THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (12 page)

The argument was about the boxes. He sat on one. On the old olive-green paintwork was the stencilled legend:
Department of Defense -

FIM-92A. (1.)
There was a date, seventeen years back, when he had been a child, now blacked from his memory. He knew the weapons loaded into the boxes, had handled one briefly in the training camps, had felt its weight on his shoulder, and had seen one fired in the trenches, but he did not know its workings and guidance system.

There were six boxes and they had created the dispute. Caleb sat with Hosni and Tommy, and watched the argument between Fahd and the farmer. Away to the right, barely visible, was a village with surrounding irrigated fields, clumps of date palms and lines of bright washing. Further up the watercourse, taking no part in the argument, a man and a boy squatted beside the legs of six camels.

There were three more camels with Fahd and the farmer, and the price for them was contested.

Six camels were sufficient, just, to carry a guide, his son, Fahd, Tommy, Hosni and Caleb, with food and water, to their destination.

But the six camels could not also carry the six boxes. For that more camels were needed. The farmer had more camels, and a price for them. Fahd had to have the extra camels but bridled at the price - the farmer was a 'thief' and an 'extortioner'. Each time he was insulted the farmer moved away and Fahd had to chase after him. They had been more than an hour, sitting with the boxes, in the full heat of the day. Caleb stared at the camels that were needed. He said, 'Why is it him who negotiates?'

Hosni shrugged. 'Because we are close to Saudi, because he is Saudi, because he speaks the same language, because that is his job.'

'But he fails.'

Hosni picked up pebbles, threw them down. 'Each of us has a responsibility in this matter. It is Fahd's.'

'Why not you?'

Hosni sniggered, as if the question were an idiot's. 'I am from Cairo, from a city. I know nothing of camels. As a child I played at the Gezira Club. Camels were for peasants. I would not know a good camel from a bad camel, a lame one from a whole one. I do not take responsibility.'

'Why not him?' Caleb eyed Tommy.

Hosni snorted. 'Where he came from, what he did, he would only have seen a camel from behind the closed window of a Mercedes saloon.'

'Where will the guides and the camels take us?'

'Into the Sands and across them.'

'What are the Sands?'

The Egyptian shuddered. He was the eldest among them. He had frail, bony shoulders and there was no weight in his arms or at his stomach. His check jacket, which was torn at the elbows and frayed at the cuffs, hung loose on him, and his beard was sparse and untended. Caleb assumed the Gezira Club, in Cairo, was for the rich and he thought the Egyptian had made great sacrifices and had given up comfort in the name of A1 Qaeda, and that the sacrifice had weakened him.

'You will find that answer.'

'And what is across the Sands?'

When Hosni spoke the breath wheezed in him. 'Across the Sands, if we can go through them, are the people who wait for us, who have called for us. Especially they have waited and called for you.'

'Thank you . .. Why do we not shoot the farmer and take his camels?'

'Then all the village knows we have been here. They make a blood feud against us. They send for soldiers and police . . . Then we are dead, and you do not reach those who wait for you.'

Caleb thought it a good answer. He stood and stretched, and the heat bathed him. The weight of the pouch was in the inner pocket of his robe. He walked away from Hosni and Tommy. He went to the guide who sat as if uninterested, and his hand ruffled the hair of the child, and he said that the child was a fine boy, a boy to be proud of, and he asked if the camels were capable of the journey The guide nodded but did not speak. Caleb went back down the watercourse to the farmer, Fahd and the hobbled camels. He led Fahd a few paces away, so that their voices would not be heard by the farmer, and told him to go and sit by the boxes. He looked into Fahd's eyes, into their brightness and fury. He gathered his strength, took hold of Fahd's hand and pushed him away, back towards the boxes. They had not yet started out on the journey - a journey that made Hosni shudder

- and Caleb knew he would travel with an unforgiving enemy. Fahd stumbled away from him.

