The Walking Dead

Two vehicles came close and braked, scuffing up sand. He told the boy, Ibrahim, that he must listen to what was ordered of him, do what he was told to do, give trust and not falter in his Faith. Through the mouth gap of his mask he kissed the boy's forehead. Then he led him to a Chevrolet truck. In the flash of the interior light, he saw the boy's face momentarily, the struggle with fear, then he slammed the door and the truck drove away.

From the second vehicle, a Dodge, he took a holdall that had been lying on the wide back seat, where he had known it would be. He stood in the sand between the Dodge and the truck with the machine-guns that had brought him, laid down his assault rifle, peeled off the webbing that held the magazines, dragged up his mask, unlaced his boots and kicked them off. He dropped his combat trousers to his ankles, stepped out of them, and stripped off the tunic. He lifted the laundered white robe from the holdall, passed his arms through the sleeves and wriggled into it. Within a minute he had passed from being a soldier at war, a commander in conflict, to a businessman of stature. The uniform, the boots, the webbing harness and the assault rifle went to the driver who had escorted him from the battlefields of Iraq. Within another minute, that driver was on his way back over the sand hump that covered the single strand of wire. Within a third minute he was driving away in the Dodge. He remained a soldier, but had exchanged one battlefield for another.

In two hours, the Scorpion would be at a remote desert airstrip, used by contractors who drilled in search of mineral deposits, where a twin-engined Cessna aircraft would be waiting for him. He did not doubt that all arrangements would be delivered as promised. His belief was total in the organizational skills of the Base now controlling him, and in the Cessna he would find the documentation for the new identity to be used in his onward travel.

Yet he felt, so rare for him — even in the worst moments of combat — a little tremor of nerves. He had no Faith to comfort him, as the boy had. The nerves in his gut were because he journeyed to a foreign battlefield, on to ground he had not fought over before, and he had no knowledge of the quality of those who would fight beside him.

* * *

She knew the name of the driver, and more of him than she should have.

At Faria's direction they had twice circled the village after leaving the cottage. The driver, Khalid, had taken her back up the track from the cottage she had rented from the farmer's wife. On the far side of the village there was a sprawling, recently built housing estate, a bolt-hole escape for the middle classes who had abandoned the town that was her home; small detached brick houses were set behind pocket-sized front gardens. Faria understood the reason for their exodus from the streets where she and her community lived. The school in the town she had left six years earlier had then had 84 per cent Asian pupils; now she had read in the local paper that the figure had crept to 91 per cent. The new residents of the village distrusted the influx of migrants from the sub-continent, and had run from them. They would have whispered among their own, those who had fled from Luton, of the ghettos in their old town, of an alien state within a state and Muslim dominance as justification for uprooting their families.

She knew that the driver, Khalid, was twenty-three and came from Hounslow, in west London. She had told him to circle the village so that she might see where there was a shop selling fruit and vegetables, where there was a doctor's surgery, in case she needed it, and a dentist. She knew that Khalid had been a worshipper at a mosque near to his home, where he lived with his parents, and that he had been recruited a year and a half before, after meetings in the evenings at an upper room in the mosque. She knew that he had been ordered to leave the mosque, not to associate again with friends there, and to await a call. She knew that his father worked as a security guard in a bonded warehouse complex at Heathrow, and that his mother cleaned the offices of the Qantas airline…They had sat in the car, a Honda Accord bought for cash at auction, in front of a pub and had watched the traffic flow through the village, and they had sat in a lay-by up the lane from which the cottage's track ran and seen the farmer's wife leave by Land Rover. After less than two hours in his company, she now knew that Khalid worked as a mini-cab driver in Hounslow, for a company owned by his uncle, and that his parents believed he had taken two weeks' leave for a holiday with cousins from Manchester. She knew all the lies of his life, and was horrified at the babble beating in her ears — and she knew that the cause of it was fear.

Of herself, she had told him nothing.