Holding the Zero

Chapter Fifteen

Early each morning an elderly corporal, with a driver and an escort of two riflemen, collected the packages of urgent, sensitive material for Fifth Army flown into Kirkuk from the capital.

Although he had lost an arm in the defence of Basra fifteen years earlier, his birthright from a tribe that gave unquestioned allegiance to the regime ensured that a position in administration was available to him for as long as he wanted it. His daily routine was the run to the airfield, the collection from the Antonov transport plane, the drive back into the centre of Kirkuk, coffee and cigarettes, then the government’s newspaper, then a game of dice with matchsticks as the stakes, a meal, a siesta, then a gossiping evening with other corporals, the ironing of his uniform, the cleaning of his boots and bed. He had little cause for complaint – and it was safe. All the other corporals in administration could expect to be transferred every two months, for a week, to the forward strong points in the hills to the north, but not him. His disability protected him.

When the jeep slowed to a stop at traffic lights, one of the few sets working in Kirkuk, on the wide carriageway into the city from the airfield, the corporal’s orderly life was ended. A single shot, fired at great range, exploded into his head and the remnants of bone, blood and brain peppered the body of his driver.

They were running.

‘Where next?’

‘Doesn’t matter where – anywhere I can aim from.’

Omar led and Gus followed. The low shafts of sunlight threw deep shadows in the narrow lanes between the shanty-town of haphazardly built shelters on the edge of the city. Men, women and children, just risen from their beds, scattered as the wraithlike figures pounded past their homes.

When the dawn came he was so tired.

Major Karim Aziz dragged himself up from the floor as the first light seeped into the room, and felt his forty-five years for the first time since he’d come to Kirkuk as the aches, pains, stiffness ran through his body. He had not slept but had watched the darkness and the ribbon of light under the door, had listened for the boots. The cries and screams had come, not often, in the long hours and he had known that the torturer was tireless.

He packed his few belongings, scattered across the floor, down into the belly of his backpack.

Leila, too, would now be filling the boys’ rucksacks and telling them that an examination at school did not matter and a football match was unimportant. She would have telephoned the hospital and lied that she was unwell. Perhaps already she had told her mother, shuffling in slippers in the kitchen, that there would be no party to celebrate her birthday. Through the night he had wondered when he would tell her of their future.

He put the last of the dog’s biscuits on the floor and they were wolfed down.

The future, in the darkness hours, had been nightmarishly with him. It might be a patrol on the ceasefire line between government territory and the Kurdish enclave; on his own, without difficulty, he could evade the patrols – but he would not be alone, he would be with his wife and his sons. It might be capture by a warlord’s men, and the Estikhabarat would pay fifty thousand American dollars for him to be returned to them, bound and blindfolded, across the line; on his own, with his rifle and his dog, he could fight his way through the danger of capture – but he would not be alone. Should he succeed, it might be the stagnant life of an exile without money in the embittered Iraqi communities of Amman or Istanbul; on his own, perhaps, he could burrow into the tawdry life of the exiles he had read of in the newspapers and heard of on the radio and exist – but he would have responsibility for his wife and children, who would be lost flotsam. Soon she would be on the road north.

He folded the dog’s rug and put it into the backpack.

At the petrol station, or in the car, or when they started to walk, he would tell them. He would say that he was a traitor to the President who smiled with warmth at him from the photograph on the wall, that he had sided with the enemies of the President. He would say that all the struggle of their lives was for nothing because he had betrayed it. In the night he had shivered because of what he had done to those he loved.

The dog was by the door and waited for him.

In his mind he had seen – again and again – the shock spreading on their faces at the petrol station, or in the car, or when they started to walk, as they learned the future. The worst of the nightmarish thoughts had been of her clutching her children to her, turning and abandoning him… It had been his vanity on the range when he had shown his shooting skills. It had been the massage of his conceit by the silky words of the general, in the car cruising at night beside the river in Baghdad, telling him that he, above all men, had the marksman’s expertise.

The dog bounded into the corridor, he closed the door of the bare room and wondered if the President still smiled.

He walked out into the compound.

Men were coming from the shadowy shape of the cell block.

He saw them rubbing their eyes in exhaustion, flexing their fists as if they were bruised, wiping smeared mess off their tunics. But the slightest among them walked briskly as if he had not missed his sleep.

The piping voice sidled across the quiet of the compound. ‘You are leaving us, Major?

Take with you my congratulations.’

He said hoarsely, ‘I accept them, I am grateful… I am a simple soldier, I did what I could.’

