The Unknown Soldier

Chapter Two

Caleb's body and face were flooded by the light. The men around him scattered.

The week in the village had passed quickly. He had rested, then he had worked at his strength and gone into the hills above the village to exercise his leg muscles and expand his lungs. He had eaten well and had known that the villagers used precious supplies of meat, rice and flour to feed him. When he had left the village, armed men had accompanied him; he was never out of their sight. The code of these people, he knew, was pukhtunzvali and it had two principles: the obligation to show hospitality to a stranger, without hope of a return favour, was malmastiya; the duty to fight to the death to protect the life of a stranger who had taken refuge among them was nanawati.

Twice in that week, formations of helicopters had flown high above them. Once, in the distance, he had seen a moving dustcloud and thought it would be a fighting patrol of the enemy's personnel carriers. The tribesmen had stayed closer to him – they would fight to the death to save his life because he was their welcomed guest. An old man, blind, sitting astride a donkey led by a boy, had come to the village in the afternoon of the seventh day with the answer to the message. On that last night in the village, they had feasted again, used more of their precious stores. No music and no dancing, but two of the older men had told stories of the fighting against the Russians, and he had offered his of the fighting against the Americans. The fires' flames had lit them, and the old man, the blind traveller, had recited a poem of combat that had been listened to in silence. He had realized at the end of the last evening, the fire dying, that all eyes had been on him, and he had seen in the shadows the furtive movements of the women and knew that they, too, watched him. He had been given a robe of pure white and he had stood and lifted it over his head, over his shoulders, and had let it fall so that it enveloped him. He had not known his own value to the family, but the village men recognized it, and the women, and they stared at him as he stood in the robe while the fires' last flames showed their awe of him. Each of the village men came to him, hugged him, kissed his cheeks. He was the chosen one.

The next morning, the old man had taken Caleb a half-day's walk from the village. At a point where a path into a mountain pass climbed away, he had held Caleb's hand in a skeleton's grip. Tears had run from his dead eyes, and he had left him. He had sat for an hour on a rock, then watched the little column of men and mules emerge from the pass. A few words spoken, a few sour gestures, and he had gone on with them. For nine days he had been with them as they led him with great caution away from the village and to the west. They hugged the foothills, but had also gone higher where the night air was frosted. From the beginning he had known what cargo they guarded in the bulging sacks strapped to the mules' backs. He could smell the opium seeds. They were villainous men, he had seen no charity in their faces. They carried curved knives at their waists with which they could have mutilated him. From the moment of their reluctant greeting, Caleb had doubted that they acknowledged the code of pukhtunwali. They shared food grudgingly, they did not talk to him or show any interest in his identity. If he had fallen back he did not think they would have waited for him. He had never complained, had never lost the pace of the march, had never feared them.

But on the eighth day he had seen the slightest softening – an extra morsel of dried meat, beyond his own ration, had been tossed at him during the evening halt, and a water-carrier just filled in a mountain torrent had been passed to him; later, an extra blanket had been thrown in his direction as he had lain between rocks trying to shelter from a fall of sleet. He sensed, that last night, he had won their respect. When the grey light under the sleet's clouds dipped, he saw that the four of them watched him, as the villagers had – as if something set him apart. He did not know by whom he was set apart, or for what reason. That ninth morning he had sensed the tension among them. In the afternoon they had gone more slowly and one of the four had been a quarter of a mile ahead, the furthest distance at which his shrill all-clear whistle could be heard. That evening they had cocked the rifles in readiness, and had told with new nervousness of the dangers ahead as they came close to Iranian territory.

With the greatest suspicion they had approached the frontier where the rendezvous was to be made to which they had been paid to bring him, where there were frequent and heavily armed border patrols.

They had been in a gully, going slowly so that the mules' hoofs would be quieter, when the light had snapped on and caught them.

Caleb raised his hands. The beam reflected off the white robe, now stained with sweat, mud and the blood from scratches on his arms.

A voice called to him from behind the beam's source – first in Pashto, then in Arabic, he was given the instruction to come forward.

Caleb could not see beyond the light. He walked and kept his arms high. Behind him he heard the retreat of the men and the mules. The voice had authority – the command beat off the gully walls around him. In front of him he should hold out his right arm so that his wrist should be seen. The light licked at the plastic bracelet, and at the photograph, and caught the print of the taxi-driver's name. He was pulled forward and ordered to lie down. He lay on the stones in the track. There was a final command, in a language he did not know. At the edge of his vision, he sensed the light's beam move on, rove further away… Then the machine-gun started.

