Jericho's War

by Gerald Seymour

  She came to the back of the crowd and for a moment stood and looked around her, then identified a member of security, the black overalls and the face mask, and a rifle held in one hand, and he was pushing people aside with the other. The girl, in her bright and pretty dress, hesitated and then shoved herself forward and grabbed at him and was pushed away, as if without value. She went again for him and slapped at the back of the mask, behind an ear, and he turned, fist raised. Maybe she did not register the horn of an approaching vehicle or the alarm, and maybe she thought herself and her message important. She gestured furiously up the hill, higher up the lane, and seemed to point to where Corrie and Belcher were. She was ignored, pushed back and sprawled on the ground. The noise of the horn grew and there were few lights and many sweeping shadows.

  ‘Why do we stay?’

  ‘To see what we have done, why else?’

  ‘Now is the best time to get away unnoticed.’

  ‘When I have seen for myself, then.’

  ‘Lunacy, for nothing.’

  ‘You go – if you want to, feel free.’

  ‘Fuck you, man.’

  And Corrie knew he had controlled him once and that the months had passed and little had changed, and he knew Belcher would not leave him. It was a bad night with a wind that channelled between the buildings and flowed like a water torrent along the narrow lanes and the alleys. He watched, needed to know, and waited. He could remember how it had been on the morning that he had come back to Vauxhall Bridge Cross, had walked there from his small flat and passed by the place where the veteran lived, who was out and tending his geraniums, and had walked as well as his limp permitted. The open wounds in his face were far from healed, and he’d been greeted with respect by the guards on the gate, and he’d have had the look of a man who had gone further than basic duty led. An assistant director had waited for him in the great lobby area, and had pumped his hand, and he’d been taken to the lift for the ride to the heights and an audience with God: had loved each moment of it, had hidden his pleasure and had treasured it. He wanted it again, repeated step by step, so he needed to know, to have seen with his own eyes. He would tell Henry Wilson, and would see admiration spread across her face, and then would tell Jericho when the helicopter put them down. Belcher, predictably, had not left him. He stayed, and watched. The time for going back was past, or perhaps had never been there, not since he had camped in the sight of the crannog and had been recruited, and guided.

  ‘I am about to give an opinion,’ Jericho said.

  ‘Your privilege, sir.’

  ‘A considered opinion.’

  ‘A customer is always entitled to an opinion.’

  ‘And it reflects the bleeding obvious.’

  A slow, grin, from Jean-Luc, the pilot. Jericho had dispensed with the buffoon act and the stomach padding, and was himself and how he wanted to be. He supposed these were the moments he lived for. The radio was lit, its display clear, and the pilot had an earpiece latched on to the side of his head. The gunners lethargically rubbed J-cloths on the barrels of the machine guns. There was little light in that corner of the airfield where they were parked up. He remembered those many months before, hearing that Rankin, good kid and the best he’d worked with, was safe back across the frontier, resurrected, in a hospital bed, injuries not life-threatening. And remembered also when a telephone had rung and there had been a distant voice, never heard it before, and the tone of a part of England he knew little about, and a name given – Belcher – and he’d damned near bitten the mouthpiece off the phone and the smile on his face had spread. And meeting him, seeing the big Puma bird settle on an apron at Akrotiri, and the hatch open and the small figure drop down from the cabin into the rich Cypriot sunshine as the rotors stilled, and the suspicion of the ground crew who hustled around the bird at the sight of a fighter who wore the guise of their enemy, and he had gone forward and shaken Belcher’s hand firmly. And seeing Corrie Rankin again . . . Grand moments and all special to him. They waited for a radio message, and the pilot had the charts, but listened also to the tower and the weather updates.

  He should speak, Jean-Luc seemed to tell him, piss or get off.

