Jericho's War

by Gerald Seymour

  The Ghost had slept a few hours, not many. He had demanded that fresh water be left in a bucket in the room where the simple bed was, a frame with rope strands criss-crossing the base. A sewn-up sack stuffed with old clothing served as a mattress. He wanted simplicity in his surroundings, no luxury, nothing of the ostentatious wealth of his upbringing in the city on the west coast of Saudi Arabia, and he believed that clearer thought came from the very ordinariness and sparseness of what was around him. With simplicity went cleanliness.

  He drifted in the white nightrobe, barefoot, across the concrete floor to the table where the bowl and the soap bar were. The water bucket was filled because he would wash many times in the night and each time the water must be clean. A light, turned low, burned in the corridor outside his room.

  Here, in this safe-house, he did not need electrical circuits and miniaturised boards, but he needed the peace and the calm to think. It was about detonation. A device in a shoe had not detonated satisfactorily. Another, in underpants that had been soaked in a liquid solution of nitro-glycerine, then been dried out so that the mixture caked on the garment, with a detonator of acetone peroxide, had evaded the checks but had failed at the final stage. The fragments should have been at the bottom of the Atlantic, evidence of the skills of the bombmaker, instead they were displayed on CNN and Al-Jazeera TV. It was about detonation, about clear thought and patience. He had thought of a heart pacemaker, with an integral timer, and good surgery, but was now discarding that option.

  He washed quietly. There was purpose to scrubbing his hands when he was at a workbench and assembling a board. But that night he merely wanted to turn matters over in his mind, to rinse and scrub them, as he did with his hands. A shadow moved across the bowl. He heard the smallest sound, and the sound was of a garment sliding over concrete.

  It was possible that his approach had become too complicated and that simplicity offered a better route. He needed a frequent flier travelling in business class, not a boy raised in a village in Yemen or from a Lebanese refugee camp or from the North-West Frontier, whose head was filled with hatred and little else. A business suit and briefcase, not a canvas bag slung over a shoulder and a look of dumb aggression. There had been a slight movement of shadow and change of light, and that sound, and nothing more. He went back to washing. A business suit and a briefcase and the confidence of a man who belonged and who carried a letter confirming the surgery he had received and who was now recuperating from the operation, was behind with his work schedule and needed to catch up on the backlog, caused by his hospitalisation, and he might use a lightweight stick.

  He looked behind him, saw the eyes and the teeth and nothing more. He thought she would have been there most of the night. He looked at the gap between the door and the frame and saw her silhouette, but she did not move away, had no fear of him discovering her. The light on the table increased, the sliver widened. She had eased the door further open. He saw her better. She wore a long shirt and no veil and her hair hung loose on her shoulders, the lamp behind her showing the outline of her body beneath the material. It was said there were prostitutes in Sana’a, certainly there were Somali women in Aden who sold themselves, and there might have been a brothel in Marib: he did not know and had never been with a prostitute, neither a women nor a boy. There was a drain at the side of the room, and he tipped the water from the bowl down it. At her age, in his home town in Saudi Arabia, she would not have been married off, but there were girls of fifteen who were sold to men in Yemeni villages, sent to a wedding ceremony; the ‘husband’ might be three times the girl’s age. He tried to ignore her, to concentrate. A businessman would carry a briefcase and inside it would be his working laptop and mobile phone. There’d be the handle of the case, and a metal buckle, and the locks and fastenings. A man doing business as soon as he left JFK airport would have an electric razor with him, and inside all those pieces could be, separated one from the other, the parts of a detonator – perhaps, but more thought was needed. He would not use a boy who was near illiterate, without education and without presence. A man of substance was a necessary part of this plan – but where to find him? The girl had a bold face and did not move. He could have shouted out in the night, called for her father, and the girl would have been dragged away, sent to the place where she slept with her sisters, but first whipped for her disobedience in flaunting herself in front of an important guest. She waited for him.

  He wondered if the girl had experience, and doubted it, and thought it likely she was as untested as himself. He breathed hard. He stood. Her eyes stayed on him and she did not duck her head, and a little heat seeped into his body and he went to the door. He needed to think of the briefcase and where to find a man who would look justified in carrying it and flying business class: such a man, fulfilling the stereotypes of wealth and success, would receive less attention than any of the boys – young and loyal and in love with God – who were kept in the separated compound and who would die at the entrance to a barracks or beside a road on which a personnel carrier drove. He wiped the thought; it was irrelevant to him. There were old cannon in Sana’a, left by the Turkish military before they had fled, and those boys each had the value of a single ball fired from a century-old cannon: fashioned, despatched, forgotten. He felt an awkwardness as he moved and he went to the door; he saw the skin at her neck and throat and on her arms and she stared up at him. He closed the door. He did not hear her move away. There was no light.

  He sat at the table and refilled the bowl with clear water. He could picture the man walking with confidence on a travelator or across a departure lounge; and a man who could play the part, who had a love of the faith and belief in the virtue of the martyr, a man strong enough to survive the insertion of the device. He sat in the darkness and pondered. He had the parts and the knowledge, but needed the mule, and the method of detonation was a detail.

