THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (11 page)

'It is a gift from God, not taught. A man who shoots is a man who respects himself. Do you have respect for yourself?'

'I've never done anything of value to get respect.'

'A man who shoots well is a man who can fight. A fighter has supreme self-esteem. He is valued by his friends, trusted by comrades, loved.'

'I wouldn't know—'

'You would not know because you were never given the chance to be valued, trusted, loved . . . I was given such a chance.'

'To shoot?'

'To fight. I learned it close to here, against the Soviets. We ran, they followed us. We ran further and still they followed. We hid among rocks, they lost us. We were quiet as mice, they went past us. They stopped. We could shoot at their backs. We killed all of them - we killed all of them because we were fighters and born to it. .. and then we were valued and trusted and loved. Does my story frighten you?'

A great plunging breath. 'I don't think so - no.'

'It is precious to have self-esteem. Would you look for it?'

The breath hissed from his lungs. 'Yes.'

Caleb was given a rifle. He had never held a firearm. The translator had slipped away. He was shown, the sign language of the claw, how to hold it. The four men had stood back. Only Caleb and the Chechen had been at the fence. The whole hand had adjusted the sight. He had fired. The rifle stock had thudded against his shoulder. The can had toppled - his breathing had been steady. The sight's range had been changed. Caleb had seen the cooking-oil tin dance in the slackening light - his squeeze on the trigger bar had been constant. The sight had been altered. The fuel drum had rocked

- he had lowered the rifle and turned to receive praise. On the Chechen's face he saw grim approval. Away beyond the garden's fence, far above the targets, a hillside was spotted with boulders, cut with little ravines, and at the summit was a precarious hanging rock.

The Chechen had the rifle and pointed the barrel at it.

Caleb had understood. He had dropped off his suit jacket and loosened his tie. He had torn the seat of his suit trousers on the barbed wire as he had gone over the fence. He had run. He wore shiny shoes, polished for a wedding, that slipped on the rock surfaces, gave him no grip. At first there had been shots above him.

He had hugged rocks, had crawled into the clefts. The firing had become less frequent. His suit trousers had ripped at the knees, his shirt was sweat-soaked, dirt-smeared. He had reached the top, bright in the last of the sun. Exhilaration had swamped him. He had stood on the hanging rock, his arms outstretched, in triumph . .. and he had come down, sliding, stumbling, and making little avalanches of stones. The dream had been near to the waking moment when Fahd had killed it. Since the scenes of the dream he had never again worn suit trousers, a suit jacket, a clean shirt with a tie, polished shoes. He was a chosen man. At the fence, when he reached it, the Chechen's claw had gripped his shoulder and held him close, and he had known that - an Outsider - he was a man respected, and wanted.

Through that evening he had sat at the feet of the Chechen; Farooq and Amin had not come near him. In the morning, before dawn, he had left with him. He was the Chechen's man. It had been the start.

He was called. The dream was finished. He was the member of a family, and there had never been a family before.

He helped Fahd lift the boxes from the back of the building's one room.

They grunted under their weight, and their bodies were close as they struggled with each through the door.

'What do we call you?'

Caleb said that he had many names - did a name matter?

'What was the first name you were given?'

Caleb said that it had been 'The Outsider' - but he had been told the name did not mean he was without trust.

'Then you are the Outsider, not from a grouping or a faith or a tribe, but held in value. If it had not been for that value we would not be here. We call ourselves by the names of our enemies, better to remember them.'

The box was set down. 'Who is your enemy?'

'I am Saudi. Fahd was the king when I was blessed by God and received into Al Qaeda. His wealth was grotesque - it was twenty thousand million dollars. When he went on his holiday to Europe, he took three thousand servants with him. He allowed the infidel soldiers into the Kingdom, the crusaders of America. He is a hypocrite, an idolator, an apostate to permit the Americans in the Holy Land of the Two Cities.'

'And Hosni?'

'He is Egyptian. His enemy is Hosni Mubarak, who follows the Americans, is their paid servant, who tortures and hangs the true believers.'

