The Unknown Soldier

Chapter One

The aircraft banked on its final circuit, then its nose went down and it started the descent.

Above him, the voice was loud, shouted over the increased pitch of the engine noise. T tell you, this has been a journey from hell.'

A voice barked back, 'You want to do it every week, sir, then you get kind of used to hell.'

It's the shit bucket, isn't it? That's the smell I can't get rid of.'

I'd say, sir, that having to wipe their arses for them is worse than the smell.'

He was ignored, might not have existed. He was as much a piece of cargo as the crates loaded with them on to the transport aircraft after he and the four others had been secured on the steel floor. It might have been four days, or five, since the journey had started. He didn't know. They had landed three times, or four, for refuelling.

Now the aircraft dived. He knew it was the last leg. If it had not been for the straps that held him he would have slid down the floor of the fuselage, then cannoned into an obstruction. He did not move, could not. He sat on a small cushion of thin foam but the floor rivets were too prominent for the cushion to protect his backside. And the cushion was damp from the urine he had leaked during the bad Security – that's the Pol-i-Charki gaol – and you're going to dump them there. That's a non-negotiable.'

'Maybe you don't understand, Captain, but I have been with these ragheads the last four days, all the way from Guantanamo. I need a cot.'

'Don't you hear, Lieutenant? You drop these losers at the Pol-i-Charki, then you come back here and find a cot. Got it?'

'Yes, sir.'

A secondary argument started up. 'Sergeant, I'm taking these men into town. Their restraints have been removed. I want them put back on.'

'No can do, sir.'

'That is an order. Manacle them.'

'Sorry, sir. As loadmaster sergeant I have authority over all Air Force equipment. Such equipment does not leave my sight, does not leave this aircraft. Manacles, chains, ear baffles, mouth masks, goggles and cushions are air-force property.'

'Goddamnit…'

'Sorry, sir. Oh, and eleven hundred hours is take-off time. You better be back by then if you want a ride out. Good luck, sir.'

He knew the book. He had been in military custody for twenty months. He knew how the book was written. The arguments had not amused him and he sat bolt still with his head down. When the goggles were pulled up from his eyes he kept them closed. He gave no sign that he had understood a word of the disputes within his hearing. A vehicle pulled up, manoeuvred close to the open tail and a door was slid open. Hands lifted him up. His eyes were open now but he did not look around him. In a stumbling slide he went down the tail and the freshness of the air caught him. It was the first time he could remember scenting fresh air since he had been with the Chechen, his friend, and the others beside the long, straight road where the pickup had lost its tyres. There had been no clean air in the taxi van, and when he had been thrown clear at the ambush the stink of cordite had covered him, then the stench of the enemy in the personnel carrier, and the smell of a holding prison that was exchanged for the shit bucket of the aircraft out. There had been no clean, pure air in the camp, not even in the exercise compound.

He sucked in the air. He was to be taken to Kabul and dumped at the Pol-i-Charki. He knew the gaol: he had taken prisoners there for interrogation, men of the Northern Alliance who had fought against AI Qaeda and the Taliban – but that was long ago. Deep in the recesses of his memory, shared with the Pol-i-Charki, was a vague vision of the road from the Bagram base into the city. If he reached the Pol-i-Charki, he would be dead… and he had not come home to die. He was lifted up into a van with smoked windows. The driver was yawning, using his forearm to wipe sleep from his eyes. A marine was in the back with a rifle, grumpily making room for the prisoners. As the officer took the front passenger seat, the driver grinned and handed back bars of nougat chocolate. They drove away, and an open jeep followed with a machine-gun mounted on a brace behind the driver.

He remembered the base as a place of ghosts and ruins. He remembered it abandoned and looted. Without turning his head he saw new, prefabricated blocks and tent camps, then a gate topped with coiled razor wire, flanked with sandbags, guarded by men in combat fatigues. He took heart. For twenty months he had existed in a vacuum of time and information. That changed. The gate was guarded, which told him there was still the chance of hostile action on the fifty kilometres of road – through flat and featureless farming country – between the Bagram base and the capital city of Kabul. As the sentries raised the bar at the base gate, the machine-gun on the jeep was noisily cocked. They left the arc-lights and the perimeter wire behind them, and the driver switched on the radio, caught the forces programme and smiled toothily at the officer's discomfort.

