Holding the Zero

Chapter Fourteen

‘You saw it?’

Gus stood over Haquim. They were under a great overhang of rock where the wounded were sheltered from the sun, and where the survivors crouched silent, beaten in fear.

‘Yes.’

‘And you did nothing?’

Haquim was the only target available to Gus. He had known she would not retreat, and had presumed she was dead. When they had reached the rendezvous, gone into the grey light of the shade, moved through the wounded in search of Haquim, Gus had expected to find a slight, shrouded figure, with the head hidden. It had not been conceivable to him that, while a man of them was left standing, they would fail to retrieve the body.

Haquim, pathetically, shrugged. ‘I did what I could.’

‘Which was nothing.’

‘Don’t insult me.’

‘You did nothing – it’s the truth that insults you.’

‘I gathered a group of men. I went back. I saw her taken away. I could do nothing. I would have given up lives…’

He saw himself far ahead, in the distance of time, in his grandfather’s kitchen making coffee, with the photograph on the window ledge above the sink, and explaining in stuttered words that Meda had been captured, abandoned, that he himself had not protected her. He played the bully.

‘Well done, I congratulate you. Because of the risk involved you abandoned her.’

‘More would have been killed.’

‘You owed it to her to have tried.’

‘I am a mustashar with responsibility for my men’s lives. I cannot give up lives for a gesture.’

‘I hope you can live with it.’

He did not know how he could live with it. He had kissed her and there was no longer the feel of her lips on his, and no longer the taste of her. He had nothing by which to remember her – not a bandanna, a handkerchief, not even a soiled field-dressing that carried her stain. In one week, she had come to mean more to him than anyone he had known in his life, and he owned not a single trifle of her. For the first time, Haquim lifted his head, stared back into Gus’s eyes, and bit back. ‘I am not frightened of the weight of responsibility… There was nothing I could have done.’

‘Live with it and sleep at night with it.’

‘If you knew more of war you would not abuse me. The lesson of war, as I have learned, is that you do not throw away what is most precious, life, like empty cigarette cartons. Life is not to be wasted. Can I tell you something?’

‘Another damn excuse?’

‘The soldiers held her before she was put in the truck, so that a family could confront her. Each of the family took their turn to spit on her. To you she was the symbol to follow, and to me – against all my judgements. For you she was romance, for me she was a vehicle that gave a small chance of success. For them, those she claimed to speak for, she was a vision of evil. That was the last I saw of her, with their spit on her face.’

He heard his own stumbled answers to the confused persistence of his grandfather’s questions. He saw the steady gaze, and honesty, of Haquim. He bent down, squatted, and reached forward to take the wearied, grizzled face in his hands.

‘How was she?’

‘That is an idiotic question.’

‘Tell me how she was.’

‘The arrogance had gone from her. You saw it, when she contradicted me, the arrogance that each time she was right, and I was wrong. You saw her cheapen my experience – how many times? She was not a fighting woman but a pinioned girl. She was no longer tall, she was small and afraid. She was not a leader, she was ordinary.

When they held her, and the family spat on her, she was without value.’

Gus crawled into the darkest corner of the overhang, and lay on the ground. The power of the rifle was in his hand, but that, too, was without value. His face was to the rock, where he could not see the wounded; he saw nothing but the bewilderment of his grandfather, and heard nothing but his grandfather’s questions, and the thought of her fear was a blow to his heart.

In the early evening, a cloud passing over the face of a full moon casting a shadow, Commander Yusuf reached the headquarters of Fifth Army.

He had the right to be tired, but fatigue was not apparent in this slight, wire-framed man. He had been driven, with his escort, from Basra where he had been engaged on pressing business, but the business in Basra took second place to the developments in the north. It was said of him that, above all, he was a family man, and liked nothing better than to be with his grandchildren, to indulge them, sit them on his knee and tell them stories, stroke their hair with neat-boned fingers.

The title ‘Commander’ was self-given. He had no rank in the echelons of the army, nor the need of it. His authority ranged over the lowliest, most humble of soldiers in the slit trenches facing the Kuwaiti border, and over the most senior generals of the High Command. He was a man who hunted for signs of dissent against the regime he served, who searched night and day for evidence of treason. There were few of any status in uniform, from bottom to top, who would not have shivered at his arrival in the camp where they were based.

