Holding the Zero

Chapter Eight

By the hurricane lamp’s light, Omar daubed the dried face with paints liberated from the wrecked school building: grey, red and white for the flesh on the face, brown for the moustache and the eyebrows, a pink mix for the lips, grey and blue for the eyes.

When the paint set, Gus sent him to find a scarf in khaki or olive green, a good strong stick and a combat shirt. The boy disappeared into the darkness. Gus should have been sleeping, resting and regaining the strength he would need in the morning. He wondered if Meda slept, or Haquim. Beyond the wire, in front of him, the night held its silence.

While the boy had made a face and while he had told him how to paint it, he thought that a great game was played out, but that he was only a small part of it. The painted face was not that of his enemy, it was his own.

‘So, I find the sniper…’ a voice boomed, then a cascade of laughter. Gus peered back, and saw the Russian.

‘I am told you are English. I bow to an English gentleman.’

‘What do you want?’

‘To pass the night hours in the company of civilization.’

Gus growled, ‘Find it somewhere else.’

‘Are you frightened?’

‘I am not frightened.’

‘Let me tell you, Mr Gentleman, about myself. Then when you have heard me with English politeness, I will ask the question of you again. I am from Volgograd, but then it had the name of our great leader, Stalin. I was two years old when the Germans came to Stalingrad. My father and my uncle fought there, my mother was in the cellars and basements with her baby son. It was a battle without etiquette or regulation, a fight for survival… Perhaps you believe, if this battle goes badly, you can still go back to the green pleasant land of England. There was no retreat for my father, my uncle and my mother from Stalingrad. Across the river were fifteen thousand troops whose military task was to prevent retreat – they shot those who fell back.’

‘I have no interest in the battle for Stalingrad.’

‘Listen to me. The battlefield bred the great snipers of history, and great sport for those who watched. Which would you prefer to see: a boxing fight, a race around a stadium, a football game, or two men with rifles hunting for each other? The sport at Stalingrad was to watch the duels of the snipers, and to bet on them – half a loaf on the Russian, a quarter of a chocolate bar on the German. The best of them were known throughout their armies. As soon as a sniper became famous he was tracked by an enemy who was also a celebrity… And you tell me you are not frightened. You are, Mr English Gentleman, already famous. The word spreads here, as in Stalingrad. Half a million men, in the third month of the battle, watched the fight to the death between the two master snipers.’

‘Your story is not relevant to me.’

‘You are famous. A man will have come because he has heard of your fame. The great duel was between Major Konings and Vasili Zaitsev. Zaitsev was a hunter from the Ural mountains, who had killed three hundred German soldiers in the battle for Stalingrad.

Konings, a major in charge of the sniper section of the School of Infantry Tactics at Wunstorf, was flown into the battle from Berlin to redress the balance of death.

‘Stalingrad was the pivotal battle of the war, Mr English Gentleman. You could say it was the turning-point in the history of the century, but at the very point of its fulcrum was the duel between Zaitsev and Konings.’

‘Come on, how did it finish?’ Beside him the boy had knotted the scarf around the papier-mache head, rammed a stick up its throat and had buttoned a tunic across its neck.

Rybinsky smiled. ‘You make a face of paper – an old tactic. For a full week Zaitsev took a place near where his friends, Morozov and Sheykin, had been shot, and he watched and saw nothing. Zaitsev took Kulikov with him as his observer, but they could not identify Konings’ position. On the seventh day of the fourth week of the month after Konings had come to Stalingrad, Kulikov saw the flash from a speck of glass in the rubble of no man’s land – a telescope or the sight on a rifle – but they could not see Konings. They used the old tactic, as old as the one you use. Kulikov raised his helmet on a stick. Perhaps Konings was tired, perhaps uncomfortable, perhaps he wanted to piss, but he made the mistake and fired at the helmet. If the helmet had only dropped back, Konings would not have exposed himself – but Kulikov screamed, as if he were hit.

