The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

  There must be a shop.

  The encampment was at the extreme end of the runway. Beyond their own wire was a single strand fence, then the desert, and set in the sands in the near distance were the landing lights of the strip.

  Half-way up the strip, on the far side, was the cluster of buildings that she presumed were the accommodation blocks for the workers: there would be a club, a gym, a clinic - and a shop.

  She walked briskly. As a New Yorker, she walked everywhere briskly. The temperature on the thermometer hanging from the support pole of her tent had shown 98° Fahrenheit, in shade. For decorum, local sensibilities and that crap, she had a blouse over her T-shirt and she'd slipped on long loose trousers and had a headscarf over her hair. She skirted the end of the runway, looking up to check there wasn't an incoming flight that might, if the wheels were down, have taken her head off.

  Selfishness had brought Lizzy-Jo to Shaybah. The electronics expert was a selfish woman; she had made a career out of selfishness ever since the Air Force had sent her on the sensor operator's course.

  She had been with Predator from the start.

  At the far side of the strip, she turned and started out on the long tramp to the buildings - she could have taken wheels, but the restrictions on their movements away from the encampment would have meant the fullest of explanations about her problem to the armourer and to George and Marty . . . Her problem was not theirs.

  She'd done Air Force time, then seen the recruitment notice posted by the Agency for UAV personnel. She'd left the Air Force and been taken on by the Agency, and then the selfishness had ruled. Rick had been with her at the Air Force camps, and Clara, but the Agency didn't do married accompanied. Rick sold insurance now in North Carolina, and last year had been his company's Salesman of the Year in the state; his parents looked after Clara. They'd divorced while she was at Taszar, Hungary, doing sensor operator for flying over Kosovo, a long-range divorce that spared her meetings in lawyers'

  offices. And she was not, it was her justification for selfishness, a natural mother. What Rick wanted out of life was to sell death benefits to customers; what she wanted was to find pictures on First Lady's cameras.

  The heat shimmered on the dun-painted buildings ahead, and the sunlight burst back from the buildings' windows, and behind them was the city of pipes and containers, cranes and stacks.

  She had seen that Marty had his old Afghan war picture propped against the metal cupboard beside his cot; Lizzy-Jo had a small tent to herself, woman's privilege, and beside her bed a collapsible side table with the picture of Rick and Clara - she assumed that Rick had a picture of her beside his bed. Not that it mattered to her. She wrote to them, not more than a page, every three or four months, birthdays and Christmas, and once a year she wrote to her own people in New York; her own people, she knew, didn't hold with divorce, were fervent Christians, and disapproved of her abandonment of Clara. It was tough shit, for all of them. She wanted to be with the Predator team, and reckoned the eighteen months of Operation Enduring freedom, out of Bagram, had been the best time of her life. She d idn't regard herself as selfish, just as professional. It mattered to her.

  She was closer. Lizzy-Jo could make out what she thought was a recreational building, fronted by a veranda. She hit her stride.

  There was a sign for a shop, and she followed its arrow.

  She walked inside and the air-conditioned cool punched her.

  She followed the shelves, wove among men - some in robes, some in slacks and shirts - who carried wire baskets or pushed trolleys.

  There was food, frozen trays, vegetables and fruit. Confectionery -

  chocolates and boiled sweets. Clothes, for men. Toiletries, for men, and cosmetics, for men. Juices of every shade and taste. Stationery and software. Music DVDs and compacts . .. Then she found the chemist's section. Headache pills, sunstroke creams, insect repellents. Eyes were on her. When she met them, they dropped or turned away, but she felt that as soon as the eyes were behind her again they fastened back on to her, clung to her.

  But the problem had to be answered.

  It was part her own fault, and part the Agency's. The instruction to travel and the take-off from Bagram had given her too little time. Too many of the few hours available between the order and the flight out had been taken up with downloading the computers and checking the loading of the gear; they were her computers, her gear, and she had fussed over them, not permitting the technicians free range over what was hers - and she had not been to the base shop.