The tracers spewed over him, bursts of six, seven shots, then a moment's pause, then more firing. There were two answering rounds, the detonation of one grenade from a launcher, and silence.

The machine-gun replied. The men who had escorted him for the last nine days were trapped between the walls of the gully. Caleb wriggled his body so that he might make a pretence of burrowing down into the stones and dirt of the path. Boots came past him, a brisk march of power, and he heard the final execution shots that would have finished the men and put the mules beyond further pain.

The boots came back behind him. A fist clamped into the back of the robe and he was hauled to his feet. His right arm was snatched and he felt fingers on the plastic bracelet.

'You are welcome.' There was no care in the voice.

Not as a reproach but as a matter of fact, Caleb said, 'They treated me with respect, with courtesy, they shared their food with me. They brought me.'

Now he saw the man who welcomed him, an officer in neat uniform with a polished belt. Attached to the belt was a holster. He smelt the cordite. The officer was dapper in build and on his upper lip was a trimmed moustache. By the markings on his shoulder flaps, Caleb thought him at least a major, perhaps a colonel. The officer led him past the troops to two lorries and a Mercedes car with smoked windows. A driver snapped out of the Mercedes and ran round the back to open the rear door. The officer flicked his finger for Caleb to follow him.

The Mercedes pulled away.

Bumping on a dry track, in low gear, they left the gully and headed into flat lands beyond. A packet of cigarettes was offered, but Caleb declined. The officer lit a cigarette, then kept the lighter's flame burning. His delicate fingers lifted Caleb's wrist and he examined the plastic bracelet. 'Who is Fawzi al-Ateh?'

'He was a taxi-driver. He is dead.'

'You took his name?'

'I did.'

'You were brought, with his name, to the American camp at Guantanamo.'

'Yes.'

'The interrogators at Guantanamo did not break your story, that you were a taxi-driver?'

'They did not.'

'That is remarkable.' His laughter fluttered across Caleb's face. 'So, I consider two possibilities. You defeated the best of the interrogators at Guantanamo. You were released to spy. I hang spies, I am a good friend of those who defeat Americans… What I immediately like about you, you do not ask questions without invitation. I invite you.'

'Why were they killed?'

The voice hardened. 'They were not killed because they were traffickers in narcotics, criminals, they died because they were witnesses. It is a mark of the importance with which you are regarded that they were condemned – I do not know who you are, why you are so valued. They saw your face.'

'So did the villagers where I stayed for a week.'

The cigarette was ground out. The officer put back his head and his breath relaxed. Caleb thought that within minutes he would be asleep… He thought of the village and the trust of its men.

Anonymously, the name of the village would be passed by this officer to American agents, and bombers would circle over it and death would rain down from the high skies – because there they had seen his face. He thought of the blind old man and he prayed to his God that the old man, who had been unable to see his face, would live.

'Where are we going?'

The officer murmured, 'You are going where you will be of use, if you are not a spy.'

'I am a fighter.'

The Mercedes took him far into Iran, and the night was nearly spent when they reached a high-walled villa where heavy gates of steel sheet opened to take him inside.

He was a bloodstained step closer to his family.

Night lay on the far-away desert. The moon was up, pitted with stars' patterns, and the quiet was total.

Two camels, one ridden by a Bedouin, moved on the desert sand, going fast and away from the escarpment and the cave's mouth. A message had been brought and a reply sent.

Far at the back of the cave, by candlelight because the generator was switched off at night to conserve fuel, a man worked at the interior of a new Samsonite suitcase – described on its sales tag as an Executive Traveller' – that had been purchased seven weeks before at the open market of the Bir Obeid district of San'a, capital city of Yemen; at the frontier roadblocks, the soldiers had laughed raucously when they had found a shiny new suitcase being taken home by a vagrant tribesman from the desert and had let him pass and head away into the Rub' al Khali. The man working on the suitcase, positioning the circuitboard behind the case's lining, ignored the quiet conversations around him. He had the knowledge gained from a university degree in electronic engineering in Prague.

