Chapter 1
‘I skirted him, and kept going.’ He said the words, but no one in that audience would have believed him. They’d have known and understood, and probably not expected a confession.
Two or three clumsy and fast paces forward, then his weight on to his one good leg, then a swipe with the fence post at the boy’s knees and the boy had gone down and the shout was stifled in his throat and for a moment there was shock, then fear. Corrie Rankin had battered the small head with the flint stone, had hammered at the thick hair shielding the scalp until blood welts had caked it and the wall of the skull had cracked. He had killed him, but without noise. All of them in the audience would have understood that, and they were not there to criticise but to learn. A few sniggered, as if the death of a goatherd two years before was marginally amusing, but not many. Most would already be thinking: ‘What would I have done?’
It had been the first time he had tried to kill and the first time he had found himself spattered with another’s blood, and neither then nor now had it seemed overwhelmingly important. He had gone forward. His luck had held and the goatherd was not missed until dusk had started to crawl over the landscape and the sunken watercourse and the villa where they were short of a prisoner. He would have been a clear mile beyond the point where he had murdered the boy to silence his voice. The heat through the day had burned him. Sometimes he had crawled on his stomach and sometimes he had used basic fieldcraft and had found dead ground and then the post was his crutch again and he’d managed a faster pace. The Chair – a major, not in uniform but kitted out in a sweatshirt and faded corduroys – asked for the next question.
‘You were with three others, two of whom were subsequently murdered on video. The Italian was freed after payment of a ransom but he has never spoken of his ordeal. When you freed yourself, did you consider loosing them, giving them the chance to flee alongside you?’
The talk had come about because up on the Third Floor of his employer’s building, with an office overlooking the Thames, was a man called George. In the outer office beyond his door were Lizzie and Farouk. Farouk had been born in Alexandria but was now naturalised British. Lizzie had softened Corrie up. Farouk had pressed the advantages of a one-off and final curtain call on his escape as ‘closure’, and lastly George had come in with the line about how valuable it would be to detail his experience to a chosen gathering of men and women who might – pray to God they would not – find themselves in a situation not dissimilar.
And word had apparently drifted out of the supposedly secure office block of an extraordinary flight: no details, no names. Poole and Hereford had asked for access and an RAF station had chipped in with a request because their aircrew lifted Special Forces in and out of ‘harm’s way’. So in front of him now, in a lecture hall in the garrison camp at Tidworth on Salisbury Plain, were men and women from Special Boat and Special Air and some Para Recce people and the cockpit crews, and the doors were locked and the windows were blacked up and the interior had been swept. The last refinement to maintaining Corrie Rankin’s anonymity was a light fitted with a power bulb positioned behind him to shadow his features. It would not happen again. He had spoken for more than ninety minutes without notes, and his throat was dry, but not as dry as it had been when he had gone forward, day after day, and in darkness. An apple tree with its few old fruits might have saved his life, and there was a water-bucket put out for a donkey, and some mouldy bread that a shepherd might have dropped. He thought the major’s was a smart-arse question and irrelevant to the purpose of the occasion, survival, and answered it quietly.
‘No.’
The questioner persisted, ‘Did you not feel an obligation to help them?’
‘No.’
The Chair intervened, was firm. ‘I’ll take one more.’
He had been heard in near silence, respect seeping around the small theatre. He had told them in detail of the value of the training course at the Fort, and of the importance of all they had taught him there. He had done ‘resistance to interrogation’ and after ‘escape’ he had done ‘evasion’. On his stomach or on one leg, crossing difficult terrain, and nine more days of it, seldom eating and drinking even more rarely, and the daytime heat burning and blistering his facial skin, and the cold of the night – and always the pain and the thirst and the hunger. The light behind him shone into their faces and he could read the expressions. None of them rolled eyebrows as if to suggest he was glorifying excessively the ordeal he had been through. It had been a long time ago, and he reckoned he’d moved on.
A young woman’s question: she might have been aircrew and skilled in contour flying to insert or extract Special Forces from a valley or a mountain in Iraq or Afghanistan, or from Syria. She had on a shapeless cardigan and a floral skirt, no make-up, and her fair hair was pulled severely back. She would need more than his help if she was ever captured where he had been. They’d have raped her till she was damaged internally on her way to death – a release of sorts.
‘Were you able to bond to any degree with the men holding you; could you exploit anything from a relationship?’
‘No. I was well served by the paper clip dropped in a corner, and the fact that those guarding me were bored with the work, happy they would be selling us on in the next few hours, and had grown careless and left exits unlocked. Circumstances conspired to give me luck.’