  She joined the queue to the cash desk. The man in front of her, robed, edged away from her, pushed against the man in front so that a distance might be between her and him. Oh, sweet Jesus . . . At the cash desk an older man, a dish-towel over his head, a moustache and fat jowls, repeated in a strident voice everything asked of him by his customers.

  She was next to the head of the queue. The customer in front of her paid for a bag of fruit and a tube of shaving soap. She said it again, to herself, and she could feel the sweat on her back. The cash-desk man looked up at her, then averted his eyes.

  Lizzy-Jo said it out loud, like she would have done in a New York drug store. 'Do you have tampons?'

  'Tampons?'

  'That's what I said. Tampons. If you have them, I can't see them.'

  'Tampons?'

  'It's a pretty simple question - what your wife .. .'

  The cash-desk man shook his head, a great rolling movement.

  The voice behind Lizzy-Jo was crisp, clear English. 'No, they don't.'

  Lizzy-Jo spun. Eyes dropped, swivelled, fell from her. Six back in the queue was a woman, younger than herself, and she caught the grin like it was contagious. 'They don't have tampons?'

  'No - not a great call for them here. Look, why don't you wait outside, or by the door? I'll sort you out.'

  Lizzy-Jo went past the younger woman and saw that her basket contained an insect repellent spray, an anti-inflammatory cream and sunblock.

  So, Lizzy-Jo met Beth, who took her to the club. They sat out on the veranda and were shaded by a table parasol. They drank iced lemon juice, and she learned that Beth Jenkins was the only woman resident with the run of the Shaybah oil-production works.

  'And I'm assuming you're with those little aircraft. I saw one take off, a pretty little thing. Why here?'

  Lizzy-Jo said quickly, too quickly, 'Just test flights, performance evaluation in heat over desert - mapping.'

  A little frown puckered the young woman's forehead: she would have thought there were about a million and ten places that were easier for that evaluation, and a hundred thousand and ten places that were more of a priority for mapping. The explanation was not queried.

  'Anyway, can't stay. I've an English literature class, my top group.

  We're doing Dickens, Oliver Twist. They like that, bestial English society, makes them feel good. Got to go. How long have I got? You desperate?'

  'Not now. I will be by the end of the week.'

  'I'll drop some by . . . Don't worry, my tongue doesn't flap, I won't see anything.'

  As she walked back along the side of the runway strip, Lizzy-Jo reflected that she'd made a poor job of the security of the mission, but maybe just once security took second place. Tampons counted.

  She reflected, also, as she turned at the strip's end, that a young woman who took a stranger for a drink when she was short of time and late on a class commitment was lonely - not alone but lonely.

  Lizzy-Jo didn't do loneliness, but the thought of it frightened her.

  George and his technicians had the casing back on the engine, and were standing back from First Lady. The light caught the forward fuselage, clean and virgin. She remembered the words loud in her headphones. 'Shoot on sight.'

  They had lost half a day. Worse than the hours lost was the water used. Caleb watched the pot brought to the boil. And more of the withered dry roots that Ghaffur had kept the fire alive with. Rashid took the sodden plants from the pot, clasped
them in his hand and seemed not to feel any pain as the scalding water seeped between his fingers. The plants were slapped on Tommy's inflamed ankle, the Iraqi cried out, then rags were bound over them. Tommy writhed.

  There was no sympathy from the guide. Caleb sensed Rashid's concern: what to do with the water? Wait for it to cool? More time gone. Throw it on to the sand?

  'What is that?' Caleb asked.

  The reply was curt. 'It is ram-ram.'

  'Is it an old cure?'

  'What my father would have used, and my grandfather.'

  'Tell me.'

  'We learn from the Sands. There are lizards. They are not bitten by the snakes, not bitten by the scorpions. We watch and we learn, and we hand down what we know. The lizards eat the ram-ram plant, and they roll in it, wherever they find it. It is a protection against the poison.'

  It was said matter-of-factly, without feeling. First the majority of the venom had been drawn out by the stroking fingernails, now the poultice would extract what remained. Old practices and old times.

