Holding the Zero

Chapter Two

After the engine of the distant vehicle had stopped, he saw them come round the escarpment’s bend. There were two men with rifles, the escort, and a man and a woman who were unarmed and European. When they’d passed a small clump of winter-dead trees, the woman pointed to the smoke of the fire near to the track and ahead of them, and their pace quickened. They would have seen the spiral of the smoke, then the vehicles parked in the trees close to the shed.

They had started to run. The unarmed man, the European, ran badly as if he had wrenched his back, but the woman turned, grabbed his arm without ceremony and heaved him forward to keep up with her. He stumbled and seemed to cry out, but she just tugged harder at him.

Gathering strength to climb the other side of the valley and witness the result of his shot, Gus sat in the sunshine against the wall of the shed. The sweat ran in faint driblets against his skin under the weight of his gillie suit. The woman saw Meda sitting alone in the pasture grass, released her burden, let him slip then fall, and waved to her. He heard the broad ring of her fierce Australian accent.

‘Christ, am I glad to see you. We are in shit, Meda… You might just be a goddam angel… I’m trying to get my regional director to the border. Too much Irish last night -

Christ, do we have hang-overs. The driver, the arsehole, took the wrong turn – alcohol poisoning’s his bloody problem. Obstinate bastard won’t admit he’s cocked it. We’re in the back end of bloody nowhere and aren’t the Iraqis just round the corner? Christ… We tried to turn but the bloody Cruiser’s stuck over a goddam rock. Do you believe it? We don’t have a bloody rope on board it or on the back-up. Do you have a rope? And maybe some bodies to help? If I don’t get him to the border, it screws everything, all the schedules, the exit visa, the flights, every bloody thing…’

She was laughing, and Meda with her.

‘I mean, Meda, that arsehole was taking us into the Iraqi army checkpoint. Christ, they’d have thought it was bloody Christmas.’

She was mud-smeared, her hair a flash of blond in the wind. Meda was leading her towards the shed and shouting to her men under the trees. And because she pointed to the shed, and the men ran ahead of her towards where he sat, the European man hobbled faster towards him.

He didn’t know what he should do. He sat rooted to the ground, his back hard against the wall. A stampede was closing on him. He heard Haquim’s whispered voice, but didn’t respond. And then he saw the way the European man gazed at him with bright, staring eyes. He had been wearing the gillie suit for so many hours that it no longer seemed special.

Haquim’s fist closed on his shoulder. ‘Get in, Mr Peake, get out of sight.’

He was wrenched up, pitched inside the windowless shed, and crawled towards the far corner, into the darkness where his rucksack and the rifle he had cleaned earlier were.

Perhaps he should have been sleeping, perhaps he did not realize the necessity of taking any opportunity to sleep. He had been too captivated by the tranquil beauty of the valley, and the eagle’s soaring flight, and too angered that Meda ignored him. Now, exhausted, he did not know why he was hurled into the back of the shed.

The doorway was crowded, a torchbeam roved over the floor of stamped dirt and goat droppings. Before they found the length of rope among the ammunition boxes and the stacked heap of armour-piercing grenades, the beam of the torch discovered him. He couldn’t see the face of the European man who was framed in the doorway with fierce sunlight behind him. The beam lit him and the rifle propped against the wall close to him.

‘ Mr Peake? Is that English, American?’

Without thinking, he muttered, ‘English.’

‘A long way from home. Where is home?’

Still without thinking: ‘Guildford.’

Haquim spat at him, ‘Don’t give them your face. Shut up. Don’t say anything.’

He was startled by the venom of the order, flinched instinctively, turned his head so that the torchbeam fell on his neck, then moved to the rifle and lingered on the camouflage strips of hessian material wound round the barrel and the telescopic sight.

Then it jumped away because the coil of rope had been found. As fast as it had filled, the shed emptied. He sat in the darkness. His mind cleared. He did not need to be told that he had made a mistake, but he knew that when the aid-worker’s vehicle had been pulled back on to the track and had driven away, Haquim would return and batter him with criticism.

When he had climbed down from the cab of the lorry that had brought him from Guildford in south-east England to Diyarbakir in south-east Turkey ten days before, he would have said that he could cope with isolation. He would have said just as firmly nine nights ago, when he had been taken along a smugglers’ route over the mountains, the border and into northern Iraq, that loneliness did not affect him. He sat in the darkness with his head drooping – he had wanted to talk to somebody, anybody, in English and about home, about what was safe. He clenched his fists and ground his fingernails into the palms of his hands so that the pain would wipe out the guilt of making a small mistake… and then he closed his eyes.

It was about visualization. It was about each crawling movement towards the firing position, each moment of preparation, and each controlled breath when he aimed at the forward bunker that was on the plan drawn for him, and each contour of the map over which the. 338 bullet would fly.

