THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (7 page)

. . . You have to go, my friend . . . Time calls. May I say something more? . . . I am certain of you. If I had doubted you, I would have hanged you. I do not understand your motivation, your commitment, but I believe in its steel strength. You will strike a great blow against a common enemy - I do not know when or where, but I am satisfied that I will have played a humble and insignificant part in your strike, and I will listen to the radio and watch the television and when it happens I will be happy to have played a part. .. May God go with you.'

The officer put his arm on Caleb's and they walked together towards the launches.

'The war goes badly. There have been setbacks. Have regard to the power of the enemy and its machines - only the hardest man can succeed . . . You look at the men who will carry you across the Gulf, and they will have seen your face. Have no worry. They will return with cigarettes, they will be taken by the Customs police and they will go to gaols in the north. They cannot betray you.'

He stood above the ladder. Five of the launches were already edging out into the harbour behind the breakwater; the last was held against the ladder.

'You have seen my face and I have seen yours. My friend, already I have forgotten you, even if I wake in the night, and I have no fear of your betrayal. You will never again be captured. You will taste sweet freedom or sweeter death. God watch you.'

Caleb went down the ladder. He felt the night close round him, and the cold.

'What the hell, man, I was asleep. What time is it?'

Marty blinked at the ceiling light.

The duty officer who manned night-time communications in the Agency's corral stood over him.

'The time is about ten minutes after the Best and the Brightest have finished a good lunch in the senior staff diner at Langley. An excellent time, they believe, to fuck with the lives of low-rank foot-soldiers. Local time, if you need it, is ten after midnight. Read this, Marty, and inwardly digest . . . Seems clear enough, even for a pretend pilot.'

Marty worked the sleep from his eyes, reached out and took the offered sheet, and read. He read it again. The duty officer was raking round the little room with its low ceiling and hardboard walls. He read it a third time, like he hoped it would go away but it didn't.

'Shit. . . Who's seen it?'

'George - well, he's the one who's going to have the headache. I felt he should be first.'

George Khoo, the Chinese-born mission technical officer, was responsible for keeping
First Lady
and
Carnival Girl
maintained and operationally ready. Down the corridor, through the thin door and the thin walls of the rooms, Marty heard a door slam, then boots hammering away, and he heard a shout of protest at the disturbance.

George wouldn't have cared, not now he'd been given Langley's orders.

'So, what did George say?'

'That's a real nice picture, that is, pretty cool . . . Nothing I'd care to repeat.'

There was a framed photograph of his parents outside their cabin in the hills up north from Santa Barbara. But the duty officer was staring in fascination at a big picture in a gold-rimmed frame, Marty's pride and joy. He'd seen it on the Internet, offered by a firm in London, and it had arrived at Bagram six weeks back. The legend under it was 'The Last Stand of the 44th Regiment at Gundamuck, 1842'. It showed fourteen Brit soldiers clustered in a little circle, rifles raised and bayonets fixed; a couple of them had sabres drawn, and plenty more Brits were spread round the group, dead or wounded, and the tribesmen were coming up the hill towards them. It didn't seem that the Brits had a single round left between them. Behind the tribesmen were snow-covered mountains. It was by William Barnes Wollen, born 1857, died 1936.

'That is a really cool picture.'

Marty grunted and pulled himself off the bed. It was the first picture he'd ever owned and it had cost him seventy-five dollars for the print, ninety dollars for the frame and $110 for shipment, but it had survived the transportation. In front of the men who were going to die, and knew it, an officer stood, sword in one hand, a revolver in the other, straight-backed like all Brits were supposed to be, and he wore a suede coat with fur lining. Under the coat the gold-decorated flag of his regiment was wrapped round him and worth defending.

The officer, Lieutenant Souter, had been spared because the Afghans thought him too important - he had the flag - to castrate and kill, so he'd been ransomed. Marty had done research on the Internet, but he didn't tell the duty officer.

'Has Lizzy-Jo been woken up?'

'Thought I'd give that pleasure to you .. .'

