It was easy for Corrie to analyse what he dreaded most.
There would be the shout. Allahu Akbar. When he heard that it would mean that a guy was there who was intent on heading for his Heaven, meeting up with those celestial girls, and he’d come running and charge to impress others, and they’d take up the call and the cause. When Corrie next fired they would have a line on him. What to do? His business was buying time.
He was right handed. The wound was in his left shoulder. It would hurt like hell, might make him faint. He thought, more than a rifle shot, the grenades would slow them. He went with the crabbing speed that his injuries permitted. After the first volley there were sporadic shots, and a burst of automatic. They had one machine gun, which would have been belt loaded, and one in four was tracer, but the rounds went high, wide. He did not know whether they had taken a hit or not, but the lights had formed back into a line and they were shouting for him. He couldn’t quite hear them, but they would have been taunting him for not joining battle with them. There seemed to be fifty or sixty of them.
He broke into a fast lope, seeing the jungle of lights each time he pirouetted around and looked for them. When he did that, he lost ground. He knew Belcher and Henry would understand that he alone covered their backs, could hope to delay their pursuers. They would brush him aside and then would settle on the chase. He thought he heard the voices more often, that they were closing on him, but the wind was against them. He would have, soon, to turn and fire again. Last, he would use the grenades; he had never yet thrown one.
He twisted and tried to hold the weapon steady, aiming into the mass of lights where he thought them densest, and fired and felt the echo in his ear and the jolt against his shoulder. His chest spasmed with pain at the recoil impact, and he went left before straightening, like a damaged spider evading a bird. He could not look around him, but heard a barrage of shots but also a squeal. It could be a man hit by a high velocity bullet.
Another hundred yards, he estimated.
He stopped again, took a grenade out of the bag across his back. Wedged the rifle barrel into his crotch, held it at his groin. Put his finger in the ring. Surprised himself that he didn’t fumble. He pulled the pin. Corrie arched his back, threw the grenade, tried to give it height. Then turned and was on the move again, but he knew they would be closer each time he stopped and turned to face them.
The grenade exploded, a blast dulled by the sand, and there was the singing of shrapnel.
‘I don’t mean to go on about it, but we have to understand the realities. It’s a Grade A cock-up, but where better to stage it than here, poor old hapless Yemen,’ Jericho said.
He warmed to his theme. Jean-Luc did not interrupt, and Jericho had almost, not quite, closed his eyes, and his cigar still nurdled smoke.
‘There’s two great forces and they are vying for supremacy. Liberalism and commercialism on the one side – extreme conservatism and fuck the money, if you actually have to work for it, on the other. It is nothing personal about Yemen, which visitors half a century ago thought to be utterly backward, fiercely independent and equally fiercely hospitable. What that adds up to, my good friend, is a convenient street corner in which we and the other crowd can have a bare-knuckle fight. A place that fitted the bill.’
He dragged on the cigar again and detected a fall of ash from the tip down on to his shirt. He wiped it carelessly with his hand. He had a rapt audience and the gunners were no longer snoring. Jericho did not find many chances to explore his theories, and grasped the opportunity. His voice was a drawl and he was near to sleep, but not quite there.
‘We don’t hate the Yemenis. Probably don’t hate any of the crowd that have set up camp here. We just wish they would stay at home, let us buy their bloody oil, and leave the world order alone. It all started in Israel, didn’t it? Where else? Palestinians waving Kalashnikov rifles over their heads, marching into airports, turning up uninvited at the Olympics. Seedy little dictators like the Gaddafi chap shoved a bucket of money their way – and we funked it. Put another way, a little man with the military equivalent of a pop gun and a tea towel wrapped around his face became an icon, challenging the Guevara legend for status. We let it out of the bottle, and the “nobodies” decided they were “somebodies”. That’s what it is here. An anorexic young man, barely into middle age, becomes – because we gave him the status – a world-class enemy. They have a right to believe in their importance – what’s the budget for this bloody place?’
There were no lights close to him that he could see through the sand-pocked cockpit window of the helicopter, and the terminal building was dark.
‘Well, I’ll tell you. I am thinking in billions. We shove in a little of that, not much, and other well-meaning European allies make a contribution, but our beloved Yanks carry the burden. Like pouring water into sand. It disappears, is utterly wasted, nothing gained. They have more tanks in this country, heavy armour, than almost the whole of the NATO forces in Europe put together, and what do they do with them? They let them rust. We have failed here and yet we continue to believe we can zap a few minor characters, knock them over, and that will safeguard us from the horrors of a downed airliner. We have no interest in the future of this country. Nothing of what we do is about this place. Listen to me, it is about the people in my aunt’s street, a corner of Paddington in need of fast regeneration, people who have never heard of Yemen, never want to, don’t know where it is. It is about those people, not geopolitics or all the stuff preached at us by think-tanks. Am I depressed? A little . . . Depressed not because of what will happen to this place now labelled as a “failed state”, and its good citizens who would prefer to be herding goats rather than fighting Alpha Quebec with our glossy shilling in their pocket. No Depressed because we have good men and a good woman out there on the ground. Anything fresh on the weather?’
