Holding the Zero

Chapter Nine

She was alone, friendless, far from home.

She sat on the bonnet of the pick-up and waited. She was angry, blamed the tooth -right upper molar – was tired and hot. It was rare for Sarah to feel sorry for herself, but she did that day, and the tooth made it worse. The doctor sat in his own pick-up’s shade, parked behind hers, read a paperback, his Walkman earphones clamped over his head, being no bloody company. She wouldn’t have trusted him with her tooth. The two nurses, local women from Arbil, were in the cab of the third pick-up, fanning away flies and listening to a wailing singer on Radio Baghdad. Joe Denton, the sour little beggar, was a mile up the road, but what he did would make any bloody man sour. Her bodyguards and the interpreter were under a tree beside the road and sleeping.

She was a failure because she achieved a small damned part of nothing. Sarah could not have said truthfully that, in her time in northern Iraq, she had changed the lives of any of the communities with which she had worked. When she went, when they had found another high-principled lunatic to take her place, she’d be forgotten in a day. Her own high principles had long ago been battered out of her. Build a school, fill it with kids, appoint a teacher – a month later the school’s half empty because the bloody Stone Age fathers won’t permit education for the girls. Build a clinic, equip it, appoint a nurse -three months later the drugs have been stolen for black-market sale, and the nurse has been bought by a UN agency paying better money.

Her charity, Protect the Children, had a two-million-pound budget sloshing into northern Iraq, and the biggest single part of it was for the payment of the goddam loafing bodyguards who watched her, her colleagues, the warehouse, the offices and villas in Arbil and Sulaymaniyah. And no bloody way they’d give up their lives to protect her if she was targeted by the Iraqis, or fell foul of an agha. It was all a bloody mess.

The reinforcements had arrived, spewed from a convoy of lorries, and had set off up the hillside towards the line of disappearing ridges. Sarah had known nothing of guns before she had come to northern Iraq. Guns were what policemen carried, holstered on their hips, at home, and were shouldered by the toytown soldiers outside the palaces in London where she’d au paired for six months. Now she knew about guns. She could have reeled off the names, calibres and qualities of all the weapons carried up the hillside by the reinforcements. She had also seen what such weapons could do. There had been a significant battle – she knew because the word had reached her clinic that she should go to the rendezvous point again to meet casualties. If so many reinforcements were going forward, a bigger battle was copper damn certain.

The previous evening, the meat had been tough, stringy. Her tooth hurt. She might, God willing, only have loosened it; she might, her damn luck, have cracked the filling.

To get a tooth fixed would mean a three-day journey out of northern Iraq into Syria, and then a three-day journey back. She didn’t have a week to lose, not with more casualties forecast.

She saw the column clear the nearest ridge and start to wind down the slope.

She was trained as a paramedic. With her were a doctor and two local nurses. They did not add up to a goddam casualty clearing station. They had three pick-ups. Lorries had been available to bring the reinforcements, but had done an about-turn and disappeared, not waiting for the inevitable casualties. They were for her to clear up. Good old Sarah would cope, always coped.

‘Tell me something new,’ she muttered.

She started to try to count the litters being carried down the hill, then hitched herself off the pick-up’s bonnet and marched, big steps, to the tree where her bodyguards and the interpreter rested in the shade. She snatched a pair of binoculars from her senior bodyguard’s neck without bothering to ask and leaned against the tree to steady her view.

Sarah swore.

She had three pick-up vehicles, all fitted with carrying slots for stretchers. Three pickups could take eighteen casualties. With the binoculars she counted forty litters being carried down the hill, then snapped her fingers for the bodyguards and the interpreter to follow and walked back to her vehicle.

She knew what she needed to do and said where she wanted to be driven.

It was a short ride. Around two bends, along a straight stretch flanked by stone-strewn hillsides, past a clump of trees beside which wild flowers grew, and they came to the place where the two pick-up vehicles were parked off the road near to the small village of stone homes with iron roofing. Normally she’d have had time for the kids who ran to greet her. She tossed her hair back, and strode briskly through them, ignoring their expectant faces.

