The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

  astonished him. The involvement of Bartholomew bewildered him

  - and then his own guilt swelled around him. It came back to him as the scabs on his face and body itched. A phone plug pulled out, a mobile switched off. But Bartholomew could still have left a message on the voice mail. His head sank. Why had no message been left?

  . There was a knock.

  Wroughton called sullenly, 'Come.'

  His assistant always had a nervous twitch in his presence, as if expecting a rebuke. He had not known she was still there. Thirty-five minutes past four in the morning. What was she staring at? She was staring at nothing. Hadn't she ever seen the scrapes from walking into a door? She hadn't noticed any scrapes. What did she want? Had thought Mr Wroughton might need coffee and a hot beef sandwich -

  and she put the mug and the plate on the table in front of him.

  As Wroughton growled an acknowledgement, without grace, she said cautiously, 'Oh, and this just came through - it's a general notification, to all stations. It's probably not worth you looking at right now but. ..'

  'I am trying, if you didn't know it, to work.'

  Papers and photographs were laid on the table alongside the mug and the plate, and she fled.

  On his hands and knees, Wroughton went to the table, lifted down the mug and slurped from it, then the plate and took a coarse bite of the sandwich. In putting back the plate he dislodged the papers and the photographs. They fell at his knees. He started to read.

  Caleb Hunt. 24 years. Description, ethnic Caucasian but sallow-skinned, and no distinguishing marks, and his height and weight. The address, 20, Albert Parade, and the name of a town sandwiched between the conurbations of Birmingham and Wolverhampton; the address of his place of work as a trainee garage mechanic. The recruitment, Landi Khotal, North West Frontier of Pakistan, April 2000 by known Al Qaeda talent-spotter. The arrest, captured by US military persooel in ambush south of Kabul, December 2001. The deception, assumed the name and identity of Fawzi al-Ateh, with profession of taxi-driver. The detention, held at Camps X-Ray and Delta, Guantanamo Bay, under category of 'unlawful combatant' until release back to Afghanistan in programme for freeing those believed innocent of terrorist involvement. The escape, during comfort stop en route from Bagram to Kabul City for lodgement and processing with Afghan intelligence, ran, and was not subsequently recaptured. Status, extremely dangerous, exceptionally professional and highly motivated. His success at duping interrogators at Guantanamo marks him out as . . . His laughter split across the room and broke the night's quiet. More detail to follow. He pushed the papers away across the floor, looked again at the bricks - and the upper photograph caught his eye.

  Wroughton breathed hard.

  The upper photograph was a school group, a leavers' picture, with a circle drawn round one face. The lower photograph was a compilation of a prisoner, full face, left profile and right profile.

  He laid the papers from Vauxhall Bridge Cross on the yellow-bordered sheet, then the photographs. The image of the lost fugitive taken before the Predator's strike did not match Guantanamo, humble and cowed. He gazed down at the school photograph - the boy was taller than the others, straight-backed and head held high.

  The face, Wroughton thought, showed a mind that was detached and restless, and the eyes looked through him and beyond. It was where Caleb Hunt would be, in the wilderness of the Rub' al Khali. He was injured, and Samuel Bartholomew had been idiot enough to be persuaded to minister to him. He went to the door, leaned through it.

  'I'd like to say thank you for the coffee and the sandwich. I much appreciate that you've worked through the night.'

  It was the first decent thing he had said to his assistant in months and he saw her gape.

  Back on the floor, peering down at the papers and photographs, he realized there was one area of doubt among the many certainties.

  Why was she involved? Why was Bethany Jenkins - quality, with class, wealth and education - in the desert and helping the man?

  Why . . . ? The doubt was erased.

