THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (48 page)

Himself, he didn't go to work because of an optician's appointment.

He was in the waiting room, was next in line to be called. The TV was on. Where his partner worked was above the hit point of the American Airlines plane. It was all on the TV in front of him, and he could see the window nearest to his partner's desk. I listened.'

She talked without emotion, didn't play to a gallery, watched her screens.

'Twenty minutes later, as he sees it on TV, the United plane goes into the South Tower. What he's telling me, he's not watching the South Tower, only the North Tower and the window nearest his partner's desk. You know what he sees - there's smoke and fire. You want to know what he sees from the window nearest his partner's desk? They jump. People start to jump. They got the fire coming up under them and they got nowhere to go, and some of them jump.

They are ninety floors up, and they jump. He sees people jump from that floor, from those windows. He sees tiny, ant figures falling. It's

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all on the TV. Did his partner jump? There's a lot of people jumped.

Now, sudden but late, he starts to get active. Goes to the desk, rings his partner's phone. It's not picked up. He wants to think his partner jumped, that falling ninety floors, arms and legs out, was a quicker death than waiting for the fire to get up there - or the collapse. He said his partner was the only love of his life, and he thinks he saw his partner jump from ninety floors up .. . That's a horrible way to die.

That's bad people that make you die like that. I bought him a drink, and I told him we went hard as we could after the people that made his partner jump, to hurt them. Then I headed out to catch my flight.'

She saw, from the side of her eye, the tears stream from under Marty's spectacles and run on his cheeks. She had no shame for the saccharine emotion of the lie, daytime talk-show stuff. She went brusque. 'How's she doing?'

'She's doing well,' he choked.
'Carnival Girl's
flying great. She's the bomb.'

Caleb felt the strength back in him, but the pain was agony and it rolled down in waves to his foot and came up through his hips and stomach. Lifting his right arm brought the pain in a torrent. He gestured for Rashid to come to him. When the guide was close to him, ear bent to mouth, Caleb whispered what he wanted brought to him. He heard other voices, indistinct - a man's and a woman's -

but could not make out what they said. The camels chewed cud on either side of him and slung between them was the awning that made shade for him. A blow hammered down on metal. Wood screamed as it was broken and hinges whined. He was brought the manual.

The pages were grey, dry and crackled in his hand, and the large print on the cover had faded.

There was a needle attached to a tube that dangled over him, in his left arm, inserted immediately above the plastic bracelet, which was no longer covered. He tried to push himself up to look around, but that was beyond his strength.

The voice was in the old language. 'Don't do that - please, don't.

Now, let's set down the ground rules. I am a British-born doctor, sir, I am here at the request of your friend, Miss Jenkins. I do not speak Arabic, nor do I need to. When you were in, sir, a confused state -

natural following the traumatic experience of your wounds - you talked English. You were incoherent and rambling, and I understood nothing of it. Got me? But as far as I am concerned you are as British as I am . . . I call you "sir" not as a mark of respect, but because neither Miss Jenkins nor I knows your identity, and we have no interest in it.'

On the cover page of the manual was printed:
Raytheon Electronic
Systems FIM-92 Stinger loiv-altitude surface-to-air system family.
The man materialized above him.

A pudgy fat-filled face. A shirt stuck with sweat to a vest. Trousers held up by a narrow belt. He saw the man. The woman was behind the man.

'You should not have come,' Caleb said faintly.

'I said, remember it, "If it is ever possible, I will repay you." It was possible. I brought a doctor who is going—'

'Who saw my face.'

'Who is going to help you - don't be so damn stupid. He's a doctor, not a bloody policeman.'

'Why did you come?' Caleb grated.

'The boy was sent to find me. Why?'

'I had forgotten you - you should have forgotten me.'

He saw her head shake, as if in personal crisis. 'It doesn't matter why. I'm here and he's here. That'll have to be good enough.'

The doctor said, 'All very charming, but hardly relevant. I think we should get on with it, or I won't be cleaning your leg, sir, I'll be taking it off. Now, do you want me here or do you want me to bugger off?'

Caleb felt the smile wreathe his face and he heard his own soft-spoken voice: 'I'm very grateful to you. Don't look at my face. I thank you for coming. Lose my face from your mind. I appreciate what you do for me.'

