There was washing barely moving on the line, and a guard asleep. An otter swam by languidly, and time was running out for them. He didn’t know what would cause the next explosion of temper.
Hamfist had come forward.
She hadn’t moved, still sat cross-legged. He had brought a bottle of tepid water and put it down beside her hip. He’d seen that her gaze didn’t confront the crowd but was on the ground a little ahead of her. The crowd had just done prayers, had swung away from the gate and taken a line to the east. The stand-off began again.
They reckoned – him, Shagger, Corky and Harding – that she had, temporarily, calmed the crowd. For all the broken heads and probably broken bones, the men seemed comatose. Might have been the heat. He’d had a company commander, up Highway 6 at al-Amara, who daily blessed the heat of the day and thanked the good Lord for any temperature above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit because it drained hostile energy out of the young bucks. The crowd had no shade. Neither did she.
He stood tall. If it had not been for the alcohol he’d have been promoted above his last substantive rank, corporal, could have made it up to platoon sergeant. The drink did him and there had, often enough, been that regretful look from officers when they’d busted him down. He denied to himself that he had a problem with drink: Hamfist had heard it said, and clung to it leech-like, that an alcoholic was a man who couldn’t remember the last day on which he hadn’t had a drink. It was yesterday, and the day before. If they had charged at her suddenly, he was confident of the quick reaction that would have dropped them on the dirt track before they were halfway. If the weapon on the strap across his chest had jammed, he had grenades – gas, blast and fragmentation – and a pistol. If the weapons had jammed and the grenades had malfunctioned, he would have used his hands and boots to protect her.
They would have had to take his life before they reached her. The other Boys were the same.
He was thirty-one years old, and his thirty-second birthday would come round in eleven days. She knew the date. Shagger, Corky and Harding didn’t. She had known the previous year, his thirty-first, and he hadn’t broadcast it but it would have been in the file she’d have flipped through before he’d joined her protection detail. God knew where she’d bought it. It was wrapped up in smart paper, and there was a little card on it, Hamfist, Happy Day, Best, AJ, and inside was a crumbling cake, with fruit and orange rind and sliced almonds in circles on the top. The best Dundee cake he’d ever eaten, for all it was damaged in transit. There had been nothing from his wife. He’d not shared the cake but had eked it out and made it last into a seventh week.
He understood what she had done and how she hoped to extricate them, her decision to use the site where there had once been oil-drilling exploration teams. Her decision, too, that they were close enough to the surveillance boys, and inside the Golden Hour of protection. Her decision, now, to sit in the dirt, exposed to the sun, face the crowd and wait. If it came to fighting, they wouldn’t survive another night.
Hamfist couldn’t know whether she had called right or wrong. If a leader came, she might have called right, and if there was no leader and only darkness, she had called wrong. It was a big call, and it would matter for the men up front. The hours drifted, and time passed. The sun had started to tilt and he no longer stood astride his own shadow – it had begun to nudge out towards his left side, and the soft shape of his body on the dirt was broken by the rifle’s barrel.
Not for him to say that they walked a line, a high wire, and that maybe they headed for disaster… not for him to say that.
She didn’t drink the water he had brought her. She sat and never moved.
They started up the engines every two hours. One Black Hawk crew would go through the procedures while the other rested, and an hour later it would be reversed.
Each had a pair of General Electric T700-GE-70 turbo shafts and each manufactured a power of 1890 h.p. While the pilot and his colleague sat up front and did their checks, the cabin guys did the look-over on the M240 machine guns. They were ready, and each hour a few of the men and women not yet due to return to the States – or to be shipped to Kabul – would stand in little huddles in what shade they could find to watch. Before the draw-down was well advanced, it would have been possible for the Black Hawks, with their unmarked black fuselages that were the signature of special-forces operations – the covert stuff – to be parked out of sight where only a chosen few maintenance technicians had access. Times had changed. The end-of-empire days dictated that a hefty chunk of the base was now in the hands of local forces and only an area inside a contracted perimeter remained for the Americans. Clerks, typists, cooks, marines off duty from security rosters would watch the exhausts spew fumes, feel the draught of the rotors and dream.
Inside every American compound life was now stultifyingly dull. No fire fights, no patrols, no finds of arms caches, and no bodies to be photographed They stayed behind the blast walls and saw nothing of the country but its skies, blue and merciless. They pumped iron, played basketball and smoked what they could find. The helicopters broke the monotony and intrigued them. On immediate stand-by. Prepared for a mission. Cloaked in secrecy. They attracted attention. When the cabin doors were pulled right back, medical gear and stacked gurneys were visible.
Tristram closed down the engines and Eddie did the calls as the switches were flipped. Dwayne wrapped a tea towel round the breech of his machine gun and the rounds in the belt, then secured it with tape. Federico aped him.
For those on the ground, the rubber-neckers, the attraction was that they might see – a final time – the birds take off and fly low over walls and fences, then across the desert and go into actual mother-fuck combat. The suppression fire of the machine guns would be called for, and there’d be blood on the cabin floor, lives at risk and
… It was a dream, and good enough for the voyeurs. In draw-down days, excitement was sparse.
They jumped down, boots hitting the tarmacadam of the apron. A few pocket cameras were pointed at them, but their shades were good enough protection.
Tristram said, ‘I got the whole lot of charts and the software fed for the Iran frontier.’
Eddie said, ‘Up to the frontier, not over it.’
‘I have that. The far side of the frontier and they’re on their own. Not negotiable.’
‘Wherever they’re coming from, how far over the frontier, they have to get this side of it. For us to go over there is classified as an act of war. Into Iran, and when we land back I’m up for court martial, bet your life, and castration. No one will believe the navigation screwed me.’
‘But it would be good to fly a last time.’
His voice dropped: ‘Problem is, if we get called they’re in deep shit out there. At the edge of survival. For the sake of those guys, I half hope we don’t get to fly a last time.’
‘I don’t want state secrets, but are you any further forward?’ She had come into central London carrying a plastic bag filled with clean clothing.
‘Can’t say.’ Len Gibbons’s shrug was expressive. ‘Honestly, my love, I don’t know.’
They were in the same coffee shop across Haymarket from his office, and she had already shown him the shirts she had brought on the train. Pity there were no shoes – the only pair he had with him were damp from so much rain and sleet, and now from the sprinkle of snow.
‘Just trying to plan. Audrey said there’s a meeting at the garden centre, advice on how to protect shrubs in winter. It’s next Monday. I didn’t want to accept her invite if you’d just come home that evening. Is it likely?’
He grimaced. ‘In the dark and I haven’t a candle. Be on the safe side, and go.’