The Unknown Soldier

Chapter Nineteen

'Do you want morphine?'

'No.'

He had taken the injection in his arm. Caleb had lain on his back while the doctor had examined the leg wound, then replaced the lint dressing.

'You can have morphine either intravenously or by ampoule, for the pain.'

'I don't want morphine.'

'It's a free world.' The doctor smiled grimly. 'You take it or leave it.'

He did not want morphine because he thought the drug would cloud his mind. Back at home, in the old world that he sought to forget, there had been heroin addicts – the world came back more often to him, nestled with him, disturbed him – and in the summer they went down the canal towpath to the bridge that carried the rail link between Birmingham and Wolverhampton, and they huddled in the gloom below the bridge's arches and injected themselves. To feed it, they stole, mugged and burgled. Going to school, going to the garage, going in the car to Birmingham for the mosque, he had seen them shambling, pale, their minds lost. He needed control, that day above all others. .

The doctor hovered over him, rubbing his eyes as if tiredness overwhelmed him. Caleb had slept. The sweat ran from the doctor's forehead and down into the stubble on his cheeks… The doctor had saved him, but had seen his face.

'Actually, I'm rather pleased with it.'

The low light seeped under the awning that swung and jerked from the growing restlessness of the hobbled camels. In an hour he and Rashid and Ghaffur would be gone, the ropes would be unfastened and the animals would be loaded, and they would move.

Morphine would derange his mind when he needed clarity.

'It's clean, there are no indications of infection. Oozing, that's expected, but no pus. It's what's going to happen next that you have to think about.'

Only the high-flying eye could find the vehicles, and then by chance. They might not be found for weeks, months, a year. If a storm came, at any time in the weeks or months, the contours of the dunes would shift and the vehicles would be buried – and the bodies.

'What you've got now is temporary. With clean dressings, it'll last three or four days, but then – if you've kept the infection out – you'll have to have it stitched tight. I'll be frank with you. The speed of your recovery, from trauma and dehydration, astonishes me. You've done well, or been lucky. But you will need a professional for the stitches.'

He would not bury the bodies. He would abandon them to rot in the sun and decay, and the clothes would degrade, and the flesh would be burned off the bones, but the first storm would bury them.

His strength would be safeguarded.

'I'm going to do you some extra dressings, and I'll leave eight Ampicillin syringes, enough for two days, and then the same in tablets – just swallow them. Twenty pills will keep you going for another five days. You'll need proper care in a week. I'll put out some morphine as well, and two syringes of Lignocaine anaesthetic if you have to take a penknife to the wound – I don't think you will. There's not much more I can do for you, but you've had my best effort.'

'Why?' Caleb asked.

The doctor giggled at him, then wiped the smile. 'I don't think we need to talk about that. I'll get it all ready and packaged up. No . sudden movements, no exertions, no walking unaided, and when you ride one of those bloody creatures you should keep the pace steady and slow. You, my friend, are a fragile petal.'

He watched the doctor walk away. There was, for a brief moment, a shiver of anger in him that his question had not been answered. A brief moment. It did not matter. He bent his body, levered his back up and looked out from under the awning. He saw the doctor head towards his vehicle. The woman was sitting against the wheel of the Land Rover, her knees drawn up to her chest and her head down on them, sitting against the wheel where he had laboured to dig out the sand. Beyond the guide, who was hunched down with his rifle laid across his lap, the boy stood with his head still and listened. He brushed his hand against the furred skin above the nose, and the Beautiful One nuzzled his arm. He caught her harness and dragged himself up. The pain shimmered through his body. He stood, his head against the awning's ceiling, used the launcher as a crutch, his hand tight on the grip stock.

He went, slow step by slow step, out from under the awning and towards the guide.

Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay.

They sat on the bus. They were all blindfolded, and the chains were on their wrists and ankles and round their waists. He heard guards' voices from outside the bus windows and the hammering of construction workers and the churning of cement mixers. The sun beat on the bus roof, minutes passed.

Maybe there was shade from a tree or a building, but the guards outside the bus came nearer, and Caleb could listen. It was drawled, slow talk.

'Me, I wouldn't have let any of them out. Me, I'd have kept them all here, here for the shed.'

'Three weeks, so I heard, ready for when the tribunals start up.'

'Are we going to hang them, inject them or fry them in the shed?'

'Each of them's too good for these bastards.'

