Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

Caleb felt the new strength. He was no longer frightened. He was toughened, hardened by the encounter. He zvas a taxi-driver, but he had given his promise.

It broke quickly, without warning.

Silence, then raised gasping and exhausted voices.

Caleb scraped the crust of sand from his eyes. The Saudi, Fahd, high on his saddle, lashed his foot at Tommy's shoulder, toppling him. When Tommy stood again, Fahd worked the camel round so that he could return to kick again; he aimed for Tommy's head, but missed; the effort almost made him fall from the saddle. Tommy had hold of his leg and was trying to drag him down, but he lost the grip and sagged back.

A blade flashed.

Tommy had the knife. Fahd watched it. Tommy edged closer, the knife raised, ready to strike.

The guide, Rashid, came from behind Tommy and, with the speed of a snake's hit, snatched at Tommy's knife arm, held it, then twisted it behind Tommy's back, until the man's face grimaced in pain. The knife was loosed. As it fell, Tommy smashed back with his free arm and caught Rashid on the upper cheek. The arm was twisted tighter and Tommy dropped to the sand. Rashid bent to pick up the knife, took the reins of Fahd's camel and led it to the front of the column. The march resumed.

The boy was beside Caleb. 'Do you understand?'

'What should I understand?'

The boy's face creased as if in anguish. 'He hit my father. He struck my father. Because he hit my father, he is dead. Nothing else is possible.'

'But your father walked away, he did not kill him.'

'He will, at his own choosing. It was the worst insult, to hit my father.'

Caleb asked the question heavily: 'What did they fight over?'

The boy said, 'The one called the other a murderer of the faithful.

The other called the one a coward and a fool. It is what they said, and now the other is condemned.'

Caleb pushed the boy away, gently but with tired firmness. He thought death now trudged with them. His anger blossomed. Where they travelled there was no beacon of hope. Life did not, could not, exist. The sun burned and crushed them. Madness had made the argument. Impossible difficulties weighed them down, and now they had the new burden of the argument, and one of them was condemned.

He could have howled with his anger.

Most days a wrapped baguette, tuna and mayonnaise, with a can of Coke in his office passed for Jed Dietrich's lunch. He took the chance of the midday break to write up the assessment of the morning interrogation – increasingly fewer observations seemed relevant – and to prepare for the afternoon session. The secretary for Defense had called the men he questioned 'hard-core, well-trained terrorists'; the attorney general had said they were 'uniquely dangerous'. But neither the secretary nor the attorney sat in with Jed. There were six hundred inmates at Delta, and maybe a hundred of them were 'hard-core' and 'dangerous', and the Bureau and the Agency had care of them. Jed never saw them.

He binned the wrapping from his baguette, drained the can, wiped the crumbs off the table. As the minute hand climbed to the hour, the knock came on cue.

The prisoner was brought in.

Jed doubted he was even a 'foot-soldier'. God alone knew what questions he would find to put to the man. The prisoner, the file said, came from a small town in the English Midlands, was of Bengali ethnic origin, was one of the five per cent for whom anti-depressive medication was prescribed by the Delta doctor, had been studying Arabic and the Qur'an at a religious school up the road from Peshawar, and had gone into the net, had been handed over by the Pakistani intelligence people, who probably felt they needed to show willing and make up a quota number. If Jed, the fisherman, had pulled this one out of a Wisconsin lake, he'd not have bothered with a photograph or the scales, would have chucked him straight back – he had never been to England, had no knowledge of the 'Midlands'.

Jed was aware of a growing swell of opinion outside the States that demanded either for criminal charges to be laid against prisoners or for them to be freed. He was as aware that the courts back home had claimed no jurisdiction over Camp Delta. It was not his business, he had no opinion. Had he gone out of his room for lunch and discussed it with enlisted men he would have found total indifference. The Agency and Bureau men wanted every last one of the prisoners locked up in perpetuity. The Red Cross people, had they ever owned up to their true feelings, would have condemned Delta, would have criticized the concept of the camp, but he didn't go out to lunch.

None of the British ones had been brought to Jed's room before.

With a British prisoner, at least there was no requirement for an interpreter. Translators destroyed the chance of an interrogator displaying his skills.

The man shuffled through the door. Well, not a man – more of a boy. The file said he was twenty-three years old. He would have been twenty when he was captured, would have had his twenty-first birthday inside a Guantanamo cage… Jed thought of him as a boy.

The chains were taken off, and the guards stood back. The man sat down. He put his hands on the table top – it was orders that a prisoner's hands must be visible at all times when he was unshackled. The hands shook. Jed reckoned they would have shaken worse if it had not been for the anti-depressants… God, was this guy, categorized as an 'unlawful combatant', the real enemy?

He went through what had been asked of the man in previous interrogations. Why had he gone to Pakistan? Whom had he met in Pakistan? What had he been taught in Pakistan? Who had funded his studies in Pakistan? Had he ever received military training? Had he gone into Afghanistan at any time? The answers were the same, word for word, as they had been at every interrogation. He had the transcripts in front of him, and the pages were signed by the interrogators. Sometimes Jed let the answers run; sometimes he interrupted and his tone was savage; sometimes he smiled and softened his voice as he put the question; sometimes he doubled back. As the boy was denying ever having been in Afghanistan, he returned to the funding of the studies. Jed never caught him out, no discrepancies in the story, but far down in his mind a thought was developing.

He couldn't place where it came from. Whom had he met in Pakistan? Had he ever received military training? He felt the stab of recognition.

Jed paused. He collected his thoughts. They had been chaff, a jumble. Most of his concentration had been on the questions he'd asked, a little of it had been on his family and on the week gone by.

He cut away the chaff.

He sat for a full minute in silence. He watched the fingers writhing, and the breath come in little pants, and let his instinct rule.

Jed's voice was gentle, in English. 'Friend, do you speak Pashto?'

The faces of the two guards were impassive. He had used the word

'friend'. The guards would talk about that afterwards. Guards hated the prisoners. Guards knew that any fraternization with prisoners was forbidden, would lead to a flight out without their boots touching the Tarmac. Guards knew that a brigadier general, Camp Delta's commander, had been summarily fired and that 'defense sources' had claimed he was too 'soft' with the regime he'd ordered. In Delta, signs – printed by the ICRC – told detainees their rights, and had been posted with the authorization of the brigadier general. When the brigadier general had visited prisoners' cages he had greeted them in Arabic, 'Peace be with you.' He'd been sacked… but an interrogator had the freedom to call a prisoner 'friend'.

The man across the table, the 'friend', nodded.

In English, because Jed didn't speak that language: 'Would that be good Pashto, or only a little Pashto?'