Holding the Zero

Chapter Ten

‘The tanks will not be used,’ Meda said.

A fire still burned in the roof of the police station’s main block and the tang of the smoke caught in Joe Denton’s nostrils. He had hiked blindly across the mountains all through the night; in an hour it would be dawn. Other than when he had smacked his girlfriend’s father’s face, he had never in his adult life done anything as stupid as leave the safety of northern Iraq and travel through the punched hole into government territory.

The thanks he received were, he felt, bloody minimal.

‘They will not use the tanks they have in Kirkuk.’ She turned on her heel and stalked off.

Arrogant cow. Arrogant good-looking cow, though, none the less. Joe watched her, saw the firm roll of her hips as she walked away from him, and before that he’d seen the clean-cut lines of her chest where her blouse was unfastened.

Scattered through the police-station yard were huddles of men who waited without protest for her to find the time to come, hear their problems, talk to them. He had tried to help. He had joined a column of reinforcements, walked through the goddam night, unloaded the mines from the backs of two mules and believed he would be welcomed, thanked. On the hike across the high wilderness, Sarah had talked of the woman, said she was the last best chance, was unique, not said she was an arrogant cow. So, they didn’t want his bloody mines… There had been an older man near to her, a pace behind her.

When the woman had dismissed the chance of tanks being deployed out of Kirkuk, the older man had gazed to the heavens as though argument were pointless – and then had trailed away after her.

Joe settled himself against a truck’s wheel and closed his eyes. Sarah had gone to the town hospital to get busy and executive and organize a convoy to take more wounded back north where they could receive better treatment. She knew where he was. He sat close to the heap of mines, cold, hungry, his pride punched. For her and her march south, he had broken the inviolate rule of the charity that employed him. He had taken sides. He had stepped off the lofty pedestal on which he was supposed to stand. He had only been a corporal in the Royal Engineers, but he’d learned enough about military tactics to believe that he would have been of some use to these bloody peasants.

‘Godforsaken fucking place!’ he spat.

‘I thought you were sleeping.’ There was a gravelly chuckle above him.

Joe stared into the darkness, blinked and saw the shadowed outline of the older man.

It came in a torrent. ‘Don’t mind me – I’ve only put my job on the line. I came here to do something that is almost criminal, to bring you mines. I’ve dug them up and now I’m offering them to you to bury them again. Stupid or criminal, take your pick. I thought I was helping. But it appears I’m surplus to requirements.’

‘You have our gratitude.’

‘It’s a hell of a way to show it. She-’

‘She is what takes us forward.’

‘She is an arrogant cow.’

‘She is what has brought us here. I am Haquim, the mustashar. I am, if I am listened to, the adviser on tactics. You are a military man, Mr Denton?’

Joe said bitterly, ‘Not an officer, not a bloody Rupert. Corporal, ex, Royal Engineers, if it matters…’

The older man squatted beside him. ‘Would you know, Mr Denton, how – where – to lay mines for the maximum effectiveness, with an expert sniper, against tanks?’

‘She said there would be no tanks.’

‘That’s what she said…’

Joe took a deep breath, as if it were a moment when his involvement firmed. ‘Yes, I might be able to help you in that area.’

The older man unfolded a map, shone his torch down on it and pointed to the position of Fifth Army in Kirkuk and the crossroads outside the city. His finger traced a line on the route that linked them. He remembered what he had said to Sarah, a few minutes less than twelve hours before: the tanks would mince them. He was told what weapon the sniper carried, the calibre and capability of the ammunition the rifle fired. His face was close to the ragged map. Joe talked softly, carefully, asked for paper and a pencil, and for the man to give him a couple of minutes to think it through. He had an idea but it would be a betting man’s throw.

By the time Haquim returned, he had drawn the plan. Haquim folded away the map.

Joe asked, ‘Where’s the sniper?’

Haquim shrugged.

‘I need to talk to him,’ Joe said. ‘He’s the one who has to get it right. If he doesn’t get it right, and the tanks come, then everyone’s toast.’

The crossing of the mountains was hard going. There were no lights to guide them and the German hissed a protest each time they kicked a rock or set a stone tumbling down from the path.

Four hours into their march the discipline was fracturing.

‘God, what I’d give for a drink…’ Mike whispered.

‘A bed, a clean bed…’ Dean murmured.

