THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (55 page)

Beth saw his head lift from the sight. Her boots ground and kicked in the sand as she slithered nearer to Bart.

For the slightest moment, there was irresolution on his face.

.

The rifle dropped.

Beth reached Bart. She stood in front of him, panted, felt the heave of his chest against her back. She was a shield for him.

'You don't have to,' Bart's voice quavered in her ear.

'I do.'

Images cascaded in Beth's mind. His control over the men who would have killed her, his sweat dripping as he dug out the sand-locked wheels, his smile of gratitude as she passed him water, his frown of concern and patience as he cleaned the engine, his peace as he slept in the sand beside her, the stars and moon above h i m . . . The barrel was up, aimed. She looked into his face and searched for passion, loathing, madness, and saw only a strange calm. She thought his eyes had the emptiness of death, as if the light had gone from them.

'I've seen your face. I remember it. Be a hero, be a killer. Isn't that what you want? . . . Do you know what you said before the drip worked? I'll tell you: "They'll hear my name, they'll know it . . .

Everyone will hear my name . . . When you hear my name, all of you bastards, it'll be because I've done what my family wants of me."

Your family, big deal, have made an animal of you. Common Brit scum is what you are, always will be - and vain as a fucking peacock

. .. I've seen your face and I will not forget it.'

She stared back at the barrel of the rifle and she knew. Through the sights he must look into her eyes. She held her gaze steady, never lost his eyes. The finger was on the trigger.

She hadn't seen him come. One moment she faced the barrel, the next - the boy was in front of her. The boy protected her.

She felt the trembling of his slight sinewy body against her stomach, and against her back was Bart. Could he shoot? To save him, the boy had been near to death in the desert. To save him, the boy had trekked to her. Over the boy's head, she saw now the pain in his face, and it was not the pain from the wound. The sun caught the bracelet on his wrist, and she thought that when it had been put on him he had not weakened. Now he did. More movement from the corner of her eye. The boy's father walked past the long-flung shadow, and past him, never looked at him, and past the raised barrel. The boy's father spat into the sand, then turned and stood in front of his son. Beth knew he would not shoot. They made their untidy line, body to body, and faced him.

She did not taunt him again, did not need to.

At that moment, as Beth saw it, there was a vulnerability about him, and loneliness, and—

In snapped movements, those of a trained man, the rifle barrel was raised towards the brightened skies, there was the clatter of the mechanism as it was wrenched back and the bullet ejected. The bullet, its case gleaming, arched from the rifle and fell, and his finger was off the trigger. There was the click of the safety lever. The rifle was held out, and the guide went a dozen paces and took it. She wondered if he was broken - if she had isolated him, had killed him.

He walked away from them, using the weapon to lean on, struggling to walk.

Bart said softly, behind her, 'How's he going to get his name up in lights, murder half a city, if he can't blow us away?'

The guide was at the trumpeting camels, knelt to loosen their hobble ropes, and the boy trudged to the high ground to resume his watch. Beth clung to Bart, held the gross, sweaty man in her arms, felt him quiver against her.

'I'm not taking blame. Not any way I'm not. I done everything for him, he never wanted. One quick shag - excuse me - and it's with you the rest of your life. Might as well have hung a rock round my neck. Want to hear about it?'

Jed Dietrich thought himself privileged to be at a master-class as taught by Michael Lovejoy. He knew the woman to be aged forty-three, but appearance gave her fifteen years more, minimum.

'Well, you're going to . . . Me and Lucy Winthrop and Di Mackie, we're all eighteen, all in work at a packager, and it's Friday night.

Twenty-five years ago, and it's like yesterday - would be because it screwed my life. We were in the Crown and Anchor, that's Wolverhampton, but it's a car park now. Hot night, summer night, too much booze. Three guys . . . They were Italians, all the soft talk.

