The launch knifed into the surf of the shore and surged as if on a collision course with the beach. The final quarter of the sun balanced on the ridges of distant hills. Caleb watched the approach from the cabin's porthole. All through the journey across the Gulf the kids had not spoken to him and they had not fed him. His only contact with them had been when a canvas bucket filled with sea-water had been dumped at the entrance to the cabin. He had realized its purpose and rinsed out the vomit from his robe, then had used his hands to clean the cabin floor. Much of the time they had watched him but when he had looked up from his place against the bulkhead they had turned away their eyes as if they understood that – unarmed, alone – he had carried danger to them… As the sun fell below the hills, Caleb failed to see any movement on the shore. Three or four miles to the right, when they had been further out at sea, he had seen what he thought was a fishing village, but as they came closer it had disappeared.
Abruptly, the kid at the wheel swung it. Caleb was thrown across the floor. His shoulder thudded into the far wall and spray drenched him through the cabin's open door. On his hands and knees he crawled to a hard chair that was screwed down, and held tightly to it. Then the kid who was at the controls throttled down the two outboards, allowing the waves to carry the rocking launch nearer to the beach. The kid at the wheel jerked his head, gesturing for Caleb to come out of the cabin. He could barely stand, and he used the chair, then the edge of a table and the doorway to support himself.
He could see the beach where the surf broke, and he heard the little ripples of sound as the sea ran on sand and shingle, then fell back.
Fast, they had him by the shoulders and arms and propelled him towards the launch's side. Not only was he no sailor, he had never swum. He did not resist.
They had had time to learn every contour of his face. They could have described the shape of his nose, the cut of his jaw, the colour of his eyes.
He could have told them the fate of four men who trafficked opium who, also, had seen his face.
They lifted him up, his stomach scraping on the launch's side.
He told them nothing.
Had they stopped, pulled back his head by the hair at the last moment and looked into his face in the dying light they would have seen the harshness of his features – but they did not.
Caleb was pitched over the side. He saw the twin grinning faces, and then he went under. The shock of the water forced air from his lungs. He went down, into blackness. He was scrambling with his feet, kicking, and the salt water was in his mouth, his nostrils, and the pressure on his chest was leaden. His feet flailed into the sea bed.
When he broke the surface, gasping and coughing, the launch was already under full power, arrowing away from the beach. The limit of his memory was the few days in Landi Khotal and the wedding party – before that there was nothing, the same blackness as when he had gone under the water, and after that there were memories of Afghanistan and more memories of the camps at Guantanamo Bay.
Nothing in that cut-short memory told Caleb how to swim. He was a man who could fight with skill, with resolve, a man who could trek and endure the confines of a prison cage constructed to destroy a prisoner's soul, but he had never swum. He lashed at the water. The thrashes of his legs and arms, and the power of the waves, pushed him towards the beach. He felt no guilt that he had not told them of their fate. His mind was as cold as his body in the water. His feet hit the bottom. His sandals had stayed on. He stood at his full height and the waves broke against his back. He waded towards the shore.
When he was clear of the water, Caleb sank down on his haunches, then rolled on to his back and little pebbles pressed into his spine.
Above him, a low shaft of moonlight came off the water and covered him.
His life, as he knew it, had begun at a wedding party on the outskirts of the town of Landi Khotal and before that there was the same darkness as when he had gone down into the water off the launch.
He had no wish to clear the darkness because older memories threatened him. On his back, looking up at the stars, he saw the man with the eyepatch and the chrome claw, always watching him. He had felt then that the one eye was never off him. The party had drifted on and food had been eaten, and when the evening had come, the man with the eyepatch and the claw had sat beside him. Lit by hurricane lamps in which moths danced, he had seen the scars spreading out from under the eyepatch and up the wrist to which the claw was strapped.
It had been the start of the journey of Caleb's life.
A light flashed in the trees, winked at him.
His sandals slithered in the sand. He went towards it. For a whole minute the flashes guided him but when he reached the debris left by the tide's highest point the light was killed. He blundered forward in darkness and wove between tree-trunks. Thorns caught at his robe.
His clothes were sodden and the cold of the coming night swaddled him… Caleb was not ashamed of fear. Since the wedding, he had been afraid many times. The Chechen had said that fear was unimportant, that the control of fear was the talent of a fighter… If he was to return to his family, he must take every step on trust.
He trudged through the trees. He pulled the robe clear when it snagged.
Caleb had control of the fear because the camps at Guantanamo had hardened him. He was a survivor… He passed a palm tree's trunk. His arm was grabbed and the light fell on the plastic bracelet on his right wrist. Then his arm was loosed. The fear was gone.
In the low light, the farmers approached the corpse with caution.