Konings’ mistake was that the scream aroused his vanity. He thought he had killed Zaitsev. He raised his head to see his success. It was all Zaitsev needed… Are you frightened that you don’t know whether you are Zaitsev or Konings?’

Gus pushed himself up. There was the murmur of voices behind him and the sounds of weapons being armed, and the squeal of the wheels that carried the heavy machine-gun.

He said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Rybinsky, but I don’t care to give myself that significance.’

‘Is he there? Has Major Konings come from Berlin?’

Gus sighed hard. ‘Yes. Yes, he has travelled. If you stick around, you’ll have the grandstand seat.’

Gus and Omar joined the great silent column moving away into the night, and far ahead of them the bright flame burned.

Major Aziz sat in a doorway at the front of a hardware shop. The door behind him, and every other door in the town, was locked, bolted.

He looked down the street in front of him: like every other street in the town, it was barricaded and empty.

He sat with his rifle loose across his knees, fed biscuits to his dog, and waited.

Ken Willet took the key that was passed to him.

Ms Manning had planted her buttocks against the cleared desk. Her arms were folded across her chest and she gazed back defiantly at the source of the tirade that had been halted in its tracks, briefly, to offer up the key.

‘I don’t know what sort of pressure you people, spooks and whatever, have to endure, but if you think you’re hard done by then try half a day in here.’

Around the cleared desk, telephones were ringing and two women were trying to stem a tide of chaos. Outside the office, in the wide tarmac yard, the giant lorries with their trailers were starting up and manoeuvring towards the main gate. Each time the office door opened for a shouted query from a driver, the owner broke off from his lecture to Ms Manning. Willet had the safe door unlocked and pulled it back.

‘If he was here, right now, Gus would be taking care of the Hamburg consignment, which is up the spout because the bloody Germans have filed the wrong customs declaration – can’t be late because that lorry’s got to get back, off-load, then be in Birmingham for a machinery pick-up for Milan – and in Milan there’s a factory on short time because they haven’t got that machinery, and I’m on a penalty if I don’t meet the schedule. I’ve two drivers off with flu, genuine, not skiving, but I’m shuffling the others round so that our supermarket contract doesn’t suffer. I’ve another lorry off the road with gearbox trouble, perishables to lift out of Barcelona, three lorries in the queue at Dover because the bloody French are on strike… and an empty bloody desk where my transport manager should be sitting.’

Willet took the papers from the safe, stacked them neatly beside his knee and began to read.

‘I may own the bloody place, own the lorries, own the bloody overdraft, but I don’t run this office. Be in hospital with a coronary if I had to. Gus runs it – or ran it until three weeks back. He said he wanted to go to Turkey with one of the drivers. That’s agricultural equipment spares going out, and denim jeans coming back. Said he wanted to understand better the drivers’ problems – but he didn’t come back with the jeans. In Ankara, he off-loaded himself… God knows what he was up to, because he’d stowed gear under the seat that wasn’t shown to Customs. He told the driver he’d make his own way home. I’ve not had sight or sound of him since.’

‘What was the gear?’ Ms Manning asked crisply.

Willet, on the floor with the papers, could have answered.

The owner snapped, ‘It was a rucksack, the driver said, and a long carrying bag. The driver said it was camouflaged. It was smuggled so God alone knows what was in it. If Customs had found it, Christ… Didn’t say where he was going, how long he’d be. The least of my problems right now. My problems are pressure, and no bloody transport manager here to sort them.’

‘Good at his job, is he?’

Willet, shuffling through the papers, speed-reading them, didn’t think she understood her capacity to sneer a question.

‘Are you good at your job? If you’re half as good at your bloody job as he is then my taxes are well spent. Course he’s bloody good. Pressure doesn’t faze him, not like me.

There can be fuck-ups from bloody Edinburgh to Eastbourne, from Cardiff to Cologne, and he soaks them up. I don’t get tantrums or shouting from Gus, I get the fuck-ups sorted. He doesn’t bawl out the girls, doesn’t shout at the drivers. He sits there, where your arse is, and sorts it. He does it on his own. Calm – just what I’m not… So, get out of my hair, and leave me to keep this shambles on the road.’

