Holding the Zero

Chapter Nineteen

Abruptly, suddenly, the dreamless sleep was finished.

Gus woke. He jerked up, blinked, and did not understand. He was wrapped in a grey-white shroud.

For a moment, no thought, he flailed at the sheet, beat at it because it seemed to suffocate him, and could not move it. His fists punched the sheet, were absorbed, and it pressed down on him.

He sagged back.

He wiped hard at his eyes. The sheet was pegged just below his feet and just beyond his head, and the memory of where he was, what he had done, filtered back to him.

The rain had stopped. There was a stillness. The cloud nestled over him, but the thunder had rolled on. The sleep had not rested him. Together with the understanding that the cloud over the valley covered him came the tiredness and the slow, aching pains and the hunger.

At that moment, because he had lost hold of the emotion, he could have gathered together his kit and the rifle, and used the cloud as protection to crawl away up the slope towards the hidden ridge. He could put it all behind him and start out on the journey to the frontier, to an airport or to a lorry park.

Gus thought he was blessed.

In the scramble of his thoughts, as the residue of sleep was pushed aside, he realized the value of the cloud that sat tightly on him. Faces and voices slipped across his mind, competing for attention. Each gave him an opportunity, and it was no longer possible for Gus Peake to gather together the kit and the rifle and climb to the top of the slope.

He murmured, ‘I am blessed because I am here and because you, sir, have followed me. There is no hate, no slogans of politics, there is no baggage of distrust. I don’t know what your shooting range is called, I don’t know where you go to pit yourself against opponents and elements. My range is Stickledown. It can be quite a pleasant place in summer – birds, flowers, good light – and it can be a hell of a place in winter, believe me, wind, rain and flat, dead emptiness all the way to the butts and the V-Bulls. Thank you for following me, because it’s like I’m on Stickledown and shooting for a silver spoon, and you’re on your range and shooting for whatever prize is important to you, and for both of us it is real. You could have walked away from me, I could have walked away from you, and both of us would have been left with dried-out lives. Do you understand me, sir, am I making sense? No-one else will understand me or understand you but, then, I don’t think either of us would ask them to. We are blessed, we can only use the blessing. I’d like to have met you, and talked with you, but…’

He could not hear the rambled words he murmured. It might have been the tiredness, the pain or the hunger, but he felt, to a slight degree, better and more settled for having talked. He thought those other voices – from the kitchen, the factory, on the Common, at the tent camp, in the office, on the bench – would have understood what he said, and why.

Blessed…

He shook himself, cleared the chaff from his mind. The talk was finished. He was blessed because he was given time by the density of the cloud hanging in the valley.

Where he lay there was sparse cover from stubby wind-broken bushes with the first buds of bilberry fruit and a rock that covered his shoulders and flattened lifeless bracken.

It was a useful place for a firing position. He felt a keening breath of wind on his face: he must use his time because soon the wind would carry away the cloud cover and he would be able to see what lay before him. He rummaged in the rucksack for rounds of his Green Spot ammunition, took two from the tissue paper in which they were individually wrapped to prevent scrape noise. The magazine was already loaded on the rifle, five bullets, and he did not believe he would have an opportunity to fire more than one. He polished the two rounds so that the Full Metal Jackets shone, would catch the light when the cloud was gone. He had no string, or bandages, so he unwound the towel from the barrel and working parts of the rifle, made slits in it with his penknife at the ends then tore off narrow strips of fraying cotton. He knotted them together. Because of the thinness of the strips, the cotton rope he made would not take a weight and would snap at a violent pull, but it would be of sufficient strength for his purpose. He would have liked it longer, but that was not possible. He tied one end of the slim rope to a shoulder-strap of the rucksack and tested the knot with a gentle jerk. The rucksack shivered with a slight movement.

He was satisfied. His hand dipped again into the rucksack and retrieved a khaki woollen ski hat, and used the penknife to snip off more stems of the bilberry bushes, weaving them between the stitching.

He placed the rucksack half behind the rock and masked it with bracken fronds. He laid the two rounds of Green Spot ammunition on top, and behind them he put a stone the size of his hand. Over the stone he placed the wool hat.