'I'm going to talk you through it, each stage of it. Your head wound is clean, a direct shrapnel strike, but below your headcloth. Not so the leg wound. It is dirty, infected, with the early stages of gangrene.

In the wound is sand grit, probably small stones, maybe missile fragments, certainly pieces from your robe will be buried deep in it. It has to be cleaned and all of the detritus has to come out. I intend to use Cetrimide as a cleaning agent, and I will inject a local anaesthetic -

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Lignocaine - into the muscle around the wound. Its location is good, too low for nerve damage and the wrong side of your leg for the principal arteries, and the muscle has protected the bones from splintering. Later, when I've worked on the wound, I will inject you with antibiotics, Ampicillin is what I carry. I see you have reading material. I advise you to use it. In spite of the Lignocaine, this is going to hurt like hell. Are you ready?'

The question must have been in Caleb's eyes.

'What's worrying me most - not who or what you are, sir - is that bloody item up in the sky, hunting and searching. We've her vehicle and mine and no cover for them, which is a good enough reason for getting on with it. Do I make a start?'

Caleb nodded. He lifted the manual, the words on the page dancing in his eyes, and he felt the first needle plunge into his flesh.

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The face above Caleb was impassive. He saw it above the manual held tight in his hands. He tried to read. To read, he thought, was to escape from the pain and - what was worse than the pain - his dependence on the doctor.

He read of the launcher assembly with a missile, the grip stock, the IFF interrogator and the argon gas battery coolant unit. Words played across his eyes, which blurred. Target adaptive guidance circuit, azimuth coverage . . . it was their world. Their technology, their skill, their power . . . He was a man who had fought from ditches and trenches, from caves and scraped holes in the dirt, from the cages of a cell block. Their technology, their skill dwarfed him, and their power could crush him. The face hovered over him, and the pain sought out each nerve in his body. He could only fight, nothing more was left to him: fight or die, fight or be forgotten. His eyes, watering, fastened on the caption line: 'Engagement Procedure'. The moisture in his eyes blinded him and he looked away from the page.

The last thing he had read, before the mist closed on his vision, was

'Training requires 136 hours of instruction before weapon qualification is given.' He did not have the hours, did not have the instructor, did not have the knowledge. He looked up.

'What is your name?'

'Samuel Bartholomew - I would not claim to have friends, but acquaintances call me Bart. Won't be long, the Lignocaine works quickly.'

'Have you looked long enough at my face to remember it?'

He saw the doctor flinch.

'I never remember a face - whatever that bloody book is, just read it.'

Behind the doctor, squatting at the edge of the awning's shade, the woman bit her lip. He understood so little, not why the doctor had come, not why she had cared enough to bring him. They were no part of him, either of them.

'Can you wipe my eyes?'

She did.

Caleb read again. First the system was shouldered, then the battery coolant unit was slotted into the grip stock, then the IFF

antenna was unfolded. The target, if visible, was interrogated by the AN-PPX-1 system. The IFF switch is depressed and locks on the target. Depress the impulse-generator switch, and 6000 PSI pressurized argon gas flows to the IR detector. Did it bloody matter?

Did it matter to him how their technology worked? What mattered was whether the bloody thing fired. Again he stared into the doctor's face. 'What am I to you?'

He saw a slow smile settle at the doctor's mouth.

A third time, the needle was raised. The manual was all he had. If the aircraft came back - hunted for them and found them - and the boy heard it, he must use the weapon and know the manual's procedures. He started again to read the close print below the caption -

shoulder the system, insert the battery coolant unit, unfold the IFF

antenna, depress the impulse-generator switch, listen for the audio signal telling of target acquisition. He felt the growing deadness in his leg and the dulling of the pain. Chubby white fingers gripped the syringe, held it poised.

He could see, beyond the doctor, beyond her and behind the guide, that the boy sat alone, his head cocked. He thought the boy listened: he was cross-legged with his back straight and his chin raised. If the aircraft hunted for them and found them, the boy was the first line of defence. If Caleb was to reach his family, he needed the boy as much as he depended on the doctor.

