THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (45 page)

Jed saw a sudden smile crease the headteacher's face.

'I have to say that the vision of a past pupil of Adelaide Comprehensive rising to be a serious player against the security of the state appears to me to be almost ludicrous. Ambition is rare, boredom is endemic, fatalism is contagious. They see no hope. What do they look for, the ultimate? Good benefits, a hotted-up car with anti-social speakers at full blast, not the destruction of the United Kingdom. Look, this area from which my school feeds is listed in the dozen most deprived parts of Britain.'

Jed took the cue. Lovejoy had stood and picked up the photograph. The headteacher shrugged. There was nothing more to be said.

They saw themselves out, left the beaten man behind them.

The rain still fell. Not a cleansing rain, Jed thought, but a dirtied, contaminating rain. He had taken Michael Lovejoy on trust. All of the elation he had felt at unravelling a God Almighty-sized error at Guantanamo was being scrubbed out of him in the English rain.

Behind them was an avenue of closed classrooms, now darkened, where nothing had been learned that day or would be learned the next. They were at the Volvo, in the black evening, when he heard the piped shout.

Water ran on the shirtsleeved shoulders of the headteacher and on the sheet of paper he held.

'I was wrong. We might just be able to help you. Try Eric Parsons.

He's retired, but a bit of an icon at the Adelaide. He went two years before I arrived but - don't ask me how - he lasted sixteen years here.

Taught maths, but did the football team and drama. He might just be your man. I've his address and his number for you. Eric's worth a try'

The paper was given to Lovejoy.

In the Volvo, Lovejoy used his mobile. It rang until the answer-machine responded, a tinny voice: 'Eric and Violet cannot take your call, please leave a message after the tone.' He didn't, he cut it.

Jed slumped. 'Probably on vacation - God, just what I needed.

Damn . . . damn . ..'

Lovejoy said grimly, 'My wife always tells me that shouting at a kettle never made it boil faster.'

They drove out through heavy gates that were set in a high barricade of close-set steel posts with mesh slung between them and coils of barbed wire over the top. It didn't add up to Jed. They went away down streets lit by dull lights, where windows had plywood hammered over them, where the sodden grass was knee high in front gardens, where there were old industrial chimneys - silhouetted against the night - with no smoke and factories whose roofs had collapsed. It didn't add up - in the conventional thinking of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon - that this was where a fighter had come from who was clever enough to have fucked the system at Camps X-Ray and Delta. Jed Dietrich didn't know if he was capable of eccentric thinking but reckoned it was time to start trying.

'What are you thinking?'

Lovejoy said, eyes never off the road, and face in shadow, 'I'm thinking that our target fits a pattern - and the pattern makes him a headache.'

Unobtainable on the landline, and a voice message on the mobile.

Bart swore. He had never known Wroughton's twin phones, home and mobile, to be unobtainable and switched off. But he prepared himself to travel. A bag of intravenous drips, two multi-packs of lint field dressings, his suture kit, the plastic box that held the debridement gear of scalpels, scissors, clips, forceps and swabs, the wound-cleaning agents, the antibiotics and the local anaesthetics went into a neat pile on the floor. He checked each one off against his list. Last was the morphine, the painkiller.

When they were all laid out, he tried the numbers again. No answer.

For fuck's sake, it was his freedom, but the damn phones were unobtainable and on the answer-machine. He left no message. It was the damned big one. It was the chance to wipe all of the indifference off Eddie bloody Wroughton's face, to shove the sneer down his throat. It was the reason he had told the daft cow that he would drive through the night into the damn emptiness of the desert.

Bart went to the lock-up room off the utility room - where his maid washed and ironed his clothes and kept her buckets - for the big water bottles and the plastic petrol containers. All expatriates had such a supply had done since the attacks in the city. Water and fuel would be needed, if civil disturbance broke out and the airport was closed, for an escape north to Tabuk or Sakakah or Ar'ar and then on to the Jordanian frontier - eight hundred kilometres from Riyadh.

He ferried the medical bags, packets and boxes to the Mitsubishi outside, then the water and the fuel. Inside again, he studied the map. The journey would take him down the main highway, 513, to Al Kharj and on to the metalled road, Route 10, to Harad. Then he was directed to use the dirt surface track south into the Rub' al Khali.

It was the only way into the desert, and he would be on it for a minimum of three hundred and fifty kilometres . . . Bloody hell, madness.

But - perhaps - out of madness came freedom.

