THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (57 page)

'What's that? . . . What we got?' The one called Oscar Golf, on the loudspeakers, had never lost his calm. There had been a woman's voice, merged with Oscar Golf's, a flat monotone, as if it were merely a training exercise and instructors had thrown up a problem. The aircraft had swerved, made violent manoeuvres, but the fireball -

shown by the lens - had closed. She'd gone down, spinning and spiralling, and the lens had shown a mad image of yellow reddened

.

sand racing to meet her. The voice of Oscar Golf was gone, cut off in mid-sentence - a switch thrown. Who wanted an inquest on failure?

Hell, it was only a piece of metal junk, off a factory floor - not the death of a friend. As the audience slouched out, as Gonsalves in that hideous shirt came to him and punched him on the upper chest, Wroughton opened the file and held up the photographs of Caleb Hunt, schoolboy, Camp Delta prisoner and Rub' al Khali fugitive.

'That's who you didn't get, that's your target.' Wroughton chuckled.

'What is it with you people? So goddamn patronizing. You keep a notebook on points scored?'

They were both laughing, hugging and hanging on to each other, and laughing, like they didn't care it was the waiting room of a funeral parlour, laughing till it hurt . .. and it did hurt because a target of importance had been missed.

He did not look back at her.

The last he saw of her, she was sitting on the sand on a dune and her head was down.

If he had gone to her - confused and tongue-tied and deafened by the launcher's blast - he did not know what he would have said to her.

Neither the guide, Rashid, nor the boy, Ghaffur, had helped him mount the saddle on the hump of the Beautiful One. He was beyond feeling the pain of the wound. He had struggled to drag himself up, then to swing the leg across the saddle.

They were ahead of him and she was behind him, and far beyond her were the last wisps of two columns of smoke. Caleb did not look back, did not wave, did not - at the last moment when his voice would have carried to her - shout his farewell.

He rode away, followed the guide and the boy into the sand that stretched to a far horizon. All that mattered to him, he thought, was that he was close now to his family, to their love.

She stood. She shaded her eyes. Riding away from her were three ant-sized dots almost swallowed by the desert.

She watched them as they diminished, disappeared into the far haze.

The smoke had gone from the downed aircraft and the destroyed vehicle. Her dream of him was downed too. She was glad that he had not spoken to her. There had been no contact between them when he had gone. She had not wanted to hear his voice, see his face: she had feared they would break her resolve. He had not looked back - it was as if he did not acknowledge that he had come into her life, had passed her in the night.

She walked to her Land Rover. The quiet of the place, its beauty and emptiness, washed over her. She took from the Land Rover the two towels she had packed, a spare blouse she had brought, and a bright red blanket she had thought she might need in the night's cold but which she had not used. She carried them back to the dune she had watched him from.

The haze had thickened round them.

She made the arrowhead so that it pointed to him, and the tiny specks on either side of him. There was no wind. The sand was still.

She bent the blanket for the point, blood scarlet on the sand. At each end, to lengthen the arrowhead, she laid the towels. He had gone into the haze, was swallowed in it, but she marked the route he had taken. Beyond the point, as if to sharpen it, she rolled her blouse, put it on the sand.

She marked him.

Beth would never again hear his voice, see him, feel the touch of him. She would not have justified her betrayal of him as having been for the greater good of humanity: she marked him as a piece of personal vengeance. Planes would come, or helicopters, and they would see the arrow she had fashioned. They would hunt him till they killed him . . . Love was dead.

As an afterthought, she stripped off her blouse - exposed the whiteness of her skin to the sun's beat - and that, too, she rolled tightly and used it to make the point of the arrowhead more distinct, more exact.

She walked down off the high ground, left the arrow behind her.

She passed the abandoned tube, the emptied box and the dropped manual. She saw the insect column that carried away the slivers ol flesh from his wound. At the Land Rover, she threw a scarf over her shoulders, and gunned the engine.

The sun hammered at him, and the pain surged. Sometimes his eyes were closed and sometimes they could see nothing more than the reins in his hand and the fur of the Beautiful One's neck. The heat was without mercy, and Caleb did not know for how long he had ridden alone.

