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