It would take, as he remembered it, an hour at most to reach the outskirts of the city. His sole hope was in open country. They passed a village. The officer ignored the no-smoking sign in the cab and lit a cigarett. The driver grimaced.

If he were in the Pol-i-Charki, if he were interrogated by Afghan security – the hard bastards of the Northern Alliance – he would fail.

He would be dead. Memories of the road silted in his mind. A village, as he had known it more than twenty months before, flashed past in the headlights. Two ruined compounds, gutted in earlier lighting, wore on the right. There were open fields and scrub…

Then, if his memory held, there were trees beside the road, both sides. His fingers played with the sharp edge of the plastic bracelet on his wrist. He coughed, was ignored, and coughed again. The officer turned, irritated, and the cigarette smoke wreathed his face.

He looked pathetic and cringed, then pointed downwards. The officer's eyes followed where he pointed, to his groin. The driver, too, had turned back to look.

'Shit, man,' the driver whined. 'Not in here, not in my vehicle. I'm not having him piss in my vehicle.'

The driver didn't wait for the officer's agreement. He braked hard, swerved on to the gravel, stopped.

'I take one-star generals in this vehicle. I'm not having it pissed in.'

The officer climbed out, threw down his cigarette and opened the back door. He climbed out and the officer's hand steadied him. He smiled his thanks. He went to the side of the road and knew he was watched by the men in the jeep who had the mounted, cocked machine-gun. He stepped down off the road and into scrub. He fiddled with the zipper at the front of his overalls. Behind him, the strike of a match lit another cigarette. A torch played on his back. He was coiled, tense. He did not know whether he would be able to run after four days in the aircraft and the months in the camp. If he reached Pol-i-Charki he was dead… He ran. The torch wavered off him as he wove. His legs were leaden. He was already panting when he reached the first of the trees. A single shot crashed in his ears. He heard shouts, and the officer's voice.

'No, don't – he isn't worth killing… '

He ran, panting, gasping for air, trying to kick his legs forward.

'… he's only a taxi-driver.'

He lost the lights and sensed the freedom. He ran till he fell, then pushed himself up and ran again.

Dawn came across the mountains, and the mountain peaks in the east made sharp funnels of sunshine. The light speared the coiled wire on the perimeter fence of Bagram – the sprawling military base, originally Soviet-built, an hour's drive west across the plain to Kabul

– and slashed at the night mist, glinted on the bright corrugated-iron roofs of the repaired buildings, caught the wan faces of troopers sleep-walking to the shower blocks, burned the smoke rising in still air from kitchen stacks, lit the dull camouflage of transport aircraft parked on the aprons, then threw shadows down from the angles of the wings and tail fins of two small white-painted planes that were being laboriously manhandled and wheeled out from under shelters of canvas.

They were like toys in a man's world. Teams of men, not in military fatigues, heaved their weight against the slight wings and directed the planes towards a slip-road leading on to the main runway. They bent their heads away as a bomber careered past them on full take-off power. These two planes were different from anything else flown off the Bagram runway. Length: twenty-six feet and eight inches. Wing span: forty-eight feet and six inches. Height above the oil-smeared Tarmac: six feet and one inch. Width of fuselage: (widest point) three feet and eight inches, (narrowest point) one foot and eleven inches. They seemed so fragile, so delicate – ballet dancers in comparison with the clog-booted brigade that screamed up the runway. I he planes were each powered by a single two-blade variable pitch push-propellor capable of flying the machine at top speed of 127 miles per hour, and at loiter speed of seventy-five miles per hour when fuel conservation was necessary. What a stranger to the base, ignorant of modern technology, would first have noticed about these two planes was that unbroken white paint covered the forward area where there should have been cockpit glass for a pilot's vision. What he would not have known was that the planes, the unmanned aerial vehicles, were regarded by those who knew as the most formidable weapon in the occupying power's arsenal. They seemed so innocent in their bright white paint, so harmless, but their name was Predator.

