Holding the Zero

Chapter One

Their home was a single-roomed building for the family to live, eat and sleep in.

Augustus Henderson Peake sat cross-legged on the floor of stamped-down earth within the circle of women around the fire.

The stones of the walls, some roughly shaped and some rounded by the torrent in the gorge below the house, were held in place by mud substituting as cement or mortar. In places there were gaps through which the wind off the mountains came in stiletto stabs.

There were no windows and the door of crude-cut wood planks was closed on the night, but the wind shook it, and the penetrating blasts whipped at the smoke from the fire inside the circle. It scurried up towards the room’s rafters of tree branches with peeling bark. Nailed above them was a sheet of flapping white plastic, and through the plastic’s ripped tears he could see the dried-out underside of the turfs that were laid over the roof.

There was a hole in the centre of the roof through which the smoke escaped.

Against one wall was an old mattress covered by scattered sacking and blankets, and he thought it was where the parents of the children would sleep. The children’s beds were at the wall facing the closed door, more sacking and blankets but no mattress; there were four children pressed close to each other for warmth and each of them, in turn, hacked deep coughs from their chests and throats. The light in the room, by which the women worked, was from a single stinking oil lamp that threw cavorting shadows of the women’s heads and shoulders against the upper walls and into the ceiling where the smoke gathered before finding the release of the hole.

There were no hand-woven tapestries on the walls, nor any photographs, but on the wall in front of him, hanging from a hook where it was at an easy height to be snatched down, was an assault rifle with a magazine fitted.

Behind him, against the door, the men watched in silence and waited for the women’s work to be done.

Gnarled fingers with broken nails and dirt-grimed wrinkles fought with needles to gather in pieces of the garment. It had once been a suit of overalls that a mechanic would have worn; it was drab olive green. Two women were busy sewing the heavy canvas strip that had been cut from an old tarpaulin to the front. Another pulled for possession of the knees and elbows, to sew smaller canvas squares onto them. Another stitched a veil of soft, sand-coloured netting to the front of the hood, which had already been fastened to the collar. Three more women clawed at the back, shoulders, body, legs and arms, wherever he pointed, and sewed to them short-looped straps of hessian fabric. The garment was wrenched from hand to hand, over the smouldering fire of wet wood, past and around the hurricane oil lamp. Each time a strap was in place and the cotton snapped, the eyes would look to him and he would point again to a place where the surface was not broken, the hessian strap would be torn for the necessary length and the needles would dive and flash in the light. They talked softly among themselves. It was a language of which he knew nothing, but when they caught his glance the older women cackled, gaptoothed, in amusement, and the younger ones, who were little more than girls, dropped their heads and giggled.

The fire gave little heat, only smoke; the lamp gave a small light and many shadows.

The smoke was in his eyes, watering them, and the smell of the oil from the lamp was in his nose and his mouth.

The shape of the overalls was changing. The clear lines of the body, arms and legs were gradually distorted by the mess of hessian straps; the sharpness of the outline was broken in a hundred places. The needles darted, disappeared, then rose again. Each time the garment was pulled by a new hand the smoke billowed under it and fanned into their faces and his. It was good work, and he could not have accomplished it himself. When they were finished he thanked them. There was laughter all around the room as he stood and held the garment against his body.

A man stepped forward and tugged at his arm, as if to tell him that his time had run out.

Gus untied the laces of the old hiking-boots he had brought with him, then kicked them off. He pulled on the loose overalls over his denims, shirt and sweater. He wriggled and shook into the garment, pulled up the zip from crotch to throat. A woman broke the circle around the fire, went to the mattress bed, took a small broken shard of mirror from a plastic bag of her treasures, and handed it to him. He stood to his full height, his head close to the plastic-sheeted ceiling, and the smoke curled around him. He looked into the mirror to study the front, then held it out to the side at arm’s length and tilted his head so that he could see part of his own back. He pulled up the cowled hood and dropped the veil over his face. There was more laughter.

He told them that, in his own country, this was called a ‘gillie’ suit, and he said it was the best he had ever seen and that, pray his God and theirs, he would be invisible to the enemy of them all – and they seemed not to understand a word he said. And he thanked them. With his hands and his eyes, he thanked them, and there was a murmur of appreciation. The oldest woman pushed herself up arthritically from her place by the fire and touched his arm, a gentle, sweeping brush as if now he was understood.

