The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

'What are they thinking?'

  She darted a glance at him. 'God, I don't know.'

  'Doesn't that matter - what they're thinking?'

  'Thinking about water, about chow, thinking about a shower - I don't know. Thinking about us.'

  'What are they thinking about us?'

  'Whether we've found them, I suppose - how the hell should I know? - whether we're over them.'

  He saw them on the screen, worked the joystick and banked First Lady so that she would line up behind them for the strike. 'That's not an answer - what do they think about us?'

  'About hating us, about having contempt for us . . . you want to be their shrink, Marty? Forget it. Think of your duty to our country and do your job. Forget that shit - I don't know what they're thinking and I don't care.'

  Marty said softly, 'We are flying west-north-west, wind speed eight knots, our air speed is—'

  'I got all that. . . Going in five.'

  He did not know about them and that hurt in his mind.

  The whisper, 'Port side gone.'

  His fingers tightened on the joystick and he compensated for the luch of First Lady. She was thrown up at an angle, starboard side dipping. He heard the little gasp of annoyance from beside him: he'd been slow in making the commands that held her steady On the central screen, the fireball seemed to loiter before it started to race away on its guided descent. He had her steady, and he waited for the next leap of First Lady - which didn't come.

  ' You shooting?'

  'I'm holding . . . Look at them, Marty, look at them run.'

  t )n the big screen, the central one, the beetle below the fireball broke up.

  'bastards.'

  Marty saw the panic scattering of the camels. They went in crazy lines, like they'd broken the knot that held them.

  At that height, and with the oblique firing angle, the Hellfire would fly for seventeen seconds . . . Half-way down . . . He saw, from the fireball, the little adjustments she made as she guided it, and he watched the camels career together and apart. He watched their panic. lie was the voyeur. He was the hard-breathing youth in the shadows of the car park above the ocean where the university students brought their girls. He rubbernecked the stampede of the camels. The missile went into the sand.

  The Hellfire was for a tank. Firing a Hellfire at Nellis, the sensor operator should get an armour-piercing warhead up against a tank turret from twenty-four thousand feet, should get a hit on the range within one yard of the aimed point. Instructors liked to reckon they could hit within half a foot on a stationary tank turret.. . Nobody at Nellis had ever thought of a target of running camels for an impact of a fragmentation warhead. The dustcloud rose.

  The cloud came up towards the camera lens. Marty lost the camels, did not know whether they were under it, or had escaped it. There was a darkness at the core of the cloud, then a fire flash in its heart.

  Red flame blossomed from the cloud. They had hit ordnance. The new fire burst through the cloud and climbed, then guttered. Smoke, dark and poisonous black, replaced the fire.

  The voice came in his ear, massaged him like her fingers had.

  'Good work, guys. Secondary explosions would prove you've hit gold. Please look at your screens, extreme left. I see empty camels on the right side, ten o'clock, but you should be looking extreme left, four o'clock. Centre on that target, and take it. Oscar Golf, out.'

  Alone in the desert, a single camel ran. Marty had been to ten o'clock, four camels together - like they were tied - no riders. Then Lizzy-Jo was raking the picture across, going to four o'clock, and zooming. The picture was tugged to close-up, and she tweaked the lost focus. A single camel ran in the sand, wove between the hills.

  Marty came over it. The camel stumbled, like it had no more running left in it, tried again, then stopped. The screen was filled with the camel. It stopped, like its spirit was broken. It sank. The knees went from under it. The technology that Marty watched, that Lizzy-Jo worked, showed a camel run to exhaustion and crumpling. He saw the weight that the camel could no longer run with.

  The vomit was in his throat.

  He was the representative of a master race. Four point five four -

  recurring - miles below the camera an old man was laid out on the back of the camel.

  Beside him, Lizzy-Jo trilled amazement. 'This is just wonderful gear, incredible - like he's just down under us.'

