THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (3 page)

The light flashed. He was manhandled again and turned so that his head was profile to the lens, and the light flashed once more. The fists took his arms and he was shuffled out through the door and in front of the desk. The chains were tight on his ankles and his arms were pinioned behind his back; the manacles were fastened to a chain looped round his waist. They put the face mask back over his mouth. A heavy-built soldier, with a swollen gut and a shaven head, gazed up at the number written in indelible ink on his forehead, then riffled through the mass of files on the desk. Beside him, a woman sat, middle-aged, her greying hair covered with a loose scarf.

'Right, boy, we'll start at the beginning. Name?'

He stared straight ahead, and saw the first flicker of impatience in the soldier's eyes.

The woman translated in Pashto.

The Chechen had said that, if they were captured, the Americans would kill them. They would torture them, then shoot them. They would rape their women and bayonet their children. The Chechen had said it was better to die with the last bullet and the last grenade than to be captured by the Americans.

T am Fawzi al-Ateh. I am a taxi-driver. I—'

'You answer only my questions. I want only answers to what I ask. Got me?'

She translated fast.

He had been beaten at the first camp he had been brought to. He had not been allowed to sleep. Questions had rained on him, with the fists. Noise had bellowed in his ears, shrill, howling sounds played over loudspeakers. Lights had been shone into his face, and if he had slumped in exhaustion he was kicked back upright and made to resume standing. Then he had been put on the aircraft. He had not known, still did not, the destination. For a week he had been in a wire cage, in a block of cages, and if a man talked through the mesh wire to the prisoner alongside him, guards came and shouted and manhandled their victim away. There were prayer-mats in the cages, and buckets. He had learned from watching the men brought to the camp with him, and from those already there. Some had fought, struggled, spat at the guards, and were kicked for it. Some had collapsed, disoriented, and they were loaded on to wheeled stretchers, held down with straps and taken away, he did not know where to. He had been searched, had stood naked while fingers in plastic gloves had pried into his ears, his mouth and his anus, but he had not resisted. When it was hardest for him, every time it was worst, he groped back in his memory for each phrase, every word of the story of the taxi-driver, each detail and every fact of the life of the taxi-driver.

'Listen here, boy. You are a prisoner of the United States of America. You are held at Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay. You probably don't know geography, but Guantanamo Bay is a military base under United States control on the island of Cuba. You are not classified as a prisoner-of-war but as an unlawful combatant. You have no rights. You will be held here as long as we consider you a threat to our country. You will be interrogated here so that we can learn the full extent of your involvement with Al Qaeda. My advice to you is to co-operate with the interrogators when you are brought before them. Failure to co-operate will lead to harsh punishment measures.

At Camp X-Ray, you are a forgotten person, you have disappeared off the face of the earth. We can do with you what we want. You may think this is all a bad dream, boy, and that you will soon be going home - forget it.'

The translator's voice droned in his ear, as if it was a familiar routine, as if the words meant nothing to her.

Behind him he heard the clatter of boots, then felt something fastened to his right wrist.

'Take him away.'

He was led back to the block of cages. Flies played on his face but he coidd not swat them because his arms were chained. The chain at his ankles con-stricted his stride and the guards dragged him so that he had to hop so as not to scrape his toes in gravel. He was brought down corridors of wire covered with green sheeting. He had no comprehension of the size of the camp but from all around he heard the moaning of men whose minds had turned. He understood the muttered words of the guards, what they would eat that day, what movie they woidd see that evening, but he showed no sign of his understanding. He thought that if they knew he was Caleb, who had become Abu Khaleb, he would be dragged out one dawn and shot or hanged.

He thought it would be as the Chechen had said: the interrogators, when he was brought before them, would torture him. His only protection was the taxi-driver's name and the taxi-driver's life - every detail of what he had been told as he had rocked in tiredness in the front of the van was protection against the fear.