'Do that and there's no chance for regrets, kind of final… I mean, who says those jerks are innocent and should be sent home?'

T reckon the high and mighty said it, and as usual their talk is probable shit.'

The engine started up ami he no longer heard the voices. Birds sang, and . there was the waft of salted air through the open door of the bus, and he heard gates open in front of them, then scrape shut after them. On his knee was a little plastic bag, compliments of the Joint Task Force, Guantanamo.

It contained a change of underpants, fresh socks, a bar of soap, a toothbrush and a small tube of paste. He did not know that beside the gate now closed behind them was the big board that said, 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom.'

They drove for the ferry and the airfield on the far side of the bay. He wanted nothing of them, would carry with him only the bracelet on his wrist that gave his name, Fawzi al-Ateh. As the bus bumped through more checkpoints, past more guards, he put the plastic bag on the bus floor and kicked it back under the seat. He wanted nothing of them but that they should be hurt, by his hand.

The fly came back, settled on her lip. Beth swiped at it again with savagery. She saw him.

With short stumbled strides, his weight on the weapon, he came clear of the shelter and headed out over the sand. His robe was hooked into his waist, the sun caught the whiteness of the new dressing and his shadow stretched away in front of him. The guide's boy had come to her, told her she should leave in the night, and she had spoken of her bloody promise. She should have gone in the night to the snoring, tossing Bartholomew, and told him, ordered him, to load up the big dose to burn away the dream. She had not had the courage. He reached the guide.

At that distance Beth could not have heard words spoken between them. She screwed her eyes to see better and did not think words were spoken. He let his weight settle on the weapon that supported him, reached down to the guide's lap and lifted the rifle. There was no protest from the guide, no struggle for the rifle. He stood over the guide, the weapon as his crutch, and both his hands held it. She heard – as an echoed sound across the sand – the scrape of metal on metal as he cocked it.

He held the rifle in one hand and turned, with his weight on the weapon and the length of its tube, so that he faced vaguely towards her. He moved. She leaned her weight against the tyre and watched him. His face was contorted. The veins stood out on his neck and the lines cut his forehead, and his eyes were near closed as if that might hold back the pain. She saw the first blood trickle from his lip where he bit it. He came nearer to her and the sand scuffed out from under his bare feet. The guide still sat and she could not read his thought, and further back and higher the boy was on the shallow dune. She wriggled back against the tyre, but it was ungiving. Then she realized. He was not coming towards her. His target was at a shallow angle from her.

Beth swung her head.

The tail of the Mitsubishi was past the Land Rover's front fender.

Bart had his back to him, had not seen him, was stuffing packeted syringes, rolled dressings and tablet bottles into a plastic bag. He did not know that he was stalked.

The rifle was held out, but Beth saw the way the barrel wavered, wobbled, as if caught by the wind.

Bart had a small refrigerated box and unzipped it. He put the plastic bag into it. He reached into the tail of the Mitsubishi and lifted out a water bottle. First he mopped a handkerchief across his face, then he swigged from the bottle.

The rifle was raised. Its barrel seemed to shake. She thought he struggled to hold it steady, and to aim. He was a dozen yards behind Bart.

Beth screamed. No words of warning, only an anguished cry that pierced the quiet.

She saw Bart start up, saw his shock, saw him stare at her, then follow her line of sight. He fixed his gaze on the rifle barrel, then seemed to shrivel.

She heard Bart's voice. 'You don't have to do that, my friend. No cause for you to be worried by me. Snitch on you? No… no. Turn in a fighter? Been there. I've seen your face – it doesn't matter. Sort of made the decision last night. I'd go to my grave rather than turn in another fighter, done that long ago… I'm grateful to you. Coming down here and getting you on your feet has been kind of important to me – like the chains are off, my friend. What I'm saying is…'

She saw that the barrel of the rifle was steady. She pulled herself up against the tyre. She saw the finger slide from the guard to the trigger. She gulped in a breath, and ran.

Beth saw his head lift from the sight. Her boots ground and kicked in the sand as she slithered nearer to Bart.

For the slightest moment, there was irresolution on his face. .

The rifle dropped.

Beth reached Bart. She stood in front of him, panted, felt the heave of his chest against her back. She was a shield for him.

'You don't have to,' Bart's voice quavered in her ear.

'I do.'

