THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (36 page)

- each time - the route had swung into another gentle long and arching turn.

What if they were lost?

The guide had no map, no instruments, and in the darkness he could not see the features of the greater dunes - if there were any.

His mind had drifted back into his memory. He had seen a room.

There was a bed, unmade, and a green coverlet was crumpled on the floor. The carpet was thin and pale brown and magazines tossed down shared it with the coverlet. Motorcycles and cars were the photographs on the opened magazines. Girls - big hips, small swim-suit bottoms, big breasts - were on the walls. The room was gone from Caleb's mind.

He tried to remember from what direction the sand hit him, didn't know, was too confused, too tired, too thirsty, hungry and bruised by the day's heat, and now chilled by the night. Each of the Beautiful One's strides dragged her closer to collapse. He had set in his mind that they were lost, that they had doubled back on sand covered the previous day, or the day before. He croaked the question: 'Does he know where he's going, Ghaffur, does your father know?'

The boy seemed to hiss for him to be quiet.

'Has your father been here before, ever before?'

The hiss was louder, sharper.

'It is madness to move in darkness . . .'

The hiss whistled at him, cut him.

He could see, faintly, that Ghaffur was high on his saddle. His head was raised. The wind tore at the boy's robe. It was natural to ride into the wind with the body bent low and the target for the wind minimized. It was as though Ghaffur sniffed the wind, or listened.

He strained to see the boy better, could not. 'Ghaffur, tell me - are we lost?'

'My father knows where he is, where we go. He knows everything of the Sands.'

'Why do we not go straight, in a straight line?'

'Only God knows more about the Sands. My father is responsible for you. He decides the route and you follow.'

'Why do you go forward and talk to him, and then each time we turn?'

The boy called back to him, a slight voice beaten by the wind,

'Because of what I hear.'

'I hear nothing.'

'My ears are the best, my father says they are the ears of a leopard, one that lives in the mountains. It is an engine's noise. A long way off, but I thought I heard it.'

'What sort of engine? On the air or on the ground? Where was it?'

'I do not know. Each time you talk I cannot listen.'

Caleb heard only the footfall of the camels, the snoring of Fahd and Hosni, and the darkness closed round him and the wind speared against him.

In the night the wind swerved to come from the north, and greater ferocity came with the change.

In the sands of the Rub' al Khali, men lay against their camels' bodies to find shelter, and only their guide knew the value of the wind.

Above the sands, rocked, tossed and shaken, a Predator flew and hunted, in secrecy and silence, and under each wing was a Hellfire missile.

The dawn's light nestled on the wings of the Predator and caught the sandcoated backs of the camels.

'In words of one syllable, or two, stop fucking me about.'

'I am sorry, Mr Wroughton, sir, but I do not have authority to admit you.'

'Young man, I am expected.'

'I don't think so, Mr Wroughton, sir.'

'I had a meeting fixed up.'

'Yes, sir, but not here.'

In the half-light, as the city woke, Wroughton had left the bed of an agronomist's wife - Belgian, large and not entirely pretty, but experienced - and had driven to the Gonsalves' compound.

Sometimes he went there when Teresa was giving the kids their tea and waited for Juan's return, sometimes it was for breakfast before Juan drove to the embassy. The agronomist was due back in Riyadh from Layla, west of the big desert, that evening. If it had not been for his appointment with Juan, his friend, Wroughton would have enjoyed another three hours, or four if he could last it, in the agronomist's bed - inside the agronomist's wife; the man was down in Layla to examine the possibilities of growing a strawberry crop on the edge of the big desert - bloody fool. Teresa had said, in her night-dress and with the kids howling round her, that Juan had already gone down to the embassy, had been gone an hour.

'Just, please, get on the phone and tell him that I'm downstairs . ..

or is that too bloody difficult?'

'He knows you are here, Mr Wroughton, sir.'

Teresa, at her front door, had yawned, then pulled a face and winked. 'Big flap, Eddie. Panic call. He was dressing as he was driving.' The marine on the embassy desk had rung through, and the young man had come down. Wroughton knew him as the number five out of five in the Agency's Riyadh pecking order. The meeting, over breakfast, round the kitchen table, was just routine and the chance to exchange snippets, but it was important for Wroughton.

