Just on twelve and a half hours later, the C-5A rolled to a stop. The nose on the monster raised while the ramp at the back lowered on huge hydraulic arms, and the Caribbean sun flooded in. After the darkness of the hold lit by occasional dim fluorescent strips, Wilkes and Monroe both blinked and squinted at the sudden ferocity of the glare. A squad of half a dozen US Army troopers armed with M16A2s were marching across the tarmac towards them, accompanied by a bird colonel and a couple of lieutenant colonels. Before they arrived, Corporal Punishment unlocked the prisoner’s chains after giving him a halfhearted kick in the legs, supervised by the doctor, to check that he was still alive.
‘Welcome to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, gentlemen. We’ll take it from here,’ said the colonel to Wilkes and Monroe with a soft Kentucky drawl as he strode up the ramp. ‘I do hope he hasn’t given y’all too much trouble.’
‘Well, yeah, actually — he’s a snorer,’ said Monroe, screwing up his face.
‘Good,’ said the colonel, distracted, looking at the man in chains being heaved to his feet. ‘I am now officially relieving you of the prisoner,’ he said with continued formality.
‘Why, thank you, Colonel,’ said Monroe.
‘I believe you’re going straight on to Diego Garcia once you’ve refuelled. We’ll have to show you our wonderful facilities some other time. Have a pleasant flight,’ he said politely. The colonel turned and walked down the ramp. The NCO commanding the squad shouted something incomprehensible and Kadar Al-Jahani was taken away, secreted in the middle of the knot of armed soldiers. Next stop, Camp Echo — so named because it recalled the infamous but now dismantled Camp X-Ray.
The US Army corporal grumbled as he hosed away the puddle of urine the prisoner had left behind. ‘Fuckin’ motherfuckers all do it.’
‘Did you see those two lieutenant colonels?’ asked Monroe, ignoring the enlisted man.
‘Yeah,’ said Wilkes, rubbing the top of his head. He’d noticed and taken an instant dislike to them.
‘Those guys must have been what, mid thirties?’
‘Yeah. One of them still had nappy rash.’
‘No one gets to be a lieutenant colonel that young.’
‘Not unless you have a very particular expertise,’ said Wilkes.
Atticus nodded.
Kadar Al-Jahani had moved without resistance. He knew full well where he was. No one told him that escape was utterly pointless. He could figure that one out for himself. Where could he possibly have escaped to? In his more lucid moments, he remembered passing through countless gates, through tunnels of razor wire, eventually arriving at a bunker. No one spoke to him. They had unchained him at gunpoint. Next they shaved his head and beard, and drenched him in delousing chemicals that made him gag and vomit. They then strip-searched him brutally, leaving his anus bleeding, and dressed him in red — the colour of flayed skin.
He warned himself that pain and suffering would be his only companions for the foreseeable future. He worried that he would not be up to the task of locking his precious knowledge deep within. Keeping it to himself would be a last revenge, a final great victory. Physical pain was something he’d experienced many times through his life, but it occurred to him that pain had always come to him by accident. Now it would be administered by practised, enthusiastic hands.
Kadar Al-Jahani sat slumped in the chair he’d been strapped to, in a room painted brilliant white. Overhead, halogen lights blazed down. Kadar Al-Jahani again dared to close his eyes and shut out the present, if only for a moment. Electric shocks jammed into his body, pulsing through him like a thousand glass needles breaking off under his skin. His jaw clamped down on his tongue, biting off the tip, and his mouth filled with blood. He opened his eyes and the electricity instantly stopped. Soon, he knew, his lids would close again and nothing he could do would prevent them.
Central Intelligence Agency, Australia bureau, US Embassy, Canberra
The report came to Ferallo over the intranet, the secure feed. Originally written in Hebrew, it had gone through CIA translators in Tel Aviv and the Shin Bet had costamped the translation, meaning they were okay with its accuracy. She flicked through it first with her finger on the ‘page down’ key, stopping occasionally for more detail. But the more she took in, the more Ferallo became both intrigued and disturbed, emotions that seemed to the assistant deputy director to go hand in hand too often in this business. She decided to print it off, all one hundred and sixty-seven pages. It was the IDF report from the operation Atticus and Tom Wilkes had recently been involved in. Too many Israeli soldiers had died, and Atticus was lucky not to have been counted amongst them. According to the report, Atticus had Tom to thank for that.
The IDF wrap-up included a detailed coronial report and identified by their remains the men Kadar Al-Jahani had been meeting with. They were mostly members of Hamas and Hezbollah, along with several others the Israelis believed to be financiers. Their various names were provided in the report, as were photographs. They looked familiar. Ferallo sat back and stared at the photos, and wondered why. And then she realised. She called up on screen the photographs taken at Kadar’s meeting with several unknowns in Rome. Yep, it was the same men. So they were financiers. Ferallo was fleetingly annoyed that their identities and involvement in the scheme of things had only come to light by their deaths. Terrorists with money. Rarely was there a more lethal combination. Money gave terrorists the financial freedom to recruit, train, plot and scheme. The template example was 9/11. Sure, the men who took the planes in that instance did so with threedollar box cutters, but it took millions to put them in those aircraft at the right time with the right skills, in a coordinated attack timed to perfection. The collective intuition was that Kadar Al-Jahani and his South East Asian connection, Duat, were up to something major. Now, as far as Ferallo was concerned, it was fact. And yes, the bombing of the embassy was just the entree. Still the big question remained: what?
Flores, Indonesia
Hendra and Duat stood on the beach in silence with their binoculars trained on the horizon. The moment of truth for Hendra’s latest guidance system had nearly arrived. This time, Hendra was sure of the test’s outcome, but he didn’t want to think that, much less say it out loud, for fear of casting bad fortune upon it. The test bed, a commercially made powered glider, had a wingspan of five metres. It had been modified extensively, of course, to accept the guidance and flight management systems and a larger fuel tank, and the sheer size of the thing would make it easy to spot once it cleared the horizon.
But as with all Hendra’s test flights, there were many components under scrutiny, and the failure of any one could spell disaster. And disaster was now the outcome he most expected after so many failures. Electronic music behind him distracted him and shifted his thoughts. The young boy he’d caught playing with the computer toy had become his assistant. His name was Unang.
The youngster had been standing beside Duat and Hendra with his hand sheltering his eyes, watching the horizon for movement. But after a time, Unang had given up through boredom, and was sitting under a tree with a new Nintendo Gameboy, one of the hundred Hendra had bought. Duat had earlier been annoyed by the device, believing that it was frivolous. But then Hendra had spoken up both for Unang’s surprising talents and for the quite extraordinary qualities of the games platform itself, and Duat had eventually stopped slapping the boy around the head.