THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (6 page)

'Don't know.'

'Jesus, you're a useless piece of shit. Have you been listening?

You're going to have to do better or I'll be squeezing and twisting.'

Wroughton was gone.

Bart stood in the corridor and gasped. Little spurts of breath bubbled on his lips. He mopped the sweat from his forehead. When he had composed himself, when his breathing was regular, he went back down the corridor. The noise from the room bayed at him. His host barked in his ear, 'Not got a glass, Bart? More champagne? Or are you going to hang around for a bit and have something better?'

A nod and a wink . . . Bart smiled weakly. He was looking for the hostess. A guest, a woman in a bright floral dress, tried to intercept him and he started to hear her query on the best preventive tablets for diarrhoea, but he slipped her his card, pointed to his surgery number and moved on. He saw Bethany, Miss Jenkins, her hand easily on her hip, talking to oil people.

The hostess said, 'Not going yet, Bart, surely not? It's just warming up.' He said he had a call-out, embellished the excuse with a casual mention of septicaemia, and thanked her for a wonderful party, quite lovely.

Bart drove the mile back to his own compound, and his own three-bedroomed villa, which cost him the
riyal
equivalent of twenty-two thousand pounds in annual rental and which he could comfortably afford. In the daytime he used a chauffeured car but at night, a short journey through light traffic, he drove himself. The security men at the gate recognized his Mitsubishi four-wheel drive, waved to him and let him through. Two more parties were blaring out over the compound lawns. He let himself inside the darkened villa. Nothing of his life adorned his home, no pictures, no photographs, no ornaments, no mementoes from his past. Even the cat, the sole centre of affection in Bart's life, mutual love, couldn't help him escape from the place he hated.

Wroughton left. He knew he had the whispered reputation of a sexual goat, but he would not have made a pass at the nurse with the ghastly accent, Falkirk or East Kilbride. His conquests were with wives mature enough to maintain discretion. The reputation was never proven. He headed for his bachelor apartment in the diplomatic quarter. As the station chief attached to the embassy, Eddie Wroughton was allocated an armour-plated Land Rover Discovery with bullet-proof windows, but the plates inside the bodywork and the reinforced glass beside him, through which he looked on to the deserted road, would only have been noticed by an expert.

He despised men like Samuel Bartholomew; one of the hardships of his life as a senior officer of the Secret Intelligence Service was the requirement to deal with first-degree scum. But against the hardships there were purple moments when he gloried in his work. Saudi Arabia was a class posting, interesting intellectually, challenging and, above all, a stepping-stone to greater things.

He always left an expatriate party before the alcohol was served.

He left before the 'champagne' was exhausted, before the home brew was offered, or the 'brown tea' was poured - usually ostentatiously

- from a china teapot, most often Jack Daniel's but sometimes Johnnie Walker and always taken neat. It would have been bad for his career, probably terminal, if a party he was attending where alcohol was available was raided by the
mutawwa,
the zealots of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

He always went home early . . . If he needed to drink, the bottles were in the sideboard of his apartment's living room, premises protected by diplomatic immunity, and in the safe of his embassy office.

Few knew him. Only the wives he bedded, the most valued of the agents he handled and his one friend in the Kingdom's capital could have passed a serious judgement on Eddie Wroughton. He appeared a caricature of an Englishman abroad and he played to that super-ficial image. Day and night, at work, at the ambassador's dinner table, as a guest of the princes of the ruling family or on a field trip out of the city, he wore a cream-coloured linen suit that was always pressed and creaseless, a brilliant white shirt, a knotted silk tie and burnished brown brogues. He wore dark glasses, indoors or out, in the heat of the sun or the cool of an evening. Few knew the strength of those eyes and would have recognized in them traits of character.

They were bright, ruthless, glinting, mocking. They were cruel. . . He was a clever man, and knew it.

In his apartment's kitchen, in the microwave, he heated himself a curry for one, then washed his hands.

