The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

  'My father says there are too many men for too little water,' the boy said simply.

  George Khoo took charge. The accommodation tents were streaming from the barbed wire of their inner perimeter fence; the clothes and bedding had gone further and were held by the barbs on the fencing at the extreme end of the runway.

  He had fretted all night because of the forecast. Every hour, on the hour, his pocket alarm had bleeped on the flooring beside his camp bed. He'd not undressed, had not even shed his boots. His only concession to the night had been to leave the laces loose. For five minutes in each hour he had paced restlessly round the tethered awnings that sheltered First Lady and Carnival Girl, then had gone back to his bed. He'd lain on his back, stared at the tent ceiling and waited for the bleep to sound again. He'd been lucky. The first strike of the storm had been while he was hunched on his camp bed, gathering the strength to slide off and go to make the inspection tour.

  It had come in a numbing shockwave, with a suddenness that would have paralysed another man into indecision.

  On his orders, barked against the wind and split with expletives, the twin sets of wings had been taken off First Lady and Carnival Girl.

  They had been dumped without ceremony. Then the awnings had been dropped to hang loose on the fuselages of the two aircraft.

  Ropes had been hurled over the awnings. Each man, and Lizzy-Jo, had been given an instruction, shouted at a volume and passion that frightened them more than the storm. Some hung on to the ropes.

  Others, with Lizzy-Jo, clung to more ropes that straddled the roof of the Ground Control shed and the trailer with the satellite dish. While their possessions, few enough of them, raced to be snagged on the perimeter wire, they held the ropes against the wind.

  George Khoo heard them cry out, yell, swear, and he ignored their fear. He thought it was like combat - but there was no enemy, no hostile incoming. One, on the same rope as Lizzy-Jo, pumped blood

  - a chair had struck the guy across the forehead close to the left eye.

  He would have been knocked half-unconscious, but his grip never wavered on the rope; neither did Lizzy-Jo's, nor the others'.

  George had not known before a storm of this ferocity. Nothing like it in Chicago, the Windy City, where he'd been reared. Or at Nellis where he'd been trained, or at Bagram. He moved, best as he could, among them and each time he came back past them he blasphemed worse, ridiculed their efforts and cursed harder. He was, near as made no difference, double the age of the pilot, Marty, and a full fifteen years senior to Lizzy-Jo, and he felt for each of them as if they were his kids. His own kids were back in Chicago with their ma, and their ma's ma.

  Without George Khoo's bullying aggression they would not have come through, would not have held on to the ropes till the palms of their hands were rubbed raw and bleeding.

  Because he thought of Marty and Lizzy-Jo as if they were his kids he suffered and cried for them, and cheered with them. If First Lady had turned over, had gone in a rolling spiral towards the perimeter crushing the real-time cameras and the infra-red sensors then goodbye, damn double fast, to the mission. George Khoo knew responsibility for failure was never dumped fairly by the Agency.

  Failure was failure - no excuse permitted. Failure had a smell that made a man's gut turn. Failure stank, was cruel. If the aircraft went, the shit would rain down, buckets of it, on Marty, the pilot, and on Lizzy-Jo, the sensor operator.

  And it went on by.

  The wind dropped and the sand haze cleared. If he was weak they were all weak. He snapped orders. Guys to go get the tents and awnings back off the perimeter wire. Guys to go get the wings fitted back in place on First Lady and Carnival Girl. Guys, Marty and Lizzy-Jo, to go get the electronics tested in Ground Control and the satellite link. Guys to get some breakfast made. Guys to get medical treatment readied. Guys to go get. . . He felt so damn tired and so damn old, and he hadn't the time to think he'd done well.

  And he told the armourer to go get the Hellfire missiles checked.

  He looked across to where the tents had been and saw Marty who seemed to probe in what debris was left there and he saw him lift up the picture that was his pride and joy. Even at that distance George could see that the glass, small miracles, was intact and a big smile creased the kid's face.

  George Khoo's gruff cruelty melted. Lizzy-Jo stood apart from the team clustered inside and outside the Ground Control. He saw her wipe her hands on her trousers, just pyjama trousers that she'd slept in. She was gazing out over the desert and her eyeline seemed to follow the disappearing tail of the storm. There was new blood on the trousers where her hands had wiped. God, they were good kids, all of them.

