The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

  Bart had been in Israel. God, so naive, such an innocent.

  He hooted impatiently. He looked to the side where the bodies came closer to the vehicle doors. He saw faces that were alive with emotion, and the anger around him seemed to grow. He might have been in an air-conditioned cocoon, but the anger, the emotion, seemed to swell. Shouldn't have bloody hooted. Before he had hooted, the crowd had seemed barely to notice him. Now faces were pressed against the windows and the bodies made a wall in front of the bonnet. Against the noise of the air-conditioning, through the closed windows and locked doors he could detect a slow chant.

  The interior seemed to darken as the weight of bodies came closer.

  Then Bart recognized the one word. It came endlessly repeated, with growing force.

  'Osama . . . Osama . .. Osama . . . Osama . . .'

  Now hands were on his vehicle. It shook, they rocked it. The voices matched the faces, anger and emotion. He bounced in his seat.

  Without the restraint of the belt his head would have hit the ceiling.

  He felt light-headed, not afraid. He was rolling and the chant reached a new pitch of intensity. Then came the siren.

  The crowd melted. As the street cleared, a police wagon drove down it at speed. Extraordinary, but the sun shone through the windows and light bathed Bart. Another few seconds, if the siren had not made the crowds run, he would have felt the fear - he was no hero. He looked to the side, no particular reason, just checking it was clear for him to accelerate away. He could see past the Grand Mosque. A black wagon was pulling away from the square's centre.

  A man scattered sawdust from a sack, threw it on to the ground, then moved on, chucked more handfuls down and did it again. He thought that the executioner would already have cleaned his sword, would already have gone. He drove away.

  Three men's heads had been severed from their bodies. The bodies and the heads would now be in the black wagon. The crowd had chanted an icon's name. The condemned would not have been rapists, murderers or drugs traffickers. The crowd had chanted the name of Osama.

  Bart felt, could not hide from it, a creeping sense of excitement.

  The proximity of death, the name of Osama bin Laden, the power of the crowd made that excitement course in him. He hated the place, the regime, the country, the life he led, the blood now covered with sawdust, the wagon, the chant and the hands that had rocked his vehicle. He was confused and the adrenaline pulsed - gave him a wild message. It thrilled him. Everything he hated he shared with that crowd. He had no loyalties, he identified . . . Bart gasped. He drove fast. But the voice echoed in his head: 'You leave when I say so

  .. . You are going, Bart, nowhere.'

  He went to see a man who had fallen off a chair while changing a lightbulb.

  To Juan Gonsalves, a telephone call was the better medium for a problem than an electronic message. Electronics left a non-erasable trail and settled for eternity in a man's or a woman's records. He called Wilbur Schwarz on a secure line at six thirty in the morning, Washington DC time, and his confidence that Schwarz would be at his desk was justified. Schwarz oversaw the Agency's counter-terrorism operations in the Kingdom from a windowless office at Langley, was close to retirement and his dedication would be missed.

  Gonsalves trusted him.

  'Wilbur, I am not making a complaint. It is off-the-record, and I don't want it to go formal. You shipped in a team with Predators to Shaybah - OK so far? It seems accepted they are doing test flights to examine extreme heat over a desert .. . Yeah, yeah, it is some desert. Trouble is, they've been shorted. One pilot and one sensor operator. These kids are great but they're low on fuel and they don't have back-up. They're working round the clock, and then some. I was down yesterday and they were dead on their feet. You have to understand that desert. It didn't get to be called "Empty Quarter" for no reason. It is empty. You want sand, you got it. Anything else, you haven't. They spend hours just watching sand. I suppose the first day the sand looks pretty, not after that . . . Now, get me right, I am not saying they are already inefficient, that's too big a word. I am saying too much is being asked. Not for me to tell you what sort of help they need, or what is possible in the budget. What I am telling you is that they are liable, in my opinion, to make an error, to miss something.

  They are searching a hundred thousand square miles of fuck-all... I don't want to predict disaster here, but in my view that's where we are heading. Wilbur, can we do something here? First thing I had to do when I was down yesterday was lift them, get their morale up -

  not easy. You got me, Wilbur, will you crunch some numbers and come up with something that eases the load? Try . . .'

