THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (53 page)

They had
Carnival Girl
up over the track that ran north to south. On the map boxes, she would fly from Al Ubayiah at the northern point and down above Bir Faysal and At Turayqa to Qalamat Khawr al luhaysh in the south.

Because they tracked a lorry they were both awake. Marty brought
Carnival Girl
down to the low limits of loiter speed and they kept pace with the lorry and its trailer. The infra-red real-time picture had the lorry as a clean dark shape on the screen. They might have been ready to doze, might have needed more caffeine to keep them upright, but the lorry diverted them from drooping. It wasn't the first

.

lorry on the track, but all of the others had been going south to north, which was pretty much a straight line running through the centre of the map boxes. What was a lorry with a trailer carrying?

Marty said, 'It's refrigerated and it's got a load of iced root beer.'

'I wish.'

'Or it's got Big Macs, and ketchup and chillies and fries.'

'Dumb-ass.'

Marty said, 'My last go, it's got fans and air-conditioning units.'

'I tell you what it's got,' Lizzy-Jo chuckled, 'it's got sand. There's not enough sand here so they're hauling it down from the north -

what you think?'

In the dulled light inside the Ground Control - easier to see the screens - George's entry was not noticed. They were both laughing: Lizzy-Jo thought they needed laughter as a distraction to stay awake, keep working.

George said, 'What you got is a visitor.'

He told them. The laughter went cold. She snapped upright, listened to all of it, then she called up Langley. Oscar Golf was on the headsets. George hadn't the authority to challenge a visitor. Marty was flying
Carnival Girl.
Lizzy-Jo said she'd do it, the challenge, and Oscar Golf would take over the sensor operator's controls via the satellite link. Effortless transition. Oscar Golf told her to take the guy on the perimeter-gate bar with her.

'Lizzy-Jo, go careful. Don't start a war, and don't give a yard.'

'Hearing you, Oscar Golf. Out.'

She took a swig from the water bottle, did up a couple of the lower buttons of her blouse and followed George down the steps, into the night. He'd been working on
First Lady.
The wings were off, and the engine was being stripped, the camera units already taken out.

By the time it was daylight,
First Lady
would be ready for her coffin.

The transport plane was due in at ten hundred and was scheduled for lift-off at twelve ten hours, and for
Carnival Girl
to be stashed and loaded in time for lift-off, then her sister craft had to be packed and crated in the coffin. George's people swarmed round
First Lady.

George left her when they reached the armourer, who had a stubby rifle hanging across his spine from a strap, but his hand was hooked back and had hold of it.

The armourer pointed up past the gate in the razor wire, then handed Lizzy-Jo his night-sights. The binoculars were heavy in her hand, and she took a moment to get the focus right. A Mercedes was parked two hundred yards up from the gate bar, with a chair by the front passenger door. On it sat an Arab. He was middle-aged, had an austere, thin face and trimmed moustache, wore a dark outer robe, an under-robe of white brilliant enough to flood her glasses, and a headcloth held in place with woven rope. Around his neck, hanging from straps, were his own binoculars. Behind his chair the Mercedes'

rear doors were open and three men stood close to the body of it. She gave the night-sight glasses back to the armourer.

'You reckon they've got hardware?'

'In the back - yes, Miss. An arm's reach away.'

'What you got?'

'An M4A1. We call it a close-quarters battle weapon, Miss. It uses ball ammunition and it has an attached M203 grenade launcher. And I g o t - '

'Jesus, is this going to be fucking Dodge City?'

'It's their call, Miss, what it gets to be.'

'Where are you going to stand?'

'I'll be, Miss, right behind you.'

'Don't mind me saying it, but I'd prefer you a yard to the right or lo the left. Wouldn't want to be in the way of a close-quarters battle weapon,' Lizzy-Jo said, dry.

The armourer lifted the bar for her. She walked forward. Lizzy-Jo was a sensor operator, not a diplomat, a negotiator or a soldier. She felt the cool of the night air, a little wafting wind, on her bared thighs and shins, on her arms and face. The man stood as she approached and the guys with him seemed to inch closer to the open doors. She heard, against the tread of her footsteps, very soft, the click of oiled metal behind her and knew the armourer's weapon was armed. The man moved a little aside from his chair and motioned that she should sit.