She saw Joe Denton. In the green meadow beyond the village were five lines of bright white pegs. Sitting in a small knot, short of the meadow, were his own guards and his own interpreter, and the local men to whom he was teaching his trade.

She thought him a miserable little man, but from what she knew of him it was typical that he would not allow any other man into the minefield until he had first been into it himself and made his evaluation.

He wouldn’t have seen her arrival. Facing away from her, he lay on his stomach, his weight on his elbows, his eyes on his fingers. He wore a biscuit-coloured pair of overalls, but there was a heavy armour-plated waistcoat over his chest, shoulders and back. A helmet with a Perspex visor covered his eyes. Sarah had seen mines detonated often enough from safe distances, and she’d seen all too often the mutilations they made. She didn’t think the waistcoat and the helmet would be of too much use to him if his fingers didn’t get it right.

She knew about mines: they were a part of the education she had received in northern Iraq, were not on any curriculum in Sydney or London. Even from this distance she could see that Joe Denton was carefully unscrewing the top cover of a VS50. She knew about the VS50: pressure on the pad in the top cover activated a firing pin into a stab-sensitive detonator, range of 24-30 feet. His hands were holding it and his eyes were nine inches from it. Purchasers of the product could tell the Italian factory whether or not they wanted a metal or a plastic plate inside it – a bastard for a de-miner to find and make safe, easy for a kid to step on. She watched as he unscrewed the top, the painstakingly slow movements of his fingers. He laid the detonator aside, then the disarmed mine. Bloody good – one down, about another ten million to go.

Sarah shouted, ‘Joe – Christ, I am sorry to disturb you. It’s Sarah. Please, I need a favour, like now.’

He didn’t turn to look at her. He was crawling forward and spiking the grass in front of him, probing for his next target.

‘Joe, I need help. Please.’

His voice came softly back to her. ‘What sort of help?’

‘There’s a load of casualties coming back from the other side. I don’t have the vehicle space. Can I borrow your trucks, and drivers, please?’

‘Feel free. Bring them back.’

‘You can spare them – great.’

‘I’m not going anywhere… Wash ’em out before you bring them back.’

In the culture of Joe Denton, and she knew it, she was just a tree hugger. She was a stupid bloody woman, interfering, adding to the dependency culture of Kurdish villagers, achieving bloody nothing, like all the rest of the huggers, the aid-workers. He put down the probe and started to work with a small trowel, the same as her mother used in the garden at home. She never saw his eyes, but she could picture them behind the visor.

Very clear, and very certain, eyes that could have looked right through her at that moment.

God knows how, but they did it. They squashed, forced, pushed fifty-two casualties into five pick-ups… Not all of them would make it to the hospital. There would be more room for the survivors by the time they reached Arbil.

In the late afternoon, when the stillness had settled, Omar found Gus, sitting against the low wall, gazing out over the slope of the hill that fell away from him. He saw the boy first, searching, then felt the glow of relief when the boy reached him. Behind the wall goats were penned, restless but quiet. He hadn’t waved to the boy, or called to him, but allowed himself to be found. Omar’s battered face showed his nervousness.

‘I did not know where you were.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘I have been through the town to find you.’

‘Have you?’

‘Are you very angry, Mr Gus?’

‘I am not angry, Omar, not any more.’

He could not have explained it to the boy, or to anyone he knew, how the early morning of the battle for Tarjil had changed him. The inner man was altered.

The boy squatted down beside him. ‘I have to take, Mr Gus, or I do not have anything.’

‘I understand.’

‘Because I have no father to give to me, and no mother.’

‘Yes.’

‘Worse than not having anything is to have your anger, Mr Gus.’

The boy shifted up to be against Gus’s shoulder. Back where he came from, because he was changed, none of them would have wanted to know him. The boy’s sharp smell against him was mingled with the stench of his own body. They would not have known his eyes, which were brighter, colder, staring out from his paint-streaked face. His trousers were torn alongside the reinforcement strips at the knees, and the foliage knitted into the hessian strips of the gillie suit was old and as dead as the man they had known.

‘They say your rifle jammed, Mr Gus.’

‘Do they?’

‘That you beat me in anger because your rifle jammed.’

