Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

Will thought of the fruit machines he played when he could find them – thought he had a better chance of a once-a-year jackpot than the kid had had of being spotted out there in the sand.

Pete reckoned that Someone, up there in the clear blue sky, must have cared for the kid, must have watched out for him, because if he'd come down the dunes heading left they'd never have seen him.

The Hummer powered towards Shaybah, the late-night flight out and burgers in Riyadh.

*

The deputy governor was ushered out by Gennifer.

Before the outer door had closed, the ambassador had the internal phone against his face.

'Gonsalves, that you? The ambassador here. Get yourself down to me, please, with a degree of urgency.'

He reflected. Power had shifted from his desk. The evacuation of military personnel from the big airbase south of the capital had grievously wounded his status. The war in Iraq had further damaged it. The pending lawsuits – where legal men back in New York talked billions of dollars in prohibitive damages on behalf of the victims of the Twin Towers – against members of the ruling elite, the Royal Family, had caused a breakdown in precious trust. The compound attacks in Riyadh had been a coffin nail. Before the evacuation, the war, the filed suit, and the suicide bombers' assault, he would have told – with exquisite politeness – the deputy governor to go stuff himself. The world marched on, and the Kingdom was no longer his fiefdom. Another year and he would be teaching at Yale.

The door opened after a knock, and Gennifer showed the Agency man inside.

He launched: 'Gonsalves, this is not a criticism. I have no complaint about the liaison you have had with me. You told me, and I acknowledge it, that you were bringing a Predator team into the Shaybah Field base for, as I remember it, surveillance of the Rub' al Khali – under a pretence of mapping and also the testing of performance in extreme heat. Well, we have a problem.'

The ambassador was a man for whom personal appearances mattered. He changed his shirt twice in a day, and three times if he had an important evening function. He always wore a tie, never dragged the knot down or loosened his collar button. Opposite him, lounging and appearing at the edge of sleep Gonsalves wore jeans, a grubby vest and an open shirt. His face was stubbled, his hair uncombed, like some damned Fed in deep cover in Little Italy, the right gear for lamp-post leaning.

'The local authorities here are increasingly suspicious of us. There is growing obstruction. It comes down to a desire to derail us. Just out of my office is the deputy governor, the province that includes that big block of sand, and Shaybah. We are not welcome. No longer are Predator aircraft welcome at Shaybah. We have little prying eyes watching us, you'd know that better than me, seeking to flex long-unused muscles. I suppose there's other places you can go – Djibouti or Dohar – but the door at Shaybah is closed. Two alternatives: ship out and smile, cut them in and tell them what you're doing… I know which I would go for. Personally, I would not trust the last live rat in the Kingdom with detail of any anti-Al Qaeda operation of sensitivity. I think you should talk to your people. I bought you some time, probably about three days, but no more.'

Not too many clouds passed over the Riyadh sun. A cloud flitted across Gonsalves' face. He was up and heading for the door, like he'd a bayonet under his backside.

'It was surveillance, wasn't it, Gonsalves? Just surveillance?' from the door, a child's smile spread across the Agency man's face. 'Yes, we were watching them. Right down to the time the Hellfires hit. We watched them when the secondary explosions, ordnance, blew. If you ever get tired of TV movies just call me, and I'll send you down a video.'

'Three days.'

The smile was gone. 'It's a prime route to where they are.'

It was like they were wary of each other.

There were areas that were off-limits.

The light had gone out for him, Lizzy-Jo thought.

Three days and three nights back, George had thrown a bucket of water on to the Ground Control steps but there were still scrapes on the treads of his dried-out vomit. He'd brought her in, had made a good landing for First Lady, then had gone to his tent. He had not studied the video the morning after, not like the first time, had not seen a second time the zoomed lens image of the old man bent across the camel's neck. He had not gone out to see the handiwork of George on the fuselage of First Lady, the new skull-and-crossbones stencil. Had not eaten with her, had not talked with her. What did he think it was all for? A teen game in an arcade? Staying in for computer warfare because it was raining outside? There hadn't been fun between them, or laughter.

Three days and three nights. That was enough.

She looked away from her screen, flipped off the switch that gave voice contact to Oscar Golf. 'OK, so he looked like your damn granpa

– so what? You think Al Qaeda pensions them out, don't do granpas?

Don't be a wuss – you're a kid who wants to play with the big boys' toys. Grow up. Next time you want to go soft I'm making certain the whole world's going to hear and you'll be dead in a junkyard.'

She slipped the switch back, regained voice contact with Langley.

The sand slipped across her screen as it had done for most of the hours of three days and three nights, all the time that First Lady had flown. When they landed her, seven more hours and into the night, she would be grounded for maintenance. The next day they would take up Carnival Girl, the old lady. She was beginning to hate the fucking sand.

On the screen it was empty, had been in all their flying hours spread over three days and three nights, and the real-time camera in the day and the electro-optic/infra-red in the darkness had shown up nothing.

The teleprinter started up.

They were on new boxes. They'd circled where the old man had been, lying across the kneeling camel, before the Hellfire pulverized him, and they'd stayed up there on station till the smoke dust had cleared. When the cloud had gone, after they'd seen the small crater, he'd brought her back over the first hit and the larger crater. Then they'd gone searching. Four camels, no riders, in the screen. Four camels tied together, no men, followed for a half-hour, then allowed to go on. If they'd searched again, hard enough, she thought they'd have found one camel down and the rest standing and unable to drag themselves clear, or two camels down… dying in the sand, under the sun.

Best that they'd been given a new set of boxes to work over.

Lizzy-Jo tore the sheet off the teleprinter. She felt bad at the verbal abuse she'd given him but did not know an alternative.

'Listen,' she said. 'Just less than seventy hours and we're out of here. The Saudis have closed us down. If that's what Bagram is, we're going home. Hey, you shoot, you score – we wiped out bad people, and their granpa, wasted them.'

He came out of the supermarket. He loathed the place, a little corner of London or New York, but it was fast and quick. Faster and quicker because so many of the expatriates it was designed to serve had checked out from the Kingdom, gone back where they'd come from.

He would have liked to browse in a street market, buy what was local, but the security situation forbade it.

In two plastic bags Eddie Wroughton carried a sliced loaf of bread, two litres of milk and three chilled meals-for-one that would go into his microwave, a kilo of New Zealand-grown apples and two containers of water allegedly bottled in Scotland. That evening, had it been normal – but it was not – he should have eaten at the Gonsalves' kitchen table, then chucked a Softball in their backyard.

He crossed the car park. There were high lights, sufficient to show him his own vehicle, but they threw down shadows. He did not see the red Toyota, or the man who loitered close to it. The lights fell, for a moment, on his linen suit and his laundered white shirt; the silk of his tie glistened and made stars on the darkness of his glasses. His mind unravelled an old memory. The family Sunday lunch, and the next day he was going to Century House for the start of his recruits' induction course. His father there, his grandfather and his great-uncle – old warriors of intelligence – and the talk had gone on from how he should conduct himself with his examiners and had eddied to comfortable nostalgia. Old campaigns refought – and port passed, cigars lit, and the bone had been the favourite one for chewing… the Americans.