Commander Yusuf saw himself as a shield behind which the regime and, above all, the President could feel secure. The work of that shield was torture. The same fingers that caressed and smoothed the hair of his grandchildren were equally adept in the arts of inflicting crude pain on those who were assumed to be enemies of the state. He was always busy. His work left little time for him to enjoy the youth of his grandchildren. He was rarely at home. His life was lived at pace because the twin threats of dissent and treason were ever present. Before he had been in Basra he had been in Karbala, before Karbala he had been in Ar Ramadi, before Ar Ramadi he had been in Ba’qubah. Because he would be among the first hoisted up under any conveniently close lamp-post if the regime fell, he devoted his waking hours to the search for dissenters and traitors.

He had the appearance of a junior functionary, the look of a man who organized railway timetables or administered a minor section of a hospital, as he carried his briefcase from his car and walked to that part of the compound that housed the section of the Estikhabarat. It was said of him, in bitterness, that where he came the birds no longer sang.

He sat alone in a far corner of the mess. He had turned the high-backed chair round so that he faced the drawn curtains of the window and the wall.

An orderly had brought Major Karim Aziz a plate of bread and cheese, an apple, a glass of milk, and had asked if he wished to drink whisky. He had declined. He shared the bread and cheese with his dog, and gave it the apple core. He was sipping the milk when Scout growled. Then Aziz heard low voices and the shuffle of feet on the carpet behind him.

He shunned company because the earlier elation was gone and he thought himself a man who had been cheated. The force of the peshmerga was in flight. The former brigade position at the crossroads was reoccupied. At first light, the next morning, units of Fifth Army would move back into Tarjil, and by the afternoon probing patrols would have reached the Victory City of Darbantaq. By the end of the next day the narrow corridor would have been emptied of the saboteurs. The chance to hunt the sniper – one to one, skill to skill, eye to eye, bullet to bullet – was lost to him.

The growl had become a snarl.

He stared at the curtain and the wall and imagined the man tramping back towards the distant mountains, walking in a ragged column bowed by defeat. He would be gone in the morning. There was no work for him in Tarjil or at the Victory City. And then the future hit him. The future was…

The snarl was a yelp of pain.

He started up in his seat and his sudden movement, as he twisted to look behind him, knocked the table and spilled the milk. A small man, older than himself, with flecked, cropped grey hair and a complexion of extraordinary smoothness, was crouched by the back legs of the chair. Aziz had not heard his approach. The narrow, fleshless fingers of one hand held the skin at the nape of the dog’s neck, while the other played gently over the fur on its head. His uniform of drab olive green had no rank insignia on the shoulders and no ribbons on the chest. In his breast pocket was a neat line of ballpoint pens, as though he were a bureaucrat, but he held the dog with expert power so that it did not dare to struggle, and stroked its head as if it were a child. Four men stood behind him, sweat staining their armpits and blood spattered on their tunics and trousers.

The dog quivered.

‘I am Commander Yusuf, and I am honoured to meet the sniper who has delivered to us this misguided peasant woman. I almost feel sympathy for her because she is not more, not less, than a plaything for others. It must be comforting to be able to shoot with such accuracy even when the target is a person of so little worth.’

‘Would you let go of my dog?’

‘I call her “worthless” – do I offend you? I assure you that offence is not intended.

There are some here who believe she was of importance, but I do not share that opinion.

It is the mark of our Arab society that some of our heroic forces feel demeaned by fighting against saboteurs led by a woman. It is an affront to their dignity and manhood that a woman should better them in combat.’

‘You are hurting my dog. Please, let go of it.’

‘They call her a witch. It is understandable. A witch has supernatural powers. Our heroic forces wish to offer her such powers as an excuse for their own failure, and their own treachery. She will be a victim, and it will give me no pleasure to hang her, but that will be necessary to satisfy the simple minds of our soldiers. I need to know from her only the extent of the treachery of officers who betrayed their trust. Then she hangs. The officers, Major Aziz, concern me.’

