The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

  There, at least, he would be treated with courtesy, made to feel valued - and so, at their prices, he damn well ought to be. Little luxuries had come late in life to Samuel Bartholomew: none at home as a child, none at school where pocket-money allowances were grudgingly paid by his father, none as a student in London. He was looking for a couple of ties, silk, and a couple of shirts, best Egyptian cotton.

  Bart's student years and the pre-qualification studies had been an endless miserly existence. Nine years in all, and always his wallet had been light. Through pre-clinical and clinical, through his pre-registration year with six months as a hospital house physician and six more months as house surgeon, and during the final three working as junior scrote at a general practitioner's surgery in east London and back again into a south London hospital, he had suffered un-relenting penury. The legacy of it was that today's purchase of shirts and ties had importance. Being able to shop when the mood took him was, even now, a small sign of personal achievement.

  The traffic wove and schemed around them. The blast of horns and the roar of speeding engines was filtered in the air-conditioned interior.

  Ahead, over the driver's shoulder, he saw a Land Rover Discovery pull up to the kerb. A blonde woman, quite young and European, stepped out and kids spilled from the back.

  He could see the nape of a young man's neck tilted back against the driver's headrest. An Arab, holding a plastic bag, paused by the near side door, hesitated on the pavement.

  His own driver was slowing: the traffic-lights in front were against them. Around his car he heard the scream of brakes. God, worse than castration for these people would be the loss of their vehicle's horn.

  The Arab crouched, was hidden by the Discovery, and when he stood again he no longer held the plastic bag.

  The lights changed, and suddenly the Arab was running.

  The driver saw nothing, concentrated on the surge of the traffic towards the junction. The plastic bag was half under the rear door of the Discovery. There was a waft of cigarette smoke through the front window on which a tanned elbow rested.

  Bart knew. Every three months, in batches, expatriates were summoned to the embassy for sessions with the security officer, and Eddie Wroughton would usually slope in, unannounced and without introductions, and stand at the back as the security officer briefed the audience of bankers, accountants, surveyors and defence-equipment engineers on precautions that should be taken, where the no-go areas were and the dangers. During the war, when Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV had pumped out, twenty-four/seven, images of destruction and mutilation in Iraq, expatriates had been advised to stay at home, keep off the streets and boycott work. Now the families were back, but 'Care should at all times be exercised', the security officer had said, at the last briefing Bart had attended. Usual routes should be varied and vehicles should not be left on the street; it was sensible to check under a car each morning. Bart understood what he had seen. He sat rigidly upright in the back of the car.

  They passed the Discovery.

  He said nothing. He saw the young man lounging, relaxed, in the driver's seat, waiting while the wife and kids browsed in a jeweller's shop. Through the plate-glass front of the shop, he saw a flash of the young mother's hair and the kids beside her. His own driver accelerated. Then they passed the Arab, sprinting, and his thobe billowed against his legs as he ran. His face was close to Bart. He seemed to be reciting, his lips moved as if in prayer, his eyes were behind spectacles, his cheeks were clean and his moustache trimmed

  - he was like any other of the young men who paraded the pavements and hospital corridors, and sat behind ministry desks. His driver was picking up speed. The Arab was lost from Bart's view. He had swivelled in the back seat, inside the constraint of the belt, and looked back at the Discovery, could just see the young man's face: first posting abroad, making the sort of money he could not hope to match back home, living in a villa with servants and a pool for the kids, and . . . The Discovery was a hundred yards behind them. They went through the junction.

  He could have turned his head away, looked instead over his own driver's shoulder, but did not.

  He saw the flash, its blinding light.

  He saw a door come off and cannon across the pavement into the glass of the jeweller's window. Then a bonnet. The Discovery seemed to be lifted up, and when it came down the duststorm gathered round it. There was the thunder. His driver braked. Every vehicle around them braked. They were spewed across the road, jamming it.