  Caleb knelt. He could not have matched Fahd's cries, or the simple devotion of Hosni, or the dignity and belief in God of Rashid and his son, but he tried. Sapped by exhaustion, burned, suffering the pain of his sores, asking for strength, Caleb felt comfort in his prayers.

  Only the Iraqi, Tommy, sitting away from them, cross-legged, his back to them, was not a part of them.

  When the prayers were finished, when the sun was directly above them and the only shade was between their feet, the guide measured out their midday water ration. It was poured with great care, Ghaffur holding the mug and Rashid tipping the water bag over the mug.

  There was no line drawn or scratched on the inside of the metal mug, but Caleb sensed the accuracy with which Rashid doled it out.

  Not a mouthful, more or less, for any of them.

  When they had all drunk, the voice burst over the sand.

  'You, here, you come here.'

  Rashid was beside Tommy's camel. The voice had been a command. Rashid's arm pointed at the Iraqi, who swore, then spat into the sand beside him.

  'You obey me, you come here.'

  Caleb remembered the tension that the prayers and the water, and his own tiredness, had filtered from his mind. The Iraqi was now the target of the guide's anger.

  'You are to obey me, and you are to come to me.'

  Tommy pushed himself up, brushed the sand off the seat of his trousers and started a slow, indifferent walk towards Rashid and his camel. Fahd watched him and Hosni, and the boy.

  Caleb strained to hear.

  The voice of Rashid was quiet, but with poison. 'How many water bags do you carry?'

  The surly grudging response. 'I carry four.'

  'How many are on the camel?'

  'Four, of course.'

  'Count them, show me there are four.'

  Caleb saw Tommy shrug, as if he dealt with an idiot. He counted aloud as he moved round the camel. 'There is one, there is two . . .

  here is three, and here is . ..'

  The savage interruption. 'Where is four?'

  The shoulders crumpled. 'I don't know where is four.'

  'You are responsible for the water bags you carry.'

  'I am responsible . . . I do not know where it is. All the bindings, before we started, were secure.'

  'I show you where is the fourth water bag.'

  'I tested all the bindings.' Then defiance. 'If you know where the water bag is then why ask me? I don't know.'

  With his arm, Rashid gestured back where they had come. Caleb struggled to follow the line, on their zigzag path, of the arm. The light from the sun bounced back from the sand. He thought he saw a speck, dark against the red of the sand, but could not know at first whether his eyes tricked him. He held his hands over them, shaded them, opened them wider, peered and saw the speck again. The wind moved the surface sand, seemed to make a slight mist over the desert floor. He saw it clearly, held it for a few seconds, but then the brightness in his eyes and the pain in them made him look away. He did not understand how a water bag could have fallen from Tommy's camel four hundred yards back or more. He blinked, screwed his eyes together to cut out the pain.

  'There is your fourth water bag.'

  'I see it.'

  'Go, pick it up, bring it to us.'

  The Iraqi had no fight in him. He could n
ot shout or bluster or beg.

  To have done so would have denied his dignity, destroyed his pride.

  Caleb saw him reach up and snatch the hair at his camel's neck, lock his fingers in it, then try to drag it down to the kneeling position.

  Caleb remembered how the order of march that morning had been changed. He had no longer taken back-marker, had been replaced at the tail of the march by the Iraqi. And, he remembered how Rashid had stopped, let the rest of them pass him and dropped back until he rode alongside Tommy, then had come up fast to regain his position at the head of them.

  'You don't take the camel.'

  The Iraqi spat his answer. 'Am I to walk?'

  'You are not to waste the strength of the camel, you walk. The camel did not lose the water bag.'

  'Fuck you.'

  'It is your responsibility. You walk back and pick up the water bag.'

  'I will not.'

  'You pick it up and you bring it back to us, and then we will go on.'

  The pitch of Tommy's voice rose. 'I am a man of importance. I have a role in this fucking idiotic journey - you are paid to escort me.'