  Eight million dollars of Predator, at factory-gate prices, circled an old man on a camel and lining up against him was a hundred thousand dollars of Hellfire with a fragmentation warhead. He could see the old man's face and a blur of greying hair, and the old man seemed to twist his head and look up, and he would have seen nothing and would have heard nothing. Marty did not know why the old man had not jumped clear of the knelt camel, why he had not gone away from it. He was stretched across the camel from the hump to the neck. Did he know? Must have. His arm came up. First, Marty thought it was like a salute. Wrong. The arm was outstretched, pointed upwards towards First Lady: 'Fuck you.' He thought the arm, raised, said, 'Fuck you,' to him.

  Lizzy-Jo let the second Hellfire go.

  For a dozen of the sixteen seconds of its fireball flight, Marty watched the screen, then turned away, his eyes closed. He did not watch its hit.

  He spun his chair and ripped off his headset. He pushed away George's hand and went to the door. He heard Lizzy-Jo murmur to her mouth microphone that her pilot had gone off station. He stood in the door, above the steps.

  The vomit cascaded from his bowed head.

  When he was conscious, he could feel the warm wetness of the blood. But Caleb drifted.

  When he came back to consciousness, he could feel the pain. It was deep waves.

  Conscious, he did not know how they had made the litter, and how they clung to the undersides of the camel's bellies, hanging from the hidden saddle straps.

  The litter, three sacks, was suspended low down between the Beautiful One and Rashid's camel. He was belted by the animal's legs and rocked from the motion of their walk. On the far side of him was the boy. Father and son, gasping, held themselves against the stomachs of the camels, and behind them was the last of the bulls.

  When the pain came, and the scent of the blood, he could remember. The boy had howled the warning. The fire had come down on them. The blow, with the hot wind and the clap of the thunder, had felled him. They had snatched him up, father and son.

  He was hidden, as were Rashid and Ghaffur.

  The last sight he had seen was the one camel, Hosni strapped

  .across it, fleeing from them.

  He prayed to sleep, to lose the pain.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The cloth against his head was wet and cold. It stank with stale odour. The voice said, 'Do not try to speak.' With great gentleness, the cloth was wiped on his forehead, round his eyes and on his cheeks. A little of the dribble from it rested on his lips - it stung his eyes.

  He tried to move, to shift the weight on his back, but the effort brought the pain - he gasped - and for a moment the cloth was across his mouth.

  'You must not cry out.'

  How long he had been unconscious, asleep, dead, he did not know.

  The pain was in his leg and at the side of his head. When he tried to shift, the pain was agony in his leg and his head throbbed.

  'If you are seen, heard, it will have been for nothing. You must not be found.'

  The cloth over his face calmed him.

  His eyes moved, not his head.

  The night was around them. Rashid crouched over him, laid the cloth in a bucket, lifted it, squeezed the water from it, then spread it, cool and bringing life back, across his throat and his upper chest. He lay on the same sacks that had made the litter and in his nose was the smell of shit and urine - his. Flies buzzed him. Close to him were the hoofs of the camels. As if she were alerted by his faint movements, or the guide's murmured voice, the Beautiful One arched her neck down and her nostrils nudged against him. Beyond the ca
mels, fires burned. He heard roaming voices, laughter and the scrape of harnesses. He smelt cooking meat, carried on the wind, and spices mixed with boiling rice, could recognize them through the stench of the camels and his own excreta. He squinted to see better, and shadows passed across the fires - when a shadow approached closer to them, Rashid reached for his rifle and was alert, but the shadow ignored them and went on. They were separated by thornbushes from a great gathering of men and animals. When it reached his lips and he sucked at it, the water was foul, old. He retched, could not bring anything up, and the choking in his throat and gut brought back the agony in his leg and the hammer in his head. Rashid cradled him.

  ' I thought you were dead, I praise God.' The voice guttered in his ear. 'For three days and three nights, I thought you were the scrape of a fingernail from death. Only God could have saved you . . . I sent Chaffur for help. I asked him to go alone into the Sands, and his life is with God . . . All the water we had was for you, and one day back, and one night, it was finished. Now we are at a well-head. It is bad water, it has not rained here for many years, but it is the water that God has given us. If you are found here there will be people who will see your wounds and will know you are an Outsider to the Sands, and they will seek to sell you to the government, or they will kill you and lake your head to the government and ask money for it. We came in the night and we will leave in the night, with God's protection.. You should rest. Death is still close to you. If God forgets you then you are dead.'