At the bottom of the papers on the floor was a sixteen-page colour sales brochure.

Willet slipped it into his briefcase and replaced the other papers in the safe, swung the door closed and turned the key on it.

The owner didn’t see them out. He had a telephone at each ear, the secretaries were trying to attract his attention, and a driver and a grease-stained mechanic were hovering at his shoulder. Willet followed Ms Manning from the dreary little office and they left behind them the confusion, and the girlie calendars sent out by the tyre companies.

‘What a dreadful man,’ she said.

‘Pays the taxes, doesn’t he, for our salaries?’

She gave him a savage, disdainful look. He wondered how she’d survive the slash-throat world of private enterprise. They paused as a juggernaut drove past them. The tang of the diesel seeped into his nose.

‘We’re wasting our time,’ she said. ‘We’re wasting it on a damn fool idiot with a death-wish.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Really? Then enlighten me.’

They were walking towards her car.

Willet said, ‘We are not wasting our time. We are evaluating Peake’s capabilities as a sniper. That’s what we’ve been briefed to do and that’s what we’re doing. We are learning. We do not yet know what those capabilities are. If he doesn’t have those capabilities, then yes, he is a damn fool, who will be killed. If he does have them, the horizons change.’

The sneer was back. ‘One man? No way.’

They were at her car. Willet stood in front of the door, blocking her.

‘A sniper can change the course of a battle – no other soldier has so much influence.

I’ll tell you what a sniper can do. A brigade-size manoeuvre I was at on Salisbury Plain

… the acronym is TESEX, that’s Tactical Evaluation and Simulation Exercise. All the weapons have the capability to fire a laser beam, and every man has a device on his uniform that’ll register the laser. A rifle shoots the laser and if there’s a hit the device bleeps. With me so far? A brigadier, a high-flier, was in charge of the attack side of the exercise, been planning it for weeks, probably months. The defending force, commanded by a colonel with a proper sense of humour, pushed a sniper forward towards the brigadier’s command post. It was going to be a three-day exercise and the brigadier thought it would notch him up to major-general level. Five minutes into the first of the three days, the sniper “shot” the brigadier. The old bleeper went

… all the planning out of the window, all the promotion hopes dumped. The brigadier shouted, “This can’t happen to me,” but the observer controller told him it could and it had. He yelled and argued, didn’t make any difference. “Do you know who I am?” was his last throw, and the observer controller told him, “Yes, you’re a casualty and you’re going into a body bag, sir.” The attack failed.’

He stepped aside. She unlocked the door.

‘It’s a ridiculous story – just men playing kids’ games.’

‘Actual war, that’s the same game. It’s what he can achieve if he’s good enough, which is why Peake is worth learning about. Cheer up, things are looking rosy: we’re going to have a day at the seaside.’

‘Do you have anything I should know about?’

Both of them were too long in the trade to posture a courtship ritual, like peacock and hen; they wouldn’t waste each other’s time.

‘What are you looking for?’

Isaac Cohen lay in the bath, his flabby stomach protruding from a sea of soapsuds.

Caspar Reinholtz had seen the helicopter land, as it always did on that date of the month, had looked through the windows of his offices as the Mossad man went from the American living quarters to the bathhouse with a towel over his arm. The Israeli’s controller would arrive at Incerlik in the next half-hour and then Cohen would be beyond reach.

‘The woman, the advance, anything that I haven’t got.’

‘They took Darbantaq.’

‘Figured they would.’

‘And didn’t give themselves the burden of prisoners.’

‘Predictable.’

‘Right now they’re hitting Tarjil.’

‘That’s a nut you could break your teeth on.’

If their masters in Langley or Tel Aviv had known of the contacts between Isaac Cohen and Caspar Reinholtz there would have been an immediate order that they be discontinued. Relationships between the Mossad and the Agency were scarred by suspicion. But it was hard enough in the field without letting the bickering of their masters prevent a casual exchange of information.

