If a woman had a problem with childbirth, where did she go? If a fighter was wounded, who treated him? He had his answer, and nodded, and a small, thin eyebrow was raised. It was agreed; the young Egyptian did not suggest that his way should be followed, he did not ask whether they agreed with him. He told them.
Men went to find what he said would be necessary, particularly two strong lengths of metal piping, perhaps a centimetre in diameter, and either string that would stay taut or binding tape of the type used to secure a package. He did not ask the permission of the wife of the Emir. He had assumed, and rightly, that she had stayed at her man’s side through rare good times and frequent days and nights of pain, and would not want his memory to be tainted by defeat. He told her what he planned. Her eyes were dry, she did not show histrionic grief. He suggested that she should wash his face, present him as she would wish to remember him. He was obeyed. He heard the crowd outside the window. He wanted to satisfy them, not send them to their beds with the sullen acceptance of defeat. That would ruin morale, weaken the movement’s hold.
Hot water was brought, with a towel, and the wife alone would wash him.
Xavier reckoned that Casper had flown well, taking the bird through the worst of the storm and over the big mountain range where the turbulence battered her, and then bringing her down, one small bump, on to the strip at King Khalid.
Beside him, Casper eased his hands off the stick. They seemed bent like an old man’s, and he’d trouble straightening his fingers. Casper’s head dropped.
Men and women from the technical support unit, the maintenance crowd, would be swarming around her and would have the message Bart had sent, not strictly official. A fast turnaround, a developing situation, fuck-awful weather which they would have known about, and a full checklist and all done in half the usual time. They were good kids; they had a tyrant of a master sergeant whom they moaned at but also worshipped. The fuel would be going in and the ailerons would be examined to see the winds hadn’t torn or weakened them, and the pods for the Hellfires would be looked at for damage or stress, and the lens would be cleaned lovingly. Other birds were either in their hangars or with the engineer sections; one was up over Sadah in the extreme north and not available.
Casper was already asleep. All of them could cat-nap, but this was proper sleep and deserved. Bart had nothing new, but Xavier had more information about the weather, knew that a bad night was a certainty. There would be visibility holes in the cloud cover during the following morning from the early hours, but not lasting.
Bart went for coffee, and Casper still slept, and Xavier looked at charts for high pressure, low pressure, wind speed and the rest. He made one fast call to his home, ignoring the frosty response and said they’d not be coming off shift when the rota said, but would be hanging on in, and didn’t explain why it seemed important to get NJB-3 up as soon as they could. They’d fly her, and risk her, which was a big call.
They gasped and wheezed through the last few crawled steps, then made the top plateau. It had hurt Slime, but had been worse for Rat.
Age was catching him up, but he’d only carried the rifle, whereas Slime had been loaded with the rest. More than once he’d had to grip Rat’s elbow and keep him upright, and the slope had seemed steeper and they’d been slower on it. But they were not being followed.
It was apparent to Slime what had happened – there’d been mega-fuck confusion and no idea as to where the shots, the double-tap, had come from, and the goats had been magic in slowing the vehicle and the wind had been a problem, but not enough to affect a marksman of Rat’s skills. The fighters would not have known where to look or how to respond, and there had been no escort vehicle. The road stayed empty, and when Slime looked left he could see a single light burning where the tent camp had been, and a fire that was burning its last. They were back at the scrape, where the Bergens and the folded scrim nets were. He used the binoculars. He could see lights in the fortress village and thought the wind carried the noise of chanting. That was not right – Slime thought – for a funeral wake, seemed wrong. He could only hear it very faintly and lightly on the wind, but it was almost as if it were an anthem being chanted. He didn’t tell Rat what he thought – himself, he reckoned there had been hits through the open window of the back cab of the Toyota, but there had also been goats rampaging and leaping and it had been difficult for him, and he seldom spoke when not asked to, and rarely out of turn.
Slime looked the other way and raked the binoculars over the ground and could see some of the flock were still in the road, some hobbling as if injured, and some grazing at the side of the road. He supposed the living took precedence; as he’d learned in Helmand and Basra, casualties were soon forgotten once they were shipped out on the transporter. He shivered. He turned the binoculars towards the tent camp. She sat. She was alone. A little of the fire’s light was on her, but the lamp must have been low on fuel. The soldiers would have left her short.
He didn’t speak, and didn’t ask what should, by now, have happened. Rat was fumbling – all fingers and thumbs, and breathing hard – in one of the Bergens, dragging out the communications stuff.
It worked. Small mercy. Rat typed on the keyboard, clumsily, and had to redo the message. The button was hit, and it was sent. The wavelength would surely be monitored. The helicopter, parked wherever, would have a switch thrown, and the rotors would begin the slow turn and would gain power, and there would be the dust storm and she’d lift off, turn west and get some altitude, and would come hammering to the named point. The conditions were shit, but it did not seem to Slime to be the best time for talking about what the pilot and helicopter could cope with. He said nothing, but Rat did.
‘Where the hell are they?’
‘They’re not here, Rat.’
‘Where’s the boy, Jamil, where’s he? Supposed to be here – how do we get across country with no guide, no light, dark as Hades? How?’
