THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (5 page)

Caleb could not see beyond the light. He walked and kept his arms high. Behind him he heard the retreat of the men and the mules. The voice had authority - the command beat off the gully walls around him. In front of him he should hold out his right arm so that his wrist should be seen. The light licked at the plastic bracelet, and at the photograph, and caught the print of the taxi-driver's name. He was pulled forward and ordered to lie down. He lay on the stones in the track. There was a final command, in a language he did not know. At the edge of his vision, he sensed the light's beam move on, rove further away . . . Then the machine-gun started.

The tracers spewed over him, bursts of six, seven shots, then a moment's pause, then more firing. There were two answering rounds, the detonation of one grenade from a launcher, and silence.

The machine-gun replied. The men who had escorted him for the last nine days were trapped between the walls of the gully. Caleb wriggled his body so that he might make a pretence of burrowing down into the stones and dirt of the path. Boots came past him, a brisk march of power, and he heard the final execution shots that would have finished the men and put the mules beyond further pain.

The boots came back behind him. A fist clamped into the back of the robe and he was hauled to his feet. His right arm was snatched and he felt fingers on the plastic bracelet.

'You are welcome.' There was no care in the voice.

Not as a reproach but as a matter of fact, Caleb said, 'They treated me with respect, with courtesy, they shared their food with me. They brought me.'

Now he saw the man who welcomed him, an officer in neat uniform with a polished belt. Attached to the belt was a holster. He smelt the cordite. The officer was dapper in build and on his upper lip was a trimmed moustache. By the markings on his shoulder flaps, Caleb thought him at least a major, perhaps a colonel. The officer led him past the troops to two lorries and a Mercedes car with smoked windows. A driver snapped out of the Mercedes and ran round the back to open the rear door. The officer flicked his finger for Caleb to follow him.

The Mercedes pulled away.

Bumping on a dry track, in low gear, they left the gully and headed into flat lands beyond. A packet of cigarettes was offered, but Caleb declined. The officer lit a cigarette, then kept the lighter's flame burning. His delicate fingers lifted Caleb's wrist and he examined the plastic bracelet. 'Who is Fawzi al-Ateh?'

'He was a taxi-driver. He is dead.'

'You took his name?'

'I did.'

'You were brought, with his name, to the American camp at Guantanamo.'

'Yes.'

'The interrogators at Guantanamo did not break your story, that you were a taxi-driver?'

'They did not.'

'That is remarkable.' His laughter fluttered across Caleb's face. 'So, I consider two possibilities. You defeated the best of the interrogators at Guantanamo. You were released to spy. I hang spies, I am a good friend of those who defeat Americans . . . What I immediately like about you, you do not ask questions without invitation. I invite you.'

'Why were they killed?'

The voice hardened. 'They were not killed because they were traffickers in narcotics, criminals, they died because they were witnesses. It is a mark of the importance with which you are regarded that they were condemned - I do not know who you are, why you are so valued. They saw your face.'

'So did the villagers where I stayed for a week.'

The cigarette was ground out. The officer put back his head and his breath relaxed. Caleb thought that within minutes he would be asleep . .. He thought of the village and the trust of its men.

Anonymously, the name of the village would be passed by this officer to American agents, and bombers would circle over it and death would rain down from the high skies - because there they had seen his face. He thought of the blind old man and he prayed to his God that the old man, who had been unable to see his face, would live.

'Where are we going?'

The officer murmured, 'You are going where you will be of use, if you are not a spy.'

'I am a fighter.'

The Mercedes took him far into Iran, and the night was nearly spent when they reached a high-walled villa where heavy gates of steel sheet opened to take him inside.

He was a bloodstained step closer to his family.

Night lay on the far-away desert. The moon was up, pitted with stars' patterns, and the quiet was total.

Two camels, one ridden by a Bedouin, moved on the desert sand, going fast and away from the escarpment and the cave's mouth. A message had been brought and a reply sent.