His eyes ached in the dim interior. He knew nothing of where the suitcase would be taken when his work was finished, but he had been told by the Emir General, who coughed near to him because his chest was inflamed, that the man who would carry the suitcase had begun his journey to reach them. He had also been told that the hazards of that journey, which still lay in front of that man, were huge.

But time was short – all in the cave knew it. They were hunted, they were in retreat. Time ran like sand through their fingers.

'Hello – I'm told you're Dr Bartholomew. Is that right?'

He was standing at the edge of the room, more of a voyeur at the party than a participator. He had not noticed her approach. He seldom joined the spirit of a party, preferring to remain at the edge, listening to conversations but not contributing to them. His glass was close to his hand but set down on a set of bookshelves. He had slopped the Saudi champagne when his arm had been jogged, leaving a stained ring on the wood. He cared as little about the ring as he cared for Saudi champagne. It was always served early at Riyadh's expatriate parties – a mix of apple juice, American dry ginger and fresh mint leaves; cucumber slices floated with the ice cubes. He could have gone to a party such as this one every night of the week if he had chosen to, could have mingled with the familiar crowd of aerospace workers, oil men, medical people and their wives, and the nurses who were there for decoration. The talk around him was the usual numbingly tedious crap – the rental price of compound villas, the quality of the local workforce, the heat, the cost of imported food.

He hadn't noticed her coming.

'Dr Samuel Bartholomew, or Bart to the many who know me and the very few who love me.'

He realized she had trapped him. Against the wall he had been a free agent at the party, now he was confronted. A hi-fi system played loud music, as if the combination of its beat and the alcohol-free champagne would stimulate the guests into believing they were enjoying themselves… She was different from the nurses and wives.

She blocked any escape and her posture, with her feet a little apart, almost intimidated him. And it was an interruption. As he always did at the parties, he had been listening hard for little morsels of information. He sucked in trifles of indiscretion, was a carrier of tales and confidences, and his hidden existence was the sole pleasure he took from life: it gave him power. He was forty-seven years old. He had been christened Samuel Algernon Laker Bartholomew – his father had taken two weeks' holiday a year, one for the Guildford cricket festival, one for the annual Oval Test match, and his third given name came from the cricketer who had done something to the Australians in the year of his birth. As a schoolboy, with pudgy jowls and a slack stomach, he had detested organized sports. His maxim, then and now, was not to run if he could walk, not to walk if he could ride. Others at the party would jog on the pavements round the compound walls in the early morning before the heat became intolerable or would work out in an air-conditioned gymnasium. His late father had believed that cricket gave a man a code of decent disciplines for life – he would have turned in his grave if he had known his son traduced the trust given him.

'I'm Bethany Jenkins.'

'Pleased to meet you, Miss Jenkins.'

Bart always used old-world manners… It was the start of his third year as a general practitioner in the Kingdom. He acted as a link man between patients with real or imagined symptoms and the expensive foreign consultants at the King Fahd Medical City, or the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, or the King Khalid Eye Hospital. He passed them on and received a cut of the fees, smoothed the way and was rewarded. He was losing the drift of a conversation to his right: two men from a British company's aerospace software division in earnest talk about the failure of in-flight radar in the Tornado strike aircraft sold to the Air Force. He tried to refocus on the conversation, but her hand was held out.

He shook it limply, but she held his hand too tightly for him to ignore her.

'I've booked an appointment with your secretary for a couple of day's time. I'm up from the south, going on to Bahrain tomorrow, a bit of shopping, then I'm coming to see you before I go back down.'

'I'll look forward to it, Miss Jenkins.'

There didn't look to be much wrong with her. She was different from the other women in the room: she was tanned hard, her legs and ankles, arms and wrists, her face below the cropped blonde hair weatherbeaten from winds and sun. Late twenties, he thought, but an obvious outdoors life had aged her skin. The other women in the room fled from exposure to the sun, anointed themselves with protective creams when they had to go out, wore headscarves and carried parasols. And she was different also in her clothing – the other women wore cocktail dresses, but she was in a blouse that was clean but not ironed and a shapeless denim skirt that hung on her hips. She was stocky but he thought that there was no flab under the blouse and skirt, only muscle. Other women wore gold chains, pendants and bracelets bought in the souk, but she had no jewellery.

'Mind if I say something, Dr Bartholomew?'

