THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (25 page)

After the gunfire there were the explosions of grenades.

Men and kids were running in the street in front of him. More shots. He was recognized. More explosions. His door was opened, he was pulled out by a clutch of hands and his bag was snatched off the seat beside his. He was propelled forward. Across the street in front of him an armoured personnel carrier was slewed and the same machine-gun now traversed on to him.

That day he was wearing, over his anorak, a white sleeveless jerkin with a red crescent symbol at the front and a red cross on the back. His bag was pushed into his hand. From beside the carrier two shots were fired into the air. The crowd stayed back but Bart advanced. The barrel of the machine-gun was locked on him. There was a shout, first in Hebrew then in English. He was to stop or he would be shot. He was alone in the street. Behind the armoured personnel carrier there was sudden movement. Soldiers burst from an alley dragging what might have been a sack of grain, but the sack had legs and a lolling, lifeless head. Bart saw the head, only for an instant, as it bounced on the street's mud. The engines revved, the troops jumped for the rear doors of the carriers, and they were gone.

Screaming filled the street. He saw a brightening bruise on the mother's cheekbone and blood dribbling from a cut on the father's forehead. He wondered if they had tried to block the troops' entry, or whether they had attempted to hold on to the dead body of their son and been beaten back with rifle butts. God might forgive Bart, no other bastard would. He reached the door and the crowd had thickened behind him. He did what was necessary, bathed the bruise and staunched the cut, and all around him was the wailing of misery. He realized it: he was a trusted as a friend.

Three hours later he was at the checkpoint, and while his vehicle was searched methodically, and while the pretence was made that he was questioned in the hut, he drank a mug of strong coffee.

Joseph said quietly, 7 don't think you are a military man, Bart - a s a man of medicine you are a man of healing and peace - but, I promise you, what we do is for the preservation of peace. Terrorists are the parasites that feed off people. We have to destroy those parasites or there can never be healing.

You saw a body. The body was defenceless. You saw but you did not comprehend. He made the belts and the waistcoats that are used by suicide bombers. You have seen the buses that are destroyed, you have seen the markets where they kill themselves, you have seen the cafes where they detonate the bombs. He was good at his work. What you have done, Bart, is save lives. Sometimes a suicide bomber kills maybe ten, but it has been as high as thirty, and for every death there are five more innocents who lose their sight, their limbs or their mobility. Because of you, many innocents have been given the chance to live a whole life. You should feel good, you have removed a major player in what they call their armed struggle. I salute you.'

He did not want to be saluted or congratulated. Some time, on the decision of others - and it had been promised him - his life would begin again, but only when others permitted it.

Bart swallowed hard. He blurted, 'I saw him. I was in the house. Surely there will be a security investigation. How was it known he would be back at his home, that he was using his home? I was there. Too many people know I was there. What about me?'

Joseph smiled and his hand rested in reassurance on Bart's shoulder. 'We take great care of you. You are a jewel to us, so precious. Have no fear.'

He left his coffee half drunk. He was pitched out of the hut and his feet slithered in the mud. When he had his balance he swung and shouted at the troops by the hut door. He was watched by the Palestinians who waited for processing at the checkpoint and he heard the applause, the fervent clapping.

Some chanted his name.

He drove away.

They talked of the complicated and intricately webbed world they inhabited.

'You're not bullshitting me here, Eddie?'

'You can count on it. I was there. I found the prime eyewitness. He wouldn't have known how to lie. The body of the paymaster, I saw it, on the slab. It's about as far from bullshit as you can get.'

They were at the kitchen table. Juan Gonsalves and Eddie Wroughton shared the table with his children, their crayon-coloured drawings, and pepperoni pizza fresh from the microwave. The children ate and drew, Teresa tried to separate sheets of paper from the food, Wroughton talked and Gonsalves scribbled notes.

Separated from his work, Gonsalves could laugh, but he never laughed when he worked. Wroughton understood the pressures now lying on the shoulders of every Agency man in the field: the disaster of failed intelligence analysis before 9/11 dictated that every scrap should be written down, passed on and evaluated. The life of a Langley man who ignored a warning was a cheap life. The pressures on Wroughton were lightweight, he thought, by comparison.

