The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

  He tightened the hold on his reins and he bent and his voice whispered soft words in the ear of the Beautiful One. He slowed her step, and the sight of Fahd's head and feet drifted further away. The sand disturbed by Hosni's camel was no longer lifted into his face, and the pack bull passed him. Caleb waited for the boy to reach him.

  'Will you talk to me?'

  'My father says that to talk is to waste strength.'

  'Does your father also say that to be alone is to be frightened?'

  'We are never alone in the Sands. God is with us, my father says.'

  'Were you frightened, Ghaffur?'

  'No.' The boy shook his head.

  He remembered himself at Ghaffur's age, and the kids he'd messed with. Caleb would have been, they would have been, terrified when the flames had come down, fireballs, from the sky, which was clear, blue and empty. He believed the boy.

  'Tell me.'

  'My father says it is an aircraft without a pilot. It is flown by commands -I do not understand how - that are given it by men who sit far away. They could be a week's camel ride from it, or more. My father heard about it from the Bedouin of the Yemen. There was a man from the town of Marib, he was Qaed Sunian al-Harthi and he was hunted by the Americans, but he was in the desert and he thought himself safe, and he rode in a vehicle towards an oil well where Americans worked. He had made a bomb . . . He was betrayed. They knew when he would move and in what vehicle.

  There was no warning. He was hit from the sky. My father says there are cameras in the aircraft, and the Americans would have watched the vehicle he rode in. He was killed from the sky, and all the men with him. The Bedouin would have believed that the bomb he carried had exploded, but the police told the Bedouin that the Americans had boasted about their aircraft in the sky . . . You were frightened?'

  Caleb bit at his lip, and the sand stuck at his teeth. 'I hope I am not a coward -1 admit I was frightened . . . Does your father say how we can run from it?'

  'Only with God's help, and He gives us the wind.'

  'If the wind is too strong?'

  'If that is what He wishes,' the boy said solemnly. 'God spared you

  - He has a great purpose for you.'

  It came in against the gale. From her window, Beth had seen it make the first attempt to land, but that was failure.

  She had thought it extraordinary that the aircraft should have flown in those conditions. It had been fifty feet or so above the extreme end of the runway and had seemed to be lifted up, as if by an unseen hand, then thrown sideways. The regular flight from Riyadh had not come in that morning, and that would have been a Hoeing 737, heavy and stable. This aircraft was tiny in comparison, lightweight toy. It had climbed, shaking, as if it was punched, and while it had come round for the second attempt, Beth had gone out on to the patio. It made no sense to her that they should be flying, for evaluation and mapping, in such weather.

  It had lined up again over the landing guide lights that were in the sand beyond the perimeter fence. Everything in Beth Jenkins's life, before these last several days, had been based on certainty. She clung to the trunk of the palm, and she saw what was different. There were no tubes under the wings. There had been tubes under the wings the last time she had seen the aircraft lift off.

  She was confused, knew no answers, heard only the questions.

  It rolled with the wind. It was over the runway, seemed to stop like the hovering shahin her patron flew. It lurched clumsily - she remembered the grace of its take-off. A wing went down, its balance was lost. In bad weather, her patron would not have risked the lives of his prized shahin or his hurr. He had paid - and had told her the money was well spent - a hundred and ten thousand dollars for the trained peregrine, and eighty thousand dollars for the saker falcon, and she thought this bird must have been valued at many millions of dollars.

  Why would they risk it? It made no sense. Beth thought it was past the point of return, had to come down.

  The right wing came up, it levelled, was a crippled bird and fragile. The left wing dipped.

  No pilot. The only life in danger was that of the bird itself. The left wing-tip scraped on the Tarmac. It ran on, stopped, then turned. It taxied down the runway and, as if its engine was cut, came to a slow and hesitant halt. A jeep came from the little camp and sped towards it.

  She went back into the bungalow and started to work again on her report on the ejecta field, but she could not concentrate . . . Nothing was certain, doubt ruled. He was with her. 'You never met me, I was never here . . . You never saw my face.' She hit the laptop's keys, but demons danced and she could not lose them. Beth could not make the link between the aircraft and him, but sensed it existed.

