The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

  The pilot said, smile beaming, 'Right on. You should be glad we're flying out today, forecast is nasty tomorrow - storms and winds that'll gust to seventy knots - good that we got the window today I'll come and talk after we've lifted off.'

  The request welled in Marty's throat as he unfastened the harness clasp. The pilot was half gone through the hatch door, and the ramp was already up. The second pilot had started up the heavy engines.

  Marty had to yell: 'Excuse me, sir, but could I ask you a favour?

  Means a lot to me.'

  He explained, shouted it in the pilot's ear above the growing howl as the power gathered.

  The transporter, laden to the maximum, used the length of the runway, and even then the undercarriage seemed to skim the airfield's perimeter. The pilot should have done an immediate starboard turn for a plotted flight path to the Omani border, then the crossing of the Jabal Akhdar mountains but instead banked to port on lift-off. Marty gave him the map co-ordinates, which were passed on to the navigator, lines were pencil-drawn on the map and the diversion course was set. He clung to the back of the pilot's seat and the transporter shook and bumped as it gained height. Lizzy-Jo was crouched beside him, her hand over his fingers clamped on the seat. He thought that she understood his need. They crossed plateau sand and dunes, and the mountains of the desert. They went over the track

  - a traffic-control tower queried them, and the pilot said, dry, that navigation equipment had gone faulty, was being worked on, would be rectified in the near future - left it behind them. The navigator did well.

  She lay two miles below them. Spread out, fractured, dead. The pilot took them on a tilting circuit. Marty had his nose pressed against the glass of the cockpit side window. He saw the twenty-foot length of one white wing, and the broken pieces of the fuselage. He did not know how to say a prayer, but words of respect choked at the back of his mouth. Lizzy-Jo held his shoulder tight, but it was his moment. He grieved . . . Her fingernails cut down through his T-shirt and then she rapped the pilot's arm and gestured beyond the wreckage.

  They saw the arrow. It was on raised ground and pointed across open sand. It seemed, to Marty, as if the arrowhead of bright colours was laid out to be seen from the air. The navigator made calculations, then scribbled on his pad the exact compass bearing in which the arrowhead faced.

  Lizzy-Jo said, 'Someone left a marker - someone wants them fucked over. Thanks for the diversion, sir. Let's get on home now.'

  As they climbed, headed for the Omani border, for the mountain range of Jabal Akhdar and for the wide sea of the Gulf of Oman, Lizzy-Jo u s e d the communications and broadcast the co-ordinate reference points and the compass bearing - and they went back to their canvas seats.

  Marty slept, his head on her shoulder.

  The winds rose and they went into the teeth, the mouth of the storm.

  His eyes were closed against the spat pricks of the sand. Had his eyes been open he would have been blinded. Waves came across him, beat on him, threatened to drag him down off the saddle, to pitch him on to the desert's floor. The Beautiful One led him. Caleb could not have directed her. He let the reins hang loose and clung to the saddle, and when the fiercest gusts hit him he dropped his arms on to her neck and held the long hair. He knew that if they stopped, found a dune that protected them and huddled for shelter behind it, they would never regain the direction of their path. And, if the Beautiful One flinched from the storm, turned away from it, they were dead. The force of the storm brought the hot, scalding air against him, flattened his robe against his body. The sand was in his closed eyes, his pinched nostrils and his mouth, and it beat into the wound, lifted the lint dressing and lay in the cavity that was not stitched closed. He could not drink, could not eat. His throat was raw, dry - his stomach was aching, empty. Stubborn, as he had always been, Caleb clung to life.

  Again and .again - his mouth closed because to open it would let in the storm's sand - he shouted in his mind that he had not lived lo fail now. Obstinacy gave him strength. If he went down, on to the sand and against the Beautiful One's body, his life was wasted . . .

  before it had begun. He did not see skeletons in the sand, the whitened b o n e s of a man and a camel, rotted clothing and the frayed sacking leatheer of a saddle. He did not know how fast the Beautiful One carried him, or how far she could take him against the lash of the wind.

  He was alone with his God, with his purpose.

  *

  A day had passed. The shuttle bus waited at the end of the ferry pier.

