Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

The boy seemed to hiss for him to be quiet.

'Has your father been here before, ever before?'

The hiss was louder, sharper.

'It is madness to move in darkness…'

The hiss whistled at him, cut him.

He could see, faintly, that Ghaffur was high on his saddle. His head was raised. The wind tore at the boy's robe. It was natural to ride into the wind with the body bent low and the target for the wind minimized. It was as though Ghaffur sniffed the wind, or listened.

He strained to see the boy better, could not. 'Ghaffur, tell me – are we lost?'

'My father knows where he is, where we go. He knows everything of the Sands.'

'Why do we not go straight, in a straight line?'

'Only God knows more about the Sands. My father is responsible for you. He decides the route and you follow.'

'Why do you go forward and talk to him, and then each time we turn?'

The boy called back to him, a slight voice beaten by the wind,

'Because of what I hear.'

'I hear nothing.'

'My ears are the best, my father says they are the ears of a leopard, one that lives in the mountains. It is an engine's noise. A long way off, but I thought I heard it.'

'What sort of engine? On the air or on the ground? Where was it?'

'I do not know. Each time you talk I cannot listen.'

Caleb heard only the footfall of the camels, the snoring of Fahd and Hosni, and the darkness closed round him and the wind speared against him.

In the night the wind swerved to come from the north, and greater ferocity came with the change.

In the sands of the Rub' al Khali, men lay against their camels' bodies to find shelter, and only their guide knew the value of the wind.

Above the sands, rocked, tossed and shaken, a Predator flew and hunted, in secrecy and silence, and under each wing was a Hellfire missile.

The dawn's light nestled on the wings of the Predator and caught the sandcoated backs of the camels.

'In words of one syllable, or two, stop fucking me about.'

'I am sorry, Mr Wroughton, sir, but I do not have authority to admit you.'

'Young man, I am expected.'

'I don't think so, Mr Wroughton, sir.'

'I had a meeting fixed up.'

'Yes, sir, but not here.'

In the half-light, as the city woke, Wroughton had left the bed of an agronomist's wife – Belgian, large and not entirely pretty, but experienced – and had driven to the Gonsalves' compound.

Sometimes he went there when Teresa was giving the kids their tea and waited for Juan's return, sometimes it was for breakfast before Juan drove to the embassy. The agronomist was due back in Riyadh from Layla, west of the big desert, that evening. If it had not been for his appointment with Juan, his friend, Wroughton would have enjoyed another three hours, or four if he could last it, in the agronomist's bed – inside the agronomist's wife; the man was down in Layla to examine the possibilities of growing a strawberry crop on the edge of the big desert – bloody fool. Teresa had said, in her night-dress and with the kids howling round her, that Juan had already gone down to the embassy, had been gone an hour.

'Just, please, get on the phone and tell him that I'm downstairs. .. or is that too bloody difficult?'

'He knows you are here, Mr Wroughton, sir.'

Teresa, at her front door, had yawned, then pulled a face and winked. 'Big flap, Eddie. Panic call. He was dressing as he was driving.' The marine on the embassy desk had rung through, and the young man had come down. Wroughton knew him as the number five out of five in the Agency's Riyadh pecking order. The meeting, over breakfast, round the kitchen table, was just routine and the chance to exchange snippets, but it was important for Wroughton.

That day of each month he started on his report, regular as his bowels, for Vauxhall Bridge Cross. Much, too much, of his monthly report came from the crumbs off Juan and Teresa's kitchen table. A big flap, a panic call, he needed to know the detail of that. He was blocked, and his temper rose.

Wroughton swung his fist towards the internal phone on the desk in front of the marine guard. 'Just get him on the phone – I'll speak to him.'

He thought this young man had a future in fielding customer complaints in a telephone or electricity company – so calm, and his voice never betrayed anger. 'He said you'd be round. He said, when you came round, I was to come down and tell you that he was too busy – some other time. He'd ring. That's what I was to tell you, Mr Wroughton, sir.'

The young man shrugged, then sidled away, went through the inner gate with a punch-number lock.

Wroughton turned, furious. What price the special fucking relationship? He stamped towards the swing doors where the marines watched him impassively. A big flap, a panic call, and Eddie Wroughton was shut out. He would not have believed it, not of the special relationship, not of his friend. He could still smell the Belgian woman on him, and he went home to change his shirt… and his whole damned world was upside-down, was tossed aside.

'How much more time, for God's sake, do they need?'

For five minutes more than an hour, Juan Gonsalves had been watching the screen. He wore a bar microphone and the headset was clamped in his uncombed hair. He paced in the communications area. His shirt hung out of his trousers and his vest had the hand-prints of last night's kids' food – but his eyes, bloodshot and tired, never left the screen. Not often did he show raw stress.

He was not permitted a direct link with the Ground Control at Shaybah. The raised hut on the trailer down at the end of the runway, beside the perimeter fence, was off-limits to Gonsalves. Too fraught down there, he'd been told. What it meant, they didn't need a rubber-necker over their shoulder. Close to him, leaning against the closed door, was Nathan, the new guy out from Langley, and he'd had the signal from the young man that the visitor in the lobby had been sent away. There were things that Gonsalves would share, and things he would not. A live image from four and a half miles over the Rub' al Khali – with a target – was not to be shared.

The feed on the screen, real time, rolled and bucked, went soft focus, reclaimed the target, lost it, found it again. Nathan had moved to the coffee dispenser. Over the headset, Gonsalves heard the reassurance of Langley and the increasing tension of the guys down at Shaybah. The talk was coded, technical, and Gonsalves could understand only trifles. Why the hell did they not strike? The picture on the screen, beamed off the Predator, wavered off and on to a drawn-out camel train. The effort of the sensor operator was to get clear images of the cargo carried by three of the camels. More times than he had counted, the zoom had gone down on the camels, blurred with magnification, but then the picture had been lost. He had seen the men, five of them, spread out over a length that might have been as much as two hundred metres. They went slowly in long arcs. The camera tried, one more time, to go close-up on a cargo box, but the focus failed. The angle changed. Gonsalves imagined, high above the caravan, kicked by the gale winds, that the Predator circled.

Nathan gave him coffee. He drank, didn't notice the taste. He flung the beaker towards the trash can, missed, and coffee dribbled on to the floor. He picked up off the table the photocopied picture of a crate box, olive green, that could hold a Stinger, the man-portable surface-to-air missile system. He knew the wind had reached new levels at the altitude of the Predator and at the level of the desert, because the picture rocked more severely and there seemed to be a mist over the camels and the men, which he thought to be from driven sand. In his working life, Juan Gonsalves had not known a stress level so high. He depressed the speech button on his headset.