The dawn light rested on a young man and a young woman walking quickly away from a camouflaged trailer parked beside the sheeting from which the Predators, designation MQ-1, had been wheeled oul by ihe ground crew. They passed a satellite dish mounted on a second trailer hitched to a closed unmarked van.

Marty wore baggy brown shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with a Yellowstone Park brown bear and flip-flops. She wore jeans with frayed hems and patches at the knees, a loose plain green sweatshirt that was crumpled, as if she'd slept in it, and a pair of old trainers.

His eyes were masked by thick pebble lenses secured in a metal frame, his skin was pale, his hair a mass of untidy, mousy curls. His physique was puny. Lizzy-Jo was taller, but plumper from the weight never discarded after childbirth. Her dark glasses were hooked on the crown of a wild mess of auburn hair scooped at the back of her head into an extravagant yellow ribbon. The stranger, seeing them, would not have known that, between them, they controlled the Predator.

Temperamentally they could not have been more different: he was quiet, withdrawn, she was noisy, exuberant. But two common factors bound them into their relationship: both were employed by the Agency, took their orders from Langley and were not subject to the military regimen that controlled the base; both worshipped, in their differing ways, the power and meanness of the Predator, version MQ-1. Initially, when they had been posted to Afghanistan, the Bagram base, they had existed inside the inner compound used by the Agency and had lived alongside the Agency teams, and those from the Feds, who ran the detention block behind a double inner fence of razor wire with its own sleeping, eating and recreation quarters – an apartheid cocoon for the elite that separated them from the Air Force people and the marines' units. At first they had not been part of the general life of the huge base. But the war was winding down, the Al Qaeda targets were harder to come by, and old disciplines were discarded.

The best breakfasts at Bagram were served in the marines' compound. The marines had the best cooks, the best variety of food, the best coffee. And a good breakfast would last them through the day in the stifling heat of the Ground Control Station.

He wore his ID card hooked on his belt. Hers, more provocatively, was clipped to her T-shirt between her breasts. After a sentry had checked them through the gate into the marines' compound, they joined the queue in the canteen.

In front of them, a lieutenant was bitching at a loadmaster sergeant. They listened, rolling their eyes at each other, entertained.

The lieutenant, dead tired and slurring as if he'd barely slept, said,

'I just felt such a goddamn idiot. I never figured that the little bastard was setting me up to do a runner. What am I supposed to do? Mow the little fucker down? Didn't seem right… He was free – useless to us, no risk, but I'd his name on the docket and was tasked to hand him over at the Pol-i-Charki. I tell you, my only piece of luck, the people that were there at the gaol, they never even read the names, never did the counting, just kicked inside the four we brought. I just felt such a fool at falling for that old trick, wanting to pee. Just some simple gook, and free – after where he's been, in the cage at Guantanamo, why would he want to run?'

'Don't worry about it, sir – I mean, he wasn't bin Laden, was he?

You said just some taxi-driver.'

They dressed down, Marty and Lizzy-Jo, to emphasize that they were not military. Foul-ups in the military were always entertaining.

It had made a good start to the day.

A half-hour later, with the dawn on full thrust and killing the mist, in the Ground Control Station, Marty took the Predator – First Lady – up off the runway, working the small computer-game joystick on the bench above his knees. Carnival Girl, the second craft, was back-up and would stay grounded unless needed. Lizzy-Jo thwacked her fingers on the console keys and watched as the first pictures flickered, then settled on the screens above her. The mission that day was for reconnaissance over the Tora Bora mountains to the south-west. The bird climbed, optimum conditions with light north-east winds at fifteen thousand feet. She reached across, tapped his shoulder and pointed to the central screen, which gave the real-time image from the belly camera. She giggled. 'On his way to the garage to collect his yellow cab… eh?'

Below the camera, clear and in sharp focus on dun-coloured scree, the figure in the orange overalls was running, but slowly. Marty grimaced – not their business. The Predator hunted meatier prey.

The orange-suited figure tripped, fell, and stumbled on. Then the camera's field surged forward and he was lost.

'What do you think it's like in Guantanamo?'

