Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

A story from Gonsalves was like water spilled on linoleum, it meandered but it kept going. It did not sink quickly into sand.

Without the morsels of Agency information Wroughton's own work would have been harder and his future darker.

'We don't have people in north Yemen, not on the ground, but we have the Yemeni military we've trained. Three days ago, our liaison officer in San'a was brought a cardboard box, like it was a present, the sort of size box you'd put groceries in. There were guys standing around and giggling, and he was invited to open it up. There was a head, severed, and two hands, all sawn off with a knife, and there was some squidgy sort of shit – I mean it. A guy had approached a roadblock, had seen the military, had jumped out and left his vehicle, then run for cover in the rocks. They did well, the military, but not quite well enough. Before they shot him, he was seen to swallow something – OK, OK, he's dead. So, what they did, Eddie, was they disembowelled him. They got into his upper intestine, down the bottom of his throat, and they got out a scrap of chewed paper, what you'd use for home-made cigarettes. Then they took off the head and the hands – you understand, for identification. I think our liaison guy's putting in for counselling, maybe for a transfer. I mean it, they slit his stomach and got out his tubes, then cut into them. Christ, we got some allies… What was left of the paper went back as an image to the laboratory at Langley, but we can't break into whatever writing there was. All we end up with is a courier carrying a message so tiny it might not have been found, so important it was worth swallowing and dying to protect it, and we don't have identification and there's no databank in Yemen that could match the fingerprints off the hands. The other thing – earlier, the roadblock military had seen a small camel train waiting down the track, nearer to the frontier. We trained those boys well, they're bright and keen. As soon as they'd filled the cardboard box they skipped back up the road to where the camels had been and two Bedouin. The sound of shooting carries a long way across those hills and the sand – no camels, no Bedouin. What do you think?'

'I'd say that's promising, maybe interesting.'

'What we're doing, Eddie – this is between you and me, this is between friends or it'll be my head in the next cardboard box – is we're going to put some toys down in the Empty Quarter, we're-'

'Big kids' toys?'

'You could say that. Anything you hear-'

'Top of my agenda. Your toys, what's going to be their status with the locals?'

Fifteen of the hijackers came out of here. They're bankrolled from here. The families of the Twin Towers are serving writs here for punitive damages. Then there's the war, the Angst. I wouldn't trust any last one of the bastards. They get to know the sum total of damn all. I'd appreciate your help. What we're saying is, the indications are that the Empty Quarter might just be a good place to regroup.'

Eddie Wroughton was escorted out and the marine corporal slammed the gate after him. He remembered his one flight over a desolate, heat-baked wilderness. His step was jaunty – God, he fed well off the Agency's table.

The swollen fingers, where the flesh bulged over gold rings, took his hand.

'Don't look into my face,' Caleb said. 'Don't remember me.'

The man's head dropped, as if he took a point of focus for his eyes on the dirt and gravel at the centre of the intersection of the two tracks, but his slug-thick fingertips moved over Caleb's hand and on to his wrist. Clumsily, they unravelled the cloth, then the wrist was pulled gently forward and the head twisted to look down at the bracelet. In a soft voice, the man recited Fawzi al-Ateh's name, and the reference number given at Camp Delta. Caleb's wrist was let go.

The man walked, with a waddling stride, back to his car, and bent to retrieve something from the safe box under the passenger seat.

He was a parcel and was passed on. A van with smoked windows had met him at the Omani shoreline and driven him inland. He had sat in the back, at the side, away from the field of vision of the driver's mirror. He had been left at a roadside near to a town, Ad Dari, on the far side of a mountain range. Traffic had sped past him until a Japanese four-wheel drive had ploughed on to the road's dirt shoulder, scattering dust over him. Through the open window his wrist bracelet had been examined. He had been driven away, again in the back seat, and taken beyond the wadi Rafash. He had been dropped off at a cross-point where trees in leaf threw down a sweet pool of shadow. He had waited there an hour, or more, and then the Audi had come, and the grossly overweight man had levered himself out and come to him.

The plastic bracelet from Camp Delta was his identification, as important as the pass-code numbers used by the guards when he had been brought from the cell blocks to the interrogation compound.

The man's robes flapped loose in a light wind. He carried back a small but heavy silken pouch, whose neck was held tight by a woven thong. He had forgotten himself and had stared momentarily at Caleb, then remembered and ducked his head. He gave the pouch to Caleb.

Caleb squatted down. His robe, dry from the sun, starched from the salt water, was tight between his thighs and made a basin in which to empty the pouch's contents. Gold coins cascaded on to his robe. They shimmered in the light. Caleb counted out a fortune in money, then carefully replaced each coin in the pouch, and put it into the inner pocket of his robe. The man looked away studiously, up the empty roads.

His voice was soft, like spoken music. 'I do not know your name, stranger, or what is your business, or where you go. You are a person held in extreme value by your friends… May God go with you, wherever he takes you. As a hawaldar, I have no eyes and no memory.

You do not seem to me to be from Oman, you are too tall and too heavily built, and I do not think you come from the Gulf. 1 deal in transactions of cash – ten dollars or a million dollars. I do not require your name because J do not need your signature. Haiual is the name of the trade. In our tongue, in Oman and the Gulf, it is a word that means trust. There is no trail of paper. I say you have received the money and those who are your friends will believe me. The trust is absolute. Rather than betray you, I would go to my grave. Rather than betray those who have sent you the money, I would cut out my tongue.'

He looked down into Caleb's face. The sincerity was there, and loyalty. He seemed to drink in the features of Caleb's face, to gorge himself. He crouched beside Caleb. 'I tell you, my young stranger, that the intelligence agencies of the Americans and the British hate, detest, loathe, the system of hawal. Money transfers are made, coded signals, and they cannot suck up the messages into their computers and so identify me, you and your friends. They blaspheme in frustration. The links are secret and you should have no fear.'

Caleb leaned forward and kissed the man's cheeks. He saw the admiration in the man's eyes and was confused.

'May God go with you, may your destination be Paradise. The poet Hasan Abdullah al-Qurashi wrote: "Glory in life is complete for the one who dies for a principle, for an ideal, for a grain of sand." I have admiration, beyond bounds, for your courage and for your willingness to sacrifice yourself. I know you are of great importance were you not, the effort to move you would not have been made. It is my privilege to have helped you. You are like the bright star in the night, the brightest.'

The man pushed himself up and went to his car. The dust spewed behind him as he drove away.

At the crossroads, where the tracks met, where the shadows lengthened, Caleb sat, his head bowed. After the vehicle had disappeared, the quiet was broken only by birds' chatter. With each step he had made since he had run from the road between the base and the prison, he had sought only to return to his family. But each man he had met, who had moved him on, had shown the same fascination, awe of him. Why?