Images cascaded in Beth's mind. His control over the men who would have killed her, his sweat dripping as he dug out the sand-locked wheels, his smile of gratitude as she passed him water, his frown of concern and patience as he cleaned the engine, his peace as he slept in the sand beside her, the stars and moon above h i m… The barrel was up, aimed. She looked into his face and searched for passion, loathing, madness, and saw only a strange calm. She thought his eyes had the emptiness of death, as if the light had gone from them.

'I've seen your face. I remember it. Be a hero, be a killer. Isn't that what you want?… Do you know what you said before the drip worked? I'll tell you: "They'll hear my name, they'll know it…

Everyone will hear my name… When you hear my name, all of you bastards, it'll be because I've done what my family wants of me."

Your family, big deal, have made an animal of you. Common Brit scum is what you are, always will be – and vain as a fucking peacock

… I've seen your face and I will not forget it.'

She stared back at the barrel of the rifle and she knew. Through the sights he must look into her eyes. She held her gaze steady, never lost his eyes. The finger was on the trigger.

She hadn't seen him come. One moment she faced the barrel, the next – the boy was in front of her. The boy protected her.

She felt the trembling of his slight sinewy body against her stomach, and against her back was Bart. Could he shoot? To save him, the boy had been near to death in the desert. To save him, the boy had trekked to her. Over the boy's head, she saw now the pain in his face, and it was not the pain from the wound. The sun caught the bracelet on his wrist, and she thought that when it had been put on him he had not weakened. Now he did. More movement from the corner of her eye. The boy's father walked past the long-flung shadow, and past him, never looked at him, and past the raised barrel. The boy's father spat into the sand, then turned and stood in front of his son. Beth knew he would not shoot. They made their untidy line, body to body, and faced him.

She did not taunt him again, did not need to.

At that moment, as Beth saw it, there was a vulnerability about him, and loneliness, and In snapped movements, those of a trained man, the rifle barrel was raised towards the brightened skies, there was the clatter of the mechanism as it was wrenched back and the bullet ejected. The bullet, its case gleaming, arched from the rifle and fell, and his finger was off the trigger. There was the click of the safety lever. The rifle was held out, and the guide went a dozen paces and took it. She wondered if he was broken – if she had isolated him, had killed him.

He walked away from them, using the weapon to lean on, struggling to walk.

Bart said softly, behind her, 'How's he going to get his name up in lights, murder half a city, if he can't blow us away?'

The guide was at the trumpeting camels, knelt to loosen their hobble ropes, and the boy trudged to the high ground to resume his watch. Beth clung to Bart, held the gross, sweaty man in her arms, felt him quiver against her.

'I'm not taking blame. Not any way I'm not. I done everything for him, he never wanted. One quick shag – excuse me – and it's with you the rest of your life. Might as well have hung a rock round my neck. Want to hear about it?'

Jed Dietrich thought himself privileged to be at a master-class as taught by Michael Lovejoy. He knew the woman to be aged forty-three, but appearance gave her fifteen years more, minimum.

'Well, you're going to… Me and Lucy Winthrop and Di Mackie, we're all eighteen, all in work at a packager, and it's Friday night.

Twenty-five years ago, and it's like yesterday – would be because it screwed my life. We were in the Crown and Anchor, that's Wolverhampton, but it's a car park now. Hot night, summer night, too much booze. Three guys… They were Italians, all the soft talk.

Italians in Wolverhampton to put in a new printing press or something. Closing time, chucking out. Christ, they'd hands like bloody octopuses, the lot of them. We're down an alley and it's a knee-trembler job. I'm in the middle and we're all going at it – and we're pissed. Mine's called himself Pier-Luigi, and he's from Sicily. What else do I know about him? Not much. Oh, yes – he was big and it . hurt. They did their zips and we pulled our knickers up. We went home, they went wherever… Di's OK and Lucy's OK, but I'm in the club. Trouble is, I don't know it till it's too late to dump it. My dad tried to trace him but it was a brick wall. We called him Caleb – don't ask me why, it was Dad's choice. Five years later, Dad and Mum moved down south, bought a bungalow. Truth was, they wanted to be shot of us. So I was left behind with the little bastard. They hated him, said he'd ruined their lives. They're dead now, both of them. We didn't go to the funerals. They wouldn't have wanted us there, neither of them. As a baby and a child he was dark, he was different.'