Gretchen soldiered on, her mind apparently elsewhere.

They heard Jurgen’s guttural whisper for quiet. Did they not realize the density of Turkish army patrols?

‘All right for that human fucking parasite, he’s not carrying half a ton of gear.’ Mike’s cameraman, propositioned late in the evening, had flatly refused to take part in a night march over the mountains from Turkey into northern Iraq. Equally resolutely, Dean and Gretchen had declined to help Mike with the camera equipment. If they bounced a patrol they risked being shot out of hand in the darkness, or they faced arrest, thuggery, unpleasant interrogation, and a week’s sojourn in Diyarbakir’s military gaol.

Significantly, the German, Jurgen, carried nothing.

They were at a narrow point in the path, which was good enough for low-life smugglers, but for the journalistic pride of London, Baltimore and Frankfurt it was hell.

There was a cliff wall to the left, a loose-stoned track for them to walk on, and a precipice to the right. Each of them had an idea of the depth of the precipice: the last rock dislodged by Gretchen had slid from under her boot and fallen, fallen for an age before they’d heard its distant impact. The bastard Russian, back at the Hotel Malkoc, with a drink and a clean bed and probably a woman, would meet them in the morning. He’d said it was impossible for them to be hidden in a lorry for the border crossing. They’d walk -maybe get shot, or at least captured – and if they made it through he’d meet them.

‘After we come back, I promise to do that swine proper damage.’

‘ If we come back.’

‘Get positive, Gretchen – Mike, you’ll have me to help you.’

The wind ripped at their clothes, the cold shredded them and all for a story about a woman leading a distant army, talk of freedom, the prospect of air-time and column inches. They held hands and made a chain, and stumbled on after the German. Holding hands was their small gesture to each other of solidarity – if one went over the goddam precipice they’d all go.

‘Why are we doing this?’

‘I am doing this, Gretchen, for my real-estate mortgage.’

‘Anyone who does this, goes into northern Iraq and not for money, is an idiot,’

Gretchen said solemnly.

He saw the man.

The dawn came slowly, layering the light across the ground. Before its arrival, Aziz had crawled for an hour in a network of rain gullies until he had reached a vantage-point where he could conceal himself and watch. It was the furthest forward he could go and he was settled beside the collapsed roof of rusted tin and the broken wooden frame of what had once been a shepherd’s shelter. He could go no further forward because the ground ahead of him was scratched empty and bare by the wind. Not even his dog, resting beside his knee, could have crossed that ground and remained concealed.

The dawn had come from over the high hills to the left of the man. Beyond the wind-whipped, sun-scorched ground that stretched three times the range of the Dragunov was an isolated clump of rocks rubbed smooth by the elements. The man sat on the rocks and made no effort to conceal himself.

Aziz’s eyesight, unaided, was not adequate, but with his telescope he could see him clearly.

As the sun rose, as the heat settled on the ground, his view of the man would become distorted, but the air at dawn was cold enough for him to see the man in sharp focus.

He understood why the man showed himself. It was a challenge.

Through the telescope, Major Karim Aziz watched the man who was his enemy. He saw the dirt and the dust that cloyed the overalls, and the confused tangle of the hessian strips, and he saw but did not recognize the shape of the rifle that was held loosely across the man’s thighs. The face of the man was paint-smeared and daubed with mud, and there was a dark shadow of stubble over his cheeks and chin. Sitting on the rock with his rifle, the man seemed at peace.

Aziz knew from his experience of the battles against the Iranians that there were times when soldiers sought calm, as if at those moments the hate in them for their enemy died.

Later, they would fight… they would stalk… they would kill. In the quiet, killing men looked for the faces of their enemy as if there was a need to prise away the masks, as if to find something of brotherhood. He could not reach the man. The flat, featureless ground between them prevented him from a hidden stalk and a single rifle shot, and the man knew it.

He was disturbed, could not lift away the mask – and, confused, could not make the brotherhood. The challenge mocked him.

Major Karim Aziz knew what he had to do. If he did not do it, the fear would take root.

If the fear was in him, when the peace was gone he would not aim and shoot well. Fear was the true enemy of the sniper. If he did not answer the challenge, he would know his fear had conquered him. The strength of the sun was growing on his back and the dog panted beside him. In a few minutes, a little time, the heat would have settled on the ground and the clarity of his lens would subside to mirage and distortion… He thought of his wife, in the hospital, with the children who had no drugs – and he wondered whether this man, sitting at peace, had a wife. He thought of his children, in the school that had no books – and he wondered whether this man had children.