'Don't know and don't care,' Marty murmured, side of mouth.

I'm going up to seventeen thousand feet altitude, which'll be our loiter height… OK, OK, I suppose Guantanamo would be kind of scary.'

Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay.

It was the end of the first week and he was learning. He had not failed the hardest test. Hardest was not to respond when an order, in English, was screamed in his ear. No movement, no obedience, until the order was translated into Pashto, or a gesture was made to indicate what he should do.

The numbers coming into the camp were so great that it had taken them a week to process him. Hands gripped him, pulled him upright in front of the white screen. A fist took his chin, lifted it, and lie stared into the camera.

The light flashed. He was manhandled again and turned so that his head was profile to the lens, and the light flashed once more. The fists took his arms and he was shuffled out through the door and in front of the desk. The chains were tight on his ankles and his arms were pinioned behind his back; the manacles were fastened to a chain looped round his waist. They put the face mask back over his mouth. A heavy-built soldier, with a swollen gut and a shaven head, gazed up at the number written in indelible ink on his forehead, then riffled through the mass of files on the desk. Beside him, a woman sat, middle-aged, her greying hair covered with a loose scarf.

'Right, boy, we'll start at the beginning. Name?'

He stared straight ahead, and saw the first flicker of impatience in the soldier's eyes.

The woman translated in Pashto.

The Chechen had said that, if they were captured, the Americans would kill them. They would torture them, then shoot them. They would rape their women and bayonet their children. The Chechen had said it was better to die with the last bullet and the last grenade than to be captured by the Americans.

T am Fawzi al-Ateh. I am a taxi-driver. I-'

'You answer only my questions. I want only answers to what I ask. Got me?'

She translated fast.

He had been beaten at the first camp he had been brought to. He had not been allowed to sleep. Questions had rained on him, with the fists. Noise had bellowed in his ears, shrill, howling sounds played over loudspeakers. Lights had been shone into his face, and if he had slumped in exhaustion he was kicked back upright and made to resume standing. Then he had been put on the aircraft. He had not known, still did not, the destination. For a week he had been in a wire cage, in a block of cages, and if a man talked through the mesh wire to the prisoner alongside him, guards came and shouted and manhandled their victim away. There were prayer-mats in the cages, and buckets. He had learned from watching the men brought to the camp with him, and from those already there. Some had fought, struggled, spat at the guards, and were kicked for it. Some had collapsed, disoriented, and they were loaded on to wheeled stretchers, held down with straps and taken away, he did not know where to. He had been searched, had stood naked while fingers in plastic gloves had pried into his ears, his mouth and his anus, but he had not resisted. When it was hardest for him, every time it was worst, he groped back in his memory for each phrase, every word of the story of the taxi-driver, each detail and every fact of the life of the taxi-driver.

'Listen here, boy. You are a prisoner of the United States of America. You are held at Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay. You probably don't know geography, but Guantanamo Bay is a military base under United States control on the island of Cuba. You are not classified as a prisoner-of-war but as an unlawful combatant. You have no rights. You will be held here as long as we consider you a threat to our country. You will be interrogated here so that we can learn the full extent of your involvement with Al Qaeda. My advice to you is to co-operate with the interrogators when you are brought before them. Failure to co-operate will lead to harsh punishment measures.

At Camp X-Ray, you are a forgotten person, you have disappeared off the face of the earth. We can do with you what we want. You may think this is all a bad dream, boy, and that you will soon be going home – forget it.'

The translator's voice droned in his ear, as if it was a familiar routine, as if the words meant nothing to her.

Behind him he heard the clatter of boots, then felt something fastened to his right wrist.

'Take him away.'

He was led back to the block of cages. Flies played on his face but he coidd not swat them because his arms were chained. The chain at his ankles con-stricted his stride and the guards dragged him so that he had to hop so as not to scrape his toes in gravel. He was brought down corridors of wire covered with green sheeting. He had no comprehension of the size of the camp but from all around he heard the moaning of men whose minds had turned. He understood the muttered words of the guards, what they would eat that day, what movie they woidd see that evening, but he showed no sign of his understanding. He thought that if they knew he was Caleb, who had become Abu Khaleb, he would be dragged out one dawn and shot or hanged.