‘I never met a simple soldier. Have a good journey back to Baghdad.’

He tried to ask the casual question: ‘Your own work, Commander, is it nearly done?’

‘Near, but not yet there. A few hours, and this preliminary stage of my investigation will be completed… but the trails of treachery run far. You have my assurance, simple soldier, that I will follow the trails wherever they lead… Enough of me. Are you disappointed that your triumph is not total?’

‘I do not understand you.’

‘You were sent to kill a sniper, a foreigner – and you did not.’

Aziz blurted, ‘He is beyond my reach.’

‘Have a good journey, and be assured that those who take responsibility for the security of the state will not rest while traitors live.’

Aziz heard the dog’s low angry growl, flicked his fingers nervously to it and strode out towards the administration building, where he would find a driver to take him across the city to the military car pool. While he walked he felt the small narrow-set eyes on his back, following him.

The soldier stood at the road block.

He was nineteen years old, a conscript in a mechanized infantry unit. The road block was behind him. He had been detailed by his sergeant to wave down the cars, lorries and vans for inspection. He was from a poor family in Baghdad, and his move to the basic training camp before going to Kirkuk had been the first time in his life that he had been away from his mother. He hated the army’s food and hardly ate. He was ghostly thin and his stomach churned as he held his rifle and directed the traffic into the lane where the drivers’ papers could be looked over. He was a lonely youngster, shunned by his colleagues in the barracks hut because the loneliness caused him to wet his bed most nights of the week. Behind the road block, workmen were digging a trench in preparation for the repair of a blocked sewer. The smell was foul but, more importantly, the piledriver the workmen used to break up the tarmacadam had obliterated the sound of a single shot fired half an hour earlier a full kilometre away. He was thinking of his mother when he died. Against the noise of the vehicles’ brakes and gear changes and the hammer of the piledriver, none of the men near to him heard the crack of the rifle’s report or the thump of the bullet’s strike. The soldier subsided, as if the strength was gone from his legs, and blood spilled from deep holes in his chest and his back.

The orderly paused at the back of the truck.

On the flat-bed was a heap of black rubbish bags. He lit a cigarette. The ebony crows were waiting for him, flapping their wings as they strutted on the bags he had brought earlier in the week to the dump, and cried raucously at him. Each morning the orderly cleaned the quarters used by the officers of an armoured unit based at Kirkuk and collected their rubbish in the bags along with the food they had not bothered to eat the previous evening. It attracted the crows, but the brutes could wait while he enjoyed his cigarette. The orderly was from the desert region, near to the small town of an-Nahiya, close to the Syrian border. There were no mountains in that region, but he enjoyed those moments when he could smoke a cigarette and admire the high ground beyond the city.

There was the same emptiness, and he blinked into the sun rising over the faraway ridges.

He was particularly cheerful that morning: his time in the army had nine days to run and then he would be on the slow bus back to an-Nahiya where his father kept a roadside coffee shop. The orderly did not realize that by standing and dragging contentedly on his cigarette he made a good target for a distant marksman. As he fell backwards the crows screamed and rose in a moment of panicked flight over the heap of rubbish bags.

They moved again, fast.

‘Why, Mr Gus?’

‘Because, Omar, they are available.’

‘I do not complain, Mr Gus, but they are not officers, not commanders. They are not helicopters, tanks, communications… Why?’

‘They wear the uniform.’

The boy shrugged. They went through yards, over fences that sometimes collapsed under them. There would have been many inside their homes or outside sweeping away dirt or hanging out clothes to dry who saw them. But those who were inside looked away and those who were outside hurried back through the doors and locked them. They were not in that part of the city where Party members lived, or functionaries of the administration, but where people valued their lives and believed the best preservation was to see, hear and know nothing. The boy carried the Kalashnikov assault weapon, and Gus held hard on to the stock of the big rifle as he ran. As the sun rose, they careered on, hunting for the next position from which he could find a target wearing the uniform. And gradually the pattern of the boy’s route led him towards the heart of the city.

He arrived at the military transport pool.

Major Karim Aziz thanked the driver curtly, hoisted up his backpack and the rifle’s polished wooden box. The dog ran beside him as he walked to the pool office. He gave his name and his rank at the desk, and demanded a self-drive car for his journey back to Baghdad. His name was known, his reputation had moved quickly. Surely, for the major, whose expert marksmanship was responsible for the capture of the witch, there was a place on a flight south to Baghdad?