They had walked up from the track, among the rocks, because they had smelt the stench of the body. The track ran from the Yemeni town of Marib across the border, and on north-east to the Saudi town of Sharurah. They had left their donkeys and sheep by the track where a bullet-scarred car had burned out. They came to the corpse. The head had been cut from the neck and the hands from the wrists. Flies crawled over the torso, and already some of the flesh had been torn away by foxes. Holding his shirt tail over his nose, one went close enough to the body to reach out and check the pockets, but they were empty, and when he pulled up a sleeve there was no watch. The farmers circled the corpse and threw stones on it until they had made a cairn to cover the body. Then they ran, leaving the smell and the stones behind them.
'Is that right, we let some out?'
'Just five, only five… It was about pressure, image. So, what's the big deal? It was five guys, why does that matter?'
Across the desk, the supervisor glowered at him. To Jed, he looked drawn, stressed in the neon strip-light washing over his face. It highlighted the strain at his mouth and the sacs below the eyes. If Jed hadn't gone down with the headcold he would have returned to Guantanamo a week earlier. By the time he had gone back with Brigitte and Arnie Junior to the apartment near the Pentagon, the headcold had been streaming out of his nose, he'd had a raw throat and a hacking cough. He'd delayed his return to Gitmo. He held the list of names in his hand. The days that Jed Dietrich, in his time with the Defense Intelligence Agency, had called in sick could have been counted on the fingers of one hand. It had hurt him, a conscientious man, to be back late off leave, and the winnowing guilt fuelled his show of temper.
'It matters, Edgar, because two of them are on my work list.'
'The hell it matters – and, as I said, pressure and image played their part. Those factors may not figure at your level, Jed, but they do at mine. Coming across my desk is pressure to improve the image of this god-forsaken place. So, we let a few out and the pressure eases, the image improves. Now, it may be the end of the day but I still have . a shitload of work to do.' The supervisor grinned cagily. 'And I imagine, Jed, you'll want to look after that cold of yours. Get your loot up so you don't lose any more time here.'
It was dismissal. His supervisor had fifteen years on Jed and three grades of superiority. Perhaps because the headcold had tired him, perhaps because the connection out of San Juan had been late, perhaps because victories at Camp Delta were in short supply, Jed persisted.
'Shouldn't have happened, not names on my list. They shouldn't have been released, not without consultation. Did they just come out of a hat?'
'For God's sake, look at that.' The supervisor waved at his piled in-tray. 'I have work to do.'
'Did you authorize the releases? Was it your decision?'
To a few colleagues, Jed Dietrich was dedicated. To most colleagues he was a plodder. He liked things done right… He had nearly, almost, cleared two of the names on the list but 'nearly' and
'almost' were not good enough for him. A frown clung to his brow.
He knew the way it would have worked out in his absence. The Bureau and the Agency had authority; DIA was down the ladder, bottom rung.
Jed said, 'The blind one, I don't have a difficulty with him, but this guy – Fawzi al-Ateh – he was unfinished business.'
'What are you trying to say?' the supervisor menaced him.
'I'm just saying that it's not professional. It's crazy to clear a guy, Edgar, when interrogation hasn't run the full road.'
'You're on a roll this morning.' The supervisor's smile was grim.
'It's not crazy, it was an order.'
'I thought about him.'
'Did you? Well, let me say it – when I'm up for vacation I won't be thinking about any of them, about anything to do with this place. He was just a taxi-driver… Lighten up. Forget about him. All you need to remember is that he's gone. This is your new roster.'
The supervisor handed Jed the printout of his interrogation duties for the coming week. Jed held it in one hand; in the other was a list of the five names of men released when he'd been away from Gitmo.
The first week of his vacation, the names and patterns of the questioning had drilled in his mind; by the time he'd reached the cabin in Wisconsin overlooking the lake, they'd been scrubbed out. But on seeing the name on the list, the itch and irritation had returned. He must have been scowling.
'Damnit, Jed, didn't you get any fish up there?'
He stood up and went out into the evening air. The Maghrib prayers were being broadcast over loudspeakers. Beyond the wire fences, flooded by the arc lamps' light, he heard the murmured response of six hundred men, a droning cry, like the swarm of bees.
He passed the interrogation block, his workplace, where ceiling lights blazed, and came to the prefabricated wood building that was his work-home. He hated the place because, here, even little victories were hard to come by. In front of him was the concrete building – not of prefabricated wood – where the Agency and the Bureau were installed: they took the cream of the prisoners; they weeded out the best from which bigger victories might be squeezed. They were the kings of Gitmo.
