The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

  Abruptly, the kid at the wheel swung it. Caleb was thrown across the floor. His shoulder thudded into the far wall and spray drenched him through the cabin's open door. On his hands and knees he crawled to a hard chair that was screwed down, and held tightly to it. Then the kid who was at the controls throttled down the two outboards, allowing the waves to carry the rocking launch nearer to the beach. The kid at the wheel jerked his head, gesturing for Caleb to come out of the cabin. He could barely stand, and he used the chair, then the edge of a table and the doorway to support himself.

  He could see the beach where the surf broke, and he heard the little ripples of sound as the sea ran on sand and shingle, then fell back.

  Fast, they had him by the shoulders and arms and propelled him towards the launch's side. Not only was he no sailor, he had never swum. He did not resist.

  They had had time to learn every contour of his face. They could have described the shape of his nose, the cut of his jaw, the colour of his eyes.

  He could have told them the fate of four men who trafficked opium who, also, had seen his face.

  They lifted him up, his stomach scraping on the launch's side.

  He told them nothing.

  Had they stopped, pulled back his head by the hair at the last moment and looked into his face in the dying light they would have seen the harshness of his features - but they did not.

  Caleb was pitched over the side. He saw the twin grinning faces, and then he went under. The shock of the water forced air from his lungs. He went down, into blackness. He was scrambling with his feet, kicking, and the salt water was in his mouth, his nostrils, and the pressure on his chest was leaden. His feet flailed into the sea bed.

  When he broke the surface, gasping and coughing, the launch was already under full power, arrowing away from the beach. The limit of his memory was the few days in Landi Khotal and the wedding party - before that there was nothing, the same blackness as when he had gone under the water, and after that there were memories of Afghanistan and more memories of the camps at Guantanamo Bay.

  Nothing in that cut-short memory told Caleb how to swim. He was a man who could fight with skill, with resolve, a man who could trek and endure the confines of a prison cage constructed to destroy a prisoner's soul, but he had never swum. He lashed at the water. The thrashes of his legs and arms, and the power of the waves, pushed him towards the beach. He felt no guilt that he had not told them of their fate. His mind was as cold as his body in the water. His feet hit the bottom. His sandals had stayed on. He stood at his full height and the waves broke against his back. He waded towards the shore.

  When he was clear of the water, Caleb sank down on his haunches, then rolled on to his back and little pebbles pressed into his spine.

  Above him, a low shaft of moonlight came off the water and covered him.

  His life, as he knew it, had begun at a wedding party on the outskirts of the town of Landi Khotal and before that there was the same darkness as when he had gone down into the water off the launch.

  He had no wish to clear the darkness because older memories threatened him. On his back, looking up at the stars, he saw the man with the eyepatch and the chrome claw, always watching him. He had felt then that the one eye was never off him. The party had drifted on and food had been eaten, and when the evening had come, the man with the eyepatch and the claw had sat beside him. Lit by hurricane lamps in which moths danced, he had seen the scars spreading out from under the eyepatch and up the wrist to which the claw was strapped.

  It had been the start of the journey of Caleb's life.

  A light flashed in the trees, winked at him.

  His sandals slithered in the sand. He went towards it. For a whole minute the flashes guided him but when he reached the debris left by the tide's highest point the light was killed. He blundered forward in darkness and wove between tree-trunks. Thorns caught at his robe.

  His clothes were sodden and the cold of the coming night swaddled him .. . Caleb was not ashamed of fear. Since the wedding, he had been afraid many times. The Chechen had said that fear was unimportant, that the control of fear was the talent of a fighter . . . If he was to return to his family, he must take every step on trust.

  He trudged through the trees. He pulled the robe clear when it snagged.

  Caleb had control of the fear because the camps at Guantanamo had hardened him. He was a survivor .. . He passed a palm tree's trunk. His arm was grabbed and the light fell on the plastic bracelet on his right wrist. Then his arm was loosed. The fear was gone.

  In the low light, the farmers approached the corpse with caution.

