The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

  It amazed him. On the whole of the day's march, he had seen no wood - nothing that lived and nothing that was even long dead. The pain had throbbed on the soles of his feet even as the sand had cooled and he had been self-absorbed by his discomfort and his pursuit of respect. Three times, where Caleb had only seen ochre sand the boy crouched and scrabbled with his hands like a burrowing rabbit and had triumphantly produced dried-out roots.

  The roots were brought back, broken and lit. Rashid used the old ways - worked his hands under the smallest and narrowest of the stems, sliced a flint across the blade of his knife, again and again, until the spark made smoke and then flame. The fire darkened the desert beyond the small circle of its light and the outline of the tents.

  Caleb watched. He had much to learn.

  Where the fire flared, Rashid scooped a hole under the widening embers, not seeming to feel pain. He had a metal bowl filled with flour and he sprinkled salt on it, then sparingly poured water on to the flour and kneaded the mess to little shapes. When he'd worked them and was satisfied he put the shapes into the hole and pushed sand over them. Their eyes met.

  Rashid, the guide, stared at Caleb's feet. Caleb tried to read him.

  Was he impressed? Rashid had the face of a wolf. Under his headcloth, held loosely in place with rope, his forehead was lined and wrinkled, his narrow eyes savaged what they lighted on and his nose was as prominent as a hook. Thin lips were above and below yellowed, uneven teeth and around them a tangle of hairs made the moustache and beard. No comment was given. Rashid moved on, hid his feelings. There was no sign of respect.

  When the sun had gone, before the moon was up and when the blackness cloaked them beyond the little fire's range, Ghaffur took the bread from the hole, shook off the sand and passed each of them two pieces. Rashid measured the water ration, poured a cupful. They ate the bread, drank from the cup and passed it back. Then they were given three dates. Caleb held them in his mouth and sucked until the stones had no more fruit on them.

  He said quietly to the Egyptian, 'What are you doing here? Why are you with me? What is my importance?'

  Hosni smiled and the shadows of the fire crackled across his face.

  He blinked and Caleb saw the opaque gloss on his eyes.

  'In the morning, perhaps . ..'

  Inside the cool of the tent, the pain at last ebbed from Caleb's feet.

  He knew so little. If the memories had crossed the chasm, he would have known more. He slept dreamlessly, his mind as dark as the night outside the tent.

  Chapter Six

  The scream pierced the morning air.

  Startled, Caleb looked around. He saw the guide, Rashid, loading the boxes on to the pack camels, with his son, Ghaffur. Fahd was clumsily folding the tents. Hosni kicked sand over what was left of the night's fire that the signs of it might be hidden.

  The scream was terror, from the depths of a man.

  He saw the Iraqi, Tommy. Tommy had never, not since they had set out into the desert, helped with the loading of the boxes or with folding the tents, as if that were beneath the dignity once belonging to him. Tommy had walked away after they had eaten the last of the bread baked the evening before. Once the work to move off had started, he had walked fifty paces, or sixty, from the camp and had squatted to defecate. That completed, he had sat apart from them and watched them as if he were not a part of them.

  The scream shrieked for help.

  As Caleb saw it, the Iraqi sat with his hands out behind him to support his weight, his legs stretched in front of him. He was rigid, as if not daring to move, staring down at the skin between his boots and the hem of his trousers.

  The guide was the first to react. Rashid ran with a short, scurrying stride towards Tommy, and Ghaffur followed. Hosni looked into the distance, at the direction of the scream, but seemed unable to identify its source. Fahd scrambled to catch the guide but when he was at the Bedouin's shoulder, he was abruptly pushed away. Caleb went slowly after them, but hung back.

  He looked past Rashid, gazed at the Iraqi. He stared at the eyes, which were distended, he raked over the chest and the open jacket and on to the trousers, still unfastened, and around the groin, then on down to the trembling ankles. Caleb saw the scorpion.

  The sun, not yet high, fell on the scorpion's back, identified each marking on it. It was small, would have fitted into the palm of his hand. Its head was hidden in a fold of the trouser leg, but the tail was clear. It was arched over its back, and below it was an angry reddening swell with a puncture hole at its centre.