In his cubicle, barely wide enough to take a single outstretched boat rod, long enough for a single float rod for bank angling, Jed studied the roster for his week's interrogations. There were names he didn't know, which would have been passed down to him because other interrogators had finished their Gitmo posting. There was a rhythm and routine at Camp Delta that added merely to a sum result of failure. He swore… Later, he would sign himself out at the compound gate, take the shuttle bus to the ferry and go across the bay to the main Marine Corps base. From his sparsely furnished room he would phone Brigitte and he'd tell her everything was dandy, fine, but first he had work.
His fingers hammered on the computer console. The message was to Defense Intelligence Agency at the Bagram airfield in Afghanistan. Could a check be run on Fawzi al-Ateh, ref. no. US8AF-000593DP? Could a report be sent back on the return of Fawzi al-Ateh to his community? Had he been quizzed on the reasons for the request, Jed could not have responded with any coherence. Might have been merely pique that he had not been consulted. Might have been a feeling far down in his gut.
It would be a month, if he was lucky, before Bagram replied. He sent the signal. the marine eyed him as if he was an intruder and not welcome.
Eddie Wroughton smiled back, left his opinion, like flatulence hanging in the air, that the marine corporal's hostility was of no concern. The messenger from the front desk of the embassy left him at the gate. The suite of offices used by the Central Intelligence Agency was high in the building. The outer walls had been strengthened, the windows were shatter-proof, and the inner doors were steel-plated. The marine watched over the grille gate into the suite. Wroughton gave his name and flashed his passport. Before the marine could telephone for instructions, Juan Gonsalves had bustled from an inner room. The gate was opened. Wroughton was admitted.
His name went into the ledger. They embraced. Gonsalves led Wroughton through an open-plan work area, the territory of the juniors and secretaries. Eyes followed Wroughton, echoing the hostility of the marine corporal. Precious few of the embassy's own American staff, seldom even the ambassador and no other non-nationals, were permitted access to this inner sanctum where Riyadh's heat and dust could not penetrate. The air-conditioners purred. What Wroughton knew, Juan Gonsalves didn't give a shit.
Eddie Wroughton was the only foreigner allowed into the heartland of Agency territory. They went past a desk and a junior bent forward awkwardly to hide his papers. A secretary flipped the button to blank her screen. They walked on. Wroughton wore his linen suit and ironed white shirt, his tie knotted over the button; Gonsalves had faded jeans low on his ample hips and his shirt tail had worked out of the belt. They were opposites but they had mutual trust because they fed off each other, and they shared a common enemy. It was, however, an unequal feast.
Eddie Wroughton's greatest problem in his Riyadh posting was bringing sufficient food to the table. Too often – and it nagged him – all he had was a fistful of crumbs. He was led into a side office.
The room was a mess. Wroughton knew there had been an inspection team out from Langley three months before, and he presumed that his friend had made an effort to shift chaotic heaps of files off the floor, the table and chairs, to have the coffee-cups and wine glasses washed and laid to rest in the cupboard, to clear away the fast-food packaging, to put a cover sheet over the updated Most Wanted photographs, to keep the safe locked – but it was now twelve weeks since the team had gone home and standards had slipped again. His own office, in the British Embassy, was presided over by an assistant, who was prim and elderly with her hair netted tight in a bun above the nape of her neck.
She kept the room pristine, as if she feared provoking his criticism.
Wroughton stepped carefully between the files, removed a box of papers from a chair, selected the least dirty coffee mug, held it up and gazed into the crowded depth of the open safe. Above him, when he sat down, the faces of the Most Wanted stared down malevolently, some with a Chinagraph cross daubed across their cheeks with the date of their capture or death; the majority were still unmarked. A plate with a half-moon of pizza abandoned on it lay beside Gonsalves' steaming kettle. Coffee was made and an old biscuit tin passed to him. Dominating the Most Wanted photographs was the image of the First Fugitive. A long face topped by a white cloth that hid the hairline, bright, sparkling eyes, a prominent nose, a range of uneven but white teeth, a moustache that came wispily past a laughing mouth to merge into a straggling beard of which the centre was greying and the extremes were dark. Around the throat was a buttoned-up brown overshirt. Above the First Fugitive's head had been written in a juvenile hand, ' "The death of the Martyr for the unification of all the people to the cause of God and His word is the happiest, best, easiest and most virtuous of deaths": Medieval Scholar.' Wroughton was thinking of the men who had climbed on to the passenger aircraft less than three years before and was wondering if they'd known those words. Gonsalves slumped in his chair, tilted it, heaved his feet on to the table, scattering papers, and slopped his coffee.
'OK, Eddie, can I shoot?'
'Fire.'
Gonsalves languidly gestured to the Most Wanted and the First Fugitive, sipped his coffee, then shot.
'They are screwed. In trouble. Hunted. They have problems. They are in disarray. They are looking over their shoulders. Not capable, right now, of the big hit. They are hurt. But-'
'But they are intact, Juan.'