  They had walked up from the track, among the rocks, because they had smelt the stench of the body. The track ran from the Yemeni town of Marib across the border, and on north-east to the Saudi town of Sharurah. They had left their donkeys and sheep by the track where a bullet-scarred car had burned out. They came to the corpse. The head had been cut from the neck and the hands from the wrists. Flies crawled over the torso, and already some of the flesh had been torn away by foxes. Holding his shirt tail over his nose, one went close enough to the body to reach out and check the pockets, but they were empty, and when he pulled up a sleeve there was no watch. The farmers circled the corpse and threw stones on it until they had made a cairn to cover the body. Then they ran, leaving the smell and the stones behind them.

  'Is that right, we let some out?'

  'Just five, only five . . . It was about pressure, image. So, what's the big deal? It was five guys, why does that matter?'

  Across the desk, the supervisor glowered at him. To Jed, he looked drawn, stressed in the neon strip-light washing over his face. It highlighted the strain at his mouth and the sacs below the eyes. If Jed hadn't gone down with the headcold he would have returned to Guantanamo a week earlier. By the time he had gone back with Brigitte and Arnie Junior to the apartment near the Pentagon, the headcold had been streaming out of his nose, he'd had a raw throat and a hacking cough. He'd delayed his return to Gitmo. He held the list of names in his hand. The days that Jed Dietrich, in his time with the Defense Intelligence Agency, had called in sick could have been counted on the fingers of one hand. It had hurt him, a conscientious man, to be back late off leave, and the winnowing guilt fuelled his show of temper.

  'It matters, Edgar, because two of them are on my work list.'

  'The hell it matters - and, as I said, pressure and image played their part. Those factors may not figure at your level, Jed, but they do at mine. Coming across my desk is pressure to improve the image of this god-forsaken place. So, we let a few out and the pressure eases, the image improves. Now, it may be the end of the day but I still have

  .a shitload of work to do.' The supervisor grinned cagily. 'And I imagine, Jed, you'll want to look after that cold of yours. Get your loot up so you don't lose any more time here.'

  It was dismissal. His supervisor had fifteen years on Jed and three grades of superiority. Perhaps because the headcold had tired him, perhaps because the connection out of San Juan had been late, perhaps because victories at Camp Delta were in short supply, Jed persisted.

  'Shouldn't have happened, not names on my list. They shouldn't have been released, not without consultation. Did they just come out of a hat?'

  'For God's sake, look at that.' The supervisor waved at his piled in-tray. 'I have work to do.'

  'Did you authorize the releases? Was it your decision?'

  To a few colleagues, Jed Dietrich was dedicated. To most colleagues he was a plodder. He liked things done right . .. He had nearly, almost, cleared two of the names on the list but 'nearly' and

  'almost' were not good enough for him. A frown clung to his brow.

  He knew the way it would have worked out in his absence. The Bureau and the Agency had authority; DIA was down the ladder, bottom rung.

  Jed said, 'The blind one, I don't have a difficulty with him, but this guy - Fawzi al-Ateh - he was unfinished business.'

  'What are y
ou trying to say?' the supervisor menaced him.

  'I'm just saying that it's not professional. It's crazy to clear a guy, Edgar, when interrogation hasn't run the full road.'

  'You're on a roll this morning.' The supervisor's smile was grim.

  'It's not crazy, it was an order.'

  'I thought about him.'

  'Did you? Well, let me say it - when I'm up for vacation I won't be thinking about any of them, about anything to do with this place. He was just a taxi-driver . . . Lighten up. Forget about him. All you need to remember is that he's gone. This is your new roster.'

  The supervisor handed Jed the printout of his interrogation duties for the coming week. Jed held it in one hand; in the other was a list of the five names of men released when he'd been away from Gitmo.

  The first week of his vacation, the names and patterns of the questioning had drilled in his mind; by the time he'd reached the cabin in Wisconsin overlooking the lake, they'd been scrubbed out. But on seeing the name on the list, the itch and irritation had returned. He must have been scowling.

  'Damnit, Jed, didn't you get any fish up there?'

  He stood up and went out into the evening air. The Maghrib prayers were being broadcast over loudspeakers. Beyond the wire fences, flooded by the arc lamps' light, he heard the murmured response of six hundred men, a droning cry, like the swarm of bees.

  He passed the interrogation block, his workplace, where ceiling lights blazed, and came to the prefabricated wood building that was his work-home. He hated the place because, here, even little victories were hard to come by. In front of him was the concrete building - not of prefabricated wood - where the Agency and the Bureau were installed: they took the cream of the prisoners; they weeded out the best from which bigger victories might be squeezed. They were the kings of Gitmo.

