The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

  'I'd say that's promising, maybe interesting.'

  'What we're doing, Eddie - this is between you and me, this is between friends or it'll be my head in the next cardboard box -

  is we're going to put some toys down in the Empty Quarter, we're—'

  'Big kids' toys?'

  'You could say that. Anything you hear—'

  'Top of my agenda. Your toys, what's going to be their status with the locals?'

  Fifteen of the hijackers came out of here. They're bankrolled from here. The families of the Twin Towers are serving writs here for punitive damages. Then there's the war, the Angst. I wouldn't trust any last one of the bastards. They get to know the sum total of damn all. I'd appreciate your help. What we're saying is, the indications are that the Empty Quarter might just be a good place to regroup.'

  Eddie Wroughton was escorted out and the marine corporal slammed the gate after him. He remembered his one flight over a desolate, heat-baked wilderness. His step was jaunty - God, he fed well off the Agency's table.

  The swollen fingers, where the flesh bulged over gold rings, took his hand.

  'Don't look into my face,' Caleb said. 'Don't remember me.'

  The man's head dropped, as if he took a point of focus for his eyes on the dirt and gravel at the centre of the intersection of the two tracks, but his slug-thick fingertips moved over Caleb's hand and on to his wrist. Clumsily, they unravelled the cloth, then the wrist was pulled gently forward and the head twisted to look down at the bracelet. In a soft voice, the man recited Fawzi al-Ateh's name, and the reference number given at Camp Delta. Caleb's wrist was let go.

  The man walked, with a waddling stride, back to his car, and bent to retrieve something from the safe box under the passenger seat.

  He was a parcel and was passed on. A van with smoked windows had met him at the Omani shoreline and driven him inland. He had sat in the back, at the side, away from the field of vision of the driver's mirror. He had been left at a roadside near to a town, Ad Dari, on the far side of a mountain range. Traffic had sped past him until a Japanese four-wheel drive had ploughed on to the road's dirt shoulder, scattering dust over him. Through the open window his wrist bracelet had been examined. He had been driven away, again in the back seat, and taken beyond the wadi Rafash. He had been dropped off at a cross-point where trees in leaf threw down a sweet pool of shadow. He had waited there an hour, or more, and then the Audi had come, and the grossly overweight man had levered himself out and come to him.

  The plastic bracelet from Camp Delta was his identification, as important as the pass-code numbers used by the guards when he had been brought from the cell blocks to the interrogation compound.

  The man's robes flapped loose in a light wind. He carried back a small but heavy silken pouch, whose neck was held tight by a woven thong. He had forgotten himself and had stared momentarily at Caleb, then remembered and ducked his head. He gave the pouch to Caleb.

  Caleb squatted down. His robe, dry from the sun, starched from the salt water, was tight between his thighs and made a basin in which to empty the pouch's contents. Gold coins cascaded on to his robe. They shimmered in the light. Caleb counted out a fortune in money, then carefully replaced each coin in the pouch, and put it into the inner pocket of his robe. The man looked away studiously, up the empty roads.

  His voice was soft, like spoken music. 'I do not know your name, stranger, or what is your business, or where you go. You are a person held in extreme value by your friends .. . May God go with you, wherever he takes you. As a hawaldar, I have no eyes and no memory.

  You do not seem to me to be from Oman, you are too tall and too heavily built, and I do not think you come from the Gulf. 1 deal in transactions of cash - ten dollars or a million dollars. I do not require your name because J do not need your signature. Haiual is the name of the trade. In our tongue, in Oman and the Gulf, it is a word that means trust. There is no trail of paper. I say you have received the money and those who are your friends will believe me. The trust is absolute. Rather than betray you, I would go to my grave. Rather than betray those who have sent you the money, I would cut out my tongue.'

  He looked down into Caleb's face. The sincerity was there, and loyalty. He seemed to drink in the features of Caleb's face, to gorge himself. He crouched beside Caleb. 'I tell you, my young stranger, that the intelligence agencies of the Americans and the British hate, detest, loathe, the system of hawal. Money transfers are made, coded signals, and they cannot suck up the messages into their computers and so identify me, you and your friends. They blaspheme in frustration. The links are secret and you should have no fear.'

  Caleb leaned forward and kissed the man's cheeks. He saw the admiration in the man's eyes and was confused.

  'May God go with you, may your destination be Paradise. The poet Hasan Abdullah al-Qurashi wrote: "Glory in life is complete for the one who dies for a principle, for an ideal, for a grain of sand." I have admiration, beyond bounds, for your courage and for your willingness to sacrifice yourself. I know you are of great importance were you not, the effort to move you would not have been made. It is my privilege to have helped you. You are like the bright star in the night, the brightest.'

  The man pushed himself up and went to his car. The dust spewed behind him as he drove away.

  At the crossroads, where the tracks met, where the shadows lengthened, Caleb sat, his head bowed. After the vehicle had disappeared, the quiet was broken only by birds' chatter. With each step he had made since he had run from the road between the base and the prison, he had sought only to return to his family. But each man he had met, who had moved him on, had shown the same fascination, awe of him. Why?

