He drove away through the chicane of concrete blocks, and the sullen eyes of soldiers tracked him.
*
Marty took First Lady up for the first time from Shaybah.
He could not see her as she sped along the runway: the windows of the Ground Control Station looked out over their tent camp.
The Predator, MQ-1, needed sixteen hundred metres of runway to get airborne. Lizzy-Jo called the variants of cross-wind, but they were inside what was manageable – hadn't been the day before.
The first flight since she'd been unloaded from her coffin and put back together would be an hour, not a lot more, but they'd get to the ceiling of altitude and go on maximum speed and loiter speed, and they'd run First Lady's cameras and infra-red systems, all the gear.
They'd check the satellite link to Langley and that the Agency floor in Riyadh had a real-time picture. The lift-off was fine. The forward camera showed the perimeter fence disappearing beneath them, and then there was the sand, only the sand. His place was in the Ground Control Station with the joystick in his hands and the screens in front of him, but where he'd like to have been was outside with his hand shading his eyes, watching her go. She was the most beautiful thing he knew. Back at Bagram, Marty had always wanted to know when the other Agency birds, or the USAF MQ-ls, were going up. Like a bird, such grace… Worst thing he'd known was a ride on a Black Hawk and seeing, below the helicopter, the wreckage of an Air Force Predator that had gone down with on-wing icing; a broken bird, shattered, scattered among rocks. His bird, First Lady, had a maximum operational radius of five hundred nautical miles and an operational endurance time of twenty-four hours, but for the first flight they'd do little more than an hour with close to seventy-five nautical miles covered.
Lizzy-Jo talked first to Langley. Yes, they read her well. Yes, the pictures were good. She switched to Riyadh.
They'd taken off away from the control tower, and away from the cluster of office buildings and accommodation blocks. The control tower had had to be informed of their presence and of all their flight movements: it had a vaguely worded sheet of paper from the Prince Sultan base up at Al Kharj: test-flying, evaluation of performance in extreme heat conditions – the bare minimum.
The zooms on the belly camera showed wide landscapes, then blurred till they refocused on the individual rims of dunes. Marty thought the place had beauty, but the pilot's talk still hurt him. The guy who'd parachuted down from the Navy's Hornet had done what was right, stayed by the wreckage and died of thirst and heat stroke. He reflected that beauty did not have to be kind: there could be dangerous beauty. She'd found a bush, a bush that was ten feet high and maybe six feet across, and he had First Lady at twelve thousand feet and climbing at a ground speed of seventy-three nautical miles per hour. Lizzy-Jo had a bush to show to Riyadh. On the screen, the bush was clear and all of its branches and most of what leaves it had.
'That's cute,' she said, into the bar microphone over her mouth.
'There you are, Mr Gonsalves – fantastic! Life is up and running in the Empty Quarter. Wow…'
The voice came back over Marty's headphones. 'Incredible, I've never seen that before. Extraordinary. You could recognize a man, one man. I am in awe…'
But the wind, at that altitude, caught First Lady and tossed her, like she was a child's model, and the bush was lost and the picture, for all the gyroscopic kit, rocked and wavered.
'Correction, I was in awe – is that the wind?'
Marty said, 'It was the wind, sir. Understand me, I'm not making excuses here, but this will not be an easy place to fly out of.'
'It's where we are, you are. Can't base in French Djibouti, too long a range. If it was at Prince Sultan, we're telling the world, a hostile one, where we are and what we're at… It's about security. You got to live with the wind. You got to learn to fly with the wind. Security is paramount. They have a saying here: 'You want to send a message, then tell it – and swear her to secrecy – to your daughter-in-law.' You don't talk to anyone outside your perimeter and, most certain, you do not permit anyone entry. You draw as little attention to yourselves as possible. It's like these people, who hate us, have their ears down on the railtracks. I tell you, believe it, security counts
… But you can fly there, no problem, right?'
Marty said, 'We can fly here.'
Lizzy-Jo muttered, 'I'm not about to promise how effective we'll be.'
Marty said, 'Don't worry. We'll get the show on the road.'
'I got a meeting – thanks, guys.'
Marty chipped, 'You didn't tell us when you were down here – if we get a target, what's the status?'
'You'll have Hellfire on the wings when you go operational. I'm running late for my meeting… If I'm right in what I'm predicting, and it's a courier route, then you track, but if you're at the end of your fuel load and can't stay and track, then a target is 'shoot on sight'. Adios, amigos.'
The static burst in Marty's headphones. He threw the switch and cut the link. He felt the excitement and looked at her. Lizzy-Jo winked a big brown eye at him. Shoot on sight.
They had all prayed, even Tommy.
Caleb thought it a mark of the brutality all around them that when they had reached the stop point of the day, with the light going down on the dunes, they had made a line and sunk to their knees. Then he and the boy had gone foraging, and left Rashid to build the night camp and hoist the tents.
It amazed him. On the whole of the day's march, he had seen no wood – nothing that lived and nothing that was even long dead. The pain had throbbed on the soles of his feet even as the sand had cooled and he had been self-absorbed by his discomfort and his pursuit of respect. Three times, where Caleb had only seen ochre sand the boy crouched and scrabbled with his hands like a burrowing rabbit and had triumphantly produced dried-out roots.
The roots were brought back, broken and lit. Rashid used the old ways – worked his hands under the smallest and narrowest of the stems, sliced a flint across the blade of his knife, again and again, until the spark made smoke and then flame. The fire darkened the desert beyond the small circle of its light and the outline of the tents.
Caleb watched. He had much to learn.
Where the fire flared, Rashid scooped a hole under the widening embers, not seeming to feel pain. He had a metal bowl filled with flour and he sprinkled salt on it, then sparingly poured water on to the flour and kneaded the mess to little shapes. When he'd worked them and was satisfied he put the shapes into the hole and pushed sand over them. Their eyes met.
Rashid, the guide, stared at Caleb's feet. Caleb tried to read him.
Was he impressed? Rashid had the face of a wolf. Under his headcloth, held loosely in place with rope, his forehead was lined and wrinkled, his narrow eyes savaged what they lighted on and his nose was as prominent as a hook. Thin lips were above and below yellowed, uneven teeth and around them a tangle of hairs made the moustache and beard. No comment was given. Rashid moved on, hid his feelings. There was no sign of respect.
When the sun had gone, before the moon was up and when the blackness cloaked them beyond the little fire's range, Ghaffur took the bread from the hole, shook off the sand and passed each of them two pieces. Rashid measured the water ration, poured a cupful. They ate the bread, drank from the cup and passed it back. Then they were given three dates. Caleb held them in his mouth and sucked until the stones had no more fruit on them.
He said quietly to the Egyptian, 'What are you doing here? Why are you with me? What is my importance?'
Hosni smiled and the shadows of the fire crackled across his face.
He blinked and Caleb saw the opaque gloss on his eyes.
'In the morning, perhaps…'
Inside the cool of the tent, the pain at last ebbed from Caleb's feet.
He knew so little. If the memories had crossed the chasm, he would have known more. He slept dreamlessly, his mind as dark as the night outside the tent.
Chapter Six