'But they are intact. Bull's eye, Eddie, right in the inner circle. So, in retreat a commander looks to find a new defence line, somewhere he can hunker down and-'
'And regroup, Juan.'
'Afghanistan is finished for him. Pakistan is hot and difficult for him. Iran is-'
IIran is quietly co-operative, useful as a transit and short-time hideaway.'
'Iran is not a place for a long-term base camp. Chechnya, forget it.
Somalia and Sudan are past history for him, the game's moved on.
We're hearing talk from elsewhere… What do you know, Eddie, about the Empty Quarter?'
Eddie Wroughton could have said that what he knew about the Empty Quarter was that it was empty, could have said that it wasn't a part of Saudi Arabia to which Juan should take his Teresa and the tribe of children for weekend camping, could have said anything facetious – but didn't. When he fed from his friend's table, he cut the smart-arse quips.
'I've flown over it, of course. I used to have that major in the Border Guard, you'll remember him, but he's posted up north now. I know precious little about it.'
'It isn't Siglnt, and not EIInt, and it's most certainly not HumInt, it's just rumour. I did some reading anyway. Except for some mountain in the Himalayas, right on the peak, the Empty Quarter seems to be as remote as you can get. It's a huge area, like the name says, but I have confirmation there have been no satphone links out of there, or radio, and-'
'There wouldn't be, unless they're suicidal.'
'-and all I have to go on is a rumour of couriers passing through northern Yemen and heading up to the border, and people coming back. Three days ago it got kind of interesting.'
A story from Gonsalves was like water spilled on linoleum, it meandered but it kept going. It did not sink quickly into sand.
Without the morsels of Agency information Wroughton's own work would have been harder and his future darker.
'We don't have people in north Yemen, not on the ground, but we have the Yemeni military we've trained. Three days ago, our liaison officer in San'a was brought a cardboard box, like it was a present, the sort of size box you'd put groceries in. There were guys standing around and giggling, and he was invited to open it up. There was a head, severed, and two hands, all sawn off with a knife, and there was some squidgy sort of shit – I mean it. A guy had approached a roadblock, had seen the military, had jumped out and left his vehicle, then run for cover in the rocks. They did well, the military, but not quite well enough. Before they shot him, he was seen to swallow something – OK, OK, he's dead. So, what they did, Eddie, was they disembowelled him. They got into his upper intestine, down the bottom of his throat, and they got out a scrap of chewed paper, what you'd use for home-made cigarettes. Then they took off the head and the hands – you understand, for identification. I think our liaison guy's putting in for counselling, maybe for a transfer. I mean it, they slit his stomach and got out his tubes, then cut into them. Christ, we got some allies… What was left of the paper went back as an image to the laboratory at Langley, but we can't break into whatever writing there was. All we end up with is a courier carrying a message so tiny it might not have been found, so important it was worth swallowing and dying to protect it, and we don't have identification and there's no databank in Yemen that could match the fingerprints off the hands. The other thing – earlier, the roadblock military had seen a small camel train waiting down the track, nearer to the frontier. We trained those boys well, they're bright and keen. As soon as they'd filled the cardboard box they skipped back up the road to where the camels had been and two Bedouin. The sound of shooting carries a long way across those hills and the sand – no camels, no Bedouin. What do you think?'
'I'd say that's promising, maybe interesting.'
'What we're doing, Eddie – this is between you and me, this is between friends or it'll be my head in the next cardboard box – is we're going to put some toys down in the Empty Quarter, we're-'
'Big kids' toys?'
'You could say that. Anything you hear-'
'Top of my agenda. Your toys, what's going to be their status with the locals?'
Fifteen of the hijackers came out of here. They're bankrolled from here. The families of the Twin Towers are serving writs here for punitive damages. Then there's the war, the Angst. I wouldn't trust any last one of the bastards. They get to know the sum total of damn all. I'd appreciate your help. What we're saying is, the indications are that the Empty Quarter might just be a good place to regroup.'
Eddie Wroughton was escorted out and the marine corporal slammed the gate after him. He remembered his one flight over a desolate, heat-baked wilderness. His step was jaunty – God, he fed well off the Agency's table.
The swollen fingers, where the flesh bulged over gold rings, took his hand.
'Don't look into my face,' Caleb said. 'Don't remember me.'
The man's head dropped, as if he took a point of focus for his eyes on the dirt and gravel at the centre of the intersection of the two tracks, but his slug-thick fingertips moved over Caleb's hand and on to his wrist. Clumsily, they unravelled the cloth, then the wrist was pulled gently forward and the head twisted to look down at the bracelet. In a soft voice, the man recited Fawzi al-Ateh's name, and the reference number given at Camp Delta. Caleb's wrist was let go.