After he had laced his boots, the oldest woman took the mirror from him and held it where he could best look into it. He lifted the veil then bent to take the small tubes of camouflage cream from his rucksack. He smeared lines of ochre, black and green on to his hands and throat, his nose, cheeks and chin.

The door opened behind him. The wind howled into the room, guttered the fire, spread the smoke and flickered the lamp. The children cowered under their tent of sacks and blankets.

‘It is time, Mr Peake? You are ready?’

‘Yes, Haquim, I am ready.’

Kneeling beside the rucksack, he put the tubes of cream back into a side pouch and gazed down at the rifle around which the hessian bandage was already wound. The lens of the telescopic sight flickered in the lamplight. Abruptly, he zipped shut the camouflaged, padded carrying case that held the rifle. He turned for the door.

They would be finished now. The night would have fallen heavy on Stickledown Range, his colleagues of the Historic Breech-loading and Small-arms Association would be gone. They would have had their last beer, worried over their scoring charts, packed their cars, locked up their caravans, and would be on the crowded roads going their separate ways to their homes. He doubted that they would have missed him… The owls would be out now over the quietness of the range, hunting for the rabbits that would have emerged once the boom of the old rifles was silenced. He breathed hard then rocked slowly on his feet before slipping the strap of the carrying case over one shoulder and the loop of the rucksack over the other. His shadow leaped from the assault rifle on the wall towards the children shivering on their bed. He wondered if any of those in their cars at the end of their day’s target shooting knew the true force of fear. But it had been his choice to come, his decision… Without a backward glance he went out through the door.

The men were around him. The wind gripped at the hessian straps and caught the billows of his gillie suit. He thought of the Lee Enfield No. 4 Mark 1 (T) in its secure cabinet at home, and the collection of silver teaspoons, awarded for competition marksmanship, in the sideboard drawer. He walked towards the lights of the vehicles.

Close about him was the darkness, the smell of fighting men and the scent of struggle

… It had been his own decision, his own choice.

It is a place that is an afterthought of history.

The Tarus and Zagros mountains are the kernel of this region and its people. The natural limits, recognized only by the inhabitants of a harsh, wind-stripped land, are the plains below the mountains to the south and east, the upwaters of the great Tigris river to the west, and the Black Sea shores to the north. The modern frontiers, created artificially by long-dead diplomats in faraway chancelleries, have divided up the territory with a confluence of boundaries scarring that kernel. The present-day nation states of Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq now have uncertain stewardship of the towering mountains, the razor-edged ridges running between them and the cliff-faced valleys below, and jealously guard their sovereign rights with aircraft, artillery pieces, armoured vehicles, infantrymen and the shadowy agents of the secret police.

The people of this arbitrarily carved land are the Kurds. They have an old history, a culture unique to themselves, a language that is their own, and no country. Only when they are useful in gaining greater political advantage to outsiders is their dream of nationhood supported, or when their pathetic lot in defeat pricks foreigners’ consciences.

Most days of the week, most weeks of the year, most years of a decade, most decades of a century, their dream and their struggle are ignored by blind eyes and deaf ears. They are not Arabs, not Persians, not Turks; they do not fit conveniently.

A war progresses fitfully in that part of the Kurdish heartland that is nominally within the territorial boundaries of the Republic of Iraq. It is like a restless man’s sleep, sometimes aroused and flailing intensely, sometimes dormant. The enemy of today, as he has been for twenty years, is the President in his palace in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein.

Since the Gulf War, the modern army of Saddam has been kept out of the Kurdish territory by the threat of aerial action from American and British warplanes based at the Turkish NATO base at Incerlik. The army waits for the opportunity. It is a poised cobra watching for a prey’s moment of weakness.

Some Kurds say that the life, always waiting for the cobra’s strike, is not worth living, that it would be better to sidle up to the reptile and lie under its protection. Other Kurds say that the comforting words from Washington and London are hollow, spoken from toothless mouths. And a few Kurds say that the present time offers the last best hope of a military thrust to recapture their old capital city of Kirkuk.

