The Unknown Soldier

Chapter Seven

The heat drained life, energy, from Caleb. The sun was not yet high but still scorched him. Rashid made no allowance for weakness, offered no encouragement, no reassurance, but he had slowed the pace. Even Ghaffur had lost the cheerfulness and stayed close to his father. The camels trudged on but the spring in their stride was gone.

Tommy preferred to walk in a camel's shadow rather than ride and be unprotected from the sun.

An hour back, they had passed a little square of baked black sand

– where earlier travellers had made a fire – but there was no trail of hoofprints or footmarks, no sign of when they had been there, a week or a year before.

Caleb retched, and dizziness forced him to cling to the straps holding the boxes on to the camel's side. He thought he would fall.

He was the back-marker. If he fell, would any of them know?

Would they walk on and not realize he had fallen? They did not look back. The camels would not have cried out if he had fallen. Two more hours, at least, before the stop for the dhuhr prayers. Each step was harder, each stride fractionally shorter. The sun, rising, towered over him.

Abruptly, he was lifted.

The sand was caked round his eyes, hard like concrete from the tears, but he saw it.

Away to his left, level with him, was a patch of green. Living, luscious, wet green confronted him. It seemed to call to Caleb. If he let go of the strap, started out over the sand, went to the left of the struggling column, kept going, then the green and the coolness of it would be closer. He heard the ripple of water falling, and smelt it, and he saw the waving of branches heavy and bowed by leaves…

It was not Afghanistan. In his mind he saw jumping, dancing pictures. He clutched the strap and his head rolled. The green of a park and the shrieks of kids kicking a ball, a fountain of old stone where the water spiralled up then fell back into a pool filled with the debris of potato-crisp packets and… Caleb gripped the plastic bracelet, held it so tightly that his fingers hurt with the pressure against its edges. As he squeezed his bracelet, he closed his eyes and the sand's crust pricked them. He shut it out. There had been a green grass park where the kids played football in the rain; there had been a fountain to an old queen on whose head and crown the pigeons crapped, and the water from the fountain came down on a filthy pool. He obliterated it. Only when the memory of the park and the fountain were gone did Caleb loosen his hold on the bracelet and open his eyes.

He walked on.

The mirage was broken, the delirium was beaten, the memory was dead.

He forced his stride forward, faster and longer. They would have returned for him if he had fallen. They were there because of him, because of his importance.

The column stretched ahead, and he followed. He thought he had glimpsed his weakness, and that sight hurt him.

'I'm sorry, ma'am, but I can't admit you.'

The bar was across the entrance and the man stood in front of it.

He looked as though his mind was made up. Beth leaned through the open window of her vehicle and gave him a sweet smile, the one that usually opened doors or gates, raised bars.

'It's only a package that I promised to bring round for Lizzy-Jo.'

The man stood in front of the bar, his arms folded across his chest.

She could see the bulge under his waistcoat. The small white-painted aircraft had glided along the runway an hour earlier, then lifted off.

It had climbed slowly and had headed out over the Rub' al Khali.

The heat was coming up and she had lost it over the dunes, in the haze.

The man said, with studied and insincere politeness, 'Then I'll see she gets it, ma'am.'

She persisted. 'It'll only take a minute. I'd be grateful if you'd tell her I'm here.'

'No can do, ma'am. But, rest assured, she'll get it, the package.'

He came to her window and reached out a hand. She had wanted, damn sure, to look around the site, hear about it. The bar was not about to be raised. The woman, Lizzy-Jo, was not about to be called from whatever work she did. The man was not going to shift. The combination of the barbed wire, the compound at the end of the runway, the aircraft that flew without pilots and the bulge under the man's arm all tickled her imagination – OK, to hell with it. She snatched up the plastic bag and thrust it through the window. He took it, nodded with courtesy, and turned his back on her, as if she was so unimportant in the order of his day that he'd already forgotten her.

He was back down on his chair and the way he sat, chair tilted back, the bulge was unmistakable. By his feet was a sports bag that she thought was long enough to hold a rifle with a folded stock. She gunned the engine, made the sharpest of fast three-point turns.

She scraped up a dirtcloud with the tyres. In her wing mirror, she saw the cloud cloak him. She paused before pulling away. He emerged from the cloud on his chair and he didn't wipe his face or curse her – he merely ignored her. She drove off.

Back in her bungalow, she started to pack what she would need.

