and we had Predator UAVs up, with Hellfires loaded. And we'd done a con-job on the Saudis – which is why it was secure and why you weren't cut in, and-'
'Fuck you.'
'That what the door handle said? We did two hits and we couldn't keep it secure and now the Saudis have chucked us out. We got a day and a half left in there, then fatter cats than me have to decide whether to fly UAVs out of Yemen, Djibouti or Dohar and take the risk of violating Saudi air space. We're out in a day and a half.'
Gonsalves carried in the tray, put it down, poured tea, gave a mug to Wroughton.
When he'd sipped his tea, Gonsalves reached into his briefcase.
'Want to see the tricks the 'big boys' toys' can do?'
'I don't beg, not a damn poodle and dribbling.'
'Why I love you, Eddie…' Gonsalves had a file of photographs in his hand and spread them over the coffee table around Wroughton's mug.
He couldn't help himself, felt his excitement quicken. Three pictures, colour, eight-by-six, showed black- circled craters in the ochre sand. They were the raw, only dreamed-of currency of an intelligence officer. Centred on one was a dead, keeled-over camel.
Not electronic intercepts, not analysis of radio traffic pulled down by the dishes. He snatched up the crucial picture, peered at it and lingered over it.
'Don't get a hard-on, Eddie – do me a favour. OK, it's before the first strike. Three men travelling. Two guides leading them. Three pack camels carrying crates, and Stingers is as good a guess as any.
Now, look at the close-ups on the three… Is this not as sexy as it gets?'
Wroughton held the three photographs, felt in awe of the technology that had magnified them to a point of recognition from four miles of altitude.
'That one.' Gonsalves' finger stabbed at a photograph. 'We identify him as Gibran al-Wafa, aged twenty- seven, involved in the Riyadh compound bombs, Saudi citizen.' The finger moved on. 'Him, he is Muhammad Sherif, aged fifty-nine, was in Afghanistan in the Soviet war, with bin Laden in the Sudan exile, with him back in Kabul, but disappeared before Enduring Freedom, now a strategist. Egyptian national and sentenced to death in his absence.' The finger loitered.
'This one, we don't have him. The computers can't chuck anything up.'
Wroughton gazed at the photograph. He saw the body of the young man upright on the camel, the head high. He strained to make out the features, but the pixels confused him. He thought he saw a strong chin but… 'So what? Isn't he dead?'
Gonsalves said that the sensor operator had aimed twice for specific and individual targets as the camels had scattered. The two targets in the two strikes had been the Saudi and the Egyptian.
'So, you may have missed him, for all your damn technology…
And I get cut in because you don't know who he is, right?'
'Succinctly put, Eddie. I'll see you.'
After Gonsalves had gone, Eddie Wroughton sat in his chair, held the photograph in front of him, and tried to read the face.
Lizzy-Jo cursed. George's message was pithy, without embellishment. The needs of maintenance ruled his life. Maintenance was obligatory, not optional. The Predator, First Lady, was now beyond all limits set for maintenance. Flying hours in optimum conditions had been exceeded, but she had also been up in worst-status conditions.
She was grounded – no argument – confirmation of what he'd said the afternoon before. She needed a sanitized hangar for the necessary maintenance, and the only sanitized hangar she would see was back at Bagram. He went out of the Ground Control, went heavily down the steps, as if unsettled by Lizzy-Jo's curse.
Beside her, Marty flew Carnival Girl, did the new boxes. When they'd brought her back in the small hours, while she and Marty had stolen sleep, the bird's tanks had been filled so that fuel had spilled out.
Carnival Girl, the old warhorse, the fighter from Bosnia and Kosovo, from Afghanistan – with a first skull- and-crossbones stencilled on her fuselage – had gone up twenty minutes after midday for her final run out of Shaybah, not her prettiest chase down the runway, with the fuel load and the burden of the Hellfires under the wings.
The boxes on the map were on the east side of a track. They had tasked themselves, and Oscar Golf had not argued it over the link, to . have her up for the full twenty-four hours of her endurance at four miles altitude and at loiter speed. Late on in the flight, tomorrow, they would do a small section of the map boxes on the west side of the track. They had not yet reached the track, but it would be good when they did, would make a diversion from watching goddamn sand.
He was hunched over the joystick. She had tried to jolt him, but he spoke when he had to, not otherwise. She had wanted to bring the life back to him. He flew Carnival Girl without error but as if he sleep-walked.
She lied…
Lizzy-Jo said, 'Last time I was in New York, I was in a bar – been to see my mom and was going down to North Carolina for the last spat, but had time to kill. The bar was behind Fifth Avenue. I was alone, this guy was alone. What did I do? Wasn't much of a chat-up line. I was in Afghanistan. Was I hurting those bastards? Real venom in his question. I was trying. He told me why he hoped I was.'
She had gone straight from her mom's apartment, in a taxi, out to the airport for the flight. She had never been in a bar behind Fifth Avenue.
'His partner worked up high in the North Tower. It was a day like any other. Nothing different about the eleventh of September.
Himself, he didn't go to work because of an optician's appointment.
He was in the waiting room, was next in line to be called. The TV was on. Where his partner worked was above the hit point of the American Airlines plane. It was all on the TV in front of him, and he could see the window nearest to his partner's desk. I listened.'
She talked without emotion, didn't play to a gallery, watched her screens.
'Twenty minutes later, as he sees it on TV, the United plane goes into the South Tower. What he's telling me, he's not watching the South Tower, only the North Tower and the window nearest his partner's desk. You know what he sees – there's smoke and fire. You want to know what he sees from the window nearest his partner's desk? They jump. People start to jump. They got the fire coming up under them and they got nowhere to go, and some of them jump.
They are ninety floors up, and they jump. He sees people jump from that floor, from those windows. He sees tiny, ant figures falling. It's . all on the TV. Did his partner jump? There's a lot of people jumped.
Now, sudden but late, he starts to get active. Goes to the desk, rings his partner's phone. It's not picked up. He wants to think his partner jumped, that falling ninety floors, arms and legs out, was a quicker death than waiting for the fire to get up there – or the collapse. He said his partner was the only love of his life, and he thinks he saw his partner jump from ninety floors up… That's a horrible way to die.
That's bad people that make you die like that. I bought him a drink, and I told him we went hard as we could after the people that made his partner jump, to hurt them. Then I headed out to catch my flight.'
She saw, from the side of her eye, the tears stream from under Marty's spectacles and run on his cheeks. She had no shame for the saccharine emotion of the lie, daytime talk-show stuff. She went brusque. 'How's she doing?'
'She's doing well,' he choked. 'Carnival Girl's flying great. She's the bomb.'
Caleb felt the strength back in him, but the pain was agony and it rolled down in waves to his foot and came up through his hips and stomach. Lifting his right arm brought the pain in a torrent. He gestured for Rashid to come to him. When the guide was close to him, ear bent to mouth, Caleb whispered what he wanted brought to him. He heard other voices, indistinct – a man's and a woman's – but could not make out what they said. The camels chewed cud on either side of him and slung between them was the awning that made shade for him. A blow hammered down on metal. Wood screamed as it was broken and hinges whined. He was brought the manual.
The pages were grey, dry and crackled in his hand, and the large print on the cover had faded.
There was a needle attached to a tube that dangled over him, in his left arm, inserted immediately above the plastic bracelet, which was no longer covered. He tried to push himself up to look around, but that was beyond his strength.
