Holding the Zero

Chapter Five

The helicopter had come in at first light, flying low like a hawk hunting, hugging the contours of the ground. It came smoothly over a ridge to the north, all the time looking for gullies along which to fly, then hovered. For a moment it was a predator, black and without identification, over a prey. The prey was Meda… and she had waved it down.

Four men had immediately jumped clear from the open fuselage hatch. Two carried machine-guns, one had an assault rifle, and one held a grenade launcher; all wore a common uniform of jeans, anoraks, face masks and baseball caps, and they had scattered to secure a perimeter area round the big bird. Gus thought that after the guards the next man out was also American. Under his windcheater, his tie was whipped up from his throat as he bent to run clear of the downdraught of the blades, he had a lavatory brush of cropped grey hair, and carried maps in plastic covering. He’d shaken hands perfunctorily with Meda, then turned back and helped two more men, Kurds, down from the hatch.

The American, the Kurds and Meda had settled down amongst stones, the maps spread out across their legs, and Gus saw a Thermos flask passed between the men. Meda refused to drink from it.

The pilots kept the turbines running. Where he had been told to stay, with the peshmerga, the boy and Haquim, Gus was a full three hundred paces from the meeting-point and the helicopter.

Haquim said bitterly, ‘I am not important enough to be a part of the negotiation.’

Through his binoculars, Gus watched them. He could recognize the body language of the Kurds – one in a suit and one in laundered but old tribal dress. The American was between them, the conduit. Gus sensed deep-held suspicion. Meda faced them and her arms alternated between gestures of frustration and the softer movements of persuasion.

He passed the binoculars to Haquim.

Haquim said, ‘In the suit, dressed as the Westerner he wants to be, is agha Bekir. He controls the west of the enclave. I trust him as I trust a scorpion. Three weeks after the Iraqi attack of 1991, in which his people were murdered, left destitute to starve in the mountains, agha Bekir was shown on Baghdad’s television hugging Saddam as if he were a favoured cousin. He looks only for power and money. He would sleep with a snake to gain them.’

‘But he has men…’

‘And agha Ibrahim has more men. He is more simple but more cunning, which is why he wears the clothes of his people, and he has more greed. He controls the north and the east, and therefore can take the toll money from the lorries that cross the Turkish frontier to go to Baghdad. He should know Saddam, because Saddam tried on many occasions to kill his father. Once Saddam sent Shi’a clerics from Baghdad to talk peace with agha Ibrahim’s father, and Saddam told the clerics they must wear a hidden tape-recorder so that he could know what was said. When the meeting had started, one of the government drivers outside threw a switch, with radio control. The tape-recorder was a bomb. At the moment the bomb exploded a servant was leaning across in front of agha Ibrahim’s father and filling his glass with lemon juice. The servant died, and the cleric with the tape-recorder, and many others. But agha Ibrahim’s father survived to tell his son of the treachery of Saddam. Did he listen? Three years ago, agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim fought full-scale war over the division of the money from the smugglers, and when agha Ibrahim was losing, being driven back, he called to Saddam for help. He was rescued by Saddam’s tanks. It was when I was wounded… He has many men, fighting men, because he has the money to pay them. It is the miracle of Meda that has brought them together.’

‘I think they both want to fuck her,’ the boy said.

Haquim lashed out behind him, but Omar laughed and leaped back as a boxer avoids a tiring opponent’s punch.

‘What is being decided?’ Gus asked quietly.

‘They are deciding what they will risk. Meda has to persuade them, again, of her vision.’

Gus had taken back his binoculars and watched her. There was something of virginal innocence about her. She smiled and scowled. Her head would drop as if sulking, then would be lifted and a child’s happiness would break across her face. Without her, nothing would happen. She wove a spell over them. It was as if, Gus thought, her very innocence

– her enthusiasm, her optimism, her certainty – persuaded them. Omar, the vulgar little wretch, had spoken the truth. She sat facing them with her legs splayed out in the combat trousers, and with the upper buttons of her tunic unfastened so that they could see the skin of her chest. He saw, so clearly, Ibrahim’s leering smile and the way Bekir gazed into her eyes. The American wore an older man’s frown, as though anxiety – for her -raged in him.