  He would speak to the Emir, would charge him to find such a man.

  He washed and gazed out through the window – and did not doubt that the child was still on the far side of the closed door, and heat seeped from his body – and he could see no stars and no moon and knew the cloud cover was still good and he doubted that the drones, which one day would kill him, would be flying above the village. There was a side door to the room and he unlocked it and went outside. He let his cleaned hands dry in a soft wind, and a bodyguard had materialised, a similar ghost, from the darkness, and a ripple of reflection came off the barrel of the weapon across his chest: these were good men, who would die to protect him, he believed that – but he needed another man loyal enough to go to his death.

  ‘Heh, after another heavy day of aerial combat, shit, they look exhausted,’ remarked a weapons system crewman.

  ‘Need to knock off duty early, before they close up at the bank, and talk investments,’ added a navigator on the C130 transporters that lifted Special Forces into bad corners of Syria, or Iraq – where it was hairy flying and they only emerged from skimming the tree tops when they needed enough altitude for the boys to jump.

  A fast jet pilot said, ‘At least going down to the bank stops them getting bed sores.’

  A woman from weapons systems said, ‘You guys have no idea of the serious stress-related illnesses that the unmanned aerial vehicle people can get from sitting all day, all night, in an ergonomic designer seat. It’s a tough war they’re fighting.’

  It had come through that day. A squadron of F-16 crews and aircraft were on a week’s notice of deployment, as were those flying close-support gunships, into the thick shit when folk on the ground were having difficulty. Ospreys too – they could bring thirty Seals or Rangers into a fire-fight; they carried a triple-barrel Gatling .50, which was awesome. They were going away, would be flying on operations within two weeks, out of a Jordanian base, or be up in Kurd country facing severe ground defences, and a bad outlook if brought down and captured. They had done live fire and drop exercises in the New Mexico desert. They had needed a soft target, and one
was ready made and presented in the form of Xavier and Casper. They came through the door and into the Mess, and the section where men and women wound down after a shower and debrief.

  The Predator, NJB-3, with its stencil proud on the fuselage, was still parked in the hangar on the edge of the runway at the King Khalid strip, which was – give or take – 10,000 miles away, and the targets were another several hundred miles on down the line. The meteorologist, accurate and dead-pan in her analysis, was not able to offer good news. The cloud cover over Marib Governorate, that area east of Sana’a and into northern Sabwah and southern Al Jawf, had cloud that she forecast would last another twenty-four hours, then might lift and might not, and she’d shrugged as if to indicate – what an imbecile would have realised – that projecting trends in that asshole area of the world was difficult. No point in staring any longer at a blank TV screen. So, they’d gone for coffee. Casper’s problem was that his boy had brought home a school evaluation and there were codified warnings about aggressive in-class behaviour and non-achievement. It was not yet a crisis, but needed close appraisal. It worried him, and worried his wife more, but he had to work peculiar hours, and was tired to the point of exhaustion from the close concentration of keeping the bird up, and he didn’t often get a chance to talk to his son properly. Xavier and he didn’t talk too much among themselves, either, but he knew his systems side-kick was tense and anxious about his wife’s fertility-problems. These were the issues that concerned Casper and Xavier, and seemed important, and, for fuck’s sake, they did a job. It wasn’t Casper’s goddam fault that he flew a Predator and not a manned plane in the war on the other side of the globe.

  There had been some shit in a local paper. A piece about the ‘burn-out factor’ and some more. It had been the ‘more’ that had awoken an old grievance.

  The airforce bosses, it had been written in the rag that was available at the Cannon base, were again considering a bait of an additional $25,000 a year, every year, for the drone teams, to keep them in those ‘ergonomically designed’ seats, to prevent further chronic shrinkage. Leaving in droves, the paper had said, because of fifty-hour weeks, spent in a little box with KillTV and a systems geek for company. It was said that the ‘in-garrison lifestyle’ seldom suited the fliers, and with exhaustion went big layers of – God forbid – cynicism, which to the military world was like a heresy. They suffered a range of medical ailments, and it was claimed that ‘mission fatigue’ bred incompetence, mishaps, the destruction of a wedding party rather than a convoy of terrorists. That sort of piece won Casper and Xavier, and the rest of the teams who spent their days in the cubicles off that long corridor, little respect.

  ‘You should go there sometime, guys, do six months in theatre – or won’t the little woman at home let you?’ A pilot.

  ‘You might get down to the bazaar and buy some nice rugs to bring home, souvenir of active service.’ A navigator.

  A senior man came into the canteen, and his appearance put a lid on their fun, and Casper and Xavier went to their own table, away and by the windows, and the sunshine blasted the tinted windows and it seemed ridiculous that they could not fly – weather conditions here were perfect – because of persistent low cloud over the target area. There was laughter now at the table; the group had moved on and were talking football and claiming allegiances and Casper and Xavier were forgotten, though neither of them let what had been said roll from their minds.

