THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (2 page)

Now the aircraft dived. He knew it was the last leg. If it had not been for the straps that held him he would have slid down the floor of the fuselage, then cannoned into an obstruction. He did not move, could not. He sat on a small cushion of thin foam but the floor rivets were too prominent for the cushion to protect his backside. And the cushion was damp from the urine he had leaked during the bad Security - that's the Pol-i-Charki gaol - and you're going to dump them there. That's a non-negotiable.'

'Maybe you don't understand, Captain, but I have been with these ragheads the last four days, all the way from Guantanamo. I need a cot.'

'Don't you hear, Lieutenant? You drop these losers at the Pol-i-Charki, then you come back here and find a cot. Got it?'

'Yes, sir.'

A secondary argument started up. 'Sergeant, I'm taking these men into town. Their restraints have been removed. I want them put back on.'

'No can do, sir.'

'That is an order. Manacle them.'

'Sorry, sir. As loadmaster sergeant I have authority over all Air Force equipment. Such equipment does not leave my sight, does not leave this aircraft. Manacles, chains, ear baffles, mouth masks, goggles and cushions are air-force property.'

'Goddamnit. ..'

'Sorry, sir. Oh, and eleven hundred hours is take-off time. You better be back by then if you want a ride out. Good luck, sir.'

He knew the book. He had been in military custody for twenty months. He knew how the book was written. The arguments had not amused him and he sat bolt still with his head down. When the goggles were pulled up from his eyes he kept them closed. He gave no sign that he had understood a word of the disputes within his hearing. A vehicle pulled up, manoeuvred close to the open tail and a door was slid open. Hands lifted him up. His eyes were open now but he did not look around him. In a stumbling slide he went down the tail and the freshness of the air caught him. It was the first time he could remember scenting fresh air since he had been with the Chechen, his friend, and the others beside the long, straight road where the pickup had lost its tyres. There had been no clean air in the taxi van, and when he had been thrown clear at the ambush the stink of cordite had covered him, then the stench of the enemy in the personnel carrier, and the smell of a holding prison that was exchanged for the shit bucket of the aircraft out. There had been no clean, pure air in the camp, not even in the exercise compound.

He sucked in the air. He was to be taken to Kabul and dumped at the Pol-i-Charki. He knew the gaol: he had taken prisoners there for interrogation, men of the Northern Alliance who had fought against AI Qaeda and the Taliban - but that was long ago. Deep in the recesses of his memory, shared with the Pol-i-Charki, was a vague vision of the road from the Bagram base into the city. If he reached the Pol-i-Charki, he would be dead . . . and he had not come home to die. He was lifted up into a van with smoked windows. The driver was yawning, using his forearm to wipe sleep from his eyes. A marine was in the back with a rifle, grumpily making room for the prisoners. As the officer took the front passenger seat, the driver grinned and handed back bars of nougat chocolate. They drove away, and an open jeep followed with a machine-gun mounted on a brace behind the driver.

He remembered the base as a place of ghosts and ruins. He remembered it abandoned and looted. Without turning his head he saw new, prefabricated blocks and tent camps, then a gate topped with coiled razor wire, flanked with sandbags, guarded by men in combat fatigues. He took heart. For twenty months he had existed in a vacuum of time and information. That changed. The gate was guarded, which told him there was still the chance of hostile action on the fifty kilometres of road - through flat and featureless farming country — between the Bagram base and the capital city of Kabul. As the sentries raised the bar at the base gate, the machine-gun on the jeep was noisily cocked. They left the arc-lights and the perimeter wire behind them, and the driver switched on the radio, caught the forces programme and smiled toothily at the officer's discomfort.

It would take, as he remembered it, an hour at most to reach the outskirts of the city. His sole hope was in open country. They passed a village. The officer ignored the no-smoking sign in the cab and lit a cigarett.The driver grimaced.

If he were in the Pol-i-Charki, if he were interrogated by Afghan security - the hard bastards of the Northern Alliance - he would fail.

He would be dead. Memories of the road silted in his mind. A village, as he had known it more than twenty months before, flashed past in the headlights. Two ruined compounds, gutted in earlier lighting, wore on the right. There were open fields and scrub . . .