After he shook her hand, he stood and shouted to the guards, who backed towards the helicopter and covered the ground ahead with their weapons. Hands were held and shaken, then all were gone into the belly of the helicopter.

She stood with her hands on her hips against the growing power of the rotors. The blast threw back her hair, and thrust her tunic and trousers against the shape of her body, slender and young, without fear. As the helicopter lifted, she didn’t wave to them, as if to affirm her independence.

It came low over them, and Gus saw the face of the American peering down. He held the rifle close to him against the blow of the blades.

And the silence came… He felt a sense of great loss. The helicopter had been a lifeline. It had come, he could have walked to it, climbed inside it, could have argued himself a seat and been carried back to his home, his work and his life. The chance had been laid before him, and he had not thought to take it. She was walking back towards them, the big grin of triumph on her face.

The men ran to her, and Haquim hobbled after them. Gus cuffed the boy and said he should go, too, while he sat alone with his thoughts. He could never have turned his back on her: she had trapped him. Everything that was home, work, life, seemed now of minimal relevance. She stood and they sat in front of her. He saw the old and the young faces that had been hardened by cruelty and suffering, that were cold and brutal, and the light in their eyes. She trapped all of them.

The boy returned to where he sat.

‘What does she say?’

‘She says that later today the agha Bekir and the agha Ibrahim will each send one hundred of their best fighting men to join us. In the morning we attack the mujamma’a in the front of us – that is a new village, what is called a Victory City. She says when we have captured it more men will come and we will fight at the town of Tarjil – we will have more men and we will make a battle at the crossroads of the Baghdad road and the Sulaymaniyah road. After that, when more men have arrived, she will lead us past the flame of Baba Gurgur, and into Kirkuk. We are going to Kirkuk. Do you believe her?’

‘I have to,’ Gus said.

‘They believe her, agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim, because they want to fuck her. They can fuck any woman they want to, but they want her because they know they cannot have her.’

‘You are a disgusting child.’

‘Do you want to fuck her, Mr Gus?’

He caught the lobe of the boy’s ear, where it peeped from under the matt of tangled dark curls, and twisted it hard so that Omar yelped like a hurt dog.

He started to tell the boy of the role of an observer working in close harmony with a sniper. Everything he knew about life told him that when a blow was struck there inevitably followed a stinging counter-strike. Mapped ahead of him was a timetable of war, locations on a map that would all be fought for and each would be harder. He talked softly, earnestly, of the work of an observer, as if the boy, Omar, were an equal to him, as if his very survival would rest on the skill of the boy when the counter-strike fell.

The door to the ageing Antonov howled open on poorly oiled hinges. He allowed his eyes to grow accustomed to the brightness beating up from the tarmac, and waited for the steps to reach the aircraft.

Other men he knew in the army would have refused to take a flight in the veteran transport, but Major Karim Aziz had been often enough in combat for the fear of death to be replaced by a comforting fatalism. Everything was behind him now.

He shouted his thanks to the pilot. He had been the only passenger on the flight, with his dog. He gazed around him. It was three years since he had last been at Kirkuk Military. Then, some of the attack aircraft’s hardened bunkers were still under repair, and wooden scaffolding had surrounded the control tower. But there was nothing to see now of the work of the American bombers; the scaffolding and the workmen were long gone.

A jeep was approaching fast from the tower.

Aziz called the dog to heel and went down the steps struggling with the weight of his backpack and the wooden box. When the jeep pulled up he saw from the gaze of the officer deputed to meet him that his reputation had travelled before him. His cheeks were brush-kissed, an offer made to take the box, which was refused. The box was the basis of his reputation and Aziz allowed no other man to take charge of it.

He followed the officer to the jeep. In any unit he worked with, there had never been any love for the sniper. He would be respected for his skill, but not liked. Soldiers in a front line always felt a vague affinity with the enemy across no man’s land; Iraqi soldiers had felt that for Iranian soldiers – and the sniper brought anonymous death to the man in the opposing trench. When a sniper came to a quiet front line, killed, moved on, the hell of artillery fell on those left behind. And the sniper’s killing was premeditated and took away the random, haphazard chance of shell shrapnel with which soldiers could live.

The officer was wary. ‘You had a good flight, I hope?’

‘Good for me, but the dog was sick.’

The officer laughed thinly. ‘Not a good companion.’

