Jericho's War

by Gerald Seymour

  The other soldier returned. He was called forward. He inclined his head in thanks. He assumed the sergeant slept, and likely had chewed qat most of the afternoon and early evening, and had not been consulted. He saw the sentry’s face and sensed the nerves of the young man, and smiled reassurance and touched the arm near to where the rifle was held, then grimaced as if the tooth was agony and worsening.

  He followed; it had been a long road. On days when he was surrounded by armed men and when he saw the casualness of death and the acceptance of inflicting pain, it was hard for him to remember where the journey had started and how long the road had been. Where? A coastal town in the northeast of England, facing out on to the chill of the North Sea, a place scoured by winds. When? In the October of 1991 he had been born in the maternity unit of the town’s principal hospital: he was now a week short of his twenty-fifth birthday. His mother, Julie, had taken him home alone to the terrace on Colenso Street. Who? Tobias Darke, the solitary child of a ruptured marriage. His mother worked in the town’s brewery and had stayed to look after her mother, a semi-invalid, and his father had gone to find work on the building sites of the German economic miracle. Tobias had been the result of unprotected sex; he had never seen his father. After a few years the picture on the sideboard had gone into a drawer; at around that time the money might have stopped coming. His mother had had to pay the bills and to clothe and feed them, and he had been farmed out to his grandmother. She had died. A bright kid, the teachers said at the junior school at the top of Elwick Road, but teetering on the edge of control. Later classified as disruptive, a poor influence in class and the playground, he had a reputation to uphold, with fights, slammed doors, shouting and his mother’s tears, all by the time he went, nominally, to Hartlepool Sixth-Form College. Well on the road then, the journey under way.

  She was the contact, Jericho had told him.

  He walked between camouflaged canvas tents, no doubt provided by the American paymasters of the regime’s military forces. Small lamps burned, and he heard the sound of the engine, coughing and in severe need of maintenance, powering a generator from a tent dominated by a radio antenna. He thought there were probably a dozen men stationed in the little camp, and they were tolerated. If the militants, with whom he lived and who trusted him as a committed fighter, had decided that the presence of the woman aggravated them in any way, however small, a message would have been passed and the tents packed away and a column of vehicles would have driven away and her work would have been abandoned.

  He walked between trenches – if he had not used the torch he might have fallen into one of them. They had been dug to a depth of three or four feet and, because the rains that year had been slight, and the worst of them were still expected, the ground would have been rock hard and the digging difficult for the woman and for the two volunteers who stayed with her. He wondered who she was and why she stayed and what obsession for history drove her. He thought that his own people, whom he now deceived, did not object to her presence because she had some medical knowledge and access to painkillers and dressings and the ointments that alleviated infected insect bites: she had become a little part of this landscape, and was – except for her local helpers from the National Museum and her military escort – alone. She had stayed among her excavations long after all the other foreign archaeologists had quit. Jericho had told him about her and said how it would be, and whether he was Tobias Darke or Towfik al-Dhakir, he belonged to Jericho, who had another name for him.

  She was called in a tone of respect by the soldier who had escorted him. There was a pause, then a light shone in the recesses of a tent. He saw the shadow shape of a figure behind the canvas, first crouched, then stretching, finally standing tall. He wondered if Jericho owned this woman, too, and was there ever a release from the ownership?

  The tent flap was pulled aside. He reverted to what he had done when confronting the sentry, turning his torch to shine on his face. She had a flashlamp, powerful, enough of its cone of light spilled off him to show her. Extraordinary. What had he expected? Could not have said. He did not know what image he’d had of a female archaeologist who had refused to leave when the others had run to get back to Sana’a escorted by machine-guns and armoured cars. She was younger than he had expected, and slim and with her hips showing prominently because the robe she had wrapped around her was pulled tight. A scarf was tossed over a part of her hair so as not to give offence to the soldiers, but much of it peeped out and was soft gold: there had been a teacher in the school at the top end of Elwick Road who’d had hair that colour. Her skin was flushed from the sun but was speckled with a mess of freckles. He blinked because the light of her lamp burned his eyes.