He had said nothing of the girl he had lodged in his mind, and of her face being there and her voice when the tiredness seemed about to pitch him over, and he had not mentioned the role played by the clean skin, to whom he had given the code name of Belcher. Without Belcher it would not have been possible to get clear of the building. Without the girl he could not have traversed the barren territory, day after day and night after night, until reaching the border. The last act of endurance had been to crawl into a fence of coiled razor wire; it had slashed his face and arms and chest and the clothes on his back had been ripped. A Turkish military patrol had extricated him. Jericho had appeared the next day from Ankara, courtesy of a chartered jet, had greeted him in a curtained-off area of a casualty ward. ‘Well, my lad, there’s not many of us expected to clap eyes on you again. A surprise, but a welcome one. ’Fraid most of us had given up on you, dead and buried and all that stuff.’ He had taken him, still in a hospital gown, to the aircraft waiting on the strip at Gaziantep. On the way, Corrie had talked about Belcher. Jericho had driven abominably and had written in a notepad when he should have been steering. Corrie gave the name and the background and what he knew of the life history, and why he’d fastened on the name Belcher, and the number he’d offered his helper. He’d thought that most likely Belcher was already dead, killed in the security cull that would have followed his escape, with the certainty of night following day. And then he had passed out. It might have been the tiredness and might have been the morphine pumped into him, and an RAF flight had shipped him back to Northolt. His girl and Belcher were nothing to do with this theatre. He finished.
A voice murmured in the young woman’s ear, ‘A hard little shit. That’s what you have to be to live. Hard and ruthless and a shit?’
He should have finished but the Chair had his say. ‘You spoke of luck. My experience is that men and women earn their luck. You went through, by any definition, fifty shades of hell. Were you, are you, scarred? A changed man? If so, in what way?’
‘I don’t do trust well . . . trust would be the casualty.’
Nothing to add. He looked at the Chair, gave him the nod. He had done his performance, for the one and only time, and wanted out. He was thanked. There was subdued applause and he sensed many eyes on him, as if an answer was looked for, a truth that had been obscured. He was not in the business of helping them. Some tried to intercept him in the aisle and there was talk of drinks in the Mess. They’d have hoped to hear morsels he’d held back on. But very politely and very decisively, he’d declined.
The young woman heard again, ‘A hard little shit . . . me, I couldn
’t have done it, and don’t know many who could.’
Out into the evening rain, and a car waited for Corrie Rankin. It had not been easy reliving it, and thinking again of the girl, Maggie, and of the man he’d recruited, Belcher. Lizzie had come down from VBX and fussed around him. He’d be late home – not that it was important, because there was nobody waiting up for him.
He was known as the Emir.
The title was used by those he consulted on tactics, and by those who followed his orders with devotion, as if they were words handed down by God, and by those whose homes he used to sleep in – changing two or three times each week. He was a man of power and influence in Yemen, designated a ‘failed state’ by foreigners and unbelievers, but once an undisputed centre of civilisation. Few photographs of him existed; those that did showed him as he had been in Afghanistan fifteen years earlier, and before his flight, through the Tora Bora mountains, as the American bombers and specialist troops harried him and his leader. His task that evening was to purchase a donkey.
The same title also figured in the electronic files held in the secure offices of the Central Intelligence Agency in the American embassy in Yemen’s capital city, the part-medieval and part-modern Sana’a, and in the small section given to the Secret Intelligence Service officer at the British Embassy, and in the rooms where the German representative of the BND worked through the ordeal of his posting. The Emir, to all of them and in the labyrinth where the Public Security Office was based, was a man of importance and would have deserved categorising as a High Value Target. He was a military commander but wore no recognised uniform, had no bank of staff officers working with sophisticated computers. The weapons at his disposal were mostly those available in any bazaar in Yemen or northern Pakistan, or could be bought on the internet and shipped to him across the desert from one of the Gulf states. His hearing was poor and his eyesight damaged but, over a large area of Yemen – plateaux of shifting dunes and flat gravel expanses, steep mountains and beautiful but lawless coastline – his authority was undisputed. The Emir’s attention to detail was legendary. He wanted to see the donkey for himself, and to agree a price for the beast that was fair to the family owning it.
His voice was soft, hard to listen to, and those who were most often in his company had to lean forward so that their ears were close to his lips. Flitting between safe-houses, he had to keep his entourage compact. Once, three years back, he had seen a vehicle convoy carrying the American chargé d’affaires, from their embassy, on the road to Marib town; there had been pick-ups ahead and behind with .50-calibre machine-guns, and open jeeps with security men in gilet tops festooned with grenades and spare magazines and satellite phone equipment, and the man himself was behind darkened bullet-proof windows and armour-plated doors in an air-conditioned cocoon. He had stood in a defile a hundred or so metres back from the road and watched the caravan pass and seen the flashing lights. An Improvised Explosive Device might have killed that man, or a shaheed – a martyr – if he had pushed a cart along the road, appropriately loaded, and had detonated at the right moment. He had seen the cars go by.
The Emir’s own people travelled in one vehicle. Two bodyguards and a driver, and always his wife, went with him. The protection of the Emir was in the hands of men who had been close to him for two decades in Afghanistan and Iran and in Yemen, and his wife was never far from his side. She alone could soothe the pain that came from old shrapnel slivers in his right shoulder, and she could calm him when tension grew and seemed near to suffocating him.
He feared drones. He would not hear them. The drones were from the fleets of Predator unmanned aircraft; they carried Hellfire missiles under lightweight and narrow wings and he knew they would be searching for him. If a drone found him, he would be killed, and his wife and his team. If a drone found him it would be because a mistake had been made by those near to him, because a traitor was near enough to him to identify his vehicle. He would see the donkey and would pay for it in cash.