Then, if his memory held, there were trees beside the road, both sides. His fingers played with the sharp edge of the plastic bracelet on his wrist. He coughed, was ignored, and coughed again. The officer turned, irritated, and the cigarette smoke wreathed his face.

He looked pathetic and cringed, then pointed downwards. The officer's eyes followed where he pointed, to his groin. The driver, too, had turned back to look.

'Shit, man,' the driver whined. 'Not in here, not in my vehicle. I'm not having him piss in my vehicle.'

The driver didn't wait for the officer's agreement. He braked hard, swerved on to the gravel, stopped.

'I take one-star generals in this vehicle. I'm not having it pissed in.'

The officer climbed out, threw down his cigarette and opened the back door. He climbed out and the officer's hand steadied him. He smiled his thanks. He went to the side of the road and knew he was watched by the men in the jeep who had the mounted, cocked machine-gun. He stepped down off the road and into scrub. He fiddled with the zipper at the front of his overalls. Behind him, the strike of a match lit another cigarette. A torch played on his back. He was coiled, tense. He did not know whether he would be able to run after four days in the aircraft and the months in the camp. If he reached Pol-i-Charki he was dead . . . He ran. The torch wavered off him as he wove. His legs were leaden. He was already panting when he reached the first of the trees. A single shot crashed in his ears. He heard shouts, and the officer's voice.

'No, don't - he isn't worth killing . . . '

He ran, panting, gasping for air, trying to kick his legs forward.

'. .. he's only a taxi-driver.'

He lost the lights and sensed the freedom. He ran till he fell, then pushed himself up and ran again.

Dawn came across the mountains, and the mountain peaks in the east made sharp funnels of sunshine. The light speared the coiled wire on the perimeter fence of Bagram - the sprawling military base, originally Soviet-built, an hour's drive west across the plain to Kabul

- and slashed at the night mist, glinted on the bright corrugated-iron roofs of the repaired buildings, caught the wan faces of troopers sleep-walking to the shower blocks, burned the smoke rising in still air from kitchen stacks, lit the dull camouflage of transport aircraft parked on the aprons, then threw shadows down from the angles of the wings and tail fins of two small white-painted planes that were being laboriously manhandled and wheeled out from under shelters of canvas.

They were like toys in a man's world. Teams of men, not in military fatigues, heaved their weight against the slight wings and directed the planes towards a slip-road leading on to the main runway. They bent their heads away as a bomber careered past them on full take-off power. These two planes were different from anything else flown off the Bagram runway. Length: twenty-six feet and eight inches. Wing span: forty-eight feet and six inches. Height above the oil-smeared Tarmac: six feet and one inch. Width of fuselage: (widest point) three feet and eight inches, (narrowest point) one foot and eleven inches. They seemed so fragile, so delicate - ballet dancers in comparison with the clog-booted brigade that screamed up the runway. I he planes were each powered by a single two-blade variable pitch push-propellor capable of flying the machine at top speed of 127 miles per hour, and at loiter speed of seventy-five miles per hour when fuel conservation was necessary. What a stranger to the base, ignorant of modern technology, would first have noticed about these two planes was that unbroken white paint covered the forward area where there should have been cockpit glass for a pilot's vision. What he would not have known was that the planes, the unmanned aerial vehicles, were regarded by those who knew as the most formidable weapon in the occupying power's arsenal. They seemed so innocent in their bright white paint, so harmless, but their name was Predator.

The dawn light rested on a young man and a young woman walking quickly away from a camouflaged trailer parked beside the sheeting from which the Predators, designation MQ-1, had been wheeled oul by ihe ground crew. They passed a satellite dish mounted on a second trailer hitched to a closed unmarked van.

Marty wore baggy brown shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with a Yellowstone Park brown bear and flip-flops. She wore jeans with frayed hems and patches at the knees, a loose plain green sweatshirt that was crumpled, as if she'd slept in it, and a pair of old trainers.

