The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

  He was shuffled away, the chains clanking on his ankles.

  He had contempt of them, had beaten them. He would hear them scream, wherever he was. When he had returned to his family, he would hear them scream in shrill terror.

  'I think I'm going to ask you to help me.'

  'Of course.'

  'And it's best if I educate you to my equipment.'

  'Yes.'

  She followed Bart out from under the low awning, stretched and stood tall. 'What should I know?'

  He hissed, 'Not what you should know, what about me knowing something? When did you realize this man was a fully fledged terrorist, and British? May we begin there?'

  'What do you want? A confessional?'

  'The truth would help.'

  'What he is and what I knew, does that determine what treatment you give him?'

  'My decision, Miss Jenkins, not yours.'

  She told him, haltingly, what had brought her to this unmapped corner of the greatest desert in the world and what she owed this man. He thought, himself, he owed nothing. 'That's it - are you going to walk away?'

  Whatever he was, Bart was not an idiot. If he walked away, went back to the awning, collected up his boxes and packages, carted them to the Mitsubishi and loaded them, the rifle on the older Bedouin's lap would be up to the shoulder and would be aimed. The eye behind the sight would be brilliant with hatred, and he'd hear the clatter of it arming; he would die in the sand. He pondered on all those who had wrecked his life, had walked over him.

  'In about half an hour,' Bart said, 'I'll start to work on the leg wound.'

  'I trust you.'

  From the sky, the heat cascaded on him, and the sweat ran on his body and collected in the folds of his stomach. 'That's good, because you have to.'

  *

  Gonsalves rang the bell.

  Wroughton checked him in the spy-hole then opened the door. He held his hands across his privates.

  Gonsalves walked inside, had half skirted the black bin-bag, then stopped at it, put down his briefcase and tipped the bloodstained clothes on to the floor.

  'Your people, when I called them, they said you had a flu dose.

  When I asked if a remedy for flu was taking a phone off the hook, your people didn't know.'

  Wroughton said, 'It seemed easier to say flu than that I'd walked into a door.'

  He hadn't washed. The bruises on his body, thickest at his groin, were a technicolour parade of black, mauve and yellow. The blood had dried around his nose and at the split in his lower lip. He dropped his hands away from his privates, away from where he was shrivelled up, because modesty didn't seem to matter.

  'You could help me, Eddie, you could tell me where to look on your face for an imprint of a door handle, because I don't see it. Did the door handle have a wife?'

  'I'm not expecting flowers or an apology - my father used to tell me, never explain and never apologize - but I expect to be cut in/

  'Where's your maid?'

  'When she came to the door I told her to get lost.'

  'I'll make some tea.'

  Gonsalves went to the kitchen and Wroughton slumped into his chair. The voice boomed through the rattle of the mugs and the opening and closing of cupboard doors. 'I think I heard you right. "Cut in?" You hear me. You are a junior partner in our endeavour. We use you when we need you, we ignore you when we don't. Did you get big ideas because Teresa does pizza for you, and you're Uncle Eddie to the kids? Shouldn't have done. It's a tough world out there. You're a taker, Eddie, but you don't have much to give. It's why I cut you out. We were running a secure operation down in the Rub' al Khali.'

  'I think you told me you had "big boys' toys" there,'

  'In the Rub' al Khali we had something special going, and -'

  'And I told you - "not much to give", I'm sure - about a caravan going out of Oman and a direction route.'

  and we had Predator UAVs up, with Hellfires loaded. And we'd done a con-job on the Saudis - which is why it was secure and why you weren't cut in, and—'

  'Fuck you.'

  'That what the door handle said? We did two hits and we couldn't keep it secure and now the Saudis have chucked us out. We got a day and a half left in there, then fatter cats than me have to decide whether to fly UAVs out of Yemen, Djibouti or Dohar and take the risk of violating Saudi air space. We're out in a day and a half.'

  Gonsalves carried in the tray, put it down, poured tea, gave a mug to Wroughton.

  When he'd sipped his tea, Gonsalves reached into his briefcase.

  'Want to see the tricks the "big boys' toys" can do?'

