leg. Nothing to keep the flies off. Had no strength and could not swat them.
They were over the raised track, and headed away from the lights.
Caleb knew he was slipping. The heat, the flies and the dirt in the wounds doomed him. He knew it… He was back across the chasm, where he had come from and where he had not known of a God to pray to. The camels stank around him, but he had a new smell in his nose, meat that was decayed, flesh that rotted – where the flies laid the eggs. Himself.
Thanks to the water, and the fodder at the well-head, the camels' stride was faster now, and each jolt made Caleb slip further.
It was charity for him when he drifted, unconscious.
Chapter Sixteen
Still talking, a murmur in the old language, but weaker. He no longer saw the guide. He did not know that Rashid sat apart from him, that he was alone under an awning spread between two kneeling camels.
'I was nothing before I met the Chechen – nobody. A man looks at you, strips you, reads right through you. You know he's judging you.
Are you shit or are you useful? To anybody else who'd ever looked at me, I was shit. Not looking at me like I was a piece of meat, and hung up, but like I was a person. I went up that hill, it was all live rounds they fired. It was his test. If I had failed it, I'd have been on that plane home the next day – and I'd be back in that shit-heap, and I'd be nobody.'
He had not the strength to swipe away the flies at his leg wound, or to push himself up and see the darker flesh ringing the wound.
'The Chechen's a fighter. He didn't tell me but I heard it – he was one of those who lay in trenches and let the tanks come over the trench, then came out, was behind them where they were soft and broke the tracks with grenades, or put grenades down the hatches.
He did that – bloody tanks. He was under tanks, fifty tons of them, and he wasn't scared. He was my hero, and he cared about me – like he was my father.'
On his back, the flies buzzing about him, he did not know that the guide had sent his son – his only son – out into the desert to bring help. He was beyond that corner of his memory.
'The Chechen made me someone. Back in that crap-heap. 'You want to come down the canal? You got enough for the chipper? Heh, you met that bird out of Prince's Road, who'll do you a suck for a fiver? Get your arse moving, 'cos there's a Beemer in the station park and the radio's a Blaupunkt – you want it?' There, they never knew a man like the Chechen. He made me feel important, no one else ever had… wanted.'
He did not know that, in the heat and with his blood oozing away, he was on the road to death.
'Among those kids – none of them'd ever met anyone like the Chechen, because they live in a crap-heap. I owe everything to him.
I make you a promise, Chechen – you won't ever regret picking me.
But you're dead, aren't you? Out in all that fucking dirt, you're buried… Can you hear me, Chechen, can you? I'm your man…
God, it bloody hurts, Chechen.'
Still talking, but fading.
In the slack dawn light, the spread cloud of dust reached the settlement. He approached, Bart thought, the back end of nowhere – the only stop for food or fuel on the only track running south into the desert. On his map, 'nowhere' was given the name of Bir Faysal.
Back up north – at Al Kharj, and again at Harad – where there was still a metalled road, he had pulled into the side and had used his mobile. In both towns, high in the darkness of the night, there were antennae on towers to relay his signal, but there had still been no answer from either of Wroughton's phones, both switched off. Three times, in seven hours of driving on the track after Harad, he had had to swerve on to the bedded stones at the verge to avoid collision with lorries – bastards, coming straight at him, not giving way to him, using the centre of the track – and once he had gone right off the track and the stones, nodding off to sleep, and had manoeuvred his way back on to the track by crossing packed sand. To keep himself awake, he had found a station on the radio, but it had static across it.
No phone signal, no radio – only his thoughts to keep him company.
Excited thoughts. Thoughts of liberation. Freedom to go to the airport, with his cat box, in the knowledge that he had paid his debt and that the files were shredded. Thoughts of what he would tell Eddie bloody Wroughton.
The tyres of the Mitsubishi threw up a dustcloud behind him.
Scattered grey concrete buildings were in front of him. He slowed.
He had not thought, alone in his vehicle and struggling with tiredness, of what he had – by his own volition – edged himself into. Now he did. The thought clamoured in his mind as he drove carefully past the building over which a flag hung limply against its post. In front of the police station, one man in khaki drill lounged on a chair and watched him go by. It would have taken some wriggling if the policeman had been alert, had jumped up from his chair, had waved him down, would have taken a bloody good story. After the police station he came to a fuel forecourt, then a cluster of low buildings surrounded by thorn hedges… The policeman might not have been, but Bart was alert. He had his window down, the air-conditioner switched off, and he heard clearly the bleat of goats behind the hedges. The desert was ahead. Where was she? He went past the last of the buildings. A woman in scalp-to-toe black ducked away and a child waved enthusiastically and… the flashed headlights caught the side of his Mitsubishi.
It was madness.
The lights speared into his face from a gully beyond the last building.
It would not have been madness if he had been able to speak to the landline phone or to the mobile. He had not spoken to Eddie bloody Wroughton. Perhaps he should never have started out from his compound.
He saw the Land Rover come up from the gully, straining for traction. She drove. There was a boy beside her. She came past him, spewing sand, then he saw the wave of her hand, the instruction that he follow. Like a damned hired hand, wasn't he? He followed her for a mile, until the settlement was lost behind them, then she braked the Land Rover and pulled on to the stones He stopped behind her. Her door snapped open and she walked towards him. What to tell her?
He remembered the brightness in her face at the party, its lustre in his surgery, and it was all gone. She was drawn, pale, and she seemed to rock as though exhaustion was near to beating her. The sand coated her, was in her hair, on her face and round her eyes; it lay on her blouse and across her trousers. He framed in his mind what he would say.
She leaned on his door. 'Thank you for coming. Thank you very much.'
He had intended a response of cutting sarcasm. Then he saw the genuineness of the gratitude on her face, and in her eyes, reddened by tiredness, strain and sand grit. Oh, God, that sort of genuineness came from one source, one alone. Bloody hell, that was love. The world threw up enough problems in Bart's life without the intrusion of love
… a lucky man he'd be, the subject of her love.
He said, matter-of-fact, 'Good morning, Miss Jenkins – it looks like you're about to spill a load of trouble on to my shoes.'
'Probably, I have…'
It was another of the moments, fleeting, when he could have – should have – turned back.
'Did you bring your gear?'
'Yes… If it's not presumptuous, who is my mystery patient who has suffered injuries in military action?'
'I don't know. Honestly, I don't know his name or where he's come from or where he's going to. That's the truth.'
He believed her. It was the last time he could have turned back. At the end of the day he would have been in Riyadh, and in his compound. And he would not have forgiven himself. He looked into her face. It was all madness.