He crawled away, paying out the length of towel rope, burying its length under further pieces of bracken. He used the sideways crawl – which they had shown him on the common and called the ‘slug’ crawl – so that the trail was minimal. When he had paid out the towel rope he was some twenty feet away from the rucksack. He was on a flat ledge of broken-down bracken, without stones, rocks or bushes, without serious cover.

Gus could not tell how long he would have the protection of the cloud. He worked at controlled speed, but not in panic, to snatch at the bracken, tear it up and make a blanket of it over his boots, legs, body and head, and over the rifle, the sight and the barrel. Then he draped the hessian net over the brightness of the ’scope’s lens.

He settled, waited on the wind, and wondered what his opponent was doing.

Through patience, Major Karim Aziz had learnt to hold the present in perpetuity, at the expense of past and future. The patience was based, as if embedded in concrete, on certainty.

He had slept for three hours. He had woken and immediately felt alert and alive. His resting place, chosen in pitch darkness, was under a flat slab stone that jutted out over a small table of grass that in turn gave way to sheltered ochre bracken fronds. If he had thought of the past or the future, he would have walked down the slope, through the blanket of cloud, and climbed the far side to safety.

Patiently he had watched the wall of lightening grey mist that was around him until, imperceptibly, it began to fragment. He had confidence in himself, and in the man he thought of as a friend, and confidence in his dog.

The cloud had started to break above his eyeline.

First there were lighter points, then blue islands, then a first glimpse of the sun. The cloud served him well, satisfied him. It had blocked out the early-rising sun, which would have peeped over the ridge on the far side of the valley and beamed onto him. He would have been looking into the sun in the early morning and his side of the valley would have been illuminated. It would have been the point of maximum danger when the sun’s strength caught the colouring of his face, penetrating under the stone slab, nicking the lens of his ’scope. Later, when the cloud blanket was burned away and the sun was higher, the stone slab would throw down deep shadow over him and his rifle. Much later, towards the end of the day, the sun would be behind him and its power would fall on the far slope. Then it would search for the man, his friend… That was the present, and all else was forgotten.

When the sun fell on him, through the cloud gaps, he squirmed as far back as possible into the cavity under the stone slab, and his hand gently, tenderly, ruffled the hair at the dog’s throat. His preparations were made and he had no doubt that the man, his friend and adversary, had stayed.

As the cloud thinned, pushed away by the wind, so the vista of the valley opened before him. There were gullies of dark rock with silver ribbons of water from the night’s rain; scattered trees, clumps of wild fruit bushes, small patches of gorse, bracken and heather littered the rocky ground. There were dispersed rocks, open stone screes, and pockets of grass. It was good terrain for him and for his friend. He stared out over the carpet of cloud that filled the bottom of the valley, where its dispersal would be slowest, using his binoculars with a cotton net over them. He thought that a lesser man than himself would have peered at the unveiled expanse and harboured doubts.

He would not want to fire the one bullet, ready in the breech mechanism of the Dragunov, until the sun was behind him, playing on the slope opposite, but he had already made the necessary preparations for that moment, still many hours away. His patience would see him through the waiting. He was on his stomach and his head was behind the ’scope, his body twisted so that his legs could splay out under the slab. He would be hundreds of minutes in that position, without food, without water and without sleep. He was as comfortable as he could make himself as he studied the ground on the valley’s far side. There was a symmetrical shape to it. He estimated that the twin ridges bounding the valley were 1,300 metres apart. Both then fell sharply before flattening to a more gradual incline that in each case, at its limit, almost made a level plateau. On his side, looking across the cloud floor, he was close to the lip of that plateau. He reckoned that its forward edge on the far side, matched and dotted with trees, occasional protruding rocks, bushes and weather-flattened bracken, was 700 metres from his position. Below the lip, where he looked from and where he looked to, were cliff faces that fell into the cloud, tumbled stones and rare paths where animals or shepherds had made precarious tracks. There were fissures now in the cloud floor below and he could hear more distinctly the roll of a water torrent among rocks. Directly facing him was a rambling track that led up, across the plateau and then towards the far ridge, similar in every way to the one on his side down which his dog had led him before he had veered off and stumbled into the cavity below the slab.

