Holding the Zero

Chapter Thirteen

Away to the west, the flame burned, an isolated beacon beyond the myriad lights in Kirkuk.

They went fast over flat, open ground. If they looked for cover, went forward at a crawl, they would not make their schedule. If he had not believed in her, he would have turned.

The route, Omar leading and Gus a pace behind, would take them in a great arcing circuit around the city’s lights. Going hard, Gus could not avoid kicking loose stones and sometimes stumbling into small ditches. He took on trust, too, the boy’s skills and the sharpness of his hearing. He had known at home, as a child, out with Billings, the night flight of the hunting barn owl and learned its skills, the sharpness of its hearing as it phantom-glided in the new plantations, listening for the movements of tiny voles and shrews. He thought the boy had the skills and hearing of the owl. The schedule allowed no slack. His own stride was heavy, scuffing the ground, but the boy was as silent as the owl when the old poacher had showed it him.

It was two hours since they had left what remained of the main column. There were isolated lights to their left, lamps over a fence, a roving searchlight from a silhouetted watchtower, and a dull glow from the tightly packed homes. Omar’s route would bring them between the fortified village and the more distant spread of Kirkuk’s brightness.

He heard a shrill cry.

Omar never wavered from the route, as if it carried no threat to them.

The crying was pain, that of a rabbit in a snare.

A track crossed the dark ground ahead and linked a Victory City to Kirkuk. The sound of the crying grew, but the boy did not slow.

They came to the track, crossed it, stepped down into the ditch on the far side of it and Gus straddled the source of the crying. The woman was a black shadow shape. The thin moonlight fell on the beads of her necklace and caught the irregular shape of her teeth, the lines on her face, made jewelled rivers of her tears.

The men were dumped in grotesque postures in the pit of the ditch. Omar, ahead of Gus, shuddered – as if ghosts crossed his soul – and the woman’s cries turned to a ranted anguish. The smaller body wore a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt, but the motif was stained in black blood. The moonlight caught the lustreless eyes of the heavier man. She shouted at them as they went by, and after them as they hurried away. Her shouts seemed to hang in the night air like a thinning mist. They went on until they no longer heard the sound.

‘What did she say?’

‘I do not think you wish to know, Mr Gus.’

‘Tell me.’

In his mind were the bodies, perhaps her husband and son. The face he had seen was aged with suffering. He told himself that it was right to go on, not give sympathy and help. He heard Omar draw in a great gulp of breath, then the whisper of his voice.

‘She went into the fields the day before yesterday and she found wild flowers. She brought the flowers home. She is a widow and she lives with her son, her son’s wife and her grandson. She put the flowers in a jar that had been used for storing jam. She set the jar and the flowers outside the door of her house. She told the people who lived near to her that, yesterday, they should collect flowers as a celebration because the woman, Meda, was coming to bring them freedom. The soldiers did nothing because they, also, Mr Gus, believed that Meda was coming. Then they heard that the peshmerga had turned, had gone back to the mountains. They are survivors, Mr Gus. They denounced her, her son and her grandson as followers of the witch. She said the whole village walked with them, abusing them, when the soldiers took them out of the village and shot them. She curses Meda. She says that if Meda had stayed in her own village, in the mountains, then she would have her son and her grandson. She wanted us to bury her son and grandson…

Are you better for knowing that?’

His heel hurt worse, his body ached with tiredness, there was the growing pain in his eyes from peering into the darkness and, ceaselessly, his stomach growled for food. He, too, had put his trust in her. They walked on. The sling of his rifle bit into the flesh of his shoulder, freshening the sores of the rucksack’s straps, and he welcomed it.

The boy pleaded, a child’s voice, ‘Tell me, Mr Gus, a story from Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard.’

He should have remained silent, should have concentrated on his footfall, but there was rare fear in the boy’s voice. He should have been thinking of the schedule, and the helicopters.

Gus said softly, ‘Major Hesketh-Prichard wrote that the best scout he ever knew was an American called Burnham who fought as an officer with the British army in the war against the Matabele tribes of Rhodesia in southern Africa, and that was more than a hundred years ago. He was awarded the medal of the Distinguished Service Order by the Queen. He was a small man but always very physically fit. He had good hearing and strong eyesight, and his sense of smell was remarkable – as sensitive as any animal’s. His finest achievement was to go with his rifle through the entire Matabele army, alone, past their sentries, past their patrols, right into the centre of their camp. In the middle of the camp he found the tent of their leader, M’limo, and Burnham shot him dead. Then he was excellent enough in his fieldcraft to go back through their lines to safety. He was the best …’

‘It is a good story, Mr Gus.’

