THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (47 page)

The American said, 'It will be easier to find him and stop him in his tracks before he can murder innocents.'

'Of course, of course . . . He's from that estate near the school, by the canal. Perhaps I sell him short, perhaps he's more than I've

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painted him.' His jaw jutted and his fists clenched. 'Always interesting to hear how former pupils have progressed. He is Caleb Hunt.'

Caleb did not know that a third bag dripped saline solution through the tube and the needle into his arm.

'They'll hear my name, won't they? The bastards'll hear it. Hear it loud. They're walking dead, got nothing - all they got is radios out of Beemers and sucks and smokes, got nothing. They're not really living. I live. Everyone will hear my name.'

Caleb did not know that Beth stared bleak-faced at him.

'Guys, where are you? What you doing? I did something else.

You'll live, fucking die, no one will know, you're nothing. What you got? You got fuck-all.'

Caleb did not know as he rambled, as the drip gave him strength, that Bart prepared a scalpel, scissors, clips, forceps and sterile swabs, and listened, or that Beth bit her lip.

'It's the biggest desert in the world, it's got worse heat than anywhere in the world. I'm walking in it. I'm barefoot in it. You wouldn't have lasted in it a day, not half a day. I'm going through it because my family's waiting for me . . . That's a proper family. I belong to my family.'

Bart loaded a syringe with Lignocaine, the local anaesthetic.

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

Caleb exposed his mind, made his mind as bare as the wound on his leg.

Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay.

'This is him?'

'This is al-Ateh, the taxi-driver.'

'Have we done him?'

'No, the Agency haven't interrogated him. The Bureau have hut not for eight months. The DIA done him since eight months back. These are their transcripts.'

He stood with his head bowed in docility. In front of him were two men he had not seen before. He had learned well to give no sign that he understood what they said.

'Who did him last, from the DIA, which of those creeps?'

'Dietrich. You know Dietrich, Jed Dietrich?'

T know him. What does he say, Harry?'

'He doesn't say anything - he's on vacation. And won't say anything -

not back till after the due date, if this jerk goes.'

The chain manacles bit at his wrist, and the shackles at his ankles. He stared at the floor, made a target of his feet and did not watch them as they shuffled paper between them. The interpreter stood beside them, an Arab, and his respect for them told Caleb of their importance.

'It's the quota, that's what matters. Two old guys, a middle-aged guy and a young guy to make up a quota minimum of four - if they're clean.'

'Too many of them are clean.'

'I hear you, Wallace. Try not to think about i t . . . You going to the club tonight, that concert?'

'Marine brass band - woiddn't miss . . . OK, let's go process this guy.'

The interpreter translated. The one called Harry told him that the United States of America had no grievance against the innocent, the United States of America valued the freedom of the individual, the United States of America was committed only to rooting out the guilty. The one called Wallace told him that he was going home, back to Afghanistan, to his family then had checked as if a paragraph in the file about the iviping out of the family by B-52 bomber had been, for a moment, forgotten. He was going back to the chance of making a new life with his taxi.

Through the interpreter, Harry asked, T hope, young man, back in Afghanistan you won't come out with any lies about torture?'

The meek answer. 'No, sir. I am grateful, sir.'

Through the interpreter, Wallace queried, 'You have no complaints about your treatment here?'

'No, sir. I have been treated well, sir.'

Through the interpreter, both of them: 'You take good care, young man, of the opportunity given you . . . You help to build a new Afghanistan . . .

Good luck .. . Yes, good luck.'

The guards' hands were on his arms, and the waist chain was tugged back.

He heard Harry say, 'Pathetic, aren't they, these jerks? He's lucky to be out. I reckon the lid's going to come off this place.'

He was being led out through the door. Wallace said, 'Too right -

discipline's cracking, more suicide tries and more defiance. When the

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tribunals start up and when that execution chamber comes on line, the lid could come off big-time. What time is the concert?'

He was shuffled away, the chains clanking on his ankles.

He had contempt of them, had beaten them. He would hear them scream, wherever he was. When he had returned to his family, he would hear them scream in shrill terror.