Aziz put his telescope back into his backpack and stood.

He walked away from the shepherd’s shelter with his backpack looped over his shoulders and his rifle loose in his hands. Far beyond the growing shimmer as the ground warmed was the outline of the rocks, and he did not know whether, at three thousand metres, the man noticed his movement, but it was important to him that he had picked up the challenge.

He turned his back on the man and headed towards the road, Scout skipping beside him.

The next time he saw him, when there was no peace and no calm, he would kill the man.

‘He’s a champion, that’s what you have to realize. He’s a winner.’

Willet had told Ms Manning that they were going to the seaside. It wasn’t strictly true.

The industrial estate east of Southampton allowed them a slight whiff of the sea, but no view of it. The unit that had produced the brochure he’d taken from Peake’s safe in the haulage-company offices was old, uncared-for and drab. It was anonymous: only the steel-plated door and the small heavily barred windows gave evidence of the factory’s product inside. They sat in a small, untidy office and the walls around them were hung with photographs of weapons. The sales director, earnest and bright-eyed, a communicator, had told the outer office to hold his calls.

‘He’s can, will, must. I see enough of them, I recognize them. I call it being “the master of circumstances”. It’s about the ability to withstand pressure, and I’m talking about extreme stress.’

It was the unpeeling of another layer. Willet scribbled his notes, but Ms Manning gazed around her and studied the photographs. He thought he’d brought her to new territory, and her expression showed she thought it disreputable.

‘Look, if Gus Peake had not decided to interest himself in firing a half-century-old sniper rifle, if he’d focused on the modern equipment, he’d be right up in the top flight of the Queen’s Hundred. I’d go as far as to say that he’d be challenging for the Queen’s Prize. Instead he chose the sort of demanding discipline that will not produce celebrities, but he’s still the best at that discipline. He won’t get a chair ride at Bisley, won’t have a cabinet of display cups, but I’ll wager he has a drawerful of spoons, if you know what I mean.’

Afterwards Willet would have to explain to Ms Manning about Bisley, about the annual shoot that was the showpiece for the year, the choosing of the hundred best marksmen for the last day’s competition, and the lifting of the winner onto a chair so that he could be hoisted to receive the Queen’s Prize as the band played ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’. He might tell her that in 1930 a woman had sat in the chair and been serenaded… He cursed himself for allowing distraction to cloud his thoughts. It was why Ken Willet was not a champion and never would be, and why he’d failed the sniper course.

‘I liked his mind management. He’s very quiet. When he was down here he only spoke when he had something to ask. Some customers talk the whole time, think that’ll impress me. He’s not afraid of silence. That’s important – it marks a man down as one who doesn’t have conceit.’

Ms Manning frowned. Willet wondered, after they’d gone, whether the pair of them, the investigators, would be dissected by the sales director to his colleagues – whether he and Ms Manning would be categorized as conceited or confident, or simply from a second division.

‘Confidence and conceit are very different things. Conceit is failure, confidence is success. A conceited man cannot abide failure and turns away from any area where he may lose. But a confident man thinks through the ground conditions then backs his intuition. Champions are confident, not conceited – that’s why Gus Peake is a champion.

I’ve known him for the last three years. You see, we make military and civilian rifles, so I go to Bisley. Target-shooting with modern rifles can be about as dull as watching paint dry – I usually wander over to the HBSA people for a chat and a coffee, it’s how I met him. I’m not a friend, I doubt he has any, he didn’t seem the type – but I’ve watched him shoot and talked through shooting problems. He has my respect. What’s he up to?’

‘You don’t have to know that,’ Ms Manning said coldly.

Willet cut in, offering a little truth for something more, ‘He’s in northern Iraq. It’s a long story, doesn’t affect you, but he’s with a group of Kurdish tribesmen. He’s gone to war.’

‘It might just affect me. What he purchased from me was sale or return. I promised him a good price if he brought the kit back.’

Ms Manning asked, ‘What did he buy?’