By the frail light of a small torch, a child was buried beside the road going south to Kirkuk, her legs taken off by a V69 Italian-made anti-personnel mine laid by Iraqi army sappers.

The girl’s legs had been severed at the knees when her running footfall triggered the tripwire. She had been gambolling ahead of her father towards a meadow of yellowed grass where the family’s four goats grazed. He had known there were mines close to the small collection of homes that made a village, but it was the first day of April, it was eleven days after the sparse celebration of the Kurdish New Year, Newruz, and the winter fodder for the goats was exhausted. They must find their own food if they were to fill their udders and give the family the milk of life. Had there been a hospital close by, had there been a four-wheel-drive vehicle in the village to take the child to it, then a life might have been saved. As it was, the child had died of trauma and blood loss.

Her father and brothers paused by the pit they had dug beside the road under the shelter of battered, stormtossed, leafless mulberry trees. The father slid down into the hole on his backside, and the eldest of the brothers took the small wrapped bundle from the mother and passed it to him. The tears ran on the father’s cheeks, dribbled with the rain on his face, and all the time the mother cried the dirge that was familiar to all women, all mothers, in northern Iraq.

‘Saddam! Saddam! Why do you sow mines in our fields?

‘Why do you hang our sons, why do you bulldoze our villages?

‘Why do you bury us alive?… We beg you, America!

‘We beg you, United Nations! We beg you, God!

‘Help us and save us…

‘For our lives are destroyed, and we have become beggars.’

The small convoy of vehicles passed her as she sat swaying her shoulders and crying her song. Her hands were folded tightly against the emptiness of her chest, where she had held her dead, desecrated child. The vehicles were travelling slowly along the rutted track on dulled sidelights. The torch that lit the burial of her child, with a weakened, failing battery, threw a wide cone of grey light into the first dun-painted, mudscarred truck that passed her. She did not recognize the man who drove, or the men squashed into two rows of seats behind him, but she recognized the young woman sitting beside the driver. The mother had never before seen the young woman, but she recognized her from the rumour slipping through the villages. It had been brought, as surely as the leaves of autumn eddied from the orchards, by nomads. She saw the young woman’s face, the combat fatigues on her upper body, the rifle against her shoulder, and the chest harness to which the grenades were hooked. All the mothers in her village had heard the whispered rumour of the young woman who had come from the north, many days’ walk away, where the mountains were highest.

She shouted at the limit of her voice: ‘Punish them. Punish them for what they have done to me.’

More vehicles passed.

Her child’s father and brothers were pushing the clods of wet soil and the stones back into the pit. Then the father stood and held up the torch so that the brothers might better see stones to heap on top of the shallow grave to protect it against wild dogs and foxes.

There should have been a man of God there, but they lived too far from any mosque to receive that comfort. There should have been neighbours and friends and cousins, but they were too close to the positions of the Iraqi murderers and the front line of their bunkers for any but the close family to venture into the darkness. The boys gasped under the weight of the stones.

The light of their father’s torch caught the last vehicle in the convoy. It had a closed cab and an open back in which were huddled men in fighting clothes who clutched weapons to their bodies. The men saw the mother, they saw the father and the brothers, they saw the stones that marked the grave, and all but one raised their fists, clenched, in a gesture of sympathy.

One man, squatting in the back of the last vehicle, was different. He gazed at the mother but his hands remained firmly on the straps of a many-coloured container, green and black, white and deadened yellow, and his rucksack. The beam of the torch caught the smeared lines on his face. He was different because he was not of their people. The mother saw the strange garment that the man wore, bulky, covered with the little strips of hessian net in the colours of the hills and earth, foliage and stones among which she lived. She thought he came from far away.

‘Kill them,’ she shouted into the night. ‘Kill them as vengeance for taking my child.’

And the line of lights drifted into the distance. She knew nothing of history and nothing of politics, but she knew everything of suffering, and she knew what the rumour had told her of the young woman who had come from the distant north.

When his bed was cold, long after his woman had left it, the shepherd crawled from under the blankets.

