Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

The new idea of the director general, the new broom, was to expose senior officers at the London headquarters building of the Security Service to external opinions and to encourage more lateral thinking.

Michael Lovejoy sat in the auditorium's back row; he always chose a back row when he had not volunteered. Behind his folded newspaper, his study of the crossword interrupted, he yawned – but he listened as he scanned the clues.

The psychologist, from a north-east English university, gripped the lectern tightly. 'What we have to understand – a disturbing and unwelcome truth but nevertheless a truth – is that terrorist leaders have a better understanding of "profiling" than the people charged with countering political violence. On your side, ladies and gentlemen, you look for obvious and naive stereotyping – not so with your opposition. They – in particular Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants

– have refined a skill in identifying young men of varying social backgrounds and economic advantage who are prepared to make supreme sacrifices for a cause. They look for men who may be willing to die, may want to die as a price for the attack's success, but whether suicidal or not will drive home that attack. We are fond of using the word "brainwashed" about our enemy. It is inappropriate and erroneous. They are patient and work by gradual progression to the stage where a man is prepared to crash an air-liner into a public building, plant a bomb in a crowded concourse, carry a suitcase filled with explosives and lethal chemicals or microbes into the heart of a city. They lead him towards that goal. They do not hurry. They set ever greater hurdles for him to climb – and all the time he is wrapped in the familial culture. Isolated in training camps or in a wilderness of desolation, he loses contact with any world other than that which is close to him. The family becomes the only society he knows, and he will develop intense pride in that association. They are better at spotting the right man than you are.'

There was a little sucking intake of breath in front of Lovejoy. He was an old hand with the Service. Insults no longer disturbed him.

The psychologist had his interest – and fifteen down, 'The patrician of Coriolanus', eight letters, went unanswered. It was only the newspaper's quick crossword.

'You look upon the terrorist groups, and Al Qaeda specifically, as parasites that lure young men into their ranks. You have the catch-all word of "loner". I imagine you search through your Special Branch files looking for these "loners". Friendless and inadequate boys, who are impressionable, drifters, and therefore may easily be drawn towards commitment to terrorist outrages, are your targets. Have you done well? I don't think so… Al Qaeda has stood a quantum leap in front of you. "Loners" may be satisfactory as foot-soldiers, good enough to wash the plates in Afghanistan, but quite inappropriate for the war that I guarantee stretches for years ahead of you. Look for a simple stereotype and, please believe me, you will fail.'

The psychologist paused, gazed balefully at his audience, then sipped from the glass of water on the table beside the lectern.

Lovejoy imagined irritated frowns settling on the foreheads of the younger generation who had taken forward seats: the profiling of loners was taught as a creed in D Branch. He thought he rather liked the cut of the academic.

'I've taken up most of your lunch-hour, and I know you're busy people, but may I leave you with a final couple of thoughts? A retired soldier recently wrote to me and his notepaper was headed, along with his address, "A beaten path is for beaten men." The stereotype of the "loner" is a beaten path, and if you follow it you will be the beaten men and the beaten women. I urge you to look elsewhere.

Where? For quality, for ability, for the best – because it is those young men that the lieutenants of bin Laden search for. Imagine, also, the excitement of being a part of that select fugitive family, picture the personal self-esteem, conjure up a sense of the adventure and purpose. No, no, I promise you, the young man who can damage us, wound us to the quick, revels in that excitement – his true religion – and in the adventure that life brings him. Thank you.'

As quiet, polite applause rippled in front of him, Lovejoy wrote

'Menenius' in fifteen down.

The watercourse was far behind them. They had climbed and scrambled up a steeper slope and now, on the summit, the wind whipped them and their shadows splayed out beyond. The sun sank.

Fahd prayed. He cried out, as if for help, and his eyes were closed, as if the view ahead overwhelmed him. The Saudi was tall and gangling and he seemed to plead to his God, as if God alone could save him. Beside him, the guide knelt, the boy at his side. Tommy made no pretence of worship but had his old army boots off, and his socks, and massaged his feet. He moaned. Hosni did not pray but sat on a rock by the camels, who shredded the feebly growing thornbushes. Caleb sat close to the Egyptian and thought he had not heard such passion in prayer since the first days at X-Ray and Delta when despair was greatest.

He gazed in front of him.

'How far do we go?'

'Only the guide knows – perhaps a thousand kilometres.'

Caleb said, 'It's late to ask it, but why don't we drive?'

'Where there are roads for a vehicle, there are blocks and checks.

The military has blocks and checks… They wait for us, for you, those who have called us, in a place of death where there are no roads, no eyes to watch for us. It is a place of death but also a place of dreamers and fools.'

'Are you a dreamer?'

Hosni said, in a murmur, 'I think I am a fool.'

The guide collected together the camels, and Tommy hurriedly pulled on his socks and his boots. They went down the hill's reverse slope, past a cairn of stones that was the border. Ahead of them, limitless, stretching towards dusk's infinity, was the desert that was made red gold by the sun. Caleb saw the Empty Quarter, where his family waited for him.

Rashid, the guide, was at the front and walked beside the lead camel.

The Egyptian, the Saudi and the Iraqi rode, then came the baggage camels with the tents and the water, and they were followed by the three camels that each carried two of the boxes. At the back, walking, were Caleb and the boy, Ghaffur.

It was the third day since they had entered the desert.

The sun beat down on him. The heat pierced the ghutrah that wrapped his head and wound round his mouth and jaw. It burned his exposed cheeks and nose, and the reflected brightness devilled in his eyes… and the boy talked. In his ears was the soft singing of a light wind, the muffled strike of the camels' hoofs in the sand and the groaning murmurs of the Saudi. They left behind them a trail of broken sand, indented with hoofmarks and footprints, but even the gentle wind had the strength to shift loose sand into the little pits they had made. When he looked back, as far as he could see, their trail was already covered, lost. The boy questioned him as thoroughly as had any of the interrogators at X-Ray or Delta. Ahead of them, what he saw, through squinted eyes, was an endless sandscape to the horizon. Caleb set himself the target of. each horizon, a dune ridge that met a sky that was without a single cloud, and when that horizon and ridge was reached another faced them. The treble pitch of the questions was like a fly's attention, distracting but not irritating, and he ignored it as he would have ignored a fly at his nose.

Who was he? Where had he come from? What was his purpose?

Why did he travel? They might have been the questions of interrogators. Then he had hung his head and had quietly repeated the life story of the taxi-driver. Now he swatted the questions away with a smile or a grin that was hidden by his ghutrah. They skirted the higher dunes where they could but some were so vast that they could not be avoided and then Caleb and the boy helped to drag the stumbling, sliding animals up the lee side where it was steepest, and on the way down they would let the camels loose so that their angled legs danced awkward steps as they careered down. On top of each dune, driven by the winds, were razor ridges that made slight avalanches when broken. Mostly Caleb looked at his feet because then he did not see the horizon and had less sense of the pitiful slowness of their progress and the distance to the next dune's top… It was only the beginning. Last evening they had stopped at a well, and the camels had been allowed to drink their fill, and he had heard the guide, Rashid, tell the Egyptian that this was the last well on their route. That morning, after prayers, before the sun's heat had gathered, they had left the well, which was merely a little box of mud bricks with a dead wood beam across it and a rope stretching down to a hanging bucket – the water had been brackish, stale, foul: he knew because he had sipped it, then spat it out. His own questions played in his mind and mirrored the boy's. Who was he? Where did he come from? What was his purpose? Why did he travel? He could not have answered them.