The feed on the screen, real time, rolled and bucked, went soft focus, reclaimed the target, lost it, found it again. Nathan had moved to the coffee dispenser. Over the headset, Gonsalves heard the reassurance of Langley and the increasing tension of the guys down at Shaybah. The talk was coded, technical, and Gonsalves could understand only trifles. Why the hell did they not strike? The picture on the screen, beamed off the Predator, wavered off and on to a drawn-out camel train. The effort of the sensor operator was to get clear images of the cargo carried by three of the camels. More times than he had counted, the zoom had gone down on the camels, blurred with magnification, but then the picture had been lost. He had seen the men, five of them, spread out over a length that might have been as much as two hundred metres. They went slowly in long arcs. The camera tried, one more time, to go close-up on a cargo box, but the focus failed. The angle changed. Gonsalves imagined, high above the caravan, kicked by the gale winds, that the Predator circled.
Nathan gave him coffee. He drank, didn't notice the taste. He flung the beaker towards the trash can, missed, and coffee dribbled on to the floor. He picked up off the table the photocopied picture of a crate box, olive green, that could hold a Stinger, the man-portable surface-to-air missile system. He knew the wind had reached new levels at the altitude of the Predator and at the level of the desert, because the picture rocked more severely and there seemed to be a mist over the camels and the men, which he thought to be from driven sand. In his working life, Juan Gonsalves had not known a stress level so high. He depressed the speech button on his headset.
'How much longer – when can we go?'
The voice was massaged, quiet: 'This is Oscar Golf. Interjections from what we regard as spectators interrupt and divert us. Briefly, we do not take out a target until it has been identified with certainty
– identification is in process. These are difficult conditions. We're right at the upper altitude where the UAV currently flies, and it's near impossible to get a stable platform. The weather is deteriorating and we are running low on fuel. So, please, no further interruptions.
Oscar Golf, out.'
He had been put down, felt like a scolded child. He watched the screen, saw the caravan moving steadily under the real-time camera.
He felt weak, sick.
'Four more minutes on station,' Marty said.
'After four more minutes we cannot bring Carnival Girl back,'
Lizzy-Jo said.
The voice of Oscar Golf came back, so calm. 'Reading you, hearing you.'
Marty worked the joystick, his decision, and brought Carnival Girl down a full six thousand feet of height. Each foot of descent made the camera platform less stable. He had backed her away, gone to the west, had lowered the lens angle. Lizzy-Jo followed him. They were like dancers in step. The camera raked along the straggling length of the caravan. He didn't need to speak to her. They moved together, better that day than any other. He ran Carnival Girl from the tail of the caravan and on towards the front of it. The computers did the calculations. George flitted at their backs and kept the bottles of water coming. Marty could not drink, did not dare to release his fingers from the joystick. It fascinated him that down below, on the camels, they did not know the eye of the lens watched them. He was half-way along the caravan, and Lizzy-Jo's finger stabbed at the digits playing at the base of the screen – two minutes and forty seconds.
Would they pull out, on Oscar Golf's orders, or would they sacrifice Carnival Girl and let her crash in the desert with her fuel tanks exhausted? The momentary image was of a big camel, loaded – then the voice in the headphones.
'We have a freeze – wait out. We are looking at a freeze frame.' No excitement in the voice, without passion.
Marty looked up, took in the screen on the right side of the main image. The freeze frame was like a still photograph. The picture held two camels. He saw the clear lines of the crate box. He The voice betrayed nothing, no thrill, like it was a machine. 'Hit them. Right now.'
He heard Lizzy-Jo's question. 'One strike or two?'
The answer. 'Give them both. Waste the fuckers.'
He came round, was head on towards the caravan. It was what they trained for, what they practised to achieve. Lizzy-Jo didn't have to tell him what she needed. It would be without warning. Down there, slow moving in the sand, they would have no warning. The cross-winds hammered Carnival Girl.
'Port side, missile gone,' Lizzy-Jo murmured.
On the screen, racing from it and diminishing, was the fireball.
Twelve seconds or thirteen, at that height, from firing to impact.
Again the camera shook at the weight loss.
'Starboard side, missile gone.'
Two concentrated flame masses, burning solid propellant, careered down. Each powered a missile with a warhead of twenty-live pounds weight of explosive, fragmentation quality, on impact fuses. He watched. Lizzy-Jo guided them and he heard little yelps whistle through her teeth. They were nearly down, he was counting silently, when the camels scattered. A few paces, the lens picked up the panic. They were turning, running, and then the flames cut in among them. He saw the camels break the line, then the cloud burst over them, and the fireflash. A ceiling of dust, sand, filled the screen image.
Marty said, flat, into his face microphone. 'I am out of flight time.
Do I bring her back or do I lose her?'
'Bring her back – and give her some good loving care. Nothing will live under that. Bring her home. Oscar Golf, out.'
Marty turned her, and the lens lost the cloud.
He heard nothing.
The boy was on a dune's rim, and his hands were cupped together across his mouth, his shoulders heaving with the effort of shouting.
Caleb could not hear him.
He did not know how long he had been alone in the Sands with the Beautiful One. She had stampeded in terrified flight. He had clung to her. She had bolted, had run in the few seconds of ear-splitting noise before the first explosion. She had been going at full stride at the moment of the second explosion. He had hung on to her neck. She had gone on until she could run no more, then had stopped, trembling. He did what he had learned from the guide. As he had seen Rashid do it, he snuggled his face against the Beautiful One's mouth, his nose against the foulness of her breath, and he had whispered sweetness to her. He had stilled the trembling. They had meandered on, alone and together. He had not known where he went – the camel had taken the course. His ears were dead and his mind was numbed, and the strength of the sun had grown.
In the distance, high on the dune, the wind made a canopy of the boy's robe. The ears of the Beautiful One lifted, pricked, as if she heard him when Caleb could not… They were all his family, the boy and the Beautiful One, and the men who waited for him at the end of his journey. He had no other family. The camel's pace quickened, closing on the boy who had searched for him and found him.
Chapter Thirteen
They rode on.
Many times, Caleb looked up and searched for the danger. There was not a cloud in the brilliant blue of the sky. He gazed up till his eyes ached, saw nothing and heard nothing.
They made a straggling line, their tracks covered by the wind's shift of the sand. Rashid was out in front. On a bull camel, already laden with two crates, was the body of Fahd. Further back was Hosni, then Caleb, then another bull. Last in the line was the boy, Ghaffur. Caleb had not seen them, but left beyond the horizon were the carcasses of Fahd's animal and one that had carried crates and one that had carried food.