The Unknown Soldier

Chapter Eleven

Caleb could not escape the dream. He was drawn towards the chasm. 'Recall the past… reclaim it.' The voice was at his back, the chasm was ahead of him. Each time he stared into the chasm, he wavered. Each time he hesitated, the voice behind him was more demanding. The last time he approached the chasm, his stride quickened. He ran, launched, his feet kicking.

He hung in the air. A chill seemed to grip him. He would not reach the far side of the chasm. It seemed to widen. The moon's light hovered on the far rim. He heard his own cry for help. His arms were outstretched, his fingers splayed. He was falling. The chasm widened. He snatched.

The dream played back to him each moment of his jump, then each moment of his fall.

The fingers caught the rim. The tips and nails of his fingers grabbed at grass and loose earth, at rocks and the roots of trees. His feet, bare, had no support. Grass came away in his hands, and earth crumbled. He slipped back. However hard he struggled for a grip, the weight of his body took him further down into the chasm. The rocks that had broken free fell past his face, bruised it, and cannoned against his legs, then dropped. A single root held him. He heard the rocks bounce on the chasm's side. He grasped the root and waited for the noise of the final strike of the rocks against the chasm's floor – nothing, only the fainter noise of the rocks' tumble. The chasm had no floor. He did not know if the root, dry in his fists, would snap. If it snapped, he would fall. He hauled himself up. The root held him.

He reached over the rim, one-handed, and the root made a support for his knee, and his fingers grappled in the earth and the grass. He crawled on to the rim. He would never go back. He lay on the grass and his breath sobbed in his throat. He looked behind him, across the chasm, and he could not see Hosni, only a mist. The wind seemed to lug at his clothes. He saw the terrace of houses. He walked through a door, a hall, a kitchen, and he looked out across a yard. Over the low wall was the canal towpath. He knew he would never go back, over the chasm. He wept.

Caleb woke. He did not know where he was, did not know who he was.

The boy stood over him, dark and silhouetted against the stars.

'You screamed.'

'Did I?'

'You made the camels restless and that woke me. Then I heard you scream.'

'I am sorry. It was a dream.'

'What was the dream?'

'Nothing – something about the past.'

'Was it so bad for you to scream?'

'It was only a dream. It was not real… How long is it before dawn?'

'Enough time to sleep again.'

'Co away.'

'I hope you sleep again and do not dream.'

"I hank you, Ghaffur.'

' I never dream,' the boy said, and drifted away into the darkness.

Caleb lay on his side and, as if he were now vulnerable, his knees were pulled up against his chest. The images, recalled from the past and reclaimed, played in his mind, but his eyes were open. He was too frightened to sleep. If he slept, he might be pushed again towards the chasm, might have to jump it again, might feel again the grass and earth and rocks breaking away as he clung to them, the emptiness below his feet. He had crossed the chasm, there was no going back, his memory lived.

Caleb lay in the sand and waited for the first light in the east.

Murky pale, the dawn came as Beth finally regained her bungalow, dead tired, hungry and thirsty. Although her headlights had caught the car she did not register it until she had to swerve to miss it. It was parked in the unmade road outside the gates that led up to the carport beside the villa. She knew the Mercedes, top of the range, and she swore. She took her time. Outside her front door, which was ajar, she unloaded the Land Rover. On the patio, she dumped her cold box, her water canisters, which were empty, her sleeping-bag, her clipboard and the filled sample sack. She felt a wreck. Sand was stuck to her face, held there by the sweat, oil streaks were on her hands and her blouse, and grime was caked under her fingernails.

She wanted to lie in a bath, gorge herself from the refrigerator, then sleep. What she did not want was a visitor. The exhaustion caught her as she pushed the door wider. For a moment she leaned against the jamb, then went inside to face him.

The deputy governor was sitting on the couch in her living room.

How long had be been there? The answer was in the ashtray on the couch's arm, filled with crushed filters… God.