He was brought to his cage. He realized the hatred of the guards. They wanted nothing more of him than that he should fight, kick, spit, and give them the excuse to beat him. The chains were taken off his ankles and from his waist, and the manacles at his wrists were unfastened. He was pushed crudely into his cage. He squatted down, huddled against the back wall near to the bucket, and a little of the wind off the sea filtered through the wire at the sides of the cage. He held his right wrist in front of his eyes. He saw his photograph on the plastic bracelet, the reference number US8AF-000593DP, his sex, height, weight, date of birth and his name.

He tried to remember everything of Fawzi al-Ateh. It was the only strand he had to cling to.

The dawn widened.

Ahead, Caleb saw a grey-blue strip, the mountains. Separating the peaks from the skies were patches of snow topped by cloud bundles.

The high ground was his immediate target. He crossed a wilderness of bare ground broken by low outcrops of rock. Before capture, before the twenty months in the cages of Guantanamo - first at what was called Camp X-Ray and then the movement to the newly built and permanent-to-last Camp Delta - he had prided himself on his ability to run or travel at forced-march pace. When he had been, proudly, in the 055 Brigade with Saudis and Yemenis, Kuwaitis, Egyptians and Uzbeks, he had been one of the fittest. Twenty months in the cages - Fawzi al-Ateh, the taxi-driver - had leached the strength from his legs, had squeezed the capacity of his lungs. If he had not been at home, if he had not needed to return to the ranks of his family, he would not have been able to move at such speed across the bare, stone-strewn ground. At the training camp, the Chechen who had recruited him always made him go first over stamina-degrading assault courses because the Chechen knew he would do well and would set a standard for the other newcomers. Afghanistan was the only home he knew and the 055 Brigade was the only family he acknowledged. Everything about a life before the training camps was expelled from his mind; it did not exist. For twenty months he had been taken out for two sessions a week of fifteen minutes'

exercise. His legs had been shackled, his steps stumbling and short within the constraints of the chain's length. A guard had held each arm, and his sandals had scuffed the flattened worn dirt of the circuit in the yard. In those twenty months, he had been walked the hundred yards to the interrogation block nine times. His leg muscles had atrophied, but still he ran.

He sobbed from pain. In front of another man - an instructor at the training camp, an Arab in the 055 Brigade, a guard or interrogator at Camp X-Ray or Camp Delta - he would never have shown how pain hurt him. He was alone. The pain was in his legs, in the muscles of his calves and thighs. The unworked muscles seemed to scream as he pounded forward. When he fell, many times, he scraped the skin off his knees and elbows, and blood stained the cotton of his overalls.

There was no water and his throat rasped with dryness. His lungs sucked in the growing warmth of the air. The only time he stopped was when he came to a rutted track and lay in scrub near to it, with the scent of wild flowers in his nose. He waited till his heartbeat had subsided to listen for a vehicle or a man or a goat's bell. When he heard nothing, only the wind, he crossed the track and went on.

Somewhere in front of him, by the base of the line of the mountains, was the family he yearned for.

Across Afghan mountains, the Iranian land mass and the chasm of the Gulf of Oman, the same dawn rose over a limitless desert of salt flats and razor-spined dunes of ochre sand. The desert, the largest sand mass on Earth, was flanked to the north by the Saudi Arabian province of A1 Najd, to the east by the oil-rich region of Al Hasa based on the refinery complex near the city of Ad Dammam and the statelets of the United Arab Emirates, to the south by the hills of Oman and Yemen, to the west by the Saudi mountains of the Asir range. Whipped by the winds, the desert sands continually moved, lorming new peaks and patterns, and the great area that was a thousand kilometres wide and six hundred kilometres in depth was perpetually burned by the sun's ferocity. The itinerant Bedouin tribesmen, who alone could exist in the desert's privations, called it the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter.

The dawn light, thrown low, caught the mahogany wings of a hunting eagle. It lit the dark upper coat of a stalking fox and highlighted the tracks of the jerboas that would be food for both the fox and the eagle. It glistened the still moist gobbet of phlegm spat out by a camel that had passed two days before. The light nestled on a point of black darkness between a cleft of rocks where higher ground rose above the western section of the sands.