'No, thank you, sir.'

'Would you like water?'

'Sir, no, thank you. What I would like to know is why, at seventeen minutes past three in the morning, you have binoculars on us.'

'You should button your blouse. In the night cold it is possible to contract influenza or a headeold if one is insufficiently covered. I am a prince of the Kingdom, I am the deputy governor of this province.

Each time I am in Shaybah, since you came, I watch you, but before from a distance. I have a question for you too: why are you flying at seventeen minutes past three in the morning?'

She said, parrot-like, 'We're doing mapping and evaluation of flying performance over desert lands, as we stated when permission was granted us.'

She heard the mockery in his voice. 'With a military aircraft?'

Lizzy-Jo might have been a corporate recorded message. 'The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator has dual purpose military or civilian use.'

'For mapping and for evaluation of performance do you need to carry, without the Kingdom's authorization, air-to-ground missiles?'

In the darkness he would not have seen her rock. 'I think you must have mistaken the additional fuel tanks carried under the wings for missiles.'

'When you came the fuselages of your two aircraft were without markings. Yet the one being dismantled now carries a skull-and-crossbones - once the symbol of a pirate, now a warning of death or danger - on the forward fuselage. I ask, why would such a symbol be on an aircraft preparing maps and evaluations?'

'Sir, I can only refer you to our embassy in Riyadh.'

'Of course.'

'And I am sure that, inside office hours, any query you have will be answered. Actually, sir, we will be gone in less than nine hours.'

'With your mapping finished, your performance evaluation completed?'

'No, sir,' Lizzy-Jo flared - should not have done, but did. 'Not completed - because some jerk shoved his nose in, and screwed things for us.'

He stared at her. She heard the hiss of his breath between his lips.

In the darkness, his body seemed to shake.

The words were chill. 'Maybe you are from the Air Force, maybe from Defense Intelligence, maybe from the Central Intelligence -

maybe you were never taught to dress with correctness and decency, were never drilled in the virtues of truthfulness and the values of humility . .. but you are American, and how could it be different?

You lie to us because you do not trust us. You have no humility because you believe in your superiority over us. When you have been expelled, in less than nine hours, take this message back. We fight terrorism. Al Qaeda is our enemy. We are not the wet-nurse to the fanaticism of bin Laden. Together, and with trust, you would have been able to fulfil your mission. Your arrogance destroys that possibility. It is why you are hated and why you are despised, and why your money cannot buy affection or respect. Take that message home with you.'

She bit her lip. Anyone who knew Lizzy-Jo - knew her in New York or at Bagram base - would not have believed that she could resist a response. She turned on her heel. She walked back to the armourer and kept going. She went past George and his team, who were struggling to crate the engine of
First Lady,
and past her tent, which was now folded with her possessions stacked, and past Marty's tent - and past the boxes of the Hellfires that would not now be needed. Alone untouched, because
Carnival Girl
still flew, were the Ground Control and the trailer attached to it that carried the satellite dish. She climbed the steps.

Flopped beside Marty, she called Oscar Golf. 'Lizzy-Jo here. It was just some local rubbernecker, it was nothing. I'm taking over, but thanks for helping out.'

Marty said, smiling, 'I got bored watching that lorry. Wasn't sand it was carrying. I reckon it was pretzels.'

She snapped, 'Just watch your fucking screen - watch it till we finish.'

It was as if he was building a wall of information. Eddie Wroughton's way, when trying to make sense of intelligence, was always to pretend that he was building a wall of coloured bricks. He sat cross-legged on the floor, had pushed aside the rug to give himself a firm surface and spread out sheets of paper. He had used his highlighter pens to ring each of the sheets - red and green, white and blue, and yellow.

He had started to build the wall.

In the
red
brick was the telephone number that had called Bartholomew's home. The number's code identified it as coming from the extreme south-east of the Kingdom, and his assistant's unpraised work had found that it was listed in the name of Bethany

.