From the bedroom, standing on tiptoe at the window, she could just make out the distant compound. The irritation had grown. She should have been focused, totally, on the trip she was embarking on.

Everything else should have been cleared from her mind. If the Bedouin traveller had spoken the truth, had recognized the stones and the glass, had given her the correct direction and landmarks, she would be walking the next day on an ejecta field where no man or woman had ever set foot before. She had a checklist of clothing and equipment that should guarantee her survival. If the Bedouin's description of the scale of what he had found was correct, if the single stone and the piece of black glass he had brought her were samples of a greater scattered mass, then the paper the deputy governor had commissioned her to write would make her a scientist of proven worth.

Beth could, of course, have gone out into the sands with an escort

– drivers, a cook, servants to pitch her tent, and guards – but an escort would have killed the exhilaration of the solitude.

Too many times, Beth broke away from her checklist, dropped the sheet of paper on the bed, returned to the window, stretched up and peered at the vague shapes of the distant tent tops. And the sun beat down on her bungalow's little patio beyond the window, and on the roof of her Land Rover, and no wind rustled the palm trees' fronds.

Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay.

When the prisoner was half-way down the corridor, Caleb recognized him.

It was six days since they had been taken out of the cages at X-Ray, shackled and blindfolded, had been pushed on to buses and driven to the new camp. They had been led down new corridors and had smelt the new concrete and new wire, and they were closer to the sea. When the chains were off, and the blindfold, Caleb had studied the new cage. Under the high grille window, through which the sea wind blew, there was a basin with running water, and beside it a squatting lavatory with a tap for flushing.

There was nothing temporary here. They were out of the converted cargo containers, and these blocks had been built to last.

He knew the man.

He had seen the Emir General only once. Surrounded by his bodyguards, the Emir General had visited the second training camp to watch the recruits go through the assatdt course, with live firing. This man, with a lean, hungered body and eyes that never rested, had been on the left side of the Emir General. He had seen the man again a week after the bombing had started. Caleb and others of the 055 Brigade had been manning a checkpoint and a convoy of pickups had come through. The side rear windozvs of the third pickup had been curtained, but the convoy had stopped and the Chechen had climbed inside it. The bodyguard had stood at the back and a machine-gun was mounted on the cab roof. They had exchanged remarks, Caleb and the bodyguard, nothing talk, then the Chechen had left the pickup, and the convoy had gone on.

The cage beside Caleb's was unlocked. There were two more guards than usually escorted a prisoner. The bodyguard was pitched inside. At X-Ray they were moved every fourteen days, and put into cages where there were strangers on each side of them. Caleb understood: they did not allow relationships to build. The guards came in after him and two held batons threateningly as the prisoner's chains were taken off. They seemed to expect him to fight, seemed to want him to. The man gave them no excuse. They left him. Caleb thought they went reluctantly, cheated.

He sensed this was a prisoner of status.

The guards now came down the corridor every two minutes. Before the bodyguard's arrival it had been every ten or twelve. But everything about them was predictable. Caleb sat against his wall, and the bodyguard lay on his bed, both in silence and ignoring each other, until prayer time. The guards did not come down the corridors in prayer times, did not spy on them. When the call came on Delta's new loudspeakers, the bodyguard knelt and faced the direction ivhere they were told the Holy City was, his shirtsleeve pressed against the wire. Caleb came close. They were both kneeling. Their words were soft-spoken but were not the words of the Holy Book.

'Where have you come from?'

The bodyguard's head did not turn. 'From what they call the "cooler", the isolation cell. I speak to a brother, encourage him, then I go back to the cooler.

In a few days they take me from the cooler and put me in another cage.

I speak more encouragement, then I go back to the cooler. If I stay in one cage I may damage the chance of a brother.'

'The chance of what?'

'Of freedom. They know my identity. I am a prize for them. Wlw are you?'

'I was at the training camp, I saw you. I saiv you also at a roadcheck we had, outside Kabul. We talked.'

'With the rocket-launcher, at the block. On the assault course at the camp.

Each time, you were spoken of… What do they know of you?'

'I am a taxi-driver.'

'Who can denounce you?'

Caleb murmured, 'All the men I was with, and the Chechen, were killed when I was taken by the Americans. When I am interrogated, I tell them that I, alone, survived, I am a taxi-driver. I do not believe they know anything else of me.'

'And you are strong?'

