Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

When you going to go?'

'Next pass,' she said. 'I don't have a problem.'

His fingers were softer on the joystick than the last time. Then he had had the wind to fight. She had it on the wide angle. The camera caught the target as it moved, a little wriggling beetle, over the expanse of sand. What had changed, the target was closed up. It was now the ninth hour since he had taken First Lady up. Two hours into the flight they had circled over the first missile strike and he had seen the twin blackened craters and the carcass of the camel, and then they had started to hunt. He had taken First Lady on a criss-cross of patterns over the desert floor. A pursuit that was relentless after fugitives who could have no hope, that was what he'd thought.

Inevitable. He had not doubted that Lizzy-Jo's camera would find them. Nothing shrill in her voice when she had, no blurt of excitement – only the gesture of her hand, then the finger pointing to the right upper quarter of the screen. She'd worked the camera and the target had gone to the screen's centre. Fourteen minutes later he brought First Lady back on the figure-eight curves, and Lizzy-Jo was going through the procedures for firing.

The beetle moved so slowly. They were tight together. He wondered whether they searched the skies, gazed up at the sun and burned out their eyes. They would fail. The heat haze came up off the sand round them, distorted the picture, but it remained clear enough for him to see them, to watch their crawling progress. He saw four men. He did not know them, they had no identity for him. He remembered what Gonsalves had said. It echoed in his mind: 'The hardest man, the strongest. The man they need. The man that can hurt us most. A man without fear.' He saw four men, saw no threat, no danger, no chance of risk – four men, on camels, in the desert.

She said, 'When you turn behind them, I'm launching.'

Marty wished he knew them, wished he saw the threat, the danger they made.

'What are they thinking?'

She darted a glance at him. 'God, I don't know.'

'Doesn't that matter – what they're thinking?'

'Thinking about water, about chow, thinking about a shower – I don't know. Thinking about us.'

'What are they thinking about us?'

'Whether we've found them, I suppose – how the hell should I know? – whether we're over them.'

He saw them on the screen, worked the joystick and banked First Lady so that she would line up behind them for the strike. 'That's not an answer – what do they think about us?'

'About hating us, about having contempt for us… you want to be their shrink, Marty? Forget it. Think of your duty to our country and do your job. Forget that shit – I don't know what they're thinking and I don't care.'

Marty said softly, 'We are flying west-north-west, wind speed eight knots, our air speed is-'

'I got all that… Going in five.'

He did not know about them and that hurt in his mind.

The whisper, 'Port side gone.'

His fingers tightened on the joystick and he compensated for the luch of First Lady. She was thrown up at an angle, starboard side dipping. He heard the little gasp of annoyance from beside him: he'd been slow in making the commands that held her steady On the central screen, the fireball seemed to loiter before it started to race away on its guided descent. He had her steady, and he waited for the next leap of First Lady – which didn't come.

' You shooting?'

'I'm holding… Look at them, Marty, look at them run.' t)n the big screen, the central one, the beetle below the fireball broke up.

'bastards.'

Marty saw the panic scattering of the camels. They went in crazy lines, like they'd broken the knot that held them.

At that height, and with the oblique firing angle, the Hellfire would fly for seventeen seconds… Half-way down… He saw, from the fireball, the little adjustments she made as she guided it, and he watched the camels career together and apart. He watched their panic. lie was the voyeur. He was the hard-breathing youth in the shadows of the car park above the ocean where the university students brought their girls. He rubbernecked the stampede of the camels. The missile went into the sand.

The Hellfire was for a tank. Firing a Hellfire at Nellis, the sensor operator should get an armour-piercing warhead up against a tank turret from twenty-four thousand feet, should get a hit on the range within one yard of the aimed point. Instructors liked to reckon they could hit within half a foot on a stationary tank turret… Nobody at Nellis had ever thought of a target of running camels for an impact of a fragmentation warhead. The dustcloud rose.

The cloud came up towards the camera lens. Marty lost the camels, did not know whether they were under it, or had escaped it. There was a darkness at the core of the cloud, then a fire flash in its heart.

Red flame blossomed from the cloud. They had hit ordnance. The new fire burst through the cloud and climbed, then guttered. Smoke, dark and poisonous black, replaced the fire.

The voice came in his ear, massaged him like her fingers had.

'Good work, guys. Secondary explosions would prove you've hit gold. Please look at your screens, extreme left. I see empty camels on the right side, ten o'clock, but you should be looking extreme left, four o'clock. Centre on that target, and take it. Oscar Golf, out.'

Alone in the desert, a single camel ran. Marty had been to ten o'clock, four camels together – like they were tied – no riders. Then Lizzy-Jo was raking the picture across, going to four o'clock, and zooming. The picture was tugged to close-up, and she tweaked the lost focus. A single camel ran in the sand, wove between the hills.

Marty came over it. The camel stumbled, like it had no more running left in it, tried again, then stopped. The screen was filled with the camel. It stopped, like its spirit was broken. It sank. The knees went from under it. The technology that Marty watched, that Lizzy-Jo worked, showed a camel run to exhaustion and crumpling. He saw the weight that the camel could no longer run with.

The vomit was in his throat.

He was the representative of a master race. Four point five four – recurring – miles below the camera an old man was laid out on the back of the camel.

Beside him, Lizzy-Jo trilled amazement. 'This is just wonderful gear, incredible – like he's just down under us.'

Eight million dollars of Predator, at factory-gate prices, circled an old man on a camel and lining up against him was a hundred thousand dollars of Hellfire with a fragmentation warhead. He could see the old man's face and a blur of greying hair, and the old man seemed to twist his head and look up, and he would have seen nothing and would have heard nothing. Marty did not know why the old man had not jumped clear of the knelt camel, why he had not gone away from it. He was stretched across the camel from the hump to the neck. Did he know? Must have. His arm came up. First, Marty thought it was like a salute. Wrong. The arm was outstretched, pointed upwards towards First Lady: 'Fuck you.' He thought the arm, raised, said, 'Fuck you,' to him.

Lizzy-Jo let the second Hellfire go.

For a dozen of the sixteen seconds of its fireball flight, Marty watched the screen, then turned away, his eyes closed. He did not watch its hit.

He spun his chair and ripped off his headset. He pushed away George's hand and went to the door. He heard Lizzy-Jo murmur to her mouth microphone that her pilot had gone off station. He stood in the door, above the steps.

The vomit cascaded from his bowed head.

When he was conscious, he could feel the warm wetness of the blood. But Caleb drifted.

When he came back to consciousness, he could feel the pain. It was deep waves.

Conscious, he did not know how they had made the litter, and how they clung to the undersides of the camel's bellies, hanging from the hidden saddle straps.