  ‘So, the “bleeding obvious”. We hope, can do no more than hope, that an attack is launched and pressed home. I don’t expect a running commentary. When they’re good and ready, they’ll shout. Imagine a hornets nest. Big, noisy buggers, blessed with venomous stings. Their poison can kill a human, a big enough dose of acetylcholine. Yemen is where some of the nastiest find habitation. I’m getting there, dear boy. Shove a stick into the nest, push it far down and then jag it about. That would be the equivalent of putting an expert sniper into position and have him blast off at a major player in the Alpha Quebec hierarchy. Out of that famous ‘‘clear blue sky’’ comes such an attack. It is in their back yard and creating more chaos than a drone strike, up close and very personal. There is a moment when surprise rules. The hornets do not know what the hell is happening, and that’s the time when anyone with a modicum of intelligence is scarpering, and fast. I have to hope my boys – as the echo dies – are legging it. After the shock, the opposition will be organised, and angry. Very angry. Not a good time to be lingering for an eyeball. That’s the “bleeding obvious”, if you’re with me.’

  The radio message was not yet through. A gust came and the helicopter seemed to shake.

  Jean-Luc said, ‘And the weather is not great – also, as you call it, “bleeding obvious”, not as I would want it. Hell, we will try, but . . .’

  He had a good view of it.

  Beside him was Belcher, who gasped.

  The Toyota pick-up surged up the hill, climbed in a whine from a low gear, swerved among the crowd who had come to cheer and to shout support: the faithful, the loyal, the believers. Those at the back, too short or with their view blocked, pushed hard, and those in the front would have known they risked being pitched forward under the wheels. Corrie had a good vantage point, knew what had made Belcher gasp, and the vehicle was slowing and a man stood, incongruous, ridiculous, in the open back. He had a .50-calibre machine gun in a single hand from which belt ammunition trailed, and an animal – it looked to be a sheep – kept falling sideways and against him. With his other hand the man waved at the crowd, frantically trying to make them move back.

  Their position was good enough for Corrie and Belcher to see that the head and shoulder of a man, in a black uniform and black balaclava, was visible through the open window, his arm bouncing without control on the outside of the door. The top of his skull had been blown off, and the blood and the brains spattered over the door and on what remained of his face. And the vehicle was blocked and the driver hammered the horn and the headlights lit up grotesque shapes and threw shadows high on to the stones of the buildings. The machine-gunner fired, one handed, into the air.

  A rolling blast of bullets, some of them red-tipped tracer rounds, soared towards the cloud ceiling, and he fired a second long and rolling burst, and brought the level of the barrel down and seemed to aim it ahead of the front fender of the Toyota. There was a parting of the sea. Corrie saw the girl. She was not interested in what was happening close to her. The child still caught at the arms of uniformed men and pointed up the hill and was shaken off or was pushed aside, or was hit with an open hand, and found no taker for her story, and Corrie lost her. The barrel lowered, the man in the back of the pick-up waved it in their faces, and the path ahead was free again.

  ‘We have seen enough.’

  ‘Have seen nothing.’

  Heartfelt, ‘I can’t take more of this.’

  ‘I told you, go – see if I care.’ Corrie turned away.

  He had the time to see the Toyota push forward again, and then it was gone and the tail had disappeared and the corner of a building obscured it, and more shots were fired and were ignored and the crush was tighter and following the vehicle. There had been a hit and a bodyguard was dead and . . . They had not come to kill a major player’s bodyg
uard; they were not here to take down the bodyguard of a High Value Target. He thought Belcher wept. The shoulders shook and the head trembled. An arm smeared across the face and cleaned the cheeks. Corrie Rankin was not indifferent to it. He could imagine, without difficulty, how it would be to live a lie day after day, night following on night. To wonder when the mistake would be made, and whether it would be recognised, and could the blame be passed on to another, some wretch who would suffer.

  He said, ‘I will see what happened, with my own eyes, but you can go.’