T try to be.'

Caleb had to strain to hear the bodyguard. 'Make a promise for me.'

'What do I promise?'

'If you are ever freed, you never forget. You remember your brothers. You remember the martyrs. You remember the evils of the crusaders.'

'I promise I will never forget, will always remember.'

There was a great calm about the man. He was thin, without a dominating stature, and his face was unremarkable, but his eyes burned.

'And you zvill fight. Whatever the barriers put in front of you, you will cross them. You zvill walk through fire. You will fight.'

The prayers ended. The guards tramped down the corridor. The bodyguard did not speak again, neither did Caleb, and they sat as far apart as the cage confines allowed. When food was brought, when the mosquitoes buzzed close to the ceiling lights, when the bodyguard's cage door was opened, he lashed out with his fool and caught the knee of the guard carrying his tray from the trolley, spilling the food. More guards came. Twice he was cudgelled with a baton, and he was blindfolded, then dragged away.

Caleb felt the new strength. He was no longer frightened. He was toughened, hardened by the encounter. He zvas a taxi-driver, but he had given his promise.

It broke quickly, without warning.

Silence, then raised gasping and exhausted voices.

Caleb scraped the crust of sand from his eyes. The Saudi, Fahd, high on his saddle, lashed his foot at Tommy's shoulder, toppling him. When Tommy stood again, Fahd worked the camel round so that he could return to kick again; he aimed for Tommy's head, but missed; the effort almost made him fall from the saddle. Tommy had hold of his leg and was trying to drag him down, but he lost the grip and sagged back.

A blade flashed.

Tommy had the knife. Fahd watched it. Tommy edged closer, the knife raised, ready to strike.

The guide, Rashid, came from behind Tommy and, with the speed of a snake's hit, snatched at Tommy's knife arm, held it, then twisted it behind Tommy's back, until the man's face grimaced in pain. The knife was loosed. As it fell, Tommy smashed back with his free arm and caught Rashid on the upper cheek. The arm was twisted tighter and Tommy dropped to the sand. Rashid bent to pick up the knife, took the reins of Fahd's camel and led it to the front of the column. The march resumed.

The boy was beside Caleb. 'Do you understand?'

'What should I understand?'

The boy's face creased as if in anguish. 'He hit my father. He struck my father. Because he hit my father, he is dead. Nothing else is possible.'

'But your father walked away, he did not kill him.'

'He will, at his own choosing. It was the worst insult, to hit my father.'

Caleb asked the question heavily: 'What did they fight over?'

The boy said, 'The one called the other a murderer of the faithful.

The other called the one a coward and a fool. It is what they said, and now the other is condemned.'

Caleb pushed the boy away, gently but with tired firmness. He thought death now trudged with them. His anger blossomed. Where they travelled there was no beacon of hope. Life did not, could not, exist. The sun burned and crushed them. Madness had made the argument. Impossible difficulties weighed them down, and now they had the new burden of the argument, and one of them was condemned.

He could have howled with his anger.

Most days a wrapped baguette, tuna and mayonnaise, with a can of Coke in his office passed for Jed Dietrich's lunch. He took the chance of the midday break to write up the assessment of the morning interrogation – increasingly fewer observations seemed relevant – and to prepare for the afternoon session. The secretary for Defense had called the men he questioned 'hard-core, well-trained terrorists'; the attorney general had said they were 'uniquely dangerous'. But neither the secretary nor the attorney sat in with Jed. There were six hundred inmates at Delta, and maybe a hundred of them were 'hard-core' and 'dangerous', and the Bureau and the Agency had care of them. Jed never saw them.

He binned the wrapping from his baguette, drained the can, wiped the crumbs off the table. As the minute hand climbed to the hour, the knock came on cue.

The prisoner was brought in.

Jed doubted he was even a 'foot-soldier'. God alone knew what questions he would find to put to the man. The prisoner, the file said, came from a small town in the English Midlands, was of Bengali ethnic origin, was one of the five per cent for whom anti-depressive medication was prescribed by the Delta doctor, had been studying Arabic and the Qur'an at a religious school up the road from Peshawar, and had gone into the net, had been handed over by the Pakistani intelligence people, who probably felt they needed to show willing and make up a quota number. If Jed, the fisherman, had pulled this one out of a Wisconsin lake, he'd not have bothered with a photograph or the scales, would have chucked him straight back – he had never been to England, had no knowledge of the 'Midlands'.

