THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (26 page)

She had had a torch, and in its light Caleb had stepped over that chasm of his memory. He had raised the bonnet over the Land Rover's engine then fastened it upright. With his fingers and then using his headcloth - the
ghutrah -
as a whisk, he had cleared the surplus sand that covered the parts. Since the wedding and his recruitment, he had never taken that step into his past, never shown his knowledge of the working parts of a vehicle's engine. She had rummaged in a bag for a clean blouse, ripped the soft cotton material into strips and passed them to him. A strip for the filters, two strips for the carburettor, a strip for the pump, strips for each part of the engine that sand grains had infiltrated. When the torchlight had guttered, the moon had fallen, he had worked by touch, from memory.

The freedom would not last. With the coming morning he would resume his march to return to his family.

At the end he had used the short-handled shovel and, with what little remained of his strength, he had battered the blade against the wood of one of the boxes until it had fallen apart, then he had placed the wood lengths, four of them, hard against the revealed tyres, for a valuable yard of traction. He had sat in the driver's seat, had turned the key and pumped the pedal. The engine had caught, then he had switched it off.

He had climbed up to the crest of a shallow dune, had collapsed on to the sand, and begun to erase the memories. Without the memories, Caleb was an Arab, he was returning to his family, was a man who hated, was a chosen man. Behind him he could hear the quiet sounds of the restless camels and the soothing voice of the boy.

She was beside him and he knew he must guard himself or the memories would swamp him, and with them came weakness.

Her questions were a torrent.

'Who are you?'

'Where are you from?'

'Where are you going?'

The questions were asked in Arabic. He stared up at stars losing lustre, at a moon losing brilliance. He felt the cold of the night, the pain in his legs, arms and shoulders, the emptiness in his mind. She crouched over him. It must have been the last strip from her ripped blouse, and the last of the water, that she used to damp his forehead and his mouth. He could smell her, not perfume from a spray but her sweat. Her fingers moved over his skin and his lips. He had been frightened to talk for fear that his language would slip and betray him.

'You are not a Bedu - too tall, too strong. Where have you travelled from? You knew the engine of the Land Rover - where did you learn it?'

He had the last of her blouse strips, the last drops from the water container, and the last of her sandwiches - hot, curled and dried out in the past day's heat - and he had thought he was going to vomit but he had swallowed hard instead.

She was closer to him, lying back. She lapsed into silence but her fingers played patterns with the hairs on his right arm. Old senses stirred in Caleb, pulses beat. The fingers worked over his forearm, then came to rest on the material that covered the plastic bracelet.

They stopped there, as if it were a barrier. The bracelet was exposed, then the torch snapped on and its failing beam was on his wrist.

Caleb writhed away from her, but she had hold of his wrist and tried to work it into the beam. She was strong-muscled, not dainty. They wrestled, but he had his arm under his body. She loosed him, knelt beside him. The beam moved on. It caught the soles of his feet. He heard the shocked gasp, then it veered on again and shone full into his face. He hit her arm, suddenly, surprised her and the torch fell away.

She sat back, reached out and switched off the torch. 'Time to talk.'

He looked away.

'Who are you?'

'You don't look into my face. You don't read what is on my wrist.

You don't know me, please, and you forget me.'

She was laughing. 'He speaks, has a voice. The mystery grows. A voice that is not Saudi, not Bedu, feet that are raw. Who are you? I am Beth Jenkins, teacher and geologist. I work at the Shaybah oil-extraction plant. I am twenty-seven years old. I was in the desert because I had been told of a meteorite site never studied before. I have no satphone and I am out of range of any mobile link. I have left no note of where I am, it would be days before a search was started and then they would not know where to look. There - you know all about me. Now, what about you? You saved me from dehydration and death, or from a rifle and death. At Shaybah there are Arabs of all nationalities, but you I cannot place. Your feet tell me that for the first time in your life you are walking without shoes or sandals.

Why? Because of my debt to you, I have the right to know who you are.'

'You never saw me. The storm missed you. In the morning you go on and you never remember me.'

Sitting close to him and cross-legged, she said, 'Those men with you, because I saw their faces, wanted to kill me, would have. I heard you. Know that I thank you.'

