Would he have killed the boys if they had threatened to denounce him? Would they tell what they had seen, bring men back? He left the place; regretted it, but had to.
Jamil had seen the long burst of light. Jamil had never been a goatherd. He was from the city, had gone to the language school, and then had fled across the borders of Yemen and into Oman. He was a guide for tourists who wanted to go on desert safaris, and was devoted to the image, faint and fleeting, of the leopard. But the goats were necessary. They would be across the road, would slow any vehicle, creating a marksman’s opportunity. He knew the light’s meaning, and understood its message.
To put stones or rocks in the road would give a clear indication that a vehicle was being forced to drop speed before an ambush. To have left a petrol drum, old and rusted, on the crown of the main road, would similarly have given an experienced driver all the warning he needed. He did not know goats, but he thought they could probably be frightened easily and would attempt a stampede. The goatherd slept. Jamil knew him from the flat ground at the top of the slope, his wariness, and the rifle coming off his shoulder, and being armed, then the brilliance of the tossed snake that had frightened the goats and dog. They had all fled, the goatherd with them. A small lamp, stinking of oil, swung above his head. The wind grew and the boy seemed unaware of the coming gale, his dog against his back. What Jamil had seen before the snake had driven them off was that one goat led the herd. He looked for it. He would take that one goat first and would pray to his God, not done often, that the rest stayed quiet.
It was a big animal, taller in the shoulder and the crown of the head than any of the others. It eyed him. The gate to the compound, close to where the youth and his dog slept, was tied with a length of frayed twine. Jamil learned fast about goats. He soothed them and they pressed around him, but he devoted most of his attention to the male that would lead. In the half-light his fumbling fingers loosed the knot. He had nothing but dried bread in his pocket to attract the leader. He moved the gate and the goatherd coughed hard in his sleep. He had one small blanket over him that rode up as he shifted. Near to his shoulder and against the timbered wall was the assault rifle. Many had put their faith in him. Jericho had, and the marksman, who Slime said could hit a head at a kilometre distance, and the boss who was stressed and had lost control. They all depended on him, and on his ability to manoeuvre the goats, and perhaps the woman who dug in the sand did too.
He had the gate open, had bread in his hand. The leader was at the front, but the beast refused to go through. Jamil could not shout.
Jamil reached, caught the spare skin and coat, and dragged it forward and past him. He shoved food in the animal’s face. He changed his grip and held it by a horn, and fed it again, and at first it was truculent, but greed won through – and the rest came. He had found twine beside where the goats were kept, where the goatherd and his dog slept. He knotted it around the animal’s throat. Jamil dragged it forward, fed it again, and the others followed.
Desperate not to be late, Jamil led his livestock towards the road, and the point that Rat had chosen. They depended on him, all of them.
Rat had seen the light, noted it, was ready.
The continuous beam, first spotted by Slime, told him the vehicle was imminent. Could have been within an hour or within a handful of minutes.
That version of the rifle, the .308, was expected to kill at 800 metres, and probably would at 1,000. The best that Rat had done with it, on a Brecon range and with good wind conditions, was to hit a coconut at 1,000 metres: an end-of-day shot he was put up to by a light-infantry sergeant, who wanted to impress recruits. In its way that had been a pressure shot, as this would be. He’d rely on the goats, and the data.
It was important having the data in his logbook. He had not been able to zero the sights again since the journey in the helicopter and the lay-up on the ridge, and now they had brought the kit forward and once he had fallen and the weapon had been under him as he landed. He had not done a test fire to validate the calibration of his sights, nor had he been able to see – close up – the ground between his position and the main road. He had the small plastic bag snarled on a bush so that he could better gauge the wind across his line of sight. He would also have liked to have had long grass tufts out in front of him, perhaps a foot high; the wind always bounced them and they were good for judging its strength. An archive of information was held in the logbook, all of it recorded in his scrawled handwriting. His tape-measure work was in there: he knew the height from the road surface to the top of a Toyota pick-up’s door: he could judge where the upper chest or the head would be of a passenger. The Kestrel NV weather system was also available to him, and from the dull glow of the screen he could read altitude, temperature, air density and barometric pressure, which could make the difference in terms of accuracy when firing at 400 yards – could be the difference between a miss or a clean shot and kill. He had been told that in Yemen the wind was strong in the early morning, then would drop as the sun rose, but at dusk would bluster again and might blow hardest after darkness.
The defining moment in his career approached. On his stomach, in darkness, and with the wind flicking up grit, and with a rifle nestled against him, his finger alongside the trigger guard, the sights set and the distance known, and all the climatic factors acknowledged, he waited. It was the shot he would be judged by . . . A confidential whisper: I heard the sour old beggar fucked up in Yemen. Nothing said about him being a twenty-fiver, his good hits, big men taken down around Helmand and north of Basra. Never was chatty, without the time of day, but he screwed up on a shot that mattered – it’s what I heard. There was nothing more to do but wait: he let his mind roam a little, not far. It helped him to stay calm, and if he were calm his muscles would be looser and his breathing more regular. He hoped first he would see the boy, Jamil – good and one of the best – show up with the goats. It had been, in Rat’s opinion, a screaming disgrace that there were still interpreters left behind in Afghanistan and not allowed into UK. The army would have been blind and deaf without local interpreters to work alongside them, take the shit with them. He had two shots maximum, and coming out of pitch darkness, and he had the intensifier and they’d have nothing but their headlights. It was a procedure listed in his logbook and checked out. He liked to say, and only had Slime to listen, that ‘careless men were dead men’.