He heard the sound of the generator throbbing, and he smelt the rich coffee that she had already placed in the pot for heating. The fire was lit but its warmth had not yet spread through the room. With the coffee was the scent of bread baking. She worked hard to look after him, but he deserved a good woman because he had brought her the electricity generator and fuel for the fire, ground coffee and sugar and food and money to spend in the bazaar in Kirkuk away beyond the checkpoints and road blocks. He gave her the money to buy carpets for the floors, and bedclothes and drapes for the walls, which were dry under a roof of new corrugated iron.

He waved to her and she scurried from the stove to the window and pulled back the drape. He saw the slow-moving clouds against the light gold sky of the dawn. He knew the colour of gold, the best gold, because sometimes he could buy it at the bazaar in Kirkuk. It had been a bad night, but the storm buffeting his home had moved on. The shepherd usually slept well. He was a contented man. He had a fine house, a fine flock of sheep, he had a generator for electricity, he had food, he had an old biscuit tin filled with dinar notes issued by the Central Bank that he kept against the wall under his bed, and a smaller box beside it held four chains of eighteen-carat gold… and he had their equipment.

By taking their equipment, the shepherd had sold himself.

He pulled on his loose-fitting trousers, knotted the string at the waist, then drew over his head that week’s shirt and a thick woollen sweater, gently unravelling where the thorns had plucked at it, then a heavy coat. He sat on the bed and slid into his still-wet shoes. He wound a turban loosely around his head. From a hook beside the door he took the Kalashnikov and the binoculars that had come with the equipment. She gave him his first coffee of the day in a chipped cup. He grunted, drank it, belched, and returned the cup to her. He lifted an old television set from the floor – wires snaked from it across the room and climbed the walls before disappearing into the ceiling – pressed down the button and waited for the picture to form. It showed, in black and white, a steep-sided valley, and at the bottom of it were the gouged lines of a vehicle track. It was the same each day, and each night, deserted. But he checked it many times each day. The shepherd was conscientious because he valued the things given him when he had sold himself.

He went out into the dawn light. He cut along the side of his home, shielding his eyes from the low slant of the sunlight, and hurried to the small building of concrete blocks that protruded from the end of the one-room house. He rapped three times on the wood door, the signal, heard the footfall within, then the grate of a bolt being withdrawn. The door was opened. As he did every day at the end of the night watch, his son embraced him, kissed both his cheeks.

The shepherd stepped inside. There were no windows in the room. The generator chattered in the corner. In the dim light the dials of the military radio glowed brightly.

The television on the table beside the radio showed the same picture of the valley floor.

His son shrugged, as if to say, as always, nothing had moved on the track below in the night, then ran for the door. His son always went first to the pit at the back to shit and piss, then to his mother for his last meal of the day; his son would sleep during the daylight hours then resume watch as night fell.

It was a few minutes before the time when the shepherd was scheduled to make his morning call on the radio. There would be another call as dusk fell but there was, of course, a frequency he could use in an emergency. He threw the switch that killed the television picture, and the second switch that governed the alternative camera capable of thermal imaging, and the last switch that controlled the sound sensors at the floor of the valley. He did not know the age of the equipment or its origins, but he had been taught how to operate it by men of the Estikhabarat in the headquarters of the Military Command at Kirkuk. Everything he owned – the gold, the money in the biscuit tin, the stove, the fresh coffee, the oven for baking bread, his flock – was his because he had agreed to work the equipment they had given him.

He went outside and padlocked the door behind him.

On the south side of the valley, above a sheer cliff face, was a plateau of good grazing grass covering an area of a little more than eleven hectares. Though he did not have the education to measure it, the shepherd was some 150 metres above the valley floor along which the rough track ran. To the left and right of the plateau were higher, impassable cliff faces. Three kilometres down the track, past two sharp bends in the valley’s narrow passage, was the nearest Iraqi checkpoint. The cliff below the plateau was climbable, with great care, by a sure-footed man, if he followed the trails used by the shepherd’s animals. The shepherd was a tripwire, an early-warning system for the troops at the checkpoint.

He was not aware that the summit of the valley on the far side was exactly 725 metres from the front door of his house, but he knew it was a distance far greater than a Kalashnikov rifle was capable of firing. He believed himself impregnable, safe from his own people, and he had the big radio to back him, if men tried to climb the sheep trails to the plateau.