Italians in Wolverhampton to put in a new printing press or something. Closing time, chucking out. Christ, they'd hands like bloody octopuses, the lot of them. We're down an alley and it's a knee-trembler job. I'm in the middle and we're all going at it - and we're pissed. Mine's called himself Pier-Luigi, and he's from Sicily. What else do I know about him? Not much. Oh, yes - he was big and it

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hurt. They did their zips and we pulled our knickers up. We went home, they went wherever.. . . Di's OK and Lucy's OK, but I'm in the club. Trouble is, I don't know it till it's too late to dump it. My dad tried to trace him but it was a brick wall. We called him Caleb - don't ask me why, it was Dad's choice. Five years later, Dad and Mum moved down south, bought a bungalow. Truth was, they wanted to be shot of us. So I was left behind with the little bastard. They hated him, said he'd ruined their lives. They're dead now, both of them. We didn't go to the funerals. They wouldn't have wanted us there, neither of them. As a baby and a child he was dark, he was different.'

They'd been at the door early. In her housecoat, she'd answered Lovejoy's knock. He had been so charming, so gentle. Inside the hall he'd remarked on the wallpaper - 'What a pretty pattern, Miss Hunt, what a nice choice' - and he'd edged into the kitchen, and not seemed to notice the filled sink and last night's plate, and he'd fixed on a dying plant in a pot - 'Always did like that one, Miss Hunt, in fact I'd say it's my favourite' - and he'd put the kettle on.

'I was lucky to get this place. Dad had a friend in the town hall, housing. It was his price to me for moving south. Dad got my file moved up, then he could go and wash his hands of me. We're here, like an island, all Asians around us. I'm not complaining - some people would, not me - they're good people and good neighbours, so all his friends were Asians, had to be. He got to blaming me that I wasn't Asian, and hadn't a family like his friends had - but I'm not taking any blame. Nothing's my fault.'

Said so quietly and with a smile that won: 'Miss Hunt, you seem like a woman who looks after herself. I'm hesitating - will you have sugar if I do?' Lovejoy had poured the tea into cups he'd taken from the cupboard, and she'd almost purred. Dietrich reflected that the woman had no idea of the devastation about to hit her shabby, damp little home, and Lovejoy wasn't about to tell her; effortlessly it was established that the room upstairs was untouched, uncleared, from the day the 'little bastard' had left - the room would be the centre of the storm, but only when Lovejoy was finished.

'I tell you who I blame most . . . that Perkins at the school. Made too much of a fuss of Caleb, made him do things that weren't natural to him. Speaking in front of the class, being special, marking him out.

Caleb got so that nothing satisfied him. I was dirt. No respect for me,

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his mother. No respect for the people in the job he had. Always dreaming of something he couldn't have. Why couldn't he have a family like Farooq, like Amin? Why couldn't he belong? He only wanted the Asians - didn't even have a nice white girlfriend. Could have had Tracey Moore or Debbi Binns. Truth to be told, girls scared him and he ran a bloody mile from them. Then the offer came. Nag, nag, nag, money, money, money. He never came back, nor did my money.'

Looking out through the kitchen window - and Dietrich didn't think it had been cleaned that year - he saw a rubbish-filled yard, a washing-machine tipped on its side against a low wall, and above it, the walkway that he knew from the map was beside the canal. A group of loafing kids wandered along it, and he saw an old man with a bent back, who had a terrier straining on a leash, move aside to give them passage. He seemed to understand it was a place to escape from. Lovejoy had driven him through the estate on their way to the early-morning knock. Little streets, little terraced homes, little food shops, and everywhere the little bright-painted boxes of security systems. The only buildings of stature on the estate were the new mosque and the new Muslim community centre. It was a ghetto, not a place where Caleb Hunt could have belonged, and Jed understood why it had failed to provide the man with what he needed. All so different from the scrubbed-down interrogation rooms of Camp Delta where he met the enemy - but he learned more here than there.

'They came round to see me, Farooq did and Amin, and they weren't straight up with me but they stuck to it - Caleb had gone travelling. I'd hear from him, they said, but he'd gone travelling.

He's a grown-up, and I got on with my life. Two postcards came, one after two months and one after five. The Opera House in Sydney, and that big rock in the middle. It's more than three and a half years since the last one came. Nothing at my birthday, nothing at Christmas. I suppose he's forgotten me.'

Tears ran down her lined, prematurely aged cheeks. She looked up, past Dietrich, towards Lovejoy.

'Who did you say you were from?'

'I didn't.' Lovejoy stood. 'Thank you for the tea, Miss Hunt.'

They went out of the front door, on to the pavement.