He stopped, dragged on the rein and whispered to the Beautiful One what he had heard the boy say. They had been in front of him, but were no longer there. He looked to his right and left, and saw only the expanse of the sand and the gentle rise of the dunes. He gasped, forced himself to turn further, to look behind.

Their camels knelt. They stood in front of them and the father's arm was round his son's shoulders. Caleb did not know whether it was for protection or if it was to comfort the boy. He could not see them clearly, was not able to read them, because the tiredness and pain played tricks with his sight.

He realized their intention.

.

He would have gone on, reeling in his dreams and his fantasies, burned by the sun, half dead and half alive, and would not have known that they had fallen back, had left him. Now, they were a hundred yards, less, from him. In an hour he would not have been able to see them.

He realized they wanted no more part of him.

T need you,' Caleb shouted.

They would head for their village. The guide would spin a story.

The boy would go to a desert grave rather than gainsay his father's lie. Back in their village they would tell of the deaths from the eye in the sky, and of the demand of the wounded traveller, without a name and without a home, that he go on alone. They would return to their village and no man would be able to contradict their story.

His shout burst over the sand: 'I need you to take me to my family.'

For answer, the guide pointed far ahead, far beyond Caleb, towards the haze and the horizon.

'Do you want money? I can give you money.' His fingers scrabbled at the belt at his waist. He loosened the fastening and held up the pouch. 'I will pay you to lead me.'

They gave no sign that they had heard him. He saw them straddle the saddles, then the camels rose. The guide pulled at his camel's head and moved away at a right angle to the route they had led Caleb on. The boy followed him. The money in the pouch would buy a well for the village, pickup trucks for the villagers, was wealth to a degree they could not have dreamed of. As they went away, they did not look at him. Caleb threw the pouch towards them.

He threw it high. It arched in flight and the neck fell open. The coins glittered as they dropped.

'I will get there without you.'

Gold coins lay on the sand, were scattered round the pouch.

They walked under the raised bar, through the gap in the coiled razor wire.

The bags were hooked on their shoulders and Marty carried his picture.

From the tail ramp of the aircraft, George called, 'Come on, guys, you're busting the take-off schedule.'

But they did not hurry. The place was a part of them, where they had lived and where they had killed. Behind them was the emptiness of the compound. Dumped boxes of cardboard and plastic bags bulged with rubbish. Torn-up paper scraps hung from the barbs of the wire. She reached out and took his free hand. They went together.

Marty felt a shyness but did not pull away his hand. They went at their own pace, as if the schedule for take-off was not important to them.

At the bottom of the ramp, watched by George and his people, Lizzy-Jo grinned, then tilted up her head, and kissed his cheek -

there were cat-calls and whistles through fingers, and feet stamped applause. Marty blushed. They went on up the ramp and into the gloom of the stowage area. Two coffins were being brought back to Bagram, one loaded and one empty, except for boxed spares and maintenance toolkits. Marty blushed because he thought he had failed.
First Lady
was in her coffin, but
Carnival Girl
was out in the desert, broken and lost. While the camp was torn apart, and he had packed his bag, Lizzy-Jo had lectured him on the success of the mission. One more chance to hurt the man who had brought down
Carnival Girl
was all he could have asked for, but it was denied him.

Marty edged up the side of the fuselage, over the legs and knees of George's people, past the coffins and satellite kit, the stowed tents and cookhouse gear, and they found little canvas seats where their feet would be against the wheels of the Ground Control trailer. They were near to the bulkhead, close to the hatch door to the cockpit. He settled, fastened the restraining harness. He was not thinking of Lizzy-Jo and a future, but of
Carnival Girl
who was down and mourned and alone . . .

The Texan drawl cut through his thoughts. 'Good to see you, folks.'

He was far away, where
Carnival Girl
was, in the sand. He looked up and scratched in his clouded memory.

'You don't remember me? I brought you in here - you look rough.

You not slept? How did it go?'

'It went OK,' Marty said.