The man walked, with a waddling stride, back to his car, and bent to retrieve something from the safe box under the passenger seat.
He was a parcel and was passed on. A van with smoked windows had met him at the Omani shoreline and driven him inland. He had sat in the back, at the side, away from the field of vision of the driver's mirror. He had been left at a roadside near to a town, Ad Dari, on the far side of a mountain range. Traffic had sped past him until a Japanese four-wheel drive had ploughed on to the road's dirt shoulder, scattering dust over him. Through the open window his wrist bracelet had been examined. He had been driven away, again in the back seat, and taken beyond the wadi Rafash. He had been dropped off at a cross-point where trees in leaf threw down a sweet pool of shadow. He had waited there an hour, or more, and then the Audi had come, and the grossly overweight man had levered himself out and come to him.
The plastic bracelet from Camp Delta was his identification, as important as the pass-code numbers used by the guards when he had been brought from the cell blocks to the interrogation compound.
The man's robes flapped loose in a light wind. He carried back a small but heavy silken pouch, whose neck was held tight by a woven thong. He had forgotten himself and had stared momentarily at Caleb, then remembered and ducked his head. He gave the pouch to Caleb.
Caleb squatted down. His robe, dry from the sun, starched from the salt water, was tight between his thighs and made a basin in which to empty the pouch's contents. Gold coins cascaded on to his robe. They shimmered in the light. Caleb counted out a fortune in money, then carefully replaced each coin in the pouch, and put it into the inner pocket of his robe. The man looked away studiously, up the empty roads.
His voice was soft, like spoken music. 'I do not know your name, stranger, or what is your business, or where you go. You are a person held in extreme value by your friends… May God go with you, wherever he takes you. As a hawaldar, I have no eyes and no memory.
You do not seem to me to be from Oman, you are too tall and too heavily built, and I do not think you come from the Gulf. 1 deal in transactions of cash – ten dollars or a million dollars. I do not require your name because J do not need your signature. Haiual is the name of the trade. In our tongue, in Oman and the Gulf, it is a word that means trust. There is no trail of paper. I say you have received the money and those who are your friends will believe me. The trust is absolute. Rather than betray you, I would go to my grave. Rather than betray those who have sent you the money, I would cut out my tongue.'
He looked down into Caleb's face. The sincerity was there, and loyalty. He seemed to drink in the features of Caleb's face, to gorge himself. He crouched beside Caleb. 'I tell you, my young stranger, that the intelligence agencies of the Americans and the British hate, detest, loathe, the system of hawal. Money transfers are made, coded signals, and they cannot suck up the messages into their computers and so identify me, you and your friends. They blaspheme in frustration. The links are secret and you should have no fear.'
Caleb leaned forward and kissed the man's cheeks. He saw the admiration in the man's eyes and was confused.
'May God go with you, may your destination be Paradise. The poet Hasan Abdullah al-Qurashi wrote: "Glory in life is complete for the one who dies for a principle, for an ideal, for a grain of sand." I have admiration, beyond bounds, for your courage and for your willingness to sacrifice yourself. I know you are of great importance were you not, the effort to move you would not have been made. It is my privilege to have helped you. You are like the bright star in the night, the brightest.'
The man pushed himself up and went to his car. The dust spewed behind him as he drove away.
At the crossroads, where the tracks met, where the shadows lengthened, Caleb sat, his head bowed. After the vehicle had disappeared, the quiet was broken only by birds' chatter. With each step he had made since he had run from the road between the base and the prison, he had sought only to return to his family. But each man he had met, who had moved him on, had shown the same fascination, awe of him. Why?
Far away, a dustcloud careered off the northern track and came closer.
Was he already marked with death? Had the family chosen him for death? The words were hammer beats in his head: 'Glory in life is complete for the one who dies for a principle, for an ideal, for a grain of sand.' The poet's lilt had gone.
An old, dust-coated pickup stopped, then reversed and sped bumpily away. He was taken north, and sat close to a bleating lamb between two hobbled goats.
Bart worked late. The surgery was in a side-turning off the Al-Imam Abdul Aziz ibn Muhammad street. The glass-faced block was easy to find, half-way between the Central Hospital and the Riyadh museum.
He reassured the German banker that his stomach pains came from ulcers in the lower gut, not from bowel cancer, prescribed the necessary remedies and showed the grateful man to the door. The banker would pay his receptionist, and the fee would be generous.
