Luckhurst replied without hesitation, ‘No. It took maybe twenty minutes before we got to the beach. Admittedly the boats they took us in were pretty small, but they had reasonable outboards on them. We must have gone south, or else I would have seen Mogadishu. It’s quite a large city.’
Peggy zeroed in on the coastline, starting on the southern fringes of the capital city, which was laid out in visible rectangles, then moving slowly south, past the long strip of the international airport and further down the coast. Here the white tops of breakers could be made out, the flat sand of the beach, and dunes pockmarked by the few trees hardy enough to grow there. There seemed to be little or no signs of habitation, and no obvious dwellings; where the city ended, the desert took over.
‘Can’t say anything looks familiar…’
Peggy understood, since even at close range, from a height of less than a mile, it was hard to make sense of a terrain of water, sand, and more sand. ‘Was there any specific feature in the camp you can recall?’
‘I can’t give you an account of the whole camp, as I said. But there was a big block house behind the compound wall which I once got a glimpse of – Khalid lived there. He was the leader of the pirates. And the pen we were held in was very long – fifty, maybe sixty feet, and seven or eight feet wide. It must once have been used to hold animals – chickens, maybe.’
‘Would it be visible to an aerial shot?’
‘Absolutely. If there’d been any shade – even a baobab tree or whatever – we’d have been delighted. But there was nothing – just the sun above.’
Then Peggy clicked for another pop-up box, which listed categories of search items: elevated contours, elevated installations, bodies of water, moving water, vegetation, dwellings, vehicles, humans, animal life. She ticked dwellings and hit return.
‘What’s this?’
‘It ties intelligent search to the satellite photos,’ she said, and left it at that. Not that I could explain much further, she thought, since she was just parroting the explanation of Technical Ted, from A2, who had loaded the special software on to her laptop the day before, and briefed her on how to use it.
The screen view was from a higher vantage point again, but this time a series of highlighted dots, labelled A, B, C, etc., also appeared onscreen, scattered along the shoreline for a range of roughly twenty miles.
They worked their way through the dots carefully. Several were false positives – large boulders detected as buildings, or else abandoned sites, including a tiny village perched right on the shore, now full of deserted crumbling shacks.
Then, just half a mile down from the former village, they examined a number of shapes bunched closely together. They sat under a high rolling dune which half-disguised them from the normal perspective of the MOD aerial cameras. But zoomed in on and looked at carefully, they revealed a suspiciously orderly arrangement, with a central blob that could have been the block house Luckhurst had mentioned, surrounded by a thin line that might have been a wall. A dusty square sat next to it, and at its far end was a long dark rectangle.
‘The pen you were kept in,’ asked Peggy, ‘was it roofed?’
‘Part of it was. With plywood covered by tar paper – to keep us warm,’ Luckhurst said ironically.
Peggy laughed and increased the magnification by a notch. The blob sharpened slightly, and she could see that, yes, it was a structure – nature didn’t like straight lines. ‘What about this? Have we found it?’
Luckhurst peered closely at the scene. Finally he nodded. ‘It must be. There’s the wall, and the compound, and the pen next to the patch of ground where they let us out to exercise and where the food was cooked. There’s something else inside the compound wall…’
‘They look like huts,’ said Peggy.
‘Probably – that’s where Khalid’s men would stay, I suppose. But what are those?’
He pointed to some small triangular shapes that sat at the bottom of the square. ‘Can we look at them from a different angle?’ he asked hopefully.
‘You mean, like Google View?’ Peggy said, referring to the perspective showing scenes at street level. ‘Not very likely,’ she said, and laughed at the thought of a Google representative venturing out to the camp with a video camera. She looked back at the screen and suddenly said, ‘I know – they’re tents. Lots of tents. There must be a dozen of them.’
‘Taban said there had been visitors.’
‘And now we know exactly where they were staying.’ The next step, thought Peggy, was finding out who they were.
