THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (42 page)

'I can only tell you, Eddie, what he told me.' Teresa leaned against the door and two of her kids, the youngest, hung from her skirt. The other two were shouting inside. 'He wasn't proud of it, you getting the turnaround in the lobby, but there were things - what he told me

- that were too grand to cut you in on.'

'I see.'

'For God's sake, Eddie, surely there are things you wouldn't share with the Agency, even with Juan.'

'Maybe.'

'He's sleeping down there. Nathan, his sidekick, came round for his spares. When Juan rings, shall I tell him you called by?'

Wroughton said evenly, 'I wouldn't want to bother him, wouldn't want to disturb him.'

She couldn't see behind his tinted glasses but she fancied his eyes would have blazed. 'Come on, Eddie, you know what it's like.'

He seemed not to hear her, had already turned his back. She watched him walk briskly away across the lawn and past the Pakistani garden boy. She was not prepared to incubate a feud so she stayed in the doorway and waved to him, to a friend, as he drove off, aggressively fast. She was still in the doorway when he went through the guarded entrance gates and pulled out into the traffic. She saw a red Toyota car come up behind him, brake, then follow him away. She watched and waved until Eddie was gone.

Inside, the kids' shouting had become screaming. She closed the front door and went into the kitchen to play peacemaker - it upset her that there was not peace between her husband and his best friend, and she did not know what was too critical for sharing between them.

He heard the voice in his headphones, like it caressed him. 'No better time than the present. At your own pace, guys. Oscar Golf, out.'

It was fourteen minutes since the camera slung to the belly of
First
Lady
had found them. Inside the Ground Control the heat baked them. The desultory conversations between Marty and Lizzy-Jo had died. George was behind them with the water. The screens were in front. of them and their focus was on the central picture beamed down to them.

The tactic of the target had changed.

From an altitude of twenty-three thousand feet and a ground speed of seventy-one knots, the picture was transmitted to the middle screen, the largest. Marty held her steady - optimum weather conditions - on figure-eight passes over the target, and she went through the programmes that changed surveillance to target acquisition, The water George had poured on to his head, which ran down his back and stomach, had cooled him. He felt good, had the right to.

Marly could stand alongside the former Air Force pilots who flew for the Agency out of Bagram. Because he had killed, he thought himself a veteran.

She had not spoken about the sex, hadn't touched him, hadn't brushed against him - like she'd distanced herself from him. Her Mouse was undone again to her waist and he'd seen the water run down to the flesh folds of her stomach . . . She had the target on camera, followed it and never let it go while he made the figure-eight passes and thought she seemed older than before, more clinical than he'd known her.

When you going to go?'

'Next pass,' she said. 'I don't have a problem.'

His fingers were softer on the joystick than the last time. Then he had had the wind to fight. She had it on the wide angle. The camera caught the target as it moved, a little wriggling beetle, over the expanse of sand. What had changed, the target was closed up. It was now the ninth hour since he had taken
First Lady
up. Two hours into the flight they had circled over the first missile strike and he had seen the twin blackened craters and the carcass of the camel, and then they had started to hunt. He had taken
First Lady
on a criss-cross of patterns over the desert floor. A pursuit that was relentless after fugitives who could have no hope, that was what he'd thought.

Inevitable. He had not doubted that Lizzy-Jo's camera would find them. Nothing shrill in her voice when she had, no blurt of excitement - only the gesture of her hand, then the finger pointing to the right upper quarter of the screen. She'd worked the camera and the target had gone to the screen's centre. Fourteen minutes later he brought
First Lady
back on the figure-eight curves, and Lizzy-Jo was going through the procedures for firing.

The beetle moved so slowly. They were tight together. He wondered whether they searched the skies, gazed up at the sun and burned out their eyes. They would fail. The heat haze came up off the sand round them, distorted the picture, but it remained clear enough for him to see them, to watch their crawling progress. He saw four men. He did not know them, they had no identity for him. He remembered what Gonsalves had said. It echoed in his mind:
'The
hardest man, the strongest. The man they need. The man that can hurt us
most. A man without fear.'
He saw four men, saw no threat, no danger, no chance of risk - four men, on camels, in the desert.

