Holding the Zero

Chapter Six

Gus, after a long time watching the night sky, had finally drifted to the sleep he needed when he was shaken awake. He started up at the touch of Haquim’s hand on his shoulder.

He heard the voices and blinked to see better. Omar was crouched protectively beside him and was holding his assault rifle as if Gus were threatened. Haquim kicked at Omar’s ankle, drove him back, and pulled Gus to his feet.

A torch shone into Gus’s face.

‘Is this him? Is this the sniper?’ The voice, deep and harsh with the Israeli-American accent, came from a shadowy, stocky man who was bent under a backpack.

Gus coughed out phlegm in his throat and spat it on the ground. ‘Who needs to know?’

The shadow’s breath clouded the chill air between them. The man came forward from a group, and as the men behind him followed, he waved them away dismissively. He reached Gus, poked his finger into Haquim’s chest and pointed into the reaches of the darkness. Maybe he didn’t see Omar, who was crouched down close to rocks.

The voice dropped. ‘Are you the sniper?’

‘Who are you?’

‘At dawn you attack the Victory City of Darbantaq, yes?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘It is not often I step outside my front door. Less often I spend a night walking through these goddam hills. Put another way, it is something remarkable for me to have hiked this sort of distance when I could be tucked up in my cot. Isaac Cohen, who in the wisdom and generosity of the government of Israel is stationed in this fuck-awful place. I’m tired, I’ve twisted my ankle, I smoke too much, I have carried a load of tricks for you – can we talk?’

Instinctively, Gus reached out his hand and took the Israeli’s. ‘I’m Gus.’

‘I have much to tell you, and I want to be back in my bed before dawn. Are you listening?’

‘We have a mustashar and a leader. Should they not be listening?’

‘Do you know nothing? First lesson here, trust nobody. They’ll say what they think you want to hear. Believe nothing you are told, accept nothing you see. They are terminally divided and incapable of unity, just watch. You’ll have a crowd with you going forward. If you have to go back you won’t be able to run fast enough to keep up.

So, in answer to your question, I’m only talking to you.’

‘Why did you come?’

‘To tell you about Darbantaq. If you’re a sniper then you’ve reconnoitred the village

… ’

‘Yes.’

‘You saw the BMP personnel carriers?’

Gus hesitated. ‘No.’

Cohen chuckled. ‘Then it was worth my coming. You didn’t circle the village. There are three BMPs in earth revetments behind the command post. All will be fitted with a 73mm 2A20 main armament, rate of fire at four rounds a minute. Also they will be mounted with a light machine-gun. Unless you can handle the BMPs you won’t get near the place – and one of them will be fitted with thermal imaging… ’

The Israeli had slung his backpack off his shoulders and gasped at the release from the weight. He rooted in a side pocket, produced a folded wad of papers and gave them to Gus. ‘It’s all here. I’d have thought a combat veteran would have known about BMPs.’

Gus said quietly, ‘It’s my first week in combat.’

‘That’s very funny. Your famous British sense of humour? This is perhaps not so funny – you should read it.’

The hands burrowed into the backpack, the fingers working fast. Gus watched. The olive-green dish was expanded to full size and a stubby antenna pulled out in the centre.

Short cables were stretched to their maximum length and plugs slid into sockets in the box. Cohen threw a switch, a red light flashed and the dial’s needle jumped, then he killed the power.

Cohen said, ‘In the command post is an R-123M AFV radio that’ll go back to a booster, then to battalion at Tarjil, then on a relay to the brigade HQ on the Sulaymaniyah-Baghdad crossroads, and ultimately to Fifth Army HQ in Kirkuk. This box will block an R-123M’s transmissions, but it’ll only work at one hundred and fifty metres. So you have to get to one hundred and fifty metres from their command post at Darbantaq, then you can put them off-air. There’ll be no hero in a bunker giving a running commentary on the main assault, got me?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s what I came to give you.’

‘Thank you. What do you call it?’

‘It’s just a box of tricks. You want a name for it? Try “Josephus”. Josephus will do nicely. He died one thousand, nine hundred years ago, and he was a big man in the last Jewish revolt against the Romans. Josephus will work well for you… That was a joke, that you’re really not a veteran?’

Gus said simply, ‘I have never in my life done anything like this before, nor wanted to.’

Cohen reached out and his fingers caught Gus’s cheek. He held it tight enough to hurt.

‘You picked a bad place to learn. Your opposition knows about you and takes you seriously, which is not healthy news for a beginner… I sit on a mountain and I hear everything. They’ve sent a man from Baghdad for you.’

‘Have they?’

‘They have sent a master sniper to track you. He is Karim Aziz, a major, and they think he’s one of their top guys.’

‘Do they?’

‘He’s coming to track you and to kill you.’

Gus batted the fingers from his cheek. ‘I hope you get back safely to where you came from, and I hope your ankle’s better soon.’

Cohen said grimly, ‘Sniper against sniper. Secure your front, secure your flank, secure your back. I’ll listen for you, I’ll hear each step he takes and you take, until he finds you or you find him… It’s like something from the intestines of history. I’ll be listening, but I hope, and you’d better hope too, that your god watches for you.’

