The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

  'Where have you come from?'

  The bodyguard's head did not turn. 'From what they call the "cooler", the isolation cell. I speak to a brother, encourage him, then I go back to the cooler.

  In a few days they take me from the cooler and put me in another cage.

  I speak more encouragement, then I go back to the cooler. If I stay in one cage I may damage the chance of a brother.'

  'The chance of what?'

  'Of freedom. They know my identity. I am a prize for them. Wlw are you?'

  'I was at the training camp, I saw you. I saiv you also at a roadcheck we had, outside Kabul. We talked.'

  'With the rocket-launcher, at the block. On the assault course at the camp.

  Each time, you were spoken of.. . What do they know of you?'

  'I am a taxi-driver.'

  'Who can denounce you?'

  Caleb murmured, 'All the men I was with, and the Chechen, were killed when I was taken by the Americans. When I am interrogated, I tell them that I, alone, survived, I am a taxi-driver. I do not believe they know anything else of me.'

  'And you are strong?'

  T try to be.'

  Caleb had to strain to hear the bodyguard. 'Make a promise for me.'

  'What do I promise?'

  'If you are ever freed, you never forget. You remember your brothers. You remember the martyrs. You remember the evils of the crusaders.'

  'I promise I will never forget, will always remember.'

  There was a great calm about the man. He was thin, without a dominating stature, and his face was unremarkable, but his eyes burned.

  'And you zvill fight. Whatever the barriers put in front of you, you will cross them. You zvill walk through fire. You will fight.'

  The prayers ended. The guards tramped down the corridor. The bodyguard did not speak again, neither did Caleb, and they sat as far apart as the cage confines allowed. When food was brought, when the mosquitoes buzzed close to the ceiling lights, when the bodyguard's cage door was opened, he lashed out with his fool and caught the knee of the guard carrying his tray from the trolley, spilling the food. More guards came. Twice he was cudgelled with a baton, and he was blindfolded, then dragged away.

  Caleb felt the new strength. He was no longer frightened. He was toughened, hardened by the encounter. He zvas a taxi-driver, but he had given his promise.

  It broke quickly, without warning.

  Silence, then raised gasping and exhausted voices.

  Caleb scraped the crust of sand from his eyes. The Saudi, Fahd, high on his saddle, lashed his foot at Tommy's shoulder, toppling him. When Tommy stood again, Fahd worked the camel round so that he could return to kick again; he aimed for Tommy's head, but missed; the effort almost made him fall from the saddle. Tommy had hold of his leg and was trying to drag him down, but he lost the grip and sagged back.

  A blade flashed.

  Tommy had the knife. Fahd watched it. Tommy edged closer, the knife raised, ready to strike.

  The guide, Rashid, came from behind Tommy and, with the speed of a snake's hit, snatched at Tommy's knife arm, held it, then twisted it behind Tommy's back, until the man's face grimaced in pain. The knife was loosed. As it fell, Tommy smashed back with his free arm and caught Rashid on the upper cheek. The arm was twisted tighter and Tommy dropped to the sand. Rashid bent to pick up the knife, took the reins of Fahd's camel and led it to the front of the column. The march resumed.

  The boy was beside Caleb. 'Do you understand?'

  'What should I understand?'

  The boy's face creased as if in anguish. 'He hit my father. He struck my father. Because he hit my father, he is dead. Nothing else is possible.'

  'But your father walked away, he did not kill him.'

  'He will, at his own choosing. It was the worst insult, to hit my father.'

  Caleb asked the question heavily: 'What did they fight over?'

  The boy said, 'The one called the other a murderer of the faithful.

  The other called the one a coward and a fool. It is what they said, and now the other is condemned.'

  Caleb pushed the boy away, gently but with tired firmness. He thought death now trudged with them. His anger blossomed. Where they travelled there was no beacon of hope. Life did not, could not, exist. The sun burned and crushed them. Madness had made the argument. Impossible difficulties weighed them down, and now they had the new burden of the argument, and one of them was condemned.

  He could have howled with his anger.