The duty officer left him. Marty swigged water from his bottle and spat it into the sink, then unhitched his robe from the door hook.

He knocked on Lizzy-Jo's door, heard her, went in. She sat up in her bed and didn't seem bothered that her pyjama top was open.

Marty said, 'We're being moved. We're pulling out in the morning, heading to Saudi Arabia, don't know for how long . . . George - God, and I wouldn't like to be near him - has gone off to get the birds in the coffins. The plane to lift us is being readied.'

She heard him out, then told him to switch off the ceiling light and turned to the wall. He went out. Only Lizzy-Jo could go back to sleep in the face of such crazy intrusion into the routine of their work - it would have taken an earthquake to frazzle her.

As the night ended, the flotilla broke formation. Five of the launches veered to the south, his carried straight on. The parting was at speed and the farewell shouts, the other crews to his, were drowned in the engine noise and the hull beating on the swell of the waves. He watched until the wakes of the five were gone, then subsided again into the corner of the low cabin where he'd wedged himself. He had been sick twice and his shoulders were bruised where he'd been tossed against the forward bulkhead of the cabin and its side wall.

The crew were two kids in jeans and windcheaters with long hair. He wouldn't have talked to them if they had wanted it, but they didn't.

He was as much a piece of cargo as the cigarette cartons they would bring back. He assumed they had been paid generously by the intelligence officer for transporting him and had no suspicion that when they returned to the harbour on the southern shore of Iran they would be arrested, then left to rot in prison cells. Above the engine he heard the shout. The one at the wheel had his hands cupped at his mouth, then pointed. He saw the excitement on the kid's spray-soaked face. He peered through the cabin's porthole.

He saw the great hulk.

A tiny bow wave parted as the aircraft-carrier edged towards the launch. It was grey against a grey sea and a grey sky. He saw its massive power. The other kid passed him binoculars and he steadied himself, elbows on the ledge below the porthole, focused and looked.

The image danced before his eyes. He saw sailors on the decks walking as if they were in a park, like in Jalalabad or by the zoo in Kabul.

He saw the aircraft stacked at the edge of the deck, some with their wings folded back. The kid at the wheel jerked them away from a closing course and he dropped back into his corner. They would have thought, walking on the aircraft-carrier's deck, that their power was invincible. He held his head in his hands.

Crossing the Gulf, wearing the white linen robe that had been given him, Caleb sensed the complexity of the plan to move him closer to his family. He had come to the village, pathetic in his weakness, and now - out on the sea and speeding towards a distant landfall - he understood the great effort made to return him to the family.

It lay as a burden on him, which only he could carry.

The launch knifed into the surf of the shore and surged as if on a collision course with the beach. The final quarter of the sun balanced on the ridges of distant hills. Caleb watched the approach from the cabin's porthole. All through the journey across the Gulf the kids had not spoken to him and they had not fed him. His only contact with them had been when a canvas bucket filled with sea-water had been dumped at the entrance to the cabin. He had realized its purpose and rinsed out the vomit from his robe, then had used his hands to clean the cabin floor. Much of the time they had watched him but when he had looked up from his place against the bulkhead they had turned away their eyes as if they understood that - unarmed, alone - he had carried danger to them . . . As the sun fell below the hills, Caleb failed to see any movement on the shore. Three or four miles to the right, when they had been further out at sea, he had seen what he thought was a fishing village, but as they came closer it had disappeared.

Abruptly, the kid at the wheel swung it. Caleb was thrown across the floor. His shoulder thudded into the far wall and spray drenched him through the cabin's open door. On his hands and knees he crawled to a hard chair that was screwed down, and held tightly to it. Then the kid who was at the controls throttled down the two outboards, allowing the waves to carry the rocking launch nearer to the beach. The kid at the wheel jerked his head, gesturing for Caleb to come out of the cabin. He could barely stand, and he used the chair, then the edge of a table and the doorway to support himself.

He could see the beach where the surf broke, and he heard the little ripples of sound as the sea ran on sand and shingle, then fell back.