‘I wish to drive and I want a car immediately.’

Beyond a closed door, behind the desk, he could vaguely hear the military radio net.

He could not distinguish the messages, only the babble of activity.

Forms were produced from below the desk, and carbon sheets. With two fingers, a clerk laboriously typed his name, his rank and his destination. He fidgeted impatiently.

He was asked if he wanted coffee, but irritably shook his head. He paced in front of the desk, and perhaps that increased the clerk’s nervousness and the errors; the papers and carbons were torn out of the typewriter and the work began again. When the typing was complete the papers were passed to him. He scrawled his signature on them, and they were taken from him into the office where the radio was… By now, Leila and the children would have left home, would be on the road towards Sulaiman Bak.

An officer, a major’s insignia on his shoulder, overweight from a life spent welded to a desk, came from the inner room.

‘I am honoured to meet you, Major Aziz. Did these fools not find you a chair?’

‘I don’t want a chair, I just want a car.’

With a flourish the officer countersigned the papers. ‘I apologize that I can only provide a Toyota, Major. As soon as it is valeted, fuelled, it will be at your disposal.’

‘Forget the valeting, give me the keys.’

The officer smiled smugly. ‘You are an expert at marksmanship, I am an expert at running the motor pool of Fifth Army. You have pride in your work, Major, and I have pride in mine. No car issued to a distinguished officer will leave this yard until it has been correctly cleaned and prepared. We are both proud men, yes?’

‘Just get it done.’

He started to pace again. The officer hesitated, then said uncertainly, ‘I am assuming, Major, that you have not been beside a radio for the last three-quarters of an hour.’

‘I have been getting here, in bad traffic.’

‘You do not know of the killings?’

‘What killings?’

‘Three soldiers have been shot dead in Kirkuk in the last three-quarters of an hour. A corporal on the airport road, a soldier at a road block, an orderly taking rubbish to the dump. Not important men, Major, not officers.’

‘Perhaps the remnants of the saboteurs from yesterday are still holed up, hiding.’

‘Each without any warning, each from an unseen rifle, each with a single bullet.’

She would be on the road coming north. She would be driving with their sons, and with her trust in him. Behind him was the cell block. He had thought the sniper had fled back to the mountains, beyond reach. He remembered the sun-hazed mirage of the man sitting on the rock at too great a range for the Dragunov. If she did not have trust in him she would not have taken the car, loaded it, and driven north.

‘Get the fuelling and the cleaning done quickly. I need to leave.’ *** She heard him cough, then hack the spittle from his throat.

Meda was sprawled in the furthest corner of the cell from the door. She heard him, then the long painful wheeze.

She twisted, each slight movement hurting her, and heard the gasps. She lay on a foul-smelling bed of old straw in a sleeve of stained cotton. She had not heard him so clearly before, but the last time they had brought her back to the cell, as she fell to the concrete floor, she had found that the bed had been moved from the left side of the cell to the right. Close to her face was warmth, a wet heat. Against the back wall of the cell, under the high, barred window where the dirt filtered the light, was a channel in the concrete, where water could run out when the floor was sluiced. The warmth and the heat were from urine dribbling out of a hole in the wall beside her head.

Her mouth was close to the drain, and the stumbling flow of his urine.

‘Are you there?’

‘Where else would I be? I am here.’ From the drain came a black, shaken chuckle, not laughter.

‘Can we survive?’

‘We have to survive.’

‘For how long?’

‘For as long as God gives us strength.’

‘Can we be saved?’

‘Only by death.’

She trembled. Between the interrogation sessions and the smiling soft-skinned face phrasing the questions with care in the intervals between the beatings and the pain, she had thought of home. She had summoned the image of the village, the orchards in blossom, the smell of food cooking and of wet wood burning, the children bringing back armfuls of wild spring flowers, and of old Hoyshar reading to her from the books of military history that had been left for him by his friend, esteemed brother Basil, children playing and shouting – but she could no longer find the image. All she had left were the words coming through the narrow drain hole and sighs as if the effort of speaking each word brought a worse pain.

‘When does death come?’

‘When they have finished with us – for you earlier, for me later.’

‘Can you not tell them something, a little?’

‘If you start, you weaken. Then it is not a little but everything.’

‘If you are strong?’

‘Today men pray for my strength that they can live.’

‘How do you make the strength?’

‘By thinking of those I love.’

‘May I be loved by you, because I am frightened.’

‘We will love each other, child and father…’

She closed her fist. She reached into the hole, pushing her hand, wrist, forearm, into it.