In the room, Hosni folded the blankets, had washed the plates from the previous evening's meal, had prepared a breakfast of bread and fruit.

'And who is Tommy's enemy?'

'Do you not know about Iraq?'

'I know nothing about Iraq since I was taken to Guantanamo.'

'Do you not know what happened in Iraq?' Fahd's voice whistled in astonishment.

'We were told nothing in Guantanamo,' Caleb said simply.

'You did not know the name of Tommy Franks?'

'I have not heard that name.'

'Let him tell you.'

Tommy did not help them but sat on his haunches in the sun, cleaned the weapons and did not look at them. There was sour concentration in his eyes. They set down the last of the boxes.

'Are you here - and Hosni and Tommy - because of me?' Caleb asked.

'Because of you we waited here for twelve days.'

She had taken the early flight down from the King Khalid International airport at Riyadh, claimed by the Kingdom to be the most perfect in the world, and had arrived at the oasis of steel and concrete before the heat had settled on the sands around it. She had dumped her shopping in her two-room bungalow, changed, and had kept running. Beth had been ten minutes late for her first class of the day.

A blackboard behind her, workers from Saudi, Yemen, Pakistan and the Philippines in front of her, she taught English language. The majority of her pupils were older than her. They were engineers, chemists, construction managers and surveyors, and the English she taught them was not that of polite conversation but would enable them better to scan manuals and technical work. The workers were the cream of the Kingdom's oil-production personnel; the site where they brought up extra-light crude from one hundred and twenty-five wells was called the most advanced in the world, and was praised as the most ambitious.

They were good students, determined to learn.

Other than the three nurses in the medical centre, Beth was the only woman at Shaybah. Standing before her class, she wore a long, plain dark dress that hid her ankles, the shape of her body, her wrists and her throat; a scarf covered her hair. If it had not been for the patronage of the province's deputy governor, she would not have been there . . . but she had that patronage. In Riyadh, Jedda, Ad Dammam or Tabuk, it would not have been acceptable for a lone woman to teach men - or to drive a vehicle, or to eat and use the library in the compound's club - but the pioneering site at Shaybah, deep in the Rub' al Khali desert, was beyond the reach of the
mutawwa.
The religious police of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice had no remit at Shaybah, and it was known throughout the compound that Beth had the patronage of the deputy governor. The job, teaching English oil-extraction language, allowed her to pursue the love of her life. The love was in the study of meteorite geology and far into the sand dunes from Shaybah, but reachable, was the meteorite impact site at Wabar, considered by scholars to be the most remarkable on the earth's surface. The job and the patronage enabled Beth to fulfil her passion.

Apart from the nurses, Beth Jenkins was an only woman among some seven hundred and fifty men. The compound was two hundred and fifty land miles from the nearest habitation. The living accommodation, offices, the club, the high-rise constructions of the gas-oil separation plants, the towers of piping and the airfield covered forty-five hectares of desert. Production exceeded half a million barrels per day. Shaybah was the jewel in Saudi ARAMCO's crown. The statistics were daunting: 30 million cubic metres of sand had been moved; 638 kilometres of pipeline carried the extra-light crude to the refineries in the north; 200,000 cubic metres of concrete had been poured; 12,500 tonnes of fabricated steel had been shipped in to make 735 kilometres of interconnecting pipes. Beth thought herself blessed to be there. The men she taught came and went, worked short spells away from their families, took the shuttle flights out whenever they could, griped about the harshness of the climate and the conditions. Beth did not complain.

She would have said that she wanted nothing more of life. She would have claimed she could hack the heat and the isolation.

She would have refuted the mildest suggestion that she was isolated. She would have been perplexed to know that she was described, behind her back, as brutally rude and aloof. Away from the classroom, in her little bungalow where her clothes were strewn, she kept her books and study papers on the Wabar meteorite site, all she cared for. One day, Beth Jenkins would write the definitive paper on the site where black glass and white stone had rained down with the explosive force of a primitive atomic detonation on to what science called an 'ejecta field'.

