the real-time camera in the day and the electro-optic/infra-red in the darkness had shown up nothing.
The teleprinter started up.
They were on new boxes. They'd circled where the old man had been, lying across the kneeling camel, before the Hellfire pulverized him, and they'd stayed up there on station till the smoke dust had cleared. When the cloud had gone, after they'd seen the small crater, he'd brought her back over the first hit and the larger crater. Then they'd gone searching. Four camels, no riders, in the screen. Four camels tied together, no men, followed for a half-hour, then allowed to go on. If they'd searched again, hard enough, she thought they'd have found one camel down and the rest standing and unable to drag themselves clear, or two camels down… dying in the sand, under the sun.
Best that they'd been given a new set of boxes to work over.
Lizzy-Jo tore the sheet off the teleprinter. She felt bad at the verbal abuse she'd given him but did not know an alternative.
'Listen,' she said. 'Just less than seventy hours and we're out of here. The Saudis have closed us down. If that's what Bagram is, we're going home. Hey, you shoot, you score – we wiped out bad people, and their granpa, wasted them.'
He came out of the supermarket. He loathed the place, a little corner of London or New York, but it was fast and quick. Faster and quicker because so many of the expatriates it was designed to serve had checked out from the Kingdom, gone back where they'd come from.
He would have liked to browse in a street market, buy what was local, but the security situation forbade it.
In two plastic bags Eddie Wroughton carried a sliced loaf of bread, two litres of milk and three chilled meals- for-one that would go into his microwave, a kilo of New Zealand-grown apples and two containers of water allegedly bottled in Scotland. That evening, had it been normal – but it was not – he should have eaten at the Gonsalves' kitchen table, then chucked a Softball in their backyard.
He crossed the car park. There were high lights, sufficient to show him his own vehicle, but they threw down shadows. He did not see the red Toyota, or the man who loitered close to it. The lights fell, for a moment, on his linen suit and his laundered white shirt; the silk of his tie glistened and made stars on the darkness of his glasses. His mind unravelled an old memory. The family Sunday lunch, and the next day he was going to Century House for the start of his recruits' induction course. His father there, his grandfather and his great-uncle – old warriors of intelligence – and the talk had gone on from how he should conduct himself with his examiners and had eddied to comfortable nostalgia. Old campaigns refought – and port passed, cigars lit, and the bone had been the favourite one for chewing… the Americans.
'Never trust them, Eddie, never ever.'
'The greatest sin for an American is to lose – don't forget that, Eddie, don't. Make certain you're on a different planet if they're losing, don't be up close.'
' A chap once said: 'America is a big happy dog in a small room, and each time it wags its tail it breaks something.' They don't even notice, Eddie, the damage they do. Be your own man, not their poodle.'
He had thought Juan Gonsalves was his friend… He reached his vehicle, zapped his lock, then the shadow was across him. He opened the back door, to dump the bags.
Is that Mr Wroughton, Mr Eddie Wroughton?' the voice, English language and foreign accent, whined.
He turned. The man came from the shadows, tall and wiry, middle aged, with a sharpness in his eyes.
He said curtly, 'Yes, that's me.'
Is that the bastard who fucks my wife?'
Nowhere to back off to. His vehicle was behind him. The man was in front of him. From the high lights, he saw the clenched fists and the stone-bruised, sand-scraped boots, and the loathing at the mouth.
Wroughton stiffened, felt the deadness in his legs and arms, couldn't have run. Could have shouted out, could have yelled for Security at the main doors, but his throat had tightened: nothing would have come from it. He saw the right boot swing back. The kick came into his shin, against the bone and the pain ran rivers. He crumpled. His head went down and the clenched fist hit him on the side of the jaw, the edge of his cheek. More kicks, some on the thigh and the target was his groin. More fist blows and his head was a punchball. He was down. Men from the Royal Military Police came to the fort on the south coast – outside Portsmouth – and taught self-defence. Last time he'd been on the course was seven years back, before the posting to Riga. He tried to protect his head – could not protect head and testicles. One or the other. It was done cold. Iced venom. Not frantic or flailing. It was the attack of a street-fighter. Where had a bloody Belgian agronomist learned the tactics of a street-fighter? Nothing said, not a word. The man did not even pant. Wroughton felt the blood in his mouth. He was not going to die, he knew that. The man was too calm to kill him, intended only to humiliate. The tinted spectacles had gone and he heard the crunch of the boot on them, then a hand snatched at his tie, grasped the silk and pulled up his head with it. Twice, as he choked on the tightened knot, the fist hit his face, once the lower lip, once the bridge of his nose. The man spat in his face.
The tie was let go. Wroughton fell back. The shadow moved away from him. The blood was on his chin and in his mouth. It washed round his teeth and ran in his throat. As the clatter of the boots left him, he managed in a supreme effort to lift himself on one elbow.
Through a spew of blood, Wroughton shouted, 'Pity you couldn't satisfy her – she said you were a lousy screw.'
The boots went away, the stride never breaking.
He pulled himself up, using the door-handle, and sagged into the seat, then drove out of the car park.
Wroughton knew enough of personal medicine to realize that if any of his ribs had been broken, or his wrist or his jaw, the pain would have been too great for him to drive. What was hurt was his pride. He went through deserted streets. What was kicked and punched, blown away, was his prized self-esteem. He reached the compound and held up his ID for the guard to see, his face turned away.
Inside, he stripped off his clothes, moaning at the struggle to loosen the belt, the zip and the buttons. His linen suit was torn at the knees and elbows and smeared with the car park's dirt; his shirt was blood-stained. When he had binned the suit, shirt, socks, shoes and underclothes, he crawled across the floor, dragged out the telephone plug, then switched off his mobile. Eddie Wroughton could not face the world. Naked, he sat in his chair and let the darkened room close around him.
She lay on the stone patio. She thought of love.
Far in the distance, below the bungalow, she heard the high-pitched roar of a powered engine.
For Bethany Jenkins, love was alive.
Infatuation, no. Lust, no. Love, yes – damnit. It consumed her. Love was the skin, could be pinched, scratched, scraped, but could not be shed – the hard skin on her legs and arms, the soft skin below the hair on her thighs, the tanned skin on her face. She could not forget him.
Her mother had said to her once, on a third gin and Italian, that she'd seen her father across a crowded box at Newbury races – before they'd met, before they'd spoken – and known, when their eyes had met, through the shoulders and between the heads, that he was the man with whom she would live her life.
Love was not, as Beth reckoned it, the product of introductions made by grandmothers, aunts and best friends. Wasn't about bloody suitability. Love was not sensible. Love happened, and fuck the consequences.
Love was the chance meeting on the upper deck of a late-night London bus, in a carriage on a train out of King's Cross going north
… Love was not about earning prospects in the City, nor about decent families and fat inheritances.
It was beyond control. Did not have an agenda. A rifle was raised, a knife was grasped, and a man held her life in his hand. She didn't know him, he didn't know her. He had put aside the rifle, had shielded her from the knife – had protected her. She had not believed him. She'd said: 'Are you going to try to rape me… are you going to kill me?' She'd held the little opened penknife with the two-inch blade. He'd said: 'No… I am going to dig you out.' He had. And she had loved him.
'Well, I can't bloody help it,' she said to the moths. 'It's not my fault, blame the bloody hormones.'
The beams came up the track towards her bungalow.
Beth would have said that she remembered him with more clarity now, on the patio, than an hour after he had disappeared over the crest of the dune… Would her mother understand? It would take more than three gin and Italians – if Beth ever met him again – for her mother to take her daughter into her arms and gush, 'Oh, that's
