THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (20 page)

He walked on.

The mirage was broken, the delirium was beaten, the memory was dead.

He forced his stride forward, faster and longer. They would have returned for him if he had fallen. They were there because of him, because of his importance.

The column stretched ahead, and he followed. He thought he had glimpsed his weakness, and that sight hurt him.

'I'm sorry, ma'am, but I can't admit you.'

The bar was across the entrance and the man stood in front of it.

He looked as though his mind was made up. Beth leaned through the open window of her vehicle and gave him a sweet smile, the one that usually opened doors or gates, raised bars.

'It's only a package that I promised to bring round for Lizzy-Jo.'

The man stood in front of the bar, his arms folded across his chest.

She could see the bulge under his waistcoat. The small white-painted aircraft had glided along the runway an hour earlier, then lifted off.

It had climbed slowly and had headed out over the Rub' al Khali.

The heat was coming up and she had lost it over the dunes, in the haze.

The man said, with studied and insincere politeness, 'Then I'll see she gets it, ma'am.'

She persisted. 'It'll only take a minute. I'd be grateful if you'd tell her I'm here.'

'No can do, ma'am. But, rest assured, she'll get it, the package.'

He came to her window and reached out a hand. She had wanted, damn sure, to look around the site, hear about it. The bar was not about to be raised. The woman, Lizzy-Jo, was not about to be called from whatever work she did. The man was not going to shift. The combination of the barbed wire, the compound at the end of the runway, the aircraft that flew without pilots and the bulge under the man's arm all tickled her imagination - OK, to hell with it. She snatched up the plastic bag and thrust it through the window. He took it, nodded with courtesy, and turned his back on her, as if she was so unimportant in the order of his day that he'd already forgotten her.

He was back down on his chair and the way he sat, chair tilted back, the bulge was unmistakable. By his feet was a sports bag that she thought was long enough to hold a rifle with a folded stock. She gunned the engine, made the sharpest of fast three-point turns.

She scraped up a dirtcloud with the tyres. In her wing mirror, she saw the cloud cloak him. She paused before pulling away. He emerged from the cloud on his chair and he didn't wipe his face or curse her - he merely ignored her. She drove off.

Back in her bungalow, she started to pack what she would need.

From the bedroom, standing on tiptoe at the window, she could just make out the distant compound. The irritation had grown. She should have been focused, totally, on the trip she was embarking on.

Everything else should have been cleared from her mind. If the Bedouin traveller had spoken the truth, had recognized the stones and the glass, had given her the correct direction and landmarks, she would be walking the next day on an ejecta field where no man or woman had ever set foot before. She had a checklist of clothing and equipment that should guarantee her survival. If the Bedouin's description of the scale of what he had found was correct, if the single stone and the piece of black glass he had brought her were samples of a greater scattered mass, then the paper the deputy governor had commissioned her to write would make her a scientist of proven worth.

Beth could, of course, have gone out into the sands with an escort

- drivers, a cook, servants to pitch her tent, and guards - but an escort would have killed the exhilaration of the solitude.

Too many times, Beth broke away from her checklist, dropped the sheet of paper on the bed, returned to the window, stretched up and peered at the vague shapes of the distant tent tops. And the sun beat down on her bungalow's little patio beyond the window, and on the roof of her Land Rover, and no wind rustled the palm trees' fronds.

Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay.

When the prisoner was half-way down the corridor, Caleb recognized him.

It was six days since they had been taken out of the cages at X-Ray, shackled and blindfolded, had been pushed on to buses and driven to the new camp. They had been led down new corridors and had smelt the new concrete and new wire, and they were closer to the sea. When the chains were off, and the blindfold, Caleb had studied the new cage. Under the high grille window, through which the sea wind blew, there was a basin with running water, and beside it a squatting lavatory with a tap for flushing.

There was nothing temporary here. They were out of the converted cargo containers, and these blocks had been built to last.

He knew the man.