He listened to the purring voice. He had never met the man before, nor seen him, but had heard the name. It was whispered in the corridors of the Baghdad Military College, at the headquarters of the armies, and in the command posts of divisions and regiments. It was said, in the whispers, that none who faced him in the cells, whatever their courage, could resist the persuasiveness of his interrogation techniques.

‘I have no interest in those who betray their trust. I am a soldier, I do my duty. Would you, please, release my dog?’

‘I watch, Major Aziz, for the trail made by the belly of a snake and I follow the slime of that trail. The trail leads me, always, to the nest of the snakes. When the nest has been found, it is best to pour petrol into its hole and set fire to the petrol. The snake is a creature of treachery. It is discovered where least expected, then it must be followed, then killed… I am honoured to meet a man who knows where his duty lies.’

As he stood, the hand released the nape of the dog’s neck. The dog, coiled like a spring, hurled itself at the man’s ankle and bit hard. Commander Yusuf did not flinch, did not cry out. He seemed to watch the dog for a moment as it worried at his ankle. The strength of his kick was sufficient to break the hold of the dog’s teeth and propel it against the wall below the drawn curtains, where it fell back gasping.

‘Why should your dog regard me as a threat, Major Aziz, when all I offer it is kindness?’

The brigadier was on the floor of his cell, crumpled, finished with perhaps for an hour.

The door was left open so that he could hear everything from the adjacent cell. He could not see through the open door because his eyes were closed by swelling, nor could he feel the rough concrete on which he lay because his fingers were numbed by the pain from the extraction of his nails. He was the Boot, a man credited with brutal strength and fortitude.

He had not yet broken, not yet given names.

The brigadier knew of the reputation of the little puny bastard with the voice that was never raised, and with the thin-boned fingers that had held the pliers. The reputation said his patience was great and failure was never accepted. He had tried not to cry out, even when the pain ran like rivers in him, because to cry out was to weaken her as she waited for them to return to her cell. He heard sometimes her whimpered cries, and once he heard her scream, and he thought that they burned her. What they had done to him, what they now did to her, was as nothing to the agony that awaited them both if they did not break, because the bastard’s reputation was for a refusal to be beaten.

When he had seen her first, she had been vibrant and so patronizing of him – but his ears heard her fear and the eyes of his mind saw the cigarettes ground out on her, the fingers prising into her. And when she had cried, screamed, weakened him, they would come back to his cell. He did not know how long he could last, but he knew that when he broke, others, now trusting in his courage, would follow him into the dark cells to await the coming of Commander Yusuf.

Isaac Cohen heard the radio transmissions as they were decyphered by his computers.

He felt a crippling weight of sadness. She was not one of their own, but the grief was as acute as if she had been.

In Tel Aviv, there were old men of the Mossad, retired and gathering now in the pavement cafes on Ben Yehuda, who had spoken of that pitiful and helpless sadness when the news had leaked of Elie Cohen’s capture in Damascus and of his execution in Simiramis Square. So much power at their disposal and none of it able to pluck out a patriot from a cell and from the gallows’ platform… There were the veterans of the Agency, whom he had met on Washington visits, who had spoken of that same burden of sadness when the news had filtered through of the taking in Beirut, and the subsequent death, of Bill Buckley – and a greater power had been worthless.

He remembered her as she had been when he had seen her in the mountains: certain, confident, at the edge of conceit, dismissive of his help. The torches had played on her eyes, and he had known why men followed her. He wanted to remember the certainty, the confidence, because then he did not imagine her in the cells of Fifth Army. The old men that he’d known had said to him that when Elie Cohen was in the cells in Damascus, they could not sleep, rest, laugh, make love to their women, could not live. He would talk to the sniper when the remnant army straggled back and hear how it had happened, and he might curse him for allowing it to happen… He was not the lapdog of the Americans. If his sadness permitted it, he would call them in the morning, but that night he would think of her, and say a prayer for her.

Gus asked, ‘Will you go to see the old man, Hoyshar, for me?’

‘I will.’ Haquim’s hawk eyes beaded on him.

‘Tell the old man everything that has happened.’

Haquim nodded.

‘And he should write about it, and what he writes he should send to my grandfather.’

‘I will do what you ask – but I tell you, Mr Peake, this death wish will achieve nothing.’ There was a choke in Haquim’s voice.