From the side of his mouth, he whispered to the dog, ‘You have to be very strong and very patient, but I think my friend is there. In this life, nothing can be guaranteed, but I do not think the man, my friend, would run from me. My concern is the casualty he carried and his desire to find help for the child guide, but he is very tired. He has carried the child, who must have been precious to him, for a great distance – I could not have done that – but I cannot believe he would have had the strength in the time that was available to him to take the casualty up the first difficult climb, then across the easier plateau, then up the second climb. But, more important, I do not think that such a man would pass over the chance to face me. We are solitary people – I laugh when I say it, we are also possessed of a great arrogance – and we wait for the day when we can confront an equal.

What else is there, in this life, but to take up a challenge that is offered? I do not think he will have cheated me.’

He passed a biscuit to the dog, the last and damp from the bottom of the backpack, and apologized that he had not brought more food for it.

A shaft of sunlight broke the mist cover below him.

He saw the body, laid out on a smoothed wide stone around which the swollen river funnelled.

There was a dark stain high on the shoulder. It had been laid there with dignity and he saw, through the binoculars, that the eyes had been closed and that the arms had been laid at rest at the sides, and he thought the young face was at peace, the pain gone.

The body was where he was guaranteed to see it. The sun blazed down, destroyed the mist. He had not been cheated. He had not doubted the man, his friend.

Very carefully, concerned that he should not make sudden movements, Major Karim Aziz began to scan the steep slopes and the plateau across the valley, over the body.

‘Oh, by the way – I should have told you this morning, just didn’t get round to it – last night on my voicemail, my leave has come through,’ Ms Manning said. ‘All the days in lieu that I’m owed, two weeks – thank God.’

‘What are you going to do with it?’ Willet looked up from the console that he had just switched on.

‘I’ve got to see my mother, she’s had a bit of bronchitis, and I thought of a week’s sunshine break, Tenerife or-’

‘That’ll be nice,’ he said heavily. He pointed to the screen. ‘What do I do with this?’

‘Slam it in, and get on with other things. It’s finished, as far as I can see – look, it’s been good working with you, but there’s no-one else to see. We did what we were asked to do.’

Willet said coldly, ‘I don’t suppose there is anyone left to see.’

‘This sort of business always ends with a whimper. I don’t like it any more than you, but it’s what happens. Maybe we’ll meet up again.’

Willet gazed into her face. ‘He’s a victim. Won’t anything be done about the people who used him?’

‘Shouldn’t think so,’ she said. ‘They’re always forgotten, always hidden, always protected, those people.’

‘A victim, for Christ’s sake…’

She fidgeted for a moment, awkward, then said, ‘I don’t deal the cards. It’s been good knowing you. My advice, meant kindly, type it up, hand it in, and start at something else.’

‘He deserves more…’

She pulled the door closed behind her with the firmness of finality.

His fingers rattled on the keyboard.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE

9. (Conclusions after interview with George – (identity unknown),

SIS

Vauxhall Bridge Cross, conducted by self and Ms Manning, transcript attached.)

VICTIM: AHP in my opinion was manipulated by SIS. A man of limited intelligence and sparse experience, he was encouraged to travel to northern Iraq and involve himself in a harebrained scheme where other more powerful forces might win, where he would most certainly lose.

BLAME: There was a trail of Open Doors. SIS was at the heart of a programme aimed at deceiving AHP. The trail, and direct responsibility for it, leads to SIS. They and many others should take accountable responsibility for the utter precariousness of AHP’s position.

SUMMARY: For a raft of reasons, AHP was allowed to travel to northern Iraq with a ‘slim to non-existent’ chance of survival, in order to push forward matters of HMG policy. He was an innocent. His inevitable fate is a matter of public scandal.

TO BE COMPLETED

Irritably and impatiently, he flicked into the file for the number. When he had dialled it, and it had been answered, Willet had to wait a full four minutes for the junior-school teacher, Meg, to be brought to the telephone in the headmistress’s office.

He blurted breathily, ‘It’s Willet here, I met you on that disgraceful early morning when we barged into Mr Peake’s home. You should know that he is currently in northern Iraq, being hounded by a pursuit force of the Iraqi army. There are many who are culpable for his situation, but you should also know that you are one of the few without blame. I apologize for disturbing you… It’s not your fault but it’s in the hands of the gods now.’