  He stood behind her.

  Lizzy-Jo said, distracted, 'Hey, you know, there's a girl out there.

  A really nice girl. I needed some tampons, and she sussed some out for me. She drove out there and I never saw her come back before I turned in. She's out there, in that storm - no way she'd have escaped it. . . Sorry, George, I know it's not your problem, I know, but - listen

  - she's all alone.'

  It had been like the white-out blizzards she'd known in Scotland and Norway.

  She sat on the sand, the small of her back against the top of the near front wheel casing of the Land Rover.

  No tears, of course not. Beth Jenkins could rage at herself and she could be contemplative about the future, but she would not weep.

  She had precious little to sustain her and tears would have eroded what little was left. The sand on the near side was banked to the wheel casings; on the driver's side it was higher . . . It was madness to have gone out into the desert without leaving a note in her bungalow giving detail and map co-ordinates of her route and destination. She had no satellite phone and she had no classes for three days, and she was often away and it might be four days or five before she was missed, and a week or more before a search was mounted . . . In her rush to be away from the bungalow she had not done the most fundamental, bloody obvious task of consulting the airfield control tower for the weather outlook.

  She was marooned. She had been driving on full headlights, guided by her GPS, had been threading between the dunes and using salt-baked flats and was, she reckoned, within eight miles of the site of the ejecta field she had been told about. The four-litre plus engine had coped, just, with the ground terrain - until the storm had hit when she was about to kill the headlights and use the natural light of the dawn. God, and it had hit. The wind had seemed to shake the Land Rover's heavy frame and the sandclouds had overwhelmed the wipers. She'd had the sense to turn and manoeuvre the vehicle's tail towards the oncoming storm - about the only clever thing she'd done. She might have gone a hundred yards before the traction was lost, the cab had filled with sand, insinuated through closed doors and windows, and the pedals were covered. A minute or two after the wheels had started to spin, going nowhere, the engine had cut out. She had sat in the cab until the storm had passed.

  When it had gone, Beth had prised open her door - had to put her shoulder to it - and she had slid and stumbled round the Land Rover.

  At the back the sand had banked high over the tail door. She couldn't see the rear wheels. At the front only the tops of the tyres were visible. She had lifted the bonnet and seen the coating of sand over the engine parts. She had then crawled into the back of the Land Rover and scrabbled through the film of sand to retrieve her shovel.

  With the sun climbing and the temperature rising, Beth had dug at the sand round the forward wheels for two hours. It had been a Sisyphean labour. For two hours, with the temperature above forty degrees, Beth had dug away the sand from the near front wheel, and each shovelful she'd chucked away had been replaced immediately by more soft dry sand rolling into the cavity she had made. The tyre was still hidden. Two hours had achieved nothing. Then she'd drunk water. She'd loaded enough, she reckoned, for three days. Half of what she'd loaded was now drunk. And even if she had been able to clear the sand from round one wheel, down t
o below the axle, there would have been three more tyres needing to be exposed - and even if she had been able to get all four tyres free of sand there was the engine, which would need stripping down and cleaning. She sat against the wheel casing and the sun was too high for the vehicle's body to give off shade.

  Beth Jenkins understood what would happen to her.

  One distant day, a dried-out, clothed body would be retrieved and shipped home. A stone would be put over a grave. Bethany Diana Jenkins. 1977-2004. Failure, idiot, life cut short through arrogance.

  Spinster. She thought of boys and young men, and love she had not known. She had told herself, often enough, that her work was more important than searching for love. Plenty of time for love later. Now there was no more time . .. She had never met the man she could love, never would. Other young men, introduced by her mother, from Guards regiments and City broking firms, had faded from her side when she'd enthused about the rocks she studied. Guards officers and City brokers weren't big on granite, volcanoes and meteorite glass - their eyes glazed and they sloped off to hunt elsewhere. She had been left, too many times, mid-sentence . . . Love had never been offered.

  The sun baked on her.