He had seen the Emir General only once. Surrounded by his bodyguards, the Emir General had visited the second training camp to watch the recruits go through the assatdt course, with live firing. This man, with a lean, hungered body and eyes that never rested, had been on the left side of the Emir General. He had seen the man again a week after the bombing had started. Caleb and others of the 055 Brigade had been manning a checkpoint and a convoy of pickups had come through. The side rear windozvs of the third pickup had been curtained, but the convoy had stopped and the Chechen had climbed inside it. The bodyguard had stood at the back and a machine-gun was mounted on the cab roof. They had exchanged remarks
,
Caleb and the bodyguard, nothing talk, then the Chechen had left the pickup, and the convoy had gone on.

The cage beside Caleb's was unlocked. There were two more guards than usually escorted a prisoner. The bodyguard was pitched inside. At X-Ray they were moved every fourteen days, and put into cages where there were strangers on each side of them. Caleb understood: they did not allow relationships to build. The guards came in after him and two held batons threateningly as the prisoner's chains were taken off. They seemed to expect him to fight, seemed to want him to. The man gave them no excuse. They left him. Caleb thought they went reluctantly, cheated.

He sensed this was a prisoner of status.

The guards now came down the corridor every two minutes. Before the bodyguard's arrival it had been every ten or twelve. But everything about them was predictable. Caleb sat against his wall, and the bodyguard lay on his bed, both in silence and ignoring each other, until prayer time. The guards did not come down the corridors in prayer times, did not spy on them. When the call came on Delta's new loudspeakers, the bodyguard knelt and faced the direction ivhere they were told the Holy City was, his shirtsleeve pressed against the wire. Caleb came close. They were both kneeling. Their words were soft-spoken but were not the words of the Holy Book.

'Where have you come from?'

The bodyguard's head did not turn. 'From what they call the "cooler", the isolation cell. I speak to a brother, encourage him, then I go back to the cooler.

In a few days they take me from the cooler and put me in another cage.

I speak more encouragement, then I go back to the cooler. If I stay in one cage I may damage the chance of a brother.'

'The chance of what?'

'Of freedom. They know my identity. I am a prize for them. Wlw are you?'

'I was at the training camp, I saw you. I saiv you also at a roadcheck we had, outside Kabul. We talked.'

'With the rocket-launcher, at the block. On the assault course at the camp.

Each time, you were spoken of.. . What do they know of you?'

'I am a taxi-driver.'

'Who can denounce you?'

Caleb murmured, 'All the men I was with, and the Chechen, were killed when I was taken by the Americans. When I am interrogated, I tell them that I, alone, survived, I am a taxi-driver. I do not believe they know anything else of me.'

'And you are strong?'

T try to be.'

Caleb had to strain to hear the bodyguard. 'Make a promise for me.'

'What do I promise?'

'If you are ever freed, you never forget. You remember your brothers. You remember the martyrs. You remember the evils of the crusaders.'

'I promise I will never forget, will always remember.'

There was a great calm about the man. He was thin, without a dominating stature, and his face was unremarkable, but his eyes burned.

'And you zvill fight. Whatever the barriers put in front of you, you will cross them. You zvill walk through fire. You will fight.'

The prayers ended. The guards tramped down the corridor. The bodyguard did not speak again, neither did Caleb, and they sat as far apart as the cage confines allowed. When food was brought, when the mosquitoes buzzed close to the ceiling lights, when the bodyguard's cage door was opened, he lashed out with his fool and caught the knee of the guard carrying his tray from the trolley, spilling the food. More guards came. Twice he was cudgelled with a baton, and he was blindfolded, then dragged away.

Caleb felt the new strength. He was no longer frightened. He was toughened, hardened by the encounter. He zvas a taxi-driver, but he had given his promise.

It broke quickly, without warning.

Silence, then raised gasping and exhausted voices.

Caleb scraped the crust of sand from his eyes. The Saudi, Fahd, high on his saddle, lashed his foot at Tommy's shoulder, toppling him. When Tommy stood again, Fahd worked the camel round so that he could return to kick again; he aimed for Tommy's head, but missed; the effort almost made him fall from the saddle. Tommy had hold of his leg and was trying to drag him down, but he lost the grip and sagged back.

A blade flashed.