  In his cubicle, barely wide enough to take a single outstretched boat rod, long enough for a single float rod for bank angling, Jed studied the roster for his week's interrogations. There were names he didn't know, which would have been passed down to him because other interrogators had finished their Gitmo posting. There was a rhythm and routine at Camp Delta that added merely to a sum result of failure. He swore . . . Later, he would sign himself out at the compound gate, take the shuttle bus to the ferry and go across the bay to the main Marine Corps base. From his sparsely furnished room he would phone Brigitte and he'd tell her everything was dandy, fine, but first he had work.

  His fingers hammered on the computer console. The message was to Defense Intelligence Agency at the Bagram airfield in Afghanistan. Could a check be run on Fawzi al-Ateh, ref. no. US8AF-000593DP? Could a report be sent back on the return of Fawzi al-Ateh to his community? Had he been quizzed on the reasons for the request, Jed could not have responded with any coherence. Might have been merely pique that he had not been consulted. Might have been a feeling far down in his gut.

  It would be a month, if he was lucky, before Bagram replied. He sent the signal.

  the marine eyed him as if he was an intruder and not welcome.

  Eddie Wroughton smiled back, left his opinion, like flatulence hanging in the air, that the marine corporal's hostility was of no concern. The messenger from the front desk of the embassy left him at the gate. The suite of offices used by the Central Intelligence Agency was high in the building. The outer walls had been strengthened, the windows were shatter-proof, and the inner doors were steel-plated. The marine watched over the grille gate into the suite. Wroughton gave his name and flashed his passport. Before the marine could telephone for instructions, Juan Gonsalves had bustled from an inner room. The gate was opened. Wroughton was admitted.

  His name went into the ledger. They embraced. Gonsalves led Wroughton through an open-plan work area, the territory of the juniors and secretaries. Eyes followed Wroughton, echoing the hostility of the marine corporal. Precious few of the embassy's own American staff, seldom even the ambassador and no other non-nationals, were permitted access to this inner sanctum where Riyadh's heat and dust could not penetrate. The air-conditioners purred. What Wroughton knew, Juan Gonsalves didn't give a shit.

  Eddie Wroughton was the only foreigner allowed into the heartland of Agency territory. They went past a desk and a junior bent forward awkwardly to hide his papers. A secretary flipped the button to blank her screen. They walked on. Wroughton wore his linen suit and ironed white shirt, his tie knotted over the button; Gonsalves had faded jeans low on his ample hips and his shirt tail had worked out of the belt. They were opposites but they had mutual trust because they fed off each other, and they shared a common enemy. It was, however, an unequal feast.

  Eddie Wroughton's greatest problem in his Riyadh posting was bringing sufficient food to the table. Too often - and it nagged him -

  all he had was a fistful of crumbs. He was led into a side office.

  The room was a mess. Wroughton knew there had been an inspection team out from Langley three months before, and he presumed that his friend had made an effort to shift chaotic heaps of files off the floor, the table and chairs, to have the coffee-cups and wine glasses washed and laid to rest in the cupboard, to clear away the fast-food packaging, to put a cover sheet over the updated Most Wanted photographs, to keep the safe locked -

  but it was now twelve weeks since the team had gone home and standards had slipped again. His own office, in the British Embassy, was presided over by an assistant, who was prim and elderly with her hair netted tight in a bun above the nape of her neck.

  She kept the room pristine, as if she feared provoking his criticism.

  Wroughton stepped carefully between the files, removed a box of papers from a chair, selected the least dirty coffee mug, held it up and gazed into the crowded depth of the open safe. Above him, when he sat down, the faces of the Most Wanted stared down malevolently, some with a Chinagraph cross daubed across their cheeks with the date of their capture or death; the majority were still unmarked. A plate with a half-moon of pizza abandoned on it lay beside Gonsalves' steaming kettle. Coffee was made and an old biscuit tin passed to him. Dominating the Most Wanted photographs was the image of the First Fugitive. A long face topped by a white cloth that hid the hairline, bright, sparkling eyes, a prominent nose, a range of uneven but white teeth, a moustache that came wispily past a laughing mouth to merge into a straggling beard of which the centre was greying and the extremes were dark. Around the throat was a buttoned-up brown overshirt. Above the First Fugitive's head had been written in a juvenile hand, ' "The death of the Martyr for the unification of all the people to the cause of God and His word is the happiest, best, easiest and most virtuous of deaths": Medieval Scholar.' Wroughton was thinking of the men who had climbed on to the passenger aircraft less than three years before and was wondering if they'd known those words. Gonsalves slumped in his chair, tilted it, heaved his feet on to the table, scattering papers, and slopped his coffee.