With regard to Samuel Bartholomew he had two distinct certainties: he dominated him, and at some moment in the future the domination would pay off, big-time. The microwave bleeped. He knew the doctor's history, had read it in the confidential file sent to him when the wretch had arrived in Riyadh. He served his meal and took it on a tray to his favoured chair. He thought the man pitiful, knew what he had done in Palestine, thought him beneath contempt

- but potentially so very useful, one day.

Al Maz'an village, near Jenin, Occupied West Bank.

It was only the end of the first week and already he had played his part.

Bart stamped out of the wooden hut and jumped down from the doorway on to the thick gravel that made a path across a sea of mud. He turned, held up his medical bag and waved it angrily at the man now leaning against the door jamb. It had been his first meeting with the Shin Beth officer, his handler. 'You know what? I'll tell you what. You dishonour the human race.

Your behaviour is simply beyond the pale,' Bart shouted.

His handler lit a cigarette, threw the dead match down on to the mud, and gazed back at him with indifference.

'And I'll tell you something else - and wipe that smile off your arrogant little face. You are a fucking disgrace to your nation.'

He rather liked the handler. He'd expected a man manipulative and brusque but he'd found instead a sensitive, frail young fellow, perhaps fifteen years younger than himself. Would he like coffee? How was he settling into the village? Were the signs good? Was he trusted? Could anything be done to help him? The handler, Joseph, worked and slept, cooked and ate in the hut close to the checkpoint. Of course, Joseph wore military uniform with the same insignia flashes as the troops controlling the checkpoint.

'I'm going to report you for gross obstruction. As a UK national engaged on humanitarian work, funded by my government, I can raise a storm. I hope that storm lands on your disgusting little head. Stopping a doctor of medicine going about his work shames your uniform. You see if I don't make waves.'

In the hut, over coffee, Bart had been shown photographs of local leaders of Islamic Jihad and Hamas. He had pored over the map of the village and its satellite communities. He had a good retentive memory. Joseph's briefing on the local security situation had been excellent - calm, detailed and lacking in political rhetoric. Joseph was professional... He'd had pictures, in a threadbare-covered album, of the aftermath of suicide attacks on Haifa buses, Jerusalem's market and Tel Aviv's cafes, but Bart had already been shown similar albums in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem where this stage of his journey had begun - and from the start of that journey he had never had the chance to refuse, to step off the treadmill. As he walked away, crunching over the gravel, the rain spattered on him, and the mud seeping through the stones caked his shoes.

'Don't forget my name! It's Sam Bartholomew, you bastard,' Bart shouted over his shoulder. 'But you'll wish you'd never heard it by the time I'm through with you.'

The soldiers had finished searching his car - he heard the door slam. By the time he reached it the rain had soaked what hair he had left, ran down his face and dampened his clothes. A corporal, scowling, held open the car door for him, but Bart shouldered him aside, as if he refused to accept any belated courtesy from a member of the Israeli Defence Forces. Standing in the rain, perhaps forty Palestinians were held up at the checkpoint. It had taken Bart twenty-five minutes apparently to be processed at the roadblock, but it would take the Palestinians half a day to go through if they were lucky, and half a day to be turned back if they weren't. Their faces, men, women and children, had been sullen when he had emerged from the hut.

But they had heard his abuse, and those who understood it translated for those who did not. As he climbed into his car, decorated with red crescents

- the Palestinian equivalent symbol to a red cross - on the side doors and on the roof, there was a ripple of applause, and he saw little rays of pleasure break on their faces. It was as intended. He drove away.

His head slumped. His eyeline was barely above the rim of the dashboard.

He was trapped, he could tell himself, he'd had no option. If his father had learned to where his son had sunk he would have strangled him, but his father was dead. He drove on towards Jenin where he would go to the clinic, make friends and collect what few of the basic medicines were available. He cut his father out of his mind, and the need for medicines, so that he could better remember the map he had been shown and the photographs of wanted men . . .

Joseph had told him that he must beware of self-doubt, that he should not hate himself, that above all he should not entertain the luxury of conscience. If Joseph had only known, Samuel Bartholomew's conscience was long gone.

