The Unknown Soldier

by Gerald Seymour

  Clinging to the wheel, he drove away, jerking the gear lever, and never looked back, never glanced in his mirror at the sandcloud behind him, never thought of the trail he left for the high eye.

  He had no idea of distance, might have gone a mile . . . He was in the drift.

  Not a wall, not a barrier, but a steady sinking movement. The engine raced, whined, and the needle on the speedometer dial sagged from twenty to ten, to five. Going slower .. . He stamped harder on the accelerator, swung the wheel, went to the clutch and changed down, stamped again, and the loose sand of the drift settled round the tyres.

  What to do? Bart did not know.

  He did not know whether to claw his way out of the vehicle and try, in the scorched heat, to run. Did not know whether to go into reverse. He did not know whether to get out, go to the back, take the shovel and dig.

  'He's got in a drift. Line him up, guys. In your own time, take him.

  Oscar Golf, out.'

  It was like driftwood washed up on a beach. Marty had flown the figure eights tighter as he had gone after the vehicle. Didn't know, not with Carnival Girl at altitude and on loiter thrust, how - down there on the sand - they had suddenly been aware of the Predator presence. Two vehicles, camels, and people had been on the screen.

  Then they'd broken. His concentration had been on the flying, not the detail of the screen. Beside him, Lizzy-Jo hadn't had the zoom in focus and close until the smoke had started spilling from the back end of the vehicle. Of course, that was the target. At first the vehicle had done well, had gone clear of the group, and the screen had shown only the roof of its cabin and the tail of dust spat out behind it. It was the sort of target they did at Nellis for training recruits, slow and easily visible, then it had gotten easy - too easy. It had stopped.

  He wondered if the guy would get out and run. He half hoped the guy would run. What he had was a vehicle, marooned and going nowhere.

  'How long we got?'

  She said they had a clear four minutes on station.

  'How do you want me to come in?'

  She wanted him on the driver's side, and said she'd take the Hellfire in through the driver's door.

  Marty had no thoughts of grandfathers - not his own with whom he'd gone out duck-shooting, and not the old man strapped down on the back of a camel and laid out over the hump. He had not seen the man on the screen, as the man had run for the vehicle. He did not see a face and did not care to look for a mind . . . but he had the target.

  The end of his figure eight brought him on to the passenger side of the vehicle, and he banked her, dipped the wing, for the half-circle to take him to a firing point against the driver's door. He did not understand why the guy did not run.

  He heard Lizzy-Jo recite the check questions to herself, and give herself the check answers for readiness to launch.

  Marty held Carnival Girl steady, and the camera image was flush on the driver's door. It was as if she hovered, a hawk, in the moment before the dive on the prey. Beside him, Lizzy-Jo whispered the command, then her finger hit the lit button. The screen shook, as if Carnival Girl had been punched by turbulence. Marty clenched his fist on the joystick, and watched the flame veer away. The ball of fire dived, like a hawk falling.

  In the seconds before the Hellfire hit, Marty said, 'We'll go take a look at what's left behind, the rest of them, then we'll bring her back.'

  'Yes, take her home.'

  'She done us proud.'

  'She's a great girl - then it's turn for home.'

  The hit was on the driver's door. A flash of flame, then the first smoke, the climbing cloud of debris that obscured the target.

  Around him there was, to Wroughton, an ejaculation of excitement.

  He could have told them that the chosen target was not Caleb Hunt, terrorist or adventurer or fighter, could have told them that the vehicle belonged to a pathetic doctor of medicine, that the driver was pitiful and harmless. Gonsalves' people whooped and screamed and stamped applause. They hung on each other, clung to each other. He thought the death of Samuel Bartholomew, gossip and spy, made a Mardi Gras day for them. He knew that if his telephone had not been unplugged, and if he had not tapped in the code on his mobile that prevented messages being recorded, Bart, his puppet, would have called him. He held the file, and the noise of celebration hit the low ceiling of the control centre, and Wroughton knew he would not be heard.