They'd been at the door early. In her housecoat, she'd answered Lovejoy's knock. He had been so charming, so gentle. Inside the hall he'd remarked on the wallpaper – 'What a pretty pattern, Miss Hunt, what a nice choice' – and he'd edged into the kitchen, and not seemed to notice the filled sink and last night's plate, and he'd fixed on a dying plant in a pot – 'Always did like that one, Miss Hunt, in fact I'd say it's my favourite' – and he'd put the kettle on.

'I was lucky to get this place. Dad had a friend in the town hall, housing. It was his price to me for moving south. Dad got my file moved up, then he could go and wash his hands of me. We're here, like an island, all Asians around us. I'm not complaining – some people would, not me – they're good people and good neighbours, so all his friends were Asians, had to be. He got to blaming me that I wasn't Asian, and hadn't a family like his friends had – but I'm not taking any blame. Nothing's my fault.'

Said so quietly and with a smile that won: 'Miss Hunt, you seem like a woman who looks after herself. I'm hesitating – will you have sugar if I do?' Lovejoy had poured the tea into cups he'd taken from the cupboard, and she'd almost purred. Dietrich reflected that the woman had no idea of the devastation about to hit her shabby, damp little home, and Lovejoy wasn't about to tell her; effortlessly it was established that the room upstairs was untouched, uncleared, from the day the 'little bastard' had left – the room would be the centre of the storm, but only when Lovejoy was finished.

'I tell you who I blame most… that Perkins at the school. Made too much of a fuss of Caleb, made him do things that weren't natural to him. Speaking in front of the class, being special, marking him out.

Caleb got so that nothing satisfied him. I was dirt. No respect for me, . his mother. No respect for the people in the job he had. Always dreaming of something he couldn't have. Why couldn't he have a family like Farooq, like Amin? Why couldn't he belong? He only wanted the Asians – didn't even have a nice white girlfriend. Could have had Tracey Moore or Debbi Binns. Truth to be told, girls scared him and he ran a bloody mile from them. Then the offer came. Nag, nag, nag, money, money, money. He never came back, nor did my money.'

Looking out through the kitchen window – and Dietrich didn't think it had been cleaned that year – he saw a rubbish-filled yard, a washing-machine tipped on its side against a low wall, and above it, the walkway that he knew from the map was beside the canal. A group of loafing kids wandered along it, and he saw an old man with a bent back, who had a terrier straining on a leash, move aside to give them passage. He seemed to understand it was a place to escape from. Lovejoy had driven him through the estate on their way to the early-morning knock. Little streets, little terraced homes, little food shops, and everywhere the little bright-painted boxes of security systems. The only buildings of stature on the estate were the new mosque and the new Muslim community centre. It was a ghetto, not a place where Caleb Hunt could have belonged, and Jed understood why it had failed to provide the man with what he needed. All so different from the scrubbed-down interrogation rooms of Camp Delta where he met the enemy – but he learned more here than there.

'They came round to see me, Farooq did and Amin, and they weren't straight up with me but they stuck to it – Caleb had gone travelling. I'd hear from him, they said, but he'd gone travelling.

He's a grown-up, and I got on with my life. Two postcards came, one after two months and one after five. The Opera House in Sydney, and that big rock in the middle. It's more than three and a half years since the last one came. Nothing at my birthday, nothing at Christmas. I suppose he's forgotten me.'

Tears ran down her lined, prematurely aged cheeks. She looked up, past Dietrich, towards Lovejoy.

'Who did you say you were from?'

'I didn't.' Lovejoy stood. 'Thank you for the tea, Miss Hunt.'

They went out of the front door, on to the pavement.

Two big vans, smoked-glass windows, were parked, one at each end of the short street. They walked past the van at the top, and Lovejoy rapped on its window with the palm of his hand. They went on, round the corner, to where the Volvo was parked. Lovejoy wasn't a man to linger for the uglier side of his work. They would be well gone, speeding on the road south, when the detectives spilled from the vans, elbowed inside, tore apart the terraced house for evidence of the life, times and motivations of Caleb Hunt. Not that Dietrich thought there was anything left to know.

They reached the car.

Lovejoy asked brusquely, 'You happy, ready to call it a day?'

Dietrich said, 'Ready to wrap, yes. Happy, no.'

'The postcards?'

'The postcards say that right from the start they marked him down as high potential for infiltration, created a cover. They reckoned they'd their hands on high-grade material. We did well but I don't feel like cheering or breaking out a bottle – I suppose it's because I think I know him.'