‘Just so that there are no misunderstandings, he produced a section 1 firearms certificate, so he is quite entitled to purchase a bolt-action rifle, and it was quite legal for me to sell it to him. Obviously he’s passed all the necessary user tests, he’s a member of a recognized club, he’s satisfied the police that he owns a secure gun box. Do you want to see what I sold him?’

Manning nodded. He swung round his chair and darted for a side door, leaving them at the table. She sipped her coffee; Willet reached for the last of the biscuits that had come on a plate with the coffee mugs.

The rifle was slapped down on the table in front of them. Ms Manning spluttered on her coffee.

It was a killing machine, she could recognize that, as Willet could. It was nothing about sport, but was for killing men. The butt, stock and barrel were painted a dull olive.

It was tilted upwards by a fixed bipod, and the polished glass of the telescopic sight winked malevolently. The sales director didn’t ask her, but picked it up and dumped it in Ms Manning’s hands.

‘That’s it, that’s what Gus bought. The grand title is AWM. 338 Lapua Magnum. I say it myself, it’s the best thing we make and the best sniper rifle that anyone makes, anywhere.’

Very slowly, bulging the biceps under her blouse, Manning lifted it to her shoulder.

She’d tilted her spectacles up on to her forehead. Her eye peered into the sight, her finger was on the trigger. Willet wondered whether she’d ever held a rifle before. Her aim moved round the office, from the leave chart to the computer screen in the corner, from the computer screen to an American presented plaque, from the plaque to the window and wavered as a seagull flew close, from the seagull to Ken Willet’s head and chest. It was the first time he had seen her grin in that way. She had the power, given her by the size, weight, sleekness of the rifle. He looked into the small, dark abyss of the barrel. She squeezed. He felt sick, his stomach twisting. She put the rifle on the table and dropped her spectacles back over the bridge of her nose.

‘Don’t ever do that again,’ Willet hissed. ‘Don’t ever point a weapon…’

She laughed in his face.

‘That’s what Gus has taken. In the right hands it’s a serious weapon. Sale or return, as I said. Am I going to see it back here? I suppose that depends on what he learned down in Devon.’

‘You sat out there?’ There was an accusing note in Haquim’s voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Alone? Without protection?’

‘Yes,’ Gus said.

‘Where you could be seen?’

‘Where I could be seen.’

‘For why? For what?’

‘I can’t explain.’

‘You talk serious rubbish… Meda says there will be no tanks.’

‘Does she?’

‘If Meda says it the men will believe her.’

‘Will they?’

‘You think yourself amusing, Mr Peake…’

He was light-headed, as if drunk with alcohol.

As the sun had climbed Gus had tramped back to the outskirts of the town and to the low wall that penned the goats where he had left Omar. He had had to shout at the boy to drill home the instruction that he was not to be followed. There had been a purpose to his long, lonely walk, to evaluate the ground over which they would fight in the morning. He had sat on a rock and soaked the place into his body and his mind. He had wanted to test his powers of observation and to reckon out the camouflage he would need and to measure the visibility that would be available to him as the heat grew… He had known he was being watched. Gus had not seen him, but at one point there had been the flash of sunlight striking the prism of a lens. It was the knowledge that he had been watched from a great distance that induced the impertinence he threw back at Haquim. The mustashar sobered him, jolted him.

‘Have you thought that you might be taken, Mr Peake? Not killed clean – captured, dirty.’

‘No.’

‘Perhaps that is what you should think. It is all a bluff. We must create an illusion of energy, strength. We have to go forward on a narrow thrust. Each step we go forward takes us further from the protection of the mountains. Tomorrow that protection is behind us. We are in the open. We go forward, and every step we advance we make the salient deeper and we expose the flanks. Do you know about flanks, Mr Peake? The most important thing is that they can be pinched. I put it very simply to you, when you make a salient with flanks you can be cut off, you can be surrounded, and squeezed. You wonder that I am worried? I carry the worry alone. She has no idea of the danger of encirclement.

She has no military experience. Meda believes only in the certainty of her destiny, and she says there will be no tanks. I’m not asking for sympathy, but I have the right to demand that you do not make fun of me. She says there will be no tanks, but it is for me to consider whether she might be wrong. She does not ask it of me but I fear for her, for those who follow her, for myself, for you – if the tanks come and we are not killed cleanly.’

‘I apologize,’ Gus said quietly. ‘I apologize sincerely.’