  She wanted to cry out, to yell a warning, could not and the silence dripped around her.

  He saw a man who was tall, athletically built, tanned, and not dressed for that morning's English weather.

  Michael Lovejoy strode forward, not with a springing step because the legacy of the winter was increasing pain in his hip joints. The man had Lovejoy's name in big letters on a sheet of paper and held it up. The flight was in early and Lovejoy was late. The man wore heavy shoes, suede, and faded jeans with a brightly checked cotton shirt. There was a grip bag at his feet as he gazed around him, a frown of impatience writ large on a sunburned forehead. Lovejoy played at charm.

  'Mr Dietrich - Mr Jed Dietrich? I'm Lovejoy, I was asked to meet you. Sincere apologies for keeping you hanging round. The traffic was awful.'

  'Pleased to meet you. I was just beginning to wonder . . .'

  His handshake crunched Lovejoy's fingers. 'I'm sure you were.

  Anyway, all's well that ends well, don't you know? God, this place is a nightmare. Car's outside, bit of a walk, I'm afraid.'

  Lovejoy rarely met Americans. Those he did were from the embassy's legal department. They were Federal Bureau of Investigation, men with cropped scalps, polished shoes and bow-ties, or women with flat chests, trouser suits and bobbed hair. As a breed, he was innately suspicious of them. When they came on to his territory it always seemed they expected his immediate and un-divided attention, and when he went on to their ground it always seemed they were busy and uninterested. He was not late because of awful traffic but because Mercy and he had lingered over breakfast.

  He had brought his own car, a six-year-old Volvo estate that was good for ferrying the grandchildren.

  In the multi-storey car park, after walking as fast as his hip joints permitted him, he unlocked the vehicle. He expected the American to comment on the child seats in the back. The cousins from across the water, both sexes, usually liked to talk kids and produce photographs from their wallets. There was no remark on the seats, or on the kids' clutter in the front from the school run Mercy had done the previous week. They pulled out.

  'I see you've been in the sunshine, Mr Dietrich. You won't find much of that here . . . So, you've come in from Florida. Is that your workplace, or the end of a vacation?'

  There had been no holiday that year for Michael and Mercy Lovejoy. The new conservatory at the back of their home had gulped the spare cash. Lack of funds had denied them the usual two weeks in a rented Cornish cottage and his summer leave had been spent decorating the dining room and the sitting room. When Lovejoy referred to other people's holidays there was often a barb in his tone.

  The reply was crisp. 'I work at Guantanamo Bay.'

  Last thing before leaving home for the drive to the airport, as Mercy had kissed his cheek, Lovejoy had told her: 'God knows what their Defense Intelligence Agency want from us. What I've always understood, they're the "eternal flames" - you know, never go out.

  Spend their days stuck in bunkers trying to make sense of radio traffic and - I suppose - looking over aerial pix with a magnifying-glass and searching for an oil drum of anthrax in suburban Baghdad.

  Feel for me, darling, it's going to be grim.' He was a safe pair of hands. More important, as the trail of Al Qaeda funding grew colder, was iced over, in
the City of London, his absence from his desk would matter little. Mercy had grimaced, had kissed him again.

  'I am an interrogator at Camp Delta.'

  'Oh, are you? Well, that's a rather interesting place.' He hoped the little intake of breath, sharp, went unnoticed. At Thames House there was a desk on the third floor that dealt with Guantanamo Bay and the eight Britons detained there. Five visits had been made to Camps X-Ray and Delta but he had never seen anything remotely relevant coming back, or not, at least, across his desk. He knew that High Court judges refused to denounce the detention without charge and trial of the Britons as illegal under international law; he knew also that the relevant government ministers obdurately declined to make a noise, or waves. The Britons were, as Lovejoy understood it, in a Black Hole.

