Holding the Zero

Chapter Four

‘I suppose I’d better start at the beginning. That would be the orderly way to do it.’

‘Yes, start at the beginning,’ Ms Carol Manning said.

Ken Willet sat at a table behind her. Among the plates, the empty glass and the cup with dregs of coffee in it, he opened a foolscap notebook. At the top of the page he wrote,

‘WING CO BASIL PEAKE’. Immediately underneath the page heading he scrawled ‘LETTER’, and half-way down the page ‘MOTIVATION’. Ms Manning’s temper had sounded grim at midnight when she’d rung to tell him that her lieu day was postponed; there was no improvement now.

‘It all began at Habbaniyah – I don’t suppose, my dear, you’ve ever heard that name.’

‘I haven’t, but I’d be grateful if you’d get on with it.’

Willet thought the old man’s eyes glittered in covert amusement.

They’d come up the drive to the vicarage, found it locked, shuttered, and a solitary cat had run from their approach. After circling the darkened building, late Georgian or early Victorian, they’d seen the modern bungalow – where a dull light burned – set back amongst trees beyond lawns covered with the winter’s leaves. But the daffodils were up, and made a show with beds of crocuses. It was five to eight when she pressed the bell button.

‘Habbaniyah is just north of the Euphrates, about forty-five miles west of Baghdad. Of course, there’s a vegetation belt alongside the river, but where we were was surrounded by desert dunes, flat, horrible, lifeless. It’s 1953, before you were born, my dear, I think.

There was an RAF base there. It was ghastly. There was a single runway of rolled dirt reinforced with perforated metal plate. There were only three permanent buildings: administration, sick quarters and a damn great control tower. Everyone, men and officers, right up to the CO, lived in tents. We were “in the blue” – that’s colloquial, my dear, in the forces for being posted out to the back end of nowhere. I was one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine penguins – you know what they call the RAF? The penguins, only one in a thousand flies… Sorry, just joking…’

‘Best you stick to the point,’ she said.

‘As you wish. I was a wing commander, in charge of movements. The control tower was mine. We were a little island in hostile territory. The King and his government in Baghdad were marionettes for our ambassador to play with, but increasingly there was resentment from the civilian population and the younger army officers about our presence

– so we lived on camp. All the food was flown in. We had a swimming-pool of sorts, a marquee dropped down into a sand scrape, and we had sports pitches – we didn’t play the locals, we’d go as far as Nairobi, Aden or Karachi for cricket, hockey and soccer. To get out, if we had a few days’ leave, we hitched rides to Cyprus or Beirut – few of the officers and none of the men were permitted to travel inside Iraq.’

He was eighty-four years old, widowed for the last six. Willet thought the straightness of his back remarkable. Wearing worn carpet slippers, flannel pyjamas and a heavy dressing gown, he’d let them in, sat them down, then excused himself with old-world politeness. He’d come back still dressed in the slippers, pyjamas and dressing gown, but shaven and with his fine silver hair carefully combed. He’d checked their identity cards, then eased into a high wing-backed chair. He hadn’t challenged them, had seemed in fact to have expected them.

‘You passed on a letter to your grandson, Augustus Peake.’

‘Patience, my dear, always a virtue… We had two squadrons of Vampire fighter-bombers there. It was a troubled little corner of the world, the Soviet border was less than an hour’s flying away, and we had the transports coming through. They used to put down on Malta, then reach us, then go on to East Africa or the Red Sea, or keep going east to Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea. Most of the transports were Hastings, 53 Squadron.

They came in and went out in the early morning; that’s when everyone did their day’s work. After that, in the heat – mad dogs and Englishmen stuff – we played sport. In the evening, officers anyway, we dressed for dinner, drank, ate, drank, played cards or took in a film in the open-air cinema, drank, and went to bed. We had to wear our issue greatcoats over our pyjamas, it was so damned cold. An evening a week, I was out on guard duty in support of the RAF regiment, shooting at shadows out of our trenches – the Arabs would steal anything they could creep in and get their hands on. It was damned dull. That wasn’t good enough for me. All I saw of the local culture was the traders at the main gate, nomads crossing the desert, and the thieves looking for a gap in our defences at night. What a waste… Barbara – that’s my wife – wrote to me from the married quarters in Lyneham and pointed out what was just over the horizon. Well, not exactly -about two hundred miles, actually. Antiquities. Do you know anything about antiquities, my dear?’

‘No, I don’t, but I expect you’re going to tell me.’

