Holding the Zero

Chapter Eleven

The brigadier, dressing in the darkness before dawn, had selected his best uniform with the medal ribbons of three decades of military service. The orderly had made a fine job of polishing his boots. He had chosen to wear his brigade’s scarlet cravat, which hid the heave in his throat. In the shining holster on his webbing belt was his service pistol, loaded and armed. His heart pounded, dinned in his ears, and he did not at first hear the shout from his orderly, a man he would trust with his life.

While he had slept, men had flown north from Baghdad, had come in secrecy to Kirkuk.

He had rehearsed his speech, again, while showering, shaving, dressing. Ahead of him were the opened double doors to the briefing room. He had tried twice, the evening before, to make secure telephone contact with the general commanding the armoured division to the south, but had failed. That had not distressed him. Since the American bombing and the imposition of sanctions, secure communications were haphazard, replacement parts rarely available. He heard the shout repeated, but his mind was far away in the detail of his speech.

All of the officers of the brigade, equipped with T-72 tanks and BMP armoured personnel carriers, would now be waiting on him in the briefing room. He had served with the older men, the more senior, most of his adult life. The younger men were the sons and nephews of officers, now retired from active duty, whom he had fought alongside in the Iranian, Kurdish and Kuwaiti wars. The brigadier believed the senior and junior officers owed primary loyalty to him, not to the regime. His speech, practised alone in his room, would appeal to that ingrained loyalty. The shout and the running feet were a barely noticed distraction as he approached the double doors.

From the Kirkuk military airfield, the men had been driven to Fifth Army headquarters, had taken an office behind a steel reinforced door, had established a radio link to the al-Rashid barracks and had prepared to talk to him about loyalty.

The brigadier paused at the double doors. He heard the scrape of chairs as the officers were ordered to stand. He smoothed his hair, and his tongue flicked at his lips. In no battle he had fought, and the medal ribbons on his chest showed there had been many, had he felt such gut-wrenching tension. Had the brigadier been a gambler, a dice-thrower, he would have been better able to control that tension – but he believed in loyalty. They stood in ranks in front of the lectern he would use… A fresh tension intruded on his thoughts. He had instructed the technical officers and NCOs to work through the night, to scavenge and cannibalize, to get the maximum number of the brigade’s fighting vehicles to combat readiness. The tanks and personnel carriers made an imposing parade-ground army but spares were at a premium. The speech returned to his mind, melded with the repeated shout and the drum of approaching feet.

The first moments of his speech, the first words they heard, would be the most important. He steadied himself. He would say, decisively: ‘Officers, friends, our brigade is a family. A family stands together – a family will make the supreme sacrifice in blood.

In the history of this family, united by selfless dedication, this is now a time of critical importance. The loyalty of this family is to the proud and honoured state of Iraq, not to the criminal clique that has for too long abused this family’s trust. Today we are given, by God, the chance to rid our beloved people from the rule of the felons, which has brought misery down on us… ’ The shout and the footfall were clearer. The doors would be locked behind him. If there was a weasel complaint from any officer, he would draw his pistol and shoot dead the callow bastard who made it.

‘Brigadier, please, there is a call from Tuz Khurmatu – the general commanding the Republican Guard armoured division. He must speak with you personally – a matter of national security.’

He needed the support of the general commanding the Republican Guard armour at Tuz Khurmatu. He gestured to his second-in-command standing beside the lectern – two minutes.

He did not see his orderly’s face. He was led from the corridor on to the parade ground where the maintenance teams sweated under arc lights over the tanks and the personnel carriers. There was the roar of revving engines and choking clouds of diesel fumes. He did not see the tears of betrayal running on his orderly’s face. He was led into a small brick building with high barred windows and through an opened steel reinforced door. In a bare room, on the the wood table, the telephone was off the cradle. He snatched it up.

He said hoarsely, ‘We are about to move, in an hour we move. Do I have your support?’

He recognized the voice on a crackling line. ‘You are a traitor. I am a servant of the President. You are a traitor and will die like a traitor – like a dog.’

The pistol barrel was against his neck. In the moments before his arms were pinioned, he struggled to get a hand to his holster and failed. When his arms were pinioned, when his service weapon had been taken, when the cotton hood was over his head, the beating started.

In his own leisurely fashion, and after an untroubled night’s sleep, Isaac Cohen began his day. He shaved with an old blade that barely scraped the stubble from his cheeks and chin, sluiced his body in cold water, dressed in faded jeans, a T-shirt, two sweaters and worn sneakers, ate an apple and a carton of yoghurt, flicked the pages of Maariv, which he had read the night before, made football small-talk with the commander of the Turkish troops who guarded him, and went to the building that housed the computers.

At the door, the key to the padlock in his hand, he looked down over the land lightening in the dawn.

There was snow on the highest peaks, and the deeper ravine valleys were still in black shadow, but the first shafts of the sun caught the lower hillsides beyond the mountains.

With binoculars, if he had steadied himself against the door, he might have seen the brightness of the flame that burned at Kirkuk, but he did not have his binoculars. Below him, over the crag faces, an eagle glided, hunted. He blinked and unlocked the padlock.