He thought it would be as the Chechen had said: the interrogators, when he was brought before them, would torture him. His only protection was the taxi-driver's name and the taxi-driver's life – every detail of what he had been told as he had rocked in tiredness in the front of the van was protection against the fear.

He was brought to his cage. He realized the hatred of the guards. They wanted nothing more of him than that he should fight, kick, spit, and give them the excuse to beat him. The chains were taken off his ankles and from his waist, and the manacles at his wrists were unfastened. He was pushed crudely into his cage. He squatted down, huddled against the back wall near to the bucket, and a little of the wind off the sea filtered through the wire at the sides of the cage. He held his right wrist in front of his eyes. He saw his photograph on the plastic bracelet, the reference number US8AF-000593DP, his sex, height, weight, date of birth and his name.

He tried to remember everything of Fawzi al-Ateh. It was the only strand he had to cling to.

The dawn widened.

Ahead, Caleb saw a grey-blue strip, the mountains. Separating the peaks from the skies were patches of snow topped by cloud bundles.

The high ground was his immediate target. He crossed a wilderness of bare ground broken by low outcrops of rock. Before capture, before the twenty months in the cages of Guantanamo – first at what was called Camp X-Ray and then the movement to the newly built and permanent-to-last Camp Delta – he had prided himself on his ability to run or travel at forced-march pace. When he had been, proudly, in the 055 Brigade with Saudis and Yemenis, Kuwaitis, Egyptians and Uzbeks, he had been one of the fittest. Twenty months in the cages – Fawzi al-Ateh, the taxi-driver – had leached the strength from his legs, had squeezed the capacity of his lungs. If he had not been at home, if he had not needed to return to the ranks of his family, he would not have been able to move at such speed across the bare, stone-strewn ground. At the training camp, the Chechen who had recruited him always made him go first over stamina-degrading assault courses because the Chechen knew he would do well and would set a standard for the other newcomers. Afghanistan was the only home he knew and the 055 Brigade was the only family he acknowledged. Everything about a life before the training camps was expelled from his mind; it did not exist. For twenty months he had been taken out for two sessions a week of fifteen minutes' exercise. His legs had been shackled, his steps stumbling and short within the constraints of the chain's length. A guard had held each arm, and his sandals had scuffed the flattened worn dirt of the circuit in the yard. In those twenty months, he had been walked the hundred yards to the interrogation block nine times. His leg muscles had atrophied, but still he ran.

He sobbed from pain. In front of another man – an instructor at the training camp, an Arab in the 055 Brigade, a guard or interrogator at Camp X-Ray or Camp Delta – he would never have shown how pain hurt him. He was alone. The pain was in his legs, in the muscles of his calves and thighs. The unworked muscles seemed to scream as he pounded forward. When he fell, many times, he scraped the skin off his knees and elbows, and blood stained the cotton of his overalls.

There was no water and his throat rasped with dryness. His lungs sucked in the growing warmth of the air. The only time he stopped was when he came to a rutted track and lay in scrub near to it, with the scent of wild flowers in his nose. He waited till his heartbeat had subsided to listen for a vehicle or a man or a goat's bell. When he heard nothing, only the wind, he crossed the track and went on.

Somewhere in front of him, by the base of the line of the mountains, was the family he yearned for.

Across Afghan mountains, the Iranian land mass and the chasm of the Gulf of Oman, the same dawn rose over a limitless desert of salt flats and razor-spined dunes of ochre sand. The desert, the largest sand mass on Earth, was flanked to the north by the Saudi Arabian province of A1 Najd, to the east by the oil-rich region of Al Hasa based on the refinery complex near the city of Ad Dammam and the statelets of the United Arab Emirates, to the south by the hills of Oman and Yemen, to the west by the Saudi mountains of the Asir range. Whipped by the winds, the desert sands continually moved, lorming new peaks and patterns, and the great area that was a thousand kilometres wide and six hundred kilometres in depth was perpetually burned by the sun's ferocity. The itinerant Bedouin tribesmen, who alone could exist in the desert's privations, called it the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter.

