THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (34 page)

It was late in the afternoon when they had halted, not to pitch camp. The guide said they would stop for a short time, then go on.

Caleb sat against the body of the kneeling Beautiful One and felt the rhythmic panting of the beast against his back.

If he went where his memory took him, he would have stood with his arms outstretched, his head thrown back and his shirt unbuttoned, and he would have let the rain cascade on to him. When it had drenched him, and his clothes had clung to him, he would have danced and sung, gloried in it. He would not have huddled like the woman who pushed her baby in a buggy on the pavement or cringed from it like the man on the towpath who dragged his tiny ratting dog on a lead. He yearned for the rain that would have cooled the heat burning him and soothed the blister sores, that would have dribbled sweet on his lips.

The guide had poured water from the neck of a water bag into a metal mug that Fahd had held. Fahd had carried the mug to Hosni.

Perhaps Hosni did not see the mug clearly. Perhaps his eyesight failed him, perhaps he was too confused by exhaustion, by sunstroke. Hosni reached out, snatched at the mug, missed it and caught Fahd's wrist, twisted it. The mug toppled. Water fell from it, like rain.

The water drops from the mug sparkled, jerked Caleb from his fantasy.

'Idiot. .. fool,' Fahd screamed.

Hosni whimpered.

'You wasted water - imbecile.'

Hosni had the mug in his thin claw fingers and tugged for it. More water slurped over the rim. When Fahd released his hold on the mug and Hosni sagged back, more water spilled.

'I bring you water. What do you do? You throw it in the sand.'

Caleb watched, said nothing. The mug would have been a third full when Fahd had offered it to Hosni's stretched-out hands. Now there would only be a wetness at the mug's bottom.

'You don't get any more. You waste water, you go without,' Fahd yelled in his fury and his body quivered. 'We should never have brought you.'

He saw Hosni tilt the mug so that the last drops would run into his mouth, and then run his tongue round the sides and the base of it.

Hosni's wet watery eyes seemed to plead with Fahd as he prised the mug back from the fingers.

'There is no more water for you. I am not sharing my water with you.'

Fahd took away the mug. Caleb saw Hosni, his head bent, scrape the film of sand off the place where the water had fallen to retrieve the sand that was darkened. He cupped it into his hands, gobbled it into his mouth, then choked. The guide poured out Fahd's measure and Fahd drank it to the final drop.

'You will learn it for the next time, you do not throw away water,'

Fahd shouted.

Without water, they died. The camels could go a maximum of eighteen days without water, the boy had said, then they would die

- Caleb had long ago lost count of how many days they had been in the Sands. The men could not go eighteen hours without water. The bags on the Beautiful One were all empty. Caleb was not sure how many bags remained, filled, on the guide's camel; one or two, he hoped . .. Water went again into the mug, and Fahd brought it to him. Caleb took the mug.

He looked down into the water. It was green-coloured, dead. He felt the dryness of his throat, the roughness inside his mouth.

He remembered the rain, and the comfort of it. He held the mug carefully as he stood and walked across to Hosni.

He put his finger into Hosni's mouth, worked it round his tongue and the recesses of the man's throat, took out the sand and smeared it on his robe. Then, Caleb held the mug at Hosni's lips and tipped it.

When it was empty he carried the mug back to Rashid.

'We are carrying two fools,' Fahd snarled at Caleb, his face contorted with anger.

The heat burning them and burning the sand, and the sky that was clear, blue and without pity, the expanse of the desert, destroyed them. Caleb knew it.

They mounted up, rode away, and the windblown sand covered any trace of their passing.

Another lunchtime, another lecture. The crossword on the back page of Michael Lovejoy's newspaper had not yet been started. The folded page lay across his knee and the pencil was in his hand, but he had read no more than the first question, one across:
A woman who strives
to he like a man lacks . . . (Graffito, NY)
eight letters. Lovejoy had his usual seat at the back of the room. He'd come down early, when he'd finished a mid-morning meeting, and had left the newspaper on the favoured chair. Just as well. They were sitting on the aisle steps and standing inside the door.