'The caravan was a Bedu, his son and four strangers. I don't have the exact number of camels, but they carried enough water and food for a long trek into the Empty Quarter. They are important enough to be using about as remote a piece of the border to cross as there is. No Omani or Saudi border patrols, and camels rather than trucks and pickups.'

'Who'd walk, or get camel sores, when they could ride in a vehicle?'

'People of exceptional value. For the Organization it would be a major setback if men of that value were intercepted on either side of the border.'

Theirs was a good friendship, that was Wroughton's belief. Most politicians in London deluded themselves they had a special relationship with the White House .. . but, here, on the Gonsalves kitchen table, the relationship was indeed special. Wroughton's report of his journey up-country in Oman was now being studied in London; in a week, when desk warriors had rewritten it, the revised report would go in the bag to Washington; in another week, the report would be passed to the sister agency at Langley; a week later, after further revisions and rewriting, a version would be sent in cypher back to Riyadh and would land in Gonsalves' office. The real relationship, between two dedicated professionals, was across a clutter of crayons and paper, and was dictated above a babble of excited kids' voices.

'He said quite specifically that the camels were loaded with six packing cases, crates, whatever - they were painted olive green, military. Dimensions are estimated but seemed to be the eyewitness's arm span, both arms. Machine-guns wouldn't be in crates. The weight of the crates is a handicap going into the Empty Quarter, so we are looking at something that cannot be exposed to the elements, also that requires cushioning.'

'What are we talking about?'

'I'd reckon we're talking armour-piercing or ground-to-air missiles. If I had to bet I'd say we're talking ground-to-air. Try Stinger.'

Gonsalves grimaced.

'I did some work on it today. You shipped, with your typical generosity, some nine hundred Stingers into Afghanistan; the mujahidin downed an estimated two hundred and sixty-nine Soviet fixed wing and helicopters using them. At the end of the war, when the Soviets quit, two hundred were unaccounted for, still out there.

Your people tried to buy them back but went empty-handed. They can blow a military plane out of the skies or a civilian air-liner . . .

What we don't know is shelf life. Eighteen years after their delivery, are they still functioning? Have they degraded? Don't know. My own view, what it's worth, the crates aren't the problem. The problem's bigger. I think the men matter, the four strangers are the priority.'

Their greatest difficulty, as counter-intelligence officers, was to sift the relevant from the dross. Mostly their trade relied on the electronic intercepts of conversations sucked down from satellites, gobbled by computers, then spat out as raw verbiage. Wroughton and Gonsalves called it 'chatter'. Their bosses called it Ellnt. But this was the rarest commodity they dealt with: the word of an eyewitness.

'Right, four men are being taken across the Empty Quarter in conditions of the greatest secrecy - they matter. The eyewitness is definite there was an argument over the price of the camels. Then one of the men intervenes. He assumes authority. He is young. He is tall. He does not fit in physique and build - the eyewitness notes that. He is different in his features from the others - wears their clothes, but is different. A young leader, with authority, that's what I have - but that's all.'

All of the best material, high grade and rare, was exchanged across the kitchen table. The kids liked Wroughton. He drew the pencil outlines for them to colour in better than their own father, and after the meal they would go out into the floodlit yard where he would pitch a ball at the eldest kid, and do it better than Gonsalves, and later he would read to the kids in their beds and they liked his accent better than their mother's. In London and Washington there would have been coronaries and fury at the closeness of the two men.

'Juan, they are regrouping down there, pulling in new men, new blood. I can smell it.'

'Kill her.'

Caleb's head was down as he climbed the dune. He saw the sand, loose, slide through his burned toes. Beside him the camel struggled.

He had hold of its rein and helped it steady itself. They went up together. The voice was Tommy's.

'I say it, kill her.'

He looked up and the low sun bruised his eyes. They were all at the top of the dune and were silhouetted in the dropping light. Their shadows, and those of the camels, fell down the dune's slope towards Caleb. He heard only the Iraqi's voice.

