The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

Few knew him. Only the wives he bedded, the most valued of the agents he handled and his one friend in the Kingdom's capital could have passed a serious judgement on Eddie Wroughton. He appeared a caricature of an Englishman abroad and he played to that super-ficial image. Day and night, at work, at the ambassador's dinner table, as a guest of the princes of the ruling family or on a field trip out of the city, he wore a cream-coloured linen suit that was always pressed and creaseless, a brilliant white shirt, a knotted silk tie and burnished brown brogues. He wore dark glasses, indoors or out, in the heat of the sun or the cool of an evening. Few knew the strength of those eyes and would have recognized in them traits of character.

  They were bright, ruthless, glinting, mocking. They were cruel. . . He was a clever man, and knew it.

  In his apartment's kitchen, in the microwave, he heated himself a curry for one, then washed his hands.

  With regard to Samuel Bartholomew he had two distinct certainties: he dominated him, and at some moment in the future the domination would pay off, big-time. The microwave bleeped. He knew the doctor's history, had read it in the confidential file sent to him when the wretch had arrived in Riyadh. He served his meal and took it on a tray to his favoured chair. He thought the man pitiful, knew what he had done in Palestine, thought him beneath contempt

  - but potentially so very useful, one day.

  Al Maz'an village, near Jenin, Occupied West Bank.

  It was only the end of the first week and already he had played his part.

  Bart stamped out of the wooden hut and jumped down from the doorway on to the thick gravel that made a path across a sea of mud. He turned, held up his medical bag and waved it angrily at the man now leaning against the door jamb. It had been his first meeting with the Shin Beth officer, his handler. 'You know what? I'll tell you what. You dishonour the human race.

  Your behaviour is simply beyond the pale,' Bart shouted.

  His handler lit a cigarette, threw the dead match down on to the mud, and gazed back at him with indifference.

  'And I'll tell you something else - and wipe that smile off your arrogant little face. You are a fucking disgrace to your nation.'

  He rather liked the handler. He'd expected a man manipulative and brusque but he'd found instead a sensitive, frail young fellow, perhaps fifteen years younger than himself. Would he like coffee? How was he settling into the village? Were the signs good? Was he trusted? Could anything be done to help him? The handler, Joseph, worked and slept, cooked and ate in the hut close to the checkpoint. Of course, Joseph wore military uniform with the same insignia flashes as the troops controlling the checkpoint.

  'I'm going to report you for gross obstruction. As a UK national engaged on humanitarian work, funded by my government, I can raise a storm. I hope that storm lands on your disgusting little head. Stopping a doctor of medicine going about his work shames your uniform. You see if I don't make waves.'

  In the hut, over coffee, Bart had been shown photographs of local leaders of Islamic Jihad and Hamas. He had pored over the map of the village and its satellite communities. He had a good retentive memory. Joseph's briefing on the local security situation had been excellent - calm, detailed and lacking in political rhetoric. Joseph was professional... He'd had pictures, in a threadbare-covered album, of the aftermath of suicide attacks on Haifa buses, Jerusalem's market and Tel Aviv's cafes, but Bart had already been shown similar albums in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem where this stage of his journey had begun - and from the start of that journey he had never had the chance to refuse, to step off the treadmill. As he walked away, crunching over the gravel, the rain spattered on him, and the mud seeping through the stones caked his shoes.

  'Don't forget my name! It's Sam Bartholomew, you bastard,' Bart shouted over his shoulder. 'But you'll wish you'd never heard it by the time I'm through with you.'

  The soldiers had finished searching his car - he heard the door slam. By the time he reached it the rain had soaked what hair he had left, ran down his face and dampened his clothes. A corporal, scowling, held open the car door for him, but Bart shouldered him aside, as if he refused to accept any belated courtesy from a member of the Israeli Defence Forces. Standing in the rain, perhaps forty Palestinians were held up at the checkpoint. It had taken Bart twenty-five minutes apparently to be processed at the roadblock, but it would take the Palestinians half a day to go through if they were lucky, and half a day to be turned back if they weren't. Their faces, men, women and children, had been sullen when he had emerged from the hut.