  Most days a wrapped baguette, tuna and mayonnaise, with a can of Coke in his office passed for Jed Dietrich's lunch. He took the chance of the midday break to write up the assessment of the morning interrogation - increasingly fewer observations seemed relevant -

  and to prepare for the afternoon session. The secretary for Defense had called the men he questioned 'hard-core, well-trained terrorists'; the attorney general had said they were 'uniquely dangerous'. But neither the secretary nor the attorney sat in with Jed. There were six hundred inmates at Delta, and maybe a hundred of them were 'hard-core' and 'dangerous', and the Bureau and the Agency had care of them. Jed never saw them.

  He binned the wrapping from his baguette, drained the can, wiped the crumbs off the table. As the minute hand climbed to the hour, the knock came on cue.

  The prisoner was brought in.

  Jed doubted he was even a 'foot-soldier'. God alone knew what questions he would find to put to the man. The prisoner, the file said, came from a small town in the English Midlands, was of Bengali ethnic origin, was one of the five per cent for whom anti-depressive medication was prescribed by the Delta doctor, had been studying Arabic and the Qur'an at a religious school up the road from Peshawar, and had gone into the net, had been handed over by the Pakistani intelligence people, who probably felt they needed to show willing and make up a quota number. If Jed, the fisherman, had pulled this one out of a Wisconsin lake, he'd not have bothered with a photograph or the scales, would have chucked him straight back -

  he had never been to England, had no knowledge of the 'Midlands'.

  Jed was aware of a growing swell of opinion outside the States that demanded either for criminal charges to be laid against prisoners or for them to be freed. He was as aware that the courts back home had claimed no jurisdiction over Camp Delta. It was not his business, he had no opinion. Had he gone out of his room for lunch and discussed it with enlisted men he would have found total indifference. The Agency and Bureau men wanted every last one of the prisoners locked up in perpetuity. The Red Cross people, had they ever owned up to their true feelings, would have condemned Delta, would have criticized the concept of the camp, but he didn't go out to lunch.

  None of the British ones had been brought to Jed's room before.

  With a British prisoner, at least there was no requirement for an interpreter. Translators destroyed the chance of an interrogator displaying his skills.

  The man shuffled through the door. Well, not a man - more of a boy. The file said he was twenty-three years old. He would have been twenty when he was captured, would have had his twenty-first birthday inside a Guantanamo cage . . . Jed thought of him as a boy.

  The chains were taken off, and the guards stood back. The man sat down. He put his hands on the table top - it was orders that a prisoner's hands must be visible at all times when he was unshackled. The hands shook. Jed reckoned they would have shaken worse if it had not been for the anti-depressants .. . God, was this guy, categorized as an 'unlawful combatant', the real enemy?

  He went through what had been asked of the man in previous interrogations. Why had he gone to Pakistan? Whom had he met in Pakistan? What had he been taught in Pakistan? Who had funded his studies in Pakistan? Had he ever received military training? Had he gone into Afghanistan at any time? The answers were the same, word for word, as they had been at every interrogation. He had the transcripts in front of him, and the pages were signed by the interrogators. Sometimes Jed let the answers run; sometimes he int
errupted and his tone was savage; sometimes he smiled and softened his voice as he put the question; sometimes he doubled back. As the boy was denying ever having been in Afghanistan, he returned to the funding of the studies. Jed never caught him out, no discrepancies in the story, but far down in his mind a thought was developing.

  He couldn't place where it came from. Whom had he met in Pakistan? Had he ever received military training? He felt the stab of recognition.

  Jed paused. He collected his thoughts. They had been chaff, a jumble. Most of his concentration had been on the questions he'd asked, a little of it had been on his family and on the week gone by.

  He cut away the chaff.

  He sat for a full minute in silence. He watched the fingers writhing, and the breath come in little pants, and let his instinct rule.

  Jed's voice was gentle, in English. 'Friend, do you speak Pashto?'