Other than in the few minutes when the sun came up in the east, the entrance to the cave was hidden. A man emerged from it and blinked as the sun's brightness blinded him after a night in the dim interior. Behind him, in the depth of darkness, a petrol-driven generator started up and coughed before the engine engaged. He spat out the waste between his teeth and lit the first cigarette of the day.

Staring out over the expanse, he saw the single sentry squatting in a cleft below the cave's entrance, a rifle held loosely in his lap. He ground out the cigarette, then placed the butt in a small tin box; later it would go with other waste into a pit dug in the sand, then be covered up. He whistled to the sentry, who turned his head, smiled grimly, then shook it. Only the desert confronted them, not danger.

He called back into the cave quietly.

Others emerged.

When the cave had first been found, when the decision had been made that it burrowed far enough into the escarpment for their needs, a compass had been used to determine the direction of the holy city of Makkah. A line was fixed in the memories of each of them as they came in the half-light away from the cave and on to a small square of beaten dirt between the rocks. In unison, they knelt.

Among the five pillars of their faith was the requirement that they should pray five times each day. The
fajr
was the first obligatory prayer, at dawn. They were silent as they knelt, each man wrapped in his own thoughts, but common among them was the pleading to their God that the opportunity be given them for revenge, the chance to strike back against the embracing power of their enemy. And common among them also was the appearance of hunted men, drawn-faced, thin-bodied, exhausted in spirit.

Very few knew of the cave. A satellite telephone was inside it, but gathered dust and was not used. The generator was capable of recharging the batteries of a laptop computer but that was also left idle. Once a week, or less frequently if the security situation was difficult, trusted couriers came across the desert with messages, food and water. All of those in the cave, hunted, harried and condemned, knew that their photographs and biographies were listed in Internet sites for the Most Wanted, and they knew the size - millions of the accursed dollars - of the reward that would be paid out for information that pinpointed the location of their lair, for their capture or for their deaths.

In a few minutes, as the sun rose, the shadow of the cave's entrance would be lost.

Many hours later, the same dawn rose, this time a slow-growing light that seeped through dark gun-metal cloud that was thick enough for a second heavy fall of snow. It was the last day of their rental on the cabin and in three hours Jed Dietrich would be loading the vehicle and turning his back on the wild Wisconsin lakes. It was too late in the year to have a real hope of hooking a decent muskie but it was what he had dreamed of for the last eight months of duty far to the south. He took Arnie Junior with him and left Brigitte to pack the bags and clean the cabin. The night cold had left the first snowfall as frozen slush on the ground and the water around the pontoon piers where the boats were moored was thinly crusted with ice.

He checked his son's life-jacket, then his own, and he saw that the five-year-old child was shivering in the cold. They would not be out long but he could not have given up the year's last chance of a good fish.

In the boat, Jed smiled reassurance at his son, tugged the engine to life and sped out for deeper water, the ice crackling at the bow.

Where Jed Dietrich worked, unaccompanied by Brigitte and Arnie Junior, there was sunshine, warm water and ideal conditions for good-fighting sport fish, but recreational boats were not permitted out of harbour by the patrolling coastguards and the beaches were out of bounds to servicemen and civilians because the shoreline was covered by infra-red and heat-seeking surveillance beams. There he could only gaze out at the sea, not fish in it . . . they'd tried for more children, a brother or sister for Arnie Junior, but had not been fortunate, reason enough to have the kid with him for every one of the precious hours it was possible. He slowed the engine to little more than idling speed, tossed out the lure and let out line with it so that it would go deep. Then he dropped off the small spoon, with little hope that a wall-eye, perch or sucker would be any hungrier than a muskie, and winked encouragement at the boy. As they trolled across the lake, under the thick and darkened cloud, they talked fish talk - as Arnie Senior had to him when he was a kid - of big-mouthed monsters with rows of slashing teeth and record weights, sunken reefs and rock walls where the muskie might gather, their habits and lifestyles. The little boy liked the talk. When Jed was away, and he had only the photograph of Brigitte and Arnie Junior for company, and the phone calls when the kid seemed forever tongue-tied, he would savour the memory of these moments.