‘Only the best, Omar, can go through the lines, kill the heart of the enemy, and go back to safety.’

‘But the fault was with the Matabele people who did not protect their leader.’

‘Fail to protect the leader, Omar, and everything is wasted.’

Their stride quickened in the cloak of darkness. The minutes of the schedule given them were slowly being eaten away.

His mind was made up. It was not duty that drove Major Karim Aziz, but vanity.

In the night hours he searched, as he had many weeks before – a lifetime before – for a vantage-point.

Because he had fought before in the streets, cellars and sewers, Aziz knew the pulse of a city at war, but that night the mood of Kirkuk perplexed him. He would have expected the city’s people to have retreated behind barred doors and shuttered windows, that every shop would be padlocked and closed, that the street sellers would have gone to the shanty town beyond the airfield. But the lights burned out over the wide boulevard streets of the New Quarter, and there were still cars and commercial trucks on them, with the tanks and personnel carriers. The cafes, too, were doing trade, and at the pavement tables men sat in thick coats and smoked, drank and talked.

He knew she must come at dawn, and the sniper with her. With a small force, she would have gained a toehold, or at least a fingernail grip, on the centre of the city where the big buildings of the administration were sited. If she were not coming then she would have joined the long, dusty convoy he had seen retreating from the crossroads. Vanity was his spur, as it had been when the troops had cheered him after he had shot the mullah many years before. The same vanity, not duty to his family, his army and his country, had sent him on the hunt for a vantage-point that would have given him the shot of a lifetime on the flat roof with the view of the door of a villa. The vanity obscured the image of the brigadier in the cell block from his thoughts.

He strode away from the governor’s house and the gate into Fifth Army headquarters.

He was certain that she would attack down the width of Martyr Avenue towards the house and the headquarters. He was refreshed by the rest on his bed and he had eaten bread, a little cheese and an apple. The dog was close to him. It was a week since he had shaved. The dust and mud clung to his boots, his trousers and his smock; the backpack, perched high on his shoulders, was grimed in filth; but there was brightness in his eyes, and in the lens of the sight mounted on the stock of the Dragunov. When he passed the cafes, the men stopped their talk, lowered their cups and held their cigarettes away from their mouths as if drawn by the sight of him. He walked towards the outskirts of the city, and visualized the battle and the part he would play in it… She would make the punch down the six lanes of Martyr Avenue, with a small diversionary assault on the parallel 16th July Avenue that was four lanes wide. The helicopters would be up and over them, would scatter them. She would be in a doorway, or in the flood-drain in the centre of Martyr Avenue, but if she were to lead, she must show herself.

There was a doorman at the entrance to the last block of apartments on Martyr Avenue.

He walked past the man, who bowed his head, the dirt from his boots flaking on the lobby carpet, and climbed the stairs. He emerged onto the roof and stood in the shadow of the water tank.

Aziz looked out over the vista beneath him. Behind him, on the far side of the city, was the glow of the lights of the airfield from which the helicopters would fly. To the side, set in a shambles and without pattern, were the pinpricks of the Old Quarter. In front of him was Martyr Avenue, the barricade and two tanks with personnel carriers behind them.

Beyond Martyr Avenue were two neat lines of apartment blocks, then the sharply illuminated length of 16th July Avenue. When he swivelled further he could see the plaza outside the governor’s house, and at the end of it was the floodlit gate to Fifth Army headquarters. His search for a vantage-point was completed… But he was too high, the elevation was too great. For a moment longer, as if he had earned a little of its luxury, he let the night air play, cool and cleansing, on the stubble of his face and the dirt. Then he whistled for the dog and went back to the staircase, down three flights of steps.

The door on the second floor had no nameplate. He rang the bell, kept his finger on the button.

A bolt was drawn back, a key was turned. He saw a momentary joy on her face, then the shock. Without explanation, Aziz pushed her aside, kicking the door shut behind him with his heel.

She wore a loose housecoat and fluffy slippers. There was make-up on her face but insufficient to hide the crow’s feet lines at her eyes and mouth – his wife, in his home, did not use cosmetics because they could not be paid for. She had blond, short-cut hair, but the stems were grey-black below the platinum. He went through the living room, past the chairs and tables and lamps – more expensive than they could have afforded to buy -and into the soft-lit bedroom. There was a big bed, with pink sheets and blankets, and a padded headboard, such as he and his wife had never slept in. He pulled aside the drawn curtains and stepped through the French windows onto the balcony. He could see the edge of the airfield perimeter, the Old Quarter and the barricade at the end of Martyr Avenue. Through the apartment blocks was a clear view of long sectors of 16th July Avenue. It was a corner apartment and there was an additional balcony off the living room from which he would be able to look over the square outside the governor’s house and the gates to Fifth Army. He went back into the bedroom, and gazed at the photograph in the frame on the dressing table.

