The Tower (29 page)

Shepherd burst from the interview room and headed across the almost empty office with Franklin following close behind. ‘It was during summer break at the end of the first year of my master's,’ he said, bundling the laptop back in its case as he walked. ‘I was at Marshall working as a lab monkey in data analysis, cataloguing all the new stuff that was pouring in from Hubble. James Webb had just been green lit and Professor Douglas was in charge, though he hadn’t put his team together yet. It was really hot that year and everyone else seemed to be on holiday. Me and a couple of other research students were the only ones doing any work.’

They pushed through a set of double doors out to the main stairway and started heading back down to the reception area. ‘One Friday a few weeks into our placement Professor Douglas popped his head round the door and told us all to go back to the dorm we were staying in and pack for a two-day trip. We had no idea what he had planned but he was the boss so we did as we were told.

‘He picked us up in his old jeep and we headed east. We thought maybe he was taking us to one of the other launch areas but we drove right past them and kept on going. He said it was good to go back to basics every once in a while, remind yourself what it was all about, and that was what we were going to do: no hi-tech, no computers, just a simple reflector telescope, a few beers and a clear sky.

‘We wound up late in the afternoon heading up into the Smoky Mountains just north of Cherokee, North Carolina. He had this log cabin there, way up on a ridge. It looked like it was straight out of a Western: three rooms, potbelly stove, fresh water you had to pump out of a well. It even had a porch with a rocking chair on it. I guess it was just far enough away from anywhere so that the sweep of the modern world kind of passed it by. And because it was miles from anywhere it got so dark that the whole sky lit up at night. You could see more stars there with your naked eye than you could with a good telescope in a light-drenched town or a city. He had a telescope set up near the cabin in a hunter’s hide built on a rocky ledge and we spent two days up there, tracking the planets, looking at the stars, talking about Galileo and Copernicus and Kepler, where it all came from and where we thought it was all going. He was fired up about James Webb even then. Talked about how it was going to see right to the edge of the universe, right back to the beginning of time.’

They reached the bottom of the stairs and the desk sergeant looked up wearily.

‘We need a car,’ Franklin said.

‘Sure, no problem,’ the walrus replied, wearily picking up his phone and punching a button. ‘I trust your stay with us has been a pleasant one. Please let me know if you used anything from the mini-bar. I’ll let you know when your cab is here.’

‘I don’t mean a cab. We need to borrow a car. One that’s going to be able to cope with the weather out there.’

Shepherd frowned. ‘Why do we need a car? I mean, much as I hate to say it, but wouldn’t flying be quicker?’

‘I doubt anything will be taking off in this,’ Franklin said, pointing outside at the thickening snow. ‘We might get lucky and make it to Charlotte, always assuming they haven’t got worse weather there. But then it’s still about a three-to-four-hour drive to Cherokee on mostly mountain roads. It’s maybe five hours from here but mostly on dead-straight, flat plain roads. Trust me, I know this area pretty well. We’ll be better off driving.’

Franklin steered Shepherd away from the main desk and over to the row of seats by the wall. ‘Tell me why you think Douglas is there.’

‘There was something special about the place. The professor had history there, real history, why else would he drive all that way when there are plenty of mountains much closer to Huntsville? It had all these photographs of people in frames tacked to the walls, some going way back, including one of the Professor as a kid standing on the porch and squinting into the sunlight as he held a model plane over his head. He must have been about five or six but you could still see the man he would become.’

Franklin looked over at the desk sergeant who was now resolutely ignoring the constantly ringing phone. ‘How we doing with that ride?’ he shouted over.

The sergeant looked at them over the top of his reading glasses. ‘We’re just having a Caddy waxed and polished for you now.’

Franklin turned back to Shepherd. ‘Funny guy. He should be on Comedy Central.’

Shepherd glanced outside at the swirling white. ‘What about the roads – the traffic’s all snarled up already, we saw it coming in.’

‘Exactly. We saw it coming in to town. The roads heading out will be pretty clear. So long as we get a decent car, driving’s going to be our best option. Trust me.’