  Rashid's voice had quietened, was hard for Caleb to hear. 'If you do not go back, pick up the water bag and bring it to us, then we leave you. We ride the camels and go on. You will run after us for a hundred strides, then you will fall back. We will be gone over a horizon, and you will be alone. Which way do you choose?'

  Spinning on his heel, the sand scuffing at his feet, Tommy turned to each of them. Who backed him? None did. Who spoke for him?

  None did. Not Hosni and not Fahd. Caleb stared back at him. With a brutal kick, Tommy heaved sand up on to Rashid's legs, then started to walk.

  He took a straight line, not the zigzag path right and left that Rashid had led them on after finding the first of the two marker posts.

  Caleb asked of the boy, 'Would your father leave a man here, walk away from him?'

  The boy said, 'If we had no love for him, no trust for him, then, yes, we would leave him.'

  The beat of the tension grew. Tommy walked upright and there was a roll in his stride. Hosni ducked his head down as if his eyes could no longer follow him. The heat seared all of them. Fahd seemed to shiver. The sand around Tommy shimmered. They had gone far to the right in the zigzag, and when they had cut back to the left they had not been near the direct line that Tommy took as he tramped, never looking back, towards the speck that was the dropped water bag. Rashid did not look over his shoulder but his face was close to Tommy's camel's head and he murmured soft words in its ear and stroked the hair of its neck. Tommy was half-way to the water bag, the speck. Caleb did not know what would happen, only that the Sands were a place of death, a cruel place, a place with as little mercy as a hangman's shed. Tommy walked the straight line.

  He was the only one, Caleb realized it, who did not know what would be the end of it. He had been away from the camp for a whole night, and away from the march for most hours of a day. Through that morning's march, after the marker posts, every turn that Rashid had made had been planned, and he would have gone back to the tail of the caravan and ridden beside the Iraqi, and the Iraqi would have been dead to the world astride the camel with the sun beating on his head and the torpor of the endless vista of the sand sea would have dulled him. The Iraqi would not have known that the guide's fingers released a water bag from the baggage and then tossed it aside, left it to lie on the sand, left it where it could just be seen when the halt was called for water and prayers.

  The cry came back to them, carried on the wind.

  Caleb thought Tommy a smaller man - shorter, cut off, stunted.

  There was a little squeal from the boy. For a moment, as Caleb saw it, the Iraqi stood and tried to walk, but could not, and fell. All around him, the sand was clean, unmarked. It was where the zigzag trail had not crossed. The cry became a scream. Caleb remembered: 'Because he hit my father, he is dead .. . Nothing else is possible.' The Iraqi tried to stand, but Caleb could not see his shins or his knees. The arms flailed, and with each struggling movement the Iraqi sank.

  The first cry had been shock, then anger. The last cry, the loudest, was terror.

  He went to Ghaffur, grabbed the boy's arm, held it so that the boy could not break loose. 'You knew of the quicksand?'

  'My father knew.'

  'It is not by chance that we came past it?'

  'Since he struck my father we changed the route. We came this way for a purpose.'

  'To kill a man.'

  'He struck my father.'

  'How much time have we lost, to kill a man?'

  'Perhaps a day - half a day.'

  He freed the boy. The cry came again, louder and shriller. There had been bogs in Afghanistan: once he had seen a goat sinking in mud, had heard its bleating, but then the grass carpet covering the bog had been of a deeper, brighter, more treacherous green. Then, one of the Arabs with Caleb had fired a single shot from his assault rifle and the bullet had disintegrated the skull of the goat. It had not been shot to end its misery but to stop the bleating. Caleb would not have thought of quicksands, the same as a bog, in the desert where it might not have rained for ten years, fifteen. To the noses of the camels, there would have been a scent of the buried moisture under the surface of the sand, and the guide had known the purpose of the marker posts . . . it had been a killing as planned and prepared for as any execution.

  He saw the chest of the Iraqi and his head and his arms.

  The man struggled. Caleb thought Tommy struggled so that he would sink quicker, finish it faster.

  He looked around. Rashid had the camels kneeling and was waving to them to join him. Caleb now had his back to Tommy. He walked past Fahd, perched on the hump, as his camel awkwardly stood, and heard the Saudi's sneer. 'Do you want to help him as you helped the woman?' He understood more. He, too, was tested. His strength, or his weakness, was tested. He climbed on to his saddle and gave, gently, the command he had heard the guide use and the Beautiful One rocked him, shook him, and stood.

