THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (33 page)

'If you have no memory you are worthless.'

His memory had given him the terrace of red-brick homes, and the front door, with black paint, the number askew because a screw had fallen from the base of the second plastic digit. He had walked through a narrow hall where the wallpaper peeled, where the pattern of the stair carpet was worn away with age. He had gone through a kitchen that stank of old frying fat, and through a yard littered with rubbish. At the back of the yard against the low wall the dumped washing-machine lay on its side. They were back, the images that would have betrayed him to the interrogators. He felt weakened.

'You have to have the past, and live with it. You are not an Arab.

We have an army of Arabs . ..'

Caleb said, 'Where I come from, no one - not anyone I knew -

would have lasted a day in this place. No one would have, not more than a day. I can survive because I have forgotten. The past is nothing to me.'

Would they tell him what was wanted of him? He could not ask.

Fahd dropped back and Hosni kicked his camel's sides and went forward. He realized that Hosni had never looked into his face and he wondered how far the blindness affected the elderly Egyptian . . .

Then the sand swallowed his thoughts and the pains from the blister sores consumed him.

The caravan moved on.

'This is Oscar Golf . . . Your last turn to starboard, because of wind direction change to north-north-west, meant we missed out. We didn't get picture on the base of that dune. We lost vision of an area we estimate to be zero point nine miles by zero point three miles.

Could you go back, please? Could you repeat over that ground, please? Oscar Golf, out.'

It was the third time in the five hours
First Lady
had been up that the voice, always so reasonable, had come seeping into their headphones.

Lizzy-Jo responded, wouldn't have trusted Marty to. 'Roger that, we will make that manoeuvre.'

'This is Oscar Golf. Much appreciated. Looks like flying conditions are not easy. Oscar Golf, out.'

Marty was on the joystick and Lizzy-Jo called the co-ordinates to him of a new backtracking course that would bring
First Lady
on a second run over a stretch of sand that was zero point nine miles in length by zero point three miles in width. She sensed that Marty burned. Everything they did, and said, was now watched and listened to. The feeling, hers and Marty's, was that they were no longer trusted, and each time the voice oozed politeness, the feeling grew. It was not unusual for pictures in real time to be going live to Langley, she'd had that in Bosnia and Afghanistan, but the pitch of the disembodied voice seemed to doubt their skill. Marty took it harder than her. After the second call, he had freed his right hand from the joystick and scribbled on his notepad: 'This feels like three in a bed' She'd grimaced, no humour, had leaned across and written:

'Worse - like his mother's in my kitchen.' Everything overheard, every move monitored, they were spied on . . . but Lizzy-Jo would have had to admit that the starboard turn had clipped an area of desert. The area was a quarter of a square mile of flat, gold- and red-coloured sand, and they had missed it because of the upper-air turbulence.

They went back over. The camera surveyed empty sand. Lizzy-Jo's eyes ached as she peered at the screen. The voice of Oscar Golf, when it came into the headphones and intruded into their world, could always be justified. To shut the goddamn voice up she strove for perfection. The sandscape was infinite, limitless, and nothing moved down there. There was a needle pain in her skull from concentration on the real-time images. Out in that wilderness a camel train was loaded with six crates, escorted by perhaps six men. She saw just the sand and the sloping dunes, the high points and the flat expanses.

She looked for the camels, the men, for tracks . . . There was nothing.

Lizzy-Jo punched up the forecast. She swore.

Marty's head rocked in exhaustion. His eyes blinked shut, then opened. She mashed her fist into the small of his back. She said,

'Doesn't let up, does it? The forecast is for stronger winds, westerly, tomorrow. If the forecast's right, there's no way we're flying tomorrow . . .'

Lizzy-Jo was only a handful of years older than Marty but she felt, more often since they had come to Shaybah, as if she was his aunt and he was her kid nephew. She was fonder of him, a little more each day, since they had shared the Ground Control, just them together.

She hoped the wind speed, up there four miles above the desert, would strengthen, and then the kid could sleep. She cared for him, wanted him to sleep and shed the exhaustion.

He smiled ruefully, and her hand, which had belted him, rested on the skin of his forearm and . . .

