Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

Through slitted eyes, Caleb watched the destruction of the overnight camp as the pieces billowed away from him. Tommy howled abuse at Rashid. 'You are a fool, an idiot. Did you not know it was coming? Were you not paid to know?'

The camels tried to flee the gale and the thickening cloud now blotting out the sun. Caleb heard their shrill bellowing. They could not run: their hobble ropes held them. They skipped, fell, rolled, and their long legs thrashed before they could stand again. Watching them, Caleb realized the scale of the catastrophe that had hit the caravan. While the others had still slept, Rashid and Ghaffur had begun loading the camels. Some had the crates already fastened to their backs, others had the water bags and food sacks roped to their flanks.

Caleb forced himself up, was tossed forward and tumbled, then crawled towards the two shadowed figures in front of him going in wavering strides after the camels.

Without the water they were lost. Bones in the sand. Without the camels they were lost. Bent double, Rashid and Ghaffur were in pursuit of the camels. On his hands and knees Caleb followed them.

Sometimes the cloud of whipped sand was too dense for him to see them. Sometimes he could see them clearly, father and his son, staggering after the camels that carried the water bags. The camels that carried the crates were ignored. Water was the lifeblood of travellers in the desert. Whenever he stood, thrust himself up, Caleb was immediately tossed down on to his face, and ate the sand grains.

He called out to them that he was coming, following, but the distance between them and him widened.

The wind came with a new force, stronger, hitting harder. Its cry blasted at his ears, and the grains scoured his body. He did not know for how long he crawled. He could no longer see Rashid and Ghaffur, or the scattered camels. The darkness spread over him. The only light in his mind was that of the whitened bones of a camel's ribcage.

It was gone as suddenly as it had come. His eyes were closed, the sand was loose under his hands and knees. His robe fell back over his buttocks and thighs. The sun, as harsh as on any day before, beat on his face and eyelids.

Caleb wiped the sand from his eyes. He stood and was not felled by the wind. The sun blazed at him. The cloud was in the far distance.

Stone-faced, eyes glinting in anger, Rashid came towards him leading three camels, with two more following. Away to the guide's right, the boy brought more. Two water bags, deflated and empty, lay in Caleb's path. He saw Ghaffur bend and pick up another, heard the triumphant cry that signalled that the binding on the neck had held.

Caleb called after Rashid, 'How much have we lost?'

There was a snarl in the reply pitched over the guide's shoulder:

'Too much. We have lost too much.'

The storm hovered at the horizon.

Caleb found a crate lying nearly buried. He scraped the sand from around it, snatched up the fastening rope and dragged it after the guide, his son and the camels.

Wretchedly, at the campsite, they searched for what could be retrieved. They had lost water, a quarter of what had remained, and food that would have lasted four days; one camel had broken a leg.

Caleb had turned away as Rashid's knife had flashed and Ghaffur had held the long hair above the beast's throat. They had lost a day of the march. When Caleb found Hosni, the Egyptian was on his stomach, his eyes pale and watering. The lower part of his body was buried in sand and his shoulders shook with a never-ceasing convulsion.

All that morning, as the sun's heat grew, Caleb helped the guide and his son search for the remnants from the campsite, but they found no more filled bags of water. When the sun was high, Caleb was beside the boy. 'Is it bad?'

'My father says there are too many men for too little water,' the boy said simply.

George Khoo took charge. The accommodation tents were streaming from the barbed wire of their inner perimeter fence; the clothes and bedding had gone further and were held by the barbs on the fencing at the extreme end of the runway.

He had fretted all night because of the forecast. Every hour, on the hour, his pocket alarm had bleeped on the flooring beside his camp bed. He'd not undressed, had not even shed his boots. His only concession to the night had been to leave the laces loose. For five minutes in each hour he had paced restlessly round the tethered awnings that sheltered First Lady and Carnival Girl, then had gone back to his bed. He'd lain on his back, stared at the tent ceiling and waited for the bleep to sound again. He'd been lucky. The first strike of the storm had been while he was hunched on his camp bed, gathering the strength to slide off and go to make the inspection tour.

It had come in a numbing shockwave, with a suddenness that would have paralysed another man into indecision.

On his orders, barked against the wind and split with expletives, the twin sets of wings had been taken off First Lady and Carnival Girl.

They had been dumped without ceremony. Then the awnings had been dropped to hang loose on the fuselages of the two aircraft.

Ropes had been hurled over the awnings. Each man, and Lizzy-Jo, had been given an instruction, shouted at a volume and passion that frightened them more than the storm. Some hung on to the ropes.

Others, with Lizzy-Jo, clung to more ropes that straddled the roof of the Ground Control shed and the trailer with the satellite dish. While their possessions, few enough of them, raced to be snagged on the perimeter wire, they held the ropes against the wind.

George Khoo heard them cry out, yell, swear, and he ignored their fear. He thought it was like combat – but there was no enemy, no hostile incoming. One, on the same rope as Lizzy-Jo, pumped blood

– a chair had struck the guy across the forehead close to the left eye.

He would have been knocked half-unconscious, but his grip never wavered on the rope; neither did Lizzy-Jo's, nor the others'.

George had not known before a storm of this ferocity. Nothing like it in Chicago, the Windy City, where he'd been reared. Or at Nellis where he'd been trained, or at Bagram. He moved, best as he could, among them and each time he came back past them he blasphemed worse, ridiculed their efforts and cursed harder. He was, near as made no difference, double the age of the pilot, Marty, and a full fifteen years senior to Lizzy-Jo, and he felt for each of them as if they were his kids. His own kids were back in Chicago with their ma, and their ma's ma.

Without George Khoo's bullying aggression they would not have come through, would not have held on to the ropes till the palms of their hands were rubbed raw and bleeding.

Because he thought of Marty and Lizzy-Jo as if they were his kids he suffered and cried for them, and cheered with them. If First Lady had turned over, had gone in a rolling spiral towards the perimeter crushing the real-time cameras and the infra-red sensors then goodbye, damn double fast, to the mission. George Khoo knew responsibility for failure was never dumped fairly by the Agency.

Failure was failure – no excuse permitted. Failure had a smell that made a man's gut turn. Failure stank, was cruel. If the aircraft went, the shit would rain down, buckets of it, on Marty, the pilot, and on Lizzy-Jo, the sensor operator.

And it went on by.

The wind dropped and the sand haze cleared. If he was weak they were all weak. He snapped orders. Guys to go get the tents and awnings back off the perimeter wire. Guys to go get the wings fitted back in place on First Lady and Carnival Girl. Guys, Marty and Lizzy-Jo, to go get the electronics tested in Ground Control and the satellite link. Guys to get some breakfast made. Guys to get medical treatment readied. Guys to go get… He felt so damn tired and so damn old, and he hadn't the time to think he'd done well.