Holding the Zero

Chapter Eighteen

There was no emotional bond between Major Karim Aziz and the dog, Scout. He recognized the animal as a tool of his trade, less important than the old Dragunov, more important than his own eyes and ears. As the years had passed since he had picked up the abandoned, hungry puppy in Kuwait City, his sight had lost its edge and his hearing become more cluttered. Just as it was important to him to maintain the rifle to the highest possible state of perfection, he kept up an ever more rigorous training schedule for the dog. The affection he gave it was merely to guarantee its efficiency.

At first the dog had been a companion against the loneliness of his work, then he had started to recognize the potential qualities held in its twig-thin body. By the time he had gone north four years earlier, when the Kurdish saboteurs were pushed off the plains and hills into the mountains, he had understood the abilities of the animal.

It was ahead of him in the darkness.

He could list the qualities and abilities, and exploit them. The dog was inquisitive, intelligent, energetic and brave. Its low profile as it moved enabled it to see skyline silhouettes that he was unable to spot. Its hearing located movements, clothing against equipment or boots through mud, that were quite inaudible to him. Its nose was crucial, several hundred times keener than his own. Once Scout had found a scent – in the air or on the ground – a chain was established that was almost impossible for a fugitive to break.

He had made a study of scent: the strongest was given by sweat from the human body, the product of physical exertion and stressed tension. Unseen and unheard, hidden by darkness, the man ahead of him carried his wounded guide, and there would be exertion and tension that could not be disguised. Aziz did not believe the man would have been so careless as to smell of shaving lotion or cosmetic sprays, but there would be oil on his rifle and that, too, would leave a signature for the dog to follow. On the ground there would be disturbed dust, broken grass and earth scraped by a skidding boot, which Aziz would not see but which the dog would find. Beyond the range of his vision, the dog would scurry on a seemingly erratic course, with its nose down on the ground and then with its head up to sniff the evaporating scent in the air, which was special to the night and hung low in the chill of darkness.

The moon was up, and the stars. If Aziz had stepped out of a lighted building, he would have been blind, but his eyes were now accustomed to the blackness around him.

He never saw the man he followed, but he kept the dog within his short horizon. The pace of the fugitive surprised him but he never doubted that Scout would hold the chain linking him to the man. Many times he slipped on smooth stones and stumbled into the secret dips in the ground, but he maintained his advance.

Aziz assumed the man knew he was followed and had by now registered the whistles, and he thought that, as the night hours elapsed, the man’s exhaustion would grow and he would seek to lose the ever-present tail, but he had faith in his dog.

Later, as the burden became heavier and the man more desperate, Aziz expected to see the signs of evasion, but he did not think the man could trick his dog.

He was walking more slowly, but every few minutes he heard the clear, distant whistle.

Gus carried the rucksack, the rifle and the boy. He did not know what his rucksack weighed, but the rifle was fifteen pounds, and he guessed the boy was 125 pounds. The rucksack was on his back and the sling of the rifle was looped over his neck so that it hung down on his chest. Omar was draped over his shoulder. He did not know how long he could go on with the burden. He fell twice, but the boy never cried out, and each time Gus staggered to his feet and pushed forward.

The whistle was an infuriating constant, never closer or more distant.

The boy would tell him, in a small, weedy voice, which way he should go. He thought it extraordinary that, unschooled, Omar could read the moon’s passage and the lie of the stars, and know when he was off course. Those he had met at the commando training centre, and the man who ran the survival school for the arrogant bastards and bitches on corporate adventure, would have needed state-of-the-art Magellan positioning handsets and readings off three or four satellites. Omar guided him. Without the boy he would have blundered in circles. If the boy died on him then the dawn would come and he would be short by miles of the safety line.

The whistling tracked him.

They had talked to him about dogs at the commando training centre, and he scanned in his mind for the memory of what they had said. What he had seen of it, at last light, the boy’s wound was high in the chest. There was only one. The bullet had not exited. The bleeding was also inside the boy, oozing from the wound against the rough cloth of the gillie suit… They had told him that water was the key to breaking the scent trail.

‘I have to find a stream, a lake.’

‘Go right.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Can you not smell the water?’ The question seemed to bubble in the boy’s throat and Gus knew the lungs were damaged.

‘I can’t smell anything.’

‘Go right, and you will find water.’

‘Then we go away from the line – you have to be sure.’

‘There is water.’