  But they had heard his abuse, and those who understood it translated for those who did not. As he climbed into his car, decorated with red crescents

  - the Palestinian equivalent symbol to a red cross - on the side doors and on the roof, there was a ripple of applause, and he saw little rays of pleasure break on their faces. It was as intended. He drove away.

  His head slumped. His eyeline was barely above the rim of the dashboard.

  He was trapped, he could tell himself, he'd had no option. If his father had learned to where his son had sunk he would have strangled him, but his father was dead. He drove on towards Jenin where he would go to the clinic, make friends and collect what few of the basic medicines were available. He cut his father out of his mind, and the need for medicines, so that he could better remember the map he had been shown and the photographs of wanted men . . .

  Joseph had told him that he must beware of self-doubt, that he should not hate himself, that above all he should not entertain the luxury of conscience. If Joseph had only known, Samuel Bartholomew's conscience was long gone.

  They reached the quayside at Sadich. The map shown to him told Caleb they were on the southern extremity of the Iranian coastline.

  The dark seascape in front of him was the Gulf of Oman. He felt a raw, drifting excitement because he was about to take a further step in his journey.

  The officer spoke in Arabic: 'You are, my friend, an enigma to me.

  I cannot think of the last time that a man surprised me. You have achieved what I would have believed an impossibility, a confusion in my mind. I call you "my friend" because I do not know your given name or the name of your father. I am given tasks by my government that are of the greatest sensitivity, and trust is placed in me for the reason that I have a reputation for delving into the secrets of men's minds, but after eleven days in your company I have failed. You are not a taxi-driver - and I consider also that Abu Khaleb is only a temporary flag of convenience. Before I pass you on, who are you?'

  It was certainly not a town, barely a village. They had left the Mercedes and the driver in the car park beside the building for the co-operative that boxed fish and put ice into the boxes before the lorries came. At the quayside there were trading dhows, fishing-boats and a little flotilla of a half-dozen launches with large twin outboards, all poorly lit by the high lights. The wind came in hard and sang in the rigging stays of the dhows, and rocked the launches at their moorings. Caleb gazed at the sea, did not respond to the officer's question, as he had not for the past eleven days and nights.

  Some of those days had passed fast, some slowly. Some of the nights he had slept, for others there had been no end. He had been questioned by the colonel inside the locked, shuttered villa, but for most of the hours between meals he had watched Iranian television and had used the weights and the rowing machine offered him; he had alternately rested and built his strength. He imagined that messages had gone ahead, that answers had been received, but he did not know where the messages had been sent, or from where they had been returned. What he had learned, in those long days and longer nights, was that his importance and value to his family were confirmed further - as they had been during the time he had waited in the village in far-away Afghanistan. The sea's blow whipped his long robe and the importance gave him pride - not that he would boast of it.

  'Do I need to know your true identity? No .. . but I like to have the loose threads tied. There is your accent. The Arabic I speak is
from Iraq. I learned the Arabic of Iraq from prisoners of their army captured in the fighting on the Faw peninsula - but I do not know Egyptian Arabic or Yemeni, Syrian or Saudi. I tried tricks on you . . .

  You remember the morning I woke you with a shout, an order, in English, but you did not respond? At lunch, two days ago, without warning I spoke to you in the German language. Five days ago when we walked in the garden, it was Russian . . . You are a man of great talent, my friend, because you did not betray yourself. You have no name, you have no origin -1 think that is your value.'

  He looked out beyond the breakwater of heaped boulders, beyond the navigation light raised on rusted stanchions, and he saw the whipped white crests of the incoming waves. He felt the chill of the wind. At the villa behind the walls and the steel-plated gate, the robe had been taken from him and laundered. Now the wind plastered it against the outline of his torso and legs.

  'And you have no history - perhaps because you are ashamed of it, perhaps because it is irrelevant to you, perhaps because you are in denial of it. You appear in Landi Khotal, on the Pakistan side of the common border with Afghanistan, some four years ago, a little less, and there is nothing before that, only darkness. You frustrate me . . .

  You are recruited, trained, placed with the 055 Brigade, captured, and by deception - I promise you, I admire the deception - are freed.