‘Oh, yes, the best.’ He lifted his box into the back of the jeep and the dog bounded in after it. They drove away. He had kept the name of the dog, Scout. It had been four months old when he had found it on his third day in Kuwait City. It had had a collar on it, with its name on a tag and an address. Major Karim Aziz had flown in with the first assault troops, by helicopter, to take one of the Emir’s palaces, but the fighting had been slack. The third day he had wandered the streets of Kuwait City and marvelled at the ostentation. He had found the cowering, terrorized puppy whimpering as the tanks growled past. While fellow officers successfully looted that wealth, he had gone to the address on the tag and found the wrecked, emptied home of an expatriate British oil engineer. He had taken the dog back to the hotel where he was quartered. When, two weeks later, he had returned to Baghdad, he had felt a sense of shame that he took with him the dog, a video camera and a bracelet from the famous gold souk. Others had taken back new Mercedes, and BMWs, and had loaded lorries with ‘souvenirs’. They had never used the video camera at home because he had not stolen the cassettes to go with it, and his wife had sold the bracelet for money to buy clothes for the children, but he had kept the dog. Scout was now nine years old, but still had the legs and eyes, nose and ears that made him indispensable to Aziz when he went to war.

From the airport, he was driven through the city.

Kirkuk was home to a million people. The jeep wove through crowded streets, past bustling pavements. The shops were open. He saw nothing that made him sense panic, and yet out in the distant hills to the north, beyond the clear, bright, high flame, an army marched on that city. The jeep’s horn cleared a path through the laden lorries, donkey-drawn carts and the kids careering on bicycles and scooters. There was no atmosphere of danger.

He was taken into the headquarters compound of the Fifth Army, driven at speed past smart sentries, and lines of T-72 tanks and ranks of BMP personnel carriers.

With his dog at his heel, Aziz carried his box into the command bunker.

He was introduced to a general. He saluted, shook hands. Behind the general was a brigadier who looked up, through him, and returned to the study of the map spread on the table. He knew the brigadier, recognized him, but could not place where he had seen him.

He struggled to find it, before it was swept from his mind.

‘So, Baghdad has sent us a sniper.’ The general spoke scornfully. ‘One man to do with a rifle what an army with tanks and artillery and two divisions of infantry cannot achieve.’

‘Against a sniper, the best defence is a superior counter-sniper.’

The sneer formed. ‘With a dog and the fleas it carries.’

‘With my dog, yes.’

‘What do you need to know?’

‘I need to know the route the incursion has taken, and the exact position of the blocking force you have deployed.’

The silence hung in the room. The brigadier peered up from the map, then ducked his head and played with a pencil.

‘A blocking force has been deployed?’

The general said, without expression, ‘Your job, Major, is at a level of local tactics. Do not try to teach me strategy.’

‘I need to meet the eyewitnesses who saw the enemy’s sniper.’

They both stared at him before telling him when he could interrogate the witnesses. He was escorted out.

In a bare room with a small cupboard and an ironframed bed, he took a square of goatskin from his backpack and laid it in the corner as a mat for his dog, then filled the dog’s bowl with water. From a framed photograph on the wall, the President watched him, smiled down on him.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE.

2. (Conclusions after interview with Wing Co. Basil Peake RAF (Retd.) conducted by self and Ms Carol Manning – transcript attached.) MOTIVATION: A central focus point for AHP in making his journey to northern Iraq is the powerful influence of his grandfather. Ms Manning believes BP used his manipulative arguments to persuade AHP to travel and involve himself. Motivation is important for a sniper in a military theatre, but that importance will diminish quickly once AHP is involved in combat, and will ultimately be of little relevance. BP has old, legally held rifles, and from his youth AHP was, therefore, familiar with handling firearms, but BP was unable or unwilling to offer information concerning the necessary MIND-SET of the hunter that is crucial if the step from target marksman to sniper is to be made.

SUMMARY: Without that MINDSET, AHP will fail and if he fails he will be killed. No evidence of a military background. My earlier assessment stands: the chances of medium-term survival remain slim to nonexistent.

TEXT of letter sent to BP by Hoyshar – see transcript above.

(NB: The letter is the start, and may be the only indication we find as to what AHP hopes to achieve in northern Iraq. In my opinion, the end is a military impossibility.)