The face smiled above the uniformed shoulders.

It was the face he had seen, cold and evaluating, when he had fired on the range and in the mountains too. He picked up the photograph of the brigadier. The face, bloodied and scarred, was now in the cell block. His hand shook as he laid the photograph face down on the dressing table.

‘You know him? He is very kind to me. To me, he is a gentle man…’

He told her to close the bedroom door and switch off the light.

‘He did not come last night. I thought, just now, that you were him…’

When the room was darkened, Aziz dragged back the curtains and fastened them at the sides of the window. He went to the bed, ripped off the pink coverlet and threw it onto the balcony.

‘I am from Malmo in Sweden. I have been in London, Paris, Nicosia, Bucharest, Beirut, Cairo and Baghdad, and now I am in Kirkuk. I am very lucky to have found such a kind and gentle man at the end of my road. I suppose that he is busy with the situation -but you know better than me that he is important.’

He settled himself down on the coverlet, used it as padding so that the hard tiles of the balcony would not stiffen his legs, reduce the circulation and harm the accuracy of his shooting.

‘And he has told me that soon he will be more important…’

He told her to leave him and to take her photograph with her. The peace of his mind was fracturing. He watched for the woman and the sniper. Because he had put vanity above duty to his family, his life depended on the man in the cell block.

‘We should go in one group.’

‘No, we must be in small groups,’ Meda said.

Haquim smacked his knuckle into the palm of his hand. ‘We need to be a fist and punch with firepower.’

‘We should be water running through fingers, in groups of twenty, no more.’

‘Strength in numbers is our only option,’ Haquim persisted.

‘We should attack from all angles so they do not know where to find the heart of us.’

The men, 280 of them – fewer than the number needed to take the Victory City, far fewer than the number who had charged the defences at Tarjil – stood in a tight, mesmerized circle around her and Haquim. It was as if she held them in a noose. In the moonlight, he saw the adoration in their eyes. He knew some of them as thieves, and some of them as beggars. Some were so old they could barely run and others were so young they could not have done a day of man’s work in the fields. The best men, the men on whom the mustashar would have depended, had gone back with agha Ibrahim and agha Bekir, as he had… but, unlike him, none of the best men had returned. They would be slaughtered, all of them – her and him – when the helicopters flew. He thought she had sacrificed the life of the Englishman, used an old loyalty, sent him on the long march against the helicopters and killed him.

‘You’re wrong.’

She laughed in his face. ‘I am right, always right. You are wrong, always wrong.’

‘It is madness.’

Haquim heard the hostile rumble in the throats of the men around her. He fought for their lives and they did not recognize it. She danced on him. Everything he had achieved in a lifetime of soldiering she danced on, as if it were worthless. He had told the Englishman of his long march across the country when he had brought the peasant boys back to their homes, and at least the Englishman had listened with respect. He had held the pass with the rearguard so that the refugees could reach the safety of the frontier; without value. He did not dare to look into her eyes for fear that she would entrap him, too… but he would lay down his life to protect her.

‘You should not be frightened, old man. We are not frightened, nor Mr Peake. Trust me. We are two hundred and eighty. We are in groups of twenty men. We are in houses, gardens, alleyways, yards, not in the roads where they have barricades and tanks. They will not have the helicopters to search for us because Mr Peake will not be frightened.

We are going forward. You will sleep, tonight, in the governor’s bed, while I direct Kirkuk’s defence from the governor’s office.’

‘If you get to the governor’s house, how long do you think you can hold it?’

‘Until they come, a few hours, it’s all we need.’

Still, Haquim did not dare to look into the light of her eyes. He rasped, ‘Who comes?’

‘It is because you are frightened, old man, that you are stupid… The pigs will come, of course. Bekir and Ibrahim will come – all of the peshmerga will come. They wait a little way off. They need me to give them courage. When I am in the governor’s house they will have the courage and come. It will happen.’

At last, reluctantly, Haquim looked into her face. The sneers and taunts had gone. He was responsible. He had heard talk of her, gone to her village, listened to her, believed in her, promised her grandfather that he would watch over her, had taken her to meet agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim, and he had watched the little army swell. The smile caught him as surely as the barbed hooks the children used when they caught fish off the dam of the great Dukan reservoir. He took her hand. There were grenades on straps against her chest.