'Because she has seen us, kill her.'

They seemed not to hear him behind them. They gazed ahead and below. Caleb reached them. He pushed past Hosni and Fahd, past the boy, who turned and faced him, wide-eyed, past the guide, who was clawing at the baggage on his camel and had his hand on the rifle. He was at the shoulder of Tommy, the executioner. He looked down.

'Because she has seen us, can identify us, kill her.'

She was standing. The sun back-lit the gold of her hair, which was tangled and sweat-streaked. She wore a dirtied blouse of soft colours, faded jeans and heavy boots. Her hands, face and clothing were stained with oil. She looked up at them, rocking as if she no longer had the strength to stand erect. There was a calm about her, like an indifference. She did not flinch from Tommy .. . and Caleb saw the Land Rover wedged in the drifts of sand. He wondered what faint, minuscule, mathematical chance had thrown her into their path.

'If you won't, I will kill her.'

The guide had the rifle. With a fast, clattering movement of his hands, he armed it. Caleb looked into Rashid's face, saw the hesitation. Furrows lined his weathered forehead. Caleb understood.

It was the way of the Bedu to offer help, aid, whatever was in their power, to a traveller in distress. It would have been the way of any villager in Afghanistan . . . He had been offered help, aid, when he had crawled towards the village. Deep memories stirred. They came from beyond the chasm he had fashioned to block them out. The words croaked in his throat: 'We would break the culture of the Sands. We would dishonour ourselves.'

Tommy laughed at him and spittle flew from his mouth. It rested wet on Caleb's face. 'Culture, that is fucking rubbish. Dishonour, what is that? You won't, I will.'

'She has seen a caravan pass by. She has seen nothing . . .'

They would have known, all of them, that his words were empty.

In turn they sneered derision at him.

Caleb ignored them. Rashid had the rifle. He fixed Rashid with his eye. He held the eye. He did not blink, did not waver. He stared at Rashid. He would listen only to Rashid . . . He himself was the chosen man. He was the one for whom the rest struggled in the Sands. Was he not worthy of trust? Rashid broke, looked away, then began to replace the rifle under the bags on his camel's flank.

Caleb said to Rashid, 'You are a fine man, a man I love .. . Go, till it is too dark to go further. Light a fire. There I will find you.'

They went. After a splutter of argument, on which Caleb turned his back, the guide led them in a deep half-circle around the woman, as if by her glance or her presence she might poison them. Caleb watched them go. When the sun first touched the horizon's dunes, when he could no longer see them, when his body ached with tiredness, hunger and thirst, he went heavily down the slope towards her.

She was reaching into her hip pocket. 'Are you going to try to rape me?'

As she spoke, in clear Arabic, her hand slipped to a position of defence. Against the dirt and the oil smears on her blouse Caleb saw the clean shape of an open penknife blade.

'Are you going to kill me?'

'No,' Caleb said. 'I am going to dig you out.'

In the bone-crushing, muscle-numbing exhaustion, he felt freedom.

Caleb had dug through the last of the sunlight, through the dusk, through the time the desert was bathed in silver. He had cleared the wheels. From the time she had given him the short-handled shovel he had not spoken a word, as if talking would further waste his energy, and she had seemed to realize the silence's value. He had used the roof boxes from the Land Rover to make a wall beside the wheels so that when he threw aside a shovel's load, the sanci did not slip back into the cavity he dug. Each wheel was harder to clear; with each wheel his strength seeped and his tiredness grew. She could not help him. When each wheel was freed, he let her ram down the next box into place for the next wall, and she brought him the water that sustained him. She had watched him through the dusk and the night, only darting forward to drag the boxes into position and to bring him the water.

The boy had come back in the night, had sat apart from them and had minded his own camel and Caleb's.

For those hours, digging and gasping down the water given him, Caleb had known a new freedom. Links were broken, burdens offloaded. He was no longer a recruit in the training camp, no more a member of the 055 Brigade, was away from the trenches and the bombing, was distanced from Camps X-Ray and Delta, did not live the lie, was not travelling to rejoin his family. The sense of freedom burgeoned.