He did not know where he could have started to explain to the boy, who had nothing, that it was wrong to steal from the dead. But if he had started, he would still have been the same man, would not have been changed. He thought that now there was no place for him to criticize the boy. He no longer had that right, or the inclination to exercise it.

‘Is that what they say?’

In the far distance was the flame. He made the promise to himself that he would walk to the flame, and offer no judgements on the boy, and the men who marched with him.

‘I told them, Mr Gus, that your rifle jammed.’

He sat in the last sunlight, which beat low against his eyes, and he slipped his arm over the narrow bony shoulders of the boy. He watched the flame burning close to the dipping sun. By comparison it was dimmer, less substantial. The boy wriggled and reached into his pocket, then took Gus’s hand and prised it open. In a small cascade the chains of gold, the bracelets, the dull rings and a thin wad of banknotes fell into Gus’s palm. He let them drop through his fingers. They lay in the dried dirt between his legs.

He looked down at the tawdry chains and rings. The grey dusk was slipping over the sloped ground that ran to the high, spurting flame, gaining ascendancy once more.

Gus held the boy close, because again the boy had nothing. He thought of the sniper, the man without a face. To himself, he laughed, and wondered whether the sniper, too, with his own people, claimed that his rifle had jammed.

‘I didn’t fire because I did not see the man I came for… You dispute my orders? Then, please, immediately, call the barracks at al-Rashid of the Estikhabarat, and my orders will be confirmed to you. You ask why I did not fire on random targets. My skill is as a sniper, I am not an artillery officer, I don’t play with tanks. You ask why I shot the commanding officer of the regiment. He was fleeing in the face of the enemy and abandoning his troops, he disgusted me. Myself, I was the last officer to leave the town.

Do you have any more questions for me, General?’

The general would never countermand an order given by the Estikhabarat. Not even he would dare to take action against an officer who had shot down a coward.

‘Did you see her?’

‘I saw her.’

‘But you did not have the opportunity to shoot her?’

He saw the general’s sly smile, which invited him to lay his foot on the mantrap. Major Aziz wondered where the brigadier was; he did not understand why, at a time of military movement and confusion, he was not in the communications bunker. He had not seen the brigadier at the crossroads, or on the road between the crossroads and Kirkuk. He thought that he stood among mirrors that distorted all of the images. He did not know who was his friend and who was his enemy.

He retorted, ‘I could have shot her. If I had shot her a minimum of a hundred civilians would have been cut down in the counter-strike. You were not there, General, you did not see those people fleeing. If I had shot I would have condemned them. They are citizens of our republic, yes? They have the protection of our President?’

He stood in front of the laundered general. He could smell the scent of the lotions on the man’s body. His own was streaked with sweat, the smears of camouflage paint dripped into his eyes and down his stubbled cheeks. The dust from his smock and the mud from his boots flaked to the floor around him.

The map was exposed on the table. At the centre of the map was the crossroads. The lines were drawn in bold Chinagraph from Kirkuk to the crossroads. It was what he understood. The lines were clarity. The mirror images were distortion. At that moment, if he had been able to telephone his wife, speak to her, explain to her, beg her for guidance, she would have told him that he was a simple man and that he should perform his duty.

The mirrors twisted his perspective, made ugly his sense of duty. He had never known the mirrors before he had allowed himself to be recruited and gone to lie each night on the flat roof waiting to take his shot. The plan was explained.

‘I lose a town for a few hours. I lose a Victory City for a few days, and here I destroy them.’ The general stabbed his finger for emphasis on the map. Stained with nicotine, it rested on the ground between the crossroads and Tarjil, at the furthest point of the Chinagraph lines. And the question was silkily put. ‘Do your orders permit you to fight there, Major?’

Aziz nodded and stumbled out of the bunker. In the last light of the day he went to find food for his dog and put behind him the images of mirrors that distorted simplicity.

‘Hi, Caspar, had a good day?’

‘How’d the shopping go?’