He stood by the door of his home, drinking the air. He watched an eagle making slow circuits above the summit of the far valley wall. He had strong, clear vision. The far side of the valley was as it had been, exactly, the day before and the day before that. He raked his eyes across the landscape of yellow grass tufts, grey stone, brown, exposed earth and the sharp greens of the bilberry leaves. If anything had changed, if man or animal were on the summit across the void, the shepherd would have seen it. His stomach rumbled, called on him to return inside, take his first food of the day and more coffee. But he stayed the extra moments and gazed at the simple peace around him. Later, while his son slept, he would lead the sheep towards the west of the plateau, but always he would have his rifle with him and his binoculars, always he would be able to see the track along the valley floor and he would be a few seconds’ hard running from the room of concrete blocks and the live radio. He had lost sight of the eagle. He blinked as the sun was in his eyes… and then the blackness came. He heard nothing.

The shepherd felt as though he had been hit by a great iron hammer full in the centre of his chest. He slid, against his will, down onto the short, sheep-cropped grass in front of the door.

His life had passed within a second. He had no knowledge of a. 338 bullet fired at a range of 725 metres and fracturing his spinal column between the second and third thoracic vertebrae. He could not know that his wife and his son would cower under the table of their home and be too terrorized to open the door, run to the radio and send the coded signal summoning immediate help. Nor would he know that, as the dawn spread light on the paths made by his sheep over the precipice face of the cliff, men would scramble up the heights, break his radio, smash his television, cut the cables to the cameras, drink his coffee, find his biscuit tin and the smaller box holding four gold chains, and he could not know what the men did to his wife and son – the jahsh, the little donkeys, the traitor Kurds who sided with Saddam. And he would not know that amongst the men was a young woman, sweating and panting from the exertion of the climb, who summoned the spittle in her mouth and spat down onto his still-open eyes.

The first hour of the day shift was the busiest for the technicians in Kirkuk working at the radios of the Estikhabarat al-Askariyya. Early in the morning the new shift handled the volume of check calls and radio signals sent to the Military Intelligence Service. At the end of the day, the new night shift would be deluged by a similar number of calls. There were transmissions that were classified as important, and there were the regular checks that had low priority because nothing of worth was ever reported on them. In a cubicle compartment, four yawning, scratching, smoking technicians listlessly ticked off radio calls received, and wallowed in boredom.

The role tasked to the regional office of the Estikhabarat in Kirkuk was to provide military intelligence on armed Kurdish factions north of the army’s defence line, and to infiltrate the factions so that a peshmerga commander could not shit, could not screw his wife, without it being known and reported on down the line to national headquarters in the Aladhamia area of Baghdad. Low priority, bumping the bottom of the barrel, was given to Call-sign 17, Sector 8.

Call-signs 1 to 16 had reported in, nothing of significance. Call-signs 18 to 23 had been received on clear transmission. Only Call-sign 17 in Sector 8 was not ticked off.

The technician who should have received the call alerted his supervisor when the transmission was forty-eight minutes late.

‘Probably poking sheep,’ the supervisor said, and walked away. ‘He’ll come through in the evening.’

But the technician, a conscript who would follow military service with an electronics course in higher education in Basra, was not satisfied until he had personally checked the file for Call-sign 17. Call-sign 17 was issued with a Russian-made R-107 radio. It had a four-to-six-kilometre range, which meant it relied on a booster antenna in the mountains.

The radio, in the opinion of the conscript technician, was poor and the antenna, during the night, would have been battered by the storm that had raged over the high ground north of Kirkuk. He made a note to refer it to the technician taking over from him at the end of the day. Of course, the sheep poker was low priority or he would have been given more sophisticated equipment than the R-107 radio.

At dawn that day, a little crack had been opened in the many-layered lines of defence separating the Kurdish enclave from their spiritual capital of Kirkuk, and it was not seen by the technician, or by his supervisor.

They had all played a part in moving the letter. Written in a spidery hand by Hoyshar, the father of Jamal, father-in-law of Faima and grandfather of Meda, it had begun its journey six weeks earlier, while the snow was still falling in the northern mountains and valleys.

