THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (56 page)

The dust filled the Ground Control Centre, settled on his head and his shoulders and spread over the chart of map boxes. She choked.

He heard her gulp and then she had hold of his hand.

'Heh, Marty, see that? What are we looking at?'

Wroughton was led into Gonsalves' empire.

All the desks were deserted. All the screens in the open-plan flickered, but were not watched. He went past a conference annexe, and through the door saw briefcases dumped and files left open.

Wroughton was brought to a technology and electronic control centre. He went in. Over shoulders, backs and heads there was a bank of screens. He saw Gonsalves in a Godawful floral shirt.

He said, 'I've hit a jackpot, Juan, and I'm sharing it with you.'

It should have been a moment of triumph for Eddie Wroughton. In the throne room of the empire, he held up the file and was ready to boast of what he had achieved. He won no reaction, except that Gonsalves waved a hand at him without turning, gestured for him to shut his mouth. He looked at the screen they all watched. And he heard the voice, metallic and distant, from the high speakers.

'That's good, Marty, and well done for bringing us back. You have eleven minutes more flying time on station. . . Lizzy-Jo, please, could you give me a zoom, right in close? I reckon it's a target.. . Good flying, guys. Oscar Golf, out.'

Bart carried the coolbox from the tail of his Mitsubishi, walked well and steadily. The vehicle was fuelled up and he'd discarded the empty cans by the tail.

He felt almost a slight disappointment in the young man:
How's he
going to get his name up in lights, murder half a city, if he can't blow us away? Not that he wanted to be dead, his thorax blasted, his spinal cord broken, lungs and heart punctured by bullets fired on semi-automatic, not that he wanted his blood coagulating in the sand and the flies clustering. He recognized the scale of the failure and it left him with a trace of sadness . .. The two men in the village, fingered by Bart, they would have shot him, would not have failed. He saw, to his right, that the guide and the boy had their animals loaded. He was not sure whose life had tipped the balance, had won his survival. He walked over to the young man who had the launcher on his shoulder and seemed to wait irresolutely by his camel, as if expecting help to mount it.

He reached him, put down the coolbox that held the drugs, syringes and dressings, and looked into the face.

'Can I pay you?'

Bart shook his head. There was, because of the traced smile, a charm about the face he had not registered before. The pain that had twisted it was gone. The shake of Bart's head was expansive, as if mere mention of remuneration cheapened him. He saw the cut of the chin, the delicate shape of the nose, and the brightness seemed back in the eyes. To Bart there was, in that short moment, an image of wildness, of freedom, of magnificence. Rambling, old boy, he thought. Rambling and getting bloody stupid. The bugger should have ended you .. . And it was what she had seen, little Miss Bethany Jenkins.

He turned away. He saw, fleetingly, that the guide's boy had moved a few paces from his father and a frown laced the young skin of his forehead.

She intercepted him, came towards him, and the sand kicked from her boots with the urgency of her stride. Nothing sweet about her, and her mouth was puckered in a suppressed anger. She stood in front of him, blocked him. 'You could have put him down.'

A sheepish smile, a shrug.

'He wouldn't have known - you could have squirted half a gallon of morphine into him.'

But he hadn't. He had patched him up, had brought him to his feet

- and had faced his rifle.

'Why didn't you?'

.

He snapped at her, 'Miss Jenkins, don't ever presume to look into a man's mind, search it and strip it. The exercise might cause you to put your delicate head between your knees and vomit.'

'That is pathetic.'

'It's what you're going to get and—'

The shout came, shrill, keened across the sand, rooted him. He saw the boy, one hand cupping an ear and the other pointed up. Bart's head jolted up to the sky, clear blue, and he saw nothing. He heard nothing. The boy howled the warning.

Bart stammered, 'What does he say - saying what - what?'

'The aircraft, up there - scatter - get clear.'

The guide's arms flailed. Right and left, in front of him and behind.

Now the boy ran, and the guide, and she had ducked her head and charged for open sand, and the camels caught the panic, except one.

The man, his patient, knelt beside his camel and held tight to its strained harness, had the launcher at his shoulder. Bart was alone.