But it was hard for him to erase the memory of the mistake.

The regional director, Benedict, waited until they were back on the open road.

‘Did you see that man?’

‘What man?’

‘Called Peake. Said he was English, from Guildford.’

‘Didn’t see him.’

‘He was a professional soldier.’

‘I see what’s good for me to see – and I get on with my job.’

‘He had a sniper’s rifle in there.’

‘It’s not my business.’

‘It’s my damn business. Don’t bloody laugh at me, I worry about you more than any other of Protect the Children’s field-workers. That’s honest, more than the guys in Afghanistan or Somalia. Yes, you’re protected by goons, but we all know that’s just show. The Iraqis could take you any day they want.’

‘You’re a bag of bloody fun today, Benedict. It’s best you forget it.’

‘No way. If the British military is deploying expert snipers in northern Iraq, that jeopardizes the safety of British-employed aid-workers.’

‘Leave it.’

‘I’m raising the roof when I get back.’

She turned away, shut her eyes. Her head throbbed. It was a good place to be drunk, pity was it didn’t happen often enough. She heard his breath hissing through gritted teeth.

She knew he would raise the bloody roof, and she knew the Iraqis could kidnap her at any time they chose.

‘And who was that woman?’

She didn’t open her eyes. ‘You don’t need to know, so don’t ask.’

They crowded around Gus.

Haquim said they had all seen Russian-made sniper rifles, but never a weapon as large as the one he carried.

The hands groped towards it, but he did not let any of them touch it for fear that they might jolt the mounting of the telescopic sight.

Four days before, he had zeroed the sight. He had gone off alone on to a flat, sheltered meadow of grass and spring flowers. He had paced out a distance of 100 yards and left a cardboard box there with a bull blacked in with ink. He had paced out a further 100 yards, and left another cardboard box, and a final one at 300 yards. He had gone back to his firing position, turned the clicks on the distance turret of the sight to the elevation for 100 yards, fired, examined the target with his binoculars, found the shot low, had made adjustments to the mounting, fired again, checked with his binoculars where the shot had clipped the top edge of the four-inch bull, had made more adjustments, fired and been satisfied. Then he had moved to the 200-yard target, and then to the 300-yard target. Only when he was completely satisfied with the accuracy of his shooting had he packed away the rifle. Then, an hour later, he had met Meda. No talk, no gratitude, no curiosity as to how he had made the great journey, nothing about family, no recall of the past. She had handed him on to Haquim, and had not spoken to him since.

Gus let them look at the rifle, but he would not let them touch, feel or hold it.

He counted forty-two of them. There were forty-one men and a boy. He was slim, had stick-like wrists and a thin throat. On the smooth complexion of his cheeks and upper lip there was a haze of fluff, as if he was trying to grow a man’s beard. Most of the men were middle-aged, some shaven and some bearded, some in fatigues and some in their own tribal clothes. There was one who pressed closer than the others – turbaned, an old torn check shirt under a grey-blue anorak with a face masked by stubble and dangerous flitting eyes. They were bad, hostile eyes, and they raked him. His mouth had narrow lips, between which the tongue was turned and rolled in the mouth to gather the spittle. It was directed down between his boots. There was the single croaked word, spoken with contempt: ‘American.’

Gus stared back into the man’s face, shook his head and said, ‘English.’ He saw the eyes and mouth relax, then the man turned his back on him.

He thought them proud men, but with the common features of cruel eyes and brutal mouths. His grandfather would have described them, in the language of long ago, as

‘villains’. They carried assault rifles and grenade launchers; one had a light machine-gun and was wrapped with belts of ammunition. Then, in a moment, he was no longer the centre of attention because they had seen her, Meda.

They were around her. She spoke softly, with the glow in her eyes. They hung on her words. The one who’d spat, his mouth gaped open as if the foul old bastard had found the light of God and was mesmerized. Gus thought they danced for her.

Haquim, at his shoulder, said, ‘I can tell them about the tactics of frontal attack, and about clearing trenches with grenades, and about enfilading fire, and they tolerate me.

She tells them of destiny and freedom, and they will follow wherever she leads. I fear where she will lead us, Mr Peake.’

‘When are we leaving?’

Haquim said dully, ‘We go when she says we go.’

‘I counted forty-two new men – is that enough?’

‘Forty-one men and a boy, Mr Peake. Forty-one fighters and a boy to wash and cook for them. And there were eighteen of us, and you, and her. You go to war, Mr Peake, with fifty-nine men, a boy and her… It is what we have, it has to be enough. I told you it would be a drip feed. Today, agha Bekir has sent us forty-one men and a boy from the slum camps of Sulaymaniyah. In Arbil, agha Ibrahim will watch to see if we are successful. If we are he will not wish to lose status and he will send a hundred men, who will also be the scum from the slums. I told you how it would be.’

