He heard Lizzy-Jo's question. 'One strike or two?'
The answer. 'Give them both. Waste the fuckers.'
He came round, was head on towards the caravan. It was what they trained for, what they practised to achieve. Lizzy-Jo didn't have to tell him what she needed. It would be without warning. Down there, slow moving in the sand, they would have no warning. The cross-winds hammered Carnival Girl.
'Port side, missile gone,' Lizzy-Jo murmured.
On the screen, racing from it and diminishing, was the fireball.
Twelve seconds or thirteen, at that height, from firing to impact.
Again the camera shook at the weight loss.
'Starboard side, missile gone.'
Two concentrated flame masses, burning solid propellant, careered down. Each powered a missile with a warhead of twenty-live pounds weight of explosive, fragmentation quality, on impact fuses. He watched. Lizzy-Jo guided them and he heard little yelps whistle through her teeth. They were nearly down, he was counting silently, when the camels scattered. A few paces, the lens picked up the panic. They were turning, running, and then the flames cut in among them. He saw the camels break the line, then the cloud burst over them, and the fireflash. A ceiling of dust, sand, filled the screen image.
Marty said, flat, into his face microphone. 'I am out of flight time.
Do I bring her back or do I lose her?'
'Bring her back – and give her some good loving care. Nothing will live under that. Bring her home. Oscar Golf, out.'
Marty turned her, and the lens lost the cloud.
He heard nothing.
The boy was on a dune's rim, and his hands were cupped together across his mouth, his shoulders heaving with the effort of shouting.
Caleb could not hear him.
He did not know how long he had been alone in the Sands with the Beautiful One. She had stampeded in terrified flight. He had clung to her. She had bolted, had run in the few seconds of ear-splitting noise before the first explosion. She had been going at full stride at the moment of the second explosion. He had hung on to her neck. She had gone on until she could run no more, then had stopped, trembling. He did what he had learned from the guide. As he had seen Rashid do it, he snuggled his face against the Beautiful One's mouth, his nose against the foulness of her breath, and he had whispered sweetness to her. He had stilled the trembling. They had meandered on, alone and together. He had not known where he went – the camel had taken the course. His ears were dead and his mind was numbed, and the strength of the sun had grown.
In the distance, high on the dune, the wind made a canopy of the boy's robe. The ears of the Beautiful One lifted, pricked, as if she heard him when Caleb could not… They were all his family, the boy and the Beautiful One, and the men who waited for him at the end of his journey. He had no other family. The camel's pace quickened, closing on the boy who had searched for him and found him.
Chapter Thirteen
They rode on.
Many times, Caleb looked up and searched for the danger. There was not a cloud in the brilliant blue of the sky. He gazed up till his eyes ached, saw nothing and heard nothing.
They made a straggling line, their tracks covered by the wind's shift of the sand. Rashid was out in front. On a bull camel, already laden with two crates, was the body of Fahd. Further back was Hosni, then Caleb, then another bull. Last in the line was the boy, Ghaffur. Caleb had not seen them, but left beyond the horizon were the carcasses of Fahd's animal and one that had carried crates and one that had carried food.
He thought of Fahd, the zealot, who had insisted that they stop each time for the necessary prayers, thought of the man who had not had an encouraging word for him, for any of them… His eyes had watered but now had no more moisture to secrete, and there was agony in them each time he lifted his head and tried to scan the sky, to search into its blue depths.
The wind dragged at Caleb's robe and tore at the headcloth that covered his mouth, his scalp and his ears. He did not know whether Fahd had been taken by the first explosion or the second, whether he had had a moment to think on Paradise. Had he – for one second or two, or for the half-minute that had separated the explosions – considered the Garden of Paradise? All of the Arabs in the 055 Brigade swore on their Faith that they believed in the Garden where martyrs went, where cool streams ran, where baskets of fresh fruit lay, where girls waited for them. He could see Fahd's corpse, its feet hanging on one side of the camel's flanks, and the head on the other. The back of Fahd's head was gone, but the blood from it and the brain tissue had fallen out long ago and had been trampled into the sand by the following camels. Caleb had looked into the skies, into the clearness of the blue, as the Beautiful One had lumbered through the last of the blood and brain that had dropped from the opened skull. Had Fahd, in the last seconds of his life, welcomed death? Had he believed in the Garden of Paradise? Caleb did not, could not, know. Caleb had crossed the chasm into his old world, rejected before, which muddied the certainty of the Garden of Paradise. Rolling on his saddle, gazing up, Caleb felt a sadness that the last he would remember of Fahd was the anger in the Saudi's face and the screams of his voice… The man had been his family too.
He tightened the hold on his reins and he bent and his voice whispered soft words in the ear of the Beautiful One. He slowed her step, and the sight of Fahd's head and feet drifted further away. The sand disturbed by Hosni's camel was no longer lifted into his face, and the pack bull passed him. Caleb waited for the boy to reach him.
'Will you talk to me?'
'My father says that to talk is to waste strength.'
'Does your father also say that to be alone is to be frightened?'
'We are never alone in the Sands. God is with us, my father says.'
'Were you frightened, Ghaffur?'
'No.' The boy shook his head.
He remembered himself at Ghaffur's age, and the kids he'd messed with. Caleb would have been, they would have been, terrified when the flames had come down, fireballs, from the sky, which was clear, blue and empty. He believed the boy.
'Tell me.'
'My father says it is an aircraft without a pilot. It is flown by commands -I do not understand how – that are given it by men who sit far away. They could be a week's camel ride from it, or more. My father heard about it from the Bedouin of the Yemen. There was a man from the town of Marib, he was Qaed Sunian al-Harthi and he was hunted by the Americans, but he was in the desert and he thought himself safe, and he rode in a vehicle towards an oil well where Americans worked. He had made a bomb… He was betrayed. They knew when he would move and in what vehicle.
There was no warning. He was hit from the sky. My father says there are cameras in the aircraft, and the Americans would have watched the vehicle he rode in. He was killed from the sky, and all the men with him. The Bedouin would have believed that the bomb he carried had exploded, but the police told the Bedouin that the Americans had boasted about their aircraft in the sky… You were frightened?'
Caleb bit at his lip, and the sand stuck at his teeth. 'I hope I am not a coward -1 admit I was frightened… Does your father say how we can run from it?'
'Only with God's help, and He gives us the wind.'
'If the wind is too strong?'
'If that is what He wishes,' the boy said solemnly. 'God spared you
– He has a great purpose for you.'
It came in against the gale. From her window, Beth had seen it make the first attempt to land, but that was failure.
She had thought it extraordinary that the aircraft should have flown in those conditions. It had been fifty feet or so above the extreme end of the runway and had seemed to be lifted up, as if by an unseen hand, then thrown
