Chapter Five
Rashid, the guide, was at the front and walked beside the lead camel.
The Egyptian, the Saudi and the Iraqi rode, then came the baggage camels with the tents and the water, and they were followed by the three camels that each carried two of the boxes. At the back, walking, were Caleb and the boy, Ghaffur.
It was the third day since they had entered the desert.
The sun beat down on him. The heat pierced the ghutrah that wrapped his head and wound round his mouth and jaw. It burned his exposed cheeks and nose, and the reflected brightness devilled in his eyes… and the boy talked. In his ears was the soft singing of a light wind, the muffled strike of the camels' hoofs in the sand and the groaning murmurs of the Saudi. They left behind them a trail of broken sand, indented with hoofmarks and footprints, but even the gentle wind had the strength to shift loose sand into the little pits they had made. When he looked back, as far as he could see, their trail was already covered, lost. The boy questioned him as thoroughly as had any of the interrogators at X-Ray or Delta. Ahead of them, what he saw, through squinted eyes, was an endless sandscape to the horizon. Caleb set himself the target of. each horizon, a dune ridge that met a sky that was without a single cloud, and when that horizon and ridge was reached another faced them. The treble pitch of the questions was like a fly's attention, distracting but not irritating, and he ignored it as he would have ignored a fly at his nose.
Who was he? Where had he come from? What was his purpose?
Why did he travel? They might have been the questions of interrogators. Then he had hung his head and had quietly repeated the life story of the taxi-driver. Now he swatted the questions away with a smile or a grin that was hidden by his ghutrah. They skirted the higher dunes where they could but some were so vast that they could not be avoided and then Caleb and the boy helped to drag the stumbling, sliding animals up the lee side where it was steepest, and on the way down they would let the camels loose so that their angled legs danced awkward steps as they careered down. On top of each dune, driven by the winds, were razor ridges that made slight avalanches when broken. Mostly Caleb looked at his feet because then he did not see the horizon and had less sense of the pitiful slowness of their progress and the distance to the next dune's top… It was only the beginning. Last evening they had stopped at a well, and the camels had been allowed to drink their fill, and he had heard the guide, Rashid, tell the Egyptian that this was the last well on their route. That morning, after prayers, before the sun's heat had gathered, they had left the well, which was merely a little box of mud bricks with a dead wood beam across it and a rope stretching down to a hanging bucket – the water had been brackish, stale, foul: he knew because he had sipped it, then spat it out. His own questions played in his mind and mirrored the boy's. Who was he? Where did he come from? What was his purpose? Why did he travel? He could not have answered them.
They halted in the middle of the day – not for food or to drink, but to pray. They had eaten and drunk before they had left the well and would not do so again until they stopped and pitched tents. By walking at the back of the caravan, with the boy, Caleb had distanced himself from his unchosen companions. The last evening, before they slept, Fahd had told him briefly, with a sneer, of the disaster to Iraq, the fall of the regime, that American tanks had driven at leisure through the wide avenues of Baghdad. Then Tommy's glance had settled on Fahd and the story had been left unfinished… In front of him, astride the camels and perched on the humps, they all suffered.
The Saudi would yell out his pain, and twice the Egyptian had tumbled into the sand. Rashid had lifted him up without sympathy, then thwacked the camel's back to get it moving again. He sensed, constant in his mind, the resentment they held for him because they had waited twelve days for his arrival.
They climbed, scrambled, descended, and each in his own way would have prayed for another of the salt- crusted flats that made plateaux before the next line of dunes, and the heat was unforgiving
… and it was only the start. The questions had started again, the piping voice demanded answers.
'No,' Caleb said. 'You shall answer me.'
'What?'
He saw the triumph on the boy's face: a response had been won.
'How long do we travel?'
Mischief lit the boy's face. He grinned. 'How fast can you go? And the others? I think we go slowly.'
'How many days?'
'The camels drank this morning.'
'How many days can the camels travel after they have drunk?'
'For eighteen days.'
'Is eighteen days enough time?'
'How fast will you go?'
'What happens after eighteen days?'
'The camels die,' the boy, Ghaffur, said, and his eyes sparkled. 'But we must have water.'
'How many days can we live without water?'
'Two days, then we die.' The boy's smile wreathed his face.
'Has your father been on this route before?'
'I do not think so. Not with me. He has not said it.'
More questions bounced in Caleb's mind. All had the same core.
How did the guide, Rashid, know where he was going? What markers did he use? What pointers guided him? They were un-spoken. They had barely started, it was only the beginning… On every camel goats' stomach skins bulged with drinking water. Two days after that water was exhausted, they would die of thirst, and after eighteen days the camels would die. Caleb had not seen anything that told him men and beasts had gone this way before. The sands were pure. There were no tramped trails where hoofs or feet had been, and he did not think there was any possibility, however remote, that a vehicle could have ploughed through the soft, shifting sands of the dunes. Twice, in that morning's march, the guide had stopped and looked ahead, had seemed to sniff at the air, and his concentration had been total. The first time he had veered towards the right, a sharp, angled turn, and the second he had gone to the left, a softer turn. But the boy said his father had never been here before.
He realized it: their lives depended on the instincts of the guide who strode ahead of them, led them further into the sand wilderness.
Caleb asked, 'Does anyone come here?'
'God is here.'
He walked faster. The straps of his sandals were making blisters on his heels. He saw nothing that supported life, only the dunes – no track, no bush or dead wood, no trail. If he had not been important then the challenge of crossing the wilderness would not have been given him, but he did not know why he was important… He walked faster but his legs were leaden and his mouth cried out for water. The boy gambolled beside him, mocked him.
He staggered. The boy caught his arm, but Caleb angrily pushed him away, and the horizon was blurred by the sweat in his eyes. He seemed to see, in his mind, the bones of the dead who had exhausted their water, and the bones were stripped white by the sand and the wind. He blinked, then wiped the sweat savagely from his eyes. He had stared into a trap of self-pity, as men had done at X-Ray and Delta.
He screamed and the sound of it soaked into the dunes' walls and the cloudless sky.
He checked his list for the day – three interrogations.
They would all be dross. The Bureau and the Agency ruled in Joint Task Force 170, and the DIA ran a poor third, bottom of the heap. In his cubicle, Jed had scanned his overnight emails – nothing that couldn't wait – then turned to the files of the three men. The Bureau and the Agency worked the prisoners who stared at the ceiling and soundlessly repeated Holy Qur'an verses, or fed out the disinformation snippets, or gazed back at the questioner with silent contempt. The Bureau and the Agency had the big-time game of trying to break into the silence or the lies, and that was good, stimulating work. The men given to the DIA were the no-hopers, the unfortunates on the edge of nervous collapse. In the morning he would see a Kuwaiti, who said he was an aid worker in Jalalabad. In the afternoon, an Afghan would be brought in who said his father had given offence to a tribal chief in Paktia province and the chief had therefore denounced him. In the early evening, across the desk there would be a German passport holder from Tunisia who claimed the Pakistanis had handed him over when he was only an Arabic
