shouted at him and he had flailed the stick around him, but had not seen them.
Caleb had been one of the kids. He had thought of the old man beside the canal, his stick and the jeers, and he rode with Hosni.
Hosni was so frail, so weak, and Caleb thought his courage was an inspiration.
'What, Hosni, can you see?'
'I see what I need to see. I see the sand, I see the sun.'
'Is there something a doctor can do?'
'A year ago, perhaps there was something. Two years ago, for certain a doctor could do something. We were hunted, first in the Tor a Bora, then in caves on the border. I could not go to Quetta or to Kandahar to find a doctor. I was with the Emir General. If I had gone to find a doctor and been taken… I knew too much to go to Quetta or Kandahar. In Oman I saw a doctor.'
'Was there nothing he could do?'
The head came up and the smile cracked the face; the caked sand spilled down from it. 'He could do something. He could tell me. I have from the doctor a diagnosis. It cannot be treated, it is not reversible, it deteriorates.'
'What?'
'Maybe I washed in dirty water. Maybe I waded a stream that was polluted. It could have been long ago, right back in the days when we fought the Soviets and I was beside the Emir General. The doctor had a fine name for the condition, onchocerciasis, and a finer name for the parasite, Onchocerca volvulus. The doctor in Oman was a very educated and well-read man. The parasite is a worm that can live for fourteen years in the body. The female enters the body through any lesion, a scraped knee or cut foot, as you go through dirty and polluted water, and it breeds larvae. Soon your body is the home of many millions of worms and they roam through you. Some, it does not need to be many, make the long journey to the backs of your eyes.
They live there, the little worms, eat there and breed there. The diagnosis is eventual blindness.'
'How much time do you have?'
'I have enough time to do what I wish to do. Do not be frightened for me.'
'Tell me.'
'I will not live to go blind.'
'Explain.'
'There is a suitcase or a bag that a brother prepares. In the bag are materials. I handle them, I work with them. I have said I will do it.
To touch the materials is to walk away from life. When the bag or case is sealed it can be carried in safety. I dream of it. The dream sustains me in this hell. And I dream of the young man who will carry the case or the bag, and he is my friend.'
'I am your friend, Hosni.'
'Do you hate enough?'
The smell of Fahd's body played in his nose. The noise of the thunder was in Caleb's ears, and he saw the fire exhaust from the missile streaming down from the sky.
'I hate enough. I will carry a case or a bag.'
Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay.
Exercise day… Another week gone by. Exercise, then his shower.
He was escorted into the dirt yard. It was the second time that he had been led into the exercise yard and had seen the new goalposts.
His hands were manacled. A chain led from the manacles to his waist, circled by another chain. More chain link hung down from his waist and reached the shackles on his ankles. The guards let go of his arms. 'Off you go, kid – go get your circuits in.'
The football pitch was in the centre of the yard, with white lines marked out across the dried mud. Around the pitch, a line of men shuffled the circuit, each twenty paces apart, their steps restricted by the length of chain between the shackled ankles, and listened to the shouts from the pitch where twenty or twenty-five prisoners chased a football. The most recent edict at Delta had invited prisoners to apply for extra exercise. Caleb had been confused by it. He had not known whether he should volunteer, whether it would help the deceit, or whether it would compromise him. If he had taken up the invitation would he then be expected to inform on fellow prisoners?
He had not put his name forward. He had fifteen minutes of exercise ahead of him, but the football-players had an hour of chasing the ball.
A big American, tracksuited, ruled the pitch with a whistle. He loathed them, all of them, loathed them whether they wore a tracksuit and praised, whether they wore the bright sun shirts and interrogated, whether they had the camouflage uniform and the key bars to the manacles and shackles.
He did his circuits. When a goal was scored, the American blasted his whistle and applauded. He looked at the players, dancing because the ball was in the back netting, and tried to remember the faces. If any were moved to the cell next to his, he would be more careful, would guard against the smallest mistake.
At the end of his last circuit, his escort gestured for him.
His arms were held as he was led out of the yard. He would not exercise for another week.
'You could be doing that, kid, playing soccer. You've only got to ask.'
He did not understand. He smiled nervously at the guard. He had learned his part.
He was taken to the shower block.
With the loathing was contempt. He felt superior to the men who escorted him, unmanacled and unshackled him, who watched him undress, who saw him into the cubicle where the water sluiced down on him. He did not come cheap. They would not turn him with the offer of a game of football. He deceived them. The certainty of his superiority gave him strength.
A towel was thrown to him.
Marty lay on his back on the camp bed. Beside it, propped against the chair on which his clothes hung, was the picture, his only valued possession. Behind the glass, spattered with sand grains and misted with condensation, was Marty's hero; the hero at Gundamuck who had wrapped round his chest the colours of the 44th Regiment.
Lieutenant Souter, a hundred and sixty-two years before, had survived the last stand of his troops and gone home, feted.
Marty aspired to heroism, and did not know how he would achieve it.
If he had still been at Bagram, Marty would now have been in the Officers' Club. He would have been a centre of attention. The beers would have kept coming. The Agency people would have been round him, pilots, sensor operators, interrogators and analysts, and the cans would have kept coming for free. He had done a launch, seen the Hellfires go, watched the cloud mushroom up. It would have been his party time, his moment of heroics, if he had been at Bagram.
But he was not, he was in this shit-hole.
At Bagram Marty would have had an audience, with supervisors and ranking agents doing cheer-leading. His praises would have been sung. And the talk would have moved on to him bringing Carnival Girl home, with the tanks showing empty and the wind plucking at her as she touched down. He was a goddamn hero but no one was around to tell him.
The wind battered at the tent's sides. The sand came in between the flaps and the ground sheet, and the roof billowed. A solitary beer, given him by George, was half hidden on the chair by his clothes, which were hitched on the back. Marty hadn't pulled the can's ring.
The last thing he'd heard from Oscar Golf was a demand for
'soonest' information on potential damage to the port-side wing-tip of Carnival Girl in the touch-down. There had been no hero-gram out of Langley, no congratulation from goddamn Gonsalves, nothing. He had staggered out of the Ground Control, had been close to spilling himself on to the sand at the foot of the trailer steps, and George had given him the beer, which hadn't come from an icebox.
George had gone off in the jeep to tow the bird off the runway. Lizzy-Jo had been slumped, dead to the world, over her end of the workbench. He should have slept, but he could not. Again and again, searing in his mind, he saw the lurch of the platform when the first Hellfire went away from Carnival Girl, the ball of fire going down, and the camels breaking their line of march, then the cloud – and the second missile going into that cloud. Could not
