Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

The Beautiful One crossed the sand with long, weary strides. He had seen the way Rashid treated his camels; foul-tempered to the men he escorted, but sweet with the animals – almost love. The boy turned often, as if expecting to see that he had been pitched off, but there was not the usual mischief on the young face. They made time. Caleb realized that the boy had caught from his father a new suspicion of his resolve, and had caught it, too, from Hosni and Fahd and Tommy: all of them – without his intervention – would have killed Beth Jenkins and would have left her body for the wind and sand to strip, for the sun to rot.

Twice they found the tracks of the caravan, each time close to a gully between the dunes where the sand was sheltered from a brisk wind. Each time they had gone through the gully, the tracks were lost. The surface of the sand seemed to float and it filled the hoofprints. Caleb marvelled that the boy could go with certainty after the caravan when he, himself, saw no tracks.

They did not stop to rest, eat or drink. He perched on the hump, bounced on it, would not fall. He had forgotten her, she was no part of him, the long night was behind him, and the wind blew the smell of her from his robe.

'I've got a target.' Gonsalves was flushed with excitement at the Ground Control's door. They needed the excitement he peddled: the door hadn't been more than half open, and he'd only had a glimpse of the back of the pilot's head and the profile of the sensor operator's, but the shoulders and back postures told him excitement was in short supply. 'I've got a real target for you.'

He had been strapped into the Cessna for the flight down, had never loosened his belt. Now he paced the tiny space behind their workbench. He thought that the pilot desperately wanted to believe him, that the sensor operator was suspicious of gifts that might be snatched away.

'What I'm telling you is for real. Doesn't come often, but this is HumInt, it is eyewitness. What I told you stands. They are hunted, they are regrouping, they are trying so damned hard to get their shape again. What we have is a camel caravan, and it has crossed the Oman-Saudi border and it has gone into the Rub' al Khali. By going the hard way, they tell us they have with them at least one man of exceptional value, but they are also carrying sophisticated weapons that we consider to be of lesser but still considerable importance.'

He took from his briefcase a photocopied sheet. He reached forward and slapped it on to the bench between the console the sensor operator used and the joystick that the pilot's fingers were on.

'That is a Stinger box. As it's reported to me, second hand, it is at least similar to the ones the HumInt saw loaded on the camels.

Stinger is a shoulder-launched ground-to-air missile, it-'

The woman said, 'I think we know what a Stinger is, Mr Gonsalves.'

Deflated, Gonsalves said, 'There are six of them, loaded in pairs on three camels.'

On the workbench, covered for protection with Cellophane sheeting, was a large-scale map of the Rub' al Khali. Over the sheeting were the squares they had drawn, and a pitiful few had crosses on them with dates and times.

The woman did the talking for herself and the pilot. 'Where did the caravan cross the border?'

Gonsalves checked his own map, then stabbed with his pencil at theirs. The point rested on the broken line of the international frontier.

'Very good,' she said quietly. 'And when does the Humlnt say the caravan crossed?'

'These people are vague. They don't do days of the month like we do.'

'When?' Her question was icy calm.

'More than a week, could be ten days, up to two weeks. We were lucky to get this much.'

Disappointment clouded the pilot's face, his eyes losing hope.

Gonsalves could see them through the thick lenses of the spectacles.

She talked for him.

'We would have to estimate, Mr Gonsalves, that a camel train can move at twenty-five land miles on a bad day, thirty-five miles on a good day – something between there on an average day.'

She used a black Chinagraph and drew three half-circles on the Cellophane, each covering more of the box squares than the last. He understood. A great segment of the desert was enclosed by the outer half-circle, and its radius from the pencil mark on the border was just short of five hundred land miles.

He said emptily, 'It's the best HumInt I've got. What are you trying to tell me?'

'About needles and haystacks. Take a look, Mr Gonsalves.'

She pointed up to the bank of monitors. He saw the sand, miles of it. Sand that was without an horizon. Flat sand, humped sand, ridged sand and dune sand. He saw true emptiness. Then her finger was on the map, inside the widest of the half-circles.

'We are flying Carnival Girl today. Out behind you there's a piss-bucket. We don't leave here when a bird is flying. Marty and I, we're like a fist and glove, we are together. He wants to piss, he stands over the bucket. I want to piss, I squat over the bucket. Why? Because if one of us went out to piss and the other's head was rocking we would miss, on the wide angle, any sort of caravan, let alone a few camels. We get brought sandwiches and we get brought water. We are here as long as the bird is up. We should have at least one more relief shift, but we don't. We should have a stand-by sensor operator, but we don't. Why am I telling you this, Mr Gonsalves? So you appreciate this is a big haystack, and the needle you're giving us – the "best Humlnt I've got" – is tiny. Don't take offence. You are trying and we are trying. You are giving it your best shot, and so are we.

I hope you have a good flight back.'

He stared at the sand on the screens, stared till the picture distorted his vision. He thought that the pilot and the sensor operator should have relief every two hours if their concentration was to hold, and he thought they were prisoners in the Ground Control for twelve or fifteen hours at a time. The nightmare gathering in his mind: they would fly the UAV, Carnival Girl, right over a camel caravan that carried six boxes of importance and at least one man of significance, and they would not see either a trail of beasts or that man.

'Do what you can,' Gonsalves said weakly. For a moment, on his arrival, he had lifted them. Now their shoulders had flopped again.

He went out.

The heat hit him, seemed to stifle his breath.

He walked towards the jeep that would drive him back to the Cessna. It was the life he knew… A counter-intelligence officer encountered rare highs and frequent troughs. He fought in what was now dubbed in the smart current-affairs magazines back home the War without End. The customers expected goddamn miracles. He remembered what had been said after the Riyadh attacks last year:

'They're saying, "We can get you any time, anywhere."' It had been good information, but quietly trashed as they had shown him the desert pictures and the half-circles on the map, and all the time his enemy was regrouping… Savagely, he kicked a stone from his path to the jeep.

His name was called. He turned, went back, climbed the steps into the Ground Control.

She pointed to a screen.

He saw two tiny shapes. A vehicle roof was at the screen's side and a minuscule figure was in the centre. She played her tricks, the zoom started. He identified the Land Rover, then a woman. The zoom lost the Land Rover as it closed on the woman. She was bending. He could see a clipboard on the sand beside her and bright stones reflected up, then she crouched. Her hair was fair – damn it, he could see the colour of her hair, and of her blouse.

'I just wanted you to know, Mr Gonsalves, what the gear did, if we can find a target.'

'Who the hell do you think she is?'

The sensor operator grinned as she took the picture fractionally closer. 'She's two people. She's a meteorite expert, a scholar. She is also my supplier of tampons. And she's also the only living person, thing, we've seen all day.'