Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

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:

'What's that?… What we got?' The one called Oscar Golf, on the loudspeakers, had never lost his calm. There had been a woman's voice, merged with Oscar Golf's, a flat monotone, as if it were merely a training exercise and instructors had thrown up a problem. The aircraft had swerved, made violent manoeuvres, but the fireball – shown by the lens – had closed. She'd gone down, spinning and spiralling, and the lens had shown a mad image of yellow reddened . sand racing to meet her. The voice of Oscar Golf was gone, cut off in mid-sentence – a switch thrown. Who wanted an inquest on failure?

Hell, it was only a piece of metal junk, off a factory floor – not the death of a friend. As the audience slouched out, as Gonsalves in that hideous shirt came to him and punched him on the upper chest, Wroughton opened the file and held up the photographs of Caleb Hunt, schoolboy, Camp Delta prisoner and Rub' al Khali fugitive.

'That's who you didn't get, that's your target.' Wroughton chuckled.

'What is it with you people? So goddamn patronizing. You keep a notebook on points scored?'

They were both laughing, hugging and hanging on to each other, and laughing, like they didn't care it was the waiting room of a funeral parlour, laughing till it hurt… and it did hurt because a target of importance had been missed.

He did not look back at her.

The last he saw of her, she was sitting on the sand on a dune and her head was down.

If he had gone to her – confused and tongue-tied and deafened by the launcher's blast – he did not know what he would have said to her.

Neither the guide, Rashid, nor the boy, Ghaffur, had helped him mount the saddle on the hump of the Beautiful One. He was beyond feeling the pain of the wound. He had struggled to drag himself up, then to swing the leg across the saddle.