He heaved the backpack up onto his shoulders.

Gus watched the wavering, diminishing light from the Israeli’s torch. When it was gone, he called Haquim forward and repeated everything he had been told about the box, Josephus, and the positioning of the BMP personnel carriers, but he said nothing of a man sent from Baghdad to track and kill him.

The cold was around him. In an hour he would go forward with Omar. He felt a suffocating sense of loneliness.

They sat in the cold dining room, at the table, and Ms Manning kept her outdoor coat on.

On his pad, at the top of the blank page, Willet had written and underlined the word MINDSET.

‘His grandfather told us nothing of this.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t, would he?’

After another early start, after another early pickup by Ms Manning, they’d hammered at the door of the vicarage. Henry Peake had not been dressed, had told them firmly to wait. They’d sat in the car for fifteen minutes before being allowed inside. There were sounds of movement in the kitchen, but they were neither taken there, nor offered tea or coffee.

‘I don’t know – you tell me.’

‘We’re not responsible for our parentage and I am certainly not responsible for my father’s prejudices.’

Henry Peake was a slimmer man than his father, and already more gaunt. He had little of the certainty that the old man in the bungalow behind the big house had shown. But he talked in response to the prodding questions rattled at him by Ms Manning. ‘You’ll have to explain.’

He was lighting his third cigarette. He retched a cough, then launched. ‘Gus’s grandfather, my father, wouldn’t have talked to you about his grandson’s child-hood. He didn’t approve, you understand me? I was brought up in a service household. I made a crystal-clear decision, and Fiona was right with me on this, that Gus would not be reared as I had been. We let the child run. He was a free spirit. He wasn’t hidebound by the diktat of meaningless traditions. It was only later, when my father needed Gus, that he quite shamelessly involved him in this nonsense about northern Iraq. It’s where he is now, isn’t it?’

They were in a sheep scrape Omar had found. The ground would have been weakened by years of rain, and then the sheep in the last summer, or the summer before, had used that weakness and with their bodies had insinuated a narrow cavity on the slope of the hill.

The depth of the scrape was sufficient shelter from a summer squall for four or five sheep pressed close to each other, but was barely big enough for the boy and Gus. To use it and still be hidden by its lip of earth, the two were huddled close against each other.

In the scrape Gus could not take his usual firing position with his legs splayed out behind him. He used the Hawkins position, lying sideways with his upper body twisted so that he could aim out to the extreme left. It was neither comfortable nor satisfactory, but the rule of a marksman was to accept the conditions as he found them. Each time Omar wriggled, the movement reverberated through Gus’s body and disturbed his aim, and each time he kneed hard against the back of the boy’s legs and hoped he felt it.

In front of Gus, magnified through the telescopic sight, was the Victory City of Darbantaq. He could see the upper casings and the mounted guns on the BMPs behind their earthen walls, women starting to form a queue at a building close to the command post, the machine-gun crew on the roof of the command post, men fussing around their penned goats and sheep beside their concrete homes, soldiers shivering in the watchtowers, and children playing with a deflated football behind the wire.

Behind him and to his right, waiting on his first shot, were four hundred peshmerga men, and Meda. They would be crouched, nervous and fidgeting, holding tight to their weapons, waiting for the signal of his first shot.

The boy was more restless, his movements more frequent. Gus could not fault the way he had been led forward, partly at a crouch, and then at the leopard crawl. The last three hundred yards down the slope had taken them a full hour, scraping the ground in the half-light, because the Israeli had said one of the personnel carriers had thermal imaging, and if they were not flat to the ground they would make a signature. The boy had done well but now shifted more often as he raked a greater arc of ground with the telescope.

‘Our approach was good, Omar,’ Gus whispered, ‘but now we must be patient.’

‘Then the chance comes to kill them, Mr Gus.’

‘Where did you learn to stalk?’

‘Going into Iraqi camps, and going past the guards into the compounds of the charities, to take-’

‘To steal, Omar.’ Gus laughed soundlessly, and his eye never left the scope’s lens, which covered the entrance to the command post.

‘It is necessary to live, Mr Gus. And to live I have to take.’

She had ignored the father’s question. ‘Didn’t his grandfather teach him to shoot?’

‘God, no. He was into partridges and pheasants, semi-tame birds being driven towards the guns – he calls it sport, I call it murder.’

‘Did you teach him to shoot?’

‘Never been in the slightest bit interested. It’s all down to Harry Billings, a rogue who lived in the village, dead now, and no tears shed. We’d sent Gus away to school, of course, but he was a loner, didn’t mix well, and a bit of an under-achiever. I’d hoped that boarding school would make him more sociable. It didn’t. When he was home on holiday we hardly saw him. He virtually lived with Billings, just came home late at night to sleep, and was gone again at first light. His grandfather alternately said Billings should be horsewhipped or locked up, never seemed quite sure of the remedy.’

‘What was the nature of Mr Billings’ roguishness?’