The voice said, 'This is Oscar Golf. We fly tomorrow, we fly every day. If you didn't know it, this is priority We ignore the manual instructions on what is possible. Until that target is found, we fly to the limit. Oscar Golf, out.'

'Are you sure? Are you telling me, man, you are sure?'

'Sure, and no argument. It's tied down.'

His supervisor, Edgar, had been off Guantanamo for two days, back at the Pentagon for sessions on the preparations for retirement.

The Pentagon had a good programme for readying long-service men in the Defense Intelligence Agency for the cold-shower shock of waking up on a Monday morning and having no work to go to. Jed watched his superior's eyes twitch and his fingers fidget. He might as well have rolled a hand grenade, pin out, across his supervisor's desk.

Maybe Jed should have felt a tinge of sympathy for the man. The physical reactions were clear enough signs that his supervisor had taken on board the seriousness of Jed's message. Those two days, while the supervisor had been lectured on pension income, the tax implications of part-time employment in the civilian sector, the psychology of switching allegiance from government service to a golf course, had been well spent. The audiotapes of the voices of the supposed taxi-driver and the British 'unlawful combatant' had been edited together and the nasal similarity could not be argued with.

'You are saying . . .' The supervisor's voice eddied away, as if he could not stomach the enormity of a truth now striking him.

Jed said, 'I am saying we freed the wrong man. I am saying that Fawzi al-Ateh, taxi-driver, was a bogus identity. We freed a man who was smart enough, sufficiently intelligent, to deceive us.'

'He was flown back to Afghanistan, so what's the problem? Round him up, bring him back. It's a cakewalk.'

Jed pushed across the desk the signal from Bagram, from Karen Lebed. The eyes scanned it, and the fingers could not hold the paper steady. There was a long sigh, like it was personal pain.

'God Almighty - did we deserve this?'

'Can't say, but it's what we've got. The supposition is that we released a British-origin prisoner who, most likely, never drove an Afghan taxi in his life . . . I suggest you look on the bright side.'

The supervisor was dulled. 'I'd like to but where do I look?'

All the times when the Agency and the Bureau guys had let him know they were the chosen people flashed in Jed's mind. Every little insultt, each put-down, every sneer, each patronizing quip floated by him. He might have felt regret at his supervisor's discomfort, but not at any shit that landed on the Agency and the Bureau. Jed grinned. 'I think other guys took that decision. I'd say we're clean.'

The supervisor's gloomy response: 'I sat in.'

'Only to rubber stamp. I don't want to be offensive, but you wouldn't have been in the loop.'

The supervisor brightened. 'It was just a list of names put down in front of me. They'd already done the list.. . Jed, are you aware of the ultimate potential end-game of this?'

'I know it'll be a bad day for the Bureau and the Agency.'

The supervisor's fist tightened on the pencil he held. 'There are bigger things in the world, Jed, than turf wars. Look at it . . . The implications of the release of a man who has gone to that deal of trouble to disguise his identity mean, to me, that he is a dedicated and committed activist. We are not looking at some guy who is just anxious to get himself home. We are talking dedication, commitment. That is a prime man, a man capable of inflicting maximum danger. There could be
consequences,
Jed, real bad consequences.'

'But they're not in our ballpark.'

'Christ, there is a bigger picture.' The supervisor's shoulders dropped as if a burden weighed down on him. 'And that picture is a verified homeland threat. A British-born and -reared fighter, with a shitty little heart filled with hate, can go to places an Arab cannot

. .. No name.'

'Then we go find a name.'

The supervisor's pencil was stabbed close to Jed's face. 'I wouldn't want this plastered all over the walls.'

Jed threw his last card, the ace card: 'Shouldn't I get on a plane?'

'Give me time.'

'Thought we don't have much time.'

'Leave me to do this, Jed, and my way. I am not having a situation where my last days here are in a conflict zone with the Bureau and the Agency, I am not.'

Jed scraped his chair back. Between grated teeth, he bit back,

'Don't bury this. If you are going to bury—''

'I am not. I need twenty-four hours of time.'

'After twenty-four hours, I should be on a plane. Don't think this can be buried and don't think I can be bounced off it. It's mine.'

