They disappeared inside it. He recognized the face of the son, the brother. The last time he had seen it had been in a photograph album, front on and profile, monochrome, with a serial number written underneath it.
The mother clung to his hand. Did she believe him? Could the decline of her daughter be arrested?
He smiled back his best smile. 'Trust me.'
He left them.
Do nothing that creates suspicion, they had told him. 'If you make suspicion, Bart, you will be watched. If you make the smallest mistake when you are watched, you condemn yourself. A condemned man is a dead man,' they had told him. He had lingered at the outer door with the father, had held his arm tightly and had remembered the features of the face of the father's son. He had gone to another patient, who had the symptoms of hepatitis, an old woman, and to the home of a small child with post-traumatic stress syndrome, and then he had driven to the roadblock.
He shouted at the soldiers, Israelis the same age as the three young Palestinians, bawled at them as they ordered him out of his car. 'Oh, yes?
What are you looking for this time? The way you behave is criminal.'
He was quickly propelled into the hut – larger and warmer than the one in the yard of a home in the shanty part of the village. Joseph made him coffee.
When the coffee had warmed Bart, the album of photographs was retrieved from a safe. He had a good memory, excellent recall. Within five minutes, after eight pages, he had identified the young man. Joseph was expressionless, did not congratulate him and did not tell him what importance the young man was given. Did Joseph admire his agent, or did he consider him scum? Immaterial, really – neither the admiration nor the contempt of the Shin Beth officer would have freed Bart from the treadmill he walked on. Joseph took him to the door.
Back out in the street, Bart shouted, 'Just you wait, your time will come.
Justice will catch you. You are as much a criminal, in wilfully obstructing a doctor of medicine, as any of those Serbs at The Hague. I wonder, after what you do, how you can sleep at night – no decent man would sleep.'
He drove away through the chicane of concrete blocks, and the sullen eyes of soldiers tracked him.
*
Marty took First Lady up for the first time from Shaybah.
He could not see her as she sped along the runway: the windows of the Ground Control Station looked out over their tent camp.
The Predator, MQ-1, needed sixteen hundred metres of runway to get airborne. Lizzy-Jo called the variants of cross-wind, but they were inside what was manageable – hadn't been the day before.
The first flight since she'd been unloaded from her coffin and put back together would be an hour, not a lot more, but they'd get to the ceiling of altitude and go on maximum speed and loiter speed, and they'd run First Lady's cameras and infra-red systems, all the gear.
They'd check the satellite link to Langley and that the Agency floor in Riyadh had a real-time picture. The lift-off was fine. The forward camera showed the perimeter fence disappearing beneath them, and then there was the sand, only the sand. His place was in the Ground Control Station with the joystick in his hands and the screens in front of him, but where he'd like to have been was outside with his hand shading his eyes, watching her go. She was the most beautiful thing he knew. Back at Bagram, Marty had always wanted to know when the other Agency birds, or the USAF MQ-ls, were going up. Like a bird, such grace… Worst thing he'd known was a ride on a Black Hawk and seeing, below the helicopter, the wreckage of an Air Force Predator that had gone down with on-wing icing; a broken bird, shattered, scattered among rocks. His bird, First Lady, had a maximum operational radius of five hundred nautical miles and an operational endurance time of twenty-four hours, but for the first flight they'd do little more than an hour with close to seventy-five nautical miles covered.
Lizzy-Jo talked first to Langley. Yes, they read her well. Yes, the pictures were good. She switched to Riyadh.
They'd taken off away from the control tower, and away from the cluster of office buildings and accommodation blocks. The control tower had had to be informed of their presence and of all their flight movements: it had a vaguely worded sheet of paper from the Prince Sultan base up at Al Kharj: test-flying, evaluation of performance in extreme heat conditions – the bare minimum.
The zooms on the belly camera showed wide landscapes, then blurred till they refocused on the individual rims of dunes. Marty thought the place had beauty, but the pilot's talk still hurt him. The guy who'd parachuted down from the Navy's Hornet had done what was right, stayed by the wreckage and died of thirst and heat stroke. He reflected that beauty did not have to be kind: there could be dangerous beauty. She'd found a bush, a bush that was ten feet high and maybe six feet across, and he had First Lady at twelve thousand feet and climbing at a ground speed of seventy-three nautical miles per hour. Lizzy-Jo had a bush to show to Riyadh. On the screen, the bush was clear and all of its branches and most of what leaves it had.
'That's cute,' she said, into the bar microphone over her mouth.
'There you are, Mr Gonsalves – fantastic! Life is up and running in the Empty Quarter. Wow…'
The voice came back over Marty's headphones. 'Incredible, I've never seen that before. Extraordinary. You could recognize a man, one man. I am in awe…'
But the wind, at that altitude, caught First Lady and tossed her, like she was a child's model, and the bush was lost and the picture, for all the gyroscopic kit, rocked and wavered.
'Correction, I was in awe – is that the wind?'
Marty said, 'It was the wind, sir. Understand me, I'm not making excuses here, but this will not be an easy place to fly out of.'
'It's where we are, you are. Can't base in French Djibouti, too long a range. If it was at Prince Sultan, we're telling the world, a hostile one, where we are and what we're at… It's about security. You got to live with the wind. You got to learn to fly with the wind. Security is paramount. They have a saying here: "You want to send a message, then tell it – and swear her to secrecy – to your daughter-in-law." You don't talk to anyone outside your perimeter and, most certain, you do not permit anyone entry. You draw as little attention to yourselves as possible. It's like these people, who hate us, have their ears down on the railtracks. I tell you, believe it, security counts
… But you can fly there, no problem, right?'
Marty said, 'We can fly here.'
Lizzy-Jo muttered, 'I'm not about to promise how effective we'll be.'
Marty said, 'Don't worry. We'll get the show on the road.'
'I got a meeting – thanks, guys.'
Marty chipped, 'You didn't tell us when you were down here – if we get a target, what's the status?'
'You'll have Hellfire on the wings when you go operational. I'm running late for my meeting… If I'm right in what I'm predicting, and it's a courier route, then you track, but if you're at the end of your fuel load and can't stay and track, then a target is "shoot on sight". Adios, amigos.'
The static burst in Marty's headphones. He threw the switch and cut the link. He felt the excitement and looked at her. Lizzy-Jo winked a big brown eye at him. Shoot on sight.
They had all prayed, even Tommy.
Caleb thought it a mark of the brutality all around them that when they had reached the stop point of the day, with the light going down on the dunes, they had made a line and sunk to their knees. Then he and the boy had gone foraging, and left Rashid to build the night camp and hoist the tents.