Holding the Zero

Chapter Seven

‘Without your grandfather, his friendship for my grandfather, I would be a peasant.’

‘Has your wound been treated?’

‘Without his books I would not be able to read. I would be in a village with children, animals, a small field and a man – and I would have nothing.’

‘Stop talking for a moment and answer me. Has anyone looked at your wound?’

The night was around them, and the quiet. The scant moon’s light shimmered on the wire of the fence in front of them. Gus held her shoulder loosely, as if she were a sister or a loved cousin. At home he had neither. He smelt the stale sweat of her body and the dankness of her clothes. No radios played behind them, and he heard no voices. Gus thought the village was stilled by mourning and exhaustion.

‘I know from the books, Gus, of the workings of the engine of a Hastings aircraft of Transport Command and the armaments carried by a Vampire jet bomber. I do not think that many peasant women have such knowledge. I know the history of the Peninsula war, and the campaign of the British in North Africa. I know of the lives of Montgomery and Haig, Kitchener and Wellington, and why William won at Hastings, Henry at Agincourt.

I read the books well that your grandfather gave to my grandfather. How could I be a peasant?’

‘If you’re wounded, it must be looked at and treated.’

‘How could I work in the fields, clean children, cook, watch goats and sheep, when I have read the many books given to Hoyshar? I think it was destiny, Gus.’

‘It has to be looked at.’

‘I felt the weakness when I fell. It was God’s mercy that very few of the men saw I was hit. If they know I am hurt, believe I cannot go forward, they will be gone by the morning. It would be the end of the destiny. Do you not understand, Gus? I cannot go for treatment where the wound is seen.’

He asked quietly, a murmur in her ear, ‘Will you allow me to look at the wound?’

‘But you would not tell? You must not…’

There had been a fierceness in her voice when she had spoken of destiny. When she spoke of the wound there was, Gus recognized it, a timid slightness about her. The wound made her young, frightened. He understood. Destiny would carry forward the cold, hard, cruel men of the peshmerga – the pain of the wound and her fear would cause them to go.

If she could not go forward then he, himself, would turn. He would go back to his grandfather, back to Meg, back to Stickledown Range, back to the offices of Davies and Sons; he sensed the burden she carried.

Gus said, ‘I’m sorry, I know very little about medical treatment. I’ll do what I can.’

‘But you won’t tell?’

‘I promise.’

He slipped his arm from her shoulder and walked across the dead, darkened ground between the wire and the homes of concrete blocks. He stumbled against the carcass of a dead sheep, sloshed in the mud of a sewer, moved past the low houses where muted lights burned. He went into the command post, where Haquim was crouched over the captured maps. He told Haquim what he wanted, and saw anguish crease the face of the fighter, ageing him.

Haquim stood awkwardly, as if the pain had settled again on his old wound, and was gone. If her injury was serious, if she was living on borrowed time, it was all finished.

Gus sat amongst the dark debris of the command post. All finished, for nothing… The minutes slipped by. He would return home and the one thing in his life that had seemed to him to be important would have been dogged by failure. He would carry that failure to his grave. Haquim returned.

Gus carried the saucepan of boiled water, the sealed field dressing, the small wad of cotton wool, the narrow roll of bandage gauze and the torch out into the night.

He set down the torch, knelt beside her, and did what no man had done. His fingers trembled as he reached under her tunic, unbuttoned the waist of her trousers and drew down the zip. She was looking into his face and he saw trust there. He put his arm around her waist, lifted her to drag down her trousers and felt the spasm of pain grip her. He saw the clean skin of her thigh, the caked blood and the livid colour of the bruising. He tore off small pieces of cotton wool, dipped them in the water and began to separate the blood from the bruising.

Three years before, Gus had been the first driver to reach a motor accident – chest injuries from the impact on the steering wheel. He had run a hundred yards to the nearest house and demanded that an ambulance be called. He had gone back to the car, held the woman’s hand until the paramedics arrived and had vowed to replace his ignorance with the basic skills. He had driven away with good intentions on his mind, and had never enrolled in an evening first-aid course.

He cleaned away the blood, edged his hand high on her thigh to hold her still when she squirmed in pain, and found the wound. An inch to the left and the bullet would have missed her; an inch to the right and it would have nicked an artery or shattered her femur.