‘Poacher.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

A grin creased Willet’s face, which she would not have seen. He knew from her monologues in the car that Ms Manning lived in Islington, that her parents were also close by in north London, that she had been to local schools and to university down a bus route. She was an urban person: she would know damn all of a country poacher’s life. His pen was poised.

‘A low-life ignorant poacher. Game birds, rabbits, the occasional deer. It wasn’t all illegal, there’s a big area of common ground up to the north of the village where they could shoot, but it was decidedly criminal when they were on the Vatchery estate. They were never caught by the gamekeeper there, though not for want of trying. That man used to sit half the night outside the Billings house waiting for the old devil to creep home with the pheasants or a fallow deer carcass. There was a bond between that uncouth man who’d not an iota of education or ambition and my son – I have to say it, a much closer bond than ever existed between Gus and his mother and me. Billings had a son, younger than Gus, a proper little tearaway, quite unsuitable company… Anyway, Billings was finally arrested and given three months inside by the bench. The police stopped him with a van full of pheasants. At the time I thanked God that Gus was away at school. When he was released the whole dreadful family moved away, good riddance, never heard of again. You give freedom to a youngster and hope common sense prevails. Sadly, parents are not always rewarded.’

He had been writing hard, taking a note that was almost verbatim. For Willet, it was as if a small light illuminated the darkness. He looked up. ‘What was the ultimate for your son, Mr Peake, when he was with Billings?’

‘A clean shot. I was once bawling him out, the way fathers do with teenage sons – he’d come home quite filthy from the fields and ditches, and we’d guests in for drinks. His response, as if he were talking to an idiot, was “You have to be prepared to lie up, Dad, so’s you get a clean shot under your own terms. Otherwise all you’ve done is wound a rabbit, break a pigeon’s wing. The worst sound in the world is a rabbit in pain, screaming, when you can’t reach it, hurt because you rushed your shot, Dad. It has to be a good kill.”

I had the impression that the hunting was more important to him than the slaughter, though I doubt that applied to Billings.’

‘Is that all there is?’ Ms Manning was already bored and lost.

“Fraid so. What else? Gus left school with pretty average grades, and I managed to pull some strings, got him into a haulage firm in Guildford. I did business with them and was owed favours. He’s been there ever since. I can only talk about his youth because we hardly see him, these days… What do I tell my wife?’

‘Your problem, Mr Peake, not mine,’ she said, without charity.

‘What’s he doing there? Is he driving a relief lorry?’

‘He’s gone to fight, Mr Peake,’ she intoned.

‘But that’s a war zone…’ The man’s mouth gaped.

Gus saw the target. He came slowly towards the command post. His own estimate of the distance was 750 yards, and the binoculars confirmed it at 741. There was a short line of soldiers at attention. A moment before, as Gus had done a fast scan with the binoculars, the crew on the roof with the machine-gun had closed up behind their weapon, and the soldiers in the watchtower ducked below their sandbag parapets. The T-junction of the reticule in his ’scope sight was on the target. He would fire at the next moment that his breath was steadied.

‘Watch the shot, Omar. Don’t move, not a fraction, just watch the shot.’

Gus breathed deeply, then slowly, so slowly, began to empty his lungs. When they were emptied he would relax, then fire. The smoke curled from the homes of the villagers, there was no new adjustment to make for the slight wind’s strength. Above the chest of the target were the gold insignia of rank on the target’s shoulders.

‘No.’

‘What?’ Gus hissed.

‘No. Don’t.’

Gus breathed again, his finger was inside the trigger guard.

‘Why not?’

‘It is not the officer.’

‘He has the rank.’

‘No, Mr Gus. The soldiers are laughing at him.’

Gus stared through the ’scope. Behind the target figure, level with the insignia on the target’s shoulder, a soldier grinned and Gus saw the flash of his teeth, and another man near to him laughing.

‘It is not the officer, it is a pretend. They know about you, trick you. They would not dare to laugh at their officer.’

The breath seeped from Gus’s body. He eased his finger off the trigger. He felt flattened by the simplicity of the trap set for him. Without the boy, he would have walked into it, fired into it. At that moment he saw his own importance. The life of a soldier, with a family and with a mother, was to be snuffed out so that his own life could be taken.

‘Thank you, Omar.’

‘It was easy to see the trick – yes, Mr Gus?’

He kneed the boy savagely. The sun crawled up behind him, over the ridge where the attack force lay and waited on him.

‘Correct, Mr Peake. Maybe you should chat it out with your father as to why your son is currently in a war zone. Good day.’

She was on her feet. Willet had filled the page below the heading of MINDSET. He put the pad into his briefcase. There were no handshakes at the door. Momentarily Willet saw a woman’s face at the kitchen door, grey, lined and harassed. He wouldn’t have known what to say to her that might have been of any comfort. The door slammed shut behind them.

They walked to the car.

‘What a bloody fool,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘Peake, of course.’

‘Which Peake?’

‘The son, that idiot.’

‘Why?’

‘For doing what he’s done – for going where he’s gone.’

Willet felt the anger brimming in his mind. ‘The last weekend you had time off, what did you do? Where did you go?’