A myth, handed from grandfather to child, says that the Ark of Noah grounded as the floods fell back on the summit of Mount Cudi in present-day Iraq, 4,490 years before the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. The survivors were the first Kurds.

They were, through history, a warrior people.

Another myth, from ancient Jewish lore, tells that four hundred virgins were taken out of Europe by devil spirits who had been exiled from the court of Solomon, the djinn, to the Zagros mountains and their bastard children became the unique and isolated Kurds.

Xenophon wrote of the retreat of 10,000 Greek soldiers towards their homeland after defeat by Cyrus of Persia, and a week-long epic battle through the mountain passes, harried by the ferocious Carduchi tribesmen. The victor over the Crusader king, Richard the Lionheart of England, at Hittin by the Sea of Galilee was Salah al-Din Yusuf, the Kurd known in medieval Europe as Saladin. Kurds fought on both sides in the war of total barbarity, four hundred years ago, between Beg Ustajlu and Selim the Cruel. As irregular soldiers, toughened by the physical hardship of life in the mountains, they were employed occasionally by the governments of Britain, France and Russia. But the reward never came… their own country was never given to them. When their usefulness was past they were as bones thrown from the table.

They were an image of the fallen stones from temples and palaces, scattered, antiquities.

Willet saw her fidget. The page in front of him, under LETTER and MOTIVATION was blank, but he was rather enjoying the story and it didn’t seem to matter that he hadn’t an idea where it was going.

‘There I was, sitting at Habbaniyah, bored out of my mind, and six hours’ drive to the north were the ruined cities of Nineveh and Nimrud. I obtained permission, took a car from the motor pool with a driver. We had a couple of tents, some food, service revolvers and a rifle, and off we went – the first time. That evening, humbled by the sense of place and time, I walked in the ruins of Nineveh. I actually saw – some blighter’s hacked it out and stolen it now – the alabaster carvings in the ruins of King Sennacherib’s palace, in his throne room, and he died 2,680 years ago. The next morning we drove the few miles to Nimrud. There, I stood amongst the fallen stones of the palace where King Ashurnasirpal the Second is said to have entertained 69,500 guests. I mean, your mind just falls apart in such a place. There’s an observatory there where they studied the stars in the ninth century BC. We had to get back, and, sod’s law, the bloody car wouldn’t start.

Had the bonnet up but couldn’t get a spark of life out of her… A local wandered by, quite a different dress and stance to the Arabs down at Habbaniyah, watched us for a bit, then came close. The driver thought he was going to steal something from the car and drew his damn revolver. No, he didn’t shoot him. I’m not mechanical but the local had a poke about – cleaned something, put it all back in place, then climbed into the driving seat, started her up, and she was as sweet as new. He wouldn’t take any money. He was the first Kurd I ever met. His name was Hoyshar.’

Willet thought they were getting there, in the old man’s own time.

‘I went back a couple of times with the driver. It was purgatory for the poor fellow. He had no interest whatsoever in me picking around among the stones, giving a hand to the three German archaeologists at Nimrud – that became my favourite. He used to find some shade and sit down with a comic book, and this man, my age, Hoyshar, was always there and he worked on the engine and polished the bodywork so that it gleamed, never would take any money… The third time I wanted to go the driver was sick and no-one else was available. I had permission to go on my own. Hoyshar was waiting. It’s a damn strange language the Kurds have, extraordinary, but, there are English roots. “Earth” is erd,

“new” is new, a “drop” of water is a dlop. We got to be able to speak to each other; it was a bit like a comedy sketch but we understood what the other said. He drove me back to Habbaniyah, drove excellently, and took a bus home to the mountains. It became a routine. Every two weeks I’d drive from the motor pool to just outside the main gate, he’d be there, and he’d drive all the way to Nimrud, and then he’d bring me south again.

‘By the fourth or fifth time I went up there – and I was then the only married officer who had ever applied for an extension to his posting at Habbaniyah – I’d stopped going to the kitchens for packed meals. Hoyshar brought all the food we needed. Yoghurt, apricot jam because I was important, bread, goat’s cheese, dried meat… He was old enough to remember the RAF bombing his village, knocking the tribes into submission before the Second World War, but didn’t seem to hold it against me. Always he refused money, so I used to take him books. If you went into his house now you’d probably find a stack of them, stamped “RAF HABBANIYAH: LIBRARY”, mostly military history. At night, when it was too dark to work on the site with the Germans, we’d sit outside the tents. I’d learn about his people and he’d learn about mine. The seventh or eighth time, he brought me clothes to change into, those baggy trousers they wear and the loose shirts. I was going a bit native… That was it, scratching around for fragments of pottery, scraps of glass and gold from necklaces and earrings in the day, and talking at night… Do you know, my dear, that King Tiglath-Pileser the Third, from Nimrud, ruled an empire he had himself conquered that stretched from Azerbaijan to Syria to the Persian Gulf? Think of it, the scale of the civilization – and we were wearing skins and living in caves… I used to feel, every time I was there, privileged, and doubly privileged to be with such a man as Hoyshar.’