He worked faster as the water cooled. The wound was a deep furrow in the flesh of her thigh. It was worst for her when the cotton wool touched the rawness, and then he held her tightest, but she never cried out.

He smeared the last strands of trouser cotton out of the wound. The field dressing was old British Army surplus, would have been sold to the Iraqi military at a knock-down price. When he held her, and hurt her, the warmth of her chest was arched against his face and she bled from her bitten lip. He read the faded instructions on the dressing, then stripped it out and fastened it. He lifted the slight weight of her thigh higher and wrapped the bandage round the dressing.

There was a guttural cough behind him.

Gus pulled her trousers up over her thighs and hips, and buttoned them. She sagged away from him and lay on her back.

He lifted the torch and the beam speared into the darkness. The men sat silently in a wide crescent, their backs to him and to her. No man looked at her, had seen her nakedness.

The softness passed from her eyes. The trust was a memory. She dragged herself up and picked up the torch.

Meda walked freely among them and kept the torch on her face so that they could see that she felt no pain.

He was bound to her. Where she walked, he would follow.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE.

3. (Conclusions after interview with Henry Peake (father of AHP) conducted by self and Ms Carol Manning – transcript attached.) MINDSET: In a solitary childhood, AHP received a grounding in countryside lore and hunting. He would have learned to kill and, more important, would have become familiar with the basic techniques of stalking and tracking. In my opinion it is impossible for a sniper to operate successfully unless he has the hunter’s MINDSET. However, my assessment of AHP’s chances of medium-term survival (slim to nonexistent) in the northern Iraq theatre are unchanged. The MINDSET is good, as far as it goes, but a teenager’s ability to shoot rabbits and pigeons does not compensate for lack of MILITARY TRAINING. Also, I have no evidence of AHP possessing the necessary TEMPERAMENT that differentiates a sniper from a target marksman.

Ken Willet read it back to himself in the quiet of his London living room. It would be on the desk of Ms Manning’s line manager in a few hours, would be read and then filed into dusty oblivion.

Four years earlier he’d failed a sniper’s course at the Infantry Training School at Warminster. It had been the only minor setback to his army career, and at the time it had hurt. Not any more. There were five parts to the final examination and he had passed in two, Camouflage and Concealment along with Observation, and failed in three, Marksmanship, Stalking and Judging Distance. To have won a sniper badge he’d needed passes in all disciplines. From his own teenage years he already had the mindset, he’d also been a good shot against rabbits and pigeons, but had realized in the second of the course’s five weeks that his temperament was inadequate. And there was nothing he’d yet found, as the character of Augustus Peake was laid bare, to convince him that this civilian had a temperament to withstand the physical and psychological pressures that would close on him.

Ken Willet had failed the course, along with nine others out of the dozen starters. He’d had a fast beer, and driven away from the Infantry Training School. Forty-eight hours later he had been back with his platoon in Belfast. Easy. If Peake failed, there was no beer and no commiserations, and no drive out. He would be dead in a bloody foreign field.

As he started for bed, Willet thought that the man must be damned arrogant to imagine that, without a sniper’s temperament or training, he could waft into a faraway war and make any sort of difference.

They had left Omar and the mustashar behind, sulking and resentful. No explanations offered, she had walked out of the village at first light. Only Gus was with her. A dozen men had pressed forward, claiming in a babble that they should go with her, and she had flashed her wide smile, then told them they were not needed.

They had walked for two hours, then crawled forward. She had walked well, but the crawling was tough. They had crossed two ridges and the valley separating them. The further valley, now ahead, was steep-sided and rock-sprayed. She should have been in bed, or at least resting, but he didn’t bother to tell her. She’d stumbled once, the wound taking the force of her fall against a stony outcrop, and had let out a shrill cry. When they had pressed forward on their knees, she had twice had her backside in the air to keep her weight off the wound, and each time Gus had belted her buttocks without ceremony.

They were at the rim. Below, there was a track on the valley floor, insufficient for a vehicle, perhaps used by a goatherd or shepherd but not since the last summer. He soaked up the wild quiet of the place, and the small clumps of flowers.

‘Watch for me.’

It was an instruction. He was no longer the man who had tended her wound. ‘What am I looking for?’

‘If there is a threat to me, to take me, then shoot.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your promise, Gus, if they try to take me, shoot me.’

‘I promise.’