He seldom lingered at dawn or in the middle of the day or at dusk to strain his eyes and look over the falling ground. The eyes that mattered in the life of Isaac Cohen, that gave him vision, were in the dishes and the loosely slung aerials and the antennae that were riveted down on the roof of his communications den.

Inside, with the murmur of the machines for company, he filled, then switched on his electric kettle.

When he had made himself instant coffee, he would use the eyes that bored deep across the lands he could not see, and scan the decrypted messages the computers had gobbled in the night.

Later, where his own eyes could not see, the computers would give him a clear view of a fighting ground. He had done what he could, was now no more than a spectator, but he thought of them as he started to read the overnight radio traffic and he whispered a short private prayer.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE.

5. (Conclusions after interview with Brian Robins (sales director of AI Ltd, rifle manufacturers) conducted by self and Ms Carol Manning -transcript attached.) ABILITY: As a marksman, AHP is as good as any. He has the ability to shoot under all conditions and can absorb the stress of competition. He is regarded by this source as a WINNER. He has the inner steel that prevents him from accepting second best as an adequate outcome.

KNOWLEDGE OF MILITARY WEAPONS: AHP has wisely purchased the most complete sniper rifle on the market (paid in cash,?3,500).

He has travelled to northern Iraq with an AWM. 338 Lapua Magnum.

The rifle has a maximum range of 1,200 yards to 1,400 yards. The AWM has greater range and hitting power than the standard AW using 7.62 NATO ammunition, and is more manoeuvrable and covert than the heavier AW50 version.

The AWM is classified as a ‘basic’ weapon. It is not sophisticated; fewer technical problems in rugged terrain and battlefield conditions.

The armour-piercing rounds, Green Spot ball, give the AWM a versatility not present with more conventional sniper rifles. It can kill personnel, but will also destroy equipment. It has the penetrative power, using FMJ (Full Metal Jacket) rounds, to be used successfully against a variety of targets – ammunition dumps, grounded aircraft, radar installations, bunkers and armoured vehicles (with the sniper in an offensive or defensive mode).

The AWM creates COMBAT POWER. It can degrade key equipment and gain psychological battlefield advantage.

Before that morning in the sales director’s office, Ken Willet had never seen a sniper’s rifle the size and power of the AWM. 338 Lapua Magnum. When he had tried, and failed, the course at Warminster, he had used the Parker Hale weapon, which was smaller, lighter and did not have the capacity to fire the armour-piercing bullet. What had been aimed at him by Ms Manning was a rifle altogether more deadly than anything he had himself ever handled. He was confused. Was a professional’s weapon in the hands of an amateur or an expert? With the confusion came the problem. His adult life was steeped in the lore of the military. He had been taught to believe that only the men who made a total study of military tactics and were subject to military discipline could achieve results in a military theatre of operations. If the reason for his confusion was valid then he might just have wasted the last dozen years of his life. Could an amateur, a transport manager in a haulage company, gain the same combat successes as a professionally trained sniper? He was too tired to find the answer, to end the confusion.

When he went to bed the dawn was coming up. But he could not sleep. Inside his mind, thundering and reverberating, was the roar of tank tracks.

‘Keep clear of officers and white stones.’

‘What, Mr Gus?’

‘Major Hesketh-Prichard would have known that – it was the advice given by sergeants to fresh troops in South Africa. The British army was fighting there a hundred years ago.’

‘Because officers get shot?’

‘Correct, Omar, and because the sniper uses landmarks, any light-coloured stones, as points for measuring distance.’

‘Why do you tell me?’

‘Everything in the skill is old, everything we do has been done before, everything is learned from the past…’

Gus was deadened by tiredness. It was only something to say to help him to beat it.

Inside the thick material of the gillie suit he was cold because of the tiredness. He felt a sickness, a scratching in his throat, from the cold and the stink of the goats. In front of them was the raised roadway leading to the bridge. Beyond the bridge the road led on to the defended crossroads. On the road’s far side, dead ground to him, the embankment was steeper than the incline facing him, and at the far side of the bridge the river’s banks plunged down to a morass of boulders. When the tanks left the road they must turn towards him, then drive towards the one place in the riverbed where the banks were shallow and the stones smaller – if they were to reach the crossroads.

Gus had not slept. He had marched back from the road, said whispered farewells to the men who had carried the mines and helped Omar to bury them. Tracking back over the open ground to find the firing position, he had then dug out the small trench in which he now lay. The light was coming, spreading over the desert landscape before him. His eyes roved over the markers. Wedged against rocks, hooked on to strands of rusted barbed wire, caught against old fence posts were scraps of newspaper and torn plastic bags. Each time he had placed the newspaper and the bags he had remembered the distances of his stride. There was nothing random in their placing: they were his white stones. The goats had been Omar’s idea. They had bleated in the night; they were the missing peg to be slotted in the plan. The light was coming and Gus heard the first distant popping of small-arms fire. He tried to sound calm but his teeth chattered.