She felt the feathery brush of the cockroaches’ legs on her skin. In the rough hole, with the creatures on her, her arm shivered, but she thrust it deeper, to the elbow. She felt the coarse close-cut hair and thought she touched his neck, and he started at the touch and let out a small cry because he had moved suddenly. The big, hard hand took Meda’s. Her fingers were in his. She felt the wetness of his lips on her fingers, on the palm of her hand that had been burned with cigarette stubs. It was as if she reached beyond her cell, beyond the fences and walls, beyond the city, through the drain towards a freedom. It was not a father holding a child’s hand and kissing it, it was the hold and the kiss of the man she loved. She was alone with him, given strength, watching the same stars as shone over Nineveh and Nimrud… Gus would come for her, take her back into the night, to freedom, and she would feel again his lips kissing hers.

‘He will come and save me.’

‘No-one will come. The only safety is death.’

‘I have to believe it.’

‘If you believe it then you will be weak. Be strong, give me strength.’

‘You were my enemy.’

‘I am all you have, you are all I have.’

‘I will be saved…’

Meda tried to drag her arm back from the drain hole, but she could not. He held her hand with the firmness of desperation.

‘She is only a girl, a peasant. We are responsible.’

Etiquette said that Haquim, already offered coffee in a thimble china cup and sweet biscuits, should have taken the chair, upholstered in royal blue, and sat opposite agha Ibrahim and engaged in polite talk before gently steering the conversation towards the reason for his visit. He was incapable of such courtesies. The coffee remained untouched on the low table, the biscuits uneaten. He roamed the salon room, beating out a stride, then turning and gesticulating with his finger for emphasis. The room had been the principal lounge of the hotel that had once been a retreat for the privileged of the regime when they came north to escape the heat of Baghdad’s summer; it was now the commandeered residence of the agha, and the old opulence was maintained. Haquim’s boots, as he pounded backwards and forwards, scattered dried mud on a hand-woven carpet.

‘She had dreams, delusions. We played on her simplicity. We have a duty to her.’

The agha ’s eyes followed Haquim. The only evidence of his mood and inclination was in the eyes. The hands were still, did not fidget. The mouth was set, expressionless. But agha Ibrahim could not hide the message of his eyes. Haquim was heard out in silence, but knew he had failed. Nothing would be done, a finger would not be lifted. As he spoke he seemed to see her in the cell, just as he had seen her in the village, just as he had seen her in the charge of the Victory City and on the stampede towards the town of Tarjil, and the rush along the ditch beside the high-built road to the perimeter defences at the crossroads. Because of what he saw, and the memory of the way she trapped him with innocence and certainty, his voice rose.

‘She took you to the outskirts of Kirkuk. You saw the flame of Baba Gurgur. When you turned, it was a betrayal of her. History will curse you, and the spirit of your father and your grandfather, if you abandon her.’

The passion of the veteran fighter went unanswered. No man, certainly no woman, spoke to agha Ibrahim with such disdain. Haquim thought that the call would already have been made on the satellite telephone to the palace offices in Baghdad and that there would have been the protestations of loyalty; but it would not be admitted. He thought he shouted to the wind.

‘I beg of you, use the communications you have. Call them and plead and bargain with them. Offer them what they want.’

Perhaps, if he had wished to, the agha could have saved her. If he had picked up again the satellite telephone and begged, pleaded, perhaps her life could be returned to her.

Perhaps, for a quarter or half a million dollars, of the customs tolls exacted by the agha for permission for lorries and tankers to cross his territory, her life could be won. The slight shrug told Haquim that nothing would be done, that the interview was terminated.

‘She did it for you. She risked her life to bring you to Kirkuk. Your indifference shames you.’

He had expected nothing more and nothing less, but it had been his obligation to try.

He would drive from Arbil to Sulaymaniyah, and if the answer was the same he would go back to the mountains, to his village, to forget. He stamped out of the salon room.

The soldier in the watchtower at the fuel depot was high above the traffic on the nearest street.