‘Actually, I was in Snowdonia, with a group rebuilding footpaths for the National Trust. We were all volunteers.’

Through gritted teeth, Willet said pleasantly, ‘It must have seemed, Ms Manning, important. I suppose rebuilding a footpath is about as important as fighting for the freedom of a subjugated people in a war zone.’

She looked at him curiously. ‘Are you all right?’

He sat with his head down, his chin on his chest. ‘I’m fine – but what about him?’

‘The wind’s changed.’

‘He is coming.’

Gus hissed venomously, ‘You didn’t tell me, it’s veered.’

Omar persisted shrilly, ‘The officer is coming.’

‘The wind has moved from south-west-south to west-south-west – you’ve got to warn me about this sort of thing.’

‘Do you want to know about the wind or the officer?’

‘Both.’

The panic consumed him.

The wind had come up from gentle to moderate strength. A flag on the Stickledown Range would have eased clear of the pole and lethargically flapped free. Its direction had shifted from No Value to Half Value. On that range he could have waited, settled, then tapped into the calculator on the mat beside him and computed whether to alter the windage turret on the ’scope by a full click, or by half a click, or whether to aim off from the centre of the target’s V-Bull. Gus saw the officer. There were no insignia on his shoulder but men straightened to attention as he passed. He was within half a dozen feet of the entrance door to the command post and walking. There was no time to settle or make the necessary calculations. He aimed off, his mind racing for an answer to the equation, to compensate for the fresher wind and for the brisk stride of the officer.

‘Watch the shot’s fall,’ Gus whispered.

But the officer, wide-chested, in fatigues, would pause at the jamb of the command post’s door, and that, too, must go into the equation.

Gus fired. The moment that the recoil hammered into his shoulder, he knew that the breath pattern was wrong, and that he’d squeezed too fast on the trigger. The rifle’s compensator attachment at the barrel end kept the ’scope sight steady. He saw the hazed shapes of single waving grass stems and the flattening climb of the smoke columns, and the eddy of the air disturbed by the bullet’s track, and then he lost the flight.

The bullet would run for more than one and a half seconds. Its trajectory curve would take it to an apex of a fraction more than four feet above the aim point before the sliding fall. The flight, to Gus, was endless.

The target, the officer, at the door of the command post had turned and was issuing an instruction, jabbing with a finger for emphasis. Then he stood as if frozen.

Omar piped, ‘Miss. One metre to the right. Hit the wall. Miss.’

Gus slid the bolt back, eased out the wasted bullet. They were all rooted to the ground.

It was what he had been told. Men stood statue still in the seconds after a bullet had been fired and had missed them. But that moment would pass. It would pass before he had the chance to breathe in, breathe out, and use the respiratory pause. He locked the aim. His mind made the adjustment on intuition and instinct. He fired a second shot. A soldier dived to the ground. A second cowered, another fell to his knees, as if the ice of the tableau had melted. The officer’s jabbing finger was retracted and he seemed to be twisting his hips to turn for safety.

Gus saw him spin, one arm whipped high in the air. He saw the shock on his target’s face and watched him pirouette, fall. The officer was on his back and his legs kicked in the air. No-one came to his aid, and across the open ground came the faint whinnying cry of his scream.

He slid back the bolt, ejected the cartridge case. He tried to steady the post-shoot shake in his hands. He loathed himself for his failure to make a good, clean kill and started to analyse the first total failure and the second partial failure, as he had been instructed. And with the analysis came the calm… He had asked too much of the boy, he had not allowed enough for the wind, he had not reckoned on the pace of the officer’s walk, and he would think about it some more in the evening.

Gus said evenly, ‘The old stalkers in Scotland knew it. They’d have a guest fire at a stag and miss, and the stag always stays exactly still for two or three seconds. Then it runs. But, if it is winged, it runs immediately, until the wound kills it. I was lucky with that second shot.’

The machine-gun had opened up behind him and to his right, the tracer rounds arced across the dead ground, scattering little chasing patterns. The view through the ’scope was a blurred, fluid mess as he searched to find the position on the roof of the command post. And behind him he heard the whooping roar as the line of men began their charge.

A soldier yelled his name, waved frantically for him.

Major Karim Aziz was walking the dog alongside the edge of the high wire fence.

He heard his name and ran towards the soldier. The dog at his heel, he was led to the communications bunker.

The brigadier was already there, the general bursting in a minute after him.

He stood at the central map table and listened. The words that came blurted over the loudspeakers, high on the wall, were interspersed with break-up and howl.

‘… The captain is hit… Yes, Corporal Ahmad wore the captain’s coat, but was not shot at… Captain Kifaar is hit, is not dead, but they cannot bring a medical orderly to him. There is a general attack. We are waiting for Lieutenant Muhammad to take the place of Captain Kifaar in the command post.’

The Victory City at Quadir Beg broke across the transmission – their water tanker was late. When could they expect it?

The Victory City at Keshdan reported the failure of the single-stage air filtration system of a BMP. Could a qualified engineer accompany the next resupply column with a replacement?