Caleb sat beside the hobbled hoofs of the camels and smelt them and he stroked the leg of one. Then he took the pouch from the inner pocket and on a flat rock he spilled out all of the gold coins that the
hawaldar
had given him, on trust. He told the farmer that he wished to buy the three camels and he asked the farmer to take what coins they were worth. A fortune lay close to the farmer's gnarled, calloused hand. Sunlight danced on the coins. Trust counted, trust showed friendship. The hand hovered over the coins, pecked at them, lifting and dropping them. Trust. The farmer took three coins, then gazed up into the impassive face confronting him. He took three more coins, smuggled the gold into the pocket of his trousers, then reached out his hand. Caleb took it.

In his life, as far back as his memory took him, it had never been hard for Caleb to lead.

He retrieved the remaining coins from the flat stone and dropped the pouch back into his hidden pocket. The farmer kissed him and started to remove the camels' hobbles. Caleb waved for the guide to come to him.

An hour later, with all the camels loaded, they started out.

Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay.

He squirmed back into the recess of the cage.

Each day, others had been taken. Hours later, as long as a day later, some had come back shivering, some had been pitched into the cage and had huddled with their heads bent on to their knees; some had wept or cried for their mothers - one had spat at the guards when they returned him, had been dragged away again and rechained. Caleb had not seen him since.

He had waited his turn, and the fear had built.

Three men and a woman crowded into the cage. They were huge in their uniforms and they towered above him. The chains were for his ankles, waist and wrists. Hostile faces, reddened by the sun. He seemed to read in all of them, but most particularly the woman, that they wanted him to fight. He thought he had been in the cage for three weeks but on a few of the days, as dusk had gathered and the arc-lights had brightened, he had forgotten to scratch the little mark with his fingernail on the back concrete wall to mark the passing of that day.

The fear was bad, worse than the shock of capture, worse than the beatings or the disorientation. The fear held him as the big hands, and the woman's, reached forward, seized and heaved him to his feet. Up to now, they had only taken him out of his cage for the first processing and photographing, for weekly exercise and showering ~ but he had been exercised and showered the day before. The fear caught in his stomach and he knew the little routine that he had learned was broken. The chains were tight on his ankles and wrists, and further chains were linked to the one that circled his waist. Then he was blindfolded.

They took him out.

He was a taxi-driver. The fear was in his mind and his body. He was Fawzi al-Ateh. The fear made his bladder burst. The wife of Fawzi al-Ateh, and the children, his parents and hers, had been killed by the bomber that made the trails in the sky. The warm wetness ran down the inside of his legs and he heard the sneering laughter. He was from a village in the hills above a town where he drove his taxi.

He was taken into a building. The blindfold stayed on. His feet were kicked apart. He was pushed forward, a blow in the small of his back and his fingers took his weight against a concrete wall, and when his feet wriggled closer to the wall to relieve the weight the boots hacked at his ankles to drive them back. His weight was between his toes and his fingers. A screeching sound filled his ears. He was a taxi-driver. The sound blasted into him, penetrated his skull and his mind. He was Fawzi al-Ateh. He could not escape the noise and the pain grew in his fingers and toes. The sound blistered him, but again and again he repeated silent words that alone could save him. He fought the wail of the noise. He did not know for how many hours he stood against the wall.

Then silence.

Then a new voice drawled, 'All right, hand him over.'

He tried to fall hut hands caught his overalls and he was propelled back up, and he took the weight again on his toes and fingers and his bladder again burst.

'Give me your name.' The demand was in English. He felt each grain of the concrete against his fingertips. He bit his tongue.

'I said, give me your name.' Arabic. He closed his eyes behind the blindfold and bit harder on his tongue.

'What is your name?' Accented Pashto, as if from a classroom, not spoken with the softness of the people he had known.

'I am Fawzi al-Ateh.'

'What is your occupation?'

'Taxi-driver.'

'Where are you from?'

He named the village, the town, the province. The Pashto of the questions was poorly phrased, as if the interrogator had learned the basic language on a brief intensive course. A little of the fear was lost. Everything he had learned in the van, he told. He stumbled through his answers. A pause. He heard water poured into a glass, then it was drunk.