  Far away, a dustcloud careered off the northern track and came closer.

  Was he already marked with death? Had the family chosen him for death? The words were hammer beats in his head: 'Glory in life is complete for the one who dies for a principle, for an ideal, for a grain of sand.' The poet's lilt had gone.

  An old, dust-coated pickup stopped, then reversed and sped bumpily away. He was taken north, and sat close to a bleating lamb between two hobbled goats.

  Bart worked late. The surgery was in a side-turning off the Al-Imam Abdul Aziz ibn Muhammad street. The glass-faced block was easy to find, half-way between the Central Hospital and the Riyadh museum.

  He reassured the German banker that his stomach pains came from ulcers in the lower gut, not from bowel cancer, prescribed the necessary remedies and showed the grateful man to the door. The banker would pay his receptionist, and the fee would be generous.

  No expatriate was using his own money: it was either from an insurance policy or from the company employing him. The banker wrung his hand in thanks at the diagnosis, then headed for the receptionist and ferreted in his pocket for either his cheque book or his wallet with the credit cards. Bart smiled balefully after him, then closed the door. He washed his hands at the sink, then stared out of the window, through the slat blinds, at the evening traffic. In the morning, the reward for his diagnosis, not a life-threatening tumour but a simple ulcer, would be electronically moved to a numbered, nameless bank account in Geneva, then its trail would scatter via Liechtenstein and Gibraltar to the Cayman Islands . . . It was his nest-egg - but where would he spend it? He assumed that, one day, when Wroughton had no more use for him, he would be cast off and allowed to drift away, but he did not know where he would eke out his last days. Then, wherever, he would be alone at the mercy of a conscience. Oh, yes, Samuel Algernon Laker Bartholomew had a newly developed conscience: in the nights it gnawed at him - he would wake sweating - and in the days it stabbed him. He dried his hands. His buzzer went.

  She was shown in by the Malaysian nurse.

  Bart beamed. 'Good evening, Miss Jenkins. I hope you haven't been waiting too long.'

  'It's Beth, remember? No, not too long.'

  'How was the shopping in Bahrain?'

  'Bought a couple of pairs of jeans, some smalls, some pasta, a
new pair of sand boots. Oh, I read a bit, swam a bit - crashed out, really.

  It was just good to feel the sea.'

  Her voice, Bart thought, was money - educated money and class money. She was one of those young women, he felt, who had only certainties in her life, for whom things happened because she wanted them to. There was about her that same confidence he had seen at the party. She was, he recognized it, a little breath of freshness in the daily routine that cocooned him in the sealed consulting room.

  'Good, glad it worked out/ he said vacantly. 'Well, how can I help you?'

  'I'm hoping you can't help me at all.'

  She was rocking on her feet, staring back at him. She might have been gently mocking him. She wore the same skirt and the same blouse as she had at the party. He wondered if she had stayed for the

  'brown tea', but doubted it. She didn't look to Bart to be the sort of expatriate who needed slugs of Jack Daniel's or Johnnie Walker for survival in the Kingdom.

  Bart said, 'Very few people come to see me merely to indulge in conversation.'

  She laughed. 'Sorry, sorry - I've been here just short of two years.

  I've never had a check-up. I live down south and I'm the only woman there. The quack's used to dealing with men falling off drilling platforms. I just wanted to make sure I was all right before going back. I hope I'm not wasting your time.'

  'Very wise, a check-up. You're not wasting my time. Anything that's worrying you?'

  He was glad he hadn't to ask her to strip: her directness frightened him. He took her blood pressure. He listened, through the material of her blouse, to her heartbeat. Women who caught his eyes and held them had always frightened him - Ann had, and the senior partner in the practice at Torquay, and his mother. Her blood pressure was good and her heartbeat was fine. He tapped her chest, poked her a little with his finger and felt the solid wall of her stomach muscles.

  Nothing wrong with her reflexes. The stomach muscles told him she was as strong as an ox, and he saw that her biceps bulged against the cuffs of her short-sleeved blouse. He went through his check-list.

  Menstrual problems? She hadn't any. Pains in the kidneys? None.

  Ten minutes later, he stepped back from her. 'Nothing to worry about.'

  'Thanks, it was just that I don't know when I'll next be up here, in civilization.'

  Something about her disarmed his caution, as it had at the party.

  The examination finished, the nurse had left them.

  'Not that I wish to contradict you, Miss Jenkins, but we have differing ideas about civilization. I would think you have to be fresh out of a cave to regard this place as civilized. In my book the construction of glossy buildings, wide roads and an extravagant spending power bordering on the obscene do not add up to civilization. The culture here is of corruption - it's a society of skimmers, fixers and intermediaries, one bloody great family freeloading off the oil resource. I'm here, like every other expatriate, to feed the greed.'

  She asked, with that inbred directness, 'So why do you stay?'