Now in his eighty-fifth year, a remarkable age for a man who had lived the greater part of his life in a village community where the houses clung to the steep slopes, near Birkim, of the mountains of Kurdish Iraq, it had been a great effort for Hoyshar to write to an old friend whom he valued as a brother.

There was no postal service out of the region, and Hoyshar had no access to a facsimile machine or to a satellite telephone. The letter had moved by hand, growing grubbier, accumulating the fingerprints of people Hoyshar did not know. The young woman, Meda, had started her march out of the northern fortress uplands in the week that the letter was written. All of those who had moved it woke that morning unaware of the small fissure opened in the outer extremity of the Iraqi army’s defence line.

The letter had been given by the old man to Sarah, an Australian working in northern Iraq for a London-backed children’s charity. She had been in the mountains investigating reports of a diphtheria epidemic, and the letter had been pressed into her hand… That morning, an hour after a single bullet had sung across the emptiness of a steep-sided valley, she nursed an aching hangover from the farewell party for her regional director…

She had passed on the letter.

Joe had taken it from the aid-worker. He was Scots born, a one-time soldier in the Royal Engineers, and was in northern Iraq to clear minefields. She had pleaded, explained, and he had stuffed it into his shoulder-bag and gone back to the ground around a village well where he taught local men, by example and practice, how to kneel and probe for the anti-personnel mines… That morning, with his bodyguards, interpreter and three Kurdish recruits, he was staking out the pegs round a field of V69s and POMZ 2Ms and Type 72As that had been laid in an orchard of pomegranate trees… Three days later he had handed on the crumpled envelope.

Lev had taken the letter, been told its history. Everybody knew the overweight and balding Russian. He was equally loved and loathed: loved because he could smooth paths and provide comforts, loathed because of his corrupt amorality… That morning, he spat orders to his houseboy, who carried to the boot of the Mercedes two crates of bourbon, a video-cassette recorder and an Apple Mac computer… He had slid the envelope down into the hip pocket of his trousers, where it wedged against a gross roll of American dollar bills, and delivered it at the end of the week.

Isaac had been given the letter and had, of course, steamed open the envelope. If it had not interested him, it would have gone into the plastic bag of shredded waste-paper beside the table where the banks of monitoring equipment were stacked. He was an Israeli, an employee of the Mossad, in charge of the most Godforsaken post offered to any agent sent from Tel Aviv. His equipment, his dishes, his antenna, in the high, empty country south of the Arbil to Rawandiz road, could eavesdrop on every communication between army headquarters in Baghdad and Fifth Army headquarters in Kirkuk, and the signals of the Estikhabarat, and he could monitor the SIGINT and ELINT operations of the Project 858. As a result of the strange alliances of northern Iraq he was protected in his eyrie by a platoon of Turkish paratroops. That morning, he had listened to Call-signs 1-16 and 18-23, in Sector 8, broadcasting news of nothing to Kirkuk, and he had noted that Call-sign 17 had failed to make scheduled contact. Then he had begun to listen to a radio conversation between armoured corps commanders in the Mosul area… A Turkish air force Blackhawk helicopter, with no navigation lights, came in at night once a week to the small LZ, shaking the roof of his building and tugging at the tents of the paratroops.

The helicopter had taken the letter, resealed.

The letter handled by the aid-worker, the de-miner, the entrepreneur and the intelligence agent had been delivered four weeks after it had left the mountain village to a vicarage in southern England, and none of its couriers yet knew of the consequences of their actions.

Sometimes their voices were raised, at others they bickered quietly. Gus Peake did not know the cause of the dispute. He sat on his haunches with his back against the wall of the shed, with the map and plan they had drawn across his knees. They were within earshot but out of his sight, around the edge of the shed, and beyond the thorn corral where the goats were. Nor did he know why the advantage from his single shot was not exploited. He had seen with his binoculars how the men had swarmed on the cliff face and run to the building in front of which the body lay. He had seen the main door of the house beaten down, and he had heard the screams, the smashing of the equipment from inside. And she had come back down the cliff, descended nimbly, as easily as a deer, and later she had reached where he waited. He did not understand why they had not, immediately, pushed forward. He tried to shut from his mind the argument raging near to him.

