THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (29 page)

The march now was different from any other of the days crossing the desert. There was a second marker. The piece of wood protruded less than half a foot from the sand, and Caleb's burned eyes would have missed it, but at this marker Rashid set a new course to his left.

The heat dulled him. Too tired to shout a question at Rashid or at the boy, he clung to the saddle and the Beautiful One followed the camels in front, slow and lethargic, each hoof sinking into the tracks of the ones she followed. The heat was worse, the blister sores were worse. After what he thought was four hundred yards they went to the left and, after what he thought was another two hundred yards, to the right. Then they straightened, and the camels sniffed the warmth of the air and the bulls bellowed, but Caleb thought the sand around them was no different from how it had been every day. The angles that Rashid took confused him, but Caleb could not escape the sense of increasing tension.

He had barely noticed it when Rashid stopped.

Ghaffur took the lead position. Caleb followed the boy. He passed Rashid. He tried to focus on Rashid's face to read it, could not, his eyes wavered and could not lock. No greeting, no explanation, no word. The Beautiful One lumbered on. Behind him were the pack animals, then Hosni and Fahd, and last the Iraqi. He did not understand the tension that now held him.

Caleb turned, twisted on the saddle of sacking. The pain surged in his thighs from the movement: the sores had opened wider. Rashid was now behind Tommy, his camel's neck level with Tommy's camel's haunches. Caleb looked ahead. He took a point for his eyes in the centre of Ghaffur's back. Now the boy swung his camel to the right and the zigzag pattern continued.

His eyes were closed. He yearned for the next stop, for the quarter-mug of water. His eyes were tight against the strength of the sun. His throat was parched. Sand pricked at his face. He rolled, thought he might fall, forgot any concern for whatever happened behind him.

The embassy advised against driving alone.

Bart drove alone and took the shortest route.

Even with a chauffeur, the embassy advised, travel on a Friday in Riyadh should be made with extreme caution.

It was Friday.

Never on a Friday, advised the embassy, should an expatriate go anywhere near the Grand Mosque and the wide pedestrian square between the mosque and the Palace of Justice.

The call had come, it was an emergency and, it being Friday, there was no chauffeur available to drive Bart. He discarded embassy advice, and his mind mapped the most direct way from his compound to that from which the panic phone call had come. He came down Al-Malik Faisal Street, his speedometer needle on the edge of the limit, did not notice the drifting crowds of men, young and old, had no thought of what time prayers would have finished in the Grand Mosque and, when the city's old restored walls were ahead of him, he swung to the right into Al-Imam Torki Ibn Abdulla Street, and had to slow because the crowds thickened and filled the road. Then, crawling, Bart realized where he was.

The pedestrian precinct, bounded on the north by the mosque, on the south by the justice building, on the east by the souvenir shops and on the west by the Souq Deira Shopping and Commercial Centre, was known to expatriates. It was an endless source of fascination, gossip, speculation, and shivering horror. The embassy's security officer advised all expatriates, in the strongest possible terms, that they should never be near that part of the city on a Friday after morning prayers. To the expatriates, the precinct was 'Chop Chop Square'. Without prior announcement in newspapers or on the television-news broadcasts, after Friday-morning prayers the Kingdom's executions were carried out in Chop Chop Square. 'Don't ever want to gawp, don't ever be tempted . . . It is a place of extreme emotions at the time of a beheading . . . Stay clear. Give the place as wide a berth as possible . . . Take no chances there,' the security officer at the embassy advised expatriates. But Bart had been called out on an emergency, and had not been concentrating on the embassy's lectures. Now he had to slow and the crowds flowed around him. He could see, between the moving sea of robes, past the side of the mosque and into the square.

It was an emergency, and emergencies paid well. Friday, no servants in the compound villa: in the main lighting unit of a kitchen a bulb had failed. The tenant, an American lawyer with no servant to do it for him, had put a chair under the unit, had climbed on to it for the purpose of changing the bulb. The chair had toppled, the lawyer had fallen and, with increasing hysteria, his wife had phoned all of the listed American doctors . . . Friday, and they were golfing or tennis-playing or visiting, and Bart's number had been given her.