There was, Willet noted, a slight wetness at the old man’s eyes. He blinked as if to clear it.

‘At the end, before I went home, I was taken to his village. None of his family, and none of the other Kurds there, had ever seen a European. I slept in his bed, and he and his wife slept on the floor. I was shown the tail fins of a bomb that the RAF had dropped on the village twenty-something years before. If I had not been with Hoyshar the men of the village would have slit my throat, probably after cutting off an appendage… He is the grandest man I’ve ever known, my friend Hoyshar. I’m not a blinkered Arabist, and I hope I never stoop to patronizing the “noble savage”.’

The old man paused, screwed his eyes shut, opened them, closed them again, then flickered the lids. His angular jaw jutted. The wetness was gone, the moment of weakness banished. Willet realized that some trauma had been released in the talk of the bare detail of the night in the village. He didn’t think the former wing commander would degrade himself with a lie but he thought him capable of parsimony with the truth. He wondered whether he should interrupt and probe, but he was not the trained interrogator. She was.

He had already begun to doubt his first instinct by the time composure was regained and the voice continued the story.

‘What he wanted was freedom, for himself, his family and for his people. As a mature man, aged thirty-one, he stood in the Circle in the middle of Mahabad, that’s across the Iranian border, and saw Qazi Muhammad hanged for the crime of proclaiming the First Republic of Kurdistan. I have good recall, I remember what I’ve read. A Foreign Office man wrote, in bloody Whitehall, about their freedom: “Their mode of life is primitive.

They are illiterate, untutored, resentful of authority and lacking in any sense of discipline.

The United Kingdom should not offer encouragement to the sterile idea of Kurdish independence.” We used to talk about freedom.

‘I went back to Lyneham, then to Germany, then was retired. I wrote two letters a year to him till 1979, and had two letters back, then I went out there again to see him. It was pretty hard to get the visa, but the British Museum was helpful. It had all changed…

That damned man had taken power. There were soldiers everywhere. I sensed the subjugation of the people. There was a French team digging at Nimrud, and we helped them. It wasn’t the same, there was an atmosphere of hate and fear. We continued to exchange letters. I was growing older and visas were exceptionally difficult to come by during the Iraq-Iran war, nigh on impossible, then there was the Gulf War, and the weasel messages sent by the Americans for the Kurds to rise up against the dictator. They did, the promised help never came, they fled.

‘I thought of Hoyshar and his family, refugees in the mountains. I found the comfort of my twilight life obscene. My son wouldn’t accompany me, said he was too busy with work. My grandson came with me. I heard his mother, my daughter-in-law, tell Gus before we set off, “Watch him, he’s a complete lunatic where these wretched Kurds are concerned. Don’t let him make a fool of himself.” I’d have gone anyway, he didn’t have to be with me. We were the original odd couple, me at seventy and him a full fifty years younger. They have a saying, “The Kurds have no friends but the mountains.” That’s where we found them, in their mountains, in the snow. It was incredible, a little piece of fate, that amongst a hundred thousand people we found them. His son had just buried two of Hoyshar’s grandchildren. All they had tried to do was to take what is natural to us, their freedom.’

Willet looked up from the page. He had filled all the space under the heading of MOTIVATION. There was a feeble sunlight on the window behind the old man, but he could see the bright boldness of the flowers on the lawns.

‘When did the letter come?’ Ms Manning asked briskly.

‘A month ago… That day on the mountains Gus met my friend and my friend’s family, and he met Meda, who was then a teenager. When the letter came last month, it was about freedom for a far-away people. Do you think, my dear, I’ve deserved a coffee break?’

She made the coffee while Willet carried the plate, cup, glass and the cutlery from the table and washed them up. The captain’s eyes were drawn to a curled photograph stuck with adhesive tape to a kitchen unit. On the slope of a hill, a thousand blurred faces behind them, a grizzle-faced man sat on a rock with a girl behind him, her hands on his shoulders. Defiance blazed from her eyes, which were compelling and erotic in their power.

