Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

'The Chechen's a fighter. He didn't tell me but I heard it – he was one of those who lay in trenches and let the tanks come over the trench, then came out, was behind them where they were soft and broke the tracks with grenades, or put grenades down the hatches.

He did that – bloody tanks. He was under tanks, fifty tons of them, and he wasn't scared. He was my hero, and he cared about me – like he was my father.'

On his back, the flies buzzing about him, he did not know that the guide had sent his son – his only son – out into the desert to bring help. He was beyond that corner of his memory.

'The Chechen made me someone. Back in that crap-heap. "You want to come down the canal? You got enough for the chipper? Heh, you met that bird out of Prince's Road, who'll do you a suck for a fiver? Get your arse moving, 'cos there's a Beemer in the station park and the radio's a Blaupunkt – you want it?" There, they never knew a man like the Chechen. He made me feel important, no one else ever had… wanted.'

He did not know that, in the heat and with his blood oozing away, he was on the road to death.

'Among those kids – none of them'd ever met anyone like the Chechen, because they live in a crap-heap. I owe everything to him.

I make you a promise, Chechen – you won't ever regret picking me.

But you're dead, aren't you? Out in all that fucking dirt, you're buried… Can you hear me, Chechen, can you? I'm your man…

God, it bloody hurts, Chechen.'

Still talking, but fading.

In the slack dawn light, the spread cloud of dust reached the settlement. He approached, Bart thought, the back end of nowhere – the only stop for food or fuel on the only track running south into the desert. On his map, 'nowhere' was given the name of Bir Faysal.

Back up north – at Al Kharj, and again at Harad – where there was still a metalled road, he had pulled into the side and had used his mobile. In both towns, high in the darkness of the night, there were antennae on towers to relay his signal, but there had still been no answer from either of Wroughton's phones, both switched off. Three times, in seven hours of driving on the track after Harad, he had had to swerve on to the bedded stones at the verge to avoid collision with lorries – bastards, coming straight at him, not giving way to him, using the centre of the track – and once he had gone right off the track and the stones, nodding off to sleep, and had manoeuvred his way back on to the track by crossing packed sand. To keep himself awake, he had found a station on the radio, but it had static across it.

No phone signal, no radio – only his thoughts to keep him company.

Excited thoughts. Thoughts of liberation. Freedom to go to the airport, with his cat box, in the knowledge that he had paid his debt and that the files were shredded. Thoughts of what he would tell Eddie bloody Wroughton.

The tyres of the Mitsubishi threw up a dustcloud behind him.

Scattered grey concrete buildings were in front of him. He slowed.

He had not thought, alone in his vehicle and struggling with tiredness, of what he had – by his own volition – edged himself into. Now he did. The thought clamoured in his mind as he drove carefully past the building over which a flag hung limply against its post. In front of the police station, one man in khaki drill lounged on a chair and watched him go by. It would have taken some wriggling if the policeman had been alert, had jumped up from his chair, had waved him down, would have taken a bloody good story. After the police station he came to a fuel forecourt, then a cluster of low buildings surrounded by thorn hedges… The policeman might not have been, but Bart was alert. He had his window down, the air-conditioner switched off, and he heard clearly the bleat of goats behind the hedges. The desert was ahead. Where was she? He went past the last of the buildings. A woman in scalp-to-toe black ducked away and a child waved enthusiastically and… the flashed headlights caught the side of his Mitsubishi.

It was madness.

The lights speared into his face from a gully beyond the last building.

It would not have been madness if he had been able to speak to the landline phone or to the mobile. He had not spoken to Eddie bloody Wroughton. Perhaps he should never have started out from his compound.

He saw the Land Rover come up from the gully, straining for traction. She drove. There was a boy beside her. She came past him, spewing sand, then he saw the wave of her hand, the instruction that he follow. Like a damned hired hand, wasn't he? He followed her for a mile, until the settlement was lost behind them, then she braked the Land Rover and pulled on to the stones He stopped behind her. Her door snapped open and she walked towards him. What to tell her?

He remembered the brightness in her face at the party, its lustre in his surgery, and it was all gone. She was drawn, pale, and she seemed to rock as though exhaustion was near to beating her. The sand coated her, was in her hair, on her face and round her eyes; it lay on her blouse and across her trousers. He framed in his mind what he would say.

She leaned on his door. 'Thank you for coming. Thank you very much.'

He had intended a response of cutting sarcasm. Then he saw the genuineness of the gratitude on her face, and in her eyes, reddened by tiredness, strain and sand grit. Oh, God, that sort of genuineness came from one source, one alone. Bloody hell, that was love. The world threw up enough problems in Bart's life without the intrusion of love

… a lucky man he'd be, the subject of her love.

He said, matter-of-fact, 'Good morning, Miss Jenkins – it looks like you're about to spill a load of trouble on to my shoes.'

'Probably, I have…'

It was another of the moments, fleeting, when he could have – should have – turned back.

'Did you bring your gear?'

'Yes… If it's not presumptuous, who is my mystery patient who has suffered injuries in military action?'

'I don't know. Honestly, I don't know his name or where he's come from or where he's going to. That's the truth.'

He believed her. It was the last time he could have turned back. At the end of the day he would have been in Riyadh, and in his compound. And he would not have forgiven himself. He looked into her face. It was all madness. Bart's life was a story of being trapped and never turning.

'Right, then, we'd better get moving.'

She told him to follow her. She said the Bedouin boy with her would guide them. She walked away, lurched back to her Land Rover.

He kept close to her. She led him another mile down the track, then swung right and went west. He went down off the track and the wheels ground on the chip stones, then sagged on to sand. He used the low gears for cross-country. He had never driven on sand before.

He sensed that the boy – who had stared back at him from the Land Rover, his face riddled with suspicion – guided her. Many times they stopped and the sand in front of the Land Rover and Bart's Mitsubishi seemed without features, endless ochre hillocks that had no bushes, no trees, no cliffs, nothing to Bart that was recognizable or could be caught by memory; they would halt for a few seconds, then veer to the right or the left. He found his steering was sluggish and unresponsive. No one that Bart knew, back in Riyadh, went into the desert, even with their vast four-by-fours. The wildlife park, a few kilometres beyond the city limits, was enough. A trip by tarmacadam road cutting into a desert on the way to Jedda or Ad Dammam was sufficient for anyone he knew to believe they had experienced a survival ordeal. Other than the straining engines of the Land Rover and the Mitsubishi there was silence around them. He saw nothing that lived. By the end of the second hour, off the track and twenty-eight miles covered, he felt a crawling fear. He could not turn back: he had lost his sense of direction. Wouldn't have known whether he drove towards the safety of the track, went parallel to it or away from i t