  'Because, Miss Jenkins, you are naive, self-centred, and you have let the world pass you by.' The photographs and printouts, the imagined bricks, were Wroughton's witnesses as he spoke. 'You cut yourself off from the real world, and scrabbled in the sand after meteorites and did not listen to the radio, didn't watch the satellite TV and didn't read newspapers. You did not concern yourself with the Twin Towers or with Bali or Nairobi or a hundred bombs around the world. You did not care about rows of coffins and about the weeping of victims' loved ones. You did not know about the hatred because you'd closed your mind to everything other than your own demands. It'll take some getting out of, Miss Jenkins, where you've put yourself. Unless you're very smart - smarter than you've ever been - you are destined to end up as a casualty, and you'll call for people to help you but they'll not come running.'

  Through a pane of glass, she saw them. She dreamed. They were together and she rode beside him, rocking on the camel hump, and the emptiness of the desert stretched away in front of her. She did not feel the heat, or the dryness in her throat, or exhaustion, and she was aware only of her happiness to be with him in a place of beauty, and free, and it was her future and his.

  A shot was fired. She heard the rifle's crack, then the breaking of the glass.

  She no longer saw herself clearly, and did not see him.

  The voice was in her ear, replaced the ring of the shot.

  Beth woke, blinked in the darkness.

  The boy was above her, his face was silhouetted against the sunken moon.

  'Please, Miss Bethany, do not make any sound.'

  'What . . . what?' She lay on the sand, a single blanket wrapped round her, beside the Land Rover's wheel.

  'What my father says . . .'

  'What does your father say?'

  'My father says you should go.'

  'Go?' Beth stammered. 'Go? Where to?'

  'My father says you should go, and leave, drive away.'

  'Yes, in the morning. More injections. When he can stand, ride, when he leaves . . .'

  'Go, my father says, go now.'

  'I made a promise,' Beth said bleakly. 'I gave my word. I cannot break my word.'

  'My father says you should go.'

  The boy slipped away. She heard the rustle of the camels'

  harnesses, their endless grinding chewing, and Bart's snores.

  She felt small, frightened, and she knew by how far she had overreached herself. She had given her word, had made her promise.

  She would not sleep again, would not dream again . . . There would be no happiness, no place of beauty, and she thought the simplicity of love was snatched.

  Beth rolled in her blanket, swore, lay on her stomach, swore again, and beat her fists down against the sand.

  He slept. He heard nothing, saw no movements. The great body of the Beautiful One, beside him and close to him, soothed his sleep.

  Caleb slept because the pain had been beaten back, slept as the first light of dawn broke.

  Chapter Nineteen

  'Do you want morphine?'

  'No.'

  He had taken the injection in his arm. Caleb had lain on his back while the doctor had examined the leg wound, then replaced the lint dressing.

  'You can have morphine either intravenously or by ampoule, for the pain.'

  'I don't want morphine.'

  'It's a free world.' The doctor smiled grimly. 'You take it or leave it.'

  He did not want morphine because he thought the drug would cloud his mind. Back at home, in the old world that he sought to forget, there had been heroin addicts - the world came back more often to him, nestled with him, disturbed him - and in the summer they went down the canal towpath to the bridge that carried the rail link between Birmingham and Wolverhampton, and they huddled in the gloom below the bridge's arches and injected themselves. To feed it, they stole, mugged and burgled. Going to school, going to the garage, going in the car to Birmingham for the
mosque, he had seen them shambling, pale, their minds lost. He needed control, that day above all others.

  .

  The doctor hovered over him, rubbing his eyes as if tiredness overwhelmed him. Caleb had slept. The sweat ran from the doctor's forehead and down into the stubble on his cheeks . . . The doctor had saved him, but had seen his face.

  'Actually, I'm rather pleased with it.'

  The low light seeped under the awning that swung and jerked from the growing restlessness of the hobbled camels. In an hour he and Rashid and Ghaffur would be gone, the ropes would be unfastened and the animals would be loaded, and they would move.

  Morphine would derange his mind when he needed clarity.

  'It's clean, there are no indications of infection. Oozing, that's expected, but no pus. It's what's going to happen next that you have to think about.'

  Only the high-flying eye could find the vehicles, and then by chance. They might not be found for weeks, months, a year. If a storm came, at any time in the weeks or months, the contours of the dunes would shift and the vehicles would be buried - and the bodies.

