… a lucky man he'd be, the subject of her love.
He said, matter-of-fact, 'Good morning, Miss Jenkins – it looks like you're about to spill a load of trouble on to my shoes.'
'Probably, I have…'
It was another of the moments, fleeting, when he could have – should have – turned back.
'Did you bring your gear?'
'Yes… If it's not presumptuous, who is my mystery patient who has suffered injuries in military action?'
'I don't know. Honestly, I don't know his name or where he's come from or where he's going to. That's the truth.'
He believed her. It was the last time he could have turned back. At the end of the day he would have been in Riyadh, and in his compound. And he would not have forgiven himself. He looked into her face. It was all madness. Bart's life was a story of being trapped and never turning.
'Right, then, we'd better get moving.'
She told him to follow her. She said the Bedouin boy with her would guide them. She walked away, lurched back to her Land Rover.
He kept close to her. She led him another mile down the track, then swung right and went west. He went down off the track and the wheels ground on the chip stones, then sagged on to sand. He used the low gears for cross-country. He had never driven on sand before.
He sensed that the boy – who had stared back at him from the Land Rover, his face riddled with suspicion – guided her. Many times they stopped and the sand in front of the Land Rover and Bart's Mitsubishi seemed without features, endless ochre hillocks that had no bushes, no trees, no cliffs, nothing to Bart that was recognizable or could be caught by memory; they would halt for a few seconds, then veer to the right or the left. He found his steering was sluggish and unresponsive. No one that Bart knew, back in Riyadh, went into the desert, even with their vast four-by-fours. The wildlife park, a few kilometres beyond the city limits, was enough. A trip by tarmacadam road cutting into a desert on the way to Jedda or Ad Dammam was sufficient for anyone he knew to believe they had experienced a survival ordeal. Other than the straining engines of the Land Rover and the Mitsubishi there was silence around them. He saw nothing that lived. By the end of the second hour, off the track and twenty-eight miles covered, he felt a crawling fear. He could not turn back: he had lost his sense of direction. Wouldn't have known whether he drove towards the safety of the track, went parallel to it or away from i t
… worse than fear, and he sweated. His mind played games with him, mocked him. He remembered a school play. His father and mother in the audience. Its setting was a First World War dug-out. He was the coward among the officers waiting for the Big Push. The hero asked, musing, whether a worm knew, when it tunnelled in the earth, whether it was going up or down and speculated on the worm's bad luck if it went down when it thought it was coming up.
His father had said that he should not have allowed himself to be cast as a coward. He clung to the tyremarks left by the Land Rover, and he saw that, behind him from the mirror, the brisk wind lifted the sand and covered the tyres' ruts. The fear made him shiver.
It looked at first, through the haze thrown up by the Land Rover, like a stunted needle. At the start of the third hour, Bart realized their larget was a column of stone, weathered and sculpted by the wind, with a sharpened tip.
Beth watched.
'He's pretty far down the road.'
Behind Beth, the boy squatted beside his father, whose hands loosely held a rifle across his lap.
'I think I'm just in time but I can't promise anything. By rights he should have died yesterday. Extraordinary resilience.' The doctor spoke as if a commentary were needed from him. The needle was in a forearm vein, and he was hooking the bag, connected by a tube to the needle, on to the cross-rope that supported the awning. Then he crouched over the leg wound. 'First things first. Do the dehydration, get as much from an intravenous drip into him as quickly as possible, saline. You see, there's a big blood loss. It's all about liquids in the body. First, to counter dehydration loss, the body steals from the blood supply, then from extra-cellular space, and the last reserve is from intra-cellular space. When that's exhausted it's death by dehydration. I'm surprised he's still with us.'
She wanted to throw up. The doctor took the other arm, without the drip in it, and firmly pinched the skin just above a bandage of dirty cloth on the wrist. When his fingers let go, the pinched flesh still stood erect.
'It would have gone down, where I pinched, if there was enough liquid in the body. It hasn't fallen back because there's no liquid there. It's an old trick.'
Beth thought the doctor talked because of his fear.
He reached for the cloth on the wrist and started to unravel it.
'We're hardly going to make a sterile area, but at least we can try – let's get shot of this filth for starters.'
Beth saw the plastic bracelet. In the sand, in the night, she had found it, had tried to examine it. His strength had prevented her. She saw the doctor peer down at it. She leaned closer and made out the printed reference number. The photograph was clear to her. Alongside it, under the number and the filled-in spaces for height and weight, below sex, was 'Issued by: Delta'. She gagged.
The doctor turned to her. 'Did you know about this?'
'No, I didn't. No.'
'Do you know what Delta is?'
'I think so.'
'Think, Miss Jenkins? Can't you do better than think? Let me help you. Delta is the name of the camp at Guantanamo Bay, the camp for terrorists. Good God, what have I got into?'
'I didn't know.'
The doctor seemed to gasp, to drag in a great gulp of air. 'For helping this man, I – and you, Miss Jenkins – could go to Chop Chop Square. May I assume your ignorance stops short of not knowing what Chop Chop Square is?'
She seemed to shudder, could not help herself. 'I know what Chop Chop Square is.'
The doctor went on – as if he had cut the square and the ritual of public execution after Friday prayers from his mind – in a flat monotone. 'You see, his tongue, and his mouth, they'll be dried out.
It's not a worry because the drip will fix that. He will have had an extreme shock from the effect of the missile detonation and that will have surged his adrenaline, further aggravating the dehydration process. First appearances, the head wound will have caused severe concussion but not much else. The leg is the greater problem, and the resulting blood loss. There are ten pints of blood in the body and it is my estimate that-'
'Are you going to save him?'
'My estimate is that he's lost at least two pints – I make no promises. There is blood loss and there are signs of advancing gangrene. Do you want him saved?'
She looked down. He lay on old sacks. His eyes were closed and his breathing was a slow, shallow struggle. The head wound was a long slice, below his forehead and above his right ear, and the hair had been cut back from it by the guide. As soon as they had arrived, the doctor had barked questions to her, for translation: What had been done for him? What, if anything, had he been given? What had been the patient's reaction? The guide had used a knife to cut away hair from the head wound, then had anointed it. He had wiped the gum from murr on to the wound's edges. Beth translated this as
'myrrh', and the doctor had muttered, 'Commiphora molmol', and had not criticized the Bedouin's use of the ancient healing resin. She saw the first drip bag draining steadily into his arm. A cloth lay across his groin. The leg wound was on the left side – there were flies around it. It was shorter in length than that on the skull, but wider, deeper, and the flesh around it had already blackened. He did not look, to Beth, like a threat. He seemed to her to rest in exhausted peace. She crawled closer to him and took his hand, both fists covering his fingers.