Each step hurt. Each breath was harder to find. Each jolt scraped the pain from the blister on his heel, merged it with the ache in his limbs and the emptiness of his lungs and the numbing pressure on his shoulder. Each pace was worse. He heard the tinkle of water running on stones.

‘Can you go on, Mr Gus?’

‘I can go on.’

He could go on because he still had the chance to live, and did not have a wound without an exit. He could go on because he had only the blister, the ravaged muscles and the burden, not a squashed rough fragment of lead in his body. He had to throw off the scent, lose the dog. He slipped down into a narrow stream and went against its flow. The stones under his boots were smoothed, as if greased, and the whistle was away to his left.

The stream took him into a small lake. The ripples were illuminated by the moonlight on the water and he waded close to the bank. The water was cold heaven on the pain of the blister.

The boy’s voice croaked in Gus’s ear. ‘I am cold.’

‘I’ll do something about it when I can.’

‘I am not frightened, Mr Gus.’

‘No cause to be.’

‘You can leave me and have a better chance.’

‘I would not leave you as I could not leave her.’

‘Tell me a story, Mr Gus, from Major Hesketh-Prichard.’

His voice, however quiet, would carry in the darkness, but so would the sounds of his movement through the water.

Gus whispered, ‘I always liked best the story of when they searched for Wilibald the Hun…’

Over and over again, Commander Yusuf read the reply from Baghdad, and the name of a

‘simple soldier’. The man had been in his hand, but the hand had opened and the man had slipped away from him.

It was dangerous for a servant of the regime to be wrong.

He went to the door of the inner room and opened it. They were vulgar thugs, still wearing the same blood-spattered uniforms, and there was a near-emptied bottle of whisky on the table and filled ashtrays. He would not have allowed any of them to touch the sweet innocence of the grandchildren he loved. He had been fooled by a simple soldier with a record of distinguished combat in Kurdistan, along the length of the Iranian border and in Kuwait. When he had met him, he had seen nothing of ambition, cunning, access to the elite or vanity, and he could be blamed for opening his closed fist and allowing the supreme sniper in the ranks of the Iraqi army to walk away from him.

‘The marksman, Major Aziz, where is he? Find where he is.’

They were drunk. They leered back at him. Could it wait until the morning? They were slumped in their chairs.

He walked to the table and kicked it over. The fury blazed in him. The whisky dribbled into the rug, the cigarette ash clouded them, and they cringed away from him. If the order came from a higher authority, they would carry the chainsaw towards him, and his hands.

‘Now. Find him now. Where is Aziz?’

He went back into his room and dictated his instructions over the telephone to the night-duty staff at the al-Rashid barracks in Baghdad. It would be a bad night for him, he thought, and long.

He had stood by the high stretch of the water while the dog had searched the bank, careered between rushes and rocks and then had picked up the scent again.

It had been a predictable ploy, but he thought that the man had done well to find the water in the darkness, and he marvelled at his endurance. Aziz understood why the man pressed on in desperation.

If he had not had the burden of a casualty, and not felt the responsibility to carry the casualty back, then the man could have gone to a rocky outcrop and hidden himself and waited. The dog would have pointed to him, but the man would have given himself the chance, at dawn, when the light flickered across the ground, to search for his tracker and shoot and rid himself of the pursuit. But the man carried a casualty – the child guide -who was in need of medical attention if his life were to be saved. He thought that the fugitive must be a fine man: only a fine man would have accepted the responsibility of the casualty. He had met hunters, who went after deer, boar and wolves, who spoke with gruff awe of the evasion skills of the beasts they hunted – but the respect did not stop them stalking, killing.

Three or four kilometres behind him, a speck of white light climbed, then burst and fell. It was his link with the world he had left behind him, the struggling line of spread-out, wearied soldiers, making a rallying-point for the line to contract and come together for the rest of the night. He would not rest, not sleep, nor would the man he followed.

It was difficult, because of his tiredness, for Aziz to concentrate, but it would be worse for the man with the burden… He could respect him, and still kill him… To stall the tiredness he worked through the checklist. They had tried the water, and only delayed the dog. They could not climb up or down vertical rock to break the scent because the man could not do so with the casualty. They could not scale a tree, then crawl along a branch, then jump. The man could not run steadily, no sweat and no deep bootprints. He was going lethargically over the checklist when the dog came back past him.

He froze.