  Ignored, he said softly, 'Idiots, you killed a nobody. You took out the wrong target.'

  *

  The fire flash, the Hellfire's launch, gave Caleb his aim point.

  He stood, he was alone. The Beautiful One had gone, and the other camels. In the distance, clear to see against the sands and the sky, was the cloud of smoke. He did not know where the guide and the boy, Ghaffur, were, where she was, and he did not look for them. His memory held the point in the blue stretched sky where the flash had come from.

  He did it as he had learned it from the manual.

  The guidance antenna at the muzzle end of the tube was unfolded.

  The covering cap of the tube was discarded, lay by his bare and sand-worn feet. The open sight was raised and the belt pack hung on his waist. The impulse-generator switch was depressed by his finger.

  Caleb did it as the manual told him, without the one hundred and thirty-six hours of instruction that the manual demanded. He heard the whine of the audio signal, struggled to hold up the weight of the launcher, and stood - solid and square - with his two legs taking equally the strain of it: no support, no crutch. The pain throbbed in the wound, which was raw and not closed by stitches. He pulled the trigger in the grip stock. The manual said it was one point seven seconds from trigger depression to motor ignition. The missile lurched from the tube and fire scorched the sand behind him. He saw it so sharply, the clumsy flight from the tube mouth, and, for a moment, he thought it would fall back and roll in front of him on the sand. The tail fins opened out and - as the manual had said - the ejector motor dropped away. A flash as the second-stage engine bit, and she was away.

  He sank to his knees. The sand behind him, burned from the exhaust fire and the ignition fumes, stank acrid in his nose. He would have fallen, had he not had the tube to support him.

  It was gone fast above the low horizon line. He watched the fire that powered it ebb from him, diminish from him against the sky's blue.

  He depended on their technology, their electronics, their magic and wizardry.

  It flew free, beyond his control. Twice it meandered, as if it had lost sight of the target, and it hunted to find it again, and twice it locked back. He peered up to where its path took it, close to the sun, but he saw nothing. He did not know where the men would be who flew it, but he imagined the ever-increasing chaos around them as they dived the craft or climbed it, or threw it to the side, tried to lose the closing spurt of fire. The hit was so sudden. It darted, bent its course, sharp, as if its last command was late. High, near to the sun where his eyes burned, a little flash of brightness, but small against the sun's light.

  It was not a clean strike. There was no explosion. The little flash, and then the fire moved on, soared higher and burst.

  For a long time, Caleb looked up. He looked until his eyes had watered, until he blinked, until he could no longer stare up close to the sun, and the heat burdened him and the flies clustered on the dressing on his leg, and the pain washed in him, and he was alone.

  It was a speck, falling, and he thought he heard the voice of a child, singing.

  It was a swan's song. The far edge of the left wing had been hit, a great destabilizing hole punched in it.

  The Predator, brilliant white from nose tip to tail, from port wing to left wing, was spinning down.

  Control was gone, death inevitable, falling, with the wind streaming against its wings - until the debris scattered in the sand, until the fire became a pyre.

  If he had spoken someone would have hit him. They had all watched the Predator go down. If he had spoken, ha
d pointed out that he had warned of the crates the camels carried, he would have been hit. The silence was like life arrested. The picture on the screen, untouched, was a white-out snowstorm. They had still been in noisy celebration, without shame and not a thought of the incinerated corpse in the vehicle, as the camera had tracked back over the sand, and there had been the flash from far below. At first, a little winnow of confusion:

  'What's that? . . . What we got?' The one called Oscar Golf, on the loudspeakers, had never lost his calm. There had been a woman's voice, merged with Oscar Golf's, a flat monotone, as if it were merely a training exercise and instructors had thrown up a problem. The aircraft had swerved, made violent manoeuvres, but the fireball -

  shown by the lens - had closed. She'd gone down, spinning and spiralling, and the lens had shown a mad image of yellow reddened

  .

  sand racing to meet her. The voice of Oscar Golf was gone, cut off in mid-sentence - a switch thrown. Who wanted an inquest on failure?