He had heard two shots fired with thirty minutes separating them but, and he checked his wristwatch again, the second shot had been eighteen minutes before. The soldier strained to hear another shot but it was harder now because a mullah called the faithful to prayer and the chant billowed out from the loud-speakers in the minaret tower of the mosque closest to him. In the watchtower, he was dismayed at not being able to respond to the mullah’s call – he was from one of the few Sunni families in Karbala where the treacherous Shi’a were in the majority. Being of the minority sect in that city, he gave total support to the regime, its troops, police and security agents – his family might be butchered with knives in their beds in the night. He had reported hearing the shots, shouted it down to his sergeant, but he could not locate them. From his vantage, he scanned with binoculars across rooftops, upper windows and street junctions, but saw nothing that threatened him. The call had reached a crescendo when the binoculars were driven back into his eye sockets by the armour-piercing bullet and the top half of his head spiralled down to the ground close to the boots of his sergeant, who supervised the refuelling of a lorry.

The back marker in the scrambled patrol crouched at the corner of an office block.

The patrol was one of many that had been hustled out of the barracks and were now scattering beyond the inner city and reaching the outer suburban blocks. He was back marker, on the young officer’s insistence, because he was the most intelligent soldier in the platoon, and he understood that it was a position of trust. He had a place offered him at the university in Baghdad for the study of chemical engineering when his army service was completed. He detested the army because it took him away from the laboratories and pitched him amongst illiterate peasants. It was an indication to him of the officer’s regard for him that he was given the role of guarding the safety of the men ahead of him. He heard, over his shoulder, the officer’s shout for the patrol to move forward. It seemed idiotic that he did not know against what force they were deployed. Twice, patiently, he had tried to ask the officer to explain for what or whom they searched, but each time the officer’s attention was on the peasant soldiers. He stiffened in his crouched position, ready to follow the patrol, to track backwards. His eyes were on the far side of the street, on the windows and a flat roof with aerials and TV dishes. He had not been told that, to protect the patrol and himself, he should be watching roofs and windows that were a full 700 metres away from him, and far beyond the range of his assault rifle. There was no pain, only the blow against his chest, and then the swift collapse onto the pavement. The back marker heard, for a moment, the officer’s call for him to follow, and saw a man emerge from the office block and stand beside him, his face wide with horror.

The military policeman was holding up traffic to let a column of armoured personnel carriers through the junction.

He enjoyed the authority given him by his uniform – and his authority was about to grow. In the breast pocket of his tunic was a typed sheet of paper, signed by his captain, informing him of promotion from corporal to sergeant to take effect from the first day of the next month. Everything about the military policeman’s bearing was proud. As the first of the personnel carriers thundered past him, he raised his arms and held back the civilian traffic. The previous day, he had been at one of the barricades on the edge of the Old Quarter where the bastards from the mountains had been blocked. He had not seen the witch herself, but the convoy carrying her to headquarters had raced past him with horns blaring and sirens calling in triumph. He hoped they would hang her, high and soon, and that he would be there to watch it. There was a great confusion in the city that morning and he had heard that riflemen were scattered in Kirkuk, but he knew little of the detail other than that there had been five fatalities. When he fell, bludgeoned down onto the road, his upper body sprawled under the wheel of a personnel carrier whose driver felt only the slightest bump.

‘How far do we go?’

‘Close enough for her to hear.’

‘Hear what, Mr Gus?’

‘Hear that I haven’t abandoned her, Omar.’

‘How does that help?’

‘I hope it gives her strength.’

‘Is it to help you, Mr Gus, that you are killing?’

They were closer to the city’s heart and heard more often the drone whine of the armoured vehicles on the main routes, and the shouts of patrols. They were at the back fence of a villa’s garden when a woman yelled. He saw the blotched face at the upper window and she clasped her hand at her mouth as if to stifle herself, and her dressing gown gaped open. Gus understood. The woman yelled because she saw two figures of a bygone age, primitives, filth-encrusted and armed, camouflaged, tracking across the end of her garden. She would waddle from the window to the telephone. The boy went over the fence first, vaulting it easily, and Gus followed.

As always, the moment before the yell, the boy had bared him. He was glad not to have to answer Omar’s question as they ran down the alleyway.

He stood in the doorway.

The officer looked up, saw Aziz, smiled obsequiously. ‘I promise you, Major, it will only be another two, three minutes, and the car will be ready.’

‘What does it say on the radio?’

‘There is great chaos, Major. I do not mean it disrespectfully but the men on the radio are running around like headless chickens.’

He hissed, ‘What does it say?’

‘Patrols, cordons, lines, and the new casualties. For myself – and I am not a hero as you are, Major – I am happy to be here and organizing an efficient-’

‘How many new casualties?’

‘There are three more – a soldier at the fuel depot, another on patrol, a military policeman. There is a hunt but they cannot find the sniper, he shoots one time at a long distance then moves. Ah, your wait is over, Major.’