'Hello,' she said, playing natural and failing. 'What a surprise.'

The response was bitter, an attack that the politeness and softness of the voice did not hide. 'Where have you been? I came yesterday in the morning, yesterday in the evening. In the morning the maid told me you had packed food and water as if for the desert, and in the evening the bungalow was still empty. In two hours' time, if you had not returned, I was going to call out the trackers, a search would have been mounted for you… I was worried. You left no note, no indication of where you had gone. While you were away there was a storm in the Sands. You can easily understand my anxiety.'

'I was on a field survey trip, it took longer,' she said, and knew the explanation was inadequate and hollow.

'There was a storm and you were alone. I am disappointed, Miss Bethany, that you declined to take the offer that I have always made to you, that I provide an escort with reliable vehicles for you to go into the Sands – exceptionally disappointed. A person such as yourself, a distinguished scholar… under my patronage and support – has no need to travel by herself, with all the attendant risks that creates.'

He was indeed, and Beth understood it, her patron and supporter.

Without that patronage and support, her visa was worthless. She would be on the next night's flight out of Riyadh.

'I'm sorry, truly sorry,' she said. 'I just didn't think, being selfish, that anyone would worry.'

She could still feel the touch of him. She had thought of him, no name, all through the night as she had bumped, sped and woven, always searching for the hard salt flats ahead, the lights' beams arrowing over the sand and guiding her. He had been with her. He had left her. He had roused feelings in her passionless, loveless life.

Yet she had not owned him. She owned everything she wanted, except him. He had gone away from her, gone away into the Sands, gone beyond reach. The deputy governor, prince of the Kingdom, owned her. She was his chattel.

'I sincerely apologize. It was selfishness. What else can I say? I thought only of myself. I very much respect, and am grateful, that you worried for me.'

Well, short of getting down on her knees and ripping off her blouse and exposing her back for a bloody good flogging, there was not much more she could do. At the convent, when in minor trouble, she had learned that the contrite approach softened anger, reduced punishment. Beth hung her head.

'You, better than any foreigner, understand the dangers of the Sands. You know them as the Bedu do. You know them as I know them.'

'I do.'

'It is basic procedure that if you go into the Sands for even half a day, you leave a map of your route.'

'It is.'

'I was fearful for you.'

The ashtray told her he had been on her couch for the whole night.

His robe was crumpled, creased, from sitting through the long hours in the quiet of her bungalow… She wondered where the man without a name was – where a little caravan of camels was. Had he already moved because the dawn had come, along with the men who had wanted to kill her, and him? She owned nothing of him. He was not of the Bedu, not of the Arabs, she did not know where he came from or what was his destination, or the purpose of his journey. He went in secrecy – others, to preserve the secret, would have killed her. Her life was saved by his trust in her… She smiled, dreamed.

'You take it lightly, Miss Bethany, my anxiety and your danger?'

'No, no… I can only apologize.'

The silken voice hardened. 'The storm, Miss Bethany? The airfield here was closed. I could not come back from Riyadh because of the storm. Nothing moved here. Because of the storm I was concerned for your welfare.'

The lie came easily 'I missed it, no problem. I saw it coming, hunkered down in shelter. There was some drifting round the wheels but I dug them out.'

When had she last lied? Beth could not remember. It was not in her nature to lie. Everything she had learned at the convent, and at home, had told her that an untruth chased a liar.

The question slithered quietly from him. 'Did you see anybody, Miss Bethany, in the Sands?'

She blustered: 'No… Who?'

'Any travellers, any traders?'

'Why do you ask?'

'I merely ask because, if we had had to search for you, Miss Bethany, I wonder if we would have met travellers or traders who had seen you and would have directed us towards where you were.'

'No.' It was the second lie. 'I did not see anybody.'

'These are difficult times… there are rumours… It is said men travel in the Sands, who are illegal and dangerous… only whispers, I do not have evidence of it.'

The lie tripped from her tongue. 'I told you, there was nobody.'