‘You have to meet a man who has brought mines to hear how a sniper should use the mines – if she is wrong and if the tanks come.’

Gus followed Haquim back through the town towards the police station to listen to another expert.

The brigadier was a strong man, and he shivered as he watched the tanks being armed and fuelled. He had shared, spread the conspiracy, and the promises were piled behind him. He had the promise of the witch and her peshmerga army, and the promise of the Americans, and the promise of men in Baghdad. But – and he knew the sort of promises that wafted around men committed to insurrection – there were always more promises.

Never had sufficient promises been heaped behind the officers planning a coup d’etat.

With insufficient promises there was a short walk to the gallows. He needed the promise of the general at Tuz Khurmatu.

The huge tank shells, 125mm calibre, were being lifted into the hatches. The fuel lorries were alongside the leviathans, loading the diesel. In the morning he would address the officers of the armoured brigade and demand their loyalty to him as their commander, and the promises that they would follow him.

He would be a great man if the promises were kept, and a dead man if they were broken.

The brigadier could not shed the chill from his body as the sun beat down on him, and on his tanks.

Present at the meeting were all the male members of the general’s extended family.

Inside the barracks compound of the Republican Guard armoured division at Tuz Khurmatu, the windows of the villa were curtained and the door to the salon locked on the inside. The mahogany-framed television set was tuned to a satellite channel from Germany and played promotional music videos, with the sound turned high. They were of the Sunni religion, and of the Dulaimi tribe. Their territory stretched from Fallujah on the Euphrates river, across the desert wasteland to Al Qaim near the Syrian border. The Dulaimi tribe held second place in the regime’s favours and trust after the President’s own tribe, the Takriti. They were men hardened by an upbringing in the harsh desert territory of sun-scorched days and bitter night frosts. They were fighters. The sons, cousins and nephews of the general crowded the salon. They wore the insignia on their shoulders of armoured units, artillery, infantry and Special Forces. The general was the head of the family and they listened in silent respect, craned to hear what he said. He was known to his family and his tribe and his tank crews as ‘the Hammerfist’. No man had ever doubted his courage.

He explained his dilemma. The general, the Hammerfist, told them of the visit he had received from a brigadier of Fifth Army in Kirkuk, and the proposition put to him.

Did they join the conspiracy, or did they destroy it?

To know of treason, and not to denounce it, was to commit treason. Should the conspiracy founder, should the brigadier be captured and interrogated, should he be broken under torture, should he speak of a meeting with a general that had not been reported to the relevant authorities, then the general too was a conspirator – and all of them who now attended the meeting in the villa’s salon. There was no middle way.

If they joined the conspiracy and it succeeded, each of them would be rewarded. If it failed, however, they would be hanged after they had been tortured. Faced with the dilemma, the general asked for advice as to which course he should follow. He could arm the tanks of his division, or he could pick up the telephone and make a call to the al-Rashid barracks of the Estikhabarat. Which?

The quiet clung around them.

Each man considered insults thrown at him by the regime, and benefits they had gained from it. They thought of the consequences to their families, pondered the reliability of the Kurds, and of an American promise to create a no-fly zone and a no-drive zone above the tanks roaring towards Baghdad.

Straight-backed, hands clasped behind him, the general – the Hammerfist – waited for them to make known their reaction to a devil’s dilemma.

At brigade, at the crossroads, five miles north-east of Kirkuk, Major Aziz did what all soldiers do in the last hours before a battle. He cleaned his weapon and wrote a letter to his wife.

They were not dirty, but from habit he cleaned the bolt and the breech, the PSO-1 telescopic sight mounted directly above the trigger, the interior of the magazine, and then he wiped hard at each of the ten rounds of 7.62mm ammunition before returning them to the magazine. All around him, in the gathering darkness, soldiers checked their weapons.

When he was satisfied that there was no possibility of a malfunction caused by dirt, he wound the loose rough cloth strips round the butt, stock, ’scope and barrel of the Dragunov.