Ms Manning carried the coffee mugs back into the living room.

‘Right, so a letter came, and you showed that letter to your grandson… ’

They crossed high, bare ground. Sometimes, rarely, they had the cover of wind-stripped clumps of trees, but the column mostly hugged the little valleys and ravines created by the rainstorms and snow-melt of centuries. Until they reached a flat ridge, pocked with rock outcrops, they were the lone inhabitants of a wilderness.

Gus plodded at the back, weighed down by the rucksack and the rifle bag. The wind diluted the warmth of the sun, and it was hard for him to maintain the pace of the peshmerga because the bulk of the gillie suit impeded him. He was behind Haquim who, even with the disability of his knee, seemed to move more easily over the jagged stones and the small, hidden bogs. Gus felt the sting of a blister on his right heel. Meda was in the leading group, moving fast, never looking behind her to see how he coped.

He had formed in his mind what he wanted to say.

The men and Meda had settled on the ground, amongst the rocks in the lee of the ridge.

Some chewed at food, some bickered quietly, some laughed softly as if they were told an old and favourite joke, some cupped the water from a spring’s source, some lay prone with their eyes closed. Haquim had reached them and sat on a stone and massaged his knee. Gus was going slower, and the tear in the skin at his right heel was opening. The boy was watching two men as they cleaned the breech of their heavy machine-gun…

Nobody came back to help him as he struggled forward. He was bathed in self-pity. With his rifle and his skill, he was of critical importance to them. He didn’t have to be there…

Gus heaved the rucksack off his back and carefully lowered the carrying case to the ground, onto the tufted yellow grass and the weathered rock. He untied the laces of his right boot, pulled off the sock, and examined the reddened welt of the blister. He rummaged in his rucksack for the small first-aid box, and selected a square of Elastoplast to cover the broken skin. He let the freshness of the air bathe his bare foot.

‘Put your sock and boot back on.’

He hadn’t heard Haquim’s approach, was not aware of him until the man’s shadow fell on him.

‘It needs to breathe.’

‘Put them back on.’

‘When we’re ready to move.’

‘You need to do it now.’

‘Why?’

‘If the Iraqis ambush us, we will not ask them to stop and wait, while one amongst us pulls his sock and his boot back on.’

He felt hurt, as if degraded. ‘Yes. Right.’

‘And, Mr Peake, you do not question what I tell you.’

‘My foot hurts.’

‘Do you see others complaining? If it is such a big matter to you that your foot hurts, perhaps you should not have come.’

His head down, Gus heaved on his sock and his boot. Haquim was turning away. Gus said, ‘I want somebody to be with me, to help me.’

‘To carry your sack? Have all the men not enough to carry already?’

Gus said evenly, ‘I want someone with me when I shoot.’

‘I will choose someone.’

‘No.’ Gus’s voice rose. ‘I do it, it has to be my choice.’

‘You give yourself great importance.’

‘Because it is important.’

‘Later, then, when we stop for the next rest.’

‘Thank you.’ Gus had finished retying his bootlace.

The column moved forward again. He heaved on his rucksack, lifted the rifle in its bag onto his shoulder, and gingerly put his weight on his right foot.

When the line of men passed through a small gully that broke the ridge, a great vista was laid out in front of them. Gus’s eyes travelled over the sloping ground, the lower ridges, the distant curls of smoke above a faraway cluster of buildings, and on towards the single flame burning bright in a haze of lighter grey. Twenty miles away, and it was still a beacon, the flame at Kirkuk. He looked down on the ground that was to be the battlefield he would fight over.

Once again, the target had not come in the night.

On a bright, crisp morning, before the heat of the day settled over it, Major Karim Aziz reached the al-Rashid camp.

He showed his identification to the sentries at the gate, his name was checked off a list and he was shown where to park.

He’d known many who had come here on similar bright, crisp mornings in their best uniforms, who had been picked up by camp transport and who had never been seen again.

He had shut out the picture of the disappeared men and their families from his mind.

The transport pulled up beside his car. He had driven out to al-Rashid in a daze of tiredness and now he sleepwalked to the van.

Since the bombing of 1991 the camp had been rebuilt, the rubble removed, the craters filled in. The van took him past the many complexes of the Estikhabarat. There were the buildings occupied by the headquarters personnel of the second-in-command, a staff major general, those that liaised with Regional Headquarters, those that controlled the Administration Section, the Political Section, the Special Branch and the Security Unit.

