THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (43 page)

The words croaked in Caleb's throat. 'You sent your son?'

'I sent my son into the Sands, that you might live. We are just two men That we are alive is because of the Egyptian. He rode away from us. He took the eye in the sky from us. The eye went after him.

I heard the explosion as we fled. He gave his life for us, for you. You have to live, it is owed to him.'

And to your son . ..'

His eyes closed. His hold on what was around him slackened. So tired, so weak. He did not have the strength to think of the wound in his leg or the wound in the side of his head. He drifted. He was by the canal, on the pavement close to the black-painted door, was kicking the ball in the yard and aiming at the glass in the hatch of the overturned washing-machine . . . He was nothing, nobody. He lost the pain, lost the cool, healing touch of the wet cloth. He lost the image of the boy, his bright mischief eyes, sent by his father and alone in the Sands.

In the Hummer, they played Willie Nelson loud. Will drove and Pete did the satellite navigation. 'Help Me Make It Through The Night'

came out of the CD system. Two more Hummers, with the Arabs, followed them. Will never trusted an Arab to drive him, and Pete never reckoned anyone else but himself could do better on navigation. Both rated the Hummer, the civilian version of the Army's Humvee, as the best there was on wheels, and capable of taking them where a helicopter - screwed up with the density altitude barrier from the heat - could not. They were the same age, had been through the same Galveston education line, lived on adjacent plots in the Houston suburbs, and did the same work. They were two gas-extraction field surveyors. Blood brothers. The trip, never a snide word between them, had already taken them across in excess of six hundred miles of sand - but the mapping now was complete. That night, if the Hummer with three tonnes loaded on her held up - and the Hummers with the Arabs behind them - they would be on a late plane back to Riyadh. They were on the Exxon-Mobil books, earned good money - and the world, because of where they were, owed them it.

Time had slipped away, two and a half weeks of it. For eighteen days they had driven, camped, worked in the Empty Quarter, without sight of human company other than the Arabs who travelled behind them; top temperature out there was a confirmed 124°

Fahrenheit. The Hummer took them anywhere they fancied going, up dunes and down them, through loose sand.

'Well, well, lookey-here . . .'

Will was imagining the juicy burger he'd have on their return to the Riyadh hotel.

'Hey, no foolin', take a look.'

Will said, 'Well, I'll be. You got some hawk eyes on you. I'd have driven right on by.'

'I don't reckon we should. Look it, he's just a kid.'

A hundred yards, a little more, to the right of where they came down off the dune, were a child and a camel. The camel stood and the boy sat in its shade. At that distance, through the sealed sand-sprayed windows, they could see, each of them, the gaunt resignation on the boy's face. The camel, dead on its feet, didn't even turn towards them as they edged closer.

'Like they're jus' waitin' to die.'

'This is one evil fucking place.'

'I reckon the camel's just stopped, won't go another step. You're gonna go and git yourself a rosette, Pete, that's one good deed for the day.'

Fifteen minutes later, they moved on. The kid was stowed on top of the luggage mountain on the second Hummer. The camel was dead, shot with a bullet to the head by their camp manager. They were two hard men, away from home in Houston for eight months of every year, played hard and drove themselves hard. Neither spoke. Pete had a wet eye and Will would have choked on any words. The kid had held the camel, soft hands round its neck as the rifle barrel had gone against its head, and the big dopey brown eyes had been on the kid. Blood had spattered when the bullet had been fired - new blood on old across the kid's robe. Old caked blood covered the kid's robe .. . He wouldn't talk of it. The camp manager had tried, hadn't gotten an answer - it wasn't the kid's blood. What the kid said, translated by the camp manager, he had to get to Miss Bethany at Shaybah, and nothin' else.

Will thought of the fruit machines he played when he could find them - thought he had a better chance of a once-a-year jackpot than the kid had had of being spotted out there in the sand.

Pete reckoned that Someone, up there in the clear blue sky, must have cared for the kid, must have watched out for him, because if he'd come down the dunes heading left they'd never have seen him.

The Hummer powered towards Shaybah, the late-night flight out and burgers in Riyadh.

*

The deputy governor was ushered out by Gennifer.

Before the outer door had closed, the ambassador had the internal phone against his face.

'Gonsalves, that you? The ambassador here. Get yourself down to me, please, with a degree of urgency.'