Gus worked on the plan of the bunkers they had given him and married them to the old map. He used a compass to measure distance, because he had been told he should never rely completely on the technology of his binoculars. From the map, he tried to locate a vantage-point amongst the whorls of the contours that he could approach using dead ground. He accepted that luck had been with him that morning, that a clean kill at 785 yards without a sighting shot was more than fortunate. He had little conceit, and less arrogance. He believed in himself and his ability, but he was seldom less than realistic.

He had been lucky, more than fortunate. He tried to find a point on the map that he could reach in darkness, that would offer him cover and protection and give him a range of not more than 650 yards.

Their voices were angry again. He pictured them, toe to toe, eyeball to eyeball. Some of the men had been left on the plateau, some had come down, and they sat in the shade of trees where the vehicles were hidden around a small fire. Their faces were impassive, as if they heard and saw nothing of the argument.

He did not know if the map was accurate, or whether the plan that had been given to him of the bunkers was loosely drawn or to an exact scale. Then he heard the silence. The lines on the map seemed to bounce in front of his eyes. She was walking away, crossing open ground, skirting the clump of trees where the men sat and the vehicles were hidden.

He saw her sink down and her head fall into her hands. Suddenly the smell of the goats seemed revolting. He folded away the map, dumped the plan into the rucksack’s pouch, threw his calculator and the compass in with it. He kicked at a stone and watched it career towards the track.

‘You have a problem?’

Haquim limped the last few strides from the corner of the shed to where Gus sat and used the butt of his rifle as a prop while he clumsily lowered himself down.

‘Only that I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know why we are here. I don’t know what everyone is arguing about. I don’t know why she’s not speaking to me…’

‘Why do we not go forward, Mr Peake? Because we wait for more men. I try to tell her and she abuses me. Why do we wait for more men? Because there are very few who will follow me, and many who follow only the orders of their agha. Yes, because of her, because simple people believe in her, illiterate people, people who have old rifles to keep bears and dogs away from their livestock, she can raise an army that would be butchered by machine-guns, artillery and tanks. We need trained men who are familiar with the tactics of battle, who will receive and carry out orders, who know how to use weapons.

The men we need, the peshmerga, which in your language means “those who face death”, are controlled by the two agha of the Kurdish people. They have promised a few men, only a few. They want to fight a war, yes, but only if they believe they will win that war.

So, the supply of men will be like a drip feed. Each time we advance, a few more men will be sent. I cannot change it. I have to wait for more men… She does not understand

… I tell you, Mr Peake, sometimes I can be angry with her.’

‘I was called, I came, and now I am ignored.’

‘Also, I tell you that without her we would not have started to march, we would not have had the dream. Without her there would be nothing. Being ignored is a small price to pay… I am experienced in war. She has no experience, but at every step she will question me. But without her nothing is possible, and I believe you know it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘We move at last light… You want to hurry to war, Mr Peake. You will be there soon enough. In a week or two weeks, tell me then if you still want to hurry…’

Carried on the wind, he heard, faintly, the sound of the furious revving of a vehicle far down the track, around a gentle sloping escarpment that rose to the valley’s cliff wall, beyond his sight. Haquim had stiffened, lifted his head to hear better, then pushed himself up with his rifle. He said coldly, ‘When you meet a target that can shoot back, Mr Peake, then you will have found a war.’

The first fires of the day pushed up a pall of hanging smoke that merged with the fumes of cars’ exhausts, which hung as a thickening carpet across his view of Baghdad awakening.

He had stayed too long, should have been gone before the sun was up. It was suicidal for him to have remained there until daylight broke over the city.

He had stayed too long because, for the fifth night, the target had not appeared. The frustration bit into him. He should have been gone an hour earlier, at least, while the shadows still hugged the streets. Although the sun’s early warmth was on the flat roof beside the water tank, Major Karim Aziz shivered. Throughout the last hour he had known that the chance of the target coming diminished with each passing minute, and yet he had stayed.

His legs were cramped and stiff, all feeling gone. His eyes watered from the long hours of gazing into the aperture of the sight’s lens. His shoulders ached from holding the rifle butt at his shoulder for so long. He realized that for the last fifteen minutes, as the smoke and fumes had formed a cloudy haze, he had barely been able to see the driveway, the steps and the door on which his telescopic sight was locked.