The column had begun to march away. The wounded were carried on the strongest men’s backs and on litters. Over Haquim’s shoulder, Gus could see the long straggle of the fighters. They were slow going, at the start, but he thought that when they sniffed the fine air of the high ground their pace would quicken, and they would have the goal of home to stretch their strides.

Gus said, ‘I am grateful for your advice, and I want your forgiveness.’

‘For what?’ Haquim asked gruffly.

Simply said, ‘For the insults I heaped on you.’

Their hands clasped, locked, the gnarled, blistered hands of the older man and those of the younger man. Gus could see the laid-out lights of Kirkuk and the silhouettes of the higher buildings, the towering flame that had been the unattainable target. It was about respect, which was precious to him.

Haquim said, ‘There is a remote possibility that I can save her. I have to attempt it, but I have little time.’

Their hands slipped apart. Haquim leaned over Gus and whipped his fist against Omar’s face. That, too, was about respect. Then he was on his way. Gus thought that a lesser man than Haquim would have turned, hesitated, waved a final time, but there was no such gesture. There was no stolen moment for the softness of sentiment. He watched Haquim hobbling away into the fading light to catch the tail of the column.

Gus twisted towards Omar and said, ‘You can still go…’

Stubbornly, his face lowered, the boy shook his head.

‘There is a life for you, stealing and thieving and pilfering, looting from the dead, there is still a chance of a life for you.’

‘Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard always needed an observer.’

Gus’s voice shrilled in the dark space under the overhang, into the infuriating calm of the boy’s eyes: ‘You can go, damn you, and feel no shame. You can run, reach them, and live.’

He watched the column merge into the gloom. For Gus, it was like the breaking of a linked chain, which, while secure, led to Hoyshar and on from Hoyshar to another old man, and from his grandfather to his parents, his woman, his work and the long weekend days on Stickledown Range. But the column had disappeared into the last traces of grey light and he could no longer hear the shuffling of their boots, or the scrape of the litters.

A chain was broken, but new chains were fastened. There would be chains on her ankles; a chain held him to her, a chain held the boy to him. He snatched at Omar’s tunic top, caught it at the collar, wrenched the boy up then pushed him hard away from him, away towards where the column had gone. The boy sat beyond his reach. Gus picked up a stone and hurled it savagely at him, then another. They scudded past the small body with his patient, staring eyes.

Gus shouted, ‘Go, you little bastard, and live! Thieve from the dead and the wounded.

I don’t need you. I don’t want you. Head away out of here – do as you’re bloody told!

Go.’

His voice, trapped by the overhang, boomed around him. He threw one more stone and hit the boy’s shoulder. He saw Omar wince, but any cry was stifled and the boy did not rub the place where the stone had struck.

‘We are all not happy, Mr Gus, not only you.’ Then the cheek came, and the grin cracked across the boy’s smooth face. ‘Did you fuck her?’

Gus shook his head, slowly and miserably. He could not remember the taste of her or the feel of her. ‘I kissed her, I loved her.’

‘We all loved her, Mr Gus, not only you. Please, tell me a story from Major Hesketh-Prichard.’

Gus jerked his back straight. He recognized that the argument was ended, settled. The link to the past had gone with the column. They would be in Kirkuk by dawn.

‘No man’s land – where there were shell craters and fallen trees – was the best place for observers, where they were most valuable, and any unit with an aggressive commander always tried to dominate there. An intelligence officer with the 4th Battalion of the Royal Berkshire Regiment called Mr Gaythorne-Hardy thought it was necessary to know the exact layout of the German defences on Hill Sixty-three at a place called Messines. There was no point going at night across the four hundred yards of no man’s land because at night he wouldn’t be able to see the plan of their trenches and their defences so he went in daylight. It would have taken him hours to cross the open ground, and all the time the German snipers and sentries would have been watching it, but he was good enough in his fieldcraft to get right up to the enemy wire, to learn everything there was to know about their position. He was under their noses, but they did not see him.

Getting there, learning, was of no value unless he was able to return safely to his own lines and report what he had seen. That was much harder, and he would have been tired.

