Holding the Zero

Chapter Sixteen

His family would be pulling into the fuel station – hot, tired, fractious and looking for him.

Major Karim Aziz came out of the medical unit. The gate sentry might live and he might die. He was escorted by a doctor who thanked him sheepishly, and explained again, uselessly, why a wounded man had been left in the road to bleed without help. The doctor said that the sniper had made a corridor of fear that ordinary men did not have the courage to enter. The doctor wheedled congratulations at the major’s bravery, but Aziz walked on and left the man babbling behind him. He had a fresh, urgent step as if a reason for living had again been given him.

The boys would be spilling from the car and complaining to their mother; her temper would be short and she would be barking at them.

He was walking towards the command bunker when his name was shouted from behind him. He walked on, but his name was called again in a thin, nasal voice. He stopped, turned slowly. He thought that Commander Yusuf, the man who was said to harbour an obsessive love of his grandchildren, was breaking again for coffee or for biscuits. There were more blood spatters on the tunics and trousers of the brutes with him; they would not have changed into new uniforms because it was part of the terror they strewed around them that the pain they inflicted should be seen in the bunker and in the officers’ quarters.

‘You came back, Major.’

‘I had thought my duty here was finished, Commander Yusuf. I returned when I realized that was not the case.’

‘You are a sniper, Major,’ the torturer said, with distaste. ‘You understand the psychology of this cowardly killing.’

Aziz stood his ground. ‘The man who came into Kirkuk this morning was not a coward.’

‘Soldiers without military significance were butchered – a fox amongst chickens. Is that not the work of a coward?’

‘I came back to shoot him but he is not a coward, Commander. He is no more a coward than the man who, in the name of the state, tortures and mutilates the body of a defenceless prisoner.’

His words died. The men around the commander, the heavy-set, cold-faced beasts, stiffened, and he saw the menace in their eyes, but the commander laughed. The dog bared its teeth.

‘Is he, Major, as much a hero as yourself?’

Major Karim Aziz said quietly, ‘He is a brave man, Commander, but I am also certain that it requires great courage – in the name of the state – to interrogate a bound captive.’

The eyes watching him were amused.

‘Come.’

The commander took his arm, gripped it with his narrow fingers. The hand was against the body of the rifle that he carried loosely in the crook of his elbow. The dog scampered warily beside him, and the brutes made a phalanx behind him. He thought he was as much of a prisoner as the wretches in the cells. His vanity had made him turn.

Pacing around the petrol station, she would be telling the children their father would come soon and wondering where he was.

He did not try to break the grip of the fingers. He was led, taken, into the building used by the Estikhabarat. The boots stamped in rhythm behind him. He was brought into a room that was fragrantly scented with air-freshener, and there were flowers on the table.

He saw a desk with papers from files piled on it, and beside the files was a framed photograph of the commander sitting on a sand beach with near-naked children beside him. On the far side of the room a tape-recorder’s spools turned, and another of the brutes, headphones on a shaven skull, sat at the table and wrote busily. Aziz was offered an easy chair and settled into it. Did he want coffee? He shook his head, but asked if water could be brought for his dog.

The commander walked to the tape-recorder and threw a switch. The sound burst into the room. As if confined in a minuscule space, a guttering, hacking cough came from the speakers, then a slow moan of pain.

‘Be strong. We are together. Together we are strong.’

‘I told them nothing.’

He heard the wheezed words of the brigadier, the Boot, and her small, timid voice. He stared expressionlessly ahead of him. The commander had lit a cigarette and was glancing with studied casualness at the front page of the regime’s morning newspaper.

His conceit had brought him back, and his wife and his children were waiting, would now be anxious because he was late meeting them.

‘They ask me, always, who gave me my orders – which officers? The Americans? The pigs, Ibrahim and Bekir? I can tell them nothing because the pigs and the Americans gave me no orders. I have not told them of when we met…’

He forced himself to listen to the whispered, frightened, hurt voice.

‘I have told them nothing. If it were not for your strength I would have broken…’

‘Hold my hand tighter.’

‘I hold it and I love it as if it were my family.’

‘Hold my hand because I am afraid.’

‘When you are close, with me, I can survive the pain.’