The way she told it, in her panic, her husband's arm was critically damaged. Could he come? Like now. Like half an hour ago. Bart didn't golf, didn't play tennis, didn't do social visiting. He had scooped out a bowlful of food for the cat from a tin, grabbed his bag and hurried out. Expatriates, Americans and Europeans, dreaded accidents and had mortal fear of going alone to a Saudi hospital Accident and Emergency; Bart would be well rewarded for turning out on a Friday in the middle of the day.

The crowds refused to edge out of his way. He twisted among them. Why was he there? Samuel Algernon Laker Bartholomew's road led back directly to the day when he had stumbled from the surgery in Nicosia, and the man had been waiting for him on the pavement and had taken him for a drink. The man, who had so briefly entered his life, was Jimmy: no second name, no address, no telephone number, but a wallet and the minimal generosity of putting, at ten twenty-five in the morning, a double Jameson - no water - on the table in the corner of the bar. 'A man's down, and the whole bloody world gets in a queue to kick him - bloody unfair. This island's dead for you. Look on the bright side, I always say a glass is half full, not half empty. I happen to know where a highly qualified general practitioner, brimming with experience, can do really good work and be appreciated. How I'd put it, the sort of work that would enable a highly qualified and experienced doctor to stuff these unproven allegations down the necks of the bastards making them.

Let me run this one by you . . .' Unemployable back home, his bank account drained, marooned in Cyprus, Bart had actually thanked the man for his kindness. It extended to meeting his Nicosia hotel bill, providing petty cash for meals and an airline ticket for the short-hop flight to Tel Aviv. Two days later - and never to see Jimmy again -

Bart had been in Israel. God, so naive, such an innocent.

He hooted impatiently. He looked to the side where the bodies came closer to the vehicle doors. He saw faces that were alive with emotion, and the anger around him seemed to grow. He might have been in an air-conditioned cocoon, but the anger, the emotion, seemed to swell. Shouldn't have bloody hooted. Before he had hooted, the crowd had seemed barely to notice him. Now faces were pressed against the windows and the bodies made a wall in front of the bonnet. Against the noise of the air-conditioning, through the closed windows and locked doors he could detect a slow chant.

The interior seemed to darken as the weight of bodies came closer.

Then Bart recognized the one word. It came endlessly repeated, with growing force.

'Osama . . . Osama . .. Osama . . . Osama . . .'

Now hands were on his vehicle. It shook, they rocked it. The voices matched the faces, anger and emotion. He bounced in his seat.

Without the restraint of the belt his head would have hit the ceiling.

He felt light-headed, not afraid. He was rolling and the chant reached a new pitch of intensity. Then came the siren.

The crowd melted. As the street cleared, a police wagon drove down it at speed. Extraordinary, but the sun shone through the windows and light bathed Bart. Another few seconds, if the siren had not made the crowds run, he would have felt the fear - he was no hero. He looked to the side, no particular reason, just checking it was clear for him to accelerate away. He could see past the Grand Mosque. A black wagon was pulling away from the square's centre.

A man scattered sawdust from a sack, threw it on to the ground, then moved on, chucked more handfuls down and did it again. He thought that the executioner would already have cleaned his sword, would already have gone. He drove away.

Three men's heads had been severed from their bodies. The bodies and the heads would now be in the black wagon. The crowd had chanted an icon's name. The condemned would not have been rapists, murderers or drugs traffickers. The crowd had chanted the name of Osama.

Bart felt, could not hide from it, a creeping sense of excitement.

The proximity of death, the name of Osama bin Laden, the power of the crowd made that excitement course in him. He hated the place, the regime, the country, the life he led, the blood now covered with sawdust, the wagon, the chant and the hands that had rocked his vehicle. He was confused and the adrenaline pulsed - gave him a wild message. It thrilled him. Everything he hated he shared with that crowd. He had no loyalties, he identified . . . Bart gasped. He drove fast. But the voice echoed in his head: 'You leave when I say so

.. . You are going, Bart, nowhere.'

He went to see a man who had fallen off a chair while changing a lightbulb.