‘Shoot me – promise it, on your grandfather’s life.’

‘I will shoot you, Meda. Don’t move, stand still, don’t break my aim. Don’t make it hard for me to get a clean kill.’

Could he shoot her? Circumstances had shifted once more. From killing an enemy to shooting a friend. And each time they changed, he was further involved. She had not told him who might take her, or what was the threat. Could he measure the distance, make the windage adjustment, find her body on the T-junction of the reticule in the ’scope, hold his hands steady and squeeze the trigger?

She slipped away. He crawled off to his left, then began a slow search with his binoculars to find a position where he could lie up. She slithered down the sloped wall of the valley, kicking up dust, carelessly cascading stones in her wake. There was a place that was blanketed by old yellowed grass – well away from a tree stump that was the obvious position of concealment, two dozen paces from a small cluster of rocks that was the second most obvious. He spent several minutes tearing up similar strands of the grass and wove them into the hessian loops of his gillie suit, over his back, his shoulders, onto the hood, and put the last pieces into the hessian bandaging the rifle.

He armed the rifle and depressed the safety. She was on the floor of the valley, sitting on a smoothed rock with a child’s innocence. She was picking tiny flowers and he saw her slide them across her nose. The one thing she feared, he thought, was capture. He had been brought with her because she could not show the men, or the mustashar , the smallest sign of fear… She started up, no longer the child. He watched as she transformed herself once more into the warrior. He could not see who approached her. As he had told her, she did not take a step forward. The sight was on her. She was unbending, magnificent. Gus’s finger rested on the trigger guard.

The gloved hands came first into the tunnelled vision of the ’scope, reaching for her, then Gus saw the arms in drab military olive green, then the insignia of rank on the shoulders, and then the pocked sallow face with the black brush of the moustache, the beret.

Gus’s finger lay on the cold metal of the trigger. He watched as Meda’s cheek was kissed by a senior officer of the Iraqi army. They sat together and a map case was opened between them.

His cook-boy came with two buckets filled with dried earth as Lev Rybinsky unravelled the hosepipe at the side of his bungalow home. The water gushed out, he doused the buckets, hurled the mud at his car and sent the cook-boy for more.

His car was a 500SL Mercedes saloon. With old newspaper Rybinsky smeared the dripping dirt over the panelwork, the lights, the bumpers and the windows. When more mud was brought to him, he threw it against the body of the car. The day before, the cook-boy had spent the whole afternoon cleaning and polishing the Mercedes, but that was before Rybinsky had heard the whispered rumour.

Eight buckets of mud went onto the car before he was satisfied that every trace of polish had been removed. Rybinsky wiped a small part of the windscreen clear, enough for him to see through, shouted for the cook-boy to follow him and went back inside the bungalow. The hall and the living room were filled with packing cases. There were more in the kitchen, each stamped with the names of aid organizations. He skirted around them, went into the rear yard and unlocked the heavy padlock on the steel door of a concrete shed. His two Alsatians leaped at him from their chain tethers.

From the shed, with the cook-boy’s help, he carried out a new, never-fired DShKM

12.7mm heavy machinegun. The cook-boy took most of the weight, and would return to the shed to bring out the ammunition, while Rybinsky had the light wheels as his second load.

Preparing to set out on a journey, Rybinsky would ordinarily have filled his Mercedes with oil, crates of corned-beef, sacks of pasta or flour, packets of computer chips or cases of whisky. He had them all, but because of the rumour he took only the machine-gun, which had an effective range of 1,500 metres and the ability to penetrate 20mm-thick armoured plate, from the arsenal of military weapons stored in the shed.

He supervised the lifting of the gun and its wheels into the back of the Mercedes where they covered the medicines he always travelled with. Lev Rybinsky was a week from his sixtieth birthday; his wife, his children, would be in their home at Volgograd when the date fell. He checked his jacket pockets – he needed to be clear exactly where the documents were. On the left side he kept the passes and letters of authorization supplied to him by agha Bekir, and on the right were the papers given him by agha Ibrahim. He tapped his bulging buttock and felt the reassurance of the roll of banknotes, American dollars. As a trader, a provider, a milch-cow, needed by everybody and loved by nobody, the roll of notes gave him access, influence and the ability to trade. The rumour he’d heard offered the possibility of a major commercial opportunity. He left a short letter for his junior partner, Jurgen, in the living room on the stacked crates that held an X-ray scanner for a hospital – donated by an Italian charity – and as an afterthought picked up a carton of Marlboro cigarettes.