'I'll get you on the afternoon flight – my granddaughter's birthday today, and I'll catch the end of the party, which'll please Mercy. I find there's not often cause, in our work, for cheering… Never seems quite appropriate.'

They drove away, out of the estate, over the canal and left behind the place that had fashioned the past, present and future of Caleb Hunt.

The file was under his arm. On it was written the name.

'I want Mr Gonsalves on the phone, and I want him now. Please.'

The marine guard and the receptionist stared at the scars on Eddie Wroughton's face.

'You should tell him I am in possession of information he'd give his right ball for, and if you obstruct me I guarantee to flay the skin off your backs. You want to sit comfortably again, then do it.'

A call was made. The receptionist murmured into the phone and fixed Wroughton with a glance of sincere hostility. Somebody would be with him soon. Would he like to sit down? He paced and held tight to the file.

The young man came down the stairs, went through the security barrier, and tracked towards him. 'I'm sorry, Mr Wroughton, but Mr Gonsalves is in conference, and I am deputed to take whatever message you have for him.'

Wroughton saw his curled lip, the sneer.

'Get me up to Gonsalves, if he wants to see this.' Theatrically, Wroughton held the file in front of the young man's spectacles.

'Wait here.'

He waved the file again, taunting with it, as the desk telephone was lifted.

'Excuse me, guys, bottom right of screen, wasn't that? We lost it.'

The serene voice of Oscar Golf broke into their headsets, the intervention from Langley.

'No, it's not there now. We've gone past… Did you see anything?

Bottom right of screen for four or five seconds.'

It was a little short of two hours since they had last heard from Oscar Golf. Marty had stiffened. It was like they were watched, tested, spied on. He saw Lizzy-Jo's mouth move as she swore under her breath.

'Our calculations give you fourteen minutes more time over your current box. Let's use the time, guys, by going back. How does that sound?'

He looked at Lizzy-Jo. She'd her tongue stuck out, like she was a kid in contempt of an adult. Then her forefinger waved across her lips – not a time to fight.

'I'll bring her back. We'll work back.'

Oscar Golf, lounging in a swivel chair in the darkened room at Langley, was not a target to pick for a scrap. Maybe Oscar Golf had six pairs of eyes alongside to help him. Marty grimaced at Lizzy-Jo and she shrugged. He'd seen nothing, bottom right of the screen, neither had she, and… He heard a thundering roar, piercing into his headset, billowing through the open door. Where he sat, he couldn't see the window of Ground Control, and the door was at the wrong angle. She leaned close, slipped his headset up off his ear and whispered that it was the transporter landing, their freedom bird.

'Oscar Golf, I am going into a figure eight, and let's hope we find what you think you saw.'

'Appreciate that. Oscar Golf, out.'

There was just sand on the screen – from top left to bottom right.

Red sand and yellow sand, ochre sand and gold sand, and there were sand hills, sand mountains and flat sand. The track was out of sight, too far to the east of the last map boxes they flew. Tiredness ached in Marty. The previous day, at the start of the last flight and before the weariness had settled on him, he would have resented any request to go back and look again. With the joystick, he banked Carnival Girl and swung her to starboard before the correction to port. Dust came in a storm through the Ground Control open door and he did not need Lizzy-Jo to tell him that the transporter had taxied off the runway and come on to the compacted dirt beside the compound gate.

The dust filled the Ground Control Centre, settled on his head and his shoulders and spread over the chart of map boxes. She choked.

He heard her gulp and then she had hold of his hand.

'Heh, Marty, see that? What are we looking at?'

Wroughton was led into Gonsalves' empire.

All the desks were deserted. All the screens in the open-plan flickered, but were not watched. He went past a conference annexe, and through the door saw briefcases dumped and files left open.

Wroughton was brought to a technology and electronic control centre. He went in. Over shoulders, backs and heads there was a bank of screens. He saw Gonsalves in a Godawful floral shirt.

He said, 'I've hit a jackpot, Juan, and I'm sharing it with you.'

It should have been a moment of triumph for Eddie Wroughton. In the throne room of the empire, he held up the file and was ready to boast of what he had achieved. He won no reaction, except that Gonsalves waved a hand at him without turning, gestured for him to shut his mouth. He looked at the screen they all watched. And he heard the voice, metallic and distant, from the high speakers.