The voice said, the same drawled English: 'You never know, with these ragheads, whether they're lying through their teeth or whether they're snivelling the truth. Give him another dance, and I'll call him back - give him some more. Victim of circumstance or a killer - how do I know? God, get me a beer.'

A door closed. The noise started again. At least twice he fell, and each time he was hoisted up, and he could smell the breath and the sweat on the men who lifted him and threw him back against the wall. The noise wailed around him and he coidd not shut it out.

A second time, the questions were asked. They were in Pashto, and he cherished the little victory.

Slumped, held up by their fists, unable to swing his shackled legs, he was taken back to his cage. He had told his whole story. He was Fawzi al-Ateh, taxi-driver, he had been driving at night and alone when his combi-van had been seized by armed men. He had never seen those men before. He had driven them at gunpoint. If they had not been so tired or if they had known that part of the province, they would have killed him and driven themselves.

The cage door was opened and he fell inside. Some had shivered, some had huddled at the back of the cage, some had wept and some had cried for a loved one . . . Caleb lay on the mattress and slept.

Because, for the first time, he had lost a little of the fear and was able to sleep.

The white-painted Cessna, twin engines, circled once then levelled out for a slow approach.

Marty watched it yaw in the headwind. The same wind, blowing in his hair, threw up a screen of sand from the edges of the runway.

Everything the pilot had told him on the transporter was seared in his memory, though he didn't believe the Air Force flier would have realized how deeply he'd drunk in the information. Cross-winds, heat making a density-altitude barrier, and upper turbulence had all played in his mind overnight; he'd barely slept. Lizzy-Jo had: she didn't take responsibility for keeping First Lady and Carnival Girl up and operational. Lizzy-Jo was back in the Ground Control Station, would be checking out the camera and satellite systems after the journey. Behind him, he could hear George Khoo lecturing the ground crew under the slung tarpaulins as the wings were bolted back on the fuselages of his girls. He watched the landing, saw the Cessna waver before it set down. Here, at this oil dump, he would have no wise head to feed off when he flew the girls. At Nellis or at Bagram there had always been a veteran pilot to take into a corner and quiz about conditions. That he had been awake in the night was the mark of his anxiety. The Cessna taxied.

He went to the door of the Ground Control Station. He rapped the door.

'Lizzy-Jo - the head honcho's down.'

A man climbed awkwardly from the Cessna's hatch. He was big, bloated, and his shirt-tail flapped out of his trousers in the wind. He was unshaven, was mopping his forehead already in the few short yards he had walked across the Tarmac, and was clinging to a briefcase, as if it held his life savings, holding it against his chest. He came towards the little ghetto of tents, awnings and vehicles that George Khoo had made in the night at the extreme end of the runway.

George worked the men hard, and the noise had disturbed Marty nearly as much as the worries about flying conditions.

'You Marty?'

'Yup, that's me, sir.'

The man looked at him quizzically. It wasn't said, but the man gave him the feeling that he had expected Marty, the pilot, to be ten years older, or fifteen - not looking like a student just out of high school; it was the way he'd been looked at by the other Agency guys and the Air Force men when he'd first pitched down at Bagram. He was getting used to it, but it still annoyed him.

'I'm Juan Gonsalves - God, flying's a bitch. We were tossed around like rats in a sack. Wish I could do your sort of flying.'

'What is my sort of flying, sir?'

'Just sat in a cabin, air-conditioned - no air-pockets and no turbulence . . . Hey, I'm not suggestin' you don't do the real thing.

Look, where can we talk, where are there no ears? I mean
no
ears.'

'There's people at Ground Control. Back in the tents, there's people sleeping, sir. I'd say there's no ears right here, sir.'

Marty waved expansively around him. They were a hundred yards from the tents and the awning shelters where the wings of
First
Lady
and
Carnival Girl
were going on to the fuselages. The sun was high, at the top, and his shadow was around his feet. Lizzy-Jo came out, hopped down the steps. He introduced her and Gonsalves broke off from the mopping to shake her hand, then took a map from his briefcase, spread it out on the dirt and put small stones on the corners.

'You been in this sort of heat before, Marty?'

'No, sir.'