'Promise me, you will not go alone again into the Sands.'

'I saw nobody… But I want to tell you what I did see.'

She told the deputy governor about the ejecta field where the iron-ore fragments had come down, and she ran outside. She tipped the sample bag on to the plastic patio table, and the stones and glass pieces rattled and rolled on the table's surface. His hands were cupped and she laid the largest pieces in them. His fingers stroked them. She told him that when she had written her paper, when it was submitted with maps, photographs and samples to the American-based society that collated meteorite finds, she would give the field his name. She saw the pleasure in his face and the joy with which his fingers, hesitant, touched the pieces. He had been frightened for her

– he did not own her, she owned him. There was one man whom she did not own.

As he handled the pieces, with love, Beth heard the soft drone in the air and looked down from her patio into the brightness of the low sun. She saw the small aircraft lift from the runway. It did not have the grace she had seen before, but seemed to yaw and struggle clumsily for height. There were khaki tubes, one under each wing…

The aircraft climbed. She saw that her patron looked up, watched the aircraft's slow, pained climb, then his eyes were back on the stones, bright with fascination for them.

She had lied, she had avoided the promise. She let the deputy governor keep two pieces for his collection, then saw him go.

Beth ran her bath, and stripped… She did not recognize how greatly the lies she had spoken had changed her.

High in the control tower beside the runway, the deputy governor was given binoculars. He raised them and studied the tent camp by the far edge of the perimeter fence, and a frown puckered on his forehead. The beauty of the glass and the stones slipped from his mind.

His host passed the glass of Saudi champagne. It was done awkwardly, and the man's heavily strapped wrist restricted any fluency of movement. Bart smiled, took the glass. He thought his host would have preferred a sling, as if it were a Purple Heart ribbon, but Bart had decreed that a tightly wrapped bandage was appropriate. It was only a sprain. By way of reward for coming across Riyadh at the speed appropriate for an emergency, he had been invited to an all-American picnic. It was not permitted to barbecue in the park of the diplomatic quarter, but the host's wife had cooked the beefburgers in her villa kitchen, had wrapped them well in tinfoil, and they were still warm. The talk bustled round him, and Bart thought he was expected to look and feel privileged to be present.

'I don't know where this country is going, except down. I don't see a future here. Once they got it into their thick skulls that they could do without us, without Americans, when they'd got that delusion into their heads, they were going nowhere but down the pan.

'What really sucks is the absence of gratitude. I have spent ten whole years here, eleven come Thanksgiving, and I have never heard a Saudi say that he is grateful for what we have done in their country.

All right, they have oil. All right, so we want the oil. At every stage we have shown them how to exploit and market that asset. Up to last year we have posted the finest young men and women in our armed forces here, let them live out there in the desert, for the protection of the regime. I ask you, did you ever hear any thanks? Arabic for

"thank you", I'm using it from morning to night, is shukran, and I don't hear it said to me much. You know, in 'ninety-one we fought a war to stop this place ending up as an out-station of Baghdad, and we get no gratitude.'

Bart seldom met Americans. They inhabited their own compounds. They used their own Chamber of Commerce, had their own fenced-off section of the grandstand at the races. Insularity was the name of their game. These men, Bart accepted it, were not fools.

Bombastic, yes. Arrogant, yes. Stupid, no.

'They are living in denial. Their heads are in the sand. They're the source of Al Qaeda, they bankrolled that gang of fanatics, zealots, psychopaths. I read that think-tank report from back home. Quote:

"For years, individuals and charities based in Saudi Arabia have been the most important source of funds for Al Qaeda, and for years Saudi officials have turned a blind eye to the problem." Unquote.

You wait till that nine/eleven law case gets up steam. You remember what that Pentagon briefer called this virtuous and God-following Kingdom: he called it a "kernel of evil". What I say – who needs Saudi Arabia? We got Iraq, we don't need these people. We're the power, they're nothing. They sowed the field, let them harvest it.'

