THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (41 page)

Where are you from? Who are you?

In the boxes are the Stinger missiles. Do you know about the Stinger missiles?' Hosni was laid across the neck of his camel and his voice was a reedy, frail whisper.

Caleb crouched in his saddle to hear him. 'Once I saw one, but not close.'

'They are old. We do not know whether they are affected by the age. But they are important.'

They moved in a tightened knot, man close to man, camel brushing against camel, and he smelt the sweat on the guide and the boy, on the Egyptian and himself, the foul breath panted by the camels.

His knee bumped against a box's edge on the flank of a pack bull.

'I saw one when we tried to hold a line beyond Kabul, but the bombers were too high,' Caleb said. 'It was not fired.'

'The Stinger turned the war for us against the Soviets. The Soviets had a great fear of them.' Hosni coughed, tried to spit, as if the old memory of an enemy required it.

'I was never taught to fire one.'

'We bring them across the desert, deliver them, then they will be moved on, taken to where there is a target . . . but we do not know whether they will operate. Tommy opened the boxes, and there were manuals inside. They were written for Americans and Tommy could not read American.'

'Should we leave them behind?' Caleb had changed the order of the march. He expected to be listened to. 'Will the weight of them kill the camels?'

'You are the Outsider to us. I am told to escort you. I am told to bring you to the heart of the family. I do not know where you have come from, who you were. I do not ask. Two are already lost, but four remain. If I ask whether you can read the American manual of the Stinger, then you tell me something of yourself. My ignorance is your protection.'

'I am asking you, is their weight worth the life of the camels, do they slow us? What is more important? You and me or the Stingers?'

He knew the answer, expected to be told what he knew. 'Tell me.'

He did not know what the pale, watering eyes saw, but they speared at him and the voice grew in its pitch. 'I think you show ignorance. Perhaps it is only the Stingers, if they work, that will get us, you and me, through to those who wait for us.'

'The next time we stop, I will open a box, take the manual. . .'

'And read it?'

'. .. and read it. I will, because of my importance,' Caleb said.

For a moment, Hosni struggled to rise in his saddle, but the pinions held him. Caleb saw the man who had fought the Soviets, who had given his life to the struggle of the Emir General, saw the controlled anger.

'I warn you, ignorance you will learn from - vanity will destroy you. With vanity comes arrogance, with arrogance comes failure . . .

Imagine. Caravans move, columns of men move, mule trains move.

Men struggle not only through this desert but through mountains, through passes, through streets and through the alleyways of
souks,
they
come from the doorways of mosques and from the entrances to caves. You are only one man. Do you believe the organization of the Emir General depends on one man, whose past gives him importance? We are many. A hundred men move - some will be slopped, some captured, some will be killed - and they will be replaced by another thousand. In an engine, you are one tooth in one cog. I ask of you, never again show me your vanity,'

Caleb flinched. The boy close behind him would have heard the attack, and the guide in front. It was as if he had been struck. He felt small, a pygmy dwarfed by this needle-thin old man whose hand he had kissed in love.

'The next time we stop I will read the manual.'

A dozen men and women sat in two lines, divided by computers.

Two lines of six, facing each other, separated by the screens and keyboards.

The raindrops, from their run between the car park and the Libtary entrance, were on the shoulders of Lovejoy's coat and the waxed waterproof loaned to the American. The skies outside were ashen and the forecast was for rain all day, then an unsettled week no clear blue skies on the horizon.

He spoke quietly to the chief librarian. He'd telephoned her in the morning and been told at what time the Internet class was scheduled to finish. He didn't do tourist trips. They'd stayed in a hotel just outside the centre of Wolverhampton, gone early to bed because the American seemed exhausted from his overnight flight. Over breakfast Lovejoy had made his calls, which had culminated in a less than frank conversation with the chief librarian. This was the first step. He had not taken the American for a drive round the sights of Wolverhampton, but had killed time in the hotel lobby. The first step always made Michael Lovejoy nervous, and his justification for going to the Library had been brief and terse.