Luther was black, cheerful and had joined them four months before at Incerlik from time in Venezuela. Across the office space, Bill and Rusty were clearing their desks and shutting down their consoles for the evening. Luther was scheduled for night duty, and should have been sleeping in the day, but he’d caught a late ride into town. Three plastic bags were slapped down on the desk, which was dominated by the framed photograph of the guy’s family. The packages, wrapped in newspaper, poked out from them.

‘Went well. I got some good bronze stuff that’ll look nice on the walls at home, and a couple of drapes, and a bit of jewellery for Annie that a little oily mother-robber swore was out of a Van grave – you know, the Ararat mountain and Noah story. But what the hell? It was a decent price.’

‘Pleased to know that. I’ve had a poor sort of day.’ Bill and Rusty were gone. ‘Pull up a chair.’

Luther gangled towards him. The guy was tall enough for basketball. He sat. ‘Sorry to hear that, Caspar.’

‘I am talking about RECOIL.’

‘You have my full attention.’

‘I hate the Need-to-Know bullshit. There are three strands to RECOIL. I have the three, for my sins. Bill has one, Rusty has one, you have one.’

‘I have one, correct.’

Bill was briefed on the movement of an armoured column, Rusty on the uprising led by a woman, Luther covered the plan’s third element – the same in the Agency’s posts in Amman and Riyadh, a three-way split for the watchers.

‘Not any more. You had Major Karim Aziz and his goddam rifle down in Baghdad -but not any more. I hear, sadly on the best authority, that he’s been deployed to Kirkuk.’

‘Shit.’

‘Aptly said, Luther. It’s like a strand is cut.’

‘Frankly, Caspar, are two strands enough?’

‘Maybe, maybe not. I just don’t know…’

The last time Caspar Reinholtz had known the quivering, gut-turning apprehension as a plan went to the wire had been three years before. Two strands then. The promise of a culvert bomb near to the Abbasio Palace to catch the motorcade, and a mutiny by the 14

July Battalion. The cars hadn’t come, the culvert bomb hadn’t been fired, but the battalion had moved on the Baghdad Radio transmitters and a heliport used by the President – poor bastards. The arrest, torture, mutilation, execution of a cousin had provoked a general to lead the battalion in mutiny. One strand hadn’t been enough to carry the weight. The troops with their tanks had been massacred, the general had killed himself. That night, he’d written his report in frustrated anger, and known that, once again, the President sat in his goddam palace and laughed at a failure of American policy.

He’d sent further reports of the round-up arrests, the hangings in the Abu Gharib gaol, and hated writing them because he knew they all reeked of failure.

‘What I can tell you, if another strand goes, RECOIL is fucked sideways.’

‘You’ve been here for ever, Caspar. How many times have we been to the brink, had a really good scene in place, had the Boss for Life in the sights, had all the players lined and ready to go, and seen it all go down?’

Not a week went by without his superiors pursuing him for details of the chance of insurrection, mutiny, treachery in Iraq that would topple the President, the Boss for Life.

They waited at Langley, champagne on ice, for the day they could dance and sing on the man’s grave. Every photograph of the President, out of Baghdad, showed the shit laughing.

‘More times than I’d like to count, Luther. I have to play positive, it’s what I’m paid to be, but if either of the other two goes belly-up, it’s over. And I’m getting a bad feeling in my gut. That’s why I’ve had a poor sort of day.’

A plan of mutiny must spread.

In the last days, before execution, it must breathe and move beyond a cabal of key conspirators whispering in secrecy. At a crucial moment of maximum risk, the plan must be shared if the recruitment of others is to be won and it is to reach critical mass.

The brigadier was a hard, tempered fighting man.

His staff car drove him past the sentries and into the compound of an armoured division of the Republican Guard. It was said, in the eddy of whispered rumours that passed amongst the chosen families of the regime, that the niece of the general commanding the division of the Republican Guard had been propositioned for sex by a nephew of the President, had declined the overture, and had been insulted. The rumour said the nephew of the President had called the niece of the general a ‘barren useless goat’. When it happened and the drive south began, down the highway from Kirkuk to Baghdad, the brigadier’s armour must pass through Tuz Khurmatu, the garrison camp he now entered.

