by Andrew Brown
‘Sorry, Air Marshal,’ she whispered hoarsely, her voice clearly discernible to everyone in Ms Easter’s icily imposed silence. ‘He said it’s very urgent.’
Bartholomew nodded her away, feeling his lower abdomen clench in a momentary spasm. He hadn’t managed a bowel movement for days and his belly was taut and bloated. It felt like he was carrying a foreign load, imposed as punishment for some undisclosed misconduct. There were days he felt he might explode, or just sink to the floor, immobilised by sheer turgidity.
The handwritten note was from Frank Richards, the group captain on the Reaper Project. He had scrawled in childlike handwriting: ‘Problem with the last operation.’ Bartholomew paused to isolate ‘the last operation’ in his mind, then felt a chill cross the back of his neck as the vision of the green hue of the operations room revived itself.
‘Would you please excuse me.’ He directed his apology to Air Marshal Henderson, not bothering to acknowledge the blonde presenter. The country might not be at war – at least not a declared state of war – but the combination of weapons, politics and testosterone made an urgent message unassailable, and non-military personnel utterly irrelevant.
The secretary ushered him to a small conference room down the corridor from the meeting. Richards was waiting, all brawn, tapping the table with the back of his pen. He didn’t get up as Bartholomew entered the room, but simply slid a black-and-white photograph across the table towards him. Bartholomew’s irritation at his junior officer’s lack of deference only increased when he looked down at the photograph, a blurred puzzle of greys and blacks. Richards would’ve been well aware that his superior would not be able to discern the significance of the image. He knew he would have to ask his assistance. Bartholomew thought of feigning some appreciation of its import, but looking at the patchwork of dull colours he realised he would not know where to start. Frankly, he was too old for such pretences. And Richards’s grave expression concerned him.
‘What am I looking at, Frank?’ he relented.
‘Fragment from the Hellfire blast. The last hit from the Reaper UAV.’ Richards leant across and placed a muscular finger on a small rectangle towards the right of the picture. Bartholomew noted how closely he cut his nails, the skin pink at the edges. ‘Could be part of the target,’ Richards went on. ‘But the regularity of the fragment suggests it’s pre-manufactured. We think it may be a part of the body of the delivery system itself.’
Bartholomew sat down and picked up the photograph, staring once more at the tiny black shape, willing it into comprehension. His stomach ached and he was in no mood for games. Richards was deliberately talking in riddles.
‘Part of the delivery system. So what?’
‘Well, it may be nothing, of course. A weak spot in the target, a loose piece of metal on the ground in the blast zone. But the regular shape is a concern. It may be a large fragment as a result of a weakness in the warhead itself, but you were present when we tested this …’
Bartholomew recalled the day he had observed a test to check the efficiency of the self-destructing air-to-ground missile. The missile had screamed through the air and slammed into the test site target, the lithium core superheating in the blast and reducing the entire guidance section to a lump of metal. He remembered how surprised he had been at the melted ball, still warm from the blast, all that had remained of the missile. It was extraordinary that all that heat and power could dissipate so quickly, leaving no trace, save for the devastation of its surroundings.
Richards had paused for dramatic effect. He seemed to be enjoying himself at his superior’s expense. ‘However, George’ – the startling use of his first name was a clear message that the usual rules did not apply – ‘we think that this might be the cover of the rear control access panel. Its shape suggests this rather than a sheared portion of the missile body.’
Bartholomew was still looking at the picture in puzzlement. ‘The rear access panel to the control section?’
‘Yes. And George, that access panel has identifiable markings on it.’ Richards seemed almost smug about this disclosure.
‘“Identifiable markings”? What the hell does that mean? Identifiable markings! This is supposed to be a secret fucking stealth weapon!’
The ache had changed, suddenly dropping to an intense pressure in his lower bowel. The word ‘identifiable’ had somehow attached itself to the inner lining of his intestine. The gravity of the situation descended: a self-destructing interception missile launched from a United Kingdom Reaper UAV had successfully eliminated a citizen of a sovereign state in respect of which his country had not declared any hostilities, leaving identifiable shrapnel in its wake.
