Holding the Zero

Chapter Twelve

‘Do you know that you stink? I hear that you are a tank killer.’ The Russian stood over him.

Gus lay on the sandy ground, his head on his rucksack, propped against a jeep’s wheel.

The boy was sitting cross-legged beside him. The jeep was a few paces inside the wide circle of men. Some squatted, some crouched, some stood, and they held their weapons and watched. In the centre of the circle with Meda, with the maps, were agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim. The great ring around them listened in silence to the bickering between the warlords, and the interventions of Meda as she stabbed her finger at the maps. Each time the Russian spoke there were concerted grunts and hisses from the peshmerga nearest to him, protests at his voice, but he ignored them.

‘I hear that you and the boy stopped an armour column, but you still stink. You should get yourself a bath or a shower and some soap. You smell like a carcass out on the steppe, in summer, a rotten carcass… She is saying she will take them into Kirkuk tomorrow, and they are arguing about whose fighters should lead the attack. They are shit.’

The shells still whined overhead and hit the road to the north. Gus could not, for the life of him, understand why the order was not given to target the crossroads. He thought that three thousand men made the circle, and she was in the middle of it with agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim. One salvo would be enough. Agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim had come in separate convoys, had run the gauntlet down the road, with escorts of jeeps and pickups. He watched the body language. If one agreed, the other disputed it. Sometimes she threw up her arms and sometimes, to their faces, she cursed them.

Rybinsky said, ‘She is saying that she will take them into the headquarters of Fifth Army tomorrow, and they are arguing about whose foot should be first through the gate.

That’s the sort of shits they are.’

The two aghas sat on metal-framed deckchairs. She was between them, on her knees, with the maps held down by stones. Gus watched them, animated in distrust or sulking.

‘You know what she said? She said she’d tie Bekir’s left foot to Ibrahim’s right foot, and they would go into Fifth Army together – then she’d tie Bekir’s right foot to Ibrahim’s left foot, and they’ll go into the governor’s offices. Look at the hatred behind the smiles, because she’s leading them where they cannot lead themselves. And she’s a woman, that is very painful for them – on that they are united, the one thing. And they have a very great fear of Baghdad, but if they get to Kirkuk they will be famous in Kurdish history. They want to believe her, but still they have the fear.’

She had ripped the bandanna from her forehead, and her hair hung loose. She gripped their ankles, above their smart polished footwear. With a decisive movement she tied her bandanna around one’s left leg and the other’s right. She stood. She held out her arms as if to demonstrate to the circle the unity of their commanders. Above the whistle of the shells and the rumble of the detonation, there was a creeping growl of approval.

‘It is always the same with army commanders, the jealousy. I know, I was in the army.

I was in Germany, in Minsk, I was in Afghanistan – always commanders of men have an envy. Then I transferred to Strategic Nuclear Forces. I was at Krasnie Sosenki guarding the SS-25 intercontinental ballistic missiles – perhaps one was targeted on where you lived, worked. The only thing good about Krasnie Sosenki was that it was not Chechnya.

I left, I walked out six years ago. I had not been paid for eight months, so I went my own way, into import-export.’

Gus saw Haquim on the far side of the circle. There was a great sadness in Haquim’s eyes. He was squatted down and his hand cupped his ear so that he could hear better. If he survived, came through, he would tell his grandfather about Haquim and about a boy who climbed onto the hulks of tanks. There would be much to tell his grandfather, but import and bloody export would not be a part of it.

‘In import-export in Kurdistan, I have no competitors. I have the market. That is why I am here. For me there is a big opportunity. These are a very unsophisticated people: for a percentage they will sign anything. Around the Kirkuk oil fields there is chrome, copper, iron, coal. I will get the licence to exploit the wealth of Kirkuk – an honourable financial agreement, of course. Then I can retire…’

She was back on her knees, very close to them and their tied ankles. He watched the softness of the movement of her hands and the persuasion in her eyes. He could not look away from her, and neither could the tied men. He knew it, he would follow her where she led.

‘Do you know Cannes? Do you know the South of France? I would like a little apartment over the harbour, with a view of the sea, when I retire. I have never been there but I have seen the postcards. I think an apartment over the harbour in Cannes is very expensive. Are you a rich man, tank killer?’

There was a bank account that had been emptied, and a job that he had walked out of.

Three days before, or it might have been five – because those days now slipped by unnoticed, merged with each other, and he no longer knew the day of the week or the date – the mortgage payment would have been triggered, and would not have been paid.