'Bart, please – feel free.' He'd lost the conversation on in-flight radar failure. He smiled sweetly. 'Please, say what you want to, Miss Jenkins.'

'OK, Bart.' She looked directly at him, one of those wretched people who had no disguise. He detested honesty. She reached out and picked up his glass, took a handkerchief from her skirt pocket and wiped the base, then rubbed hard at the ring on the bookshelf.

His grin was as limp as his handshake. He disliked women who fixed him in the headlights of their eyes. He was the rabbit. He shuffled. The Tornado people had split and moved on. He was fearful of women, particularly those who seemed to strip him down, leave him naked. It was a long time, so long, since he had been close to a woman – then there had been tears, his, and arguments, hers, and the overwhelming sense of private failure. He did not know where Ann was now, where she lived with the children, and the shield he used to safeguard himself from that failure was that he did not care.

'You don't look like a man who enjoys being a guest of the Kingdom.'

It was an extraordinary remark. She knew nothing – nothing of his past and nothing of his present… He frowned, then downed the contents of his glass and slapped it back on to the bookshelf. 'It is, Miss Jenkins-'

'I'm called Beth.'

'It is, Miss Jenkins, almost a privilege to be a humble part of this fulcrum of the sophistication and technological excellence of Saudi Arabia. Actually, I hate the bloody place, and all who sail in her – yourself, of course, excepted.'

Her eyebrows arched. She laughed richly, as if at last he interested her. She followed with a flood of questions. When had he come here?

Why had he come? What were his hobbies? Where did he live? How long was he staying? His answers were staccato. He deflected her with responses that were rude in their brevity, but she seemed not to recognize it. He was frightened of close questioning. In the expatriate community he avoided the endless discussions about family, work conditions, terms of service, anything that might expose the lie with which he lived.

'You don't want to mind me, Bart. Where I live, down south, I don't get too many chances to talk to people. It's like one of those monasteries with a vow of silence.' She touched his hand, was smiling

… Then rescue came, of sorts…

He hadn't seen Wroughton arrive, hadn't seen him among the guests. Wroughton's fingers pulled at his sleeve, his head gesturing towards the door. No apology at the interruption, but Edward -

Eddie to his female friends – Wroughton never apologized, wouldn't have bloody known how to. Bart blundered away from the young woman, followed Wroughton into the hall and down towards the kitchen.

Wroughton leaned against the wall. Then his finger poked in a tattoo on Bart's chest. 'You cut our last meeting, Bart.'

'I was busy.'

'You don't cut meetings with me.'

'Just pressure of work.'

'I waited two hours, wasted two hours.'

'And I hadn't anything to give you.'

'Then just pedal a bit bloody harder.'

'Sorry about that, Eddie.'

'Mr Wroughton to you. Got me?'

'It won't happen again, Mr Wroughton,' Bart whined.

'Listen to me – I don't want to be fucked about here. It's not pleasant, believe me, but I have you by your shrivelled little balls, and I will squeeze and I will twist and -'

'What I just heard, there's problems on the in-flight radar of the Tornado aircraft they've got.'

'Which squadron?'

'Don't know.'

'Jesus, you're a useless piece of shit. Have you been listening?

You're going to have to do better or I'll be squeezing and twisting.'

Wroughton was gone.

Bart stood in the corridor and gasped. Little spurts of breath bubbled on his lips. He mopped the sweat from his forehead. When he had composed himself, when his breathing was regular, he went back down the corridor. The noise from the room bayed at him. His host barked in his ear, 'Not got a glass, Bart? More champagne? Or are you going to hang around for a bit and have something better?'

A nod and a wink… Bart smiled weakly. He was looking for the hostess. A guest, a woman in a bright floral dress, tried to intercept him and he started to hear her query on the best preventive tablets for diarrhoea, but he slipped her his card, pointed to his surgery number and moved on. He saw Bethany, Miss Jenkins, her hand easily on her hip, talking to oil people.

The hostess said, 'Not going yet, Bart, surely not? It's just warming up.' He said he had a call-out, embellished the excuse with a casual mention of septicaemia, and thanked her for a wonderful party, quite lovely.