  At Camp Delta, when the guard had been stung by the scorpion alarms had rung, medics had charged to the scene, an ambulance had come with the siren wailing, panic had been alive, and within two days the guard had been returned to the block. That was the new way, but the old way of Rashid had been quiet, calm and competent.

  Rashid swung his foot, kicked over the pot and the water momentarily stained the sand. Then he shouted for Ghaffur to pick up the pot and stow it. The guide lifted Tommy on to his shoulder, carried him to the kneeling camel and heaved him on to the saddle on the hump.

  Again Tommy cried out, again his pain was ignored. The caravan moved on. The wisp of smoke from the fire was left behind them.

  Caleb walked beside Hosni, who rolled on his saddle. Twice Caleb reached up to steady the Egyptian; it was not a journey for a man of his age. The question welled in him. 'What is the first thing that I should know?'

  The voice wheezed, 'You should know your only loyalty is to your family, us and those who wait for you.'

  'And the second thing?'

  'Your duty is to your brothers, us and those who wait for you.'

  Again he put the question. What should he know?

  'You have no nationality, it is behind you. None of us has a country. We are the rejected. Tommy would be taken by the Americans, or their puppets, and would be put before a military court or a sham court of their stooges, and he would be executed . . .

  Fahd, if he were arrested here, would be tortured by the police, then taken to the square in Riyadh in front of the Central Mosque and beheaded. I, if I were held, would be flown to Cairo and if I survived the interrogation I would be hanged in a prison. And you, you would be . ..' Hosni's voice died.

  'What would happen to me?'

  No answer. The question was ignored. A new fervour came to the Egyptian. 'You are a jewel to us. Men will give their lives that you should live . . . Is that not enough? At a chosen time you will go back where you came from, or to America. You will be the servant of your family and your brothers, and you will resurrect your memory. You will strike the blow that only you are capable of . . . Enough.'

  Hosni's eyes, as if they hurt or disappointed him, were closed.

  Caleb dropped back.

  'If only he'd come with me,' she sobbed. 'If the silly bugger had come with me, he'd have been all right - but he didn't. He wasn't interested.'

  Her behaviour, the anger in it, was predictable to Bart. He knew the pattern from road accidents back in Torquay, and from his time as house physician in London. Melanie Garnett's outburst was what he would have expected. If he'd been called out earlier, just after it had happened, he would have heard a horrified description of the bomb detonating under the Land Rover Discovery.'

  'No, he wasn't interested in that necklace. He said we were saving money, were supposed to be. We're only here for the mortgage -

  God, what other reason would anyone be here? He didn't have the guts to tell me I couldn't have it so he stayed in the Discovery.'

  Clearest in Bart's mind was the image of the man at the driving-wheel, elbow out through the open window, and the puff of his cigarette smoke. She was a fainter image, blurred behind the glass of the jeweller's shop. He wondered where the children were now - oh, yes, they'd be round at a neighbour's, with the Lego out on the tiled floor. Yesterday there would have been the horror, today would be the anger, tomorrow the guilt. The anger was easier to deal with . . .

  Even if he had stopped, done his duty as a man of medicine, he would not have been able to save the man.

  'He wanted to save for a mortgage so's we could live somewhere posh when this three years of hell was over - somewhere like Beaconsfield or the Chalfonts. And it killed him. Damn him! I mean, what's a three-bedroomed semi in Beaconsfield worth? Worth getting killed for?'

  An older woman shared the sofa with Melanie Garnett, widow.