  It took Jed to Camp Delta. He showed his card and the guard let him through the turnstile gate. He'd had a good flight to Miami, then a feeder to Puerto Rico, then a military ride to Guantanamo. He had left his bag at the reception of Officers' Quarters, had not checked back in but had gone for the ferry, taking with him only the filled file.

  Jed thought the guard looked at him strangely as he presented himself at the gate for Administration, but his ID, swiped, took him through. Maybe the guard was new, hauled out of the reserve, taken off a civilian street, and didn't know him. And he did not see, as he walked towards Administration with the sunshine, the light and the perfect breeze off the sea on him, the guard pick up the telephone in his box. The sun and the feel of the wind made him feel good. If he had not had the file under his arm, Jed might have forgotten, fast, where he had been; might have forgotten the rain of that place and its darkness, the grime on the streets and the sort of despair of it.

  He went up the steps into the block, and the guys on the desk looked away from him, like they hadn't seen him. He went down the corridor and headed for his office, wanted to get the file secure in his safe. He went past closed doors, did not look at them. At the end of the corridor, as he walked along it, he saw the big plastic bag, filled.

  It was by his door. He reached the door. His name wasn't on it. It had been typed on a sticky paper strip, but the strip had been scraped off, as if with a penknife blade. He had his key out of his pocket and into the lock, but the key did not fit the changed lock. He unknotted the top of the plastic bag and saw the photograph in its frame of Brigitte, Arnie Junior and himself on a lake boat in Wisconsin.

  He turned, stamped back up the corridor towards his supervisor's room.

  Two doors, now, were open - one to a room the Bureau used and one to an Agency room. It was done as if it were synchronized. The Agency man was in front of him and the Bureau man was behind.

  Their voices rattled round him.

  'You looking for Edgar, your supervisor? You won't find him.'

  'Edgar went sick yesterday, got flown off Guantanamo.'

  Jed thought he understood, thought he knew what their business would be in blocking him.

  The Agency man, in front of him, said, 'And he wasn't alone

  .

  on the flight. Wallace went with him - except Wallace wasn't sick.'

  The man behind him, from the Bureau door, said, 'And Harry was on the same plane - and Harry, too, wasn't sick.'

  Jed remembered Lovejoy. The droll and laid-back quip: In my experience, few of our masters regard a messenger bearing bad tidings favourably - about as bad as it can get, wouldn't you agree? Lovejoy had told him he would find it at first hand - in front of him and behind him.

  'Suppose you think you're clever and a hero - not an utter asshole.

  You fucked Wallace, and Wallace was a good man.'

  'What I think, you motherfucker, you're not fit to wipe Harry's boots. You destroyed his life's service, disgraced him.'

  He thought of Lovejoy and his kindness, and of the back roads he'd taken . .. thought of old people in a library and a headteacher and a man who'd seen the potential of a kid, the guys in a repair workshop who weren't good enough to satisfy the kid's ambition to be somebody . . . thought of two Asian youths who'd walked away when the kid hadn't. . . thought of a woman, a mother, on whom the kid had turned his back . . . thought of what it added up to, and the danger that was the kid, Caleb Hunt.
r />   'Wallace, most likely - because of you - will face a disciplinary board, might lose his pension.'

  'Those gatherings of senior men, gone off the payroll but honoured

  - Harry won't ever be there. You disgraced him, snapped him like a fucking twig. For what?'

  'For your ego, asshole?'

  'To trample on good men's reputations and belittle them?'

  'So a mistake was made - big deal.'

  'Should have been kept close. You fish, Dietrich, don't you? Good.

  You've got yourself all the months of the year for fishing.' The Bureau man behind him sidled back to his door.

  The Agency man eased to the corridor's side. 'You broke two fine men. We'll break you.'

  Jed turned, went back and picked up the black plastic bag. He dumped the file in the top of it, covered the picture of Brigitte, Arnie Junior and himself. He carried the bag down the corridor, past the closed doors. He thought of the panic that caught a city and the screams welled in his ears. Through tears, he saw bloodstains on pavements .. . and he wondered where was Caleb Hunt who could make the panic.

  A week had gone . . . The pilot of the big Chinook double-rotor helicopter had told them, in their headsets, that it was unusual, not exceptional, for the Rub' al Khali desert to be hit by a storm of that intensity and duration, but flight was now possible, though un-comfortable. He had added that ground temperature was currently at 134° Fahrenheit, 56.7° centigrade, and he'd wished them well.