  She spoke in Arabic, with a poor accent, but her attempts would have won her loyalty.

  ‘You have a bad tooth?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Then I’ll take a look at it . . .’ She reached down and lifted up a folded chair. He realised the skill with which the tent had been sited. Her tent was inside the troops’ perimeter, but from where they slept they could not spy on her. He sat and lifted his head and opened his mouth and made a little play-act of pointing towards the right side upper molars. She waved the soldier away, a dismissive gesture, then shone the torch into his mouth. She would have appeared, if the soldier had turned and watched her, to be making a first examination. In English, with a twang in her accent that he thought was West Country, the limit of his experience, she asked, softly, who he was.

  A deep breath. He would be taken on trust. ‘I am Belcher.’

  The thought of it had thrilled her and yet she had dreaded the moment.

  Her hand shook and the torchbeam wobbled. She was bending close to him, and asked in a loud voice, and in Arabic, how long he had had the pain in his tooth. It had been four months since her recruitment by Jericho, the obese slug of a man who played at being a buffoon and who had effortlessly tricked her. In that meeting, she had never seemed to have the opportunity to back away. She had played out that conversation many times since in her mind: her smiling at him, shaking her head, beginning excuses that Jericho had swiftly batted away. Last time she had seen him, on the airstrip at Sayun, his parting shot had been, ‘If he’s not come then he’s nothing to say. He won’t be knocking on your tent flap with a sore tooth, wanting to spread the word of the price of bread. When he comes it will matter, believe it.’

  He repeated it. A growl came from his throat and the words spluttered up through his opened mouth. ‘I am Belcher.’

  She understood that she was dealing with an agent of substance and was close to matters far more important than anything she had known. She held his face and looked down at the teeth; she had no idea whether they were good, bad, or indifferent teeth. She understood well that she was involved in a plot of complexity and danger. She had lived a simple life, focused on her work; she had won praise for her scholarship and both admiration for and jealousy of her dedication. She told him who she was. He nodded; he already knew her name. In English.

  ‘I was told you were “Henry”, really Henrietta – Henrietta Wilson, but were called Henry. I liked that.’

  The thrill and the dread loosened her tongue. He had no need to know that she worked at one of the great undeveloped, unexcavated, unmapped corners of the ancient world, where a descendant of Noah, after the Ark was grounded, had been the first overlord. On this piece of scrub and sand, the civilisation of Saba had been rooted, and she was Sheba whose wealth came from the duties charged to the merchants on the caravan routes as they took incense north to the Mediterranean Sea. A thousand years before the birth of Christ, this had been a centre of learning and sophisticates, and the queen of Sheba herself might have passed this way with her camel train before crossing the great Saudi desert, on the start of her journey to see Solomon in present-day Israel. Now it was abandoned ground, and old workings left by past experts were covered over with layers of sand. Most days she dug where no one with her scientific background had been
before. There was a wooden crate at the back of her tent and inside it, bubble-wrapped, were items, near to perfection, of stone and jasper and gold, which she had lifted from where they had been hidden three, four millennia before. Excitement and fear melded together in her.

  She had grants from Germany, and Italian support, and was helped by a branch of the Royal Archaeological Institute in London, and she enjoyed the goodwill of the National Museum in Sana’a, and a minister had provided her with a small military unit – and there would also have been other negotiations, she not privy to them, with men and tribal leaders who were on the fringe of the militant groups. Henry Wilson, best training she had ever had, had been through four intensive first-aid courses, and had viewed herself when she first came to Yemen as someone who ‘could make a difference’: she dug and she treated the sick if they were brought to her. She had a sack full of prescription painkillers, could sew up a wound that she had cleaned, might have made a fair job of delivering a baby, and would have had a stab at setting and bandaging a broken limb. She was open to all callers, and twice men had been brought to her with fleshy bullet wounds and she had done what she could and seen them carried away into the darkness. Perhaps it was poor company she kept but it enabled her to dig. The last find that mattered to her was a carved image of a cat, in silver, some seven inches high. It would go to the museum in Sana’a. Jericho had made it clear that all that was at risk, everything she had so far achieved, and anything she aspired to in the future. No escape route had been offered.