‘Remember what I said. Keep clear of officers and white stones.’

Against the scratching of the goats, he heard the boy’s quiet laughter. ‘Are you very frightened, Mr Gus?’

‘Go away, and take those foul stinking creatures with you.’

The light was growing; the popping of the guns had become a rattle. The boy whistled and thwacked his stick on a goat’s back, then the hoofs and Omar’s light tread drifted away. The first golds of the morning caught the ground, flickered on the newspaper pages and the plastic, and Gus tried to remember each distance he had paced out in the darkness. It had been the boy’s idea to steal the goats and then to go forward with them.

He lay in a shallow trench covered by the sacking in which the mines had been carried, and over the sacking was loose dirt and small stones. Away to Gus’s right, the shooting was persistent and no longer sporadic.

Haquim had said they depended on him – if the tanks came. He had a role. Far to his front, where the incline rose to the roadway, was a scene as old as the warning of officers and white stones: a goatherd boy sat and watched his beasts. Gus wriggled his hand under his gillie suit and found the water bottle at his waist. He reached forward, emptied the precious water onto the ground under the end of the rifle barrel, and made a mud pool -that was old, as old as Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard.

Somewhere, out there, was the sniper sent to kill him. *** The water dribbled into the ground. Little rivulets ran from the point where he poured and disappeared. Then he tipped the last of the water from the bottle into the palm of his hand and let the dog drink from it.

Major Aziz lay in a scrape in the dirt and readied himself. The letter with his wife’s name on the envelope was against his heart, but she was nowhere in his thoughts -obliterated, along with his children.

The position he had taken was forward of the crossroads and a full 500 metres to the right flank of the route he reckoned they would use when they attacked. The first skirmish had begun. In front of him was the crisscross of the machine-guns’ tracers, and the blast of mortars.

When they made the encirclement, the tanks would be like a crude fishing-net that scooped up the majority of a catch but which let part of the shoal slip away. His target -he had agreed to it – was the witch. She would be at the forefront of the charge on the trenches and bunkers at the crossroads. He estimated she would pause to regroup her strike force at a distance of around 300 metres from the wire perimeter of the brigade positions. She would have her men around her, would be close to the roadway, and she was his target.

They would not charge against the wire unless she was there to goad them, urge them onwards.

He saw the first men in the advance. The sun beat on his back and he felt the rhythmic pant of the dog’s breathing against his thigh. He wished he had more water for the dog, but the wetted ground under his rifle barrel was more important. A hundred metres ahead of him, on a branch, he had placed a torn-off length from the cotton scarf knotted around his head to prevent sweat running to his eyes. It hung limply and there was no need to make adjustments for wind deflection. The bullet was in the breech, the rifle armed, and his finger was beside the trigger guard.

He looked for the witch and waited.

‘I am about to fight a battle.’ The general spoke with frayed anger. ‘What will handicap my fighting ability is distraction. What I tell you, you will find no treachery with me or the men who serve under me.’

‘It was never suggested.’

‘You will find only loyalty and dedication to the President.’

‘Treachery is a plague.’

‘There is no sickness with me or the men serving under me.’

He had been called from his room. He had been told that officers of the Estikhabarat had arrived in the night from Baghdad. He had been informed that his armoured brigade commander was under close arrest. With four subordinate officers, each carrying loaded side arms, he had marched to the briefing room. He had lectured the officers. He had stood at his full height in front of them. ‘We fight for our President. We go to battle in the name of the Ba’ath Party. We protect the integrity of the Republic of Iraq.’ He had spat on the floor then drawn his pistol and fired a single shot into the spittle. While the smell of the cordite hung in the air, he had said, ‘If any of you wish to follow the traitor then I will first spit in your eye then shoot it out. Are there any who wish to proclaim their loyalty?’ There had been an answering shout, at first hesitant, then raucous: ‘We fight for our President, our Party, our beloved Republic.’ He had briefed them, dismissed them.

‘Allow me to explain the tactical plan.’

‘It is right that you should do so.’

‘There are no traitors here,’ the general said defiantly. He would have said that the brigadier, the Boot, the man with big feet, was his friend. He did not know whether his protestations of loyalty were believed. ‘Traitors should be shot.’

‘Of course. The plan?’

Some would have stayed with his friend, and with the fists and the clubs; only the most senior would have come to the command bunker. The most senior would have no trust for him.

He pointed to the map. ‘I have a holding force, a battalion, in brigade base at the crossroads. Their task is to delay the advance of the woman and her people. We seek to persuade them that the position is weakly defended, to give them encouragement to mass and cross open ground. I send an armoured column forward, to encircle and to destroy.

The rabble will be in the open, without cover. They will be destroyed by the tanks.’

‘How many tanks?’

‘Six.’

‘Why six? Why not twenty-six, or forty-eight?’

‘Six tanks because that is the number that are in working order, plus a reserve of nine, plus seven more that have faults but are nearly serviceable, out of forty-eight. There are forty-eight on the parade ground for inspection – but there are six tanks plus the reserve that are fully operational. Check for yourself.’

