Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

… thought of what it added up to, and the danger that was the kid, Caleb Hunt.

'Wallace, most likely – because of you – will face a disciplinary board, might lose his pension.'

'Those gatherings of senior men, gone off the payroll but honoured

– Harry won't ever be there. You disgraced him, snapped him like a fucking twig. For what?'

'For your ego, asshole?'

'To trample on good men's reputations and belittle them?'

'So a mistake was made – big deal.'

'Should have been kept close. You fish, Dietrich, don't you? Good.

You've got yourself all the months of the year for fishing.' The Bureau man behind him sidled back to his door.

The Agency man eased to the corridor's side. 'You broke two fine men. We'll break you.'

Jed turned, went back and picked up the black plastic bag. He dumped the file in the top of it, covered the picture of Brigitte, Arnie Junior and himself. He carried the bag down the corridor, past the closed doors. He thought of the panic that caught a city and the screams welled in his ears. Through tears, he saw bloodstains on pavements… and he wondered where was Caleb Hunt who could make the panic.

A week had gone… The pilot of the big Chinook double-rotor helicopter had told them, in their headsets, that it was unusual, not exceptional, for the Rub' al Khali desert to be hit by a storm of that intensity and duration, but flight was now possible, though un-comfortable. He had added that ground temperature was currently at 134° Fahrenheit, 56.7° centigrade, and he'd wished them well.

All the time they had been up, Wroughton had felt sick and Gonsalves had twice used the paper bags offered them.

The Chinook carried a platoon of the National Guard, the deputy governor of the province, Gonsalves and Wroughton. The weather had cleared sufficiently for two F-15 bombers, Saudi piloted, to strike the cave complex the previous afternoon; the Chinook flew to confirm the success or failure of the strike.

Wroughton knew he was lucky to be on board. Gonsalves, the ally, had the right to be there. Wroughton was on sufferance, on the manifest because he had the file and the name on the file. Gonsalves had supplied the map co-ordinates where the marker had been left, and the compass-bearing of the arrow.

In a direct line from the compass-bearing, forty-eight land miles from the map co-ordinates, the bombers had found a steep rock escarpment, and among stones they had seen a flash of light, sun upon chrome metal, and on their third pass the cave entrance had been seen. It had been hit. Six laser-guided five-hundred-pound high-explosive bombs had been dropped on the cave entrance.

Wroughton had said it, Gonsalves had believed him, that the cave would have been the destination of Caleb Hunt.

They went, feeling sick and being sick, in search of the body – and the bodies of the commanders that he had crossed the desert to rejoin.

At the map co-ordinates, the Chinook had gone low. They had sensed, both of them, that the pilot struggled to keep the helicopter up. They had seen, faces pressed against porthole windows, clothes, a blanket and towels scattered over a half-mile. The scorch mark', where a vehicle had been burned out were covered by a sand carpel, and only the roof protruded. Of the downed Predator, all they saw was the section of the tail wings and the push-propellor, the rest of it submerged by sand.

On the compass-bearing, they looked for bodies and the carcasses of camels, but the desert below them was clean, wind-scoured sand.

They landed at the base of the escarpment.

Ears ringing, his step unsteady from the Chinook's turbulent flight, Wroughton walked towards the pile of rock rubble. Gonsalves, sweating and complaining, followed him. He could smell the death.

The sweet, sickly scent of the dead came on the gusted wind. He heard Gonsalves throw up again, didn't know how the man had anything left to vomit. He had felt at ease with himself. The previous night, using the full weight of his embassy authority, he had escorted Bethany Jenkins to the airport, to the check-in counter, to the departure gate and had got her out safely, gratitude for services rendered, before questions had closed around her, hadn't even asked for her London phone number. She could have gone to gaol, or to Chop Chop Square… He had felt comfortable, until the smell soaked him.

Wroughton stepped among the stones at the base of the escarpment, and held his handkerchief to his nose. A little of the cave's entrance was clear but it was high above him; no way that Wroughton would scramble up over the fractured rocks when he wore his last linen suit. The light caught it. He bent and picked up the tin box – what the sunlight had struck, what the bombers' pilots had seen – and opened it gingerly. Ash and cigarette butts spilled out. His handkerchief was insufficient. Wroughton gagged. Buried by the rocks, only the head, arm and rifle barrel visible, the sentry stank.

Wroughton said quietly, 'Bad luck, sir. You did it all carefully, kept a tin for your fag ends. You were nice and tidy and professional.

Except that a flier at ten thousand feet, four hundred miles an hour, can't see fag ends but can see a metal tin when the sun hits it. It wasn't me who ever said life was fair, sir.'

The National Guard troops had crawled – like ferrets, Wroughton thought – into the cave entrance. The bodies were lowered down the escarpment, or dropped. They had not yet swollen, but he reckoned the stench worse than anything he'd encountered in Bosnia, at the mass graves. He knew the stench of death. .

The troops lined the bodies up, six of them.

Duty beckoned. It could not be avoided.

He worked the collar of his suit jacket over the handkerchief at his nose.

Gonsalves had a camera up to his eye, worked along the line and photographed the dead.

Unmarked. All of the corpses were without wound, scratch or abrasion. He imagined them all cowering at the back of the cave, and the blast funnelling in, finding and killing them. Wroughton had the picture from Guantanamo and the one of the school group. He looked down on them. All at peace, rag-doll men.

'Kind of look harmless, don't they? Like everybody's neighbour, would you not say?'

'I'd say, Juan, that you should change your street.'

'Fuck you. Your man's not here. Likely the storm took him, and the sand buried him. You saw that stuff we flew over… '

Now, the troops brought down from the cave boxes of blankets, books, saucepans and plates, files, a typewriter and filled sacks.

Wroughton said quietly, 'What are you standing in, Juan?'

'What we flew over was just impossible. He was hurt bad, had been through all kind of shit. Who'd last out there who wasn't a Bedouin? No one. That place is evil. No one from outside could live in it. He would have to be incredible to survive. Good riddance, I'm betting he didn't. You saw the place…'

A box was carried past Wroughton, and maybe his body made a point round which the wind blew, and a slip of bright laminated cardboard blew out of it and guttered down by Wroughton's polished shoes.

'Juan, you are standing in camel dung – not old dung, fresh dung.

Have you seen a camel's corpse? Have you seen bits of camel? I have not.'

He picked up the cardboard slip. He went to the platoon officer, broke his deep conversation with the deputy governor, showed him the slip and asked his question. It was denied. Was he sure? It was certain. He went back to Gonsalves.

'Look at it. It's a sales tag. It's for a Samsonite case. The case is called an Executive Traveller, and that'll be a hard-sided case. It's not been brought out. The slip is new, not old rubbish. The case is nol . there. I'm telling you, Juan, that a man came by camel and the camel crapped and the camel's gone, and a suitcase is gone, and Caleb Hunt is not here.'