He saw the batteries of anti-aircraft guns, and the clusters of ground-to-air missiles.

The van stopped outside a squat building. From the set of the windows he could see the thickness of the reinforced-concrete walls, painted in camouflage colours, and on the roof was a farm of aerials and satellite dishes. The armed guard opened the door for him and smiled. He wondered whether the guard always smiled at an officer summoned early in the morning to this building.

When he had reached home again after the night on the flat roof, he had clung to his wife briefly, then she had shrugged him off. It was unspoken, but she blamed him for the fiasco of his birthday celebration. The children had gone to school, her parents had stayed in their lean-to annexe at the back of the house. His wife, without a backward glance at him, had gone for the bus to the hospital. Then, alone in his home, he had checked through every item in the sports bag under the bed to satisfy himself that nothing incriminating could be found there… He did not know how he would resist torture…

What could have damaged them, him, he had buried in the garden.

At the inner guard desk of the building he was asked to enter his name. There was another smile, and a finger jabbed towards his belt. He unhooked the clasp, passed the webbing belt over the desk, and with it the holster holding the Makharov pistol.

He was led down the corridor, then up a flight of stairs, then on to another corridor.

He had to make the effort to kick his legs in front of him. The panic was growing, the urge to turn and run insistent, but there was nowhere to turn and no-one to run to. He heard the boom of his boots on the smooth surface of the corridor’s floor.

With each step towards the closed door at the far end he remembered the path he had taken towards joining the conspiracy. In February, two generals and a brigadier had come to a firing range to watch his progress in teaching marksmanship to his students, junior officers and senior NCOs. The course, like so much of the tactics learned in the Iraqi military, was based on old British army manuals. As he did, the students had used the Russian-made Dragunov SVD sniper’s rifle. It was not the best rifle available in the international market, but he had a curious and almost emotional attachment to the weapon that had been with him for a year less than two decades. His students had had good shots at 400 metres, but at 500 metres none had hit the inner bulls on the targets, a man-sized cardboard shape, when they should have had an 80 per cent probability of doing so.

Perhaps they were made more nervous by the presence of the generals and the brigadier.

He had then fired his own Dragunov, but at 700 metres. From behind him the generals and the brigadier had watched his shooting through telescopes. Six rounds, six hits, when the probability of a ‘kill’ was listed as only 60 per cent, and after each shot he had heard the grunted surprise from behind the telescopes.

He reached the door at the end of the corridor.

His escort knocked with quiet respect.

He heard the gravel voice call for him to enter.

Three weeks after the shoot Major Karim Aziz had received a telephone call from the more senior of the two generals. He was invited to a meeting – not in the general’s quarters, not in a villa in the Baghdad suburbs, but in a military car that had cruised for an hour with him, the general and two colonels along the city’s roads flanking the Tigris river. He could, he supposed, have said that he had no interest in the proposition put to him in the car. He could also have lied, given them his support, then the next morning gone to the Estikhabarat, in this building, in this camp, and denounced them. They wanted a marksman. He had agreed to be that marksman. The general had said that an armoured brigade in the north would mutiny and drive south, but only after word was received that the bastard, the President, was dead. He had been told of the villa, of the bastard’s new woman. The detail had been left to him – but without their esteemed leader’s death, the armoured brigade would not move. The general had talked of a domino effect inside the ranks of the regular army once the bastard was killed.

The general had been a big and powerfully built man, but he had stammered like a nervous child as he explained the plan. Aziz had agreed, then, there; only afterwards, when he had been dropped from the car, did he consider that he might have been set-up, stung, and he had been sick in the gutter. He had dismissed that thought because he had witnessed the precautions taken to preserve the secrecy of the meeting and seen the nervousness of the officers in the car.

He had tracked for days around the villa and had found the place from which to shoot.

He had met the general again, cruised the same route in the same car, and the general had embraced him.

He went inside. His stomach was slack and his bladder full. He tried to stand proud, to pretend that he was not intimidated, was a patriot surrounded by cowards. He thought of his wife and his children, and of the pain of torture.

A colonel had his back to the door and stared at a wall map, but turned at his approach.

‘Ah, Major Aziz. I hope there was nothing important in your schedule that had to be cancelled.’

He looked up at the photograph of the smiling, all-powerful President. He stuttered his answer. ‘No, my schedule was clear.’

‘You are the marksman, the sniper, that is correct?’

