'What are we talking about?'
'I'd reckon we're talking armour-piercing or ground-to-air missiles. If I had to bet I'd say we're talking ground-to-air. Try Stinger.'
Gonsalves grimaced.
'I did some work on it today. You shipped, with your typical generosity, some nine hundred Stingers into Afghanistan; the mujahidin downed an estimated two hundred and sixty-nine Soviet fixed wing and helicopters using them. At the end of the war, when the Soviets quit, two hundred were unaccounted for, still out there.
Your people tried to buy them back but went empty-handed. They can blow a military plane out of the skies or a civilian air-liner…
What we don't know is shelf life. Eighteen years after their delivery, are they still functioning? Have they degraded? Don't know. My own view, what it's worth, the crates aren't the problem. The problem's bigger. I think the men matter, the four strangers are the priority.'
Their greatest difficulty, as counter-intelligence officers, was to sift the relevant from the dross. Mostly their trade relied on the electronic intercepts of conversations sucked down from satellites, gobbled by computers, then spat out as raw verbiage. Wroughton and Gonsalves called it 'chatter'. Their bosses called it Ellnt. But this was the rarest commodity they dealt with: the word of an eyewitness.
'Right, four men are being taken across the Empty Quarter in conditions of the greatest secrecy – they matter. The eyewitness is definite there was an argument over the price of the camels. Then one of the men intervenes. He assumes authority. He is young. He is tall. He does not fit in physique and build – the eyewitness notes that. He is different in his features from the others – wears their clothes, but is different. A young leader, with authority, that's what I have – but that's all.'
All of the best material, high grade and rare, was exchanged across the kitchen table. The kids liked Wroughton. He drew the pencil outlines for them to colour in better than their own father, and after the meal they would go out into the floodlit yard where he would pitch a ball at the eldest kid, and do it better than Gonsalves, and later he would read to the kids in their beds and they liked his accent better than their mother's. In London and Washington there would have been coronaries and fury at the closeness of the two men.
'Juan, they are regrouping down there, pulling in new men, new blood. I can smell it.'
'Kill her.'
Caleb's head was down as he climbed the dune. He saw the sand, loose, slide through his burned toes. Beside him the camel struggled.
He had hold of its rein and helped it steady itself. They went up together. The voice was Tommy's.
'I say it, kill her.'
He looked up and the low sun bruised his eyes. They were all at the top of the dune and were silhouetted in the dropping light. Their shadows, and those of the camels, fell down the dune's slope towards Caleb. He heard only the Iraqi's voice.
'Because she has seen us, kill her.'
They seemed not to hear him behind them. They gazed ahead and below. Caleb reached them. He pushed past Hosni and Fahd, past the boy, who turned and faced him, wide-eyed, past the guide, who was clawing at the baggage on his camel and had his hand on the rifle. He was at the shoulder of Tommy, the executioner. He looked down.
'Because she has seen us, can identify us, kill her.'
She was standing. The sun back-lit the gold of her hair, which was tangled and sweat-streaked. She wore a dirtied blouse of soft colours, faded jeans and heavy boots. Her hands, face and clothing were stained with oil. She looked up at them, rocking as if she no longer had the strength to stand erect. There was a calm about her, like an indifference. She did not flinch from Tommy… and Caleb saw the Land Rover wedged in the drifts of sand. He wondered what faint, minuscule, mathematical chance had thrown her into their path.
'If you won't, I will kill her.'
The guide had the rifle. With a fast, clattering movement of his hands, he armed it. Caleb looked into Rashid's face, saw the hesitation. Furrows lined his weathered forehead. Caleb understood.
It was the way of the Bedu to offer help, aid, whatever was in their power, to a traveller in distress. It would have been the way of any villager in Afghanistan… He had been offered help, aid, when he had crawled towards the village. Deep memories stirred. They came from beyond the chasm he had fashioned to block them out. The words croaked in his throat: 'We would break the culture of the Sands. We would dishonour ourselves.'
Tommy laughed at him and spittle flew from his mouth. It rested wet on Caleb's face. 'Culture, that is fucking rubbish. Dishonour, what is that? You won't, I will.'
'She has seen a caravan pass by. She has seen nothing…'
They would have known, all of them, that his words were empty.
In turn they sneered derision at him.
Caleb ignored them. Rashid had the rifle. He fixed Rashid with his eye. He held the eye. He did not blink, did not waver. He stared at Rashid. He would listen only to Rashid… He himself was the chosen man. He was the one for whom the rest struggled in the Sands. Was he not worthy of trust? Rashid broke, looked away, then began to replace the rifle under the bags on his camel's flank.
Caleb said to Rashid, 'You are a fine man, a man I love… Go, till it is too dark to go further. Light a fire. There I will find you.'
They went. After a splutter of argument, on which Caleb turned his back, the guide led them in a deep half-circle around the woman, as if by her glance or her presence she might poison them. Caleb watched them go. When the sun first touched the horizon's dunes, when he could no longer see them, when his body ached with tiredness, hunger and thirst, he went heavily down the slope towards her.
She was reaching into her hip pocket. 'Are you going to try to rape me?'
As she spoke, in clear Arabic, her hand slipped to a position of defence. Against the dirt and the oil smears on her blouse Caleb saw the clean shape of an open penknife blade.
'Are you going to kill me?'
'No,' Caleb said. 'I am going to dig you out.'
Chapter Nine
In the bone-crushing, muscle-numbing exhaustion, he felt freedom.
Caleb had dug through the last of the sunlight, through the dusk, through the time the desert was bathed in silver. He had cleared the wheels. From the time she had given him the short-handled shovel he had not spoken a word, as if talking would further waste his energy, and she had seemed to realize the silence's value. He had used the roof boxes from the Land Rover to make a wall beside the wheels so that when he threw aside a shovel's load, the sanci did not slip back into the cavity he dug. Each wheel was harder to clear; with each wheel his strength seeped and his tiredness grew. She could not help him. When each wheel was freed, he let her ram down the next box into place for the next wall, and she brought him the water that sustained him. She had watched him through the dusk and the night, only darting forward to drag the boxes into position and to bring him the water.
The boy had come back in the night, had sat apart from them and had minded his own camel and Caleb's.
For those hours, digging and gasping down the water given him, Caleb had known a new freedom. Links were broken, burdens offloaded. He was no longer a recruit in the training camp, no more a member of the 055 Brigade, was away from the trenches and the bombing, was distanced from Camps X-Ray and Delta, did not live the lie, was not travelling to rejoin his family. The sense of freedom burgeoned.