He placed his hand, with hers inside his, on the metal of the RG-5 fragmentation grenade that was closest to her heart.

‘If I am with you and believe you will be captured, then I will shoot you. If I am not with you, and you will be captured, please, please, I beg it of you, pull the pin.’

Against the wire that stretched either side of them, limitless until lost in the darkness, Gus used the binoculars and confirmed what he already knew. The range was too great – they had to go through the wire.

So little time… A jeep passed, idled into his view and he was close enough to it to see the faces of the soldiers. There was a tumbler strand a foot above the ground into which the mesh wire was buried, another at the waist height of a standing man, another at the eyeline of a man at full height and just below the stretched coils of razor wire. They began, frantically, to dig with their hands at the dry soil.

There was a growing smear of grey-gold light behind the faraway mountains.

Three helicopters were on the bright-lit apron, slug beasts; he had been told they would be the Russian-built Mi-24 gun-ships, and if they caught her in the open with anti-tank missiles, rockets and the rapid-fire machine-gun, she was gone, and it was finished. He dug, ripped his nails, scraped the skin from his hands.

The tankers backed away. The crews, in loose-fitting flying-suits, were walking round the beasts, approving the fitting of the ordnance stowed under the wings.

They had reached the bottom of the wire, but the deeper earth was harder, drier. The boy used a knife to stab into the ground and Gus scraped it back behind him. The light was growing, the time was slipping away. The hole widened. The boy hacked down into the earth and Gus shovelled it aside. He should have been resting, should have been calm and with the chance to watch for wind variation over the expanse of ground between the fence and the apron area where the helicopters were readied to fly. The boy, eel-like, wriggled down into the hole and then began to chop at the soil on the far side of the wire until it sprouted up as if a maddened mole made the tunnel. Omar was through.

Gus heard the whine of a helicopter engine starting and saw the first lazy turns of the rotors.

He tore off a hessian strip from his suit and gently looped it over the lowest of the tumbler strands.

As he passed the rifle through the cavity, the boy took it. He crawled into the hole and stuck. Omar dragged at his shoulders. Gus was stuck fast. He saw only the darkness of the hole… If the tumbler strand was disturbed the sirens would blast, the jeep would come, and the helicopters would fly… His head burst out into the light.

The pitch of the engines rose.

They crawled, together, on their bellies towards the helicopters.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE.

6. (Conclusions after interviews with personnel at CTCRM, Lympstone conducted by self and Ms Manning – transcripts attached.) MILITARY TRAINING: The normal duration of a sniping course would be 3 weeks, AHP was given 72 hours (less minimal sleep time) of concentrated Fieldcraft and Tactical training. It is possible he would have absorbed a considerable amount of what he was told, shown and briefed on, but at best the knowledge will remain superficial. Also, he has been educated in procedures that would be adopted by a regular army where he would be provided with all necessary support. AHP is not in such an environment and will be operating alongside irregulars of doubtful quality.

TACTICAL TRAINING: AHP, at CTCRM, received specialist advice from 5 sergeant instructors – but I consider that given by Sgt Stevens, MM, to be the most important. Sgt Stevens served in northern Iraq in 1991 in the Safe Haven operation for Kurdish refugees, and therefore had a first-hand knowledge of the terrain; he stressed to AHP that the further south the irregular force probed, so would increase the technical superiority of Govt of Iraq forces. Emphasis was placed on the use of the AWM Lapua Magnum rifle’s armour-piercing capability against helicopter gun-ships, and the need for bold and imaginative counter-measures against such a threat. (The fact that AHP is a civilian, not hidebound by standard military procedures, leads me to believe that boldness and imagination would be expected from him. KW) In the use of such tactics, the LOYALTY spoken of by Sgt Billings would probably cause AHP to push home an attack in situations where his personal safety is directly threatened.

Willet paused, his fingers lying limply alongside the keyboard. He wanted to push himself up from his chair, go to the window, pull back the curtains and open it. He wanted to shove his head out into the night air and shout over the roofs and the streets, over the crawling cars and the last stragglers going home from the clubs, to throw his voice far beyond and far away. He wanted to be heard by a man who sat huddled in the warmth of a gillie suit, who held the long barrel of the rifle, who waited for the dawn.

He wanted to yell, ‘Turn back, don’t be a stupid bastard… Walk away. It’s for nothing

… Come home, come back to where people love you… Live a life, a fucking boring life, but live it… Be like me, be a bloody coward, be like me and find an excuse to turn…’

He knew that if he screamed into the emptiness of the night, he would not be heard.

Willet began, again, to type.