The officer gestured. Major Karim Aziz turned and saw a soldier driving a small saloon car to the front of the building.

‘I am happy to have been of service to you.’

Beyond the car was the jeep that had brought him from the headquarters of Fifth Army: the driver was sprawled behind the wheel, dozing in the morning sunshine. He would be beyond the grasp of his sergeant and would hope to while away the rest of the morning before returning to duty. The man offered himself, challenged.

At the desk, Aziz took the typed sheets of paper and tore them in half. The dog followed him from the building. He carried his backpack and the rifle’s box to the jeep, opened the door, and punched the driver awake. As they sped out of the military car-pool yard he was already unfastening the clasp locks of the carrying-box of his rifle. *** ‘I’m not looking back – I never want to see that fucking place again,’ Mike said.

‘No way, I’m happily waving goodbye to the land of broken goddam dreams,’ Dean said.

‘I think we should never have come, never have believed in the nonsense about that woman,’ Gretchen said.

They walked away from the roadside and the big Mercedes. None of them had thanked Rybinsky. They followed the German, Jurgen, up the winding path that led to the ridge, and above that ridge were three more, and beyond all of the ridges were the mountain peaks. Each carried their own personal bags but, as a gesture of comradeship and democracy, the camera gear was shared between the three of them. They would climb in daylight towards the border, then rest, and under cover of darkness make the dangerous crossing into Turkey. Their heads were down: neither of the men or the woman were used to failure. Each, in their own way, grunting with the exertion of the steep trek, expressed the bitterness that went with failure.

‘I’ll get a radio spot,’ Mike said. ‘I’m going to crucify this fucking bullshit place, and the woman, if she ever existed.’

‘I reckon she existed, but only as a myth in these people’s minds,’ Dean said. ‘Being realistic, we’re talking about a foot soldier at best.’

And then they were quiet, struggling to climb, and behind them was the bright yellow Mercedes and the ever falling panorama of the ground.

‘What do you want?’

‘For, God’s sake, Joe, I want to talk.’

‘Talking seldom helped anybody, Sarah.’

‘Because I can’t help, that’s why I have to talk.’

‘I might not listen.’

‘They caught her. She was captured…’

Joe Denton knelt in the rich grass. There were now eleven lines of pegs running the length of the meadow, and he had just begun to work up the second of them. From the pattern of the laying of the mines he had calculated that he could clear a little more than half of each line in a single day’s work. It annoyed him that she was there, distracting him. She had been up and down the road all day looking for any straggling survivors of the final battle in Kirkuk to make it over the hills and ridges. Most had come the previous evening, but she had found six, burdened by two grievously wounded men, early that morning, and had ferried them to hospital. They’d been the last. He looked at her. She was sitting awkwardly on the pick-up’s bonnet. It was dangerous for him to be distracted.

‘Doesn’t that concern you?’

‘Predictable. What concerns me is a thousand V69s, then another field of them, and another.’

‘You helped.’

‘And sometimes my stupidity amazes even me.’

‘That’s not Joe Denton. Joe Denton cared.’

‘I did what I could. Sorry, Sarah, but she’s not my problem. Your problem. You think you can do something, you can’t. Get a look at the map. The map says this is fucking Kurdistan. It is an unforgiving place and when we, outsiders, try to do something we fall on our bloody arses. We think we are important, interfere, but we don’t affect events -we go home. I am busy. I am clearing twenty-five V69s a day, tops, so there are only another ten fucking million left. That’s why I’m busy. You don’t want to talk, you want a shoulder to cry on – like all the other huggers. Go and find the sniper, go and have a cuddle and cry with him, give him a good ride before he flies back home to tell his war stories in the bloody pub. Go away, because I am busy.’

‘Can’t.’

‘Can’t what?’

‘Can’t do anything like that.’

‘Try harder – close your eyes and think of the beach, Sarah, think of where you bloody belong.’

‘He didn’t come out.’

‘What? Is he dead?’

‘He stayed behind, to “do something”.’

She slid off the bonnet of the pick-up. She slipped into the passenger seat beside the driver, in front of the bodyguards. He stared in front of him, at the line of pegs, as the pick-up drove away. He was glad that Sarah hadn’t asked him what would happen to the woman in Kirkuk because he would not have lied to her. He was a long time staring at the line of pegs. After the sound of the truck had gone, drifting away in the bare hills, he began again to probe for the next of the buried V69s and to feel for the tripwires and for the antennae. He tried to shut from his mind the sniper who had stayed to ‘do something’, but he could not because he didn’t know what could be done.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE

7. (Conclusions after interview with Dogsy (sic) Jennings of Corporate Survival, Hereford, conducted by self and Ms Manning – transcripts attached.)