‘Do the best we can. We’ll have to, if he’s legged it.’
‘And where are the others? The prat, your “Boss”, the turncoat who I’d not trust further than I can spit. The woman down there that we’re supposed to lift out. Where are they? How long do we wait? That’s what I’m asking, how long?’
Slime would not have said to Rat that they’d wait as ‘long as it takes’. That would not be wise, not at the moment. He sensed the fear in Rat, the fear he felt himself.
He said, ‘You done a good shot, Rat, a fine shot.’
‘I did my job, did it well. Where are they? I’m doing the hard stuff, bloody good marksmanship, and where are they? What in hell’s name is keeping them? Once they heard my shots, they should have come running. It’s fucking over, finished – so why are they not here?’
Slime couldn’t say anything; the winds snatched at his hair and pulled at his clothing, and the grit caked his face. He could see her if he used the binoculars, and no one had yet come for her. So, they’d wait.
Henry had nothing to eat except stale biscuits and leftover cooked rice, nothing to drink except bottled water. The fire had almost gone, and the tent’s stays were loosening and the pegs were breaking free as the winds hit the canvas; she didn’t have the sledgehammer needed to drive them back down. In the past, the troops always obliged once Lamya had rounded them up. She thought she’d lose the tent soon, and with it the work she had been so proud of.
It was almost time for Henry Wilson to make a decision: which of them? It seemed to her that she must choose. If they came for her and she made it out to her own place, her people, how could she hope to share the rest of her life with a guy who had not been here, had not been a witness to all she had endured. So, she would choose one of them. Her stomach growled and she nursed the water in the bottle. One of them, but which? She needed someone who could share the dark moments, and nightmares, to hold tight to somebody who understood.
She wolfed down the last of the rice. The biscuits were foul; she swallowed one and then retched and tossed the other t
hree away. They landed on the far side of the dying fire. Her hair was wild and she had no bloody interest in having a scarf wrapped over her head, and she’d pulled up the bottoms of the floppy, shapeless trousers to above her knees. It was good to feel the force of the wind against her skin, a liberation.
She waited, believing in the promise, had nothing else to trust. She was a passenger, and no longer had control of her destiny – except in her choice.
‘You are certain? That is all?’
The room was crowded, men pressed close. Villagers were there, prominent men, and guards. Heads shook and shoulders were shrugged – there was another cause for concern, because the one they called the Ghost should have been there and was not, should have been at the side of the Emir for the meetings that evening but he had not been seen. And there was no one with medical qualifications to help the Emir, only this one option. No other, becuase the nurse was dead.
The Egyptian challenged them. ‘I have to believe you.’
The same man answered, hesitantly, had to be encouraged to speak up.
The Egyptian had been brought the items he had asked for, and the Emir’s face had been washed by his wife, and a torn sheet had been tied firmly around his chest to cover the wounds, and a fresh shirt had been taken from the house owner.
‘You say there is someone?’
The man described a woman, a foreigner, who dug in the ruins near the old Marib dam, looking for the artefacts of the great Queen. She had set the leg of a boy who had fallen and broken it, and it had healed. Another took the cue, telling of a difficult birth and bleeding and the need for sterilised stitches. And more voices were raised: a martyr had been close to death she had treated him respectfully and given him painkiller tablets and comfort. One man – tall and with a gravelly voice – talked of an important fighter, one they valued, who had needed a tooth extraction, and she had done it.
The Egyptian said what he wanted. It was his experience, he told them, that a vacuum in authority had to be filled quickly. It was important that victory should not cheaply be given to an enemy – had he her blessing? He knelt beside the wife of the Emir, and he told her what was wanted of her, and of her dying husband. He saw defiance flicker briefly in her eyes: she had been at her husband’s side through the Tora Bora mountains and under the bombing, the rock on which the Emir had leaned. He saw a brutal honesty there. He told her it was about victory, one last one, and then he guaranteed to try, not more than try because he could not promise more, to take her husband to the woman who might be able to help.
She agreed. The window was opened for him and the crowd quietened.
He shouted as loudly as he could. ‘He is alive. They have not stolen him from us. There was an attack on his life by cowards and snakes and traitors, and they took the lives of a woman and martyred one of his escort. He is shaken, but they cannot destroy a man who is a lion and who fights in defence of Allah with each breath of his body. They failed. Now he is resting. Very soon he will show himself, and then will leave because that is the demand of the people charged with his safety. You will see him, and will know that he has, again, defeated the enemies of God.’
He backed away, and the window was closed, but the sounds of chanting reverberated inside the room. At the Egyptian’s direction they started the preparations.
‘What did he say?’
‘Didn’t you understand, Sixer?’
‘If I had, I wouldn’t have asked.’
The noise of the voices in front of them was louder. The name was chanted and with it were exhortations to God, and hatred of Americans and their allies.