There was a shocked, stunned silence, then the phone rang off.

He would deal first with those who were without blame. He dialled the number of a vicarage built in the countryside under old trees, but the phone was not picked up. Then he rang the number for the modern bungalow behind the vicarage, and heard a faint, aged voice.

‘Wing Commander Peake? It’s Willet, from MoD – I came to see you with Ms Manning of the Security Service. I have to tell you that I have a very poor view of elderly men sending the young to their deaths. Your grandson is somewhere, at this moment, behind Iraqi lines and hunted like a dog – because of you. You indoctrinated him with that rubbish history of your “friendship” with Hoyshar, the Kurd. You fed it like bacteria into his system. You took him back there ten years ago and further infected him. You passed on to him the letter that has probably killed him. You, because of your background at Habbaniyah and in the Kurdish region, had occasional contact with the Secret Intelligence Service, and I believe that you informed them of the letter. You set this process in motion. Where doors should have been locked in the face of your grandson, they were opened and his journey was made possible. What you couldn’t achieve yourself, you sent someone else to do. I hope you can live with that, what you’ve done to your own blood. Good-day, Wing Commander.’

The line of troops had bivouacked in small cluster knots for the night, and endured the storm.

At dawn they’d been caught in the cloud and had had to wait until it dispersed.

The line had formed again, and pressed on. They had reached the ridge and seen the body. The officer, on the radio, reported back to Fifth Army in Kirkuk that, beyond boot marks in the mud at the summit of the ridge, there was no sign of the foreign sniper, or of Major Karim Aziz, and that the valley below him seemed at a cursory glance to be empty

… except for the body. The officer said that the body confused him: it was not abandoned, not dumped, but laid out as if it were a sign or a symbol that he did not understand.

The troops around the officer squatted down and began to eat their rations.

He lay across the line they took.

They had red-brown bodies and were twice the size of what Gus knew from home.

Each of them, each of the thousands, found him blocking their track, crawled onto his body, then diverted in search of his flesh, and bit him. Every last one of the little bastards bit him fiercely. They had fangs and venom, and they bit his ankles and the skin at his waist, and were up under the gillie suit. They found the skin at his throat and his face, and they bit his hands.

The bites, the injections of the venom, were all over his body, itching and hurting.

Anywhere else he would have paused from lining up his aim on the target and would have swept the little bastards to oblivion. He could not move. He could not swat them and could not scratch the wounds they left him with. When he eased his glance to the right he could see them coming for him in a long, limitless line.

It might have been for half an hour that the ants crossed him and crawled on the rifle, and after them it was the turn of the flies.

The sun was high and had settled a haze over the valley when the flies came in the wake of the ants. There would have been his sweat to attract them and the raw pimple wounds with the blood, and the urine that he had leaked into his trousers. They flew against his hands and face, hovered in front of his blinking eyes, insinuated under his face net, up his nostrils and into his ears. The flies inflicted more wounds and drew more blood. After them were mite-sized creatures from the bilberry bushes, then spiders from the bracken circled him and feasted.

He remembered the bubble. Inside it, where it never rained and was never too hot, where the wind never blew, there were no ant columns, no flies, no mites and no bloody spiders. He imagined himself to be inside the bubble’s comfort.

The sun at its height, with its haze, seemed to burn steam off the floor of the valley.

His eyes were tiring from the long hours of searching through the ’scope. He whose eyes lasted best would win. It was hard to see the detail on the valley floor through the steam mist and sometimes the body of the boy was reduced to a blurred outline. Hard, too, to gaze across the valley and identify individual rocks, particular bushes and isolated clumps of vegetation that made cover.

He yawned hard, and that broke the walls of the bubble. He yawned again, then swore to himself. The Iraqi would be on the plateau across the valley at his level, not on the steeper slopes above because there the range would be too great, and not among the rocks below, because there the cover would be harder to use. He searched and could not find, and he knew he should rest his eyes but he did not dare. He looked for light on metal or for a clean line where there should be only a broken one.