  A scream came on the wind. Tommy's upper shoulders, his neck, head and arms would still be above the sand's level, but Caleb did not turn. The cry was for mercy, and for help, the cry was to him.

  They rode away. The guide now ruled them. They were in his hands, dependent on his skills. The Iraqi, their brother in arms, had been condemned and none of them - Hosni, Fahd, or Caleb - had fought the guide for his life. He rode beside Rashid.

  Caleb asked bleakly, 'When you took the water bag from Tommy's camel, was it full? To kill him, did you waste a bag of water?'

  Rashid said, 'It was filled with sand. At that distance, had it not been full, it would not have been seen. I did not waste water.'

  The last scream burst behind them, called him, then was stifled and died. There was the sound of the wind against Caleb's robe, the rustle of the loose sand it blew and the thud of the camels' strides. He never looked back.

  Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay.

  The guards swaggered behind the orderly ivho pushed the food trolley along the cell-block corridor. He was at the back of the cell and he wore pathetic gratitude on his face. Earlier, there had been the sounds of a military band playing and singing and cheering had been carried into the block by the wind off the sea. It was the second Fourth of July since he had been brought to the camps. From the scale of the music, singing and cheering, he thought there had been a bigger parade than the previous year when he had been held in X-Ray. Through his dropped eyes, he saw the aggression of the guards, and he thought the music and their love of their country had been primed by the day.

  The pathetic gratitude was the act Caleb had mastered.

  He had absorbed the routine. The days of his week were governed by his exercise session, two days away, and by his visit to the showers in three days. He had not been interrogated for twenty-nine days, and the only break in the routine would be if he was summoned again. Some men in the block were destroyed by the routine, had their minds tur
ned by it or whimpered because of it, or screamed in the frustration that it brought. He played the part of the model prisoner, whose imprisonment was a mistake.

  The plastic food tray was slipped through the hatch at the base of the barred door to the cell. He ducked his head in submissive thanks. The men with red necks and shaven heads, huge in their uniforms, towered in the corridor. Two of the four carried wooden truncheons, and the hand of one, who stood back from the trolley, fidgeted restlessly over a pistol holster.

  Caleb smiled inanely and waited for them to move on; then he would crawl over the floor to the tray.

  A guard said, loud, 'We got Independence Day, son, to celebrate.

  You got special food today. You, son, enjoy the day as much as we do.. .'

  The voice dropped to conversational. 'Goddamn gook doesn't understand a single goddamn word. Goddamn pitiful, aren't they? Goddamn pieces of shit.'

  Caleb treasured the few hours spent close to the bodyguard and still fed off the strength given him. The guards and the food trolley moved on; he was superior to them, believed it, despised them. The success of the deceit gave him raw pleasure. His head bobbed, he showed his gratitude. They were despised and they were hated.

  The strength gave him attention to detail. It might be a year away, or two, or five years - his freedom - but he prepared for it. Word had seeped through the wire mesh sides of the cages that four men, the first, had been released.

  His life in the cage was consumed by the detail.

  Primary in the detail was the removal, the scrubbing clean, of all traces in his mind of an earlier life; the final relegation of nationality, culture, upbringing, work, all gone. Second was the creating of two compartments for his life: in the privacy of his soul he was Abu Khaleb, fighter in the 055

  Brigade, and in the eyes of the guards who fed, exercised and escorted him he was Fawzi al-Ateh, taxi-driver. But the detail went deep into the heart of the deceit. He prayed five times a day. When he whispered to the prisoners in the next cells it was about a dead family and a bombed village, and a childhood among orchards; he assumed there would be 'plants', informers, among prisoners rotated round the cages. He assumed also, and the belief bred paranoia, that microphones were buried in the cell back wall and that hidden cameras watched him. He conformed, utterly, to the image he created - the taxi-driver's. If there had been suspicion of him, or if he had been denounced, he would have been subjected to ferocious interrogation, but he was not. The detail protected him.