Belcher bit on the answer, heard the impatience. What could he say? He supposed it was a supreme moment. To go into the heart of their territory and to take down a powerful leader using a sniper rifle, which would be an insult to the movement. The chance battering of the Ghost had been a bonus, huge, but there would be others who would follow, a production line of clever kids, good with electronics or chemical engineering. To be close to a man of the Emir’s prominence and to kill him on his own ground was a blow that AQ would reel from. So much had gone into the preparation for the strike. Belcher himself, he had been with a fighting unit, far from the garage attached to the villa outside Aleppo. He had not known whether the prisoner had successfully fled or had died of exposure in the night cold, or had starved to death when unable to forage for food because of his broken leg.
He had found an opportunity to call the number given him. He did not get a message back that said. ‘Wait and see’ or ‘We’ll check out what’s possible’. The response had been authoritative and fast. How he should be a minimum of a quarter of a mile distant from the positions occupied by his fellow fighters, at what time, at what date, then where he should trek to, at what time and at what date. There had been an air strike, a pair of Saudi jets, napalm and fragmentation. He had been hunkered down, watching, and had not believed man or beast could survive; he would have been written off as dead. Two nights later, before dawn and alone on a hillside, he’d heard the sudden clatter of the approaching helicopter, one bird, no escort. He’d come running forward and guns were covering him from the hatch and men jumped out, pinioning him to the dirt and searching him, disarming him. They’d heaved him up and inside and he was handcuffed, his clothing dumped between his feet.
No one had spoken to him, and they’d gone fast and low, and the dawn had come up by the time they hit the coast, and then were over the beauty of the sea, not like the dark and chill water of Hartlepool. They’d landed in Cyprus, and the handcuffs had been unlocked, and his discarded clothes given back to him and he had dressed in the rocking cabin. Not a word was said. He was confronted by faces that betrayed no expression. He did not know whether the servicemen would have regarded him as a hero who had gone undercover in the service of the Crown, or as some low-life scumbag who would be milked then ditched when his usefulness expired. The hatch had been opened, and the troops stayed back so that their faces were not seen, but a boot was against his buttocks and he was propelled forward, out into the sunshine, and was met by a fat guy, a joker, his hand held out to greet him, like he was important, and a booming voice of welcome: ‘Don’t suppose those bastards gave you a decent breakfast . . . So you are Belcher. Very pleased to meet you, we have much to be grateful to you for. Yes, thanks to you he is at home and convalescing well. What you did showed extraordinary courage. We think, Belcher, that you are an extremely resourceful asset, and we’ve a very good idea of where to use you. There’s seldom enough time – we should get to work.’
They had never suggested that he might want to return, fresh start and fresh identity, to the northeast, or that they’d put him up in a swanky hotel and feed him up a bit, but no, it was back on to the treadmill again. He’d said to the heavy guy, ‘The man I helped, he was fantastic, a real top man. A leader.’ He’d won a smile, but not a response. He’d been on the road and in the air a week later, and then on the boat a month later.
‘What are you going to do, afterwards?’
‘A bath, a beer – why?’
‘Just wondered,’ Belcher said, and shrugged.
A response. ‘And you?’
It came out fast, not controlled. Belcher said, ‘I’m going to be with Henry. What else? So, what the guy said was that there had been an attack, but it failed. The big man is resting, probably shaken up. He’ll show himself, then head off. That’s what was said.’
Belcher watched in the poor light. He had spoken of ‘afterwards’, and hadn’t reckoned on talking that kind of shit. He watched Corrie’s face. When he’d spoken of Henry, he had seen the blink, the frown, confusion, then when he’d talked of the attack, he had seen the Sixer’s jaw jut out, as if he’d regained focus.
‘I’ll see for myself,’ a flat and monotone whisper.
‘Or we could be gone. I’ve told you what he said.’
‘I believe only what I see.’ His voice slackened to a whisper. ‘My eyes, what I see.’
Th
ey gazed up at the window, and waited.
The pipes were strapped to his waist, and reached high enough for the ends to be just below his scalp. More tape was wound around his upper forehead to secure his head to the pipes so that it stayed upright. The turban he always favoured was wound around his head and then fastened so that the tape was hidden. The Emir was hoisted up. His feet tottered and he seemed about to spit more blood, but his wife held a small towel against his chest. He was pale, the colour of wax. The height of the window was crucial: it had to be, where men could kneel, squat, and hold him high enough so that he would be seen from the waist up and they would not. The Egyptian was the master of all before him, lecturing those in the room about the dire consequences of telling those outside what they had witnessed. For such a small and young man, he had presence. And power was passing, and the security guards would soon be alongside him. He explained to the Emir’s wife where she should be and how she should move his arm, and told the Emir too. It was just possible that the Emir heard his remarks; those closest to the wounded man said that they had seen the eyes flash, as if the fight had not gone from him.
It was a gesture, and the young Egyptian believed in its value.
He might stay in Yemen for years, or he might leave within a month and work a passage on a dhow going up the Red Sea, travelling up into the Sinai wilderness, or he might find himself ferried to a port on the Egyptian coast and go west and beyond Luxor and into the White Desert. If he took the dhow and travelled, then he would aim to start concerted resistance to the new rule of another pharaoh who wore a military uniform. If he stayed, he would hope to progress in power and influence and make that territory safe as a haven for the organisation’s fighters. He had big ambitions and the plight of the Emir could only further them.
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