Holding the Zero

Chapter Seventeen

‘Will you send my body back to the mountains?’

The commander seemed to ponder that last request. They were in her cell, the door open behind him. He seemed to think on it as if he were slightly confused. He had taken no part in the stripping of her military clothes, and army boots, and had looked to the ceiling when she was naked, before the smock of white cotton was lifted over her head and her arms were threaded into the sleeves. She was calm, stiff and awkward but he had heard on the speakers in the office the mewling of the wretch in the adjacent cell and he had heard the last faint words of comfort she had given him. Most men, officers in the army, asked for a cigarette and panted on it before it was taken from their mouths, discarded on the cell’s floor and they were led out. The cigarettes lay on the floor half-smoked, still burning by the time the execution had been completed. He would not have admitted to being a man invested with cruelty, but he was keen on the bureaucracy entailed in his work as a shield to the state.

He looked into Meda’s face. Her hair was held close against her head with a cloth bandanna. He could understand why men had followed her. If the shield he held was lowered, if the regime became vulnerable, if he – himself – were about to be led out, he would not be given an opportunity to make a last request. There would be sons, fathers, uncles and nephews, cousins of those he had sent to their deaths that the regime might survive, crowding around him and kicking, punching, spitting. No cigarette would be lit for him before he was lifted up under the lamp-post or the telegraph pole. He thought of what she asked. If the regime fell he knew what would become of his beloved grandchildren. It was her very calmness that disturbed him.

He answered her quietly, ‘I promise your body will be sent back to the mountains…’

‘Thank you.’

‘… when your family have paid the price of the rope.’

There was a titter of laughter from the men who held her and fastened the thong on her wrists behind her back. He had sought to destroy the calm, but her eyes were unwavering and beading into his. He saw the contempt, and understood better why men had followed her – and why agha Ibrahim in Arbil and agha Bekir had not lifted the telephone and pleaded with Baghdad for her life. He broke the hold of her eyes and looked at the wall where other wretches had written their names and the dates on which they had been taken from the cell, but noticed that she had not bothered to do so.

‘It is time,’ he said brusquely. ‘Move her.’

They took her out quickly and her feet, in plain plastic sandals, scraped the floor. They dragged her from his sight.

He heard her cry out in the corridor, ‘Be strong, friend, be brave. Remember those who depend on you…’

He thought that one of the escort would then have clamped a hand over her mouth. He heard their boots and the scrape of her sandals, then the squeal of the unlocking of the cell block’s outer door and the clang as it was shut again.

There was a deep, limitless silence around him. He stood alone in the cell and the walls seemed to close around him, the ceiling to slide down on him. He saw the high window, the grime on the glass that repulsed the brightness of the low sunlight, and the bulb that burned dully above the protective screen of wire. An hour before he had come to the cell to see her stripped, dressed in the white cotton smock that was too large for her, made for a man, which had been soiled with the excrement of the last traitor whose bowels had burst as he had kicked under the rope, he had been telexed from the al-Rashid barracks. A general of mechanized infantry, commanding a division, had crossed the Jordanian frontier and had reached Amman. A brigadier of anti-aircraft artillery defences, and two colonels of the Engineer Corps – with their families – had fled their homes. A colonel in an armoured regiment had driven his car into the cover of trees beside the Tigris river, sealed the windows, squeezed a pipe on to the exhaust and was dead… There would be others, there always were. A few escaped, but others stayed, believed it was possible to disguise their guilt from him, the shield of the regime.

The quiet burdened him, and the emptiness of the cell. Her calm had made the silence that seemed to crush him. He could not escape the gaze of her eyes. He felt the weakness at his knees and he would have fallen had he not reached out and steadied himself against the door of the cell. He had seen many men taken from the cells, and afterwards he had gone to the home of his son and sat the children on his knee and told them stories or played with them with their toys on the rugs, but that morning he was far from his son’s home and his grandchildren. He staggered out of the cell and leaned, breathless, against the corridor wall.

Commander Yusuf heard the crowd’s voices. She would be on the ladder to the platform of planks. She would be seen. His composure returned as the silence ended with the shouts, jeers, yells of the crowd outside the gate.

He stood by the closed cell door. ‘Do you hear it?’ he murmured, in his soft singing voice. ‘She is alone, as you are alone. She is beyond help, as you are beyond help.’