Her hands moved, outstretched, as she spoke. They seemed capable of carrying the weight of the world. He watched the power with which she held them, then ducked inside the shed.

When he came out, the rucksack and the carrying case hooked over his shoulders, Meda was leading and they were following up the narrow paths on the cliff face that generations of sheep had made. He heard their singing, in quiet, throaty voices. Haquim was ahead of him, labouring over the rocks. He climbed slowly and carefully, never looking back or down. Around him, he heard the songs of men going to war.

Sarah stood by the two Landcruisers, the bodyguards crowded around her. The customs men on the Syrian side of the river were waving urgently for him to hurry, and the man in the ferry-boat was shouting for him. Her regional director kissed her awkwardly on the cheek. She didn’t know whether she believed what he’d said, that he worried more about her than any of his other field people. When he was back in his London home, with his wife or partner or boyfriend, would he be worrying about her? The visits were little light lines in the darkness of her everyday life, but they unsettled her. It would take a week to reassemble her existence, fall back into the routine of the isolation and exposure to suffering that were commonplace.

‘Keep safe, Sarah.’

‘Give my love to the office,’ she said flatly.

‘I’m going to do what I said I’d do.’

‘What’s that?’

‘British snipers hazarding your safety… raise hell.’

Under the glare of the afternoon sun he scrambled down the track towards the ferry.

She waved desultorily. She watched him climb aboard and the ferry carried him across the Tigris, towards Syrian territory, towards safety. Tomorrow she would be back in the high villages and her concern would be for children who had no school, no clinic and no hope. What could one sniper do, however fucking expert, however big his fucking rifle, to give the children hope, a clinic and a school? The ferry reached the far side of the river, and he ran to the car that would drive him to the airstrip for the feeder flight to Damascus.

She shouted after him, ‘I hope your back’s better in the morning. Don’t tell them in the office that you did it getting the Cruiser back on the road. Tell them you were escaping from a battalion of the Republican Guard…’

Gus had made the climb up the far side of the valley his bullet had crossed.

Only once before had he stood, silent, and looked down on the dead. Then, more than nine years before, he had steeled himself, erect, tall, and adopted a concerned expression.

Hands had plucked at the sleeves of his coat and led him between the clusters of wrapped shapes. He had tried, then, to close his ears to the persistence of the sobbing of the living.

Men had wept and women had cried out in their anguish and the tears had rolled down children’s cheeks. He could remember, then, that he had worried how they would bury so many bodies because there was little earth between the rock outcrops and that was frozen under the sporadic patches of snow. He could remember the endless crawling line of people coming down a track on a far slope towards the swaying rope bridge with their bundles, bags, cases and more dead. Sometimes, that was clear in his mind, the cloths that wrapped the corpses had been unwound so that he could see the faces of the dead, as if it was important to those who lived that he should share with them the agony of their loss.

They had died from hunger, thirst, cold, exhaustion, from wounds into which gangrene gas had spread infection, and from the cruelty of eccentric accidents. She had been with him as he had toured the panorama of the dead, always behind him and never speaking, never interrupting her father and grandfather, never weeping, never crying out. Her gaze had been impassive as her father had drawn back blankets and sacking to show the crushed faces of her sister and brother killed by a pallet of grain bags parachuted down from an American mercy flight. He had witnessed her strength.

Before they had left, then, the mountain slope of tents and plastic sheeting, the shivering living and the cold dead, he had said the unthinking words that he had mouthed several times before and since. At the doors of English crematoria and at the gates of cemeteries, he had taken the hands of mothers, widows and daughters, and murmured, ‘If there’s anything I can ever do to help, absolutely anything, then make contact, and I’ll do my best…’ It had been the decent thing to say. Empty words spoken before he had turned his back and hurried for the border, the car, the hotel and a damn great drink, all long ago, and the chance to put the dead from his mind.

Again, he saw the dead.

Again, the plucking hands pulled him forward.

The flies were on the face. They flew, buzzed, settled around the gaping mouth and the wide stare of the eyes and over the stubble set in the opaque skin. He saw a fly go into the man’s mouth while another rested on his eyeball.

Gus was brought closer.