He left the file and the audiotapes on his supervisor's desk. He closed the door and left his man to work a strategy. He walked back to his office and heard the noise of the camp around him; the sun hit on him and he smelt the sea. He did not know where the matched voices would take him, if he was allowed to get on a plane. He felt proud, as if at last in his professional life he had achieved something of value. He strode past the open doors of the Agency team, and past the doors of the Bureau men.

He went into the interrogation block where a prisoner, an escort and an interpreter waited for him, and he thought of the chaos he had let loose. He sat in front of the prisoner, a Yemeni, but another face was there. The Yemeni's features were gone, had merged into those of a taller man with a strong nose and a powerful jaw that the cringing protestations of innocence could not hide, and he thought of the skill of the man who had deceived them all.

The woman was forgotten, as Tommy was. Danger was forgotten.

Only survival counted. His mind was deadened and his memory gone.

The sun was in Caleb's eyes. The dried air scraped his throat and the growing wind lifted sand from the hoofs of Hosni's camel, which pricked his face. His eyes were squeezed shut against the grains. If he opened his eyes, blinked, he saw Hosni's back low across his saddle. He rocked on the hump of the Beautiful One, and he thought lhat only her courage carried her forward. She moved with leaden slow steps over the soft sand. More often than on any other day, he thought he would fall, and he yearned for the evening and the smaller portion of water that his tongue would move round his mouth, and the cold of the night, the uncooked dough, the handful of dates, and then sleep. He had heard Fahd fall behind him and the shouts of the boy, but he had not stopped, had let the boy get Fahd hack on to his camel. At the last stop, when the sun had been highest, fiercest, when they had remounted the kneeling camels, Rashid had put a rope round Hosni's waist and had knotted it to the saddle.

Hiss survival depended on himself.

The anger billowed in him.

Caleb recognized it, understood it.

The anger came in sharp surges . . . It was the same anger as in the camps. In X-Ray and Delta, the target of the anger had been the guards. The guards imprisoned him . .. Fahd and Hosni were his gaolers. They had the keys and the batons, and they were around him. His mind wandered loose. He was their prisoner. He had the hate for them, as for the guards. His throat, without water, was pricking with the pain, his eyes hurt, the blister sores ate at him. He was the one, supposedly, with the strength, and he was rocking, sliding.

Caleb toppled, lost his hold.

He went down the Beautiful One's flank, was dumped in the sand.

He fell face first.

He heard the shrill laughter behind him.

The Beautiful One had stopped and towered over him and the great brown eyes gazed down on him. It was Fahd's laughter.

Fahd reached down and Caleb took his hand. Fahd heaved him up and Caleb caught the reins that hung from the Beautiful One's neck.

He climbed, struggled, pulled himself back into the saddle.

'Are you going to fail us? We do not expect the mule to fail us.'

Caleb spat the sand. 'Is that what I am, a mule?'

'A mule is noble, a beast of burden.'

He ran his tongue round his mouth, let it gather the sand, then scraped it with his finger off his tongue. 'Is that what I am to you, a mule?' he repeated.

'What else?' All the laughter had gone from Fahd's face. It was grim, closed. 'A mule is important to us because it carries what we put on its back. It goes where we want it to go, carries what we want it to carry. It is necessary for us to use the mule, but if we thought it would fail us we would shoot it. We would not waste food on it and we would find another mule. You are a mule - a pack animal. You will carry what we put on your back.'

Caleb rode on towards his family.

Instinctively, he looked up around him, ignored the sand blown into his face. He scanned the dunes and the tips of the sand walls, and he looked for danger, and saw nothing. Once, briefly, he looked into the blue sky but then the low sun burned his eyes.

He thought of rain, cooling, healing and sweet, spattering on to the panes of windows.

That last night he had slept, had not dreamed, woken as exhausted as when he had lain down on the sand. In the morning they had set out again. Twice, a bull camel loaded with two of the boxes had slopped, had refused to go forward, and each time Rashid had come back from the front of them, had taken the bull's head in his hands, had put his own face close to it, stroked and soothed its bellowing, and whispered to it. Twice, the bull camel had responded to the kindness of the guide, had shown its loyalty to him, had started again to walk into the strength of the wind.