The speaker had the appearance of an old-fashioned preparatory-school teacher. He was as mild-looking a man as could be imagined wispy grey hair that had not been combed, a checked shirt with the collar curled up, a woven tie that was not pulled tight, a jacket with leather at the elbows, trousers that hadn't been pressed, and shoes that were scuffed. The man who had filled the lecture room in Thames House, on the north embankment of the river, came with a reputation. Officers from every branch of the Security Service had cut lunch to hear the scientist who was said to be better-informed on his specialized subject than any other man or woman in the United Kingdom. The subject was 'Dirty Bombs'.

'I don't consider there to be a great risk from either microbiological or chemical sources. An explosion that scatters anthrax or smallpox spores or that spreads a nerve gas in aerosol form would have little effect, even in the confined space of an underground-railway system.

The evidence from the United States of America, anthrax, and from Japan, nerve gas such as Sarin, tells me the result is bigger in instant headlines than in the reality of damage caused. No, it is the real Dirty Bomb that concerns me, the radioactive bomb. Let us consider, first, the availability of the necessary materials for that bomb . . . '

There was a grated cough from the assistant director of C Branch, otherwise nervous silence. Lovejoy had read the assessments, but the slightness and mildness of the speaker, and the quietness of his voice, gave his message a uniquely chilling quality. He was known to many of his younger colleagues - when they were polite about him - as a

'veteran'. A veteran of the Cold War counter-intelligence work, and the days of the Marxists in the trade unions, and a veteran of the twenty years of Irish guerrilla warfare, he had also learned the earlier history of the Security Service. Already, he thought this the bleakest lecture of a nightmare future he had heard since he had enrolled from Army service. In fact, and his mind roved, the only comparable moment would have been when the Service was told, sixty-four years earlier, of the imminence of a German invasion.

'We start with a suitcase. Any suitcase of a size that a man or woman uses for a week's stay in a hotel. Stand at Heathrow airport, at the arrivals gates of any of the terminals, and you will see passengers flooding through with suitcases of such a size. The wires and timing devices are available at any hardware and electronics shops. The terrorist will need ten pounds of Semtex or military explosives or what's used in quarrying operations, and he'll need detonators - everything so far is readily available. Sadly, and I urge you to believe me, the necessary radioactive material can be found without difficulty. Caesium chloride would be suitable. Vast quantities of it litter the countryside and farm buildings of the former Soviet Union. It was used to blast seeds, in powder form, at high pressure, therefore making them more productive once sown. We do not have to go to the agricultural industries of Belarus or the Ukraine. Radioactive materials govern X-rays. Medical instruments for the treatment of cervical cancer use caesium. The radio isotope caesium 137, which if spilled has a contamination life of thirty years, is widely used in radiotherapy. We are awash with it, but I am going to stay with caesium chloride, what you could hold in one hand, no more - bought in lethal quantities for next to nothing. The caesium chloride is packed round the explosives, and is covered with clothes, books, washing-bags, presents, and only the most awake security man at an airport, monitoring check-in and fresh off a meal break, will see anything suspicious.'

All of them in the room were supposed to be the last line of defence for the tax-payers who coughed up their salaries. He did not know where that defence line could be drawn, and the hushed quiet in the room told him that none of the others, newcomers or old-timers, had a bloody clue . .. and he remembered the young Russian from last week, and the psychologist from the week before, and their messages. He would go home that night to his wife, Mercy, and not stop at the pub - where they thought he worked for Social Security -

and he'd talk it through with her, because she was the only shoulder for crying on that he had.

'A man walks with this suitcase, not an onerous burden, into London's Trafalgar Square or New York's Times Square or he approaches a major intersection in central Paris. He puts down the suitcase and walks away, and before the alarm is raised, the suitcase explodes. A big, big bang. On that night's television news, we see burning cars, damaged buildings - all very obvious - and we are told that three people have been killed and thirty injured. We do not see or hear the cloud, the particles of caesium chloride. The cloud climbs in air heated by the detonation, then it moves on the wind. The speed is extraordinary - half a mile in one minute, five miles in thirty minutes. The particles reach cooler air, further from the bomb site, and they drop. They fall on grass, into gardens, on to buildings that are residential and that house thousands of office workers, and they seep into drains and through the air-intake ducts of the underground's ventilation system. Twenty-four hours later, the terrorists use a Middle East originating website to announce that the bomb is dirty, the city is contaminated. Then, ladies and gentlemen, what do you do?'