Bart drove the mile back to his own compound, and his own three-bedroomed villa, which cost him the riyal equivalent of twenty-two thousand pounds in annual rental and which he could comfortably afford. In the daytime he used a chauffeured car but at night, a short journey through light traffic, he drove himself. The security men at the gate recognized his Mitsubishi four-wheel drive, waved to him and let him through. Two more parties were blaring out over the compound lawns. He let himself inside the darkened villa. Nothing of his life adorned his home, no pictures, no photographs, no ornaments, no mementoes from his past. Even the cat, the sole centre of affection in Bart's life, mutual love, couldn't help him escape from the place he hated.

Wroughton left. He knew he had the whispered reputation of a sexual goat, but he would not have made a pass at the nurse with the ghastly accent, Falkirk or East Kilbride. His conquests were with wives mature enough to maintain discretion. The reputation was never proven. He headed for his bachelor apartment in the diplomatic quarter. As the station chief attached to the embassy, Eddie Wroughton was allocated an armour-plated Land Rover Discovery with bullet-proof windows, but the plates inside the bodywork and the reinforced glass beside him, through which he looked on to the deserted road, would only have been noticed by an expert.

He despised men like Samuel Bartholomew; one of the hardships of his life as a senior officer of the Secret Intelligence Service was the requirement to deal with first-degree scum. But against the hardships there were purple moments when he gloried in his work. Saudi Arabia was a class posting, interesting intellectually, challenging and, above all, a stepping-stone to greater things.

He always left an expatriate party before the alcohol was served.

He left before the 'champagne' was exhausted, before the home brew was offered, or the 'brown tea' was poured – usually ostentatiously

– from a china teapot, most often Jack Daniel's but sometimes Johnnie Walker and always taken neat. It would have been bad for his career, probably terminal, if a party he was attending where alcohol was available was raided by the mutawwa, the zealots of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

He always went home early… If he needed to drink, the bottles were in the sideboard of his apartment's living room, premises protected by diplomatic immunity, and in the safe of his embassy office.

Few knew him. Only the wives he bedded, the most valued of the agents he handled and his one friend in the Kingdom's capital could have passed a serious judgement on Eddie Wroughton. He appeared a caricature of an Englishman abroad and he played to that super-ficial image. Day and night, at work, at the ambassador's dinner table, as a guest of the princes of the ruling family or on a field trip out of the city, he wore a cream-coloured linen suit that was always pressed and creaseless, a brilliant white shirt, a knotted silk tie and burnished brown brogues. He wore dark glasses, indoors or out, in the heat of the sun or the cool of an evening. Few knew the strength of those eyes and would have recognized in them traits of character.

They were bright, ruthless, glinting, mocking. They were cruel.. . He was a clever man, and knew it.

In his apartment's kitchen, in the microwave, he heated himself a curry for one, then washed his hands.

With regard to Samuel Bartholomew he had two distinct certainties: he dominated him, and at some moment in the future the domination would pay off, big-time. The microwave bleeped. He knew the doctor's history, had read it in the confidential file sent to him when the wretch had arrived in Riyadh. He served his meal and took it on a tray to his favoured chair. He thought the man pitiful, knew what he had done in Palestine, thought him beneath contempt

– but potentially so very useful, one day.

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

It was only the end of the first week and already he had played his part.

Bart stamped out of the wooden hut and jumped down from the doorway on to the thick gravel that made a path across a sea of mud. He turned, held up his medical bag and waved it angrily at the man now leaning against the door jamb. It had been his first meeting with the Shin Beth officer, his handler. 'You know what? I'll tell you what. You dishonour the human race.

Your behaviour is simply beyond the pale,' Bart shouted.

His handler lit a cigarette, threw the dead match down on to the mud, and gazed back at him with indifference.

'And I'll tell you something else – and wipe that smile off your arrogant little face. You are a fucking disgrace to your nation.'

He rather liked the handler. He'd expected a man manipulative and brusque but he'd found instead a sensitive, frail young fellow, perhaps fifteen years younger than himself. Would he like coffee? How was he settling into the village? Were the signs good? Was he trusted? Could anything be done to help him? The handler, Joseph, worked and slept, cooked and ate in the hut close to the checkpoint. Of course, Joseph wore military uniform with the same insignia flashes as the troops controlling the checkpoint.

'I'm going to report you for gross obstruction. As a UK national engaged on humanitarian work, funded by my government, I can raise a storm. I hope that storm lands on your disgusting little head. Stopping a doctor of medicine going about his work shames your uniform. You see if I don't make waves.'