'I think I'm going to ask you to help me.'

'Of course.'

'And it's best if I educate you to my equipment.'

'Yes.'

She followed Bart out from under the low awning, stretched and stood tall. 'What should I know?'

He hissed, 'Not what you should know, what about me knowing something? When did you realize this man was a fully fledged terrorist, and British? May we begin there?'

'What do you want? A confessional?'

'The truth would help.'

'What he is and what I knew, does that determine what treatment you give him?'

'My decision, Miss Jenkins, not yours.'

She told him, haltingly, what had brought her to this unmapped corner of the greatest desert in the world and what she owed this man. He thought, himself, he owed nothing. 'That's it - are you going to walk away?'

Whatever he was, Bart was not an idiot. If he walked away, went back to the awning, collected up his boxes and packages, carted them to the Mitsubishi and loaded them, the rifle on the older Bedouin's lap would be up to the shoulder and would be aimed. The eye behind the sight would be brilliant with hatred, and he'd hear the clatter of it arming; he would die in the sand. He pondered on all those who had wrecked his life, had walked over him.

'In about half an hour,' Bart said, 'I'll start to work on the leg wound.'

'I trust you.'

From the sky, the heat cascaded on him, and the sweat ran on his body and collected in the folds of his stomach. 'That's good, because you have to.'

*

Gonsalves rang the bell.

Wroughton checked him in the spy-hole then opened the door. He held his hands across his privates.

Gonsalves walked inside, had half skirted the black bin-bag, then stopped at it, put down his briefcase and tipped the bloodstained clothes on to the floor.

'Your people, when I called them, they said you had a flu dose.

When I asked if a remedy for flu was taking a phone off the hook, your people didn't know.'

Wroughton said, 'It seemed easier to say flu than that I'd walked into a door.'

He hadn't washed. The bruises on his body, thickest at his groin, were a technicolour parade of black, mauve and yellow. The blood had dried around his nose and at the split in his lower lip. He dropped his hands away from his privates, away from where he was shrivelled up, because modesty didn't seem to matter.

'You could help me, Eddie, you could tell me where to look on your face for an imprint of a door handle, because I don't see it. Did the door handle have a wife?'

'I'm not expecting flowers or an apology - my father used to tell me, never explain and never apologize - but I expect to be cut in/

'Where's your maid?'

'When she came to the door I told her to get lost.'

'I'll make some tea.'

Gonsalves went to the kitchen and Wroughton slumped into his chair. The voice boomed through the rattle of the mugs and the opening and closing of cupboard doors. 'I think I heard you right. "Cut in?" You hear me. You are a junior partner in our endeavour. We use you when we need you, we ignore you when we don't. Did you get big ideas because Teresa does pizza for you, and you're Uncle Eddie to the kids? Shouldn't have done. It's a tough world out there. You're a taker, Eddie, but you don't have much to give. It's why I cut you out. We were running a secure operation down in the Rub' al Khali.'

'I think you told me you had "big boys' toys" there,'

'In the Rub' al Khali we had something special going, and -'

'And I told you - "not much to give", I'm sure - about a caravan going out of Oman and a direction route.'

and we had Predator UAVs up, with Hellfires loaded. And we'd done a con-job on the Saudis - which is why it was secure and why you weren't cut in, and—'

'Fuck you.'

'That what the door handle said? We did two hits and we couldn't keep it secure and now the Saudis have chucked us out. We got a day and a half left in there, then fatter cats than me have to decide whether to fly UAVs out of Yemen, Djibouti or Dohar and take the risk of violating Saudi air space. We're out in a day and a half.'

Gonsalves carried in the tray, put it down, poured tea, gave a mug to Wroughton.

When he'd sipped his tea, Gonsalves reached into his briefcase.

'Want to see the tricks the "big boys' toys" can do?'

'I don't beg, not a damn poodle and dribbling.'

'Why I love you, Eddie . . .' Gonsalves had a file of photographs in his hand and spread them over the coffee table around Wroughton's mug.

He couldn't help himself, felt his excitement quicken. Three pictures, colour, eight-by-six, showed black-circled craters in the ochre sand. They were the raw, only dreamed-of currency of an intelligence officer. Centred on one was a dead, keeled-over camel.