He reflected. Power had shifted from his desk. The evacuation of military personnel from the big airbase south of the capital had grievously wounded his status. The war in Iraq had further damaged it. The pending lawsuits - where legal men back in New York talked billions of dollars in prohibitive damages on behalf of the victims of the Twin Towers - against members of the ruling elite, the Royal Family, had caused a breakdown in precious trust. The compound attacks in Riyadh had been a coffin nail. Before the evacuation, the war, the filed suit, and the suicide bombers' assault, he would have told - with exquisite politeness - the deputy governor to go stuff himself. The world marched on, and the Kingdom was no longer his fiefdom. Another year and he would be teaching at Yale.

The door opened after a knock, and Gennifer showed the Agency man inside.

He launched: 'Gonsalves, this is not a criticism. I have no complaint about the liaison you have had with me. You told me, and I acknowledge it, that you were bringing a Predator team into the Shaybah Field base for, as I remember it, surveillance of the Rub' al Khali - under a pretence of mapping and also the testing of performance in extreme heat. Well, we have a problem.'

The ambassador was a man for whom personal appearances mattered. He changed his shirt twice in a day, and three times if he had an important evening function. He always wore a tie, never dragged the knot down or loosened his collar button. Opposite him, lounging and appearing at the edge of sleep Gonsalves wore jeans, a grubby vest and an open shirt. His face was stubbled, his hair uncombed, like some damned Fed in deep cover in Little Italy, the right gear for lamp-post leaning.

'The local authorities here are increasingly suspicious of us. There is growing obstruction. It comes down to a desire to derail us. Just out of my office is the deputy governor, the province that includes that big block of sand, and Shaybah. We are not welcome. No longer are Predator aircraft welcome at Shaybah. We have little prying eyes watching us, you'd know that better than me, seeking to flex long-unused muscles. I suppose there's other places you can go - Djibouti or Dohar - but the door at Shaybah is closed. Two alternatives: ship out and smile, cut them in and tell them what you're doing . . . I know which I would go for. Personally, I would not trust the last live rat in the Kingdom with detail of any anti-Al Qaeda operation of sensitivity. I think you should talk to your people. I bought you some time, probably about three days, but no more.'

Not too many clouds passed over the Riyadh sun. A cloud flitted across Gonsalves' face. He was up and heading for the door, like he'd a bayonet under his backside.

'It was surveillance, wasn't it, Gonsalves? Just surveillance?'

from the door, a child's smile spread across the Agency man's face. 'Yes, we were watching them. Right down to the time the Hellfires hit. We watched them when the secondary explosions, ordnance, blew. If you ever get tired of TV movies just call me, and I'll send you down a video.'

'Three days.'

The smile was gone. 'It's a prime route to where they are.'

It was like they were wary of each other.

There were areas that were off-limits.

The light had gone out for him, Lizzy-Jo thought.

Three days and three nights back, George had thrown a bucket of water on to the Ground Control steps but there were still scrapes on the treads of his dried-out vomit. He'd brought her in, had made a good landing for First Lady, then had gone to his tent. He had not studied the video the morning after, not like the first time, had not seen a second time the zoomed lens image of the old man bent across the camel's neck. He had not gone out to see the handiwork of George on the fuselage of First Lady, the new skull-and-crossbones stencil. Had not eaten with her, had not talked with her. What did he think it was all for? A teen game in an arcade? Staying in for computer warfare because it was raining outside? There hadn't been fun between them, or laughter.

Three days and three nights. That was enough.

She looked away from her screen, flipped off the switch that gave voice contact to Oscar Golf. 'OK, so he looked like your damn granpa

- so what? You think Al Qaeda pensions them out, don't do granpas?

Don't be a wuss - you're a kid who wants to play with the big boys'

toys. Grow up. Next time you want to go soft I'm making certain the whole world's going to hear and you'll be dead in a junkyard.'

She slipped the switch back, regained voice contact with Langley.

The sand slipped across her screen as it had done for most of the hours of three days and three nights, all the time that
First Lady
had flown. When they landed her, seven more hours and into the night, she would be grounded for maintenance. The next day they would take up
Carnival Girl,
the old lady. She was beginning to hate the fucking sand.

On the screen it was empty, had been in all their flying hours spread over three days and three nights, and the real-time camera in the day and the electro-optic/infra-red in the darkness had shown up nothing.

The teleprinter started up.