When the sun dipped, sank, then the haze over the valley would be gone. The light would be into his tired eyes, and the gentle slope of his plateau would be clearly lit to the man on the far side. He had to believe that inside the bubble his eyes would not tire, or he would lose.

He heard the crows calling, above him, high over the valley floor as they circled the smoothed stone on which he had laid the body.

Did they have doubts, the men he had read of and whom he believed he walked with?

Aziz knew the names of some with whom he believed he walked, but some were anonymous to him except for the reputation of what they had achieved. It was unsettling that he had doubts that gnawed at his patience… There was an American marine who had confirmed a kill at 1,290 metres across the river at Hue; and another marine with a known-distance range map who had hit at 1,150 metres, witnessed and written up by his officer, in the Vietnam Central Highlands; and there was Carlos Hathcock who had taken seventy-two hours to move just one kilometre and then had killed a general of the North Vietnamese army at 650 metres. He knew their stories, but did not know whether they had harboured doubts at the moment when they squeezed the trigger.

Had the rifle held the zero? He lay under the jut of the slab and the worry fretted at him. The Dragunov, with the PSO-1 telescope sight, had held the zero the last evening when he had fired on the man and hit the boy, but the doubts lingered because he remembered each stumble in the night and every jolt on the rifle. He had tried to protect it, because the rifle was his life, but he could not be certain he had succeeded. The ’scope seemed solid on the stock, but if it had shifted half a millimetre, he would miss and he would lose, and he would not walk with the great men.

His mind flitted on, sifting the doubts. He had sunk in the bog; the mud had cloyed round him, he had cleaned the outside of the rifle and the inner parts of the breech. What if a speck of mud was in the rifling of the barrel? The round would go high or low or wide, and he would lose.

In front of the muzzle of the barrel, he had cleared a small area of bracken fronds so that he had a clear shot ahead. To the sides he had thinned the bracken. What if, when he identified the position of his friend, a single frond blocked a clear shot? Billy Sing, the Australian – and Aziz knew of him from his reading in the library at the Baghdad Military College – had killed 150 Turks at Gallipoli. He would have squirmed in anxiety lest his bullet nicked a single frond or blade of grass or twig. A bracken frond close to the muzzle, unseen through the focus of the ’scope, would deflect a bullet travelling at 830 metres a second and he would fail.

He thought of the great men of the Civil War in America – Virginius Hutchen, Truman Head and Old Thousand Yards, who was the buffalo hunter – and he believed they would all, in inner secrecy, in their lying-up positions, have entertained nagging doubts about their equipment. He would not know the answer to any of his doubts, or whether he would ever walk with the great men, until he fired.

He heard the crows, and that pleased him. He watched them circling, and he thanked them because they turned his mind from the doubts, and he started again, through the heat haze, to search the far wall of the valley, and the plateau.

Once a month, Lev Rybinsky drove his Mercedes up the winding stone track and brought Isaac Cohen a twelve-bottle crate of whisky and gossip, and was paid for both commodities in crisp new dollar bills.

That midday, mopping his head with a handkerchief and pocketing the money, he told the Israeli of new gun positions on the peshmerga side of the ceasefire line, and of what was said in the bazaar in Arbil about the hanging of the woman in Kirkuk, and of the pillow talk of the agha Bekir’s treasurer that he had learned from a whore in the UN club at Sulaymaniyah, and of… but the Jew hardly seemed to listen.

‘Do you remember, Rybinsky, the sniper with her?’

‘I met him. I talked to him. He said that a big sniper had been sent from Baghdad for him. I told him of the duels between snipers in my city, Stalingrad.’

‘You are so full of shit, Rybinsky.’

‘How people in the city watched the duels, wars within wars, primitive, and took grandstand seats and would bet… Did he run away, too, and leave her? I have not heard of him since she was taken.’

‘I have it from the radio intercepts – you should get yourself there.’ Cohen went to the wall map, used his pointer and gave the six-figure reference. ‘That is where they are, to duel.’

‘He was not experienced.’

‘Then you should bet on the Iraqi.’

‘I told him about Zaitsev and Konings, at Stalingrad, how they watched for each other, stalked each other. Zaitsev had the experience, as does the Iraqi.’