More difficult to crawl away than to go forward. But Mr Gaythorne-Hardy had the skill.

From what he had seen, the enemy’s trenches could be targeted more effectively by the artillery and our snipers had a better chance of killing Germans. Major Hesketh-Prichard thought him one of the best.’

‘Not as good as me.’ The smile swept the boy’s face.

‘Of course not.’

Then came the puzzlement that creased lines at Omar’s mouth and eyes. ‘Why, Mr Gus, are we staying?’

Gus said, a hoarseness in his throat, ‘Because it is owed her.’

‘What can we do?’

‘Something, anything is better than nothing.’

He heard the scream as he walked across the compound to find the telephone, the same scream as a goat’s when it is tied and held and first sees the knife as the guests gather for a wedding feast.

At the steps of the building that dealt with Fifth Army’s victualling, there would be an empty office and a telephone.

The sentry at the main entrance saluted, unlocked the door and admitted him. The screams would have been heard by the sentry and by every soldier, every non-commissioned officer, every officer in the compound. If the screams destroyed the brigadier’s resolve, if the Boot broke, then any man in the compound whose name stumbled from his lips was doomed. His own name would end the pain, would still the cries.

The clerks who filled the order forms for Fifth Army’s meat and rice, vegetables, fruit and cooking oil had all returned to their barracks. He walked along a half-lit corridor and into a darkened room. He did not switch on the light but groped towards a desk. He found the telephone. The arrival of the torturer had precipitated his course of action. He had lain on his bed and fashioned the plan. He could not abandon them. There was a dialling code that circumvented the switchboard operators and provided access to a direct line. She was distant, faint.

‘Leila, you must listen exactly to what I say, and do it.’

He could hear the television playing behind her, the babble of the children’s voices and her mother’s. She said she was listening.

He was wary of the security of the direct line. ‘Leila, are you listening? Don’t interrupt. I am leaving Kirkuk in the morning. I have the chance to take a short holiday.

You remember that four years ago we camped with the children? I wish to do that again.

You will pack what is necessary and meet me at Sulaiman Bak on the Kirkuk road.’

She said that the weather forecast on the television had warned of freezing nights, and she did not think the conditions were suitable for camping with the children.

‘You should pack clothes for four days, and the children’s best boots. From Sulaiman Bak we will take the road for Kingirban and Kifri, then we will find a place to make a camp.’

She said that tomorrow was a busy day at the hospital, that it was impossible for her to find a replacement at such short notice – perhaps later they could camp, when the weather improved.

‘As you love me, Leila, do as I say. Meet me at Sulaiman Bak. We have to take the chance being offered here.’

She said that Wafiq had an examination at school in the morning – had he forgotten?

And Hani was playing football for the school in the afternoon of the day after tomorrow -had he forgotten that, too? Karim Aziz could not know if the line was routinely monitored, whether it was already listened to. He repressed the desire to shout and block out each of her reasoned excuses for not leaving Baghdad.

‘Leila, it is the best chance we have of a holiday with the children. There will always be busy days at the hospital, many examinations and football games. Pack tonight, be on the road early. It is important to me.’

She said that it was her mother’s birthday two days after tomorrow – had he forgotten that, also?

‘Be there, I beg of you. Bring tents, warm clothes, food. On the Kifri road there is a fuel station, about a kilometre from the Kirkuk road. I ask little of you. It is about the love that I have for you and for our children. It is the chance of a short freedom. It is for us. Please, be there…’

She said that it was difficult. Aziz replaced the receiver. He knew she would be at the fuel station. They had been married too long for her not to be there. He walked out of the building and across the compound, ringed by high lights. He was beyond middle age. She was plump and wide at the hips and her youth had gone. They had only each other, and their boys. He heard the cry in the night. He wondered if the torturer would need to sleep, would go to a cot bed to rest, wondered if the torturer’s need to sleep and rest would win him the time to drive south to a fuel station eighty-five kilometres away and meet those he loved, take them towards Kifri then strike out for the jebel ridge, and cross the lines.