‘For God’s sake, Richards,’ he said. ‘It’s a goddamn assassination machine. And you’re telling me it has left some fucking control panel behind!’
‘Finance insists that everything has a serial number on it.’ The smugness had gone, and Richards looked rather glummer now. ‘They won’t sign off on anything unless they can trace it to the asset register, even if it’s “off the books”.’
‘This is what happens when you leave war to the fucking bureaucrats.’
The room was claustrophobic and seemed unnaturally hot, the skin around his neck and forehead suddenly damp. His anus had started twitching, and he groaned inadvertently, which Richards misconstrued as the air marshal’s appreciation of the potentially disastrous occurrence that had transpired.
‘Indeed, Air Marshal …’ Richards’s false deprecation was cut short as Bartholomew rose and made for the door. He had the clear sensation of warm water sloshing in his rectum, waiting for his sphincter to give just the slightest gap for it to spurt out in a final catastrophic moment of humiliation. He hobbled as fast as he could, ignoring the startled expression of the secretary still hovering outside, and dived into the men’s bathroom. There was no knowing what might have transpired had the two cubicles been occupied. As fortune would have it, they were both free and Bartholomew tore at his belt and trouser buttons even as he slammed the cubicle door closed.
What followed was an alarming explosion of pent-up excretory failures. ‘Faecal loading’ Maurice called it, but that didn’t capture the ferocity of the moment and what it produced. Bartholomew had longed for an expulsion like this for weeks, but now he felt dazed and a bit depleted.
‘Are you all right, Air Marshal?’ the secretary asked him when he emerged looking wan. He nodded, holding himself with as much dignity as he could muster, his thin hair stuck to his dome. He re-entered the small room. Richards had apparently not moved at all and said nothing about his sudden disappearance.
‘We’ve been fucked by the British obsession with paperwork,’ Bartholomew raged, ‘and a soldier in Saudi who doesn’t know a spanner from his arsehole. Why I thought the British army could conduct a sensitive mission and not fuck it up I’ll never know. Why the hell didn’t we just paint the thing in red, white and blue and fly the St George’s cross behind it?’
Richards nodded solemnly, as if to emphasise his lack of culpability for the disaster.
‘But if that piece of metal can be traced back to a British Hellfire missile, Richards, then we have to retrieve it. Simple as that.’
‘I agree, Air Marshal. But before we risk an intervention like that’ – Bartholomew had thought they were back on firmer ground, but Richards’s accentuation of the word ‘that’ suggested otherwise – ‘we need to know whether it’s needed. We have to work out – on the likelihoods at least – what that piece of metal is. The UAV footage won’t give us a clearer image. What you have in front of you is the best close-up of the rogue piece that we can produce. We may have to base our assessment on theoretical trajectory modelling. God help us.’
Bartholomew thought for a moment, and then said: ‘I may have just the person. Wait here.’
He walked out for a second time, this time with as much purpose but without clutching at his backside. He headed with some satisfaction past the toilets, the jittery secretar
y watching, and went through the open doorway into the committee room. The room was now deserted, save for the BAE civilian packing up her laptop near the screen. She glared at him as he came up to her.
‘My apologies, Ms Easter.’
She returned his sincerity with frigidity.
‘My premature exit from your presentation was necessitated by a serious problem.’
The glimmer of a smile lightened her face considerably, but Bartholomew immediately felt disconcerted. Had he said something inopportune, using the word ‘premature’? Had he not said ‘exit’, could he have used another word? She cocked her head slightly – perhaps she wasn’t quite so icy after all, he thought. Old devil like me.
‘Prematurity aside, I wonder if you’d accompany me to meet a colleague. We have a small … but rather important query we’d like you to answer.’