‘Tarjil wasn’t reinforced.’

‘That’s taken care of.’ Reinholtz sat languidly on the toilet seat beside the bath.

Cohen’s smile of understanding widened. He used the sponge on his chest. ‘The armour hasn’t moved out of Kirkuk.’

‘Tell me something new.’

‘It’ll be a difficult fight in Tarjil, Caspar, with or without fresh armour.’

‘She’s got to get through Tarjil or she’s dead in the water. For the big play to start, she has to get all the way to Kirkuk.’

‘It’s a big play – am I hearing you?’

‘Telling it frankly, Isaac, as big as it gets. It’s her and the armour and the sniper?’

‘He seemed a good guy, the sniper, I met him.’

‘I don’t think so, Isaac. I’m not talking about the guy in the column – I met him, too.

This is very confidential. There’s a sniper in Baghdad…’

‘Do you have a name?’

‘That is very sensitive confidential. I’d like to share on that one, but…’

The Israeli gazed into the American’s eyes. ‘Aziz? Major? Baghdad Military College?

Chief instructor in sniping? Major Karim Aziz? Sorry, Caspar, he’s not in Baghdad. He was transferred to Fifth Army three days ago. Is that important? I wouldn’t want to spoil your day but doesn’t that make a difference to your plan?’

The American rocked on the lavatory seat. His hands went up to his face as if to block out the news. His body shook. He stood and tossed the towel for the Israeli to catch and went towards the bathroom’s door, his cheeks ashen.

‘You could just say, Isaac, you spoiled my day. You’ve screwed it big-time.’

Cohen stared at the taps, heard the door open then close, and wondered whether the first strand of the big plan was unravelling. *** For Gus, it was a simple shot. Any of the Sunday-morning amateurs on Stickledown Range would have made the hit.

In the hour before dawn, he had followed Omar to the house that was set back from the road into the town. It had been empty but the lights were on, there was still food on the table and toys lay on the kitchen floor. The cupboard doors upstairs were open. He thought the father had finally decided on flight after the children had been put to bed, and that the parents had packed frantically what they could carry with the children into a car.

He had gone up the stairs, led by Omar, and had wedged the pulped-paper head into the corner of the main bedroom’s window so that the features would appear to gaze back at the town, and had put the binoculars on the windowsill immediately below the head.

They had pushed aside the cover of the ceiling hatch, and levered themselves up among the rafters. Before first light he had dislodged a roof tile for the firing position, then removed a second tile for the telescope Omar would use.

Gus had stared down on to a battlefield swathed in grey mist. When he’d settled he told Omar to knock out a minimum of another fifteen tiles, and heard them slide crazily down to the guttering.

The house he had chosen was set in a wide plot. The ground was already dug and hoed and the first vegetables were sprouting. Beyond a low wire fence, against which children’s bicycles lay, was the garden of the next house, which had a lower roof. A hundred yards further down the road a lorry was slewed across as a barricade. Then the houses formed close-set streets, and rising above them were the minarets and the dull, plastered facade of the police station, topped by a communications dish. In front of the police station, where the road widened, was another barricade of three overturned cars.

He had taken his aim. The range was four hundred yards. The flare was fired from behind them, arched over the rooftop, then burst above the first barricade.

Gus fired.

The communications dish on the roof of the police station disintegrated and its frame collapsed.

He waited.

It was as though he had thrown down a glove into the mud in the path of his opponent, or slapped the face of his enemy.

Paint flakes and metal fragments had fallen on him when the dish was hit.

There was a waist-high parapet on the roof of the police station, but at two of the corners there were higher sandbag emplacements that covered the road into the town and the two barricades blocking it. Aziz had chosen the centre point of the wall facing the road and, as he lay on his stomach, his view was through a rainwater gully. The furthest house from him, along the road, was held in the Dragunov’s sight.

