rasp of her voice. Yes, they could manage on their own.
Maybe Marty's hand slipped, sweat on the joystick. Maybe his fingers were numbed from holding the stick. Carnival Girl's picture jolted, and she swore, and the picture dived.
'You OK?'
'I'm fine.'
'What I mean is, are you really OK?'
'I'm really fine.'
'No kidding?'
'I'm good and fine and I'm grateful – can't say more.'
She stretched, touched his hand on the joystick and her nails indented on the veins at the back of his hand, which shook a moment, and Carnival Girl plunged another two hundred feet. She was giggling like a girl and Marty felt the smile fill his face. He was grateful because he had blipped, grateful because she had kicked the blip hard. He owed her his thanks. It was between them. He had certainty that the collapse of his morale after he had flown in pursuit of the old man was a story she would never tell. And he would never tell that she had come to his tent and had bedded him on his cot. He would go back to Bagram and the coffins off the transporter would be unpacked and technicians and ground crew would stand around and admire the skull-and-crossbones symbols adorning First Lady and Carnival Girl, and his own crew and his own technicians would recite stories of the killing, wasting, of Al Qaeda men in the desert of the Rub' al Khali. He might even let them know, at Bagram, it had not been easy flying.
Languidly, that was how she flew. Carnival Girl climbed in response to the joystick's command, without enthusiasm. Alongside him, like she recognized he had come through the depression, she had the blouse unbuttoned and she hung loose, but he didn't look at her a lot, more at the screen above the stick. If he had found something in the Sands she would have alerted him and zoomed on it and he would have done a figure eight over it, but she didn't, and there was only the pure windblown shapes of the dunes on the screen, and the emptiness – utter emptiness. A couple of hours back, when Oscar Golf had gone for his shower and food, she'd asked him if he'd need a pill to keep him going till he brought Carnival Girl back the next midday. He hadn't wanted a pill, he could last.
He thought they might, because she was old and ancient, put Carnival Girl in a museum. Useful life gone, stripped of what was valuable but put on show. Schoolkids might come round her with teachers, and hold maps of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
The kids would gather at the forward fuselage, where the skull-and-crossbones was stencilled on it, and the teacher would talk about the men and women who defended the United States of America and about the hunting down of the country's enemies. He dreamed…
'So, are we flying or not?'
On the screen he saw the dive, and arrested it – then grimaced.
'Sorry.'
'Stop playing deadhead. I'm telling you, we're flying until the last hour, the last minute, of fuel. We're keeping her up all night and through tomorrow morning. We're going till the tanks are dry. It's the way it is. Always there's one more map box – it's Murphy's law, always the next box where the action is. We're with this until the end.'
'Got you.'
He thought of the man she had drunk with in the bar behind Fifth Avenue, and of the phone ringing out unanswered on the high floor of the North Tower, and of the bodies of the jumpers that seemed to float but came on down. Then he wiped his mind clear and flew Carnival Girl on towards the next map box. When the day died, they would reach the boxes alongside the track marked on the chart, do the east side of it in the night, and by dawn they would be over the track. Then time for the west side of it, and one last line of boxes over desert, before he turned her for home.
Far from him, but under his command, the Predator's lens ate the Sands.
He ad waited an hour in the car park, but the bastard hadn't shown.
It was the first time that the weasel, Bartholomew, had stood him up.
For an hour he had sat in his car, in the far corner of the car park, and the wait had been fruitless.
He had driven to the surgery, had stamped through an empty wailing room and confronted the receptionist. Where was he? There had been a message on the answerphone the previous morning . telling her to cancel all existing appointments for three days, but she had not known where he was. And, staring at the scars on his face, she had told him that he could either go in the book for three days' time, when there was a window, or she could give him the name of another doctor if his complaints were urgent. He had stormed out.
Never before had Bartholomew left town without warning.
His finger on the doorbell, Eddie Wroughton stood on the step at the villa's front door beside the empty carport. The maid came.
He pushed past her. A cat, obviously a stray, stood its ground in the hallway, arched its back and hissed defiance. He kicked at it, missed.
Where was he? The maid scowled, hostile as the cat, then shrugged. She did not know.
He was trained to check over a room, a villa. The maid followed him, but did not watch what he did – only stared at his face.
'Something wrong with me, is there?' Wroughton snarled.
She broke away, fled for the kitchen.
In his mind was an inventory, not of what he found but of what was not there.
Bartholomew's medical bag – gone. He forced open the drugs cabinet in the bedroom – the lower shelf was half emptied. He broke into the cupboard beside the cabinet – no operating kit there, and the packets of lint and bandages had been rifled through, as if some had been taken hurriedly. From the kitchen, stepping over the treacherously wet floor that the maid had mopped, he went into the utility room; he remembered from the one time he had been to the villa that Bartholomew kept water and fuel there. No water canister and no fuel can.
Back in the living room, alongside the chair where the cat had taken refuge, Wroughton lifted the phone and dialled the call back.
The answer came in Arabic digits for the last number that had called.
He was about to write it on the pad beside the phone when he checked himself and scrawled it on the back of his hand around an abrasion that was now scabbed. He tore off the top sheet and slipped it carefully into the breast pocket of his last linen suit.
He rang his office in the embassy, gave his instructions to his assistant, told her the telephone number. Where had that call originated from?
Wroughton looked around him, saw the bareness of Bartholomew's life. Nothing there that was personal. Rented furniture, hired fittings – as if his soul had been eradicated. How could it have been different? It came to him like a jolting blow, as violent as any of the agronomist's kicks and punches: he himself had pulled his telephone plug from the wall socket, he had switched off his mobile while he had sat naked in his own room, among his own rented furniture and hired fittings.
On his way out of the living room, going past the settee beside the door, he lifted a cushion and threw it at the chair where the cat was, but when it landed the cat had gone.
Wroughton slammed the front door shut after him.
He asked, in the new language of his life, 'How long?' The dark had settled under the awning. He could barely see the doctor's face.
The voice from the shadowed mouth was crisp. 'Let's not fuck about. You speak the Queen's English as well as I do. I haven't the faintest idea what you're asking me. In your condition, and if you want my further help, I would suggest you end the charade. You're English – if you want answers you will speak in English. So, let's start again.'
Caleb shook. He thought the doctor knelt on the manual and that his thigh pressed the launcher against Caleb's good leg. As he remembered, he had last spoken English in the taxi on his way to the wedding. Through the dusty streets of Landi Khotal, bumping in the back of the taxi, squashed between his friends and nervous, he had spoken English – but not since.
As if he walked a new road, he spoke with soft hesitation: 'How long before I can move?'
'That's better, wasn't so difficult, eh? You spoke English when you were in extreme pain. How long? Depends what you want to achieve. If you want to get off these stinking unhygienic sacks and go have a piss, because you've