Ms Easter’s tight smile relaxed into a little laugh. She was too flattered by the request to maintain her standoffishness. And by his charm, he imagined. Obediently, she headed for the door, Bartholomew making a drama of ushering her before him.
His delight with his impact on the woman soon dissipated, however. As they entered the small office, his younger counterpart immediately rose and flashed perhaps the first smile that Bartholomew had seen grace his visage. Ms Easter appeared to physically soften, her lips no longer pursed, her demeanour less Maggie Thatcher and rather more Joanna Lumley. Bartholomew felt vaguely jilted.
The presence of a civilian on the fringes of a covert operation made Bartholomew anxious and he outlined the issue to her in the vaguest of terms. Could she provide a notional trajectory and impact modelling to provide insight into whether an unusually substantive ejected piece could be stated with probability to emanate from the target or the missile delivery system? But Ms Easter pounced with an alarming intensity, addressing her questions to Richards.
‘From a missile?’ She couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.
Richards nodded, his eyes all charm.
‘What kind of delivery system?’
‘Predator Reaper using AGM-114 NT Hellfire missile.’
‘NT?’ Ms Easter looked puzzled. ‘I’m not sure I’m familiar with that, sir.’
‘Non-Traceable. Self-destructing.’ Richards said it almost as a growl.
‘Are we talking about an actual … event? Just how theoretical is this?’ Again the quiver, naivety, disbelief perhaps. Or excitement.
Bartholomew cleared his throat to answer, but Richards beat him to it. ‘You can assume that it is an actual event. Given the obvious international sensitivity that attaches to such a test event, your information will be limited to the absolutely necessary. And your clearance level will have to be redetermined, of course.’ Again the flash of a smile. Charming bloody devil, Bartholomew thought, regarding Frank Richards in a new light.
‘I thought the self-destruct delivery system was still in the notional phase. Experimental only.’
‘It is, Ms Easter.’ This time, Bartholomew asserted himself, his stern gaze levelled at his enamoured junior officer. ‘As we’ve just found out to our eternal damnation, it is.’
Chapter 7
EN ROUTE TO NAIROBI
Gabriel and Jane left the staff meal soon after Professor Ismail had taken his leave. Jane had remained distracted by her phone call, while Gabriel had not recovered from the Sudanese man’s recriminations, and the evening stalled and coasted, spluttering to an early standstill. They walked to their car in silence, parked near the entrance to the Bristol Grammar School, its pinkish stonework hidden in the dark, their footsteps accentuated by the cold night. Gabriel always felt a burgeoning pressure in these tense moments, pushed either to declare open hostilities or to paper over the rifts with polite platitudes. But Jane did not appear to be angry with him so much as disconnected, caught up in her own unfathomable thoughts. Even his brave and searching ‘Is there anything wrong, dear?’ was met with flighty dismissal.
They drove towards the promenade to buy milk at the all-night convenience store near Broad Quay. The small fountains and shallow pools were lit up by green and red lights, the colours reflecting off the crisp packets and other city detritus collected in the water. Jane remained in the car while Gabriel went inside the small shop run by a skinny Pakistani who still hadn’t mastered even the most basic English, nor the quantification of the correct change. Jane was texting on her phone again when he returned. She had sent off her message as he pulled away in the direction of the Marriott Royal Hotel and the College Green. As they headed up the hill they passed, on the right, one of Banksy’s more famous pieces of graffiti. The owner of the tenement building the risqué artist had chosen as his canvas had decided to illuminate the work for night-time viewers. A naked man hung by one hand from an open window, while above him his half-dressed paramour and her angry husband looked out across Park Street in vain. Someone had thrown blue paint from the walkway, most of the splatters spraying out below the painting, and one partially obliterating the corner of the window pane.
Gabriel was not sufficiently offended by the graffiti to actually throw paint at it, but he did feel a prudish twinge of distaste for the public display of sexual jocularity. He didn’t find the ignorance of the cuckold particularly humorous. The man looked out from the window, oblivious to his rival just a foot below him, his cheating spouse wrapped in nought but a sheet. It was ribald and unsophisticated. Somehow demeaning of the city.
