Midnight Empire (7 page)

‘Canberra.'

Dupont nodded—nodded as if this was the correct answer, as if he already knew. Daniel waited for a follow-up, a small interrogation. The man turned towards the screens.

It took just ten minutes for someone to appear. Ellis zoomed in but there wasn't much to see, only a man in white with a dark beard who started to load the Hilux.

Nobody spoke. The man worked and the silence grew and Daniel realised he was listening to himself breathing. Then the courtyard gate was opened, and the man, presumably Dhaif, brought the Hilux onto the road.

He drove east on the sealed road. They followed him through Ma'rib and then on past the dam, towards the hills. The sun came slowly into force, the long dawn shadows shortened into dark morning wells, sharp at the edges of the roadway against the rocks and the ledges.

The man's white elbow protruded from the car. He turned now onto a dirt track. Still nobody spoke. This seemed a basic instinct: remain quiet, communicate at a level beneath language, through gesture and shared thought, as if any verbal conference would break the spell, let slip the prey.

Daniel looked at the weapons console, saw that the drone was fully armed with hellfires. There'd been no discussion of a strike in the briefing, but from the mood in this room it felt like if they found this guy, they'd go.

The Hilux slowed, began to bounce about the track and its potholes. From thirty-eight thousand feet up, there seemed to be nothing out here, just this track and a kind of moonscape. They followed for another twenty minutes, the truck climbing unevenly, unsteadily. Ahead, they saw the faint outline that was the track as it went higher, contours around the cliff faces, small chasms.

Eventually, the Hilux stopped. The man got out and they watched him stare into a rising hill, a series of rock faces and small plateaus. He retrieved something from the truck and soon he was climbing, hoisting himself into a crag. When he came to the first plateau, an area about twenty yards wide, he stopped and stood for a long time, looking up into the sky.

The sun was bright. They waited for the man to move. In his white clothing he stood out from his surrounds like something religious. He kept staring at the sky.

Dupont was the first to say it. ‘He knows.'

Could that be true? They watched him. From his stance, from his orientation, it was possible to believe that he was looking at them, staring up.

‘How big are we?' asked Gray.

‘Wingspan sixty-six feet,' said Ellis. ‘Twice a Cessna, half a U2.'

‘At this altitude?'

‘We're tiny. A speck in the high pale.'

‘But he sees us.'

‘He may not.'

‘He knows.'

‘We're not in the sun?'

‘We're next to it. Thirty or forty degrees.'

‘The feed,' said Dupont. ‘It's definitely encrypted?'

‘Yes,' said Daniel.

Ellis said, ‘The feed is scrambled but it's still there.'

‘Meaning?' asked Dupont.

‘If he's smart, if he has the equipment in the car, the wouldn't need to spot us, he can listen to the air and know we're there. All he needs is line of sight. He can't tell what we're seeing but he can hear that we're there.'

They watched Dhaif for another minute. They looked at him in starlight and then in infra-red. Difficult to believe now that he wasn't looking straight at them, straight up at the lens.

Moore said, ‘Who is this guy?'

Daniel examined Gray. The older man was intensely calm, looking occasionally at the screens but mostly at Raul. There was something in his gaze; it was the way you look at someone when there is a question hanging in the air, and Daniel realised something was happening here, some rift.

The silence continued. It was finally broken by Dhaif pulling something from his robe, a handset, some kind of radio.

‘Get that,' said Raul. Ellis looked at his console, searching for the signal. It was clear that Dhaif was speaking, the handset to his mouth.

‘UHF,' said Ellis suddenly, and over the air came the last fragments of Dhaif 's voice, soft but pristine, hardly a trace of static, a voice much younger than Daniel had expected, much bolder.

‘What is that?'

‘Arabic,' said Gray. ‘Nonsense Arabic. A code.'

They listened. Harsh sounds, occasionally urgent. A string that carried on for thirty seconds or more, another voice replying now and again in short phrases, calmer, almost soothing. Abu Yamin?