Go and live in a cave in mid-Wales. Go and rent a farmhouse in the Yorkshire dales. There were no names, no faces, on the files in Library, and Lovejoy doubted that the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation held anything of value. They groped in the dark. He sensed, in the room, a pent-up desire to be out and looking, hunting, and a matching frustration that there was no target to search for.

'Depending on the proximity to the explosion, the particles could be harmful to human life for up to two hundred years - which is, to most of us, for ever. The risk of fast-developing cancer is small, but in the long-term that risk increases. In theory millions, born and unborn, face the nightmare of being cut down by hideous tumours.

In reality, the greater problem for government is the spread of panic.

Panic.
An ugly word for an ugly image. The creation of panic is the terrorist's principal aim, and I guarantee to you that he will have succeeded. Consider the psychological impact, so much worse than the recent SARS outbreak, then imagine panic on a scale never seen before by our western societies, and a commercial shut-down that is unprecedented. You see, ladies and gentlemen, civilians under the weight of the German blitz or the Anglo-American bombing of Hamburg, Berlin or Dresden could see, feel, touch, hear those attacks

- but this cloud moves invisibly, at speed, silently. Panic would be total. What response can government make?'

Precious little - it would come out of a clear blue sky. The explosion, the panic would tumble from that sky, probably without warning. And the lead to the identity of such a man who carried a suitcase, that also would come out of the same cloudless sky The good old clear blue sky was both the hell and the heaven of counter-intelligence officers.

'The clean-up after the spill of one fistful of radioactive material in a Brazilian city, not scattered by explosives and not riding on the wind, necessitated the removal of three and a half thousand cubic metres of earth and rubble. My scenario is a bomb in the heart of a city, and the impossibility of stripping out buildings, tunnels, gardens and parks. It would take years, not months - and where then do you dump this Himalayan heap of dirtied material? The cost would be prohibitive. I venture that the answer is mass evacuation, then the abandonment of an inner city . . . The panic caused would initiate a new Dark Age. I can offer only one fractionally small area of comfort to you.'

Lovejoy decided on the answer to one across.

'If the man who carried the suitcase into that crowded city centre never opened it, never touched the caesium chloride, and was well clear when it exploded, he would survive. I cannot say the same for the bomb-maker. I would estimate that the bomb-maker's un-avoidable contact with the powder would limit his life to a few weeks after the completion of the device. He would die a slow and most unpleasant death. That is the only comfort I can offer you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your attention.'

There was 110 titter of relieved laughter at the fate of a bomb architect, and no applause when the scientist stepped back from the lectern. No chair moved. Lovejoy wrote:
Ambition.
'A woman who strives to be like a man lacks ambition'. It would give him a start for three, five and six down. For a moment, the crossword was protection for Michael Lovejoy against the awfulness of the message.

When he reached his office, and his sandwich, there was a note on his desk from his Branch director.

Mikey,

Arriving tomorrow, American Airlines 061, from Florida, is Jed Dietrich (Defense Intelligence Agency). His people coy/shy about reason for his travel to UK, but they request co-operation. You, please, meet, escort and wet-nurse.

Boris.

A clear blue sky - not bloody likely. He looked from his window, out over the Thames. The cloud was low, ashen and carried rain.

The voice was quiet, calm, and eased into Marty's headphones. 'This is Oscar Golf. We appreciate that conditions are adverse, but we think we - you, sorry - are doing well. You have good control and we like what you're doing.'

He acknowledged curtly.

'Unless there is a major deterioration in upper-air wind strength, we believe that we - sorry again - you should keep the bird up.