Perhaps Meg used her key, came in, sorted his post on the mat and made a pile of the brown envelopes, but her teaching salary was not enough to meet the gas, electricity, tax and water. In terms of the life he had turned his back on, he was as destitute as the men who crowded shop doorways, when the light fell and the businesses closed in Guildford’s high street, with blankets and carton boxes. He had nothing but his rifle, the kit in the rucksack under his head, and his love.

‘What do they pay you for killing tanks? Five thousand a week, dollars? No, that is not enough – ten thousand a week? Will you have a bonus for reaching Kirkuk? What’s the package, fifty thousand?’

It would not have happened unless she had done it. She took agha Bekir’s hand and agha Ibrahim’s hand. She held their two hands up high, so that each man was jerked off his chair and the handkerchief and the umbrella they held were dropped. Slowly, so that every man in the circle could see it, she brought their hands together, and the fingers clasped. The great circle bayed their names. It was a moment of power. The men kissed

… Gus thought that the next day he would stand in Kirkuk.

‘She is fantastic. She is incredible. I think she is a virgin. I, myself, would trade in all that package, fifty thousand dollars, to take away that virginity. Would you? I tell you, tank killer, if you want to trade in the package then you should first find a bath or a shower, and some soap. I wish it were me – I think I have to be satisfied with the licences to exploit the chrome at Kirkuk, and the copper, iron and coal.’

Gus closed his eyes. If he had not shut his eyes, lost sight of the Russian’s leering face, he would have hit him.

‘I suppose I’ve been expecting you – someone like you and like the lady.’

The sergeant sat on a camping stool. The rain drove in from the west and the sea. The slope of the Common ran away and up in front of him. His binoculars were up to his eyes, never left them, as he scanned the gorse, dead bracken and heather.

‘I was expecting to meet you. That’s why I asked for you by name,’ Willet said.

It had been a dreadful drive down from London. Two coned-off roadworks on the motorway and the start of the Easter holiday had snarled the traffic. He and Ms Manning hadn’t talked much, and mostly he’d relied on the radio for company. When they had finally turned off the road south of Exeter and reached the guarded main gate of the Commando Training College – Royal Marines, they’d been eighty minutes late for their appointment. A pleasant-faced major had met them, given them coffee, accepted Ms Manning’s grudging apology, then shaken his head in puzzlement and said, without equivocation, that he’d never heard of Augustus Henderson Peake – and, anyway, it was quite impossible for a civilian to receive the advanced sniper training conducted by the Lympstone base. Ms Manning had sworn, and Willet had proffered a name.

‘Does this drop me in the shit?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so, Mr Billings, I wouldn’t have thought there’s any call for that.’

The major had driven them out to the Common. The rain came from low cloud that settled on the ridge a thousand yards or so from where Sergeant Billings sat. There was little to see and Ms Manning stood back, with the major, and had opened a brightly floral umbrella. Willet crouched beside the sergeant and watched the observers, who stood like old fence posts in the dead foliage on the slope and waited for Sergeant Billings to direct them. Willet had seen no movement, and he’d been passed a pair of binoculars, until the sudden murmur of Billings’ voice into a pocket radio sent the left-side observer tracking fast into a clump of flattened ochre bracken. The weird shape of a man in a gillie suit, covered with bracken sprigs and heather, emerged from under the observer’s feet.

‘Wrong mix of camouflage – he rushed it,’ Billings mouthed. ‘Too much bracken when he was in the heather, too much heather in the bracken. Shouldn’t have used bracken until he was out of the heather. He’s failed. Actually, he’s lucky. If he’d been in the field and I’d been the counter-sniper, he’d be dead.’

‘How long was Peake here?’

‘Three days.’

‘Is that long enough?’

‘It was all the time Gus had. Yes, it was long enough.’

‘Doesn’t seem long.’

The failed sniper, who would be dead if he had been in the field, tramped miserably towards them.

‘That jerk’s been here a month, great on the written stuff, useless on the practical. It depends where you’re coming from. Gus was coming from the right direction, Gus had my dad to teach him, like he taught me. Dad understood ground, understood the animals he stalked…’

‘I was told he was a poacher, your father.’

‘What the landowners called him, and the magistrates. Dad could have got up close enough to undo your bootlaces. He told me he was going to northern Iraq. It was about his grandfather, he said. I remember his grandfather, a good old boy, but Gus’s father was crap. He said my dad was a bad influence – but at least my dad might just keep him alive

…’

There was another murmur into the radio and the right-side observer plunged off into a low gorse thicket and identified the target, spotted through the sergeant’s binoculars at 624 yards. Again Willet had seen nothing.

‘What was his mistake?’