.

Caleb did not know if the weapon would fire, if it had passed its shelf life. His family waited for him. In a single-storey building of concrete blocks, or in a cave, they waited. He seemed to see men rise up and their arms were outstretched and they held him and hugged him; they gave him the welcome that was the heart of a family. He tried to cry out, as if to tell his family that he came, but had no voice

. . . He walked away from the family that he cared for, that he was a part of. He wore a suit and a clean shirt, with a tie, and his shoes were polished, and he came through a great concourse of people - none of them saw him as they flowed around him - and he carried a suitcase or a grip or had a traveller's rucksack hitched on his shoulder, and he yearned for the praise of his family, and he prayed to hear the screamed terror of those his family hated.

He read the pages, memorized them. The needle came down. The woman tried to hold his hand but it would not free itself from the manual's pages. He felt the pain of the needle.

The total dose of local anaesthetic, split between three injections, was

- and Bart had carefully measured it - twenty millilitres of one per cent of Lignocaine.

He could, so easily, have killed him.

As a rabid dog was shot, so Bart could have ended the life of the man whose face he had looked into, whose name he did not know.

He could have said that the brute was a violent fanatic, raging with a desire to murder. He eased the needle into the left side flesh of the wound, where the blackened gangrene had taken deepest hold. A total dose of forty millilitres of two per cent Lignocaine would have put down the rabid brute. The dog would have gone into spasm, then been on the irreversible process towards death. Instead, Bart had measured out what was necessary to spare the dog pain. Too many had walked over Bart. He was not their servant. He thought the young man handsome. There was a quality about him, Bart thought, that the stubble on his face, the tangle of hair above his eyes, their brightness, and the dirt encrusted round his mouth did not mask. Flitting into his mind was his own boy. The boy who loved his mother, loved Ann. The boy who had taken the owner of the Saab franchise to be a proxy father. The boy who had never looked into his face after the dawn visit of the police. He could justify himself.

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He used the cleaning agent, Cetrimide, slopped it into the wound, and began to dab with the lint. 'This is going to hurt, going to hurt worse as I go on. I've used all the painkiller that's possible.'

He sensed that the head nodded behind the manual. He did not think that the man would cry out. Perhaps an intake of hissed breath, maybe a gasp, stifled . .. He cut deeper into the wound pit, poured more of the Cetrimide into it, swabbed, then manoeuvred the forceps over the first pieces of grit and stone, and took them out. The woman's hand was over the man's fist but his eyes never left the printed page. Bart went deeper. He cut, swabbed, retrieved. He knelt beside his patient and the sweat slaked off him. He thought it extraordinary that the man did not cry out, but had known he would not.

She held the hand tight. Bart could have told her she served no purpose, that the man did not need her as comforter. He found the pieces of cotton, embedded, and lifted each of them out, had to cut again to find their root. Any other man that Bart had known would have fainted. Himself, probably his heart would have stopped . . .

Debridement was from the battlefield surgery of the Napoleonic wars, with patients either insensible from shock or dosed with brandy or biting on a peg of wood or leather. No gasp, no hiss for breath. He searched for more cotton fibre, stone, grit, a fragment of I he missile, and heard the rustle of a page turned. No man that Bart had ever met could have endured it without protest. Bart had reckoned he might have to kneel on his patient's ankles and have the woman hold down one arm and the older Bedouin the other arm, grip him so that he could not struggle as the scalpel went in and the lorceps probed. Not necessary.

'You're doing well,' he murmured. 'We're getting there.' He was sodden with sweat.

He went to work on the gangrene. It was neither pretty nor delicate work. Not at medical school, certainly not in the practice at Torquay, not even in the villages around Jenin had he performed such primitive surgery before. He was guided by old memories of books read long ago, and his instincts. Bart sliced at the flesh, cut slivers from it, then flicked the scalpel blade to the side, ditched it behind him. The woman flushed. A section of flesh, poorly discarded, had fallen on to her ankle. Her eyes were screwed up at the sight of it. She would have felt its diseased wetness on her skin. He cut again. Still there was no cry and no hiss of breath. Closest to the wound the flesh was black. Away from the wound it was darkened.