He wanted to shrug their hands off him but he did not, could not. There was a pool of blood on the chest and more blood, which had earlier seeped from the hole in the corpse’s back. That, too, was a focus of the flies’ feeding frenzy. The coat and shirt that the living body would have dragged on in the dawn cold a few minutes before its owner’s death were pulled back to reveal the matted chest hair and the neatly drilled hole into which a pencil or a biro, of less than. 338 diameter, would have fitted comfortably. He remembered the moment at which he had fired, as the target had seemed to arch his back and his head had tilted to face the heavens and his god, to drink the freshness of the air. A man clawed a hand around his shoulder and cackled, squeezing his flesh as if to offer congratulations at the accuracy of the shot. He thought he belonged. A bullet of. 338 calibre moving at supersonic velocity, killing, had won him the respect of the men crowded close to him.

With a babble of voices around him he was taken into the home of the carcass, through the door that had been hammered down. The table was toppled over, the food trodden into the floor: there was a woman’s body and a young man’s, and the flies were worse.

They rose in swarms from the bloodied wounds at the corpses’ throats. He understood why the woman and the young man had been killed: they should not be able to carry away news of the attack over the plateau to the military position. He knew why they had been knifed: if they had been killed by gunfire the crash of the shots might have carried in the stillness of the early-morning air across the roll of the hills to the bunkers.

Gus thought of Stickledown. It would be quiet there after the previous day’s shooting, the targets would be lowered and the flags down. Would any of those who had fired the old weapons the afternoon before, his friends and his fellow enthusiasts, the other lunatics, comprehend what he had done, what had brought him to this place?

Perhaps the men around him had seen him rock on the balls of his feet, perhaps they had seen the pallor spread over his face… They took him out and around the building, through the crazily hanging door and into the annexe block. He was shown the smashed screen of the television, the cut cables and the radio. Grimed fingers jabbed at the typed sheets of paper that he presumed carried the codewords, frequencies and schedules of transmission.

Outside, with the sunlight on his face, he too drank at the air, gulped at its purity.

They ate from an iron pot that the boy had heated over the last embers in the stove inside. With his fingers he snatched saffron-flavoured rice, and palmed up the juicy swill of tomato and onion. Twice he found small scraps of meat, goat or mutton.

She had not eaten with them.

As the light sank they moved off.

She was ahead.

In the middle of the straggling column of men was the boy, burdened by the bags of food and the emptied iron pot. He skipped between the men, talking all the time, and stayed with each one until their patience was exhausted and he was cuffed away to dance on, light-footedly, to his next victim.

Gus trudged alongside Haquim at the end of the column, and realized the mustashar, the commander, was finding the going hard over rock and scrub, over shallow gorges and up rock inclines. He saw the pain in Haquim’s grizzled, heavy-boned face and the sharp biting at his lower lip to stifle it. When Haquim stumbled and he put out his hand to offer help, it was pushed away. He wished he had slept more in the day, when the chance had been given. They would march in the evening, then he and Haquim would go forward in the night. The sun was dazzlingly fierce and starting the slide below a rim of granite rock.

Twice, now, Haquim had stopped and steadied himself, breathing hard, then sighed and gone on. At the head of the column, he saw Meda drop down into a gully, near to the last ridge. He stayed with Haquim. He did not know whether he should insist on carrying part of the load balanced in a backpack on Haquim’s spine. The column ahead waited for them in the gully.

Gus hadn’t seen the boy turn when he materialized from among the rocks and wind-bent scrub close to them. All the time that he had been walking alongside Haquim, peering into the sun’s fall, sometimes blinded by it, he had not seen the boy’s charge back towards them. The boy said nothing, came to Haquim, stripped off the backpack, heaved it up alongside his rifle, the food bags and the cooking pot, and there was no protest.

Then, again, with the sun in his face as it cringed below the ridge, he lost sight of the boy between the greying rocks and the darkening trees.

Haquim challenged him. ‘You think I am not able?’

‘I think nothing.’

‘I am able.’

‘If you say it then I believe you.’

‘You, you are the worry.’

‘Why am I the worry?’

‘I doubt your strength. I may have a broken knee but I have strength. When I look down at a body, at a man I have killed, my stomach does not turn, I am not a girl. Let me tell you, Mr Peake, what you saw was as nothing to what the Iraqis would do to any of us, and to you. Do you know that?’

‘Yes, I know that.’

‘Today, for you, it is simple. Tomorrow, perhaps, it is easy. After tomorrow nothing is simple, nothing is easy. After tomorrow you will not look at me as if I am an aged cripple worthy of your sympathy, you will look at yourself.’

The first shadows of darkness cloaked them as they moved towards the second target.

He had showered, cold water to keep himself awake, eaten with the family, and gone out into the evening darkness.

Major Karim Aziz had yearned, again, to give some sign to his wife as to why he went out with his heavy waterproof tunic on and with the sports bag in his hand. There was nothing he could have told her. He could have lied about ‘Special Operations’ or manufactured an excuse involving ‘continuing night exercises’, but she always knew when he was lying. She’d done her best with the cooking for the family meal, and her mother would have spent hours on her slow old feet going round the open market stalls for the vegetables they could afford and a little meat. He had risen from the table, circled it and kissed in turn her parents, his boys and his wife. Then he had dressed for the night and left them.