‘I give you fifty dollars, Rybinsky at two to one against, that the Iraqi sleeps tonight with God.’

They shook hands, Rybinsky wrote down the grid reference and hurried to his car.

Commander Yusuf was brought a transcript of the radio signal from the ceasefire line.

‘Where is this place?’

He was shown it on the map, a finger prodding into an area of wilderness. He pondered, gazed at the harsh whorls of the contours and the shaded empty spaces without marked roads. He was a man of streets, buildings, restaurants, wide parade grounds, prison yards and cells, and he had no familiarity with such a place.

‘How can it be reached?’

Lev Rybinsky found Sarah at the clinic she held each week in the schoolhouse at Taqtaq, and pushed his way past the queue of waiting pregnant women. He shooed out the patient on the couch and ignored her protest.

He told Sarah why he had come.

Her face widened in astonishment.

‘Not only do I give you morphine and penicillin, I give you sport.’

‘You are sick, Rybinsky, fucking sick and warped.’

But she wrote down the map reference, closed the clinic for the day, and ran out into the sunlight to her pick-up. *** ‘Is that Davies and Sons, the haulage company? I’d like to speak with Mr Ray Davies -it’s Willet, Ministry of Defence.’ He waited, listened to the tinny music over the telephone, then heard the voice. Willet said brusquely, ‘I’d like to congratulate you, Mr Davies, because you damn nearly fooled me. I thought you were merely stupid. I now know better. I assume that, with lorries running all over Europe, you quite often do little courier jobs for the intelligence people. I assume that you had a call before Gus Peake said he wanted to travel to Turkey and gave that preposterous story about needing to understand better the drivers’ problems. You made available a lorry with a secret compartment where the rifle could be hidden from foreign Customs. To a degree you are responsible for Mr Peake’s present situation – he is lost in northern Iraq with half of their regular army chasing him. Well done. My suggestion, you put a notice in the trade magazines for a new transport manager because you’ll be needing one.’ Willet paused, listened to the question from the other end. ‘Why are you responsible? Instead of opening the door you could have slammed it on him, and saved his life. You ingratiated yourself in the hope of a future favour – probably a blind eye turned to another of your dodgy consignments. Good-day.’

He slammed the telephone down hard, and his hand shook. Then, again, he pecked into the file for a number.

‘Mr Robins, please. It’s Willet of MoD. No, it’s not urgent, it’s not a matter of life and death – it’s past that time…’ He was told that Mr Robins was unavailable because he was on business in America. He left no message and limply set down the telephone. If the connection had been made, he would have said, ‘Mr Robins, good to speak to you. I thought you would like to know that in the report I am writing on the journey by Mr Peake to northern Iraq, and what we believe will be his subsequent death there, I hold you partially responsible. I have reason to assume that you were told by SIS to give what help you could to Peake. Of course, you didn’t demur – you were advised by a faceless bastard that an opportunity now presented itself to gain Green Role battlefield experience for your. 338 calibre Lapua Magnum rifle at a time when it is still under trial. What a heaven-sent chance to find out how the bloody thing stands up to combat conditions. You could have told them at Fort Bragg or Leavenworth or Benning or Quantico, and at Warminster and Lympstone, all of the damned rifle’s tested qualities – good for the old export business, yes? Right now, his situation behind the lines is quite desperate. Sale or return, wasn’t it? I don’t think it will be returned – such a bloody shame.’ He would have liked to say that.

‘What’s it to me?’

‘It would be like standing with him, for God’s sake.’

Joe Denton knelt in the minefield with his back to her. She had shouted from the road to him what the Russian had told her. The line of V69s where he worked was particularly difficult because they were dispersed into a gully, and over the years sediment had covered them. It was a place too complicated for local men, even those he’d trained. He looked after himself, and thought he did not need emotional baggage.

‘If you used your eyes, Sarah, you’d see that I’ve got a job of work here.’

‘Please, Joe, it’s important to me – and I think it’s important to him.’

He swore under his breath, pushed himself up, gathered together his probes and the shovel and the roll of white tape, and walked back up the cleared path. She showed him the map and gave him the grid-reference figures. He climbed into the passenger seat and planned a route.