‘How long can we last?’

‘Long enough, I pray, for others to escape.’

‘What was your dream?’

‘I was told I would be the Minister of Defence.’ There was the bitter whinge of his laughter, and the slight motion in his body would have hurt him, because he moaned again. ‘I was told I would be a great man in the new Iraq. I was told…’

The pain of his gasp sighed in her ear. She felt the grip of his hand slacken and wondered whether he had drifted towards unconsciousness. The comfort she had felt when she had heard the single shot – the faraway crack and the close-by thump – were long gone. In a wild moment of excitement, she had thought that a crescendo of firing would burst around her, and that there would be the fear-driven cries of men in the corridor as they ran and, in the delirium of her terror, she had seen the cell door open and he would have been there with the rifle and would have caught her up in his arms and carried her from this hellish place… But there had been only the one shot and it was long gone, and she had cursed him for not coming, for being safe.

‘Hold me, you have to, hold me.’

‘I am holding you.’

She felt the tightening of his fingers on hers, as if she had brought him back to the living, as if she were not alone.

‘Hold me because I am afraid, and have nothing to tell them.’

‘What is your dream?’

‘To be in my village, to be a woman, to be free.’

‘Without you, I cannot protect them, buy them their time to escape.’

Through the conduit of a drain hole between two holding cells, the brigadier of the staff of Fifth Army and the peasant woman from the mountains knotted their fingers to give each other strength.

The voice seemed to fail, then rise again.

‘I was to be paid a million American dollars for taking the armoured brigade south from Kirkuk.’

‘I was offered nothing. What would I do with a million American dollars?’

‘I would have put you on the lead tank – washed you, cleaned you, carried you into Baghdad.’

‘Then I would have gone home.’

The commander gestured for the switch to be lifted, and the silence fell on the room.

His smile was easy, affable.

‘Major Aziz, it is standard to allow prisoners in adjacent cells the opportunity to communicate with each other. There is a drain between them, and a microphone in it.

Prisoners who believe they have successfully resisted interrogation always betray themselves when they have been returned to their cells – we learned it from the British, it was their procedure in Ireland. I am surprised that it has taken them so long to find the culvert. It is because we hold her that the sniper, this butcher, has killed so many, yes?’

‘I think it was to tell her that she was not forgotten – and to expiate his shame that he did not or could not protect her.’

‘The sniper is your target?’

He said simply, ‘It is important to me.’

‘I have finished with her. Is she of use to you?’

‘She will be hanged?’

‘Of course – she is a witch. Our brave soldiers ran from her. She is talked of in the bazaars and in the souks. It is necessary to hang her.’

Cold words. ‘She should be hanged in public tomorrow morning at the main gate…’

He said how the gallows should be built. He thought of his wife and children at the petrol station, angry and fretting for him. He thought of the brigadier, the Boot, denied the strength of the grip of her hand, and the names that were secreted in his mind. He thought of the sniper who would be drawn from a hiding place by the sight of the gallows and the peasant woman standing under the beam.

The moth would be drawn to the flame. If a moth flew too close to the flame the wings were singed, and it fell. But he was – himself – walking towards a flame and if he was burned he would fall, and if he fell then he was dead. And there had been the great flame burning above the oilfield outside the city that had drawn her fatally nearer. The flame burned for all of them, bright and dangerous, beckoning them.

A young man, walking back to his village near Qizil Yar, west of the city, had been knifed and his body thieved from. The young man who had thought himself fortunate to find work in Kirkuk, cleaning the tables in a coffee shop, had stayed on in the evening to see a film at a cinema. He had been stabbed in the back, killed, and his identity card stolen. Before his body was cold, while it lay in a road drain and the first of the rats sniffed at it, the identity card was presented at the outer road block on the main route into the city.

In the next hour, the identity card was presented three more times, studied by torchlight, then the beams switched to a young man’s face, and Omar was waved on.

He was the observer in the tradition laid down by Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard.

Everything he saw was remembered: where the tanks were, and the blocks, and the personnel carriers parked in side-streets with the radios playing soft music from the Baghdad transmitter he remembered.