‘He’s got hessian net over the lens of his ’scope. He let the net get snagged in the gorse. I saw the lens.’

‘So, he’s dead.’

‘Failed or dead, take your pick. I spotted Gus morning and afternoon the first day, morning and afternoon the second day, morning on the third day, and each time he was closer to me. The third afternoon, I didn’t get him. What I can say to you, Mr Willet, it would take a real class counter-sniper, as good as me, to bust Gus.’

‘Why did you help him? You put your career on the line, your pension with it. You were in flagrant abuse of Queen’s Regulations. Why?’

For the first time, the sergeant’s eyes flicked away from his binoculars. He had a strong, weathered face and piercingly clear eyes. ‘It was owed him, because of his loyalty.’ The eyes were back to the binoculars. ‘I had a debt to him because of his loyalty to Dad. You called my dad what the landowners and the magistrates called him, a poacher. A poacher is a thief in the eyes of those turds. He got sent down, my dad did.

He was locked up in Horfield – that’s the gaol at Bristol – for three months. Mum and I, we hadn’t any money, we only got to see him twice. The first time, my dad was pathetic.

They might just as well have put him down as cage him. He was a free spirit, had to have the wind on his face, had to be out in the pissing rain. I cried all the way home and Mum wasn’t much better. The second time he was brighter, changed, and he said that Gus had been to see him. My dad thought he had plenty of friends before they locked him up, but Mum and me, and Gus, were the only ones who visited him. He’d taken the day off school, told his teachers he was going home for a family funeral, but he hitched rides up to Bristol and saw my dad. All the other friends had turned their backs on him. Not Gus.

That’s loyalty. He wouldn’t run out on you. He never saw my dad again… We moved and Dad was dead within the twelvemonth. Why? To me, loyalty is important. It’s the mark of a true friend, when you’re down the back’s not turned. What’s he doing there?

Will he make it through?’

‘I don’t know.’

Behind them, the major called out that he was taking Ms Manning to the shelter of his car. Willet seemed not to feel the rain dripping off his face. There was another failure, another death, another soldier tramping disconsolately forward after his position was identified. He told the sergeant that he would make damn certain that no blame accrued to him for helping the civilian, Augustus Henderson Peake, understand the trade of killing, and surviving.

‘What else did he learn here?’

‘I took him into the library, showed him what we had on sniping and signed them out in my name. In the evenings, off camp, I got the specialist instructors to meet him. There was Sergeant Williams who’s into dogs, because dogs are big for snipers, that’s tracker dogs. Sergeant Browne is weapons maintenance, Sergeant Fenton is camouflage, Sergeant Stevens is the top man for the tactics of using the AWM Lapua Magnum against armour, communications and helicopters. Sergeant-’

‘Did you say helicopters? You mean gun-ship helicopters?’

‘It’s not a cake-walk he’s gone on, Mr Willet. That’s why I passed him on to an old friend. Whatever they throw at him, he won’t back off. It’s a powerful thing, loyalty.’

He’d sent the signals first, then steadied himself and opened the secure voice link to Langley.

Caspar Reinholtz was alone in his office. The overall picture that he would share with the disembodied voices on the link was not for Luther, Bill and Rusty to hear.

He allowed few interruptions. The inquest would come later, a commission of inquiry, but his job now was merely to put flesh on the bones of another disaster in Iraq. Beside the receiver for the link was a sat-phone he would use as soon as he had finished with the link.

While he spoke, however hard he tried to cut her from his mind, the picture of the young woman was in his thoughts.

The great circle was tighter around agha Bekir, agha Ibrahim and Meda, but held at a respectful distance.

Gus heard the warbling pulse of the sat-phone, heard it because the men in the circle were quiet as they watched the feast of celebration. The chairs had been pushed aside and a rug laid out for the dishes of lamb and rice, and spicy vegetables. He knew what they ate because the scent of the food drifted across the open space of the circle. He sat against the wheel of the jeep and the boy was crouched beside him. The sat-phone cried to be answered. They would eat later, with all the men in the circle, then be briefed, then march in the dusk towards distant Kirkuk and the flame. The persistence of the sat-phone was silenced.

Gus watched idly. He saw agha Bekir put a dripping piece of meat in his mouth, hold the receiver to his face, and chew while he listened. Gus saw the sea-change.