  Hell, it was only a piece of metal junk, off a factory floor - not the death of a friend. As the audience slouched out, as Gonsalves in that hideous shirt came to him and punched him on the upper chest, Wroughton opened the file and held up the photographs of Caleb Hunt, schoolboy, Camp Delta prisoner and Rub' al Khali fugitive.

  'That's who you didn't get, that's your target.' Wroughton chuckled.

  'What is it with you people? So goddamn patronizing. You keep a notebook on points scored?'

  They were both laughing, hugging and hanging on to each other, and laughing, like they didn't care it was the waiting room of a funeral parlour, laughing till it hurt . .. and it did hurt because a target of importance had been missed.

  He did not look back at her.

  The last he saw of her, she was sitting on the sand on a dune and her head was down.

  If he had gone to her - confused and tongue-tied and deafened by the launcher's blast - he did not know what he would have said to her.

  Neither the guide, Rashid, nor the boy, Ghaffur, had helped him mount the saddle on the hump of the Beautiful One. He was beyond feeling the pain of the wound. He had struggled to drag himself up, then to swing the leg across the saddle.

  They were ahead of him and she was behind him, and far beyond her were the last wisps of two columns of smoke. Caleb did not look back, did not wave, did not - at the last moment when his voice would have carried to her - shout his farewell.

  He rode away, followed the guide and the boy into the sand that stretched to a far horizon. All that mattered to him, he thought, was that he was close now to his family, to their love.

  Chapter Twenty

  She stood. She shaded her eyes. Riding away from her were three ant-sized dots almost swallowed by the desert.

  She watched them as they diminished, disappeared into the far haze.

  The smoke had gone from the downed aircraft and the destroyed vehicle. Her dream of him was downed too. She was glad that he had not spoken to her. There had been no contact between them when he had gone. She had not wanted to hear his voice, see his face: she had feared they would break her resolve. He had not looked back - it was as if he did not acknowledge that he had come into her life, had passed her in the night.

  She walked to her Land Rover. The quiet of the place, its beauty and emptiness, washed over her. She took from the Land Rover the two towels she had packed, a spare blouse she had brought, and a bright red blanket she had thought she might need in the night's cold but which she had not used. She carried them back to the dune she had watched him from.

  The haze had thickened round them.

  She made the arrowhead so that it pointed to him, and the tiny specks on either side of him. There was no wind. The sand was still.

  She bent the blanket for the point, blood scarlet on the sand. At each end, to lengthen the arrowhead, she laid the towels. He had gone into the haze, was swallowed in it, but she marked the route he had taken. Beyond the point, as if to sharpen it, she rolled her blouse, put it on the sand.

  She marked him.

  Beth would never again hear his voice, see him, feel the touch of him. She would not have justified her betrayal of him as having been for the greater good of humanity: she marked him as a piece of personal vengeance. Planes would come, or helicopters, and they would see the arrow she had fashioned. They would hunt him till they killed him . . . Love was dead.

  As an afterthought, she stripped off her blouse - exposed the whiteness of her skin to the sun's beat - and that, too, she rolled tightly and used it to make the point of the arrowhead more distinct, more exact.

  She walked down off the high ground, left the arrow behind her.

  She passed the abandoned tube, the emptied box and the dropped manual. She saw the insect column that carried away the slivers ol flesh from his wound. At the Land Rover, she threw a scarf over her shoulders, and gunned the engine.

  The sun hammered at him, and the pain surged. Sometimes his eyes were closed and sometimes they could see nothing more than the reins in his hand and the fur of the Beautiful One's neck. The heat was without mercy, and Caleb did not know for how long he had ridden alone.

  He stopped, dragged on the rein and whispered to the Beautiful One what he had heard the boy say. They had been in front of him, but were no longer there. He looked to his right and left, and saw only the expanse of the sand and the gentle rise of the dunes. He gasped, forced himself to turn further, to look behind.