He knew of many who had failed to find an unguarded track, and he had heard of a few who had successfully crossed the lines and then been captured by the peshmerga and handed back to the soldiers at an outpost for a cash reward. The wife he loved tolerated the regime in helpless resignation, never complained at the shortages of equipment and drugs in the hospital, merely stoically endured. The children he loved went to the school, believed implicitly what their teachers told them of the evil of Iraq’s enemies, stood each morning facing the smiling image of the President and chanted their support, were proud that their father served him. He would tell them, on the road beyond the fuel station, that their tolerance and pride was a fraud. He would lead them, as fleeing refugees, towards the patrols and the strong points and he did not know whether they would curse him.

He settled on the floor of his room, in a corner where he faced the door. The dog was on his lap and the rifle in his hands.

The screams continued, and he knew the torturer did not yet sleep or rest behind the barred windows of the cell block. If his name was given he would hear the stamping footfall in the corridor and the door would burst open… What hurt him most, sitting through the night, watching the door, was that the sniper had turned, gone back, had in some way cheated him.

‘He was cold, trying to focus, but wasn’t doing it well because he was too tired.’

She had driven, and Willet had navigated. In her small car they had bumped up a dark forest track on a shale and chipstone surface, weaving amongst the ruts, following the crude painted arrows in the headlights. It had been a good drive down from London until they’d turned off the main road and onto the forest track. Willet had folded away the map. She had snapped twice that she was damn certain she was going to get Resources to pay for a car wash, but he’d sensed – and it was new – a staccato excitement in Ms Manning. He’d wondered if plain little Carol had been to a place like this on a Security Service training course and found fulfilment. Willet himself had not sploshed around on Survival in deep wet woodland for more months than he cared to remember. The rain had come on more heavily, was sluicing over the windscreen, when the lights had found the blurred image of the little camp of tents.

‘I had a small group here then, merchant-bank people,’ Dogsy said. ‘I told Peake I’d give him as much time as I could, but he’d have to muck in with them, get into line in the queue.’

The rain had eased since they’d arrived at the tent camp. There was a small square of canvas over a low, smoking fire. A London-based insurance company, a corporate giant, had sent five men and four women out into the woods, into Dogsy’s care, to learn self-esteem, self-help, self-control. On a spit of stripped hazel over the fire was a skinned rabbit, and Willet thought that it wouldn’t be much short of midnight before the bloody thing was heated through, half cooked, and ready for eating. They’d done abseiling over a torrential river gorge before finding the rabbit in a snare they’d set the day before. Line managers and regional directors, bright-eyed and sharp, they took it all as serious fun, as the people from the bank would have done. The fact that Willet was from the MoD, and Ms Manning was out of the Security Service, hadn’t fazed Dogsy, and the two new arrivals were sat down in the circle round the fire as if they hadn’t any rights to privacy.

‘What interested me, I reckoned that the young ’uns from the bank would welcome a fellow sufferer. They made the effort but Peake didn’t let them close… They didn’t take to him, and he rejected them. If you know what I mean, they rated him as just a wannabe.

He was trying too hard. He didn’t laugh, didn’t joke, like that was beneath him… I’ve seen that sort before. When I came out of the marines and transferred into the Regiment, I was put on the recruit-induction programme. Most of the recruits were too bottled-up, the type that fail. It’s a character problem. A few like that get through, but you know the way they’ll go. If they slip into the Regiment then, at first, they think they’re going to save the world. Saving the world means killing. Killing gets to be a habit, makes a man lonely, isolated. Killing becomes addictive, can’t be given up.’

The rain pattered on the small awning over the fire. The young people, sodden wet and mud-spattered, watched, listened. Willet understood why Gus Peake had not let them near. They would be going back to baths and champagne, client investments and pension funds; they would be thinking of themselves as the fucking chosen ones. Dogsy Jennings, ex-Marine, ex-instructor in the Regiment, played to his bloody gallery. Willet thought that the chosen children, the money crunchers, would return to their City world, complacent and important, and laugh for a month at what they’d heard around the bloody smoking fire, and believe they’d fucking well achieved something in getting wet for three days and eating rare rabbit.

‘What did he learn from you?’ Willet asked, without grace.

‘Escape and Evasion. That’s what old Bill said he needed – Billings, that is, a good mate – but what I told him might just have been a waste of time, mine and his.’

‘You’re ahead of me,’ Ms Manning said quietly.