  She would drink the water, what was left. She would not hoard it.

  She would not fight for life any more than patients in Intensive Care who knew nothing of the drugs in their bloodstream and the tubes in their veins.

  Beth had her arms tight across her chest and the sun seemed to suck the moisture from her body. The sweat seeped and she hugged herself as if that might give her an image of love.

  Another lunchtime, and the programme of lectures continued.

  Michael Lovejoy's packet of sandwiches, bought from the mid-morning trolley, awaited him on his desk. His newspaper crossword was frustratingly held up by the complications of five down:

  'Groucho on Ike', three, four, six, seven and seven letters. And, not that he would have shown it, the lecturer interested him, diverted him from the clues.

  They had a Russian from Counter-intelligence - flown in from Moscow - young and bright, with a flawless command of spoken English, and he came with enough good baggage to make waiting for the prawn and coleslaw worthwhile. 'The kernel of what I want to say is that we can too easily be blinkered when we seek out the snake with the intention of decapitating it. We look too easily at the obvious and then we are surprised when the television news in the morning confronts us with the newest atrocity .. . and do not ever forget that we bleed in our cities from the same atrocities as you do. Too readily, you, ladies and gentlemen, and we in Moscow and St Petersburg and Volgograd, attempt to target the Muslim that we can classify as a fanatic - and the bombs continue to kill and maim our innocents.

  Take my advice. When you stand and look for the Muslims whom you believe carry the Holy Book in one hand and an explosives charge in the other, stop, consider, then turn a hundred and eighty degrees. Face the other way. Consider, what do you now see?'

  Four seats down from Lovejoy was the military historian, retired from the Army, and from a Strategic Studies think-tank, now doing time with A Branch on surveillance; a mild-looking senior citizen in a checked sports jacket was unnoticeable in a public library or on a crowded train.

  'What do you see? At first you see nobody. No Muslim, no fist clutching a Holy Book, no finger on an electrical circuit switch. Are you looking in the right place? You are confused. You do not wish to take my advice, but you hesitate. Men appear - but not the right men. They are people like yourselves, and like myself. You see white faces. You see Caucasians and Anglo-Saxons. Not robes and beards but suits and clean-shaven cheeks. Let me take you back to an inexact analogy, but that will point to the direction in which I travel. I believe I have the names correct - Omar Khan Sharif and Asif Muhammad Hanif, whom you had never heard of before they crossed into Israel through the most stringent border checks on the border with Jordan, journeyed across Israel to the Gaza Strip, left the Strip and went to Tel Aviv for reconnaissance, then put on the

  'martyr warriors" belts and attempted to kill Jews in an Irish bar.

  What was most significant in this inexact analogy? They used British passports. They claimed the protection of Her Britannic Majesty - not Egyptian passports, or Saudi, or Moroccan, or Algerian, but British passports. That is my starting point, and that is where you will not look if you are blinkered. I will take it further.'

  Leaning across, without apology, Lovejoy tapped the arm of the historian, passed him the newspaper and rapped his pencil on the clue to five down . . . Khan and Hanif were still Muslims even if they did carry British passports.

  'Believe in the unbelievable, that is what I urge you. What if the men recruited by Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, or the multitude of pilot organizations that swim with that shark, were white-skinned and had no links to the Faith of Islam? Where are we then? They carry British or American, French or German passports, they dress like you and me, they speak with our accent, and they have access. A young man, well dressed and clearly recognizable as one of you, one of us, carries a shoulder-bag containing a laptop. Why should he be denied entry to any crowded public building? Why should he be stopped when he goes down an escalator into a subway or Underground station? Why should he be prevented from reaching the front row of a crowd that greets a prominent figure? Why should he be regarded with suspicion?

  I hear, ladies and gentlemen, your silence. I do not hear your answers.'

  Men and women sat statue still. But, from the corner of his eye, Lovejoy saw the historian writing busily . . . So what do we do? Lock everyone up who is too young to be in a care home?