If the rumour were true, it would be a long journey. He drove away in his mud-spattered car towards a distant war.

The old Israeli had told him to trust nobody, to believe nothing he was told and to accept nothing that he saw. Gus watched Meda shake the officer’s hand as if she were his equal.

The maps were folded away and the officer had slipped from the sight.

Gus burned. Her talk was of destiny. Because of her, the peshmerga had charged a machine-gun. He had watched the dead buried and the wounded taken on bumping litters to the north – and she had met an Iraqi officer. She was climbing the slope of the valley wall, slowly and with effort, and he saw the small stain on her thigh where the wound wept. The tears of anger in his eyes misted his view of her. He thought of betrayal, as he slithered away from his firing position and crawled to the far side of the ridge to intercept her.

Meda came over the rim and looked into his face.

There was the haughty whip in her voice, ‘What is your problem, Gus?’

‘Not my problem,’ he blurted, ‘the problem of the men, the problem of Haquim, the problem of the villagers. Maybe only the dead don’t have a problem.’

She flared. ‘Because I meet an Iraqi?’

‘Because you go secretly to meet an Iraqi.’

Her hands caught at the hessian loops at his shoulders. ‘Do I have to tell you, like a child has to be told, everything? You tell me! Why was the village not reinforced? Why have not new tanks and new personnel carriers been sent to Tarjil? If you cannot tell me then say nothing.’ Her mood swung: she was again the innocent. ‘If he had tried to trap me, to take me, would you have shot me?’

‘I try to keep my promises.’

‘You know what they call me?’

‘I imagine they call you friend.’

‘He said that at Fifth Army they call me the witch.’

He set a fast pace back towards the village, and never looked behind him to see how well she followed.

Major Karim Aziz had come back to a place that was like home to him. It was old ground, familiar territory.

The driver had taken him to Tarjil. In the police station he had studied the maps, talked with the commanding officer, slept on the floor with his dog cuddled against him, and he had left the town long before dawn.

At first he had tracked north, towards the Little Zab river, shadowing the Arbil-Kirkuk road, keeping in the lee of a ridge-line.

It was twenty-five years since he had first been posted to the region, and the fifth time that he had returned there. Nothing had changed except that trees he knew were taller, and the Victory Cities he skirted were more permanent and weathered, the hulks of abandoned personnel carriers more rusted.

He had slipped past a small gorge where a unit had been blocked in the al-Anfal operation, eleven years before. They had only been able to go forward after he had identified then shot the saboteurs’ commander.

In the early morning, from higher ground, he had seen the track where three armoured vehicles had been ambushed twenty-one years before. He had been with the relief force that had driven off the bastards as they looted the vehicles, and they had found the bodies of the vehicles’ crews; he could see the overgrown ditch beside the ochre hulks where he had vomited when he had seen the mutilation of the bodies.

By mid-morning he had looked down on a shepherd’s hut of stone and corrugated iron from the same position he had taken nine years back. It had been the furthest point of the saboteurs’ advance when they had swarmed south in the belief that the Americans would fly in support. The hut had been a night shelter for a reconnaissance group; with his Dragunov, he had shot their chief when he came out of the hut and stretched in the sunlight. The shot had been at the top of the Dragunov’s range, one of the best he had ever achieved, and had made a stomach wound. In his mind he could still hear the screaming of the chief man as he lay outside the hut for an hour while none dared expose themselves to pull him inside.

By late morning he had reached a division of the shepherds’ trails and he had gone to the west but, four years before, he had taken the eastern path on a forced march in the failed attempt to intercept the fleeing American spies who abandoned their Arbil villa base. Everything he saw, every step he took, was as he remembered it. The ground had eroded but each footfall was an echo in his memory.

He took a position and settled. The dog had moved well with him. It ran when he scurried forward, slithered on its stomach when he crawled, lay motionless when he stopped, kneeling to scan the ground ahead. In the manuals it was written, by the Soviets, the British and the Americans, that a sniper must always be accompanied by an observer.

In his long years in the army, Karim Aziz had not met a man he would have trusted sufficiently to accompany him; but he would trust the dog with his life.

