The fight was ahead.
Corrie Rankin would not tolerate being sidelined. He went down on his hands and knees and the small stones, there since antiquity, carved into the cloth of his trousers and scarred the heels of his hands. Before he had not had anyone ahead of him to guide and challenge his authority – had been on his own. Sort of defining moments. He lived with them when awake and when asleep and dreaming. He had the clear image, acid etched, of dragging himself across fields, through draining ditches and of resting up in crudely dug culverts. It had been either side of the confrontation – and the killing – of the boy who herded the livestock. He might have needed help then, but it did not exist, and he had coped on his own, done it well enough to be the ‘legend’. Three hours’ sleep in each twenty-four cycle. No one had helped him, his authority had not been usurped. He had done it all himself, which was a good enough reason for George, prompted by Lizzie and Farouk, to have chosen him. Now that he was on the move, with his body scraping the ground and the fabric rustling under him, he plotted what he might say.
He was an officer of Six.
The likes of Rat and Slime were there to give basic protection, not to plan and instruct. They told horror stories at VBX of having private military contractors in tow – half were dosed up on steroids and some were still caught up in PTSD; a few had failed to get the combat drug out of their systems, and many regretted the day they had shoved in their papers. No Six officer wanted them at close quarters, and they were never friends: some shagged the principal’s secretaries, some shagged his daughters or his wife.
He focused on what he might say, how to take back the control. Happened often enough that the basic lines of authority were left loose, and there never seemed time in the planning stage for those lines to be drawn hard. It seemed important. Where to start? What did he know?
Not much, really. The targets would meet, and soon, come to a fortress village, and one at least would travel in a black pick-up with a rusted and dented fender. What more? He was close to the scrim net and Slime had lifted the back of it a few inches clear of the ground. Corrie saw Rat’s boots and the invitation was clear enough – he should get down lower and wriggle forward, then be granted a bloody audience. He could hear what Rat knew, then turn and go back and take the communications gear from the Bergen, do the call signs, raise Jericho, brief him. Could drop the business, all of it, into his pudgy hands; could gather together his own people, and Belcher, and lift the woman from the tent camp and if necessary pull her kicking and screaming from her ditch, then call again for the helicopter lift, let the drones do it. Could, because that was simple.
He stopped, paused. The edge of the net was lifted and he could see straight down the length of Rat’s body and on towards the rifle barrel and the spotter scope and the neat pile of squashed-down silver tinfoil. He could back out. Might even take Henry Wilson’s hand as they legged it to the rendezvous point and might make the speech that he had wimped out of when he’d been in her tent. Might – about where they could go and what they could do. And they’d listen for the noise of a helicopter’s engine powering closer, and he would have forsaken control.
It would all have been for nothing. Then he might as well have stayed in Vauxhall Street, gone to work past the ground-floor housing association flat of the veteran who grew geraniums, maybe shouted: ‘Hi, everybody, yes, I’ve been away. Copped out. Not my kind of job, bit too near the sharp end. Back here for the easy life and to shift through the paper on my desk. Gave it to someone else who’s dealing with it. I don’t know whether they managed it or not. Only thing I can say is that the Faraday Fracture might be a place to steer clear of. I don’t plan to go near there.’ Could have said that to all of them, and to the guards on the gates, and could have gone up to the Third Floor and seen the crowd there – and could not have lived with himself.
How to regain control? He paused. The wind had freshened and would take the gloss of the sun’s heat. It riffled the leaves of the few plants that had a foothold. The skies were cloudless and the haze lifting and there was a view over scattered villages and a tiny tent camp and the distant buildings of Marib and the faraway smoke from the refinery. He had been considered a hero and did not know how to regain that image. The targets were down there, and Belcher was, and the woman was there – and he felt what was a new sensation to him, which was uncertainty.
George ruled.
‘Thought about it long and hard. Decided.’
