'Excuse me, guys, bottom right of screen, wasn't that? We lost it.'
The serene voice of Oscar Golf broke into their headsets, the intervention from Langley.
'No, it's not there now. We've gone past… Did you see anything?
Bottom right of screen for four or five seconds.'
It was a little short of two hours since they had last heard from Oscar Golf. Marty had stiffened. It was like they were watched, tested, spied on. He saw Lizzy-Jo's mouth move as she swore under her breath.
'Our calculations give you fourteen minutes more time over your current box. Let's use the time, guys, by going back. How does that sound?'
He looked at Lizzy-Jo. She'd her tongue stuck out, like she was a kid in contempt of an adult. Then her forefinger waved across her lips – not a time to fight.
'I'll bring her back. We'll work back.'
Oscar Golf, lounging in a swivel chair in the darkened room at Langley, was not a target to pick for a scrap. Maybe Oscar Golf had six pairs of eyes alongside to help him. Marty grimaced at Lizzy-Jo and she shrugged. He'd seen nothing, bottom right of the screen, neither had she, and… He heard a thundering roar, piercing into his headset, billowing through the open door. Where he sat, he couldn't see the window of Ground Control, and the door was at the wrong angle. She leaned close, slipped his headset up off his ear and whispered that it was the transporter landing, their freedom bird.
'Oscar Golf, I am going into a figure eight, and let's hope we find what you think you saw.'
'Appreciate that. Oscar Golf, out.'
There was just sand on the screen – from top left to bottom right.
Red sand and yellow sand, ochre sand and gold sand, and there were sand hills, sand mountains and flat sand. The track was out of sight, too far to the east of the last map boxes they flew. Tiredness ached in Marty. The previous day, at the start of the last flight and before the weariness had settled on him, he would have resented any request to go back and look again. With the joystick, he banked Carnival Girl and swung her to starboard before the correction to port. Dust came in a storm through the Ground Control open door and he did not need Lizzy-Jo to tell him that the transporter had taxied off the runway and come on to the compacted dirt beside the compound gate.
The dust filled the Ground Control Centre, settled on his head and his shoulders and spread over the chart of map boxes. She choked.
He heard her gulp and then she had hold of his hand.
'Heh, Marty, see that? What are we looking at?'
Wroughton was led into Gonsalves' empire.
All the desks were deserted. All the screens in the open-plan flickered, but were not watched. He went past a conference annexe, and through the door saw briefcases dumped and files left open.
Wroughton was brought to a technology and electronic control centre. He went in. Over shoulders, backs and heads there was a bank of screens. He saw Gonsalves in a Godawful floral shirt.
He said, 'I've hit a jackpot, Juan, and I'm sharing it with you.'
It should have been a moment of triumph for Eddie Wroughton. In the throne room of the empire, he held up the file and was ready to boast of what he had achieved. He won no reaction, except that Gonsalves waved a hand at him without turning, gestured for him to shut his mouth. He looked at the screen they all watched. And he heard the voice, metallic and distant, from the high speakers.
'That's good, Marty, and well done for bringing us back. You have eleven minutes more flying time on station… Lizzy-Jo, please, could you give me a zoom, right in close? I reckon it's a target… Good flying, guys. Oscar Golf, out.'
Bart carried the coolbox from the tail of his Mitsubishi, walked well and steadily. The vehicle was fuelled up and he'd discarded the empty cans by the tail.
He felt almost a slight disappointment in the young man: How's he going to get his name up in lights, murder half a city, if he can't blow us away? Not that he wanted to be dead, his thorax blasted, his spinal cord broken, lungs and heart punctured by bullets fired on semi-automatic, not that he wanted his blood coagulating in the sand and the flies clustering. He recognized the scale of the failure and it left him with a trace of sadness… The two men in the village, fingered by Bart, they would have shot him, would not have failed. He saw, to his right, that the guide and the boy had their animals loaded. He was not sure whose life had tipped the balance, had won his survival. He walked over to the young man who had the launcher on his shoulder and seemed to wait irresolutely by his camel, as if expecting help to mount it.
He reached him, put down the coolbox that held the drugs, syringes and dressings, and looked into the face.
'Can I pay you?'
Bart shook his head. There was, because of the traced smile, a charm about the face he had not registered before. The pain that had twisted it was gone. The shake of Bart's head was expansive, as if mere mention of remuneration cheapened him. He saw the cut of the chin, the delicate shape of the nose, and the brightness seemed back in the eyes. To Bart there was, in that short moment, an image of wildness, of freedom, of magnificence. Rambling, old boy, he thought. Rambling and getting bloody stupid. The bugger should have ended you
… And it was what she had seen, little Miss Bethany Jenkins.
He turned away. He saw, fleetingly, that the guide's boy had moved a few paces from his father and a frown laced the young skin of his forehead.
She intercepted him, came towards him, and the sand kicked from her boots with the urgency of her stride. Nothing sweet about her, and her mouth was puckered in a suppressed anger. She stood in front of him, blocked him. 'You could have put him down.'
A sheepish smile, a shrug.
'He wouldn't have known – you could have squirted half a gallon of morphine into him.'
But he hadn't. He had patched him up, had brought him to his feet
– and had faced his rifle.
'Why didn't you?' .
He snapped at her, 'Miss Jenkins, don't ever presume to look into a man's mind, search it and strip it. The exercise might cause you to put your delicate head between your knees and vomit.'
'That is pathetic.'
'It's what you're going to get and-'
The shout came, shrill, keened across the sand, rooted him. He saw the boy, one hand cupping an ear and the other pointed up. Bart's head jolted up to the sky, clear blue, and he saw nothing. He heard nothing. The boy howled the warning.
Bart stammered, 'What does he say – saying what – what?'
'The aircraft, up there – scatter – get clear.'
The guide's arms flailed. Right and left, in front of him and behind.
Now the boy ran, and the guide, and she had ducked her head and charged for open sand, and the camels caught the panic, except one.
The man, his patient, knelt beside his camel and held tight to its strained harness, had the launcher at his shoulder. Bart was alone.
He looked a last time into the sky, and then the sun was in his eyes and he was blinking, blinded. He was alone and stumbling towards his vehicle, groping towards it. He had no cover. He seemed to see himself grotesquely magnified, trapped by a hovering eye. He blundered towards the vehicle's cab, reached it, threw open the door.
Fumbling, grasping for the keys, twisting them, stamping on the clutch, then the accelerator – crying out in fear. He felt the power under him. The wheels spun, whined, then caught. He did not know whether he faced the track and headed for it, or went away from it.
He did not consider whether he could, lumbering across the desert, escape the aircraft's eye. He did not look at the speedometer, which would have told him that his pace over shifting sand was not more than twenty-five miles in an hour. Bart went in little surges on caked sand, then slowed in loose drifts. His eyes were misted from the sweat and the sun's power bounced at him from the Mitsubishi's bonnet. He could not see where he went, what