Esteemed brother Basil, I write to you at a time when I have not received any of your valued letters for two years. This letter will be given to SARAH of the Protect the Children, and only God will decide if it shall reach you.

It is now, esteemed brother, a moment of crisis in the recent history of our people. The Kurdish people, my people, in the mountains and in the towns and in the villages are filled with despair. We believe no longer in the will of the West to protect us from the Great Murderer.

We think that we are forgotten. When we have been forgotten then the Great Murderer will send his tanks and guns and aircraft to destroy us.

We understand that very little time is left to us. You will remember my dear granddaughter, my Meda. She now has twenty-five years. For one so young she has the fire of a lion in her breast, and she has power over men. I believe, esteemed friend, that the strength in her is God-given.

For a year she has visited many villages in our region and talked to women, and to men, of a new moment when the Kurdish people shall rise up to take their freedom from the Great Murderer. At first she could only talk. Then, three months ago, she was heard in Rost, near to the Sar i-Piran mountain, by a military commander of proven courage, the mustashar Haquim. She entranced him as she had the simple village people. He took her to Arbil and to Sulaymaniyah, and his influence as a fighting man enabled her to meet with agha Ibrahim and agha Bekir.

They are cunning men, men of deceit. They have fought the Great Murderer and they have kissed his cheeks. They bend when the wind is against them, and they go forward when the wind is behind them. They are corrupt dogs but they have power. Meda met them and talked to them about freedom. She looked in their faces, each in turn, Haquim told me, and she asked them did they want to live as the servant of the Great Murderer and in fear, or as proud men who had led their people to freedom? Did they want to be remembered as cowards or heroes?

She is just a young woman, and she demanded their answer. They could not refuse her. She promised them that she would bring them past the flame of Baba Gurgur, and into the square of Kirkuk.

Esteemed friend, she has the power over men and they did not dare to refuse her. It will be a small army at the beginning, but it will grow.

Each time she wins, more men will be given to her. She will have Haquim, whom I love like a son, at her side to guide her. She will be in God’s care. I cannot say whether this letter will reach you. If it is delivered with success to you, please, esteemed friend, look at your newspapers and your television and discover the day that she reaches Kirkuk.

This is not, of course, the calling-in of a debt, or for you to feel there is an old obligation that you carry, but any assistance you can offer would be a gift of the highest generosity. It is a great journey that she is beginning. She is the last chance of the Kurdish people. With pride, I pray for her.

I am, as always, honoured to call myself your friend, Hoyshar. *** Ken Willet had read the letter many times. It reached him, touched him. Each time he’d read it, scanned through the clear copperplate handwriting, he remembered the photograph in the kitchen of the old man sitting and the young woman standing beside him. He had patrolled in Northern Ireland before the ceasefire, he had heard shots fired in anger, but all he knew of combat was what had been taught him on the training grounds of the Welsh mountains. From his posting to the Ministry of Defence, he would move on to an administrative position at a barracks, then probably try his luck in the civilian world. He would never know about combat at first hand.

He felt, and he was not ashamed of it, a very great sadness. The force of the words played in his mind: ‘chances of medium-term survival remain slim to nonexistent’.

He’d let Omar lead him forward.

For Gus that was the act of faith, the first step.

‘You do it well and you stay with me, you do it poorly and you go back to cooking and carrying. There are no second chances, Omar,’ Gus had said, at the start of the stalk. He had tried to sound ruthless and brutal, but it was not in his nature. Omar had grinned back at him, then led.

They had come over a ridge and looked down on what Omar called the mujamma’a, what Haquim had called the Victory City, his lip curled in sarcasm, and what Gus thought of as a concentration camp. Far beyond the village was a town, then a crossroads, then the flame and Kirkuk, but all were hidden by the heat-haze of the afternoon. He had seen the original village, which had been flattened by explosives. Now he saw the replacement, sited in the centre of a desolate plateau of rock and bogland. No fields had been made, no strips cultivated. Outside a wire perimeter fence were groups of sheep and goats, pathetically thin, hunting for sustenance. Behind the fence, closed in by it, regimented rows of concrete block-houses were linked only by washing lines. Gus made a plan of the fence, the gate, the watchtowers and the single large building that dominated from the centre the ranks of block-houses. There was no grass to brighten the vista, and no flowers. The gate had been opened to admit a water tanker and a lorry.

