was alone. The pain was in his legs, in the muscles of his calves and thighs. The unworked muscles seemed to scream as he pounded forward. When he fell, many times, he scraped the skin off his knees and elbows, and blood stained the cotton of his overalls.
There was no water and his throat rasped with dryness. His lungs sucked in the growing warmth of the air. The only time he stopped was when he came to a rutted track and lay in scrub near to it, with the scent of wild flowers in his nose. He waited till his heartbeat had subsided to listen for a vehicle or a man or a goat's bell. When he heard nothing, only the wind, he crossed the track and went on.
Somewhere in front of him, by the base of the line of the mountains, was the family he yearned for.
Across Afghan mountains, the Iranian land mass and the chasm of the Gulf of Oman, the same dawn rose over a limitless desert of salt flats and razor-spined dunes of ochre sand. The desert, the largest sand mass on Earth, was flanked to the north by the Saudi Arabian province of A1 Najd, to the east by the oil-rich region of Al Hasa based on the refinery complex near the city of Ad Dammam and the statelets of the United Arab Emirates, to the south by the hills of Oman and Yemen, to the west by the Saudi mountains of the Asir range. Whipped by the winds, the desert sands continually moved, lorming new peaks and patterns, and the great area that was a thousand kilometres wide and six hundred kilometres in depth was perpetually burned by the sun's ferocity. The itinerant Bedouin tribesmen, who alone could exist in the desert's privations, called it the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter.
The dawn light, thrown low, caught the mahogany wings of a hunting eagle. It lit the dark upper coat of a stalking fox and highlighted the tracks of the jerboas that would be food for both the fox and the eagle. It glistened the still moist gobbet of phlegm spat out by a camel that had passed two days before. The light nestled on a point of black darkness between a cleft of rocks where higher ground rose above the western section of the sands.
Other than in the few minutes when the sun came up in the east, the entrance to the cave was hidden. A man emerged from it and blinked as the sun's brightness blinded him after a night in the dim interior. Behind him, in the depth of darkness, a petrol-driven generator started up and coughed before the engine engaged. He spat out the waste between his teeth and lit the first cigarette of the day.
Staring out over the expanse, he saw the single sentry squatting in a cleft below the cave's entrance, a rifle held loosely in his lap. He ground out the cigarette, then placed the butt in a small tin box; later it would go with other waste into a pit dug in the sand, then be covered up. He whistled to the sentry, who turned his head, smiled grimly, then shook it. Only the desert confronted them, not danger.
He called back into the cave quietly.
Others emerged.
When the cave had first been found, when the decision had been made that it burrowed far enough into the escarpment for their needs, a compass had been used to determine the direction of the holy city of Makkah. A line was fixed in the memories of each of them as they came in the half-light away from the cave and on to a small square of beaten dirt between the rocks. In unison, they knelt.
Among the five pillars of their faith was the requirement that they should pray five times each day. The fajr was the first obligatory prayer, at dawn. They were silent as they knelt, each man wrapped in his own thoughts, but common among them was the pleading to their God that the opportunity be given them for revenge, the chance to strike back against the embracing power of their enemy. And common among them also was the appearance of hunted men, drawn-faced, thin-bodied, exhausted in spirit.
Very few knew of the cave. A satellite telephone was inside it, but gathered dust and was not used. The generator was capable of recharging the batteries of a laptop computer but that was also left idle. Once a week, or less frequently if the security situation was difficult, trusted couriers came across the desert with messages, food and water. All of those in the cave, hunted, harried and condemned, knew that their photographs and biographies were listed in Internet sites for the Most Wanted, and they knew the size – millions of the accursed dollars – of the reward that would be paid out for information that pinpointed the location of their lair, for their capture or for their deaths.
In a few minutes, as the sun rose, the shadow of the cave's entrance would be lost.