A big moment in his life, but not one that he’d share.
His women at home, busy with their lives, would not want to know, or would not know how to find words of congratulation. Nobody in his house understood, and down at Credenhill where the gun club was, he’d be yesterday’s newspaper, a bit-player who had no relevance. Slime wouldn’t last long – he’d be off and gone when he’d bought the new home, under the thumb of the new woman. Slime was tense beside him, and his breath was a hiss, but he didn’t talk or might have had his ear clouted. Rat would do it for himself, take the big shot, and for his own satisfaction – no crap of Queen and Country, nothing personal about the ‘ragheads’ that he dropped. A target such as this one and in these circumstances was a challenge on a grand scale. He thought himself up to it, had never thought otherwise. One more shot, or could be two, and they could pull down the flag on his life.
He thought it was time to take the bullets from the fold of his vest where they’d nicely warmed against his skin, and get them into the magazine, and arm, and have the finger right there and against the guard, and the trigger took little in the way of a squeeze. He was good at waiting, not fussed by it.
Maybe the next night, or the one after, he’d be down in the pub and they’d be at dominoes in there and if they asked him to join then he’d shake his head and decline. The wind was bad, and he thought it right to make another calculation to allow for its gusts.
He was in the air and uncomfortable. Jericho classified himself as a ‘poor flier’, and the helicopter was heaving, taking the force of the wind.
He had been dining with a bank of
ficial and his wife, pretty little soul, and the talk had been of accounts held and going undeclared, and proxy transfers – all the usual gossip that enabled him, with delicacy or rough bluntness, to gain the cooperation of a potential asset, a bit of leverage. He had slipped away over coffee and headed for the restaurant’s toilets.
Now he sat in the depths of the machine’s passenger area alongside the two machine-gunners, Serbs and men of few words. Up front was Jean-Luc, his favourite pilot, impeccably English but with a French born mother who had dictated his name. He had flown formerly for the Royal Air Force, then ferried workers to the North Sea rigs before drifting to the Gulf. Jericho was a valued passenger, but no concessions were made; they flew at speed and into the weather, and sometimes they were picked up, hurled high then seemed to drop, and what he had eaten churned in his stomach.
Jericho had headed down a corridor to the restaurant’s toilets, A door from the corridor led into the kitchens. From the kitchens there was access to the staff car park. Because the Yanks were outside, in one of their big vehicles – black and with tinted windows – which was parked across two bays in front of the main entrance. He had been tailed from his premises above the travel agency. He liked to do business in private, and not with the Agency surveilling him, eavesdropping on him. He had assumed that his Intrepids remained on site, the deed not done, and that VBX wished to speak with him concerning a wholesale handover of authority and logistics to the Mighty Dollar Men – not while he had breath in his abused lungs. He punched above his weight, as the Service did – or had done, and he shared only when acute necessity demanded it. Not quite, not yet. There could have been a half-squadron of Black Hawks in the area around Marib at that moment, and it could have been their man in front of the screens calling the shots; if that happened, it would mean that Jericho had been consigned to the trashcan. He had left and Penelope had been waiting for him, had driven him to the airfield, and had produced the jumpsuit for him. He’d unhooked his stomach padding, taken an automatic pistol and an armoured vest from her, and she’d fussed around him like a school matron. She’d touched his arm for a moment before he’d climbed in.
The pilot told him nothing. He did not know whether conditions ahead were an improvement or had deteriorated. Their routing was to reach Seiyun, call-sign Golf X-Ray Foxtrot, and there – if events blessed them – they would receive the call for the final run.
The Yanks would sit outside the restaurant until the last guests of the evening were leaving, and the banker and his wife, and when the lights had started to dim they might send one of their people inside to check out where the ‘old fart’ had gotten himself to: he’d heard them call him by that name and rather rejoiced in the prospect, again, of nailing them to the floor. All allies? All on the same side? All singing in harmony and off the same hymn sheet? He had a feeling that by the morning he would be inviting the local American spook to take a latte with him, or was that wishful thinking?
They went into the teeth of the wind. The buffeting was less febrile when the air speed slackened, but they stayed on full power. If the mission succeeded, there would have been no real point in Jericho travelling. He would not know whether corks should be popped or sackcloth worn until the final moments and the rendezvous. If it failed, went sour down there on the ground, he would need to think and act fast. He would have, in the least rosy scenario, to consider a calling on the ‘friends’ for a helping hand, and he would loathe that . . . or it might be that Crannog was beyond help. Rocking, rolling inside the constraints of the harness, he tried to think only of the best outcome. Tossed around in his seat, Jericho realised how much he was in debt to the men and the woman who he’d sent towards harm.