He took a last look through the sight, cursed, then began to pack his gear quickly. He wrapped the sight in a loose towel, snapped the butt-release button and reduced the weapon’s length so that it would fit easily into the anonymous sports bag, then his binoculars, then his bottle of water, and his box for salad and bread, then the larger bottle, tightly corked, to hold urine passed during the night. He rolled up the thin rubber mat on which he had lain motionless for eleven hours and dropped it inside, zipped the bag and stood up. As he had calculated it from the city’s maps, it was a distance of 545 metres from the leading edge of the building’s water tank to the front door, across which, up which, through which, he had now waited five full nights for the target to come.

He checked around him. His life and the lives of those he loved depended on the care with which he checked the concrete of the roof beside the water tower for scraps of paper and drops of urine or water.

Below him were the sounds of radios, shouting children and banging doors. He pulled the hood of his army windcheater up over his head so that his features were masked, and hurried towards the service door to the roof of the block. Behind him was the view across the apartment blocks between Rashid Street and al-Jamoun Street, past Wahtba Square, across lower blocks between al-Jamoun Street and Kifah Street, and into a gap on the far side of Kifah Street that offered a small window view of the few yards of driveway to the villa.

He took the rough concrete service steps three at a time, clattered down them. He had spent a week searching out his vantage-point, trudging into building after building, gaining access by his military uniform, giving a false name on a forged identity card, claiming he was looking for accommodation for himself and his family. He had made a great circle around the villa to which he had been assured the target would come, and found only the one rooftop, of a seven-storey building, which was between 400 and 700 metres from the villa and offered a view over the surrounding wall of the short way the target must walk between his bomb-proof car and the front door.

Maybe the bastard’s penis did not itch enough: when it itched, when it needed stroking, sucking, then the bastard would come. He passed two smoking, gossiping maids on the service stairs. They saw him, looked for a moment at his army coat, then flattened against the wall and averted their gaze. They would have assumed that he, too, had an itching penis, and they would not dare to speak of an army officer’s assignation for fear of a beating from the Military Security Service… It was all about the President’s itch, and the visits to the villa of his current mistress.

Major Karim Aziz let himself out of the side fire exit of the building, and joined the pavement throng heading for the Shuhada Bridge that crossed the Tigris.

He walked quickly, imagining that every eye was on him, believing that every eye was in the head of an agent of the regime. The weight of the sports bag banged against his thigh. At every step, he expected a hand to grab him, a body to block him, and the bag to be snatched and opened. He crossed the bridge over the wide, slow-flowing mud brown of the river, swollen from the thaw of the snow in the mountains far to the north. The tiredness bred the fantasies of danger.

He reached Haifa Street, crossed it near to the central railway station, and came to his home.

Major Karim Aziz’s home was a modest two-storey house, with a muddy front garden where the roses that Leila tended would bloom in a month’s time, where Wafiq and Hani played football, where her parents would sit in the summer months. They were all in the kitchen. The boys were gathering their books together for school. His wife was shuffling through papers she would need in her day’s work at the hospital. Her father was listening to the radio’s news bulletin, and her mother was clearing the table. His own place was laid, a piece of melon, a slice of bread, a square of cheese. They all looked away from him and he gave no explanation as to why he had, for the fifth time, been away from his home for the night. It was impossible for him to give any.

He kissed the boys sharply, touched the arm of his wife and nodded to her parents.

They would have seen the tiredness in his eyes, and they would have looked down and wondered what he carried in his sports bag.

It was too late for him to sleep.

He showered, shaved. By the time he had changed into a clean uniform and come back into the kitchen, the boys had left for school and Leila had gone to the hospital where she nursed children. Her father stared at the radio while her mother rinsed the plates at the sink; they wouldn’t have understood even if he had been able to tell them. He thought it was better that he had not come home earlier. The previous time, he had slipped into his home, a thief in the night, and snuggled against her back and known that she only pretended to sleep, and he had heard the tossing in their beds of his sons, the cough of her father, then the fear of the consequences he might inflict on them had ravaged in his mind.

Aziz took the family car, the old Nissan Micra, to his workplace at the Baghdad Military College.