They had only brought him because they did not speak her language. Belcher was at the edge, near the fire. He had talked to her and had seen the stress in her face, and in her shaking hands.
He spoke to her in a brisk, matter-of-fact tone, but the tremor in his own voice was hard to hide. ‘You have their trust. They see you as his only chance. How we get out, I don’t know. Make a show of it – or we are dead. I’ll tell you when.’
‘When what?’
‘When we go – when we run like the fucking wind.’
The tent was askew and half the pegs were dragging. The security men found stones and beat the pegs back in and tightened the ropes and raised the roof and secured it, and none of them spoke to her. She had no boiled water, so she tipped all that she had in bottles into a cooking bowl and dumped that in the middle of what was left of the fire. She readied her washing kit and the box of basic first-aid stuff, antiseptic and bandages. He watched her. If she stayed cool, was calm, they might come through. If she panicked, they would not.
She showed control, led them with gestures, told them where she wanted the camp bed moved to, close to her table and in the centre of the floor space. She’d dug out plastic gloves, like the ones she wore for digging, and a pile of dressings, and had found some small scissors. The Emir stood so awkwardly, until one of the guards began to free him from the pipes, and from the strapping that had held them against his head. One amongst them, with a wrestler’s build had taken the frail weight of the Emir and nestled the lolling head in his elbow, and did it tenderly, carrying the old man to the bed, and the breathing came in little spurts and seemed to bubble, leaving blood on his lips. He was put down.
The Emir was laid down on her bed. She had to wave them back so that she had more room and more light. The wife was close to him and sat on the canvas floor, but made no attempt to help, and Belcher thought she – by now – had admitted that he was gone. Henry cut at the clothing and the caking of blood was adhesive, sticking the material against the wounds. Belcher reckoned it immaterial whether the old guy croaked now. Business done. The show carried through, an appearance at a window and a satisfied crowd. Defeat pushed back and out of sight.
The clothes were stripped off his chest and the wounds oozed. The Emir’s breathing was ragged, failing. She felt for a pulse in his wrist, and grimaced. Belcher had seen men who were close to death here and in Syria: some who had prepared themselves and who were hit in combat, others who were lined up next to a ditch and told to kneel and would have heard the weapons cocked. She went through what she would have thought was a necessary degree of examination, procedures that would have been at the edge of her competence, appearing conscientious – Belcher thought her wonderful.
She caught his eye, gave nothing away, and said, ‘I think I can make him comfortable, only that.’
He answered her, ‘You give it to them straight, honest: that’s how they’ll want it.’
She said, ‘I can make him more comfortable, no more.’
Belcher told her, ‘They’re not interested in “comfort”. They want to know if he’s going to be around and dishing out instructions tomorrow. Is he still the big man? Is he yesterday’s story? How long will he last?’
‘Could be an hour, a bit more or less, but not till the morning, I don’t think.’
It was what he told them. There was no gnashing or wailing; no reaction, actually. Nor from the wife, no screaming or tears. The breathing was no better. She washed the wound a little more, the water warm but not boiled. He remembered how it had been when she had been pressed close to him and he could feel the quiver of her muscles as she’d heaved on the pliers. She was what he wanted, and he didn’t know how he would tell her, and didn’t know if she would have him. The face of the Sixer had twisted sharply in the moment when he had talked of his ‘afterwards’ and he’d realised what he had done, offended him. The Emir’s men talked briefly among themselves, which gave her an opportunity to ask. How they would do it? And he’d answered, not helpful: Thinking about it.
The men seemed satisfied with the diagnosis, the passing over of power: The King is Dead, Long Live the King. More important was Belcher ‘thinking about it’, and coming up with an answer. She looked hard at him, and he bit at his lip. But Belcher was a survivor – she was sure of that – and thinking ahead was how he had survived.
Henry watched the old man, his life behind him. She looked for serenity. There had been a woman from a village a year before, and Henry had been called out in the night to her. The baby had been stillborn and the mother failing, but she had still managed to derive a calm and a dignity from her Faith, and had gone with peace around her and the soft sounds of her husband’s sobbing; she would have known in a final thought that she was loved. Henry thought that the Emir’s baldness made him pathetic, somehow, diminished the stature that the turban had given him. His wife sat close and he might have known she was there, and might have seen her from the corner of an eye, but he was going – her opinion – in poor humour, was not ready. Henry felt a loathing for him. She wondered if he had ever thought again about the death of a man on a cross and the order he had given, and she wondered if his problem was that the work in getting a bomb to detonate over a fracture or a trough or a basin was unfinished, and he’d be denied the chance to hear about it on a generator-powered TV: as if immortality had been taken from him, he had gone too soon.