‘If you’ve set out to save the world, gone on a killing spree, then you may hang around too long. If you’re around too long, you lose sight of the way back, you don’t get the chance to escape and evade. He’s gone walking in northern Iraq, right?’

Ms Manning said, ‘There’s a revolt, a tribal uprising. I suppose the target is the city of Kirkuk. The Iraqi Fifth Army is based there.’

There was a whinny of general laughter from the group around them. That would have made their bloody evening, and the week ahead when they were back at their desks, God’s fucking chosen children, and playing with investment figures and exchange rates on their bloody screens before heading down to the wine bar.

‘Then I have to hope he knows when to quit,’ Dogsy said. He was a big man, with long gorilla arms and a well-trimmed moustache. A top-of-the-range Land-Rover was parked behind the tents – Willet could have wept because in his imagination the exhausted Gus Peake sat around the same damp fire and heard the patronizing bastard talk Escape and Evasion, and heard the same laughter ripple from his audience. ‘Do you know how long he’s been in combat?’

There was a flicker in Ms Manning’s voice. She said crisply, ‘Maybe a week, or a few days more.’

‘It has to be a stampede for that sort of thing to work… He’ll be killing every day. The killing would be so frequent that he loses count – how many, how often – and he won’t be in a structure where anyone orders him to stop, quit. He’ll be a changed man. Should he get out, those who knew him before won’t know him – might not, when they meet him and see him, want to know him. He’ll be a new man, and it may not be a pleasant sight.

He didn’t tell me what he did, his old life.’

‘He was a transport manager…’

It was like a joke to those around the fire. Willet hated them. The giggles wafted across him.

‘… in a provincial haulage company,’ Ms Manning persisted.

A ponderous smile played at Dogsy Jennings’ face. ‘There’s your answer. Should he come back, he’s hardly going to be able to slip his feet under the desk and start again to move lorries about, like nothing’s happened. He’ll have taken a dozen men’s lives, if he’s any good. If he’s brilliant as a marksman, it could be twenty men’s lives, thirty. Any jerk who’s arrogant enough to think he can change the world won’t just switch off after one dose of it, he’ll have to find more causes, more bloody crusades. I read men. It’s my job to get under the bullshit of human nature. I didn’t like him.’

‘Didn’t you? Why not?’ The sneer rasped in her voice.

‘I didn’t like him, Miss, because that sort craves to belong. Got me? Whatever the motivation, he can’t belong out there, and if he gets back he can’t belong here. I did my best with Escape and Evasion because that’s what old Bill asked of me – but any road I didn’t like him. I don’t like men who go looking to be bloody heroes.’

‘What about loyalty, important things like freedom, heritage? What about sacrifice?’

Willet saw Dogsy’s wink. The circle chuckled. The smoke eddied across the rabbit’s carcass. Ms Manning pushed herself up then rubbed the damp off her backside and Willet saw the anger in her face.

‘Come on, Ken,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave these creeps to their silly bloody games.’

He followed after her, past the tents and the Land-Rover and back towards the track where her car was parked. He hadn’t thought it could happen, that her emotional commitment could be made to Peake and his rifle. Dogsy Jennings’ words seared in his mind. ‘He won’t be in a structure where anybody orders him to stop, quit… Should he get out, those who knew him before won’t know him… He can’t belong out there and, if he gets back, he can’t belong here.’ He thought she’d been magnificent, and he’d tell her.

She reached the car. Her eyes blazed at him, and she spat her words. ‘When you write this up, do me a favour, leave out all that pompous crap about survival chances. Spare me that shit.’

They moved in darkness, in total silence, towards the lights and the flame.

The boy led. Gus had given Omar authority over his life and safety. They went at a steady pace past patrols that he had not heard but the boy had. They crossed roads along which personnel carriers cruised, and the boy found the hidden ground into which they could duck as the searchlights roved over the ground, and he would not have sensed where the shallow earth scrapes offered them that protection. When there was a ditch into which he would have stumbled, the boy gently held his hand and guided him. Where men, talking softly, guarded their goats, they slipped by and the boy had read the wind so that they did not alert the goatherds’ dogs.

They went towards the lights where the chains held her.