Jericho's War

by Gerald Seymour

  Henry lashed him. ‘I am not giving up, I am not stopping.’

  She fell, her anger exhausted. A half-hour before it had been she who had collapsed and he who had hoisted her up on to his shoulder. He had staggered on and might have covered another quarter of a mile. And two hours before it had been her who had cajoled him into another effort when he had been close to failure. He could not have said how far they had gone since dawn, and how many miles they had progressed since they had heard the booming explosions, and seen the blaze of short-lived light. The sun was high now. After the days of cloud and wind, overcast days and gale-swept nights, the air was warm above them, the heat blistering back from the sand. Sometimes they had gone over the summits of dunes and then had slithered down, had rolled, had landed together at the bottom with the breath knocked from them. They’d had to fight to go on and climb the next ridge.

  They lay together and their breath came in deep and unsatisfied pants, heads close and hands touching.

  He said, ‘I can’t.’

  She said, ‘Don’t know that bloody word.’

  ‘I cannot go further,’ Belcher said.

  ‘You have to, have to.’

  ‘And cannot, can not.’

  ‘Don’t hear it.’

  ‘I just want to sleep, to hold you and sleep.’

  ‘Won’t allow it.’

  ‘Have to sleep.’

  She pushed herself up on an elbow, her head hovering above his and her hair falling over his face, and he was a dulled, soft-focus image because of the sand in her eye.

  ‘. . . have to sleep and then afterwards we—’

  ‘Except there will be no afterwards. White bones is what we’ll be. Clothes disintegrate, flesh comes off and the bloody rodents get it. Just the bones are left. God, however bad it is where you come from, up there in the dark north, it cannot be as bad as ending up with white bones. That is not ‘‘afterwards’’. ‘‘Afterwards’’ is you and me. I’m an ugly cow and you’re worse, and no one else would have us, no one. That is afterwards, us together: you and me together, and babies, and all that shit . . . and memories of where we were, what we did. He told me about the fracture, Jericho did, and the basin and the trough. We did what we could. Every day that planes go over, and not into it, we will know what we did. See all the faces at the airports, maybe just go and stand there and watch them board, and know we played a part. Belcher, you are not sleeping.’

  He had no answer. Belcher rolled to his side and started to lever himself up and on to his knees and she rocked and then gained balance and stood over him and dragged him higher and he staggered a pace and she supported him and the effort must have weakened her, with all the talking she’d done, because she nearly fell over, and they were both laughing – hysterical and cackling – and knew they were close to death, closer if they slept, closest if they gave up, either one of them, and stopped the fight. They had nothing left to carry, only each other.

  They went forward. The sound started as a faraway moan. He might have been holding her, or she might have been supporting him, and he said nothing and would have thought himself asleep on his feet, and the dream in his head was of them lying, holding and touching and feeling, and at peace, and without bloody noise, but he could not escape it, that drone in his ear, like the sound of a bee’s flight.

  Belcher remembered the sound. He had been in the lea of a hill, and the fast-jet strike had been on the small camp he and his people had made on the far side of its summit, and he had slipped away, as innocent as anyone needing a crap, and had taken some paper with him. They were always supposed to have a weapon and a rucksack when they moved in case of surprise combat, so everything he owned was with him, and the aircraft had come, screaming and ferocious, and had bombed. A silence had followed them. He had looked up, as he did now, and had seen the speck, watched it grow and had waved, and it had banked. And remembered the cold faces of men in uniform who had first searched him and then had hoisted him aboard. He had waved hard at the speck before it had locked on him.

  Now he saw it and heard the growing sound and it seemed to bank away, like a dog with a scent but no definite target, and it veered from them. His own clothes – what was left of them, were wrong, dark brown T-shirt, black gilet. Her blouse was short-sleeved and coral pink, over a whitish, but heavily stained, T-shirt. No explanations.

