He could pretend not to hear Saul or he could answer. And for once the truth was a better reply. “Colonel Abad,” said Ka, “those are his direct orders . . .” He turned to where Sarah was washing her fingers in the river.
“Sergeant . . .”
Ka had led the way up a wadi, coarse gravel giving way to grit as rare grass scabs grew more spiky and vanished altogether. Walking in the heat of the afternoon was insane but that was what the Colonel had wanted. And the man had been sympathetic, his voice understanding but firm as it crackled through the radio.
“I only ever ask for the necessary,” he had said. “And you and Sergeant Sarah can do it. I’m certain you can.”
So Ka kept walking into the shimmering haze, with the low cliffs two hours behind him and miles of low slope ahead. Plus a dark line at the horizon that could have been mountains but was probably low cloud. And if not cloud, perhaps a trick of the heat haze. Whatever it was, that thin smudge of colour was further than either of them could walk.
“Give me the bottle . . .”
“No.” Ka shook his head and kept going. One foot in front of the other, his plastic rifle held firmly in front of him. They’d stopped twice already for water. If they finished their bottle now how could they manage the return?
“You don’t even know where you’re going . . .”
That was true.
“Colonel Abad will tell us,” said Ka. “When he’s ready.”
Sarah sucked at her teeth and pushed past Ka, forcing her aching legs to carry her over a crescent-shaped dune. Sweat had glued her vest to her back and drawn dark circles under her arms. Even her combats were sticky with perspiration and those were made from a special kind of cloth that breathed for itself. She knew that because it said so on the label.
Ka let her go on ahead. Sometimes when Sarah got angry it was best to leave her alone. But that wasn’t the real reason Ka was happy to let her walk on. Ka liked watching the way her thin hips swung as she walked. And he liked the changing gap of nakedness between the top of her loose combats and the bottom of her vest. Also . . .
Any further thoughts were cut off by the crackle of his radio.
“Lieutenant Ka here.”
Ka noticed Sarah turn back but he was already intent on new orders that were simple and precise. Walk half a klick straight ahead, climb to the top of a vast mound and wait until their target was too close to miss. No more than fifty paces max . . .
“Load your rifle,” he told Sarah.
She shifted her Martini Henry so that it was angled across her body. “It’s already loaded,” Sarah said, as if she couldn’t believe he’d say something that stupid.
“What about the sights?”
“What about them?”
“Set them for fifty . . .”
Obediently Sarah adjusted for distance. Then she licked her finger and tested for wind, even though she knew there wasn’t any. Satisfied that she was right, she made another slight adjustment and worked the bolt, pulling a bullet into the gun’s chamber.
“What now?” she asked.
“We wait . . .”
The truck looked like a child’s toy. That might have been a side effect of a yellow Tonka-toy paint-job that was intended to make it blend in with the desert, or it might have been the balloon tyres, which bulged with each jolt across the broken ground.
“The Colonel knew this was coming?” A look that Ka recognized began to creep across her face, smoothing away all expression. She didn’t even glance over when she spoke. Instead, she wriggled her body down into the sand, shuffling one knee outwards until it gripped the ground like a rider’s leg locked tight to the side of a mount.
“Well?” she said.
“Yeah,” said Ka, “undoubtedly.” Right on cue Ka heard his radio crackle to life. They both guessed what the orders would be but Ka told her anyway. “Shoot the driver.”
Sarah wanted to suggest taking out a tyre instead. Only, so what if she killed the driver and the truck crashed? The hardest thing it could smack into was the side of a dune and besides, shooting people was her job. She never got the shakes, at least not in advance and she always held the moment.
Ice in the soul, her uncle had called it. The feeling had come after Kordofan, which was when she’d first been captured, towards the end of a battle with her brigade already retreating and the scrub full of bodies and abandoned weapons. One of Sarah’s own officers had unwittingly provided camouflage and she’d almost got away with hiding in a ditch beneath him. And then the stripping crews had come and yanked away his body, intending to strip it of everything valuable and found Sarah crouched beneath.
Faced with five men who had wrists heavy with Rolexes and Tag Hauers worn like bracelets, she’d stood up, straightened her shirt and recited the first verse of the Holy Quran.
She’d been learning the words for weeks. Everyone she knew had been learning them in secret, when the officers weren’t around; friends testing each other until their recitations were perfect.
The men still raped her, of course, but not that violently and when she crawled to her knees afterwards to find her clothes, she buttoned her shirt around a throat that was uncut and over a stomach that still had its guts where they should be, on the inside.
They’d taken nothing she couldn’t afford to lose. At least that’s what she told herself as she limped away towards her new camp. Equally it was nothing she’d wanted to give them either. And so the ice froze inside her and hardened around her like a shell, unnoticeable to everybody except those who got too close.
“Now,” Ka told her.
Close up it was possible to see blue lettering on the bonnet and a whip aerial that flew a blue pennant, which cracked and flicked in the afternoon air. Two white men sat together up front, both wearing shades and talking to each other rather than keeping watch on the rough track.
North European or American. Or that other continent that began with A. There were a lot of those. Pulling in a breath and holding it, Sarah aimed her rifle high, then slowly lowered the barrel and fired the moment she dropped through her target.
“Clean shot,” she said to no one.
Ka was already up and running. He rolled once at the bottom and came upright, then crashed forward, his doublePup already sighting itself in . . . Not that Ka needed hi-tech to cut down the uniforms scrambling from the back of the truck. Those he missed with his first magazine were too stunned to do anything but panic as his next reduced them to noncombatant status.
Only one man, an elderly sergeant, hit the ground and racked back the slide on his own submachine gun. Which was as far as he got. Ka’s third magazine took off the top of the man’s skull in a single burst.
“Got it.” It was the man’s battered AK49 Ka wanted. A cookie-cutter buzz gun stamped out of cheap metal, idiotproof and unbreakable. Just getting that made his whole trip worthwhile.
“Lieutenant Ka,” he answered his radio without consciously realizing it had buzzed. The voice on the other end was quietly impressed. “I knew you could do it. Heap sand over the bodies and drive back to the river . . .”