The position he had chosen was amongst haphazardly shaped stones that offered him a clear view of the ground between the Victory City of Darbantaq and the town of Tarjil.

Behind him were the tight-packed homes, the mosque’s minaret, the faint outline of the communications equipment on the police station’s roof. Further behind him, and barely visible, were the brigade’s tents at the crossroads, the burning flame, and the conurbation of Kirkuk. Ahead of him was Darbantaq, five kilometres distant, with small smoke columns to identify it. Around him were the hills and valleys, and the silence.

Major Karim Aziz was at peace.

The peace came because he was far from Baghdad – from the pace and fumes, the noise and lifebeat of a city. He was anonymous in Baghdad, a pygmy figure. Even waiting endlessly on the flat roof with the Dragunov, he had never been able to gather up the sensation of power that was with him now. In the city he was one man against a million, one man against a regime, one man against an army. Here, it was hunter against hunter, a single marksman against a single marksman. It was his territory into which an intruder had strayed.

He looked towards Darbantaq across the slope of the valleys and over the swollen water-filled gullies. Bright green patches of ground, surrounded by yellowed grass, marked the peat marshlands. The dog growled softly, a whisper in its throat.

He was cautious with the telescope and he had draped a small square of grey cloth over the end of the lens glass. The sun beat down on him. If it caught the glass then his position was betrayed. He could see the roofs of Darbantaq, the smoke, and the personnel carrier skewed off the track leading to the village. Sometimes he could see figures moving between the buildings. At last light, with the sun sinking behind him, he would move closer.

He laid down the telescope, put it beside his rifle, and slowly turned his head. There should be no sudden movements to break the pattern of his camouflage. He slipped his hand back, ruffled the fur on the dog’s neck, and felt the vibration of the growl. The work of an observer was to protect a sniper’s back from attack from the flank or the rear. The dog lay facing away from him, and growled. It was on its stomach, head between its front paws, ears flattened, nose pointing the way for him.

There was a trellis of small valleys. One went north to south, another ran on a parallel line, and another east to west. He scanned each of them, and the further valleys, before he saw the movement that had alerted the dog.

A single man moved along on a herdsman’s track at furtive speed in the second valley from him.

He reached for his telescope.

The man wore an officer’s uniform. On the shoulders, magnified thirty times, was the gold-braid insignia of a ranking brigadier.

Of course, Aziz had checked with the regimental commander at Tarjil that no patrols would be out in the sector. A brigadier would not personally check forward positions, would not walk, and would not be alone. The man half ran and looked behind him as if pursued by demons.

He remembered… The brigadier in the communications centre of Fifth Army headquarters, and no reinforcements deployed, the lines of motionless tanks and personnel carriers… A demonstration of shooting power on a range. Two generals and a brigadier had come to the firing range and witnessed him accrue six hits from six shots at 700 metres when the probability of a kill at that range was listed as only 60 per cent. He saw that brigadier hurrying along the track on the valley floor. He lost him… Three weeks after the demonstration on the range he had received the invitation to a meeting.

He had sat in the general’s car, and the proposition of assassination had been made to him.

He was held in the tentacles of conspiracy. He heard the distant whine of a jeep’s engine, and lay on his stomach, numbed.

‘Did you see an army?’

‘What sort of bloody army?’

Joe Denton had been standing with his bodyguards and the local men he’d trained, and was studying the fall of a well-grassed meadow between the village and the road. It was the best meadow available to the village, but the edge of the grass area was pocked with a small disturbance of earth, where the child had lost his leg. There should have been a wire fence round the meadow but some goddam greedy idiot from the village had taken the warning wire to corral his animals. The stupidity had cost a child’s leg, and maybe even the child’s life. It might have been a 72A, could have been a POMZ 2M, but it was most likely that a fucking V69 anti-personnel mine had exploded.

Denton was well paid by a British charity to clear old Iraqi mines, close to fifty thousand sterling a year, tax-free, but it was a bloody lonely life. Had it not been he would never have mixed in the UN club in Arbil with a crook like Lev Rybinsky. The mud-caked car had pulled up on the road behind him.

‘Joe, my friend, did you see an army led by a woman?’

‘What are you talking about, Lev? The usual old crap?’

‘You call me crap when you want cigarettes, Joe, when you want whisky? Hey, did you see a woman leading an army?’