His eyes were masked by thick pebble lenses secured in a metal frame, his skin was pale, his hair a mass of untidy, mousy curls. His physique was puny. Lizzy-Jo was taller, but plumper from the weight never discarded after childbirth. Her dark glasses were hooked on the crown of a wild mess of auburn hair scooped at the back of her head into an extravagant yellow ribbon. The stranger, seeing them, would not have known that, between them, they controlled the Predator.

Temperamentally they could not have been more different: he was quiet, withdrawn, she was noisy, exuberant. But two common factors bound them into their relationship: both were employed by the Agency, took their orders from Langley and were not subject to the military regimen that controlled the base; both worshipped, in their differing ways, the power and meanness of the Predator, version MQ-1. Initially, when they had been posted to Afghanistan, the Bagram base, they had existed inside the inner compound used by the Agency and had lived alongside the Agency teams, and those from the Feds, who ran the detention block behind a double inner fence of razor wire with its own sleeping, eating and recreation quarters - an apartheid cocoon for the elite that separated them from the Air Force people and the marines' units. At first they had not been part of the general life of the huge base. But the war was winding down, the Al Qaeda targets were harder to come by, and old disciplines were discarded.

The best breakfasts at Bagram were served in the marines' compound. The marines had the best cooks, the best variety of food, the best coffee. And a good breakfast would last them through the day in the stifling heat of the Ground Control Station.

He wore his ID card hooked on his belt. Hers, more provocatively, was clipped to her T-shirt between her breasts. After a sentry had checked them through the gate into the marines' compound, they joined the queue in the canteen.

In front of them, a lieutenant was bitching at a loadmaster sergeant. They listened, rolling their eyes at each other, entertained.

The lieutenant, dead tired and slurring as if he'd barely slept, said,

'I just felt such a goddamn idiot. I never figured that the little bastard was setting me up to do a runner. What am I supposed to do? Mow the little fucker down? Didn't seem right. . . He was free - useless to us, no risk, but I'd his name on the docket and was tasked to hand him over at the Pol-i-Charki. I tell you, my only piece of luck, the people that were there at the gaol, they never even read the names, never did the counting, just kicked inside the four we brought. I just felt such a fool at falling for that old trick, wanting to pee. Just some simple gook, and free - after where he's been, in the cage at Guantanamo, why would he want to run?'

'Don't worry about it, sir - I mean, he wasn't bin Laden, was he?

You said just some taxi-driver.'

They dressed down, Marty and Lizzy-Jo, to emphasize that they were not military. Foul-ups in the military were always entertaining.

It had made a good start to the day.

A half-hour later, with the dawn on full thrust and killing the mist, in the Ground Control Station, Marty took the Predator -
First Lady -

up off the runway, working the small computer-game joystick on the bench above his knees.
Carnival Girl,
the second craft, was back-up and would stay grounded unless needed. Lizzy-Jo thwacked her fingers on the console keys and watched as the first pictures flickered, then settled on the screens above her. The mission that day was for reconnaissance over the Tora Bora mountains to the south-west. The bird climbed, optimum conditions with light north-east winds at fifteen thousand feet. She reached across, tapped his shoulder and pointed to the central screen, which gave the real-time image from the belly camera. She giggled. 'On his way to the garage to collect his yellow cab . .. eh?'

Below the camera, clear and in sharp focus on dun-coloured scree, the figure in the orange overalls was running, but slowly. Marty grimaced - not their business. The Predator hunted meatier prey.

The orange-suited figure tripped, fell, and stumbled on. Then the camera's field surged forward and he was lost.

'What do you think it's like in Guantanamo?'

'Don't know and don't care,' Marty murmured, side of mouth.

I'm going up to seventeen thousand feet altitude, which'll be our loiter height . . . OK, OK, I suppose Guantanamo would be kind of scary.'

Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay.

It was the end of the first week and he was learning. He had not failed the
hardest test. Hardest was not to respond when an order, in English, was
screamed in his ear. No movement, no obedience, until the order was
translated into Pashto, or a gesture was made to indicate what he should do.

The numbers coming into the camp were so great that it had taken them a week to process him. Hands gripped him, pulled him upright in front of the white screen. A fist took his chin, lifted it, and lie stared into the camera.