  Bart imagined .. . His own driver swung his body and lifted the medical bag - black leather and embossed with the initials S.A.L.B. -

  off the front seat and was passing it into the back . . . Bart imagined the blood spurting from severed arteries, legs amputated because they always were in a vehicle explosion, a head crushed against a shattered windscreen. Hardly turning from what he watched, Bart pushed away the medical bag. He imagined the young woman frozen in the jeweller's shop, cut by glass, and the kids clinging to her legs. He imagined the quiet groans of the young man in the Discovery, as the pallor settled on his face, because death from vehicle explosions always came later, in Accident and Emergency. He knew it because he had seen it when his life was a greater lie.

  He faced his driver, who still clung to the medical bag, which held the morphine and syringes that killed pain when death was inevitable. What he should have done, what he had practised and become expert at before moving to the Kingdom, was debridement.

  If there had been the smallest chance of saving life, there in the road while the patient groaned in shock and pain, he could have cut out the wounds and lifted clear with forceps - they were in his bag - the worst of the blast's debris: plastic from the dashboard, cloth material from the seating, clothing, old techniques developed by Napoleonic surgeons and still valid.

  'Drive on/ Bart said.

  Amazement and confusion wreathed the driver's face. Bart was a qualified medical doctor, had passed the exams and been inducted as a member of the Royal College of General Practitioners. He had sworn the oath named after the father of medicine, Hippocrates, to follow the ethics and duties required of him. He was, he knew it, dirt

  . . . Did he care? So much of his life was betrayal. He did not care.

  'Don't get involved, don't get caught up' was the mantra of expatriates in the Kingdom. 'Don't put your nose in because no one'll thank you and you'll get it bitten off instead' . . . Fuck the shirts, screw the ethics, fuck the ties and screw the duties . . . The oath had been sworn too long ago. He hated himself, and disgust squirmed in him.

  'Where to, Doctor?' the driver asked.

  'Back to the villa, I think. Thank you.'

  When the traffic moved, when the sirens were in the road, they drove away.

  Bart had justification to hate himself.

  Al Maz'an village, near Jenin, Occupied West Bank.

  The patient had acute diarrhoea.

  He had been called by the patient's father. It was now four months since he had been embedded in the Palestinian community, and trust for him was growing.

  Bart was escorted into the bedroom. In lozv light other members of the family ringed the walls, but only the mother was beside the bed where the girl lay. Four months before, the smell would have made Bart retch; he was used to it now. The mother held her daughter's hand and spoke soft, comforting words to her.

  What astonished Bart was that the whole of the village was not laid out prostrate with acute diarrhoea. That part of the village was a shanty town of homes thrown together with corrugated iron, canvas and packing-case boards. No sanitation or running water. When he had left his car he had seen that this corner of the village used an open sewer.

  The girl was pale and weak from dehydration. He had learned already that hospitalization was not an option for the shanty's community. At home - at what he still thought of as home - there would have been an express ambulance ride to the Royal Devon and Exeter. He was not at home, and l ikely never would be. Clean drinking wat
er, care and love were the best that the girl could hope for. He had the water, and the parents would give the care and love. From the father's description of his daughter's symptoms, Bart had known what to expect, and had brought with him four tzvo-litre bottles of Evian water, and he told the mother how much should be given by spoon to the girl and how often; he made a point of urging her to wash the spoon in boiled water. There was a picture of Arafat on a wall and, near to it, another of a young man with doe dead eyes and a red cloth band tight round his forehead. Bart never talked politics in the village, never talked of the struggle of Arafat's people, never passed comment on the martyrdom of the suicide bombers. He did not have to. The whole village, the shanty area and the homes round the central square, knew of his bitter denunciation of the military at the roadblock outside the village. He was the worm in the apple's core. The door at the back of the room was open. Beyond it was a cooking lean-to with a table and bowls for washing, and a stove threw off the scent of damp, burning wood. It was not warm enough for rain, not cold enough for snow; the weather was driving wet sleet. What blankets they had were piled on the girl's bed, and he thought the other children and the parents would sleep cold that night, if they slept. The girl was a waif, reduced by the severity of the diarrhoea, but he smiled warmly and predicted she would be fine. At the back of the cooking area there was another door and from it came the draught.

