Don't go getting me wrong. I'm not a racial nut – plenty round here that are, but I'm not one of them. They had a hold on him. At the end, they'd show up and he'd just down tools – whatever he was doing – and he'd be gone. No more weekends and no more Sundays either, and half the Fridays he was gone. There was this Tuesday, and they came in for him. I was going to fire him that evening anyway, would have done it a month earlier if it hadn't been for old Perkins. They came in late morning, and he went off and wiped his hands – and we were busy as sin – and he told me, like my problems didn't matter to him, that he'd be gone for a couple of weeks. I told him he could be gone for a couple of months or a couple of years because there wouldn't be a job here when he came back. Both the Pakistanis were laughing at me, but not Caleb. I turned my back on him and I went in the office. He followed me. Nobody else saw it. He'd this spanner in his hand and his fingers were all white round it. God's my witness, I thought he was going to belt me, I reckoned he'd lost it – then he put the spanner down. You know what it was? I'd said he was sacked. He was not in control, and he couldn't take it. What I saw in his eyes, when he had that spanner, he'd have killed me and just walked like nothing had happened… I don't know why you're interested in Caleb Hunt, and don't suppose you'd tell me if I asked.
No, of course… Oh, the lads who used to come round for him, one's called Farooq, and his dad's got a restaurant down on their estate.
Amin is the name of the other one, don't know what he does. You see, there's very few white boys are close to Asians, but they all come from the same street. Sorry, gents, but I've got a business to run.'
They went outside where the sky seemed to merge with the grime of the old brickwork.
'It was the capital of the country's old engineering industry,'
Lovejoy said. .
'What have we got?' Jed asked.
'And it's all gone, the engineering industry. You know, just down the road from here they made the Titanic' s anchor chains… What have we got? I'd say we've got enough to lose sleep over.'
'Much sleep?'
'Persuasive leadership and pride, violence and vanity, commitment and courage – doesn't that stack up to a sleepless night? Come on, I'm hungry.'
They walked briskly towards the car, but Jed wasn't done. 'I can see him, clear as yesterday, in my room.'
'But he's not there, is he? He's lost and he needs killing. He's not in your room. Do you eat curry?'
Marty flew the map boxes. The chart on the work-surface lay between his joystick and her console keyboard. Each time they'd covered a box, she'd reach across with her Chinagraph pen and make a black cross on it. There were guys at Bagram who did mine clearance and they used map boxes, not of a mile square but of ten yards square, and they crossed out the sections of the map they believed they'd cleared. The guys said that the sections wouldn't be a place to take a picnic because they could never be certain they'd not missed one. It was like that with the boxes on the chart: they could have missed a target and flown on. Below the new line of black crosses were the red exclamation marks she'd made, four in two boxes, one mark for each firing of a Hellfire. He thought that when he brought Carnival Girl back for the last time – the late morning of tomorrow – he'd route her over the exclaimers and give himself a last look at the craters, freshen his memory of them before he climbed up into the big transport aircraft.
The wind made for good flying conditions; the one problem was the thermals coming up off the sand, which made Carnival Girl sluggish to commands. What he'd learned and what he'd tell them at the Bagram debrief, the heat from the ground killed the infra-red, but the real-time camera showed acceptable pictures for her to look at… They were alone.
For once, they did not have Langley with them. Two hours before, Oscar Golf had signed off, telling them he was going for a shower and food. Could they manage on their own? He'd seen Lizzy-Jo . smile and heard the clear rasp of her voice. Yes, they could manage on their own.
Maybe Marty's hand slipped, sweat on the joystick. Maybe his fingers were numbed from holding the stick. Carnival Girl's picture jolted, and she swore, and the picture dived.
'You OK?'
'I'm fine.'
'What I mean is, are you really OK?'
'I'm really fine.'
'No kidding?'
'I'm good and fine and I'm grateful – can't say more.'
She stretched, touched his hand on the joystick and her nails indented on the veins at the back of his hand, which shook a moment, and Carnival Girl plunged another two hundred feet. She was giggling like a girl and Marty felt the smile fill his face. He was grateful because he had blipped, grateful because she had kicked the blip hard. He owed her his thanks. It was between them. He had certainty that the collapse of his morale after he had flown in pursuit of the old man was a story she would never tell. And he would never tell that she had come to his tent and had bedded him on his cot. He would go back to Bagram and the coffins off the transporter would be unpacked and technicians and ground crew would stand around and admire the skull-and-crossbones symbols adorning First Lady and Carnival Girl, and his own crew and his own technicians would recite stories of the killing, wasting, of Al Qaeda men in the desert of the Rub' al Khali. He might even let them know, at Bagram, it had not been easy flying.
Languidly, that was how she flew. Carnival Girl climbed in response to the joystick's command, without enthusiasm. Alongside him, like she recognized he had come through the depression, she had the blouse unbuttoned and she hung loose, but he didn't look at her a lot, more at the screen above the stick. If he had found something in the Sands she would have alerted him and zoomed on it and he would have done a figure eight over it, but she didn't, and there was only the pure windblown shapes of the dunes on the screen, and the emptiness – utter emptiness. A couple of hours back, when Oscar Golf had gone for his shower and food, she'd asked him if he'd need a pill to keep him going till he brought Carnival Girl back the next midday. He hadn't wanted a pill, he could last.
He thought they might, because she was old and ancient, put Carnival Girl in a museum. Useful life gone, stripped of what was valuable but put on show. Schoolkids might come round her with teachers, and hold maps of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
The kids would gather at the forward fuselage, where the skull-and-crossbones was stencilled on it, and the teacher would talk about the men and women who defended the United States of America and about the hunting down of the country's enemies. He dreamed…
'So, are we flying or not?'
On the screen he saw the dive, and arrested it – then grimaced.
'Sorry.'
'Stop playing deadhead. I'm telling you, we're flying until the last hour, the last minute, of fuel. We're keeping her up all night and through tomorrow morning. We're going till the tanks are dry. It's the way it is. Always there's one more map box – it's Murphy's law, always the next box where the action is. We're with this until the end.'
'Got you.'
He thought of the man she had drunk with in the bar behind Fifth Avenue, and of the phone ringing out unanswered on the high floor of the North Tower, and of the bodies of the jumpers that seemed to float but came on down. Then he wiped his mind clear and flew Carnival Girl on towards the next map box. When the day died, they would reach the boxes alongside the track marked on the chart, do the east side of it in the night, and by dawn they would be over the track. Then time for the west side of it, and one last line of boxes over desert, before he turned her for home.