  Bart blanched. 'We don't all have options, Miss Jenkins,' he stammered. 'Right, any problems and you don't hesitate to call me.

  Oh, if it's not impertinent, how did you hear of me?'

  'I was down at the embassy, logging in with the new people. I was talking to one of the second secretaries and asking him about a doctor, a check-up. Another chap wandered up to us, must have heard what I was asking for. He gave me your name.'

  'Oh, I must thank him. It's always good to know the grapevine works. Who was he?'

  She paused, seemed to trawl in her memory, then smiled. 'Got it. Wroughton, Eddie Wroughton. That's who you should thank.'

  Bart stiffened. She had made him reckless. He hardly knew her, but she had weakened all the defences he arrayed round himself.

  'He's a parasite. He feeds off people. No, I'm wrong, he's worse than a parasite. Wroughton is as poisonous as a viper.' He caught himself.

  'Have a good journey back, down south.'

  Later, when his waiting room was empty and the nurse and receptionist had gone, he looked through the papers she had filled in.

  She was twenty-seven years old. Her handwriting was like her personality - b o l d . He rather hoped he would never see her again. Her address was a post box, c/o Saudi ARAMCO, at Shaybah. He knew where Shaybah was, and that little morsel of knowledge comforted him - he would not see her or hear of her again. He rang for a taxi, ft seemed to him that when he'd touched her, her chest, muscles and organs, he'd touched danger - and when he'd looked at her, into the sparkle of her eyes, he'd looked into the depths of danger.

  Before the sun had dipped far away to the west over the Asir mountains, the pilot had called Marty and Lizzy-Jo forward, had parked them in a jump-seat and the co-pilot's and had given them the bird's eye view. They had flown over the desert, and the map, devoid of recognizable features or the green of vegetation or any sign of habitation, had been on Lizzy-Jo's knee. The red sand, lit by the falling sun, had been scarred only by the dune formations, and what the pilot called their 'slipfaces', and he'd talked about 'crescentic dunes', 'star dunes', 'fishhook dunes' and 'linear dunes', and had identified all the strange and naturally made shapes at twenty-eight thousand feet below them. And he'd pointed out the sabkhas, the salt-crusted playas of sand between the dunes. He'd told them, his dry Texan voice clear in their headphones, that the Rub' al Khali covered an area of - close to - a quarter million square miles, and that trying to map the dune features was time wasted because they moved, prodded and reshaped by the winds. He'd said that, right now, down there and under the sun's blaze, the current ground temperature was well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Three years back an F-A18 Hornet, overflying the Rub' al Khali, had gone down out there in the middle of nowhere and a sandstorm had prevented helicopters with long-range tanks getting in. The rescue party from the Prince Sultan airbase at Al Kharj, on the northern fringe of the desert, had finally reached the wreckage using Hummer four-wheel drives, and had been too late. 'It was like the sun had burned him to death, dehydrated him, taken every last drop of juice out of him, and he was a trained guy, and the last day he'd been alive it was reckoned the temperature had hit one hundred and forty degrees, ma'am.' Then, the light had gone and they'd started a gradual descent.

  'You folks drive the Predator?' The pilot was on manual but found time to talk. He wanted conversation: the UAVs were in their coffins behind the bulkhead, with the Ground Control Station and the trailers on which the satellite dishes were housed. Perhaps he thought that a young man with distorting spectacles, tousled hair and short trousers didn't look like any pilot that he, a military man, had ever known. Or perhaps he thought the young woman in her short skirt didn't seem like any sensor operator he'd ever met.

  'What we do, as with all Agency business, is rated as classified,'

  Marty said.

  'Just asking - don't mean to put my nose where it's not meant to be.'

  Lizzy-Jo said, 'He's the pilot for what we've got, MQ-ls. I sit beside him and do the fancy stuff - telling the truth, there should be two of me but the guy who's supposed to be—'

  'Lizzy-Jo, that's classified,' Marty snapped.

  She ignored him. '—supposed to be alongside me is down at Bagram with amoebic dysentery. We have to make do.'

  The pilot was almost old enough to be Marty's father. 'Where have you flown, son?'

  Marty said that he had flown at Nellis, Nevada, for his training, and out of Bagram, and he looked defiantly at the pilot. At Nellis there had been veteran pilots, and at Bagram from the USAF, and they'd all been spare with words but had not hidden their contempt at his age and appearance. Flying for them was a killing game when the Hellfires were on the pods under a Predator's wings. For Marty, flying was as intellectual a task as working the machines in a kids'

  arcade. He scowled and waited for the sarcastic retort from the pilot about his inexperience. He didn't get it.

  'Perhaps ya'll know all this -
in which case you'll say so. Feel the turbulence? That's standard here. We have big winds over the dunes, forty knots or fifty. What I heard, Predator doesn't like winds.'

  'It can cope,' Marty said.

  'Can't even take off if cross-winds exceed fifteen knots,' Lizzy-Jo said. 'And it's pretty difficult to get decent imagery on screen if it's rough up high.'