‘One one six zero.’ Omar was looking through the binoculars.

‘One thousand one hundred and sixty yards, check?’

‘That’s what I said, Mr Gus.’

He had never fired at that distance. The furthest target on the Stickledown Range was at a thousand yards. His finger made the final adjustment to the sight’s elevation turret.

At its maximum height in flight, the bullet would be on a line that was 135 inches above the aiming point, then it would drop.

‘Wind isn’t so strong, maybe three to five miles per hour at our point, coming from the side. From smoke, between the office and the apartment block – four two zero yards – it is more strong, five to eight miles per hour. At three-quarters distance, by the governor’s house, it is again as strong. I can see from the flag there.’

‘If the flag’s on top of the building that’s too high for trajectory, doesn’t count.’

‘I know that, Mr Gus. The flag is from a window balcony, at her height.’

‘What is it, at her?’

‘It is again more gentle, from the side.’

The bullet, at that range, would be in the air for the time it would take to speak, not gabble, two phrases of seven syllables each. ‘Point three three eight ca-lib-re. Point three three eight ca-lib-re.’ He must allow for wind deflection at the muzzle point when the velocity was greatest, then twice more during its flight… Two clicks of deflection on the windage turret. Before the wind straightened it, the bullet would fly on a course that was initially eighteen inches to the left of the target.

‘Check.’

He thanked God that the wind at the muzzle point was not moderate but gentle, not fresh and not strong. He could not see her. Men were clustered around her. The reticule lines of the sight were on the noose. There was no traffic on Martyr Avenue and he sensed the swelling quiet of the crowd, who had jeered as she was led out but now stood in hushed silence.

Then, two of the men in dun olive uniforms bent in front of her, and he thought they pinioned her legs. She stood so still. He breathed in hard, filled his lungs, and waited for them to lift her feet onto the chair.

The commander was outside the cell block. He had no need to be there, he could not have counted the number of executions he had witnessed, and with minor variations they were all the same. The quiet had drawn him out of the block. He did not know why the Party men, the Ba’athists, did not lead the cheering and shouting. He could see her through the open gates, small and hemmed in by big men, below the noose. He looked hard and expected to see her back and shoulders quiver, but her head had not dropped. Away past her was the length of Martyr Avenue, and then the foothills of the mountains. He saw the hands grip her body, to raise her, and he turned away as if he had no stomach for it.

There were open windows with curtains flapping in them, roofs with lines of washing, the shadows thrown by water tanks, and the dark recesses in unfinished buildings where the sun did not penetrate. Using the magnification of the telescopic sight, Major Karim Aziz roved over the windows, roofs and the skeletal sites.

When the first light had peeped over the high distant ground he had sent the woman inside. He was calm. He had made the necessary calculations. For the sniper to have a view of the scaffold, between the side screens, he must be on Martyr Avenue. As he had requested, the street below him was blocked with armoured cars. It was, and he had paced the distance, 525 metres from the balcony to the scaffold. The sniper must be further back, but Aziz did not believe the man would trust himself to shoot at a greater range than 850 metres. He believed himself to be within 325 metres of the greatest prize his life had yet offered him.

There was no sound to distract him. Not a car moved on the street, not a hawker cried out, and the great crowd was stilled as if it held, guarded, its breath. The quiet was good and brought him the peace he needed.

He knew they had led her out, the crowd had told him, but in the quiet he did not know whether they had lifted her yet onto the chair. He could not turn to see. It might be the flash of light from the rifle’s sight, or the brief brilliance of the firing gases, or the dispersal of dust on a window sill. He thought the target would be the hangman. It would be the sad and stupid gesture of a man demented by helplessness to shoot the hangman.

The gesture would leave her, in terror, on the platform for another minute or another five minutes before an officer had the courage to crawl forward, lift her, set her feet on the chair, the noose on her neck and kick the chair. To shoot the hangman would not help her. He had no complaint, as long as the sniper fired and, through firing, exposed himself.

There was a low moan from the crowd, wind on wire, and he thought they lifted her.

He stared through the sight at the windows and roofs and the open floors of unfinished buildings.

She was on the chair.

Hands steadied her.

She stared ahead of her, across the crowd and up the length of the street. He wondered whether she looked for him.

He let the breath slip. His words were silent. ‘Don’t move. I am here. Don’t move your head. My love…’ He squeezed gently on the trigger.