Oskar and Doris had been called by the American, Hector, late at night. An inquisition on the agenda: the sole item.
‘It is not us,’ Oskar said. Oskar had not pleaded that he was at dinner, or asleep, and Doris had not claimed to be awaiting a conference call. When Hector had demanded their attendance, they came. There was Jack Daniel’s on the table, and bottled water, that was all. Business time.
Oskar reiterated, ‘We do not have covert forces in this theatre.’
‘Doris?’
‘We are back in an age of Make Do and Mend. We do not have assets to throw around the Yemeni badlands. We leave the blood, guts and killing to your chaps and lasses. But, you, Hector, would you have been told?’
To the heart of the matter. Boots on the ground, more exactly boots protruding from under a sheet of camouflaged netting, had been identified. Doris had not risen to this rank – station chief in volatile Yemen – by trusting all that she was told. Yet, she believed him. He did not know of the mission into Yemen. She saw his face cloud over. A raw moment for him. He reached again for the big bottle – he might already have sunk a half-gill. She shook her head, and Oskar gestured with a hand that he declined too. The American poured for himself.
Doris said, ‘I don’t mean to be offensive in any way, Hector. I would not have been copied in if we had decided to fly in a mission, and God alone knows what would justify such a risky operation. I would only be expected to arrive inside the loop if it all fucks up – excuse me – and we have to scrub the mess off the floorboards and placate what purports to be a government here. Oskar’s crowd would need a cabinet meeting, then approval from a dozen focus groups, merely to send a pop gun to Sana’a – sorry and all that, friend. Would they have told you?’
First the pause, then the growl of Hector’s concession. ‘It is possible that I’d not have been informed. Humiliating, but possible.’
And Oskar was the shining knight, a Teutonic version, to the rescue. ‘Perhaps we are fortunate to be outside the wire when operations that achieve little are promoted to the fore. We spend billions and the corrupt prosper from our aid; we are not loved, nor thanked, and will be forgotten the day after we go. Above all, Hector, you should take nothing personally. Yes, a whisky, one finger. Thank you.’
‘None of us was told. Doris, I have to make a confession.’
‘Shoot, friend – it’s better to hang together on a gibbet than separately. Tell me.’
‘We have surveillance on Jericho, your illustrious colleague, and—’
He might have expected that she’d bridle at a friendly agency watching the operations of an ally; instead she hooted with laughter.
‘And he threw the tail. We think he is up and flying west, a chopper lift. We are trying to get a track on him but the bird’s keeping silent, and he is headed into powerful weather, and on a line close to our boots’ location.’
‘Silly old bugger,’ she said. ‘From the dinosaur era – he should have been stunned and put to sleep an age ago. For God’s sake, why do our seniors and desk warriors persist in the belief that a single act of violence, a target’s killing, changes the path of history. Why?’
‘Because the pursuit of blood is addictive,’ Hector said, and Oskar nodded his agreement, and the bottle was picked up again, and the laughter was long gone.
The old man leading his camel convoy thought – and he had the experience to form good judgements – that the weather would be harsher. He had left sunshine and a degree of warmth down on the coast, but the conditions had steadily deteriorated as he had come north, and he wanted to press on and be in the wilderness, in the sands of the Rub’ al Khali, where he would feel safe and unthreatened.
They would walk through the night. If conditions were bad then he always walked, alongside the male animal that was his pride and his joy, and which would have attracted the best money, except that it would not be sold, its value to him being too great. Its place was at the front. The rest were loosely tied to each other in a long and steadily moving line, and his grandson was at the back.
They had watered the animals, had found a well dug by Chinese engineers, and the camels had grazed on what they could find, and he and the youth had slept briefly, and now they pushed on and to the north. The wind blew grit into their faces and they wrapped up
well against it. They were near the refinery, where flames were blown near flat, but they kept the lights of Marib far to their left because he did not wish to be near the place, or the villages round it. He knew that many strangers were now in this region, and he was less skilled with a rifle than he had been ten years before, and his grandson was bold but not yet wise. The camel train was valuable and it would pay to support his extended family for the rest of the year after he had sold all the animals excepting the big male, and gone back to the seashore where the calves were, reared by his wife and daughter, whose husband was away with the boats they sailed to India. It was a hard life, but rewarding, and he did not intend for it to end in an unequal fire fight, fighters had descended on this part of the route from the Indian Ocean. The trail continued to the markets of the Saudi town of Sharurah, where there were soldiers who kept those people away. He had heard nothing good of the strangers, and was keen to avoid the area that they had infected with violence. They did not come into the sands of the great desert.
With his grandson he had done Ish a’, the night prayer, and he hoped for protection.
There was cloud cover, so no stars or moonlight to guide him, but his instinct led him. They went in silence, except for the hiss of the hooves and the cough of some of the beasts when they spat phlegm, and it was the route chosen in history from the Great Queen’s time, as good now as then. The wind buffeted him and it would be a bad night, one on which very few would venture from the shelter of their homes. He thought that was good, and picked up the pace.
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