He was without fear. As a battalion commander he had survived the ferocious battles to hold the Basra road against the Khomeini zealot hordes, coming at his bunkers in human waves. As a brigade commander, he had been widely praised by his peers for keeping his unit intact as a cohesive fighting force confronting the American 1st Armoured Division. No-one had ever doubted his courage or his tactical skill to his face

… but no promotion had come his way. He should have had command of a division; he should have had the riches that were the reward of a divisional commander. The months had turned to years, the festering resentment had grown, and he had welcomed his recruitment to the plan. When it succeeded he would receive – it was promised him – the Defence Ministry. Also promised was a draft of one million American dollars.

He was saluted and ushered with deference up the steps of the general’s villa. If he had been a man who knew fear there would have been a slight crease of anxiety on the brigadier’s face, because a sniper had been transferred abruptly from Baghdad to Kirkuk.

Fear was not a sector of his character.

His boots beat on a marble floor, a door was opened for him.

The plan must be shared.

Joe Denton thought she’d probably done it herself. He walked round the two pick-ups with a surly stride. The seats in the front and the floor in the back of each vehicle had been hosed, scrubbed, wiped clean. Joe had heard the vehicles arrive at the roadside by the village, but he’d worked in the meadow until there was no longer light to continue.

Then he’d crawled back along the peg-marked path that was cleared. It had been a slow day, but the pace was the same as every other. Beside the road was the return for his work. He had extracted and made safe fourteen VS50s and three V69s. Next week he would allow the locally employed de-miners to start, not before; he was not yet satisfied, from his own expert skill, that the mines hadn’t shifted from the straight rows in which they had been planted. It would be at least three weeks before he could take a beer with the villagers and tell them they could use that meadow of best grazing grass. He finished the inspection of the vehicles.

‘Thanks.’

‘Thanks for loaning them.’

‘Do you want something to eat.’

‘Wouldn’t mind – like to hear about my day, what I heard?’

‘If you want to tell me,’ Joe said gruffly.

They were as lonely as each other. Neither had a friend amongst the Kurds they worked with. They were both employers, there to maintain discipline, had the authority to dismiss their workers and take the decisions that mattered. Without friends they existed in a vacuum of trust. They had little in common other than proximity and loneliness. She was the blond, weather-tanned girl from a Sydney suburb; Joe was the straggly built one-time soldier from the west of England. No point of their cultures intersected. She needed company, and with bad grace he needed the same.

They sat under a tree.

Sarah said, ‘We started with fifty-two casualties. There was every sort of wound you could imagine. We had brain damage, livers, spinal cords, stomachs, lungs, main arteries

– we had the lot – and they’d only brought the worst. Christ knows about the people left behind. We started with them all squashed in. There was room when we finished the journey.’

She laughed.

He thought it was the shock that made her laugh.

‘You know, Joe, when we finished we had them all bedded down in the pick-ups, nice and restful, thirty-seven when we reached Arbil. We had dropped off fifteen. The ones I was with told me about the battle. There’s a town called Tarjil over the ridges there and it was defended by a regiment, a whole bloody regiment. I’m not a soldier, Joe, but I would have thought soldiering is about watching your arse. They went frontal, up the main street. They ran against machine-guns – is it me or is that just dumb?’

Joe’s hand slipped to her arm to stop her. He waved in the gloom towards his bodyguards and made a gesture of eating. They should bring some food. He touched her again to tell her that he listened. He knew about fighting. His experience of war was close second-hand, moving behind the combat troops in Kuwait and making safe unexploded ordnance. After the guns had gone silent he had been in the Iraqi slit trenches and in their bunkers, dealt with their ordnance, and seen the slaughter’s end-game.

‘I don’t know how I’d be if I’d had half my guts taken away – maybe not too bloody happy. Not one whined. It’s all for freedom. They say they have to fight for their freedom. Is that crap, Joe? There’s this woman leading them called Meda, and she’s told them about freedom. I don’t suppose you’ve met her but I have, and they’d follow her wherever she goes. This morning, dawn, she took them to hell.’

He sat against the tree-trunk. She was beside him. He had his legs pulled up tight and his arms wrapped round them. His chin was down on his knees as he stared at the dark ground in front of his boots.

