Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

He tightened the hold on his reins and he bent and his voice whispered soft words in the ear of the Beautiful One. He slowed her step, and the sight of Fahd's head and feet drifted further away. The sand disturbed by Hosni's camel was no longer lifted into his face, and the pack bull passed him. Caleb waited for the boy to reach him.

'Will you talk to me?'

'My father says that to talk is to waste strength.'

'Does your father also say that to be alone is to be frightened?'

'We are never alone in the Sands. God is with us, my father says.'

'Were you frightened, Ghaffur?'

'No.' The boy shook his head.

He remembered himself at Ghaffur's age, and the kids he'd messed with. Caleb would have been, they would have been, terrified when the flames had come down, fireballs, from the sky, which was clear, blue and empty. He believed the boy.

'Tell me.'

'My father says it is an aircraft without a pilot. It is flown by commands -I do not understand how – that are given it by men who sit far away. They could be a week's camel ride from it, or more. My father heard about it from the Bedouin of the Yemen. There was a man from the town of Marib, he was Qaed Sunian al-Harthi and he was hunted by the Americans, but he was in the desert and he thought himself safe, and he rode in a vehicle towards an oil well where Americans worked. He had made a bomb… He was betrayed. They knew when he would move and in what vehicle.

There was no warning. He was hit from the sky. My father says there are cameras in the aircraft, and the Americans would have watched the vehicle he rode in. He was killed from the sky, and all the men with him. The Bedouin would have believed that the bomb he carried had exploded, but the police told the Bedouin that the Americans had boasted about their aircraft in the sky… You were frightened?'

Caleb bit at his lip, and the sand stuck at his teeth. 'I hope I am not a coward -1 admit I was frightened… Does your father say how we can run from it?'

'Only with God's help, and He gives us the wind.'

'If the wind is too strong?'

'If that is what He wishes,' the boy said solemnly. 'God spared you

– He has a great purpose for you.'

It came in against the gale. From her window, Beth had seen it make the first attempt to land, but that was failure.

She had thought it extraordinary that the aircraft should have flown in those conditions. It had been fifty feet or so above the extreme end of the runway and had seemed to be lifted up, as if by an unseen hand, then thrown sideways. The regular flight from Riyadh had not come in that morning, and that would have been a Hoeing 737, heavy and stable. This aircraft was tiny in comparison, lightweight toy. It had climbed, shaking, as if it was punched, and while it had come round for the second attempt, Beth had gone out on to the patio. It made no sense to her that they should be flying, for evaluation and mapping, in such weather.

It had lined up again over the landing guide lights that were in the sand beyond the perimeter fence. Everything in Beth Jenkins's life, before these last several days, had been based on certainty. She clung to the trunk of the palm, and she saw what was different. There were no tubes under the wings. There had been tubes under the wings the last time she had seen the aircraft lift off.

She was confused, knew no answers, heard only the questions.

It rolled with the wind. It was over the runway, seemed to stop like the hovering shahin her patron flew. It lurched clumsily – she remembered the grace of its take-off. A wing went down, its balance was lost. In bad weather, her patron would not have risked the lives of his prized shahin or his hurr. He had paid – and had told her the money was well spent – a hundred and ten thousand dollars for the trained peregrine, and eighty thousand dollars for the saker falcon, and she thought this bird must have been valued at many millions of dollars.

Why would they risk it? It made no sense. Beth thought it was past the point of return, had to come down.

The right wing came up, it levelled, was a crippled bird and fragile. The left wing dipped.

No pilot. The only life in danger was that of the bird itself. The left wing-tip scraped on the Tarmac. It ran on, stopped, then turned. It taxied down the runway and, as if its engine was cut, came to a slow and hesitant halt. A jeep came from the little camp and sped towards it.

She went back into the bungalow and started to work again on her report on the ejecta field, but she could not concentrate… Nothing was certain, doubt ruled. He was with her. 'You never met me, I was never here… You never saw my face.' She hit the laptop's keys, but demons danced and she could not lose them. Beth could not make the link between the aircraft and him, but sensed it existed.

She wanted to cry out, to yell a warning, could not and the silence dripped around her.

He saw a man who was tall, athletically built, tanned, and not dressed for that morning's English weather.

Michael Lovejoy strode forward, not with a springing step because the legacy of the winter was increasing pain in his hip joints. The man had Lovejoy's name in big letters on a sheet of paper and held it up. The flight was in early and Lovejoy was late. The man wore heavy shoes, suede, and faded jeans with a brightly checked cotton shirt. There was a grip bag at his feet as he gazed around him, a frown of impatience writ large on a sunburned forehead. Lovejoy played at charm.

'Mr Dietrich – Mr Jed Dietrich? I'm Lovejoy, I was asked to meet you. Sincere apologies for keeping you hanging round. The traffic was awful.'

'Pleased to meet you. I was just beginning to wonder…'

His handshake crunched Lovejoy's fingers. 'I'm sure you were.

Anyway, all's well that ends well, don't you know? God, this place is a nightmare. Car's outside, bit of a walk, I'm afraid.'

Lovejoy rarely met Americans. Those he did were from the embassy's legal department. They were Federal Bureau of Investigation, men with cropped scalps, polished shoes and bow-ties, or women with flat chests, trouser suits and bobbed hair. As a breed, he was innately suspicious of them. When they came on to his territory it always seemed they expected his immediate and un-divided attention, and when he went on to their ground it always seemed they were busy and uninterested. He was not late because of awful traffic but because Mercy and he had lingered over breakfast.

He had brought his own car, a six-year-old Volvo estate that was good for ferrying the grandchildren.

In the multi-storey car park, after walking as fast as his hip joints permitted him, he unlocked the vehicle. He expected the American to comment on the child seats in the back. The cousins from across the water, both sexes, usually liked to talk kids and produce photographs from their wallets. There was no remark on the seats, or on the kids' clutter in the front from the school run Mercy had done the previous week. They pulled out.

'I see you've been in the sunshine, Mr Dietrich. You won't find much of that here… So, you've come in from Florida. Is that your workplace, or the end of a vacation?'

There had been no holiday that year for Michael and Mercy Lovejoy. The new conservatory at the back of their home had gulped the spare cash. Lack of funds had denied them the usual two weeks in a rented Cornish cottage and his summer leave had been spent decorating the dining room and the sitting room. When Lovejoy referred to other people's holidays there was often a barb in his tone.

The reply was crisp. 'I work at Guantanamo Bay.'

Last thing before leaving home for the drive to the airport, as Mercy had kissed his cheek, Lovejoy had told her: 'God knows what their Defense Intelligence Agency want from us. What I've always understood, they're the "eternal flames" – you know, never go out.