De Payns sat in the departure lounge of Haifa’s airport, keeping his distance from Danny, who sat in another row of seats. Jéjé and Templar had caught buses to Tel Aviv and were flying from there. It was part of the Company’s security protocols that, having operated in-country as a team, the OTs travelled back to Paris separately, playing out their individual legends.
He’d slept very little. He was exhausted and confused. It was only right to let the Israelis deal with a threat in their own territory, as the French would always insist on doing in France, and being pulled away from the conclusion of his work was the nature of the job. But he liked it to be done right and he preferred to be there at the finish.
As he waited for the 2 p.m. flight he noticed the airport had three news services on different television screens. Al Jazeera carried a story about tomorrow’s commissioning of the first gas from the Pontus rig and the Pantheon gas field. There were sweeping helicopter shots of the massive gas-processing ship, the IceMAX, standing off from the gas rig: the journalist explained that the ship would take off gas and ship it to Egypt, but one day that gas could be piped directly into Europe via Greece and Italy. De Payns drank coffee and winced, fearing that at any moment a Javelin rocket would shimmy through the air like a sliver of death and turn Pontus into a fireball. It made him nervous, even though he knew the threat was extinguished—for now.
The BBC screen carried a short piece about a section of Haifa losing power and residents complaining that their cars and computers no longer worked. He couldn’t hear the sound, so he followed the English subtitles: the power company was calling it an ‘anomaly’ and the government had ‘no comment’ about the rumour that an EMP had been set off. The BBC interviewed a person who claimed that the oil and gas operators in the port area had not been affected because oil and gas operators in Israel protected their critical ITC infrastructure with Faraday cages, a claim the government person called a ‘conspiracy theory’.
De Payns needed a drink. He went to the bar and ordered a beer, and while paying he saw another TV behind the bar. CNN was playing a news segment with a ‘Breaking’ chyron across the bottom of the screen. A ship named Golden Lady—from Muscat, sailing for Port Said—had sunk in the Gulf of Aden as it tried to pass into the Red Sea. The report said French frigates had secured the area and were hunting for survivors. The TV footage showed what looked like dive boats and frogmen between the two warships. A local man was talking to a reporter, and CNN had provided a voice-over translation: ‘The French navy opened fire on the ship—we could see it from the beach where we were fishing—they sailed up to the freighter and sank it.’ The French navy had issued a statement explaining that the frigates were conducting humanitarian operations in the wake of the maritime tragedy and disinformation about French aggression was emanating from terror cells in Yemen.
De Payns raised his beer and grinned. Wagner Group had just lost one hundred and twenty Javelins, which would be better recovered by French naval divers than left in the hands of Hezbollah’s Homs militia. He also reflected on the fact that a bunch of sailors had lost their lives in the process.
He looked out the window as he sipped his cold beer. He thought about Romy and the boys, his marriage and his own mental condition. Then he shoved the thoughts aside and concentrated on coming back from the moon and getting his final mile totally correct. He went to take another sip and realised he’d been holding his breath.