‘God, I don’t know what freedom is. No way I know what their idea of freedom means. The nearest I know about freedom is when my bloody contract here is finished and I get out and I’ve money in the bank to spend. Can you imagine, Joe, running up an open road into gunfire because that’s the way to find freedom? There’s a part of it that we’re involved in, you and me, Joe. It’s only a small part, but we’re in there.’

He looked up sharply.

Sarah said, ‘I took a letter from an old man. The old man, Hoyshar, is the woman’s grandfather. The letter was addressed to an Englishman. I gave you the letter, you promised you’d hand it on. Did you?’

The memory of what he’d done, and thought nothing of, welled back in him. He nodded. He remembered what he had forgotten, the name on the envelope. He stared into her eyes and didn’t answer.

She pressed. ‘Moving that letter ensured our bloody involvement… Apparently some sniper came out here because of that letter. A guy from England, didn’t have to. You know what they said, those guys who were wounded, with their guts hanging out, without arms, with holes in their lungs? The poor simple bastards say he is the best shot they ever knew, but they were hurt at Tarjil because his rifle fouled up and he couldn’t shoot over them. He came because of that letter I gave to you and you moved on. No-one else came.

After Tarjil they’re going to hit a brigade camp, and then it’s Kirkuk. And the daft fuckers think they’ll win because of one sniper and the woman.’

‘They’ll be out of the mountains,’ Joe said grimly, ‘be in the open. The tanks’ll put them through the mincer.’

‘Makes you feel small, doesn’t it? Involved but not able to help. Fucking small.’

‘I just do my job. That’s what I’m here for. Nothing more.’

Joe Denton, twenty years in the Royal Engineers, specialist in explosives, stared down at the shadowy pile of the seventeen mines he had made safe that day. In the backpack beside him, with his helmet and armoured waistcoat, were the seventeen detonators. If Joe, the corporal, had not been screwing the daughter of a Military Police officer on his last posting in Germany, if he’d not smacked the officer’s chin when ordered to stay away from his little angel, he’d still be in the army, and would be without involvement.

‘I’m thinking of all that shit going on out there, while all I do is sit back here and pick up the fucking pieces.’

The food was brought to them. They sat under the tree and the night settled around them.

‘I had toothache this morning, Joe. What I saw today made me forget it. Toothache just doesn’t compete. It’s all in the mind.’

‘My last war… What a hell of a way to finish.’

‘Prizes, awards – hey, and rises. I hear cash registers.’

‘You want to get killed, Mike? Try somewhere to get killed that people care about, Dean. It’s the way the world works.’

They were still in Diyarbakir’s premier league watering-hole, the bar of the Hotel Malkoc, huddled around a table by the window.

‘It’d be the ultimate bow out.’

‘I might get a professorship in media studies, out in the Midwest.’

‘Don’t kid yourself. People wouldn’t even bother to look in the atlas to find where you were killed.’

It had been the end of another fruitless day of obstruction and failure, capped by a lousy meal. Mike, Dean and Gretchen had swapped their sob stories, and had moved on to the inevitable – the pull-out, the booking of air tickets – when the Russian had sidled up and greeted them as old friends.

‘How did he know about us? I mean, how?’

‘Because we talk too much, Mike.’

‘That German, I say it myself, he is a complete sod.’

Gretchen pulled a face, her mouth curled in disgust. So, they had been talking flights out from Diyarbakir when the stiletto-thin German, Jurgen, had intruded into their group and made the introduction. The proposition had been put. The German and the Russian were behind them, leaning comfortably at the bar. Fifteen thousand dollars was the price.

‘I’d be putting my reputation on the line, asking the office for a guarantee of five thou.’

‘They’d crucify me if they paid up and he was a conman.’

‘It’s not the point. The point is the danger. Don’t you see that? It’s the danger of going in there, and nobody caring.’

‘Then we’ll just have to make them care,’ Mike said boldly. It had been written of him in a television rag that he’d dodged more bullets than John Wayne. The image was there to be maintained. He twisted and waved to the Russian to join them.

Gretchen had her eyes tight shut. She grimaced. ‘I can’t quite believe it is actually true.’

