So little time left, and what made it worse — hardest to accept — was that there was bugger-all, sweet damn all of nothing, for him to look back at and feel a shimmer of pride in. He was a journeyman. He had failed at nothing but succeeded at less, and a week on Monday would see him wrestling with the sections of a greenhouse, and no one would have noticed his going. He snorted annoyance. There was nothing on his computer screen now that had not been there the day before.
The section he headed, overseeing Mary Reakes who had officer rank and four women who did not, had twin responsibilities in Riverside Villas. It was tasked with identifying the possible arrival into the United Kingdom of a suicide-bomber of foreign origin, and — considered of greater importance and therefore greater threat — the arrival of what the neighbouring sister 'Firm' in Ceauescu Towers across the river called a 'coordinator' and the residents of the Villas described as a 'facilitator'. Since Nine-Eleven and the formation of his section, neither had appeared on the horizon…Dickie and Anne had not been blessed with children, therefore were denied grandchildren. There would be no small boy to sit on his knee and ask, 'What did you do in the war, Gramps?' and get the answer, 'Nothing, darling, because on my watch the bloody enemy never came.' Plenty to tell the kid, who didn't exist, if he had been following the money trails of that enemy's credit-card frauds, which financially supported their planning; too much to tell, if he had been setting up informants in mosques and madrassa schools where the principles of the Koran were taught and the texts learned by heart; or he could have talked of the computer records of those youths from north London or the west Midlands who shuffled passports and took flights to Karachi or Rawalpindi…Nothing to recount and nothing to speak of, and Dickie Naylor's time was slipping away.
He rehearsed what he would say, turned away from his screen and dialled home. He apologized, curtly and awkwardly, stuttered through it.
Naylor heard her: 'Don't be silly, nothing to be sorry for. Everyone has to do it, retire and start a new life, as I said. You just caught me as I was going to the supermarket — it'll be nice, you being able to come with me.'
He grimaced, and replaced the receiver.
In a room high in the principal building inside the protected complex of the American Embassy in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, Cindy read aloud from the situation reports that had come through on the teleprinter. She had a fine voice, and Joe Hegner listened. In his mind he played pictures of the carnage she described from the flimsy, neatly bullet-pointed sheets.
SitRep, Task Force Olympia, Northern Command, Mosuclass="underline" Triple car-bomb attack in our Area of Responsibility. Attack One: Target was a Contractors' Convoy. Attack Two: Target was the Follow-Up reaction of Coalition Forces, 300 metres from first strike. Attack Three: Target was approach to Coalition base as reaction forces returned. Casualties include 2 civilian security guards from convoy, KIA. 3 Coalition Forces from Follow-Up, KIA. 8 Iraqi civilians at Coalition base, KIA. WIA in 3 attacks not yet available but expected as 'substantial': Message Ends.
Without interruption, Joe Hegner heard her as she stood in the open doorway and read to him. He knew the men who worked as civilians and guarded the electricity-supply engineers, or who came in to fix the sewage plants, or who tried to keep the oil flowing through the pipelines that crossed the desert sands. With them, a bad bet for life insurance, were their guards. Many of the guards were from the old apartheid days of South Africa, some were prematurely retired paratroops and special forces from the UK; more were from the Midwest states of America and had left behind broken relationships and mounting debts. They could earn, for riding shotgun in armoured SUVs with the contractors, five thousand US dollars a week. They had, as a stereotype, shaven heads, muscles pumped up by weights and steroids, and skin covered with the permanence of crap-done tattoos…and now two were dead. Later that day, from the safety of an office in Johannesburg, London or Los Angeles, an email or a telegram would be winging to an abandoned family, and in a few days a bag would be packed with the censored contents of a locker, the porno magazines not included. In the evening, Budweisers and slugs of Jack Daniel's would be downed by the survivors, and toasts made…Joe Hegner liked them as free spirits, liked them well. He felt it more keenly because his experience of Mosul had scarred him.
SitRep, Central Command, Ar-Ramadi: Double vehicle-bomb attack. Liquid gas tanker driven at improvised defences at Police Barracks, followed by car used as rescue and medical help reached site of tanker strike. Killed and Wounded casualties not yet assessed, but will be categorized as 'heavy' among police personnel and civilians: Message Ends.
His shoes off, Joe Hegner had his feet on the desk, and there was a hole in the heel of his right sock, but there didn't seem time, these days, to call up a driver assigned to the Bureau and the necessary security people and travel downtown to get new pairs. His stick was propped against the desk edge. Many times he had been into police barracks, and he had good friends among the newly recruited officers. He had a rapport with them that verged on love. Most Iraqis living in the goddamn Triangle preferred to go short; see their family half starve from privation, rather than risk signing up and taking the American dollar, but a few were prepared to break the mould of fear. They had such damn awful equipment — shitty vehicles, shitty weapons and shifty barricades round their barracks — but they seemed so cheerful when he was over there, one week in four. For seven days in every month he was out of the embassy in Riyadh, holed up in the protected Green Zone on the Tigris river that split Baghdad, and before he caught the flight back to the Saudi capital, he would make damn certain:- even if he had to get there inside the armour-plated walls of a Main Battle Tank — that he visited policemen in their barracks. There were Agency boys in the Green Zone, and agents from the Bureau, but they never moved off their asses and never went to meet the men at the real front line. He seemed to hear the keening wail of widows, brothers and mothers, as the bodies of policemen were identified — what-was left of them, after the explosion of a liquid fuel tanker. He knew Ar-Ramadi as a place of rare hatred, of particular cruelty.
SitRep, Central Command, Ba'quba: Single suicide-bomber attack. Target was an Iraqi Army recruitment centre — suicide-bomber had joined end of queue and detonated explosives when challenged. Casualty figure not known, but will be 'large': Message Ends.
Thoughts formed in Joe Hegner's mind, and they ran alongside the images he held of the days when he had lived in the rarefied atmosphere of the Green Zone, before his hospitalization, before his convalescence, and before it was confirmed that he could work out of the embassy in Saudi Arabia…A queue outside a grimy building that was set back from concrete blast barriers and sandbag parapets. A line of young and middle-aged men watching uneasily behind them as they shuffled forward with painful slowness. A table with three clerks sitting behind it and a wad of application forms, riffled by an early-morning breeze. A man joined the far end of the line, and perhaps he smiled, as if at peace, and perhaps his clothing was too bulky for the size of his shoulders or the shape of his head, and perhaps the sweat ran on his forehead when the sun was not yet high, and perhaps those in the queue smelt the scent of danger and started to run back, and perhaps a security guard — paid a pittance — had had the courage to charge towards the sweating, overweight, smiling man. But a hand was inside the robe. A finger was on a switch. A bomb detonated. A body disintegrated and many other bodies were mutilated…He knew those young men. They were the secondary field of Joe Hegner's expertise.