followed. Slime said that Jamil didn’t believe the main men – the Emir and the Ghost – would come before dusk. Corrie understood. The drone, if it still circled the villages, would have seen a wedding procession, and then one for a funeral, and the lens would have focused on the girl and on the corpse. Slime said that Jamil told Rat there had been a pay-out of more than a million dollars, cash in plastic bags, after the last fuck-up – a wedding hit, twelve dead. They too headed for the raised village. Corrie was not told the plan, it was not shared with him. And afterwards? There’d be a charge, a race to put distance between them and here, jabbering into the communications, a helicopter flying and a rendezvous to the north. But there was much to do first.
Corrie said, ‘I’ll go when it’s dark.’
Slime said, ‘Don’t get left behind, Boss, cos we won’t be hanging around to wait for you.’
Chapter 13
The remainder of the day passed slowly.
&nb
sp; The plan was set, no more talk was needed, was agreed. It was clear to all of them that the end game would play out that evening, and the time towards dusk had dragged. The sun sank and far shadows lengthened, and the smoke from the two nearest villages grew less distinct. Corrie did not consider whether the plan was good, bad, or indifferent, nor evaluate its chances of success. It was the plan they had, the sole one in town. The scrim net was folded away and the Bergens packed, and Jamil had produced a long-tailed shirt from his own small bag and had wrapped a creased khaffiya around Corrie’s head because his haircut was wrong, and he had grubbed up dirt, used a trickle of precious water to muddy it, and had smeared it hard on to his face. It was enough for the darkness in the village’s close streets and alleys.
He would see it for himself. No one could ever say that he had chickened out and allowed others to go ahead of him. He would lead, that sort of crap. So, Corrie scratched the places that irritated, and rubbed his stomach under the long shirt to lessen the hunger, and before the light had gone he had taken apart the pistol issued to him, then had reassembled it, checked the mechanism and heard the smooth click of it. He had removed all the rounds from the magazine in the butt and had wiped them so that no grit or muck could cause a jammed breach. Then, for want of something better to do, he had gone through the same procedure with the reserve magazine. But Corrie Rankin knew if he fired one shot he was a dead man running. Inside the village would be heavy-calibre machine guns and rocket launchers and pretty much every child had been given an AK assault job. He had his share of grenades, and it was pretty damn obvious that one of the fragmentation jobs should be kept close to his chest, adjacent to the vital organs. It was a bad place to be taken. There had been a girl in VBX, quite a feisty kid, married to a Special Boat Squadron sergeant. She’d done time in Kabul and used to be one of the few who tried to get out of the compound, see something for herself.
She’d taken it seriously enough to knot a loop of bootlace on her grenade’s ring, so her finger could more easily – if she were wounded – get into it and yank the pin away, then face the half-dozen seconds before detonation. The sun wobbled on the crests of the hills above the fortress village and the mountains through which the Sana’a road ran.
Why go into the village? In truth, God’s truth as a witness, it was less about leadership and more about the magnetic pull of challenge, which was difficult to avoid, and might have been impossible. It was the reason for accepting Jericho’s offer the first time round, doing the same with George’s, and soaking up some of the ego-juice that they dispensed freely . . . There had been a student at the university who’d come to do chemical engineering after a gap year spent travelling. Not a discipline that needed heroics or a weighty physical challenge, but he had gone to Queenstown in New Zealand and done a 145-foot bungee jump. He’d said to Corrie that he had had no option – he knew from the moment he set foot on the island that he had to confront the fear.
Their gear was beside his. It was the rendezvous point they’d get back to, where they would call for the lift out. It would take two hours for the bird to reach them and two hours of forced march to be where the helicopter could put down. The plan was shit, but was what they had. He stretched and heard the snap of muscles and slapped his face hard – once on each cheek, and went forward like a crab that had to cross a beach fast as the tide raced out and the sand dried. He went as fast as he could. His leg was hurting badly; that would have been from the long hours in the scrape, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. It seemed important to Corrie that he had given himself a dangerous role, that he still played the part of ‘leader’.
For a moment, Corrie could see the others silhouetted against the last of the evening’s skies. A bad sunset, A blood-red sunset, and the dregs of it dived. He’d seen them and then lost them and the gloom settled on him and he bloody near tripped on a stone he hadn’t seen and stumbled and almost fell, but recovered his balance – they would not have seen it.
Had there been a moment when they – all of them – had hugged? No. Wished each other well? No. Slime would be the donkey and carry the load; Jamil knelt and finished his devotion. Corrie thought that Rat nodded to him but was not sure. It was Crannog’s moment and talk would not help it.