Jed was aware of a growing swell of opinion outside the States that demanded either for criminal charges to be laid against prisoners or for them to be freed. He was as aware that the courts back home had claimed no jurisdiction over Camp Delta. It was not his business, he had no opinion. Had he gone out of his room for lunch and discussed it with enlisted men he would have found total indifference. The Agency and Bureau men wanted every last one of the prisoners locked up in perpetuity. The Red Cross people, had they ever owned up to their true feelings, would have condemned Delta, would have criticized the concept of the camp, but he didn't go out to lunch.

None of the British ones had been brought to Jed's room before.

With a British prisoner, at least there was no requirement for an interpreter. Translators destroyed the chance of an interrogator displaying his skills.

The man shuffled through the door. Well, not a man – more of a boy. The file said he was twenty-three years old. He would have been twenty when he was captured, would have had his twenty-first birthday inside a Guantanamo cage… Jed thought of him as a boy.

The chains were taken off, and the guards stood back. The man sat down. He put his hands on the table top – it was orders that a prisoner's hands must be visible at all times when he was unshackled. The hands shook. Jed reckoned they would have shaken worse if it had not been for the anti-depressants… God, was this guy, categorized as an 'unlawful combatant', the real enemy?

He went through what had been asked of the man in previous interrogations. Why had he gone to Pakistan? Whom had he met in Pakistan? What had he been taught in Pakistan? Who had funded his studies in Pakistan? Had he ever received military training? Had he gone into Afghanistan at any time? The answers were the same, word for word, as they had been at every interrogation. He had the transcripts in front of him, and the pages were signed by the interrogators. Sometimes Jed let the answers run; sometimes he interrupted and his tone was savage; sometimes he smiled and softened his voice as he put the question; sometimes he doubled back. As the boy was denying ever having been in Afghanistan, he returned to the funding of the studies. Jed never caught him out, no discrepancies in the story, but far down in his mind a thought was developing.

He couldn't place where it came from. Whom had he met in Pakistan? Had he ever received military training? He felt the stab of recognition.

Jed paused. He collected his thoughts. They had been chaff, a jumble. Most of his concentration had been on the questions he'd asked, a little of it had been on his family and on the week gone by.

He cut away the chaff.

He sat for a full minute in silence. He watched the fingers writhing, and the breath come in little pants, and let his instinct rule.

Jed's voice was gentle, in English. 'Friend, do you speak Pashto?'

The faces of the two guards were impassive. He had used the word

'friend'. The guards would talk about that afterwards. Guards hated the prisoners. Guards knew that any fraternization with prisoners was forbidden, would lead to a flight out without their boots touching the Tarmac. Guards knew that a brigadier general, Camp Delta's commander, had been summarily fired and that 'defense sources' had claimed he was too 'soft' with the regime he'd ordered. In Delta, signs – printed by the ICRC – told detainees their rights, and had been posted with the authorization of the brigadier general. When the brigadier general had visited prisoners' cages he had greeted them in Arabic, 'Peace be with you.' He'd been sacked… but an interrogator had the freedom to call a prisoner 'friend'.

The man across the table, the 'friend', nodded.

In English, because Jed didn't speak that language: 'Would that be good Pashto, or only a little Pashto?'

'I can speak in Urdu…'

'No, no.' Jed leaned forward. 'Do you have Pashto?'

'Some, a bit, there were Afghan people in the college. I…'

Jed used his hand to gesture that the answer was sufficient. He used his desk telephone to call the central office. He requested the immediate presence of a Pashto interpreter. There was doubt as to whether one was available. He did not raise his voice, but it carried enough menace to the clerk. He dropped the 'request', replaced it with 'requirement': a Pashto interpreter to his room immediately – not tomorrow, not in half an hour. In a drawer on his side of the table the tape-recorder turned, and microphones were built into the table, on his side and on the prisoner's. He opened the drawer and stopped the tape. He waited. The quiet clung in the room. The man opposite sat bolt upright and still, except for the motion of his hands.

Jed wrote, in a fast long-hand scrawl, answers he remembered. The answers were not verbatim, but as he recalled them. Ten minutes later, when the interpreter came into the room, he passed him the two pages, now thickly covered with his handwriting. He asked the interpreter to translate them, on paper, into Pashto. Again there was silence as the interpreter crouched at the table and wrote down the translation.