Far at the back of the cave, by candlelight because the generator was switched off at night to conserve fuel, a man worked at the interior of a new Samsonite suitcase - described on its sales tag as an Executive Traveller' - that had been purchased seven weeks before at the open market of the Bir Obeid district of San'a, capital city of Yemen; at the frontier roadblocks, the soldiers had laughed raucously when they had found a shiny new suitcase being taken home by a vagrant tribesman from the desert and had let him pass and head away into the Rub' al Khali. The man working on the suitcase, positioning the circuitboard behind the case's lining, ignored the quiet conversations around him. He had the knowledge gained from a university degree in electronic engineering in Prague.

His eyes ached in the dim interior. He knew nothing of where the suitcase would be taken when his work was finished, but he had been told by the Emir General, who coughed near to him because his chest was inflamed, that the man who would carry the suitcase had begun his journey to reach them. He had also been told that the hazards of that journey, which still lay in front of that man, were huge.

But time was short - all in the cave knew it. They were hunted, they were in retreat. Time ran like sand through their fingers.

'Hello - I'm told you're Dr Bartholomew. Is that right?'

He was standing at the edge of the room, more of a voyeur at the party than a participator. He had not noticed her approach. He seldom joined the spirit of a party, preferring to remain at the edge, listening to conversations but not contributing to them. His glass was close to his hand but set down on a set of bookshelves. He had slopped the Saudi champagne when his arm had been jogged, leaving a stained ring on the wood. He cared as little about the ring as he cared for Saudi champagne. It was always served early at Riyadh's expatriate parties - a mix of apple juice, American dry ginger and fresh mint leaves; cucumber slices floated with the ice cubes. He could have gone to a party such as this one every night of the week if he had chosen to, could have mingled with the familiar crowd of aerospace workers, oil men, medical people and their wives, and the nurses who were there for decoration. The talk around him was the usual numbingly tedious crap - the rental price of compound villas, the quality of the local workforce, the heat, the cost of imported food.

He hadn't noticed her coming.

'Dr Samuel Bartholomew, or Bart to the many who know me and the very few who love me.'

He realized she had trapped him. Against the wall he had been a free agent at the party, now he was confronted. A hi-fi system played loud music, as if the combination of its beat and the alcohol-free champagne would stimulate the guests into believing they were enjoying themselves . . . She was different from the nurses and wives.

She blocked any escape and her posture, with her feet a little apart, almost intimidated him. And it was an interruption. As he always did at the parties, he had been listening hard for little morsels of information. He sucked in trifles of indiscretion, was a carrier of tales and confidences, and his hidden existence was the sole pleasure he took from life: it gave him power. He was forty-seven years old. He had been christened Samuel Algernon Laker Bartholomew - his father had taken two weeks' holiday a year, one for the Guildford cricket festival, one for the annual Oval Test match, and his third given name came from the cricketer who had done something to the Australians in the year of his birth. As a schoolboy, with pudgy jowls and a slack stomach, he had detested organized sports. His maxim, then and now, was not to run if he could walk, not to walk if he could ride. Others at the party would jog on the pavements round the compound walls in the early morning before the heat became intolerable or would work out in an air-conditioned gymnasium. His late father had believed that cricket gave a man a code of decent disciplines for life - he would have turned in his grave if he had known his son traduced the trust given him.

'I'm Bethany Jenkins.'

'Pleased to meet you, Miss Jenkins.'

Bart always used old-world manners . . . It was the start of his third year as a general practitioner in the Kingdom. He acted as a link man between patients with real or imagined symptoms and the expensive foreign consultants at the King Fahd Medical City, or the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, or the King Khalid Eye Hospital. He passed them on and received a cut of the fees, smoothed the way and was rewarded. He was losing the drift of a conversation to his right: two men from a British company's aerospace software division in earnest talk about the failure of in-flight radar in the Tornado strike aircraft sold to the Air Force. He tried to refocus on the conversation, but her hand was held out.

He shook it limply, but she held his hand too tightly for him to ignore her.