The face clouded. Where there had been a wary smile there was now a concentrated coldness. The lines were back on the features. The boy had seen it and seemed to squirm; the murmur of voices in the circle was stilled and quiet laughter died. Agha Ibrahim was passed the sat-phone receiver and grains of rice slid from his fingers as he took it. He too listened, his face darkening, then threw the receiver away from him. Meda scrabbled on her knees across the rug, tipping aside food bowls and pots, and snatched it up. Gus heard her furious scream, and then she too dropped it. They were all on their feet. Agha Bekir was shouting to one side of the circle, and agha Ibrahim to the other, as if some strange apartheid divided their forces, and Meda was a small, spinning, yelling shape between them, and the rumble of the voices in the circle was confusion.

Every emotion of anguish was on the boy’s features.

‘What do they say?’

The boy piped, ‘They say it is finished. Meda will not believe them… They have the courage of sheep… They say it were better that it had never begun. Meda says tomorrow she will take them to Kirkuk. They say there is no air cover, that there is no mutiny in the Iraqi tanks, as they were promised. They say they are going home.’

Meda gripped their clothes in turn. She was ferocious in her attack, and she pleaded with them, but neither would catch her eye, as if they dared not, as if they feared her reproach.

The boy said, ‘They say that if they go now it is possible the revenge of the government will not be so great. The Americans’ promises are broken, they say they will never see Kirkuk. Meda says there is a place in history for them. They are worse than sheep when wolves come.’

For a moment, she hung on to the men, but they pulled clear of her. Agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim shouted their orders at the sectors of the circle. Meda was pleading with their men.

The boy’s passion was squeezed from him. ‘They say they are taking their men with them. Meda says she will be in Kirkuk in the morning, on her own if no man will follow her.’

On each side, the circle parted to allow the departure of the chieftains. Gus sat against the wheel of the jeep and held the big rifle across his legs. He felt a sense of calm because it was still a part of his perfect day.

Great shuffling columns of men passed her. She gazed on them with contempt. Gus saw the men who had used the wheeled machine-gun abandon it and walk on. He saw those who had run to the wire with her at the Victory City, and those who had gone down the road with her towards the barricade at Tarjil. A few broke the regimen of the columns and dropped down to sit in the dirt at her feet. He saw the big cars spurt away with their escorts of pick-ups and jeeps, and clinging in the back of one of them, amongst the men with guns, was the Russian. So, the bastard turned his back on licences for chrome, copper, iron and coal – and a small bitter smile hovered at Gus’s lips. He saw Haquim go to Meda, argue with her and try to pull her away, but she pushed him from her and his weight went on to his injured leg. He slipped to the dirt, and crawled away in his humiliation. Many went and only a few were left.

‘What are you going to do, Mr Gus?’

‘You should walk, Omar, you have a life to live.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Perhaps go and find something to eat.’

‘I cannot leave you, Mr Gus.’

They hugged each other. They were the transport manager and the urchin thief, and they clung to each other, were tied to each other as tightly as the chieftains’ ankles had been.

‘I am honoured to meet the sniper who does not fire.’

‘Do you wish to hear my report, Colonel?’

The new man, flown in from Baghdad, was rake thin. His uniform was immaculately creased and the medal ribbons on his chest were a kaleidoscope of colours. Major Aziz knew his name and his face from the photographs in the newspapers. The photographs always showed him at parades standing a pace behind the President. He wore the flash on his shoulder of the brigade of Amn al-Khass, the unit of the Special Security Service tasked with the protection of the President. It was predictable that a new commander would seek to belittle the men over whom he had authority, to demonstrate his power. In his filth, tired, hungry, Aziz stood loosely, not at attention, in the command bunker, and the dog lay in the dirt from his boots.

‘How many rounds have you fired, Major Aziz, in defence of our positions?’

‘I have fired once. I missed. Sniping is not an exact art, as you will know, Colonel. Do you wish to hear my report now?’

‘Perhaps your mind was resting on your duties as a kennel-boy. Get that fucking animal out of here, then clean yourself up, then make your report.’

Aziz had come back across the dried riverbed, and rejoined the road south of the bridge near to the raised embankment where the engineers still worked under floodlights to recover the last tank, and where the sappers had cleared the last mine. He had been given a ride back to Fifth Army. Then he had been told of the fate of the brigadier, the Boot -and of the general’s suicide. As he’d walked across the open ground towards the command bunker, he’d glanced at the squat cell block, and he had thought of his family.

Where he stood, the floor of the command bunker was scrubbed clean except for the dirt from his boots, but they had not been able to remove the blood spatters from the ceiling.

‘Were you at Susangerd, Colonel?’ He spoke quietly, as if in casual conversation. ‘I do not remember seeing you at Susangerd, nor at Khorramshahr. We did not meet, I think, in Kuwait City. Were you operational in al-Anfal? I look forward to hearing of the rigours of staff work in divisional headquarters.’