He could not be sure where this would lead him. When the translation was complete, the pages in Pashto were laid in front of the prisoner ard Jed switched on the tape-recorder. The prisoner was asked to read aloud.

His host had put Bart at the end of the line.

They had been down to the paddock to inspect the first race's runners, then had climbed back to the stand. They made a party of eight and they waited for the start of the five thirty-five at Riyadh. The banker did the book. No Tote or William Hill or on-course bookmaker, the banker wrote down their little bets. Ten riyals or twenty riyals were the flutters. No money would change hands in the stand, no winnings or losses would be paid over in public, but rewards and debts would be settled at dinner at the defence-procurement man's villa.

Most of the row of seats in front of Bart was empty, and the row behind him only sparsely filled. Not like the old days, before the war in Iraq: then the whole stand would have heaved with expatriates.

'Terrorism threat' and 'personal security' were the catchphrases of the day. Only the diehards remained. He did not own binoculars and struggled, when he looked down the course to the start, to see the quartered shirt and cap that he was backing, and he listened to the talk in the row stretching away from him. Here, at least, indiscretion was possible.

'What I say is, the place is cracking up. I think it's terminal.'

'Take the servants, there's a new impertinence. I'd call it dumb insolence.'

'More to the point is Saudization – is that a real word? You know what I mean. They're stuffing lazy incompetents into jobs they can't handle.'

'I never go out at night, not now, not even with a driver. This used to be the safest city on earth, not any more.'

'Dreadful what happened to young Garnett – such a sweet girl that Melanie, beautiful children.'

'It's all become so dishonest, corrupt. The ethos is almost criminal here now. I… '

They were off, away in the distance the small shapes of the horses, and the smaller ones of the jockeys. Bart could not make out his horse and he didn't bloody care. He had not been invited because his host particularly liked him: one day he might be useful for a late-night emergency call-out.

It all came back to Ann. He wondered where she was, whether she was still shagging the owner of the Saab franchise showroom, how the kids were… Ann demanded private schools, two holidays a year that weren't package. The debts had mounted: unopened envelopes carrying final demands had littered the Torquay house, and the mortgage payments were in arrears. By 1995 – yes, he could remember the date, clear as bloody crystal – she'd started the taunting that he hadn't the balls to stand up to the practice partners and demand they offloaded private patients on to him. He'd faced ruin, and he'd faced her goading… Then Bart had responded.

In April that year he had come to the solution to the ills. Josh, a right little weasel, had been in the consulting room and had sown the seed. Josh was an NHS patient, there to have his face patched up after a beating. Josh was a dealer. Josh left an address in the bed-sit land at the wrong end of the town. Josh had a roll of banknotes in his hip pocket, a fat wad. Josh paid up on the nail, cash on delivery… and Bart had delivered. Morphine alkaloid tablets were the currency for which Josh paid cash, and heroin and cocaine.

Any patient on Bart's books who was terminally ill, or any patient with chronic pain from a back injury, could be prescribed the morphine tablets – and always, from the spring of 1995, he prescribed big. The bathroom cabinets of his patients bulged with the bottles of morphine tablets… And when there was a death, or when a back's pain was relieved, he collected what was left and took it away. Josh had the left-over tablets, and the cash from the roll of notes in Josh's hip pocket began, by the late summer of 1995, to dent the piles of unpaid bills. So simple… Heroin and cocaine were used to help, quietly, those on their way when life had little more than a fortnight to run. Relatives were grateful for the release of their loved one from suffering. Bart called it the Brompton's Mixture: a gin or sherry cocktail with the addition of liquid heroin or powdered cocaine; when he signed the death certificate, and before the undertakers called, Bart cleared the unused excess. The partnership with the little weasel, the bastard, Josh, might have lasted for ever – not for a mere eighteen months, until the catastrophe.

There was no betting slip to tear up at the races in Riyadh. His prediction had been correct: his horse was last over the line. Again, the conversation down the line of seats clamoured, as if the race had been a minor diversion from the main business of gossip and complaint.

'I really don't know whether we should all get out, cut and run. but what I reckon – back home – no one wants to employ a banker of my age.'

'That Al Qaeda, it's a cancer, and Iraq's taken the eye off the main hall. We're all targets now, that's what I feel.'