It was still dark outside and the overnight rain glistened on the bridge pavements. The first barges of the day left a surly wake behind them as they went upstream, vehicles were nose to bumper on the streets, and the early trains powered into Vauxhall. It was two hours before they would normally have gathered in his office.
‘Thank you for sending me dear Jericho’s response. It certainly helped to settle my mind. I’ll not put my future, our future, in his hands any longer.’
Lizzie had brought bacon sandwiches from the canteen and Farouk had brewed strong coffee. George imagined he created a breezy personality: a clean shirt, a well-pressed suit and a tie carrying the RCMP logo, courtesy of an Ottawa trip. His face shone from a close shave, but he’d not had any sleep after the reply from Muscat had been downloaded to him.
‘I regard it as a strength of mine that I can acknowledge errors of judgement, and this was one. I allowed myself, and should not have, to be steamrollered by that man into a decision I now regard as hasty. It’s never too late to reverse a decision, a poor one, never.’
It wasn’t their business to know that he had woken an assistant director at eight minutes past two that morning and had indicated second thoughts and anxieties and by doing so had passed the parcel of responsibility. The gloss and glitter had slipped off the Crannog mission, and alone in his home he had begun to row back on his commitment – he’d be broken if it failed. Alone in a quiet house with his wife asleep, he had fretted. He had been with the Service for thirty-nine years, pretty much man and boy, had at one time been tipped for high office with which went either a knighthood or at the least a major gong. It had not worked out quite as he, and his wife, had planned, but had been a solid if unspectacular career. It would go down the urinal, in totality, if Crannog failed. He would not be remembered for the good work he’d put in – in the Middle East, a spell in the Balkans, a temporary posting in Washington, and he’d cut his teeth in the Baltic states – but would be known as the ‘little man who fucked up in Yemen’. He had been full of the possibilities of success when floating the mission with superiors, seeming to indicate that he had hands-on direction, was not remote and leaving the loose cannon, Jericho, in charge. It had been a six-minute call to the assistant director and he could be as certain as night follows day that the AD had pondered not more than five minutes before himself making a call: the deputy director general would have been turfed out of bed. Men caught in the middle of Yemen, exposed on video before an inevitable curtain fell on them, had seemed a risk worth taking. No longer. The precariousness of the situation was heaped squarely now on Jericho – who had stalwart supporters in the old guard – and he would be condemned for not keeping a tight rein on the incursion. Now others could field the risk, which was why George was so cheerful and chirpy that morning.
‘I want them out. My decision, endorsed on high. Jericho’s problem is his damned secretiveness, well he can choke on it. They’re to be extracted, and immediately. Crannog is dead.’
Said with what George would have considered gravitas, and not up for debate.
But Lizzie queried, ‘Is that possible? Just like that?’
George answered as if matters had moved on. ‘Get hold of Jericho – if he’s up yet, out of his pit – drag him out of a bar if that’s where he is. Not for negotiation, but to happen, and soonest, and electronic confirmation will follow. First, it is our voice in his ear. They come out and not “tomorrow” and not “perhaps”. Out.’
Farouk, always the courtier, asked, ‘Are we sure, George,
that this is not a hasty reaction to unforgivable insubordination. Should we wait? Should—?’
But it had been rubber-stamped by an assistant director, and would have the approval of the deputy director general, and the wheels were turning. George said, ‘Words of one syllable, “out” and “now”. Thank you both. Cheer up, not the end of the world. My last word: a few hours’ grace and them off the scene and it can go into the lap of our esteemed ally. It won’t be on my watch if they screw it.’
‘Guys, are you noticing something?’
‘Where am I looking, Bart?’
‘Around top right, but I’ll track there.’
‘Can we bring the zoom up?’
Bart had the good eyes and the worst job. Beside Xavier, Casper needed guidance on where he should focus. Himself, he needed to see it better, which meant the zoom and a steadier platform. Bart could manoeuvre the lens, take it down closer. The gyroscope in the mount helped, but could be cancelled out by crosswinds: at least, small mercies, there was no cloud cover. They had been over the villages that morning and seen nothing to excite them, and over the tent camp, where it was reported that a handful of troops guarded a woman archaeologist – a ‘right mad bitch’ it was said by analysts at Hurlburt, but without provenance.