  'I don't beg, not a damn poodle and dribbling.'

  'Why I love you, Eddie . . .' Gonsalves had a file of photographs in his hand and spread them over the coffee table around Wroughton's mug.

  He couldn't help himself, felt his excitement quicken. Three pictures, colour, eight-by-six, showed black-circled craters in the ochre sand. They were the raw, only dreamed-of currency of an intelligence officer. Centred on one was a dead, keeled-over camel.

  Not electronic intercepts, not analysis of radio traffic pulled down by the dishes. He snatched up the crucial picture, peered at it and lingered over it.

  'Don't get a hard-on, Eddie - do me a favour. OK, it's before the first strike. Three men travelling. Two guides leading them. Three pack camels carrying crates, and Stingers is as good a guess as any.

  Now, look at the close-ups on the three . . . Is this not as sexy as it gets?'

  Wroughton held the three photographs, felt in awe of the technology that had magnified them to a point of recognition from four miles of altitude.

  'That one.' Gonsalves' finger stabbed at a photograph. 'We identify him as Gibran al-Wafa, aged twenty-seven, involved in the Riyadh compound bombs, Saudi citizen.' The finger moved on. 'Him, he is Muhammad Sherif, aged fifty-nine, was in Afghanistan in the Soviet war, with bin Laden in the Sudan exile, with him back in Kabul, but disappeared before Enduring Freedom, now a strategist. Egyptian national and sentenced to death in his absence.' The finger loitered.

  'This one, we don't have him. The computers can't chuck anything up.'

  Wroughton gazed at the photograph. He saw the body of the young man upright on the camel, the head high. He strained to make out the features, but the pixels confused him. He thought he saw a strong chin but. . . 'So what? Isn't he dead?'

  Gonsalves said that the sensor operator had aimed twice for specific and individual targets as the camels had scattered. The two targets in the two strikes had been the Saudi and the Egyptian.

  'So, you may have missed him, for all your damn technology . . .

  And I get cut in because you don't know who he is, right?'

  'Succinctly put, Eddie. I'll see you.'

  After Gonsalves had gone, Eddie Wroughton sat in his chair, held the photograph in front of him, and tried to read the face.

  Lizzy-Jo cursed. George's message was pithy, without embellishment. The needs of maintenance ruled his life. Maintenance was obligatory, not optional. The Predator, First Lady, was now beyond all limits set for maintenance. Flying hours in optimum conditions had been exceeded, but she had also been up in worst-status conditions.

  She was grounded - no argument - confirmation of what he'd said the afternoon before. She needed a sanitized hangar for the necessary maintenance, and the only sanitized hangar she would see was back at Bagram. He went out of the Ground Control, went heavily down the steps, as if unsettled by Lizzy-Jo's curse.

  Beside her, Marty flew Carnival Girl, did the new boxes. When they'd brought her back in the small hours, while she and Marty had stolen sleep, the bird's tanks had been filled so that fuel had spilled out.

  Carnival Girl, the old warhorse, the fighter from Bosnia and Kosovo, from Afghanistan - with a first skull-and-crossbones stencilled on her fuselage - had gone up twenty minutes after midday for her final run out of Shaybah, not her prettiest chase down the runway, with the fuel load and the burden of the Hellfires
under the wings.

  The boxes on the map were on the east side of a track. They had tasked themselves, and Oscar Golf had not argued it over the link, to

  .

  have her up for the full twenty-four hours of her endurance at four miles altitude and at loiter speed. Late on in the flight, tomorrow, they would do a small section of the map boxes on the west side of the track. They had not yet reached the track, but it would be good when they did, would make a diversion from watching goddamn sand.

  He was hunched over the joystick. She had tried to jolt him, but he spoke when he had to, not otherwise. She had wanted to bring the life back to him. He flew Carnival Girl without error but as if he sleep-walked.

  She lied . . .