This was not Stickledown. He was on the third floor of an unfinished office block facing down the Martyr Avenue in the city of Kirkuk. He was in the bubble where it never rained, was never too cold and never too hot, and the wind never freshened. The boy was beside him but he no longer knew it.

A hand reached up for the noose. Her head was still, and he thought she heard him.

Gus Peake fired, as if he were on Stickledown Range, at the centre of the V-Bull of his target.

‘Kill her… Kill her…’

He watched the speck of the bullet and the early-morning air burst away from it.

‘Kill her… Kill her… Kill her…’

When he could no longer see the bullet, he saw the buffet vortex of the air.

‘Kill her… Kill…’

His lips made the fourteenth syllable as her head pitched apart.

Gus lay with the shock of the rifle burning in his shoulder and closed his eyes to shut out the sight of what he had done.

He had heard the bullet go past him.

It was part of the discipline of Major Aziz that he did not twist his body to follow the path of the bullet to see what target it had hit, or if it had missed. The moment after he had registered the crack of the bullet’s supersonic flight, he heard the thump. Through his

’scope sight he studied the windows and roofs that were between 300 and 350 metres from him, but there was nothing. His search covered two or three seconds. He did not believe that the shot had been fired from closer than 300 metres, but there was that instant nagging suspicion that it had been loosed at a greater distance. His viewpoint, magnified and centred on the cross-lines of the Dragunov’s sight, raked up the length of Martyr Avenue, over office windows and apartment balconies and more roofs. There was so little time. Beyond the office housing the Oil Company of Iraq, beyond the block with balconies and flower-pots, beyond the office of the Agriculture Ministry (Northern Region) was a construction site of concrete floors and reinforced steel pillars, open to the winds.

He would have tracked on with the sight had it not been for what he saw from the lowest point of the sight’s circle – the workmen.

The workmen – and his mind raced to the calculation that they were a minimum of 1,000 metres from the scaffold – were the sign. A gasp of exhilaration slipped his lips.

He found them in the ’scope at the moment the tableau broke. There were four of them, day labourers, the fetchers and carriers of the cement blocks, the men who placed the crane’s cable hook onto the steel beams, but the crane was idle and the operator had gone with the architects, surveyors and supervisors to see the hanging. Perhaps the workmen were Kurds and not willing to watch the slow, strangled death. They were on the first floor’s bare plateau of concrete. They had frozen at the proximity of the shot. When he saw them their shock was fading and they cringed down, then looked up. It was what men anywhere would have done if a rifle was fired close to them, above them.

He had found his man.

Aziz grabbed his backpack, stampeded off the balcony and into her bedroom. He careered into her, flattened her and ran for the door. The dog scampered beside him. He charged down the staircase of the block. The man, too, would be running, but he would not have a wide staircase to go down, three steps at a time, but would be groping for a loose, swaying ladder. He burst out of the building and ran up the pavement. He never looked back towards the scaffold. It was a panting sprint but the adrenaline gave him speed and the dog was always a couple of metres ahead of him, as if doing the work of a pacemaker. He passed soldiers in a doorway, ignored them, and was crossing the further traffic lanes of Martyr Avenue as a personnel carrier swerved to avoid him. In his youth, in spiked shoes and shorts, he could have covered the distance in seventy seconds. Now he was middle-aged, and there was no crowd to cheer him towards a tape. He had the weight of the backpack hooked on one shoulder and the awkwardness of the rifle in his hand, but the scent of the chase was with him. He reached the palisade of planks fronting the construction site, heaving and fit to vomit, a minute and a half after the single shot had been fired.

The man would be coming off the ladder, would be weaving between stacked heaps of pipes, blocks and cables. At the back of the site, he would be running, for the plank wall or the wire fence, whichever was there. Aziz ducked along the side length of the palisade, covered with fly-posters and exhortations from the Party, and reached the corner of the wall.

The alleyway was empty. Facing the high chain-mesh fence were little lock-up businesses, all closed because their owners had gone to the execution. Three hundred metres down the fence, a boy appeared on the top and rolled and fell. From his run, Aziz could barely stand. He trembled with the effort. The boy saw him, covered him with an assault rifle, but did not fire. The man followed him. For a moment his weight was hooked on the top of the wire and then he dropped down.