The darkness seemed tight around him. On the checklist was the circle back. He did not know how close they had been, so tired, to each other. He could not know whether the man and the burden had been fifty paces from him, or two hundred and fifty. Had they passed each other? Had the man seen him, and hesitated? Had he made a silhouette, and had the man reached to unhook his rifle from his shoulder, and had the moment then passed? The dog worked over two loops. Could they have shouted to each other? The circle back was predictable. Could they have blundered into each other?

By going into the water, and the circle back, the man had tried each of the principal evasion tactics. They had been used and had failed and the dog now tracked along a straight, true path – as if the man struggled in desperation to reach the ceasefire line, with his burden, before dawn.

‘Did you tell me the story of Wilibald the Hun?’

‘I did.’

‘Can you tell me the story of Mr Gaythorne-Hardy of the 4th Battalion of the Royal Berkshires?’

‘How he crawled in daylight to the German wire at Hill Sixty-three, Messines? I did.’

‘I must have slept – please, tell me the story of the cat.’

The lake water sloshed in his boots but he had lost too much time to stop and empty them, and wring out his socks. He thought that the boy lapsed into and out of unconsciousness. More time had slipped away in the long circle back. Once, the dog had scurried on the loop run and he had seen its grey-white coat in the moonlight, but the scent had held its attention and it had gone by him. Once, too, he had seen a straight standing figure – a tree-trunk, a rock, the hunter – and he had held his hand over the boy’s mouth to shut out the wheeze of his breath and the bubble in it.

There would be no more attempts at evasion. Omar had given him the star that was his guide. He had failed to break the track that the dog followed. It would be the same star that had watched him and Meda, the same star that had been above his grandfather and her grandfather at the ruins of Nineveh. He lurched on. It was darker now behind him and the gathering clouds obliterated the washed-out light of the moon.

‘What has our father done?’

She could not answer her younger son’s demand for an explanation. Men swarmed through the house. She knew what he had done because they had shown her the papers dug up in the garden. She had been shown plans of the city’s north-west sector, with a ruler-straight line drawn from the outline of an apartment block to the outline of a villa, and with sentry-points arrowed and road blocks circled. She sat at the table in the kitchen with her mother, who wept, and her father, who held his head in his hands, and her sons, and watching over them was the barrel of a machine-gun. She had told the men of her previous day, the drive to the fuel station on the Kingirban and Kifri road outside Sulaiman Bak; they had written what she said. She had told them that her husband had said she was to bring boots for rough walking and food and a small tent; they had pointed on a map to the ceasefire line within an hour’s drive of the fuel station. The kindnesses he had shown her over many years were now forgotten, and the intimacies. She told them, flat-voiced, how he had been away from her bed every night in the week before he had been ordered north, and of his distraction and nervous temper. Quietly – as her home was searched, stripped, she chased survival for herself, her parents and her children. She denounced him. She heard her elder son cruelly respond to the question.

‘Our father is a traitor… I hate him, as you should… Our father deserves to die.’

His family were not in his thoughts.

He whistled again for the dog to wait.

Each step was harder. The hours were crawling away but he could sense no end to the night. Aziz had had to crawl on his stomach from a bog into which he had strayed. Those had been nightmare moments. The sinking mud had clung to his legs, higher than his knees, and he had only been able to use the one hand to claw his way free because the other had held the rifle clear of the filth of the bog. He could have died there, exhausted, watched by the dog, unable to pull himself out. The nightmare had edged towards panic before he had been able to get a grip on a stone at the edge of the bog and lever himself out. He did not think of his family, but the panic had surged because he had thought he would not fire the Dragunov again. Everything in his life, which might have ended in waste in the bog, was preparation for the long hunt of the fugitive and then the long shot on the target.

Aziz looked more often now behind him. He watched for the encroaching mass of cloud. It had not yet reached the moon’s half-light, which enabled him most of the time to avoid the bogs and the stones, and to see the dog ahead of him, but twice he had heard the thunder peal and once the ground had been lit by a sheet of lightning. In its flash, he had seen the man perhaps half a kilometre ahead. It had been a fleeting glimpse. He had seen the weight on the man’s shoulder and the narrow outline of the rifle barrel stretching up past the hooded head. The man had not taken advantage of the moment to look behind him, and had trudged on, bent under the burden. He already had respect for the man’s skill – the shooting, the fieldcraft and the dedication – but Aziz did not understand why the man had not dropped off the burden, laid it down, put a handgun or a grenade in the child’s fingers, and moved faster and freer.