The calm voice asked, ‘How would you recognize that the contagion of treachery runs deeper than you now believe?’

‘If we do not encircle them, crush them, that would be evidence of treachery… Do I have permission to issue orders, to make the killing zone?’

The man from the Estikhabarat smiled, and nodded.

The life of the general, and he recognized it, hung on the capability of six tanks of the T-72 class, with nine more in reserve, to encircle and destroy a force of peasant tribesmen caught in open ground. He gave the order.

Gus heard the guttural thunder from down the road, towards the ever-burning flame.

It was like Stickledown Range on a perfect day, clear vision, no wind.

The thunder began as a murmur, and grew.

On a perfect day at Stickledown the sun never shone so brightly that the target was distorted in a mirage, the rain never lashed, the gales never blew.

The murmur was a rumble.

The perfect day was a mindset. The champion isolated himself in a bubble cocoon.

When he shot well, at the limit of his powers, Gus never sweated, was never wet or cold.

The rumble was a roar.

For that perfect day, he was not tired, not hungry, not cold, not frightened. He went through the routine, as he would have done on any of the perfect days at Stickledown Range when he fired at the V-Bull to win a silver spoon. His breathing was good, relaxed. His eyes were clear focused, not blinking. His body was loose, the muscles not tensed. The rifle was firmly against his shoulder.

The roar was the thrash of a club on a drum.

In the aim of the rifle, through the telescopic sight, was a goatherd, a mere boy. The boy ran around the goats and seemed not to know what he should do as the animals milled on the raised road in the path of the advancing tanks. Joe Denton had told him that a T-72 tank weighed 38 tons and had a maximum road speed of 39 m.p.h., and the boy with his goats was on the road and in their path. They might slow, they might shoot, they might drive straight through and over the goatherd and his animals. The boy seemed, in panic, to run round and round the goats as if he did not know how to drive them off the road. Gus thought the boy was quality. He took his eye from the ’scope and looked back along the road.

They were bunched close, a sea of dust around them. The clanking of the tracks pierced his ears. They were squat, low profile, painted in a dirty sand yellow, and the main armament barrels protruded out ahead of them. In each of them, he counted six, a man stood in the turret. They were bellowing leviathans, closing on the boy and his goats, as he ran round and round the frightened flock. The soldier in the turret of the lead tank waved, gestured for the boy to jump clear.

He settled again with the rifle. They were not going to slow for the boy and his animals, they would crush them. Gus neither hated his enemy nor felt any remorse at what he planned. His mind was clear, as on any perfect shooting day. The lead tank appeared in the edge of the circle of his ’scope. In the sight’s centre, at the T-junction of the reticule lines, was the boy and his goats.

The boy fled, the goats scattered. The boy dived down the incline and into the ditch.

Gus could see the tops of two of Joe Denton’s mines that had been obscured behind the goats.

The lead tank, its engine thundering, squirmed on the narrow elevated road to avoid the TM-46s that were Joe Denton’s gift, but there was nowhere for the driver to go. Gus saw a thunderflash of light, then smoke and the climbing debris of a tank track, and heard the scream of its brakes. The lead tank lurched across the width of the road, stabilized and stopped.

The second tank rumbled into the lead tank. To Gus, the leviathans seemed to couple.

He had his target.

At the intersection of the ’scope sight’s lines was the head and chest of the machine-gunner, reeling from the impact. The second tank’s tracks were climbing as if to straddle the lead tank’s body, and the gunner clung to the edge of the hatch for support.

Gus did not hear the noise. On Stickledown Range, he never heard the noise of voices and other rifles’ reports. He fired the shot and, as the bullet reached the target, jerked it up, he was sliding the bolt action back, ejecting and aiming again.

In a lithe loose movement, Omar climbed out of the ditch, scrambled up the incline and jumped. He cleared the spinning wheels of the tracks of the second tank and stumbled onto the superstructure of the brute. He reached at his belt; his arm seemed to rise as if in a gesture of triumph, and something small dropped from his hand into the cavity of the hatch through which the machine-gunner had slumped. Gus had no image in his mind of a hand grenade bumping with a death rattle to the iron floor of the darkened hulk then rolling to a stop beside or under the buried seats of the driver and the main armament gunner; did not consider that moment of terror in the cavern as the brief seconds of the grenade’s fuse frittered away.

His aim was on the third tank.

It was predictable. He did not see the little puff of grey smoke that followed the explosion in the second tank’s bowels, nor the first licks of flame from the body of the lead tank; nor did he see the boy leap down and run to the ditch.

The third tank had stopped, then – coughing diesel fumes – swung in a crabbing gait towards the safety of the incline. It was a frantic thrashing creature seeking its escape down the incline. Through the ’scope, Gus saw the sheets of newspaper and the scattered shreds of the plastic bags hanging from the wire and the old fence post. The wind had not risen. He had no need to alter the windage turret.

Gus had never, in his shooting life, attempted anything so difficult.

