Jericho's War

by Gerald Seymour

  They went on, alternating the effort, at a good speed. She thought they owed it, going fast, to the man behind them.

  Now, again, Casper found a window. He had flown wide figure eights and had hunted for a gap where the cloud had thinned sufficiently for the lens to capture a view of the desert floor, of their prey. And he had, also, authorisation of a type – the message had come through from Hurlbert Field, on the far side of the continent, that they should ‘proceed with caution and exercise reasonable force in the pursuit of his mission’, which gave him the copper-bottomed right to fire his remaining Hellfire if a target presented itself.

  Wisps of cloud covered the window, but the lens was high grade and he’d picked out the white figures. Previous Predator versions had boasted synthetic aperture radar for use when a target was covered by smoke or cloud or haze, but the system had been ditched because of its weight and the extra fuel it used. In exchange they could spend more hours in the air. It was hard to get through the cloud, but now he was, and throttled back on his engine and went for a loiter speed, which would tax him in the winds at the altitude he used. It was hard to stay stable.

  Xavier said, ‘You bought him time with the first go. He’s not making much of a fist of what you gave him though.’

  Casper answered, ‘On his feet and still moving – but hurt . . . How many you reckon are behind him?’

  ‘I reckon ten, maybe twelve. They’re wary – of him and getting too close, and where we are, they don’t know that.’

  Casper grimaced, ‘What I don’t understand . . . Whoever put this guy there, on the ground – I mean what for? Where’s his back-up? How did they plan to extract him? Do we have any picture of a High Value guy in this parish? What makes this an acceptable risk? Bart, what do I read in this? Sorry, how long do I have?’

  ‘Has to be the big hit, Casper, has to be this time.’

  ‘I think we took out at least half of them.’

  ‘Which means half of them are still after his butt, way too many.’

  ‘We going to go?’

  ‘Go, Casper,’ Xavier said.

  No raised voices. They had set themselves to save a life; they did not know the identity of the man whose existence lay with them, and likely never would. This was a critical moment. The pack coming after him were closer this time, and it was obvious to Casper that they intended to make a prisoner of the fugitive, not a cadaver. They were starting to fan out and make a half-circle. The guy with boots did not face them, but kept on tilting away. He was bent and hunched and went at snail’s pace, and those who followed him loped like hunting dogs. Casper had a cousin who did raccoon hunts with dogs, and they were ‘feists’: small, brave, with stamina. He was reminded of it, what his cousin said, and that the only hope the hunted creature had was to get up a tree, high up, and stay beyond the feists’ reach, except the guns would have them then.

  ‘Coming round,’ Casper said. ‘Next time we lock.’

  The wind caught the big wings – and shook the bird, and the speed with which the picture came back to them was faster than Casper’s ability on the stick. He strained to hold the platform Xavier would want; it had to be stable if the laser were to get on to the target and be hooked there.

  Bart said, ‘You asked questions, Casper?’

  ‘About extraction, I did.’

  ‘Don’t look for the obvious.’

  ‘You’re a smart boy, you’ll have a PhD somewhere – what is not the obvious?’

  Bart said, ‘Don’t mind me. Just do the job . . . I’ll throw this at you. There’s High Value Targets anywhere you look in a place like Yemen. I’d say, throw a tennis ball in the air and it’ll come down on the head of an HVT. Go in after a guy and take him down and that’s a decent barter chip on the table. You have no prestige if you come to the intelligence table empty-handed. I’m thinking that this is not necessarily about a big man being zapped, but could be about sending a message, not by Western Union but cheaply, by a bullet or a bomb. You’re sceptical? I’m paid to think out of the loop.’

  It made good sense to Casper. He had her damn near at stalling speed.

  ‘I’ve got the lock,’ Xavier murmured.

  The image was across the width of the half-circle. Little white figures on smooth grey, and a final figure ahead of them, and it would be moments before they closed.

  ‘I’m holding her.’

  Xavier said, ‘Going for it.’