‘It is my discipline, yes.’

‘You understand the skills of sniping?’

He did not know whether he was a toy for their amusement, whether the colonel played with him. ‘Of course.’

‘Two men dead, two rounds fired, on consecutive days, each shot at a range of at least seven hundred metres in Fifth Army sector. What does that tell you about the sniper?’

‘That he is trained, professional, an expert.’ He felt the tension draining from him. He was limp, a rag on a washing-line.

‘How do you confront a professional sniper, Major?’

‘Not by turning rocks over with artillery or tanks or heavy mortars. You send your own sniper to confront him.’

The colonel said sharply, ‘You go tomorrow, Major Aziz, to Kirkuk.’

‘The north? The Kurds are not snipers.’ He wanted to laugh out loud as the lightness broke into the tightness of his mind. He bubbled, ‘They cannot hit targets at a hundred metres.’

‘I am from the Tikrit people, Major. Yesterday my cousin’s son was shot at seven hundred metres in a defence position near Kirkuk. Perhaps a foreigner is responsible.’

‘Whatever the nationality, the best defence against a sniper is always a counter-sniper.’

‘Be the counter-sniper, then. Your orders will be waiting for you when you reach the garrison at Kirkuk.’

Aziz saluted, turned smartly and marched out of the room. Outside, with the door closed on him, he could have collapsed in a huddle on the floor and wept his relief. He steadied himself against the arm of his escort, and walked away.

A few moments later, the warm air brushed his face, washed it of fear.

Gus sat on a rock and scanned the ground ahead of him with his binoculars, looking for movement.

It was the best place he could find, had the nearest similarity to the terrain of the Common in Devon. It was a practice but it was still crucial. The arguments were finally over, had finished when Haquim had struck a man and knocked him flat, when the knife had flashed, and Haquim had kicked the knife from the man’s hand. Before then, the argument had raged savagely. Meda had chosen not to intervene, but had sat apart with an amused smile on her face. He needed an observer to help him with distance and windage and, most important, to guide him in on the stalk to the targets ahead and to work out the exit routes after each snipe. It could not be Haquim – too slow and too involved in the mess of strategy and tactical problems.

The arguments were because each man in the column, old and young, believed he was the best at moving unseen across open ground. The bitterness was inspired by pride, when Haquim had selected the dozen men from the hundred in the column – from agha Ibrahim’s men, or from agha Bekir’s men. The older men who had fought for the most years, or the younger ones with more agility than experience. The larger group, not chosen, sat behind Gus, and scowled or watched the slope of ground ahead with a sullen resignation.

He had four ‘walkers’ out, as he had seen it done on the Common. Each time he saw a man, magnified through the binoculars, crawling, Gus shouted to the nearest ‘walker’ and pointed, and the man was tapped on the head by the ‘walker’, and eliminated. Each time a man was eliminated there was a growl of jealous approval from behind Gus.

Gus counted those he had spotted and eliminated. Some had taken the obvious route for their stalk, along a meandering river trail, some had headed for the single tree in the centre of the open ground, some had tried to use a broken mess of buildings to the right.

The river, the tree and the ruins were all obvious points for a stalk and were therefore poorly chosen… He saw the last man: his head and chest were low, but his buttocks were up. The ‘walker’ went to him, and the last man stood.

He had asked too much of them. He had tried to bring an alien culture of warfare from the Common in southwest England to the foothills of the Zagros mountains. He had asked them to crawl, concealed, across a thousand yards of open ground, and none had reached the finish line he had set. Gus cursed. Was it better to take the best of the failures, or was it better to work alone? He pushed himself up.

‘It’s my fault, my bloody fault,’ Gus said to Haquim.

There was a single shot, the crack of it high above him, then the thump of the following sound. The sounds were almost simultaneous. Behind him there was brief pandemonium. As the moment of silence settled he heard the rasped arming of weapons.

A dozen men had gone forward and stalked back towards him, and he had identified that same dozen. He had the binoculars up to his eyes and tracked over the ground, across the grassland, over rocks, between the narrow height of the tree trunks, into and out of the stones of the ruins, and he still could not see the man who had fired. They were the best binoculars he had ever used, and he saw nothing.

Gus said to Haquim, ‘Tell him to stand.’

Haquim shouted at the emptiness in front of them. Then the silence fell again. At first Gus felt a sense of excitement, but that was whittled to annoyance because nothing moved. He covered the ground again for the outline of a face, the shape of a shoulder.

