THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER
By Gerald Seymour
Overlook. 400 pp. $24.95
(Reuters)
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This new novel by the smart, prolific Gerald Seymour isn't just abreast of the headlines, it's ahead of them. Set less than three years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, it posits what appears to be actual fact -- an al Qaeda severely damaged by Western assaults in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but regrouping slowly, purposefully, patiently -- and from that presents a fictional premise that is all too close to credible reality: A young al Qaeda operative, possessed of "persuasive leadership and pride, violence and vanity, commitment and courage," escapes from his American captors and begins a long journey back to his terrorist brigade, "the only family he acknowledged," to take up a mission that, if successful, would make the events of Sept. 2001 mere firecracker explosions by comparison.
The notion of al Qaeda as family is central to The Unknown Soldier, and Seymour explores it in ways that deserve close attention. He scrutinizes the theme most carefully in the words of a psychologist, "from a north-east English university," who addresses a gathering of senior officers of the Security Service in London. His words must be quoted at some length:
"What we have to understand -- a disturbing and unwelcome truth but nevertheless a truth -- is that terrorist leaders have a better understanding of 'profiling' than the people charged with countering political violence. On your side, ladies and gentlemen, you look for obvious and naive stereotyping -- not so with your opposition. They -- in particular Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants -- have refined a skill in identifying young men of varying social backgrounds and economic advantage who are prepared to make supreme sacrifices for a cause. . . . We are fond of using the word 'brainwashed' about our enemy. It is inappropriate and erroneous. . . . The stereotype of the 'loner' is a beaten path, and if you follow it you will be the beaten men and the beaten women. I urge you to look elsewhere. Where? For quality, for ability, for the best -- because it is those young men that the lieutenants of bin Laden search for. Imagine, also, the excitement of being a part of that select fugitive family, picture the personal self-esteem, conjure up a sense of the adventure and purpose. No, no, I promise you, the young man who can damage us, wound us to the quick, revels in that excitement -- his true religion -- and in the adventure that life brings him."
The young man who is the protagonist of The Unknown Soldier -- not a hero by any means, but not wholly a villain either -- is named Caleb, though that name "was his past, and erased." Under the tutelage of a charismatic terrorist known only as "the Chechen," he has assumed the name "Abu Khaleb, and that was his present." But as the novel opens, he and his compadres are ambushed by American troops as they ride in a van through a remote corner of Afghanistan. All of them are killed except Caleb, who is seized and flown to the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
There he is given a plastic bracelet "with his photograph on it . . . and the reference US8AF-000593DP," but the name on it is neither Caleb nor Abu Khaleb but Fawzi al-Ateh. That was the name of the driver of the van in Afghanistan, who had poured out the sad tale of his family's destruction as they drove toward their unexpected appointment with death and who had handed his wallet to Caleb, with his taxi-driver's ID card and a photograph of the driver and his dead wife and children -- a driver whose photo image "almost matched" Caleb's own.
At Guantanamo, Caleb sticks to the taxi driver's story, steadfastly and convincingly. Every effort by his interrogators to trick him into inconsistency or contradiction is turned aside. He is a poor Afghan taxi driver who just happened to have these men in his van; his wife and children and family had been killed by an aerial attack on their village; he is all innocence. Finally, although his chief interrogator -- Jed Dietrich, a 36-year-old human intelligence "specialist on the staff of the Defense Intelligence Agency" -- is away on vacation, he is shipped back to Afghanistan, where he is to be dumped at the Pol-i-Charki jail. En route, he pleads to be allowed to relieve himself, and when he steps into roadside scrub he runs for his life. One shot is fired, but an officer protests that "he isn't worth killing," and the convoy moves on.
Thus begins his arduous journey, one that he prays will return him to his al Qaeda "family." Elsewhere a metal suitcase is purchased, wired as required to set off a "dirty" radioactive bomb, and sent on its way to meet him. He is "the chosen one," a man marked, as a compatriot puts it, to "strike a great blow against a common enemy," a man of whom a poet named Hasan Abdullah al-Qurashi wrote: "Glory in life is complete for the one who dies for a principle, for an ideal, for a grain of sand." As he begins his trek, he is told by an Egyptian named Hosni:
"You are the Outsider, you are separated from us -- I am not offended. To us, the Outsider is the most valuable. He can go where we cannot. He has access where we do not. He can walk unseen where we are noticed. Who are we? Lesser creatures. What use do we have? Small, nothing that is strategic. We will watch you go, and we will pray for you, after you have disappeared into darkness, but we will listen to the radio and will hope to learn that the trust given you was not wrongly placed."
Caleb's path to his rendezvous with his al Qaeda family takes him across one of the most formidable landscapes on Earth: the Rub al Khali, "Arabic for 'Empty Quarter' . . . what the Bedouin simply know as 'the Sands,' " about a quarter-million square miles of Arabian desert. It is this that Lawrence of Arabia crossed, and readers who know David Lean's incomparable film will find themselves in familiar territory as Caleb and his small party struggle to cross it -- an undertaking so similar to that in the movie that it even includes a quicksand episode.
This is not to say that The Unknown Soldier is a spinoff of "Lawrence of Arabia" but that it is an intensely cinematic novel in which visual images are powerfully drawn and made positively palpable. The desert comes to life in Seymour's hands, but so too does much else: the squalid, brutal cells and corridors of Guantanamo, the tiny room from which young Americans guide pilotless Predator drones over Afghanistan, the walled enclaves in which foreigners live and work in Riyadh, the drab terraced neighborhoods of industrial England in which intelligence officers try to track down Caleb's roots. Since Seymour's background is in television journalism (the real thing, out in the field, not the Gong Show circus to which TV news has descended in this country), his gift for the visual is hardly surprising, but he reminds us that words can conjure images as brilliantly as pictures can, and that these images are all the more compelling for being the result of a collaboration between his own imagination and the reader's.
The Unknown Soldier is being marketed as a "thrillingly suspenseful novel from one of the world's masters of espionage fiction," which is accurate enough and presumably will do it good in the bookstores, but it sells the book short. Like the work of other writers to whom Seymour is somewhat predictably compared -- Charles McCarry, Robert Littell, Alan Furst and, of course, John le Carré -- The Unknown Soldier is more than a thriller. In time, events will outpace it, and the specifics of its plot will lose their immediacy, but the deeper matters with which Seymour concerns himself will retain their pertinence and importance. Today's and tomorrow's events are the framework around which the novel is constructed, but it is about people, not bombs. It is about why people do what they do, believe what they do, love and hate as they do. Psychologically it is acute and sensitive. If this is merely "genre fiction," then perhaps we need to take a closer look at what we rather smugly call "literature." •
Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.