Shepherd nodded, but for the first time he wasn’t sure whether he did.

Liv sat in the kitchen eating dried fruit and salt crackers she’d found in one of the food lockers. Kyle pulled a stool from beneath a stainless- steel counter top and sat down wearily opposite. ‘You should drink some of this,’ he said, pulling a bottle of water from a thermal box on the floor. ‘It might taste a bit funny because it’s got rehydration salts in it.’ He poured half of the bottle into a glass and slid it over to her. ‘I made up a batch for your friends. Don’t worry, it’s clean. In fact all the water’s clean. I’ve been running tests every hour and the ground water’s flowing pure again. The pressure must have blown away the contaminants, though I’ll still keep checking it. Go ahead – drink.’

Liv drank, forcing herself not to gulp it all down in one, savouring the saltiness on her tongue. ‘So tell me how you ended up here,’ she said, as Kyle poured the rest of the water into a second glass.

‘We were all working way down in the south in Dhi Qar Province as part of a project run by an international aid organization.’

‘Ortus,’ Liv said.

‘That’s right. How did you –’

‘– I recognized the logo on the side of your jeep. I know one of the people who runs it, Gabriel Mann.’

Kyle smiled in a way that suggested he both knew and liked him. ‘You know Gabriel?’

She nodded.

‘Ah, he’s a good bloke. When we first set up the project here he came and helped us out a lot. I heard he was in some kind of trouble with the law.’

‘He was. He is.’

‘Well I hope he’s OK.’

‘So do I … You said you were working down south.’

‘Yeah, way down in the southeast the other side of Baghdad in the Mesopotamian marshlands, or what’s left of them. The people there were pretty badly persecuted by Saddam and his mob after they rebelled against him in ’91. As part of his system of punishment he built huge canals to redirect the Tigris and Euphrates away from the marshes to drive the tribes out. He was pretty successful too. There’s only about ten per cent of them left. Then the war came. As soon as Saddam started losing, the locals blew holes in the dams and dykes and let the water flow back in again. We were sent to help monitor the water quality and manage the restocking of the wetlands with reed beds. There were sixteen of us.’

‘What happened to the others?’

‘Gone.’ He took a drink then carefully placed the glass down on the counter. ‘We’d been working together for six months. It was good work. The people were returning, the reeds were growing, we were even seeing some of the wildlife coming back. The marshes used to be a major staging post for millions of migratory birds until Saddam buggered it all up. Every day more life returned – both man and bird. Then all of a sudden the plug got pulled on us. It had something to do with what happened to Gabriel. Our headquarters are in Ruin and he was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist or something, trying to blow up the Citadel using Ortus resources. The upshot was that all of Ortus’s bank accounts were frozen while the charges were being investigated. Which meant we could no longer pay for anything and weren’t getting paid ourselves.

‘We kept going as long as we could, hoping the money would get unfrozen but pretty soon we started running out of food, fuel, you name it. So we pulled out and headed back towards the border.’ He rolled the water around in the glass, staring at the liquid, deep in thought.

‘So how come you ended up here? Did you get lost?’

‘No, nothing like that.’ He continued to stare at the glass, as if the answer might lie in it somewhere.
‘I’m still not really a hundred per cent sure what happened. We were travelling north, heading for the Turkish border in a four-vehicle convoy, which is the only safe way to travel on these roads. We were making pretty good time, considering all the roadblocks on Highway 8, had made it as far as Al-Hillah and we were getting ready to push on as far as Baghdad when I got a feeling that we were going in the wrong direction. I can’t really explain it. It was like I knew that the maps, the GPS were wrong. I wasn’t alone, Eric and Mike felt it too.

‘The rest of the guys thought we’d gone mad. They told us to shut up and keep driving but we couldn’t do it, none of us could. It was such a strong feeling. For me it was like a magnet pulling at some kind of metal core inside me.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘I’ve always been a bit of a nomad, never really stayed in one place for too long. No matter where I ended up and how good a time I was having there would always come a morning when I’d wake up with an overwhelming urge to be somewhere else. And this was exactly like that, only instead of wanting to head off into the unknown it felt like I was returning somewhere. Like I was coming home.