Many hours later, the same dawn rose, this time a slow-growing light that seeped through dark gun-metal cloud that was thick enough for a second heavy fall of snow. It was the last day of their rental on the cabin and in three hours Jed Dietrich would be loading the vehicle and turning his back on the wild Wisconsin lakes. It was too late in the year to have a real hope of hooking a decent muskie but it was what he had dreamed of for the last eight months of duty far to the south. He took Arnie Junior with him and left Brigitte to pack the bags and clean the cabin. The night cold had left the first snowfall as frozen slush on the ground and the water around the pontoon piers where the boats were moored was thinly crusted with ice.
He checked his son's life-jacket, then his own, and he saw that the five-year-old child was shivering in the cold. They would not be out long but he could not have given up the year's last chance of a good fish.
In the boat, Jed smiled reassurance at his son, tugged the engine to life and sped out for deeper water, the ice crackling at the bow.
Where Jed Dietrich worked, unaccompanied by Brigitte and Arnie Junior, there was sunshine, warm water and ideal conditions for good-fighting sport fish, but recreational boats were not permitted out of harbour by the patrolling coastguards and the beaches were out of bounds to servicemen and civilians because the shoreline was covered by infra-red and heat-seeking surveillance beams. There he could only gaze out at the sea, not fish in it… they'd tried for more children, a brother or sister for Arnie Junior, but had not been fortunate, reason enough to have the kid with him for every one of the precious hours it was possible. He slowed the engine to little more than idling speed, tossed out the lure and let out line with it so that it would go deep. Then he dropped off the small spoon, with little hope that a wall-eye, perch or sucker would be any hungrier than a muskie, and winked encouragement at the boy. As they trolled across the lake, under the thick and darkened cloud, they talked fish talk – as Arnie Senior had to him when he was a kid – of big-mouthed monsters with rows of slashing teeth and record weights, sunken reefs and rock walls where the muskie might gather, their habits and lifestyles. The little boy liked the talk. When Jed was away, and he had only the photograph of Brigitte and Arnie Junior for company, and the phone calls when the kid seemed forever tongue-tied, he would savour the memory of these moments.
For now, Jed Dietrich was at peace. He was thirty-six years old, a HumInt specialist on the staff of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
In the sunshine, beside the clear Caribbean sea where he could not fish, the same peace eluded him.
He was tall, well-built, looked after himself, and he thought Arnie Junior would soon shape up after him, would be useful at football or softball, and would soon be able to handle a boat like this on his own.
Arnie Junior was his ongoing obsession, a point of focus in a workload that was now tedious, pointless, boring. Too often, down in the distant south, as the translator's voice whined in his ear, he thought of his kid and found his attention sliding away from his target.
Out on the water, with the quiet about him and only the child's chatter and the engine to listen to, he had felt the tension drain from him. He felt good. No matter there were no fish… and then his son squealed, his rod arching. They were both laughing and shouting, and reeled in a nine-inch smallmouth bass, then returned it to the water, because Jed taught his boy to respect the prey. They fished another hour. No more takes, no more bites, but it did not matter – the peace was total. They would fly down to DC and stay a few days with Arnie Senior and Wilhelmina, then Brigitte would go back to the one-bedroom apartment they rented near to the Pentagon, and he would take the feeder flight down to Puerto Rico and on to Guantanamo.
Brigitte broke the peace. She stood on the dock in her windcheater, waved and called them in… The holiday was over. Ahead of him were the camp, the prisoners, the monotony, the cringing answers, and the stale routine of going over ground already exhausted. The camp seemed to call him, and he turned his face away from his son and cursed softly, but the kid wouldn't have seen his irritated frown or heard the obscenity. Camp Delta dragged him back.
*
A day had passed, and a night. Another dawn, another day, another night, and then the sun peeped up.
He woke. Caleb felt the sharp tugging at the arm of his overall, jerking and persistent. Hot breath splayed over his cheeks. He opened his eyes and flailed with his hands.
The dogs backed off. They were thin but their eyes were bright with excitement, their hackles up. The teeth menaced him. He rolled from his side on to his buttocks and they retreated further, all the time snarling at him. One, bolder than the others, darted towards his left ankle and caught the skin below the hem of the overalls, but he