The bog’s mud, clinging to his boots and his trousers, further slowed him, as the clouds closed behind him. The panic of the struggle to escape the bog was replaced by a new fear: of the clouds and the rain that could wipe out the scent the dog followed.

He murmured, ‘Is that what you are hoping for, friend, the rain? Do you hope that the rain will cheat me?… How do you find the strength – in the name of God, where do you find it? If the rain does not come you will have to turn… You understand, friend, that it is not personal? I believe that a man such as you, a man I respect in all sincerity, would know that it is not personal…’

There was no past in his mind and no future. There was nothing of his family, and nothing of his own salvation. The present ruled him, was each slow step forward, and the bounce of the dog ahead of him, the struggle to hold the pace, and the glimpse of the burdened man in front of him, the massing of the clouds behind.

‘It is the last ridge, Mr Gus.’ The voice was beside his ear, quiet.

‘Say that again.’

‘It is the last ridge.’

A coal-black line was ahead of him and above it was the grey mass of the mountains.

He had not noticed the dawn come. The whistle was in the air some way behind him. He did not know how far he had gone in the night hours, how many miles of slopes, screes and muddy pools he had climbed and crossed. He had lost the pain, killed by his tiredness.

‘He is still with you, Mr Gus.’

‘He is still with me.’

‘To shoot you, Mr Gus… I am so cold.’

‘We must keep you awake. It’s time for another story.’

The wind gusted abruptly onto his back. It seemed to knife into Gus’s shoulders, through the weight of the rucksack and the dangling legs of the boy. The wind went from moderate strength to fresh to strong… He would take the boy home. There was no clarity in his thoughts, and no clutter of passports, visas and immigration. He would take the boy home and put him in the spare room, find a chair for him at work, walk him on Saturday mornings in the high street, and drive him on a Sunday to Stickledown Range… The rain blustered on to his back. He would teach the boy to read the pennants that marked the wind on the range and the boy would call the deflections for the alteration on the windage turret of the old Lee Enfield No. 4, Mark 1 (T), and would lie beside him on the mat. The lightning split the skies around him – he did not look back because he knew that he was still followed – and the thunder boomed in its wake. With the boy beside him, he would win the silver spoons.

The rain came hard and sudden. He thought it had come too late, then heard again the whistle and headed towards the last ridge.

It was his agony: ‘Why does he follow me?’

‘You are the best, Mr Gus. If he kills the best then he is supreme. He follows you so that he will be the best.’

‘Is that important? Does it bloody matter?’

‘I think it mattered to Major Burnham, Distinguished Service Order, in the Matabele war, to be the best.’

Gus staggered towards the dawn and the last ridge, the rain and wind lashing at him.

Beyond the ridge would be the valley with steep-set sides, and beyond the valley would be another climb, then safety. He was lurching drunkenly towards the ridge and the dawn.

‘According to Major Hesketh-Prichard, the American – Burnham – was the greatest scout of that time. His finest achievement was to go through the entire Matabele army to shoot their leader, M’limo…’

‘Can I say something personal, Caspar?’

‘Be my guest. Shoot.’

In the darkness, under a buffeted umbrella, Caspar Reinholtz walked the shiny-faced man back to the shuttle for the flight to Ankara.

‘There are people at Langley – this is not easy for me – who doubt you, Caspar.’

‘That’s their privilege.’

‘Don’t interrupt, please, because this is, was, a problem for me. They say that Caspar Reinholtz went native, had gotten himself emotionally involved.’

‘Is that what they say?’

‘Had gotten more Kurdish than the Kurds, had lost sight of our aims.’

‘Do they say that?’

‘They told me that you, Caspar, would dump shit on the new plan. I want you to know that I am going to kick ass when I get back, and tell everybody, whether or not they want to listen, that you are on board and could not have been warmer and more supportive of the new concept.’

They were at the steps of the plane, shaking hands, while the rain spattered up from the apron. At least the bastard would have a turbulent roller-coaster ride, with his balls in his mouth, hanging on, thinking of Mother. He had not mentioned her, dead, or the sniper, missing, or the fuck-up that was RECOIL. With any luck, the bastard would be tossed from one side of the plane to the other.

Caspar smiled. ‘Do you know what Will Rogers said?’

‘What did Will Rogers say?’

‘He said, “We can’t all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the kerb and clap as they go by.”’