They were on new boxes. They'd circled where the old man had been, lying across the kneeling camel, before the Hellfire pulverized him, and they'd stayed up there on station till the smoke dust had cleared. When the cloud had gone, after they'd seen the small crater, he'd brought her back over the first hit and the larger crater. Then they'd gone searching. Four camels, no riders, in the screen. Four camels tied together, no men, followed for a half-hour, then allowed to go on. If they'd searched again, hard enough, she thought they'd have found one camel down and the rest standing and unable to drag themselves clear, or two camels down . . . dying in the sand, under the sun.

Best that they'd been given a new set of boxes to work over.

Lizzy-Jo tore the sheet off the teleprinter. She felt bad at the verbal abuse she'd given him but did not know an alternative.

'Listen,' she said. 'Just less than seventy hours and we're out of here. The Saudis have closed us down. If that's what Bagram is, we're going home. Hey, you shoot, you score - we wiped out bad people, and their granpa, wasted them.'

He came out of the supermarket. He loathed the place, a little corner of London or New York, but it was fast and quick. Faster and quicker because so many of the expatriates it was designed to serve had checked out from the Kingdom, gone back where they'd come from.

He would have liked to browse in a street market, buy what was local, but the security situation forbade it.

In two plastic bags Eddie Wroughton carried a sliced loaf of bread, two litres of milk and three chilled meals-for-one that would go into his microwave, a kilo of New Zealand-grown apples and two containers of water allegedly bottled in Scotland. That evening, had it been normal - but it was not - he should have eaten at the Gonsalves'

kitchen table, then chucked a Softball in their backyard.

He crossed the car park. There were high lights, sufficient to show him his own vehicle, but they threw down shadows. He did not see the red Toyota, or the man who loitered close to it. The lights fell, for a moment, on his linen suit and his laundered white shirt; the silk of his tie glistened and made stars on the darkness of his glasses. His mind unravelled an old memory. The family Sunday lunch, and the next day he was going to Century House for the start of his recruits'

induction course. His father there, his grandfather and his great-uncle - old warriors of intelligence - and the talk had gone on from how he should conduct himself with his examiners and had eddied to comfortable nostalgia. Old campaigns refought - and port passed, cigars lit, and the bone had been the favourite one for chewing . .. the
Americans.

'Never trust them, Eddie, never ever.'

'The greatest sin for an American is to lose - don't forget that, Eddie, don't. Make certain you're on a different planet if they're losing, don't be up close.'

' A chap once said: "America is a big happy dog in a small room, and each time it wags its tail it breaks something." They don't even notice, Eddie, the damage they do. Be your own man, not their poodle.'

He had thought Juan Gonsalves was his friend .. . He reached his vehicle, zapped his lock, then the shadow was across him. He opened the back door, to dump the bags.

Is that Mr Wroughton, Mr Eddie Wroughton?' the voice, English language and foreign accent, whined.

He turned. The man came from the shadows, tall and wiry, middle aged, with a sharpness in his eyes.

He said curtly, 'Yes, that's me.'

Is that the bastard who fucks my wife?'

Nowhere to back off to. His vehicle was behind him. The man was in front of him. From the high lights, he saw the clenched fists and the stone-bruised, sand-scraped boots, and the loathing at the mouth.

Wroughton stiffened, felt the deadness in his legs and arms, couldn't have run. Could have shouted out, could have yelled for Security at the main doors, but his throat had tightened: nothing would have come from it. He saw the right boot swing back. The kick came into his shin, against the bone and the pain ran rivers. He crumpled. His head went down and the clenched fist hit him on the side of the jaw, the edge of his cheek. More kicks, some on the thigh and the target was his groin. More fist blows and his head was a punchball. He was down. Men from the Royal Military Police came to the fort on the south coast - outside Portsmouth - and taught self-defence. Last time he'd been on the course was seven years back, before the posting to Riga. He tried to protect his head - could not protect head and testicles. One or the other. It was done cold. Iced venom. Not frantic or flailing. It was the attack of a street-fighter. Where had a bloody Belgian agronomist learned the tactics of a street-fighter? Nothing said, not a word. The man did not even pant. Wroughton felt the blood in his mouth. He was not going to die, he knew that. The man was too calm to kill him, intended only to humiliate. The tinted spectacles had gone and he heard the crunch of the boot on them, then a hand snatched at his tie, grasped the silk and pulled up his head with it. Twice, as he choked on the tightened knot, the fist hit his face, once the lower lip, once the bridge of his nose. The man spat in his face.