  Xavier asked, ‘What do you want?’

  Casper answered him, mouth pursed, ‘I want another kill.’

  ‘I’m asking, do you want latte or cappuccino, or green tea—?’

  ‘I want another kill and another stencil on the fuselage. I want a big kill, big enough to shut those fuckers up . . . and I want latte, no sugar, and I want cake.’

  It was Slime’s watch. Rat was asleep.

  Slime had followed the Boss and Jamil on the thermal imager since they had left the tent camp. It was new for Rat to snore. It wasn’t loud, just a sort of growl from the throat. When they had been on protection work, fixed by the company, they had been allocated single rooms on the grounds that – understaffed – they were entitled to good sleep when it was available. But Rat hadn’t snored in Iraq when they’d done night stag, nor in Helmand. They’d do the changeover when they had retrieved the Boss and the guide. Funny little thing, but it was natural for Rat to call the Sixer by that title: he had done it for oil company executives and for a couple of politicians and diplomats. Rat would not have it, not ‘Boss’. The ridge was quiet and Slime had not thought it necessary to wake him, but did so now. A short jab in the ribs, a grunt, a splutter, and the question.

  ‘What you got, Slime?’

  ‘Got them coming through.’

  Slime kept the glasses on them, Rat listened.

  Rat said, ‘He’s a noisy beggar.’

  Slime said, ‘It’ll be his leg, doesn’t carry it well, a limp – he scuffs.’

  ‘Probably fell off a push-bike.’

  They came up steadily, and Slime thought that the guide could have gone faster but was holding back so he didn’t out-distance the Boss. To be honest, Slime was not convinced that Rat would have managed the slope any better; Helmand and Basra had been a long time ago now. It was good money. Rat might have been long in the tooth for cross-country yomping in the dark, but had lost none of his negotiating skills. It was very good money for a pair of PMCs because Special Forces were not going to go on to the ground. It would raise a massive hue and cry in Parliament if boys from Hereford or Poole had been put in there, but someone had to be, and it was top dollar for those who did get the call. It was likely to be the last time they went into a golden sunset together. Rat would survive because gun clubs would welcome his teaching abilities, and the military was in the market for ‘consultants’. Himself? He and Gwen would be married, would get the flat. There was a bit of a network that would, he expected, see him right in the job market. Rat might get to shoot this last time, and might not. If he did it would be two rounds of 155-grain, not more than two: the first one warmed the barrel and the second one was more likely to make the true hit. Always important – warm barrels and warm bullets. If Rat fired twice then there would be, as night followed day, blood on the dirt, and time for a funeral, and they’d be back into Heathrow and met by a discreet welcoming party, their hands pumped and congratulations given. They’d slip away, get off home, and it would be their secret, never talked of. He might miss the job, but age was telling on Rat. He didn’t always shoot when he’d a target. The two of them, the guide and the Boss, were coming slowly. The last part was the steepest and there was no chase behind them. As far as he could see the woman had not come out of her tent, hadn’t raised the dead and bawled to the skies.

  About the only time he’d seen Rat really smile, he hadn’t fired. He could have, finger beside the trigger, range calculated and the target in the cross-hairs, but he hadn’t. Slime had had an itch in his groin and would have liked to scratch it, but Rat didn’t like him to move much . . . Rat did ‘life and death’ pretty much the same, with no misery and no exaltation. Just once, Slime could remember a sort of little grin from Rat. He’d been following a kid through the sight, and the kid was heaving his way towards this building down the end of a straight street in al-Amarah, eastern Iraq, which was a bad place where they’d few friends. The kid was probably less than twelve years old, a skinny little chap, and he was bent half double under the weight of the gas bombola on his back. Obvious, like night after day, that the bombola carried plenty of kilos of homemade explosive, and the fuse had been lit and was coming slowly up the hemp or jute yarn. Slime and Rat were on a flat roof up the other end of the street and watching the kid’s back as he struggled to get close to the squaddies in the building, who didn’t seem to have picked him up. Rat could have shot him, claimed him, and there would have been no complaining, but he’d let him go on. About a hundred yards short of where he wanted to be, the kid had realised that there wasn’t a futu
re in shifting the load further, and had dumped it and had run – it had taken out some parked cars and a couple of store fronts, and not much else. Slime had thought Rat almost human because he hadn’t fired when he might have. Every other time, given a chance, he had – but might not again after this show was put to bed.

  The Boss and Jamil came over the last part of the slope, broke the summit. Rat never asked him how it had been, and the Boss never told him. Pity was that they couldn’t get a brew going – a cup of tea would have slipped down well. Slime wondered how the Boss had got his limp and the marks on his face. He didn’t expect to be told, though – most men treated him as ‘need to know’ and shut him out. It was probably what Rat said, about falling off a bike somewhere, but they were strange, the marks on him, and he wasn’t sure.