‘No.’

The car drove away down the road. Denton laughed mirthlessly: a woman leads an army in northern Iraq, and next week pigs fly. He thought of how many mines were buried there, at what depth, what density, and he started to draw a plan of the meadow.

‘Did you see an army?’

‘What if I did?’

‘Was the army led by a woman?’

‘And if it was?’

Sarah was at the co-ordinates given over a radio link because the message had said there were injured children to be met. The mud-caked car had stopped at the roadside behind the small convoy of pick-up trucks she had organized to make the rendezvous.

The big fight had been to get the doctor to leave the clinic at Koi Sanjaq and come with her. She’d built the bloody clinic. That the doctor had a clinic to work in was bloody well down to her and Protect the Children funds – so, she’d told him he could bloody well get off his bum and come with her.

‘I’ve got morphine.’

‘Then hang around, Lev.’

‘And I’ve got penicillin.’

‘Make yourself comfortable. Is it that stuff you promised me weeks ago?’ She laughed, a wild bitter laugh. The last load of medical supplies trucked across the border had been stopped at a road block by peshmerga of agha Ibrahim’s faction, and bloody hijacked.

The lorry had been cleared out. The food had not been touched in the second lorry, and the third lorry with the building tools had made it through. She thought it often enough, that northern Iraq was the loneliest corner of the earth for an expatriate, which was why she knew Lev Rybinsky, and drank with him in the UN bar. If she had met the shit at home in Sydney, she would have looked right through him, walked right past him, and not noticed.

‘What’s her name, Sarah?’

‘Meda.’ Sarah saw Lev Rybinsky salivate, and his stomach quivered.

‘Where is she?’

‘Do I get the penicillin and the morphine?’

He was out of the car and scurrying to the boot. She thought him loathsome. He wore what she assumed was an Italian-made silk shirt, grubby, top button undone, the tie dangling loose, and a suit from Milan that was at least a size too small for him; the jacket wouldn’t have fastened and the trousers’ belly button was loose. The stubble on his face was creased by his jowl lines and the bald summit of his head glistened in the sunlight.

He was repulsive but she needed him, as everybody did. He lifted two cardboard boxes from the boot and carried them to her. She saw that the donor labels had been ripped off.

She didn’t know whether they were from Protect the Children or another bloody charity.

They were probably hers to begin with.

She smiled sweetly, and pointed. ‘Up there. That’s where she is.’

There was a slope and a distant clear-cut line of a ridge. Behind it were another three, softly hazy, barely visible in the high altitude. She’d hoped he’d gape and shrivel, but his pudgy face lit in triumph.

A line of men materialized over the nearest ridge. She put the boxes of morphine and penicillin in her pick-up, and Lev let her swig at the flask of whisky from the glove compartment of the Mercedes. She always needed whisky when the wounded were children. The column of men came down the slope with the casualties of battle.

One day each month a helicopter came to the eyrie in northern Iraq, collected Isaac Cohen, flew him back across the Turkish border to the base at Incerlik, and in the evening returned him to the isolation of his mountain home. On that one day he was debriefed by the Mossad officers stationed in Ankara who flew in to meet him. The contact was valuable and broke the impersonal monotony of radio intercepts – but even better was the chance to lie in a bath of warm water and to eat good cooked food. For a whole month he yearned for the comforts of that single day. The helicopter would not come for another twenty-four hours but already he was packed, ready for its arrival.

Haquim said, ‘He is a snake, but a snake that has no venom. I asked him what was the price of the machine-gun, and he said it was a gift. I asked why he wished to travel so far to make a gift, and he said that the gift was proof of his friendship.’

Breaking the rule Haquim had set, Gus had been lying in the sunshine by the fence and cleaning the blister on his heel when he had seen the return of the men who had carried down the wounded. An overweight, elderly civilian was among them, carried on one of the litters that had been used for the casualties. Behind him more men carried a heavy machine-gun and ammunition on a stretcher. At the broken gate of the village, the man had slid heavily off the litter, wiped the sweat from his forehead and taken charge of the machine-gun. He had wheeled it into the village, grunting from the weight of it, and Haquim had met him.

‘He is Lev Rybinsky, a Russian. He would not know about friendship. Everything for him is a negotiation for influence and financial gain. Where there is a closed border, he has access because he has bought the guards, he owns the customs men of the Syrians and the Turks and, perhaps, of the Iraqis. You want a tanker of fuel, he gets it for you.

