Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

Then she began to set the work for her students to be done before she next met them.

They filed out. Another class came in.

No, she was not alone and inadequate. Yes, she was blessed.

The queue failed to move. Bart hissed, moved his weight from foot to foot, whistled his frustration through his teeth, coughed, but the queue did not shift. He needed a new iqama. It was renewal time for his resident's permit. He had with him the one that was about to expire, his driver's licence, a certificate from a colleague of a satisfactory eye and blood test, the document confirming employment by his local sponsor at the hospital and a further fistful of bureaucratic crap. In front of him, beside and behind him, corralled in a narrow corridor flanked by ornate rope, was a collection of the foreigners who took the Kingdom's shilling and were treated for their efforts with all the respect shown to a dog with mange… God, he loathed the place.

But there was no way round the queues, no avoidance of them.

The key word was patience. Bart knew all the stories of expatriates who had filled in their forms and sent a minion down to the ministry to avoid the queue. The bastards at the desks always found fault and sent them back. The highly placed and low-ranked had learned that the only way to get a resident's permit renewed was to stand in the damn queue.

Around him the need for patience would be muttered in a dozen tongues – in Arabic and German, Urdu and Dutch, Bengali and English. A few, the more important, had bodyguards, who idled in the chairs away from the queue. Bodyguards were a barometer of the deterioration in the security situation in post-war times. Bart paid only lip service to security in daylight hours, but would not have walked a street at night, certainly not in the areas where the Kingdom's new reality of economic depression had spawned beggars and the women who raided refuse bins for food scraps.

The servants of the Kingdom, bought with petro-dollars, shuffled and wheezed, and watched the painfully slow progress towards the counters.

At the end of the queue there were four desks. Two were occupied by men in the traditional flowing white thobe. On his head each wore a ghutrah, held in place by rope, the igaal that, in former times – when they were all in the sand and not in concrete and glass follies – was used to hobble a camel; now they rode, not on a camel's back, but in Chevrolets. Men worked at two desks. The other two were empty.

Why were the desks not taken when the queue stretched back to the bloody door? Bart boiled. Some of the expatriates occasionally wore a thobe, and thought the gesture impressed their hosts. Did it hell!

The days when expatriates were the chosen elite of the Kingdom were long gone – there was even talk that income tax for expatriates might be introduced. They were not wanted, only tolerated, and they were made to queue.

But that day God favoured Samuel Bartholomew, Doctor of Medicine. Five hours in the queue, patience rewarded, and at the head of the queue just before the break for lunch.

He produced an oily smile, presented his papers, remarked in his passable Arabic what a delightful day it was outside. He was good at doing lies: his life was a lie. He had done lies well since childhood.

The son of Algernon Bartholomew, accountant, and Hermione (nee Waltham) Bartholomew, housewife, he had told the lie often enough about a happy childhood in a loving home in a rural village near the Surrey town of Guildford, and maintained the lie of contented boarding-school life. At the school, about as far away in the West Country as they could afford to send him, put him out of their sight and out of their minds, he had learned the law of survival: never explain, never apologize, never trust. Poor at games, unloved and lonely to the point of tears, he had comforted himself with lies. It served him well. As he walked back down the line, the stamp on his renewed iqama, a little smile spread on his mouth.

Caleb saw it but could not hear it.

The argument was about the boxes. He sat on one. On the old olive-green paintwork was the stencilled legend: Department of Defense

FIM-92A. (1.) There was a date, seventeen years back, when he had been a child, now blacked from his memory. He knew the weapons loaded into the boxes, had handled one briefly in the training camps, had felt its weight on his shoulder, and had seen one fired in the trenches, but he did not know its workings and guidance system.

There were six boxes and they had created the dispute. Caleb sat with Hosni and Tommy, and watched the argument between Fahd and the farmer. Away to the right, barely visible, was a village with surrounding irrigated fields, clumps of date palms and lines of bright washing. Further up the watercourse, taking no part in the argument, a man and a boy squatted beside the legs of six camels.

There were three more camels with Fahd and the farmer, and the price for them was contested.

Six camels were sufficient, just, to carry a guide, his son, Fahd, Tommy, Hosni and Caleb, with food and water, to their destination.

But the six camels could not also carry the six boxes. For that more camels were needed. The farmer had more camels, and a price for them. Fahd had to have the extra camels but bridled at the price – the farmer was a 'thief' and an 'extortioner'. Each time he was insulted the farmer moved away and Fahd had to chase after him. They had been more than an hour, sitting with the boxes, in the full heat of the day. Caleb stared at the camels that were needed. He said, 'Why is it him who negotiates?'

Hosni shrugged. 'Because we are close to Saudi, because he is Saudi, because he speaks the same language, because that is his job.'

'But he fails.'

Hosni picked up pebbles, threw them down. 'Each of us has a responsibility in this matter. It is Fahd's.'

'Why not you?'

Hosni sniggered, as if the question were an idiot's. 'I am from Cairo, from a city. I know nothing of camels. As a child I played at the Gezira Club. Camels were for peasants. I would not know a good camel from a bad camel, a lame one from a whole one. I do not take responsibility.'

'Why not him?' Caleb eyed Tommy.

Hosni snorted. 'Where he came from, what he did, he would only have seen a camel from behind the closed window of a Mercedes saloon.'

'Where will the guides and the camels take us?'

'Into the Sands and across them.'

'What are the Sands?'

The Egyptian shuddered. He was the eldest among them. He had frail, bony shoulders and there was no weight in his arms or at his stomach. His check jacket, which was torn at the elbows and frayed at the cuffs, hung loose on him, and his beard was sparse and untended. Caleb assumed the Gezira Club, in Cairo, was for the rich and he thought the Egyptian had made great sacrifices and had given up comfort in the name of A1 Qaeda, and that the sacrifice had weakened him.

'You will find that answer.'

'And what is across the Sands?'

When Hosni spoke the breath wheezed in him. 'Across the Sands, if we can go through them, are the people who wait for us, who have called for us. Especially they have waited and called for you.'

'Thank you… Why do we not shoot the farmer and take his camels?'

'Then all the village knows we have been here. They make a blood feud against us. They send for soldiers and police… Then we are dead, and you do not reach those who wait for you.'

Caleb thought it a good answer. He stood and stretched, and the heat bathed him. The weight of the pouch was in the inner pocket of his robe. He walked away from Hosni and Tommy. He went to the guide who sat as if uninterested, and his hand ruffled the hair of the child, and he said that the child was a fine boy, a boy to be proud of, and he asked if the camels were capable of the journey The guide nodded but did not speak. Caleb went back down the watercourse to the farmer, Fahd and the hobbled camels. He led Fahd a few paces away, so that their voices would not be heard by the farmer, and told him to go and sit by the boxes. He looked into Fahd's eyes, into their brightness and fury. He gathered his strength, took hold of Fahd's hand and pushed him away, back towards the boxes. They had not yet started out on the journey – a journey that made Hosni shudder