Aziz thought the boy had shouted something to the man, who looked up. He would have seen Aziz at the corner of the palisade and the fence. He was a big man and the sunlight threw gaunt lines on his face that was cream-smeared above the stubble. He wore the big sniper’s smock. He seemed to measure the scale of the threat of Aziz at the corner of the palisade and the fence, then to reject it as an irrelevance. The boy caught the arm of his smock, pulled him across the alleyway, and they were gone.

Still heaving, trembling, still trying to draw air into his body, Aziz could not have fired. It would have been a wasted shot. He could no longer run but he pushed himself to trot forward.

He reached the point where they had come down off the fence. He was very careful now that he should not contaminate the scuffmarks made by their boots and bodies as they had dropped down. He gestured for the dog to sniff at the broken soil beside the wire, and cooed his encouragement.

‘Find them, Scout… Hunt them, Scout… Search, Scout, search… Find them.’

His faith in the quality of the dog’s nose was total. The dog led him into an entry between the shuttered businesses, and then into a maze of shallow streets. They would have run. He did not need to. He walked briskly after the dog. He would follow his dog, wherever it led, until he had the chance to shoot. Repeatedly, from his dried lips, he whistled for the dog to slow so that it was not too far ahead of him, but the dog held the scent.

They were in a storm drain and ahead was light. Omar had found it and brought them into Kirkuk through it, bypassing a checkpoint. They were crawling in the drain and could hear cars close by and the thunder of lorries and personnel carriers. In places they were on their hands and knees, but when debris clogged the tunnel they crawled on their stomachs. At the end, where the light was, when they emerged, they would be beyond the city and the open ground would be in front of them all the way to the hills. The spirit had gone from Gus. He had no sensation of success, no pride in having made the calculations correctly for what anyone would have described as a supreme shot. Near the end of the tunnel, when he was lagging behind the boy, Omar turned, caught his coat and wrenched him forward. His hands slithered on the drain’s floor, his head went down and the foul stale water was in his mouth. He flailed out at the boy. They had not spoken – other than the boy’s shout for him to hurry when he had fallen from the top of the fence – since he had fired.

As if believing Gus hid behind an excuse, Omar rasped, ‘You missed.’

‘I did not.’

‘You hit her, you missed the hangman.’

‘I wasn’t aiming at him.’

‘You fired at her?’ He heard in the darkness of the tunnel the bewilderment of the boy.

Gus nodded tiredly.

‘Do you tell me the truth, Mr Gus? In fifteen seconds, half a minute, or five minutes, she was dead.’

‘She was my target,’ Gus said.

‘Why – if she was dead?’

Flat words, without emotion, leaden words. ‘So that she died at the hand of someone who loved her, and not theirs. In our time, not their time. It’s why we came back… The only thing I could do.’

They reached the tunnel’s end. The bright light washed over them. Two hundred yards away, in Gus’s estimation, to the right was a raised road on which were personnel carriers and troops jumping down from trucks. The drone of a helicopter was overhead. There was open ground then rock-strewn cover, but that was a mile distant. The boy crawled forward and Gus followed him.

From the side of his mouth, the boy whispered, ‘I thought it was to shoot the hangman.

I do not understand, and…’

‘I don’t ask you to understand.’

‘… and, I do not think Major Hesketh-Prichard would understand.’

The body had been dragged into the compound.

The commander had seen the wound that had scattered the blood and tissue, brain and bone. Already the square in front of the gallows platform was emptied, and the work had begun to dismantle the scaffold. He was asked by one of them who had taken her out, who had the debris of her head on his tunic and picked laconically at it, whether the body was to be sent home, and he said it was to be buried, the grave not marked, and that a chainsaw was to be brought to the cell block.

Commander Yusuf went into the block and the door of the cell was unlocked. He stood against the wall, in silence, as the men with him began to kick the brigadier’s prone body.

Until the chainsaw was brought, he asked no questions. *** The dog was in the drain.

While he waited for the dog to emerge, Major Karim Aziz saw the personnel carriers manoeuvring on the raised road to drive down on to the open ground. He stood tall, so that he would be seen clearly – and he would be known – and waved them back. The personnel carriers, with their heavy engines and stinking fuel fumes, would distract his dog when it emerged from the tunnel and would disturb the scent. He fluttered his handkerchief to the crew of the nearest circling gun-ship helicopter, pointed to the far distance in the west, and the beast veered away. He had no intention of sharing the chase.