They said on the Common that the stalk didn’t count unless the sniper had a clear view of his target when he fired… Some clever bastard in hiding, loosing off into the air.

‘Shout again.’

Haquim yelled, and the voice bellowed back off the hillside. From clear ground, ground on which there were no rocks, no trees, no fallen buildings, away from the small river, the boy rose to his feet.

There was a sod of earth with grass growing from it, a turf square, on the boy’s head.

The boy, grinning like an ape, had reached the finish line. Gus reckoned he’d covered that area of grass five, six times with his binoculars, and still hadn’t seen him.

‘I’ll have the boy.’

‘You cannot,’ Haquim said.

‘Why not?’

‘The boy is not a person of consequence.’

‘I’ll have him because he is the best stalker.’

‘He has no connection – no father, no family. It will cause resentment.’

‘I’ll have him, and when it gets harder – as it will, you tell me, and I believe you – then I will shoot better.’

He thought he was already a harder man, as if stones in a torrent battered against his body and forced the softness from it, than he had been three weeks before on the Common. They needed to make further ground before dusk. He walked in the heart of the column and ignored the blister on his right heel. The boy skipped along beside him and had offered to take his rucksack, but Gus had refused.

They went past the ruins of the village. The roofs, of concrete and tin, were collapsed inside the sunken walls, and Gus knew that each building had been dynamited. The grass grew up between the debris abandoned by a fleeing people, pots, pans, clothes faded by wind, rain and sunshine. The old village had been destroyed so that there was nothing for its people to return to. There were two men dead behind him but, passing the ruins of the village, Gus felt for the first time that he was a part of the quarrel. He was a changed man, and in the failing light he imagined that the flame far ahead burned brighter.

The Israeli, in his eyrie where the winds blew, under the sharp light of the stars and forty miles into northern Iraq from the Turkish border, heard the radio transmission from the al-Rashid camp to the Estikhabarat offices at Fifth Army headquarters in Kirkuk.

The computers in the building low slung on the mountain summit had long ago deciphered the Iraqi military codes. The previous evening Isaac Cohen had listened to a signal reporting the activities of a sniper operating in the area north of the Fifth Army’s sector. Now, a counter-sniper, a man with a reputation, was being sent to Kirkuk. The old Mossad man chuckled. He worked with the most modern electronic equipment that the factories at Haifa and in the Negev could produce, and before induction into the Mossad he had served as a captain in a tank unit that boasted the supreme technology in the sensors that sought out the enemy… The messages revealed archaic warfare – a man against a man, a rifle against a rifle, two men scrabbling on their bellies to within range of the other. Not slings and stones, not bows and arrows, but rifles that only marginally increased the distance of combat. But as the evening wore on, Cohen’s amusement was stilled. How could a sniper be so important that a counter-sniper had been sent against him?

Isaac Cohen was a methodical man. As the night settled around him, he began to track back through messages held in his computers. The calls, made at dawn and dusk over the last forty-eight hours, traced a line into, through and beyond the defence lines of the Fifth Army north of Kirkuk. He saw the trail of an incursion, and the decrypting power of his computers broke into the conversations of a satellite telephone that had spoken with agha Bekir in Arbil and agha Ibrahim in Sulaymaniyah, the time and place of a meeting.

He no longer laughed. A small army marched across the God-forsaken wilderness. The adage of the Mossad was ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’

And then he wondered what damage could be wrought to the enemy by one man with a rifle.

The dog whined behind the bedroom door.

Major Karim Aziz, with his family, ate his evening meal, and he talked. He spoke of soccer with his children and their games at school; with his wife he joked about holidays they might take one day in the northern mountains, with tents and picnics; with her parents he laughed about their continuous and never-ending hunt for food at the open markets. He talked and joked and laughed because that night he was not returning to the flat roof, and he felt as though a great weight had been shed from his shoulders. He assumed, perhaps correctly, perhaps not, that a general and two colonels would have heard that Major Karim Aziz of the Baghdad Military College was posted to the north.

And he had no route by which to pass them any urgent message. He had survived the visit to the al-Rashid camp, which few did, and he had been treated there as a valued expert.

No suspicion had fallen over him; the shadow of arrest, torture and death did not lie on him.

The dog scratched at the bedroom door.