'And you never remember me - I am forgotten.'

No reply.

Her warmth was near to him. He felt the pain loose its hold on his muscles. A great calm came to him. Her breathing was slowed, regular. She slept. Had he moved clumsily he would have woken her.

She knew everything of him. She knew that he wore a plastic bracelet on his wrist as if it were a convict's tag, that he crossed the Sands in secrecy, that his identity was hidden, that his business was worth killing to protect, that his accent separated him from the region, that the scars, blisters and welts on his feet meant he was a stranger and an Outsider. He heard, from the base of the dune, the boy's hacking cough, the sounds of the camels stirring and their grunts as they spat.

If he moved he would break the spell of her sleep. She shifted, without waking, and her head was on his chest, her throat on his shoulder. His hand moved. His fingers touched her throat. They rail on her throat from the windpipe to the back of her neck until they tangled with her hair. She could drive back where she had come from and she could go to a police post or an army post. She could betray him. His fingers were on her throat. She slept and was without defence. He moved his fingers from her throat. She slept because she trusted him.

The first shaft of the sun hit him.

He heard the boy whistle for him.

With great care, with gentleness, Caleb lifted her head and drew his arm clear, then lowered her head back to the sand. Her eyes did not open. He edged back from her, scratched at his face, shivered, then pushed himself up. The boy, expressionless, watched him. He left her and slid away down the dune.

Caleb took the camel's rein. They walked briskly, leaving behind him the woman and the Land Rover. The boy led him. He had gone fifty paces, sixty, and the slight warmth of the sun nestled on his back.

The shout was clear behind him, burst over the sand: 'Thank you.

You saved my life and I thank you. If it is ever possible I will repay you.'

He did not turn but he cupped his hands and yelled, at the plateau of sand around him, 'You never met me, I was never here . . . You never saw my face.'

They walked on.

The boy said, 'The Iraqi would have cut her throat. My father would have shot her.'

'But he did not.'

'You made a softness in my father. I think it is because you are different from us - my father cannot explain it. None of us knows you.'

'What have you been doing? Lifting too many ammunition boxes?'

Bart stepped back from the couch and peeled off the rubber gloves.

'Not ammunition boxes, no.'

The patient was mid-forties and overweight, a former Logistics Corps man, had risen to warrant officer and had looked for better remuneration than an Army pension would offer. They talked across each other.

'What I'm thinking is a hernia.' Bart's face cracked with his general practitioner's smile, comforting.

'You don't get those SANG guys to lift anything, not if they can wriggle away and get someone else, some other idiot, to do it. It's been CS-gas cartridges mostly, and plastic bullets, more than live stuff.'

'I'm going to pass you on to a consultant specialist, but I'm pretty sure that the pain and the lump mean an inguinal hernia.'

'Most of what we're doing with SANG, these days, is riot control and crowd control.'

'I expect you were worried about prostate cancer, with the swelling and the symptoms. That I can most definitely rule out - so it's not been a bad day for you.'

At the basin, gloves off and binned, Bart scrubbed his hands while the former warrant officer, now on the training programme for the Saudi Arabian National Guard, spilled out the detail of his daily work.

Only when he'd finished saying anything useful, when he'd come off the couch, zipped up and belted his trousers, put his sneakers back on, did Bart start to hurry him.

'Convalescence isn't bad, two weeks till you can drive after the operation. No heavy lifting during that time. Actually, it's the anaesthetic - if you have a full one - that governs recovery time. I'll make all the arrangements, fix an appointment and, please, leave my receptionist with the details of your cover policy .. . It's been a real pleasure to meet you.'

When the patient had gone, having grinned and pumped Bart's hand in gratitude, he sat at his chair and made his notes. Nothing about an inguinal hernia. Everything about the National Guard's current training schedule, yes: all classified as top secret, all closely guarded by the leaders of the Kingdom. Good stuff, the best he'd had for at least two months. He was a kept man, Wroughton's toy-boy.