He tried a last time to call Wroughton. He yearned to tell his tormentor of a man wounded in the desert - close to death - by military action.

He picked up his cat, kissed it, put it into its quilted basket. He closed his front door behind him.

He thought he should be there by dawn, where she'd said she'd meet him.

They came up off the sand and crossed the raised track.

Because Rashid made the camels go fast, and the sack litter jolted him, Caleb saw the distant lights between the animal's legs. Half a dozen small lights as far away as he could see, as far as the horizon was. Then they were gone.

He rolled on the sack litter. The flies droned in his ears, made their circuits, came back to his head and his leg. Nothing to keep the flies off. Had no strength and could not swat them.

They were over the raised track, and headed away from the lights.

Caleb knew he was slipping. The heat, the flies and the dirt in the wounds doomed him. He knew it.... He was back across the chasm, where he had come from and where he had not known of a God to pray to. The camels stank around him, but he had a new smell in his nose, meat that was decayed, flesh that rotted - where the flies laid the eggs. Himself.

Thanks to the water, and the fodder at the well-head, the camels'

stride was faster now, and each jolt made Caleb slip further.

It was charity for him when he drifted, unconscious.

Still talking, a murmur in the old language, but weaker. He no longer saw the guide. He did not know that Rashid sat apart from him, that he was alone under an awning spread between two kneeling camels.

'I was nothing before I met the Chechen - nobody. A man looks at you, strips you, reads right through you. You know he's judging you.

Are you shit or are you useful? To anybody else who'd ever looked at me, I was shit. Not looking at me like I was a piece of meat, and hung up, but like I was a person. I went up that hill, it was all live rounds they fired. It was his test. If I had failed it, I'd have been on that plane home the next day - and I'd be back in that shit-heap, and I'd be nobody.'

He had not the strength to swipe away the flies at his leg wound, or to push himself up and see the darker flesh ringing the wound.

'The Chechen's a fighter. He didn't tell me but I heard it - he was one of those who lay in trenches and let the tanks come over the trench, then came out, was behind them where they were soft and broke the tracks with grenades, or put grenades down the hatches.

He did that - bloody tanks. He was under tanks, fifty tons of them, and he wasn't scared. He was my hero, and he cared about me - like he was my father.'

On his back, the flies buzzing about him, he did not know that the guide had sent his son - his only son - out into the desert to bring help. He was beyond that corner of his memory.

'The Chechen made me someone. Back in that crap-heap. "You want to come down the canal? You got enough for the chipper? Heh, you met that bird out of Prince's Road, who'll do you a suck for a fiver? Get your arse moving, 'cos there's a Beemer in the station park and the radio's a Blaupunkt - you want it?" There, they never knew a man like the Chechen. He made me feel important, no one else ever had . . . wanted.'

He did not know that, in the heat and with his blood oozing away, he was on the road to death.

'Among those kids - none of them'd ever met anyone like the Chechen, because they live in a crap-heap. I owe everything to him.

I make you a promise, Chechen - you won't ever regret picking me.

But you're dead, aren't you? Out in all that fucking dirt, you're buried . . . Can you hear me, Chechen, can you? I'm your man . . .

God, it bloody hurts, Chechen.'

Still talking, but fading.

In the slack dawn light, the spread cloud of dust reached the settlement. He approached, Bart thought, the back end of nowhere - the only stop for food or fuel on the only track running south into the desert. On his map, 'nowhere' was given the name of Bir Faysal.

Back up north - at Al Kharj, and again at Harad - where there was still a metalled road, he had pulled into the side and had used his mobile. In both towns, high in the darkness of the night, there were antennae on towers to relay his signal, but there had still been no answer from either of Wroughton's phones, both switched off. Three times, in seven hours of driving on the track after Harad, he had had to swerve on to the bedded stones at the verge to avoid collision with lorries - bastards, coming straight at him, not giving way to him, using the centre of the track - and once he had gone right off the track and the stones, nodding off to sleep, and had manoeuvred his way back on to the track by crossing packed sand. To keep himself awake, he had found a station on the radio, but it had static across it.

No phone signal, no radio - only his thoughts to keep him company.

Excited thoughts. Thoughts of liberation. Freedom to go to the airport, with his cat box, in the knowledge that he had paid his debt and that the files were shredded. Thoughts of what he would tell Eddie bloody Wroughton.

The tyres of the Mitsubishi threw up a dustcloud behind him.

Scattered grey concrete buildings were in front of him. He slowed.