You want fruit from America, he supplies it. You want an artefact of antiquity from Nineveh or Samarra, he provides it. Now, he comes to us with a gift of friendship and will not talk about a price.’

‘It would have a hell of a hitting power.’

‘At a range of a thousand metres it can pierce the armour on any part of a personnel carrier. Of course it is useful, but I ask, what is the price? What does he want that we can give him?’

They watched.

The Russian dragged the machine-gun towards the command post, from which Meda emerged. He stopped, wiped an old handkerchief over his head and face, straightened his tie, then bowed elaborately to Meda. She was laughing, and he reached forward, touched her arm, as if to discover that she was real. Haquim turned away.

‘You know, Gus, that we attack Tarjil tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’

‘You understand that to attack Tarjil we must come further down from the mountains?’

‘Yes.’

‘The real friends of the Kurds are not a man who brings a machine-gun – or a man who brings a sniper’s rifle. They are the mountains. And now we are leaving our friends behind us.’

‘What do I do at Tarjil?’

‘There will be a briefing at dusk, then you will be told. Then, perhaps, I will be told.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where were you this morning, when you went with Meda?’

‘Don’t ask me because I can’t tell you.’

He saw the beaming face of the Russian amongst the tight-pressed shoulders of the men and he heard Meda’s voice. He saw the adoration of the men for her and the sunlight played on her mouth, which, in dark secrecy, had kissed the cheek of a senior Iraqi officer. Her hands moved high in emphasis, and they had shaken the hand of the officer.

He sat on the ground and began to unwind the hessian bandage roll from the body of the rifle so that he could, again, enjoy the distraction of cleaning it.

The sergeant said, ‘I am from Basra, Major, and my young brother is with me here, and my cousin. Will the saboteurs attack in the morning? It is good that you are here, Major, with your rifle.’

Karim Aziz turned away from him. He was still in shock from the extent of the conspiracy, and struggling to comprehend what he’d seen. His legs ached from the long day’s walk, but the dog still bounded at his side. The darkness on the streets of Tarjil was broken by pockets of light from curtained or shuttered windows and from fires lit by the soldiers beside their bunkers. He had seen the gleam of confidence in the eyes of the men behind the sergeant as they noted his paint-smeared face and the heavy hanging camouflage smock, the rifle balanced in the crook of his arm.

An old man hurried from the shadows carrying a small can of heating oil, then saw him and blocked him.

‘I am retired now, Major, but I was professor of the economics faculty of the University of Mosul. This is my home. My wife pleaded that we should flee south, I said the army would protect us. It is good to see you, Major, with your rifle.’

The man kissed his cheek and stumbled on into the darkness. In the last light of the day, before Aziz had turned, he had been close to the village of Darbantaq – four hundred metres from it – and had lain on his stomach with the dog beside him, and watched. He had seen her – the witch – once, but she was hemmed in by a crowd and was crossing, fast, the gap between a row of homes and the command post. He had watched as a paunchy European had brought a DShKM heavy machine-gun into the village. He had noted the way the men sat in quiet clusters, as men always did in the hours before they went into battle. He had seen a part of the body of the officer at the entrance to the command post, and had tilted his head to study the ground from which the shot would have come. He had found, at the sufficient elevation to clear the roofs, the scrape on the slope made by the sheep. He had trekked back, his mind in turmoil.

Wandering alone in the streets of the town that would be attacked in the dawn, confused and troubled, tugged between the extremes of loyalty and conspiracy, he had seemed to have become a beacon towards which the hope of frightened people was drawn.

‘You are the master sniper, Major. Through the length of the regiment you and your skill are spoken of. We are not forgotten by Baghdad, Major, if they have sent you and your rifle. Shoot her! Shoot the witch.’

If he fought he would shoot against the conspiracy he had joined. If he did not fight, he would betray the trust of those who depended on him. He went slowly through the town, past the sandbag positions and cars that had been driven across the streets to make barricades, hugging the shadows and harbouring his torment.

The man had no face.

He lay against a rock, but had no face. Or he was in a ditch, or had tunnelled out a hide, or was back in trees, buried in shadow… but there was never a face to bring a character to the man.

The meeting droned on.

