Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

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As she walked back along the side of the runway strip, Lizzy-Jo reflected that she'd made a poor job of the security of the mission, but maybe just once security took second place. Tampons counted.

She reflected, also, as she turned at the strip's end, that a young woman who took a stranger for a drink when she was short of time and late on a class commitment was lonely – not alone but lonely.

Lizzy-Jo didn't do loneliness, but the thought of it frightened her.

George and his technicians had the casing back on the engine, and were standing back from First Lady. The light caught the forward fuselage, clean and virgin. She remembered the words loud in her headphones. 'Shoot on sight.'

They had lost half a day. Worse than the hours lost was the water used. Caleb watched the pot brought to the boil. And more of the withered dry roots that Ghaffur had kept the fire alive with. Rashid took the sodden plants from the pot, clasped them in his hand and seemed not to feel any pain as the scalding water seeped between his fingers. The plants were slapped on Tommy's inflamed ankle, the Iraqi cried out, then rags were bound over them. Tommy writhed.

There was no sympathy from the guide. Caleb sensed Rashid's concern: what to do with the water? Wait for it to cool? More time gone. Throw it on to the sand?

'What is that?' Caleb asked.

The reply was curt. 'It is ram-ram.'

'Is it an old cure?'

'What my father would have used, and my grandfather.'

'Tell me.'

'We learn from the Sands. There are lizards. They are not bitten by the snakes, not bitten by the scorpions. We watch and we learn, and we hand down what we know. The lizards eat the ram-ram plant, and they roll in it, wherever they find it. It is a protection against the poison.'

It was said matter-of-factly, without feeling. First the majority of the venom had been drawn out by the stroking fingernails, now the poultice would extract what remained. Old practices and old times.

At Camp Delta, when the guard had been stung by the scorpion alarms had rung, medics had charged to the scene, an ambulance had come with the siren wailing, panic had been alive, and within two days the guard had been returned to the block. That was the new way, but the old way of Rashid had been quiet, calm and competent.

Rashid swung his foot, kicked over the pot and the water momentarily stained the sand. Then he shouted for Ghaffur to pick up the pot and stow it. The guide lifted Tommy on to his shoulder, carried him to the kneeling camel and heaved him on to the saddle on the hump.

Again Tommy cried out, again his pain was ignored. The caravan moved on. The wisp of smoke from the fire was left behind them.

Caleb walked beside Hosni, who rolled on his saddle. Twice Caleb reached up to steady the Egyptian; it was not a journey for a man of his age. The question welled in him. 'What is the first thing that I should know?'

The voice wheezed, 'You should know your only loyalty is to your family, us and those who wait for you.'

'And the second thing?'

'Your duty is to your brothers, us and those who wait for you.'

Again he put the question. What should he know?

'You have no nationality, it is behind you. None of us has a country. We are the rejected. Tommy would be taken by the Americans, or their puppets, and would be put before a military court or a sham court of their stooges, and he would be executed…

Fahd, if he were arrested here, would be tortured by the police, then taken to the square in Riyadh in front of the Central Mosque and beheaded. I, if I were held, would be flown to Cairo and if I survived the interrogation I would be hanged in a prison. And you, you would be

…' Hosni's voice died.

'What would happen to me?'

No answer. The question was ignored. A new fervour came to the Egyptian. 'You are a jewel to us. Men will give their lives that you should live… Is that not enough? At a chosen time you will go back where you came from, or to America. You will be the servant of your family and your brothers, and you will resurrect your memory. You will strike the blow that only you are capable of… Enough.'

Hosni's eyes, as if they hurt or disappointed him, were closed.

Caleb dropped back.

'If only he'd come with me,' she sobbed. 'If the silly bugger had come with me, he'd have been all right – but he didn't. He wasn't interested.'

Her behaviour, the anger in it, was predictable to Bart. He knew the pattern from road accidents back in Torquay, and from his time as house physician in London. Melanie Garnett's outburst was what he would have expected. If he'd been called out earlier, just after it had happened, he would have heard a horrified description of the bomb detonating under the Land Rover Discovery.'

'No, he wasn't interested in that necklace. He said we were saving money, were supposed to be. We're only here for the mortgage -

God, what other reason would anyone be here? He didn't have the guts to tell me I couldn't have it so he stayed in the Discovery.'

Clearest in Bart's mind was the image of the man at the driving-wheel, elbow out through the open window, and the puff of his cigarette smoke. She was a fainter image, blurred behind the glass of the jeweller's shop. He wondered where the children were now – oh, yes, they'd be round at a neighbour's, with the Lego out on the tiled floor. Yesterday there would have been the horror, today would be the anger, tomorrow the guilt. The anger was easier to deal with…

Even if he had stopped, done his duty as a man of medicine, he would not have been able to save the man.

'He wanted to save for a mortgage so's we could live somewhere posh when this three years of hell was over – somewhere like Beaconsfield or the Chalfonts. And it killed him. Damn him! I mean, what's a three-bedroomed semi in Beaconsfield worth? Worth getting killed for?'

An older woman shared the sofa with Melanie Garnett, widow.

She would have been a long-term matriarch of the expatriate society, and knew her stuff. She was doing well, made a soothing listening post with her shoulder, and didn't interrupt… Ann would have interrupted. Ann never could keep her mouth shut. Bart examined her. He murmured little questions, not to calm her but to pump information from her. What had she seen? What had she heard? Had there been any threats? Nothing, nothing, and no – nothing seen, nothing heard, no threats. It would be a negative report to Wroughton but he had asked the questions. While he took her pulse and heartbeat, he looked around him. The furnishings were sparse, the decorations minimal; the sense of a home was missing, except for the heap of toys in a corner and children's books on the table. He looked for signs of the familiar expatriates' scam, alcohol boot-legging. Then there would have been flash opulence, but there wasn't any… Ann would just have bought the bloody necklace, charged it to his card, and the first he would have known of it was when she wore it. He could blame everything on Ann. The size of the mortgage, the scale of the overdraft, the fees for the private school that the kids had to go to, the two foreign holidays a year, and the remedies he'd sunk to were all down to Ann… His mother had come to the wedding, been barely civil, but his father had not. His mother had told him, in a stage-whispered aside, well into the reception, that Ann was common and unsuitable and that her relatives were plainly vulgar – and, thank the good Lord, Hermione Bartholomew had not lived long enough to crow at him that she had been right. In the Kingdom, all the deaths of expatriates by bomb or bullet were put down to alcohol turf wars; this one would be too, but Bart knew better.

He prescribed diazepam, a maximum of ten milligrams a day, two tablets. From his open bag, he took the bottle and counted out sufficient to last three days. He should have felt, beneath the professional exterior, serious sympathy for Melanie Garnett. What had she done to deserve an encounter with a bomber? She was without blame. He was almost shocked at his reaction, as near to being shamed as was possible for him. He put the tablets into an envelope and scrawled the dosage on the label.

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