No expatriate was using his own money: it was either from an insurance policy or from the company employing him. The banker wrung his hand in thanks at the diagnosis, then headed for the receptionist and ferreted in his pocket for either his cheque book or his wallet with the credit cards. Bart smiled balefully after him, then closed the door. He washed his hands at the sink, then stared out of the window, through the slat blinds, at the evening traffic. In the morning, the reward for his diagnosis, not a life-threatening tumour but a simple ulcer, would be electronically moved to a numbered, nameless bank account in Geneva, then its trail would scatter via Liechtenstein and Gibraltar to the Cayman Islands… It was his nest-egg – but where would he spend it? He assumed that, one day, when Wroughton had no more use for him, he would be cast off and allowed to drift away, but he did not know where he would eke out his last days. Then, wherever, he would be alone at the mercy of a conscience. Oh, yes, Samuel Algernon Laker Bartholomew had a newly developed conscience: in the nights it gnawed at him – he would wake sweating – and in the days it stabbed him. He dried his hands. His buzzer went.
She was shown in by the Malaysian nurse.
Bart beamed. 'Good evening, Miss Jenkins. I hope you haven't been waiting too long.'
'It's Beth, remember? No, not too long.'
'How was the shopping in Bahrain?'
'Bought a couple of pairs of jeans, some smalls, some pasta, a new pair of sand boots. Oh, I read a bit, swam a bit – crashed out, really.
It was just good to feel the sea.'
Her voice, Bart thought, was money – educated money and class money. She was one of those young women, he felt, who had only certainties in her life, for whom things happened because she wanted them to. There was about her that same confidence he had seen at the party. She was, he recognized it, a little breath of freshness in the daily routine that cocooned him in the sealed consulting room.
'Good, glad it worked out/ he said vacantly. 'Well, how can I help you?'
'I'm hoping you can't help me at all.'
She was rocking on her feet, staring back at him. She might have been gently mocking him. She wore the same skirt and the same blouse as she had at the party. He wondered if she had stayed for the
'brown tea', but doubted it. She didn't look to Bart to be the sort of expatriate who needed slugs of Jack Daniel's or Johnnie Walker for survival in the Kingdom.
Bart said, 'Very few people come to see me merely to indulge in conversation.'
She laughed. 'Sorry, sorry – I've been here just short of two years.
I 've never had a check-up. I live down south and I'm the only woman there. The quack's used to dealing with men falling off drilling platforms. I just wanted to make sure I was all right before going back. I hope I 'm not wasting your time.'
'Very wise, a check-up. You're not wasting my time. Anything that's worrying you?'
He was glad he hadn't to ask her to strip: her directness frightened him. He took her blood pressure. He listened, through the material of her blouse, to her heartbeat. Women who caught his eyes and held them had always frightened him – Ann had, and the senior partner in the practice at Torquay, and his mother. Her blood pressure was good and her heartbeat was fine. He tapped her chest, poked her a little with his finger and felt the solid wall of her stomach muscles.
Nothing wrong with her reflexes. The stomach muscles told him she was as strong as an ox, and he saw that her biceps bulged against the cuffs of her short-sleeved blouse. He went through his check-list.
Menstrual problems? She hadn't any. Pains in the kidneys? None.
Ten minutes later, he stepped back from her. 'Nothing to worry about.'
'Thanks, it was just that I don't know when I'll next be up here, in civilization.'
Something about her disarmed his caution, as it had at the party.
The examination finished, the nurse had left them.
'Not that I wish to contradict you, Miss Jenkins, but we have differing ideas about civilization. I would think you have to be fresh out of a cave to regard this place as civilized. In my book the construction of glossy buildings, wide roads and an extravagant spending power bordering on the obscene do not add up to civilization. The culture here is of corruption – it's a society of skimmers, fixers and intermediaries, one bloody great family freeloading off the oil resource. I'm here, like every other expatriate, to feed the greed.'
She asked, with that inbred directness, 'So why do you stay?'
Bart blanched. 'We don't all have options, Miss Jenkins,' he stammered. 'Right, any problems and you don't hesitate to call me.
Oh, if it's not impertinent, how did you hear of me?'
'I was down at the embassy, logging in with the new people. I was talking to one of the second secretaries and asking him about a doctor, a check-up. Another chap wandered up to us, must have heard what I was asking for. He gave me your name.'
'Oh, I must thank him. It's always good to know the grapevine works. Who was he?'
She paused, seemed to trawl in her memory, then smiled. 'Got it. Wroughton, Eddie Wroughton. That's who you should thank.'
Bart stiffened. She had made him reckless. He hardly knew her, but she had weakened all the defences he arrayed round himself.
'He's a parasite. He feeds off people. No, I'm wrong, he's worse than a parasite. Wroughton is as poisonous as a viper.' He caught himself.
'Have a good journey back, down south.'
Later, when his waiting room was empty and the nurse and receptionist had gone, he looked through the papers she had filled in.