  Tears rolled on Tommy's cheeks, his lips quivered. The scorpion was still, but the tail was up, poised for a second strike, and Caleb could see the needle at its tip. Rashid allowed only his son, Ghaffur, to come forward.

  The man and the boy were at either side of Tommy's legs. Each knelt, then each edged slowly towards the legs, until they were within a hand's reach of the ankles and the scorpion. Caleb heard Rashid murmur to the Iraqi, but could not hear what he said. Then he spoke, with great gentleness, to his child. Caleb saw Ghaffur, so slowly, rock backwards and forwards, as if he prepared to strike with the speed of the scorpion. Father and son kept their bodies and heads low, almost to the sand, so that their shadows did not pass over the legs and the scorpion.

  The father did not tell the son when or how, had trust in him, as though he knew his son's reactions and movements would be faster than his own, he would make a better strike than himself. The trembling spread from Tommy's head to his chest and hips; if he could not control it, if the creature were further disturbed, more venom would be injected into him.

  Ghaffur's hand flashed forward.

  Caleb gasped.

  The finger and thumb, delicate, slight and unprotected, caught the tail half an inch from the poison tip . . . and then the boy was grinning and holding up the writhing little creature. The Iraqi seemed to have fainted. Ghaffur marched with the scorpion first to Fahd, who flinched away, then held it in front of Hosni's dulled eyes, then brought it to Caleb. The scorpion thrashed and its pincers, limbs, body and head crawled against Ghaffur's hand; small spurts of venom came from the needle tip. Caleb saw, momentarily, the pride on the father's face before the mask slipped back. The boy took the knife from his belt and, with a slash as fast as his strike had been, he cut the tail from the body. The scorpion fell at his feet, writhing, then the boy threw the tail and its tip carelessly over his shoulder.

  Rashid used his fingernail to stroke the bitten wound.

  The yellowish body and legs and the darker pincers of the scorpion were still, dead in the sand.

  Rashid's fingernail stroked towards the centre of the swollen place, where the pinprick was, pushing the venom back from the extremities and towards the hole.

  Rashid barked an instruction at his son.

  Caleb followed Ghaffur. The boy returned to the camels, bent close to them and started to refasten the hobble ropes.

  'What does your father say?'

  'My father says the man is not fit to travel, that we will lose half a day before he is well enough to move. My father says we have to wait until he is stronger .. It is bad.'

  'You did well with it.'

  'Where you come from, are there no scorpions?'

  Caleb grimaced, was guarded against the question. There had been scorpions at X-Ray and Delta, only once had a guard been bitten, many scorpions in the corridors and cages and the guards had stamped their heavy boots on them or the prisoners had flattened them with their sandals. He lied: 'I have never seen a scorpion before.'

  The boy shrugged. 'It is easy to kill them . . . but we may lose half a day and that angers my father.'

  Away across the sand, near the dune wall, Rashid had torn a strip of cloth to a bandage width and was binding it round the Iraqi's shin, just below the knee. He began again to stroke his fingernail across the swelling.

  Caleb went to the Egyptian. 'We will lose half a day's march.

  We cannot move until he has recovered. It was a r
evolting creature.'

  'Any snake is revolting/ Hosni said, with bitterness.

  'Yes, any snake.' Caleb stared at the dulled eyes, and knew.

  'I did not see it well, I stayed back. I saw the boy take the head off.

  Was it a viper?'

  'I don't know snakes,' Caleb said. 'Last night I asked you - why do you travel with me? Why am I important?'

  'Important? Because of where you come from. Think on it, where you have come from. They tell me you are not a believer - to us you are the Outsider. That is what you have to consider when you ask of your importance. Can you admit it, where you come from?'

  'From the 055 Brigade - from Guantanamo.'

  'And before you were recruited?'