The dawn light, thrown low, caught the mahogany wings of a hunting eagle. It lit the dark upper coat of a stalking fox and highlighted the tracks of the jerboas that would be food for both the fox and the eagle. It glistened the still moist gobbet of phlegm spat out by a camel that had passed two days before. The light nestled on a point of black darkness between a cleft of rocks where higher ground rose above the western section of the sands.

Other than in the few minutes when the sun came up in the east, the entrance to the cave was hidden. A man emerged from it and blinked as the sun's brightness blinded him after a night in the dim interior. Behind him, in the depth of darkness, a petrol-driven generator started up and coughed before the engine engaged. He spat out the waste between his teeth and lit the first cigarette of the day.

Staring out over the expanse, he saw the single sentry squatting in a cleft below the cave's entrance, a rifle held loosely in his lap. He ground out the cigarette, then placed the butt in a small tin box; later it would go with other waste into a pit dug in the sand, then be covered up. He whistled to the sentry, who turned his head, smiled grimly, then shook it. Only the desert confronted them, not danger.

He called back into the cave quietly.

Others emerged.

When the cave had first been found, when the decision had been made that it burrowed far enough into the escarpment for their needs, a compass had been used to determine the direction of the holy city of Makkah. A line was fixed in the memories of each of them as they came in the half-light away from the cave and on to a small square of beaten dirt between the rocks. In unison, they knelt.

Among the five pillars of their faith was the requirement that they should pray five times each day. The fajr was the first obligatory prayer, at dawn. They were silent as they knelt, each man wrapped in his own thoughts, but common among them was the pleading to their God that the opportunity be given them for revenge, the chance to strike back against the embracing power of their enemy. And common among them also was the appearance of hunted men, drawn-faced, thin-bodied, exhausted in spirit.

Very few knew of the cave. A satellite telephone was inside it, but gathered dust and was not used. The generator was capable of recharging the batteries of a laptop computer but that was also left idle. Once a week, or less frequently if the security situation was difficult, trusted couriers came across the desert with messages, food and water. All of those in the cave, hunted, harried and condemned, knew that their photographs and biographies were listed in Internet sites for the Most Wanted, and they knew the size – millions of the accursed dollars – of the reward that would be paid out for information that pinpointed the location of their lair, for their capture or for their deaths.

In a few minutes, as the sun rose, the shadow of the cave's entrance would be lost.

Many hours later, the same dawn rose, this time a slow-growing light that seeped through dark gun-metal cloud that was thick enough for a second heavy fall of snow. It was the last day of their rental on the cabin and in three hours Jed Dietrich would be loading the vehicle and turning his back on the wild Wisconsin lakes. It was too late in the year to have a real hope of hooking a decent muskie but it was what he had dreamed of for the last eight months of duty far to the south. He took Arnie Junior with him and left Brigitte to pack the bags and clean the cabin. The night cold had left the first snowfall as frozen slush on the ground and the water around the pontoon piers where the boats were moored was thinly crusted with ice.

He checked his son's life-jacket, then his own, and he saw that the five-year-old child was shivering in the cold. They would not be out long but he could not have given up the year's last chance of a good fish.

In the boat, Jed smiled reassurance at his son, tugged the engine to life and sped out for deeper water, the ice crackling at the bow.

Where Jed Dietrich worked, unaccompanied by Brigitte and Arnie Junior, there was sunshine, warm water and ideal conditions for good-fighting sport fish, but recreational boats were not permitted out of harbour by the patrolling coastguards and the beaches were out of bounds to servicemen and civilians because the shoreline was covered by infra-red and heat-seeking surveillance beams. There he could only gaze out at the sea, not fish in it… they'd tried for more children, a brother or sister for Arnie Junior, but had not been fortunate, reason enough to have the kid with him for every one of the precious hours it was possible. He slowed the engine to little more than idling speed, tossed out the lure and let out line with it so that it would go deep. Then he dropped off the small spoon, with little hope that a wall-eye, perch or sucker would be any hungrier than a muskie, and winked encouragement at the boy. As they trolled across the lake, under the thick and darkened cloud, they talked fish talk – as Arnie Senior had to him when he was a kid – of big-mouthed monsters with rows of slashing teeth and record weights, sunken reefs and rock walls where the muskie might gather, their habits and lifestyles. The little boy liked the talk. When Jed was away, and he had only the photograph of Brigitte and Arnie Junior for company, and the phone calls when the kid seemed forever tongue-tied, he would savour the memory of these moments.