The binoculars told him the lead helicopter was 670 yards in front of him, the second helicopter was 705 yards from him, and the third helicopter in the line was 740 yards from his aiming position.

The windsock beside the control tower hung lifelessly against the flagpole. Gus had the range and did not need to concern himself on windage deflection.

The helicopters shuddered in line as the engine power grew.

If such a beast was his target, he had been told where it was vulnerable and where the Mi-24 was protected by armour plate. The earnest Doug Stevens had laid the sheet of paper on the table among the spilled beer and the ashtray’s garbage, drawn the outline of the beast, scribbled in the shaded areas where it was armour-plated, and highlighted the parts where, if it were hit, it could be killed. A technician scrambled up the side of the lead helicopter, and the pilot’s hatch door was opened. Might be a fuel gauge playing up, or oil pressure, might be the navigation system. The pilot, high in the forward end of the fuselage, was protected – on the drawing on Doug Stevens’ paper – by armour and a bulletproof glass canopy, but his door was open and lit by the high lights.

Gus fired.

Flat on his stomach, the boy close beside him, Gus watched the vortex of the bullet’s passage through the dawn air.

The technician fell back, dropped away from the ladder. At the same moment, the pilot slumped. The core of an armour-piercing bullet would then have careered on inside the cockpit and struck glancing, spinning blows against the armour that was supposed to keep a bullet outside the womb in which the pilot sat, but not inside.

He heard the boy squeal in excitement, but his eyeline had moved on. He raked back the bolt and his fingers felt for the elevation turret of the ’scope. He twisted it the minuscule correction of one half-click.

The sides and the underpart of the fuselage of the Mi-24 were protected, Doug Stevens had said, but the gearbox in the mounting under the rotors was not. Stevens had said that Special Forces and spooks had trained the Afghan mujahedin to shoot down from the valley’s cliffs on to the gun-ships’ superstructures. They wouldn’t have heard the shot in the second and third helicopters, but they’d have seen the technician fall and the statue posture of the ground-control man with his outstretched signal batons.

Gus had a window of seconds: such an opportunity would not come again.

He fired at the gearbox of the second helicopter, immediately below the outstretched sweep of the rotors. Metal parts dropped away.

Bolt back, cartridge case ejected, and the sweep of the ’scope towards the third of the beasts. It was already lifting. He could see the pilot secure inside the casing. It rose, tilting away from him and he lost the sight of the gearbox below the rotors. He locked his aim on the blurred shape of the vertical tail rotor. He sucked in a breath, exhaled, caught the last of the air – and held it.

Gus fired three times, at 740 yards mean distance, into the spinning shape of the third helicopter’s tail rotor.

He did not hear the boy’s shout. He did not see the jeep, at the distant end of the wire, reversing and turning. He twisted up onto his knee, caught at the boy’s collar, and pitched him back towards the wire. Then Gus was running.

There was no longer a pain in his heel, an ache in his body and exhaustion in his eyes.

Gus ran for his life and the boy stampeded beside him. If he had not hung the hessian strip on the wire he would have lost precious moments, finding the hole under the wire.

He threw himself down into the hole and the boy pushed, levered him through the gap.

Then he was running again, weaving, gasping for air, bent low. Behind him, the pilot of the third helicopter fought an unequal battle with his machine and lost.

The immediate goal was the airfield’s rubbish tip where the crows, startled by the gunfire, wheeled and screamed. The secondary goal, when the piled rubbish tip covered their backs, was a dried river gully. The final goal, far ahead, was to link with Meda and the attack.

Machine-guns had started up, but without a target.

Only when he was in the gully, when the pain, the ache and the tiredness surged back to him, did Gus bleat his question.

‘Can they fly?’

‘You killed them, Mr Gus, they cannot fly.’

They ran on down the gully, as the dawn lightened. It was, Gus thought, the decisive day of his life, the day he had dreamed and dared, but there was nothing of the taste of her in his mouth, just a dry dusty film.

The attack went well, made good ground – at first.

They had advanced in silence through ditches, drains, through gardens and small vegetable fields to the edge of the city’s limits. They had scurried, crawled, run from shadow to shadow, in their small groups, and waited for the signal.

The report of the first shot, then the second, then the third, fourth and fifth, had come muffled to them across the breadth of the city, and before the sound of the fifth shot had died there had been the blast of the heavy machine-gun and the rip of its tracers – the signal.

The assault on Kirkuk was like that of mosquitoes on an ailing man. The weight of a man’s hand might fall on a biting insect, but in that moment of distraction another mosquito bit and drew blood. The barricades, with the tanks and personnel carriers in support, were ignored. Martyr Avenue and 16th July Avenue were empty. The attack was through the yards, homes and alleyways of the Old Quarter. When gaps were plugged, new points of weakness emerged. Pockets of resistance were cut off, left isolated.

