Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier

… worse than fear, and he sweated. His mind played games with him, mocked him. He remembered a school play. His father and mother in the audience. Its setting was a First World War dug-out. He was the coward among the officers waiting for the Big Push. The hero asked, musing, whether a worm knew, when it tunnelled in the earth, whether it was going up or down and speculated on the worm's bad luck if it went down when it thought it was coming up.

His father had said that he should not have allowed himself to be cast as a coward. He clung to the tyremarks left by the Land Rover, and he saw that, behind him from the mirror, the brisk wind lifted the sand and covered the tyres' ruts. The fear made him shiver.

It looked at first, through the haze thrown up by the Land Rover, like a stunted needle. At the start of the third hour, Bart realized their larget was a column of stone, weathered and sculpted by the wind, with a sharpened tip.

Beth watched.

'He's pretty far down the road.'

Behind Beth, the boy squatted beside his father, whose hands loosely held a rifle across his lap.

'I think I'm just in time but I can't promise anything. By rights he should have died yesterday. Extraordinary resilience.' The doctor spoke as if a commentary were needed from him. The needle was in a forearm vein, and he was hooking the bag, connected by a tube to the needle, on to the cross-rope that supported the awning. Then he crouched over the leg wound. 'First things first. Do the dehydration, get as much from an intravenous drip into him as quickly as possible, saline. You see, there's a big blood loss. It's all about liquids in the body. First, to counter dehydration loss, the body steals from the blood supply, then from extra-cellular space, and the last reserve is from intra-cellular space. When that's exhausted it's death by dehydration. I'm surprised he's still with us.'

She wanted to throw up. The doctor took the other arm, without the drip in it, and firmly pinched the skin just above a bandage of dirty cloth on the wrist. When his fingers let go, the pinched flesh still stood erect.

'It would have gone down, where I pinched, if there was enough liquid in the body. It hasn't fallen back because there's no liquid there. It's an old trick.'

Beth thought the doctor talked because of his fear.

He reached for the cloth on the wrist and started to unravel it.

'We're hardly going to make a sterile area, but at least we can try – let's get shot of this filth for starters.'

Beth saw the plastic bracelet. In the sand, in the night, she had found it, had tried to examine it. His strength had prevented her. She saw the doctor peer down at it. She leaned closer and made out the printed reference number. The photograph was clear to her. Alongside it, under the number and the filled-in spaces for height and weight, below sex, was 'Issued by: Delta'. She gagged.

The doctor turned to her. 'Did you know about this?'

'No, I didn't. No.'

'Do you know what Delta is?'

'I think so.'

'Think, Miss Jenkins? Can't you do better than think? Let me help you. Delta is the name of the camp at Guantanamo Bay, the camp for terrorists. Good God, what have I got into?'

'I didn't know.'

The doctor seemed to gasp, to drag in a great gulp of air. 'For helping this man, I – and you, Miss Jenkins – could go to Chop Chop Square. May I assume your ignorance stops short of not knowing what Chop Chop Square is?'

She seemed to shudder, could not help herself. 'I know what Chop Chop Square is.'

The doctor went on – as if he had cut the square and the ritual of public execution after Friday prayers from his mind – in a flat monotone. 'You see, his tongue, and his mouth, they'll be dried out.

It's not a worry because the drip will fix that. He will have had an extreme shock from the effect of the missile detonation and that will have surged his adrenaline, further aggravating the dehydration process. First appearances, the head wound will have caused severe concussion but not much else. The leg is the greater problem, and the resulting blood loss. There are ten pints of blood in the body and it is my estimate that-'

'Are you going to save him?'

'My estimate is that he's lost at least two pints – I make no promises. There is blood loss and there are signs of advancing gangrene. Do you want him saved?'

She looked down. He lay on old sacks. His eyes were closed and his breathing was a slow, shallow struggle. The head wound was a long slice, below his forehead and above his right ear, and the hair had been cut back from it by the guide. As soon as they had arrived, the doctor had barked questions to her, for translation: What had been done for him? What, if anything, had he been given? What had been the patient's reaction? The guide had used a knife to cut away hair from the head wound, then had anointed it. He had wiped the gum from murr on to the wound's edges. Beth translated this as

'myrrh', and the doctor had muttered, 'Commiphora molmol', and had not criticized the Bedouin's use of the ancient healing resin. She saw the first drip bag draining steadily into his arm. A cloth lay across his groin. The leg wound was on the left side – there were flies around it. It was shorter in length than that on the skull, but wider, deeper, and the flesh around it had already blackened. He did not look, to Beth, like a threat. He seemed to her to rest in exhausted peace. She crawled closer to him and took his hand, both fists covering his fingers.

The doctor made room for her, then stood and changed the drip hag. 'I can't do anything about the leg until he has more strength. It's the leg that worries me. Maybe in an hour I can start on it.'

What did she want of him? Everything. How far would she go to help him? To the end of the road, to the square. What did she know of him? Nothing.

She sat and held his hand. The father and son stared at her, eyes never off her. A camel pushed its head against her arm, competed with her to touch him. The doctor now knelt at his bags and packages and checked an inventory. She did not look into his leg wound, but at his face. Never before had Beth held a man's hand with such caring softness. The drip worked. She thought of a dried-out flower that was watered and straightened. She felt his fingers stir in her grip. The breathing quickened. The doctor broke off, came closer.

Lips moved. The doctor crouched to listen. The eyes opened. She saw the eyes fastening on the doctor's as he strained to listen.

The voice came weak but clear: 'Don't look into my face, don't.'

The fingers tightened in her fists. 'Don't see my face, don't ever.' He seemed to sink back. 'Don't…'

She reeled, clung to his fingers but shook.

'That's all I bloody need,' the doctor wheezed beside her. 'He's English – as English as you or me. He spoke English like I do, like you. Well done, Miss Jenkins – this just keeps getting better and better.'

'You can stand there as long as you like but until I see identification you're not coming in,' Eric Perkins had said. He'd been behind his door, opened to the extent that the security chain would permit, and his wife had been behind him. 'You can stay on my step all the hours that God gives but you're not coming in till I see who you are.'

The retired maths teacher was wizened, small, and his cheek was cut from shaving, but he seemed to have the obstinacy that came with age and bloodymindedness, and he had been behind his front door, as if it was the portcullis of his castle. The door had been closed on them, and for ten minutes the rain had dripped on them. It went against Lovejoy's grain to show his card. He'd rung the bell again.

He'd shown the identification card that gained entry through the electronic barriers at Thames House, and the American had shown what was good enough for Camp Delta, far away on Cuba.