  'OK, Eddie, can I shoot?'

  'Fire.'

  Gonsalves languidly gestured to the Most Wanted and the First Fugitive, sipped his coffee, then shot.

  'They are screwed. In trouble. Hunted. They have problems. They are in disarray. They are looking over their shoulders. Not capable, right now, of the big hit. They are hurt. But—'

  'But they are intact, Juan.'

  'But they are intact. Bull's eye, Eddie, right in the inner circle. So, in retreat a commander looks to find a new defence line, somewhere he can hunker down and—'

  'And regroup, Juan.'

  'Afghanistan is finished for him. Pakistan is hot and difficult for him. Iran is—'

  IIran is quietly co-operative, useful as a transit and short-time hideaway.'

  'Iran is not a place for a long-term base camp. Chechnya, forget it.

  Somalia and Sudan are past history for him, the game's moved on.

  We're hearing talk from elsewhere . . . What do you know, Eddie, about the Empty Quarter?'

  Eddie Wroughton could have said that what he knew about the Empty Quarte
r was that it was empty, could have said that it wasn't a part of Saudi Arabia to which Juan should take his Teresa and the tribe of children for weekend camping, could have said anything facetious - but didn't. When he fed from his friend's table, he cut the smart-arse quips.

  'I've flown over it, of course. I used to have that major in the Border Guard, you'll remember him, but he's posted up north now. I know precious little about it.'

  'It isn't Siglnt, and not EIInt, and it's most certainly not HumInt, it's just rumour. I did some reading anyway. Except for some mountain in the Himalayas, right on the peak, the Empty Quarter seems to be as remote as you can get. It's a huge area, like the name says, but I have confirmation there have been no satphone links out of there, or radio, and—'

  'There wouldn't be, unless they're suicidal.'

  '—and all I have to go on is a rumour of couriers passing through northern Yemen and heading up to the border, and people coming back. Three days ago it got kind of interesting.'

  A story from Gonsalves was like water spilled on linoleum, it meandered but it kept going. It did not sink quickly into sand.

  Without the morsels of Agency information Wroughton's own work would have been harder and his future darker.

  'We don't have people in north Yemen, not on the ground, but we have the Yemeni military we've trained. Three days ago, our liaison officer in San'a was brought a cardboard box, like it was a present, the sort of size box you'd put groceries in. There were guys standing around and giggling, and he was invited to open it up. There was a head, severed, and two hands, all sawn off with a knife, and there was some squidgy sort of shit - I mean it. A guy had approached a roadblock, had seen the military, had jumped out and left his vehicle, then run for cover in the rocks. They did well, the military, but not quite well enough. Before they shot him, he was seen to swallow something - OK, OK, he's dead. So, what they did, Eddie, was they disembowelled him. They got into his upper intestine, down the bottom of his throat, and they got out a scrap of chewed paper, what you'd use for home-made cigarettes. Then they took off the head and the hands - you understand, for identification. I think our liaison guy's putting in for counselling, maybe for a transfer. I mean it, they slit his stomach and got out his tubes, then cut into them. Christ, we got some allies . . . What was left of the paper went back as an image to the laboratory at Langley, but we can't break into whatever writing there was. All we end up with is a courier carrying a message so tiny it might not have been found, so important it was worth swallowing and dying to protect it, and we don't have identification and there's no databank in Yemen that could match the fingerprints off the hands. The other thing - earlier, the roadblock military had seen a small camel train waiting down the track, nearer to the frontier. We trained those boys well, they're bright and keen. As soon as they'd filled the cardboard box they skipped back up the road to where the camels had been and two Bedouin. The sound of shooting carries a long way across those hills and the sand - no camels, no Bedouin. What do you think?'