‘Get those arseholes off the air,’ the general shouted.

‘… There is heavy shooting from the front… There are casualties… Lieutenant Muhammad has now reached the command post… They are led by a woman. She is with their forward force. The machine-gun fires at her, no hit yet, she is protected… The medical orderly has not come to the command post to treat Captain Kifaar. The captain is close to death. Are units advancing to help us? In God’s name, send us help.’

Aziz asked quietly, ‘Please, is it possible to know the circumstances of Captain Kifaar’s wounding? It would be useful for me.’

The question was relayed.

‘… A very long shot, twice. The second shot hit him. We must have help. They are near to us… No-one knows where the shot came from. Is help on its way?’

Over the loudspeaker came the sounds, staccato, of the firing. But Aziz had been given the answer he had expected and seemed not to hear the deep, distorted terror of the men under fire.

Gus had hit a man who ran to the nearest of the personnel carriers. He had missed another who made a snaky crawl to follow him but had put the next shot right through the gunport of the command post. A fuel drum, close to the earth walls for the personnel carriers, had caught fire and the deep red blaze of the incendiary threw a lowering pall of smoke across much of the village, which ebbed towards the fence. Between gusts of wind, gaps appeared in the grey-black wall of the smoke, and he caught fleeting glimpses of the machine-gun crew on the roof.

It was a scene of hell. Against him the boy was shivering with excitement.

She was at the front of the long, straggling line approaching the fence. She had no fear.

Suddenly, as if a man had punched him, came the realization of her vulnerability. He saw her turn and face the line of crouched men behind her, and give an imperious wave that they should follow.

Gus saw the machine-gun traverse towards her, then the smoke drifted and thickened.

The tracers poked through the cloud, firing at random, searching for her. Haquim was behind her, running awkwardly over the rough ground and hugging the metal box to his chest. The hellish cauldron was a small pocket of life and death, in which she stood and demanded that the peshmerga follow.

‘Watch for the fall,’ Gus snapped.

The wind was stronger: it tugged at the grass and wafted the smoke. He waited for the chance. She was a hundred yards from the fence. He had gone to eight clicks on the windage turret, but the wall of smoke was solid and he could not see through it. The tracers swarmed around her.

The smoke dissipated without warning.

He was gazing through the ’scope at the machine-gun crew. Three choices: the man who called the aim and was crouched at the back, puffing at a cigarette clamped between his lips; the one who fed the belt and whose helmet strap was undone and hung loosely against his cheek; or the one who pulled the trigger?

‘She’s hit,’ the boy gasped. ‘She has fallen.’

Gus fired, once, twice, a third shot. The smoke closed around his view of the target. He heaved back the bolt, squeezed the trigger again, and again, heard the empty scrape of the action and knew that his magazine was empty.

‘You have them, Mr Gus.’

He choked. ‘Does it matter?’

There was a stillness around him, as if the pace and clamour of the world had stopped.

It was the silence of remembrance.

‘The witch is down.’

Around Aziz there was a growl of pleasure, and the brigadier slapped his clenched fist into the other palm.

The operations officer lifted the microphone to his mouth and yelled at it, ‘Are the BMPs now engaged? Come on, man, what is happening there?’

The voice came back at them, echoed down on them. ‘They cannot reach them. There is a marksman. There is very great difficulty… Our machine-gun, the main defence, they are all dead, it is the marksman… Is help coming? Wait…’

Aziz felt a detached distaste for such confusion. It had no part in the warfare he practised. The chaotic noise was alien to him. He was at ease with himself, he had learned what he had wanted to know. He had no sympathy for the beleaguered soldiers: they were only a testing ground for his enemy. He yearned to be alone with his Dragunov and his dog, on a hillside, pitting himself against a worthwhile adversary.

‘She’s up… the witch is up. She’s-’

The voice was lost in a sea of static.

For several minutes the technicians tried to regain the link, to break the power of the jamming equipment, but the beating pulse of the garrison was gone.

He had seen the little clutch of men around her, had seen them drag her to her feet. She had stood for a moment, dazed, had then swayed, would have fallen again if they had not held her. She had pushed them away. He had lost her in the wall of smoke, and had reloaded five bullets in the magazine. When he had looked again through the sight, she was close to the perimeter wire, a dark stain on her thigh.

Gus watched. She was driving the men over the wire. They reached up and shredded their hands on the coiled barbs at the top. She was grabbing at those who followed, pitching them forward or helping to lift them. Sometimes her face was screwed tight in pain, and each time she ducked her head so that nobody could see. A man threw his heavy leather coat onto the coils, and others lifted her, pushing her feet so that she straddled the wire. More caught her as she fell on the far side.

His body slackened and he eased his hands from the rifle. The fighting was hand to hand, body to body. Like swarms of ants, the peshmerga fanned out to hunt down the last defenders. He saw a soldier emerge from a building holding high a white strip of torn sheet, before crumpling, his blood spattered across on the whiteness. Two more were running, only to be engulfed by the mob. He saw a soldier dragged from a bunker and the flash of knives. One of the BMPs coughed exhaust fumes and drove at speed towards the gate, crashed through it, then swerved into a ditch.