The beast yawed on the rim of the incline. Below the turret, in the shadow of the flange that fastened the gun to it, was a strip of bright glass. The ’scope showed him every rivet in the metal around the glass and the smears across it. The glass was wider than a man’s forehead and as deep as the forehead of a bald man. He breathed, sucked in the air, let it slip, held it, then fired. He had a good, sharp view because there was no dust thrown up from the mud earth under the tip of his barrel. The tank lurched over the incline… It was a moment of Gus’s childhood. Like a small boy’s birthday party. Short trousers, grey ankle socks, school sweaters, and the birthday game of Blind Man’s Buff… The tank was blind. Perhaps the armour-piercing bullet had hit the side flange of the driver’s vision aperture and frosted it; perhaps the bullet had driven through the glass and was a small molten core of lead flying without control around the the interior of the tank and through the bodies of the driver, the gunner and the commander; perhaps the driver’s face was lacerated by a mist of glass fragments… Little children, blindfolded, groped for each other, tried to find each other, and did not know where they were… It was the greatest shot that Gus Peake had ever attempted. The tank engine cut. Below the incline, the beast was blinded. He did not think of the dark horror that little children felt when they were blindfolded, or in the interior of the beast of the three men who were sightless.

He watched the fourth tank. It was as Joe Denton had said it would be. The tracks screwed across the road then dipped down the incline into a dense duststorm. There were new spurts of dust and thick black smoke as the tracks lumbered across the ground where the mines were laid. The beast was crippled.

They would be screaming now, Joe Denton had said, into their radios. They were halted, bunched and hurt. Some no longer had the power to manoeuvre, some had lost the power to see. With the best shooting of his life, Gus had made a hell for them and there was no-one to cheer him as there would have been on a perfect day on Stickledown Range.

He fired at the join of the open turret hatch of the fourth tank and the impact rocked the metal flap and tilted it down. The machine-gun on the sixth tank was rotating fast towards him. Joe Denton had said that the machine-gun beside the turret could be fired from inside the hulk. It was his perfect day. He hit the machine-gun itself, the box holding the ammunition beside the breech, and watched the spray of the tracers igniting.

Omar rose out of the ditch. The boy carried the last of the anti-tank mines that had not been buried beside the road. Omar ran beside the tracks of the fourth and fifth tanks in the line, under the jutting main armament barrels that swirled round towards the source of their prickling pain and past them. The sixth tank had started to reverse. The boy ran along its length. The two big guns fired, dreadnoughts marooned in shallows, and the shells howled far beyond him. The boy was behind the sixth tank as it slewed back towards him, then Gus saw him falling and rolling back down the incline and his hands were empty. The rear tank detonated the mine. The broken track rose in the air and fell into the black cloud.

Joe Denton had said it could be done.

On the far side of the road the incline was too steep. At the front and the rear the road was blocked by the hulks. On the near side of the road, down the incline, were the mines.

The trap was sprung.

The tanks put up smoke. Little canisters flew in the air, arched, fell back and burst. A wall of smoke protected them. He did not consider the panic of the men immured in the hulks. He wondered if – in that autumn fog he had known so well in Hampshire as a child, blinding and constricting – Omar crawled over the superstructures of the beasts and looked for cavities into which to squeeze grenades.

Gus had fired the greatest shot of his life and there was no applause and he didn’t care.

When he saw her first she was beyond the Dragunov’s range.

She was in the ’scope, but at that distance he would not have had a better than fifty-fifty chance of a hit. He always told the recruits at the Baghdad Military College whom he’d taught to snipe that a prime virtue was patience, and a prime defect was to shoot too early and give away position.

She was smaller than he remembered her. She was with a group of men and her head bobbed between their shoulders. The group was close to the road, dragging the wheeled heavy machine-gun. There was a girlish twist in her hair that fanned out behind her when she ran then fell back on to her narrow shoulders.

The dog shifted suddenly beside his leg. He turned, annoyed, and saw the fly settle on the dog’s nostrils, then dance away. He swatted at it.

She was slight, but still able to reach up towards a big brute of a man, heavy and bearded, and push him forward. She ran. There was heavy firing from the crossroads, but she was charmed. The group followed her, caught up with her and crouched, then she ran again. Major Karim Aziz, a veteran of combat, understood. Without her the men would hunker down in cover and ditches and fire wildly in the air, but not expose themselves.

She shamed them. Who could hide when a girl, a woman even, exposed herself and ran forward? Steadily, as she went forward, Aziz tracked her through the ’scope. When, in his slow track, the sight reached the length of cotton scarf then he would have a shot with a 95 per cent probability of success. He had no doubt that his patience would be rewarded

– the shot, fatal or incapacitating, would be sufficient to halt the advance.

The sniper was not with her and that was a niggling irritation to him. Sometimes he strained to hear crack and thump, but the rage of gunfire was too great for him to identify the sniper. He was comfortable, almost tranquil – except when the bastard fly was at the dog’s face and the animal squirmed. He checked his wristwatch. In ten minutes the T-72 tanks would reach the battleground, turn it into a killing zone. He had time enough.

Within ten minutes the woman would have reached the line that ran from the barrel of the Dragunov, past a length of cotton material hooked to a discarded branch, to the ditch beside the road.