For now, Jed Dietrich was at peace. He was thirty-six years old, a HumInt specialist on the staff of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

In the sunshine, beside the clear Caribbean sea where he could not fish, the same peace eluded him.

He was tall, well-built, looked after himself, and he thought Arnie Junior would soon shape up after him, would be useful at football or softball, and would soon be able to handle a boat like this on his own.

Arnie Junior was his ongoing obsession, a point of focus in a workload that was now tedious, pointless, boring. Too often, down in the distant south, as the translator's voice whined in his ear, he thought of his kid and found his attention sliding away from his target.

Out on the water, with the quiet about him and only the child's chatter and the engine to listen to, he had felt the tension drain from him. He felt good. No matter there were no fish… and then his son squealed, his rod arching. They were both laughing and shouting, and reeled in a nine-inch smallmouth bass, then returned it to the water, because Jed taught his boy to respect the prey. They fished another hour. No more takes, no more bites, but it did not matter – the peace was total. They would fly down to DC and stay a few days with Arnie Senior and Wilhelmina, then Brigitte would go back to the one-bedroom apartment they rented near to the Pentagon, and he would take the feeder flight down to Puerto Rico and on to Guantanamo.

Brigitte broke the peace. She stood on the dock in her windcheater, waved and called them in… The holiday was over. Ahead of him were the camp, the prisoners, the monotony, the cringing answers, and the stale routine of going over ground already exhausted. The camp seemed to call him, and he turned his face away from his son and cursed softly, but the kid wouldn't have seen his irritated frown or heard the obscenity. Camp Delta dragged him back.

*

A day had passed, and a night. Another dawn, another day, another night, and then the sun peeped up.

He woke. Caleb felt the sharp tugging at the arm of his overall, jerking and persistent. Hot breath splayed over his cheeks. He opened his eyes and flailed with his hands.

The dogs backed off. They were thin but their eyes were bright with excitement, their hackles up. The teeth menaced him. He rolled from his side on to his buttocks and they retreated further, all the time snarling at him. One, bolder than the others, darted towards his left ankle and caught the skin below the hem of the overalls, but he lashed out and the heavy sandal hit its jaw hard enough for it to lose courage. Then the oldest of the dogs, fangs yellowed, fur greying, threw back its head and howled.

In the night he had seen the dull lights of the village. He had staggered to within a hundred yards of the nearest building, then collapsed. He had lain down on the dirt and stones, beside a fence of cut thornbushes, had heard voices and known that he did not have the strength to go the last hundred yards from the fence to the nearest building – and he had slept. The sleep had killed the pain that eked from each muscle in his body. If it had not been for the dogs pulling at him, Caleb would have slept on through the dawn, until the sun was high.

He could see a dozen low-built homes of mud bricks, flat-roofed, beyond a maze of small, fenced fields. The dogs watched him, wary of him, and the warning howl had not been answered: the doors stayed shut. To the side of the community's homes, separated from them, was a compound walled with stones and bricks – new, he thought – and above the walls bright flags of white and red and green fluttered from poles, and Caleb knew that it was a recently constructed cemetery, a shrine to men buried as martyrs.

If he were to find his family, Caleb needed food, water and clothes, and he needed help.

He pushed himself up but his knees gave under him and he sprawled back on the ground. The second time he tried he was able to stand. His legs were in agony, and his arms, shoulders and chest.

He had no choice but to approach the village. He bent and picked up a stone, hurled it at the oldest dog, the pack leader. His decision was made: he must approach the village. In all the life he knew – two years and then twenty months – decisions had never come hard to him. He was too weak to skirt the village, to put off the crisis moment of contact. He had to trust and hope.