No answer. He realised his words echoed inside the cockpit; he was alone. He jerked up.
Jean-Luc, and the Serbian gunners had abandoned him, and the wind still blew and the windscreen was dulled with debris. He ground out his cigar in the soup tin there for that purpose.
He waited. They came back. Jean-Luc wore a headtorch and it lit up the ground, swirling around, in front of him.
The bad news: there was sand inside something, under the main cowlings, that Jericho had never heard of. Its presence prevented take-off. It could not be fixed by torchlight, and if they called up arc lamps and generators their presence would be announced, loud and clear. They could deal with it in daylight, strip the bit down and clean it and then get in the air, but it would take time. And the flying conditions would be better by then, according to the weather forecast. And a habit he had learned from Penelope: she always carried clean underwear and toiletries in her handbag. He had an old leather shoulder bag, with gold initials that were now faded, and he took out replacement pants and clean socks, and an aerosol spray, and he changed his underwear and freshened up. Felt a new man. He climbed down and stood with his back to the wind and urinated on the apron. One of the Serbs had gone in search of liberating coffee. Jericho, never a fool, realised the enormous implications of sand getting into that damn hole, even if the weather eased.
He was told to go back to sleep; there was nothing else to do. And to be hopeful.
He had fired enough shots to need to change the magazine, and had used another of the grenades: he had grabbed it from the bag, pulled the pin, had not known whether it was flash and bang or fragmentation. That blast kept the pursuers back sufficiently and the beams from the torches and lamps did not reach him. When they felt they were close enough they would charge, but for now they came on with a pace that closed the gap, but they were not yet ready to overwhelm him. There was an inevitability about it, though, which Corrie recognised.
‘Should have been here by now,’ Rat spat out the words.
‘A bad night for flying,’ Slime answered him.
‘They should get off their arses. We’ve done the work, we’r
e here, we’re waiting.’
‘Too right . . . This is the right place, where we’re supposed to be?’
‘Course it is.’
‘Hopefully it’ll happen along soon. Reckon the others’ll make it?’
‘They’ll be close up and behind us. You can’t hang around, Slime, and wait for the slow movers. Grown-up world, you have to take your chance.’
Slime said, ‘Sorry and all that, Rat, but I reckon I heard gunfire.’
‘I didn’t hear anything. Come on, you beggars, shift yourselves. That bloody sand, everywhere. Sand and grit. Your mouth and your ears and your eyes . . . I didn’t hear it.’
They were sitting close, back to back, and sand piled against them. Their legs, facing the wind, were now covered in sand, like kids being buried on a beach in summer, and the wind shrieked at them. Efforts to crank the communications had failed; that was another casualty to the sand. There was nothing to do but sit, and nothing to do but wait. Rat had not heard gunfire, but Slime had better hearing. It would be a long, bad night if the helicopter did a ‘no-show’.
Sometimes, now, he saw faces behind the lights. Twice, when he had fired, he had seen a torch shone down and on to the ground, and once there had been a low scream and once the dull thwack of his bullet hitting a body. But they were closer and the beams reached out for him and very soon would lock on him. He stopped each time he fired, then twisted around and set off in the same weaving and ducking run that he had learned from crossing open ground in Syria: Corrie remembered the passive faces of the audience listening to him at the barracks on Salisbury Plain. They had applauded him, but during formal congratulations their expressions told him they regarded him as an interloper into their trade, who had once been lucky, but who’d be better off in the future staying tucked in his own bed. They would have had an organisation behind them and known what to do; would not have been alone, and would not have lost a woman. He threw two more grenades; one was smoke but that was irrelevant as the wind blustered it away. And they were becoming bolder, pressing harder.
They were good animals, fine and sturdy. They made good speed, despite the force of the wind and the dirt it threw up. They were blessed, born with long eyelashes that protected their vision, and could breathe well while seeming to close their nostrils, and there was a thick mat of hair across the orifice of their ears: sand or grit could not get in and irritate them. Hours would go by, and the beasts would move at a constant pace, and the old man didn’t talk to his grandson who was a hundred metres behind him. They had ground to cover. The old man, though his hearing was poorer than the boy’s, had thought he’d heard gunfire, and then an explosion, perhaps several, and that was an additional and pressing reason to hurry. He hated this place, and the strangers who had brought despair with them, and spilled blood. Had they crossed, in daylight, a track where the strangers had a roadblock, then he believed his animals would have been stolen and sold for a fraction of what they would make across the frontier. He wanted to be in the sanctuary of the desert, where vehicles had no traction, and where the inexperienced withered, sank to the sand, and died, and the winds would clear their bones, and the dunes float across the skeletons. The camels caught his mood and kept up a brisk pace. The firing and the explosions had been ahead, but he would skirt them, keep his distance. The night was his friend and he had no fear of it, and old instincts led him on that route along which the great queen had been with her caravans of precious cargo. He would stop for nothing, not while he could hear, carrying to his ears, the sounds of combat.