There was a quick burst of static then the radio was turned off, Dhaif descending in his white robes towards the truck, the truck pulling away again, continuing in the same direction, higher up the path. They watched him drive. The terrain became more hilly, the truck hugging the sides of high gorges and ravines. Moore sipped from a drink bottle, his hand not leaving the controls. The screens were bright now, the wash of the sun on the faces of the stone peaks, a landscape of firm exposure but there were presumably hidden places, refuges in secret recesses of rock, deep wells. The Hilux ambling hot white, all gleam and bounce.

Finally, there was a single pellet of voice on the UHF, a word or code word that, from its tone, was unmistakably a command of some kind, and the Hilux stopped again. It was on a straight section of road, a section exposed to a great valley, a hillside that seemed particularly rocky, with heavy boulders and stones in clusters.

Dhaif got out of the truck. He walked. Not uphill or down, but along the road, its valley-side edge, a sudden pedestrian in the mountains. There seemed to be no reason to do this. Path, vehicle, destination: nothing had changed. Why walk? Was he about to escape them, perform some kind of thin-air desert vanishing?

He came to a halt a hundred yards from the truck, and then he sat down, a squat white figure looking into the valley. Daniel guessed that the drone was above this valley, flying perhaps a little lower than it had been, the earth having risen to meet it.

For a short while nothing happened. Dhaif sat, the drone kept course. They all waited. But then Daniel saw an almost thing, somewhere in the monitors, pale and streaming, and then everything went blank.

In that moment Daniel's heart leapt and a wash of warmth flooded his arms. The bug. The glitch. He typed
stat
into his console and saw nothing. He typed
ping
but no reply came. Christ. He turned from his screen to the room, expecting to find everyone's sick gaze upon him. But they weren't looking his way. Ellis and Moore weren't pushing buttons, frantically attempting to regain control. They were leaning back, arms folded. Raul and Dupont stood motionless, Raul with the tip of his finger to his mouth. They stared at the blank screens.

Gray looked at Daniel, saw his confusion.

‘Stinger,' he explained, too loudly. ‘It appears we've been shot dead.'

After that, they were flying missions around the clock. Their entire drone complement was moved to Oman. More men came from Langley, quieter men, silence a form of rank.

Pictures of Abu Yamin were posted in the briefing hut, a man with a beard, a man who was gaunt but fiercely so. There were images of a figure wearing shalwar kameez taken from a Predator over somewhere. There were photographs of him front on, posing as if for a driver's licence—in each his eyes had the same glint, an empathy and a kindness, you might say a charisma.

Abu Yamin's background wasn't openly discussed. There was no biography or charge sheet of involvement in bombings or other crimes. However, his importance was clear—you felt it in the air of determination in those who came from Langley, the urgency of their conversations, the number of phone calls they traded, the very stances of their bodies. A terrorist with Stinger missiles was one of the worst possible scenarios and they wanted Abu Yamin dead. They were flying over the mountains near Ma'rib night and day, and when he was dead they would kill Dhaif too.

For two weeks, Daniel did almost nothing but sit with the flights. The Langley men hovered over his shoulder, checking and double-checking the encryption.

They thought they would find Abu Yamin in the mountains. They scoured the ranges using infra-red capable of spotting a two-day-old cigarette butt from its latent heat. They kept watch over the drone's wreckage, a slew of metal on the valley floor, waiting for anyone to come to it—Abu Yamin or a minion who'd lead them his way. When nothing happened they blew it up with hellfires after deciding that it wasn't a good problem to leave the Yemeni government with, not when the citizenry hated America and they weren't even supposed to be there.

Daniel learned that the reason the CIA had originally known who Dhaif was and who he would be resupplying was that they had a man on the inside, an agent within al-Qaeda. It seemed that the agent was very well placed. His codename was Protonic and Raul was the supervisor on the case.

The missions continued, clocking two hundred and fifty hours of flight time; hours in which Daniel became pretty much invisible, just the encryption operator, a benign presence, a regular face. Gray showed him where he could sleep on the base should he need to, a ‘hot bed' dorm for the air crews, where earphones attached to the beds played music, the soothing sounds of the ocean or white noise.