His mind drifted. The condemnations and criticisms wafted around the linen tablecloth. Food filled the mouths, the best that could be bought in the supermarkets of the Riyadh shopping malls.

He thought they rolled out this talk each time they met, yet still retained a fervour for it. If the place was such shit, why stay? Bart reckoned they stayed because the money was good, and because they were, one and all, too proud to consider that the Al Qaeda crowd – the fanatics, zealots, psychopaths – could make them scuttle for the airport. Why did he stay? Bart half choked on the end of his burger. Maybe it took more courage to run. Bart could have torn up the airline ticket, not caught the flight to Tel Aviv, could have refused to get into the waiting car, could not have checked into the Dan Hotel and settled himself into a room with a beach view. To stand against the wind took more bottle than flowing with it. An Englishman had come first, had thanked him on behalf of a medical charity, whose name and background Bart assumed had been cobbled together in the last week. The Englishman had eczema on his wrists, and the signs of over-high blood pressure – Bart was good on symptoms – and a nasal voice. 'What I heard, you were looking for a route back to respectability, old boy. I can put you on that route, but I promise that travelling on it might be bumpy… In my sort of work, I trade.

I do a friend a favour, and I know I'll get a favour back. Let's call you the favour. You are the favour I'm doing for a friend.' Bart could have walked out then, but it would have taken more guts than he had. An hour after the Englishman had left him, while he'd been watching the swimmers on the beach, there had been a knock on the door. He had met Ariel. Ariel was cheerful, bouncy, had the happy enthusiasm that made problems disappear. It would have taken a better man than Bart to refuse Ariel. After the burgers, flushed down with the bogus champagne, the wives sliced portions of apple pie, crowned them with dollops of soft-scoop vanilla ice cream from the cold box, and the venom gathered strength around him.

'What I can't stand is the corruption – nothing's transparent – the skimmers, the pay-offs, back-handers, and the middle-men's cuts.'

'I can live with that. The stone in my shoe is the waste, the extravagance – you know what it cost the last time the old king went for his summer vacation to Spain? Three million dollars a day, believe me.'

'If they don't learn, and fast, a truckload of humility, one day they'll wake up and find we're gone. Then you'll hear some hollering.'

The host's wife smiled at him, like it was outside church and everyone felt good. 'You haven't said much, Dr Bartholomew.'

There was much he could have said, but Bart chose the easy path, 'Been enjoying myself too much. Wonderful food, fantastic hospitality, couldn't have been bettered.'

*

Al Maz'an village, near Jenin, Occupied West Bank.

He saw the blood drip down and felt the guilt.

The best house in the village, on the central square, was an older building. It would have been constructed before the Second World War, perhaps by a merchant, and it represented a long-gone prosperity in the Palestinian community. Before Bart had arrived to work in the village, the building had been a target for Israeli tank shells during an armoured incursion. Now, extraordinarily, the family that had long ago scattered from the West Bank and had made money in the United States of America had sent funds for the restoration of the building and had pledged it to the village as a centre for local administration, adult education and for a communal meeting-place.

The first stage of spending the donated money was to erect scaffolding so that the building could be made safe around the shell holes. Over the weeks he had been in the village, Bart had watched the erection of the scaffolding but had seen precious little work carried out there, and he'd thought the benefactors had only a damn small return to show for their bucks. The body hung from the scaffolding.

He was a doctor who was familiar with the south-west of England, the Torbay district of the county of Devon, the town of Torquay. Where he came from could be summoned by cream teas, rolling fields grazed by cattle, families holidaying on beaches, retirement homes for men and women in their twilight years… The body of a lynch victim was suspended from the rusted scaffolding poles. The vomit rose in his throat. He understood, knew how far he had fallen.

The legs no longer kicked, but the rope between the poles and the neck twisted in the light wind and the heavy rain; the body spiralled rhythmically. The rain was dragged off the windscreen by the wipers. Bart had a clear view of the victim and of the mob below.

