And it went on by.
The wind dropped and the sand haze cleared. If he was weak they were all weak. He snapped orders. Guys to go get the tents and awnings back off the perimeter wire. Guys to go get the wings fitted back in place on First Lady and Carnival Girl. Guys, Marty and Lizzy-Jo, to go get the electronics tested in Ground Control and the satellite link. Guys to get some breakfast made. Guys to get medical treatment readied. Guys to go get… He felt so damn tired and so damn old, and he hadn't the time to think he'd done well.
And he told the armourer to go get the Hellfire missiles checked.
He looked across to where the tents had been and saw Marty who seemed to probe in what debris was left there and he saw him lift up the picture that was his pride and joy. Even at that distance George could see that the glass, small miracles, was intact and a big smile creased the kid's face.
George Khoo's gruff cruelty melted. Lizzy-Jo stood apart from the team clustered inside and outside the Ground Control. He saw her wipe her hands on her trousers, just pyjama trousers that she'd slept in. She was gazing out over the desert and her eyeline seemed to follow the disappearing tail of the storm. There was new blood on the trousers where her hands had wiped. God, they were good kids, all of them.
He stood behind her.
Lizzy-Jo said, distracted, 'Hey, you know, there's a girl out there.
A really nice girl. I needed some tampons, and she sussed some out for me. She drove out there and I never saw her come back before I turned in. She's out there, in that storm – no way she'd have escaped it… Sorry, George, I know it's not your problem, I know, but – listen
– she's all alone.'
It had been like the white-out blizzards she'd known in Scotland and Norway.
She sat on the sand, the small of her back against the top of the near front wheel casing of the Land Rover.
No tears, of course not. Beth Jenkins could rage at herself and she could be contemplative about the future, but she would not weep.
She had precious little to sustain her and tears would have eroded what little was left. The sand on the near side was banked to the wheel casings; on the driver's side it was higher… It was madness to have gone out into the desert without leaving a note in her bungalow giving detail and map co-ordinates of her route and destination. She had no satellite phone and she had no classes for three days, and she was often away and it might be four days or five before she was missed, and a week or more before a search was mounted
… In her rush to be away from the bungalow she had not done the most fundamental, bloody obvious task of consulting the airfield control tower for the weather outlook.
She was marooned. She had been driving on full headlights, guided by her GPS, had been threading between the dunes and using salt-baked flats and was, she reckoned, within eight miles of the site of the ejecta field she had been told about. The four-litre plus engine had coped, just, with the ground terrain – until the storm had hit when she was about to kill the headlights and use the natural light of the dawn. God, and it had hit. The wind had seemed to shake the Land Rover's heavy frame and the sandclouds had overwhelmed the wipers. She'd had the sense to turn and manoeuvre the vehicle's tail towards the oncoming storm – about the only clever thing she'd done. She might have gone a hundred yards before the traction was lost, the cab had filled with sand, insinuated through closed doors and windows, and the pedals were covered. A minute or two after the wheels had started to spin, going nowhere, the engine had cut out. She had sat in the cab until the storm had passed.
When it had gone, Beth had prised open her door – had to put her shoulder to it – and she had slid and stumbled round the Land Rover.
At the back the sand had banked high over the tail door. She couldn't see the rear wheels. At the front only the tops of the tyres were visible. She had lifted the bonnet and seen the coating of sand over the engine parts. She had then crawled into the back of the Land Rover and scrabbled through the film of sand to retrieve her shovel.
With the sun climbing and the temperature rising, Beth had dug at the sand round the forward wheels for two hours. It had been a Sisyphean labour. For two hours, with the temperature above forty degrees, Beth had dug away the sand from the near front wheel, and each shovelful she'd chucked away had been replaced immediately by more soft dry sand rolling into the cavity she had made. The tyre was still hidden. Two hours had achieved nothing. Then she'd drunk water. She'd loaded enough, she reckoned, for three days. Half of what she'd loaded was now drunk. And even if she had been able to clear the sand from round one wheel, down to below the axle, there would have been three more tyres needing to be exposed – and even if she had been able to get all four tyres free of sand there was the engine, which would need stripping down and cleaning. She sat against the wheel casing and the sun was too high for the vehicle's body to give off shade.
Beth Jenkins understood what would happen to her.
One distant day, a dried-out, clothed body would be retrieved and shipped home. A stone would be put over a grave. Bethany Diana Jenkins. 1977-2004. Failure, idiot, life cut short through arrogance.
Spinster. She thought of boys and young men, and love she had not known. She had told herself, often enough, that her work was more important than searching for love. Plenty of time for love later. Now there was no more time… She had never met the man she could love, never would. Other young men, introduced by her mother, from Guards regiments and City broking firms, had faded from her side when she'd enthused about the rocks she studied. Guards officers and City brokers weren't big on granite, volcanoes and meteorite glass – their eyes glazed and they sloped off to hunt elsewhere. She had been left, too many times, mid-sentence… Love had never been offered.
The sun baked on her.
She would drink the water, what was left. She would not hoard it.
She would not fight for life any more than patients in Intensive Care who knew nothing of the drugs in their bloodstream and the tubes in their veins.
Beth had her arms tight across her chest and the sun seemed to suck the moisture from her body. The sweat seeped and she hugged herself as if that might give her an image of love.
Another lunchtime, and the programme of lectures continued.
Michael Lovejoy's packet of sandwiches, bought from the mid-morning trolley, awaited him on his desk. His newspaper crossword was frustratingly held up by the complications of five down:
'Groucho on Ike', three, four, six, seven and seven letters. And, not that he would have shown it, the lecturer interested him, diverted him from the clues.
They had a Russian from Counter-intelligence – flown in from Moscow – young and bright, with a flawless command of spoken English, and he came with enough good baggage to make waiting for the prawn and coleslaw worthwhile. 'The kernel of what I want to say is that we can too easily be blinkered when we seek out the snake with the intention of decapitating it. We look too easily at the obvious and then we are surprised when the television news in the morning confronts us with the newest atrocity… and do not ever forget that we bleed in our cities from the same atrocities as you do. Too readily, you, ladies and gentlemen, and we in Moscow and St Petersburg and Volgograd, attempt to target the Muslim that we can classify as a fanatic – and the bombs continue to kill and maim our innocents.
Take my advice. When you stand and look for the Muslims whom you believe carry the Holy Book in one hand and an explosives charge in the other, stop, consider, then turn a hundred and eighty degrees. Face the other way. Consider, what do you now see?'
Four seats down from Lovejoy was the military historian, retired from the Army, and from a Strategic Studies think-tank, now doing time with A Branch on surveillance; a mild-looking senior citizen in a checked sports jacket was unnoticeable in a public library or on a crowded train.
'What do you see? At first you see nobody. No Muslim, no fist clutching a Holy Book, no finger on an electrical circuit switch. Are you looking in the right place? You are confused. You do not wish to take my advice, but you hesitate. Men appear – but not the right men. They are people like yourselves, and like myself. You see white faces. You see Caucasians and Anglo-Saxons. Not robes and beards but suits and clean-shaven cheeks. Let me take you back to an inexact analogy, but that will point to the direction in which I travel. I believe I have the names correct – Omar Khan Sharif and Asif Muhammad Hanif, whom you had never heard of before they crossed into Israel through the most stringent border checks on the border with Jordan, journeyed across Israel to the Gaza Strip, left the Strip and went to Tel Aviv for reconnaissance, then put on the