Nobody around had a word for him, and none of them touched him, and there seemed little interest in getting him the comfort she had offered. She might still dose him up with a handful of Paracetomol, if he could swallow, get the show on the road. She thought that hate lived on in his face, reckoned it was hate and not pain that twisted his lip and distorted the shape of his mouth. There was a distant blaze in the narrowed eyes – no compassion showed, nor a willingness to go, now, to his God. The men waited around him, and the wife sat in the same place, and she edged back, as if there was nothing more she could do.
Belcher’s lips barely moved but Henry watched him, read him. He told her they would go in five minutes. She saw him leave: one moment there and the next gone. She dabbed the face, which gave her a purpose and would help to kill those minutes, and she wondered if the Emir was now a burden and whether they would finish him off, then bury him. She doubted that a vigil beside him as he sank would run its full course – some had already glanced at their watches.
Time crawled. None of those people who had drifted into and out of her life before would understand what she had seen. She let the minutes slip, then excused herself in Arabic, and no one seemed to see her go, or care if she went.
He snatched her hand. Dragged her fast enough, the first strides, to pull her off her feet.
They went behind the tent and towards the shell of her latrine. Belcher lifted the upper strand of barbed wire and put his foot on the lower line, tipping her forward. She did not swear, might have, but she clung to his hand and his fingers locked in hers to steady her.
‘It is what you came for?’
‘And done double-time, twice over.’
‘The bomb in the aeroplane?’
‘Did him, the engineer, and the big man.’
‘A triumph – all that Jericho planned for?’
‘Stop talking – move, and fast.’
And the wind stayed strong, and Belcher knew little about helicopters and under what conditions they would have to be grounded. They went into the heart of the gale and it battered against their bodies; they tried to go fast, but could not.
In the village, the shot had been heard. There had been talk of traitors, and so maximum suspicion stalked the streets.
The vehicle with the Emir had gone, entertainment had been curtailed. The goat cooking on the spit was again a focus of attention. Inside the warren of buildings there were small sheltered corners where men could gather and squat and eat, enjoying the hospitality of the community. The sound of the shot had carried well on the wind, then had eddied through the alleys and lanes. T
he men gathered for meetings. One of the first, now to be led by the young Egyptian, should have been addressed by the Ghost, but no one could find him. Clever young men from different regions had come specifically to hear the Ghost, and they sat and sipped tea, confused and irritated.
Meanwhile a father looked for a wilful daughter.
The talk was of a gunshot. No guard or villager would admit to accidentally discharging a weapon, and those who had travelled to the fortress village refused to take any blame. Leadership was sought. The young man, through force of personality, took charge. He instigated a search, bringing method to it by allocating sectors. A consensus was established as to where the shot might have been fired.
Torches now lit the alleyways and lamps burned brighter. There was a shout in the night, a stampede of feet over cobbles. More shouts. The space between high buildings was filled with charging men, and the lights led them to a ledge where fodder was stored and where animals were tied, but the beams wavered and aimed down an almost sheer slope, to where they lay together.
His pockets had been turned out. Her clothing was disturbed. The lamps showed the colouring of the bruise at the back of his neck. The blood trail on her led from the hole that a bullet had made on her upper chest. He was important and she was a child and both had been killed. Why were they together? He had been murdered and she had been violated; that was clear to all because they could see her bared breast, before her father covered it.
The cry went up for revenge. A few metres from the bodies, among the refuse of decades, perhaps a century, at the bottom of the rock was the first drop of blood. A trail was clear. Men fanned out, and their lights roved over the ground, searching for more specks.
Most had little comprehension of a wider picture, though a few saw it. The young Egyptian was told. In his fertile mind, matters slotted quickly into place, made sense. Fugitives were out in the darkness and would be on foot. One at least was hurt, and the weather had not improved, and no vehicles had been on the road that could not be accounted for. Added to the mix were the goats that had slowed the Emir’s vehicle. A boy was now there on the road, steadily cutting the throats of injured goats as an act of mercy, and weeping as he did it, and telling people how they had been stolen in the night. The sniper shots had also been reported to the Egyptian.
He called out orders. Every man who could carry a rifle should be used, and each vehicle with cross-country capability and a machine-gun mounted. And another order: they should be hunted down, but not killed, should be taken alive. And a grave should be dug, far from sight.
He could rely on the powerful anger of the men, because of the child whose clothing was dishevelled, and who was dead.
‘Any better?’
‘There’s an update coming through, I’m waiting on it.’
Which was much the same answer as Jericho had been given fifteen minutes earlier.
He swigged from an old and battered hipflask. It might have appeared to be a family heirloom and to fit the persona, but had been bought at a car-boot sale at a village in Kent. It was his first sip from it since they had left Muscat. No more messages had been sent and attempts to raise the team had been frustratingly ineffective. The last positive news, reported to him by his pilot, was that there would be a window in the morning, around noon. But his response was that they had to go earlier. A stalemate, but in reality there was not much he could do. He couldn’t fly the beast himself, could not order a civilian to lift off and head into adverse weather, could not plead or threaten because both were beneath his dignity, and he had nothing to offer either as a reward or a penalty. They had eaten the sandwiches and emptied the Thermos that Woman Friday had prepared. The gunners slept.