She was closer to the line, with youth, almost a prettiness, about her face. With short, darting sprints, she was edging nearer to the line he had made. There were more men around her now and more often she was hidden behind them. If a mortar fell close to the group, if the shrapnel splayed, he would be cheated… The dog shifted and he flicked his trigger hand over its head.

There was an older man, limping, who caught the forward group. He watched the argument between the woman and the man. Maybe he told her that she should be further back, that she was too precious to be so far forward; maybe she replied that she alone could lead the rabble to the crossroads. He smiled to himself, mirthlessly. He knew the older man would lose whatever argument was played between them. She was approaching the line, but not yet at it, and he waited.

He had waited ten days, fifteen years before, in the front-line rubble of the Iranian city, Susangerd, had watched for the mullah who galvanized the defence of the town. A big man, in a black robe and always wearing a flak jacket, a dark, tangled beard below horn-rimmed spectacles and a paint-scraped helmet, who had evaded him for ten full days. On the eleventh day he had shot the mullah; by the evening of the eleventh day the greater part of the town had fallen. He had not fired a single shot before killing the mullah; but that one shot had achieved more than a thousand artillery rounds. If he could wait ten days, he could wait ten minutes.

She was up, running.

The men scrambled after her. He saw some go down – he prayed he would not be cheated – he saw one slide backwards from the heavy machine-gun but another took his place. She ran with a loose freedom and the men scurried after her. She dived forward. It would be the last resting-point before the final surge towards the wire and the bunkers.

He could hear above the gunfire blast the roar of shouting men. He heard one word, yelled again and again over the force of the bullets’ splatter, ‘Meda… Meda… Meda

…’ They came in a swarm behind her.

Through the ’scope, Aziz saw the length of cotton scarf he had hooked to the fallen branch. For a moment, his eye came away from the sight and his glance rested on the parched, cracked ground under the rifle barrel. He should not have given any water to the dog. All of his water should have been poured on to the ground under the tip of the barrel

… He was aiming… The dog moved again.

He had her upper chest in the crosshairs of the sight. Once more a fly danced over the nostrils of his dog.

He had the unfastened second button of her shirt as his target. The fly crawled over the nostrils of his dog.

He breathed deeply, began to exhale, then caught his breath at its fall point, and started the steady slow squeeze of the trigger. He was rock steady, and squeezing. The dog snorted and jumped and careered against his leg. He fired.

Because he had shared the water there was a dirty dust puff under the barrel tip, and he could not see the travelling flight of the bullet. He did not know whether it would go high or low or wide, but he knew in that moment that he had missed her.

He wrenched back the bolt, and tried to settle to fire again. He did not curse the dog.

The head of a man three feet from her, to the left and above her, split apart. There was violent movement. Men fell over her body, but the older man, a veteran like himself, had binoculars up to his eyes. He knew the older man was a veteran because the man’s arm waved immediately, pointed to the puff of dust, identifying his position.

The bullets of the heavy machine-gun, with tracer, surged towards the shallow trench in which he lay. He did not swear at the dog or hit it, but instead pulled it under his body.

The bullets, 12.7 calibre, beat around him, spattered up the dirt and stones over him. The ground around him seemed to explode. He closed his eyes. He thought of his letter. He was deafened by the onslaught. Aziz had never before fired at a target to kill, and missed.

He pressed himself down into the ground, as if to bury himself, and felt the throbbing beat of the dog’s heart against him, and he wondered if the letter would be retrieved and delivered.

When he looked again, through the ’scope, a torrent of men was running through the line. He could not see the woman, the witch, but he heard the shout of her name.

‘Is that what you’re telling me?’

Caspar Reinholtz had been called from the USAF wing of the base at Incerlik. He had been with the intelligence and photo recce officers, plotting the flight paths for the following day. The signals were coming in from State and Defence, and the maps were out that covered the road between Kirkuk and Tuz Khurmatu, and then the main highway south to Baghdad. Rusty had found him, come panting to the door of the deep bunker where the big computers were, and the hushed voices, and the pools of bright light. Rusty had said that the Israeli was on a secure link.

Cohen yelled at him down the link, ‘That’s what I’m getting off the traffic, Caspar.’

Reinholtz repeated the brigadier’s name, spelled it letter by letter, twice, and the name of the armoured unit at Fifth Army that he had commanded… He had run as fast as he could back to the Agency’s compound in the young athletic tyro’s wake. A Brit commander had once told him that officers should never be seen to run. He had panted past the reinforced hangars where the attack aircraft were being armed and fuelled to enforce no-fly and no-drive zones. A promise had been given: no Iraqi aircraft would be permitted to fly against the brigadier’s column when it headed down the road to Tuz Khurmatu; no Iraqi armour would be permitted to drive on an interception course against that column. He had staggered breathlessly into his office, and waved the kid away, told him to go find Bill.

