Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

The litter, three sacks, was suspended low down between the Beautiful One and Rashid's camel. He was belted by the animal's legs and rocked from the motion of their walk. On the far side of him was the boy. Father and son, gasping, held themselves against the stomachs of the camels, and behind them was the last of the bulls.

When the pain came, and the scent of the blood, he could remember. The boy had howled the warning. The fire had come down on them. The blow, with the hot wind and the clap of the thunder, had felled him. They had snatched him up, father and son.

He was hidden, as were Rashid and Ghaffur.

The last sight he had seen was the one camel, Hosni strapped . across it, fleeing from them.

He prayed to sleep, to lose the pain.

The cloth against his head was wet and cold. It stank with stale odour. The voice said, 'Do not try to speak.' With great gentleness, the cloth was wiped on his forehead, round his eyes and on his cheeks. A little of the dribble from it rested on his lips – it stung his eyes.

He tried to move, to shift the weight on his back, but the effort brought the pain – he gasped – and for a moment the cloth was across his mouth.

'You must not cry out.'

How long he had been unconscious, asleep, dead, he did not know.

The pain was in his leg and at the side of his head. When he tried to shift, the pain was agony in his leg and his head throbbed.

'If you are seen, heard, it will have been for nothing. You must not be found.'

The cloth over his face calmed him.

His eyes moved, not his head.

The night was around them. Rashid crouched over him, laid the cloth in a bucket, lifted it, squeezed the water from it, then spread it, cool and bringing life back, across his throat and his upper chest. He lay on the same sacks that had made the litter and in his nose was the smell of shit and urine – his. Flies buzzed him. Close to him were the hoofs of the camels. As if she were alerted by his faint movements, or the guide's murmured voice, the Beautiful One arched her neck down and her nostrils nudged against him. Beyond the camels, fires burned. He heard roaming voices, laughter and the scrape of harnesses. He smelt cooking meat, carried on the wind, and spices mixed with boiling rice, could recognize them through the stench of the camels and his own excreta. He squinted to see better, and shadows passed across the fires – when a shadow approached closer to them, Rashid reached for his rifle and was alert, but the shadow ignored them and went on. They were separated by thornbushes from a great gathering of men and animals. When it reached his lips and he sucked at it, the water was foul, old. He retched, could not bring anything up, and the choking in his throat and gut brought back the agony in his leg and the hammer in his head. Rashid cradled him.

' I thought you were dead, I praise God.' The voice guttered in his ear. 'For three days and three nights, I thought you were the scrape of a fingernail from death. Only God could have saved you… I sent Chaffur for help. I asked him to go alone into the Sands, and his life is with God… All the water we had was for you, and one day back, and one night, it was finished. Now we are at a well-head. It is bad water, it has not rained here for many years, but it is the water that God has given us. If you are found here there will be people who will see your wounds and will know you are an Outsider to the Sands, and they will seek to sell you to the government, or they will kill you and lake your head to the government and ask money for it. We came in the night and we will leave in the night, with God's protection.. You should rest. Death is still close to you. If God forgets you then you are dead.'

The words croaked in Caleb's throat. 'You sent your son?'

'I sent my son into the Sands, that you might live. We are just two men That we are alive is because of the Egyptian. He rode away from us. He took the eye in the sky from us. The eye went after him.

I heard the explosion as we fled. He gave his life for us, for you. You have to live, it is owed to him.'

And to your son…'

His eyes closed. His hold on what was around him slackened. So tired, so weak. He did not have the strength to think of the wound in his leg or the wound in the side of his head. He drifted. He was by the canal, on the pavement close to the black-painted door, was kicking the ball in the yard and aiming at the glass in the hatch of the overturned washing-machine… He was nothing, nobody. He lost the pain, lost the cool, healing touch of the wet cloth. He lost the image of the boy, his bright mischief eyes, sent by his father and alone in the Sands.

In the Hummer, they played Willie Nelson loud. Will drove and Pete did the satellite navigation. 'Help Me Make It Through The Night' came out of the CD system. Two more Hummers, with the Arabs, followed them. Will never trusted an Arab to drive him, and Pete never reckoned anyone else but himself could do better on navigation. Both rated the Hummer, the civilian version of the Army's Humvee, as the best there was on wheels, and capable of taking them where a helicopter – screwed up with the density altitude barrier from the heat – could not. They were the same age, had been through the same Galveston education line, lived on adjacent plots in the Houston suburbs, and did the same work. They were two gas-extraction field surveyors. Blood brothers. The trip, never a snide word between them, had already taken them across in excess of six hundred miles of sand – but the mapping now was complete. That night, if the Hummer with three tonnes loaded on her held up – and the Hummers with the Arabs behind them – they would be on a late plane back to Riyadh. They were on the Exxon-Mobil books, earned good money – and the world, because of where they were, owed them it.

Time had slipped away, two and a half weeks of it. For eighteen days they had driven, camped, worked in the Empty Quarter, without sight of human company other than the Arabs who travelled behind them; top temperature out there was a confirmed 124°

Fahrenheit. The Hummer took them anywhere they fancied going, up dunes and down them, through loose sand.

'Well, well, lookey-here…'

Will was imagining the juicy burger he'd have on their return to the Riyadh hotel.

'Hey, no foolin', take a look.'

Will said, 'Well, I'll be. You got some hawk eyes on you. I'd have driven right on by.'

'I don't reckon we should. Look it, he's just a kid.'

A hundred yards, a little more, to the right of where they came down off the dune, were a child and a camel. The camel stood and the boy sat in its shade. At that distance, through the sealed sand-sprayed windows, they could see, each of them, the gaunt resignation on the boy's face. The camel, dead on its feet, didn't even turn towards them as they edged closer.

'Like they're jus' waitin' to die.'

'This is one evil fucking place.'

'I reckon the camel's just stopped, won't go another step. You're gonna go and git yourself a rosette, Pete, that's one good deed for the day.'

Fifteen minutes later, they moved on. The kid was stowed on top of the luggage mountain on the second Hummer. The camel was dead, shot with a bullet to the head by their camp manager. They were two hard men, away from home in Houston for eight months of every year, played hard and drove themselves hard. Neither spoke. Pete had a wet eye and Will would have choked on any words. The kid had held the camel, soft hands round its neck as the rifle barrel had gone against its head, and the big dopey brown eyes had been on the kid. Blood had spattered when the bullet had been fired – new blood on old across the kid's robe. Old caked blood covered the kid's robe… He wouldn't talk of it. The camp manager had tried, hadn't gotten an answer – it wasn't the kid's blood. What the kid said, translated by the camp manager, he had to get to Miss Bethany at Shaybah, and nothin' else.