ESCAPE amp; EVASION: AHP, by sharing a course with a management team of bank officials, will have received a minimum of training and advice on survival tactics should he need a fast and improvised retreat from the theatre of operations – I emphasize minimum. But Jennings classified him as a ‘crusader’ and I believe such a mental attitude would lead AHP to hang around after the last bus has gone. His E amp;E tactical knowledge, as gained from Corporate Survival, would be wholly inadequate.

SUMMARY: I rate his chances of survival in the medium term as…

WHO BLOODY CARES? The bank officials didn’t; Dogsy Jennings didn’t; why should I? He made his bed. His conceit is to go where ORDINARY, DECENT and EXPERTLY TRAINED men would not dream of going. His arrogance is his involvement in a cause from which GOOD, HONOURABLE and CAREFULLY PREPARED men would turn away. AHP demeans us all. Will he survive? I don’t give a damn. Will I ever meet him? I hope not. Where he has gone, what he has attempted, makes me feel second-rate…

The bell rang as Ken Willet’s fingers rippled on the keyboard. He was losing control, his eyes were misted and he could not see the screen clearly. As he stumbled across the room he glanced at his wristwatch. It was mid-morning; he still wore his pyjama trousers.

He scratched at his bare armpit, then opened the door.

Carol Manning stood on the mat and rolled her eyes in mock astonishment. She was holding a bottle of wine. She walked past him. Tricia refused point blank to come to his flat, said it was a tip and stank, said that if they ever married and he didn’t learn to clean his act up then he’d have to sleep in the coal bunker. Carol Manning was in the centre of the room and he saw the mischievous grin on her face.

She said his desk at the Ministry had told her he’d called in sick, the wine was Australian chardonnay, and cheap.

She said where they were going the next day.

Ken Willet shambled into the kitchen to find a corkscrew and to wash two glasses.

When he came back into the room she was standing over the screen. She handed him the bottle and went on reading. He hadn’t seen her laugh like that before – and her eyes sparkled. He pulled the cork. He would, of course, have deleted the SUMMARY. His head dropped, as if humiliated. He poured the wine. She turned, and still there was the sparkle and the laughter.

She said, ‘I thought it was a good time to get pissed up – any objection? You know that feeling, a cold comes over you, something you can’t touch, can’t see, but something desperate’s happened and however hard you scratch your mind you don’t know what it is

– know it? Something awful? I felt that, so I’m going to get pissed up.’

She emptied her glass and he refilled it. He apologized for what he had written.

‘No cause to – it’s the truth. You hate him because you’re jealous. He’s ruffled your self-bloody-esteem. It’s taken you long enough to catch on that he’s brilliant… Where’s that bloody bottle? Got me? Brilliant…’

A medical orderly peeled from the cab of the marked ambulance and ran towards the casualty.

He recognized the particular fist of death, the small entry wound and the large exit hole. That morning, he had seen a similar wound on the body of a soldier at a road block and another at a rubbish dump. He was not easily unnerved. He had served as a field medic, a stretcher bearer, in the marsh battles to hold the line against the Iranian hordes, and he had been in Kuwait when the bomb loads had fallen from the American aircraft.

He could accept the random death handed down by unseeing artillerymen, machine-gunners and air crews, and the horror they left behind. But this was different somehow.

The chill gripped him. At the road block and the rubbish dump, and here at the corner of an office building, young soldiers had been specifically identified as targets. He seemed to see the bodies magnified in the telescopic sight that would have prised into their lives in the moment before death. Fear, the first he had ever experienced, ran loose in him. A crowd stared vacantly as he felt the corpse’s neck for a pulse and found none. The crashing blow to his back pitched him forward so that he toppled onto the body, and then the blackness came.

The sentry clawed open the heavy steel-plate gate at the main entrance to the headquarters of Fifth Army.