Cohen told it simply, ‘It’s what the traffic says. The first signal was in the night – al-Rashid to the local hoods of the Estikhabarat – four senior men flying to Kirkuk, and the brigadier to be under no-show surveillance. The second signal was Estikhabarat in Kirkuk to al-Rashid, the guy was in the bag and the evidence was stacking up. You talked about a “big play”, Caspar…’

‘I did.’

‘I thought your “big play” might be affected.’

‘Your kindness overwhelms me, Isaac.’

‘Do you wish you didn’t know?’

‘I’d like not to believe it.’

Bill was in the room. He gestured for him to sit. He felt it like a pain that was personal.

The voice was soft in his ear. ‘Hey, Caspar, if your “big play” is affected, please, this is serious, please do not include a source when you get down to sending signals.’

‘I hear you. Maybe, some day, I can return the gift of some really fucking bad news to you, Isaac. Don’t misunderstand me, I am grateful, but I feel like I’ve been hit with a baseball bat.’

‘If it’s still relevant, the ground force is hitting the brigade at the crossroads out of Kirkuk and going well. They’ve destroyed tanks. Your friend, the sniper…’

‘Not relevant.’

‘Keep smiling, Caspar.’

‘Have a happy day, Isaac.’

He heard the static. He laid down the secure telephone. Bill sat quietly in front of him, would have heard what he said and would be allowing him time to collect himself. He stared down at his desk. Promises had been made, and with the promises had been the expenditure of millions, goddam millions of dollars – for nothing. The bastard, the Boss for Life, laughed. The Boss for Life might just have heard of Caspar Reinholtz, might have been told of Caspar Reinholtz by the low-life of the Special Security Service or the General Intelligence Directorate or the Military Intelligence Service, might have known enough of him to make the laughter personal.

He lifted his head. ‘Where were you, late summer of ’96?’

‘Kicking my heels, Rome.’

‘I was in Arbil.’

‘I know that, Caspar – Arbil, when it was bad.’

‘When we made promises, spent the money, recruited like we were here for ever, and ran.’

‘You still carrying scars?’

‘Till the day I die. We ran from House 23-7, Ain Kawa Street, in Arbil. We ran so fast, with our pants down, that we left behind the computers and the sat-phones and the files.

Can you imagine that?’

‘It doesn’t help, Caspar, to dredge what can’t be changed.’

‘For four years we’d recruited, been the flash guys in town. We’d been free with the high and mighty talk – we were believed.’

‘It’s the past.’

‘We left people behind to be butchered. We made it easy for the butchers. They could tap into our computers, decode the sat-phones to learn who we talked to, read the files.

Good people, brave people, bought the bullshit we gave them, and their reward was that we left their names for the butchers… We gave it a couple of years, let the weeds grow on the graves, and came again with promises.’

‘Is it that bad?’

‘It’s the time to be digging more graves.’

‘The Boot?’

‘Arrested, poor bastard.’

‘That’s kind of unfortunate.’

‘Yes… Get me Langley, probably better if I have a speech rather than a text link…

There were three strands. Two strands might carry the weight. I only have one strand of thread left.’

He would talk to Langley. Langley would talk to State and Defence. Defence would stand down the attack aircraft, order the bombs and missiles unloaded, the fuel siphoned out. He would talk to Langley, then get the message to the young woman, a true goddam heroine, that it was over and she should get back where she belonged, to her home in the mountains. It was over.

It was not a sophisticated interrogation. No attempt was made to win the man, no bogus offers of clemency were offered.

They beat the brigadier, the Boot, near senseless, and when he drifted into unconsciousness, they threw buckets of fetid water over him. Then they beat him again.

There was no gag in the brigadier’s mouth as he sat pinioned to the heavy chair, but he never answered their questions, or screamed, or begged.

The senior man from the Estikhabarat stood in the doorway of the command bunker as the general gave his final orders.

He instructed that the reserve force of nine T-72 tanks was to move north from Kirkuk, within a screen of personnel carriers, to recover the initial armoured force that had been deployed. A defensive line was then to be made south of the bridge. The brigade position at the crossroads was to be abandoned and the troops there should withdraw as best they were able. Concentrated artillery fire was to be put down on the road north of the crossroads to hamper the enemy’s reinforcement.

It was little, and it was late.

The general believed that his career of distinction had been broken by a sniper who had outwitted him. By his own words he had given a definition of the evidence of treachery

… His orders were broadcast on the radios linking the units.

The senior man from the Estikhabarat beckoned to him. There would be more of them in the corridor outside the bunker, and more on the steps.

Rather casually, so as not to create alarm among the staff officers round him, he dropped his hand to his holster, drew his service pistol, held it for a moment beside his trouser leg, then pulled it up, poked the barrel into his mouth, and squeezed the trigger.

They were at a road block.

‘All my fucking life, from the first fucking war I went to, to the fucking last, I am fucking blocked by ignorant, fucking illiterate peasants,’ Mike said.

‘What’s killing me is that the goddam money is in that fucker’s pocket,’ Dean said.

They sat on the road beside the wheels of the Mercedes. The Russian had left them.