To those in the Fifth Army command bunker there was no coherent pattern to the attack: as the radios from the forward positions shouted for help, the officers trained in defensive warfare at the Baghdad Military College did not know where they should stiffen the line. And they had no serviceable helicopters. Inside the safety of the bunker, as the counters were moved remorselessly back over the map towards the red circle marking Fifth Army headquarters, the first doubts – anxieties – had surfaced. The defence line would not have been stabilized, however temporarily, if the colonel had not ordered a killing zone of fire to be put down on the Old Quarter. Mortars, machine-guns, rocket-propelled grenades hammered the small homes of those who were expendable.

In the smoke, noise and chaos, Meda sought to restore the impetus of the advance. In an alleyway between a panel-beater’s shed and a cheap clothes shop was an abandoned jeep with a machine-gun mounted and the belt of ammunition lying in the breech. She must show herself, and goad her small groups of separated fighters to press on. She must be everywhere. Without her, and she knew it, the advance would stall. They had come through the yard and into the panel-beater’s shed. The roof was ablaze. The door was destroyed. Four men were close to her, Haquim was somewhere behind. If she was to be everywhere, she needed the jeep.

He peered into the maelstrom of smoke and fire.

Many times he had seen the little darting movements of men, emerging and disappearing, but it was harder now to see them because of the smoke’s pall.

With his old trusted patience, he waited for her to show herself.

He lay on the pink coverlet, his circulation good, his stomach comfortable. He had not fired. He had seen soldiers try to surrender and had watched as they were engulfed, knifed. He had seen, also, a young officer castrated and left to writhe on the ground smearing a spray of blood from his groin onto cobblestones. He had seen three soldiers who manhandled away a wounded colleague shot in the back at close range – but he had not fired.

He had no doubt that the time would come when he would see her.

Major Karim Aziz sensed that a line formed. It stretched across the Old Quarter, its median point at a range of 450 metres, and he adjusted his elevation for that point. The smoke helped him, its billowing spirals told him the wind factor was minimal, but that was outweighed by the greater problem of its interference with his vision of the fighting ground. That median point was an abandoned jeep. Once he had taken it as his point, he tracked along the line on either side of it, slowly, so that the view through the lens would not distort.

It was a blurred movement at the extremity of the lens.

First he saw the figures running from the collapsed doorway and jumping into the jeep.

A man was bent over the steering wheel, reaching down, magnified, desperate to start it. Another man, turbaned, bearded, swathed in ammunition, was behind the mounted machine-gun. Only when the jeep jerked forward, when her body was thrown back against the support of the front passenger seat, did he see her.

The jeep had moved forward, then it was reversing, then it was lost behind a swathe of smoke. He could not follow it, but he had seen her face. He felt a great calmness. He had seen her face and the anger at her mouth. He wondered if she doubted herself, if she knew that it was over, not how it would end, but that it was finished.

The jeep emerged from the smoke, and Aziz’s finger made the intuitive adjustment to the elevation turret, one click, an additional 50 metres of range, watching as it swerved to the right at a tight junction.

He saw the jeep, her face, the driver’s, the shop behind them from which flames licked, as the steering was wrenched hard over. He could not hear the distant scream of the tyres, or the blast in his ears as he fired.

Strangely, slowly, the jeep toppled over after it had crashed against the wall. For a few moments, a seeming eternity, it was supported by the machine-gun and there was a gap from which the gunner and the driver scrabbled to free themselves, but then the mounting on the machine-gun collapsed: the jeep rocked and was still but for the spinning wheels.

His finger was on the trigger, slight pressure. He watched for her and did not see her. The gunner, delirious with shock, ran. The driver twitched and died.

He recognized the older man running forward from the ditch at the crossroads. He could have shot him – afterwards he would be unable to analyse why he had not fired on him as he limped forward and tried to lift the upturned jeep alone. He watched him stagger away, heaving for breath, then cup his hands to his mouth and bellow at the fire and the smoke for help.

No help came.

The man tried again to lift the jeep, and failed. A mortar shell exploded a little distance beyond it. He could not hear the singing of the shrapnel at that distance, but he saw the man blown over and begin to crawl away on his stomach. He knew that she was under the jeep. Through the ’scope, he fancied he saw tears on the man’s face.

Aziz walked from the balcony into the bedroom. The dog was asleep on the pillows.

He called it. He crossed the living room. He did not look at the old whore from Malmo who had reached Kirkuk, the end of the road. She was slumped in a chair with the bottle beside her and the glass in her hand.