  The words croaked in Caleb's throat. 'You sent your son?'

  'I sent my son into the Sands, that you might live. We are just two men That we are alive is because of the Egyptian. He rode away from us. He took the eye in the sky from us. The eye went after him.

  I heard the explosion as we fled. He gave his life for us, for you. You have to live, it is owed to him.'

  And to your son . ..'

  His eyes closed. His hold on what was around him slackened. So tired, so weak. He did not have the strength to think of the wound in his leg or the wound in the side of his head. He drifted. He was by the canal, on the pavement close to the black-painted door, was kicking the ball in the yard and aiming at the glass in the hatch of the overturned washing-machine . . . He was nothing, nobody. He lost the pain, lost the cool, healing touch of the wet cloth. He lost the image of the boy, his bright mischief eyes, sent by his father and alone in the Sands.

  In the Hummer, they played Willie Nelson loud. Will drove and Pete did the satellite navigation. 'Help Me Make It Through The Night'

  came out of the CD system. Two more Hummers, with the Arabs, followed them. Will never trusted an Arab to drive him, and Pete never reckoned anyone else but himself could do better on navigation. Both rated the Hummer, the civilian version of the Army's Humvee, as the best there was on wheels, and capable of taking them where a helicopter - screwed up with the density altitude barrier from the heat - could not. They were the same age, had been through the same Galveston education line, lived on adjacent plots in the Houston suburbs, and did the same work. They were two gas-extraction field surveyors. Blood brothers. The trip, never a snide word between them, had already taken them across in excess of six hundred miles of sand - but the mapping now was complete. That night, if the Hummer with three tonnes loaded on her held up - and the Hummers with the Arabs behind them - they would be on a late plane back to Riyadh. They were on the Exxon-Mobil books, earned good money - and the world, because of where they were, owed them it.

  Time had slipped away, two and a half weeks of it. For eighteen days they had driven, camped, worked in the Empty Quarter, without sight of human company other than the Arabs who travelled behind them; top temperature out there was a confirmed 124°

  Fahrenheit. The Hummer took them anywhere they fancied going, up dunes and down them, through loose sand.

  'Well, well, lookey-here . . .'

  Will was imagining the juicy burger he'd have on their return to the Riyadh hotel.

  'Hey, no foolin', take a look.'

  Will said, 'Well, I'll be. You got some hawk eyes on you. I'd have driven right on by.'

  'I don't reckon we should. Look it, he's just a kid.'

  A hundred yards, a little more, to the right of where they came down off the dune, were a child and a camel. The camel stood and the boy sat in its shade. At that distance, through the sealed sand-sprayed windows, they could see, each of them, the gaunt resignation on the boy's face. The camel, dead on its feet, didn't even turn towards them as they edged closer.

  'Like they're jus' waitin' to die.'

  'This is one evil fucking place.'

  'I reckon the camel's just stopped, won't go another step. You're gonna go and git yourself a rosette, Pete, that's one good deed for the day.'

  Fifteen minutes later, they moved on. The kid was stowed on top of the luggage mountain on the second Hummer. The camel was dead, shot with a bullet to the head by their camp manager. They were two hard men, away from home in Houston for eight months of every year, played hard and drove themselves hard. Neither spoke. Pete had a wet eye and Will would have choked on any words. The kid had held the camel, soft hands round its neck as the rifle barrel had gone against its head, and the big dopey brown eyes had been on the kid. Blood had spattered when the bullet had been fired - new blood on old across the kid's robe. Old caked blood covered the kid's robe .. . He wouldn't talk of it. The camp manager had tried, hadn't gotten an answer - it wasn't the kid's blood. What the kid said, translated by the camp manager, he had to get to Miss Bethany at Shaybah, and nothin' else.

