Dead Boy Walking

by David Brining

  #24. AL-YARMUK BORDER POST, HIGHWAY 35, JORDAN-SYRIA BORDER

  Tuesday July 14, 03:31

  AMUN'S FINGERS were numb on this cold, cloudy night. After six hours' duty, he was bored. There was nothing to see in the desert except for the dim milky-white disc of the partially obscured moon and an occasional skittering, sandy-coloured, bat-eared desert-fox but he preferred to be outside in the cold to being tucked up inside the little concrete shed with his card-playing, roll-up smoking colleagues. Their loud, raucous laughter and constant, good-natured cursing overwhelmed the crackling hiss of the radio and worsened as the night progressed and the arak bottle emptied. Propping his M-16 against the wall, he sat down in a plastic chair and glanced towards the brightly lit, barbed-wire topped building that housed Syrian Customs and Border Control a hundred metres further along the lumpy tarmac road.

  Border duty had delighted this teenage conscript. It was soft. There were no dignitaries to inspect you, no sergeants to bully you, no skirmishes with Lebanese insurgents, Palestinian guerrillas or excitable, trigger-happy Israeli soldiers, just hours of looking at papers, looking in cars and waving goodbye to the people passing between the two countries. The signs with their promise of adventure, You are now entering the Syrian Arab Republic and Welcome to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, had excited him, stirred his patriotism. Every evening, when the shift began, he and his comrades would salute their flag, salute the portrait of their King and sing their national anthem but now, after a month, the routine had grown stale, the hours of the night-shift dragged, his companions were common and boorish and no-one came through the border at three a.m.

  He wondered idly what the Syrians were doing. He guessed they would be watching television. He did not have much contact with them. They kept themselves to themselves. Occasionally he would see them playing football in the sand. Mostly he never saw them at all.

  A cat scurried across the empty car-park. Where had it come from? Where was it going? The nearest house was far out of sight.

  Amun scratched his thin, straggly beard. It had taken several months to grow but he was confident it would fill out in time to rival his father's.

  Coarse laughter burst from the shed along with the slap of cards and the chink of money. He had told them that gambling was prohibited but they told him to get lost.

  The dull, distant drone of an engine seeped into the silence. Amun sat up straight. The drone intensified. Twin yellow beams cut through the inky night-sky. Across the border, some Syrian soldiers emerged from their building. A truck was coming.

  Amun watched it bounce towards the barrier. A sudden, fierce blaze of light poured over the border-post thrusting the desert into deeper, starker darkness. A man in a khaki uniform and a red and white khefiyah moved into the middle of the road and waved the driver to stop. The driver jumped down from the cab, shook hands all round and disappeared into the building whilst two soldiers with flashlights went round the back of the truck to inspect the cargo.

  ''Truck coming!'' Amun called to his colleagues.

  ''You handle it,'' came the reply.

  Amun tutted disapprovingly. They were so unprofessional. He stood up and waited.

  Ten minutes passed before the soldiers, having completed their search, disappeared into the office as well. Twenty further minutes passed before they emerged again with the driver and returned to the truck. Good-humoured laughter tinkled from the desert. Another round of hand-shakes and the driver climbed back to his cab. The engine bellowed into life as the barrier lifted.

  Amun scratched his throat. The truck was heading towards him, its yellow headlights casting his silhouette into sharp relief against the grey concrete wall of the customs shed.

  ''Truck's coming,'' he called again.

  The sergeant stuck his head out. Amun could smell the liquor.

  ''Wassup, Amun? Can't you deal with it? 'S only one lickle truck…''

  ''Sarge, supposed to have two to inspect…''

  ''Syrians let it through?''

  ''Yes.''

  ''And they're paranoid. If they think it's OK, it's OK.''

  The truck, a large Renault with a white cab and blue tarpaulin sides, drew up alongside. AL-HOURI DELIVERIES was stencilled in white letters on the side. The driver wound down the window. Amun could hear tinny music twittering from a radio.

  ''Evening, son,'' the driver said cheerfully. He was unshaven, wore a black baseball cap pushed back from his brow and a white T-shirt under a red and white short-sleeve check shirt. A cigarette was stuck to his lower lip and his left elbow rested on the window-slot.

  ''Sala'am aleikum,'' Amun replied as the handbrake grated on.

  Narrowing his eyes against the smoke curling up from his cigarette, the driver handed his passport through the open window. Amun learned that Youssef Abdullah, from Latakia in Syria, was thirty-five years old, a Muslim, married and one meter seventy-eight centimetres tall.

  ''You were a long time at the Syrian side,'' he remarked.

  ''You know those fellows?'' asked Youssef Abdullah. ''Great bunch. Got a cuppa and a smoke. I'm a regular on this route. I do all Al-Houri's long-haul deliveries.'' Youssef Abdullah appraised Amun. ''Haven't seen you before. You new?''

  Amun snapped the passport shut and examined the documents in the lorry's headlights. Youssef Abdullah was delivering machine-parts to a factory in Amman. He had a customs inspection form stamped by the Syrians just a few minutes ago, another form stamped by some Damascene bureaucrat authorising the export, an import licence signed by an Amman administrator, letters from the factory manager and Mr Morsi of Morsi's Machine-Parts and a log-book in which his frequent trips between the two capital cities were recorded. He came through the border at three every Tuesday morning and had been doing so for several weeks.

  ''I have to look in the back too,'' said Amun.

  ''Sure,'' said Youssef Abdullah. ''Help yourself but I got to be in Amman by six and it's a couple of hours from here. If I'm late, I'll lose my bonus. They don't like unpunctuality.''

  Amun flashed his torch over the plastic snaps that held the tarpaulin in place. They looked all right. More laughter and the chink of glasses drifted from the hut.

  ''Sounds like you're missing a party,'' said Youssef Abdullah.

  Behind the rear barn-doors at the rear were dozens of large, closely stacked wooden crates labelled MORSI MACHINE-