He walked – sandalled feet scraping the ground but held up – a dozen paces, then was stopped in his tracks. He felt the weight of the hands pressing him down -not so that he should lie prostrate but so that he should kneel. His weight pressed down on the skin of his knees, the voices were stilled and he heard the silence.
The dream slipped back in time, but Bart did not wake.
Departures at the airport of Riyadh. He stood in the queue.
Around him there were families, adults grumbling and complaining, children sulking and whining. He edged towards the desk and used his toe to push forward his bag. The flight non-stop home was fully booked, and Bart queued for the KLM aircraft to Amsterdam. He thought only of escape, and the slow progress of the line towards the desk fuelled his fear and impatience. A woman behind him, bowed down by a lifestyle of bags, tried to tell him how her servants had wept before she'd left for the airport, but he ignored her. The desk came imperceptibly closer, and beyond the desk was the departure gate, then the lounge, the walkway, the aircraft cabin's door. He was sweating, could not hide the mounting fear… It was almost a relief.
Men came behind him. Nasally, in accented English, he was asked his name, and hands lifted up his bag, other hands were at his arms.
He was out of the queue. He was gone. The escape had failed.
The dream was without mercy.
He cringed. There was the slither of feet on the concrete of the corridor floor beyond the steel-faced door. Low sun threw from the barred window dark shadows the length of the cell. They always came for him in the early evening. When the sun went down, the beatings began. They were late for him: already he could hear screams that pierced his head. He had seen a man, two days before, through an open door as he was led to his own interrogation, suspended from a pole by his wrists and ankles – like a pig on a spit
– and had heard the man shriek as he was hustled further down the corridor. The door opened. Bart was taken down the corridor, but not to an interrogation room. A brightly lit room with easy chairs and a polished desk, and Eddie bloody Wroughton: 'You confessed, nothing we can do, you told them everything. You went down into the desert. You made your own bed, Bart, and now there's nothing we can do to stop you lying on it. They'll try you, closed court, condemn you, and then they'll execute you. You're beyond our help.
When it comes to the end, try to put up a good show, try to walk tall, try to have a bit of dignity… It'll be quick. What I don't understand, Bart, is why you were so incredibly stupid.' Taken back to his cell, and listening to the screams and shrieks of others.
' The dream was a circle that was routed from the square to the airport concourse, to the cell block, and back to the square. .
He knelt in the silence. He imagined that a thousand throats gasped in anticipation. He smelt the fresh sawdust. He seemed to see the machine that shredded wood and made the sawdust that spilled from the machine into a sack's mouth. He could not see the sack but the scent of the sawdust was in his nose. He hunched. The sun and a gentle breeze were on the skin at the back of his neck. He tried to make the space, the skin between the back of his head and the top of his shoulders, so small that the executioner would find no place that his sword could strike. He buried his neck in his shoulders. He had not slept in the night. The dawn had come after an endless wait.
Before he had been walked to the black van, he had been stripped of his prison uniform and dressed in a robe that was stiff from many washings and, in spite of them, was stained. The back of his head nestled against the top of his shoulders and he made no target for the executioner. He felt the pinprick at the base of his spine, where it merged with his buttocks. The prick was sharp pain, the executioner's trick with the sword point. Bart could not help himself.
He jerked forward. His neck extended.
The dream ended.
He was not on the seats of the Mitsubishi but on the floor, his face squashed against the accelerator and brake pedals.
Above him, the chrome lit by the moon, the keys were in the ignition.
Bart could have pushed himself up, could have sat in his seat, wiped the sweat off his face and from his eyes, could – in one movement – have turned the ignition key and driven away into the sand in the hope of finding the track, might have been back in Riyadh by the late afternoon. Possibly, he would have lifted a telephone, have said: 'Mr Wroughton, it's Bart here, I've something really rather extraordinary to tell you. When and where can we meet?' Should have saved himself.
'Fuck you,' Bart murmured. 'Fuck you all. I hope he, whoever he is and whatever he does, hurts you.'
Bart looked at his watch. Three more hours of night before the next injection.
He had purged the dream. He slept.
It was a risk, but necessary.
First Caleb slotted the battery coolant unit into the grip stock, then . he depressed the impulse-generator switch – as the manual told him to. He was in darkness, could not see, could only feel and hear. The manual said – he had read it and memorized it – that 6000 PSI pressurized argon gas coolant… He did not have to remember a scientist's jargon, but had to listen and watch. The whine grew, but the red light winked at him. The manual said that a red light's sporadic winking indicated low battery power. When it was exhausted the red light would be continuous. The manual recom-mended that the battery coolant unit be recharged or replaced when the red light winked – only in circumstances of exceptional combat conditions should an attempt be made to fire a Stinger at a hostile target when the red light was winking. He killed the switch, the whine faded and the red light died. Caleb might have used the last of the battery's power when he made the test: the final chance of firing might have gone.
He fell back, the launcher resting on his body.
It all depended on the boy, on the freshness and youth of Ghaffur's ears. Without his hearing – if the Predator's eye was above him – he would not succeed in the last leg of his journey back to his family.
He had had to know that the missile would fire, would eject from the launch tube, would seek out a target.
Caleb lay on his spine. The exertion of lifting the Stinger's tube had brought back the throbbing pain to his leg.
He rested, was relaxed. What had disturbed him was not what he would do in the morning after the light came when he would stand and hobble to the guide, Rashid, and take his rifle: what had churned in his mind was that the battery powering the Stinger had lost its life.
They had Carnival Girl up over the track that ran north to south. On the map boxes, she would fly from Al Ubayiah at the northern point and down above Bir Faysal and At Turayqa to Qalamat Khawr al luhaysh in the south.
Because they tracked a lorry they were both awake. Marty brought Carnival Girl down to the low limits of loiter speed and they kept pace with the lorry and its trailer. The infra-red real-time picture had the lorry as a clean dark shape on the screen. They might have been ready to doze, might have needed more caffeine to keep them upright, but the lorry diverted them from drooping. It wasn't the first . lorry on the track, but all of the others had been going south to north, which was pretty much a straight line running through the centre of the map boxes. What was a lorry with a trailer carrying?
Marty said, 'It's refrigerated and it's got a load of iced root beer.'
'I wish.'
'Or it's got Big Macs, and ketchup and chillies and fries.'
'Dumb-ass.'
Marty said, 'My last go, it's got fans and air-conditioning units.'