He could not have said whether the knife cuts that loosed the dripping blood had been inflicted before the victim was hanged, or while he was hanging but still alive, or after life had been jerked away. The rain fell hard on the body and the man's T-shirt was soaked against his chest and his back, and the flow of water made the blood run easily. In the dulled light, he saw the brightness of knives and a butcher's cleaver raised above the heads of the chanting crowd. Bart had been driving into the square, had seen the milling mob, had braked. Only when he had stopped had he seen the object of the crowd's fury – the body below the rope and the drip of the blood.

Kids were at his window. They tapped on it. Their faces were alive with excitement. One wore a football shirt from a German team. It was not a game that the kids had watched as spectators, not a goal that had thrilled them: it was a killing by lynching. Their voices jabbered broken English at him, their faces were distorted by the rain running on the driver's window.

He did not need to be told.

'He was an informer… He was a traitor paid by the Israelis. .. He had his reward for taking their money… His information killed a hero of the armed struggle.'

It was necessary for Samuel Bartholomew to play out his part, to stifle the vomit. He took up his medical bag, locked the vehicle and walked forward.

He was a Pied Piper – kids ran and skipped after him. Joseph, in the hut at the checkpoint, had told him, 'We take great care of you. You are a jewel to us, so precious. Have no fear… ' To save him, an informer of lesser importance had been sacrificed. Word would have been passed, a channel of disinformation would have been opened. He had killed an activist, that he could justify. Bart had seen the photographs of the aftermath of the attacks by suicide bombers. He could tell himself that the death of an activist, by his hand, was acceptable – not the death of an informer that he might be protected. The crowd thinned, the knives and the butcher's cleaver were lowered, voices hushed. He walked the middle line: he would not condemn, nor would he condone.

Bart said, a little stammer in his voice, T think it would be better if he were taken down. Could you, please, cut him down?'

A man, his face masked, climbed nimbly up the scaffolding, unfastened the rope and the sodden body fell. It crumpled on to the paving near to Bart's feet. He felt weak. He wondered if his knees would buckle… He saw the woman who huddled, all in black, at the building's doorway. The crowd had thinned, and the kids. The woman watched Bart, her eyes flitting off the body to his.

In a croaking aged voice through the translation of a youth, the woman said to Bart, 7 am his mother. I came. His wife would not come, his children did not come. His wife said he had shamed her family. His children said he, their father, had betrayed them. When he was taken his wife hit him and his children spat on him. Only I came. Who will bury him?'

Bart bent, felt the neck and wrist of the body, and found no pulse.

'What do 1 do? Do I bury him alone?… What he did was for his family.

He took the money from the Israelis, but it was to feed his family who had no food. The Israelis killed him, and I curse them… They will not bury him.

Who will?'

'You have not spoken.' Hosni's voice was coaxing.

'You are like a man who is tortured,' Fahd said.

The Egyptian had dropped back and the Saudi had come forward.

They rode on either side of Caleb. It was the middle of the afternoon, the sun high, and he did not welcome them.

'Did you find your memory?'

'Did you breathe life on it, as Hosni said you should?'

He stared ahead, watched the guide's back as the man rolled with the movement of his camel. Each day they went more slowly, and each hour less ground was covered. He sensed they were either near to their destination, or the march would fail. He had not asked the guide how much further they had to travel, but that morning, and at the midday break, there had been a smaller measure of water in the mug. The snap was long gone from the camels' stride. They went heavily, and the crates had had to be taken off them before they would attempt to climb a slope that a week before they would have managed without having to be unloaded. If they failed they would die in the sand. First to die would be the camels, then Hosni and Fahd, then Caleb. After he had died it would be the turn of Ghaffur, the boy, and last to die would be the boy's father, the guide. Caleb had no fear of death in the desert. The fear was of his recalled, reclaimed memory.

'If you have no memory you are worthless.'