She was twenty-seven years old. Her handwriting was like her personality – b o l d. He rather hoped he would never see her again. Her address was a post box, c/o Saudi ARAMCO, at Shaybah. He knew where Shaybah was, and that little morsel of knowledge comforted him – he would not see her or hear of her again. He rang for a taxi, ft seemed to him that when he'd touched her, her chest, muscles and organs, he'd touched danger – and when he'd looked at her, into the sparkle of her eyes, he'd looked into the depths of danger.
Before the sun had dipped far away to the west over the Asir mountains, the pilot had called Marty and Lizzy-Jo forward, had parked them in a jump-seat and the co-pilot's and had given them the bird's eye view. They had flown over the desert, and the map, devoid of recognizable features or the green of vegetation or any sign of habitation, had been on Lizzy-Jo's knee. The red sand, lit by the falling sun, had been scarred only by the dune formations, and what the pilot called their 'slipfaces', and he'd talked about 'crescentic dunes', 'star dunes', 'fishhook dunes' and 'linear dunes', and had identified all the strange and naturally made shapes at twenty-eight thousand feet below them. And he'd pointed out the sabkhas, the salt-crusted playas of sand between the dunes. He'd told them, his dry Texan voice clear in their headphones, that the Rub' al Khali covered an area of – close to – a quarter million square miles, and that trying to map the dune features was time wasted because they moved, prodded and reshaped by the winds. He'd said that, right now, down there and under the sun's blaze, the current ground temperature was well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Three years back an F-A18 Hornet, overflying the Rub' al Khali, had gone down out there in the middle of nowhere and a sandstorm had prevented helicopters with long-range tanks getting in. The rescue party from the Prince Sultan airbase at Al Kharj, on the northern fringe of the desert, had finally reached the wreckage using Hummer four-wheel drives, and had been too late. 'It was like the sun had burned him to death, dehydrated him, taken every last drop of juice out of him, and he was a trained guy, and the last day he'd been alive it was reckoned the temperature had hit one hundred and forty degrees, ma'am.' Then, the light had gone and they'd started a gradual descent.
'You folks drive the Predator?' The pilot was on manual but found time to talk. He wanted conversation: the UAVs were in their coffins behind the bulkhead, with the Ground Control Station and the trailers on which the satellite dishes were housed. Perhaps he thought that a young man with distorting spectacles, tousled hair and short trousers didn't look like any pilot that he, a military man, had ever known. Or perhaps he thought the young woman in her short skirt didn't seem like any sensor operator he'd ever met.
'What we do, as with all Agency business, is rated as classified,'
Marty said.
'Just asking – don't mean to put my nose where it's not meant to be.'
Lizzy-Jo said, 'He's the pilot for what we've got, MQ-ls. I sit beside him and do the fancy stuff – telling the truth, there should be two of me but the guy who's supposed to be-'
'Lizzy-Jo, that's classified,' Marty snapped.
She ignored him. '-supposed to be alongside me is down at Bagram with amoebic dysentery. We have to make do.'
The pilot was almost old enough to be Marty's father. 'Where have you flown, son?'
Marty said that he had flown at Nellis, Nevada, for his training, and out of Bagram, and he looked defiantly at the pilot. At Nellis there had been veteran pilots, and at Bagram from the USAF, and they'd all been spare with words but had not hidden their contempt at his age and appearance. Flying for them was a killing game when the Hellfires were on the pods under a Predator's wings. For Marty, flying was as intellectual a task as working the machines in a kids' arcade. He scowled and waited for the sarcastic retort from the pilot about his inexperience. He didn't get it.
'Perhaps ya'll know all this – in which case you'll say so. Feel the turbulence? That's standard here. We have big winds over the dunes, forty knots or fifty. What I heard, Predator doesn't like winds.'
'It can cope,' Marty said.
'Can't even take off if cross-winds exceed fifteen knots,' Lizzy-Jo said. 'And it's pretty difficult to get decent imagery on screen if it's rough up high.'
'The winds are bad, and then there's the heat over the sand. When you're up we find there's a density-altitude barrier, it's what the heat does. Even if there had been no sandstorm when we were trying to get that Navy pilot at the downed Hornet, the helicopter people were not keen on flying. What I'm saying is, it's difficult territory for aviation. It takes understanding. Nothing moves, nothing lives, you could call it a death trap. It's one hell of an unfriendly place down there, it's-'
The pilot broke off. He was holding his stick tight. The co-pilot came behind Lizzy-Jo and told her to vacate the seat. He replaced her, strapped himself in, and reached across to lock his hands over the pilot's, helping him hold the stick and fight a wind powerful enough to throw the big transporter off line. The pilot didn't loosen his grip on the stick but gestured to his left with his head.
Lizzy-Jo tugged at Marty's arm and pointed port side of the cockpit window.