  The main door, behind Bart, which opened on to the mud alleyway where the open sewer ran, creaked open and the wind was carried inside. He saw the mother look up and flinch. Bart did not react. It was what they had told him: he should react to nothing, however minor and however major: to react was to betray himself, betrayal was death. He was saying when he would next visit, at what time the next evening. He heard the boots. The mother had flinched when the first man had entered, but her face lit with brief relief, traced with concern, at the sight of the second or the third. Bart saw a smile glimmer on the face of the sick child. Three young men crossed the room, and the last momentarily hugged the father and grinned at the girl; the third would have been the son, the brother. The face of the third young man was on the edge of Bart's vision: a good face, a strong face, a fighter's face. Bart talked about the next visit, and the need for quiet for the girl, as if that were possible in the shanty where the families were crushed together - refugees from the destruction of inner Jenin when the tanks had come in seven months before - and he had the mother's hand in his, as reassurance for her. The three young men went through the cooking area and outside into a small yard with a shed of nailed-together plywood and planks.

  They disappeared inside it. He recognized the face of the son, the brother. The last time he had seen it had been in a photograph album, front on and profile, monochrome, with a serial number written underneath it.

  The mother clung to his hand. Did she believe him ? Could the decline of her daughter be arrested?

  He smiled back his best smile. 'Trust me.'

  He left them.

  Do nothing that creates suspicion, they had told him. 'If you make suspicion, Bart, you will be watched. If you make the smallest mistake when you are watched, you condemn yourself. A condemned man is a dead man,'

  they had told him. He had lingered at the outer door with the father, had held his arm tightly and had remembered the features of the face of the father's son. He had gone to another patient, who had the symptoms of hepatitis, an old woman, and to the home of a small child with post-traumatic stress syndrome, and then he had driven to the roadblock.

  He shouted at the soldiers, Israelis the same age as the three young Palestinians, bawled at them as they ordered him out of his car. 'Oh, yes?

  What are you looking for this time? The way you behave is criminal.'

  He was quickly propelled into the hut - larger and warmer than the one in the yard of a home in the shanty part of the village. Joseph made him coffee.

  When the coffee had warmed Bart, the album of photographs was retrieved from a safe. He had a good memory, excellent recall. Within five minutes, after eight pages, he had identified the young man. Joseph was expressionless, did not congratulate him and did not tell him what importance the young man was given. Did Joseph admire his agent, or did he consider him scum? Immaterial, really - neither the admiration nor the contempt of the Shin Beth officer would have freed Bart from the treadmill he walked on. Joseph took him to the door.

  Back out in the street, Bart shouted, 'Just you wait, your time will come.

  Justice will catch you. You are as much a criminal, in wilfully obstructing a doctor of medicine, as any of those Serbs at The Hague. I wonder, after what you do, how you can sleep at night - no decent man would sleep.'

  He drove away through the chicane of concrete blocks, and the sullen eyes of soldiers tracked him.

  *

  Marty took First Lady up for the first time from Shaybah.

  He could not see her as she sped along the runway: the windows of the Ground Control Station looked out over their tent camp.

  The Predator, MQ-1, needed sixteen hundred metres of runway to get airborne. Lizzy-Jo called the variants of cross-wind, but they were inside what was manageable - hadn't been the day before.

  The first flight since she'd been unloaded from her coffin and put back together would be an hour, not a lot more, but they'd get to the ceiling of altitude and go on maximum speed and loiter speed, and they'd run First Lady's cameras and infra-red systems, all the gear.