Looked at casually, the ground ahead seemed flat, featureless, and without cover.

Nothing was casual when Major Karim Aziz studied ground. There were shallow gullies worn away by the winter rain. One of the rain channels would lead to the tunnel’s mouth.

He waited for the dog to show itself.

The troops from the trucks on the raised road were forming, under their officers’ orders, the line of a cordon behind him. He gestured that they should stay back. He slipped down, sat on a low rock, and watched for the dog.

He did not think of his wife, who would now be at work in the hospital, or his sons; he did not think of the brigadier in his cell, without a hand to hold, who knew his name. Far ahead of him, scurrying and hidden in the network of rain gullies, was the man he hunted.

The bright heat of the day beat down on him, the ground shimmered and distorted his view, but for once his own eyes were not so important because he had the nose of his dog.

Away to the left, the dog came into view. It shook a rainbow of water off its coat. He whistled for it to sit.

An officer stumbled, puffing, across the dirt ground.

Aziz said curtly, ‘You do not come within a thousand metres of me. You are spectators. He is mine.’

He went to the dog and praised it. Without the dog he would not have known where to search. At the mouth of the tunnel he could see the smears where their wet bodies had crawled, and bootprints.

The dog led and he followed.

They had reached the rough ground, where there were rocks, wind-stunted trees and low thorn bushes. They had cover now and could go faster. Sometimes they crawled and the sharp flinty stones worked rips into the padding on his knees and elbows. Sometimes they ran helter-skelter from rock to bush to rock to tree to rock, then paused while the boy made the fast, intuitive decision as to where their next immediate target point was. Gus’s heel hurt worst when they ran, and the pain of it rivered in his boot and up his leg. The boy looked back each time he paused in a shred of cover, but Gus did not. He was aware of a deepening frown of concern on Omar’s forehead, even though he said nothing.

Gus did not look back because he would have seen the sprawl of the city’s suburbs then the high buildings jutting up, then the forest of faintly drawn antennae at the headquarters of Fifth Army. Hidden behind the sprawl, past the buildings, below the antennae, were the gate, the gallows and her.

In his aching tiredness, in the pain, he was aware of a remote but occasional piercing whistling, as if a hawk hunted behind him and called its mate. It was like the cry of the kestrels he had watched with Billings, the poacher. He did not look to see if a bird of prey worked the ground behind and below him. His attention was on the escarpment ahead and the little ribboned ravines set in it. After they had cleared the escarpment they would be on the high ground of the hills, and each nearer and higher hill they climbed would bring them closer to safety, and further from her. He wondered if the bird, the hunter, watched him as he struggled to keep the boy’s pace.

It was theatrical but always effective.

A prisoner was in pain, and the resolve was slipping. The commander had never known it to fail. At the far end of the cell block’s corridor, the cord was pulled and the two-stroke motor of the chainsaw coughed to life. The motor was revved viciously as it was carried towards the open door of the cell. The roar of the motor filled the corridor and hammered into the cell as the saw’s teeth raced on the sprockets.

A prisoner would not know whether they would start at the toes or the fingers, then move to the ankles or the wrists, then lop off – as if a prisoner were no more important than an overstretching pear or mulberry tree – the knees or the elbows.

The kicking was over, and no question had yet been put.

Two men held the brigadier with his back to the wall that faced the door and held his head so that he would see the arrival of the chainsaw.

The commander had never interrogated a prisoner who could shut his eyes as the chainsaw was brought down to the corridor and into view through the open cell door. He stood against the furthest wall from the brigadier – as if that, too, were a part of the theatre – so that the blood spurts would not soil his uniform.

It was in the door.

Now, he asked the question. ‘With whom did you plot? With which snakes did you collaborate?’

The arm was held out and the brigadier tried to make his hand into a fist, but the men prised open his grip and exposed his fingers. The chainsaw was carried closer.

The name of a general – but the commander shrugged, dissatisfied, because he knew the general was already in Amman. And closer… The name of a brigadier and the names of two colonels. They were posted as missing and were hunted. The teeth were an inch from the hand. The prisoner was screaming. The name of a colonel, but that was inadequate because the colonel had gassed himself in his car.

Held very delicately, as if it were a scalpel in an operating theatre, and not a chainsaw with a half-metre blade, the teeth brushed the skin of the brigadier’s knuckle and the blood careered up.