  Word is passed that you have escaped the Americans, and instructions are given at the highest level that you should be moved on

  - your worth is weighed in gold. It is not my business, I know, I only carry out instructions given me in great confidence, but you are a man of value. I do not know who you are or what your history is, or what it is hoped you will achieve. I tell you, in great honesty, my friend, when you are gone I will wake in the nights and that ignorance will be like a stone in my shoe.'

  On the quayside's rough concrete, men were working in the faint light to repair nets, and others were climbing down the quayside ladders to the launches. He heard the deep-throat roar of the outboards starting up.

  'They cross the Gulf to the Omani shore - they go empty and come back with cartons of American cigarettes. We permit the trade. It is useful to have a route out of and into the country that is not observed

  . . . You have to go, my friend . . . Time calls. May I say something more? . . . I am certain of you. If I had doubted you, I would have hanged you. I do not understand your motivation, your commitment, but I believe in its steel strength. You will strike a great blow against a common enemy - I do not know when or where, but I am satisfied that I will have played a humble and insignificant part in your strike, and I will listen to the radio and watch the television and when it happens I will be happy to have played a part. .. May God go with you.'

  The officer put his arm on Caleb's and they walked together towards the launches.

  'The war goes badly. There have been setbacks. Have regard to the power of the enemy and its machines - only the hardest man can succeed . . . You look at the men who will carry you across the Gulf, and they will have seen your face. Have no worry. They will return with cigarettes, they will be taken by the Customs police and they will go to gaols in the north. They cannot betray you.'

  He stood above the ladder. Five of the launches were already edging out into the harbour behind the breakwater; the last was held against the ladder.

  'You have seen my face and I have seen yours. My friend, already I have forgotten you, even if I wake in the night, and I have no fear of your betrayal. You will never again be captured. You will taste sweet freedom or sweeter death. God watch you.'

  Caleb went down the ladder. He felt the night close round him, and the cold.

  'What the hell, man, I was asleep. What time is it?'

  Marty blinked at the ceiling light.

  The duty officer who manned night-time communications in the Agency's corral stood over him.

  'The time is about ten minutes after the Best and the Brightest have finished a good lunch in the senior staff diner at Langley. An excellent time, they believe, to fuck with the lives of low-rank foot-soldiers. Local time, if you need it, is ten after midnight. Read this, Marty, and inwardly digest . . . Seems clear enough, even for a pretend pilot.'

  Marty worked the sleep from his eyes, reached out and took the offered sheet, and read. He read it again. The duty officer was raking round the little room with its low ceiling and hardboard walls. He read it a third time, like he hoped it would go away but it didn't.

  'Shit. . . Who's seen it?'

  'George - well, he's the one who's going to have the headache. I felt he should be first.'

  George Khoo, the Chinese-born mission technical officer, was responsible for keeping First Lady and Carnival Girl maintained and operationally ready. Down the corridor, through the thin door and the thin walls of the rooms, Marty heard a door slam, then boots hammering away, and he heard a shout of protest at the disturbance.

  George wouldn't have cared, not now he'd been given Langley's orders.

  'So, what did George say?'

  'That's a real nice picture, that is, pretty cool . . . Nothing I'd care to repeat.'

  There was a framed photograph of his parents outside their cabin in the hills up north from Santa Barbara. But the duty officer was staring in fascination at a big picture in a gold-rimmed frame, Marty's pride and joy. He'd seen it on the Internet, offered by a firm in London, and it had arrived at Bagram six weeks back. The legend under it was 'The Last Stand of the 44th Regiment at Gundamuck, 1842'. It showed fourteen Brit soldiers clustered in a little circle, rifles raised and bayonets fixed; a couple of them had sabres drawn, and plenty more Brits were spread round the group, dead or wounded, and the tribesmen were coming up the hill towards them. It didn't seem that the Brits had a single round left between them. Behind the tribesmen were snow-covered mountains. It was by William Barnes Wollen, born 1857, died 1936.

  'That is a really cool picture.'