She said, 'When you turn behind them, I'm launching.'

Marty wished he knew them, wished he saw the threat, the danger they made.

'What are they thinking?'

She darted a glance at him. 'God, I don't know.'

'Doesn't that matter - what they're thinking?'

'Thinking about water, about chow, thinking about a shower - I don't know. Thinking about us.'

'What are they thinking about us?'

'Whether we've found them, I suppose - how the hell should I know? - whether we're over them.'

He saw them on the screen, worked the joystick and banked
First
Lady
so that she would line up behind them for the strike. 'That's not an answer - what do they think about
us?'

'About hating us, about having contempt for us . . . you want to be their shrink, Marty? Forget it. Think of your duty to our country and do your job. Forget that shit - I don't know what they're thinking and I don't care.'

Marty said softly, 'We are flying west-north-west, wind speed eight knots, our air speed is—'

'I got all that. . . Going in five.'

He did not know about them and that hurt in his mind.

The whisper, 'Port side gone.'

His fingers tightened on the joystick and he compensated for the luch of First Lady. She was thrown up at an angle, starboard side dipping. He heard the little gasp of annoyance from beside him: he'd been slow in making the commands that held her steady On the central screen, the fireball seemed to loiter before it started to race away on its guided descent. He had her steady, and he waited for the next leap of First Lady - which didn't come.

' You shooting?'

'I'm holding . . . Look at them, Marty, look at them run.'

t )n the big screen, the central one, the beetle below the fireball broke up.

'bastards.'

Marty saw the panic scattering of the camels. They went in crazy lines, like they'd broken the knot that held them.

At that height, and with the oblique firing angle, the Hellfire would fly for seventeen seconds . . . Half-way down . . . He saw, from the fireball, the little adjustments she made as she guided it, and he watched the camels career together and apart. He watched their panic. lie was the voyeur. He was the hard-breathing youth in the shadows of the car park above the ocean where the university students brought their girls. He rubbernecked the stampede of the camels. The missile went into the sand.

The Hellfire was for a tank. Firing a Hellfire at Nellis, the sensor operator should get an armour-piercing warhead up against a tank turret from twenty-four thousand feet, should get a hit on the range within one yard of the aimed point. Instructors liked to reckon they could hit within half a foot on a stationary tank turret.. . Nobody at Nellis had ever thought of a target of running camels for an impact of a fragmentation warhead. The dustcloud rose.

The cloud came up towards the camera lens. Marty lost the camels, did not know whether they were under it, or had escaped it. There was a darkness at the core of the cloud, then a fire flash in its heart.

Red flame blossomed from the cloud. They had hit ordnance. The new fire burst through the cloud and climbed, then guttered. Smoke, dark and poisonous black, replaced the fire.

The voice came in his ear, massaged him like her fingers had.

'Good work, guys. Secondary explosions would prove you've hit gold. Please look at your screens, extreme left. I see empty camels on the right side, ten o'clock, but you should be looking extreme left, four o'clock. Centre on that target, and take it. Oscar Golf, out.'

Alone in the desert, a single camel ran. Marty had been to ten o'clock, four camels together - like they were tied - no riders. Then Lizzy-Jo was raking the picture across, going to four o'clock, and zooming. The picture was tugged to close-up, and she tweaked the lost focus. A single camel ran in the sand, wove between the hills.

Marty came over it. The camel stumbled, like it had no more running left in it, tried again, then stopped. The screen was filled with the camel. It stopped, like its spirit was broken. It sank. The knees went from under it. The technology that Marty watched, that Lizzy-Jo worked, showed a camel run to exhaustion and crumpling. He saw the weight that the camel could no longer run with.

The vomit was in his throat.

He was the representative of a master race. Four point five four -

recurring - miles below the camera an old man was laid out on the back of the camel.

Beside him, Lizzy-Jo trilled amazement. 'This is just wonderful gear, incredible - like he's just down under us.'