‘Please, please… the sniper…’

Two fingers had fallen away. The shriek was drowned by the noise of the saw’s motor, but the commander did not raise his voice.

‘Which sniper?’

‘The best sniper… He is…’

It was always the risk, when the chainsaw was brought to an older man, that the heart would fail. The commander never heard the name of the sniper, the best sniper. As the third of his fingers dropped away, the brigadier convulsed and his head sagged back.

‘Cut him into pieces, send him home. Charge them, his family, two thousand dinars for the fuel.’

His soft footfall slithered away down the corridor.

Major Karim Aziz tracked relentlessly after the dog, whistling every few minutes for it to wait for him. He thought that the man, this stranger who had come into his country and given him this ecstatic opportunity of triumph, sweated because the dog had a strong scent to follow.

And the man was tiring, and limping.

The sun was scorching hot above him, but was starting its slide. His own shadow was no longer at his feet but lay behind him. The escarpment, towards which the dog led him, would give the opportunity for him to shoot. Far behind him, in their wide line, the soldiers followed. Each time he whistled the dog sat and waited for him to reach it. Then he fondled the fur at the nape of its neck, whispered sweet things to it, and let it bound away on the trail.

When he stepped over slight seeping springs that would have been small torrents in winter and dried out in full summer, he saw the bootprints of the man, and the slighter prints of the child guide, who did not concern him. A man not near to exhaustion would still have been on the balls of his feet, but the prints were heavy, and one was favoured.

He had not seen them yet, but he would have the chance to shoot when, riddled with the heat and tiredness, they scaled the crevice gullies of the escarpment. The man and his guide would be at the foot of the escarpment an hour before the fall of day, and then the chance would be given him. Before dusk, he would have the man in his sights.

The message was transmitted to Baghdad, to the al-Rashid barracks.

Commander Yusuf knew only of key personnel in the armed forces when their files were handed to him and he started to probe their lives.

Who among the best marksmen serving in the army was considered supreme? Who had the ambition to crawl into the nest of snakes? Who could, with devious cunning, live a double life?

There was a profile in his mind of this marksman rated as the best. He did not yet have the paunch of middle age, he was vainly conceited and would boast of his shooting skill.

He sought out the company of high-ranking officers and enjoyed the privilege their company brought him. He was married into a powerful tribal group that provided access to the elite… From his long experience of smelling out traitors, the commander always believed that he could paint their portraits.

He settled in his chair and closed his eyes, and thought of the love of small children, and did not notice that outside the window, in the compound, the shadows lengthened and that the room around him darkened, and he waited comfortably for the answers to be sent back to him.

The sun’s orb – bloody and red – teetered on the ridge of the escarpment.

When they reached the base of it, where the rock faces rose up from the rough slope of trees and bushes, Gus pleaded, ‘Can’t we stop? Can’t we rest?’

The boy peered past him, then snatched at his smock and pulled him into the deep shadow of a crevice.

‘Can’t we stop – if not to rest, just for water?’

‘We have to climb, Mr Gus, we cannot climb in darkness – no, I can, you cannot.’

‘I have to rest. My heel…’

‘Climb.’

‘Omar, I am not a bloody goat. I don’t spend my bloody life on bloody hills. I need rest and water.’

Gus looked into Omar’s face. The eyes gazed away over his shoulder. He heard the faint whistle, the distant kestrel, and he saw the savagely cut frown on the boy’s forehead.

He turned, took the line of the boy’s sight down through the rocks and trees and bushes, and saw the small glimmer of white. He raised the rifle and peered into the telescopic sight, but his shoulders shook with exhaustion and it was hard for him to focus on it and recognize it. The reticule lines in the sight were blurred. For a moment, before the shudder in his body jerked the aim away, he saw a sitting spaniel. It was a dog like Billings had had, always at his heel; a dog like the gentry used for picking up shot pheasants in the fields around the vicarage. Far below the dog, at three times the range of his rifle, was a slow-moving line of soldiers. The soldiers did not threaten him. He tried again to aim the rifle and find the dog but could not hold the stock steady – and he failed again even when he leaned against a warm stone face for support.

‘How long?’

‘The dog has followed us since we left the tunnel, near to the road.’

‘All bloody day, then.’