He looked a last time into the sky, and then the sun was in his eyes and he was blinking, blinded. He was alone and stumbling towards his vehicle, groping towards it. He had no cover. He seemed to see himself grotesquely magnified, trapped by a hovering eye. He blundered towards the vehicle's cab, reached it, threw open the door.

Fumbling, grasping for the keys, twisting them, stamping on the clutch, then the accelerator - crying out in fear. He felt the power under him. The wheels spun, whined, then caught. He did not know whether he faced the track and headed for it, or went away from it.

He did not consider whether he could, lumbering across the desert, escape the aircraft's eye. He did not look at the speedometer, which would have told him that his pace over shifting sand was not more than twenty-five miles in an hour. Bart went in little surges on caked sand, then slowed in loose drifts. His eyes were misted from the sweat and the sun's power bounced at him from the Mitsubishi's bonnet. He could not see where he went, what was in front of him.

Clinging to the wheel, he drove away, jerking the gear lever, and never looked back, never glanced in his mirror at the sandcloud behind him, never thought of the trail he left for the high eye.

He had no idea of distance, might have gone a mile . . . He was in the drift.

Not a wall, not a barrier, but a steady sinking movement. The engine raced, whined, and the needle on the speedometer dial sagged from twenty to ten, to five. Going slower .. . He stamped harder on the accelerator, swung the wheel, went to the clutch and changed down, stamped again, and the loose sand of the drift settled round the tyres.

What to do? Bart did not know.

He did not know whether to claw his way out of the vehicle and try, in the scorched heat, to run. Did not know whether to go into reverse. He did not know whether to get out, go to the back, take the shovel and dig.

'He's got in a drift. Line him up, guys. In your own time, take him.

Oscar Golf, out.'

It was like driftwood washed up on a beach. Marty had flown the figure eights tighter as he had gone after the vehicle. Didn't know, not with
Carnival Girl
at altitude and on loiter thrust, how - down there on the sand - they had suddenly been aware of the Predator presence. Two vehicles, camels, and people had been on the screen.

Then they'd broken. His concentration had been on the flying, not the detail of the screen. Beside him, Lizzy-Jo hadn't had the zoom in focus and close until the smoke had started spilling from the back end of the vehicle. Of course, that was the target. At first the vehicle had done well, had gone clear of the group, and the screen had shown only the roof of its cabin and the tail of dust spat out behind it. It was the sort of target they did at Nellis for training recruits, slow and easily visible, then it had gotten easy - too easy. It had stopped.

He wondered if the guy would get out and run. He half hoped the guy would run. What he had was a vehicle, marooned and going nowhere.

'How long we got?'

She said they had a clear four minutes on station.

'How do you want me to come in?'

She wanted him on the driver's side, and said she'd take the Hellfire in through the driver's door.

Marty had no thoughts of grandfathers - not his own with whom he'd gone out duck-shooting, and not the old man strapped down on the back of a camel and laid out over the hump. He had not seen the man on the screen, as the man had run for the vehicle. He did not see a face and did not care to look for a mind . . . but he had the target.

The end of his figure eight brought him on to the passenger side of the vehicle, and he banked her, dipped the wing, for the half-circle to take him to a firing point against the driver's door. He did not understand why the guy did not run.

He heard Lizzy-Jo recite the check questions to herself, and give herself the check answers for readiness to launch.

Marty held
Carnival Girl
steady, and the camera image was flush on the driver's door. It was as if she hovered, a hawk, in the moment before the dive on the prey. Beside him, Lizzy-Jo whispered the command, then her finger hit the lit button. The screen shook, as if
Carnival Girl
had been punched by turbulence. Marty clenched his fist on the joystick, and watched the flame veer away. The ball of fire dived, like a hawk falling.

In the seconds before the Hellfire hit, Marty said, 'We'll go take a look at what's left behind, the rest of them, then we'll bring her back.'

'Yes, take her home.'

'She done us proud.'

'She's a great girl - then it's turn for home.'

The hit was on the driver's door. A flash of flame, then the first smoke, the climbing cloud of debris that obscured the target.