  He threw out her hands, waved them wide. He dragged at the blouse, and the buttons, exploded out of the holes and the material ripped, and he shook it off her shoulders. He had the T-shirt up, yanking it over her head and off her and waving it. He held it high, stood and thrashed the air with it, but the path the aircraft took was away, and he yelled into the skies as it grew smaller.

  He thought she sobbed.

  It turned, working a track back, but it had not seen them and did not come towards them. Demented, Belcher howled for it to notice them, and he tried to run higher and get to the top of a dune but the sand was treacherous and he slipped back, still shouting and waving, and he could no longer see it, but heard it. She had tears on her face and her body, exposed, was trembling

  Still going forward, not knowing his destination, Corrie had no shelter from the sun and no water for his throat and his reserves of strength were dregs in a tank. He had lost, almost, the power to think or summon reason, and he followed the valleys of sand that the winds had made in the night, crested the summits and toppled and tipped over, and was near to delirious, and he felt a great calm, like fulfilment. And soon he would sleep: that was what he promised himself.

  Chapter 20

  He was on his knees, and he used his hands to scuff the weight of his body forward.

  The shadow passed over him. He did not look up.

  It came in silence and didn’t hesitate and then went beyond him, then swung and came back. It was difficult for Corrie Rankin to estimate it, but he thought the size of the shadow grew a little each time it was closer to him. The quiet was not complete because he could hear the wheeze of his own breath and the scraping clear of the sand under his hands and the slithering sounds as his knees and boots dragged after them. It was a strong shadow and it drifted backwards and forwards and became larger and also clearer, and the sun’s strength showed him no mercy.

  Corrie had heard it said that men, when faced with a desperate thirst, would try to collect their own urine and drink it, hoping by that to lessen the dryness in their throats. A girl at the survival course had asked if that would work, but the instructor’s face had been a study in contempt. It would make the thirst more acute, would enter raw waste into the body. It could be used to dampen clothing in extreme heat. Corrie could not have drunk his own urine, anyway, because he could not pass any; his bladder was empty, body fluids drained, no sweat left.

  The shadow was lower, still without sound, but as it passed by his head he felt a small flutter of breath as if still air was disturbed. He continued forward. Something animal drove him; his will to live was strong, but so was the urge to sleep. He wrestled with it: when to sleep, when to survive, and faces jumbled in his mind and voices echoed there.

  The wind brought by the shadow became stronger, more of a zephyr. It landed. The shadow was in front of him, motionless.

  Corrie caught the dark shape of it and focused and blinked and used a sand-caked forearm to wipe his eyes, which only spread the stuff, achieved nothing. He blinked some more. He looked at the shadow, followed it to its source. It was in front of him and he edged closer to it but it did not shift and make way for him. The shadow defied him – he saw claws and what were feathers but seemed like bell-bottom trousers, and then the bulk of a dark body, and at the top was a diminutive head and a bright but dark eye locked on him, and a cruelly curved beak. It flapped at him, spread its wings as if in a declaration of intent, and he did a slow sum in his head and reckoned that their span was nine feet, and then the shadow seemed to engulf him. It watched him carelessly from a few feet away.

  He went forward. ‘Sod off, man.’ Waved it clea
r of his route. It flew off, a good sign, but only using a few flaps.

  It might have been a griffon or an Egyptian or a lappet-faced vulture. He did not know. It had white breeches, and a chest that was caramel-coloured but with dark streaks in the feathers, and the neck and head were raw and pink. It hopped back, then steadied, eyed him again. When it was necessary the great wings shook and it gave him more space, but it was done grudgingly. He was still on hands and knees and he reckoned the bird was there for the duration. It showed no hatred and little interest, but was prepared to wait. How long? They moved together and the distance between them stayed constant, never lessened and never grew. He wondered when another would come from up high, and whether they would fight for the right to wait closest to him.

  How long it would have to wait until it could feed, Corrie Rankin did not know.

  It had found them. Belcher had sunk back into the sand, and was lying on his back gasping for breath. It did a pass over them and then flew in a wide circle and he could see the men in the hatches and the gun barrel trained on the sand.