Aziz found a place close to the command bunker where a small shaft of light spilled out from a narrow firing slit. Also, a part of his routine was to carry in his backpack a few sheets of crumpled writing-paper, with envelopes. He was hunched down so that the spear of light was on his raised thigh, where the paper rested. He wrote only a half-dozen lines. He had written the same letters many times, for fear of not saying goodbye, in Kirkuk, in Basra, and in Kuwait City. The following morning, or a week afterwards, each of those letters had been destroyed, ripped to shreds, because he had lived. He wrote of his love for her, and for the boys – they were jewels on which fell the golden sun – and he thanked her for the happiness she had given him. When he had finished he sealed the sheet of paper in an envelope, put her name on it and placed it in the breast pocket of his shirt, where it would be close to his heartbeat. If he were killed, if he died the next day, or the day after, he held the hope that the letter would be retrieved from his body, perhaps stained in blood, and that it would be taken back to her. Once it was in his pocket, the moments of self-doubt evaporated, the time for reflection was finished.

He slipped into the command bunker. It was buried in the sandy soil, roofed by heavy timbers that were, in turn, covered with bulldozed earth. There was quiet inside, as if the staff officers had already made their preparations. Aziz asked for the plan for the morning, and guidance as to where he and his Dragunov should be positioned. He explained where he believed the enemy’s sniper would be. *** Joe Denton’s voice dripped at him – where he should be, how he should lay the mines, and how and at what point he should arm them.

The column had formed in the darkness outside the police station. Gus said that he understood the plan and thanked Joe for it. Denton reached up, caught at the hessian straps on Gus’s shoulders and kissed his cheek, not wet but a brush of the lips against the stubble and the patina of dirt and paint, then turned away. He saw Denton climb into a truck beside the aid-worker. The headlights led a convoy of lorries away to the north; more wounded from the battle for Tarjil were being moved to safety. If he had been able to see the man’s face, Denton’s, then he thought there might have been tears in the eyes.

It was Gus’s duty to go forward, but not Denton’s, nor was his the responsibility of a grandfather’s friendship: he was the victim of destiny, but Joe Denton was not.

After the convoy’s lights had slipped away into the darkness, he heard Meda’s hectoring voice at the front of the column. When she paused for breath, there was the coughed, spluttered echo of approval. There was a last declaiming shout from her, an exhortation, and the answering bellow of loyalty.

Shuffling at first, but growing in speed, the column surged out of the town. There were no doors open, no upper windows unshuttered, no knots of civilians to watch them go. It was as though they had come as liberators and left as a conquering army of occupation.

He remembered the tide of vengeance that had accompanied them. The tramping feet of the column marched over the place where the tarmacadam had been scorched, and under the doused light on the lamp-post over which the noose had been hooked. He walked with Omar and the four men carrying the grain sacks that held the mines. Whether they were liberators or occupiers was the judgement to be made by the people who did not wish them well. Their judgement hammered him. If they were victors they would be liberators; if they were losers they would be occupiers. It hammered him because the people of Tarjil had branded them, sunk the fire into the flesh, as losers. No man or woman would shout support for a loser and wish them well. Dirty, fetid, the column left the town and its darkened, empty streets.

Gus thought the mood of the town, its judgement, had caught many of the peshmerga.

It was not until they were out of the town that the men began to sing. Again and again, with the deep power of their voices, the refrain of the anthem was howled into the night.

It was the sound of hungry wolves that came in winter from the high ground to stalk beside barricaded homes in search of food. It was the sound of a predator. Omar sang with them, a high shrill note, as if to prove his adulthood.

‘What do they sing?’

He could not see the boy’s face in the darkness.

‘We are the peshmerga, brave heroes of Kurdistan, We will never lay down our arms, We fight until victory or death.’

Gus grimaced. ‘That’s bloody cheerful, Omar.’

‘We are not frightened of death, Mr Gus. You cannot be frightened of death or you would not have come. We have the power, we have Meda

…’

Gus marched on. It was strange to him that the bold words Meda had used in the town to the peshmerga, and the repetition of the anthem, demonstrated a willingness to face death. He had seen her with the aid-worker when he had been receiving the instructions from Joe Denton. He wondered if Meda had shown the flesh wound to her, whether it had been dressed again, whether it was poisoned or clean. His blister hurt but the pace of the march did not allow him to slow and hobble. It seemed a lifetime since he had last slept decently or eaten well. He thought the civilization of an old life was being steadily stripped from him.

When they were well clear of the town, when no torches were used, when they moved in thin moonlight, the singing died. Haquim had been along the line and demanded quiet.