In the hut, over coffee, Bart had been shown photographs of local leaders of Islamic Jihad and Hamas. He had pored over the map of the village and its satellite communities. He had a good retentive memory. Joseph's briefing on the local security situation had been excellent – calm, detailed and lacking in political rhetoric. Joseph was professional… He'd had pictures, in a threadbare-covered album, of the aftermath of suicide attacks on Haifa buses, Jerusalem's market and Tel Aviv's cafes, but Bart had already been shown similar albums in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem where this stage of his journey had begun – and from the start of that journey he had never had the chance to refuse, to step off the treadmill. As he walked away, crunching over the gravel, the rain spattered on him, and the mud seeping through the stones caked his shoes.

'Don't forget my name! It's Sam Bartholomew, you bastard,' Bart shouted over his shoulder. 'But you'll wish you'd never heard it by the time I'm through with you.'

The soldiers had finished searching his car – he heard the door slam. By the time he reached it the rain had soaked what hair he had left, ran down his face and dampened his clothes. A corporal, scowling, held open the car door for him, but Bart shouldered him aside, as if he refused to accept any belated courtesy from a member of the Israeli Defence Forces. Standing in the rain, perhaps forty Palestinians were held up at the checkpoint. It had taken Bart twenty-five minutes apparently to be processed at the roadblock, but it would take the Palestinians half a day to go through if they were lucky, and half a day to be turned back if they weren't. Their faces, men, women and children, had been sullen when he had emerged from the hut.

But they had heard his abuse, and those who understood it translated for those who did not. As he climbed into his car, decorated with red crescents

– the Palestinian equivalent symbol to a red cross – on the side doors and on the roof, there was a ripple of applause, and he saw little rays of pleasure break on their faces. It was as intended. He drove away.

His head slumped. His eyeline was barely above the rim of the dashboard.

He was trapped, he could tell himself, he'd had no option. If his father had learned to where his son had sunk he would have strangled him, but his father was dead. He drove on towards Jenin where he would go to the clinic, make friends and collect what few of the basic medicines were available. He cut his father out of his mind, and the need for medicines, so that he could better remember the map he had been shown and the photographs of wanted men…

Joseph had told him that he must beware of self-doubt, that he should not hate himself, that above all he should not entertain the luxury of conscience. If Joseph had only known, Samuel Bartholomew's conscience was long gone.

They reached the quayside at Sadich. The map shown to him told Caleb they were on the southern extremity of the Iranian coastline.

The dark seascape in front of him was the Gulf of Oman. He felt a raw, drifting excitement because he was about to take a further step in his journey.

The officer spoke in Arabic: 'You are, my friend, an enigma to me.

I cannot think of the last time that a man surprised me. You have achieved what I would have believed an impossibility, a confusion in my mind. I call you "my friend" because I do not know your given name or the name of your father. I am given tasks by my government that are of the greatest sensitivity, and trust is placed in me for the reason that I have a reputation for delving into the secrets of men's minds, but after eleven days in your company I have failed. You are not a taxi-driver – and I consider also that Abu Khaleb is only a temporary flag of convenience. Before I pass you on, who are you?'

It was certainly not a town, barely a village. They had left the Mercedes and the driver in the car park beside the building for the co-operative that boxed fish and put ice into the boxes before the lorries came. At the quayside there were trading dhows, fishing-boats and a little flotilla of a half-dozen launches with large twin outboards, all poorly lit by the high lights. The wind came in hard and sang in the rigging stays of the dhows, and rocked the launches at their moorings. Caleb gazed at the sea, did not respond to the officer's question, as he had not for the past eleven days and nights.

Some of those days had passed fast, some slowly. Some of the nights he had slept, for others there had been no end. He had been questioned by the colonel inside the locked, shuttered villa, but for most of the hours between meals he had watched Iranian television and had used the weights and the rowing machine offered him; he had alternately rested and built his strength. He imagined that messages had gone ahead, that answers had been received, but he did not know where the messages had been sent, or from where they had been returned. What he had learned, in those long days and longer nights, was that his importance and value to his family were confirmed further – as they had been during the time he had waited in the village in far-away Afghanistan. The sea's blow whipped his long robe and the importance gave him pride – not that he would boast of it.