‘It has followed us and behind it is a hunter. He whistles for it to stop, so that it does not come close to us.’

‘Why didn’t you bloody well say?’

‘What would you have done, Mr Gus?’

‘I’d have shot it.’

‘You could not shoot the sky,’ Omar snapped at him. ‘Get on, climb. Climb fast.’

The boy had led them to a point where a fissure split open the escarpment wall, and the angle of the sun above the ridge created a darkness in the cranny. Gus understood the boy’s skill in spotting the fissure from a great distance and leading them to it without detour and a search. There was a hundred feet to climb and the angle of it allowed him to crawl up. Stunted tree roots and heathers in the fissure made good holds and good boot rests… He remembered what the Israeli had said, a long time ago, a lifetime. The hunter was a sniper, the sniper was Major Karim Aziz, who travelled with a reputation. He remembered how he had waited in the roof at the town and watched for him. He had forgotten the man until he had seen the dog. It was a lifetime back to when the Israeli had warned him of the sniper, as far back as his home and his work and the friendly firing on Stickledown Range. The past, the sniper, surged back into Gus Peake’s life. His mind was rambling. The past was before he had killed Meda, and before he had kissed her. The voice of the boy drilled into him.

‘You have to go over open rock. I cover you with shooting.’

At the top of the fissure was a smooth stone with lichen patches. He would be silhouetted, without the protection of the recess when he went over it, before he reached the safety of the ridge.

He heard the whistle. He did not know how he had been so stupid as to think it was a kestrel.

‘Hurry. Be quick, Mr Gus.’

There was a blast of firing, on rapid, below him. He reached up, caught at the top of the stone, the lichen making his grip slip, and he sagged, then grabbed again, heaved himself up and over and into the light of the low sun. The boy was firing to distract the man who travelled with a reputation. His boot scrabbled to find a fresh foothold, his rucksack snagged – and he was over. He lay for a moment on smooth wind-scorched grass, and the panic caught him. The boy had exposed himself to draw the attention of the hunter. He wriggled round, lay on his stomach with the weight of the rucksack and the rifle pinioning his shoulders and reached out, over the rim, to catch the boy’s hand.

Far back in the rocks, trees and bushes, caught by the last of the sun, he saw the flash of the glass of a ’scope. The boy had his hand. At that moment, the sniper would have a clear view of his head and Omar’s back. He pulled the boy towards safety.

The boy shook. The weight of the boy was in his hand. The crack rang in his ears. He dragged at the boy’s wrist. He heard the thump.

Gus pulled Omar over the ridge, the boy screamed, and then the quiet fell around them.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE

8. (Conclusions after interview with Dr Rupert Helps, consultant psychiatrist at Centre for War Studies, RMA Sandhurst, conducted by self and Ms Manning – transcripts attached.)

IRAQI ARMED FORCES: (From briefing given to AHP by Dr Frederick Williams, Senior Lecturer, as recalled by Helps.) Because of centralized command amp; control systems, the Iraqis will be slow to respond to initial attacks. Once initial surprise has been lost, the Kurdish irregular forces will face a tough experienced enemy that will quickly roll up their advance. A fighting retreat will put AHP in maximum danger of death or – worse – capture. It would provide grave embarrassment to Her Majesty’s Government should AHP be taken alive and subjected to a show trial.

AFTERMATH: In the predictable ‘roll up’, there would be inevitable harsh reprisals against Kurdish civilians. This was pointed out to AHP; he may not fully comprehend the scale of such reprisals before he sees them, in retreat, at first hand. They will shock him and weaken his resolve to escape.

HELPS’ ANALYSIS OF AHP: A romantic, decent and immature individual, and quite unsuited to the rigours of mercenary warfare

…

He should have stayed at home. He will have achieved nothing of value.

SUMMARY: A sane man would have rejected the emotional nonsense drip-fed to him by his grandfather. It is to be regretted that others – the rifle manufacturer, Royal Marines instructors, the freelancing

‘Survival’ expert, the lecturers at RMA – co-operated with this lunatic idea… They have all contributed to AHP’s likely death or possible capture. Isn’t any man better off when he’s chasing after job promotion, searching for a more satisfying sexual relationship, pursuing hobbies, increasing his mortgage, and offering himself for good works? Isn’t he?