The colder night air had cleared the smoke and smog. His view of the edge of the driveway, the steps and the villa’s main door was crystal sharp through the sight.

As a trusted professional soldier, with twenty-six years of proven combat experience behind him, Major Karim Aziz had access to any equipment he cared to demand. It would be bought abroad and smuggled by lorry from Turkey or Jordan into Iraq. But his needs were simple. He told the officers and senior NCOs he taught at the Baghdad Military College that in the area of infantry operations the art of sniping was as old and as unchanged as any. They should beware of state-of-the-art technology. He would say that if a child learned only to count with the aid of a pocket calculator, then went into a mathematics examination without it, he would fail – but the child who had learned to add, subtract and divide in his mind would pass that examination. He had learned the measuring of distance as a primitive skill, and had never asked for range-finding binoculars.

The distance from rifle barrel to target was critical, but he was satisfied he had made an accurate measurement. With correct adjustment to the elevation of the sights, the bullet would be two metres above the point he aimed at before dropping for the kill. Too great an estimation of distance, the bullet flew high and the target lived; too low, the bullet dropped too far and the target suffered a non-fatal wound… but he was satisfied with his appraisal of the distance. It was the freshening wind gusting around the edge of the roof’s water tank that bred the anxiety.

In daylight, he could have watched the flutter of the washing hung out on the roofs of the blocks of apartments fronting on to Rashid Street, al-Jahoun Street and Kifah Street.

Through his binoculars, he would have seen the mirage of dust and insects, carried by the wind, and there would have been the drift of smoke and smog. At night, peering through the black curtain of darkness towards the illuminated window of the driveway, the steps and the front door, there was no accurate way he could tell the strength of the wind beyond the blow around the forward edge of the water tank. At that range, his bullet would be in the air for one and a quarter seconds; one surge of wind gusting for two or three hundred metres between buildings would bend the bullet’s flight a few, several, centimetres and make the difference between killing and missing. But, with his experience, he did not require a calculator to make the adjustment to his PSO-1 sight. His intuition told him to compensate for a 75-degree wind direction at a strength of ten kilometres per hour, and his adjustment to the windage turret meant that his actual aim, if the target came, would be some eleven centimetres to the left.

If he was wrong, the bullet would miss, and if the bullet missed, a black hell would fall on the conspirators and on their families. What Major Karim Aziz feared most was that he would shoot and fail.

But he believed in himself, in his ability, in the certainty of his intuition. If he had not, he would not have been chosen.

An hour after he had taken up his position, he had seen car headlights sweep in a half-circle on the driveway 545 metres from him. The radio linked to his earpiece had remained silent. He had stiffened – in case the radio malfunctioned – aimed, and rested his finger on the trigger. He had watched the woman go up the steps and through the villa’s door. She’d been flanked by men, but she was tall and they were a step behind her.

He had seen, through the sight’s lens, the auburn richness of her hair, and the proud swing of her shoulders. She was carrying boutique bags… The target had not been with her, and his finger had slid away from the trigger. A shop, importing Italian or French clothes, would have been opened especially for her in the evening. The dresses she carried in the bags would have cost, each, more than he earned as an army major in a full twelve months. Not that she would have paid, not that the bastard’s most recent mistress would have been asked to delve in her wallet or purse for banknotes.

If she had new clothes to show off, then perhaps the bastard would come.

Aziz lay on his stomach on the mat, and the stiffness crept through his limbs.

The villa in the side road behind Kifah Street was closed off behind road blocks. The pedestrian public of Baghdad were denied access to that side road and to others in the city where high dignitaries lived or kept their women. From the end of the side road, when he had reconnoitred, Major Karim Aziz had seen a wall, a patrolling pair of sentries and a solid gate. There was no chance of inserting a culvert bomb in the streets at either end of the side road, and less chance of putting a marksman closer.

He had once met the target, in Basra, in the third year of the war with Iran. He had stood in a line and waited for an hour, had been frisk-searched for weapons by agents of the Amn al-Khass. He had shaken the limp wet hand and had gazed for a moment into the cold power of the face, then watched the armour-plated car drive away. Aziz thought of himself as a patriot, but there would be many who would denounce him as a traitor.

The radio stayed open. In his ear was the constant murmur of static. If the target came, there would be three tone bleeps in his ear. The man with the radio was above a butcher’s shop on Kifah Street, opposite the side road.