Two big vans, smoked-glass windows, were parked, one at each end of the short street. They walked past the van at the top, and Lovejoy rapped on its window with the palm of his hand. They went on, round the corner, to where the Volvo was parked. Lovejoy wasn't a man to linger for the uglier side of his work. They would be well gone, speeding on the road south, when the detectives spilled from the vans, elbowed inside, tore apart the terraced house for evidence of the life, times and motivations of Caleb Hunt. Not that Dietrich thought there was anything left to know.

They reached the car.

Lovejoy asked brusquely, 'You happy, ready to call it a day?'

Dietrich said, 'Ready to wrap, yes. Happy, no.'

'The postcards?'

'The postcards say that right from the start they marked him down as high potential for infiltration, created a cover. They reckoned they'd their hands on high-grade material. We did well but I don't feel like cheering or breaking out a bottle - I suppose it's because I think I know him.'

'I'll get you on the afternoon flight - my granddaughter's birthday today, and I'll catch the end of the party, which'll please Mercy. I find there's not often cause, in our work, for cheering .. . Never seems quite appropriate.'

They drove away, out of the estate, over the canal and left behind the place that had fashioned the past, present and future of Caleb Hunt.

The file was under his arm. On it was written the name.

'I want Mr Gonsalves on the phone, and I want him now. Please.'

The marine guard and the receptionist stared at the scars on Eddie Wroughton's face.

'You should tell him I am in possession of information he'd give his right ball for, and if you obstruct me I guarantee to flay the skin off your backs. You want to sit comfortably again, then do it.'

A call was made. The receptionist murmured into the phone and fixed Wroughton with a glance of sincere hostility. Somebody would be with him soon. Would he like to sit down? He paced and held tight to the file.

The young man came down the stairs, went through the security barrier, and tracked towards him. 'I'm sorry, Mr Wroughton, but Mr Gonsalves is in conference, and I am deputed to take whatever message you have for him.'

Wroughton saw his curled lip, the sneer.

'Get me up to Gonsalves, if he wants to see this.' Theatrically, Wroughton held the file in front of the young man's spectacles.

'Wait here.'

He waved the file again, taunting with it, as the desk telephone was lifted.

'Excuse me, guys, bottom right of screen, wasn't that? We lost it.'

The serene voice of Oscar Golf broke into their headsets, the intervention from Langley.

'No, it's not there now. We've gone past. . . Did you see anything?

Bottom right of screen for four or five seconds.'

It was a little short of two hours since they had last heard from Oscar Golf. Marty had stiffened. It was like they were watched, tested, spied on. He saw Lizzy-Jo's mouth move as she swore under her breath.

'Our calculations give you fourteen minutes more time over your current box. Let's use the time, guys, by going back. How does that sound?'

He looked at Lizzy-Jo. She'd her tongue stuck out, like she was a kid in contempt of an adult. Then her forefinger waved across her lips - not a time to fight.

'I'll bring her back. We'll work back.'

Oscar Golf, lounging in a swivel chair in the darkened room at Langley, was not a target to pick for a scrap. Maybe Oscar Golf had six pairs of eyes alongside to help him. Marty grimaced at Lizzy-Jo and she shrugged. He'd seen nothing, bottom right of the screen, neither had she, and . . . He heard a thundering roar, piercing into his headset, billowing through the open door. Where he sat, he couldn't see the window of Ground Control, and the door was at the wrong angle. She leaned close, slipped his headset up off his ear and whispered that it was the transporter landing, their freedom bird.

'Oscar Golf, I am going into a figure eight, and let's hope we find what you think you saw.'

'Appreciate that. Oscar Golf, out.'

There was just sand on the screen - from top left to bottom right.

Red sand and yellow sand, ochre sand and gold sand, and there were sand hills, sand mountains and flat sand. The track was out of sight, too far to the east of the last map boxes they flew. Tiredness ached in Marty. The previous day, at the start of the last flight and before the weariness had settled on him, he would have resented any request to go back and look again. With the joystick, he banked
Carnival Girl
and swung her to starboard before the correction to port. Dust came in a storm through the Ground Control open door and he did not need Lizzy-Jo to tell him that the transporter had taxied off the runway and come on to the compacted dirt beside the compound gate.