  The whole working life of Michael Lovejoy, twenty-eight years an intelligence officer with the Security Service and before that his fifteen years as an Army officer with the Green Jackets, had been governed by the Bible of Need to Know. Since marriage, only Mercy had needed to know - not the people he met in the pub or other guests at dinner parties and, often enough, not colleagues. Himself, if he had just come off a flight in New York or Washington, Lovejoy would have guarded his secrets closely, said what was necessary and not a damned word more. He listened.

  'The only thing fascinating about Camp Delta is that it is bogged down in a rut - that is, one hell of a rut, like a tractor wheel makes in mud. We're just going through the motions. Not even a dozen times in two years - after the first splash of intelligence - have we learned anything new or important. We go to work, we talk to people, we read back the transcripts, and we fall asleep. We don't learn anything. Then it happens, and we're shaking. It happens.'

  'Out of a clear blue sky is, I believe, the cliche.'

  'Out of that clear blue sky comes a thunderbolt. Got me? We released a man. We're under heavy pressure to find a few innocents and ship them back with a fanfare, the full shebang. We released a man whom we believed to be a taxi-driver, from Afghanistan . . . '

  Lovejoy waited - he was rarely impatient.

  'I was on holiday, up in Wisconsin with my wife and kid and getting in some fishing before the winter came down. The taxi-driver, he made my list - I wasn't there when they decided to shift him.

  We have the Joint Task Force 170, which is Bureau, Agency and us, but the Bureau, the Agency run it, we're country cousins. They made that decision. He was flown out. He was being driven into Kabul, asked for a comfort stop and did a runner. If he was just a taxi-driver, who cares?'

  'You care.' A further talent of Lovejoy was his ability, with apparent sincerity, to flatter. Sandwiched among the lorries and vans, he drove at a steady pace, anxious always to relax his informant . . .

  God, what would he do when he retired? What sort of man would he be? He dreaded the day. 'So, you came back from leave and found the taxi-driver gone.'

  'I had a Brit in with me. Some creep, a nobody. I asked the questions I was supposed to ask - last week. You know how it is, that gut feeling. You get a match. It was his accent . . . I was a Cold War specialist when I started, then I went to the Balkan desks, now I do Guantanamo. I've heard every goddamn accent there is - Russian, Polish, North Korean, Serb, Bosnian and Croat, Yemeni, Egyptian, Saudi and Kuwaiti. I got accents coming out of my ass. The Brit I had in, he spoke with the same accent as the taxi-driver.'

  'Did he now?'

  'To me, it was the same accent - then I got sort of scared at what I was looking at. . .'

  With good cause. Lovejoy's hands had tightened on the wheel.

  Little parts of three lunchtime lectures seeped into his mind. A psychologist had said: 'I urge you to look elsewhere. Where? For quality, for ability, for the best - because it is those young men that the lieutenants of bin Laden search for.' A Russian counter-intelligence officer had said: 'Somewhere, in his psyche or his experience, there will be a source of hatred. He hates you and me and the society that we serve.' A scientist had said: 'We start with a suitcase. Any suitcase of a size that a man or woman uses for a week's stay in a hotel. . .' Scared with good cause. He remembered the stunned quiet in that room at Thames House, the day before. A man who had the skill to defeat the interrogation process was a man who was owed respect . . . Funny thing, respect. It was often churned out for an old enemy - respect for a Rommel, or for a Vo Nguyen Giap, or for the Argentine pilots in the south Atlantic - but he had never heard respect given to the new enemy. On any floor of Thames House he would not have expected to hear of respect for a suicide bomber, or for a fighter in the new order's army. If an enemy was not shown respect - given only the status of a pest - that enemy presented increasing danger.

  'Do you have the tapes of the interrogations, the Brit and the taxi-driver?'

  He saw the head nod.

  'How long have you got, Mr Dietrich?'

  'I got till yesterday - and please call me Jed.'

  The rain on the windscreen had come on heavier. 'You travelled light - have you brought winter clothes?'

  'I got authorization, and I went out of Gitrno, like a bat out of hell.

  I know if the Bureau and the Agency had gotten their act together, I'd have been called back. This could bring down empires, could wreck big careers . .. but, for the moment, it's mine and I'm keeping it. I'm going to the end of the road, Mr Lovejoy, and -'

  'Michael, please.'