  He sensed it. He was aware of a mood in the crowd, and it was not death. If the Emir were dead then he would have expected fury and grief. He saw instead a fervour. There was a chant of defiance. Old men and young, children, even women, crowded together, shouting at the doors and windows of a building that Corrie could not see. They lived with death, were close to it each time they heard the low pitch of the idling engine of a Predator, and one of theirs escaped the enemy’s fire power, then their triumph could be rampant. He had to be certain. Corrie Rankin could not imagine turning up at a helicopter landing site, with a canister blowing orange smoke horizontally, hearing the question, ‘How did it go, guys, hop aboard, did you get the bastard?’ And answering, as the fucking smoke went in his face and up his nose, ‘Don’t know, mate. Might have and might not.’ Would not have countenanced it.

  Belcher was hangdog beside him, he understood why. Corrie led, started to edge down the lane, towards the crowd, but Belcher pushed him aside and moved to the front.

  They went from doorway to doorway: the shouting was closer and its message clearer.

  Chapter 16

  ‘Wrap your face and don’t let them hear your voice – just don’t.’ Belcher caught his arm, held him, spoke in his ear.

  Of course they should have been away and down the hill, tumbling on their arses and ending up where he had started to climb, close to the body of the man he had struck, among the rubbish and shit of the village. It was, for Corrie Rankin, a little moment of truth, he reflected, as he took each short and chopped stride down the slope: he had learned more of himself than he’d known before. He was not a hero, was a small man with small aims, driven by the fear of failing: to have gone was to fail, not to have seen for himself.

  His arm was still held, the voice still in his ear. ‘Don’t expect, that I’ll hustle you out a second time, damn you.’

  The grip was loosed. They went together, side by side, as though joined at the hip, down and towards the mass and the chanting and the faces that gazed up at a lit but empty window on the first floor of the building, above double wooden doors – centuries old – where guards thronged and held weapons warily. Corrie knew that Belcher was lying; he would stay at his side, protecting him, would bring him out when he was ready.

  Darkness cloaked them. There were some lights, mostly paraffin lamps, which the wind buffeted, creating shadows that bounced without pattern. A skinned goat hung on a spit over a fire, but one side of it was raw and the other was scorched because no one had stayed to turn the carcase. Standing beside the meat Corrie realised the truth and almost squirmed, embarrassed, because the idiot cared for him, admired him, might even in fact, fucking idiot, have taken strength from him. They had reached the edge of the crowd. Belcher’s skill kept them where they could see and watch, and gain the drift of the mood, but never get boxed in. A bedlam din surrounded them, a multitude of voices of all tones and in accents from across a region: from Syria to Morocco, wherever the Alpha Quebec recruitment groomers operated.

  Two men forced their way through the crowd and across to their left. Bodies wriggled against Corrie, pushing hard and he felt the pressure build on his ribcage, where the pain was. They brought a hose with them, dragged it loose and trailing after them, and the guards from the gate swung their rifles and made space for the hose to be brought through. When Corrie craned, he could see the roof of the black Toyota pick-up, close to the door but a few yards to the right. Plenty to see, Corrie was on tiptoe, but he attracted no attention: all eyes were on the men with the hose and on the closed door and on the window above. The chanting didn’t fade.

  A woman, flopping and lifeless, was brought out from the front bench seat of the vehicle. Belcher’s mouth was warm against Corrie’s ear; she was the woman who had drawn the alphabet letter on his skin. They’d have given Belcher a laptop, a smartphone, a suit and a briefcase, and he would have been on the plane before the local anaesthetic had fully worn off. If the wound then hurt while he sat in a window seat, then who the fuck cared. Men were handling her without respect, much as they might have done the goat as they dragged it to the spit. She was moved inside; he hardly saw a wound on her, just the skewed spectacles on her face and a small blood patch on the back of the scarf that covered her hair. Then a man was taken from the back seat. Half of his head was gone and the wound open to what little light there was . . . The village people and the fighters were not squeamish, the blood still wet on him and on the hands of those men who moved him. They took more care of the fighter than of the woman, as if he had their respect, and his blood left a trail over the stone-littered ground. He too was taken through the door, and then the hose was hooked to an outside tap and the water flowed, squirted out, and the back of the pick-up was washed down, and a brush brought and the seat scrubbed. They had cloths to wipe the seat’s material, and to mop the water that gathered in the footwell. The sight of blood and brain matter infuriated the crowd; the chanting of abuse at the enemies of the Emir, and their own enemies, grew more intense, his name invoked with more fervour.