Fast, they had him by the shoulders and arms and propelled him towards the launch's side. Not only was he no sailor, he had never swum. He did not resist.

They had had time to learn every contour of his face. They could have described the shape of his nose, the cut of his jaw, the colour of his eyes.

He could have told them the fate of four men who trafficked opium who, also, had seen his face.

They lifted him up, his stomach scraping on the launch's side.

He told them nothing.

Had they stopped, pulled back his head by the hair at the last moment and looked into his face in the dying light they would have seen the harshness of his features - but they did not.

Caleb was pitched over the side. He saw the twin grinning faces, and then he went under. The shock of the water forced air from his lungs. He went down, into blackness. He was scrambling with his feet, kicking, and the salt water was in his mouth, his nostrils, and the pressure on his chest was leaden. His feet flailed into the sea bed.

When he broke the surface, gasping and coughing, the launch was already under full power, arrowing away from the beach. The limit of his memory was the few days in Landi Khotal and the wedding party - before that there was nothing, the same blackness as when he had gone under the water, and after that there were memories of Afghanistan and more memories of the camps at Guantanamo Bay.

Nothing in that cut-short memory told Caleb how to swim. He was a man who could fight with skill, with resolve, a man who could trek and endure the confines of a prison cage constructed to destroy a prisoner's soul, but he had never swum. He lashed at the water. The thrashes of his legs and arms, and the power of the waves, pushed him towards the beach. He felt no guilt that he had not told them of their fate. His mind was as cold as his body in the water. His feet hit the bottom. His sandals had stayed on. He stood at his full height and the waves broke against his back. He waded towards the shore.

When he was clear of the water, Caleb sank down on his haunches, then rolled on to his back and little pebbles pressed into his spine.

Above him, a low shaft of moonlight came off the water and covered him.

His life, as he knew it, had begun at a wedding party on the outskirts of the town of Landi Khotal and before that there was the same darkness as when he had gone down into the water off the launch.

He had no wish to clear the darkness because older memories threatened him. On his back, looking up at the stars, he saw the man with the eyepatch and the chrome claw, always watching him. He had felt then that the one eye was never off him. The party had drifted on and food had been eaten, and when the evening had come, the man with the eyepatch and the claw had sat beside him. Lit by hurricane lamps in which moths danced, he had seen the scars spreading out from under the eyepatch and up the wrist to which the claw was strapped.

It had been the start of the journey of Caleb's life.

A light flashed in the trees, winked at him.

His sandals slithered in the sand. He went towards it. For a whole minute the flashes guided him but when he reached the debris left by the tide's highest point the light was killed. He blundered forward in darkness and wove between tree-trunks. Thorns caught at his robe.

His clothes were sodden and the cold of the coming night swaddled him .. . Caleb was not ashamed of fear. Since the wedding, he had been afraid many times. The Chechen had said that fear was unimportant, that the control of fear was the talent of a fighter . . . If he was to return to his family, he must take every step on trust.

He trudged through the trees. He pulled the robe clear when it snagged.

Caleb had control of the fear because the camps at Guantanamo had hardened him. He was a survivor .. . He passed a palm tree's trunk. His arm was grabbed and the light fell on the plastic bracelet on his right wrist. Then his arm was loosed. The fear was gone.

In the low light, the farmers approached the corpse with caution.

They had walked up from the track, among the rocks, because they had smelt the stench of the body. The track ran from the Yemeni town of Marib across the border, and on north-east to the Saudi town of Sharurah. They had left their donkeys and sheep by the track where a bullet-scarred car had burned out. They came to the corpse. The head had been cut from the neck and the hands from the wrists. Flies crawled over the torso, and already some of the flesh had been torn away by foxes. Holding his shirt tail over his nose, one went close enough to the body to reach out and check the pockets, but they were empty, and when he pulled up a sleeve there was no watch. The farmers circled the corpse and threw stones on it until they had made a cairn to cover the body. Then they ran, leaving the smell and the stones behind them.