‘I’m looking top right, Bart, but nothing jumps out at me.’
‘Just thought I saw . . . but we’ve gone on by.’
‘I can take her round.’
‘Do that, Casper, I’m grateful.’
The first flush of enthusiasm about the mission had gone. They were now playing, all three of them, their professional roles of pilot, weapons technician and intelligence analyst. With each hour the art of seeing the unexpected seemed harder, and concentration more easy to lose. They had machines enough, and technology, that could do ‘face recognition’ and ‘number-plate recognition’ that was less applicable in the Yemeni backwoods – they’d chuckle about that – but much still depended on the brain being clear and eyes staying sharp. Xavier was monitoring crosswind speed and feeding data to Casper and they did a starboard circle and seemed to have taken NJB-3 over the edge of the escarpment. The picture raked across the slope, down and then above open ground, where a boy with a rifle slung casually on his back minded his goats and there was a small collection of tents inside a perimeter less than a hundred metres square where a government flag flew and an ant-sized creature was in a ditch. But they went on from that view. Casper would have cut the speed, dropped it to a little more than 60 miles per hour, and she shook as the wind caught under her wings. Xavier thought that Casper, not a friend but respected, was as good as any on the base. He knew it was a pain in the pilot’s butt to have to field the insults thrown at him by the fast-jet people. Most of the big beasts would be taking off all that morning and that evening, heading for the base in Dohar, up the Gulf, where missions went on their way to Syria and Iraq. Xavier was a man who based his life on loyalty. Casper was worth the loyalty, was one hell of a flier.
They came along the rim and Bart failed to find what he thought he had seen before.
‘Don’t mind me asking, Bart, but what are we looking for?’
‘Not sure . . . sorry.’
‘I’ll do one more pass.’
‘Appreciated.’
‘And I’ll drop altitude. When we get there – if it’s there – it’ll be like we’re sitting over the top of it.’
‘Cannot say, Casper, what I saw. Just thought I saw something.’
It might have been tiredness that had caused his eyes to fail, or a trick of the light or a place where the goats had been or where a kid had left a bottle of fizzy orange. Pretty much every other day they’d sight something unusual and think it was El Dorado but it would turn out to be dross. Had gone well, that bonanza moment, when the Hellfire went down on the fighters, but history moved fast and bright moments dimmed. It might have been a scrape in the ground he’d spotted, or a local sitting on his haunches and chewing that hallucinatory stuff. They came back and up the rim. They were using fuel time and it was likely that Casper would only do one more sweep and then – having humoured Bart – he’d go back to the villages and to the road linking Sana’a to Marib. They had good definition on the ground and saw nothing, though all three were peering hard at the screen and were willing – and saw – a little hiss of breath from Xavier.
‘Sorry, Bart, not my job to interpret, but that is boots.’
An extraordinary lens was slung under the Predator. The airframe barely changed, and the engine was not altered on the principle that something working did not need replacing, but the lens was always under review. It was upgraded – goddam useless when there was cloud cover, goddam brilliant where there was sunshine but no haze bouncing off the ground. He had the zoom at full extent. Each in turn squinted and gazed at the big screen that gave a quality picture.
‘I’d say that’s a pair of boots and they’re stuck out from under something,’ Xavier murmured. ‘And you, sir?’
Casper said, soft, ‘That’s covert. Boots out from under a screen is surveillance. Would we not have been told to keep the hell away if there was a Delta or a Ranger or a Seal operation playing out? Wouldn’t we have been told?’
Bart shrugged, spoke with a murmur for their ears only, ‘Situation Normal All Fucked Up, is usually what goes on. But I’ll sure as hell find out why we’ve not been told. Or it’s bad guys and we hit them. Whichever . . . Hang around while I burn some ears.’