Around him there was, to Wroughton, an ejaculation of excitement.

He could have told them that the chosen target was not Caleb Hunt, terrorist or adventurer or fighter, could have told them that the vehicle belonged to a pathetic doctor of medicine, that the driver was pitiful and harmless. Gonsalves' people whooped and screamed and stamped applause. They hung on each other, clung to each other. He thought the death of Samuel Bartholomew, gossip and spy, made a Mardi Gras day for them. He knew that if his telephone had not been unplugged, and if he had not tapped in the code on his mobile that prevented messages being recorded, Bart, his puppet, would have called him. He held the file, and the noise of celebration hit the low ceiling of the control centre, and Wroughton knew he would not be heard.

Ignored, he said softly, 'Idiots, you killed a nobody. You took out the wrong target.'

*

The fire flash, the Hellfire's launch, gave Caleb his aim point.

He stood, he was alone. The Beautiful One had gone, and the other camels. In the distance, clear to see against the sands and the sky, was the cloud of smoke. He did not know where the guide and the boy, Ghaffur, were, where she was, and he did not look for them. His memory held the point in the blue stretched sky where the flash had come from.

He did it as he had learned it from the manual.

The guidance antenna at the muzzle end of the tube was unfolded.

The covering cap of the tube was discarded, lay by his bare and sand-worn feet. The open sight was raised and the belt pack hung on his waist. The impulse-generator switch was depressed by his finger.

Caleb did it as the manual told him, without the one hundred and thirty-six hours of instruction that the manual demanded. He heard the whine of the audio signal, struggled to hold up the weight of the launcher, and stood - solid and square - with his two legs taking equally the strain of it: no support, no crutch. The pain throbbed in the wound, which was raw and not closed by stitches. He pulled the trigger in the grip stock. The manual said it was one point seven seconds from trigger depression to motor ignition. The missile lurched from the tube and fire scorched the sand behind him. He saw it so sharply, the clumsy flight from the tube mouth, and, for a moment, he thought it would fall back and roll in front of him on the sand. The tail fins opened out and - as the manual had said - the ejector motor dropped away. A flash as the second-stage engine bit, and she was away.

He sank to his knees. The sand behind him, burned from the exhaust fire and the ignition fumes, stank acrid in his nose. He would have fallen, had he not had the tube to support him.

It was gone fast above the low horizon line. He watched the fire that powered it ebb from him, diminish from him against the sky's blue.

He depended on
their
technology,
their
electronics,
their
magic and wizardry.

It flew free, beyond his control. Twice it meandered, as if it had lost sight of the target, and it hunted to find it again, and twice it locked back. He peered up to where its path took it, close to the sun, but he saw nothing. He did not know where the men would be who flew it, but he imagined the ever-increasing chaos around them as they dived the craft or climbed it, or threw it to the side, tried to lose the closing spurt of fire. The hit was so sudden. It darted, bent its course, sharp, as if its last command was late. High, near to the sun where his eyes burned, a little flash of brightness, but small against the sun's light.

It was not a clean strike. There was no explosion. The little flash, and then the fire moved on, soared higher and burst.

For a long time, Caleb looked up. He looked until his eyes had watered, until he blinked, until he could no longer stare up close to the sun, and the heat burdened him and the flies clustered on the dressing on his leg, and the pain washed in him, and he was alone.

It was a speck, falling, and he thought he heard the voice of a child, singing.

It was a swan's song. The far edge of the left wing had been hit, a great destabilizing hole punched in it.

The Predator, brilliant white from nose tip to tail, from port wing to left wing, was spinning down.

Control was gone, death inevitable, falling, with the wind streaming against its wings - until the debris scattered in the sand, until the fire became a pyre.

If he had spoken someone would have hit him. They had all watched the Predator go down. If he had spoken, had pointed out that he had warned of the crates the camels carried, he would have been hit. The silence was like life arrested. The picture on the screen, untouched, was a white-out snowstorm. They had still been in noisy celebration, without shame and not a thought of the incinerated corpse in the vehicle, as the camera had tracked back over the sand, and there had been the flash from far below. At first, a little winnow of confusion: