Holding the Zero

Chapter Three

‘I have to leave you, Mr Peake,’ the voice whispered in his ear.

Gus had not been thinking of Meg, or of the office at Davies amp; Sons, or of his parents and the old wing commander (retired) who was his grandfather, and he had not been thinking of the Stickledown crew. They were all erased from his mind, as if a new life had replaced them.

He did not care whether Meg had slept that last night in bed at her home or whether she had been in his bed. He did not consider that his parents might have tossed through the last night, and those of the weeks before, in anxiety for his safety, or that they held his grandfather responsible for his going.

‘You have what you need, Mr Peake. You know what you will do?’

His view, through the fine netting over his face, stretched away from the rocky outcrop where he lay with Haquim across a slope of yellowed grass in which were set clumps of bright flowers, mauve, white and blue. There was then a ridge where the wind had eroded the soil and exposed more of the grey stone, then a valley gorge from which he could hear the tumble of a stream, then the further slope of the valley, pocked with more outcrops and more flower clusters. The sun was behind him, and intruding against the gentle blue of the sky was a single military pennant. Gus had a moment of doubt.

‘What if he doesn’t come?’

Gus could see a clean-cut low slit in the forward bunker’s facing wall of pale grey concrete, and further back was a similar shape over which the pennant flew. Between the forward bunker and the pennant was a narrow column of smoke, drifting haphazardly, but the pennant gave Gus an indication of the wind strength at what would be the end of the bullet’s flight, if he had a target to aim for. When his eye was off the sight, he watched the colours of the flowers and the movement of grass tufts, because the sway of the petals and the waft of the grass stems told him what would be the deflection of the bullet when it left the barrel at 2,970 feet per second, at 2,640 revolutions per second, if he had a target.

‘I know the way of officers. Each morning, however junior, if he has responsibility, he will inspect all his positions.’

‘What if I don’t see him? What if he’s going low through the communications trench?’

‘He is an officer of the Iraqi army. He will not permit his soldiers to see him cower.’

‘The radio?’

‘Do you think I have nothing more to do than to place you in position? Of course there is the radio. My problem is the radio, the wire, the mines, and my problem is wondering whether you make a hit. You have one chance. Everything depends on you taking that chance.’

Haquim’s hand caught at the back of his hood and held his hair, vice-like, then loosened it. It was not a gesture of friendship, or of support. Gus thought the man had tried to reinforce what he had said. They depended on him and there would be the one chance with the one shot. If Gus missed there would not be a second. The radio would be used to call up reinforcements; the advantage of surprise would be lost.

A different man, one from Augustus Henderson Peake’s past, might have crumpled under the burden of that responsibility. But the past was obliterated. A man had told him about positive thinking – can, will, must – the critical importance of mental conditioning, and the corrosive effect of stress. He had no time to wallow in the past. First, at dawn, he had estimated the distance, then confirmed his estimate with the range-finding binoculars, and all the time he had studied the flowers and the grass fronds, the smoke and the pennant for the wind. His mind was as tunnelled as his view through the ten-times magnification of the sight. Alone, spread-eagled among the rocks behind his rifle, his concentration only settling on the clear window through the sight’s lens, Gus never saw the goatherd and his flock’s slow progress far to the right.

The goatherd understood weapons. Hooked across the width of his back was a Russian-made SKS46 carbine, mass-manufactured half a century before. Its worn barrel was incapable of accurate shooting. If a wild dog was harrying his goats he could drive it off by firing over it, but to hit it he would have to be within fifty paces, and he could have thrown a stone that far. But the rifle was as much a part of him as the knife at his belt or the heavy footwear that carried him between the high grazing lands; it was a segment of his manhood. His friendship of more than twenty years with a shepherd was the most likely source of a new weapon.

His friend had access to influence and to weapons. Over the last few weeks, the goatherd had been worming towards the direct request to his friend that a rifle might be found for him – not a new one, a working replacement for his carbine.

The previous morning, he had heard the single shot. He had been an hour’s walk with his flock from his friend’s home, with the first warmth of the day’s sun on his face, when he had heard the long, rippling echo. He knew from the sound of its carry that the bullet had travelled over a great distance, further than his friend’s Kalashnikov was capable of firing. He had left the goats in a small sloping valley and gone on his stomach to a clutch of rocks that gave him a vantage-point above his friend’s home.

His eyesight was as keen as his hearing. From the cool of the early morning, through the heat of the day, into the cold of the evening, he had watched the home of his friend, the body of his friend, and the killer. He had seen the rifle that had taken his friend’s life, and the sight mounted on it. He had waited in his secret place until the killer, and the murderers with him, had moved off into the dusk.

In the darkness, keeping the goats with him by using the reed whistle to which they responded, he had gone slowly and quietly towards the military bunkers. He felt the anger aroused by a blood vendetta – and if he were fortunate, and brought good information, he might be given a new rifle.

The pennant flew slackly over the bunkers, and he whacked his goats’ backs and haunches with a short stick each time they found sparse grass to feed on. He hurried them forward so that he could report what he had seen.

The lieutenant was woken.

He cursed viciously at the conscript, no younger than himself, who had woken him and not brought fresh coffee. He threw on his uniform, dragged on his boots, then yelled at the soldier that the boots were not cleaned, and that a fresh shirt had not been laid out for him.

He bent his head, emerged from the dank shadows of his bunker and strode along the trench connecting it to the command post. Only the lieutenant, because of his rank and education, was permitted to use the radio. He made and received all transmissions. The set bleeped, a red light winked for attention.

He slotted on the headphones and threw the switches. He responded to the call from Kirkuk. There was anxiety. The forward observer, codenamed Call-sign 17, had now missed three transmissions: probably a malfunction, or maybe storm damage to the booster antenna. He was ordered to check the cause of the malfunction, to retrieve the radio if he believed the fault lay there, or to visit the booster antenna on the summit point to the west if that was the likely area of the problem. He would respond, of course, to the order, and immediately. He ended the transmission.

The lieutenant cursed again. To reach the location of Call-sign 17 he must go on foot.

There was no track passable to a vehicle between his own position and the Call-sign’s location. It was six kilometres across country, and it would be six kilometres back. To cover twelve kilometres over that ground of rock and bog, where he could stumble and bark the skin on his knees on the rock or sink to his thighs in hidden mud, would take the entire day, in the company of the peasants he commanded. He was twenty-one. He was the eldest son of a family of the Tikriti tribe. He had a future ahead of him as bright as that of his father who commanded an artillery regiment in the Basra region and his uncle who led an armoured division of the Republican Guard facing the Kuwaiti frontier. But the future, bright and glittering and perhaps one day offering him a place in the Hijaz Amn al-Khass unit that protected the President, was deferred until a year of military service in the north was completed. He hated the place. It was cold, wet, harsh, and he was marooned in a small complex of damp bunkers with only idiots for company. He hoped that one day, soon, the President, the leader of the Tikriti tribe, would give the order for them to mount up in the armoured personnel carriers and ride further north, right to the borders, and bring the bastard Kurds back under the authority of Baghdad.

There was an old corporal, double his age, in the position, the only man with whom he could talk, and each time he told the corporal of his hope that, one day, the President would unleash the columns of armoured personnel carriers to drive north, the corporal gazed at him as if he were a fool and knew nothing. When his duty was over, when he was posted back to Kirkuk, he would see that the corporal suffered for his silent insolence.

He came out of the command post. Four men would go with him to the location of Call-sign 17, leaving four and the corporal behind in the bunkers.

There was coffee now, steaming but failing to improve his temper, and the lieutenant said that he would take his breakfast when he had inspected the position, then start the cross-country trek. And the lazy bastards, with the corporal, would sleep all day without him there to goad them on with their work. The early-morning light was into his face, and sprang little diamonds of brightness from the wire that ringed the areas in front of and flanking the position where the mines were laid.

The corporal led him on the morning inspection. The corporal always scurried forward, like a hurrying rat, along the communications trenches. He had been in Kuwait nine years before, at the time of the Mother of all Victories.

The lieutenant never bent his back. It was not right that an officer of the Tikriti tribe should cower, and he knew of no danger confronting at him as he went along the trench.

He rounded a corner reinforced with sandbags and rocks. A soldier had laid his rifle down in the mud and was urinating onto the side of the trench. With his full strength, the lieutenant punched the man in the back of the head, saw him stagger and crawl away.

He went to the forward bunker of rough concrete, around which were defensive coils of wire where the mines were laid most thickly. He went inside. He thought the soldier on sentry in the bunker had shit there. He could smell it. A candle was guttering low, throwing shadows towards the firing port through which the morning sunshine streamed.

It would have burned all night. It was expressly forbidden to have lights inside the bunkers during the darkness hours. He came behind the sentry, peered over his shoulder and out through the gun port. To the extreme right he saw the distant movement of the goatherd and his animals. To the left and ahead there was nothing, just the rock, the green of the grass over the bog areas, and the wind-flattened small bare trees. He steadied himself and kicked the sentry hard. When the sentry fell to the bunker floor, whimpering, he kicked him again, belted the hands that covered the sentry’s groin, then squeezed out the candle flame with his fingers.

He knew they loathed him, the corporal included. His father had told him, and his uncle, that his men should be more afraid of him than of any enemy.

He stepped out of the bunker. He swore again, because he now had the sentry’s shit on his boot. He was not thinking of home, or of the daughter of his father’s cousin, or of his mother, or of the discotheque music that he played on the radio beside his bed, or of a bright and glittering future… but of the shit on his boot.

The corporal was going on down the trench, bent, scampering.

The lieutenant died, not gloriously, as he wiped the sentry’s shit off his boot, spreadeagled against a sandbag.

The bullet came into the broad width of his back, created an instant hydraulic shockwave through his life organs, yawed in his chest cavity and destroyed the shape of his heart, making a hole the size of a well-juiced orange as it burst out past his tunic buttons. Misshapen, tumbling, it flew past the corporal’s head and splattered into the mud wall at the back of the communications trench.

His life lingered a few seconds before he died. His last sensations were those of a burning numbness through his upper body. His last sight was of the corporal turning to stare at him in wide-eyed shock. His last hearing was the hammer of a machine-gun beginning to fire. His last thought was that, without him, the peasants would break and run.

He was the future of the regime, a favoured son, and he died with a sentry’s shit on his boot.

The goatherd had heard the single shot, as he had heard it the day before. For a moment he froze in his tracks, and the silence settled, then the machine-gun started up.

He watched the bright lines of tracers arc across the open ground and fall on the roofs and walls of the bunkers.

He whistled sharply and started to run. The persistence of the goatherd’s whistling and the clatter of the machine-gun, and the blast of individual rifles firing on automatic, drove his animals in flight after him, as if he were their salvation.

He set off, at the best speed he could muster with the goats, for a long journey across pathless ground. It would take him all morning and most of the afternoon before he reached the next army unit based below the high ground, at the Victory City, where he sold his goats’ cheese and their meat.

The guilt hit him, sea waves of remorse broke over Gus.

He had seen the face of the target, the shoulders and the upper chest, before the target had gone down into the forward bunker, and the face had been that of a young man. A smooth-skinned face, with a dark moustache, and unkempt hair, as if he had just risen from his bed. All the time he had waited, while the target was inside the forward bunker, while the sight was locked on the few feet of ground outside the entry to the bunker, he had been unable to discard that face, and he had played pictures with the life of the officer – had seen him standing proud in the doorway of a home, had seen his mother kiss him, his father shake his hand, had seen a girl standing back and shy but with the love-light in her eyes, had seen him walk away from home with the big pack on his back, waving a farewell. He had seen the tears in the eyes of the mother, the father and the girl.

The officer had come out of the bunker and stopped. Gus’s aim was on his back. It was as if the target stopped to blink in the sun after the darkness inside the bunker. He had fired. The rifle was fitted with a muzzle brake that reduced the recoil and the jump of the barrel to a minimum. His view through the sight had been constant. He could follow the flight of the bullet. Some called the vortex of the bullet’s journey the ‘wash’, others called it the ‘contrail’. Whatever it was, he could see it, a swirl and disturbance that fluttered the air. He had seen the bullet’s track all the way across the valley and he had seen it strike. Arms had gone high into the air, and the target had fallen.

Then the chatter of the machine-gun had begun.

He had tried and tried again to clear the face of the officer from his mind… The machine-gun that Haquim had sited played a pattern of fire onto the bunker above which was the radio antenna. There had been sporadic return fire. He understood why Haquim had left him, alone and with his guilt, to go back and position the machine-gun. With the officer gone, only a very brave man would have risked exposing himself to the battering of the machine-gun shells on the bunker. The peshmerga had pushed forward in a straggling line.

He had watched her, then lost her as she descended into the valley, and had seen her running up the far slope towards the ridge, the wire and the pennant. Through the telescopic sight, he could see her urge the men forward with a wild sweep of her arm. He had raked back across the ground, through the line of men with whom the boy ran, then found open ground and had seen Haquim limping behind them. When they were close to the wire and bunching to go through the corridors between the mines, slashing the view of his telescopic sight, he had seen the soldiers in flight from their bunkers. Weapons and helmets were thrown down. They took their wounded with them, but not the corpse of their officer.

She was on the roof of the command bunker snatching down the pennant. It was then that the guilt died, when he, Augustus Henderson Peake, shed the last trace of remorse.

She stood on the bunker’s flat roof, punching the clean, clear air around her in triumph.

He felt a desperate state of exhilaration, and was not shamed by it. Time after time, as the peshmerga gathered around and below her, she raised her fist to the skies.

The lines of the sight were on her in her moment of victory. If a marksman as good as himself had had that aim then she was dead. He collected up his equipment, stood and massaged the muscles in his legs to restore the circulation and stretched, arching his back to ease the stiffness.

Slowly, with an uneven, unsteady stride, Gus walked towards the bunkers.

The life of the corporal hung on a slender thread.

If he were believed his flight would be forgiven. If he were not, he would be shot as a deserter.

Across an endless wilderness of rock plains and marshes, up escarpment cliffs, down into gullies with swollen streams, he had led his men to safety. As the sun fell, he had reached the village and the company-sized unit of mechanized infantry.

He sat in the corridor outside the captain’s room in the biggest house in the village that was classified by the regime as a Victory City. The cries of his two wounded men echoed down the corridor. He sat on the floor with his hands clasped on his head. If his hands moved the guard kicked him. He recited in his mind, over and over, the story he had told the captain.

‘I often said to him that he should always use the cover of the communications trenches. I do not wish to speak ill of a martyred hero but he did not listen. Major Aziz of the Baghdad Military College can confirm that I attended his course two years ago. He taught us about the sniper. It was what he called “crack and thump”. You hear the crack beside you, then you hear the thump from the firing position. If the crack and the thump are together then the sniper is close. The major said that you would know how far away the sniper was by the time between the crack and the thump. It was between one and two seconds – so I think that is about seven hundred metres. We all fired but none of us, even with a good Dragunov, could hit the targets at that range. Only he, and he is the best, was accurate. It was a very expert sniper that killed the lieutenant. We are forbidden to use the radio, but it was impossible anyway to reach it because there was heavy machine-gun fire at the approach trench to that bunker. We had wounded, we were about to be overrun.

There were many scores of saboteurs attacking us. I have many times served my country in northern Iraq, but I never heard of a “primitive” who could shoot so straight at seven hundred metres with a rifle. It was my duty to report it.’

If they did not believe him he would be kicked again, hit around the head with a rifle butt, taken out of the building, stood against the wall and shot. It was the truth: in all the years he had fought in the north he had never confronted a ‘primitive’, a tribesman, who could shoot with accuracy at such a distance. He could hear the low voices behind the door as the captain and his two lieutenants discussed what he had told them. He had not mentioned that a woman led the final charge towards the bunkers because that would not have been believed.

The door swung open.

The captain stood over him, took the final breath from a cigarette, then ground it out against the corporal’s forehead. He screamed. He heard the rasping voice denounce him as a coward, as a disgrace to his unit. The kicks came fast and hard into his body. He had betrayed the sacred trust of the Iraqi army. The rifle butt crashed down on to the hands that protected his scalp. And then he smelled the stale old stench of the animals.

The goatherd had been brought into the corridor by two soldiers. His arms were held tight.

The corporal believed that his ribs were broken and he felt the blood on his face. He listened to what the goatherd told the captain, and it was a second thread on which his life rested.

‘It was a long shot that killed my friend who was a true and loyal servant of the Iraqi army, and the same long shot this morning took the honoured life of the officer. I saw the man who fires the long shots. Yesterday afternoon, before he went to walk in the night towards the place where he shot the officer, he sat outside my friend’s house. He has a big rifle, the devil’s rifle, bigger than I have and you have. I do not think he is a peshmerga. He wore clothes that also I have never seen before. It is only when he moves that you see him. If he does not move then he is like a rock or a pile of earth. I have never seen a man like this devil before.’

The corporal reached forward and took the ankle of the goatherd and held it tight, as if to thank him for the saving of his life.

He crawled to his feet and he was not kicked, not hit. He heard the captain inside his room shouting on the radio.

He whispered to the goatherd, ‘You did not tell them about the woman…’

‘I told them what would be believed.’

It was his birthday, and he had forgotten it.

When he had woken that morning, after three hours’ sleep, the children had been round the bed and had shaken him so that he could open the presents they had brought him. His elder son had given him a pen of sterling silver, and he had unwrapped the white shirt offered by his younger son. His wife’s present was a narrow gold ring that fitted easily onto the little finger of his right hand. He had kissed each of them, and thanked them hoarsely.

Major Karim Aziz had gone to work in his office at the Baghdad Military College, and in the afternoon he had locked his door, pulled down the blinds, put his feet on the desk and slept for two and a quarter precious hours. As he slept, the fingers of his left hand clutched the gold ring. Before drifting off, he had thought that it was as though Leila sought to bring him back to her, to wrestle him from the grasp of devils. It had been a good, deep sleep, free of dreams and nightmares.

He had returned home refreshed for the family meal in celebration of his forty-fifth birthday. The children had changed from their school uniforms to their best clothes, his wife wore a fine blouse of Indian silk, her father was in his favourite suit and her mother in the dress she took out of the cupboard only on special occasions. At another time, on another day, he would have criticized his wife for the extravagance of the presents and the cost of the food she served, and there was a bottle of Lebanese wine that had been imported across the Jordanian border. But the wine poured for him stayed in his glass, because he did not dare to cloud his mind. He picked at the rice and cubes of curried beef and ate little, because he didn’t dare to fill his stomach with food. What hurt most, they all tried so hard to make it a happy day for him… and he could tell them nothing.

He resented what they had spent on him. Only at work, only at the Baghdad Military College, was his life not subject to the sapping frustration caused by the shortages. An American had said that Iraq would be bombed back to the Stone Age of history.

And what else was there to talk about around the table? Any conversation inevitably entailed more discussion of the shortages, whether in the street markets, at school or the children’s hospital. He ate little and drank nothing, and the silences around the table grew longer.

The telephone rang. Wafiq ran to answer it, hurrying to escape the quiet of the celebration.

A year after his marriage he had been posted to the Soviet Union for six months to learn infantry tactics. He had written to his wife twice every week while he was away, and babbled conversation to her of what he had seen for days after his return. Two years later he had been in Lebanon’s Beka’a Valley teaching those tactics to militiamen, and he had told her everything when he had come home. On leave from the battle fronts of Khorramshahr and Susangerd, he had written home of the war with Iran – careful letters that would not offend the censors – and he had talked to her on leave, walking on the esplanades beside the Tigris river where he would not be heard, of the horror of the street fighting. He had held back nothing of his times in Kirkuk and Mosul and Arbil in the north. Everything he had seen in Kuwait City, at the start and at the end, when he had fled from the advance of the American tanks on the charnel-house road through the Mutla Pass, he had shared with her, because he loved her. Now, he had nothing to talk of, and he pecked at his food, and her eyes never left the ring she had given him.

The boy came back, said the call was for him.

He pushed aside his plate, scraped back his chair, and went into the hallway. He lifted the telephone and gave his name.

The call was from a duty officer at the al-Rashid camp of the Military Intelligence, the Estikhabarat. He was ordered to attend the al-Rashid camp at nine o’clock the following morning. The call was terminated.

He rocked on his feet. It was a familiar pattern, known about by every officer of his rank and experience but never talked of. The Estikhabarat always summoned a suspect to the al-Rashid barracks, but watched his home through the night to see if he fled, and to block him if he did. He knew of such calls, and of the desks cleared the following day by strangers, then occupied by new men, and of the officers who were never seen again after they had travelled to the al-Rashid complex.

Major Karim Aziz breathed hard, and the sweat ran on his stomach and down the small of his back.

Around the table, beyond his sight and reach, his family – everyone he loved – was waiting for his return and wondering why he was so troubled.

He went into the bedroom, took his heavy coat from the hook on the door, and knelt to pull the sports bag out from under the bed. From the small cupboard beside the bed, always locked and closed from the sight of his wife and his sons, he took a Makharov automatic pistol and a single hand grenade. It was possible, with planning, for a general to cross the frontier if he used his authority, or his relatives, or a dignitary, but for a major at the Baghdad Military College, with his family, it would be a journey of exceptional difficulty. He put the hand grenade under his shirt, tightened his belt so that it could not slip down, and reassured himself that his fingers could feel the loop of the pin.

He went back into the dining room. The table had been cleared. Leila was coming out of the kitchen with the cake her mother had made that day. It was iced, decorated, it would be sugary sweet, the cake he liked best. He kissed Wafiq, and the boy stared down at his table place; then he kissed Hani and the tears ran on the child’s cheeks; then his wife; then her mother and father.

He could tell them nothing.

All of them, the officers who went under orders to the al-Rashid camp, believed in the faint hope of survival, went with the hesitant innocence of lambs herded to the butcher’s knife, deluding themselves that the anxiety was unfounded.

He stood in the kitchen doorway, holding the sports bag, and faced them. Behind him was the hallway, the front door, the concrete pad where the car was parked, the shadows of the poorly lit street. If the anxiety was well founded, the agents of the Estikhabarat would already be in those shadows, watching his house. Sometimes the bodies were brought back, if their families paid a few dinars for the bullets that had been used.

He turned away from them, switched off the kitchen light, then went out through the back door. He slipped past the new building where her parents slept, and scrambled over the wall at the end of the yard.

He would spend one more night beside the water tank on the flat roof. And, if they were waiting for him, if they were there to take him, he would pull the pin from the RG-42 high-explosive fragmentation grenade. Major Karim Aziz knew of no other road he should follow.

He thought it was his duty, in the name of Arab nationalism, socialistic modernism and his country, to go to the roof and pray that all was not known and that the bastard would step into the handkerchief of light on the driveway. He wondered if, without him, they would eat the cake… He walked briskly. Alone, without the responsibility of his family, he could again cloak himself with the assurance, confidence, self-esteem that marked him down as a master of the military science of sniping. It was why he had been recruited.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE.

Profile of subject compiled by K Willet (capt.), seconded MoD to Security Services.

Role of K Willet (capt.): In liaison with Ms Carol Manning (Security Service), to assess AHP’s capability as a marksman, and the effect of his presence in northern Iraq on military/political situation in that region.

AHP is British national, born 25-10-1965. Resident at 14D, Longfellow Drive, Guildford, Surrey.

Background: AHP’s presence in northern Iraq witnessed by Benedict Curtis (Regional Director of

Protect the Children registered charity) on 14 April.

AHP seen wearing combat sniper’s camouflage kit, with unidentified sniper rifle. No known past or present links with Ministry of Defence or other government agencies.

1. Conclusions after search of AHP’s home (see above). Subject is a competition marksman of the highest quality using a vintage weapon (Lee Enfield

No. 4). From his undemonstrative lifestyle, I would consider him to be of placid temperament and not subject to personal conceit; necessary characteristics of a champion target shooter. I found, however, no signs of his having made a study of military sniping – no books, magazines etc. – and no evidence of any interest in that area. Also, there were no indications as to the motivation of AHP in going to northern Iraq.

At first sight, he presents the picture of an eccentric enigma.

SUMMARY: Without strong motivation, military background, and a hunter’s mindset, I would rate his chances of medium-term survival as extremely slim.

(To be continued.)

Willet shut down his computer. Had he sold the man short? Without motivation, the background, and the necessary mindset, Gus Peake was as naked as the day he was born.

What a bloody fool…

‘So serious, so heavy…’ The twinkle was in her eyes, as if she mocked him.

Gus had watched her approach. She had moved quietly and effortlessly over the rocks towards him. He had lit a small fire that was deep down and sheltered by the crag stones.

He was wrapped in a blanket. A half-moon was up. She had come amongst her men: some reached up to touch her hand, some brushed their fingers against the heavy material of her trousers, and he’d heard her gentle words of encouragement. Haquim followed her, then the boy.

‘Maybe tired.’

She sat close to him. She had no blanket but she did not shiver. ‘I do not think so, I think angry.’

‘Maybe angry.’

‘It is the start of a journey – why angry?’

‘In fact, it’s the end of a day… and I think you’re probably the reason for my anger.’

‘Me?’ She pouted as if he amused her. ‘Why?’

‘It was just indulgence. You stood on the bunker, you waved your arms around like a kid on a football pitch. Anyone within half a mile could have shot you.’

Haquim hovered behind her, and the boy. She waved them back as a parent would have dismissed children. ‘Were you frightened for me? It is because I lead that I have the strength to make men follow me.’

‘In the American Civil War, at the Battle of Spotsylvania, the last words spoken by General John Sedgwick were, “What, what, men, dodging? I am ashamed of you. They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” He didn’t say any more, he was dead. Someone shot him.’

‘Who else can make the men follow them? Haquim? I do not think so

… Agha Bekir, agha Ibrahim. They won’t lead. I lead. Because I am at the front, not frightened, I will lead all the way to the flame of Baba Gurgur that burns over Kirkuk. The simple people pray to the flame as if it were God, and I will lead them there. Kirkuk is the goal. If we must die, then we must die for Kirkuk. We will sacrifice everything that we have -everything, our lives, our homes, our loved ones – for Kirkuk. It is only I who can take the people there. Do you believe me?’

Her eyes never left him. She was, he thought, neither beautiful nor pretty. There was a strange simplicity about her. He would have been hard put to describe it to a man who had never seen her. Her nose was too prominent, her mouth too wide. She had high, pronounced cheekbones, and a jaw that showed nothing of compromise. To a man who had never met her, he would have talked of her eyes. They were big, open, and at the heart of them were the circles of soft brown. With her eyes, he thought, she could win a man or destroy him. He had seen the way the peshmerga clustered around her to win a single short spasm of approval from her eyes, which never wavered, stared into his. Gus looked down and tried to snatch a tone of bitterness.

‘I have to believe you, I have no choice – but the “simple people” won’t get to see their flame if you are shot, prancing on a bunker.’

‘Is that the limit of your anger?’

‘You’ve been ignoring me…’

‘Oh, a criticism because I have forgotten my social manners. That is a very serious mistake. My grandfather tells me that the Iraqi Arabs in Baghdad used to say that all the British taught them was “to walk on the pavements and iron our trousers”, to behave like them and you, Augustus Peake. I apologize for my rudeness. Between my duties of raising and leading an army, I must speak to my newest recruit. Don’t sulk. If I spend time with you, favour you, then the peshmerga believe I bend my knee to a foreigner.

Because of foreigners, where are we? We are hopeless, lost, destitute. We were abandoned by the foreigners in 1975, in 1991, in 1996 – is that enough for you? You saw in 1991 what was our fate when we trusted the word of foreigners – on the mountain, starved, dying, fighting for food thrown down from the sky, for a few hours you saw it. If you believe you are superior, should have special attention – sheets to sleep on, comfort, food to your liking – go home. Turn round, take your rifle, go back, and read of me when I take my people to Kirkuk. Is there any other cause for anger?’

She lectured him gently, tauntingly, but with a soft sweetness at her mouth. It was as if she manipulated him, and dragged the irritation from him.

Gus said, surly, ‘You treat Haquim badly. He’s a good man.’

‘He is old.’ She shrugged. ‘Has he shown you his wound? The wound took the fire from him. He is a good man at arranging for the supplies of food for the men, and the ammunition they will use, and he knows the best place to site a machine-gun. Without the fire the simple people will not follow him. Always he is cautious, always he wants to hold back. He will never take us to Kirkuk. I will. Is there more, Gus?’

He would have said that he loathed arrogance above everything – a man with arrogance could not shoot. Sometimes at work it was necessary for him to deal with arrogant men and afterwards, in the privacy of his car or the quiet of the small office, he despised them. If written down, her words would have reeked of arrogance, and yet…

Her spoken words, he thought, were the simple truth. They would all, and himself, follow her because she believed with a child’s simplicity that she would win. Her confidence was mesmeric. He remembered when he had first met her, nine years before, and had thought her silence sullen, had not understood the strength her god had given her.

‘If you reach Kirkuk…’

‘ When – and you will be with me.’

‘When you reach Kirkuk what will you do then?’

‘Return to my village. Tell my grandfather what I have done. And I will be a farmer.

We have goats there, and a pig. Kurdistan will be free, my work will be done, and I will collect the fruit from the mulberry bushes and the pomegranate trees. I will be a farmer.

May I tell you something?’

‘Of course.’

The boy came with a plastic bowl of food for her, but she waved him away. Her hand rested on Gus’s shoulder, the gesture of an older man to an inexperienced youth. ‘If you had not fired the first shot and killed the officer, if you had not come, we would still have taken their bunkers. A few of the men behind me would have been killed, and some would have been wounded, but we would still have taken the bunkers – and whether you are with us or not, we will march to Kirkuk where the flame burns over the oilfield. Can we forget about your anger now?’

‘Yes.’ Every criticism he had made had been ignored.

‘And will you follow me to Kirkuk?’

‘Yes.’ Gus laughed and saw her eyes flash.

‘Do not be so solemn. How is your grandfather’s health?’