His memory had given him the terrace of red-brick homes, and the front door, with black paint, the number askew because a screw had fallen from the base of the second plastic digit. He had walked through a narrow hall where the wallpaper peeled, where the pattern of the stair carpet was worn away with age. He had gone through a kitchen that stank of old frying fat, and through a yard littered with rubbish. At the back of the yard against the low wall the dumped washing-machine lay on its side. They were back, the images that would have betrayed him to the interrogators. He felt weakened.

'You have to have the past, and live with it. You are not an Arab.

We have an army of Arabs…'

Caleb said, 'Where I come from, no one – not anyone I knew – would have lasted a day in this place. No one would have, not more than a day. I can survive because I have forgotten. The past is nothing to me.'

Would they tell him what was wanted of him? He could not ask.

Fahd dropped back and Hosni kicked his camel's sides and went forward. He realized that Hosni had never looked into his face and he wondered how far the blindness affected the elderly Egyptian…

Then the sand swallowed his thoughts and the pains from the blister sores consumed him.

The caravan moved on.

'This is Oscar Golf… Your last turn to starboard, because of wind direction change to north-north-west, meant we missed out. We didn't get picture on the base of that dune. We lost vision of an area we estimate to be zero point nine miles by zero point three miles.

Could you go back, please? Could you repeat over that ground, please? Oscar Golf, out.'

It was the third time in the five hours First Lady had been up that the voice, always so reasonable, had come seeping into their headphones.

Lizzy-Jo responded, wouldn't have trusted Marty to. 'Roger that, we will make that manoeuvre.'

'This is Oscar Golf. Much appreciated. Looks like flying conditions are not easy. Oscar Golf, out.'

Marty was on the joystick and Lizzy-Jo called the co-ordinates to him of a new backtracking course that would bring First Lady on a second run over a stretch of sand that was zero point nine miles in length by zero point three miles in width. She sensed that Marty burned. Everything they did, and said, was now watched and listened to. The feeling, hers and Marty's, was that they were no longer trusted, and each time the voice oozed politeness, the feeling grew. It was not unusual for pictures in real time to be going live to Langley, she'd had that in Bosnia and Afghanistan, but the pitch of the disembodied voice seemed to doubt their skill. Marty took it harder than her. After the second call, he had freed his right hand from the joystick and scribbled on his notepad: 'This feels like three in a bed' She'd grimaced, no humour, had leaned across and written:

'Worse – like his mother's in my kitchen.' Everything overheard, every move monitored, they were spied on… but Lizzy-Jo would have had to admit that the starboard turn had clipped an area of desert. The area was a quarter of a square mile of flat, gold- and red-coloured sand, and they had missed it because of the upper-air turbulence.

They went back over. The camera surveyed empty sand. Lizzy-Jo's eyes ached as she peered at the screen. The voice of Oscar Golf, when it came into the headphones and intruded into their world, could always be justified. To shut the goddamn voice up she strove for perfection. The sandscape was infinite, limitless, and nothing moved down there. There was a needle pain in her skull from concentration on the real-time images. Out in that wilderness a camel train was loaded with six crates, escorted by perhaps six men. She saw just the sand and the sloping dunes, the high points and the flat expanses.

She looked for the camels, the men, for tracks… There was nothing.

Lizzy-Jo punched up the forecast. She swore.

Marty's head rocked in exhaustion. His eyes blinked shut, then opened. She mashed her fist into the small of his back. She said,

'Doesn't let up, does it? The forecast is for stronger winds, westerly, tomorrow. If the forecast's right, there's no way we're flying tomorrow…'

Lizzy-Jo was only a handful of years older than Marty but she felt, more often since they had come to Shaybah, as if she was his aunt and he was her kid nephew. She was fonder of him, a little more each day, since they had shared the Ground Control, just them together.

She hoped the wind speed, up there four miles above the desert, would strengthen, and then the kid could sleep. She cared for him, wanted him to sleep and shed the exhaustion.