  As an afterthought he threw Henry her T-shirt without a word; nothing would have been heard anyway because the helicopter had done a second circuit and was coming in low now.

  He felt a great tiredness. He saw Henry stand shakily and roll, on her feet. She lifted the garment and hooked her hands into the armholes and dragged the top down. They had nothing. Nothing remained of their lives. All was behind them, abandoned and making a trail in the sand. They had been alone in the quiet of the desert, and now big rotors thrashed the air close to them and sand flew. They had no bags to hoist on to their shoulders. His life as a jihadist traitor was over, her work as an archaeologist and tooth-puller curtailed. He had no weapon, no Book. She had no pottery, no ornaments, no plans of the buildings that would have been familiar to the great queen.

  The aircraft landed, disappeared in a storm of sand, and nobody broke through it and hurried to help them. It was a big boys’ and girls’, world. She recognised that and lowered her arm, and he caught her wrist and she took the strain and he was up and on his knees – for two, three seconds. He looked as if he might buckle, but she held him and he regained his balance. What was he going back to? Had not an idea. And her? He doubted there could be a coherent answer to that either. A daft thought – a hotel room, a sign on the outside of the door, there for however many hours the minibar lasted; it might be three days before they emerged – a sustaining thought. He thought she looked a wreck but magnificent, her thin clothing plastered against her body by the gale from the blades.

  He pushed her head down. They ran together, a graceless, lumbering trot.

  Hands came down, grasped her, lifted her, dusted her down without formality, set her in a seat. Belcher was not helped. He gripped the mounting for the machine-gun and the lowest strut of the gunner’s seat and heaved himself up, then a hand caught the back of his trousers and a jerk took him through the hatch, across the floor, and he was on the boots of the men he assumed to be the marksman and the marksman’s spotter. And then he saw Jericho.

  Barely recognised him. No fat stomach. No smooth-shaved wide cheeks with the grin of a poseur, but a narrow waist and a stubble-covered, oil-streaked face. And Belcher could read the glance; it was pretty bloody obvious. He was not the Sixer. No effort made to hide his disappointment, the crumbling expectation: it was writ large on Jericho’s face. He could have shouted, ‘Yes, it’s me, not him. And while you’re dabbing your eyes, consider it was me that fingered your two targets. Without me, you were nowhere, and I’ve been inside there, wrong side of the tracks, for months on your say-so.’ But he did not.

  Jericho faced him. They were lifting.

  ‘Good to see you, Belcher – and good to see you too, Miss Wilson. Priorities first – where is he? Corrie, what happened to him? Please, quickly, because this bird uses juice extravagantly, drinks it.’

  She said, ‘He covered our backs.’

  He said, ‘Without him, we’d not have reached this far.’

  ‘Grand, good citation but where do we look?’

  Belcher said it was further west, and spoke of explosions. Henry told of fires and high explosive and said it was west, further into the desert.

  They went up, the dust cloud under them thinning. Belcher would have liked to have felt ‘special’ and to have had his hand pumped, and to have been told that they felt huge admiration for him, and that he should feel extremely proud. A bottle of water was passed him, a small one, already half drunk, and he wiped the neck of it and passed it to Henry, and her eyes fired back at him that it was unnecessary to play old-fashioned games of mannered courtesies. They were both on the riveted metal cabin floor, which was hard on their bodies, their spines against the legs and knees of the other two. Jericho talked to the pilot, whose glances darted frequently down to a dial. The engine faltered, and they turned hard from where they had been. With one hand Belcher held tight to her T-shirt, which he had waved and which had been seen. The men behind him, the support team, said nothing; they might have slept.

  It was almost midnight when they locked up the cubicle and went along the dim-lit corridor.