  All the time they had been up, Wroughton had felt sick and Gonsalves had twice used the paper bags offered them.

  The Chinook carried a platoon of the National Guard, the deputy governor of the province, Gonsalves and Wroughton. The weather had cleared sufficiently for two F-15 bombers, Saudi piloted, to strike the cave complex the previous afternoon; the Chinook flew to confirm the success or failure of the strike.

  Wroughton knew he was lucky to be on board. Gonsalves, the ally, had the right to be there. Wroughton was on sufferance, on the manifest because he had the file and the name on the file. Gonsalves had supplied the map co-ordinates where the marker had been left, and the compass-bearing of the arrow.

  In a direct line from the compass-bearing, forty-eight land miles from the map co-ordinates, the bombers had found a steep rock escarpment, and among stones they had seen a flash of light, sun upon chrome metal, and on their third pass the cave entrance had been seen. It had been hit. Six laser-guided five-hundred-pound high-explosive bombs had been dropped on the cave entrance.

  Wroughton had said it, Gonsalves had believed him, that the cave would have been the destination of Caleb Hunt.

  They went, feeling sick and being sick, in search of the body - and the bodies of the commanders that he had crossed the desert to rejoin.

  At the map co-ordinates, the Chinook had gone low. They had sensed, both of them, that the pilot struggled to keep the helicopter up. They had seen, faces pressed against porthole windows, clothes, a blanket and towels scattered over a half-mile. The scorch mark', where a vehicle had been burned out were covered by a sand carpel, and only the roof protruded. Of the downed Predator, all they saw was the section of the tail wings and the push-propellor, the rest of it submerged by sand.

  On the compass-bearing, they looked for bodies and the carcasses of camels, but the desert below them was clean, wind-scoured sand.

  They landed at the base of the escarpment.

  Ears ringing, his step unsteady from the Chinook's turbulent flight, Wroughton walked towards the pile of rock rubble. Gonsalves, sweating and complaining, followed him. He could smell the death.

  The sweet, sickly scent of the dead came on the gusted wind. He heard Gonsalves throw up again, didn't know how the man had anything left to vomit. He had felt at ease with himself. The previous night, using the full weight of his embassy authority, he had escorted Bethany Jenkins to the airport, to the check-in counter, to the departure gate and had got her out safely, gratitude for services rendered, before questions had closed around her, hadn't even asked for her London phone number. She could have gone to gaol, or to Chop Chop Square . . . He had felt comfortable, until the smell soaked him.

  Wroughton stepped among the stones at the base of the escarpment, and held his handkerchief to his nose. A little of the cave's entrance was clear but it was high above him; no way that Wroughton would scramble up over the fractured rocks when he wore his last linen suit. The light caught it. He bent and picked up the tin box - what the sunlight had struck, what the bombers' pilots had seen - and opened it gingerly. Ash and cigarette butts spilled out. His handkerchief was insufficient. Wroughton gagged. Buried by the rocks, only the head, arm and rifle barrel visible, the sentry stank.

  Wroughton said quietly, 'Bad luck, sir. You did it all carefully, kept a tin for your fag ends. You were nice and tidy and professional.

  Except that a flier at ten thousand feet, four hundred miles an hour, can't see fag ends but can see a metal tin when the sun hits it. It wasn't me who ever said life was fair, sir.'

  The National Guard troops had crawled - like ferrets, Wroughton thought - into the cave entrance. The bodies were lowered down the escarpment, or dropped. They had not yet swollen, but he reckoned the stench worse than anything he'd encountered in Bosnia, at the mass graves. He knew the stench of death.

  .

  The troops lined the bodies up, six of them.

  Duty beckoned. It could not be avoided.

  He worked the collar of his suit jacket over the handkerchief at his nose.

  Gonsalves had a camera up to his eye, worked along the line and photographed the dead.

  Unmarked. All of the corpses were without wound, scratch or abrasion. He imagined them all cowering at the back of the cave, and the blast funnelling in, finding and killing them. Wroughton had the picture from Guantanamo and the one of the school group. He looked down on them. All at peace, rag-doll men.

  'Kind of look harmless, don't they? Like everybody's neighbour, would you not say?'

  'I'd say, Juan, that you should change your street.'