He had never been adept at the use of sarcasm. Rather desperately, Ken Willet wanted to shrug off the envy he felt. He wondered if, ever, he would walk up to this man, take his hand and wring it, hold it, shake it – but he didn’t think he would have the chance.

By the time Dean returned from the travel agent’s office to confirm their flight out the next morning, Mike had the drinks on the table. There was a beer for Mike, a bourbon on the rocks for Dean, and a brandy sour for Gretchen when she came down. They were both showered and shaved, and wore the faded safari jackets with all the pocket pouches for pens and film canisters that were their uniform. Upstairs their bags were packed. Because it was unlikely that they would meet again, here or anywhere – because the world moved on, Mike was retiring from the combat field, Dean’s editors no longer cared about little wars in remote corners of the world where nothing happened, Gretchen’s magazine wanted glamour without misery – it would be a nostalgic evening. There would be a good session, long in the bar and late into the dining room, and each would tell the familiar cobwebbed anecdotes, josh each other, laugh on the same cues, and be a little thankful that it was over.

Gretchen came into the bar. She was still in her drab, dust-coated trousers and sweat-stained shirt, her face and hair unwashed since the trip into Iraq, but her eyes were red and her cheeks smeared as if she’d wiped away tears.

‘What the hell…?’

She said faintly, ‘Just tuning the radio, when I was running the bath, caught the Baghdad station, didn’t mean to… They hanged her in Kirkuk this morning… They did it in public… They called her a traitor. The radio said they hanged her…’

‘You mean she was real?’

‘Real enough to be hanged in public, in front of a crowd outside Fifth Army’s gates,’

Gretchen stammered. ‘She actually existed, and we didn’t believe it.’

‘That is some fucking story.’

‘She led an attack into the city. She was captured, and tried by a military court. She was hanged – we doubted her – she is dead.’

‘OK, OK, it’s not fucking personal.’ Mike had his notebook on the table. ‘I can get radio on this.’

‘You’re going to get radio, I’m going for the front page.’

‘Let’s go, let’s fucking hack it,’ Mike murmured. ‘“The Kurdish people have lost today the brightest symbol of their heroic fight to rid themselves of the yoke of Saddam Hussein’s terror. The symbol was a Maid from the Mountains, whose brief life was ended by public execution on a gallows in the centre of the Kurdish city of Kirkuk.” How are we doing?’

‘Going great…’ Dean took it up, scribbling on his own pad. ‘Para two… “Known only by her given name of Meda, this illiterate peasant girl had led a small force of courageous guerrilla fighters in a desperate attack against the might of Saddam’s military machine. She was hanged in front of a huge weeping crowd, rushed to the gallows to forestall a rescue attempt.” End para.’

‘Para three… “Kurdish warlord, the veteran fighter agha Ibrahim, said this evening, quote, I feel that I have lost a daughter. Not only me, but the whole Kurdish nation is in mourning. She was a wonderful example of the supreme bravery of our people. She will not be forgotten. She has, today, lit a flame that will never be extinguished, end quote.” I think that’s reasonable licence – they’ll never know.’

‘It’s bullshit, but reasonable bullshit. Last para, “Your correspondent had the privilege of meeting this remarkable young woman, deep inside Iraqi-held territory, a few hours before she launched her last attack against overwhelming odds. She told me, quote, I want only the freedom of my people. I appeal for American – and British – help, end quote. Slightly built, stunningly beautiful, wearing a red rose pinned to her tunic, she slipped away to fight and to die.” That’s it.’

They drained their drinks, asked Gretchen to get the next round in and went to their rooms to telephone. They were each in time, and grateful for it, to instruct their editors to bin the earlier pieces of shit they had sent before descending to the bar. It would be seventy-seven seconds for the radio and four paragraphs for the paper. It might get transmission and into print, and it might not – who cared?

It had been a fine shot, into the sunlight and with the elevation making the distance hard to judge, but he knew that he had missed his target.

He had waited until the darkness fell, then had sent the dog up the fissure, scrambling and dislodging stones, and had climbed himself. He had only had half of the head of the man, at an estimated distance of 520 metres, to aim at and he had hit the child.

He had heard the scream and, at the top of the escarpment, his fingers felt the clammy wet pool of blood, which he could not see.

He set the dog on the trail. There would be more spots of blood and a good scent for the dog.

As the night thickened around him, carrying the boy on his shoulder, Gus plodded forward towards the darkest line that was the mountains.