  Lizzy-Jo said, 'Last time I was in New York, I was in a bar - been to see my mom and was going down to North Carolina for the last spat, but had time to kill. The bar was behind Fifth Avenue. I was alone, this guy was alone. What did I do? Wasn't much of a chat-up line. I was in Afghanistan. Was I hurting those bastards? Real venom in his question. I was trying. He told me why he hoped I was.'

  She had gone straight from her mom's apartment, in a taxi, out to the airport for the flight. She had never been in a bar behind Fifth Avenue.

  'His partner worked up high in the North Tower. It was a day like any other. Nothing different about the eleventh of September.

  Himself, he didn't go to work because of an optician's appointment.

  He was in the waiting room, was next in line to be called. The TV was on. Where his partner worked was above the hit point of the American Airlines plane. It was all on the TV in front of him, and he could see the window nearest to his partner's desk. I listened.'

  She talked without emotion, didn't play to a gallery, watched her screens.

  'Twenty minutes later, as he sees it on TV, the United plane goes into the South Tower. What he's telling me, he's not watching the South Tower, only the North Tower and the window nearest his partner's desk. You know what he sees - there's smoke and fire. You want to know what he sees from the window nearest his partner's desk? They jump. People start to jump. They got the fire coming up under them and they got nowhere to go, and some of them jump.

  They are ninety floors up, and they jump. He sees people jump from that floor, from those windows. He sees tiny, ant figures falling. It's

  .

  all on the TV. Did his partner jump? There's a lot of people jumped.

  Now, sudden but late, he starts to get active. Goes to the desk, rings his partner's phone. It's not picked up. He wants to think his partner jumped, that falling ninety floors, arms and legs out, was a quicker death than waiting for the fire to get up there - or the collapse. He said his partner was the only love of his life, and he thinks he saw his partner jump from ninety floors up .. . That's a horrible way to die.

  That's bad people that make you die like that. I bought him a drink, and I told him we went hard as we could after the people that made his partner jump, to hurt them. Then I headed out to catch my flight.'

  She saw, from the side of her eye, the tears stream from under Marty's spectacles and run on his cheeks. She had no shame for the saccharine emotion of the lie, daytime talk-show stuff. She went brusque. 'How's she doing?'

  'She's doing well,' he choked. 'Carnival Girl's flying great. She's the bomb.'

  Caleb felt the strength back in him, but the pain was agony and it rolled down in waves to his foot and came up through his hips and stomach. Lifting his right arm brought the pain in a torrent. He gestured for Rashid to come to him. When the guide was close to him, ear bent to mouth, Caleb whispered what he wanted brought to him. He heard other voices, indistinct - a man's and a woman's -

  but could not make out what they said. The camels chewed cud on either side of him and slung between them was the awning that made shade for him. A blow hammered down on metal. Wood screamed as it was broken and hinges whined. He was brought the manual.

  The pages were grey, dry and crackled in his hand, and the large print on the cover had faded.

  There was a needle attached to a tube that dangled over him, in his left arm, inserted immediately above the plastic bracelet, which was no longer covered. He tried to push himself up to look around, but that was beyond his strength.

  The voice was in the old language. 'Don't do that - please, don't.

  Now, let's set down the ground rules. I am a British-born doctor, sir, I am here at the request of your friend, Miss Jenkins. I do not speak Arabic, nor do I need to. When you were in, sir, a confused state -

  natural following the traumatic experience of your wounds - you talked English. You were incoherent and rambling, and I understood nothing of it. Got me? But as far as I am concerned you are as British as I am . . . I call you "sir" not as a mark of respect, but because neither Miss Jenkins nor I knows your identity, and we have no interest in it.'

  On the cover page of the manual was printed: Raytheon Electronic Systems FIM-92 Stinger loiv-altitude surface-to-air system family. The man materialized above him.

  A pudgy fat-filled face. A shirt stuck with sweat to a vest. Trousers held up by a narrow belt. He saw the man. The woman was behind the man.

  'You should not have come,' Caleb said faintly.

  'I said, remember it, "If it is ever possible, I will repay you." It was possible. I brought a doctor who is going—'

  'Who saw my face.'

  'Who is going to help you - don't be so damn stupid. He's a doctor, not a bloody policeman.'