  Marty grunted and pulled himself off the bed. It was the first picture he'd ever owned and it had cost him seventy-five dollars for the print, ninety dollars for the frame and $110 for shipment, but it had survived the transportation. In front of the men who were going to die, and knew it, an officer stood, sword in one hand, a revolver in the other, straight-backed like all Brits were supposed to be, and he wore a suede coat with fur lining. Under the coat the gold-decorated flag of his regiment was wrapped round him and worth defending.

  The officer, Lieutenant Souter, had been spared because the Afghans thought him too important - he had the flag - to castrate and kill, so he'd been ransomed. Marty had done research on the Internet, but he didn't tell the duty officer.

  'Has Lizzy-Jo been woken up?'

  'Thought I'd give that pleasure to you .. .'

  The duty officer left him. Marty swigged water from his bottle and spat it into the sink, then unhitched his robe from the door hook.

  He knocked on Lizzy-Jo's door, heard her, went in. She sat up in her bed and didn't seem bothered that her pyjama top was open.

  Marty said, 'We're being moved. We're pulling out in the morning, heading to Saudi Arabia, don't know for how long . . . George - God, and I wouldn't like to be near him - has gone off to get the birds in the coffins. The plane to lift us is being readied.'

  She heard him out, then told him to switch off the ceiling light and turned to the wall. He went out. Only Lizzy-Jo could go back to sleep in the face of such crazy intrusion into the routine of their work - it would have taken an earthquake to frazzle her.

  As the night ended, the flotilla broke formation. Five of the launches veered to the south, his carried straight on. The parting was at speed and the farewell shouts, the other crews to his, were drowned in the engine noise and the hull beating on the swell of the waves. He watched until the wakes of the five were gone, then subsided again into the corner of the low cabin where he'd wedged himself. He had been sick twice and his shoulders were bruised where he'd been tossed against the forward
bulkhead of the cabin and its side wall.

  The crew were two kids in jeans and windcheaters with long hair. He wouldn't have talked to them if they had wanted it, but they didn't.

  He was as much a piece of cargo as the cigarette cartons they would bring back. He assumed they had been paid generously by the intelligence officer for transporting him and had no suspicion that when they returned to the harbour on the southern shore of Iran they would be arrested, then left to rot in prison cells. Above the engine he heard the shout. The one at the wheel had his hands cupped at his mouth, then pointed. He saw the excitement on the kid's spray-soaked face. He peered through the cabin's porthole.

  He saw the great hulk.

  A tiny bow wave parted as the aircraft-carrier edged towards the launch. It was grey against a grey sea and a grey sky. He saw its massive power. The other kid passed him binoculars and he steadied himself, elbows on the ledge below the porthole, focused and looked.

  The image danced before his eyes. He saw sailors on the decks walking as if they were in a park, like in Jalalabad or by the zoo in Kabul.

  He saw the aircraft stacked at the edge of the deck, some with their wings folded back. The kid at the wheel jerked them away from a closing course and he dropped back into his corner. They would have thought, walking on the aircraft-carrier's deck, that their power was invincible. He held his head in his hands.

  Crossing the Gulf, wearing the white linen robe that had been given him, Caleb sensed the complexity of the plan to move him closer to his family. He had come to the village, pathetic in his weakness, and now - out on the sea and speeding towards a distant landfall - he understood the great effort made to return him to the family.

  It lay as a burden on him, which only he could carry.

  Chapter Three

  The launch knifed into the surf of the shore and surged as if on a collision course with the beach. The final quarter of the sun balanced on the ridges of distant hills. Caleb watched the approach from the cabin's porthole. All through the journey across the Gulf the kids had not spoken to him and they had not fed him. His only contact with them had been when a canvas bucket filled with sea-water had been dumped at the entrance to the cabin. He had realized its purpose and rinsed out the vomit from his robe, then had used his hands to clean the cabin floor. Much of the time they had watched him but when he had looked up from his place against the bulkhead they had turned away their eyes as if they understood that - unarmed, alone - he had carried danger to them . . . As the sun fell below the hills, Caleb failed to see any movement on the shore. Three or four miles to the right, when they had been further out at sea, he had seen what he thought was a fishing village, but as they came closer it had disappeared.