‘I like that – good for a seminar. I appreciate the hospitality and I appreciate that you’re not wallowing in what’s gone, that you’re right behind our plan. You’re a good and valued warrior, Caspar, a true Langley man.’

The man ran up the steps of the plane.

‘Have a good flight,’ Caspar shouted after him.

In those last hours, he could have said that the plan was a piece of crap, that it was a coward’s no-risk plan, and he, too, would have been on the shuttle out to Ankara. He had whitewashed it, said it was a fine plan. If he had been on the flight there would have been denied him the small chance to meet the sniper, go with him to a quiet corner, and hear how she had died – maybe put some flowers somewhere. He knew he owed it to her. The same rain, the same storm, over those goddam mountains, would be driving on the man who had seen her die. He wanted that chance.

Trudging and stumbling, falling, dragging himself to his feet, kicking his stride forward, following the dog, Major Karim Aziz did not consider that he might have turned back…

To have turned back was to face the past and the future. His concern, going forward, was to keep the rifle under his smock so that the working parts stayed dry. To stay awake, to be aware, to keep going forward, he recited the specifications of the Dragunov.

Cartridge: 7.62?54R, including 7N14 AP. Operation: gas, short-stroke piston, self-loading. Weight: with PSO-1, 4.3kg. Length : 1.225m, with bayonet-knife, 1.37m. Barrel: 622mm. Rifling: 4 grooves, rh, 1 turn in 254mm. The statistics helped him as he moved towards the ridge where the dog sat and waited for him. They were slow, grinding steps.

The raincloud scudded over him. Far behind him, a Very light was fired, and he knew that he, too, was tracked, that the line of soldiers had kept pace with him, that they had not halted for the night. The soldiers were his past and his future and, to blot them out of his mind, he dipped back into the comfort of the specifications. Muzzle Velocity: 830m/s.

Max Effective Range: 800m-1000m. PSO-1 Telescope: 4?24, 68mm eye relief, 6deg field of view. The cloud lay on the ridge in front of him, grey on black, and the rain ran on his face, the thunder clapping at his ears.

He heard, ahead, a great bellowed scream, an anguished cry of impotence, before the gale carried it beyond his hearing.

‘Does it go badly for you, my friend?’ Aziz muttered. ‘It goes badly for me. I respect you for what you have done, it is sincere respect, because it is harder for you than for me.’

Gus had known it since he had reached the ridge over the valley.

He had paused, gulped for air, wiped the rain from his face, tried to stand against the force of the wind, and known the boy was dead. He had laid him down, smaller – as if life was weight – and he had rocked and howled into the last of the night. The rain spat on the boy’s face and ran rivers into his staring eyes. He could have left him there for the dog to find, and the man; he could have left Omar and won himself precious time, because the man would stop and circle the corpse, then go close and examine it. He picked up the boy and heaved him again over his shoulder. Omar had said that the pit of the valley, under the ridge, was the ceasefire line beyond which the man would not follow.

It might have been a shepherd’s trail he found, or a track used by wild hill goats. The rain sheened its surface. He went down the path heavily, slipped clumsily because he had the boy on his shoulder and the rifle to keep dry. Other than the occasional rumble of thunder and the spatter of rain on him there was a great silence that not even his boots or the tumble of small stones broke.

There had been a moment when he had felt grief, but it had gone. He moved more easily with each descending step as if, again, the freedom were given back to him. The boy was dead, and she was dead: the burdens were lifted. If he survived, he might have time to mourn.

In the pit of the valley he had the rush of the swollen stream to guide him.

Gus found a big flat rock, hewn smooth by a millennium’s torrents, and laid the boy’s body on it.

He paddled in the water around the rock and arranged the body so that it lay on its back. It no longer had a meaning to him. The arms hung loose. He did not think that the rain would cause the river to rise enough to dislodge the body.

On the far side of the stream, as he started to climb, he heard the distant whistle.

There was no pain in his body, no aching, no hunger or thirst.

An hour of darkness was left him. Gus scrambled up from rock to rock, stone to stone, catching at stumpy bushes that took his weight.

He could have gone on, he had the strength. He could have reached the ridge on the far side of the valley, could have left the man and the dog far behind him.

Halfway up the slope, he crabbed off the path. He moved slowly on his side and carefully, without the awkwardness of his descent, worked to lodge himself between the stems of the bushes so that he would not crush them.