The night wore on, and the streets below him gradually emptied. All the time his skin nestled against the cheek-pad on the butt of his rifle. It was because of his experience and his skill that he could concentrate totally on the small, brightly lit area enclosed by the telescopic sight.

The concentration dulled the enormity of the risk he took with his life and his family’s lives.

‘All I can tell you is that there are no British military personnel – I repeat no – stationed in northern Iraq.’

‘Are you calling me a liar?’

As soon as he’d reached a payphone at Damascus International, the regional director had called the embassy and demanded of the duty officer that someone with the rank of first secretary should be at the airport within an hour.

‘It’s best you listen carefully – there are no British military personnel deployed in northern Iraq, period.’

‘I saw him with my own eyes. Seven hours and ten minutes ago, I saw a sniper in camouflage gear with a sniper rifle. His name is Peake and he told me he comes from Guildford, Surrey… My people live on the edge there. They fulfil a humanitarian role in circumstances of difficulty and enormous personal risk. I have a responsibility for my people who are beyond the reach of help, most especially when a British marksman – I assume he’s Special Forces – is roaming loose on their territory. If I don’t have your immediate guarantee of action then, on my arrival in London, I’ll be phoning every tabloid newspaper.’

‘That won’t be necessary. I hope you have a good flight.’

They lay beside each other, waiting for the dawn, among the rocks.

Haquim said that he did not know whether the position, the network of bunkers and trenches, would have thermal-imaging equipment.

It would be two more hours before they would see, for the first time, the scattered shapes of the bunkers, the radio antenna and the unit’s pennant. There was a single pinprick of light for them to watch, as if one lamp burned in a low cement-hardened bunker and was visible through a firing-port. There were high stars in shapes – he recognized some of the formations – but there was no moon. Ahead of him was the single lamp’s light with an endless seam of blackness around it. Somewhere, close to the light, was the officer that Haquim had told him he would target. He thought the man would be young, still in the first flush of youth, and he would be sleeping, and in his mind would be the image of a girl or his mother, or his home. He never thought, lying still and stiff, feeling the damp creep through the rubber mat, through the reinforced canvas knee and elbow pads of the overalls with the hessian straps, that the target would toss on a camp bed in the horror of a nightmare of fear.

When he closed his eyes to rest them, when Haquim did not grunt and break the quiet, hallucinations played in his mind of a line of men who had gone before him, the ghosts of his trade.

He made fantasy pictures of them to go with the remembered words he had read.

He lay with the Indian fighter, Tim Murphy, who had sniped the British general Fraser in the Hudson river valley. Beside him was Major Wade of the 2nd Battalion 95th Rifles, the marksman who had held the wall of the La Haye Sainte farm barns at Waterloo. Close to him was Jim the Nailer on the makeshift parapets around the Residency at Lucknow… and there was Hesketh-Prichard, his favourite, the big-game hunter turned sniper, who had said Germans in their trenches should be treated merely as ‘dangerous soft-skinned game’… and there was Billy Sing, the Australian who had shot 150 Turks at Gallipoli.

There was the marine at Saipan in the Pacific, who had destroyed a Japanese machinegun nest at 1,200 yards with his vintage Springfield rifle, and the soldier at Hue in Vietnam who was seen to gain a kill at a measured 1,400 yards. They were all around him, close and near to him. The heritage was passed down to him, hand to hand, rifle to rifle, target to target. Would any of them, in the darkness before dawn, in the cold of a slow wait, have cared whether the chosen target slept easily or shook in the hold of a nightmare?

‘I’m Carol Manning. This is Captain Willet.’

‘What time is it?’

‘If it matters, it’s eight minutes to five. Don’t get any persecuted ideas that I enjoy being out of bed at this time of night. It makes it legally easier if you invite us in.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Security Service, he’s some sort of soldier. Are you inviting us in?’

‘If I don’t…’

‘Then my foot stays in the door while we ring for the police to come with a search warrant. I wouldn’t advise that – things get broken then.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘Because the electoral roll tells us this is the home of Augustus Henderson Peake.’

‘This is Gus’s place, yes.’

‘You’re inviting us in? Thank you, that’s being sensible.’

She stood aside to let them pass. Willet had done dawn raids in the old Belfast days.

The woman’s confusion, failure to demand credentials and proper explanations, did not surprise him.

‘Are you Peake’s wife?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘What are you then? Tenant, lodger, common-law, partner?’

‘Girlfriend, I suppose you’d call it, maybe just friend. My name’s Meg. If it matters, I’m divorced, I have no children, I’m a junior-school teacher.’

‘It’s not important. Where is he? Where’s Peake?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t the faintest idea.’