  'He does not have to be a Muslim, does not have to be recruited in a mosque, does not have to be Asian. All that is required of him by the shark is that he should hate . . . Don't ask him to debate the subject of hatred because he is unlikely to give you a coherent response. Somewhere, in his psyche or his experience, there will be a source of hatred. He hates you and me and the society we serve - he holds us in contempt. He is the new danger. A radioactive dirty bomb, microbiological agents or chemicals in aerosol form may be built into the laptop. He is real, he walks among us, his power over us is devastating. How to stop him? Do I have the answer? I regret I do not. Can he be stopped? We have to believe it or we face disaster.

  I am sorry if I detain you, but I have only one more thing to say.'

  The newspaper was passed back.

  'My final thought is positive. I ask whether this man, one of us, a mutation from our own culture, suffused with bitterness from an actual or imagined wrong, believes in the seventy virgins awaiting him in Paradise. Is he a martyr? Does he plan to commit suicide or to survive? We cannot know . . . My own feeling is that he would wish to attack and live to watch the results of his revenge. We have more chance of stopping a man who wishes to live. I offer a trifle of comfort. Thank you for hearing me.'

  As the Russian stepped back from the lectern, Lovejoy read the note scribbled in the newspaper's margin. 'It wasn't a Groucho original: he lifted from a Senator Kerr of Oklahoma.' Then, as subdued and stifled applause rippled around him, he noted the answer to five down. The only living unknown soldier. He shuddered.

  How appropriate - the 'unknown soldier' who was 'one of us'.

  He went for his belated sandwich lunch. 'One of us.' That would make him chew the prawns and coleslaw with thoughtful preoccupation.

  Caleb sat, hunched, on one of the boxes. By mid-afternoon, with the skies clear and the sun baking the sand, the storm would have been a memory, a nightmare, but for its consequences. The camels, still traumatized, stayed close together, body to body, as if fenced within a wire corral. Rashid and Ghaffur had been on three separate expeditions away from the destroyed campsite to search for the remaining stores and possessions that had been scattered. After they had returned from the third search, Caleb had expected that Rashid would load the animals and order them to move; he thought there were at least three hours of daylight left, and perh
aps they could move further during dusk and the early night. The guide gave no explanations. His sour face, the thin hostile lips under his hooked nose, seemed to forbid interrogation.

  When they were small figures, Caleb heard a little whoop of delight, and saw Ghaffur hold up a metal mug. Hosni slept, prone on the sand. Caleb heard Fahd's slithering approach over the loose sand; the temperature would have been a hundred degrees, and the wind was now minimal. When Caleb turned to face him he saw that the man shivered. They were all older, wiser, frightened. As the Saudi was about to drop down beside him, Caleb stood.

  'Come on, we have work.' He said it brusquely, an instruction that was not for discussion.

  He saw the man's face fall.

  'Yes, we have work,' Caleb rapped.

  The response was shrill. 'Do you now tell me what I should do?'

  'I am telling you.'

  Caleb took Fahd's arm, gripped it, and led him to the heap of stores and bedding, tenting, water bags and sacks that had been retrieved by the guide and his son. At first, the Saudi stood beside Caleb, arms crossed and idle, as Caleb crouched and started to sift, separate and pack. Suddenly, as Caleb's arm was outstretched, reaching for the last of the plates and stacking them, Fahd reached out and snatched at his wrist. His fingers fastened in a bony vice on the plastic identification tag. 'You were at Guantanamo?'

  'I was.'

  The fingers stroked the photograph , the printed name, Fawzi al-Ateh, and roamed over the identification numbers.

  'Then they released you?'

  'After nearly two years they released me.'

  'Why? Why did they free you?'

  'Because they believed me.'

  The Saudi freed his wrist. He stood above Caleb and gazed down at him. His shoulders and arms still shook and his lips wobbled with the shiver. 'People more notable than me, more intelligent than me, have chosen you for a strike that will bring fire, pestilence against the Americans and the allies of the Americans. They have chosen you, but it is still to be decided as to whether you are trusted. Hosni says you should be trusted because you were clever and deceived the Americans at Guantanamo. Tommy trusts nobody - Tommy says that the constant purpose of the Americans is to put informers, spies, among us. Myself, I do not know whether to trust you or not to trust you . ..'