He needed to give a face to the man. He did not know whether it was cold or carried warm humour, whether the face had charity or parsimony. He did not know whether the face of the man was bearded, moustached, or clean-shaven, whether it was topped with hair, whether the eyes shone without mercy or with kindness. The man had come north to find him and to kill him, and he could not give him a face.

Meda, with the map spread in front of her, talked, and the men listened.

He could not escape from his search for the face. In the morning the man would be waiting for him. He had come north to take one life. Gus heard not a word that Meda said. Nothing he had been told, had read, that he had experienced, had prepared him for the bleak certainty that a master sniper was at that moment making his preparations for the morning.

‘Gus?’

All through the day he had been able to shut out the thought of the man, but no longer.

He was drawn, a lemming to a cliff, towards Tarjil, where a fate of sorts awaited him.

The chill was on his body.

‘Gus, is that all right?’

Who would tell his grandfather, his father and mother? Who would tell Meg? Who would clear his desk? Who would tell Jenkins? And would they pause on Stickledown Range to remember him?

Meda snapped, ‘Gus, are you listening? Do you agree?’

He pinched his nails into the palm of his hand. He asked quietly that she should run through it once more, so that he was certain he understood.

‘It is a battle against a regiment. There is more to interest me than what you have to do.’

Haquim glanced sourly at him. ‘I will explain it to him afterwards.’

When the meeting finished and the commanders fanned out into the darkness to brief their own small cabals of men, Haquim walked with him. He was told of a town of three thousand souls on flat ground just below the lip of a hill. In the heart of the town was the largest mosque, and beside the mosque was the police station, which was the headquarters of a regiment of mechanized infantry.

‘The regiment has not been reinforced, she says. She does not tell me how she knows.

If she is right then there will be a garrison of four hundred men, if she is right.’

Gus told him of the man without a face. Gus told Haquim, stampeded through the interruption, what the Israeli had said to him, and he saw the fury boil in the mustashar.

‘We go in a line, because she says so. We do not feint to the left, avoid the predictable, then attack from the right. Our route is a straight line, and across the line is Tarjil, where a regiment is placed. They have defended positions. Tomorrow you will lie on your stomach. You are permitted to hang back. What of the men who have to cross open ground? What of them? How many will be killed? How many will live without arms, legs, eyes, testicles? Think of her, think of me, think of the men going against defended positions. Do not, Mr Peake, dare to think of yourself.’

Gus hung his head.

A column of men was coming through the gate of the village, loaded with weapons. He saw their tired, serious faces and wondered how many would survive the next day.

He found Omar beside the wire amongst a small mountain of old newspapers, kneading the sheets of paper together in a metal bathtub by the light of a hurricane lamp.

The boy grinned happily at him.

‘Show me,’ Gus ordered.

Cheerfully, Omar lifted the pulped paper from the bathtub. Gus doubted the boy, in his cut-short life as a kid, had ever played with papier-mache. Childhood had been denied him. The water splashed down the boy’s arms and over his battledress and he held up the shape of a man’s head… The face was without features.

‘The cat, Mr Gus – while it dries, before we paint it – tell me about the observer and the cat.’

‘Major Hesketh-Prichard wanted to write about the importance of the observer. He thought too much emphasis was given to the sniper, and not enough credit to the observer.’

‘I am the observer, so I am important.’

‘Don’t interrupt. I thought you wanted to hear it. This young lieutenant of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment was watching a German trench that was thought to be disused and he saw this big cat. It was a tortoiseshell, orange and black and white, a fine well-fed animal, and it was sitting on some sandbags sunning itself. Many others had studied that section of trench, but the lieutenant was the first to see the cat and realize its importance.

Rats plagued the British trenches as well as the German ones. The lieutenant decided that this fine cat could only belong to a senior officer, at least a major, and had been brought to the trench to kill the rats. If the cat belonged to a major then the bunker over which the cat was sunning itself must be a command post. The lieutenant spoke to the artillery and the next morning there was a barrage of howitzers, the bunker was blown up and all the officers in it were killed. That shows the importance of a good observer, Omar… Oh, Major Hesketh-Prichard said the cat survived, it wasn’t killed.’

‘I think tomorrow, Mr Gus, many will be killed.’

He looked at the drying features of the shape, which by the morning would have been given a painted face.