'If the Kingdom collapses we're in deep trouble, about as deep as you can get. We keep bags packed, we're all ready to go, but if it happened suddenly, without warning, how would we get to the airport? Who'd protect us? And can you imagine pitching up at Heathrow with just a suitcase each? That's assuming we got to the airport.'

'It's all so unfair. What do you think, Bart?… Bart, I'm speaking to you.' The banker's wife tugged his arm, peered into his face.

He jerked his mind away from Josh, the tablets, the cocktail and Ann. 'Isn't it more dangerous crossing the road in Riyadh?'

'Is that all you've to say about the security situation?'

He was emboldened. 'If you want my opinion, A1 Qaeda's power is overstated.'

'Have you plans for a quick bolt, Bart?'

For emphasis, Bart smacked a closed fist into the other palm. 'No, I have not.'

It was a lie – of course he had a permanently packed case. Whether he would ever use it was another matter. Would Eddie bloody Wroughton – the marionette tweaker – ever permit its use? He had nowhere to go without Eddie bloody Wroughton's sanction.

'I have no plans to run. Al Qaeda's threat is probably minimal. A few fanatics in the desert or up in the mountains, chewing dates, suffering from amoebic dysentery. I don't rate them, no.'

Shocked into silence, the other guests in the row shuffled their feet and examined their racecards. Bart thought of nobody but himself himself and Eddie Wroughton.

The host's wife chipped in, 'Well, that's enough of that. I think it's time we went back down to the paddock.'

The dung was dried, desiccated.

The line drawn on the map had served Eddie Wroughton well. At each village close to the pencil line they had stopped and Wroughton had stayed in the vehicle, forcing the police officer to go among the mud-brick homes. The routine had led them to the last village, then on to the single isolated building. There had been signs there of recent use, and the fire that had been lit. He'd photographed the interior, then the new bolt and the new lock on the inside of the door.

No shepherd or goatherd would have sealed a window so thoroughly, then lit a fire inside, or would have used a new lock and a new bolt on a shed door. They had gone on, following the pencil line on the map, using ever rougher tracks.

The toe of his brogue brushed the top of a dung stool, which fell away as powdery dust. But he worked with the toe until he had exposed the stool's underside, where there was still dampness. A week, a little more perhaps, but not a month. From the dung, he decided that more than half a dozen, fewer than a dozen camels had been there, had waited, had defecated. Near to the riverbed there were tyremarks but on the dirt track; Wroughton could not have said whether they were a week, a month, or half a year old. Away to the right there was a cluster of buildings from which cooking smoke spiralled, and there were irrigated fields. That community would be centred on a well. The police officer had been there and had come back with his head down, as if he felt ashamed to report back that his questions had met a wall of silence. If he was given time, if Wroughton had allowed the police officer the time to take two of the older men away from the village and drive them to the cells at the station back down the road, the questions would still have gone unanswered, so he did not permit it. The wall of silence denied that strangers had been there within the last several days. Tribesmen and farmers, his experience of the hardship of their lives told him, did not respond to inflicted pain.

Slowly, taking his time, Wroughton gazed around him. His eyes were shaded by his dark glasses and he could look out over the ground from which the sun reflected. When he was satisfied with what he had drunk in, seen nothing that interested him, he turned and began again. He looked for the mistakes that men made. A discarded wrapper, a ground-out cigarette filter tip: men who thought their precautions were total always made one mistake. Most of Wroughton's life was dictated by paper: paper accumulated on his desk, was spewed out by cypher machines and his computer. From the paper mountain came clues to the identity and relevance of the prey he hunted, but only rarely. He turned again, stared up at the high ground on the right side of the riverbed, and saw the movement.

Horns moved, then ears, a head and then the goat was gone from . a ledge above the right side of the riverbed.

Wroughton looked hard at the ledge and saw that it reached precariously a patch of green and yellow grass, and that there were more goals. According to his father, grandfather and great-uncle, the best work of an intelligence officer was in close-quarters observation

– they might not have thought him suitable to follow them, not thought he could hack it as a career, but he had remembered. Where there were goats there would be a boy. He had left the villagers to the police officer, but this was for himself.