Corrie saw the single light at the tent camp and knew what had happened. He squeezed his eyes and locked the image of her into his mind. He thought of magazines carrying pieces celebrating ‘love at first sight’. Corrie Rankin believed in it now; he had done since he’d first seen her. For fuck’s sake, get the show on the road. He opened his eyes. He was alone and they were gone and he heard the scrape of grit and stones as they went down the incline.
Jamil went first; and had their trust.
He didn’t carry anything for them; it was not his job to be their beast of burden. He had nimble and quick feet and the noise was behind him, from them. He didn’t know whether he was facing the last night of his life.
The darkness came fast. Tourists he had taken on safaris spoke of the gradual change of light in Europe, marvelling that here it fell with the suddenness of a blade. He had nothing to guide him, no marks that he had left, but a rare instinct permitted him never to stub his toes, exposed in his sandals. He was not fond of these men, he was their servant because he needed to take them through their mission and then guide them to their meeting place. The helicopter would come and he would be paid. He would have money that would help his family to survive through the next few months, and enough left over to enable him to live in the greatest simplicity in the mountains near the frontier with Yemen: there he might, might, see the leopard. If he did not, if he died, then the leopard would have escaped him but he had the word of the Englishman that his family would receive reward. He believed that promise.
Jamil respected the one who carried the rifle. The other man was like a servant, taking the weight of everything else that had to be brought down. He respected the man with the rifle because he barely spoke, and never to hear his own voice. Power had changed hands. When he had first met them, it had been the one with the burned face and the limp who had had control. Without blood, power had been taken.
He had a place in the plan. He had suggested what he would do, which had been accepted and not argued about, but he’d been given no thanks. His plan was a stone set into a wall: if his stone held the building together, then his contribution had been good. If the building fell because of his stone, he would be cursed.
He did not suffer from nerves. It would be in God’s hands. He would do his best for the sake of his family, and for the chance to see the leopard. They finished the descent. Jamil led them now towards the firing position that had been chosen. He had to hope that his God would side with him.
Slime thought he knew Rat better than anyone, even possibly than Rat’s wife. The Arab boy led. Slime followed with their other rifles and all the magazines for them, and the grenades and the flash-bangs, and the medical kit and the spotting scope and tripod. At the back was Rat. Rat followed him. He could have helped if Slime slipped or seemed likely to lose any of his load, but Slime never had. The darkness around them was a wall and the moon had not shown and the stars were hidden. Wind snatched at their clothing.
Rat was always quiet. He had been quiet in Iraq and in Afghan, and was quiet at his home outside Hereford when they had met to catch up on work prospects, and quiet when they had protected principals. Now, still quiet. No questions about his girl, no queries about Gwen and his first home purchase, none of the usual banter of fighting men – what wouldn’t I do for a shag, a cold beer, a fag? – was off limits. When they had been on the last missions in Helmand, they had been taken forward by a small escort who would get as near as was safe to a possible firing position. They would then be lying up close as back-up, and had always parted with snappy and unsentimental embraces, and a hint of encouragement. Not this time; he did not think Rat had allowed it.
He was so quiet, had reason to be. His girl did not like Rat. If they were married, had t
he place in East Street, he assumed he and Gwen would have one big stand-up row, enough stamping and shouting to put the message across, and the link with Rat would be broken. There might at first be the occasional stolen meeting. A coffee in a Costa, Gwen not told, and awkward conversation because the link was fractured. He supposed Rat was like an actor with a big part. Up front and with it all to do. It would be a shot that – successful – would earn the right to be talked about for years. The detail would not be known. The target would never be disclosed, nor the location down to a GPS coordinate. But a ‘great’ shot, one that mattered as an example of supreme skill, had a way of leaking out. Slime reckoned this one would enter folklore. People might even hear that he, Slime, had been there, alongside. Sorry, mate, known you for ever and all that, but it’s something that I can neither confirm nor deny. It’s out of bounds. Would make Rat’s name, if he had the hit.
They went forward and the weight of his burden bit into the flesh on Slime’s shoulders. He never had learned how stories had spilled of the old guy on the firing range, Stickleback, some days, who occasionally went down into a prone position and measured up a target on a thousand paces, and they’d hear the crack of the Lee Enfield No. 4 Mark 1(T). It would have been a rifle that had done service in the dogged fighting around Cassino, or in the bocage network of hedges inland from the Normandy beaches. Sometimes he fired and missed the bull’s-eye but most often he scored well. It was said he had been on a long trek to the gates of victory, then had turned. He had, it was whispered, almost won a small war skirmish, but it was not known where or when. The legend had lived on, as it would if Rat did the business and hit with his shot.
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