'I've booked an appointment with your secretary for a couple of day's time. I'm up from the south, going on to Bahrain tomorrow, a bit of shopping, then I'm coming to see you before I go back down.'

'I'll look forward to it, Miss Jenkins.'

There didn't look to be much wrong with her. She was different from the other women in the room: she was tanned hard, her legs and ankles, arms and wrists, her face below the cropped blonde hair weatherbeaten from winds and sun. Late twenties, he thought, but an obvious outdoors life had aged her skin. The other women in the room fled from exposure to the sun, anointed themselves with protective creams when they had to go out, wore headscarves and carried parasols. And she was different also in her clothing - the other women wore cocktail dresses, but she was in a blouse that was clean but not ironed and a shapeless denim skirt that hung on her hips. She was stocky but he thought that there was no flab under the blouse and skirt, only muscle. Other women wore gold chains, pendants and bracelets bought in the
souk,
but she had no jewellery.

'Mind if I say something, Dr Bartholomew?'

'Bart, please - feel free.' He'd lost the conversation on in-flight radar failure. He smiled sweetly. 'Please, say what you want to, Miss Jenkins.'

'OK, Bart.' She looked directly at him, one of those wretched people who had no disguise. He detested honesty. She reached out and picked up his glass, took a handkerchief from her skirt pocket and wiped the base, then rubbed hard at the ring on the bookshelf.

His grin was as limp as his handshake. He disliked women who fixed him in the headlights of their eyes. He was the rabbit. He shuffled. The Tornado people had split and moved on. He was fearful of women, particularly those who seemed to strip him down, leave him naked. It was a long time, so long, since he had been close to a woman - then there had been tears, his, and arguments, hers, and the overwhelming sense of private failure. He did not know where Ann was now, where she lived with the children, and the shield he used to safeguard himself from that failure was that he did not care.

'You don't look like a man who enjoys being a guest of the Kingdom.'

It was an extraordinary remark. She knew nothing - nothing of his past and nothing of his present . . . He frowned, then downed the contents of his glass and slapped it back on to the bookshelf. 'It is, Miss Jenkins—'

'I'm called Beth.'

'It is, Miss Jenkins, almost a privilege to be a humble part of this fulcrum of the sophistication and technological excellence of Saudi Arabia. Actually, I hate the bloody place, and all who sail in her -

yourself, of course, excepted.'

Her eyebrows arched. She laughed richly, as if at last he interested her. She followed with a flood of questions. When had he come here?

Why had he come? What were his hobbies? Where did he live? How long was he staying? His answers were staccato. He deflected her with responses that were rude in their brevity, but she seemed not to recognize it. He was frightened of close questioning. In the expatriate community he avoided the endless discussions about family, work conditions, terms of service, anything that might expose the lie with which he lived.

'You don't want to mind me, Bart. Where I live, down south, I don't get too many chances to talk to people. It's like one of those monasteries with a vow of silence.' She touched his hand, was smiling . . . Then rescue came, of sorts . ..

He hadn't seen Wroughton arrive, hadn't seen him among the guests. Wroughton's fingers pulled at his sleeve, his head gesturing towards the door. No apology at the interruption, but Edward -

Eddie to his female friends - Wroughton never apologized, wouldn't have bloody known how to. Bart blundered away from the young woman, followed Wroughton into the hall and down towards the kitchen.

Wroughton leaned against the wall. Then his finger poked in a tattoo on Bart's chest. 'You cut our last meeting, Bart.'

'I was busy.'

'You don't cut meetings with me.'

'Just pressure of work.'

'I waited two hours, wasted two hours.'

'And I hadn't anything to give you.'

'Then just pedal a bit bloody harder.'

'Sorry about that, Eddie.'

'Mr Wroughton
to you. Got me?'

'It won't happen again, Mr Wroughton,' Bart whined.

'Listen to me - I don't want to be fucked about here. It's not pleasant, believe me, but I have you by your shrivelled little balls, and I will squeeze and I will twist and —'

'What I just heard, there's problems on the in-flight radar of the Tornado aircraft they've got.'

'Which squadron?'