Not electronic intercepts, not analysis of radio traffic pulled down by the dishes. He snatched up the crucial picture, peered at it and lingered over it.

'Don't get a hard-on, Eddie - do me a favour. OK, it's before the first strike. Three men travelling. Two guides leading them. Three pack camels carrying crates, and Stingers is as good a guess as any.

Now, look at the close-ups on the three . . . Is this not as sexy as it gets?'

Wroughton held the three photographs, felt in awe of the technology that had magnified them to a point of recognition from four miles of altitude.

'That one.' Gonsalves' finger stabbed at a photograph. 'We identify him as Gibran al-Wafa, aged twenty-seven, involved in the Riyadh compound bombs, Saudi citizen.' The finger moved on. 'Him, he is Muhammad Sherif, aged fifty-nine, was in Afghanistan in the Soviet war, with bin Laden in the Sudan exile, with him back in Kabul, but disappeared before Enduring Freedom, now a strategist. Egyptian national and sentenced to death in his absence.' The finger loitered.

'This one, we don't have him. The computers can't chuck anything up.'

Wroughton gazed at the photograph. He saw the body of the young man upright on the camel, the head high. He strained to make out the features, but the pixels confused him. He thought he saw a strong chin but. . . 'So what? Isn't he dead?'

Gonsalves said that the sensor operator had aimed twice for specific and individual targets as the camels had scattered. The two targets in the two strikes had been the Saudi and the Egyptian.

'So, you may have missed him, for all your damn technology . . .

And I get cut in because you don't know who he is, right?'

'Succinctly put, Eddie. I'll see you.'

After Gonsalves had gone, Eddie Wroughton sat in his chair, held the photograph in front of him, and tried to read the face.

Lizzy-Jo cursed. George's message was pithy, without embellishment. The needs of maintenance ruled his life. Maintenance was obligatory, not optional. The Predator,
First Lady,
was now beyond all limits set for maintenance. Flying hours in optimum conditions had been exceeded, but she had also been up in worst-status conditions.

She was grounded - no argument - confirmation of what he'd said the afternoon before. She needed a sanitized hangar for the necessary maintenance, and the only sanitized hangar she would see was back at Bagram. He went out of the Ground Control, went heavily down the steps, as if unsettled by Lizzy-Jo's curse.

Beside her, Marty flew
Carnival Girl,
did the new boxes. When they'd brought her back in the small hours, while she and Marty had stolen sleep, the bird's tanks had been filled so that fuel had spilled out.

Carnival Girl,
the old warhorse, the fighter from Bosnia and Kosovo, from Afghanistan - with a first skull-and-crossbones stencilled on her fuselage - had gone up twenty minutes after midday for her final run out of Shaybah, not her prettiest chase down the runway, with the fuel load and the burden of the Hellfires under the wings.

The boxes on the map were on the east side of a track. They had tasked themselves, and Oscar Golf had not argued it over the link, to

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have her up for the full twenty-four hours of her endurance at four miles altitude and at loiter speed. Late on in the flight, tomorrow, they would do a small section of the map boxes on the west side of the track. They had not yet reached the track, but it would be good when they did, would make a diversion from watching goddamn sand.

He was hunched over the joystick. She had tried to jolt him, but he spoke when he had to, not otherwise. She had wanted to bring the life back to him. He flew
Carnival Girl
without error but as if he sleep-walked.

She lied . . .

Lizzy-Jo said, 'Last time I was in New York, I was in a bar - been to see my mom and was going down to North Carolina for the last spat, but had time to kill. The bar was behind Fifth Avenue. I was alone, this guy was alone. What did I do? Wasn't much of a chat-up line. I was in Afghanistan. Was I hurting those bastards? Real venom in his question. I was trying. He told me why he hoped I was.'

She had gone straight from her mom's apartment, in a taxi, out to the airport for the flight. She had never been in a bar behind Fifth Avenue.

'His partner worked up high in the North Tower. It was a day like any other. Nothing different about the eleventh of September.