He knew that his arrival would cause panic. At Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta, the interrogators had told him that the power of A1

Qaeda was broken, for ever, in Afghanistan, and he had believed them, and that the leaders of his family were in flight; it had been the story they told to encourage him to confess involvement and contacts

… but he was just a taxi-driver, Fawzi al-Ateh, and he knew nothing.

To return to his family he must go to the village and hope for help.

The dogs trailed him. Half-way to the village, staggering, unable to walk with a steady stride, he saw a woman's face at the window of the nearest house. She ducked away and the nearer he went to the house, the greater the cacophony of barking. A door opened.

A man, half dressed, roused from sleep, was framed in the doorway, a rifle raised to his shoulder.

Caleb's life, at that moment, hung by a thread.

He knew that in some villages the Arabs of the 055 Brigade had been detested, seen as arrogant foreigners. Now he might be shot, or he might be bound and sold back to the Americans. He straightened his back, and smiled. He spoke in the language he had learned, the language he had used in Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta, that of Fawzi al-Ateh.

He greeted the man who aimed the rifle at him. 'Peace be on you.'

The response was suspicious and grudging. 'On you be peace.'

Caleb knew the weapon. He could have stripped it blindfolded in daylight or darkness and reassembled it. The safety catch was off, the finger was on the trigger, not the guard. He stood his ground and held out his arms, scratched and scraped from the times, beyond counting, that he had fallen; he showed he had no weapon. The rifle barrel lowered, then dropped. He ducked his head, a pose of humility, but he showed no fear. Like the dogs, the man would associate fear with deceit. Quietly, Caleb asked for hospitality, shelter and help.

Without taking his eyes off Caleb, the man shouted instructions to the older child. Caleb understood him. The child led, and Caleb followed, the man behind him. The store shed was of brick, with mud daubed over it. The child opened a heavy door, then ran. Caleb went inside. He saw goats, and their fodder, long-handled spades and… The door was slammed shut behind him, darkness closed round him, and he heard the fastening of the door. There were no windows. Outside, the man would now be squatted with his rifle, watching the door while the child went to bring the village elders.

He sat on a carpet of hay and the goats nuzzled against him. They might kill him and bury his body in the village's rubbish tip, or sell him, or they might help him.

He slept.

Later Caleb was woken by the sound of the door scraping open.

He staggered out into the brilliance of the sunshine, and sat cross-legged on the ground in front of a horseshoe of the village men. The oldest men were in the centre. He told his story. They might hate the Arabs of Al Qaeda, they might have fought alongside them. He spoke the truth as he knew it. His voice was soft, gentle and without hesitation. Their faces were impassive. As he spoke, a helicopter flew high overhead. His presence endangered the village. The village would have wealth beyond the dreams of any of the tribesmen if they sold him on. From the moment he held out his right arm and showed them the plastic bracelet with his photograph on it and the name of Fawzi al-Ateh, and the reference US8AF-000593DP, he knew he was believed. He was tall for an Arab, but had swarthy coloured skin, and in his time in their country he had learned their language well. They listened, were spellbound, but it was not until the end of his story, when he ducked his head to show he acknowledged that his life lay in their hands, that he knew he would not be shot or sold.

The oldest village man came to him, lifted him, then walked him to the cemetery.

A year before, fighters had been killed a day's walk from the village, caught on foot and in the open by helicopters. The younger men of the village, with mules, had brought their bodies here. They were buried with honour… The fighters were Shuhadaa, martyrs in the name of God. Their bodies lay in the cemetery, their spirits were in Paradise.

That afternoon a messenger left the village with the name of Abu Khaleb carried in his mind, along with the name of the Chechen, to travel into the mountains to the encampment of a warlord.

That evening a kid was killed, gutted and skinned, and a fire was lit. Caleb was fed and given juice to drink.

That night, his orange overalls were thrown on to the dying fire and they burned bright. He wore the clothes of a young man from the village.

That week he was the protected guest of the village while the elders waited for instructions on how the journey to return Caleb to his family could be achieved. And he did not know how long that journey would be, or where it would take him, or to what fate – but he knew that he would make that journey.