To Juan Gonsalves, a telephone call was the better medium for a problem than an electronic message. Electronics left a non-erasable trail and settled for eternity in a man's or a woman's records. He called Wilbur Schwarz on a secure line at six thirty in the morning, Washington DC time, and his confidence that Schwarz would be at his desk was justified. Schwarz oversaw the Agency's counter-terrorism operations in the Kingdom from a windowless office at Langley, was close to retirement and his dedication would be missed.

Gonsalves trusted him.

'Wilbur, I am not making a complaint. It is off-the-record, and I don't want it to go formal. You shipped in a team with Predators to Shaybah - OK so far? It seems accepted they are doing test flights to examine extreme heat over a desert .. . Yeah, yeah, it is some desert. Trouble is, they've been shorted. One pilot and one sensor operator. These kids are great but they're low on fuel and they don't have back-up. They're working round the clock, and then some. I was down yesterday and they were dead on their feet. You have to understand that desert. It didn't get to be called "Empty Quarter" for no reason. It is empty. You want sand, you got it. Anything else, you haven't. They spend hours just watching sand. I suppose the first day the sand looks pretty, not after that . . . Now, get me right, I am not saying they are already inefficient, that's too big a word. I am saying too much is being asked. Not for me to tell you what sort of help they need, or what is possible in the budget. What I am telling you is that they are liable, in my opinion, to make an error, to miss something.

They are searching a hundred thousand square miles of fuck-all... I don't want to predict disaster here, but in my view that's where we are heading. Wilbur, can we do something here? First thing I had to do when I was down yesterday was lift them, get their morale up -

not easy. You got me, Wilbur, will you crunch some numbers and come up with something that eases the load? Try . . .'

Caleb knelt. He could not have matched Fahd's cries, or the simple devotion of Hosni, or the dignity and belief in God of Rashid and his son, but he tried. Sapped by exhaustion, burned, suffering the pain of his sores, asking for strength, Caleb felt comfort in his prayers.

Only the Iraqi, Tommy, sitting away from them, cross-legged, his back to them, was not a part of them.

When the prayers were finished, when the sun was directly above them and the only shade was between their feet, the guide measured out their midday water ration. It was poured with great care, Ghaffur holding the mug and Rashid tipping the water bag over the mug.

There was no line drawn or scratched on the inside of the metal mug, but Caleb sensed the accuracy with which Rashid doled it out.

Not a mouthful, more or less, for any of them.

When they had all drunk, the voice burst over the sand.

'You, here, you come here.'

Rashid was beside Tommy's camel. The voice had been a command. Rashid's arm pointed at the Iraqi, who swore, then spat into the sand beside him.

'You obey me, you come here.'

Caleb remembered the tension that the prayers and the water, and his own tiredness, had filtered from his mind. The Iraqi was now the target of the guide's anger.

'You are to obey me, and you are to come to me.'

Tommy pushed himself up, brushed the sand off the seat of his trousers and started a slow, indifferent walk towards Rashid and his camel. Fahd watched him and Hosni, and the boy.

Caleb strained to hear.

The voice of Rashid was quiet, but with poison. 'How many water bags do you carry?'

The surly grudging response. 'I carry four.'

'How many are on the camel?'

'Four, of course.'

'Count them, show me there are four.'

Caleb saw Tommy shrug, as if he dealt with an idiot. He counted aloud as he moved round the camel. 'There is one, there is two . . .

here is three, and here is . ..'

The savage interruption. 'Where is four?'

The shoulders crumpled. 'I don't know where is four.'

'You are responsible for the water bags you carry.'

'I am responsible . . . I do not know where it is. All the bindings, before we started, were secure.'

'I show you where is the fourth water bag.'

'I tested all the bindings.' Then defiance. 'If you know where the water bag is then why ask me? I don't know.'

With his arm, Rashid gestured back where they had come. Caleb struggled to follow the line, on their zigzag path, of the arm. The light from the sun bounced back from the sand. He thought he saw a speck, dark against the red of the sand, but could not know at first whether his eyes tricked him. He held his hands over them, shaded them, opened them wider, peered and saw the speck again. The wind moved the surface sand, seemed to make a slight mist over the desert floor. He saw it clearly, held it for a few seconds, but then the brightness in his eyes and the pain in them made him look away. He did not understand how a water bag could have fallen from Tommy's camel four hundred yards back or more. He blinked, screwed his eyes together to cut out the pain.