'That's good, Marty, and well done for bringing us back. You have eleven minutes more flying time on station… Lizzy-Jo, please, could you give me a zoom, right in close? I reckon it's a target… Good flying, guys. Oscar Golf, out.'

Bart carried the coolbox from the tail of his Mitsubishi, walked well and steadily. The vehicle was fuelled up and he'd discarded the empty cans by the tail.

He felt almost a slight disappointment in the young man: How's he going to get his name up in lights, murder half a city, if he can't blow us away? Not that he wanted to be dead, his thorax blasted, his spinal cord broken, lungs and heart punctured by bullets fired on semi-automatic, not that he wanted his blood coagulating in the sand and the flies clustering. He recognized the scale of the failure and it left him with a trace of sadness… The two men in the village, fingered by Bart, they would have shot him, would not have failed. He saw, to his right, that the guide and the boy had their animals loaded. He was not sure whose life had tipped the balance, had won his survival. He walked over to the young man who had the launcher on his shoulder and seemed to wait irresolutely by his camel, as if expecting help to mount it.

He reached him, put down the coolbox that held the drugs, syringes and dressings, and looked into the face.

'Can I pay you?'

Bart shook his head. There was, because of the traced smile, a charm about the face he had not registered before. The pain that had twisted it was gone. The shake of Bart's head was expansive, as if mere mention of remuneration cheapened him. He saw the cut of the chin, the delicate shape of the nose, and the brightness seemed back in the eyes. To Bart there was, in that short moment, an image of wildness, of freedom, of magnificence. Rambling, old boy, he thought. Rambling and getting bloody stupid. The bugger should have ended you

… And it was what she had seen, little Miss Bethany Jenkins.

He turned away. He saw, fleetingly, that the guide's boy had moved a few paces from his father and a frown laced the young skin of his forehead.

She intercepted him, came towards him, and the sand kicked from her boots with the urgency of her stride. Nothing sweet about her, and her mouth was puckered in a suppressed anger. She stood in front of him, blocked him. 'You could have put him down.'

A sheepish smile, a shrug.

'He wouldn't have known – you could have squirted half a gallon of morphine into him.'

But he hadn't. He had patched him up, had brought him to his feet

– and had faced his rifle.

'Why didn't you?' .

He snapped at her, 'Miss Jenkins, don't ever presume to look into a man's mind, search it and strip it. The exercise might cause you to put your delicate head between your knees and vomit.'

'That is pathetic.'

'It's what you're going to get and-'

The shout came, shrill, keened across the sand, rooted him. He saw the boy, one hand cupping an ear and the other pointed up. Bart's head jolted up to the sky, clear blue, and he saw nothing. He heard nothing. The boy howled the warning.

Bart stammered, 'What does he say – saying what – what?'

'The aircraft, up there – scatter – get clear.'

The guide's arms flailed. Right and left, in front of him and behind.

Now the boy ran, and the guide, and she had ducked her head and charged for open sand, and the camels caught the panic, except one.

The man, his patient, knelt beside his camel and held tight to its strained harness, had the launcher at his shoulder. Bart was alone.

He looked a last time into the sky, and then the sun was in his eyes and he was blinking, blinded. He was alone and stumbling towards his vehicle, groping towards it. He had no cover. He seemed to see himself grotesquely magnified, trapped by a hovering eye. He blundered towards the vehicle's cab, reached it, threw open the door.

Fumbling, grasping for the keys, twisting them, stamping on the clutch, then the accelerator – crying out in fear. He felt the power under him. The wheels spun, whined, then caught. He did not know whether he faced the track and headed for it, or went away from it.

He did not consider whether he could, lumbering across the desert, escape the aircraft's eye. He did not look at the speedometer, which would have told him that his pace over shifting sand was not more than twenty-five miles in an hour. Bart went in little surges on caked sand, then slowed in loose drifts. His eyes were misted from the sweat and the sun's power bounced at him from the Mitsubishi's bonnet. He could not see where he went, what was in front of him.

Clinging to the wheel, he drove away, jerking the gear lever, and never looked back, never glanced in his mirror at the sandcloud behind him, never thought of the trail he left for the high eye.

He had no idea of distance, might have gone a mile… He was in the drift.

Not a wall, not a barrier, but a steady sinking movement. The engine raced, whined, and the needle on the speedometer dial sagged from twenty to ten, to five. Going slower… He stamped harder on the accelerator, swung the wheel, went to the clutch and changed down, stamped again, and the loose sand of the drift settled round the tyres.

