Gerald Seymour - At Close Quarters

He knotted the top of the bag.

Rebecca said, "Did we win anything?"

Major Zvi Dan muttered, "We lost a man who was without price."

"Not anything?"

"We lost an agent. Menny can never go back. Perhaps he, also, was beyond price."

"The British won."

"They won only vanity. Only conceit."

"Didn't Holt, at least, win?"

"If you had asked him I doubt he would have told you that he had won anything that was of value to him."

Rebecca carried the bag and Major Zvi Dan hobbled behind her. She took the bag to the corner of the camp where the rubbish of the troops was burned. With his finger Major Zvi Dan made a hole in the bag, exposed the paper, and with his lighter set fire to the bag.

A team of army engineers was set to work to dismantle the bell tents. They worked, stripped to the waist, in the midday heat. The recruits were not there to help them, they had in the morning been taken by bus to the Yarmouq camp outside Damascus.

High on the hillside above the work party was a small and unnoticed rock overhang. Under the overhang, hidden in shadow, undiscovered, lay two Bergens, and on top of one pack was a carefully folded square of scrim netting, and on top of the other pack was a single, used cartridge case.

Beyond the camp perimeter wire was a cairn of sun 21

In the darkness he walked on the moor.

Away below him, distant and separated from him by the black void, were the lights of cars moving on the roads between Dulverton and Exford, and Hawkridge and Withypool, and Liscombe and Winsford.

The moor was his, as the Beqa'a had been his and Crane's. He walked silently in this wilderness, each footfall tested, and for company he had the deer herds, and the hunting foxes, and the rooting badgers, and the sheep that had been freed from the pens in the valley and allowed to wander in search of the new summer grass of the higher ground.

He walked until the dawn light seeped onto the royal purple expanse of the moor, and when it was time for him to settle into his lying up position then he came down from the moor and took the road to the stone house that was the home of his mother and father.

In the early morning he packed a bag, and he told his mother that he was going back to work, and he asked his father to drive him to the railway station at Tiverton Junction.

His father gazed into the secret and unexplaining eyes of his son.

"Are you all right, Holt?"

"I'm all right, it's the others who have been hurt." bleached stones. The cairn marked the grave of a young man who had given himself the n a m e of Abu Hamid who had been a fighter for a refugee people, who had been a foreign cadet at the military academy at Sim feropol, who had once been frightened of death, who had a crow's foot scar on his cheek.

The depth of the grave, the weight of the stones, were reckoned to be proof against the hyenas who would come to scavenge the camp site once the army engineers had lifted the tents onto their lorries and driven away.