‘Will he come? Will he come tonight?’

He went down the stairs, pride coursing through him. He had made the most important shot of his career. *** She was trapped, in darkness. She had heard Haquim’s shouts: he would have gone for help. When the jeep had overturned she had covered her head with her arms, and now she could not move her arms and her legs were wedged. The weight of the grenades pressed against her chest. She could not see and could not move, and the stench of the fuel engulfed her. She knew that Haquim had gone for help because she could no longer hear him, and the shooting was fainter. She thought that the men must now be near to the governor’s house. When the firing moved away people would come from their houses, where they had sheltered, and they would help to lift the jeep and free her.

Time passed, slipped away from her. She did not know how long, could not see the hands of her watch. Gus would be searching for her now. She tried to remember the touch of his lips. Gus had killed the helicopters, as he had promised he would. He would come to find her.

There was no firing. If the men were near to the governor’s house, she could not understand why she could not hear the firing. There were voices, the scrape of boots.

She heard the grunts and the curses. The jeep was lifted. She blinked in the narrow shaft of sunlight and a post was pushed under the jeep’s door, as if to prop it while they took new grips. They should hurry. She would lead the last assault on the governor’s house. She did not know how they could have gone so far without her.

The jeep rolled back. She clung to the seat as it was lurched over, felt the relief of freedom until she saw the ring of soldiers and the guns pointed at her.

She remembered what Haquim had said… She was slumped in the seat. Her fingers, awkward, clumsy in the moment, groped for the ring of the pin on the grenade that was closest to her heart. A rifle butt smacked into her face and she was dragged clear of the jeep.

There was an officer behind the soldiers who cradled a big rifle like Gus’s, and who wore a smock like his gillie suit. A dog sat disinterested beside his boots. He watched as she was searched, as the grenades were stripped from her chest, as her tunic and blouse were ripped open and dirt-grimed hands patted the skin of her breasts, waist and thighs, and lingered though they found nothing. He turned and walked away.

A family had come out from the door of a house. They wore their nightclothes -grandmother, parents and children. The soldiers held her so that the family could spit on her in turn.

It had taken Haquim a full fifteen minutes to make contact with one of the groups, to extract them from a close-quarters fire-fight, to organize them, to bring them forward towards the upturned jeep. From 200 metres, through the drifting smoke, he saw the family spit on her, then saw her hustled away.

As the word of her capture spread, the attack stalled. The line sagged, then broke. An ordered retreat became the rout of a rabble. By the time they reached the city limits, many had thrown away their weapons and run.

In his life as a Kurdish fighter, Haquim was familiar with defeat – but none hurt him harder than this. The immediate goal was to cross the barren open fields, to leave the fires in the Old Quarter behind them and the flame of Baba Gurgur, and reach the high ground.

They had no friends but the mountains. He had heard her say: ‘We will sacrifice everything that we have – our lives, our homes – for Kirkuk.’ His back was turned on her but he could not forget that last sight, Meda small and without defence, hemmed in by the bodies of the soldiers.

He stumbled on, in his personal agony, towards the safety of the hazy blue line of the high ground.

‘What do you hear, Mr Gus?’

‘I hear nothing.’

‘What do you not hear, Mister Gus?’

‘I don’t hear anything.’

‘Mister Gus, you do not hear the shooting.’

In reverse and faster, they were making the same arced march as in the previous night.

Away to his left was the pall above a part of the city. For several minutes Gus had been aware that the shooting was finished, but he had said nothing and pressed on, had harboured it to himself. He wondered how many minutes it had been since the boy had realized that the shooting – far away, distant but clear – had died. He was a sharp little beggar and Gus thought that Omar would have realized before himself that it was over.

He said savagely, ‘Absolutely correct. There’s no shooting.’

‘If they had reached the governor’s house, then there would still be shooting.’

‘Correct again. You are, Omar, a fount of bloody wisdom.’

The boy looked simply into Gus’s eyes. ‘If there is no shooting they have broken the attack. They have retreated.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

‘We did what we were asked to do. As we had killed the tanks, we killed the helicopters…’

‘I doubt that it’s anybody’s fault.’

Three hundred yards ahead of them was a low cairn. He could see it clearly. If there had still been the sound of shooting, the stones would have been the marker for them to swing left, towards the city, and join the push into the Old Quarter. She hadn’t, but Haquim had planned for failure. If the attack failed, Haquim had said in a hushed voice that she should not hear, at the marker they should turn right, go east, towards the sanctuary of the high ground.