It remained unsaid, but he knew this situation was far from ordinary. The men from Langley, their pressing intensity. Daniel began to imagine mid-air explosions, attacks on 747s, on Dreamliners and A380s; aircraft falling from the sky. The more stunning the forms of death he imagined, the more he wanted to be present when they found Abu Yamin and killed him, the drone leaping silver and haunting and straight up from behind a ridge line, erasing him from the face of the earth.

It was a satisfying thought, and for a few days it drove him as he ate his meals in the mess and fell asleep listening to the far sounds of thunder and creaking rain.

At night, walking to the dorm or waking to connect another flight, he saw the lights of Las Vegas shining out of the desert.

He got so that he could recognise on the screens parts of the mountains, certain valleys and outcrops of rock, knew what they'd see when they banked to follow a particular water course or broke over a particular rise.

After the missions, the CIA men stood outside the briefing hut and smoked, figures slumped in hard thought and failure, silently examining the middle distance, it felt like a penance.

As the second week dragged on, the men became more sloppy. They ate food in the control stations, dirty bowls piling up. They took calls there also, worked on their laptops at the back of the rooms. They wore the same shirts over, you could tell by the small stains and the smell of sweat. They stopped shaving. Sometimes they fell asleep in their chairs.

Thirteen days in, the debate finally started: had Abu Yamin escaped the mountains already? Were they wasting their time? The only living things they'd seen in two hundred drone hours were goats. The fact of the goats was mercilessly exploited by those who wanted the mission to end. This was the minority position. The majority argued for a scaling back and a redistribution of resources, while another, more avid minority thought the problem could be solved by more flights, by blanket coverage. Many phone calls were placed. Serious conversations were held out on the fence line, voices hushed. The latter position eventually won. There would be a surge. Two days with four drones aloft around the clock, flying in a square formation half a mile apart.

Daniel's sleep pattern was already disturbed, and these last forty-eight hours had him in a kind of dream state. Flights went up every few hours, and he was called back and forth from the dorm. He began to nap on the floor of the briefing hut, his jacket for a pillow, the smell of linoleum thick on the dry air. It was the operators' job to raise him, hands nudging his shoulder.

The surge failed. When it was over, the men returned to Langley to regroup.

That afternoon Daniel was careful driving on the highway, sticking to the right lane. He passed the housing developments on the city border; after all this open space these were high-fenced and impossibly packed, nil room between the houses, no eaves, no yards, and—perhaps he was just tired—they struck him as sad. What would it be like to live there, he wondered, little worlds of shrinking space?

He drove somewhat faster, reached the loft and climbed into bed. He woke only when it was dark, and then from a dream about mountains, and the lights of the city cut through the night.

4

L
ieutenant Peach introduced him to cards. The crews played while they waited for their sorties or between briefings, training sessions or presentations about the evils of drink driving or of drug use.

It was pointless to play for nothing so they played for loose change, but mostly they played for something to do, entertaining each other by telling jokes and stories while the cards were dealt and the change moved around.

Daniel thought about movies he'd seen where soldiers played cards and he wondered if they could be true—did anyone really play poker in war zones?

Mostly the game was Pineapple, a variant of Texas Hold'em in which everyone was dealt a third card. They played it in the recreation room, which had once been some kind of laboratory, sinks along its walls, two ping pong tables, a DVD player and a row of computers marked
External
,
internet
.

As they played they chatted about whatever came to mind, about their kids or baseball or television, and sometimes about unusual things that had happened on their flights, IEDs that had exploded in the hands of bomb-setters, Predators whose software had stopped working and which had to be shot down by F18s. And they told jokes. Jokes about sodomy, about politicians and about each other's wives. They couldn't drink beer on base so they drank Friar's Cola and a lemon-flavoured water called Zasp.

There were seven or eight regulars, and many more interlopers, and everyone knew each other. They often talked about how many hours they'd clocked in different types of aircraft or about funny calls they'd heard on the radio while flying over Kuwait or Bosnia or the 36th parallel.