Very carefully he drew the plan of the village and he began to understand: it had been built away from a source of water and away from good grazing land, so that the village people were dependent on their guards to provide them with life support. Without it they starved. The boy had good eyes and revelled in the power of the telescope. Twice he had pointed to small sandbagged bunkers that Gus had missed. Everything he saw, and that Omar found for him, Gus marked on his plan. He studied the command post. He saw an officer, a machine-gun placed behind a parapet on the flat roof, and the queue of shuffling villagers form at the main door to receive their small packages of food. It was a place of dreary certainty, and he thought that one day would be the same as another… but not tomorrow.

While he made the plan, he whispered to Omar about the work of an observer. He was not good at sharing even the little information he knew. All his knowledge of shooting was based on his taking supreme responsibility for his own skills and shortcomings. But tomorrow he could not be alone. He was searching for a vantage-point to the side, where there was sufficient elevation for his eyeline to clear the block-house roofs, from which he could see the entrance door to the command post. Away to his left, several hundred yards from where he and the boy lay, was a barren hillside, without obvious cover. If they were there and the machine-gun found them, they would die. If they did not live, the attack would fail.

‘Omar, don’t move, don’t point, don’t move your head fast. The hill to the left…’

‘Where there is nowhere to hide, Mr Gus?’

‘Yes, where there is nowhere to hide. Can you see a place for us?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Not perhaps. Yes or no?’

‘Of course, Mr Gus.’

‘Really, yes or no. Which?’

‘There are better places.’

‘It’s where we have to be, Omar. Yes or no?’

The boy was learning. He moved the hessian-covered telescope, netting over the lens, so slowly. Then he settled and his eye was locked to it. Every bush on the hillside had been cut down for firewood, every tree felled. The slope was of dull brown, winter-dead earth, as if the snow and the rain had eroded the life from it.

‘If we are on the ridge, above the hill…’

‘Too far for me to shoot.’

There was silence between them. Gus tilted his head to watch every movement around the command post, as if each moment that he saw the villagers and the soldiers, tramping in the mud around the building, was precious. The water tanker and the lorry left. He focused on the machine-gun position. Was the officer more important, or the machinegun? Omar tugged his arm. ‘There is a place.’

‘I can’t see it. Are you sure?’ Gus had his binoculars on it, but saw only the featureless slope of the hillside.

‘Yes, Mr Gus… ’

‘Omar – do you love Meda?’

‘I love her, Mr Gus – not fuck-love, but love.’

‘If you haven’t got a place, if the machine-gun finds us and Meda is leading the attack, afterwards it will kill her… So you have to be sure.’

‘Very sure, Mr Gus.’

‘Can you get me there in the dark, no light, and can you get me out in the day?’

The boy nodded soberly. ‘I think so, Mr Gus.’

‘If you can’t, Omar, Meda is dead.’

He knew tomorrow would be different from any experience in his life. The thought of it chilled him. He wondered how he would sleep that night, if he would sleep.

‘Don’t try to please me,’ Major Karim Aziz had said, to each of them separately. ‘Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear. Do not be definite about anything you are not certain of. I want only the truth.’

He had heard what the corporal and the goatherd had said, then he had told the guards that both were to be fed a full hot meal but in different rooms so that neither knew what the other had told him. While they were eating, he had gone away to the intelligence unit and demanded they produce for him large-scale maps and aerial photographs. When he had pored over them, he had gathered up those that would help him and had returned to talk with each of them again.

The corporal’s story didn’t alter, but the goatherd had seen the man, his man. ‘My friend was shot from across the valley, and I do not lie to you, Major. God strike me if I lie to you, but I have never known of a man who could shoot at such a distance… But I saw him, Major. He was sitting in the sun’s light against the wall of the house of my friend, and the rifle he held was bigger than any rifle I have ever seen. He was dressed in clothes that made him look like the earth and the bushes. He is not a peshmerga, Major, because I never saw one of them with such a rifle or who dressed in such a way.’