That day of each month he started on his report, regular as his bowels, for Vauxhall Bridge Cross. Much, too much, of his monthly report came from the crumbs off Juan and Teresa's kitchen table. A big flap, a panic call, he needed to know the detail of that. He was blocked, and his temper rose.

Wroughton swung his fist towards the internal phone on the desk in front of the marine guard. 'Just get him on the phone - I'll speak to him.'

He thought this young man had a future in fielding customer complaints in a telephone or electricity company - so calm, and his voice never betrayed anger. 'He said you'd be round. He said, when you came round, I was to come down and tell you that he was too busy - some other time. He'd ring. That's what I was to tell you, Mr Wroughton, sir.'

The young man shrugged, then sidled away, went through the inner gate with a punch-number lock.

Wroughton turned, furious. What price the special fucking relationship? He stamped towards the swing doors where the marines watched him impassively. A big flap, a panic call, and Eddie Wroughton was shut out. He would not have believed it, not of the special relationship, not of his friend. He could still smell the Belgian woman on him, and he went home to change his shirt . .. and his whole damned world was upside-down, was tossed aside.

'How much more time, for God's sake, do they need?'

For five minutes more than an hour, Juan Gonsalves had been watching the screen. He wore a bar microphone and the headset was clamped in his uncombed hair. He paced in the communications area. His shirt hung out of his trousers and his vest had the hand-prints of last night's kids' food - but his eyes, bloodshot and tired, never left the screen. Not often did he show raw stress.

He was not permitted a direct link with the Ground Control at Shaybah. The raised hut on the trailer down at the end of the runway, beside the perimeter fence, was off-limits to Gonsalves. Too fraught down there, he'd been told. What it meant, they didn't need a rubber-necker over their shoulder. Close to him, leaning against the closed door, was Nathan, the new guy out from Langley, and he'd had the signal from the young man that the visitor in the lobby had been sent away. There were things that Gonsalves would share, and things he would not. A live image from four and a half miles over the Rub' al Khali - with a target - was not to be shared.

The feed on the screen, real time, rolled and bucked, went soft focus, reclaimed the target, lost it, found it again. Nathan had moved to the coffee dispenser. Over the headset, Gonsalves heard the reassurance of Langley and the increasing tension of the guys down at Shaybah. The talk was coded, technical, and Gonsalves could understand only trifles. Why the hell did they not strike? The picture on the screen, beamed off the Predator, wavered off and on to a drawn-out camel train. The effort of the sensor operator was to get clear images of the cargo carried by three of the camels. More times than he had counted, the zoom had gone down on the camels, blurred with magnification, but then the picture had been lost. He had seen the men, five of them, spread out over a length that might have been as much as two hundred metres. They went slowly in long arcs. The camera tried, one more time, to go close-up on a cargo box, but the focus failed. The angle changed. Gonsalves imagined, high above the caravan, kicked by the gale winds, that the Predator circled.

Nathan gave him coffee. He drank, didn't notice the taste. He flung the beaker towards the trash can, missed, and coffee dribbled on to the floor. He picked up off the table the photocopied picture of a crate box, olive green, that could hold a Stinger, the man-portable surface-to-air missile system. He knew the wind had reached new levels at the altitude of the Predator and at the level of the desert, because the picture rocked more severely and there seemed to be a mist over the camels and the men, which he thought to be from driven sand. In his working life, Juan Gonsalves had not known a stress level so high. He depressed the speech button on his headset.

'How much longer - when can we go?'

The voice was massaged, quiet: 'This is Oscar Golf. Interjections from what we regard as spectators interrupt and divert us. Briefly, we do not take out a target until it has been identified with certainty

- identification is in process. These are difficult conditions. We're right at the upper altitude where the UAV currently flies, and it's near impossible to get a stable platform. The weather is deteriorating and we are running low on fuel. So, please, no further interruptions.

Oscar Golf, out.'

He had been put down, felt like a scolded child. He watched the screen, saw the caravan moving steadily under the real-time camera.