  The faces of the two guards were impassive. He had used the word

  'friend'. The guards would talk about that afterwards. Guards hated the prisoners. Guards knew that any fraternization with prisoners was forbidden, would lead to a flight out without their boots touching the Tarmac. Guards knew that a brigadier general, Camp Delta's commander, had been summarily fired and that 'defense sources'

  had claimed he was too 'soft' with the regime he'd ordered. In Delta, signs - printed by the ICRC - told detainees their rights, and had been posted with the authorization of the brigadier general. When the brigadier general had visited prisoners' cages he had greeted them in Arabic, 'Peace be with you.' He'd been sacked . . . but an interrogator had the freedom to call a prisoner 'friend'.

  The man across the table, the 'friend', nodded.

  In English, because Jed didn't speak that language: 'Would that be good Pashto, or only a little Pashto?'

  'I can speak in Urdu . ..'

  'No, no.' Jed leaned forward. 'Do you have Pashto?'

  'Some, a bit, there were Afghan people in the college. I. ..'

  Jed used his hand to gesture that the answer was sufficient. He used his desk telephone to call the central office. He requested the immediate presence of a Pashto interpreter. There was doubt as to whether one was available. He did not raise his voice, but it carried enough menace to the clerk. He dropped the 'request', replaced it with 'requirement': a Pashto interpreter to his room immediately -

  not tomorrow, not in half an hour. In a drawer on his side of the table the tape-recorder turned, and microphones were built into the table, on his side and on the prisoner's. He opened the drawer and stopped the tape. He waited. The quiet clung in the room. The man opposite sat bolt upright and still, except for the motion of his hands.

  Jed wrote, in a fast long-hand scrawl, answers he remembered. The answers were not verbatim, but as he recalled them. Ten minutes later, when the interpreter came into the room, he passed him the two pages, now thickly covered with his handwriting. He asked the interpreter to translate them, on paper, into Pashto. Again there was silence as the interpreter crouched at the table and wrote down the translation.

  He could not be sure where this would lead him. When the translation was complete, the pages in Pashto were laid in front of the prisoner ard Jed switched on the tape-recorder. The prisoner was asked to read aloud.

  His host had put Bart at the end of the line.

  They had been down to the paddock to inspect the first race's runners, then had climbed back to the stand. They made a party of eight and they waited for the start of the five thirty-five at Riyadh. The banker did the book. No Tote or William Hill or on-course bookmaker, the banker wrote down their little bets. Ten riyals or twenty riyals were the flutters. No money would change hands in the stand, no winnings or losses would be paid over in public, but rewards and debts would be settled at dinner at the defence-procurement man's villa.

  Most of the row of seats in front of Bart was empty, and the row behind him only sparsely filled. Not like the old days, before the war in Iraq: then the whole stand would have heaved with expatriates.

  'Terrorism threat' and 'personal security' were the catchphrases of the day. Only the diehards remained. He did not own binoculars and struggled, when he looked down the course to the start, to see the quartered shirt and cap that he was backing, and he listened to the talk in the row stretching away from him. Here, at least, indiscretion was possible.

  'What I say is, the place is cracking up. I think it's terminal.'

  'Take the servants, there's a new impertinence. I'd call it dumb insolence.'

  'More to the point is Saudization - is that a real word? You know what I mean. They're stuffing lazy incompetents into jobs they can't handle.'

  'I never go out at night, not now, not even with a driver. This used to be the safest city on earth, not any more.'

  'Dreadful what happened to young Garnett - such a sweet girl that Melanie, beautiful children.'

  'It's all become so dishonest, corrupt. The ethos is almost criminal here now. I . . . '

  They were off, away in the distance the small shapes of the horses, and the smaller ones of the jockeys. Bart could not make out his horse and he didn't bloody care. He had not been invited because his host particularly liked him: one day he might be useful for a late-night emergency call-out.

  It all came back to Ann. He wondered where she was, whether she was still shagging the owner of the Saab franchise showroom, how the kids were . . . Ann demanded private schools, two holidays a year that weren't package. The debts had mounted: unopened envelopes carrying final demands had littered the Torquay house, and the mortgage payments were in arrears. By 1995 - yes, he could remember the date, clear as bloody crystal - she'd started the taunting that he hadn't the balls to stand up to the practice partners and demand they offloaded private patients on to him. He'd faced ruin, and he'd faced her goading . . . Then Bart had responded.

