The cloud came up towards the camera lens. Marty lost the camels, did not know whether they were under it, or had escaped it. There was a darkness at the core of the cloud, then a fire flash in its heart.
Red flame blossomed from the cloud. They had hit ordnance. The new fire burst through the cloud and climbed, then guttered. Smoke, dark and poisonous black, replaced the fire.
The voice came in his ear, massaged him like her fingers had.
'Good work, guys. Secondary explosions would prove you've hit gold. Please look at your screens, extreme left. I see empty camels on the right side, ten o'clock, but you should be looking extreme left, four o'clock. Centre on that target, and take it. Oscar Golf, out.'
Alone in the desert, a single camel ran. Marty had been to ten o'clock, four camels together – like they were tied – no riders. Then Lizzy-Jo was raking the picture across, going to four o'clock, and zooming. The picture was tugged to close-up, and she tweaked the lost focus. A single camel ran in the sand, wove between the hills.
Marty came over it. The camel stumbled, like it had no more running left in it, tried again, then stopped. The screen was filled with the camel. It stopped, like its spirit was broken. It sank. The knees went from under it. The technology that Marty watched, that Lizzy-Jo worked, showed a camel run to exhaustion and crumpling. He saw the weight that the camel could no longer run with.
The vomit was in his throat.
He was the representative of a master race. Four point five four – recurring – miles below the camera an old man was laid out on the back of the camel.
Beside him, Lizzy-Jo trilled amazement. 'This is just wonderful gear, incredible – like he's just down under us.'
Eight million dollars of Predator, at factory-gate prices, circled an old man on a camel and lining up against him was a hundred thousand dollars of Hellfire with a fragmentation warhead. He could see the old man's face and a blur of greying hair, and the old man seemed to twist his head and look up, and he would have seen nothing and would have heard nothing. Marty did not know why the old man had not jumped clear of the knelt camel, why he had not gone away from it. He was stretched across the camel from the hump to the neck. Did he know? Must have. His arm came up. First, Marty thought it was like a salute. Wrong. The arm was outstretched, pointed upwards towards First Lady: 'Fuck you.' He thought the arm, raised, said, 'Fuck you,' to him.
Lizzy-Jo let the second Hellfire go.
For a dozen of the sixteen seconds of its fireball flight, Marty watched the screen, then turned away, his eyes closed. He did not watch its hit.
He spun his chair and ripped off his headset. He pushed away George's hand and went to the door. He heard Lizzy-Jo murmur to her mouth microphone that her pilot had gone off station. He stood in the door, above the steps.
The vomit cascaded from his bowed head.
When he was conscious, he could feel the warm wetness of the blood. But Caleb drifted.
When he came back to consciousness, he could feel the pain. It was deep waves.
Conscious, he did not know how they had made the litter, and how they clung to the undersides of the camel's bellies, hanging from the hidden saddle straps.
The litter, three sacks, was suspended low down between the Beautiful One and Rashid's camel. He was belted by the animal's legs and rocked from the motion of their walk. On the far side of him was the boy. Father and son, gasping, held themselves against the stomachs of the camels, and behind them was the last of the bulls.
When the pain came, and the scent of the blood, he could remember. The boy had howled the warning. The fire had come down on them. The blow, with the hot wind and the clap of the thunder, had felled him. They had snatched him up, father and son.
He was hidden, as were Rashid and Ghaffur.
The last sight he had seen was the one camel, Hosni strapped . across it, fleeing from them.
He prayed to sleep, to lose the pain.
Chapter Fifteen
The cloth against his head was wet and cold. It stank with stale odour. The voice said, 'Do not try to speak.' With great gentleness, the cloth was wiped on his forehead, round his eyes and on his cheeks. A little of the dribble from it rested on his lips – it stung his eyes.
He tried to move, to shift the weight on his back, but the effort brought the pain – he gasped – and for a moment the cloth was across his mouth.
'You must not cry out.'
How long he had been unconscious, asleep, dead, he did not know.
The pain was in his leg and at the side of his head. When he tried to shift, the pain was agony in his leg and his head throbbed.
'If you are seen, heard, it will have been for nothing. You must not be found.'
The cloth over his face calmed him.
His eyes moved, not his head.
The night was around them. Rashid crouched over him, laid the cloth in a bucket, lifted it, squeezed the water from it, then spread it, cool and bringing life back, across his throat and his upper chest. He lay on the same sacks that had made the litter and in his nose was the smell of shit and urine – his. Flies buzzed him. Close to him were the hoofs of the camels. As if she were alerted by his faint movements, or the guide's murmured voice, the Beautiful One arched her neck down and her nostrils nudged against him. Beyond the camels, fires burned. He heard roaming voices, laughter and the scrape of harnesses. He smelt cooking meat, carried on the wind, and spices mixed with boiling rice, could recognize them through the stench of the camels and his own excreta. He squinted to see better, and shadows passed across the fires – when a shadow approached closer to them, Rashid reached for his rifle and was alert, but the shadow ignored them and went on. They were separated by thornbushes from a great gathering of men and animals. When it reached his lips and he sucked at it, the water was foul, old. He retched, could not bring anything up, and the choking in his throat and gut brought back the agony in his leg and the hammer in his head. Rashid cradled him.
' I thought you were dead, I praise God.' The voice guttered in his ear. 'For three days and three nights, I thought you were the scrape of a fingernail from death. Only God could have saved you… I sent Chaffur for help. I asked him to go alone into the Sands, and his life is with God… All the water we had was for you, and one day back, and one night, it was finished. Now we are at a well-head. It is bad water, it has not rained here for many years, but it is the water that God has given us. If you are found here there will be people who will see your wounds and will know you are an Outsider to the Sands, and they will seek to sell you to the government, or they will kill you and lake your head to the government and ask money for it. We came in the night and we will leave in the night, with God's protection.. You should rest. Death is still close to you. If God forgets you then you are dead.'
The words croaked in Caleb's throat. 'You sent your son?'
'I sent my son into the Sands, that you might live. We are just two men That we are alive is because of the Egyptian. He rode away from us. He took the eye in the sky from us. The eye went after him.
I heard the explosion as we fled. He gave his life for us, for you. You have to live, it is owed to him.'
And to your son…'
His eyes closed. His hold on what was around him slackened. So tired, so weak. He did not have the strength to think of the wound in his leg or the wound in the side of his head. He drifted. He was by the canal, on the pavement close to the black-painted door, was kicking the ball in the yard and aiming at the glass in the hatch of the overturned washing-machine… He was nothing, nobody. He lost the pain, lost the cool, healing touch of the wet cloth. He lost the image of the boy, his bright mischief eyes, sent by his father and alone in the Sands.
In the Hummer, they played Willie Nelson loud. Will drove and Pete did the satellite navigation. 'Help Me Make It Through The Night' came out of the CD system. Two more Hummers, with the Arabs, followed them. Will never trusted an Arab to drive him, and Pete never reckoned anyone else but himself could do better on navigation. Both rated the Hummer, the civilian version of the Army's Humvee, as the best there was on wheels, and capable of taking them where a helicopter – screwed up with the density altitude barrier from the heat – could not. They were