There was nothing more for Gus to fire at. He started to ease himself clear of the hiding place then turned and methodically started to pack away his rifle.

She was on the roof of the command post now, strutting her triumph.

‘Come on, Mr Gus. If we do not hurry, the killing will be finished.’

It was always the same in every communications bunker behind the lines when contact was lost with a forward position. The stunned quiet as if, buried tomblike in the bunker, each man considered the last seconds of a garrison’s life. Then there was shuffling movement and hushed voices to show that the living lived and the dead were abandoned.

The general clapped his hands for attention and barked out a series of orders: the battalion force at Tarjil should be alerted and should go to maximum readiness; brigade at the crossroads of the Sulaymaniyah and Baghdad routes should be warned; a situation report should be prepared for his approval before it was despatched to the Defence Ministry with copies to the al-Rashid command and the Abbasio Palace. Quiet conversation was followed by banter, then noisy laughter.

At the back of the bunker, away from the map table, Major Aziz noted that no order had been given for the advance into the hills of a column of tanks and armoured personnel carriers, either from Fifth Army headquarters or from brigade at the crossroads.

The lack of that order at first confused him, but then it slipped back in the heap of his own priorities.

His was a sense of private, covert exhilaration.

He slapped his thigh, a gesture for the dog, slipped from the bunker and climbed the steps to the freshness of the morning air. With no thought for the men of a defeated garrison, he went to his quarters to ready his gear. His time was coming.

When there was no more killing to be done Gus had brought Omar down to the village.

Near to the gate they reached Haquim packing away the cables of the box. Gus nodded abruptly to the mustashar, should have congratulated him, and did not, should have been congratulated for his shooting, and was not. He was learning. It was not Stickledown Range: Jenkins wasn’t there to slap him on the back. He walked through the gate, close to where a thick leather coat was hanging, ripped, from the top of the wire. He passed a sentry, whose body lay stupidly over a low wall of sandbags.

In the sheep scrape he had been protected from what he now saw.

He walked past the homes built of concrete blocks, Omar following. Some were on fire, some smouldered, some were pocked with bullet-holes. He saw dazed mothers walking aimlessly, holding their babies. One mother carried a bundle from which only a single tiny foot protruded at a broken angle. Another sat in front of the fractured door of her home and rocked in a chilling grief. In front of her were the corpses of two children.

Away to his right were the fathers and adult sons. Some were already digging the pit; some came to join them with spades hoisted on their shoulders. Near by was a toppled corner watch-tower, half of the body of the fallen sentry covered by it.

There was a trail for Gus to follow through the village: the trail of her voice. It led him along a sporadic line of death, towards the command post. The soldiers’ bodies had been robbed of everything of value: pockets had been ripped open, chains torn from their throats, their wallets discarded with the money gone and the photographs of their loved ones stamped into the dirt. She was on the roof, hectoring the men of the peshmerga, and he did not have the stomach to tell Omar to translate. He didn’t need to. He saw the dried blood on the thigh of her combat trousers. There were many corpses near the command post’s door, as if it had been a final rallying-point when the peshmerga had come over the perimeter fence.

On the ground in front of his boots, by the entrance to the command post, the face of the officer was barely related to the face he had seen through the ’scope. The vomit rose in Gus’s chest. The first of the peshmerga to reach him had not finished the officer’s life with a clinical head shot, but had slit his throat. Gus went into the command post and skirted through the detritus of broken tables and upturned chairs, stepped over the bodies, passed a man whose dead fingers were locked on the dials of the radio, and climbed the ladder to the roof.

He had his back to her. Behind him was the pride of her voice. With slow steps, he trudged to the corner where the machine-gun was sighted, and looked away over the bare ground towards the hillside, searching it for the sheep scrape. He could not find it. The boy had chosen well.

In the machine-gun nest, one man lay with the cigarette still clamped between his teeth. The others were more messy in death. On each was a narrow entry wound at the front and a larger wound at the back.

Haquim had crept up behind him. ‘This is not target shooting, it is war. For you it is an intellectual puzzle of distance and wind, the steadiness of your hand, and the quality of your ammunition. To us it is war. For you it is using your very great skills to combat technical difficulties. To us it is survival… No matter, you shot well.’

Haquim had said everything Gus had thought as he stood on the flat roof with her voice dinning in his ears. He turned away. On the far side of the camp, where the personnel carrier had battered a path for its flight, he saw a clutch of bodies, where men had entertained a last, hopeless belief in escape.

‘We have to harden you, Mr Peake. If you are not hardened then you will be like them, dead. Do not criticize us for behaving as barbarians would. It is what they do to us, what we have learned from them. The month that you saw Meda in the mountains nine years ago, with a hundred thousand others, starving, cold, without shelter, I held a pass with the men of agha Bekir that allowed them time for flight. We retreated rock by rock, stone by stone, to make time, and we could not take our wounded with us. We left them to the mercy of their soldiers. You don’t want me to tell you what we found when we came back. It is war.’