He took the maps and the photographs back to his room. He fed Scout, and when he settled at the table the dog nestled against his feet. The Dragunov was laid on the table with the maps and photographs. It was, he reflected, the moment for which he had prepared himself through a military career of twenty-six long years. He had killed many men, but in battle the ultimate conflict of sniper against counter-sniper had always eluded him. Everything else he now stripped from his mind. It would be an elemental struggle for supremacy, himself against an expert. Alone in his room, with the dog’s snoring to calm him, there was no admission in Aziz’s mind that the man confronting him would best him.

It was not for glory, medals, the reward of money, for killing; it was the lure of a primitive struggle between two men for supremacy in the science of fieldcraft and the skill of marksmanship. He thanked his god for the opportunity.

The conflicts began in earnest before the attack. Meda wanted to lead the attack. Haquim insisted she stay with him, in the rear. Meda wanted a frontal assault. Haquim demanded they charge the right flank of the village. Meda wanted their own machine-gun to fire on the watchtowers. Haquim said the concentration of fire should be against the command post. Meda wanted Gus close to her, shooting in support of her dash towards the fences.

Haquim told her that the marksman would decide where he placed himself.

The commentary came from Omar. It was painful to Gus. His carefully drawn plan of the village was laid on the ground between them, illuminated by a shaded torch. He thought everything Haquim said made sense, but Meda rejected it, as if governed by a wild obstinacy. When his suggestion was rejected, Haquim doggedly, fruitlessly, pursued it. It was just a damn waste of time, and Gus played no part in the running sore of their disputes – her arrogance against Haquim’s experience.

‘I know about war,’ Haquim said, and Omar whispered it.

‘You know about losing at war,’ Meda said, and Omar giggled as he translated. ‘The men follow me, not you…’ There was a shout behind her, her name was called. She pushed herself up. ‘I will lead. I will be the first to the fence, the first to the command post, and they will follow me.’

She disappeared into the darkness.

Gus and Haquim studied the plan. Gus sensed the anger of Haquim at the humiliation thrown on him by her. But he knew that the mustashar would not walk away from her, as he would not. They agreed the position to be taken by Gus and Omar, the angle of the machine-gun’s fire, and the direction of the charge.

‘And she will lead?’ Gus asked heavily.

‘What am I supposed to do? Chain her to a rock? Bind her legs? If she goes down, is hit, then everything for us is finished.’ Haquim shrugged. ‘What can I do?’

‘I will watch for her, as best I can,’ Gus said.

‘As I will, as we all will, as best we can, as much as she will allow us.’

There was a growing murmur of voices behind them. Two pinpricks of light were advancing imperceptibly up the incline of the hill, and both took as a beacon the central guttering fire of their camp. Gus watched. It was because of her that the new men tramped across the black wastes of open ground, and came to them. The lights they carried lit their wild, bearded faces and their weapons glinted. They came as gliding, savage caravans in the night, carrying rifles, mortar tubes and ammunition boxes, the silver shimmer of knife blades at their belts. She walked towards them, and Gus saw the way that those at the front quickened their stride, while those at the rear ran to catch up.

She held out her arms and the columns broke as they scattered to gather in front of her.

They squatted down and she talked to them. They rippled their approval.

‘What does she say?’

Haquim responded grimly, ‘She says that, through their courage, the Kurdish people will find freedom. That they are the heirs of Salah al-Din Yusuf. And that mercy is shown to an enemy only by a man who is weak. She says the Kurds will not find their freedom before they have killed every Iraqi soldier in the country that is their own. She says

…’

Gus walked away, turned his back on her.

He would be, and he knew it, tomorrow, a changed man – for ever changed.

All day the Israeli had listened to the radios as they sucked down the crypted and clear messages from Fifth Army headquarters to the forward echelon positions.

In the shadowlands of intelligence gathering, Isaac Cohen understood the need to recognize a crucial moment of advantage. The moment might be micro-brief. In a struggle lasting years, the moment of advantage might exist only for a few hours. Many times in a veteran’s career with the Israeli Defence Force, then with the Mossad, the window of advantage had flickered open, sometimes to be exploited and sometimes ignored with heavy and enduring consequences. As a lieutenant in an armoured unit he had been pushed across the Canal in the Yom Kippur war when intelligence had recognized the advantage to be gained from hitting the hinge between the Egyptian Third and First armies. As an operating field agent of the Mossad, he had sat in on those endless debates as to the right time to eliminate activist leaders of the terrorist Hamas organization on the West Bank. Was the better advantage gained from killing the bomb-makers as soon as they were identified, or letting them run under surveillance in the hope of more names or locations surfacing? Once, it had been decided that a man should stay free, and the moment of advantage had been lost: a 10-kilo TNT bomb had killed 13 and wounded 170 more in a bloodbath at the Jerusalem food market. He was now in his isolated posting because of the failure of his superiors to recognize that a moment of advantage had passed. Everything was about advantage.