At last, the way it always was, a little spark had come to the woman’s eyes. Ken Willet, captain, detached from his regiment to duty at the Ministry of Defence, heard Ms Manning swear quietly. The woman’s nightdress hung like a heavy, bulky shroud over her body.

‘Maybe I should make a cup of tea,’ Willet said.

‘No, we will.’

It was an instruction. Ms Manning turned and gave him the eye. He understood. The kitchen for the women, and for him the search through the living room and the bedrooms.

Willet had never worked alongside the Security Service before. His telephone had gone an hour and thirty-five minutes earlier. It was about a sniper, he’d been told by the night desk, and he knew a little about sniping – though not as much as he’d have wished – and he’d be picked up. Throwing on his clothes, he’d heard a horn hoot down in the street.

He’d expected a smelly old blighter in a dirty raincoat, his image of a counter-intelligence officer, and she’d reached over, held open the door for him, then accelerated away before he’d settled, before he’d belted up. She’d grumbled all the way down about the assignment, the time, the condition of the car, her rates of pay, the weather… but she drove well and fast.

He started to search. He heard the whistle of the kettle and the clatter of mugs. Carol Manning was expert at her work, and the talk had already begun. He heard the murmur of the woman’s voice.

‘Everything in Gus’s life is about shooting at targets with that old rifle. I’m not complaining, but I come after shooting, way after… I suppose we need each other. We go to the cinema, we watch television, we eat together. Sometimes I stay over, sometimes I don’t – never on a Friday because that’s the night before shooting, never on a Saturday because that’s cleaning the rifle after shooting. I’m just around, whether he notices, whether he doesn’t. It suits me and it suits him, but the shooting’s what matters.’

The silver spoons were thrown carelessly at the back of a drawer, and he didn’t think they’d been polished since the day they were handed out as prizes.

‘He cut his hair short four years ago, not because I asked him to, but because he hadn’t shot well one day and he thought the wind blowing his hair across his face had distracted him. Three years ago, he gave up smoking overnight, not because I wanted him to but he thought it affected his breathing pattern in the moment of aiming and firing. We jog three evenings a week, but that’s because a target marksman needs to be at top fitness. Look, up there, there’s a diet sheet. He barely eats before he shoots so that his stomach’s comfortable. He lives for his shooting. For pure happiness, he should just put up a tent on Stickledown Range, at Bisley, and live there. He’s in this club, the Historic Breech loading and Small-arms Association, and they fire these old rifles. There’s a Martini-Henry and a Mauser, a Mosin-Nagant M1891, a Garand, and the secretary shoots a Sharp’s breech-loader. I know what they’re called because I take a picnic and go with him most times, not that I get any conversation. They’re funny people – nothing wrong with them, they’re decent – and they’re obsessed with these rifles that are a hundred years old. All they talk about when they’re shooting is wind-deflection and the humidity that affects the fall of the bullet, ammunition quality, and holding the zero. Do you know?

They were quite upset when he didn’t turn up for the last club shoot. Jenkins, that’s the secretary, rang me – rather aggressively, I thought – to find out where Gus was, why he hadn’t been there. Was he ill? Why hadn’t he phoned? There’s been complaints from the group that they’d shot poorly because Gus wasn’t there. They shoot at eight hundred yards, right up to a thousand, and Gus wasn’t there, no explanation, and they couldn’t perform – and that was Gus’s fault. He’s the best one amongst them, you see, far and away the best, and they need him. I wouldn’t call them friends, but they lean on each other. They’re all a little sad, really, to an outsider – not that they’d think so.’

In the back of another drawer, not hidden away, was a packet of photographs that showed posed groups of men who held old rifles and stood or knelt as a celebration of comradeship. They were not sorted, not in order, as if they were unimportant and seldom looked at.

‘He’s very ordinary – that’s not a criticism – no interest in making an impression. I met the people he works with at last year’s Christmas party. I think they were quite surprised to see him turn up with a woman… I didn’t tell them, and none of them mentioned the shooting, didn’t know about it. He hardly shares it with me. We were drifting along, a boat on a canal, and then the letter came – you know about the letter, do you?’

First he discovered the keyring, hanging from a thin nail on the underside of the bed’s wooden leg, then the gun cabinet bolted to the wall at the back of the wardrobe. He recognized the Lee Enfield No. 4, with the telescopic sight, and the box of ammunition of match grade with the Full Metal Jacket of cupro-nickel casing. He locked the cabinet, returned the keyring to its hiding place.

‘I’d met him after work, on Newlands Corner. It’s good for running there – it’s wonderful, because you can go for miles, high up and with the wind on you, and the village lights all below you. You run better in the dark, it’s liberating. He was quite chatty on the way home, and I thought I’d stay. We’re not much good, either of us, at the sex bit, but some nights it’s better than others – why am I telling you this? His post was on the mat. There was a letter from his grandfather, and another letter with it. He just sat in his chair and read the other letter again and again, and never showed it me. I didn’t even bother to cook, there was no point, and I went back to my place.’