  ‘Waste the bastards,’ Casper murmured. The politics of it made best sense to him. He was only a low grade and passed-over pilot, once of fast jets, and now came to work with sandwiches and a thermos in his bag, and the job was in the industrial field of killing, not pharmaceuticals or household appliance engineering, or anything useful like medicine, or plumbing. It would be some fat cat at a table somewhere, getting nodded heads of agreement: small budget, point scoring, what else? Xavier fired. Moments later there would be the upheaval on the camera screen and then the clarity would be lost in the dust storm thrown up by high fragmentation. It was the last chance he had of making a difference in the stakes of a stranger’s survival.

  There was a great flash in the sand behind them and they turned, both of them. Then the rumble of the explosion reached them, and both cringed. They would not have wanted to, but did, and could not hide their relief. They were watched over, protected, and the Sixer had support from the skies. They clung close, then Belcher pulled her onward. Henry responded.

  ‘It’s because of him – he’s bought us time, it mustn’t be wasted,’ Belcher said.

  ‘No sunlit uplands, just bloody sand, and night, lost and running,’ Henry said.

  The silence returned, and the darkness, and they went forward. Something to think about: they could be looping around in a damn great circle and doubling back, and then they might find grit under their feet again and not the dunes of sliding sand, and they might come to the rim of the plateau, and see villages laid out below and, outside one of them, close to the site of an abandoned tent camp with narrow, shallow ditches around it, men would be hoisting up two poles, a dozen feet apart, and they’d be tying the crossbars in place from which to hang a man and woman who were to die by crucifixion. He wanted to run, to escape from the fear of doing a great circle, and could not move fast enough. He might be cheated of the uplands, and the sun’s low light on them, and of the smell of the sea on the wall off Marine Drive, and of beer in a bar in Church Street, and shops in the mall opposite the magistrate’s court: might never get to any of them.

  They went on together, fell together, and dragged themselves, up together, and every last bit of weight that he’d carried was gone except for a handgun and a single magazine. The rest was strewn behind him. She followed his example, and the last small bag was ditched, and she had nothing left, nothing she could show the professors and governors back home. She wore boots and basic clothing, and he was stripped beside her and their faces were streaked with dust and they’d no protection against it.

  ‘Don’t you corpse on me, girl.’

  ‘Don’t fucking tempt me.’ The hiss in her voice was over the wind.

  They went on, hurrying from the brilliant flash of light and the rumble of the detonation, where death had been handed down. It was about their living, getting through this. Humbling, he thought. He was tired, and fighting it.

  She said, a gasp, then coughing sand, ‘Will we ever see him again, the Sixer?’

  ‘How would I know?’ and he spat dirt from his mouth, and they trekked on.

  ‘How do you reckon they’ll do, Jericho?’

  ‘If I were not dependent on you for a lift, Jean-Luc, then I would say that is as dumb a question as might be asked.’

  ‘I mean, survival. All on the same start line. Who has a good chance? Just the weather conditions, and terrain – not an enemy inserted into the equation.’

  ‘Imponderables – please, Jean-Luc, spare me.’

  ‘Which of them?’

  Jericho shrugged, but joined in the game. ‘
The military pair might be worth a wager. Are you going to try an accumulator? The army pair will look after each other. They will be on location, moaning to each other, and wanting hot tea, sugared. I’d be surprised if they weren’t in fair shape.’

  ‘Which leaves three.’

  ‘Correction. We hope for three. Two men, one woman . . . remember what I said to you, Jean-Luc – words of profound wisdom – about a hornets’ nest and a stick stirring hard, creating rampant annoyance. What does London say? The relay from Woman Friday is that London has reported “chatter” – gossip and rumour and probable wishful thinking – and twin graves, burials in the dead of night and far from sight. The Emir and his acolyte dispatched, if gossip and rumour are verified, so there will be anger, hornet level, and they’ll come hunting, thirsty for revenge.’

  ‘When it’s light we can get at the filters and clean them, otherwise the engine is fouled and the oil goes to hell, overheats and we come down. We have to wait, and might as well talk because we’re not sleeping.’

  ‘Who will get the girl?’

  ‘Do I have to decide?’