He believed now that such a moment existed. It was merely a question of identifying it.

It was as though a stiletto had made a short but not fatal stab into the ribcage of an enemy. The knife could be turned – two hundred more men were moving forward, the radio intercepts told him – and then the hole would be larger. As the hole grew, as the stiletto was plunged deeper towards the vulnerable heart, so the risk to the enemy increased. But all that they had done was to send a master sniper from Baghdad. Why had a blocking force not been sent north? Why did the Fifth Army not respond to the threat and cauterize the wound?

He did not understand the reason – but he believed a moment of advantage now existed.

He sent a short message to Tel Aviv. In crisp language, he made a suggestion as to what he should do to exploit the moment.

He was fit for his age, but he still dreaded the prospect of a long night march. When the terse response came on the radio, he was already writing a letter to his wife that would be carried out on the next resupply helicopter. Permission was granted.

‘Hi! You okay, Caspar?’

‘Not too bad, Rusty.’

Caspar Reinholtz was a slave to punctuality. It was seven minutes to ten o’clock. He approved of the young man, who was early for his night shift. If it had been Bill or Luther, they’d have walked in with a half-minute to spare. He had just transmitted his report and the tiredness pulsed in waves across him. He doubted that he’d wander over to the mess where Bill and Luther would be socializing with the pilots and ground crew. He was not in the mood for USAF small-talk.

‘Long day?’

‘Long enough.’

‘But was it a good day?’

‘At best satisfactory.’

Caspar ran his hand through his cropped hair. The day, whatever it had been, had started at five, as the dawn sidled over the runways and bunkers of the Incerlik base where the USAF’s F-16 Falcons shared space with Turkish aircraft, and the helicopter had lifted him off with four marines for close protection duty. A small bungalow compound, inside the USAF security perimeter, was the home base for the Agency team responsible for northern Iraq. Drinking beer with flies in the froth was about as satisfactory as running American interests in northern Iraq from over the Turkish border.

They had flown to collect the fat cat from Arbil, then on to pick up the second fat cat from Sulaymaniyah, then had headed up and high into the mountains for the scary flight into bandit country.

‘You going to tell me?’

‘Don’t take it personal – same old problem – but it’s a Need to Know.’

‘That’s not a difficulty, Caspar. You want some coffee?’

‘I’d appreciate that.’

Rusty was big, strapping, a young man out of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He had an openness that was rare for Agency recruits, and seemed to take it to heart when information was not shared. He’d learn. Long ago, Caspar had learned all that anyone could teach him, and what he knew best was northern Iraq. It had been taught the hard way. He’d been there, first tour of duty, in 1974 – young, like Rusty, and keen -when the Agency, with Iranian and Israeli help, had armed the Kurds to go kick Baghdad’s ass, but the diplomats had signed a treaty, the aid had stopped, and the reprisals of the Iraqi army against the Kurdish hill fighters would have made a less focused man weep and slip to his knees. Caspar had gone home to find new fields.

The second tour, he’d been back across the Turkish border in 1988 when Operation al-Anfal had punished the tribesmen, bombed, gassed and butchered them. Caspar had been posted away. When he’d returned in ’91, he had been in time to set up the radio station that had broadcast the calls for the Kurds to rise up in armed open rebellion against Baghdad. They had, but the promised support hadn’t come: the runways at Incerlik had stayed silent, and the retribution had been repeated.

Caspar had been called back to Langley. But the place was like a damn malarial microbe in his bloodstream. He had requested and badgered for a last time back there – a fourth tour – and he’d made it to the Agency team in Arbil a month before the disaster when Saddam’s tanks rolled over the ceasefire line and ruthlessly drove the Kurds north.