He saw the flush in the colonel’s face. Officers looked away. The recklessness was like a narcotic.

‘Forgive me, Colonel, my memory played a trick with me. I have fired twice. I fired at the woman and I missed. At Tarjil I fired at the commanding officer – and did not miss -because he betrayed the soldiers under his command. He was running away. I am prepared to kill any officer, whatever his rank and whatever his position of influence, if he betrays the trust placed in him by the army and, of course, the people of Iraq. Do you want to hear my report, Colonel, or do you want me to go back to the war?’

He bent and ruffled his fingers through the hair at the nape of the dog’s neck, then he looked up at the blood on the ceiling, and the sight of the small, barred windows of the cell block hooked his mind.

‘Make your report.’

Major Karim Aziz spoke of what he had seen. From a good vantage point, with enough elevation for him to look down a slight gradient into the camp, he had settled with his telescope, and the dog had been beside him. He told of the arrival of agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim, then of their abrupt departure. He said that a large proportion of the force of the peshmerga had followed after them in general retreat, but the woman remained at the crossroads with no more than three hundred men. He predicted an attack in the morning because he could see no other reason for her to stay. He described what he had seen in a flat monotone, and where he would be in the morning. He finished, saluted, called for his dog and shambled out of the command bunker.

The brigadier, the Boot, was a proud man but it was hard to have pride when lying in the corner of a cell in the piles of his own excrement and the pools of his own urine.

Maybe they rested, maybe they had gone to Communications to talk with the al-Rashid barracks, maybe they had left him to agonize on the future facing him before death.

The pain racked his body. There would be many, now, who would have heard of his arrest, knew that he faced torture, and who shook in the fear that he would name them.

Pride was the only dignity left to him. If he broke under torture, screamed out the names, then the last of the dignity would be taken. He heard the stamp of feet in the corridor, and the slide of the bolt. In the cell’s doorway, he saw the faces of the men who would try again to steal his pride.

He watched the mustashar hobble towards him.

There had been more than three thousand men at the crossroads, and now there were fewer than three hundred. One jeep still waited, with the engine turning.

Haquim winced as he bent his knee and lowered himself to sit beside Gus.

His voice was dried gravel under tyres, and sad. ‘You should go now. You should walk with me, Mr Peake, to the jeep, and sit with me and leave. You have done what you could.’

Gus looked into the eyes without light and the mouth without laughter and could hear only the sadness.

‘You can be proud that you came and that you tried to help. You are not to blame that the force against you is too great and the force with you is too small. It is the story of the Kurdish people. No man can call you a coward…’

‘May your god ride with you, Haquim.’

‘Do you think I am a coward, Mr Peake, or do you think it is the anger because she does not listen to me? May I ask you, has she made her apology to you for being wrong about the tanks? Has she?’

‘It is not important.’

‘She believes to apologize is to show weakness. The stubbornness is a death wish. She will neither apologize to you, nor accept that a march on Kirkuk with so few is like a death wish – for her and for everyone who goes with her.’

‘I wish you well.’

‘The spell of her holds you… and you think of me as a coward. I cannot run fast enough to be with her and to shield her. I have no reason to be here, to go into Kirkuk, to die under the light of the flame. I was not always a coward.’

‘I will remember you as a good and true friend.’

‘Listen to me. It is important, if I am to live with myself, that I tell you of the days when I was not a coward. I was a junior officer of artillery. For five years I was with an artillery regiment in support of the ground forces defending the Basra road. We were safe, we had deep bunkers to go into when the Iranians shelled us, but in front of us were our infantry. There was as much barbed wire behind our forward positions, where our infantry were, as there was to the front. They were trapped there, peasant boys, and behind the barbed wire were minefields to prevent them breaking and fleeing from the attacks. Behind the minefields were security troops to round up the deserters and shoot them. They were fodder for the cannons of the Iranians. At the end of the fifth year that I served there, in the heat and with the smell of death, I went alone in an evening into the marshes to see if I could find a forward position for an artillery spotter. I found them.

They were all Kurds. They were from Arbil and Rawandiz, Dihok and Zakho, and there was one from the mountains near to my home at Birkim. I saw their terror of me. They thought I would call for security troops. My own blood, little more than boys, of my own people. I took off my badges of rank and threw them into the water. When the day ended we started out. I took them home, Mr Peake. We walked for a month, always at night.

