Devil’s Harvest (10 page)

‘The site?’

‘Yes, you should come to Sudan.’

‘Ah yes, well, my research assistant undertook a field trip last year. Regrettably, the authorities in South Sudan wouldn’t allow her beyond the confines of Juba.’

Ismail pondered this answer without apparent sympathy. ‘The hostilities are over between my country and the South. We are happier neighbours, for now at least.’ He stood up and leant across the table to take Gabriel’s hand. ‘Some might go so far as to say that the
ethics
of research demand the presence of the primary author there.’ Ismail smiled and withdrew his hand. ‘I wouldn’t go so far. But I do think that to publish without first-hand environmental data would be … a mistake.’

These then were the parting shots that left Gabriel exposed before his expectant colleagues. There was no witty retort, no easy escape: the professor from Khartoum had cornered his quarry.

Chapter 6

RAF WADDINGTON AIR FORCE BASE LINCOLNSHIRE, ENGLAND

Air Marshal Bartholomew had doodled a cartoon caricature of a falling bomb, whistling through imaginary clouds towards an awaiting city of skyscrapers. When he looked down at the page he realised it looked something like Fat Man descending on Nagasaki. The peaceniks would have something to say about it, he mused, as he added a smiley face to the bulge of the bomb. Air Commodore Rogers was sitting next to him, watching the drawing progress with a serious expression, as if the air marshal was busy distilling the content of the presentation to the committee into a succinct flow chart or graph. They were meant to be considering a submission from the Lethality and Vulnerability Modelling research group from BAE Filton. The work was based on fragment penetration trials looking at the interception geometry of an air-to-ground target engagement using blast-fragmenting weapons. It was military verbiage for assessing the blast radius and likely casualties from an air missile with a fragmenting warhead, fired from an unmanned aerial vehicle. The army and the naval officers referred to the UAVs as ‘drones’, even in technical committees such as this, but the air force regarded the term as somehow demeaning, a hyped-up phrase coined by the media. For the air force, these remote-controlled high-level cruisers were either UAVs or Reapers.

Bartholomew disliked the involvement of civilians in military matters, but had reluctantly come to accept that commercial realities concentrated the brains and financial capacities in private corporates. A woman from BAE – introduced as Ms Easter – was taking the committee through some of the modelling. She was a prim and aggressive blonde, in her early forties, Bartholomew surmised. She stood in front of a smart screen, addressing herself to each of the members of the committee in turn, regardless of their feigned attentiveness or lack thereof. She had dressed in an androgynous power suit and maintained an unsmiling demeanour. Yet there was a foxiness about her, a tautness in her body that suggested athleticism. A few years ago he would have shown her a thing or two, a young filly like her, succumbing to his charge. He sighed, turned the page over to hide his irreverent sketch and tried to give her his attention once more.

Each slide in the presentation had the official ministry of defence logo and the byline that was supposed to govern the research development: ‘Making the combat zone safe’ – as if combat was actually intended to be a field game with gentleman’s rules aimed at avoiding any unpleasant bumps or bruises. It seemed the very worst of oxymorons, thought up by bureaucrats in the ministry who had never fired a weapon and failed to understand that warfare was about maiming and destroying, ripping limb from limb. But war never harmed the administrators.

The door to the committee room opened and one of the mousy secretaries the military was wont to employ slunk in. Given the nature of the meeting, this was something of a breach of protocol, and Ms Easter pointedly halted her presentation. The secretary looked harried and scuttled over to Bartholomew, pushing a folded note in front of him. He could smell her floral perfume, a lightly scented aroma that was initially pleasing and then cloying. It also failed to hide the stink of cigarettes on her breath.

‘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 secretary 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.