  In April that year he had come to the solution to the ills. Josh, a right little weasel, had been in the consulting room and had sown the seed. Josh was an NHS patient, there to have his face patched up after a beating. Josh was a dealer. Josh left an address in the bed-sit land at the wrong end of the town. Josh had a roll of banknotes in his hip pocket, a fat wad. Josh paid up on the nail, cash on delivery . .. and Bart had delivered. Morphine alkaloid tablets were the currency for which Josh paid cash, and heroin and cocaine.

  Any patient on Bart's books who was terminally ill, or any patient with chronic pain from a back injury, could be prescribed the morphine tablets - and always, from the spring of 1995, he prescribed big. The bathroom cabinets of his patients bulged with the bottles of morphine tablets . . . And when there was a death, or when a back's pain was relieved, he collected what was left and took it away. Josh had the left-over tablets, and the cash from the roll of notes in Josh's hip pocket began, by the late summer of 1995, to dent the piles of unpaid bills. So simple . . . Heroin and cocaine were used to help, quietly, those on their way when life had little more than a fortnight to run. Relatives were grateful for the release of their loved one from suffering. Bart called it the Brompton's Mixture: a gin or sherry cocktail with the addition of liquid heroin or powdered cocaine; when he signed the death certificate, and before the undertakers called, Bart cleared the unused excess. The partnership with the little weasel, the bastard, Josh, might have lasted for ever - not for a mere eighteen months, until the catastrophe.

  There was no betting slip to tear up at the races in Riyadh. His prediction had been correct: his horse was last over the line. Again, the conversation down the line of seats clamoured, as if the race had been a minor diversion from the main business of gossip and complaint.

  'I really don't know whether we should all get out, cut and run.

  but what I reckon - back home - no one wants to employ a banker of my age.'

  'That Al Qaeda, it's a cancer, and Iraq's taken the eye off the main hall. We're all targets now, that's what I feel.'

  'If the Kingdom collapses we're in deep trouble, about as deep as you can get. We
keep bags packed, we're all ready to go, but if it happened suddenly, without warning, how would we get to the airport? Who'd protect us? And can you imagine pitching up at Heathrow with just a suitcase each? That's assuming we got to the airport.'

  'It's all so unfair. What do you think, Bart? . . . Bart, I'm speaking to you.' The banker's wife tugged his arm, peered into his face.

  He jerked his mind away from Josh, the tablets, the cocktail and Ann. 'Isn't it more dangerous crossing the road in Riyadh?'

  'Is that all you've to say about the security situation?'

  He was emboldened. 'If you want my opinion, A1 Qaeda's power is overstated.'

  'Have you plans for a quick bolt, Bart?'

  For emphasis, Bart smacked a closed fist into the other palm. 'No, I have not.'

  It was a lie - of course he had a permanently packed case. Whether he would ever use it was another matter. Would Eddie bloody Wroughton - the marionette tweaker - ever permit its use? He had nowhere to go without Eddie bloody Wroughton's sanction.

  'I have no plans to run. Al Qaeda's threat is probably minimal. A few fanatics in the desert or up in the mountains, chewing dates, suffering from amoebic dysentery. I don't rate them, no.'

  Shocked into silence, the other guests in the row shuffled their feet and examined their racecards. Bart thought of nobody but himself -

  himself and Eddie Wroughton.

  The host's wife chipped in, 'Well, that's enough of that. I think it's time we went back down to the paddock.'

  The dung was dried, desiccated.

  The line drawn on the map had served Eddie Wroughton well. At each village close to the pencil line they had stopped and Wroughton had stayed in the vehicle, forcing the police officer to go among the mud-brick homes. The routine had led them to the last village, then on to the single isolated building. There had been signs there of recent use, and the fire that had been lit. He'd photographed the interior, then the new bolt and the new lock on the inside of the door.