They reached the cairn. They did not need new markers as they went east. They followed a wavering line of discarded mortar shells, rocket-propelled grenades, backpacks, ammunition boxes, and the wheeled heavy machine-gun that the Russian had brought in exchange for the prospect of licences for mineral extraction.

He did not think Meda would have turned, but he said nothing because the boy, also, would have known that. His lips were sun-scorched and without feeling, and there was only the taste of dried dirt in his mouth.

Her head hit the jamb of the door as she was dragged into the cell block.

She was taken into a corridor, then the hands released her. She swayed, staggered and was pushed forward down its dull-lit length. The men lining the sides of the corridor kicked at her, or punched her, as she walked. Two doors were open at the far end. If she held her hands over her face she was kicked in the belly; if she protected her belly, her face was punched. She reached the first of the open doors. Hands grabbed her hair and her shoulders and twisted her so that she must look inside the cell. It was hard for her to recognize him.

He lay on his side, slumped against the far corner. The high ceiling light, above a close wire mesh, shone down on the blood on his face and the pools of urine on the concrete floor. Before she had met the brigadier she had told Gus Peake that he should shoot her if she walked into a trap, and Haquim had told her that if she faced capture, she should pull the pin of the grenade hanging over her heart. She was pitched through the second open door, heard it clang shut behind her. Where were the peshmerga? Where was Haquim?

Where was Gus Peake?

She sat on the floor of the cell, her knees drawn tight against her chest, under the high light. She heard no answers, only the brutal crack, and the thump again, as the bullet had struck the jeep’s driver.

Soldiers held him on their shoulders, carried him across the square, past the governor’s office, through the gate and into the compound of Fifth Army headquarters.

He was saluted, waved to, cheered.

His dog trotted alongside.

Aziz felt the exhilaration of pride and just before he was set down at the entrance to the command bunker, he punched the fist that held the Dragunov rifle into the air. At that hour, Major Karim Aziz was the hero. He told the men gathered around him that, later, he would go and search for the sniper who had humiliated the armour and destroyed the helicopters. He would hunt him down, they had his word. The colonel came from the bunker, clasped him, kissed his cheeks, told him that the remnants of the bandits were now in flight, and promised that the President would hear of his success. He said that his one bullet had achieved more than a brigade of tanks and a flight of helicopters.

Faces pressed around him, glowing in trust and admiration, but looking up beyond the men he saw the shadowed cell-block windows.

LIBRARY: Sgt Billings withdrew from CTCRM

Library the under-mentioned works:

The British Sniper – Skennerton.

Notes on the Training of Snipers, 1940-41 -

Ministry of Defence.

Scouts and Sniping in Trench Warfare – Crum.

With British Snipers to the Reich – Shore.

Sniping: Small Arms Training, vol. 1, 1946-51 -

Ministry of Defence.

Sniping – Idriess.

Sniping in France – Hesketh-Prichard.

All these works were read by AHP. They are old and deal with historic conflict situations, but the methods of sniping have changed little.

SUMMARY: I believe AHP will perform well when going forward but, through ‘doing well’, he will increasingly attract attention once all elements of surprise are lost. I am not yet satisfied that he has the necessary knowledge of ESCAPE AND EVASION when the going gets harder. He has chosen to embark on a journey of great complexity and extraordinary danger, and the LOYALTY factor may well deny to him the knowledge of when to turn in retreat. I rate his chances of survival in the medium term as slim.

Willet watched as Ms Manning read his report. A rare smile spread across her face. ‘I see you’re cracking up.’

He was tired, and he bit. ‘What exactly do you mean?’

Her eyes flashed. ‘Slim – chances of survival in the medium term – not non-existent.

That’s progress. My God, Augustus Henderson Peake, Esquire, would be happy to know that Ken Willet has changed his bloody mind, if only by a quarter of a crank. These books he read, they seem to come out of the Ark.’

‘Not everything in this world is glitzy and new. Real things, things of value, aren’t achieved at third hand, by damned remote control. We’ve tried to fight at a distance, high-tech, no casualties – good stuff for television but useless for getting things done. If you want to get things done then you have to put your life on the line. You bin the computers, you go body to body. He’d have known that because the sergeants would have told him. It was important for him to read the old books.’

‘Steady, young man, steady.’

‘Myself, if I’d gone where Peake’s gone, I’d have wanted Hesketh-Prichard in my knapsack. It’s about cunning, deviousness, courage, ruthlessness, the skill of killing…

It’s also about old-fashioned virtues. The trouble is that an old-fashioned virtue is loyalty and, at war, loyalty is a killer. “Slim” may not be realistic, I grant you.’