  She would have been a long-term matriarch of the expatriate society, and knew her stuff. She was doing well, made a soothing listening post with her shoulder, and didn't interrupt . .. Ann would have interrupted. Ann never could keep her mouth shut. Bart examined her. He murmured little questions, not to calm her but to pump information from her. What had she seen? What had she heard? Had there been any threats? Nothing, nothing, and no - nothing seen, nothing heard, no threats. It would be a negative report to Wroughton but he had asked the questions. While he took her pulse and heartbeat, he looked around him. The furnishings were sparse, the decorations minimal; the sense of a home was missing, except for the heap of toys in a corner and children's books on the table. He looked for signs of the familiar expatriates' scam, alcohol boot-legging. Then there would have been flash opulence, but there wasn't any . . . Ann would just have bought the bloody necklace, charged it to his card, and the first he would have known of it was when she wore it. He could blame everything on Ann. The size of the mortgage, the scale of the overdraft, the fees for the private school that the kids had to go to, the two foreign holidays a year, and the remedies he'd sunk to were all down to Ann . . . His mother had come to the wedding, been barely civil, but his father had not. His mother had told him, in a stage-whispered aside, well into the reception, that Ann was common and unsuitable and that her relatives were plainly vulgar - and, thank the good Lord, Hermione Bartholomew had not lived long enough to crow at him that she had been right. In the Kingdom, all the deaths of expatriates by bomb or bullet were put down to alcohol turf wars; this one would be too, but Bart knew better.

  He prescribed diazepam, a maximum of ten milligrams a day, two tablets. From his open bag, he took the bottle and counted out sufficient to last three days. He should have felt, beneath the professional exterior, serious sympathy for Melanie Garnett. What had she done to deserve an encounter with a bomber? She was without blame. He was almost shocked at his reaction, as near to being shamed as was possible for him. He put the tablets into an envelope and scrawled the dosage on the label.

  'I really wanted that necklace - wasn't a crime to want it. If he'd come with me . . . if he'd come with me just to look after the kids. He didn't come with me, the kids were arguing, and he's dead. What I hate about him, the last I saw of him, properly saw of him, he was all stone-faced and getting his fags out. Not a kiss, not a "love you", not a cuddle, but looking sour. That's the last I saw of him, damn him.'

  To his mind, rebellion was alive in the Kingdom and soon, pray God, the whole stinking edifice would come down. Bart had always been good at learning lines but, then, his talent was to play a part -

  the part of a liar. Against the weeping anger of the widow he was able to recite in his mind, perfect recall: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' The towers of glass and concrete, airports and luxury hotels, wide highways and people of such mind-numbing arrogance were floating on oil, and the edifice was crumbling. A bomb here and a shooting there, work for the executioner in Chop Chop Square, a frisson of fear eddying
into the palaces. Each time he read of, or heard of, an atrocity a little raw excitement coursed in Bart. 'Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.' He hoped, damn it, that he would still be there to see the decay come to fruition, be able to scent it.

  'His mother's on the flight tonight. What am I going to tell her? If her precious son hadn't been so bloody mean to me, his wife, he'd still be alive. Do I tell her that?'

  Tomorrow would be worse for the widow. She would have his mother there, organizing her, and she would have her guilt. Post-traumatic stress syndrome would crucify her with guilt. If she had not wanted the bloody necklace, her husband would be alive, her kids would have a father. The guilt would churn like a whirlwind in her mind - poor little cow. Ann had never felt guilt, even when she had brought him to his knees. He went into the kitchen, where a maid cowered, poured a glass of water and carried it back into the room. The matriarch slipped a tablet into Melanie Garnett's mouth, then gave her the glass.

  Bart waited until she was quieter, then left. Out in the compound, spied on by the neighbours, the sliver of independence deserted him.

  He walked to his car, preparing what he would say to Eddie Wroughton. He was in fear of Wroughton, and knew it. He flopped into the back of the car and the driver took him away. He was as pliant as putty, and he knew no route for escape, no track that could free him.

  He fumed, but his experience of recent years had taught Eddie Wroughton to mask fury. Had he shouted abuse at the Omani policeman, he would have lost him.

  He had been driven a hundred kilometres or so west of the capital to Ad Dari, a trading town en route to the interior. He should have been at the police station, in an interrogation room. Instead, he was shivering - with anger and from the cold - in the refrigeration room of the hospital mortuary. The British staffer in Muscat city was green, so lacking in experience with the Secret Intelligence Service that Wroughton - on hearing of the arrest - had caught the first available flight from Riyadh.