  'What you've got now is temporary. With clean dressings, it'll last three or four days, but then - if you've kept the infection out - you'll have to have it stitched tight. I'll be frank with you. The speed of your recovery, from trauma and dehydration, astonishes me. You've done well, or been lucky. But you will need a professional for the stitches.'

  He would not bury the bodies. He would abandon them to rot in the sun and decay, and the clothes would degrade, and the flesh would be burned off the bones, but the first storm would bury them.

  His strength would be safeguarded.

  'I'm going to do you some extra dressings, and I'll leave eight Ampicillin syringes, enough for two days, and then the same in tablets - just swallow them. Twenty pills will keep you going for another five days. You'll need proper care in a week. I'll put out some morphine as well, and two syringes of Lignocaine anaesthetic if you have to take a penknife to the wound - I don't think you will. There's not much more I can do for you, but you've had my best effort.'

  'Why?' Caleb asked.

  The doctor giggled at him, then wiped the smile. 'I don't think we need to talk about that. I'll get it all ready and packaged up. No

  .

  sudden movements, no exertions, no walking unaided, and when you ride one of those bloody creatures you should keep the pace steady and slow. You, my friend, are a fragile petal.'

  He watched the doctor walk away. There was, for a brief moment, a shiver of anger in him that his question had not been answered. A brief moment. It did not matter. He bent his body, levered his back up and looked out from under the awning. He saw the doctor head towards his vehicle. The woman was sitting against the wheel of the Land Rover, her knees drawn up to her chest and her head down on them, sitting against the wheel where he had laboured to dig out the sand. Beyond the guide, who was hunched down with his rifle laid across his lap, the boy stood with his head still and listened. He brushed his hand against the furred skin above the nose, and the Beautiful One nuzzled his arm. He caught her harness and dragged himself up. The pain shimmered through his body. He stood, his head against the awning's ceiling, used the launcher as a crutch, his hand tight on the grip stock.

  He went, slow step by slow step, out from under the awning and towards the guide.

  Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay.

  They sat on the bus. They were all blindfolded, and the chains were on their wrists and ankles and round their waists. He heard guards' voices from outside the bus windows and the hammering of construction workers and the churning of cement mixers. The sun beat on the bus roof, minutes passed.

  Maybe there was shade from a tree or a building, but the guards outside the bus came nearer, and Caleb could listen. It was drawled, slow talk.

  'Me, I wouldn't have let any of them out. Me, I'd have kept them all here, here for the shed.'

  'Three weeks, so I heard, ready for when the tribunals start up.'

  'Are we going to hang them, inject them or fry them in the shed?'

  'Each of them's too good for these bastards.'

  'Do that and there's no chance for regrets, kind of final . . . I mean, who says those jerks are innocent and should be sent home?'

  T reckon the high and mighty said it, and as usual their talk is probable shit.'

  The engine started up ami he no longer heard the voices. Birds sang, and

  .

  there was the waft of salted air through the open door of the bus, and he heard gates open in front of them, then scrape shut after them. On his knee was a little plastic bag, compliments of the Joint Task Force, Guantanamo.

  It contained a change of underpants, fresh socks, a bar of soap, a toothbrush and a small tube of paste. He did not know that beside the gate now closed behind them was the big board that said, 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom.'

  They drove for the ferry and the airfield on the far side of the bay. He wanted nothing of them, would carry with him only the bracelet on his wrist that gave his name, Fawzi al-Ateh. As the bus bumped through more checkpoints, past more guards, he put the plastic bag on the bus floor and kicked it back under the seat. He wanted nothing of them but that they should be hurt, by his hand.

  The fly came back, settled on her lip. Beth swiped at it again with savagery. She saw him.

  With short stumbled strides, his weight on the weapon, he came clear of the shelter and headed out over the sand. His robe was hooked into his waist, the sun caught the whiteness of the new dressing and his shadow stretched away in front of him. The guide's boy had come to her, told her she should leave in the night, and she had spoken of her bloody promise. She should have gone in the night to the snoring, tossing Bartholomew, and told him, ordered him, to load up the big dose to burn away the dream. She had not had the courage. He reached the guide.

