Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

He passed an FBI office. Through the open door a voice sang out,

'Hi, Jed, thought you were supposed to be down sick…' He smiled at the face behind the shoes on the desk and thanked the agent for his concern. He would shaft them.

In his room, he loaded an audiotape from Fawzi al-Ateh into his cassette-player and slipped on the earphones. He listened, then snapped down on the button. From his desk drawer he took the cassette that carried the voice of the Brit prisoner who claimed to have been nothing more than a religious student in Peshawar, and who had read a translated text in Pashto. Again and again, Jed played snatches of the two voices, till they rang and merged in his mind. His head was supported by his hands, which were clamped over the earphones… He was feeling weaker… The weight of his head grew… He sagged.

He opened his eyes. He knew he had fainted because the tape was finished.

But he had what he wanted.

Caleb and Ghaffur had ridden hard through the heat and caught the caravan in the late afternoon.

When they reached it, Ghaffur left him, urged his camel faster and went past the travellers to join his father at the head. The atmosphere for the last hour of the day, before they halted, was heavy with suspicion and dispute; Caleb was the cause of it. He saw Ghaffur chatter to his father, but Rashid seemed to ignore the boy. When the guide looked round, raked his eyes over those riding behind him, Caleb saw that the malevolence of the glance was not directed at him but fell on the Iraqi. It had been hotter that day than on any other; the heat, Caleb decided, and the lost water were the reasons for Rashid's temper. Because his camel had gone fast, Caleb was stiff, aching, and the sore blisters were growing where his thighs joined his buttocks.

Then the Beautiful One speeded up, lengthened her stride, without command. She passed Fahd, who looked away and would not catch Caleb's eye, and two of the bulls, who had the crates, and came level with Hosni's camel.

The Egyptian seemed hardly to see Caleb. His eyes were watery, without brightness and stared down only at the rein and the neck of the camel. The clothes on him hung looser than when they had started out, but even then they had flopped over the spare body.

Without shade, exposed to the ferocity of the sun, without sufficient water, Caleb realized how quickly the strength of the elderly Egyptian was waning. His own pains were severe and the blister sores were growing, but Caleb hid them because Hosni's pains and sores would be worse. It must have been his breathing, a little sucked intake as the Beautiful One lurched and the rough saddle sacking expanded the biggest of the sores, that raised the Egyptian's head a fraction.

'Thank you, Fahd, for riding with me. I will not fall, I…'

Caleb looked into the dull wet eyes. 'It is me, Hosni, I am back with you.'

'Ah, the noble one. The one with the conscience. What did you achieve?'

'I dug out the wheels, I cleaned the engine.'

'Did she thank you?'

'She thanked me.'

'How did she thank you?' Hosni's voice was mocking.

Caleb said firmly, quietly, 'She told me she was grateful for what I had done.'

The Egyptian, as if it were a great effort, threw his head back and snorted derision, 'She said she was grateful. Are we all now at risk because you dug out her wheels and cleaned her engine?'

'I did not put you at risk, I promise it.'

'Promise? It is a fine word, "promise". I would have killed her, we all would.' From the exhausted weakness of his face his voice came clear and strong. 'You will be asked to stand in a place where great crowds move. A thousand men, women and children will walk in front of you, will jostle behind you, will ignore you or will smile at you. Old men, pretty women and sweet, laughing children will pass by you – and if you carry out your order all are doomed… Can we now trust you? I am not sure, Fahd is uncertain, Tommy is certain we should not…'

'I will do what is asked of me. I made a judgement, 1 live by it.'

'If it had been a man, as gross as Tommy, as ugly as Fahd, as old and weak as me, would you have stopped to dig him out and clean his engine, or would he now be dead?'

'I live by my judgement,' Caleb said.

'But it was a pretty woman…' Hosni spat into the sand, and the hoofs erased his spittle. The coughing racked his throat. 'Because you ride with me, because you are from outside of us, of great value but new to us, I will tell you of the mistakes made by men of A1 Qaeda.

Listen well… Many mistakes, and all made by men who had faith and commitment but were careless or stupid… Ramzi Yousef will die in prison because a colleague left his laptop computer on a table in an apartment in Manila, and the whole of Ramzi's strategy was on the hard drive. Careless and stupid, and a mistake… Arab fighters posed for celebration photographs on the armour of destroyed Soviet tanks in Afghanistan, and ten years later one fighter has kept a copy of the photograph and is captured by the CIA. All his closest comrades are identified. Careless and a mistake… In Nairobi, approaching the American embassy, needing to get through a guarded barrier to be close to the building, the one chosen to shoot the guard realizes as the lorry bomb brakes that he has forgotten his pistol, has left it in the safe-house. Stupid and a mistake… An organizer plans an attack to the last detail, takes months to prepare for the strike, and an hour before the bomb is moved he boards a plane home to Pakistan. By the time he lands the bomb has exploded, security at Karachi is alert. The organizer shows his forged passport at the desk. He is bearded, the photograph in the passport shows a man who is clean-shaven. A mistake… A man carries sixty kilos of explosives in the trunk of his car to the Canadian side of the border with America and it is the middle of winter and there is snow on the ground and ice on the road, and he is sweating. A mistake that is stupid and careless… A van is driven under the World Trade Center in 1991, the first attack, which did not bring down the towers. In six thousand tonnes of debris, the Americans find the VIN number of the van's engine and trace it to a hire company, and the man who has hired it has given his own name for their records and his own address. A mistake that is careless and stupid… Each mistake, the use of the Internet, of a satellite phone, of a mobile phone, costs the freedom of many, and the lives of many. Do you listen to me?'

'I am listening.'

'A week before you came to us I read in an Omani newspaper that, on the Pakistan and Afghan border, the bodies of two men had been found; both dead. Their throats had been cut, and their mouths were filled with dollar notes. They had lost the trust… You demanded of us that the woman should live. Was that a mistake?'

Caleb said, 'I did not make a mistake.'

It was not the time to break for water, or for prayers. Rashid had halted the march, had put up his hand as a signal to them, had knelt his camel, dismounted, and walked forward alone. The boy had run back on foot and had caught each of the camels' reins; they stood motionless. The sun beat on them, and Caleb swayed on the Beautiful One. The blisters on his thighs, below his buttocks, had calmed in the night but had now reopened in the motion of riding.

'Why have we stopped?' Caleb asked Ghaffur.

The boy shrugged.

'For how long will we stop?'

The boy looked away, would not meet Caleb's eye.

He gazed around him. He sensed the camels were restless, even the Beautiful One, the most placid among them. Some raised their heads high and seemed to sniff, some bellowed, some spat out cud.

They were aware, Caleb did not know of what. Around him was a wide plain of sand, unlike any they had crossed before. It seemed crusted under a film of loose sand, and since they had come through a gully between dunes, a harsher sand had caked round the camels' hoofs.