'Juan, you are standing in camel dung – not old dung, fresh dung.
Have you seen a camel's corpse? Have you seen bits of camel? I have not.'
He picked up the cardboard slip. He went to the platoon officer, broke his deep conversation with the deputy governor, showed him the slip and asked his question. It was denied. Was he sure? It was certain. He went back to Gonsalves.
'Look at it. It's a sales tag. It's for a Samsonite case. The case is called an Executive Traveller, and that'll be a hard-sided case. It's not been brought out. The slip is new, not old rubbish. The case is nol . there. I'm telling you, Juan, that a man came by camel and the camel crapped and the camel's gone, and a suitcase is gone, and Caleb Hunt is not here.'
Gonsalves was using a chip stone to scrape the dung out of his trainer's treads.
'As I see it, Juan, the situation's gone beyond our reach already. A suitcase is a weapon. What's inside a suitcase is what we fight against. A suitcase, its contents, frightens us half to death, but when a suitcase is missing it's beyond our reach, already… The future is out of our hands. The future is with the alertness of a Customs official at the end of a ten-hour shift, or an immigration girl with a queue stretching fifty paces in front of her, or the suspicion of a probationer police officer. We depend on them, they are our future, it's in their hands – whether the suitcase goes past them, whether they stop it, whether they wave it through or whether they ask for it to be opened. If not that case, then another – and another.. .
That's the damn future and it sort of crushes you when you see it up close.'
They stared at each other, each burdened by the enormity of it, each searching the future for comfort and not finding it.
'You're leaping, making too many conclusions, going too fast for me.'
'I know I am, but I feel them in my gut.'
The bodies in bags were going into the belly of the Chinook with the boxes and sacks. The deputy governor waved for them, as if he was a tour guide and an outing was running late. Wroughton thought Gonsalves was thinking of his kids and whether they'd ever walk past a suitcase set down in the street with an activated fuse running, or that he was thinking of everyone's kids. In Bosnia he had met young men, handsome and full of friendship, who had cleansed by atrocity. In Latvia he had met old men, who had dignity and charm and who leaned on sticks, and it was rumoured they had worked in concentration camps. In Wroughton's expectation, Caleb Hunt would be handsome and dignified, friendly and charming…
He felt, as never before, a desperate sense of shame because he had once allowed himself, in a perversion of jealousy, to cheer on the young man who would carry a suitcase. He was wearied, and thought himself dirtied, inadequate. .
'Do you want to come by tonight, Eddie, have some pizza, then throw some softball?'
'Thank you.'
The desert of the Rub' al Khali seldom offered up its secrets.
For a millennium, only the stupid, the brave or the fanatical -
Outsiders and strangers – have gone into the wilderness of sand, dunes and shallow mountains that cover a quarter of a million square miles of emptiness. They walked through the fire of the sun's heat, unwelcomed and unwanted. Around them were the bones of lost men and lost beasts, and the wreckage of vehicles and aircraft used by those who believed technology offered safety, and were wrong. Only the lucky survived the desert's enmity. It was said by the few Outsiders and strangers who had known luck and who had come through the fire that the Rub' al Khali had scarred them for the rest of their lives: they were changed men. They had no need of possessions or of any ideology, no need of friends or of money, no need of love or of belonging. Like the desert's winds, the scars stripped everything from them except the determination to exist – to take another step forward, and another, to reach a distant, hidden goal. But the Outsider or the stranger who had the luck to emerge from the sands had proven his worth.
The desert of the Rub' al Khali, the home of bones and wreckage, gave a great and humble strength to the few who survived its hardships, set them apart from their brothers and family. They had gone beyond death and it held no fear for them.