A discipline had settled on the column. Gus wondered, in the quiet broken only by the scrape of weapons’ metal and the tramp of feet, if the men thought of home and families

– or were their minds as empty as the wolves’, the predators’? His own mind, except for the pain of the blister, was void of emotion.

Haquim materialized from the milky darkness. They had reached the point where Gus, Omar, the men carrying the mines and the mustashar would break away from the main march towards the crossroads. Meda was beside him.

Meda said, sarcastic, ‘Do you need a chair to sit on?’

‘I’ll send down for room-service and get a beer.’

‘You will be comfortable away from the real work, fighting.’

‘I’ve a good book to read.’

She was brittle, contemptuous. ‘There will be no tanks.’

‘Then I’ll enjoy my beer and get on with my book. It’ll be a pleasant day out.’

She flounced away, strode off up the column, and in a moment was lost among her men. It was a bad parting. If either of them did not survive the day ahead, the last memory would be of contempt and mockery. The column was going south, but the small group edged to the east and started the big loop that would take them to where Joe Denton advised they should be. Omar led. He had no compass, and had never crossed that featureless, dark-shrouded ground before. He had only been shown on the map but did not pause or look around him. Gus thought it the innate genius of the young dog-wolf.

The boy stopped, crouched, his arm held back, hand open, demanding their total stillness and silence. Gus heard the approaching sounds, the wind over dried leaves. They were huddled together, low on the open ground as the sounds grew closer. At first it merged with the night then, clear in the moonlight, a great caravan passed them. Sheep, men, goats, women, donkeys, children, dogs, all slipped by, never wavering in the path of their journey. Gus was awestruck at the simplicity of what he saw. A nomad tribe on the move, as they had whispered over the ground at night in the time of Cyrus and Salah alDin Yusuf, nothing changed, secure against the predators, the newer dictators and demagogues. Maybe they had heard, as their forebears would have, that a battle was to be fought, and they moved on. Their dark line passed. As the sounds faded into the night, Omar started out again.

An hour later, they were near to the road, the bridge and the glow of the sentries’ cigarettes. The iron-hooped sides of the bridge were lit by the lights of the patrolling armoured personnel carrier.

The sacks with the mines were dumped on the scraped earth beside the road.

Haquim said, ‘If the tanks come, if she is wrong, only your skill can save us.’

‘I can do my best, friend, but I do not know whether my best is enough.’

‘I do not ask for more. Let us pray to God she is correct, that the tanks will not come

…’

‘Then I’ll sit in my chair with a beer and a book.’

Haquim hit him hard on the arm. Gus thought that the old soldier equally disliked contempt and frivolity. Haquim was gone, and with him the men who had carried the sacks. He was alone with the boy. The embankment of the road towered above him. He watched the personnel carrier reach the bridge ahead, then reverse and turn, its searchlight spearing the flat, barren ground. They were deep in the ditch below the embankment when it returned, and the searchlight’s beam was far above them. They tracked away from the bridge to a place where the embankment was lowest, and Gus armed the mines, while Omar scratched the holes for them.

The burden crushed him. They depended on him.

There were many who saw him go.

The logistics officer in the command bunker, puzzling over the reasoning behind the decision to withdraw two of the three infantry battalions to Kirkuk and even more about the complex manoeuvre to achieve it at night and in secrecy, saw him kick himself up from the chair where he had dozed, hitch on his backpack, sling his rifle, call his dog and go out into the night.

The logistics officer called after him, ‘Hit the bastards, Karim, hit them so they scream.’

The sentry ran from behind the sandbag wall and wrenched open the wood-framed wire gates. He was about to scurry back to the security of the sandbags when he realized that the officer stood erect as if no danger could confront him. He saluted clumsily. The officer thanked him, as if he were a friend, and he walked through the gate with the dog.

His bulky over-suit dripped with fresh grey mud, and the same mud was embedded in the dog’s coat. The sentry saw him unhook his rifle from his shoulder, then hold it loosely across his body as he slipped through a pool of light and away into the shadows. He knew the bandit army coming towards them was led by a woman; it was said, in the tent where he slept when not on sentry duty, that bullets could not harm her, that she was the devil’s child. He thanked his god for sending the officer with the big rifle who went to break the magic of the witch.

While Isaac Cohen, Mossad man, slept in his eyrie, the wind-bent antenna sucked down signals, which the computers decrypted.

He slept without a care.