The Library was three miles south-west of Wolverhampton, nine miles north-east of the Birmingham city plazas. After eight phone calls, Lovejoy had spoken to the chief librarian and had heard what he wanted. She was a middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Aggie, who was careful in her appearance and had the brightness of enthusiasm. To her, Lovejoy was a lecturer from the University of Birmingham. The American, a complication to the cover story, was not introduced, had been told not to speak, just smile.

'Right, well done, everybody, the hour's up . . . ' Aggie's voice boomed in the Library's quiet.

It reflected her endeavour. The interior was bright, cheerful and clean. It had a section at the far end for magazine reading, and the newspapers. There was an annexe for children, surrounded by shelved picture books and boxes of toys. Away, against the end wall, was the double bank of computers. She might have been speaking to juveniles, but those she addressed were in their twilight years: 'If you could, please, switch off, close down. You're making great progress, I'm very pleased.'

Lovejoy held the audio-cassette player, and the American had the tape in his pocket.

'I'm going to ask you to meet Michael - he's from Birmingham University and he's needing some guinea-pigs for a social-awareness project.' She spoke slowly as if she might not be understood, and loudly because the majority of them wore hearing-aids. She'd explained on the phone earlier that her Internet Familiarization class for Senior Citizens, starting at eleven, offered him a chance to meet older community members in a group. That day, and he'd checked it out, there was no specified gathering of the elderly at either the working-men's club or at the British Legion. It was, in his opinion, the best chance of meeting men and women whose lives were embedded in the area, born and reared there, worked and retired there. They looked up at him, tired eyes magnified by spectacles, and he thought he saw an expectation of interest after the struggle to master the computers' intricacies, and the Internet that was now forced on them. 'I ask you to listen very thoroughly to what Michael says, and then help him. He's relying on you.'

She waved for them to leave their blank screens and follow her to the chairs in the magazine reading section. They straggled after her, live men and seven women, all ethnic white, all with pale, aged faces; two used wooden walking-sticks and one had a metal hospital slick. She arranged the chairs so they made a half-circle behind a table, and they sat. Lovejoy put the cassette player on the table and reached out for the American to pass him the tape; he slotted it into the player. He sensed the scepticism of the American behind him.

They hadn't spoken much so far. It was a long journey from the Caribbean sunshine of Guantanamo Bay to a public library three miles south-west of Wolverhampton.

He lifted his voice: 'Ladies and gentlemen, I'm very grateful for your time. You are the experts and you can help me. Aggie tells me that all of you have lived here all your lives. You'll know accents, you'll be able to place one. For my social-awareness project, I need to test your knowledge of where an accent comes from, which community it originates from. I'm going to play you a tape. You won't understand the language used on the tape, and that must not bother you, but I want to see if you recognize from what area that voice comes. Please, don't guess. I need you to be certain.'

He used his winning smile. Mercy Lovejoy liked to say that that smile, cultivated over more than two decades as a counter-intelligence officer, would calm an enraged bull in a china shop, would allow him access into the secrets of any life. The smile, deprecating and almost shy, always charmed.

'You will hear a voice in American, ignore it - then a voice, a woman's, in a language you won't understand, ignore that as well, then you will hear a male voice, and that's the one my project is interested in.'

His finger hovered over the 'play' button. Only very rarely did Michael Lovejoy, officer of the Security Service charged with Defence of the the Realm - the safety of these elderly men and women and their children and their grandchildren - meet
ordinary
people. His work days were spent roving in the electronic and cyber world of National Health Service records, National Insurance contribution numbers and the statistics of personal bank accounts. To confront ordinary people, who knew nothing of his world, challenged his mettle. He felt a small shiver of excitement. He pressed the 'play' button.

The American's voice was muffled, as if distant from the microphone.

'The people in your village, Fawzi, what do they think about Americans?' the voice of the man behind him drawled, bored.

Lovejoy had been told the tape was from one of the last interrogations, when hope of live intelligence was dead, fulfilling a schedule that said prisoners must be questioned once a month. 'Can you tell me how the people in your village regard Americans?'