The dog’s panting was worse. Aziz, himself, even in the heat when the sun was high, could fight thirst and endure a dried-out throat and the aching in the stomach.

He had no water for the dog. Even if he had had water in his bottle, if he had remembered to fill it from puddles or the rushing streams during the night, he would not have been able to retrieve it from his backpack because that would have created too great a disturbance. With gentle movements of his trigger hand, he tried reaching behind him, to soothe the dog’s heaving motion, but his eye never left the ’scope as he tracked it across the far wall of the valley.

The crows were lower in their wheeling flight. He found now that they came into view, and sometimes he allowed them to lead him in effortless slow arcs. When he followed them, raking the ground against which they flew, he was more relaxed, his eyes less tired.

But the crows, wary and wild, were dangerous to him. The crows, with their suspicion and their needle-sharp eyesight, were on level flight with the stone slab at the plateau’s rim. If they saw him move, they would twist away. If they spotted his head moving or his body turning, they would scream their warning. They were his enemy and his ally.

‘My friend, how goes it with you? How is the hunger, and the stiffness? Are you well, my friend, or are you suffering? If you move the crows see you, if they see you I see you

… but it is the same for the two of us. It is my dog that suffers worse than me and I cannot tell him that his suffering is not for a great time longer.’

In front of Aziz, where he had cleared the bracken, there was a small patch of shadow thrown from the stone slab. The shadow reached, now, to the muzzle brake that reduced the flash signature on firing. When the sun had lowered behind him, when the light of it shone with force onto the far valley wall, when it covered the cleared space in front of the brake, then he could loose the dog to tumble down the path and drink in the stream on the valley floor. Then it could go to its work. If he was to win, and earn the right to walk with the great men, then the dog was the key.

Aziz soothed the dog, and watched the crows floating lower.

It pecked at a worm, sodden, lifeless, drowned in the dirt.

The bird strutted in front of Gus, holding the worm in its beak, and gobbling it down.

He had watched the drifting tilt of the sun and in his ’scope there were now small shadows in front of the rocks on the far side of the valley, and in front of the bushes. The advantage was ebbing towards the man across the valley as the haze of the heat cleared.

Gus knew why the crows flew lower, but he could shut that from his mind and the mass of flies that swirled round him. The ants had reversed their march and came back over him, eagerly searching for flesh to bite. Some had crawled into his socks, down the ankle support of his boot, had found the open blister, had used their teeth on it and their venom. He could dismiss that pain and that raw irritation, the stiff ache of his body and the growl of his stomach, the stink of urine in his trousers – but it was the small bird that frightened him.

The instructors who had been with him on the Common then sat with him in the pub bar had said that all wildlife should be avoided, but birds above all. There had been a sniper in the First World War, an Australian – and even eighty-odd years later the instructors had seemed to know the story by heart, searching for his Turkish opponent in a field of ripe barley. It had been extraordinary to Gus that their stories were old, as if past history carried relevance to today’s present… The sniper, crawling so slowly and so carefully through the barley, had seen a lark. There was no panic about the small bird as it flew for food and came back to one point in the field. On the death stalk, the Australian had been drawn towards the bird and gone close enough to see its nest and the fledglings it fed. Near to the nest, so still as not to disturb the bird and send it chattering away, was the profile of the enemy’s face. The Australian had killed the Turk, one shot, and felt no remorse, only ‘hot pride’. The lark had made the kill possible, had drawn the sniper’s eye to the target.

The bird had finished its feast on the worm.

It pirouetted on its spindly legs then twisted back to preen its wing feathers with its beak, then hopped up.

The bird was the size of the sparrows, robins, chaffinches and tits for which his mother put out seeds, nuts, lard. It had bright colours and a piping call. The bird’s new perch was on the foresight of the rifle. He was frightened because he did not know whether a man peering into a ten-times magnification telescopic sight, hundreds of yards away, would be drawn to follow those bright colours, as the Australian had been.

His survival, and he knew it, was about small things. With a newer, harsher intensity he began, again, the search of the imagined squares his mind made across the width of the valley.

The crows were lower, the sun was fiercer in his face, and the end of the towelling rope was close to his hand.

It would be soon.