‘Actually true…’ The Russian beamed behind her, then bent to offer the posture of confidentiality. ‘You talk about the woman. Twenty-four hours ago, in Iraq, I was with her. I met her. You have the word of Lev Rybinsky. Look at my feet, look at my clothes, look at the mud. I walked across mountains to meet her, to be with her, and walked back.

I am very sincere with you. The money is not for me, it is to open the door of the route to her. There is no profit in this to me. I have come to you because of my love for the freedom of an abused people. The world should know about her. For me, there would be no financial gain.’

‘You’d take us?’ Mike asked, breathily.

‘Of course.’

‘We’d see combat?’ the American demanded.

‘She is marching to Kirkuk and she will not stop. The storm is gathering – yes, my guarantee, you would see combat.’

‘We would walk with her?’ Gretchen queried nervously.

‘You would walk beside her – for fifteen thousand American dollars – into a liberated Kirkuk. I regret I cannot drop the price. Did you know there was a foreign sniper with her?’

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE.

4. (Conclusions after interview with Ray Davies (owner of Davies and Sons, haulage company) conducted by self and Ms Carol Manning -transcript attached.) TEMPERAMENT: AHP is an intensely private individual, and is therefore probably best known by his employer. He has worked for the company all his adult life, starting as a teaboy/office runner aged 18, and rising to the position of Transport Manager. Much is made at the company of the stressful pace of the job – much is also made of AHP’s ability to cope with that stress. Words used to describe his TEMPERAMENT are

‘phlegmatic’, ‘patient’ and ‘calm’. They are the descriptions of a character most appreciated by instructors in sniper arts. Interestingly, the owner knew next to nothing of AHP’s life away from the workplace. His shooting passion with the Historic Breech-loading and Small-arms Association was not mentioned. He brought his partner with him to social events, the Christmas party etc., but his personal life was lived behind a closed door. However, importantly, it was made clear that AHP lacks a ruthless side to his character. (The example is minor but indicative of character.) He was unsettled when given the task of sacking a driver who was persistently behind schedule on trans-European journeys, and ‘wriggled’ over clear evidence that a second driver was claiming paid sick leave for a bogus ailment. The TEMPERAMENT is excellent for the role AHP has given himself, but I doubt he has the necessary ‘steel’ for combat. Also, without a long knowledge of MILITARY WEAPONS and MILITARY TRAINING, his chances of medium-term survival remain slim to non-existent.

Willet pondered on that last sentence.

He had found, each time he wrote his notes for Ms Manning’s line manager, an increasing urge to talk up the positive character points of this man. The urge was based, and Willet recognized it, on a growing sense of jealousy. He believed that somehow, and in the most unobtrusive way, he was belittled by Augustus Henderson Peake.

He never moved without an order to do so. In his analysis, he was an automaton and a robot. But Peake had made his own decisions, had packed up and travelled on his own impulses. Willet would never be his own man, not now and not once he had left the military. From the jealousy was born knowledge and admiration.

The concept of a transport manager affecting the course of a faraway war was laughable, of course, yet the worm of doubt ate at him. He remembered an old army video, shown to the sniper course at Warminster in monochrome, that had listed the sort of civilians who might have the required qualities. Not a transport manager among them, but… A fisherman can sit all day at a canal bank and not see his float go down: he has the virtue of patience. A steeplejack can climb to great and dangerous heights, knows his safety is in his own hands, that a false move will end his life. A countryman can shoot straight and move silently, is cunning and thinks ahead to anticipate the movement of his prey. A clerk can spend an entire day with columns of figures, has the priceless power of concentration that shuts out distractions.

All ordinary men, and all fashioned into killers by the instructors. That was the answer.

Peake had the necessary virtues, but not the military weapons and tactics. Willet realized that what had started as a tedious, late-at-night instruction to pry into an ordinary man’s life was turning into a search for the Grail.

He printed what he had written and phoned out for a delivery pizza. Waiting for it to arrive, he wondered whether he undersold that ordinary man, whether Peake could survive, whether the forces arrayed against him were too great and whether that enemy was closing in on him.