He scrambled up the loose stone. He clung to the branches of little sprouting bushes that grew from rock crannies. His best brogues were scraped, his linen suit was dust-smeared and his pure-white shirt was sweat-soaked, but he reached the ledge. Never looking down, he edged along the rock wall to where a small plateau opened out. On it, extraordinarily, there was grass. Perhaps a tiny spring dribbled water from the upper rocks. There were goats, and a boy was sitting on the grass among their excrement. He caught his breath. The occasions when excitement had gripped him were rare enough for him to count on the fingers of one hand. The boy watched him as he composed himself. He spoke in Arabic, with the gentleness he would have used to his friend Juan Gonsalves' children.

Twenty minutes later, Eddie Wroughton left the plateau, came back along the ledge, then started the descent to the riverbed. To break his fall, he snatched at the little bushes, slid on his backside in an avalanche of dust and stones. Those who had bought camels from a farmer had not looked up and spied a goat high above them. His suit jacket was torn at the elbows, his trousers at the knees and seat.

It mattered nothing. The boy had seen the men and their voices had carried faintly to him. They had been strangers. The camels had waited in the riverbed and had dropped their dung while an argument had raged over the price of the three more camels needed to move boxes, six boxes. Ten of the twenty minutes with the boy were taken with his questioning, so softly done, over the size, shape and colour of the boxes. Five of the twenty minutes concerned the detail of the features and physique of the young man who had closed the negotiations.

Unrecognizable to those who knew him, unwashed and his clothes not changed, Eddie Wroughton boarded the last flight of the day out of Muscat. At the back of a near-empty aircraft, he thought of the centuries-old trail that had been the route of the frankincense traders half a millennium before. His pencil had traced a line beyond the watercourse, over the hills, into the Empty Quarter. Nine camels,a guide and his son, four men and six crates of weapons were now on the trail. He had much to be cheerful about, but pride of place went to the boy's description of a young man unlike any Arab he had seen before.

On the screen, the image of the Land Rover flashed for a moment, and was gone; then the camera was tracking over sand again.

Lizzy-Jo didn't point out the Land Rover, painted blue with two vivid green stripes running diagonally up its sides and over its roof.

Marty was doing a banking left turn. She did not want to disturb him while he made the manoeuvres to bring First Lady on to the line-up for landing. She'd been in the Land Rover, been driven from the shop to the club in it – where she'd been lectured about meteorites; Lizzy-Jo grimaced. Marty was hunched over his stick, and his eyes, magnified by the thickness of his lenses, squinted in concentration.

The former Air Force pilots for whom she'd done sensor work in her first days with the Agency had flown the newer Predator MQ-ls like they'd have driven cars on a quiet country road up-state, but Marty always had the look on him that it was life or death.

He made a good landing.

She always clapped when he brought First Lady or Carnival Girl down. It was her routine, had been since the first time they'd flown together out of Bagram. The sound of her clapping reverberated in the Ground Control Station. He blushed, as he had the first time. She reached over and squeezed his upper shoulder, as if she could loosen the tensed muscles.

He taxied her back. He cut the pusher engine. They had flown First Lady for eight hours, covering some six hundred nautical miles. The camera had photographed sand and more sand and nothing but sand: flat sand, steep sand and sloping sand. On the workbench, between them, was the big map with the squares on it and she put a Chinagraph cross over two more. There were six squares now with crosses on them, and ninety-four without. The big man from the embassy had talked of thousands of flying map boxes, but that was because he did not understand the Predator's capability. Lizzy-Jo had divided the desert into a hundred squares. Her eyes ached from gazing at the screen. She stood and arched her back.

She opened the trailer door. The heat blasted into the air-conditioned interior. It blanketed her, seemed to suck the life from her. A plastic bag lay, roasted, on the step. None of the ground crew was permitted entry to the trailer. She looked inside, then let out a little whoop of gratitude, and thought of the Land Rover the camera had seen. She murmured her thanks – then ran for the toilet.

Five minutes later, she wandered back towards the trailer. She passed the awning where George and his team already had the engine cowling off First Lady. He called to her: 'How did she go?'

'Good.'

'No thrust problem?'

Marty was on the top step at the trailer door and answered for her:

'No problem, she was sweet. Eight hours today, twelve or thirteen tomorrow – don't reckon Lizzy-Jo and I can take more than that.'

Lizzy-Jo said, 'Yes, we can do twelve or thirteen tomorrow, then maybe take Carnival Girl up the day after and-'

George shook his head decisively. 'Not tomorrow, not thirteen hours or one. The forecast's a fucker. You're not going anywhere tomorrow. Better believe it – nowhere.'