‘Is she hurt?’

Haquim snapped, ‘Of course she is hurt.’

‘Has she had treatment?’

‘Mr Peake, twenty of our men are dead, but twice that number are wounded and cannot walk as she can. There are many people from the village who are hurt – and there are their dead. She is the inspiration. Can she go to the front of the queue and demand, because of her importance, that her wound is treated? If she had not risen when she was hit the attack would have failed. If the men do not believe she can go forward, the advance is finished. She cannot show weakness. It is the price she must pay.’

Gus climbed down the ladder from the roof, went out through the command-post door and past the body of the officer. He walked briskly around the queue of peshmerga and villagers, some standing, some sitting and others just lying in the mud, silent or crying in their pain. He headed away from the grave-pit, and away from the last bodies. Her voice behind him was faint. He squatted down in the dirt, his back to the village, and stared out through the wire at the slope of the hills, and the mountain crests.

From behind him, Omar asked, ‘Do you think, Mr Gus, he is there, searching for you?’ *** The brigadier asked him where he was going. Major Aziz shrugged, pointed vaguely to the hills beyond the flame. Because he had been sent from Baghdad on the orders of the Estikhabarat, he did not have to explain himself. He walked out of the bunker; it perplexed him that reinforcements had not yet been sent, that the great lines of tanks and personnel carriers still rested in idle lines. It irritated him more that he could not recall where, or when, he had met the brigadier, but his mind was too clogged with details of his task for him to pursue it.

Behind him, in his bare quarters, on the floor underneath the smiling photograph of his President, he left the polished box and the folded rug on which the dog had slept. On the neatly made bed he had laid out all the spare clothes that had filled his backpack when he had flown north, and the pouch with his razor and toothpaste. On the chest beside the bed was the leather frame that held the pictures of his wife and his sons. He put his wedding ring and the birthday ring beside the frame.

He walked to the jeep and the driver started the engine. Aziz sat beside him, the Dragunov across his legs and the dog beside his feet. In the backpack, stripped down to necessities, were spare ammunition, his telescope, a half-loaf of bread, a quarter-kilo of cheese, his half-filled water bottle, dried biscuits for the dog, what he called the Dennison suit, maps and a folder of aerial photographs. He ruffled the fur at the dog’s collar, saw the pleasure on its face and felt the beat of its cropped tail against his boots.

The jeep drove away from Kirkuk, and passed through the brigade formation at the crossroads for Sulaymaniyah and Baghdad, climbing towards the town of Tarjil. It was as if he were coming home.

‘You know what? It’s my last bloody war zone – thank God.’

Dean thought it was the fourth time that night Mike had made that promise, Gretchen reckoned it was at least the fifth. A week of evenings together in the ground-floor bar of the Hotel Malkoc, and the story that had brought them to Diyarbakir was still beyond reach. The whisper was that the spring thaw would provide an opportunity for Saddam Hussein to advance again into northern Iraq. But they were in Turkey, and the border was closed.

‘Only war zone I’ve found is the goddam bathroom. “As dusk fell tonight, a vista of carnage and destruction was witnessed by your correspondent. Under a flickering light I surveyed, quote, scenes reminiscent of the worst horrors of the French revolution, end quote, in which no prisoners had been taken. After a good stamping session, I counted the corpses on my bathroom floor of forty-three cockroaches, their lives taken in the prime

…” ’ Dean was a roving reporter for a Baltimore paper and had covered every substantial conflagration in the region over the last seventeen years.

‘That’s bollocks.’ Mike was slumped in a rattan chair, swatting at flies and passably drunk. His Turkish cameraman was in the old city hunting women. Mike was a veteran reporter for the BBC, and was in the fast decline towards retirement.

‘You got a better war zone?’ Dean grinned.

‘Did you get on air tonight, Mike?’ Gretchen was conciliatory. She was forty, going on fifty, and worked for the Der Spiegel group out of Frankfurt. She was neither a threat nor an attraction to them. At the start of every assignment that brought them together she told them how she missed home and the company of her friend, Anneliese. She dressed like them: chukka boots, trousers with too many zip pockets, open-necked shirts showing their chests, safari tops with loops for pens.

‘No. I am not on the air tonight. I might get a showing on breakfast tomorrow, but I’m not holding my breath. What about you, Dean?’

‘Thank you for your kind consideration. I was dropped – “pressure of space”.

Gretchen, how’d they take your feature?’

‘Took it, probably already used it – to clean the lavatory. I am “on hold pending a peg”.’

Mike and his cameraman had tried to film the Turkish army in the streets of Diyarbakir, and been swamped by plain-clothes security men. Dean had filed on the scandal of the decay of the city’s medieval mosques. Gretchen had written six thousand words on child labour in the clothing sweat factories. They had all tried to justify their existence as they waited for the permission that didn’t come to cross the border that remained resolutely closed. Northern Iraq was near and unreachable.

‘If I was to use the word “introverted”, and then the word “self-obsessed”, who would I be talking about?’ Mike finished his drink and slapped the glass down on the table for the waiter’s attention.