So Casper flew long lazy figure-eights, and Xavier checked wind speed and fuel consumption, and Bart hit the communication system, and they were locked on boots.
He persisted. ‘I am paid to make decisions.’
Corrie had set out his stall as the flies buzzed around him, had come under the scrim.
‘You don’t demonstrate leadership by waving your pay-grade slip.’ There was a lilt in Rat’s voice as if, for the moment, he was mildly amused, and Corrie had won nothing.
And Corrie thought he stood in a pit and dug deeper, could not help himself. ‘And I have seniority.’
A small grin cracked the sides of Rat’s mouth and showed up through the stubble at the edge of his cheeks. He might still be amused by Corrie’s attempt to stamp his authority. ‘Seniority is dumped on you. Leadership is something else.’
Corrie said, ‘I am not ceding responsibility, not to you. It’s mine.’
Harsher, and with contempt, Rat asked, ‘And how do you display it, your pips and your rank?’
A big breath taken. Corrie sucked the dry air far into his lungs. He wondered where Henry was, but did not use the binoculars to find her. He did not know how to back down, never had. ‘I do the ground, make the calls.’
‘What calls do you make?’ A sharp little question.
‘Description of the vehicle, timing, what we have. Jericho will call in the drones.’
The voice had gone cold. ‘Is that how you think it works? What is “do the ground”?’
Through the binoculars, Corrie could see the vista laid out. Marib wrapped in a distant haze, near hidden, and the road on which so little traffic moved, and the villages with their small spiral columns of smoke, and the boy moving out and the dog keeping his goats in a close knot, and the soldiers languid in the tent camp, but no view of her, and the village at the end of the line that was high over the surrounding plain and defensible, and where the guide said the meeting would be held. He doubted now that Crannog was about the simple execution of a semi-prominent figure in the Al-Qaeda movement, and saw it more as a gesture that sent a signal that there was life in the old lion still, however moth-eaten and flea-ridden. It was where he would be, and he answered, ‘Walk it, see it, know it.’
‘Like it came out of a manual.’
Probably right – they still did courses for field station officers that involved instructors hammering on about familiarising yourself with the ground, getting close to targets if it were possible, evaluating at first hand – he’d been asked to speak at one of t
hem and had declined, impolitely, and had only ever done the Tidworth one. ‘I walk into the village, their crannog, see it for myself, judge it, find out what is where and assess the opportunities.’
Rat was brutal now, as if talking to a child needing a lesson in reality. ‘What they call “command and control” except that you don’t have it, do I have to say again? I am here for your protection, one of mine and Slime’s tasked duties, and my reputation rests on that being successful, bringing you home. My reputation is good. You can sit in a corner and play with yourself but I will make decisions that matter. First up, I will not sanction calling up the cavalry. I travelled here, and Slime. We don’t sit on the sand and let some jerk who is ten thousand miles away, farting off his breakfast waffles and needing a break from taking his wife to a shopping mall, press the tit. I will do it, not a machine. And – big call – why send a sniper, a master bloody sniper, if a drone’ll do it? And you going there, doing “the ground”, is either an ego trip or self-destruction. I can do it better than a drone can.’
‘I sanction everything.’
‘You want to go down there, then be my guest. But, a warning. If you get taken then you will rue the day you were ever born, because of what they’ll do to you. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you? And, if you get taken, the chance is the whole thing is screwed – got me?’
‘I’ll go when it’s dark.’
Corrie hadn’t heard the noise above, too busy with failing to win back control. Slime had. Slime had snuggled inside the scrim, three in a bed and a crowd. ‘There’s a drone overhead.’
Rat said it was likely focused on them, that it bugged him, having the drone watching them. Rat told Slime what he should do and settled back to work on his scope, studying in detail the ground between the bottom of the incline and the main road, where the boy was with the goats. Slime crawled out from under the scrim. It was a clear sound now to Corrie, like an old lawnmower in a distant garden.
Jericho's War Page 31