Tommy had the knife. Fahd watched it. Tommy edged closer, the knife raised, ready to strike.

The guide, Rashid, came from behind Tommy and, with the speed of a snake's hit, snatched at Tommy's knife arm, held it, then twisted it behind Tommy's back, until the man's face grimaced in pain. The knife was loosed. As it fell, Tommy smashed back with his free arm and caught Rashid on the upper cheek. The arm was twisted tighter and Tommy dropped to the sand. Rashid bent to pick up the knife, took the reins of Fahd's camel and led it to the front of the column. The march resumed.

The boy was beside Caleb. 'Do you understand?'

'What should I understand?'

The boy's face creased as if in anguish. 'He hit my father. He struck my father. Because he hit my father, he is dead. Nothing else is possible.'

'But your father walked away, he did not kill him.'

'He will, at his own choosing. It was the worst insult, to hit my father.'

Caleb asked the question heavily: 'What did they fight over?'

The boy said, 'The one called the other a murderer of the faithful.

The other called the one a coward and a fool. It is what they said, and now the other is condemned.'

Caleb pushed the boy away, gently but with tired firmness. He thought death now trudged with them. His anger blossomed. Where they travelled there was no beacon of hope. Life did not, could not, exist. The sun burned and crushed them. Madness had made the argument. Impossible difficulties weighed them down, and now they had the new burden of the argument, and one of them was condemned.

He could have howled with his anger.

Most days a wrapped baguette, tuna and mayonnaise, with a can of Coke in his office passed for Jed Dietrich's lunch. He took the chance of the midday break to write up the assessment of the morning interrogation - increasingly fewer observations seemed relevant -

and to prepare for the afternoon session. The secretary for Defense had called the men he questioned 'hard-core, well-trained terrorists'; the attorney general had said they were 'uniquely dangerous'. But neither the secretary nor the attorney sat in with Jed. There were six hundred inmates at Delta, and maybe a hundred of them were 'hard-core' and 'dangerous', and the Bureau and the Agency had care of them. Jed never saw them.

He binned the wrapping from his baguette, drained the can, wiped the crumbs off the table. As the minute hand climbed to the hour, the knock came on cue.

The prisoner was brought in.

Jed doubted he was even a 'foot-soldier'. God alone knew what questions he would find to put to the man. The prisoner, the file said, came from a small town in the English Midlands, was of Bengali ethnic origin, was one of the five per cent for whom anti-depressive medication was prescribed by the Delta doctor, had been studying Arabic and the Qur'an at a religious school up the road from Peshawar, and had gone into the net, had been handed over by the Pakistani intelligence people, who probably felt they needed to show willing and make up a quota number. If Jed, the fisherman, had pulled this one out of a Wisconsin lake, he'd not have bothered with a photograph or the scales, would have chucked him straight back -

he had never been to England, had no knowledge of the 'Midlands'.

Jed was aware of a growing swell of opinion outside the States that demanded either for criminal charges to be laid against prisoners or for them to be freed. He was as aware that the courts back home had claimed no jurisdiction over Camp Delta. It was not his business, he had no opinion. Had he gone out of his room for lunch and discussed it with enlisted men he would have found total indifference. The Agency and Bureau men wanted every last one of the prisoners locked up in perpetuity. The Red Cross people, had they ever owned up to their true feelings, would have condemned Delta, would have criticized the concept of the camp, but he didn't go out to lunch.

None of the British ones had been brought to Jed's room before.

With a British prisoner, at least there was no requirement for an interpreter. Translators destroyed the chance of an interrogator displaying his skills.

The man shuffled through the door. Well, not a man - more of a boy. The file said he was twenty-three years old. He would have been twenty when he was captured, would have had his twenty-first birthday inside a Guantanamo cage . . . Jed thought of him as a boy.

The chains were taken off, and the guards stood back. The man sat down. He put his hands on the table top - it was orders that a prisoner's hands must be visible at all times when he was unshackled. The hands shook. Jed reckoned they would have shaken worse if it had not been for the anti-depressants .. . God, was this guy, categorized as an 'unlawful combatant', the real enemy?