CHAPTER 48

Tuesday 15th March

"Count them," said the fox. So Raf did. A handful of mubahith, teenage girls in khaki jumpsuits, jellaba-clad orderlies and two visiting Berber elders wrapped respectively in lengths of blue and black. Awaiting a day that threatened to be as impossibly hot as the day before.

Eleven in all.

And then there was Raf watching from the chott, flayed by UV that already filtered through scummy cloud to tighten his skin.

Sweat shivering down his spine in anticipation.

He stank of shit and piss and blood, the smell assailing him every time he halted long enough for his own body heat to reach his nostrils. Evidence of his own humanity.

St. John the Baptist. Minus the loincloth.

Now that a road existed between Kibili and El Hamma du Jerid, carefully skirting the edge of the wilderness before slanting off from the chott's edge to cross at the narrowest point, few people except 'packers and Soviet tourists in fat-tyred UAZ four-by-fours tried to cross the salt lake any other way.

The camel trains were gone, along with the slave markets and spice routes. And while it was true that an annual Sand Yacht Championship was held on the chott, this was only ever attended by Soviets and, in any case, was not due for another three months.

So the khaki-clad teenager sweating out her early shift on the southern perimeter of Camp Moncef watched the arrival of a naked apparition with disbelief. At first she assumed the tiny speck was an animal either lost or abandoned. Dogs escaped from cars, half-dead donkeys were cast loose when the amount they could carry stopped being worth what they cost in feed.

Not yet worried enough to find herself a pair of binoculars, Corporal Habib kept an eye on the approaching animal. But sometime between tucking a cigarette inside her hand because one of Kashif Pasha's men had suddenly roared up in his open Jeep and saluting the departing sergeant without getting caught, the speck vanished.

"Shit."

Corporal Habib blinked into the chott's acid glare, ground the butt of her cigarette underfoot and reached into her pocket for a pair of shades; circumstances demanded it even if wearing them on duty was almost as bad as smoking, being the preserve of officers.

Her shades cut down haze and cancelled out most refraction but the figure was still gone, leaving only early-morning shimmer and diminishing slivers of what had to be surface water left over from the winter rains.

Fifteen minutes later, Corporal Habib was still squinting into the distance when the emptiness beside her suddenly took her feet from under her and followed the corporal down, slamming itself into her rib cage. Bone splintered, on the wrong side; Corporal Habib's heart kept pounding and by the time she realized her aorta wasn't pierced and both lungs still drew breath the emptiness sat back on its heels, waiting, with the corporal's own machine gun to her throat.

Only the camouflage of her jumpsuit had kept Corporal Habib alive. Had her uniform been bottle green, the colour of Kashif's own guard, or the black of the mubahith, she would have been dead. Something that might still happen to judge from the blue eyes that stared down at her, pale as cracked ice.

"Single shot," said a crow's voice, raw and bitter. "All you'll get at this distance is a gas star and no chance to cry for help. You ever seen a gas star?"

The corporal nodded. A gas star happened when muzzle flash entered flesh, from guns almost touching you got burn rings, and then powder tattoos: part of the corporal was certain gas stars only occurred on upper limbs or torso but she kept that to herself. Something about the apparition staring down at her suggested he might have a more intimate knowledge of the phenomenon.

"You want my clothes?" The corporal's strangled question did exactly what she meant it to, told the apparition she wasn't about to put up a fight.

"Water," Raf demanded. Watching as the corporal silently unclipped her flask and held it out. She did a very impressive job of not looking at his nakedness or chains.

He drank.

"And those," said Raf, "I want these, too." Lifting the shades off her nose, he nodded to the two spare magazines on her belt. "And those." The weapon he held in shaking fingers was an old-model MP5i 9mm Heckler & Koch, the one issued with a thirty-round mag.

"Now get up."

Corporal Habib did what she was told.

Conditioning, Raf told himself, worked every time. He should know.

"Is Kashif Pasha here?"

The corporal nodded, only to freeze when she saw Raf's scowl. Very slowly, probably unconsciously, she began to shake her head, as if that might change the answer.

"And the Emir?"

A frightened nod. And with it a look that suggested she wanted to say more but wasn't sure whether to risk it.

"What?" Raf demanded.

"He's dying. So if you've come to kill him, there's no point."

"I haven't," said Raf. "I wouldn't . . . One last question. What's that over there?"

Corporal Habib never saw the blow that dropped her into a heap. Or realized, until long afterwards, that when Raf went through her ammo pouch he took only her bar of chocolate. Everything else he left . . .

"Fuck, no."

Not that.

Jammed into a pocket on the passenger side of an open-top Jeep, Raf found a copy of the previous evening's La Presse, final edition.

He found it shortly after swinging his shackles into the face of the NCO driving, wrapping them around the man's fat throat, bringing his screams to an abrupt halt. The NCO was still alive but his jaw hung crooked, his moustache was thick with blood and his face sported bruises which would last for a month. His arm was also broken. But some of that was self-inflicted. The NCO had run his Jeep straight into a rock.

Having read the headlines Raf wished he'd just killed him.

"You're crying," said the fox.

"Of course I'm fucking crying." Talking to the fox avoided thinking and thought was the last thing Raf wanted. He wanted emptiness. The dislocation of mind from body and body from action; not so much cognitive as psychic dissonance, blood music. The sound of glass spheres as they ground against each other.

Behind reality emptiness. Behind emptiness . . .

This.

"You want me to take it from here?" asked the fox. If Raf hadn't known otherwise, he'd have said Tiri was worried. Smart move. Raf watched himself watching the fox, standing naked on a dirt track below Jebel Morra, scanning a headline he already knew.

Kashif Pasha accused of killing half brother and cousin.

A photograph of Murad showed him staring into the lens with childish seriousness. The picture of Hani was an old papp shot, grabbed outside Le Trianon. A fact made obvious by a section of café canopy and writing on the ice-cream glass on the table in front of her. Lady Hana al-Mansur.

All the picture did for Raf was reinforce how fast Hani had changed in those last few months. In the picture she looked as he still thought of her. Would always think of her. Small and thin, with a wry smile and more imagination than was good for any child.

Rolling the NCO over with his foot, Raf bent to take his pistol and found it attached by lanyard to a leather holster, along with three spare magazines.

"You plan to do this for yourself, don't you?" said the fox.

Raf nodded.

Unbuckling the sergeant's broad belt, Raf ripped it through a handful of trouser loops to free the holster. And once he'd got the belt off, Raf decided to keep it anyway. His only problem being that, even on its tightest setting, the belt threatened to slide over his hips, so he slung it across his right shoulder instead. An action made difficult by the fact his hands were still linked by their length of rusting shackle.