. Jenkins. He remembered her from a party - tall, a picture of healthy endeavour, well muscled, tanned - and from a casual meeting at the embassy. Something about meteorites and something about the oil-extraction plant at Shaybah. She had called Bartholomew late in the evening, and he'd gone, disappeared.

He had run the fine dark sand granules across the indented sheet that he had taken from Bartholomew's notepad beside the phone.

Pretty basic, what they taught on the recruits' induction courses, about as sophisticated as invisible ink pens - and they still lectured on the use of them. Scribbled words came to life after the granules were tipped from the indent marks. 'Military action . . . missile attack

. .. head wound and a leg wound . .. Highway 513. Route 10. Harad, south. To Bir Faysal (petrol station).' That was the
green
brick.

The
white
brick was Shaybah, from where Gonsalves' people flew Predator unmanned aerial vehicles that were armed with twin pods for Hellfire missiles.

The
blue
brick built the wall higher. Wroughton reached behind him for the photographs taken by the Predator's real-time camera.

With a magnifying-glass - could have done it on the computer with the zoom, but preferred old ways and trusted practices - he studied those who were identified as dead, and the one who was not accounted for. A young man, head up and erect, and the magnifying-glass - at the blurred edge of its power - seemed to show a strong chin. He laid the photographs on the blue sheet.

Two and two did not make five. The worst sin of an intelligence officer was to leap to untested conclusions. Conclusions must always have foundations, his father used to say, as any wall must. What he knew . . . Bethany Jenkins had rung Samuel Bartholomew from Shaybah. At Shaybah there was an Agency search-and-destroy operation, which had searched and destroyed, but there was a target still not accounted for. Bartholomew had driven away in the night, with fuel and medical supplies, after being told of a patient injured in 'military action'. The stupidity of the woman - Jenkins -

astonished him. The involvement of Bartholomew bewildered him

- and then his own guilt swelled around him. It came back to him as the scabs on his face and body itched. A phone plug pulled out, a mobile switched off. But Bartholomew could still have left a message on the voice mail. His head sank. Why had no message been left?

. There was a knock.

Wroughton called sullenly, 'Come.'

His assistant always had a nervous twitch in his presence, as if expecting a rebuke. He had not known she was still there. Thirty-five minutes past four in the morning. What was she staring at? She was staring at nothing. Hadn't she ever seen the scrapes from walking into a door? She hadn't noticed any scrapes. What did she want? Had thought Mr Wroughton might need coffee and a hot beef sandwich -

and she put the mug and the plate on the table in front of him.

As Wroughton growled an acknowledgement, without grace, she said cautiously, 'Oh, and this just came through - it's a general notification, to all stations. It's probably not worth you looking at right now but. ..'

'I am trying, if you didn't know it, to work.'

Papers and photographs were laid on the table alongside the mug and the plate, and she fled.

On his hands and knees, Wroughton went to the table, lifted down the mug and slurped from it, then the plate and took a coarse bite of the sandwich. In putting back the plate he dislodged the papers and the photographs. They fell at his knees. He started to read.

Caleb Hunt. 24 years. Description, ethnic Caucasian but sallow-skinned, and no distinguishing marks, and his height and weight. The address, 20, Albert Parade, and the name of a town sandwiched between the conurbations of Birmingham and Wolverhampton; the address of his place of work as a trainee garage mechanic. The recruitment, Landi Khotal, North West Frontier of Pakistan, April 2000 by known Al Qaeda talent-spotter. The arrest, captured by US military persooel in ambush south of Kabul, December 2001. The deception, assumed the name and identity of Fawzi al-Ateh, with profession of taxi-driver. The detention, held at Camps X-Ray and Delta, Guantanamo Bay, under category of 'unlawful combatant' until release back to Afghanistan in programme for freeing those believed innocent of terrorist involvement. The escape, during comfort stop en route from Bagram to Kabul City for lodgement and processing with Afghan intelligence, ran, and was not subsequently recaptured. Status, extremely dangerous, exceptionally professional and highly motivated. His success at duping interrogators at Guantanamo marks him out as . . . His laughter split across the room and broke the night's quiet.
More detail to follow.
He pushed the papers away across the floor, looked again at the bricks - and the upper photograph caught his eye.