They reached the quayside at Sadich. The map shown to him told Caleb they were on the southern extremity of the Iranian coastline.

The dark seascape in front of him was the Gulf of Oman. He felt a raw, drifting excitement because he was about to take a further step in his journey.

The officer spoke in Arabic: 'You are, my friend, an enigma to me.

I cannot think of the last time that a man surprised me. You have achieved what I would have believed an impossibility, a confusion in my mind. I call you "my friend" because I do not know your given name or the name of your father. I am given tasks by my government that are of the greatest sensitivity, and trust is placed in me for the reason that I have a reputation for delving into the secrets of men's minds, but after eleven days in your company I have failed. You are not a taxi-driver - and I consider also that Abu Khaleb is only a temporary flag of convenience. Before I pass you on, who are you?'

It was certainly not a town, barely a village. They had left the Mercedes and the driver in the car park beside the building for the co-operative that boxed fish and put ice into the boxes before the lorries came. At the quayside there were trading dhows, fishing-boats and a little flotilla of a half-dozen launches with large twin outboards, all poorly lit by the high lights. The wind came in hard and sang in the rigging stays of the dhows, and rocked the launches at their moorings. Caleb gazed at the sea, did not respond to the officer's question, as he had not for the past eleven days and nights.

Some of those days had passed fast, some slowly. Some of the nights he had slept, for others there had been no end. He had been questioned by the colonel inside the locked, shuttered villa, but for most of the hours between meals he had watched Iranian television and had used the weights and the rowing machine offered him; he had alternately rested and built his strength. He imagined that messages had gone ahead, that answers had been received, but he did not know where the messages had been sent, or from where they had been returned. What he had learned, in those long days and longer nights, was that his importance and value to his family were confirmed further - as they had been during the time he had waited in the village in far-away Afghanistan. The sea's blow whipped his long robe and the importance gave him pride - not that he would boast of it.

'Do I need to know your true identity? No .. . but I like to have the loose threads tied. There is your accent. The Arabic I speak is from Iraq. I learned the Arabic of Iraq from prisoners of their army captured in the fighting on the Faw peninsula - but I do not know Egyptian Arabic or Yemeni, Syrian or Saudi. I tried tricks on you . . .

You remember the morning I woke you with a shout, an order, in English, but you did not respond? At lunch, two days ago, without warning I spoke to you in the German language. Five days ago when we walked in the garden, it was Russian . . . You are a man of great talent, my friend, because you did not betray yourself. You have no name, you have no origin -1 think that is your value.'

He looked out beyond the breakwater of heaped boulders, beyond the navigation light raised on rusted stanchions, and he saw the whipped white crests of the incoming waves. He felt the chill of the wind. At the villa behind the walls and the steel-plated gate, the robe had been taken from him and laundered. Now the wind plastered it against the outline of his torso and legs.

'And you have no history - perhaps because you are ashamed of it, perhaps because it is irrelevant to you, perhaps because you are in denial of it. You appear in Landi Khotal, on the Pakistan side of the common border with Afghanistan, some four years ago, a little less, and there is nothing before that, only darkness. You frustrate me . . .

You are recruited, trained, placed with the 055 Brigade, captured, and by deception - I promise you, I admire the deception - are freed.

Word is passed that you have escaped the Americans, and instructions are given at the highest level that you should be moved on

- your worth is weighed in gold. It is not my business, I know, I only carry out instructions given me in great confidence, but you are a man of value. I do not know who you are or what your history is, or what it is hoped you will achieve. I tell you, in great honesty, my friend, when you are gone I will wake in the nights and that ignorance will be like a stone in my shoe.'

On the quayside's rough concrete, men were working in the faint light to repair nets, and others were climbing down the quayside ladders to the launches. He heard the deep-throat roar of the outboards starting up.

'They cross the Gulf to the Omani shore - they go empty and come back with cartons of American cigarettes. We permit the trade. It is useful to have a route out of and into the country that is not observed