He was another grubby, dishevelled young man with unkempt hair padding the pavements of the city. There were many such as him, drawn to Kirkuk in search of subsistence work. He attracted no attention from the soldiers who were only a few months older. He passed among them, drawn forward towards a distant hammering, nails sinking into wooden planks.

Omar knew he was close to the place where she had been taken. He had heard the mustashar, Haquim, describe the place to Mr Gus and make the excuses. He slipped from the wide main street that led towards faraway arc-lights, the sounds of hammers beating on nails, and drifted through shadows in the narrowed lanes of the Old Quarter. He could smell the burned wood of homes that had been fired in the fighting. There was a line of buildings where the walls were marked by desperate bullet lacerations, a small square, muddy roads leading from it, and a broken wall into which the jeep carrying her had crashed. There was a panel-beater’s shop where men worked to the light of oil lamps. It was as Haquim had described it. He saw an open door beyond the panel-beater’s shop, closer to the wall; through the door a family gathered in a dully lit room and watched the television. There were old men, young men, women, children, in front of the television.

The mustashar, Haquim, had said a family had come from their home and had spat into the face of Meda. He would have liked to have killed them, rolled a grenade through the door or sprayed them with an assault rifle on automatic, but that was not the work of an observer as written down by Major Hesketh-Prichard. He slipped again into the shadows until he could see the lights of the wide street.

The orphan child of the aid agencies, the plaything of American soldiers, the carrier of ammunition for the peshmerga, the thief from the living and the dead, the friend of Mr Gus had no fear when he was close enough to see the high gallows being built by supervised labourers outside the barricaded gates of the headquarters of Fifth Army.

‘Which direction does it face?’

‘To the front, towards the wide street.’

‘Can you see it from the side?’

‘There are screens at the side of canvas. You can only see it from the front, from the wide street.’

‘But above it is open?’

‘No, Mr Gus. It is covered by a roof of more canvas. You cannot see it from high, not from the side, only from the front… Why do they do it so complicated, Mr Gus?’

‘So they can dictate where I will be.’

The sweat of the day’s heat had cooled long ago on his body and the night wind now insinuated the chill into him. The blister was worse on his heel, aggravated by the charge out of the city after the killings. He had the last of the plasters from his rucksack on the wound and the ache of it was inescapable. When the sun had gone down, the stiffness had gripped his shoulders, pelvis and knees, and he had not slept until the boy returned.

‘They do that, the roof and the sides, because of us?’

‘Because of me, not you. You have done your work, Omar. If I want to see Meda brought out, see the rope put on her, see… I have to be in front, because they have covered the sides. I cannot be high, because they have made a roof. They hope to restrict me so that it is easier for them to find me. A man never had a better observer, but it is finished for you – you should go.’

‘Without me you would not even get into the city.’

‘It is not your quarrel.’

‘Do you say that she is only yours, Mr Gus, not mine?’

‘I want you to go.’

‘You are nothing without me – Major Hesketh-Prichard was nothing without his observer. Even he said so.’

As he had waited for the boy to come back he had gone through the checklist he had been given so long ago. Mechanically, in the darkness, by touch, he had cleaned the breech and felt the firmness of the elevation and deflection turrets. He had tightened the screws securing the telescopic sight, he had massaged the lenses with a cloth, and had wiped each of the bullets of. 338 calibre before loading them into the magazine and slotting it back into the rifle’s belly. He could no longer conjure the faces of those who had been important to him so long ago. At each stage of the checklist she had been in his mind, and he had tried to remember the taste of her kiss.

‘Afterwards, will you take me with you? Will you take me to your home?’

Gus let out a low, involuntary chuckle. ‘Ridiculous.’

‘Why is that ridiculous?’

‘Because…’

‘I am your friend here. I can be your friend at your home.’

He could not see the boy’s face but he sensed the smarting resentment… Yes, he could take him home. The boy could sleep on the floor and each morning he could go out into the handkerchief-sized garden at the back of the block, lower his trousers, squat and defecate. Maybe he could thieve the silver spoons from the drawer. Yes, the boy could go with him to work, could sit in the office and be bored witless and look at the wallets protruding from the inside pockets of the jackets draped on chairs and the women’s handbags with the purses displayed. Yes, he could take him up Guildford’s high street on a Saturday morning. He could watch the snake-like movements of the boy’s hands and see his pockets fill. Yes, he could take him to the pub. He would try to intervene in time to stop the flash of a knife if a lout or a yob laughed at the boy’s appearance. Yes, the boy should see Stickledown Range. He could lay the boy on the mat beside him and ask for him to call the distance and wind deflection and know they would be right. Gus reached out in the darkness and his hand found the thin shoulder. He gripped it hard.