There were eleven of these Kurdish boys, and I led them home to their mountains. We moved in darkness and hid in the days. We stole food, we avoided the road blocks. If we had been seen or captured, we would have died before firing parties or on the hangman’s rope. I brought them out of the marshes and across deserts, through fields, around cities, in the heat and in the cold. I delivered them, each of them, to their homes, to their mothers, to the mountains. I was not always as you see me now…’

‘May your god go with you and watch you.’

‘Should I tell you when I fought with the rearguard when the Iraqis came in the Operation al-Anfal – the name was taken from a sura in the Koran, the chapter that describes holy war against infidels – that name was used to legalize the murder and rape and looting of Kurds? Should I tell you how I fought to win time for the refugees in 1991, after the Coalition’s great betrayal? They will see what you have done against tanks -they will fly against you with the helicopters… I want to be with my children. I do not want to die for nothing.’

The tears streamed on Haquim’s face. Gus took his grimy handkerchief from his pocket, wiped them away and made smears on the other man’s cheeks.

The handkerchief was wet in his hand as he watched the jeep leave, watched it until it was small then gone into the mist that was thrown up at the cooling end of the day, and he thought of the helicopters.

They saw the cars speed through the road block with their escorts, then came the bigger column of lorries, pick-ups and jeeps, laden low with men.

‘What’s going on here? The fucking yellow bastards are running!’ Mike exploded.

‘Looks like the stakes have gotten too high,’ Dean whined.

‘It was madness, we should never have tried. Expensive madness!’ Gretchen cried.

The dust from the wheels of the column spattered over them. The faces of the men told a story of defeat.

‘I haven’t seen her,’ Gretchen said.

‘Probably long gone, probably gone to wash her goddam hair,’ Dean said.

‘I’ll wring her neck with my own fucking hands, if I ever get sight of her,’ Mike said.

The Russian came and spilled down from the back of an open vehicle. They swarmed around him. He shouted that it was a matter beyond his control, that the war was over, finished.

‘Where is she?’

He did not know. Maybe they cared to go and look for themselves, to walk down the road through the artillery bursts and search for her. Himself, he was leaving. He reached into his back pocket and heaved out the bulging roll of banknotes, unwound the elastic band holding the roll tight, and threw the notes high in the air for the wind to catch. He let them scrabble for them.

The cheeks and jowl of Lev Rybinsky quivered in misery. ‘Your loss is that of a distant cousin, a mere story – my loss is that of a son. I have lost the chance of gaining the licences to exploit the minerals here. If you want to go and look for her then go. I am leaving.’

When they had collected all of the money they climbed into his car and joined the tail of the long column heading north towards the mountains.

The drone was in his ears. He had his back to the road but it was bad for Joe Denton to try to work while he was distracted. Over his shoulder, on the road, was the grind of the vehicles. The minefield was more difficult to work in than he had expected. A part of the meadow had a shallow dip in it, from long years of winter rain. The soil had been pushed by the rain flow to the side, and had buried the tripwires of the V69s. The Italian ones were the most dangerous of all the mines he cleared, and particularly dangerous when the tripwires were buried. The killing range was a radius of 27 yards. When the tripwire was touched – and the tension in the buried wires gave them a hair-trigger condition – the initiator charge hurled the V69’s core vertically upwards to a height of 18 inches above the ground, then a restraining wire detonated the core, throwing out thousands of tiny metal cubes. If he fired a V69 then the helmet with the visor covering his face would be lacerated, and his protective vest would be shredded. More than any of the mines he worked on, Joe detested the V69s: too many times he had seen the child amputee who had wandered out over other meadows to pick flowers, and men and women who had gone to round up cattle herds and now limped on crutches, or to harvest apples from orchards and now wore the hideous lifeless artificial legs. Clearing the long-laid mines was not work for a man suffering distraction.

All the time the approaching drone had been in his ear he had been excavating the lie of a tripwire with a trowel and a slim metal probe. He stopped, caught his breath and watched the column on the road, then crawled back along his cleared channel between the pegs.

The lorries, pick-ups and jeeps lumbered along the narrow track. He saw the faces of many men, quiet and without passion. He stood at the side of the road, scanned those faces and looked for Gus.

At the end of the convoy was a mud-spattered Mercedes, then came Sarah’s two pickups with the bright new paint of Red Crescents on the doors and bonnets. Joe waved her down. He saw casualties on stretchers in the vans, but they were not full – and yet the army retreated.

‘What happened?’

She was tough, old Sarah, the one who liked to say she’d seen everything misery could throw at her, and she gibbered.

‘They took the crossroads. The Iraqis fell back, damn nearly gave it to them. She was wrong, she – the woman, Meda – promised there would be no tanks. It was a trap, the soldiers fell back and left the peshmerga out in the middle of a killing zone, with the tanks to do the killing. Your sniper – and your mines – together they stopped the tanks.