In an old folder in an unlocked desk, held together with a bulged paper-clip, were the scoring charts. Under the heading ‘ALL-IN SCORE DIAGRAM FOR LONG-RANGE TARGET’ were the tables for wind-deflection, weather conditions, and the target circles.

There were no neat crosses in outer, inner, magpie or bull. All the crosses, on every scoring chart, were in the V-Bull circle, which was sixteen inches in diameter, and the ranges for the charts were eight hundred yards, nine hundred yards and a thousand yards.

He felt a sense of respect.

‘He packed up, it was like he was closing down his life here. I’ve never made demands of Gus, certainly I’ve never pestered him with questions, but I did ask, “What’s it about?

Where’s it from, the letter?” He didn’t answer. I know he went to see his grandfather the next day, but that’s all I know, and that’s nothing… He paid off all his bills. He dealt with everything outstanding. He spent more and more time away, before he finally headed off. I’d be here, and sometimes he’d show up late and dump his stuff in the hall, sometimes his briefcase and sometimes his rucksack. Old people do that, don’t they, when they’re going to go into hospital, deal with everything? We didn’t have much of a life by other people’s standards but, God, I miss him.’

In the hall, on a line of coat-hangers behind a curtain screen, were old, dry, mud-smeared trousers and a patched all-weather coat that hadn’t been cleaned. On a hook was a wide-brimmed, shapeless hat. He noted that there were no boots on the floor below the hangers. Of course, a man would have taken his boots… Later he found tax documents in the name of Peake, Augustus Henderson, and electricity, telephone and gas bills, cheque book stubs and bank statements. He noted the last withdrawal and whistled to himself in surprise – eight thousand pounds taken out and the deposit account almost cleared.

‘I came round two weeks ago. I thought that if he was here I could cook a meal for him. He was packing. It wasn’t a suitcase but the rucksack, and everything he put in was old, should have been thrown away years ago. I never did get round to cooking anything.

We made love on the bed beside the rucksack, and I wept all through it – it’s none of your business, but it was the best loving we ever did. He seemed to need it. I woke up early, and he’d gone… I don’t know why because he didn’t tell me, and I don’t know where he is.’

The music beside the stereo was bland, popular classics and easy listening. The books on the shelves were all technical shooting volumes. The pictures were anonymous prints of dull, well-worn country views. He thought that target marksmanship with an historic rifle consumed the man’s life – but there was nothing to tell Ken Willet, from what he rummaged through and saw, of the soul of the man. But there had to be something more, or he’d be here, not slogging in the missing boots through northern Iraq.

‘He’s just a nice man, a good man. I can’t tell you anything more.’

They left her.

Carol Manning drove the car away, down the road below the cathedral, from a cramped and unremarkable two-bedroomed maisonette.

‘Well?’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Is he a military wannabe – into all that Rambo crap?’

‘No. He shoots at targets with an historic weapon, and with great skill. His rifle is fifty-plus years old. He’s an enthusiast.’

‘A bloody anorak? Like one of those idiots on a platform writing down train numbers?’

Willet said evenly, ‘He shoots very straight. He wins prizes for hitting targets at a range of up to a thousand yards.’

‘It’s one thing to hit targets. What about killing people?’

‘I found nothing to indicate that he has the slightest interest in the military situation in-’

‘So what the hell’s he doing there?’

‘She said the letter was passed on by his grandfather. Ask him.’

‘Can’t today. Health and Safety says we’re entitled to a full day off after a night call-out. I’ve a lieu day tomorrow. Have to be the day after.’

‘I thought it was urgent.’

‘We do have entitlements. Doesn’t the army?’

‘Do you mind if I have a cigarette?’ Willet was reaching into his jacket pocket for the packet and his lighter.

‘It’s Service policy that no cigarettes, cigars or pipes are to be used in our vehicles.’

Willet said brightly, ‘Aren’t we lucky? Where he is, stomping through northern Iraq, passive smoking would seem low down on the problem list.’

It was a cheap point. He should have, but hadn’t, apologized. He wanted, rather desperately, to know more of a man who had packed up his life and gone without training and without military background to fight in someone else’s war.

‘I’d like, Ms Manning, to be with you on this one and follow it through. I’d like to learn about him.’

Her eyes never left the road. She asked brutally, ‘How long do you give him?’

‘Not long. Sorry, not long at all, but he’d be an idiot not to know that. If he’s gone to fight, front line, as a sniper, alongside irregulars, against a trained modern army, then he won’t survive. No chance at all.’