The darkness below them was broken by a spasm of light. The first light they had seen since the sun had dropped. Not a prick of light in the Rub' al Khali until the brilliance that the aircraft now banked towards. The light was like an inland sea and around it was a wall of blackness, then nothing. Coming closer, the lights broke their solid formation and Marty recognized runway lights, road lights, compound and perimeter lights and buildings' lights.
'God,' Marty said. 'Is that it?'
'That's it,' Lizzy-Jo said. 'That's our new home. How long you sticking around for?'
The pilot grimaced. 'About a half-minute after your offloading is completed, I'll be powered up.'
They went down. The wind shook them. The pilot was good and feathered them on to the runway. They taxied, but the pilot didn't cut the engines when he'd braked. Far at the back they heard the metal scrape of the tail being opened.
The pilot sipped from his water bottle, then smiled at them. 'Take my word, this is hell on earth. I hope what you're going to do is worth the effort.'
Marty said, 'Any mission we are sent on is worth the effort-'
Lizzy-Jo cut in, 'We don't know what the mission is, but I expect someone will tell us when it's convenient for them.'
They went back into the fuselage and gathered up their gear. Two bags for her, one bag and his framed print for Marty. He was subdued. Everything the pilot had said about wind turbulence and heat played in his mind. He was sort of nervous.
They walked down the tail and George Khoo already had the maintenance team at work. They carried their bags to the side and dropped them, but Marty held his picture under his arm. The coffins were rolled down the tail on their trailers.
The pilot was as good as his word. In a half-minute after the last of the gear had been offloaded, the engines were revving to full power.
They walked towards the dirt at the end of the runway, where within a half-hour George had started to supervise the erection of a tent camp.
They were off the track when, without warning, the pickup swerved to the left. The lamb screamed and a goat fell into Caleb's stomach, then kicked with hobbled hoofs to be clear of him. Ahead there was a single low building – no village, no huts, no compound walls.
Caleb crawled to the pickup's tail and jumped. On side-lights, the pickup left. The moon's glow fell on the building. There was a sliver of brightness at one window and another under the door.
Caleb clenched his fist and hammered on the wooden planks. He called out his old name, the one the Chechen had given him.
A bolt was drawn back, scraped clear of its socket. The door whined open.
Caleb went in. On an earth floor at the centre of the room a hurricane lamp threw out a dull light and the stink of kerosene.
Beside it there were three plates with meat and rice on them and on one a half-eaten apple. Beyond the lamp's light, in shadow, stood a pile of olive green wood packing-cases but he could not read the writing stencilled on them. There were crumpled blankets, discarded cigarette packets, boots caked in old dirt and… From the deeper shadows, a shaft of light fell on a rifle barrel, aimed at his chest. As he slowly, and very carefully, raised his arms, the barrel tip of a weapon was pressed hard into the back of his neck. Then he heard breathing close to him and smelt the breath behind him. Away from the rifle there was a scurrying movement and then the lamp was lifted. A man held a hand grenade, the pin gone from it, in one hand and the other held the lamp.
In Arabic, Caleb said, 'If you drop the grenade or throw it at me everyone in the room is killed, me and you – you should put the pin back.'
He heard a little giggle of nervous laughter from the side, where the rifle was. The man put down the lamp, then fumbled in a trouser pocket and replaced the hand grenade's pin. Caleb saw the face of the man, old, tired and thin… The weapon stayed against his neck, but Caleb's right arm was wrenched down. He felt the cloth strip taken from the plastic bracelet. The light was lifted. His arm was released and the weapon dropped from his neck.
Each in his own way, the three men gazed at him. One slipped a pistol into the belt of his trousers. One stacked the rifle against the wall. The elder one grimaced and dropped the grenade into a coat pocket. Then they were eating, but still they watched him – not with awe or fascination, not with wonderment. Their glances were of rank interest and they seemed to strip him bare to the skin. It was as if each weighed his appearance against the value given him. It was, he understood, the first contact with the outer layers of his family. They gave Caleb their names, but spoke indistinctly because they were all eating as if food was scarce. He thought the elder one who had had the hand grenade called himself Hosni; the one with the rifle was Fahd. The man who had held the pistol against his neck and who had examined his wrist said his name was Tommy. They wolfed the food until the plates were clear, then wiped the plates and sucked their fingers for the last of the rice and sauce. Caleb sat at the side in the shadow, leaning against the stacked crates, and his stomach growled.
He could have given his own name, or any name, but did not.
Caleb asked, 'Where do we go?'
Tommy cleared his throat and spat with venom at the floor. Fahd laughed shrilly, as if in fear. The elder, Hosni, said, without expression, 'We will be in God's hands. We are going into the Sands.'