On the gate, being a man with alert ears and eyes, the sentry knew of the stalking death spreading without pattern across the city. He had heard on the squawking radios and from the shouts of officers that a sniper was at work and firing indiscriminately. A dozen times in the last hour he had dragged open the gates, allowed foot and mechanized patrols to speed out of the compound and had heaved the gates shut. But, and it would be fatal to him, he did not know the locations in Kirkuk at which seven soldiers had died; had he known, he might have appreciated that each killing brought the marksman closer to the gate he guarded. The sentry was a big man, from a family of stonemasons working in quarries beyond As Salman in the desert quarter, and he would go back to the heavy equipment, the heavy hours, the heavy rocks when his army duty was completed. He had broad shoulders above a wide, muscled body, and his very size, too, would be fatal to him. The sentry pushing shut the gates made a fine target, and did not know it. A slimmer, slighter man would have escaped. The bullet, by small miscalculations, was fractionally low and fractionally wide, and caught the sentry in the back at the extremity of his rib-cage, then it yawed and sent crippling shock-waves up to the lungs and down to the kidney and liver. He was on the ground, his blood smeared on the gate he had been pushing shut. He screamed for help, but was not answered by men cowering behind the half-closed gates.

‘Were we close enough?’

‘She would have heard.’

‘It is enough?’

‘It is enough because she would have known.’

‘Can we get out now?’

‘We can.’

‘You have seen sufficient – Mr Gus, the tourist – of the sights of Kirkuk?’

‘No, when it is necessary I will return.’

‘For her? Fuck you, Mr Gus. You’re mad.’

‘So that she knows she is not alone… With you, Omar, or without you.’

‘Without me you are dead,’ the boy spat scornfully.

They ran from the open concrete floors of the uncompleted apartment block. Twice they were seen and erratic shooting followed them. Without Omar’s intuition, gathered from thieving and fleeing, Gus would have blundered into the closing net of patrols and into the path of the personnel carriers that criss-crossed the city.

‘Mr Gus, have you been helped?’

In the space of almost two hours he had probed into the city and fired eight shots. He had felt no remorse as he saw the vortex of air and the speck of the bullet speeding towards a chosen target, a man doomed because he was available and wore the uniform.

He had felt only a brutal anger he had not known before. They went through ditches, gardens, yards, sewer-pipes, on their stomachs or running. They left behind them road blocks, checkpoints, house searches, cordon lines of soldiers, blundering chaos, and the anger never abated.

He shouted, ‘If this gate is not opened immediately, you bastards will answer to me with your lives.’

With a full swing, full force, Major Karim Aziz kicked the steel plate of the gates. The screams of the soldier filled his ears. The wounded man, drowning in his own blood, flapped the ground. ‘Open the gate and have a stretcher with you, or I will have all of you cowards hanged before the night’s out.’

He went back from the gate and crouched over the young soldier. Behind him the square and the road leading towards the office and apartment blocks had emptied. There were troops in firing positions, down and finding cover. He sensed the terror all around him, created by a single man who fired the bullets. He cradled the soldier’s head. He could not have ignored the challenge. He heard the gate scrape open. The sniper’s trademark was on the bare chest of the soldier where, frantic to kill the pain, his fingers had torn away the tunic and shirt buttons. In the well of the blood was a cleanly drilled entry-hole. As the stretcher-bearers sprinted from the safety of the gate, he lifted the soldier and noted the exit pit large enough to take two field-dressing pads to cover it. The soldier was taken from his arms, thrown down onto a stretcher, and stampeded inside. A single man who made such fear was an opponent worthy of him. There was a small glint on the tarmacadam below the gate that caught his eye. On his hands and knees he crawled to it, picked it up. In his palm was the misshapen piece of lead antimony crushed by the impact on the gate. It had been cased in cupro-nickel when it was recognizable as a bullet. He gazed at it for a moment, then dropped it and thought of his wife, who would be in the car with their children, trusting him…

He walked across the square towards the side-street into which the driver had swerved the jeep. He found the man half hiding under the vehicle, stood over him, exposed, and gave the instruction that his backpack and the box should be returned to his old room.

With his rifle in his hands, his dog beside him, Major Karim Aziz stood in the centre of the square and stared up the length of the road at a thousand windows and a hundred roofs.

She heard the boots and the dragging slither as if a weighted sack were brought down the corridor, and the weight collapsed beside the darkness of the drain hole. The door slammed and the boots receded. Her mouth was beside the hole.

‘Did you hear it?

‘I heard only their questions – and I did not answer. I had the strength…’

‘Did you hear the shot?’

‘You had given me the strength, your love…’

‘He was there, with his rifle. He is coming.’

‘Give me your hand… No-one is coming, only death. Give me your hand, I beg you.’

‘I heard the shot…’

‘A man makes a gesture, clears his conscience, then goes… Only I can help you, child, only you can help me.’

She put her hand, her wrist and arm, back into the drain.