Eight million dollars of Predator, at factory-gate prices, circled an old man on a camel and lining up against him was a hundred thousand dollars of Hellfire with a fragmentation warhead. He could see the old man's face and a blur of greying hair, and the old man seemed to twist his head and look up, and he would have seen nothing and would have heard nothing. Marty did not know why the old man had not jumped clear of the knelt camel, why he had not gone away from it. He was stretched across the camel from the hump to the neck. Did he know? Must have. His arm came up. First, Marty thought it was like a salute. Wrong. The arm was outstretched, pointed upwards towards
First Lady:
'Fuck you.' He thought the arm, raised, said, 'Fuck you,' to him.

Lizzy-Jo let the second Hellfire go.

For a dozen of the sixteen seconds of its fireball flight, Marty watched the screen, then turned away, his eyes closed. He did not watch its hit.

He spun his chair and ripped off his headset. He pushed away George's hand and went to the door. He heard Lizzy-Jo murmur to her mouth microphone that her pilot had gone off station. He stood in the door, above the steps.

The vomit cascaded from his bowed head.

When he was conscious, he could feel the warm wetness of the blood. But Caleb drifted.

When he came back to consciousness, he could feel the pain. It was deep waves.

Conscious, he did not know how they had made the litter, and how they clung to the undersides of the camel's bellies, hanging from the hidden saddle straps.

The litter, three sacks, was suspended low down between the Beautiful One and Rashid's camel. He was belted by the animal's legs and rocked from the motion of their walk. On the far side of him was the boy. Father and son, gasping, held themselves against the stomachs of the camels, and behind them was the last of the bulls.

When the pain came, and the scent of the blood, he could remember. The boy had howled the warning. The fire had come down on them. The blow, with the hot wind and the clap of the thunder, had felled him. They had snatched him up, father and son.

He was hidden, as were Rashid and Ghaffur.

The last sight he had seen was the one camel, Hosni strapped

.across it, fleeing from them.

He prayed to sleep, to lose the pain.

The cloth against his head was wet and cold. It stank with stale odour. The voice said, 'Do not try to speak.' With great gentleness, the cloth was wiped on his forehead, round his eyes and on his cheeks. A little of the dribble from it rested on his lips - it stung his eyes.

He tried to move, to shift the weight on his back, but the effort brought the pain - he gasped - and for a moment the cloth was across his mouth.

'You must not cry out.'

How long he had been unconscious, asleep, dead, he did not know.

The pain was in his leg and at the side of his head. When he tried to shift, the pain was agony in his leg and his head throbbed.

'If you are seen, heard, it will have been for nothing. You must not be found.'

The cloth over his face calmed him.

His eyes moved, not his head.

The night was around them. Rashid crouched over him, laid the cloth in a bucket, lifted it, squeezed the water from it, then spread it, cool and bringing life back, across his throat and his upper chest. He lay on the same sacks that had made the litter and in his nose was the smell of shit and urine - his. Flies buzzed him. Close to him were the hoofs of the camels. As if she were alerted by his faint movements, or the guide's murmured voice, the Beautiful One arched her neck down and her nostrils nudged against him. Beyond the camels, fires burned. He heard roaming voices, laughter and the scrape of harnesses. He smelt cooking meat, carried on the wind, and spices mixed with boiling rice, could recognize them through the stench of the camels and his own excreta. He squinted to see better, and shadows passed across the fires - when a shadow approached closer to them, Rashid reached for his rifle and was alert, but the shadow ignored them and went on. They were separated by thornbushes from a great gathering of men and animals. When it reached his lips and he sucked at it, the water was foul, old. He retched, could not bring anything up, and the choking in his throat and gut brought back the agony in his leg and the hammer in his head. Rashid cradled him.

' I thought you were dead, I praise God.' The voice guttered in his ear. 'For three days and three nights, I thought you were the scrape of a fingernail from death. Only God could have saved you . . . I sent Chaffur for help. I asked him to go alone into the Sands, and his life is with God . . . All the water we had was for you, and one day back, and one night, it was finished. Now we are at a well-head. It is bad water, it has not rained here for many years, but it is the water that God has given us. If you are found here there will be people who will see your wounds and will know you are an Outsider to the Sands, and they will seek to sell you to the government, or they will kill you and lake your head to the government and ask money for it. We came in the night and we will leave in the night, with God's protection.. You should rest. Death is still close to you. If God forgets you then you are dead.'