Late at night, another simple man – who knew only his chosen trade – went back to the war.

He had not taken the chance of a bath, or gone to the officers’ quarters to eat, or telephoned his wife.

In Aziz’s backpack was more food for the dog, and for himself there was the filled water canteen, goat’s cheese and bread.

He was driven in an open jeep towards the crossroads, away from the flame. When next he saw her, whether there were a hundred or a thousand between them, he would shoot her. It was the decision of a man who craved simplicity. He would shoot her, over the heads of a hundred or a thousand, regardless of the consequences of a counter-strike, then go with his dog to hunt the sniper who opposed him. With the clean wind on his face, he thought that he had broken the distortion of the mirrors. He was well read. There were many books in English on military history in the library of the Baghdad Military College. If he wanted to learn their secrets, he had to have the language and over the years he had taken the chance to read textbooks, pamphlets and manuals of the British army. A book had told him of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. It had troubled the simple soldier and, perhaps, had led him along the road of recruitment and mirrors.

Stauffenberg had lost faith in his Fuhrer, did not believe in a hopeless war. Stauffenberg was the bomb carrier and had failed, was shot like a dog in the hooded headlights of lorries. How was he regarded by those who lived and fought in Normandy and in the Russian marshes? The mirrors did not make him a hero but a traitor. To troops remorselessly retreating, Stauffenberg was the man who betrayed his fellow soldiers…

He would shoot her.

He broke the mirrors in his mind, and after he had shot the witch he would hunt down the sniper.

Gus had slept, woken, started, and at that moment not known where he was.

‘Did you dream, Mr Gus?’

‘No. I dreamed nothing.’

He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. His hand dropped to the dirt beside his legs. The small, cold shapes of the chains, bracelets, rings, and the rolled notes were still there. The boy could have pocketed them in the darkness while he slept, and had not. He hadn’t dreamed of home. Home was behind him. Home would not have understood that a boy thieved from bodies because he had nothing. The boy had not pocketed the trinkets and Gus felt a humble love for him, and couldn’t have told them at home about that love. Far away, the flame burned at Kirkuk. Between him and the flame was the infinite spread of the darkness.

‘Will you be angry again?’

‘That’s in the past.’

‘Will the rifle jam again?’

‘No, not this time.’

‘It is what I said. The mustashar came with Meda. They wanted to talk to you about the rifle, but I would not let them wake you. I said that you had cleaned the rifle and it would not jam again. They wanted to hear it from you but I did not let them wake you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Will you tell me, Mr Gus, a story of Hesketh-Prichard?’

He closed his eyes. He let the quiet seep against him. ‘Right, yes

… It’s a story that Major Hesketh-Prichard tells about a man whose bravery and dedication he much admired – and that man was an enemy. The troops may have hated the enemy. Snipers weren’t taken prisoner by those in the trenches, they were shot in cold blood there and then. But a sniper doesn’t hate his opponent. There is respect for the skill of the other. He will try to kill him, hope to succeed, but there is always respect.’

‘Please, Mr Gus, the story.’

‘You’re an impatient little sod… There was a big-game hunter, Jim Corbett -elephants and lions were what he killed before the war – he told this story to Hesketh-Prichard. Corbett always gave names to the enemy’s snipers and he called this one Wilibald the Hun. Wilibald the Hun was credited with killing more than twenty British soldiers. For days they looked for Wilibald across the turnip field in no man’s land but couldn’t find him. There had to be a trick to make him fire when the snipers on the British side were all looking for him. On a cold winter’s morning, with a frost over the field, they put up a heavy steel plate with an observation slit in it. He fired at the slit, shot right through it, but that wasn’t Wilibald’s mistake. The mistake he made, and it cost Wilibald his life, was to fire early on a cold morning. The gas from the rifle, when there’s cold air and no wind, hangs for a few moments. It makes a marker. All the snipers fired into the gas. They went forward. Wilibald was in the turnip field only seventy yards from the British line, way out in front of his own trenches. He was covered in turnip leaves. He was middle-aged, very ordinary, rather fat, and he was respected for his courage and his skill… but Wilibald the Hun made the one mistake and that’s all it takes.’