  At that distance Beth could not have heard words spoken between them. She screwed her eyes to see better and did not think words were spoken. He let his weight settle on the weapon that supported him, reached down to the guide's lap and lifted the rifle. There was no protest from the guide, no struggle for the rifle. He stood over the guide, the weapon as his crutch, and both his hands held it. She heard - as an echoed sound across the sand - the scrape of metal on metal as he cocked it.

  He held the rifle in one hand and turned, with his weight on the weapon and the length of its tube, so that he faced vaguely towards her. He moved. She leaned her weight against the tyre and watched him. His face was contorted. The veins stood out on his neck and the lines cut his forehead, and his eyes were near closed as if that might hold back the pain. She saw the first blood trickle from his lip where he bit it. He came nearer to her and the sand scuffed out from under his bare feet. The guide still sat and she could not read his thought, and further back and higher the boy was on the shallow dune. She wriggled back against the tyre, but it was ungiving. Then she realized. He was not coming towards her. His target was at a shallow angle from her.

  Beth swung her head.

  The tail of the Mitsubishi was past the Land Rover's front fender.

  Bart had his back to him, had not seen him, was stuffing packeted syringes, rolled dressings and tablet bottles into a plastic bag. He did not know that he was stalked.

  The rifle was held out, but Beth saw the way the barrel wavered, wobbled, as if caught by the wind.

  Bart had a small refrigerated box and unzipped it. He put the plastic bag into it. He reached into the tail of the Mitsubishi and lifted out a water bottle. First he mopped a handkerchief across his face, then he swigged from the bottle.

  The rifle was raised. Its barrel seemed to shake. She thought he struggled to hold it steady, and to aim. He was a dozen yards behind Bart.

  Beth screamed. No words of warning, only an anguished cry that pierced the quiet.

  She saw Bart start up, saw his shock, saw him stare at her, then follow her line of sight. He fixed his gaze on the rifle barrel, t
hen seemed to shrivel.

  She heard Bart's voice. 'You don't have to do that, my friend. No cause for you to be worried by me. Snitch on you? No . . . no. Turn in a fighter? Been there. I've seen your face - it doesn't matter. Sort of made the decision last night. I'd go to my grave rather than turn in another fighter, done that long ago .. . I'm grateful to you. Coming down here and getting you on your feet has been kind of important to me - like the chains are off, my friend. What I'm saying is .. .'

  She saw that the barrel of the rifle was steady. She pulled herself up against the tyre. She saw the finger slide from the guard to the trigger. She gulped in a breath, and ran.

  Beth saw his head lift from the sight. Her boots ground and kicked in the sand as she slithered nearer to Bart.

  For the slightest moment, there was irresolution on his face.

  .

  The rifle dropped.

  Beth reached Bart. She stood in front of him, panted, felt the heave of his chest against her back. She was a shield for him.

  'You don't have to,' Bart's voice quavered in her ear.

  'I do.'

  Images cascaded in Beth's mind. His control over the men who would have killed her, his sweat dripping as he dug out the sand-locked wheels, his smile of gratitude as she passed him water, his frown of concern and patience as he cleaned the engine, his peace as he slept in the sand beside her, the stars and moon above h i m . . . The barrel was up, aimed. She looked into his face and searched for passion, loathing, madness, and saw only a strange calm. She thought his eyes had the emptiness of death, as if the light had gone from them.

  'I've seen your face. I remember it. Be a hero, be a killer. Isn't that what you want? . . . Do you know what you said before the drip worked? I'll tell you: "They'll hear my name, they'll know it . . .

  Everyone will hear my name . . . When you hear my name, all of you bastards, it'll be because I've done what my family wants of me."

  Your family, big deal, have made an animal of you. Common Brit scum is what you are, always will be - and vain as a fucking peacock