  '- and if I'm wrong, I will be fed to the crows. And if I'm right, probably the same. I will not win a popularity contest. I don't give a fuck.'

  Lovejoy took his mobile from his suit jacket and rang Mercy. She would have been upstairs, making the beds for the kids, coming that night. He told her he would be away, apologized, then asked her to dig out the sweater his daughter-in-law had given him two Christmases back, a size too large and never worn, and the old green waxed waterproof coat he hadn't used for five years. He said he'd be by for them in an hour, but would not be stopping. Then, steering with one hand and locking the wheel with his knees when he changed gear, he thumbed through the contacts book that was filled with names and numbers. He tapped out the digits on the phone and made the appointment he needed.

  After two hearings, the professor of phonetics at King's College, London University said, 'Well, you're wrong. I'm sorry to disabuse you. It's not a matter of argument, but a fact. The accents are not from the same place. What you have called Tape Alpha, the Briton reading Pashto, is quite different to a trained ear from Tape Bravo. I regret any disappointment that may cause you, but facts are facts. Tape Alpha is Birmingham, with only marginal similarities to Tape Bravo.

  Tape Bravo is the Black Country. Now, you'll have to excuse me, I have a tutorial.'

  They were out on the street, hurrying through the sluicing rain across the car park, and the American was struggling into the old waxed waterproof coat.

  Lovejoy said, 'Don't look so bloody miserable. The Black Country is not at Kandahar, or Peshawar, or in the Yemen. Forget that pedantic buffoon. The Black Country is on the immediate north-west boundary of the city of Birmingham. You did well. Fifteen miles from Birmingham, maximum. You did very well.'

  He stood in the doorway, had pressed the bell and waited for it to be answered.

  The maid, a Filipina, faced him.

  Eddie Wroughton walked past her, went into the sitting room. The Belgian woman was watching a video in her housecoat and painting her nails in a cerise that matched the lipstick.

  He went into the kitchen and poured himself a juice from the fridge. For a man who was rated clever, intelligent and cunning, he had taken a giant risk in returning to the villa in daylight, when spying neighbours and gossiping servants would see him. Three times he had tried to ring Juan Gonsalves and three times he had been told that Mr Gonsalves was 'in a meeting', and would get back to him.

  Wroughton's mobile had not rung.

  From the kitchen, he heard the shopping instructions being given to the maid. There was an officer serving in Riga, Penny, who had his
photograph beside her bed. She had told him of the photograph in one of her many unanswered letters. He had no thoughts of Riga, or of the risk, only of the agronomist's wife. He heard the front door close.

  If his friend, Gonsalves, had returned his calls Wroughton would not have been in the agronomist's kitchen, would not have been frustrated into taking the risk. He wondered whether the paint on her nails was dry, whether the lipstick on her mouth would smudge and run. His name was called, not from the living room but from the bedroom.

  He craved to erase the humiliation of the lobby below the Agency's floor.

  His shoes and clothes were scattered over the tiled floors of the kitchen and the living room and he was naked when he reached the bedroom, except for his tinted glasses. He hated his eyes to be seen: they might betray his humiliation.

  Between patients, the receptionist brought Bart a printout of the extension contract offered him by the real-estate company.

  He had won.

  The offer was for an eighteen per cent reduction in monthly payments.

  That was victory.

  When she'd gone out, as he waited for the next patient, Bart surprised himself: clumsily, he danced a little jig. He hopped from foot to foot, in tune to the whistle from his lips. He had won the victory by his boldness - Christ! He thought, as he skipped, of the many who had walked over him: in particular, Eddie bloody Wroughton - not that he would gain his freedom from Wroughton, but the victory was a moment of success to be savoured.

  The German patient spoke shamefacedly of snoring problems; Bart spoke of lymph-node complications, the patient's wife spoke of the disturbance in her night's sleep; Bart spoke of a consultant who was a very decent Greek at the ear, nose and throat section of the King Fahd Medical City. They were relieved and grateful.

  'I'll make the appointment, Mr Seitz, I'll take care of everything.