What to do? Bart did not know.

He did not know whether to claw his way out of the vehicle and try, in the scorched heat, to run. Did not know whether to go into reverse. He did not know whether to get out, go to the back, take the shovel and dig.

'He's got in a drift. Line him up, guys. In your own time, take him.

Oscar Golf, out.'

It was like driftwood washed up on a beach. Marty had flown the figure eights tighter as he had gone after the vehicle. Didn't know, not with Carnival Girl at altitude and on loiter thrust, how – down there on the sand – they had suddenly been aware of the Predator presence. Two vehicles, camels, and people had been on the screen.

Then they'd broken. His concentration had been on the flying, not the detail of the screen. Beside him, Lizzy-Jo hadn't had the zoom in focus and close until the smoke had started spilling from the back end of the vehicle. Of course, that was the target. At first the vehicle had done well, had gone clear of the group, and the screen had shown only the roof of its cabin and the tail of dust spat out behind it. It was the sort of target they did at Nellis for training recruits, slow and easily visible, then it had gotten easy – too easy. It had stopped.

He wondered if the guy would get out and run. He half hoped the guy would run. What he had was a vehicle, marooned and going nowhere.

'How long we got?'

She said they had a clear four minutes on station.

'How do you want me to come in?'

She wanted him on the driver's side, and said she'd take the Hellfire in through the driver's door.

Marty had no thoughts of grandfathers – not his own with whom he'd gone out duck-shooting, and not the old man strapped down on the back of a camel and laid out over the hump. He had not seen the man on the screen, as the man had run for the vehicle. He did not see a face and did not care to look for a mind… but he had the target.

The end of his figure eight brought him on to the passenger side of the vehicle, and he banked her, dipped the wing, for the half-circle to take him to a firing point against the driver's door. He did not understand why the guy did not run.

He heard Lizzy-Jo recite the check questions to herself, and give herself the check answers for readiness to launch.

Marty held Carnival Girl steady, and the camera image was flush on the driver's door. It was as if she hovered, a hawk, in the moment before the dive on the prey. Beside him, Lizzy-Jo whispered the command, then her finger hit the lit button. The screen shook, as if Carnival Girl had been punched by turbulence. Marty clenched his fist on the joystick, and watched the flame veer away. The ball of fire dived, like a hawk falling.

In the seconds before the Hellfire hit, Marty said, 'We'll go take a look at what's left behind, the rest of them, then we'll bring her back.'

'Yes, take her home.'

'She done us proud.'

'She's a great girl – then it's turn for home.'

The hit was on the driver's door. A flash of flame, then the first smoke, the climbing cloud of debris that obscured the target.

Around him there was, to Wroughton, an ejaculation of excitement.

He could have told them that the chosen target was not Caleb Hunt, terrorist or adventurer or fighter, could have told them that the vehicle belonged to a pathetic doctor of medicine, that the driver was pitiful and harmless. Gonsalves' people whooped and screamed and stamped applause. They hung on each other, clung to each other. He thought the death of Samuel Bartholomew, gossip and spy, made a Mardi Gras day for them. He knew that if his telephone had not been unplugged, and if he had not tapped in the code on his mobile that prevented messages being recorded, Bart, his puppet, would have called him. He held the file, and the noise of celebration hit the low ceiling of the control centre, and Wroughton knew he would not be heard.

Ignored, he said softly, 'Idiots, you killed a nobody. You took out the wrong target.'

*

The fire flash, the Hellfire's launch, gave Caleb his aim point.

He stood, he was alone. The Beautiful One had gone, and the other camels. In the distance, clear to see against the sands and the sky, was the cloud of smoke. He did not know where the guide and the boy, Ghaffur, were, where she was, and he did not look for them. His memory held the point in the blue stretched sky where the flash had come from.

He did it as he had learned it from the manual.

The guidance antenna at the muzzle end of the tube was unfolded.

The covering cap of the tube was discarded, lay by his bare and sand-worn feet. The open sight was raised and the belt pack hung on his waist. The impulse-generator switch was depressed by his finger.