  Caleb took sand in his hands and let the grains fall between his fingers. Before the wedding and his recruitment was the darkness he had imposed. He remembered arriving in his suit, with Farooq and Amin, at the celebration after the wedding, and remembered the way that the Chechen had watched him, then set tests for him; everything before was in blackness. The next morning he had left - and he could remember it clearly - Landi Khotal before dawn; he had been told by the Chechen that he should forget his friends, Farooq and Amin. A pickup had taken him through the border and through the last of the narrow passes, and he had been brought to Jalalabad, and then straight on to the camp. At the camp, two days later, two postcards had been given him. The reverse pictures on the postcards had not been shown him, but he had read the words 'Opera House' and

  'Ayers Rock', and he had written two bland messages that he was well - and on each he had written a name and an address, but the name and the address were now erased from his mind. A small, tired smile played on the Egyptian's face.

  'You are the Outsider, you are separated from us - I am not offended. To us, the Outsider is the most valuable. He can go where we cannot. He has access where we do not. He can walk unseen where we are noticed. Who are we? Lesser creatures. What use do we have? Small, nothing that is strategic. We will watch you go, and we will pray for you, after you have disappeared into darkness, but we will listen to the radio and will hope to learn that the trust given you was not wrongly placed.'

  Once the Iraqi cried out, the only sound against the whisper of the Egyptian's voice and the restless grunting of the hobbled camels.

  Hosni's fingers, stubbed and wrinkled, came and touched Caleb's face and they moved across his features, as if discovering them, ran over his nose and his chin, through the hairs round his mouth, and it was a long time before they dropped away.

  'Don't go all shy on me - what did your Miss Jenkins have to say for herself?'

  Eddie Wroughton always varied the meeting-places with Samuel Bartholomew: a bookshop, a museum, a hotel lobby . .. The hotel was sumptuous, fitted to the highest specifications of carpets on marble flooring, lighting and furnishing. He'd ordered the orange juice, which was garnished with lemon slices, but Bartholomew hadn't touched his.

  'She paid for the consultation, didn't she? Strong as a good bay mare, I'd have said. So, what did she say?'

  Opposite him, Bartholomew sat hunched, pudgy head in pudgy hands. There was a cool, comfortable temperature in the lobby, but Bartholomew sweated.

  'Come on, come on . . . all right, I'll remind you. She is friendly with the deputy governor of the province, friendly enough to be allowed to live down there - what's his pillow talk? Didn't she gossip just a little? Such a wonderful consultation-room manner you have . . .' Wroughton leached sarcasm. 'Surely a few minor confidences were exchanged as you poked round her. While she had your disgusting fingers crawling over her, surely there was some gossip. Be a good chap, cough it up.'

  He knew he frightened the man, that he was supine. At the age of forty-one, Wroughton was young to be station chief at so prestigious a posting as Riyadh. His last two overseas bases had been in Sarajevo and Riga, but now he was top league. There was one overriding catastrophe in his life, a cloud that darkened the sun's glory: he had no money. He lived off his salary, spent cash only on what could be seen, was a pauper behind the privacy of his front door. There was no investment portfolio ticking over in London, only a rabbit hutch of an apartment on the wrong side of Pimlico. His poverty was kept as hidden as his sharpness and intelligence: playing a wealthy dandy, a buffoon, did him well . . . But the irritation at the lack of personal money was only battened down by his workload. He lived for work.

  'I don't push business your way out of the goodness of my soul. I expect payback. Miss Jenkins is down there in the sand, a place where a saint wouldn't survive. Didn't you pedal a bit faster, just a little? She's unique where she is, might just be the most interesting corner of this whole hideous place - she goes out into the desert. Got eyes in her head, hasn't she? What did you talk about? Her menstrual cycle?'