He smiled ruefully, and her hand, which had belted him, rested on the skin of his forearm and…

The voice said, 'This is Oscar Golf. We fly tomorrow, we fly every day. If you didn't know it, this is priority We ignore the manual instructions on what is possible. Until that target is found, we fly to the limit. Oscar Golf, out.'

'Are you sure? Are you telling me, man, you are sure?'

'Sure, and no argument. It's tied down.'

His supervisor, Edgar, had been off Guantanamo for two days, back at the Pentagon for sessions on the preparations for retirement.

The Pentagon had a good programme for readying long-service men in the Defense Intelligence Agency for the cold-shower shock of waking up on a Monday morning and having no work to go to. Jed watched his superior's eyes twitch and his fingers fidget. He might as well have rolled a hand grenade, pin out, across his supervisor's desk.

Maybe Jed should have felt a tinge of sympathy for the man. The physical reactions were clear enough signs that his supervisor had taken on board the seriousness of Jed's message. Those two days, while the supervisor had been lectured on pension income, the tax implications of part-time employment in the civilian sector, the psychology of switching allegiance from government service to a golf course, had been well spent. The audiotapes of the voices of the supposed taxi-driver and the British 'unlawful combatant' had been edited together and the nasal similarity could not be argued with.

'You are saying…' The supervisor's voice eddied away, as if he could not stomach the enormity of a truth now striking him.

Jed said, 'I am saying we freed the wrong man. I am saying that Fawzi al-Ateh, taxi-driver, was a bogus identity. We freed a man who was smart enough, sufficiently intelligent, to deceive us.'

'He was flown back to Afghanistan, so what's the problem? Round him up, bring him back. It's a cakewalk.'

Jed pushed across the desk the signal from Bagram, from Karen Lebed. The eyes scanned it, and the fingers could not hold the paper steady. There was a long sigh, like it was personal pain.

'God Almighty – did we deserve this?'

'Can't say, but it's what we've got. The supposition is that we released a British-origin prisoner who, most likely, never drove an Afghan taxi in his life… I suggest you look on the bright side.'

The supervisor was dulled. 'I'd like to but where do I look?'

All the times when the Agency and the Bureau guys had let him know they were the chosen people flashed in Jed's mind. Every little insultt, each put-down, every sneer, each patronizing quip floated by him. He might have felt regret at his supervisor's discomfort, but not at any shit that landed on the Agency and the Bureau. Jed grinned. 'I think other guys took that decision. I'd say we're clean.'

The supervisor's gloomy response: 'I sat in.'

'Only to rubber stamp. I don't want to be offensive, but you wouldn't have been in the loop.'

The supervisor brightened. 'It was just a list of names put down in front of me. They'd already done the list… Jed, are you aware of the ultimate potential end-game of this?'

'I know it'll be a bad day for the Bureau and the Agency.'

The supervisor's fist tightened on the pencil he held. 'There are bigger things in the world, Jed, than turf wars. Look at it… The implications of the release of a man who has gone to that deal of trouble to disguise his identity mean, to me, that he is a dedicated and committed activist. We are not looking at some guy who is just anxious to get himself home. We are talking dedication, commitment. That is a prime man, a man capable of inflicting maximum danger. There could be consequences, Jed, real bad consequences.'

'But they're not in our ballpark.'

'Christ, there is a bigger picture.' The supervisor's shoulders dropped as if a burden weighed down on him. 'And that picture is a verified homeland threat. A British-born and -reared fighter, with a shitty little heart filled with hate, can go to places an Arab cannot

… No name.'

'Then we go find a name.'

The supervisor's pencil was stabbed close to Jed's face. 'I wouldn't want this plastered all over the walls.'

Jed threw his last card, the ace card: 'Shouldn't I get on a plane?'

'Give me time.'

'Thought we don't have much time.'

'Leave me to do this, Jed, and my way. I am not having a situation where my last days here are in a conflict zone with the Bureau and the Agency, I am not.'