  Belcher had a chirpy little smile, until he remembered that he was supposed to be suffering with a poisoned abscess at the least, then he squirmed convincingly. ‘A guy signed me up. I suppose I was ready for it, doubts and all that crap. He hooked me. I told him I was Tobias Darke. Honest, that’s my name. Horrible place, Miss, north of Aleppo, a bad part of Syria – you wouldn’t want to be there, Miss – asked me if I knew a play with someone called Sir Toby Belch in it. I didn’t. I’d barely read a book. Toby and Tobias. We didn’t like Belch, and changed it, so I’m Belcher. Good to talk to you, Miss. Just go and get me some pills, sure as hell we’ll be watched. Do it, Miss. I think already I stayed too long. I’m surprised, Miss, you let them involve you – maybe we’re none of us as clever as we think.’

  It was done so swiftly that she did not realise at first that he had passed a tiny and crumpled piece of paper into the palm of her hand; it was half the size of the nail on a little finger. She believed she occupied a privileged place in a world of competitive academic study; she thought many – if they had the courage – would give a right arm to be where she was, close to one of the world’s greatest civilisations, and had felt similar spurts of doubt and hesitation when Jericho had walked from the bar after propositioning her. She was bloody well taken for granted. No chat-up and no foreplay, not from Jericho and not from this guy.

  She might have said, ‘Excuse me, but I am involved in research that will illuminate people who lived in these parts thousands of years ago, who had intellectual properties that went far beyond the world of drones,’ but she did not. Not many days went by when she did not hear the drones overhead, incessantly searching for targets. Three times there had been explosions within ten miles, and after two of them she’d seen the spiral of smoke rising, dirty black from burned engine oil and tyres. She put the paper in the pocket of the robe she’d slipped into. It was tight at her throat and long enough to hide her ankles. She turned off the torch and said she would go to get some pills, and would have been gone less than half a minute. She came out of the tent and handed him an Ibuprofen packet. He might, that moment, realise the packet was empty; she would not waste her drugs when his tooth showed no sign of inflammation and needed only a good scrub, water and paste. He thanked her, and she assumed that was where it would finish, a fourth drone strike.

  She had tried not to make it her war. Had tried hard enough, successfully enough, until Jericho had clawed his hands on her. He was a nice-looking boy, Belcher, and might be a few years younger than her. He might well have wanted to take time off from the deceit he practised and talk to her. He said he would see her again.

  ‘You are the dead drop, Henry. It’s what it’s called. I bring the stuff to you, you pass it on.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She mouthed it and he wouldn’t have heard. ‘Thanks a damn million.’

  More thanks, louder, and he had the little packet in his hand. The torch moved away from her and the quiet settled and she went back inside her tent. She doubted she’d sleep – might have killed then to get a Scotch, a large one, in her hand – and the cold seemed to hunt her down, and she shivered, as she always did when she was afraid.

  They had walked all over her, and she had no way out, but she jolted out of the self-pity. She thought of Belcher, pretending to nurse an abscess, and passing through the checkpoint again and going back to his own bed and living lies, praying that he did not let slip a mistake. He was probably quite a pleasant boy.

  There were some on the base – who flew Ospreys and fast jets for Special Operations – who did not regard him as a real pilot, which antagonised Casper. He regarded what he did as being every little bit as taxing as the jobs of the others who spent time 25,000 feet and more above sea level, travelling at more than a thousand miles an hour and up to Mach-2. He knew in the Mess and at social evenings that personnel were divided between those who did it for real and wore the G-suits and sat on ejector seats, and those who dressed in comfortable fatigues and had their butts on expensive, purpose-built desk chairs.