In a pretty poor light, Lovejoy thought. He had read the file in his room last night, and the file said that the family of Fawzi al-Ateh, taxi-driver, had supposedly been pulverized by the bombs from a B-52 aircraft... except that the taxi-driver was bogus and came not from a God-forsaken village in Afghanistan but from here. The woman's translation was similarly distorted.

The voice played in the hushed area of the library. They strained to hear it. They leaned forward, and one reached inside his jacket to tweak the control of his hearing-aid. He thought them all humble, decent, generous people. Their new clothes would have come from charity shops and their old clothes would have been repaired with needle and thread. He depended on them. The voice was the target of the microphone, was sharp. One woman, deep in fierce concentration, reached out over the table and made a twisting gesture, and Lovejoy turned up the volume dial. Camp Delta swamped the section of the library. The voice died away.

The question came. 'Before the accident, Fawzi, and we very much regret accidents - accidents are inevitable in modern high-technology warfare - did your village people welcome the intervention of the United States against the repression of the Taliban, and against the terrorism of Al Qaeda? Did t h e y . . . ?' He switched off the machine, had been concentrating on the faces and had not intended the tape should run into the second question.

'Ladies and gentlemen, that's a first playing and I can play it as many times as you want. Where's he from? Where's that young man from?'

Some were certain of where he was not from.

'He's not from Moxley.'

' 'Tisn't Ocker, I'd swear on that.'

'Not from Dudley.'

'And I'll tell you something else - he's speaking Asian, but he isn't.

May speak Asian, but he's not.'

'Right, Alf - Asians can't do the V, can't get their tongues round it.

Asians say "wehicles", they say "wery", can't do V . . . And it isn't Tipton, or Upper Gornal.'

'Not Lower Gornal, neither - you're right about what Asians can't say, Alf.'

'But it's south from Wolverhampton.'

Lovejoy, so quietly that it was barely noticed, intervened. He'd reckoned - taken the gamble that he was not wasting his morning -

that the elderly whose lives were lived south-west of Wolverhampton, stuck in the concrete of their streets, immured in their communities, would have a knife-sharp recognition of strangers. They would know where the stranger came from. He interrupted: 'Let me play it again to you. Can you tell me where you think he comes from?'

They listened, transfixed, to the voice, and he sensed the start of recognition.

'It's more like Deepfield.'

'Don't you mean Woodcross?'

'I think it's sort of Ettingshall.'

What about Lanesfield? What you reckon, Alf?'

There was always a leader in any group. In the Internet Familarization group, the leader was Alf. A heavy man, bald, his trousers held under his gut by a broad leather belt. 'It's not Ettingshall and not Lanesfield, but that's close. I'm reckoning it's up Spin Road from Coseley, but not as far as Ettingshall. It's where your cousin is, Edna, the one with the pigeons.'

Wonderful birds, champions - ever so many rosettes.'

He doesn't want to know about pigeons, Edna. He wants to know where that young chappie's from. I'm saying he's from between Coseley and Ettingshall.'

'I think you're right, Alf, between Coseley and Ettingshall.'

'You've got it, Alf - funny, him speaking Asian but not being.

that's it, between Coseley and Ettingshall. Definite.'

Lovejoy picked up the cassette player, took out the tape and passed it to the American. He smiled his thanks, then told them how much they had helped his project. He shook Aggie's hand, and left them chattering happily about Edna's cousin's racing pigeons.

The American trailed after him and out into the car park. They ran in the rain, dived into the Volvo, and Lovejoy snatched the newly purchased map from the glove-box and began to spill through the pages.

'Was that scientific?'

'No,' Lovejoy said. 'It was better than science could give you. If they say it, I believe it. White and not Asian.'

'Which is going to blow the roof off Delta - Jesus Christ.'

Lovejoy's finger found the page, then pointed to and rapped down on the names. 'Ettingshall and Coseley, about a mile and a half apart.

That's where your man's from. Bet your pension on it.'