Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

Caleb squinted. Sunlight reflected up from the sand, seemed to burn the lids of his eyes. How long was it, he thought, since he had seen a scorpion or a snake's trail, the little furrowed track of a mouse, a locust hopping or a fly, a living bush or a grass blade? It was as if nothing could survive here. No creatures, no insects, no vegetation.

He did not know how far they had come, how far they had yet to travel. It seemed a place of death. It was hard for him to see as far as Rashid. The shape of the guide's body moved, shimmered. But he saw the post.

Caleb blinked.

A pace in front of the guide, and a little to the side of him, a length of old wood, without bark, stuck up from the sand and its snapped-off tip was level with the guide's knee. It could not have been there by any accident of nature. Rashid had his palm to his forehead shading his eyes, and stared out as if searching.

Then they moved. It was abrupt. Up to then, on the march, they had taken straight lines except where dune walls had blocked them and needed to be bypassed. Rashid veered to his right. The boy, behind him, had them all bunched close, and the pack camels, the bulls carrying the crates. When Ghaffur came level with Caleb, he would not look into his face and would not speak, but he slapped the Beautiful One's haunches to make him close up, and Caleb realized the order they took was changed.

He was no longer at the back.

A new order was formed. Rashid, Ghaffur, Caleb. Behind Caleb was Hosni, then Fahd. Caleb's place at the back of the caravan went to the Iraqi, Tommy. Not since they had started out, had crossed the border and moved down into the Sands, had Tommy taken the rear position.

Caleb saw Rashid's face when he turned to check behind him, and saw the face of the boy – felt a gathering tension, but could not place it, could not find a reason for it, but it clawed at him.

The march now was different from any other of the days crossing the desert. There was a second marker. The piece of wood protruded less than half a foot from the sand, and Caleb's burned eyes would have missed it, but at this marker Rashid set a new course to his left.

The heat dulled him. Too tired to shout a question at Rashid or at the boy, he clung to the saddle and the Beautiful One followed the camels in front, slow and lethargic, each hoof sinking into the tracks of the ones she followed. The heat was worse, the blister sores were worse. After what he thought was four hundred yards they went to the left and, after what he thought was another two hundred yards, to the right. Then they straightened, and the camels sniffed the warmth of the air and the bulls bellowed, but Caleb thought the sand around them was no different from how it had been every day. The angles that Rashid took confused him, but Caleb could not escape the sense of increasing tension.

He had barely noticed it when Rashid stopped.

Ghaffur took the lead position. Caleb followed the boy. He passed Rashid. He tried to focus on Rashid's face to read it, could not, his eyes wavered and could not lock. No greeting, no explanation, no word. The Beautiful One lumbered on. Behind him were the pack animals, then Hosni and Fahd, and last the Iraqi. He did not understand the tension that now held him.

Caleb turned, twisted on the saddle of sacking. The pain surged in his thighs from the movement: the sores had opened wider. Rashid was now behind Tommy, his camel's neck level with Tommy's camel's haunches. Caleb looked ahead. He took a point for his eyes in the centre of Ghaffur's back. Now the boy swung his camel to the right and the zigzag pattern continued.

His eyes were closed. He yearned for the next stop, for the quarter-mug of water. His eyes were tight against the strength of the sun. His throat was parched. Sand pricked at his face. He rolled, thought he might fall, forgot any concern for whatever happened behind him.

The embassy advised against driving alone.

Bart drove alone and took the shortest route.

Even with a chauffeur, the embassy advised, travel on a Friday in Riyadh should be made with extreme caution.

It was Friday.

Never on a Friday, advised the embassy, should an expatriate go anywhere near the Grand Mosque and the wide pedestrian square between the mosque and the Palace of Justice.

The call had come, it was an emergency and, it being Friday, there was no chauffeur available to drive Bart. He discarded embassy advice, and his mind mapped the most direct way from his compound to that from which the panic phone call had come. He came down Al-Malik Faisal Street, his speedometer needle on the edge of the limit, did not notice the drifting crowds of men, young and old, had no thought of what time prayers would have finished in the Grand Mosque and, when the city's old restored walls were ahead of him, he swung to the right into Al-Imam Torki Ibn Abdulla Street, and had to slow because the crowds thickened and filled the road. Then, crawling, Bart realized where he was.

The pedestrian precinct, bounded on the north by the mosque, on the south by the justice building, on the east by the souvenir shops and on the west by the Souq Deira Shopping and Commercial Centre, was known to expatriates. It was an endless source of fascination, gossip, speculation, and shivering horror. The embassy's security officer advised all expatriates, in the strongest possible terms, that they should never be near that part of the city on a Friday after morning prayers. To the expatriates, the precinct was 'Chop Chop Square'. Without prior announcement in newspapers or on the television-news broadcasts, after Friday-morning prayers the Kingdom's executions were carried out in Chop Chop Square. 'Don't ever want to gawp, don't ever be tempted… It is a place of extreme emotions at the time of a beheading… Stay clear. Give the place as wide a berth as possible

… Take no chances there,' the security officer at the embassy advised expatriates. But Bart had been called out on an emergency, and had not been concentrating on the embassy's lectures. Now he had to slow and the crowds flowed around him. He could see, between the moving sea of robes, past the side of the mosque and into the square.

It was an emergency, and emergencies paid well. Friday, no servants in the compound villa: in the main lighting unit of a kitchen a bulb had failed. The tenant, an American lawyer with no servant to do it for him, had put a chair under the unit, had climbed on to it for the purpose of changing the bulb. The chair had toppled, the lawyer had fallen and, with increasing hysteria, his wife had phoned all of the listed American doctors… Friday, and they were golfing or tennis-playing or visiting, and Bart's number had been given her.

The way she told it, in her panic, her husband's arm was critically damaged. Could he come? Like now. Like half an hour ago. Bart didn't golf, didn't play tennis, didn't do social visiting. He had scooped out a bowlful of food for the cat from a tin, grabbed his bag and hurried out. Expatriates, Americans and Europeans, dreaded accidents and had mortal fear of going alone to a Saudi hospital Accident and Emergency; Bart would be well rewarded for turning out on a Friday in the middle of the day.

The crowds refused to edge out of his way. He twisted among them. Why was he there? Samuel Algernon Laker Bartholomew's road led back directly to the day when he had stumbled from the surgery in Nicosia, and the man had been waiting for him on the pavement and had taken him for a drink. The man, who had so briefly entered his life, was Jimmy: no second name, no address, no telephone number, but a wallet and the minimal generosity of putting, at ten twenty-five in the morning, a double Jameson – no water – on the table in the corner of the bar. 'A man's down, and the whole bloody world gets in a queue to kick him – bloody unfair. This island's dead for you. Look on the bright side, I always say a glass is half full, not half empty. I happen to know where a highly qualified general practitioner, brimming with experience, can do really good work and be appreciated. How I'd put it, the sort of work that would enable a highly qualified and experienced doctor to stuff these unproven allegations down the necks of the bastards making them.