Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

The pilot said, smile beaming, 'Right on. You should be glad we're flying out today, forecast is nasty tomorrow – storms and winds that'll gust to seventy knots – good that we got the window today I'll come and talk after we've lifted off.'

The request welled in Marty's throat as he unfastened the harness clasp. The pilot was half gone through the hatch door, and the ramp was already up. The second pilot had started up the heavy engines.

Marty had to yell: 'Excuse me, sir, but could I ask you a favour?

Means a lot to me.'

He explained, shouted it in the pilot's ear above the growing howl as the power gathered.

The transporter, laden to the maximum, used the length of the runway, and even then the undercarriage seemed to skim the airfield's perimeter. The pilot should have done an immediate starboard turn for a plotted flight path to the Omani border, then the crossing of the Jabal Akhdar mountains but instead banked to port on lift-off. Marty gave him the map co-ordinates, which were passed on to the navigator, lines were pencil-drawn on the map and the diversion course was set. He clung to the back of the pilot's seat and the transporter shook and bumped as it gained height. Lizzy-Jo was crouched beside him, her hand over his fingers clamped on the seat. He thought that she understood his need. They crossed plateau sand and dunes, and the mountains of the desert. They went over the track

– a traffic-control tower queried them, and the pilot said, dry, that navigation equipment had gone faulty, was being worked on, would be rectified in the near future – left it behind them. The navigator did well.

She lay two miles below them. Spread out, fractured, dead. The pilot took them on a tilting circuit. Marty had his nose pressed against the glass of the cockpit side window. He saw the twenty-foot length of one white wing, and the broken pieces of the fuselage. He did not know how to say a prayer, but words of respect choked at the back of his mouth. Lizzy-Jo held his shoulder tight, but it was his moment. He grieved… Her fingernails cut down through his T-shirt and then she rapped the pilot's arm and gestured beyond the wreckage.

They saw the arrow. It was on raised ground and pointed across open sand. It seemed, to Marty, as if the arrowhead of bright colours was laid out to be seen from the air. The navigator made calculations, then scribbled on his pad the exact compass bearing in which the arrowhead faced.

Lizzy-Jo said, 'Someone left a marker – someone wants them fucked over. Thanks for the diversion, sir. Let's get on home now.'

As they climbed, headed for the Omani border, for the mountain range of Jabal Akhdar and for the wide sea of the Gulf of Oman, Lizzy-Jo u s e d the communications and broadcast the co-ordinate reference points and the compass bearing – and they went back to their canvas seats.

Marty slept, his head on her shoulder.

The winds rose and they went into the teeth, the mouth of the storm.

His eyes were closed against the spat pricks of the sand. Had his eyes been open he would have been blinded. Waves came across him, beat on him, threatened to drag him down off the saddle, to pitch him on to the desert's floor. The Beautiful One led him. Caleb could not have directed her. He let the reins hang loose and clung to the saddle, and when the fiercest gusts hit him he dropped his arms on to her neck and held the long hair. He knew that if they stopped, found a dune that protected them and huddled for shelter behind it, they would never regain the direction of their path. And, if the Beautiful One flinched from the storm, turned away from it, they were dead. The force of the storm brought the hot, scalding air against him, flattened his robe against his body. The sand was in his closed eyes, his pinched nostrils and his mouth, and it beat into the wound, lifted the lint dressing and lay in the cavity that was not stitched closed. He could not drink, could not eat. His throat was raw, dry – his stomach was aching, empty. Stubborn, as he had always been, Caleb clung to life.

Again and. again – his mouth closed because to open it would let in the storm's sand – he shouted in his mind that he had not lived lo fail now. Obstinacy gave him strength. If he went down, on to the sand and against the Beautiful One's body, his life was wasted… before it had begun. He did not see skeletons in the sand, the whitened b o n e s of a man and a camel, rotted clothing and the frayed sacking leatheer of a saddle. He did not know how fast the Beautiful One carried him, or how far she could take him against the lash of the wind.

He was alone with his God, with his purpose.

*

A day had passed. The shuttle bus waited at the end of the ferry pier.

It took Jed to Camp Delta. He showed his card and the guard let him through the turnstile gate. He'd had a good flight to Miami, then a feeder to Puerto Rico, then a military ride to Guantanamo. He had left his bag at the reception of Officers' Quarters, had not checked back in but had gone for the ferry, taking with him only the filled file.

Jed thought the guard looked at him strangely as he presented himself at the gate for Administration, but his ID, swiped, took him through. Maybe the guard was new, hauled out of the reserve, taken off a civilian street, and didn't know him. And he did not see, as he walked towards Administration with the sunshine, the light and the perfect breeze off the sea on him, the guard pick up the telephone in his box. The sun and the feel of the wind made him feel good. If he had not had the file under his arm, Jed might have forgotten, fast, where he had been; might have forgotten the rain of that place and its darkness, the grime on the streets and the sort of despair of it.

He went up the steps into the block, and the guys on the desk looked away from him, like they hadn't seen him. He went down the corridor and headed for his office, wanted to get the file secure in his safe. He went past closed doors, did not look at them. At the end of the corridor, as he walked along it, he saw the big plastic bag, filled.

It was by his door. He reached the door. His name wasn't on it. It had been typed on a sticky paper strip, but the strip had been scraped off, as if with a penknife blade. He had his key out of his pocket and into the lock, but the key did not fit the changed lock. He unknotted the top of the plastic bag and saw the photograph in its frame of Brigitte, Arnie Junior and himself on a lake boat in Wisconsin.

He turned, stamped back up the corridor towards his supervisor's room.

Two doors, now, were open – one to a room the Bureau used and one to an Agency room. It was done as if it were synchronized. The Agency man was in front of him and the Bureau man was behind.

Their voices rattled round him.

'You looking for Edgar, your supervisor? You won't find him.'

'Edgar went sick yesterday, got flown off Guantanamo.'

Jed thought he understood, thought he knew what their business would be in blocking him.

The Agency man, in front of him, said, 'And he wasn't alone . on the flight. Wallace went with him – except Wallace wasn't sick.'

The man behind him, from the Bureau door, said, 'And Harry was on the same plane – and Harry, too, wasn't sick.'

Jed remembered Lovejoy. The droll and laid-back quip: In my experience, few of our masters regard a messenger bearing bad tidings favourably – about as bad as it can get, wouldn't you agree? Lovejoy had told him he would find it at first hand – in front of him and behind him.

'Suppose you think you're clever and a hero – not an utter asshole.

You fucked Wallace, and Wallace was a good man.'

'What I think, you motherfucker, you're not fit to wipe Harry's boots. You destroyed his life's service, disgraced him.'

He thought of Lovejoy and his kindness, and of the back roads he'd taken… thought of old people in a library and a headteacher and a man who'd seen the potential of a kid, the guys in a repair workshop who weren't good enough to satisfy the kid's ambition to be somebody. .. thought of two Asian youths who'd walked away when the kid hadn't. .. thought of a woman, a mother, on whom the kid had turned his back