The Unknown Soldier

'You obey me, you come here.'

Caleb remembered the tension that the prayers and the water, and his own tiredness, had filtered from his mind. The Iraqi was now the target of the guide's anger.

'You are to obey me, and you are to come to me.'

Tommy pushed himself up, brushed the sand off the seat of his trousers and started a slow, indifferent walk towards Rashid and his camel. Fahd watched him and Hosni, and the boy.

Caleb strained to hear.

The voice of Rashid was quiet, but with poison. 'How many water bags do you carry?'

The surly grudging response. 'I carry four.'

'How many are on the camel?'

'Four, of course.'

'Count them, show me there are four.'

Caleb saw Tommy shrug, as if he dealt with an idiot. He counted aloud as he moved round the camel. 'There is one, there is two… here is three, and here is…'

The savage interruption. 'Where is four?'

The shoulders crumpled. 'I don't know where is four.'

'You are responsible for the water bags you carry.'

'I am responsible… I do not know where it is. All the bindings, before we started, were secure.'

'I show you where is the fourth water bag.'

'I tested all the bindings.' Then defiance. 'If you know where the water bag is then why ask me? I don't know.'

With his arm, Rashid gestured back where they had come. Caleb struggled to follow the line, on their zigzag path, of the arm. The light from the sun bounced back from the sand. He thought he saw a speck, dark against the red of the sand, but could not know at first whether his eyes tricked him. He held his hands over them, shaded them, opened them wider, peered and saw the speck again. The wind moved the surface sand, seemed to make a slight mist over the desert floor. He saw it clearly, held it for a few seconds, but then the brightness in his eyes and the pain in them made him look away. He did not understand how a water bag could have fallen from Tommy's camel four hundred yards back or more. He blinked, screwed his eyes together to cut out the pain.

'There is your fourth water bag.'

'I see it.'

'Go, pick it up, bring it to us.'

The Iraqi had no fight in him. He could not shout or bluster or beg.

To have done so would have denied his dignity, destroyed his pride.

Caleb saw him reach up and snatch the hair at his camel's neck, lock his fingers in it, then try to drag it down to the kneeling position.

Caleb remembered how the order of march that morning had been changed. He had no longer taken back-marker, had been replaced at the tail of the march by the Iraqi. And, he remembered how Rashid had stopped, let the rest of them pass him and dropped back until he rode alongside Tommy, then had come up fast to regain his position at the head of them.

'You don't take the camel.'

The Iraqi spat his answer. 'Am I to walk?'

'You are not to waste the strength of the camel, you walk. The camel did not lose the water bag.'

'Fuck you.'

'It is your responsibility. You walk back and pick up the water bag.'

'I will not.'

'You pick it up and you bring it back to us, and then we will go on.'

The pitch of Tommy's voice rose. 'I am a man of importance. I have a role in this fucking idiotic journey – you are paid to escort me.'

Rashid's voice had quietened, was hard for Caleb to hear. 'If you do not go back, pick up the water bag and bring it to us, then we leave you. We ride the camels and go on. You will run after us for a hundred strides, then you will fall back. We will be gone over a horizon, and you will be alone. Which way do you choose?'

Spinning on his heel, the sand scuffing at his feet, Tommy turned to each of them. Who backed him? None did. Who spoke for him?

None did. Not Hosni and not Fahd. Caleb stared back at him. With a brutal kick, Tommy heaved sand up on to Rashid's legs, then started to walk.

He took a straight line, not the zigzag path right and left that Rashid had led them on after finding the first of the two marker posts.

Caleb asked of the boy, 'Would your father leave a man here, walk away from him?'

The boy said, 'If we had no love for him, no trust for him, then, yes, we would leave him.'

The beat of the tension grew. Tommy walked upright and there was a roll in his stride. Hosni ducked his head down as if his eyes could no longer follow him. The heat seared all of them. Fahd seemed to shiver. The sand around Tommy shimmered. They had gone far to the right in the zigzag, and when they had cut back to the left they had not been near the direct line that Tommy took as he tramped, never looking back, towards the speck that was the dropped water bag. Rashid did not look over his shoulder but his face was close to Tommy's camel's head and he murmured soft words in its ear and stroked the hair of its neck. Tommy was half-way to the water bag, the speck. Caleb did not know what would happen, only that the Sands were a place of death, a cruel place, a place with as little mercy as a hangman's shed. Tommy walked the straight line.

He was the only one, Caleb realized it, who did not know what would be the end of it. He had been away from the camp for a whole night, and away from the march for most hours of a day. Through that morning's march, after the marker posts, every turn that Rashid had made had been planned, and he would have gone back to the tail of the caravan and ridden beside the Iraqi, and the Iraqi would have been dead to the world astride the camel with the sun beating on his head and the torpor of the endless vista of the sand sea would have dulled him. The Iraqi would not have known that the guide's fingers released a water bag from the baggage and then tossed it aside, left it to lie on the sand, left it where it could just be seen when the halt was called for water and prayers.

The cry came back to them, carried on the wind.

Caleb thought Tommy a smaller man – shorter, cut off, stunted.

There was a little squeal from the boy. For a moment, as Caleb saw it, the Iraqi stood and tried to walk, but could not, and fell. All around him, the sand was clean, unmarked. It was where the zigzag trail had not crossed. The cry became a scream. Caleb remembered: 'Because he hit my father, he is dead… Nothing else is possible.' The Iraqi tried to stand, but Caleb could not see his shins or his knees. The arms flailed, and with each struggling movement the Iraqi sank.

The first cry had been shock, then anger. The last cry, the loudest, was terror.

He went to Ghaffur, grabbed the boy's arm, held it so that the boy could not break loose. 'You knew of the quicksand?'

'My father knew.'

'It is not by chance that we came past it?'

'Since he struck my father we changed the route. We came this way for a purpose.'

'To kill a man.'

'He struck my father.'

'How much time have we lost, to kill a man?'

'Perhaps a day – half a day.'

He freed the boy. The cry came again, louder and shriller. There had been bogs in Afghanistan: once he had seen a goat sinking in mud, had heard its bleating, but then the grass carpet covering the bog had been of a deeper, brighter, more treacherous green. Then, one of the Arabs with Caleb had fired a single shot from his assault rifle and the bullet had disintegrated the skull of the goat. It had not been shot to end its misery but to stop the bleating. Caleb would not have thought of quicksands, the same as a bog, in the desert where it might not have rained for ten years, fifteen. To the noses of the camels, there would have been a scent of the buried moisture under the surface of the sand, and the guide had known the purpose of the marker posts. .. it had been a killing as planned and prepared for as any execution.

He saw the chest of the Iraqi and his head and his arms.

The man struggled. Caleb thought Tommy struggled so that he would sink quicker, finish it faster.