Caleb did it as the manual told him, without the one hundred and thirty-six hours of instruction that the manual demanded. He heard the whine of the audio signal, struggled to hold up the weight of the launcher, and stood – solid and square – with his two legs taking equally the strain of it: no support, no crutch. The pain throbbed in the wound, which was raw and not closed by stitches. He pulled the trigger in the grip stock. The manual said it was one point seven seconds from trigger depression to motor ignition. The missile lurched from the tube and fire scorched the sand behind him. He saw it so sharply, the clumsy flight from the tube mouth, and, for a moment, he thought it would fall back and roll in front of him on the sand. The tail fins opened out and – as the manual had said – the ejector motor dropped away. A flash as the second-stage engine bit, and she was away.

He sank to his knees. The sand behind him, burned from the exhaust fire and the ignition fumes, stank acrid in his nose. He would have fallen, had he not had the tube to support him.

It was gone fast above the low horizon line. He watched the fire that powered it ebb from him, diminish from him against the sky's blue.

He depended on their technology, their electronics, their magic and wizardry.

It flew free, beyond his control. Twice it meandered, as if it had lost sight of the target, and it hunted to find it again, and twice it locked back. He peered up to where its path took it, close to the sun, but he saw nothing. He did not know where the men would be who flew it, but he imagined the ever-increasing chaos around them as they dived the craft or climbed it, or threw it to the side, tried to lose the closing spurt of fire. The hit was so sudden. It darted, bent its course, sharp, as if its last command was late. High, near to the sun where his eyes burned, a little flash of brightness, but small against the sun's light.

It was not a clean strike. There was no explosion. The little flash, and then the fire moved on, soared higher and burst.

For a long time, Caleb looked up. He looked until his eyes had watered, until he blinked, until he could no longer stare up close to the sun, and the heat burdened him and the flies clustered on the dressing on his leg, and the pain washed in him, and he was alone.

It was a speck, falling, and he thought he heard the voice of a child, singing.

It was a swan's song. The far edge of the left wing had been hit, a great destabilizing hole punched in it.

The Predator, brilliant white from nose tip to tail, from port wing to left wing, was spinning down.

Control was gone, death inevitable, falling, with the wind streaming against its wings – until the debris scattered in the sand, until the fire became a pyre.

If he had spoken someone would have hit him. They had all watched the Predator go down. If he had spoken, had pointed out that he had warned of the crates the camels carried, he would have been hit. The silence was like life arrested. The picture on the screen, untouched, was a white-out snowstorm. They had still been in noisy celebration, without shame and not a thought of the incinerated corpse in the vehicle, as the camera had tracked back over the sand, and there had been the flash from far below. At first, a little winnow of confusion:

'What's that?… What we got?' The one called Oscar Golf, on the loudspeakers, had never lost his calm. There had been a woman's voice, merged with Oscar Golf's, a flat monotone, as if it were merely a training exercise and instructors had thrown up a problem. The aircraft had swerved, made violent manoeuvres, but the fireball – shown by the lens – had closed. She'd gone down, spinning and spiralling, and the lens had shown a mad image of yellow reddened . sand racing to meet her. The voice of Oscar Golf was gone, cut off in mid-sentence – a switch thrown. Who wanted an inquest on failure?

Hell, it was only a piece of metal junk, off a factory floor – not the death of a friend. As the audience slouched out, as Gonsalves in that hideous shirt came to him and punched him on the upper chest, Wroughton opened the file and held up the photographs of Caleb Hunt, schoolboy, Camp Delta prisoner and Rub' al Khali fugitive.

'That's who you didn't get, that's your target.' Wroughton chuckled.

'What is it with you people? So goddamn patronizing. You keep a notebook on points scored?'

They were both laughing, hugging and hanging on to each other, and laughing, like they didn't care it was the waiting room of a funeral parlour, laughing till it hurt… and it did hurt because a target of importance had been missed.

He did not look back at her.

The last he saw of her, she was sitting on the sand on a dune and her head was down.

If he had gone to her – confused and tongue-tied and deafened by the launcher's blast – he did not know what he would have said to her.

Neither the guide, Rashid, nor the boy, Ghaffur, had helped him mount the saddle on the hump of the Beautiful One. He was beyond feeling the pain of the wound. He had struggled to drag himself up, then to swing the leg across the saddle.

They were ahead of him and she was behind him, and far beyond her were the last wisps of two columns of smoke. Caleb did not look back, did not wave, did not – at the last moment when his voice would have carried to her – shout his farewell.

He rode away, followed the guide and the boy into the sand that stretched to a far horizon. All that mattered to him, he thought, was that he was close now to his family, to their love.