  'Why did you come?' Caleb grated.

  'The boy was sent to find me. Why?'

  'I had forgotten you - you should have forgotten me.'

  He saw her head shake, as if in personal crisis. 'It doesn't matter why. I'm here and he's here. That'll have to be good enough.'

  The doctor said, 'All very charming, but hardly relevant. I think we should get on with it, or I won't be cleaning your leg, sir, I'll be taking it off. Now, do you want me here or do you want me to bugger off?'

  Caleb felt the smile wreathe his face and he heard his own soft-spoken voice: 'I'm very grateful to you. Don't look at my face. I thank you for coming. Lose my face from your mind. I appreciate what you do for me.'

  'I'm going to talk you through it, each stage of it. Your head wound is clean, a direct shrapnel strike, but below your headcloth. Not so the leg wound. It is dirty, infected, with the early stages of gangrene.

  In the wound is sand grit, probably small stones, maybe missile fragments, certainly pieces from your robe will be buried deep in it. It has to be cleaned and all of the detritus has to come out. I intend to use Cetrimide as a cleaning agent, and I will inject a local anaesthetic -

  .

  Lignocaine - into the muscle around the wound. Its location is good, too low for nerve damage and the wrong side of your leg for the principal arteries, and the muscle has protected the bones from splintering. Later, when I've worked on the wound, I will inject you with antibiotics, Ampicillin is what I carry. I see you have reading material. I advise you to use it. In spite of the Lignocaine, this is going to hurt like hell. Are you ready?'

  The question must have been in Caleb's eyes.

  'What's worrying me most - not who or what you are, sir - is that bloody item up in the sky, hunting and searching. We've her vehicle and mine and no cover for them, which is a good enough reason for getting on with it. Do I make a start?'

  Caleb nodded. He lifted the manual, the words on the page dancing in his eyes, and he felt the first needle plunge into his flesh.

  .

  Chapter Seventeen

  The face above Caleb was impassive. He saw it above the manual held tight in his hands. He tried to read. To read, he thought, was to escape from the pain and - what was worse than the pain - his dependence on the doctor.

  He read of the launcher assembly with a missile, the grip stock, the IFF interrogator and the argon gas battery coolant unit. Words played across his eyes, which blurred. Target adaptive guidance circuit, az
imuth coverage . . . it was their world. Their technology, their skill, their power . . . He was a man who had fought from ditches and trenches, from caves and scraped holes in the dirt, from the cages of a cell block. Their technology, their skill dwarfed him, and their power could crush him. The face hovered over him, and the pain sought out each nerve in his body. He could only fight, nothing more was left to him: fight or die, fight or be forgotten. His eyes, watering, fastened on the caption line: 'Engagement Procedure'. The moisture in his eyes blinded him and he looked away from the page.

  The last thing he had read, before the mist closed on his vision, was

  'Training requires 136 hours of instruction before weapon qualification is given.' He did not have the hours, did not have the instructor, did not have the knowledge. He looked up.

  'What is your name?'

  'Samuel Bartholomew - I would not claim to have friends, but acquaintances call me Bart. Won't be long, the Lignocaine works quickly.'

  'Have you looked long enough at my face to remember it?'

  He saw the doctor flinch.

  'I never remember a face - whatever that bloody book is, just read it.'

  Behind the doctor, squatting at the edge of the awning's shade, the woman bit her lip. He understood so little, not why the doctor had come, not why she had cared enough to bring him. They were no part of him, either of them.

  'Can you wipe my eyes?'

  She did.

  Caleb read again. First the system was shouldered, then the battery coolant unit was slotted into the grip stock, then the IFF

  antenna was unfolded. The target, if visible, was interrogated by the AN-PPX-1 system. The IFF switch is depressed and locks on the target. Depress the impulse-generator switch, and 6000 PSI pressurized argon gas flows to the IR detector. Did it bloody matter?

  Did it matter to him how their technology worked? What mattered was whether the bloody thing fired. Again he stared into the doctor's face. 'What am I to you?'

  He saw a slow smile settle at the doctor's mouth.