Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

He had not put his name forward. He had fifteen minutes of exercise ahead of him, but the football-players had an hour of chasing the ball.

A big American, tracksuited, ruled the pitch with a whistle. He loathed them, all of them, loathed them whether they wore a tracksuit and praised, whether they wore the bright sun shirts and interrogated, whether they had the camouflage uniform and the key bars to the manacles and shackles.

He did his circuits. When a goal was scored, the American blasted his whistle and applauded. He looked at the players, dancing because the ball was in the back netting, and tried to remember the faces. If any were moved to the cell next to his, he would be more careful, would guard against the smallest mistake.

At the end of his last circuit, his escort gestured for him.

His arms were held as he was led out of the yard. He would not exercise for another week.

'You could be doing that, kid, playing soccer. You've only got to ask.'

He did not understand. He smiled nervously at the guard. He had learned his part.

He was taken to the shower block.

With the loathing was contempt. He felt superior to the men who escorted him, unmanacled and unshackled him, who watched him undress, who saw him into the cubicle where the water sluiced down on him. He did not come cheap. They would not turn him with the offer of a game of football. He deceived them. The certainty of his superiority gave him strength.

A towel was thrown to him.

Marty lay on his back on the camp bed. Beside it, propped against the chair on which his clothes hung, was the picture, his only valued possession. Behind the glass, spattered with sand grains and misted with condensation, was Marty's hero; the hero at Gundamuck who had wrapped round his chest the colours of the 44th Regiment.

Lieutenant Souter, a hundred and sixty-two years before, had survived the last stand of his troops and gone home, feted.

Marty aspired to heroism, and did not know how he would achieve it.

If he had still been at Bagram, Marty would now have been in the Officers' Club. He would have been a centre of attention. The beers would have kept coming. The Agency people would have been round him, pilots, sensor operators, interrogators and analysts, and the cans would have kept coming for free. He had done a launch, seen the Hellfires go, watched the cloud mushroom up. It would have been his party time, his moment of heroics, if he had been at Bagram.

But he was not, he was in this shit-hole.

At Bagram Marty would have had an audience, with supervisors and ranking agents doing cheer-leading. His praises would have been sung. And the talk would have moved on to him bringing Carnival Girl home, with the tanks showing empty and the wind plucking at her as she touched down. He was a goddamn hero but no one was around to tell him.

The wind battered at the tent's sides. The sand came in between the flaps and the ground sheet, and the roof billowed. A solitary beer, given him by George, was half hidden on the chair by his clothes, which were hitched on the back. Marty hadn't pulled the can's ring.

The last thing he'd heard from Oscar Golf was a demand for

'soonest' information on potential damage to the port-side wing-tip of Carnival Girl in the touch-down. There had been no hero-gram out of Langley, no congratulation from goddamn Gonsalves, nothing. He had staggered out of the Ground Control, had been close to spilling himself on to the sand at the foot of the trailer steps, and George had given him the beer, which hadn't come from an icebox.

George had gone off in the jeep to tow the bird off the runway. Lizzy-Jo had been slumped, dead to the world, over her end of the workbench. He should have slept, but he could not. Again and again, searing in his mind, he saw the lurch of the platform when the first Hellfire went away from Carnival Girl, the ball of fire going down, and the camels breaking their line of march, then the cloud – and the second missile going into that cloud. Could not sleep.

The tent's entrance flap was lifted back. The wind came in behind her. The sand spewed round her, spraying on to his legs and body, and over his face.

She dropped the flap.

She sat on the bed. Her hips, in the tight short trousers, were against his knees. He could have covered himself, could have reached for the boxers or his singlet, but he did not. Too tired, too dead, too cheated to care. The bed bent under her weight.

'That's a fine sight,' Lizzy-Jo said, and winked. 'Might frighten a girl in the Carolinas – but not a New Yorker.'

She had not buttoned up her blouse. Her hand rested on the hairs of his chest.

'Did you sleep?'

'No. Tried to, didn't.'

'You want the news?'

Her fingers pulled at the hairs, teased them.

'What's the news?'

'You look like you need a lift-up…'

For months, Marty had worked with Lizzy-Jo, had shared a workbench with her. She'd been good, he was raw. The guys said, at Bagram, that she was assigned to mind him. Half the pilots at Bagram would have given a month's pay to work alongside Lizzy-Jo. He'd wondered often enough whether she'd complained about being put with him because he was new and given the dirty work, hadn't been an Air Force flier, had acne and fat-lensed glasses. He didn't know her – knew about Rick, who sold insurance, and about Clara, who was watched over by Rick's parents during the working day, knew about a marriage that had died, knew about her dedication… and nothing of her.

' Langley says that flight out of Shaybah was of the highest quality technical achievement, that it was pressed home in the most adverse conditions, that the video record of the flight and the missile firing will be used for training programmes in the future. It's what Langley said.'

He felt the blood pound in his cheeks.

She was bent over him, her breasts hanging close to his chest where her fingers played in the hairs. 'And Gonsalves came through from Riyadh. He said he was proud of us. If you'd stayed around in the trailer you'd have heard what he said.'

He blushed, felt like a kid. It was like when his high-school grades had come through – and he'd thought he'd flunked when he hadn't.

'I'd say it's party time.'

She leaned over him, reaching for the can. He did not know her, did not know what she felt for him… and her finger was into the ring and tugging it. The beer's foam sprayed over him, ran on his belly. She tilted the can for him to drink and the beer spilled from his mouth as he swallowed. He thought he'd drunk half the can, then she put it down. She licked the warm beer off his chest, took the hairs in her mouth, then her tongue was on his stomach.

'You good to party?'

Marty nodded, closed his eyes. She kicked off her flip-flops and wriggled out of the tight short trousers. Her face was serious, set – like the business was important – as she stood and pulled down her panties, then her weight was on him. The condom had been in her pocket, and she ripped the wrapping off with her teeth and peeled it over him.

He turned his head away so that he could not see her face… and he did not know why, what she needed from him, whether she had done it like this with the insurance salesman. The sweat ran in rivulets between her breasts and on to him, oiled them and fastened them together. The last time had been with a girl at Nellis, from the management of the base canteen, and she'd had thicker spectacles than him and had weighed more than a hundred and fifty pounds.

She'd hoped he'd marry her. Then he'd gone to Bagram and she'd never written.

He had killed. The reward for him, for killing, was to get laid twice in a half-hour. Maybe she had done it many times at Bagram, in her own prefabricated quarters or in a pilot's, but it did not matter to him. He gloried in the feel of her and squeezed deeper inside her the second time. He heard her shallow cries and the pace of her breathing, and he hung on to her as if in fear that it would finish. He did not see into her eyes, did not know her. He pushed his hips against hers. At the last moment, he yelled out, gasped, and sobbed his thanks to her. She squealed… He wondered how many of the technical guys or Maintenance heard her, if George did. He could go no deeper. His nails gouged her back and the sweat came off her and was in his mouth and he tasted the salt of it, with the beer.