She and Marty went to the awning. The forecast printout was given to them. The orders were strict, about as strict as they could get: a Predator should not be hazarded in extreme weather conditions unless for vital operational necessity. There was no argument.

She was perplexed. She thought of the Land Rover picked up by the camera as it headed away from the Shaybah compound and into the emptiness. She held the package of tampons under her arm and murmured to herself, 'If the forecast was that bad, why'd you think she'd be driving off into that nowhere?'

The camel roared and swung its neck. Caleb was behind Tommy, who was against the camel's flank, as if clinging to its body's shadow. The camel's movement threw Tommy clear and water spilled from his mouth.

More water cascaded on to the flank of the camel. Its great tongue flailed to catch the drops. Ghaffur shrieked for his father. Rashid ran back, the camel snorted and Tommy crouched down.

The truth came to Caleb. The Iraqi had not walked beside the camel for its shade: he was there because his head was against a goatskin of water. They were all fighting exhaustion: all their heads were down, their feet and the camels' plodded. They knew nothing of the water being stolen, but the camel had smelt it. Perhaps, as Tommy sucked at the neck of the skin holding the water, a little had dribbled from his mouth on to the camel's flank. For days the animal had not drunk, was slowly using up its reserves from the well at the start of the Sands. Water, clear, clean crystals of it, fell to the sand.

Enough for one cup, or two, then for three cups and more… The camel's neck was arched round as its tongue tried in desperation to reach the drops.

Rashid plugged the skin's neck, then retied the loosened thong round it.

He said nothing, but his gaze on the Iraqi confirmed that Tommy was condemned.

Caleb thought at least two days' water had been lost from the slack skin. The sight of it had worsened the dryness in his throat.

At the night stop, the Iraqi sat away from them. Only the boy went to him with food, uncooked bread because there were no roots for a fire, and the measured cup of water, but Fahd and Hosni sat with their backs to him.

As the darkness fell, Caleb crawled away from the others, went to Tommy and sat beside him. His voice croaked, 'You were called a

"murderer of the faithful". Who did you kill?'

There was defiance, almost pride. 'I was the hangman. At the Abu Ghraib gaol, the gallows were mine. I could hang three men at a time, or three women. First I was the assistant, then I was the hangman, then I was the supervisor. I hanged the principals of the Shi'a who rebelled in 1991, and I hanged the agents of America in the north in 1996. I hanged men or women who were spies, who plotted against the regime, who told jokes that mocked the President. I could hang them so that death was instant, or hang them so that death was slow it depended on the order I was given. There was always a note on the execution order that said how it was to be. The scaffold was my place, it was where I worked. In the morning I would dress in a clean uniform, always clean and pressed, and my driver would take me to the prison. Some days I was idle, some days I was busy. At the end of each day I went home to my wife and my children.'

The voice softened, a little of its guttural quality left it.

'After I had hanged the Kurds who followed the CIA's instructions, in 1996, I left the Abu Ghraib, the prison in Mosul and the prison in Basra, and I was given a new posting. I became a security officer for the Republican Guard's Nebuchadnezzar Division. I gave up my ropes, my pinions and my hoods, left them to the men I had trained as my assistants. In the division, I was the officer who said nothing and heard everything. If there was doubt about a man's loyalty, I sent him to those men who had been my assistants. Then came the war. Then came Tommy Franks. Then came the disaster. I fled. I took my wife and my children and drove them by back tracks to the Syrian border. I was one of the first to go. Later the route was closed. Now my wife lives in a two-roomed apartment at Aleppo, and my children, and they have citizenship, and they will never see me, or talk of me, again. If I had stayed in Iraq, if the Shi'a or the Kurds, or the families of officers and guards in the Nebuchadnezzar Division had caught me, I would have been hanged from a lamp-post or from a tree.'

The voice quavered.

'Don't have the arrogance to judge me. I looked into the eyes of men, put the hood on them, the rope, worked the lever. Could you?

Can you? I don't know at what time or in what place you will look into a man's eyes, or a woman's, or a child's, and pull a lever. It is why you are chosen… It is why you walk with us in this God-fuck place, in secrecy so that your safety is preserved. If you judge me, then you must judge yourself. I will go back to Iraq and kill Americans, a few… You will look into hundreds of eyes, perhaps thousands of eyes, the chosen man…'

The voice dropped. The defiance and pride had fled.

'Thank you for sitting with me.'