And then the slow, creeping, hot-and-cold tickling of an idea. A thought disassociated from anything before it, a notion that popped into his head, from nowhere, but immediately established itself as an obvious truth. Of course, he thought, before verbalising the obvious.
‘Jane, are you having an affair?’
His wife’s face instantly tautened into a shrew-like pose. The fact that she hesitated was sufficient. Despite the cold, the car felt stuffy.
‘An affair, Gabriel? That makes it sound so … I don’t know … deliberate. So clandestine. But, yes, I’ve been seeing someone, if you must know. Jason. It’s nothing serious.’
And there it was, a few breaths, a mouth, a tongue and lips formed into words, and the normal course of a life was sheared across its fault line, plunging both of them on an utterly new course. The words hung like smoke in the space between them, defying understanding. And what a strange formulation, Gabriel thought in the brief silence that followed: ‘seeing someone’, ‘nothing serious’. These were phrases from an obscure world.
‘Who the hell is Jason?’ He kept driving, his subconscious controlling the vehicle as they passed St George’s. It was a familiar landmark, and yet it seemed as if he’d never seen it before. How could it stand there, so impassive, ugly and prepossessing, when reality was warping around it?
‘A horticulturalist.’
Gabriel pulled up, steering the car off the road into a lay-by. Why not just block the road, scream outrage, jump out of the car and rent one’s clothes asunder? He pulled up the handbrake with unnecessary force.
‘You’re joking! You’re fucking a gardener?’ But you hate gardening, he almost added, biting it back as he realised the obtuseness of such a complaint.
‘There’s no need to be crass, Gabriel,’ Jane responded, a quiver in her voice for the first time. ‘He actually has a postgraduate degree from Birmingham.’
‘Birmingham!’ Gabriel spluttered. That second-rate university.
‘Oh, don’t be such an insufferable snob. Anyway, he had some kind of breakdown a while ago and is now following his passion.’ There was a pause in the car as they both considered the unfortunate choice of phrase.
The ‘affair’ had already run its smutty course, she insisted, and had now fizzled out, the gardener slinking back into the tool shed from whence he had emerged. Now that the truth was out, or at least partially exposed, it was impossible to retract it or look past it, or to comprehend how he had ever missed it. It was almost a relief, an explanation for Jane’s increasingly puzzling behaviour.
But, having failed to see the obvious, Gabriel felt the humiliation even more keenly.
For weeks afterwards he walked around in stunned silence, unable to communicate save at the simplest level with those around him. He couldn’t escape his imaginings of Jane with another man – some sun-kissed, golden-fleeced Jason. He was like a dim-witted laboratory animal obsessed with a searing rod that burnt it every time it touched it. Unable to stay away, he kept putting out his destroyed appendage to grasp the metal once more.
He still felt that need now, to revisit his wounds and poke about in morbid fascination. He sensed that his shame was visible to everyone, that he carried Jane’s infidelity as a physical aberration on his body.
In spite of his obsession, he did not ask questions, he did not fancy he wanted the details, and Jane wasn’t forthcoming. How she had managed it remained, at a practical level, a mystery to him. They continued living in the house, moving about in a bizarrely polite dance. Somehow – Gabriel wasn’t clear how it had come about – he found himself sleeping on the couch, while Jane still sprawled out on the double bed. The cuckold loses more than just his dignity and his spouse, he realised – he loses his power and freedom as well. Having been outsmarted, deceived at the most basic level, he is no longer worthy of any status at all, apart from some enfeebled masculinity.
This state of abeyance continued, grey and dreadful, Gabriel immobilised by unidentifiable emotions, Jane reserved and watchful, waiting to see which way her fortunes would be cast. Gabriel felt her eyes upon him, but they weren’t softened by any regret; rather she seemed hardened by his indecision. There was no escape for either of them, circling the dying ashes of their marriage like tired dancers.