The pick-ups would have been full, and some more, if your sniper hadn’t listened well to what you said. The casualties stayed minimal… They should have been going for Kirkuk tomorrow morning, but the warlords called the whole bloody thing off. They’ve quit and taken their people with them.’

‘Have you seen him?’

Sarah said, ‘Most didn’t, but some stayed – that’s what I was told. The some are the misfits, the useless and the thieves, what the warlords don’t have on their payroll. She hasn’t come out, and he’s with her.’

‘How many are left, to go to Kirkuk?’

‘What I was told, it’s around three hundred.’

‘Then they’re best forgotten,’ Joe said. ‘You won’t see them again. When you forget, it doesn’t hurt.’

The pick-up pulled away. He saw that she bit her lip. The dusk was coming on, and he went back, so carefully, into the minefield to collect the gear he had left there. In the morning he would finish with the buried tripwire. *** He had lain a long time on his bed, until the darkness blacked out the beaming smile of the President on the wall in front of him.

Alone, but for his dog, his sense of duty burdened him.

Major Karim Aziz tried to analyse the priorities of duty. Was his first duty to his wife and children, and their safety? Was it to the soldiers who would stand at barricades in the Kirkuk suburbs and fight the woman and her remnant force, regardless of their own future? Was his supreme duty to the great and historic people of Iraq?

If his duty was to his family, he should slip away, drive in the night to Baghdad and take them as fugitives on the hazardous journey to the Turkish or Iranian frontiers. If he failed they would all be killed. If he succeeded he abandoned his duty to the soldiers at the barricades, and to the people of Iraq. Duty was his life, the prop on which he had leaned for so long. He drifted close to exhausted sleep. The dog snored contentedly on the mat by the far wall. Above his duty to his family and his soldiers and his people was the image of the sniper – faded at first, then clearing – sitting and watching and mocking him.

The thought of the sniper caught him. He tossed. His hand found the shape in his breast pocket of the letter written to his wife. He shook on the bed. His chance to fulfil his duty lay upon the courage of the wretch in a cell. The wretch would know of him, could denounce him to staunch the pain. His duty was to confront the sniper. It was his supreme indulgence to crave the aloof, alone, personal battle with the sniper – if the wretch gave him time.

He pushed himself off the bed. With his Dragunov, his backpack and his dog, he went out into the night – past the dull lights illuminating the cell block – to find the woman who would lead him to the sniper, if he was given the time.

‘Still here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not running?’ A chuckle whipped her voice.

‘No.’

‘Should I apologize?’

Gus said calmly, ‘Not necessary.’

‘Apologize because my judgement was wrong?’

‘The tanks came, you were wrong.’

‘But you, the hero, stopped them,’ she taunted.

‘I did what I could.’

‘If I don’t apologize, if my judgement was wrong, why do you stay?’

‘I don’t think I could explain.’

He had not moved all day. He had allowed the tiredness to seep from his body into the ground. He could not see her face, but the strut of her body was in bold outline above him and the bulk of her seemed greater because her hands were set on her hips. It was Gus’s own small piece of defiance that he had sat all through the day and into the evening darkness against the jeep’s wheel. If she wanted to come to him she could; if she did not, he would not go in search of her. Small fires were burning and around them were little clusters of men, some in earshot and some beyond. In the middle of the night he would move. Haquim had talked of helicopters… Omar had left him, and sometimes he saw his slight silhouette drift close to the fires then disappear. He thought the boy craved the company of adult fighters, as if that took away his youth. He was sorry that the boy had stayed.

The anger rippled in her. ‘I did everything for them, and they gave me trifles. At the moment I needed them, the swine – Bekir and Ibrahim – turned away from me because the final victory has to be earned and is not set in stone. When I am in Kirkuk…’

‘What will they do when you are in Kirkuk?’

She snorted. ‘Come, of course, what else? Come to take the rewards for what I have done for them.’

‘Yes.’

Gus jacked himself up. He used the butt of his rifle to push himself off the ground, and he hitched his rucksack onto his shoulder. He took her hand. He wondered if she would fight him. He took it loosely, then tightened his grip to jolt her forward. She dug in her heels, but his grip was the same as when he held the rifle ready to shoot, firm and strong.

As Gus took the first strides she held back but with each step he jerked harder, and after the first strides she accepted and walked beside him. They went past the sentries, sitting and smoking cigarettes, out into the black darkness beyond the perimeter of the crossroads camp.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Towards Nineveh,’ Gus said.