He had not thought, alone in his vehicle and struggling with tiredness, of what he had - by his own volition - edged himself into. Now he did. The thought clamoured in his mind as he drove carefully past the building over which a flag hung limply against its post. In front of the police station, one man in khaki drill lounged on a chair and watched him go by. It would have taken some wriggling if the policeman had been alert, had jumped up from his chair, had waved him down, would have taken a bloody good story. After the police station he came to a fuel forecourt, then a cluster of low buildings surrounded by thorn hedges . .. The policeman might not have been, but Bart was alert. He had his window down, the air-conditioner switched off, and he heard clearly the bleat of goats behind the hedges. The desert was ahead. Where was she? He went past the last of the buildings. A woman in scalp-to-toe black ducked away and a child waved enthusiastically and .. . the flashed headlights caught the side of his Mitsubishi.

It was madness.

The lights speared into his face from a gully beyond the last building.

It would not have been madness if he had been able to speak to the landline phone or to the mobile. He had not spoken to Eddie bloody Wroughton. Perhaps he should never have started out from his compound.

He saw the Land Rover come up from the gully, straining for traction. She drove. There was a boy beside her. She came past him, spewing sand, then he saw the wave of her hand, the instruction that he follow. Like a damned hired hand, wasn't he? He followed her for a mile, until the settlement was lost behind them, then she braked the Land Rover and pulled on to the stones He stopped behind her. Her door snapped open and she walked towards him. What to tell her?

He remembered the brightness in her face at the party, its lustre in his surgery, and it was all gone. She was drawn, pale, and she seemed to rock as though exhaustion was near to beating her. The sand coated her, was in her hair, on her face and round her eyes; it lay on her blouse and across her trousers. He framed in his mind what he would say.

She leaned on his door. 'Thank you for coming. Thank you very much.'

He had intended a response of cutting sarcasm. Then he saw the genuineness of the gratitude on her face, and in her eyes, reddened by tiredness, strain and sand grit. Oh, God, that sort of genuineness came from one source, one alone. Bloody hell, that was
love.
The world threw up enough problems in Bart's life without the intrusion of love . . . a lucky man he'd be, the subject of her love.

He said, matter-of-fact, 'Good morning, Miss Jenkins - it looks like you're about to spill a load of trouble on to my shoes.'

'Probably, I have . . .'

It was another of the moments, fleeting, when he could have -

should have - turned back.

'Did you bring your gear?'

'Yes . . . If it's not presumptuous, who is my mystery patient who has suffered injuries in military action?'

'I don't know. Honestly, I don't know his name or where he's come from or where he's going to. That's the truth.'

He believed her. It was the last time he could have turned back. At the end of the day he would have been in Riyadh, and in his compound. And he would not have forgiven himself. He looked into her face. It was all madness. Bart's life was a story of being trapped and never turning.

'Right, then, we'd better get moving.'

She told him to follow her. She said the Bedouin boy with her would guide them. She walked away, lurched back to her Land Rover.

He kept close to her. She led him another mile down the track, then swung right and went west. He went down off the track and the wheels ground on the chip stones, then sagged on to sand. He used the low gears for cross-country. He had never driven on sand before.

He sensed that the boy - who had stared back at him from the Land Rover, his face riddled with suspicion - guided her. Many times they stopped and the sand in front of the Land Rover and Bart's Mitsubishi seemed without features, endless ochre hillocks that had no bushes, no trees, no cliffs, nothing to Bart that was recognizable or could be caught by memory; they would halt for a few seconds, then veer to the right or the left. He found his steering was sluggish and unresponsive. No one that Bart knew, back in Riyadh, went into the desert, even with their vast four-by-fours. The wildlife park, a few kilometres beyond the city limits, was enough. A trip by tarmacadam road cutting into a desert on the way to Jedda or Ad Dammam was sufficient for anyone he knew to believe they had experienced a survival ordeal. Other than the straining engines of the Land Rover and the Mitsubishi there was silence around them. He saw nothing that lived. By the end of the second hour, off the track and twenty-eight miles covered, he felt a crawling fear. He could not turn back: he had lost his sense of direction. Wouldn't have known whether he drove towards the safety of the track, went parallel to it or away from i t . . . worse than fear, and he sweated. His mind played games with him, mocked him. He remembered a school play. His father and mother in the audience. Its setting was a First World War dug-out. He was the coward among the officers waiting for the Big Push. The hero asked, musing, whether a worm knew, when it tunnelled in the earth, whether it was going up or down and speculated on the worm's bad luck if it went down when it thought it was coming up.