‘I would like to sleep now, Omar, and I want you to wake me when it is time to go.’

‘I sort of sat on it, Caspar. I don’t like to be a harbinger, the bringer of bad news. And I’m sorry for it.’

‘I heard it on the radio, Isaac, on their news bulletin. You have nothing to apologize for.’

‘They’re going to hang her in the morning.’

‘Jesus – I didn’t get that from the radio.’

‘They’re going to hang her in the morning – they’ve told the Party faithful to ensure a good attendance.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘Did you hear about the shooting?’

‘No.’

‘There was shooting in Kirkuk this morning. You recall the marksman with her?’

‘I remember him.’

‘After she was taken, the rest of her people came out, all except him. He stayed.

Kirkuk this morning was like your Dodge City, Caspar. He shot at least seven soldiers before he backed off – long-shot stuff, one bullet for one man.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘You met her, Caspar, you saw her. She’d twist a man’s head. It could only be a futile gesture of his commitment to her… I have to believe he cannot turn away from her.’

‘Isaac, maybe he should have gone to the Agency’s school. We major in courses on walking out on trusting idiots.’

‘There are PhDs on it at the Mossad. You are not alone on the excellence of walking away. Of course, there’s nothing that he can do for her.’

‘Isaac, I appreciate your calling. Appreciate the advance warning. I won’t sleep much tonight. She was good and feisty – those bastards in Arbil and Sulaymaniyah didn’t deserve her. And we didn’t. I hope she knows he stayed when no other fucker did. Shit…

I have a paper to read so I’m up to speed to entertain a serious asshole who’ll be here about the time she’s dangling… Goodnight, Isaac.’

He cut the link. He reflected that there might just be a job vacancy, or two, or three, in the classified advertisements of the Baghdad newspapers.

Wanted: HANGMAN. No previous experience required. Expertise not necessary. Successful applicant must be prepared to work long hours.

Good career prospects.

The paper had come in two hours earlier and had clogged thirty-two seconds of time on the secure teleprinter. It took thirty-two seconds to transmit the latest piece of Langley optimism, and the plan on the paper would give work for years to a hangman, or two, or three… He was so goddam tired. He started to turn the pages of the paper – and in a few hours, as she was hanged, a shiny-faced man would step off the shuttle plane from Ankara and would be expecting Caspar Reinholtz to be similarly breezy and cheerful, to say that it was the best plan ever conceived for the toppling of the Boss for Life. He was hunched over his desk, the words in front of him bouncing uselessly in his head.

First Phase: A core group of 250 Iraqi exiles would be trained in sabotage techniques by US Special Forces. Second Phase: A further 2,000 exiles receive eight weeks’ basic military training. Third Phase : Twenty groups of twenty men infiltrate Government of Iraq territory to blow up power lines and disrupt internal transport. Fourth Phase: More men are pushed across friendly borders and set up a liberated enclave. Fifth Phase: The overthrowing of the regime of the Boss for Life.

It was always that simple and they always sent the plan on ahead of its author so that a dumb field officer, a Caspar Reinholtz, could not plead the need for time to study it. It would be considered defeatist to tell the author that the plan was a piece of crap.

A plan was dead. Long live the plan.

The woman, Meda, would hang in the morning and a new thesis of liberation was transmitted to Incerlik.

There was work for one hangman. There would soon be work for many more.

Maybe the man coming in on the shuttle would shake the lethargy out of Caspar Reinholtz’s system, and maybe he would not. But, maybe, the man on the shuttle on the last leg of his journey from Langley should be congratulated for a new refinement of warfare: combat by fucking proxy. Maybe Caspar should grip his hand and slap his shoulder and praise him for digging out a plan where someone else did the fighting for America and faced the noose. No-risk fighting, no casualties going home in body bags to Arkansas or Alaska or Alabama, no mothers trying to be brave as the caskets went down into good Virginia or Vermont earth, because the poor bastards getting killed were proxy soldiers and didn’t count.