  Their camels knelt. They stood in front of them and the father's arm was round his son's shoulders. Caleb did not know whether it was for protection or if it was to comfort the boy. He could not see them clearly, was not able to read them, because the tiredness and pain played tricks with his sight.

  He realized their intention.

  .

  He would have gone on, reeling in his dreams and his fantasies, burned by the sun, half dead and half alive, and would not have known that they had fallen back, had left him. Now, they were a hundred yards, less, from him. In an hour he would not have been able to see them.

  He realized they wanted no more part of him.

  T need you,' Caleb shouted.

  They would head for their village. The guide would spin a story.

  The boy would go to a desert grave rather than gainsay his father's lie. Back in their village they would tell of the deaths from the eye in the sky, and of the demand of the wounded traveller, without a name and without a home, that he go on alone. They would return to their village and no man would be able to contradict their story.

  His shout burst over the sand: 'I need you to take me to my family.'

  For answer, the guide pointed far ahead, far beyond Caleb, towards the haze and the horizon.

  'Do you want money? I can give you money.' His fingers scrabbled at the belt at his waist. He loosened the fastening and held up the pouch. 'I will pay you to lead me.'

  They gave no sign that they had heard him. He saw them straddle the saddles, then the camels rose. The guide pulled at his camel's head and moved away at a right angle to the route they had led Caleb on. The boy followed him. The money in the pouch would buy a well for the village, pickup trucks for the villagers, was wealth to a degree they could not have dreamed of. As they went away, they did not look at him. Caleb threw the pouch towards them.

  He threw it high. It arched in flight and the neck fell open. The coins glittered as they dropped.

  'I will get there without you.'

  Gold coins lay on the sand, were scattered round the pouch.

  They walked under the raised bar, through the gap in the coiled razor wire.

  The bags were hooked on their shoulders and Marty carried his picture.

  From the tail ramp of the aircraft, George called, 'Come on, guys, you're busting the take-off schedule.'

  But they did not hurry. The place was a part of them, where they had lived and where they had killed. Behind them was the emptiness of the compound. Dumped boxes of cardboard and plastic b
ags bulged with rubbish. Torn-up paper scraps hung from the barbs of the wire. She reached out and took his free hand. They went together.

  Marty felt a shyness but did not pull away his hand. They went at their own pace, as if the schedule for take-off was not important to them.

  At the bottom of the ramp, watched by George and his people, Lizzy-Jo grinned, then tilted up her head, and kissed his cheek -

  there were cat-calls and whistles through fingers, and feet stamped applause. Marty blushed. They went on up the ramp and into the gloom of the stowage area. Two coffins were being brought back to Bagram, one loaded and one empty, except for boxed spares and maintenance toolkits. Marty blushed because he thought he had failed. First Lady was in her coffin, but Carnival Girl was out in the desert, broken and lost. While the camp was torn apart, and he had packed his bag, Lizzy-Jo had lectured him on the success of the mission. One more chance to hurt the man who had brought down Carnival Girl was all he could have asked for, but it was denied him.

  Marty edged up the side of the fuselage, over the legs and knees of George's people, past the coffins and satellite kit, the stowed tents and cookhouse gear, and they found little canvas seats where their feet would be against the wheels of the Ground Control trailer. They were near to the bulkhead, close to the hatch door to the cockpit. He settled, fastened the restraining harness. He was not thinking of Lizzy-Jo and a future, but of Carnival Girl who was down and mourned and alone . . .

  The Texan drawl cut through his thoughts. 'Good to see you, folks.'

  He was far away, where Carnival Girl was, in the sand. He looked up and scratched in his clouded memory.

  'You don't remember me? I brought you in here - you look rough.

  You not slept? How did it go?'

  'It went OK,' Marty said.

  Lizzy-Jo cut in. 'He flew well, way beyond the limits. We lost one but we got good kills - we got Al Qaeda kills.'