He used only single shots. The automatic was too profligate. The ground under his feet had become softer and his boots were sinking and his face had a sand coating. It had become harder for him to aim, and their cries were clearer. They no longer shot back at him, and he understood why. An order would have gone down the line that he was not to be killed, he was to be taken. Corrie did not know how much further he could go, what was left of his endurance. He threw another grenade and heard the shrapnel’s wail in the moment after the detonation, but realised it had fallen short of their line.
‘I have nothing,’ said Oskar, the BND officer, burning the midnight oil in his embassy.
He was on a conference call – it was too late at night for the necessary security to be in place, armoured and protected convoys.
‘I regret that we are meeting a stubborn refusal from his office to say where he is, though, knowing Jericho’s operating style, they probably have no idea themselves. So I just don’t know either.’ Doris held a hand over the phone so her yawn would not be heard.
Each of them had contacted well-cultivated local sources – and, given the money that went swilling into them, they had expected hard answers and truthful responses – but had drawn a blank.
‘I’m told we have a drone up, getting into Marib airspace – just one because the Mosul offensive has snaffled much of what should be on station for Yemen. By the by, the weather in that quarter is awful – you wouldn’t want man or beast out and exposed in that area,’ Hector said. He felt matters drifting from his control, which was the time any astute man would hear the grind of knives sharpening and start to watch his back.
Oskar said that his bed beckoned. Doris asked to be called if news surfaced.
Hector said he hoped they’d have a quiet night, then threw out a thought. ‘I’m not wanting to spoil any much-deserved beauty sleep, but some of our people are beginning to get anxious about the situation in the north of Yemen. God help me, I tried a couple of months back to draft a paper on what a military push by the Houthis might do to this house of cards, tried to tell them what a Houthi was, where he came from, and that we’d had indications that Kuds intelligence people from Iran were there, and it might blow one day. Lost them. No one at Langley had the faintest idea what I was talking about, and I didn’t have a much better idea myself. The truth is that AQ is what we understand, and zapping bad people, and having the drones up. I’m rambling. Do you people have a good idea of what a Houthi is, where he’s coming from, where he wants to go, and if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is directing the whole damn situation? Share it if you do. Anyway, we like the simple things, like blood on the sand, and doing a victory roll. Stay in touch.’
The conference was over. Oskar read in bed and Doris washed her hair over the basin in her converted container, and Hector sipped Jack Daniel’s: their phones would ring in an inverse sequence. The same source was ‘exclusive’ to them all and received three payments, monthly. The message was cryptic and brief: an incident was reported, north of Marib garrison. There were casualties following an attack on ‘principal target personalities’. Nothing more.
Corrie could judge his own speed by the advance of the lights. Each time he fired now he barely turned his hips, let the pain surge in his shoulder and the ache penetrate his legs. He shot in their general direction and might have been short, or wide, or high. And the distance, even wind-assisted, that he could throw a grenade had lessened and the detonations were too far in front of them. He was going more slowly and hadn’t the strength to up his speed. He fired again. There was just a small, metallic click in his ear, almost shredded by the wind, and another magazine was finished. Changing it took more time. Disengaging it, fumbling in his pocket for the last of the three he had been given, slotting it in, arming it, turning away from his pursuers once more and attempting to hurry. Time was running out, like it was the bloody sand in an hourglass, turning and running.
‘George?’
‘Yes.’
‘Bertie here.’
At the right hand of God on the Fifth Floor, a DDG ranked with the angels, but this one liked to maintain a certain degree of familiarity down the ladder, calling himself by an abbreviated given name. He was five years younger than George, a number-cruncher, and reckoned overtly ambitious. He worked late most evenings and, if he did not, then his suite’s lights stayed on till midnight, and men and women fleeing VBX for home might look back up and believe he was still at
his desk, beavering away. It was after ten o’clock and the traffic had thinned on the bridge below; the river shone.
‘George, that’s me. Evening, Bertie – how can I help?’
‘Do you have some chatter in your ear?’
‘Not really. I know the lift-out has been called for. Also, I know there has been an “incident”, a vague description, in that area. Don’t know whether they’ve hit or whether, as yet, they have been extracted.’
He was staying the night. Lizzie had made up the camp bed in a corner of his office. She’d have a pump-up air bed in her own outer section and probably Farouk would cat-nap on the floor somewhere, and monitor the screens.
He was told, ‘The chatter is reported from Cheltenham. Won’t mess you about, George. The Emir, the old bugger with Afghan experience, he dead, he’s buried. The bomb boy, also dead, also buried. It’s what we’re hearing, but we don’t have any proof. I’m not sharing other than with you. What I’m saying, George, is that you might care to loosen a cork. It was Crannog, I’m right? We’ll be sweating now on the extraction, the tricky end of the business. Thought you should know soonest, but it is not more than chatter.’
‘Thank you, Bertie.’
‘It’s the boy who was in Syria, yes? Had a bad time there? Well, we’ll be rooting for him. Well done, George. Congratulations would seem in order, if a little premature. There’s something else I’d like to bounce at you . . .’
An interesting bounce. A suggestion from up there, the land of the seraphs and cherubims, on high. He was told his retirement would be postponed. He would have the rank and authority to push forward new policy in a very clearly specified area; his grade would be upped and his pension package augmented: all on Crannog’s back.
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