  'Fuck you. Your man's not here. Likely the storm took him, and the sand buried him. You saw that stuff we flew over . . . '

  Now, the troops brought down from the cave boxes of blankets, books, saucepans and plates, files, a typewriter and filled sacks.

  Wroughton said quietly, 'What are you standing in, Juan?'

  'What we flew over was just impossible. He was hurt bad, had been through all kind of shit. Who'd last out there who wasn't a Bedouin? No one. That place is evil. No one from outside could live in it. He would have to be incredible to survive. Good riddance, I'm betting he didn't. You saw the place . . .'

  A box was carried past Wroughton, and maybe his body made a point round which the wind blew, and a slip of bright laminated cardboard blew out of it and guttered down by Wroughton's polished shoes.

  'Juan, you are standing in camel dung - not old dung, fresh dung.

  Have you seen a camel's corpse? Have you seen bits of camel? I have not.'

  He picked up the cardboard slip. He went to the platoon officer, broke his deep conversation with the deputy governor, showed him the slip and asked his question. It was denied. Was he sure? It was certain. He went back to Gonsalves.

  'Look at it. It's a sales tag. It's for a Samsonite case. The case is called an Executive Traveller, and that'll be a hard-sided case. It's not been brought out. The slip is new, not old rubbish. The case is nol

  .

  there. I'm telling you, Juan, that a man came by camel and the camel crapped and the camel's gone, and a suitcase is gone, and Caleb Hunt is not here.'

  Gonsalves was using a chip stone to scrape the dung out of his trainer's treads.

  'As I see it, Juan, the situation's gone beyond our reach already. A suitcase is a weapon. What's inside a suitcase is what we fight against. A suitcase, its contents, frightens us half to death, but when a suitcase is missing it's beyond our reach, already . . . The future is out of our hands.
The future is with the alertness of a Customs official at the end of a ten-hour shift, or an immigration girl with a queue stretching fifty paces in front of her, or the suspicion of a probationer police officer. We depend on them, they are our future, it's in their hands - whether the suitcase goes past them, whether they stop it, whether they wave it through or whether they ask for it to be opened. If not that case, then another - and another . . .

  That's the damn future and it sort of crushes you when you see it up close.'

  They stared at each other, each burdened by the enormity of it, each searching the future for comfort and not finding it.

  'You're leaping, making too many conclusions, going too fast for me.'

  'I know I am, but I feel them in my gut.'

  The bodies in bags were going into the belly of the Chinook with the boxes and sacks. The deputy governor waved for them, as if he was a tour guide and an outing was running late. Wroughton thought Gonsalves was thinking of his kids and whether they'd ever walk past a suitcase set down in the street with an activated fuse running, or that he was thinking of everyone's kids. In Bosnia he had met young men, handsome and full of friendship, who had cleansed by atrocity. In Latvia he had met old men, who had dignity and charm and who leaned on sticks, and it was rumoured they had worked in concentration camps. In Wroughton's expectation, Caleb Hunt would be handsome and dignified, friendly and charming . ..

  He felt, as never before, a desperate sense of shame because he had once allowed himself, in a perversion of jealousy, to cheer on the young man who would carry a suitcase. He was wearied, and thought himself dirtied, inadequate.

  .

  'Do you want to come by tonight, Eddie, have some pizza, then throw some softball?'

  'Thank you.'

  The desert of the Rub' al Khali seldom offered up its secrets.

  For a millennium, only the stupid, the brave or the fanatical -

  Outsiders and strangers - have gone into the wilderness of sand, dunes and shallow mountains that cover a quarter of a million square miles of emptiness. They walked through the fire of the sun's heat, unwelcomed and unwanted. Around them were the bones of lost men and lost beasts, and the wreckage of vehicles and aircraft used by those who believed technology offered safety, and were wrong. Only the lucky survived the desert's enmity. It was said by the few Outsiders and strangers who had known luck and who had come through the fire that the Rub' al Khali had scarred them for the rest of their lives: they were changed men. They had no need of possessions or of any ideology, no need of friends or of money, no need of love or of belonging. Like the desert's winds, the scars stripped everything from them except the determination to exist - to take another step forward, and another, to reach a distant, hidden goal. But the Outsider or the stranger who had the luck to emerge from the sands had proven his worth.