The driver and the two bodyguards carried fragmentation grenades. He trusted them completely. The Emir believed that, if they were about to be overrun by US special troops, or by the Yemeni military, that they would not permit his capture: he would be killed either by grenade or bullet, and not frogmarched before cameras and put in a courtroom. The driver whispered that he could not hear any drones. Darkness had settled over the village. The lights in the homes were from kerosene lamps. Electricity did not reach there, and generators were not owned by these people who existed in extreme poverty. He thought himself loved and respected by them. The cluster of houses, built from mud bricks and roofed with corrugated tin, made up one of a series of villages that ringed the town of Marib and its most celebrated ancient ruins. He could move between those villages when he came to this governorate.
There was much to preoccupy the Emir’s mind as he left the house. His wife would stay in the bare and undecorated room that was given to them or she might go to the kitchen to help prepare food, or she might wash clothing. They carried little, owned almost nothing; the possessions that were either most precious or most useful could be carried in a single sack. They had four children, now living with an aunt in Taiz, and he could not hear from them because that would breach his security, and his wife too was denied contact with them which was painful. He accepted the difficulties he inflicted on her – but she came with him, was always near his side. Now, the plan obsessed him. Not his own plan, but that of the man he knew as the shabah, the Ghost, but he had endorsed it, made available the resources required, and it would strike a blow that would devastate his enemies, the kafirs, the unbelievers.
He was taken to the donkey. It was tethered under the roof of a lean-to shed. The donkey was old and the marks on its side showed where a cart had been hitched, and where men and women and children over many years had sat. It was docile and did not back away. He felt the flesh behind the front legs of the animal. The Emir himself had no need to inspect the donkey or negotiate its price, but he did so. Twenty thousand Yemeni rial was agreed and the donkey’s owner – who would have given it to him for nothing – was well satisfied. It was a good-looking animal, the Emir thought; it scoured the ground at the extent of its tethering rope, looked for grain or any other fodder. He was pleased with what he saw.
A young man came over the hill, was challenged, and gave his name. ‘Towfik al-Dhakir, and greetings to you, brother.’
He had a torch in his hand. The battery was failing and it threw little light, but enough for his face to be illuminated. He had aimed it at the ground in front of his feet so that he could see where he stepped as he approached the sentry; he had raised it slowly and let the beam traverse his clothing to show that he was not carrying a weapon. He had several names and it was sometimes difficult remembering where he was and who he was addressing. But this time he had the correct name and it tripped off his tongue. The name meant ‘One Who Remembers God’, and was a good name.
It was important that his voice should not be threatening and that he showed no arrogance, but also he must not appear cowed as the sentry covered him with a rifle. He would have a bullet in the breach and be ready to fire. Almost no visitors would come to this place under cover of darkness. He had heard the scrape as the weapon was cocked. The soldier on sentry duty would be nervous, barely trained, a city boy who had been sent to the governorate.
His business? Complicated. He would need to lie. But much of his life was spent in areas of deceit. If he showed too great a deference to the idiot with a rifle, then he would be sent on his way with a kick on his cheeks to hurry him. Too much confidence and the sentry would call for his sergeant, who would be foul tempered and aggressive at being disturbed so late. He came closer. The torchbeam stayed on his face. It was a ‘different’ face from any the sentry would have been used to seeing at that site. The beard would have been fairer than any others and the nose would have been smaller and not hooked, and the eyes – if they had shown up – a softer blue. He told the sentry
that he had a pain in his tooth and that he had heard the lady in the camp could help him, had drugs that would soften the pain. He hoped the sentry would only have been posted to this remote position, away from the main force in the garrison camp of Marib, a few days before, so would have only slight knowledge of the woman the detachment guarded. He needed, urgently, to be examined by Miss Henrietta. He had never met her and did not know what she looked like, but it was the name he had been given as a contact – only to be used in a situation when he had serious and verifiable information to pass on.
He was told to wait. He kept the torch on his face and smiled and hoped the sentry would be lulled by his calm manner. He heard the exchange of words, the sentry to a colleague, and then a shuffling away of feet. By coming at this time of evening, he hoped that the recruit would be more frightened of waking his sergeant than of dealing with an unexpected arrival. He made conversation, stilted at first, but the young man in the darkness and with the rifle grew in confidence. Each time he gained the trust of any man, touched them with his smile and was given help, he put their life in forfeit. He had come six miles from the village where he stayed and had driven on side lights to a point on the track where there was a bluff that disguised his approach. He had walked the last mile, had come slowly and with the torch light on – he had tried to minimise suspicion, and had succeeded. The sentry talked of his home on the eastern edge of Sana’a, and of his father and of his brothers, and he played on the young man’s vanity. He heard a metal click and knew that the safety catch had been eased back on the weapon and that it was now slung again on a shoulder. The sentry had a fiancée and hoped soon to marry her, and there was an uncle who owned an orchard north of Aden and south of Lahij and there was a chance he might go and work there after his marriage and after completing service in the military. Miss Henrietta had been told that if he were coming it would be in the night and that the given excuse would be acute toothache.
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