‘That is more than a hundred kilometres, and backwards.’

He said patiently, ‘We are going where we can imagine we are at Nineveh.’

‘If we could reach it, and we cannot, all we would find are old rocks and old stones.’

‘It’s where it began – it’s why I am here. It started at Nineveh.’

‘That is rubbish.’

‘We are going towards Nineveh.’

He led and she no longer fought him. They walked away from the wire and left the flickering fires behind them. They were under stars and a thin moon’s crescent. From the time he could sit on his grandfather’s knee and smell the stale whiff of tobacco on his breath, he had known of the palace, and the friendship made there. Deep in the memory of childhood was the story of King Sennacherib who had died 2,680 years ago, when the same stars and the same thin moon made a pallid dullness of the ground, and the same stars and moon had watched over the friendship of men now aged. Grafted in his mind, from the days when he could first read, were the pictures in the books of the throne room in the palace and the bas-reliefs and the shallow outline of the excavated city gates. There was a figure in relief that he remembered above all, a crouching archer. In an album of faded photographs, two men stood outside a tent, posed beside a car, larked in the ruins, knelt and helped the archaeologists: one was tall and wore an open shirt, and a wide-brimmed hat, ludicrous baggy shorts and battered sandals; the other was shorter and seemed heavier in the folds of the long-tailed tribal shirt and the shapeless trousers, with curled unruly hair under a cloth wound as a turban. And the same quiet, the same stars and moon had blessed that friendship, at Nineveh.

‘There were stories and books and pictures, but it was too far away to be real. There were letters sent to my grandfather, by your grandfather, but they had no value, no context in anything I knew. Then I came with him to the border. We found his friend, and we found you. You never cried. All around you was screaming and weeping, despair.

You had just buried your brothers. You hung back, somehow apart from the misery around you. I had never seen before, have never seen again, a young face of such determination. You were not more than a child, you never spoke, but I saw your face.

Whatever else in my life goes on past me, that face is always with me… I may not be good with words, but I am blessed for having known you, given me from old men’s friendship. Do you think we are close now to the old men, near to Nineveh?’

‘I think we are.’

‘I came because that face, without tears, enabled me to dream and to dare.’

He sat on the ground. He pulled her down beside him. A shell whined high over them and exploded in the distance on the road. He felt the light wind, medium strength but coming on to fresh, on his face, and she shuddered. He hesitated, then slipped his arm over her shoulder. Gus knew it was not the cold that made the shudder in her body.

Together, his arm around her shoulder, they could dream, dare. He pulled her harder against him, her shoulder under his, her hair against his cheek, her hips against his, her thigh… She cried out in pain. She was so strong, so proud, so bloody obstinate, and he had forgotten. He took the torch from his pocket. He did not speak. He pushed her back onto the dirt, and his hand went to her belt. He unfastened it and dragged down her trouser zip. He heaved the trousers down and shone the torch onto her thigh. The dressing was gone, and the edge of the wound was reddened and angry. Maggots moved in the centre of it, between the weals that marked its limits. He saw the wriggling life of the maggots. He crouched over her thigh, smelt the dankness of her, and very carefully began to pick each of the maggots from the wound. She did not cry out again. He poured water from his bottle over the wound and washed away the newest of the flies’ eggs. He did not criticize her for not having had the wound dressed, for not having stolen the time of the aid-worker at Tarjil while she’d worked to save the worst of the casualties. He loved her because, under the bombast of her conceit, she would never put herself first, and never complain for fear that her strength was diminished. He made the wound clean. He switched off the torch, lifted her buttocks, drew up her trousers and zipped them, then fastened her belt.

He did not think it was necessary to fumble for words to explain why he had stayed.

He saw the great flame burning and beyond it were the roofs, minarets and the high buildings of Kirkuk. He could dream and he could dare, because of her. He kissed her. It was a slow, awkward kiss, lip to lip, mouth to mouth, the kiss of teenage children in wonderment.

They walked back into the camp, away from Nineveh.

She called briskly for a briefing meeting in fifteen minutes, and the shyness was gone from her.

There was a jeep parked near to one of the fires and Gus saw Haquim beside it.

Haquim said, ‘As you could not leave her, neither could I, though it was the act of a fool to come back.’

‘Why?’

‘To be with her, and to tell you about helicopters…’

‘You didn’t have to come back – I know about helicopters.’

‘And to shield her, to keep her safe from herself.’

Gus settled comfortably against the jeep’s wheel. The boy brought them coffee. Only when he drank it did he lose the taste of her mouth in his, but still he did not forget.