Rusty came into the office, and brought coffee with him.

‘There’s a call for you, Caspar – the green phone. It’s London – been cleared by Langley. They want to talk to you.’

‘What about?’

‘About that sniper. Do I say you’re available or not available?’

He thought of the man he had met, and the big rifle, of the man who had not turned, not walked away, of the man who did not know the fucking rules.

‘I’ll take it.’

Long before dawn, while the stars and the moon’s crescent still watched the city, the first of the crowd came, intent on gaining the best places. Those who had risen earliest, or who had not been to bed, pressed against the barrier behind which a solid wall of soldiers stood. They came at first in a dribble and would arrive later in a growing mass.

Confronting them, above the soldiers, was a wooden platform on which was set a low chair. Above the chair and below a solid crossbeam was a dangling rope with a waiting noose that swayed gently in the light night wind. The same wind rippled the canvas sides of the scaffold and flapped the roof above the crossbeam. Because of the cold, those who had arrived first were well wrapped in thick coats and some carried blankets to drape over their shoulders. Music from transistor radios would help to pass the time before daybreak, and later coffee vendors would come. Warm plastic cups would be passed over heads, money would return on a reverse route, and there was a buzz of talk. Away behind the crowd, stretching into an infinity of dull street lights, was the length of Martyr Avenue. They came to see the death of the witch, but none of them who surged onto the weight of the barrier knew why there was a roof over the gallows and side screens around it.

He sat on the balcony, the night caressing his face. Her warmth was against his back. The dog nestled against his legs. Major Karim Aziz let the conceit play in his mind, and shield him from the future.

‘Did you see him?’ the woman asked.

‘I saw him.’

He had been thinking of trophies, the heads that hunters set on walls. It would be talked about. Young men, not yet old enough to know of war, would gather in the quiet of barracks’ corridors and speak of a duel to the death. He had wrapped the obsession around him, a cloak against the night. He had not thought of the brigadier, the Boot, with the nails torn from his hands, the blood seeping from the flab of his face, the burns of electrodes and cigarettes on his body, the names hidden in a tortured mind.

‘Was he well?’

‘I saw him very briefly.’

‘He will be tired – I tell him he works too hard. Will I see him when they hang her?’

‘I think not, I don’t think he will be there.’

The bell had woken her. She had come to the door with a light in her face that was washed out when she had seen he was not her lover. He had gone through to the bedroom balcony and squatted down with his dog. He could see up the length of Martyr Avenue.

He had no plan of what he would do afterwards. The duel was the present, and the anticipation of it, like some narcotic, overwhelmed him. She had come outside, sat on the cold tiles of the balcony, and leaned her back against his.

‘Are you from Kirkuk, Major?’

‘Baghdad.’

‘You have a wife there?’

‘In Baghdad, yes. She will be sleeping now – she will have had a long day.’

She would have waited for him from the middle of the day through to the end and then, cursing him, she would have ordered the boys back into the car and she would have driven back down the long road to Ba’qubah, and then on to Baghdad and home. She would have thrown the packed bags into their room and the children’s bedroom, and gone into the kitchen to make a meal. Later, because he had not met her at the fuel station, the door of their home would be sledgehammered open and the house would be defiled by the boots of strangers. He had made a choice and he lived with it.

‘And children?’

‘Two sons. One has an important examination at school today, and the younger one has a football match tomorrow. They are fine boys.’

‘And proud of their father?’

‘I have to hope so.’

The boys would have sat sullen and quiet in the car during the journey home. They would not have understood why their father had not come or why they had made the journey in the first place. Perhaps their mother would have attempted to turn their mood with talk of school or football, and perhaps she would have spoken of the importance of their father’s work. Perhaps she would have said nothing, bitten her lip and blinked into the blazing lights of the oncoming lorries going north. When the door was broken down, when their mother was beaten by the strangers, when the house was stripped and searched, his sons would be told that their father was a traitor. His choice was dictated by his vanity.

‘Why are you here, Major?’

‘To kill a man.’