  There had been paperwork to complete, was bound to be. The pilot, Casper, had had four million bucks’ worth of Predator in his care, and had fired two Hellfires, which put an additional quarter of a million dollars on the red side of the balance sheet. A colonel had been called in, in poor humour, having missed his dinner at home, or maybe his gym workout, and they had had to make statements on the mission, and the mission’s authorisation, and the checks they had made or had not made, to be assured that the authorisation remained valid. The audio tapes inside the cubicle had been downloaded and were in the colonel’s care, then the images they had watched on the screen were replayed and re-recorded. Then paperwork from Casper’s log, and from Xavier’s check sheets, went into a deep briefcase, and Bart was quizzed on what he had said to Hurlbert, and what Hurlbert had said to him.

  There would be a court of inquiry. Before the colonel had reached them in the cubicle, Casper had offered advice in a whisper that the microphones would not have registered. Say as little as you can. Bare minimum. Remember these mothers never make a clear-cut decision, don’t want to. What it was like in here, and the pressure we were under, is not something a top brass would understand, or want to. Give the mothers no help.

  The man would have believed that Xavier was a monosyllabic idiot, that Bart had no right to be classified as an intelligence analyst, and that Casper wavered on the edge of incompetence or insubordination. They might all lose their jobs: the Air Force was no longer flush with funds, nor the Agency, and four million dollars counted for more than it used to – and the mothers gave not a shit for Yemen.

  They made their way out. Bart would go to the quarters assigned for bachelor officers. Xavier would drive home. If he had any sense, and Casper had given his opinion, he’d neither apologise nor offer excuses, but might just carry his wife up the stairs and splay her and give it to her hard, and what they had been through in the cubicle might just be what he needed to make it work. It could not be any worse than hanging around the waiting rooms of physicians and psychiatrists. Xavier was a good man, and he cared, and had never raised a problem about going out on a limb to save an anonymous guy, wearing boots, who was in trouble and had no other friend. If his technician did make love to his wife before he fell asleep, Casper hoped fervently that conception would follow. Himself, he would go home to a quiet house and do himself an open sandwich on rye, drink some juice, sit in his kitchen and look out of a window on to a darkened street, and still be there at dawn – and the start of another day.

  He felt the sweat in his armpits and at his groin, his flying jumpsuit flapping against his skin. He carried the briefcase that held his empty lunchbox and flask. Not many outside their particular and limited trade, he reflected, would understand the stresses imposed by war fought far from a front line. Had they saved the guy, identifiable only b
y his boots? He could not have said. He had one certainty: having seen him he would not have left him to his fate, would not have done under any circumstances. It hurt to have lost the bird; they had been a good partnership and he had cosseted her in the air and had formed an affection for her, as Xavier had, but the life mattered more. He’d not sleep, and would be better left alone at the kitchen table. It would play on his mind what had been on the screen, a man in flight and a pack closing in on him, and he doubted he would ever know if they had saved him, or had done too little, been too late.

  It was the second time they had landed as Jericho searched for his man.

  More bodies, more scorch marks, more charred figures and more carnage. Flies and swollen stomachs, and the smell that the dead left behind. Jericho had Rat with him, and each held a cloth across their face. Some were still alive.

  Eyes followed them and heads tilted in pain and watched them, croaking for water. Not that Jericho was a cold, old bastard, but he had neither the time to minister to the injured nor the water to dispense. It would have been kinder to use a service pistol, a Browning or a Glock, a bullet for each of the living in the middle of the forehead, but that would be regarded as a crime against humanity, so he ignored the beseechers. He knew what he was looking for. Some of the carcases were barely marked and would have been killed by blast, and others had been burned so badly that the human shapes were distorted out of all recognition, and some had been decapitated by shrapnel from the missile strike, and others had lost legs and were still alive or were already winging their way to Paradise. Boots. Corrie had been wearing good, dark Karrimors, and the dead and the living here wore flip-flops or heavy-duty sandals. The two men picked their way gingerly among the bodies, the living and the dead, and the live weapons, and skirted the crater where the Hellfire had struck.