  Will thought of the fruit machines he played when he could find them - thought he had a better chance of a once-a-year jackpot than the kid had had of being spotted out there in the sand.

  Pete reckoned that Someone, up there in the clear blue sky, must have cared for the kid, must have watched out for him, because if he'd come down the dunes heading left they'd never have seen him.

  The Hummer powered towards Shaybah, the late-night flight out and burgers in Riyadh.

  *

  The deputy governor was ushered out by Gennifer.

  Before the outer door had closed, the ambassador had the internal phone against his face.

  'Gonsalves, that you? The ambassador here. Get yourself down to me, please, with a degree of urgency.'

  He reflected. Power had shifted from his desk. The evacuation of military personnel from the big airbase south of the capital had grievously wounded his status. The war in Iraq had further damaged it. The pending lawsuits - where legal men back in New York talked billions of dollars in prohibitive damages on behalf of the victims of the Twin Towers - against members of the ruling elite, the Royal Family, had caused a breakdown in precious trust. The compound attacks in Riyadh had been a coffin nail. Before the evacuation, the war, the filed suit, and the suicide bombers' assault, he would have told - with exquisite politeness - the deputy governor to go stuff himself. The world marched on, and the Kingdom was no longer his fiefdom. Another year and he would be teaching at Yale.

  The door opened after a knock, and Gennifer showed the Agency man inside.

  He launched: 'Gonsalves, this is not a criticism. I have no complaint about the liaison you have had with me. You told me, and I acknowledge it, that you were bringing a Predator team into the Shaybah Field base for, as I remember it, surveillance of the Rub' al Khali - under a pretence of mapping and also the testing of performance in extreme heat. Well, we have a problem.'

  The ambassador was a man for whom personal appearances mattered. He changed his shirt twice in a day, and three times if he had an important evening function. He always wore a tie, never dragged the knot down or loosened his collar button. Opposite him, lounging and appearing at the edge of sleep Gonsalves wore jeans, a grubby vest and an open shirt. His face was stubbled, his hair uncombed, like some damned Fed in deep cover in Little Italy, the right gear for lamp-post leaning.

  'The local authorities here are increasingly suspicious of us. The
re is growing obstruction. It comes down to a desire to derail us. Just out of my office is the deputy governor, the province that includes that big block of sand, and Shaybah. We are not welcome. No longer are Predator aircraft welcome at Shaybah. We have little prying eyes watching us, you'd know that better than me, seeking to flex long-unused muscles. I suppose there's other places you can go - Djibouti or Dohar - but the door at Shaybah is closed. Two alternatives: ship out and smile, cut them in and tell them what you're doing . . . I know which I would go for. Personally, I would not trust the last live rat in the Kingdom with detail of any anti-Al Qaeda operation of sensitivity. I think you should talk to your people. I bought you some time, probably about three days, but no more.'

  Not too many clouds passed over the Riyadh sun. A cloud flitted across Gonsalves' face. He was up and heading for the door, like he'd a bayonet under his backside.

  'It was surveillance, wasn't it, Gonsalves? Just surveillance?'

  from the door, a child's smile spread across the Agency man's face. 'Yes, we were watching them. Right down to the time the Hellfires hit. We watched them when the secondary explosions, ordnance, blew. If you ever get tired of TV movies just call me, and I'll send you down a video.'

  'Three days.'

  The smile was gone. 'It's a prime route to where they are.'

  It was like they were wary of each other.

  There were areas that were off-limits.

  The light had gone out for him, Lizzy-Jo thought.

  Three days and three nights back, George had thrown a bucket of water on to the Ground Control steps but there were still scrapes on the treads of his dried-out vomit. He'd brought her in, had made a good landing for First Lady, then had gone to his tent. He had not studied the video the morning after, not like the first time, had not seen a second time the zoomed lens image of the old man bent across the camel's neck. He had not gone out to see the handiwork of George on the fuselage of First Lady, the new skull-and-crossbones stencil. Had not eaten with her, had not talked with her. What did he think it was all for? A teen game in an arcade? Staying in for computer warfare because it was raining outside? There hadn't been fun between them, or laughter.