'Do I need to know your true identity? No… but I like to have the loose threads tied. There is your accent. The Arabic I speak is from Iraq. I learned the Arabic of Iraq from prisoners of their army captured in the fighting on the Faw peninsula – but I do not know Egyptian Arabic or Yemeni, Syrian or Saudi. I tried tricks on you.. .

You remember the morning I woke you with a shout, an order, in English, but you did not respond? At lunch, two days ago, without warning I spoke to you in the German language. Five days ago when we walked in the garden, it was Russian… You are a man of great talent, my friend, because you did not betray yourself. You have no name, you have no origin -1 think that is your value.'

He looked out beyond the breakwater of heaped boulders, beyond the navigation light raised on rusted stanchions, and he saw the whipped white crests of the incoming waves. He felt the chill of the wind. At the villa behind the walls and the steel-plated gate, the robe had been taken from him and laundered. Now the wind plastered it against the outline of his torso and legs.

'And you have no history – perhaps because you are ashamed of it, perhaps because it is irrelevant to you, perhaps because you are in denial of it. You appear in Landi Khotal, on the Pakistan side of the common border with Afghanistan, some four years ago, a little less, and there is nothing before that, only darkness. You frustrate me.. .

You are recruited, trained, placed with the 055 Brigade, captured, and by deception – I promise you, I admire the deception – are freed.

Word is passed that you have escaped the Americans, and instructions are given at the highest level that you should be moved on

– your worth is weighed in gold. It is not my business, I know, I only carry out instructions given me in great confidence, but you are a man of value. I do not know who you are or what your history is, or what it is hoped you will achieve. I tell you, in great honesty, my friend, when you are gone I will wake in the nights and that ignorance will be like a stone in my shoe.'

On the quayside's rough concrete, men were working in the faint light to repair nets, and others were climbing down the quayside ladders to the launches. He heard the deep-throat roar of the outboards starting up.

'They cross the Gulf to the Omani shore – they go empty and come back with cartons of American cigarettes. We permit the trade. It is useful to have a route out of and into the country that is not observed

… You have to go, my friend… Time calls. May I say something more?… I am certain of you. If I had doubted you, I would have hanged you. I do not understand your motivation, your commitment, but I believe in its steel strength. You will strike a great blow against a common enemy – I do not know when or where, but I am satisfied that I will have played a humble and insignificant part in your strike, and I will listen to the radio and watch the television and when it happens I will be happy to have played a part. .. May God go with you.'

The officer put his arm on Caleb's and they walked together towards the launches.

'The war goes badly. There have been setbacks. Have regard to the power of the enemy and its machines – only the hardest man can succeed

… You look at the men who will carry you across the Gulf, and they will have seen your face. Have no worry. They will return with cigarettes, they will be taken by the Customs police and they will go to gaols in the north. They cannot betray you.'

He stood above the ladder. Five of the launches were already edging out into the harbour behind the breakwater; the last was held against the ladder.

'You have seen my face and I have seen yours. My friend, already I have forgotten you, even if I wake in the night, and I have no fear of your betrayal. You will never again be captured. You will taste sweet freedom or sweeter death. God watch you.'

Caleb went down the ladder. He felt the night close round him, and the cold.

'What the hell, man, I was asleep. What time is it?'

Marty blinked at the ceiling light.

The duty officer who manned night-time communications in the Agency's corral stood over him.

'The time is about ten minutes after the Best and the Brightest have finished a good lunch in the senior staff diner at Langley. An excellent time, they believe, to fuck with the lives of low-rank foot-soldiers. Local time, if you need it, is ten after midnight. Read this, Marty, and inwardly digest… Seems clear enough, even for a pretend pilot.'

Marty worked the sleep from his eyes, reached out and took the offered sheet, and read. He read it again. The duty officer was raking round the little room with its low ceiling and hardboard walls. He read it a third time, like he hoped it would go away but it didn't.

'Shit… Who's seen it?'

'George – well, he's the one who's going to have the headache. I felt he should be first.'

George Khoo, the Chinese-born mission technical officer, was responsible for keeping First Lady and Carnival Girl maintained and operationally ready. Down the corridor, through the thin door and the thin walls of the rooms, Marty heard a door slam, then boots hammering away, and he heard a shout of protest at the disturbance.

