'Was that scientific?'
'No,' Lovejoy said. 'It was better than science could give you. If they say it, I believe it. White and not Asian.'
'Which is going to blow the roof off Delta – Jesus Christ.'
Lovejoy's finger found the page, then pointed to and rapped down on the names. 'Ettingshall and Coseley, about a mile and a half apart.
That's where your man's from. Bet your pension on it.'
'I can only tell you, Eddie, what he told me.' Teresa leaned against the door and two of her kids, the youngest, hung from her skirt. The other two were shouting inside. 'He wasn't proud of it, you getting the turnaround in the lobby, but there were things – what he told me
– that were too grand to cut you in on.'
'I see.'
'For God's sake, Eddie, surely there are things you wouldn't share with the Agency, even with Juan.'
'Maybe.'
'He's sleeping down there. Nathan, his sidekick, came round for his spares. When Juan rings, shall I tell him you called by?'
Wroughton said evenly, 'I wouldn't want to bother him, wouldn't want to disturb him.'
She couldn't see behind his tinted glasses but she fancied his eyes would have blazed. 'Come on, Eddie, you know what it's like.'
He seemed not to hear her, had already turned his back. She watched him walk briskly away across the lawn and past the Pakistani garden boy. She was not prepared to incubate a feud so she stayed in the doorway and waved to him, to a friend, as he drove off, aggressively fast. She was still in the doorway when he went through the guarded entrance gates and pulled out into the traffic. She saw a red Toyota car come up behind him, brake, then follow him away. She watched and waved until Eddie was gone.
Inside, the kids' shouting had become screaming. She closed the front door and went into the kitchen to play peacemaker – it upset her that there was not peace between her husband and his best friend, and she did not know what was too critical for sharing between them.
He heard the voice in his headphones, like it caressed him. 'No better time than the present. At your own pace, guys. Oscar Golf, out.'
It was fourteen minutes since the camera slung to the belly of First Lady had found them. Inside the Ground Control the heat baked them. The desultory conversations between Marty and Lizzy-Jo had died. George was behind them with the water. The screens were in front. of them and their focus was on the central picture beamed down to them.
The tactic of the target had changed.
From an altitude of twenty-three thousand feet and a ground speed of seventy-one knots, the picture was transmitted to the middle screen, the largest. Marty held her steady – optimum weather conditions – on figure-eight passes over the target, and she went through the programmes that changed surveillance to target acquisition, The water George had poured on to his head, which ran down his back and stomach, had cooled him. He felt good, had the right to.
Marly could stand alongside the former Air Force pilots who flew for the Agency out of Bagram. Because he had killed, he thought himself a veteran.
She had not spoken about the sex, hadn't touched him, hadn't brushed against him – like she'd distanced herself from him. Her Mouse was undone again to her waist and he'd seen the water run down to the flesh folds of her stomach… She had the target on camera, followed it and never let it go while he made the figure-eight passes and thought she seemed older than before, more clinical than he'd known her.
When you going to go?'
'Next pass,' she said. 'I don't have a problem.'
His fingers were softer on the joystick than the last time. Then he had had the wind to fight. She had it on the wide angle. The camera caught the target as it moved, a little wriggling beetle, over the expanse of sand. What had changed, the target was closed up. It was now the ninth hour since he had taken First Lady up. Two hours into the flight they had circled over the first missile strike and he had seen the twin blackened craters and the carcass of the camel, and then they had started to hunt. He had taken First Lady on a criss-cross of patterns over the desert floor. A pursuit that was relentless after fugitives who could have no hope, that was what he'd thought.
Inevitable. He had not doubted that Lizzy-Jo's camera would find them. Nothing shrill in her voice when she had, no blurt of excitement – only the gesture of her hand, then the finger pointing to the right upper quarter of the screen. She'd worked the camera and the target had gone to the screen's centre. Fourteen minutes later he brought First Lady back on the figure-eight curves, and Lizzy-Jo was going through the procedures for firing.
The beetle moved so slowly. They were tight together. He wondered whether they searched the skies, gazed up at the sun and burned out their eyes. They would fail. The heat haze came up off the sand round them, distorted the picture, but it remained clear enough for him to see them, to watch their crawling progress. He saw four men. He did not know them, they had no identity for him. He remembered what Gonsalves had said. It echoed in his mind: 'The hardest man, the strongest. The man they need. The man that can hurt us most. A man without fear.' He saw four men, saw no threat, no danger, no chance of risk – four men, on camels, in the desert.
She said, 'When you turn behind them, I'm launching.'
Marty wished he knew them, wished he saw the threat, the danger they made.
'What are they thinking?'
She darted a glance at him. 'God, I don't know.'
'Doesn't that matter – what they're thinking?'
'Thinking about water, about chow, thinking about a shower – I don't know. Thinking about us.'
'What are they thinking about us?'
'Whether we've found them, I suppose – how the hell should I know? – whether we're over them.'
He saw them on the screen, worked the joystick and banked First Lady so that she would line up behind them for the strike. 'That's not an answer – what do they think about us?'
'About hating us, about having contempt for us… you want to be their shrink, Marty? Forget it. Think of your duty to our country and do your job. Forget that shit – I don't know what they're thinking and I don't care.'
Marty said softly, 'We are flying west-north-west, wind speed eight knots, our air speed is-'
'I got all that… Going in five.'
He did not know about them and that hurt in his mind.
The whisper, 'Port side gone.'
His fingers tightened on the joystick and he compensated for the luch of First Lady. She was thrown up at an angle, starboard side dipping. He heard the little gasp of annoyance from beside him: he'd been slow in making the commands that held her steady On the central screen, the fireball seemed to loiter before it started to race away on its guided descent. He had her steady, and he waited for the next leap of First Lady – which didn't come.
' You shooting?'
'I'm holding… Look at them, Marty, look at them run.' t)n the big screen, the central one, the beetle below the fireball broke up.
'bastards.'
Marty saw the panic scattering of the camels. They went in crazy lines, like they'd broken the knot that held them.
At that height, and with the oblique firing angle, the Hellfire would fly for seventeen seconds… Half-way down… He saw, from the fireball, the little adjustments she made as she guided it, and he watched the camels career together and apart. He watched their panic. lie was the voyeur. He was the hard-breathing youth in the shadows of the car park above the ocean where the university students brought their girls. He rubbernecked the stampede of the camels. The missile went into the sand.
The Hellfire was for a tank. Firing a Hellfire at Nellis, the sensor operator should get an armour-piercing warhead up against a tank turret from twenty-four thousand feet, should get a hit on the range within one yard of the aimed point. Instructors liked to reckon they could hit within half a foot on a stationary tank turret… Nobody at Nellis had ever thought of a target of running camels for an impact of a fragmentation warhead. The dustcloud rose.