  They'd check the satellite link to Langley and that the Agency floor in Riyadh had a real-time picture. The lift-off was fine. The forward camera showed the perimeter fence disappearing beneath them, and then there was the sand, only the sand. His place was in the Ground Control Station with the joystick in his hands and the screens in front of him, but where he'd like to have been was outside with his hand shading his eyes, watching her go. She was the most beautiful thing he knew. Back at Bagram, Marty had always wanted to know when the other Agency birds, or the USAF MQ-ls, were going up. Like a bird, such grace . . . Worst thing he'd known was a ride on a Black Hawk and seeing, below the helicopter, the wreckage of an Air Force Predator that had gone down with on-wing icing; a broken bird, shattered, scattered among rocks. His bird, First Lady, had a maximum operational radius of five hundred nautical miles and an operational endurance time of twenty-four hours, but for the first flight they'd do little more than an hour with close to seventy-five nautical miles covered.

  Lizzy-Jo talked first to Langley. Yes, they read her well. Yes, the pictures were good. She switched to Riyadh.

  They'd taken off away from the control tower, and away from the cluster of office buildings and accommodation blocks. The control tower had had to be informed of their presence and of all their flight movements: it had a vaguely worded sheet of paper from the Prince Sultan base up at Al Kharj: test-flying, evaluation of performance in extreme heat conditions - the bare minimum.

  The zooms on the belly camera showed wide landscapes, then blurred till they refocused on the individual rims of dunes. Marty thought the place had beauty, but the pilot's talk still hurt him. The guy who'd parachuted down from the Navy's Hornet had done what was right, stayed by the wreckage and died of thirst and heat stroke. He reflected that beauty did not have to be kind: there could be dangerous beauty. She'd found a bush, a bush that was ten feet high and maybe six feet across, and he had First Lady at twelve thousand feet and climbing at a ground speed of seventy-three nautical miles per hour. Lizzy-Jo had a bush to show to Riyadh. On the screen, the bush was clear and all of its branches and most of what leaves it had.

  'That's cute,' she said, into the bar microphone over her mouth.

  'There you are, Mr Gonsalves - fantastic! Life is up and running in the Empty Quarter. Wow . . .'

  The voice came back over Marty's headphones. 'Incredible, I've never seen that before. Extraordinary. You could recognize a man, one man. I am in awe .. .'

  But the wind, at that altitude, caught First Lady and tossed he
r, like she was a child's model, and the bush was lost and the picture, for all the gyroscopic kit, rocked and wavered.

  'Correction, I was in awe - is that the wind?'

  Marty said, 'It was the wind, sir. Understand me, I'm not making excuses here, but this will not be an easy place to fly out of.'

  'It's where we are, you are. Can't base in French Djibouti, too long a range. If it was at Prince Sultan, we're telling the world, a hostile one, where we are and what we're at .. . It's about security. You got to live with the wind. You got to learn to fly with the wind. Security is paramount. They have a saying here: "You want to send a message, then tell it - and swear her to secrecy - to your daughter-in-law." You don't talk to anyone outside your perimeter and, most certain, you do not permit anyone entry. You draw as little attention to yourselves as possible. It's like these people, who hate us, have their ears down on the railtracks. I tell you, believe it, security counts

  . . . But you can fly there, no problem, right?'

  Marty said, 'We can fly here.'

  Lizzy-Jo muttered, 'I'm not about to promise how effective we'll be.'

  Marty said, 'Don't worry. We'll get the show on the road.'

  'I got a meeting - thanks, guys.'

  Marty chipped, 'You didn't tell us when you were down here - if we get a target, what's the status?'

  'You'll have Hellfire on the wings when you go operational. I'm running late for my meeting . . . If I'm right in what I'm predicting, and it's a courier route, then you track, but if you're at the end of your fuel load and can't stay and track, then a target is "shoot on sight". Adios, amigos.'

  The static burst in Marty's headphones. He threw the switch and cut the link. He felt the excitement and looked at her. Lizzy-Jo winked a big brown eye at him. Shoot on sight.

  They had all prayed, even Tommy.

  Caleb thought it a mark of the brutality all around them that when they had reached the stop point of the day, with the light going down on the dunes, they had made a line and sunk to their knees. Then he and the boy had gone foraging, and left Rashid to build the night camp and hoist the tents.