She had the class reciting, in unison as if they were the kids way back at an Ascot convent school, the phrases 'proven reserves', 'API gravity', 'gas compression plant', 'well-head', 'stabilization and separation' and . . . She looked out of the window. The haze was thickening. The runway that linked Shaybah to the world outside was indistinct and hard to focus on. At the far end, deep in the haze, there was a small collection of tents and vehicles, two satellite dishes mounted on trailers and wide canvas awnings. She had not seen them when the flight had come in, had been asleep till she was rocked awake by the landing. Momentarily, she wondered why they were there, at the extreme end of the runway, by the perimeter fence.

Then she began to set the work for her students to be done before she next met them.

They filed out. Another class came in.

No, she was not alone and inadequate. Yes, she was blessed.

The queue failed to move. Bart hissed, moved his weight from foot to foot, whistled his frustration through his teeth, coughed, but the queue did not shift. He needed a new
iqama.
It was renewal time for his resident's permit. He had with him the one that was about to expire, his driver's licence, a certificate from a colleague of a satisfactory eye and blood test, the document confirming employment by his local sponsor at the hospital and a further fistful of bureaucratic crap. In front of him, beside and behind him, corralled in a narrow corridor flanked by ornate rope, was a collection of the foreigners who took the Kingdom's shilling and were treated for their efforts with all the respect shown to a dog with mange . . . God, he loathed the place.

But there was no way round the queues, no avoidance of them.

The key word was
patience.
Bart knew all the stories of expatriates who had filled in their forms and sent a minion down to the ministry to avoid the queue. The bastards at the desks always found fault and sent them back. The highly placed and low-ranked had learned that the only way to get a resident's permit renewed was to stand in the damn queue.

Around him the need for
patience
would be muttered in a dozen tongues - in Arabic and German, Urdu and Dutch, Bengali and English. A few, the more important, had bodyguards, who idled in the chairs away from the queue. Bodyguards were a barometer of the deterioration in the security situation in post-war times. Bart paid only lip service to security in daylight hours, but would not have walked a street at night, certainly not in the areas where the Kingdom's new reality of economic depression had spawned beggars and the women who raided refuse bins for food scraps.

The servants of the Kingdom, bought with petro-dollars, shuffled and wheezed, and watched the painfully slow progress towards the counters.

At the end of the queue there were four desks. Two were occupied by men in the traditional flowing white
thobe.
On his head each wore a
ghutrah,
held in place by rope, the
igaal
that, in former times - when they were all in the sand and not in concrete and glass follies - was used to hobble a camel; now they rode, not on a camel's back, but in Chevrolets. Men worked at two desks. The other two were empty.

Why were the desks not taken when the queue stretched back to the bloody door? Bart boiled. Some of the expatriates occasionally wore a
thobe,
and thought the gesture impressed their hosts. Did it hell!

The days when expatriates were the chosen elite of the Kingdom were long gone - there was even talk that income tax for expatriates might be introduced. They were not wanted, only tolerated, and they were made to queue.

But that day God favoured Samuel Bartholomew, Doctor of Medicine. Five hours in the queue, patience rewarded, and at the head of the queue just before the break for lunch.

He produced an oily smile, presented his papers, remarked in his passable Arabic what a delightful day it was outside. He was good at doing lies: his life was a lie. He had done lies well since childhood.

The son of Algernon Bartholomew, accountant, and Hermione (nee Waltham) Bartholomew, housewife, he had told the lie often enough about a happy childhood in a loving home in a rural village near the Surrey town of Guildford, and maintained the lie of contented boarding-school life. At the school, about as far away in the West Country as they could afford to send him, put him out of their sight and out of their minds, he had learned the law of survival: never explain, never apologize, never trust. Poor at games, unloved and lonely to the point of tears, he had comforted himself with lies. It served him well. As he walked back down the line, the stamp on his renewed
iqama,
a little smile spread on his mouth.

Caleb saw it but could not hear it.