When the two teams came off the field Terry was standing by the roped passageway, grinning. Mike reached out and ruffled his hair.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we did it, bro.’
Terry had been seized by gut-wrenching fear when the moment came to tell his brother that he now knew he was gay. The older man, by then an officer in the Paras and just back from combat in the Falklands, thought about it for a moment, cracked his mocking grin and handed back the final line by Joe E. Brown in Some Like it Hot.
‘Well, nobody’s perfect.’
From that moment Terry’s hero-worship of his elder brother knew no limits.
In Maryland the sun set. In the same time zone it was setting over Cuba and on the south-eastern peninsula known as Guantanamo a man spread his prayer mat, turned to the east, knelt and began his prayers. Outside the cell a GI watched impassively. He had seen it all before, many times, but his instructions were never, ever, to let his watchfulness slip.
The man who prayed had been in the jail, formerly Camp X-Ray, now Camp Delta, and in the media usually ‘Gitmo’ as short for Guantanamo Bay, for nearly five years. He had been through the early brutalities and privations without a cry or a scream. He had tolerated the scores of humiliations of his body and his faith without a sound, but when he stared at his tormentors even they could read the implacable hatred in the black eyes above the black beard, so he was beaten the more. But he never broke.
In the stick-and-carrot days when inmates were encouraged to denounce their fellows in exchange for favours, he remained silent and earned no better treatment. Seeing this, others had denounced him in exchange for concessions, but as the denunciations were complete inventions, he had neither denied nor confirmed them.
In the room full of files kept by the interrogators as proof of their expertise, there was much about the man who prayed that night, but almost nothing from him. He had civilly answered questions put to him years earlier by one of the interrogators who had decided on a humane approach. That was how a passable record of his life existed at all.
But the problem was still the same. None of the interrogators had ever understood a word of his native language and had always relied on the interpreters, or ‘terps’, who accompanied them everywhere. But the terps had an agenda too. They also received favours for interesting revelations, so they had a motive to make them up.
After four years the man at prayer was dubbed ‘non-cooperative’, which simply meant unbreakable. In 2005 he had been transferred across the Gulf to the new Camp Echo, a locked-down permanent isolation unit. Here the cells were smaller, with white walls and exercise only at night. For a year the man had not seen the sun.
No family clamoured for him; no government sought news of him; no lawyer filed papers for him. Detainees around him became deranged and were taken away for therapy. He just stayed silent and read his Koran. Outside, the guards changed while he prayed.
‘Goddam Arab,’ said the man coming off duty. His replacement shook his head.
‘He’s not Arab,’ he said. ‘He’s an Afghan.’
‘So, what do you think of our problem, Terry?’
It was Ben Jolley, out of his daydream, staring at Martin across the rear of the limo.
‘Doesn’t sound good, does it?’ Terry Martin replied. ‘Did you see the faces of our two spook friends? They knew we were only confirming what they had suspected, but they were definitely not happy when we left.’
‘No other verdict, though. They have to discover what it is, this Al-Isra operation.’
‘But how?’
‘Well, I’ve been around spooks for a long time. Been advising as best I can on matters of the Mid-East since the Six Day War. They have a lot of ways: sources on the inside, turned agents, eavesdropping, file-recovery, over-flying; and the computers help a lot, cross-referencing data in minutes that used to take weeks. I guess they’ll figure it out and stop it somehow. Don’t forget we have come on a hell of a long way since Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk in nineteen sixty, or the U2 took those photos of the Cuba missiles in sixty-two. Guess before you were born, right?’ He chuckled chestily at his own antiquity as Terry Martin nodded.
‘Maybe they have someone right inside Al-Qaeda,’ Martin suggested.
‘Doubt it,’ said the older man. ‘Anyone that high up would have given us the location of the leadership by now and we’d have taken them down with smart bombs.’
‘Well, maybe they could slip someone inside Al-Qaeda to find out and report back.’
Again the older man shook his head, this time with total conviction.
‘Come on, Terry, we both know that’s impossible. A native-born Arab would quite possibly be turned and work against us. As for a non-Arab, forget it. We both know all Arabs come from extended families, clans, tribes. One enquiry of the family or clan and the impostor would be exposed.
‘So he would have to be CV-perfect. Add to that he would have to look the part, speak the part and, most important, pray the part. One syllable wrong in all those prayers and the fanatics would spot it. They recite five times a day and never miss a beat.’
‘True,’ said Martin, knowing his case was hopeless but enjoying the fantasy. ‘But one could learn the Koranic passages and invent an untraceable family.’
‘Forget it, Terry. No Westerner can pass for an Arab among Arabs.’
‘My brother can,’ said Dr Martin. In seconds, if he could have bitten off his own tongue, he would have. But it was all right. Dr Jolley grunted, dropped the subject and studied the early outskirts of Washington. Neither head in the front, beyond the glass, moved an inch. Martin let out a sigh of relief. Any mike in the car must be turned off.
He was wrong.