When he settled he took the rucksack from his shoulders, wrapped his one towel from it around the length of the rifle, and then, with his penknife, he started to cut short sprigs of bilberry and dead bracken from around the place he had chosen. When he thought he had sufficient he began to hook them into the straps of hessian that the women, an age ago, had sewn to the suit.

All the while, the rain relentlessly beat down on him.

‘I’m George. Very good to meet you, Carol. It’s not often enough that we have the chance to share snippets with our sister service. And you’re Ken, right? Ministry of Defence? Very pleasant to meet you.’

He stood and shook their hands. There was a gushing charm to the greeting that Willet thought worse than insincere. The Security Service would be lesser beings, and Ministry personnel would be primitives. The security staff at the building’s main entrance had directed them to the bench on the embankment. Willet had been rather looking forward to gaining admittance to the secure sanctum of the Secret Intelligence Service, something to gossip about when he was back at the Ministry. But no conference room was offered them, no opportunity for rubbernecking the interior. They had been told they were expected at the fourth bench, going east towards the Festival Hall on the river’s south-side embankment. George had been waiting for them, and was lighting a cigarette as they approached.

‘I hope I don’t have to apologize for meeting you out here, but it is a nice morning and I always say the view of the river is delightful. It’s not that I’m a fresh-air freak but we have a Fascist correctness inside. Can’t have a little puff indoors. I was once on night duty, dying for a gasp, and I crawled underneath my desk and lit up. I was right under the desk but the bells still went, and the gauleiters came charging in… Now, how’s the young man doing? Is that what you want to know? I don’t mean to be rude, far from it, but is Augustus Peake any concern of yours?’

‘We think so,’ Ms Manning said.

Willet challenged. ‘If a British passport holder, with a bloody great rifle, is tramping around northern Iraq – with the consequences that entails – yes, it is a legitimate concern.’

George was fifty-something. He wore a loose cardigan that had been knitted for him, Willet thought, by a woman who had overestimated his size. He had a blotched face and thinning hair, and he coughed on his cigarette. It was early in the morning, bright and cold, and the wind came up off the river. Office workers, hurrying to be in before nine, strode meaningfully past them, and were interspersed with joggers pounding along the embankment. Willet hadn’t thought to bring a coat and shivered. He thought making them use a public bench was the height of rudeness, and calculated.

‘I come out here about three times a day and the river’s sights never fail to fascinate me… It’s all over. I’ll backtrack – and what I tell you is American material because we don’t have the resources to be on the ground there – and start with the march. It lasted a little more than a week and, like most of the Kurd expeditions down from the mountains, it ended in tears. The serious fighting involved some initial successes, then a suicidal raid into the city of Kirkuk – that period spanned five days. He’s a transport manager, you know, with a small haulage company and I would say it is fair to assume that they’ve been a long five days.’

‘But he survived?’

The moment after the cigarette’s ash had fallen on his tie, George threw away the butt and lit another. Willet waited for his question to be answered, stared out at a small tugboat going downriver towards Parliament, dragging a line of barges. He thought it was a rotten damn place to be discussing the nothing chances of Gus Peake’s survival.

‘No news, in this case, may be good news. What I can say, we do not know either way.

Most of the force that retreated from Kirkuk with their wounded made a successful return to the ceasefire line. He was not among that group. On the other hand, had he been taken by the Iraqis, if he was in their custody, we would probably have heard by now. I have to assume that Augustus Peake is currently in a no man’s land and legging it back, like a hare with a thorn up its bum, towards safety. That’s what I’d be doing, but I’m not him.’

‘There’s a woman.’

He gazed at her, then sniggered, ‘ Cherchez la femme… When was there not a woman?

Excuse me, please, my dear, I don’t mean offence. Yes, there was a woman. It’s all in the bailiwick of the Americans, you understand, and tied to their obsession with removing that man who’s been in their faces for so long. Quite a simple plan really – triple-pronged. The President is assassinated… an armoured unit in the north mutinies and drives south… A woman is a useful symbol of equality, modernism and leads a tribal force into Kirkuk. It was a grand idea, but it didn’t work. The President is alive, the unit didn’t mutiny, she’s dead. Dispiriting, really.’

The cigarette was gone, thrown after the previous one. There were pigeons gathering near them, as if they expected a feast of bread, not smoking butts. A destitute woman, carrying a cider bottle, swayed optimistically towards them but was waved imperiously away. Willet thought they were like the trustees after the death of a childless widow winding up her estate without the charity of respect.