It was a familiar experience for a veteran soldier. He ate with his family around him, and before dawn the next morning he would be gone. He could have listed each of the times that he had eaten a last evening meal with the family – before going to Moscow, or the Beka’a, or to the front lines in the Iranian cities of Khorramshahr and Susangerd where the fighting had been in cellars and sewers, to the north for Operation al-Anfal against the Kurdish saboteurs, to Kuwait City for the first strike then a return in the last days, to the north again for the push into Arbil and towards Sulaymaniyah – it was a familiar routine for him. Later, before bed, he would visit the home of his own parents and would tell his father, the pensioned civil servant of the Iraqi Railway Company, and his mother that he was going away and that there was no cause for them to worry. He drank more than was normal for him because the weight was off his shoulders.

In the bedroom, with the dog, was his packed and bulging backpack, and the heavy wooden box in which he always carried the Dragunov rifle when he went to war.

As the light had fallen on the city, Aziz had gone to collect the dog. It had been lodged with his cousin for two months more than two years, since his wife’s parents had come to live in his home. It had been blamed for aggravating her father’s asthma. It was a brown and white springer spaniel, now nine years old, fast, fit and trained with all the patience he could summon. To go to war without the dog would have been to travel without his eyes and ears.

Around the table, with the warmth of his family close to him, the north was not spoken of. His detestation of the north, of the Kurds, had little to do with politics and everything to do with blood. Her father’s younger brother had died there in 1974, a dozen kilometres from where he, the young lieutenant in a mechanized infantry brigade, was serving, and he had seen the body and what had been done to it. His cousin’s nephew had been killed there in 1991, a prisoner after the fall of the Military Intelligence headquarters at Arbil, taken out on the street, shot, and his body dragged round the square from the back of a jeep; that body, too, he had seen when the city was retaken. But, at the table, it was not mentioned.

Later, when he had walked the spaniel to his parents’ home, and settled him beside their bed, when his wife was in his arms, the master sniper would tell her that she had no cause for anxiety. That night Major Karim Aziz had not the slightest doubt that he would locate, stalk and kill an enemy. He did not entertain the thought that he might fail, that his place in the bed beside her would remain cold, empty.

He said his name was Omar.

He spoke with a piping American accent, and told his story.

He had no mother, no father, no family, no home. His mother had died on the mountainous slopes of the Turkish border, frozen to death with his sister. His father had died a month earlier, killed in Arbil by Iraqi soldiers. He did not know where his uncles, aunts and cousins were. His family’s homes had been bulldozed in 1991. He said the American servicemen bringing relief supplies to the camps in the mountains had found him and cared for him.

Gus idly imagined soldiers bound together by a common sense of compassion, finding a half-dead child, numbed by cold and hunger, and taking him back to their tents, food and warmth, as they would a stray, pretty cat. They would have fussed over the child, spoiled him, and taught him their language. When they moved back over the border, consciences salved by the good work, they would have dumped him on aid-workers. Gus thought of Omar hanging about the offices of a foreign charity in Arbil or Sulaymaniyah or Zakho, running messages, scrounging, with his childhood irreplaceably snatched from him. When most of the aid agencies had fled in the late summer of 1996, the child would have attached himself with limpet-like strength to a fighting peshmerga unit, helped to carry food and ammunition forward to the sagging front line, and bring the wounded back.

Gus thought of his own childhood, of its calm and its safety. The orphan would have seen horror, and would be feral and savage as a result.

The boy stank. His pillow was a stone. He lay on the ground, without a blanket to cover him, close to Gus’s sleeping-bag, and the rifle with the double magazines taped to each other lay across his stomach. He wore drab American army fatigues, torn and still too large for him, and a pair of yellow trainers that had gone at the toes. He had brought Gus food from the cooking pot and watched him eat until Gus had passed him the bowl.

He had gulped down the last of the food and licked the bowl till it shone in the evening sunshine.

The camp was quiet and Gus spoke softly. ‘The man we have to remember is Herbert Hesketh-Prichard. There had been others before him, but as far as our army is concerned, he was really the father of sniping. He was a big-game hunter before the first war with Germany – he shot lions and elephants, and he turned those skills to shooting Germans.

He went to France, where the war was with the Germans, and took with him big-game rifles and telescopes. At first, none of the generals would listen to him, but he kept emphasizing the importance of a quality sniper on the battlefield. The sniper was more effective in breaking the enemy’s morale than an artillery barrage. Kill the officer, kill his spotters, kill his machine-gunners, and your troops feel good, they live. Almost everything we know today is based on what was taught by Hesketh-Prichard to his snipers eighty-five years ago…’

The boy, Omar, snored in his sleep.