  ‘You do not, but one of them does. Who wants her most?’

  ‘Does she get to have an opinion?’

  ‘An important say. She has to decide which of them. She is alone and frightened, wants a protector. She’ll need one; then there is a bond. She will choose from what is on offer, and they – as a pair – are stronger. The man will compete with her and not want to show weakness; she will be determined that as a woman she is not a burden. It’s that sort of chemistry. The one without a hand to hold will be alone and I would predict might be a back-marker, and the odds are against him. You think that’s rubbish? Just check out any of the great survival epics, lost at sea, in a desert, marooned in a rainforest. All tell the same story: the one who has the girl will come through and bring her with him. Better believe it.’

  ‘Which would she choose, and who will want her more?’

  ‘Not going to go there, my boy – it’s beyond my remit. Is there any more coffee?’

  He thought of the lines dinned into him at school. He’d never forgotten them, even though they didn’t mean much to him. Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day. It meant, time went bloody slowly – the hands on his watch showed the hours still remaining before dawn when the maintenance could be started. He remembered both of them, Corrie Rankin and the lad from Hartlepool codenamed Belcher. He did not linger on the young man in the Turkish hospital bed, but thought more of the other. Saw him at Akrotiri, in the hatch of the big Puma helicopter, shy and ill at ease. Jericho had thought him eager to please, but well regarded, and had to pinch himself when he realised where the kid came from, where he had been and the penalties for betrayal, and the brilliance of Rankin’s recruitment, and the bright sunlight in his face and then a brief smile. He had never given Belcher a chance to refuse, it was not on the agenda. Had packed him up after stuffing his head with briefing notes, and had sent him off, waved him into the sunset. He’d been quite optimistic and reflected that in his report to London. He had expected over the many intervening months to read on a semi-classified digest that an English-born convert operating inside the lower ranks of Alpha Quebec had been identified as an SIS asset, had been put to death, and then he’d found Henrietta Wilson. Interesting times – which of them would she have chosen?

  He was brought coffee, lit another cigar, had a raw and dry throat – and waited.

  ‘I said I’d take you home. I am taking you home. So, let it rest.’

  But Slime did not. ‘Just saying that I feel bad, Rat. I won’t ever feel different.’

  They had their backs against each other, their spines pressed awkwardly together. They sat on their haunches. Neither could see, as their eyes were crusted with sand and it was over their face scarves and had coated their clothing. Rat used an old bin liner bag, from the bottom of his Bergen, to cover the rifle. He doubted he would fire it again. Should he need to shoot, then it would mean that their position had been identified, all hope of the helicopter coming in was gone, and the long trek – a ‘fighting retreat’ as a Rupert would have called it – was under way and they were going out on foot. He was confident that he would not have to shoot because he and Slime were aware that the main trajectory of the pursuit was to the northwest. The hunters had been drawn off them, had easier meat to feed on. There had been the big explosions, two of them, and the wind had come from that quarter, out where the sands were, and he’d assumed it was a Predator’s missiles, not anything from a fast-jet strike, because he would have heard the big engine. There had been the faint sound of rifle fire, and he might have heard grenades exploding, but the bigger detonations were easy to register.

  They sat still, no longer bothering to clear their eyes or keep the damn sand from penetrating every orifice. Black walls surrounded them, and the noise was of the wind’s howl, and its cry when it broke against their backs – like the bloody surf on the beach at Akrotiri where the military did two days of flopping and binging before the last lift back from Helmand to Brize Norton: they broke the journey so that they did not come off patrol at dawn with all the warnings of snipers and bombs and ambushes ringing in their heads, and then arrive back in the arms of the little woman twenty-four hours later, with a frazzled mind.