He never spoke – not to colleagues, not to family, of the awfulness of their own escape from Arbil, and what they’d left behind. He’d been at Incerlik ever since, and had five more months to go before they’d call him home a final time. The coffee had been cooking all through the evening as he’d written, encoded and transmitted his report.

‘If you don’t mind my asking, will it work?’

‘What’s that?’

‘The plan, will it work?’

‘I’m tired – sorry, I don’t want to give offence here, Rusty. Look, there is a plan.

There’s lengths of twine that need binding together to make a rope that’ll carry the plan.

They’re not together yet.’

They called the plan RECOIL. RECOIL, in the mind of the author of its name, Caspar Reinholtz, implied the release of a pressured spring of tempered steel with the force to drive back a seemingly immovable object. He was proud of that name. The pressured spring was rebellion, the immovable object was the regime in Baghdad. As station chief, he alone of the Agency team in Incerlik knew the importance of each of the lengths of twine that must be woven to make the rope.

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘I’m not promising to answer.’

‘Did you see her?’

‘Am I going to get some coffee? Yeah, OK, I saw her.’

The strands were a woman… an armoured formation… an action in Baghdad… a movement with momentum, pace and bluff. If one frayed, the load of the plan might not be carried. The woman was to kick-start it but each succeeding part of RECOIL was as integrally important, and it worried the shit out of him. He had never before met a young woman, the same age as his second daughter, who had made an impression of such devastating simplicity and confidence. All through the flight back, with the detours to drop off the fat cats, her face, her sweetness and her goddam arrogance had been locked in his mind. He was old, he had seen everything, he was labelled a cynical bastard by those who worked for him, and he’d wished to God, and been as sober as a baby, that he could have followed where she led. If he’d told his guards or the pilots or any of the young ones here what he thought, all of them would have called him a fucking lunatic.

‘What’s she like?’

‘That’s pushy, Rusty… Actually, she’s remarkable. She -’

‘Can she get to Kirkuk?’

It was the strand Rusty knew of. He was in total ignorance of the others.

‘The coffee, please. Hey, she’s a symbol. She gets men off their butts. She’s a part of a big picture, no more and no less. Can she get to Kirkuk? I don’t know. RECOIL goes further than Kirkuk. Quit the questions… What I will tell you, I saw her point man. You been to Fort Benning?’

‘No – you want sugar or sweetener?’

‘They do snipers there,’ Caspar murmured. ‘I saw her sniper. The chopper took a run over him. He was in the real camouflage gear and he’d a hell of a big shooter. She said he was important to her. They’re going south into real shit, fucking fighting, against experienced tank units, artillery formations. That’s before they get to Kirkuk, and she thinks one guy with a rifle is important. Hey, Rusty, don’t ever believe good news comes out of this place. It doesn’t, I know… Do you want to get me some coffee or do you want to get shipped home?’

He sat in his room and he heard Rusty whistling quietly to himself in the kitchen annexe. She was in his mind… and when he lost her he seemed only to see the bleak face of the man under the helicopter’s flight path, wrapped in the camouflage smock, holding the rifle.

‘Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard had friends among the British aristocracy – that’s the people with money and influence. Once he’d made the decision that the way to take on the German snipers was with snipers of our own, he persuaded those friends to help him

… Are you asleep?’

‘No, Mr Gus. How did the friends help?’

‘Lady Graham of Arran loaned him a five-times magnification telescope to take to France, and a fund set up by Lord Roberts bought more telescopes to be used by the observers alongside the snipers. Lord Lovat sent all his gamekeepers – the men who guided Lovat’s friends into the mountains of Scotland to shoot deer – to the army because they were the best at stalking on the open slopes of the mountains.’

‘As good as me, Mr Gus?’

‘Of course not, Omar, no-one is as good as you, and no-one is as conceited as you. So shut up and listen. The best of Lord Lovat’s men was a corporal, Donald Cameron, who was described as a “very good glassman”. The observers spotted the targets for the snipers and protected them from patrols. When Major Hesketh-Prichard set up his school for snipers at Steenbecque in the Forest of Nieppe, he always trained snipers and observers alongside each other.’

‘Not the school any more, Mr Gus. Tell me about the killing.’

‘Tomorrow.’ Gus lay back and stared at the stars. ‘Tomorrow we’ll talk about the killing.’