George wouldn't have cared, not now he'd been given Langley's orders.

'So, what did George say?'

'That's a real nice picture, that is, pretty cool… Nothing I'd care to repeat.'

There was a framed photograph of his parents outside their cabin in the hills up north from Santa Barbara. But the duty officer was staring in fascination at a big picture in a gold-rimmed frame, Marty's pride and joy. He'd seen it on the Internet, offered by a firm in London, and it had arrived at Bagram six weeks back. The legend under it was 'The Last Stand of the 44th Regiment at Gundamuck, 1842'. It showed fourteen Brit soldiers clustered in a little circle, rifles raised and bayonets fixed; a couple of them had sabres drawn, and plenty more Brits were spread round the group, dead or wounded, and the tribesmen were coming up the hill towards them. It didn't seem that the Brits had a single round left between them. Behind the tribesmen were snow-covered mountains. It was by William Barnes Wollen, born 1857, died 1936.

'That is a really cool picture.'

Marty grunted and pulled himself off the bed. It was the first picture he'd ever owned and it had cost him seventy-five dollars for the print, ninety dollars for the frame and $110 for shipment, but it had survived the transportation. In front of the men who were going to die, and knew it, an officer stood, sword in one hand, a revolver in the other, straight-backed like all Brits were supposed to be, and he wore a suede coat with fur lining. Under the coat the gold-decorated flag of his regiment was wrapped round him and worth defending.

The officer, Lieutenant Souter, had been spared because the Afghans thought him too important – he had the flag – to castrate and kill, so he'd been ransomed. Marty had done research on the Internet, but he didn't tell the duty officer.

'Has Lizzy-Jo been woken up?'

'Thought I'd give that pleasure to you…'

The duty officer left him. Marty swigged water from his bottle and spat it into the sink, then unhitched his robe from the door hook.

He knocked on Lizzy-Jo's door, heard her, went in. She sat up in her bed and didn't seem bothered that her pyjama top was open.

Marty said, 'We're being moved. We're pulling out in the morning, heading to Saudi Arabia, don't know for how long… George – God, and I wouldn't like to be near him – has gone off to get the birds in the coffins. The plane to lift us is being readied.'

She heard him out, then told him to switch off the ceiling light and turned to the wall. He went out. Only Lizzy-Jo could go back to sleep in the face of such crazy intrusion into the routine of their work – it would have taken an earthquake to frazzle her.

As the night ended, the flotilla broke formation. Five of the launches veered to the south, his carried straight on. The parting was at speed and the farewell shouts, the other crews to his, were drowned in the engine noise and the hull beating on the swell of the waves. He watched until the wakes of the five were gone, then subsided again into the corner of the low cabin where he'd wedged himself. He had been sick twice and his shoulders were bruised where he'd been tossed against the forward bulkhead of the cabin and its side wall.

The crew were two kids in jeans and windcheaters with long hair. He wouldn't have talked to them if they had wanted it, but they didn't.

He was as much a piece of cargo as the cigarette cartons they would bring back. He assumed they had been paid generously by the intelligence officer for transporting him and had no suspicion that when they returned to the harbour on the southern shore of Iran they would be arrested, then left to rot in prison cells. Above the engine he heard the shout. The one at the wheel had his hands cupped at his mouth, then pointed. He saw the excitement on the kid's spray-soaked face. He peered through the cabin's porthole.

He saw the great hulk.

A tiny bow wave parted as the aircraft-carrier edged towards the launch. It was grey against a grey sea and a grey sky. He saw its massive power. The other kid passed him binoculars and he steadied himself, elbows on the ledge below the porthole, focused and looked.

The image danced before his eyes. He saw sailors on the decks walking as if they were in a park, like in Jalalabad or by the zoo in Kabul.

He saw the aircraft stacked at the edge of the deck, some with their wings folded back. The kid at the wheel jerked them away from a closing course and he dropped back into his corner. They would have thought, walking on the aircraft-carrier's deck, that their power was invincible. He held his head in his hands.

Crossing the Gulf, wearing the white linen robe that had been given him, Caleb sensed the complexity of the plan to move him closer to his family. He had come to the village, pathetic in his weakness, and now – out on the sea and speeding towards a distant landfall – he understood the great effort made to return him to the family.

It lay as a burden on him, which only he could carry.