He’d flashed greenbacks, their bloody greenbacks, he’d been allowed through the block after he’d paid off the thugs there. He’d hitched a ride on a jeep mounted with a machinegun, and no doubt lost a few more of their bloody greenbacks. He was long gone up the road.

‘To be so near to a story and not to be able to touch it, that is very, very painful,’

Gretchen said.

‘Is there anything more fucking depressing than being stopped at a fucking road block, with the fucking story in sight?’

‘When your wallet’s empty, no.’

‘But, there again, no story is worth being killed for.’

There was a distant thud of artillery fire and a long way ahead were palls of hanging smoke. The men at the block grinned venomously and repeated that it was too dangerous for honoured visitors to go up the road. They were into the third hour at the road block, and the second hour after the Russian had left them.

‘Do they know who we fucking are?’

‘Perhaps the fat crook only told them who we used to be.’

‘We are nobody, we represent people who do not care.’

Each of them, caught the wrong side of the road block, knew what they were missing.

They could hear it and, with it, fifteen thousand dollars burning up.

‘I bet nobody’s told the bitch that she could be leading tomorrow night’s news.’

Mike and Dean and Gretchen smoked, chewed gum, ate melting chocolate, did nothing, waited.

The sun was not yet at its zenith, but it was already the end of a perfect day.

Gus and Omar watched the line of tanks and armoured cars fan out beside the road.

They were among the great glacial smoothed rocks of the riverbed. He could have fired again but he had long learned on Stickledown Range that a perfect day could not be repeated so soon. With the tanks and armoured cars, toys in the distance, were cranes to drag clear the disabled T-72s… He imagined the spitting anger of the unit’s commander when he found the handkerchief scale of the minefield, and the slightness of the mantrap.

He wondered also when he would next see Joe Denton – if ever – to talk him through it, and thank him. Away to his right, a straggling column of soldiers crossed the bridge.

As he crawled up from the river and started to walk away towards the crossroads, the shivering began in Gus’s body. He lurched and might have fallen, but the boy caught him, supported him.

When the shooting had died, and the anguish of trying to protect her, Haquim took some men and went to search.

There was little for him to find.

He stood beside the discarded marker, the scrap of cloth draped over the branch. If he had looked for it in the battle, from the ditch beside the road, he would not have seen it. If he had seen it he would have thought it had been blown there on the wind. It was a short link with death, her death.

His knee hurt fiercely, but he strode on briskly away from the road and from the hanging cloth.

The single discarded cartridge case caught his eye when he was almost upon it. It was a shorter link with death, Meda’s death. Behind it was a shallow depression in the ground in which a man’s body could just have been concealed. In front of it was a plate-sized piece of cracked earth with a small gouge in the centre of it. It was a new form of warfare for him. Her life, all their lives, hung on a scrap of cloth that he had not seen, and the amount of water poured onto the ground under a barrel tip.

There was nothing more to find. Haquim left the watered ground, the cartridge case and the strip of cloth behind him – and reflected that one sniper had lost a battle, and another sniper had won it.

Willet woke.

The dream had been a nightmare. He was sweating. The last moments of his sleep, while the nightmare was rampant, had pitched and tossed him in the bed… He was the sniper, lying in a shallow ditch covered with sacking and earth. He was deafened by the clanking rumble of the approaching tanks. He was screaming for help from his mother and from Tricia as the crushing tracks came closer. He was trying to crawl from the ditch, under the great shadow of the tank. He was pulped, mashed, by the tracks, and his mother did not answer his screams; neither did Tricia.

He sat on the bed, shook, then staggered to the small bathroom and flushed cold water over his face.

He turned on the radio to find that statistics were running riot: home owners’ mortgage rates were being lowered by a half of 1 per cent; waiting lists for hip-replacement operations were up by 3.25 per cent; truancy in a school serving a sink estate in the northeast had risen by 5 per cent; travel companies reported that bookings by retired

‘greys’ going after spring sunshine in the Mediterranean had increased from the previous year by 9 per cent; the government’s popularity had dipped by 1 per cent… Life was about fucking percentage points. Life was about money in the pocket, non-critical illness, loutish kids, holiday breaks, and the rulers’ ratings. It was not about Mr Augustus Henderson Peake or his rifle in combat against tanks. Money, ailments, kids, holidays, politics were the spider’s web that constricted Ken Willet’s life, and the lives of everyone he knew.

He went back to his computer. He felt a deep resentment for Peake, the transport manager who had broken free of the web. He could not have done what Peake had, gone into combat. His innermost thought, which he would not share: the survival of Peake would belittle him, the professional soldier.

He typed briskly.

MILITARY TRAINING: This interview, however, failed to provide evidence of the necessary expertise in utilizing to the full the AWM’s capability. I can imagine situations where AHP will gain short-term successes. Without the necessary training, I would believe it unlikely that AHP can influence any important combat situation. Excitement, battlefield adrenaline, commitment are insufficient substitutes for extensive training under the guidance of experts.

I continue to rate medium-term survival chances as slim to nonexistent.

Willet shut down the machine.

He pulled his road atlas off the shelf and looked for the best route to south Devon.