Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

'I don't think I know, Dr Bartholomew, about schistosomiasis – I specialize in midwifery. You understand?'

'Of course, of course. All I am trying to say to you, Miss Hardenberger, is that when you get back to Vienna, please, stand on a rooftop and let the whole of that city know what you have seen. Please do that.'

'I will. God's truth, I will.'

It happened quickly. He was looking into her face, a little taken by the scrubbed cleanliness of her skin, no cosmetics, when the car came by. It was driven fast and the two men behind them, the doctors, quite roughly, with urgency, pushed Bart and the Austrian woman from the middle of the street.

At that moment, as the car – a rusted lime-green Fiat – passed them, the back-seat passenger looked their way. A face from a photograph.

'Tell me, Dr Bartholomew, because your commitment and dedication humble me, what did you give up back in England to come here?'

His mind wandered. All of the photographs were good. They were not standard police photographs, front and profile, but unguarded surveillance pictures. They had a naturalness, were recognizable. In Joseph's hut, the photographs were ranked in order of sensitivity and the most sensitive were shown to him most often. He knew the face of the man in the back seat of the Fiat. The car sped across the square.

'A normal practice.' Bart grinned. 'You know, hernias and hips, pregnancy and prostates.'

'You gave up so much.'

'I tell you, Miss Hardenberger, if you are here and you are tempted to drift into self-pity, you have only to look around you. Here, self-pity is not an option.'

'I hope God watches over you,' she said softly.

He smiled at her… More importantly, he thought, did the rapid-reaction unit stationed up on the hill at the checkpoint watch over him? Everything he said was listened to. They went past the scaffolding where children waited in line to give flowers to the delegation, and there was a shout from the front that they must hurry if they were to visit the medical centre, a Portakabin shed.

He let her go ahead, said something about not wanting to hog her. She walked with the man from the Palestine Authority. Alone, without the distraction of her chatter, he could look better for another sighting of the Fiat.

He saw it down a side alley, barely wide enough for it to have parked and for another vehicle to pass. The alley was on the right-hand side of the wider street that led to the medical centre in the yard of the village school.

Opposite the alley he spotted a good marker, a collapsed telephone pole, felled by a manoeuvring tank months earlier and not raised again.

Back at their vehicles, as the delegation loaded up, the Austrian woman came to Bart, stretched up on her toes and kissed his cheek. He coidd smell the soft scent of the flowers she held.

Two hours later, in the hut at the checkpoint, over a mug of coffee and a sweet seed cake, he told Joseph of the lime-green Fiat, and the photograph was on the second page – at the top – among the most sensitive fugitives, and he described the flattened telephone pole at the top of the alley.

'You are sure?'

'Certain.'

'There is no possibility of an error?'

'None.'

Joseph said, T think to utilize this we have little time. Not time enough to make a complicated separation of you from the target. 1 don't wish to frighten you – be very careful, be exceptionally careful.'

Bart drove home. He fed the cat. He sat in his favourite chair, the sun beat on the windoivs and he shivered.

The class finished.

'Shu-ismak?' What is your name?

'Min wayn inta?' Where are you from?

That morning of the week, the last before the lunch-break, Beth had her biggest class. No history, no literature, and not the detailed language of the petroleum-extraction manuals. It was for basics.

'Ana af-ham.' I understand.

'Ureed mutarjem.' I want an interpreter.

The class catered for workers from every section of the Shaybah complex, was always full. Each time she read out the Arabic phrase, there followed a choir of voices struggling with the English translation.

'Mish mushkila.' No problem.

'Wayn al-funduq?' Where is the hotel?

In any other week she would have enjoyed the class for its enthusiasm. She did not think that any of them, as she spoke the Arabic and they replied in English, had realized that her heart was not with them, her concentration was gone. The class drifted towards the door with a cacophony of conversation and scraped chairs. One of the last to leave, gathering up the photocopied sheets she gave them for private study, was the head of Security. She was wiping clean her blackboard.

She called his name. She asked, please, if he could stay a moment.

The room cleared.

'Yes, Miss Bethany?'

She hesitated, then blurted, 'There is something I do not understand.'

'If I can be of help.'

She felt stupid. She should have backed off – but she never did. It was not her way. She tried to master a fraudulent casualness in her question. 'Someone told me that the Rub' al Khali around us is a place of danger. Is that true?'

He glanced down at his watch, as if unwilling to be delayed. 'True, and you know that. Extreme heat, dehydration, remoteness, it is very harsh.'

'Sorry, I don't explain myself – danger because of the people who move in the Sands.'

'False.' Again his eye slipped to his watch and a puzzled frown settled over his eyes. 'In your language you call it the Empty Quarter.

That is what it is. Only the Bedouin are there. An old culture of trading has given them the knowledge of the Sands. They can survive there, nobody else. The Bedouin are not thieves, they have a tradition of kindness and generosity. I know you go into the Sands, Miss Bethany, when you search for the meteorites, and you should be fearful of the conditions of nature, but not of criminals. Only the Bedouin are there, no other man can survive such a place. A stranger who tries to walk in the Sands, he condemns himself – he is dead.'

Thank you.' She dropped her head.

He lightened. 'Now, I understand… You have heard, Miss Bethany, the rumours – what they would gossip about in a camel market – of terrorists in the Sands. No, no. Those people are in Riyadh, Jedda and Ad Dammam, not in the desert. They would die there. Excuse me, please.'

She was left in the emptied room.

She wiped out the last lines on her blackboard. Min wayn intal and shu-ismak? She smeared out the chalked words.

Where are you from? Who are you?

In the boxes are the Stinger missiles. Do you know about the Stinger missiles?' Hosni was laid across the neck of his camel and his voice was a reedy, frail whisper.

Caleb crouched in his saddle to hear him. 'Once I saw one, but not close.'

'They are old. We do not know whether they are affected by the age. But they are important.'

They moved in a tightened knot, man close to man, camel brushing against camel, and he smelt the sweat on the guide and the boy, on the Egyptian and himself, the foul breath panted by the camels.

His knee bumped against a box's edge on the flank of a pack bull.

'I saw one when we tried to hold a line beyond Kabul, but the bombers were too high,' Caleb said. 'It was not fired.'

'The Stinger turned the war for us against the Soviets. The Soviets had a great fear of them.' Hosni coughed, tried to spit, as if the old memory of an enemy required it.

'I was never taught to fire one.'

'We bring them across the desert, deliver them, then they will be moved on, taken to where there is a target… but we do not know whether they will operate. Tommy opened the boxes, and there were manuals inside. They were written for Americans and Tommy could not read American.'

'Should we leave them behind?' Caleb had changed the order of the march. He expected to be listened to. 'Will the weight of them kill the camels?'