‘Because he is your enemy?’

‘No,’ he said absently.

She pressed, ‘Because he is the enemy of the state?’

‘Not the reason.’

‘Because he has hurt you?’

‘He has not hurt me.’

All he knew of the man was from the one distant sighting, distorted by the mirage over the open ground, and always beyond the range of the Dragunov. He knew nothing of him.

He did not know where the man had come from, or why he had travelled, or of his life.

After he had killed the man, he would not stand over his body and pose as a hunter would over the corpse of a bear or a wolf or a leopard, but he would kneel in a moment of reverence and hope they shared a god, and close the lids of the dead eyes. Then, and only then, he would think of afterwards.

‘How do you know he will come?’

‘He will come, he has to. He is a driven man, as am I. We are equals. I respect him, and I believe he gives me respect.’

His eyes traversed the many windows of Martyr Avenue, and the roofs, and he waited for the dawn.

Three hours before first light Gus and Omar started out and headed for the glow of the street lamps and the flame.

‘She did not know her place. She treated me as if I were inferior. In front of many who could watch and listen she behaved as if I were subordinate to her. I tell you, Haquim, even if I had influence, if I was listened to in Baghdad, I would not lift a finger on her behalf. But that is idle talk because it’s not the truth. She is, and you know it, beyond reach. It is my duty now, as a leader of my people, to protect them. I will fulfil my duty, I will negotiate with the President. I can do nothing else. She deluded you. Go home, forget her. Go and sit in the sunlight in front of your house, and put her from your mind.

You will excuse me, I am tired, I wish to go to my bed.’

‘You disgrace yourself if you do nothing.’

‘She climbed too fast.’

The agha Bekir rose from his chair. The silk robe swirled around his body. Behind the sweet words and the wringing hands, Haquim could see detestation for the young woman who had taken him to the edge of Kirkuk. His feet, snug in light embroidered slippers, slid across the floor towards the inner door. Haquim thought the bastard would sleep well.

He felt old, weary, and the dusty uniform clung to his body. The double doors behind him were opened silently: the audience was concluded.

Haquim went out of the building and into the night that had fallen heavy on Sulaymaniyah. His last effort for her had won no reward.

He drove away towards the dark lines of the mountains where the air was clean, where he could still dream of the city that had been their goal, and the flame.

Meda walked into the cell, the door rattled shut behind her and the boots went away down the corridor.

She had been woken, taken to a room where harsh lights burned, read a statement from a typed sheet of paper, then wheeled round and marched back to the cell. She was alone, and when the boots had gone there was only the quiet around her. She sagged to her knees, crawled to the hole, put her mouth close to it and whispered, in a small voice, that she was to be hanged at dawn. She asked for him to hold her hand till dawn came. She heard his laboured breathing. She reached with her arm deep into the drain but in a moment of respite he slept and did not take her hand. She did not shout into the hole to rouse him, did not cry for him, because she thought it would be cruel to wake him. It was many hours since she had heard the rifle fired, and she looked up at the high window where the stars were and she did not know how long it would be until the light dismissed them.

‘My colleague, Dr Williams, did most of the talking and I did most of the listening. Fred, that’s Dr Williams, wanted a witness. Fair enough – it’s not every day a civilian comes in off the street to learn about the Iraqi armed forces. It could have been a can of worms for Fred if he’d turned out to be a mercenary, looking for kicks from killing people, so I sat in.’

It was still dark outside the building. Ken Willet could hear the chatter in other offices of the early-morning work of the cleaners, muffled by the Hoovers. He knew the block, Centre for War Studies, from his own years at the Royal Military Academy, but the psychiatrist had not been there at that time. Rupert Helps had pleaded a busy day, a first lecture at 8 a.m. then a filled, sacrosanct diary, and an evening engagement. Dr Williams was at NATO in Belgium for the week, but the psychiatrist had heard – on a routine visit to the Commando Training Centre at Lympstone – of the interest in Augustus Henderson Peake and had offered his help. Willet would have bet that Rupert Helps would have run barefoot over broken glass to help.

Ms Manning asked, ‘What did Dr Williams tell him?’