  An old lesson that Rat had learned, from Iraq and from Helmand, was that the best thing to do when a pick-up was late – if possible – was to sit tight, hunker down, and wait. The worst thing was to bugger off and head into the boondocks and expect a pilot to come searching. Not much that Slime could do with the communications, and it was crap old equipment they’d had dumped on them, which had gone down. Slime was hardly going to start fiddling with the cover off, around the circuit boards, while all the shit was coming down on them. He knew their message for the pick-up had been received because a call-sign had come back, and after that nothing. Rat would have liked to have sent one of those cryptic little signals that summed up ‘mission accomplished’, and get a return acknowledgement that he was a hero and a legend and a star. The chance of him shooting again with the rifle that had done the business on the target was slight because the marksman’s weapon was more sophisticated than the basic assault rifle that he carried, and so more likely to jam and malfunction with sand in its guts.

  Rat said, softly, allowing the wind to carry it, ‘Nothing changes. You put your faith, your trust, in people. It’s all agreed . . . We are here. Where are they? Where’s the bird?’

  He did not expect Slime to take it up. Usually Slime would acknowledge that Rat talked aloud, to himself, and did not invite a response. But Slime said, behind him, shouting it so that the words would carry into the wind, ‘Do you never stop moaning, Rat? It was a good shot, and what you were paid for. You were chosen as a good shot and you did it, end of story. Right now you had better start thinking of a life next week, next month. How you going to cope, Rat? We didn’t wait for them. We left them. That’s what you’ll be known for, if you’re ever again on Stickleback. Remember the one who used to bring the dog, the rumour mill round him, all the talk? If you’re there it’ll be more talk, and none of it about a shot. That’s how it is, Rat.’

  Nothing more to say, and nothing to do but wait. Rat turned over in his mind what he would write in his logbook when the opportunity presented itself, because that was about his skill, and the rest of it was chaff.

  Corrie trudged on.

  A torchbeam had reached him, very faint; it might have softened the darkness around his shoulders, but there was only one beam.

  Which to use? A rifle bullet or a grenade? Equally precious, both of them. Might be his last shot and the grenades might be the last fragmentation ones. And another decision. Whether to stop and try to stand steadily and get hold of the grenade and chuck the damn thing in the direction of a torchbeam and hope it was not the last one that he needed to keep for himself for a ‘self-inflicted wound’, or kneel and try to aim and hold t
he foresight so that it did not waver and squeeze the trigger and maybe hear the click of an empty breech. Which?

  He stopped, losing ground. He sank down, and the sand parted under his weight and spread. The light bent, twisted, and the hand holding it moved fast. He saw a face, big, and bearded and scratched, and blood oozed from the mouth, and he saw a stump. The stump was where an arm had been sliced off, quite a clean cut, by the elbow. The torch was waving because the man, huge and shambling, wrestled to hold it while he went to his belt, and there was a flash of light close to the knife’s blade. The rifle would have been in the hand that had been lopped off. He was the last of the pursuers, and Corrie saw a chance of deliverance. He aimed. The light was shone back in his face. The man held a torch and a knife.

  Corrie aimed, did the trigger routine. Felt the deadness. No shot fired. Silence. The torchbeam closed on him.

  ‘You’d do that?’

  ‘I’d do that,’ Casper said.

  Bart did not contribute – it wasn’t his call. Not really Xavier’s either, but he’d queried it. Live-time TV was on the screen in front of them. Nothing for Xavier to do because his area of responsibility was exhausted: he’d be the witness. That was Casper’s decision.

  There was a gap in time between the movements on the stick, small in his big hands, and the response of the drone. He would drop the altitude and gain speed, and would bank and would do the commands, but would not immediately feel the response as he executed. He doubted that many of the fixed-wing fast-jet pilots, roaring off into the Cannon Base skies, would have cared to do multiple flight corrections and not feel the response instantly. Like heading out on the highway, turning the wheel right and braking, and have nothing happen for six or seven seconds. He trusted himself, despite it probably being the hardest flying manoeuvre with the NJB-3.

  The white figure was a big man. Xavier gave Casper the description and did it well because the bird was descending fast – because a life depended on it – and the platform was crap and the image on the screen bucked. Xavier said he was a big man, and then swallowed hard, audibly. Then Xavier said that he’d only one arm, and there was a torch and weapon in his only hand. The guy with boots had tried to drill him down but the rifle had failed on him and he was now pushing himself up and trying to get his fingers into a bag.