‘It’s like – for the last six months or so, ever since I’ve been working on the marshes, I’ve been watching the birds: flamingos, pelicans, hooded crows, teals. Some of these guys fly halfway round the world from as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far south as Africa and India to end up in the exact same place where they hatched. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years, hundreds of thousands probably, and we still don’t really know how they do it. It’s just an instinct in them, a natural urge. Then a few years back the marshes vanished, I mean there was nothing there at all but cracked earth and the odd abandoned boat. But as soon as the water came back, they knew. Somehow they just knew that’s where they needed to be. That’s what it felt like for me. I felt such a strong pull to be here, though I didn’t know what this place was, or even if it was here. I’ve never been here before in my life, but I felt like I was coming home. Explain that.’

Liv shook her head. ‘I can’t,’ she said. But I felt something like it too.’

Behind her the door opened and she smiled when she saw Tariq standing there looking better than she’d seen him for a while. Her smile faded quickly when she saw the look of concern on his face. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘You better come see for yourself.’

Liv saw why Tariq had fetched her the moment she stepped out of the main building. A thick column of dust was rising in the eastern sky heralding new arrivals.

‘Soldiers,’ a voice shouted down from the guard tower.

‘How many?’ Tariq called back.

‘Difficult to tell. There’s one Humvee and one truck. The truck could be empty or it could have twenty men inside.’

Tariq looked over beyond the perimeter fence to where a group of workers were hurrying back to the compound. He waited until the last of the grave-digging detail had slipped through then shouted, ‘Close the gate and man the guns.’

‘No,’ Liv said. ‘We’ve been through this. We cannot meet everyone who comes here with suspicion and loaded weapons.’

‘We tried it your way last time,’ Tariq replied. ‘First we talk, then we let them in. I cannot risk all our lives again.’ Then he walked away before she had time to argue.

The Humvee and the truck pulled to a halt about fifty metres short of the gate and sat there for a while, engines running, shrouded in a cloud of their own dust.

‘American,’ Tariq said, reading the markings on the side of the vehicles.

Liv was standing next to him, inside the perimeter gate waiting to greet them. ‘What are they doing?’ she asked.

‘They are being cautious,’ Tariq replied, his eyes never leaving the lead vehicle.

‘Can you blame them.’ She glanced up at the .50-cal gun in the guard tower, a man standing behind it, poised and ready.

She noticed Tariq’s hand tighten on the grip of the AK47 slung across his back and wondered for a fleeting moment if he wasn’t spoiling for a fight. This was the problem with letting men do the negotiating. Sooner or later their hormones took over and it usually ended in battle. ‘HEY,’ she shouted at the Humvee, ‘OVER HERE.’ She waved her hands over her head and jumped up and down to get their attention.

‘What are you doing?’ Tariq looked at her as if she had gone insane.

‘You said we should talk first so I’m talking. HEY. I’M AN AMERICAN.’ She pulled a keffiyeh from round her neck and started waving it in the air. ‘USA. HELLO.’

‘You can stop now,’ Tariq said. ‘I think they heard you.’

The Humvee started to creep forward along the tracks in the dirt leading to the gate. It was impossible to see who was inside because of the sun on the windscreen, a bright slash of light that shimmered as the hard wheels crept over the rough ground.

‘Can you do me a favour?’ Liv said out of the corner of a fixed smile, ‘take your hand off your rifle strap.’

Tariq reluctantly obeyed just as the Humvee crunched to a stop ten feet short of them. The door popped open and a rangy corporal got out. Liv felt Tariq stiffen beside her as he saw the M-4 the soldier was cradling in his arms, eyes shielded by the standard-issue Oakleys most of the soldiers seemed to favour. He stood by the vehicle saying nothing. By the slight tilt of his head Liv could tell he was scoping out the guard tower and the .50-cal cannon that had tracked the Hummer all the way to where it now stood.