‘How did she die?’ Ms Manning asked.

‘Quite a pretty woman by all accounts, and charismatic… It’s confusing. What is clear, a sniper was sent from Baghdad to counter Augustus Peake. That sniper disabled the woman’s transport during the fighting in Kirkuk and she was taken prisoner. The death is what’s confusing. The Iraqi news agency is saying she was hanged in public, but rumour in the city has it that she was shot at very long range moments before the rope was put round her neck. She’s dead, that’s what’s relevant, she’s out of the picture…’

‘“Long range” – did Gus Peake shoot her?’ Willet asked.

‘I really wouldn’t know, I wasn’t there. Who would you trust for accuracy? The rumour mill in Kirkuk or the INA? It’s not much of a choice if you’re looking for reliability… Eight years ago, in the uprising after the Gulf War, Kirkuk was held by the Kurds for a few days, then the army pushed them out and the citizenry fled to the mountains. Many died there, starvation, cold. They’re back in Kirkuk, those people, older and wiser, chastened. They turned out in big numbers to see the execution. Look, city people rarely fight, they leave it to the peasants in the hills, they watch to see who is going to win. The word is, and it’s probably sentimental twaddle, that the crowd did not jeer and abuse her as the Party hacks would have wanted; they watched her die in complete silence. That’s promising, for the future. Mythology comes from death, and mythology – martyrdom – is something we can work on.’

‘What exactly does that mean?’ There was threat in Ms Manning’s voice but the man chose not to recognize it and puffed at his newest cigarette.

‘Obvious. You can’t stand still in this business. Mythology, out of martyrdom, can sire insurrection. Policy, as laid down by our revered masters…’ He waved, a gesture of contempt, towards the towers and facade of Parliament across the river. ‘… dictates that we seek insurrection in that awful little corner of the world. The word of the hour is

“proxy”. Other people do the dirty work, get the shit on their boots, follow the myth of a martyr, and we achieve – at minimum cost – the aims of our policy. Please, my dear, don’t look so squeamish.’

Willet interjected. ‘Are you telling us that there were two snipers in Kirkuk – and one of them was Gus Peake?’

‘That is a fair assumption.’

‘How long ago?’ A hoarse question.

‘Twenty-four hours. Probably while I was sitting here yesterday and poisoning myself

… Do you know about snipers?’

‘I failed the course.’

‘Bad luck. My father was a sniper in Normandy, 1944, but not a very good one. I rang him last night, to get a viewpoint. What he said, about the best of them that he’d met, they’re proud, solitary and elitist, and they never did understand when it was time to wander graciously home. I go as often as I can to see friends in Scotland. Sometimes it’s the time of year when the big stags are rutting and fighting off the young pretenders -basic machismo sexual stuff. I’ve that image in my mind of locked antlers. Up there you find the skeletons of massive beasts, antlers entwined, who fought too long, went on with a dispute ages after the combat should have ended, were mortally weakened, could not disengage, starved to death together. It is glorious and pointless. The Iraqi is a Major Karim Aziz who instructs on sniping at the Baghdad Military College. He wouldn’t know when to quit. Augustus Peake, in my opinion, has the temperament of a hunter. A gambler never walks away from a final throw of the dice, a hunter never turns his back on a target. More than courage, it is about obsession. Just before I came down to meet you, I spoke with my esteemed American colleagues at Incerlik for an update. There’s no word of Peake having crossed the ceasefire line… Let’s mix the metaphors. The gamblers have probably locked antlers.’

‘Did you like Peake?’ Willet asked softly.

‘Did I say I knew him? I didn’t hear myself say that.’

‘You knew him because you had met him, and you must have encouraged him.’

A cigarette end was discarded. The packet was retrieved from the pocket, another cigarette was lit. The packet was pitched expertly into a rubbish bin beside the bench.

George stood.

‘My advice, young man, learn to walk before you try to run.’

‘You encouraged him, and you may have helped to kill him.’

‘So nice to have met you, Carol. Something for you to remember, Ken. Policy is our god. If little people, silly people, stray off a safe path and into the territory of policy, they will be exploited. Policy is a long game. This game has only recently started – but if we already have a martyr and a myth, it has started promisingly. Good morning.’

When the dawn came, both men – too tired to dream – slept. Between them was the river and the wide stone on which the carcass of the boy lay.