Jed scraped his chair back. Between grated teeth, he bit back,

'Don't bury this. If you are going to bury-''

'I am not. I need twenty-four hours of time.'

'After twenty-four hours, I should be on a plane. Don't think this can be buried and don't think I can be bounced off it. It's mine.'

He left the file and the audiotapes on his supervisor's desk. He closed the door and left his man to work a strategy. He walked back to his office and heard the noise of the camp around him; the sun hit on him and he smelt the sea. He did not know where the matched voices would take him, if he was allowed to get on a plane. He felt proud, as if at last in his professional life he had achieved something of value. He strode past the open doors of the Agency team, and past the doors of the Bureau men.

He went into the interrogation block where a prisoner, an escort and an interpreter waited for him, and he thought of the chaos he had let loose. He sat in front of the prisoner, a Yemeni, but another face was there. The Yemeni's features were gone, had merged into those of a taller man with a strong nose and a powerful jaw that the cringing protestations of innocence could not hide, and he thought of the skill of the man who had deceived them all.

The woman was forgotten, as Tommy was. Danger was forgotten.

Only survival counted. His mind was deadened and his memory gone.

The sun was in Caleb's eyes. The dried air scraped his throat and the growing wind lifted sand from the hoofs of Hosni's camel, which pricked his face. His eyes were squeezed shut against the grains. If he opened his eyes, blinked, he saw Hosni's back low across his saddle. He rocked on the hump of the Beautiful One, and he thought lhat only her courage carried her forward. She moved with leaden slow steps over the soft sand. More often than on any other day, he thought he would fall, and he yearned for the evening and the smaller portion of water that his tongue would move round his mouth, and the cold of the night, the uncooked dough, the handful of dates, and then sleep. He had heard Fahd fall behind him and the shouts of the boy, but he had not stopped, had let the boy get Fahd hack on to his camel. At the last stop, when the sun had been highest, fiercest, when they had remounted the kneeling camels, Rashid had put a rope round Hosni's waist and had knotted it to the saddle.

Hiss survival depended on himself.

The anger billowed in him.

Caleb recognized it, understood it.

The anger came in sharp surges… It was the same anger as in the camps. In X-Ray and Delta, the target of the anger had been the guards. The guards imprisoned him… Fahd and Hosni were his gaolers. They had the keys and the batons, and they were around him. His mind wandered loose. He was their prisoner. He had the hate for them, as for the guards. His throat, without water, was pricking with the pain, his eyes hurt, the blister sores ate at him. He was the one, supposedly, with the strength, and he was rocking, sliding.

Caleb toppled, lost his hold.

He went down the Beautiful One's flank, was dumped in the sand.

He fell face first.

He heard the shrill laughter behind him.

The Beautiful One had stopped and towered over him and the great brown eyes gazed down on him. It was Fahd's laughter.

Fahd reached down and Caleb took his hand. Fahd heaved him up and Caleb caught the reins that hung from the Beautiful One's neck.

He climbed, struggled, pulled himself back into the saddle.

'Are you going to fail us? We do not expect the mule to fail us.'

Caleb spat the sand. 'Is that what I am, a mule?'

'A mule is noble, a beast of burden.'

He ran his tongue round his mouth, let it gather the sand, then scraped it with his finger off his tongue. 'Is that what I am to you, a mule?' he repeated.

'What else?' All the laughter had gone from Fahd's face. It was grim, closed. 'A mule is important to us because it carries what we put on its back. It goes where we want it to go, carries what we want it to carry. It is necessary for us to use the mule, but if we thought it would fail us we would shoot it. We would not waste food on it and we would find another mule. You are a mule – a pack animal. You will carry what we put on your back.'

Caleb rode on towards his family.

Instinctively, he looked up around him, ignored the sand blown into his face. He scanned the dunes and the tips of the sand walls, and he looked for danger, and saw nothing. Once, briefly, he looked into the blue sky but then the low sun burned his eyes.