‘I didn’t listen that closely – Fred’s the expert, you see. We hear it every lunchtime in the mess, his views on the Iraqi armed forces – myself, I think he’s slightly overrated.

Anyway, a resume to give an idea of the usual lecture. The Iraqis are a defensively minded and centralized military machine. Faced with the unexpected, they will be slow to react because middle-ranking officers are not able to take field decisions. So, at first, they can be caught out, lose ground and positions. Once they’ve steadied their nerve and had orders from on high they are efficient. That was the germ of it – a sudden attack will make early advances, then there will be a regrouping, consolidation, counter-attack… then reprisals. I don’t think he’d thought of that. He was jolted. I’d wager my shirt on Fred having the right appraisal of that scenario, but it is pretty obvious. The insurgents -

Kurds, yes? – would go through villages and towns, and think they were a force of liberation, but God help the poor bastards who cheered them. It’s the same through history – do you know your ‘Forty-five rebellion? The Young Pretender marched south and took Carlisle, Lancaster, Manchester, and idiots cheered him to the roof, but they were backing a loser. There’s always some nasty little creature who remembers who cheered the liberators loudest, who is going to dangle from a rope when the tables are turned – there were a great number of hangings in those northern English cities when the Highland army retreated… Back in Iraq, the same is true – the reprisals would be brutal.

He went very quiet, like the wind was out of his sails. Fred told him about the terrain he’d be in, a little about how to cope with hunger, thirst, lack of sleep, heat. Then I chipped in.’

‘What exactly was your contribution?’ Willet asked drily. He had taken a fast and certain dislike to the psychiatrist. Perhaps it was the time in the morning, dawn not yet on them, perhaps it was the man’s flamboyant bow-tie of vivid green and primrose yellow, perhaps it was the long hair gathered at the back of his head with an elastic band.

‘If I’d reckoned him a mere psychopath, I’d have stayed quiet.’

Willet persisted, ‘What would interest a psychiatrist like you?’

Rupert Helps beamed, and preened pleasure at being asked for his expert opinion.

‘He’s not a rounded man. I assessed him as an innocent, rather juvenile – a child, unwilling to grow up and shed a world of romance, but decent. You with me? Peter Pan syndrome. The talk of reprisals was the give-away.’

‘Sorry, but you haven’t told me what your contribution was.’

‘I told him to forget it. He should nurse his own problems and ignore other people’s difficulties. I said he should put himself first.’

Ms Manning gazed into the psychiatrist’s face. ‘Did you expand on that opinion?’

‘You know-’

‘No, certainly I don’t.’ Willet thought she was a cat, about to pounce, ready for the kill.

‘Be so kind as to tell me.’

‘Well, because he seemed to be searching for fulfilment, I suggested he should push at work for promotion, never said what his job was. I didn’t gather that he was in a very meaningful relationship – he could put more effort into that. He should find a hobby and develop it further. He could move home, get a garden, have a larger mortgage and therefore self-inflict the pressure to earn more through greater endeavour. If he needed to do good works I told him to drive at weekends for the elderly or the sick… I was trying to help. Did he go?’

She said brutally, ‘Oh, yes, he went, completely ignored you.’

‘Has he survived?’

The steel was in her voice. ‘We don’t know. We have very little access to intelligence from that region. Tomorrow I have a meeting at which I may find something out. Isn’t there more to living than work, loving, hobbies, mortgages, charities? Shouldn’t we rejoice that one man, alone among the dross, climbs towards further horizons?’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘What don’t I understand?’

‘If he survives, he’ll be damaged. He won’t win, can’t. Should he make it back, he’ll be a damaged, altered man. I was just trying to help, damn you. He can’t win, and it will all be for nothing – dead or damaged.’

She rose imperiously, ‘Thank you. Perhaps that’s a worthwhile sacrifice. Come on.’

Willet followed her out. They passed a column of cadets starting out on a cross-country run.

‘The pompous bastard didn’t even offer us coffee, gets us out of bed as though he’s the only one with an important day, and no bloody coffee,’ he said. ‘Well done for putting him down, laying him out on the floor like that.’

‘Don’t patronize me.’

It was a brilliant dawn of ochre and gold and red thrown up from behind the mountains in the west. The dawn was a flame to which two men were drawn.