‘You would, of course, be talking about our esteemed editors.’

‘It’s my last war zone.’

‘Fifth time.’

‘Wrong, sixth, easy.’

‘Last war zone – fuck you two – if I ever get to it, if – because my loved and admired editor is short on interest.’

‘Seem to have heard that record played somewhere before. “Sorry, Dean, but it’s the stock-market that’s playing big right now.”’

Mike banged his glass down again, louder, harder. ‘“Sorry, mate, but we really need something that’ll hook the viewer, like a celebrity visit – that’s if you’re unable to give us combat footage. Has to be an angle, Mike.” Problem is, I shot my mouth off, told them the tanks were going to roll… and I haven’t heard that Julia Roberts is arriving with an orang-utan, or Goldie Hawn up an elephant.’

‘You guys are joking.’

‘Or, Gretchen, we would cry,’ Dean said.

She persisted. ‘It is serious. Nobody cares back home. The editors tell it as it is. We believe that people at home are interested, and troubled, by the world outside their front door. We are old-fashioned, we are not “new”. When I go home, my neighbours are polite and ask where I have been. I tell them I have travelled to Somalia or Iran or Sudan, where people are suffering, and they are embarrassed…’

‘There is no technology to titillate, no smart-bomb videos, no cyber war. That’s why interest is spread thin. Doesn’t faze me – my last time, thank God…’

‘And on he goes.’

‘Fuck you both. Then I’m off to grow roses and sail a boat – and I will be, I promise faithfully, an anecdote-free zone. Not that anybody would listen.’

‘I don’t understand why people don’t care. In affluent societies, with safe lives, there is a duty of caring.’

Mike thought she was always saddest when she was earnest. ‘Forget it, Gretchen. Just enjoy the beer, the expenses, and the dazzling brilliance of the company around you.’

Dean said, ‘We’re all in the same shit, but attacking it separately. I don’t usually share.’

Mike was twisting and semaphoring to the waiter. ‘When it’s sharing your money you’ve stitched-up pockets.’

‘No way I’d share if I had a half-chance of screwing you deadbeats. I’m sharing because I can’t, as you can’t, get across that border.’ His voice had dropped, more from habit than the proximity of the Turkish plain-clothes police at a nearby table with their glasses of orange juice. ‘I was talking to one of the Turk lorry drivers who goes across, runs food loads for the UN. I offered him five hundred bucks to take me with him.’

‘You tricky bastard.’

‘You’d have left us here?’

‘Damned right I would. Didn’t do me any good. You know what he said, big bastard with no teeth? He asked me how I knew he wouldn’t drop me off on a God-awful lonely road where an Iraqi agent could take good care of me and give me a lift all the way to Baghdad. He said he’d get ten thousand dollars as bounty for an American illegal – be the same for a Britisher. Sorry, it’d be less for a German lady. Kind of nixed the negotiation.’

‘Is this story going anywhere? If it isn’t I’m off to force our bloody order down little Peach-bottom’s throat.’

‘He said there was a rumour of fighting down south on the ceasefire line.’

‘There’s always that rumour.’ Gretchen scratched at her armpit.

‘This afternoon he said a Kurdish army was being led south by a woman.’

Mike laughed loud. ‘Are you winding me up?’

‘A young woman, good-looking, with tits and an ass.’

‘Jesus, I wish I believed you.’

‘Why not a woman?’ Gretchen scowled. ‘Why should a woman not lead an army?

Why cannot men be led by a woman?’

Mike said solemnly, ‘Because it’s Kurdistan, lovely lady, because this is the Stone Age. Because women are in the home to cook, clean and open their legs on a Saturday night. I’d lead the bulletin, might even get a special out of it.’

Gretchen laughed. ‘I’d get the cover and ten pages inside.’

Dean stood. ‘After a lifetime of alcohol abuse, Mike, you are a total fucking failure at ordering drinks. You want something in this life, you have to do it yourself.’

‘Hey, it’s just a wet dream, because the border’s closed. What a way to go out from the last war zone. So, no Pulitzers for you.’ Mike caught the American’s arm and mimicked his accent. ‘“As dusk fell tonight over a vista of carnage and destruction, your correspondent stood beside the newest general to confront the awesome power of Saddam Hussein. She is a woman of soft beauty, who said her hero was the Duke of Wellington

…”’

‘Wrong… Schwartzkopf – no question.’

‘I’d love to think it’s true – two brandies, one straight Scotch, doubles. Go on, hurry up, you try and get some action here. A woman, leading an army, now that would be some story…’

In the quiet of the night, she came to the place by the wire where Gus sat.

‘The best tale in Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard’s book is about the cat. There was a German trench that was thought to be disused, but this lieutenant from the Royal Warwickshire Regiment – with his telescope – saw the cat sunning itself.’

‘He’s asleep, Gus.’ There was the tinkle of her quiet laughter. ‘I think the cat will have to keep until tomorrow.’

He had known the boy was asleep. He was telling the story for himself, for comfort.

She sat close to him. He put his arm lightly around her shoulder and remembered how he had felt when the boy had told him she was down.