  Money, promotion, status in the Service, had never mattered to Wroughton's father, or to his grandfather. He was from a dynasty -

  not a financial dynasty, but a dynasty based on the precept that a grateful population must be allowed to sleep safe in bed. His father had done time in Moscow and Prague during the Cold War; his mother had been in Library, sifting, filing and annotating, until his birth. His grandfather had been seconded to MI5 after the Dunkirk evacuation, and then had had a good war turning the agents the Abwehr parachuted in and having them broadcast back misinformation; his great-uncle had hunted down war criminals after VE Day, and enough to have filled a small bus had gone on the dawn walk to the gallows. All through his childhood, at Sunday lunches, the glories of intelligence and counter-intelligence had been preached. No chance he could have gone elsewhere. He had been groomed as a youth for the Secret Intelligence Service. To Wroughton, Bartholomew was more pathetic than the agents his father had run behind the Iron Curtain, more pitiful than the turned Germans who saved their skins, more disgusting than the hanged butchers.

  'I sometimes think you forget your situation - do you? If we cut you adrift, then slip the word round, you're a gone man. Those nice little accounts, earning a low rate of interest but safe - the nest-egg for the future - can each have funds withdrawn at the pressing of a button. We have any number of people who specialize in that. Didn't you know? With your history, a quiet word from me, and your future is sleeping under cardboard beside Waterloo station. Just that I sometimes think it's necessary to remind you . . . If she ever comes back to you from that trackless wilderness, make sure she's pumped dry -

  there's a good chap.'

  To reinforce it, emphasize his argument, Wroughton manoeuvred his right foot's brogue, then kicked hard against Bartholomew's left ankle. Wroughton had never believed his mother had liked him, let alone loved him, or that his father had respected him. On the day of his first induction interview at the Service, his grandfather had offered him the stern advice that he should look in the City for employment, but Eddie Wroughton had never flinched from meting out punishment to this repellent man. Most of his work was in the sifting of publications, less of it was in mixing with the Saudi elite, as they liked to be regarded, a little of it was cohabiting in the gutter with scum. Bartholomew was scum. The best of it was with Juan Gonsalves, his friend. The best brought the praise from London, the certainty of advancement and the probability of an augmented salary.

  'If she comes and sees you again with as much as a pimple on her sweet little shin, then you gut her and fillet her, and you damn well learn something of what goes on down in that bloody place. Don't snivel. Plenty goes on there, and she'll know it. I don't think you're big on scruples, so it shouldn't be too hard.'

  He kicked again, then stood. He looked down on Bartholomew.

  From his pocket, Wroughton took a slip of paper. A name was written on it, and an address. 'Go and see her, take the time. Give her a bit of tender and loving care, what you're so good at. And learn something - what she saw, what, if anything, was shouted out, any warning or any denunciation. Then report back - course you will.'

  'Where'll you be?' The voice squeaked fro
m between the hands.

  'Away for a couple of days, then I'll hear from you . . . All that perspiration, it makes you look old and revolting. Do something about it .. . You haven't finished your juice. It's thirty riyals a glass, don't waste it.'

  Wroughton smiled sweetly at the concierge who held open the outer door for him. He had no conscience as to dealing out a bully's Mows at Samuel Bartholomew. From his childhood days at the Sunday lunch table he had learned that the relationship between handler and agent should be master and servant: no emotion, no affection, no relationship. Like dogs, they should be at heel and obedient.

  *

  Lack of engine thrust had grounded First Lady. The four-cylinder Rotax 912 push engine was playing delicate. George wanted time on it, half a day.

  They'd already had Carnival Girl up once, but she was back-up -

  so, George would have his half a day, and Lizzy-Jo could kick her heels.

  She had her problem.

  It was not a problem to be discussed with Marty, most certainly not with any of the rest of the team. Marty was in the tent beside the Ground Control Station, was by the fan that circulated stinking hot air, had his feet up and was reading back numbers of Flight International.

  'I'm going to go find a shop,' she told him, but he was too absorbed with the magazine and last year's articles to respond with anything more than a grunt.

  'I need to look for a shop,' she called to George, and he looked up from the engine pieces and nodded.

  'I need to do some shopping, won't be long,' she said to the armourer, who sat facing the space left in the barbed wire coiled round their perimeter. He wore a multi-pocket khaki waistcoat that concealed his shoulder holster and the Colt. He had a baseball cap low over his face, and he shrugged.