Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

If we're lucky, we move on somewhere else where the stress is Jess acute. If we're unlucky we sign on with a doctor and accept our failure. We try to prepare our students for adult life, to give them a smattering of education – occasionally we even hit the heights of an exam pass – but the future of the majority is car theft, petty burglary, drug-dealing, under-age pregnancy, vandalism… The truth is, youthful ambition – other than for criminality – is rare indeed.'

Jed saw a sudden smile crease the headteacher's face.

'I have to say that the vision of a past pupil of Adelaide Comprehensive rising to be a serious player against the security of the state appears to me to be almost ludicrous. Ambition is rare, boredom is endemic, fatalism is contagious. They see no hope. What do they look for, the ultimate? Good benefits, a hotted-up car with anti-social speakers at full blast, not the destruction of the United Kingdom. Look, this area from which my school feeds is listed in the dozen most deprived parts of Britain.'

Jed took the cue. Lovejoy had stood and picked up the photograph. The headteacher shrugged. There was nothing more to be said.

They saw themselves out, left the beaten man behind them.

The rain still fell. Not a cleansing rain, Jed thought, but a dirtied, contaminating rain. He had taken Michael Lovejoy on trust. All of the elation he had felt at unravelling a God Almighty-sized error at Guantanamo was being scrubbed out of him in the English rain.

Behind them was an avenue of closed classrooms, now darkened, where nothing had been learned that day or would be learned the next. They were at the Volvo, in the black evening, when he heard the piped shout.

Water ran on the shirtsleeved shoulders of the headteacher and on the sheet of paper he held.

'I was wrong. We might just be able to help you. Try Eric Parsons.

He's retired, but a bit of an icon at the Adelaide. He went two years before I arrived but – don't ask me how – he lasted sixteen years here.

Taught maths, but did the football team and drama. He might just be your man. I've his address and his number for you. Eric's worth a try'

The paper was given to Lovejoy.

In the Volvo, Lovejoy used his mobile. It rang until the answer-machine responded, a tinny voice: 'Eric and Violet cannot take your call, please leave a message after the tone.' He didn't, he cut it.

Jed slumped. 'Probably on vacation – God, just what I needed.

Damn… damn…'

Lovejoy said grimly, 'My wife always tells me that shouting at a kettle never made it boil faster.'

They drove out through heavy gates that were set in a high barricade of close-set steel posts with mesh slung between them and coils of barbed wire over the top. It didn't add up to Jed. They went away down streets lit by dull lights, where windows had plywood hammered over them, where the sodden grass was knee high in front gardens, where there were old industrial chimneys – silhouetted against the night – with no smoke and factories whose roofs had collapsed. It didn't add up – in the conventional thinking of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon – that this was where a fighter had come from who was clever enough to have fucked the system at Camps X-Ray and Delta. Jed Dietrich didn't know if he was capable of eccentric thinking but reckoned it was time to start trying.

'What are you thinking?'

Lovejoy said, eyes never off the road, and face in shadow, 'I'm thinking that our target fits a pattern – and the pattern makes him a headache.'

Unobtainable on the landline, and a voice message on the mobile.

Bart swore. He had never known Wroughton's twin phones, home and mobile, to be unobtainable and switched off. But he prepared himself to travel. A bag of intravenous drips, two multi-packs of lint field dressings, his suture kit, the plastic box that held the debridement gear of scalpels, scissors, clips, forceps and swabs, the wound-cleaning agents, the antibiotics and the local anaesthetics went into a neat pile on the floor. He checked each one off against his list. Last was the morphine, the painkiller.

When they were all laid out, he tried the numbers again. No answer.

For fuck's sake, it was his freedom, but the damn phones were unobtainable and on the answer-machine. He left no message. It was the damned big one. It was the chance to wipe all of the indifference off Eddie bloody Wroughton's face, to shove the sneer down his throat. It was the reason he had told the daft cow that he would drive through the night into the damn emptiness of the desert.

Bart went to the lock-up room off the utility room – where his maid washed and ironed his clothes and kept her buckets – for the big water bottles and the plastic petrol containers. All expatriates had such a supply had done since the attacks in the city. Water and fuel would be needed, if civil disturbance broke out and the airport was closed, for an escape north to Tabuk or Sakakah or Ar'ar and then on to the Jordanian frontier – eight hundred kilometres from Riyadh.

He ferried the medical bags, packets and boxes to the Mitsubishi outside, then the water and the fuel. Inside again, he studied the map. The journey would take him down the main highway, 513, to Al Kharj and on to the metalled road, Route 10, to Harad. Then he was directed to use the dirt surface track south into the Rub' al Khali.

It was the only way into the desert, and he would be on it for a minimum of three hundred and fifty kilometres… Bloody hell, madness.

But – perhaps – out of madness came freedom.

He tried a last time to call Wroughton. He yearned to tell his tormentor of a man wounded in the desert – close to death – by military action.

He picked up his cat, kissed it, put it into its quilted basket. He closed his front door behind him.

He thought he should be there by dawn, where she'd said she'd meet him.

They came up off the sand and crossed the raised track.

Because Rashid made the camels go fast, and the sack litter jolted him, Caleb saw the distant lights between the animal's legs. Half a dozen small lights as far away as he could see, as far as the horizon was. Then they were gone.

He rolled on the sack litter. The flies droned in his ears, made their circuits, came back to his head and his leg. Nothing to keep the flies off. Had no strength and could not swat them.

They were over the raised track, and headed away from the lights.

Caleb knew he was slipping. The heat, the flies and the dirt in the wounds doomed him. He knew it… He was back across the chasm, where he had come from and where he had not known of a God to pray to. The camels stank around him, but he had a new smell in his nose, meat that was decayed, flesh that rotted – where the flies laid the eggs. Himself.

Thanks to the water, and the fodder at the well-head, the camels' stride was faster now, and each jolt made Caleb slip further.

It was charity for him when he drifted, unconscious.

Still talking, a murmur in the old language, but weaker. He no longer saw the guide. He did not know that Rashid sat apart from him, that he was alone under an awning spread between two kneeling camels.

'I was nothing before I met the Chechen – nobody. A man looks at you, strips you, reads right through you. You know he's judging you.

Are you shit or are you useful? To anybody else who'd ever looked at me, I was shit. Not looking at me like I was a piece of meat, and hung up, but like I was a person. I went up that hill, it was all live rounds they fired. It was his test. If I had failed it, I'd have been on that plane home the next day – and I'd be back in that shit-heap, and I'd be nobody.'

He had not the strength to swipe away the flies at his leg wound, or to push himself up and see the darker flesh ringing the wound.