Lizzy-Jo cut in. 'He flew well, way beyond the limits. We lost one but we got good kills - we got Al Qaeda kills.'

The pilot said, smile beaming, 'Right on. You should be glad we're flying out today, forecast is nasty tomorrow - storms and winds that'll gust to seventy knots - good that we got the window today I'll come and talk after we've lifted off.'

The request welled in Marty's throat as he unfastened the harness clasp. The pilot was half gone through the hatch door, and the ramp was already up. The second pilot had started up the heavy engines.

Marty had to yell: 'Excuse me, sir, but could I ask you a favour?

Means a lot to me.'

He explained, shouted it in the pilot's ear above the growing howl as the power gathered.

The transporter, laden to the maximum, used the length of the runway, and even then the undercarriage seemed to skim the airfield's perimeter. The pilot should have done an immediate starboard turn for a plotted flight path to the Omani border, then the crossing of the Jabal Akhdar mountains but instead banked to port on lift-off. Marty gave him the map co-ordinates, which were passed on to the navigator, lines were pencil-drawn on the map and the diversion course was set. He clung to the back of the pilot's seat and the transporter shook and bumped as it gained height. Lizzy-Jo was crouched beside him, her hand over his fingers clamped on the seat. He thought that she understood his need. They crossed plateau sand and dunes, and the mountains of the desert. They went over the track

- a traffic-control tower queried them, and the pilot said, dry, that navigation equipment had gone faulty, was being worked on, would be rectified in the near future - left it behind them. The navigator did well.

She lay two miles below them. Spread out, fractured, dead. The pilot took them on a tilting circuit. Marty had his nose pressed against the glass of the cockpit side window. He saw the twenty-foot length of one white wing, and the broken pieces of the fuselage. He did not know how to say a prayer, but words of respect choked at the back of his mouth. Lizzy-Jo held his shoulder tight, but it was his moment. He grieved . . . Her fingernails cut down through his T-shirt and then she rapped the pilot's arm and gestured beyond the wreckage.

They saw the arrow. It was on raised ground and pointed across open sand. It seemed, to Marty, as if the arrowhead of bright colours was laid out to be seen from the air. The navigator made calculations, then scribbled on his pad the exact compass bearing in which the arrowhead faced.

Lizzy-Jo said, 'Someone left a marker - someone wants them fucked over. Thanks for the diversion, sir. Let's get on home now.'

As they climbed, headed for the Omani border, for the mountain range of Jabal Akhdar and for the wide sea of the Gulf of Oman, Lizzy-Jo u s e d the communications and broadcast the co-ordinate reference points and the compass bearing - and they went back to their canvas seats.

Marty slept, his head on her shoulder.

The winds rose and they went into the teeth, the mouth of the storm.

His eyes were closed against the spat pricks of the sand. Had his eyes been open he would have been blinded. Waves came across him, beat on him, threatened to drag him down off the saddle, to pitch him on to the desert's floor. The Beautiful One led him. Caleb could not have directed her. He let the reins hang loose and clung to the saddle, and when the fiercest gusts hit him he dropped his arms on to her neck and held the long hair. He knew that if they stopped, found a dune that protected them and huddled for shelter behind it, they would never regain the direction of their path. And, if the Beautiful One flinched from the storm, turned away from it, they were dead. The force of the storm brought the hot, scalding air against him, flattened his robe against his body. The sand was in his closed eyes, his pinched nostrils and his mouth, and it beat into the wound, lifted the lint dressing and lay in the cavity that was not stitched closed. He could not drink, could not eat. His throat was raw, dry - his stomach was aching, empty. Stubborn, as he had always been, Caleb clung to life.

Again and .again - his mouth closed because to open it would let in the storm's sand - he shouted in his mind that he had not lived lo fail now. Obstinacy gave him strength. If he went down, on to the sand and against the Beautiful One's body, his life was wasted . . .

before it had begun. He did not see skeletons in the sand, the whitened b o n e s of a man and a camel, rotted clothing and the frayed sacking leatheer of a saddle. He did not know how fast the Beautiful One carried him, or how far she could take him against the lash of the wind.