  It had been a difficult flight and he thought he had handled the bird well.

  Casper was thirty-nine years old and at that age might have been retired anyway from sitting cramped at the controls of an F-16, the Fighting Falcon, but it had been forced on him. Stationed at the Hill airforce base in Utah, he had been messing in the yard with the kid and had stepped into a hole the dog had dug. His knee had twisted and the ligaments had never quite healed. It had been a quirk of the schedule given him by the air force, but he had always been on a training course or taking leave when others in his flight were shipped off to a combat zone. He had not done it, then the knee had given out from under him. He was patched up as best the doctors and specialists were able and able to walk and again throw a soft ball, but could not climb into the limited cockpit space of a warplane. He had done familiarisation and accepted the transfer to the Cannon base outside Clovis in a wilderness of scrub and desert of New Mexico, learning new skills, but it still rankled that he did his flying from a darkened and air-conditioned cubicle.

  It had been a difficult flight because the winds were freshening over his target and surveillance area.

  He sat with his systems man on his right side. Casper had officer ranking as a captain, but Xavier was a sergeant; his conversation roved mostly over his émigré family from Cuba who had settled in Florida. Casper sometimes found his accent hard to cope with, but left detail to him. Behind him, always, was an analyst from intelligence, but they shifted frequently and he rarely knew their names. Most were pale-faced creatures, some with acne spots and some with thick spectacles, who lived off what the computers spewed up for them. Both were close to him, near enough for him to smell what they had eaten as filling in their sandwiches, but Casper did the flying.

  He controlled an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, an MQ-1 Predator, with a wingspan of almost fifty feet and a length of near to thirty feet, but it weighed less than a tonne and was fragile and needed to be flown with sensitivity and care. Its payload was the fuel it carried, which gave it the ability to stay airborne for a full twenty-four hours, the Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, and the cameras, which were remarkable and could read a number-plate from a cruising altitude, and identify a single target’s features. He thought he flew it well, and reckoned that most of the guys, and girls, in the Falcons would not have been able to hold his Little Lady – call sign NJB-3 – steady enough for the images it was taking of the ground to be transmitted back. His wife,
Louella, said often that she could not get her head round him sitting in his cubicle, in the heart of New Mexico, and flying his Predator over a part of Yemen, east of the capital city: his kids, as an exercise on a wet day, to contain their scrapping, had done calculations and decided that their father’s Predator was something more than 8,500 miles from where he sat when he’d gone to work.

  He could sense those winds around it, and the commands he sent to it by satellite had to allow for the increasing buffeting it was taking. Xavier was feeding him the detail of the fuel load, and flight time left to them, and the latest from the meteorologist, and the spook was chipping in with requirements for specific buildings to be circled over again or needed a lens zoom on a lone vehicle. Casper had the speed down, was at the lowest point of its ‘cruise performance,’ only ten miles an hour above the ‘stall speed’ of 54 knots. Barely watching the screens in front of him which gave up the camera’s images, he concentrated on flight information. The door behind him opened to allow the new team in.

  Casper slid out of his seat, went left. Xavier was gone to the right. The fresh team were in place. Casper preferred to bring her back to her strip and not have others do the work, but he had been cajoled by his superior to allow this crew one roster – only one. Would not happen again.

  He stood, stretched, hacked a cough because his throat was dry. Already his replacement had hold of the joy-stick that controlled the craft; Casper hitched up a rucksack that had been behind his chair, and he went out into the corridor. Little time was allocated for a debrief. The spook did a longer shift and could talk through the replacements. The changeover was sudden, abrupt. They did not hang around. The area they had flown over with NJB-3 showed flat and featureless desert in the north of their assigned sector, and occasional villages, houses squashed together, to the south. There they had watched vehicles and been able to monitor women going out to scavenge for what little wood could be gathered up, and seen kids playing football. Once, not of particular interest, they had gone over an archaeological site, and several times they had criss-crossed the pipeline bringing crude to a refinery.