A cough for his attention: ‘I don’t want you to get the wrong picture.’
‘What picture, Jean-Luc, is that?’
‘That I don’t care.’
‘My dear boy, we all care.’
‘When I can, I will go to get them.’
‘Of course, I know.’
‘I feel a weight of responsibility.’
Jericho yawned. The conversation had drifted from weather conditions and no longer interested him.
‘Can I just say something, and don’t misunderstand me. We’ll fly as soon as you, an expert, say we have a reasonable chance of getting there and coming back. But I am not a scoutmaster and taking youngsters to Snowdonia. They said they would come, so we’ll get them out if it is humanly possible to accomplish it. It is life, the life that we have all chosen to enjoy. Now, my boy, if the bloody weather changes, and you can get us up, then just do it.’
The wind blew hard, shook the cabin again. They waited on the tower and the forecast for a grid reference something over a hundred miles from them, high and on the edge where the sands met the rock-strewn ground. There was nothing much more to say. Jericho closed his eyes.
A signal came on the screen and the faint pulse of a buzzer alerted them. Casper checked it. He was separated by half the world from the crew at King Khalid, but he seemed to know all those who had dealings with the air frame, the engine, the electronics, and the Hellfires. A stark little message told him that the drone was ready, and could fly if required, though it wasn’t for them, of course, to tell a pilot at Cannon in New Mexico what conditions might be in the air over central Yemen. So it was simple: their bird was ready, waited on their call.
It had been an odd afternoon in their cubicle at the Cannon Base. Strange because no one seemed to have noticed that they were still in place, had not clocked off, taken their cars and driven home to their families, and Bart to his bachelor quarters. No officer had come around and rapped on the door and wondered aloud why they were still there and had a relief team not turned up – why? Casper knew the answer. It was said in the corridors, and in the canteen where he’d gone for more sandwiches, that a major assault was in progress north of the Iraqi town of Mosul, which had taken the Djibouti-based birds north, labouring in the air towards a new location, and others at King Khalid had concerns about a tribal dispute in the mountains, and there was also hassle down south and on the coast east of the port city of Aden. Where they operated, there were no other takers. Bart had told them that all the guys and girls up in the Florida place, Hurlbert, were gunning for the Mosul attack. They had been pretty much left to their own devices.
Casper told Xavier what he needed, and Xavier headed off to find it.
He was described by his wife as a bit of a romantic. He shared comic book heroes with his kids, still, and liked Western films, the old ones. He hadn’t told Xavier, nor Bart, but he felt a sort of obligation to the men whose boots he had first seen. He had then seen them going forward, and he knew there would be a fake wedding and a bogus funeral, which meant a meeting of ‘bad guys’. Little in Casper’s life, flying the drone, was complicated by serious danger. He felt an obligation towards them, the ‘boots’, wherever they hailed out of – he would do what he could.
He went on to his keyboard. In front of him, stuck there with Sellotape, was the image of the drone, and beside the call sign NJB-3 was the stencil that showed a hit and a kill, a success. He’d like it followed up; he wanted another, like a trace of addiction had bitten in him. He thought that Xavier, a decent man, would have taken the opportunity to call his wife, to say that he would not be home for a while. He sent a message back to the team at King Khalid, and thanked them, and added that he hoped to be up soon – he just had a good feeling about it.
He crested the incline, a fury boiling in him that overwhelmed the pain. Corrie staggered and fell and then crawled, and then pushed himself up. He pushed on, guided by the lights from the old tent camp below him, heading for where he thought he would find them. He needed to get to the woman, and what he would say was meshed in his mind.
He tripped on Slime, fell, then cannoned off to the right and into a packed Bergen. There was a grunt of protest.
He could not use a light, was like a blinded man.
‘Where are you, where a
re you, Rat?’ No effort made to disguise the venom. ‘What are you saying about yourself, Rat? Are you saying you’ve done well?’
Now he saw the shape of the man, a vague silhouette.
‘Or that you screwed up?’
Corrie heard Slime’s murmur of, ‘Steady, boys,’ but he persisted.
‘You’re good at the talk; it sounded brilliant then.’
An explosion of movement and a surge from the darkness and hands were on Corrie’s clothing, on his chest near his throat He was shaken, and pain ran in rivers from his shoulder. There was a gasp, then the torrent of words.
‘What the fuck are you talking about? I had a hit.’
‘A hit? Bullshit. I saw him. I stayed to see if you hit. I saw him twice.’
‘Not possible. A lie.’
Corrie’s voice was hoarse. ‘Saw him in front of me. Yes, you had kills. A nurse, hit in the back of the head—’
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