He had been a kept man since he had answered the advertisement, had been accepted for employment on the basis of his severely edited curriculum vitae, had flown to Cyprus, paying his own fare, and had taken a taxi that had cost a small fortune to Nicosia. Ann behind him, and the kids, all of them the responsibility of the bastard with the Saab franchise, and the divorce papers signed. Anew start and a new beginning in the sunshine. He hadn't crawled into the water, he had jumped. In the last month before he flew out of the UK, with no forwarding address for the sour-faced detective sergeant in Torquay or the pompous creep of a solicitor from the British Medical Association, he had begun a crash course in the Russian language.

What he'd read, there were more Russian banks on the island of Cyprus than anywhere other than Moscow. There would be Russians with heart problems, liver problems, kidney problems, and there would be British tourists with sunstroke and alcohol poisoning. Piece of cake, on his feet at last.

After a good dinner and an excellent sleep, having shaved carefully, then dressed in his best suit and a sombre tie, he had walked from his hotel to the block where the practice he would join worked from. Kept waiting twenty-five minutes, no coffee and no biscuits. Left to cool his heels before a harassed man, with a face that said death was visiting, had called him in. 'I regret, Dr Bartholomew, that the offer made in writing to you no longer stands. We have a considerable reputation on the island that my colleagues and I will not sacrifice.' A moment of leaden silence while the man looked at the floor and Bart had gaped. A letter was passed to him, headed

'British Medical Association'. It gave close detail of a police investigation into the illegal sale of class A drugs, as yet incomplete, and a BMA inquiry, as yet not concluded. The man shrugged, then almost ran to the door to open it. 'You understand, Dr Bartholomew, that no alternative is open to us.'

He had gone out, dazed, into the sunshine. His head had been bowed, so he had seen the cigarette tossed down on the pavement, then crushed under a polished shoe. A voice had said, in flawless pedigree English, 'What I always say, those days you wake up and the sun shines are those when you go out without an umbrella and the rain starts pissing down. Know what I mean? Raining now, isn't it? Let's go and have a drink and see if we can roll the clouds back. Come on.' He had been led and he had followed, as any kept man would.

When the notes were complete, Bart rang Wroughton to fix a lunchtime meeting, then buzzed for the next patient.

Beth stood where no man or woman had stood before. She should have felt a thrill of exhilaration, should have wanted to jump and cheer and punch the air.

The memories of the night trapped her. She stared around her, then began to walk forward. The crater was in front of her. What she had been told to find was a high wall of sand, the highest in that part of the desert, and four hundred paces from the right side of the wall was the perfect circle of the crater. It should have amazed her that her Bedouin informant could be so exact in his description of the place and, without a GPS, so certain of the route she should follow. She had driven only eleven point three miles from where the storm had caught her, and after four - when doubt was settling - she had seen the wall that towered higher than any others. The crater was a dozen strides across, its rim clear to see, and there were other, smaller, circle shapes near to it, and a scattering of dark grey stones.

The crater had a raised lip. Five hundred years before, or five thousand, or five million, a mass of rock had hurtled down from the heavens. Having burst the atmosphere it had detonated on impact.

The entry heat would have melted the external parts of the rock, leaving them as blackened slag, fusing the iron ore that was its signature, and creating intense heat sufficient to turn sand to glass.

There would have been, in that part of the Sands years before, the equivalent of an explosion by five kilotonnes of TNT. Perhaps there had been people close by, perhaps the desert had been as empty as now, but anything living within hundreds of metres of the ejecta field would have been killed. Her mind, mechanically, made calculations and estimates of the size of the meteorite, while her thoughts were on the young man who had saved her, who had told her, with steel authority, 'You never met me, I was never here . . . You never saw my face.'

Beth had been eight times to the Wabar site, the ninth largest in the world, with a principal crater four hundred metres across where an iron core mass of three thousand tonnes had impacted. The largest known was in Arizona, fourteen hundred metres in diameter, but to Beth that was a tourist site, boring, and she had not visited it. Nor had she gone to the site at Chicxulub, on Mexico's Yucatan coast, which dated back sixty-five million years: there, a rock said to have been the size of Everest had hit the earth's surface at perhaps six thousand miles an hour and had caused such seismic shocks as to destroy the dinosaur population and shift fractionally the earth's orbit - coachloads went there, utterly boring.