  Corrie murmured it, ‘It’s not grief, but anger. It’s not mourning, more defiance.’

  Belcher replied, ‘You cannot say for certain, you haven’t seen him. You don’t know.’

  A spit of rain was funnelled by the wind. Enough to dampen, to give a sheen to the cobbles behind them. He thought he knew, but could not go without confirming it. He realised that the longer he and Belcher stayed, the greater the risk of exposure – but he would stay. Corrie Rankin thought he knew already what the answer would be. A failure beckoned, but needed proof.

  He was on the floor. His wife crouched close to him and held a gaunt and veined hand. They had arranged cushions for a bed and covered them with a linen sheet.

  He was alive.

  His chest was exposed, the wounds sharply visible. One bullet had entered the chest via his armpit and had gone through his lungs but had missed his heart, then had exited through his shoulder, travelling clear out of the open window and passing his wife’s mouth with a centimetre to spare. The wound was grievous. His breathing was erratic and bubbles spat from his mouth. The second bullet had hit the guard’s rifle, been diverted upwards and had pierced his skull. There it had broken up and several of the fragments had lodged in the Emir’s face, but one – with a contrary flight path – had veered at a sharp angle, cleared the back of the front bench seat and hit the women’s head. It was sheer bad luck for her that it had still possessed sufficient velocity to kill her – not that she mattered. And not that the second bullet affected the prognosis on the Emir’s injuries. He required fast treatment. The Palestinian nurse usually travelled close to the Emir, but she now lay in a shroud of her own clothing, outside the back door of the house. There were doctors and an Accident and Emergency unit at the hospital in Marib; the town itself was under the control of a garrison, and the colonel who commanded the garrison would have laughed at the suggestion that medical expertise should be provided for this casualty.

  Medical skills might save his life, but it was unlikely. Without expert attention he would be dead by the morning, that was a certainty. His death would be a defeat for his own, a victory for his enemies. The killing would show that the enemies could come close to him, into their region – its heart – and use a rifleman, and that they knew his movements to the minute and the metre, and were able to take his life. The crowd bayed outside and would be silenced if the Emir’s life ended.

  Those w
ere the thoughts of a young Egyptian, new to the Emir’s close entourage. Only twenty-three years old, who had completed less than half of a degree course at Cairo University in philosophy and political science. He had also been tried for treason in absentia and the court had handed down a sentence of death by hanging. He did not have the appearance of a fighter, weighed little more than fifty-five kilos, had barely any stubble on his cheeks and wore strong lenses in his spectacles. He had travelled with the recommendation, the endorsement, of the leader of the movement in Yemen. He had come to sanction the plan for a surgically implanted bomb to be taken on to an aircraft, to meet the designer of the device, and the man who would carry it in his body, and to arrange for more funding to reach the Emir. For one so young, who had little experience of active combat, the Egyptian had an understanding of the value of victory, and knew the cost of failure well too. The death would stink of disaster. He appreciated, also, that the organisation relied on true leadership. It was rare to find voices raised in argument or debate. If a proposition was put, with force, by whoever possessed greatest influence, it would be followed, and to the letter. These were people used to fighting, with courage and with determination, but not to debate. They were followers, and now their leader was stricken and his life was fast ebbing away.

  He spoke. Men in the room had to lean towards him to hear what he said. The wife of the Emir listened. The young man spoke a tone of sweet reasonableness but there was steel in the voice. Was there no medical expertise in the village? he asked. There was none.