He felt weak, sick.

'Four more minutes on station,' Marty said.

'After four more minutes we cannot bring
Carnival Girl
back,'

Lizzy-Jo said.

The voice of Oscar Golf came back, so calm. 'Reading you, hearing you.'

Marty worked the joystick, his decision, and brought
Carnival Girl
down a full six thousand feet of height. Each foot of descent made the camera platform less stable. He had backed her away, gone to the west, had lowered the lens angle. Lizzy-Jo followed him. They were like dancers in step. The camera raked along the straggling length of the caravan. He didn't need to speak to her. They moved together, better that day than any other. He ran
Carnival Girl
from the tail of the caravan and on towards the front of it. The computers did the calculations. George flitted at their backs and kept the bottles of water coming. Marty could not drink, did not dare to release his fingers from the joystick. It fascinated him that down below, on the camels, they did not know the eye of the lens watched them. He was half-way along the caravan, and Lizzy-Jo's finger stabbed at the digits playing at the base of the screen - two minutes and forty seconds.

Would they pull out, on Oscar Golf's orders, or would they sacrifice
Carnival Girl
and let her crash in the desert with her fuel tanks exhausted? The momentary image was of a big camel, loaded - then the voice in the headphones.

'We have a freeze - wait out. We are looking at a freeze frame.' No excitement in the voice, without passion.

Marty looked up, took in the screen on the right side of the main image. The freeze frame was like a still photograph. The picture held two camels. He saw the clear lines of the crate box. He—

The voice betrayed nothing, no thrill, like it was a machine. 'Hit them. Right now.'

He heard Lizzy-Jo's question. 'One strike or two?'

The answer. 'Give them both. Waste the fuckers.'

He came round, was head on towards the caravan. It was what they trained for, what they practised to achieve. Lizzy-Jo didn't have to tell him what she needed. It would be without warning. Down there, slow moving in the sand, they would have no warning. The cross-winds hammered
Carnival Girl.

'Port side, missile gone,' Lizzy-Jo murmured.

On the screen, racing from it and diminishing, was the fireball.

Twelve seconds or thirteen, at that height, from firing to impact.

Again the camera shook at the weight loss.

'Starboard side, missile gone.'

Two concentrated flame masses, burning solid propellant, careered down. Each powered a missile with a warhead of twenty-live pounds weight of explosive, fragmentation quality, on impact fuses. He watched. Lizzy-Jo guided them and he heard little yelps whistle through her teeth. They were nearly down, he was counting silently, when the camels scattered. A few paces, the lens picked up the panic. They were turning, running, and then the flames cut in among them. He saw the camels break the line, then the cloud burst over them, and the fireflash. A ceiling of dust, sand, filled the screen image.

Marty said, flat, into his face microphone. 'I am out of flight time.

Do I bring her back or do I lose her?'

'Bring her back - and give her some good loving care. Nothing will live under that. Bring her home. Oscar Golf, out.'

Marty turned her, and the lens lost the cloud.

He heard nothing.

The boy was on a dune's rim, and his hands were cupped together across his mouth, his shoulders heaving with the effort of shouting.

Caleb could not hear him.

He did not know how long he had been alone in the Sands with the Beautiful One. She had stampeded in terrified flight. He had clung to her. She had bolted, had run in the few seconds of ear-splitting noise before the first explosion. She had been going at full stride at the moment of the second explosion. He had hung on to her neck. She had gone on until she could run no more, then had stopped, trembling. He did what he had learned from the guide. As he had seen Rashid do it, he snuggled his face against the Beautiful One's mouth, his nose against the foulness of her breath, and he had whispered sweetness to her. He had stilled the trembling. They had meandered on, alone and together. He had not known where he went - the camel had taken the course. His ears were dead and his mind was numbed, and the strength of the sun had grown.

In the distance, high on the dune, the wind made a canopy of the boy's robe. The ears of the Beautiful One lifted, pricked, as if she heard him when Caleb could not. . . They were all his family, the boy and the Beautiful One, and the men who waited for him at the end of his journey. He had no other family. The camel's pace quickened, closing on the boy who had searched for him and found him.