He had heard crack and, a second later, thump. The firing position was between 350 metres and 450 metres from him. First, down the road, he made football pitches in his mind, and counted four. There were two houses in the sighting distance, the nearest was lower and he did not believe offered the elevation to clear the parapet and still hit the communications dish. He started his study of the further house. He was back from the gully, offered no target. He made a further calculation from the vertical lines in the reticule of the sight that were the equivalent in height of an average-sized man, then the conversion between the height of a man and the height of a window. The size of the windows told him that the house was 400 metres from him. There was no other building of sufficient height from which the shot on the communications dish could have been fired.

He saw the painted head, and the binoculars.

He counted seventeen holes in the roofing where the tiles had been forced away.

His eye never left the ’scope, and his finger stayed with an infinite gentleness on the Dragunov’s trigger, and he spoke softly to the dog.

‘He tells us that he knows we have come to hunt him. Maybe the Americans told him or the Zionists, maybe they picked it off the radio. He wants me to know where he is. Do you find that peculiar, little man? It is an old game. You put up a bogus target and the sniper shoots it, and then you look for him, and you kill him. Very old, and not even a good head. He does not have sufficient respect for us…’

The machine-guns on either side of him had started to fire. The battle was joined. At the edge of the circle of his ’scope sight were the first running and crawling columns of men closing on the furthest barricade. There was an answering thundercrack, repeated, and repeated again, from a heavy machine-gun and great chunks came careering off the parapet wall. Had Aziz shifted his aim fractionally, there would have been fine targets among the columns, but his eyes were locked on the seventeen holes in the house’s roof.

He could see the men behind the barricade scurry between different shooting positions.

Two machine-guns from the roof of the police station fired over the barricades on the road, with lazy running tracers that died among the two columns of peshmerga hugging the ditches either side of the tarmac.

It would have been easy for Gus to knock away the machine-gun crews on the police-station roof or to devastate the defence of the forward barricade. He held his fire. He searched for the sniper among the rooftops and the windows, the high points of the police station and the minarets, the heaps of rubble and rubbish beside the road. He saw men go down, some poleaxed, some writhing, in the charge for the barricade. He saw men he had hiked alongside, and eaten with, washed with, slept close to – men with familiar faces -stand and blast back at the firing from behind the barricade, then throw up their arms like helpless idiots and crumple. He saw her… She had a bandanna of torn cloth around her head to hold her hair away from her eyes, grenades tied to her body, and she carried an assault rifle. She came out of the right-hand ditch and ran low across the road towards the other side against which the firing was most concentrated. She dived for the ditch where the men were pinned down. He saw her grab two, three, by their shirts and heave them forward. She stepped over those who had fallen in the ditch, and those who flailed their arms in agony.

He watched Meda’s crabbing dash towards the barricade, and the firing slackened. He saw the soldiers break. Again and again, her arm waved above her head for the columns to come forward. Gus could have shot several of the running soldiers, aimed at their backs, but he searched instead for the position of the sniper.

The battle was fought around him, but Major Karim Aziz played no part in it.

It was beneath him, beside him, but his focus was on the house. He watched the crude head in the upper window, and he scanned the missing tiles that were spread at differing heights along the length of the roof. From his elevated position, protected by the parapet, there were many targets he could have taken. At that range, he could have picked off enough of the peshmerga to have slowed, if not halted, the advance. He was trapped by the obsession to locate and kill the sniper confronting him. He could have given covering fire to the soldiers who ran back from the furthest barricade. The course of the battle was vaguely apparent to him in the bottom of the arc of vision through his ’scope. The dog shivered against his leg. He was comfortable within himself. If he had given the cover, he would have betrayed his position. He watched the house, waited for the chance, as the concentrated fury grew below him.

‘Aren’t you going to shoot?’ Omar shouted.

‘Search the rooftops, and don’t show yourself,’ Gus murmured.

Through the magnification of the ’scope, he watched the roofs. The sun was rising behind him and he hoped its low line would catch the glass of a rifle-sight or a telescope’s lens or binoculars. Below, across the road, there was thickening smoke from fires started by the tracers, but above that grey carpet the roofs, where a sniper could have taken his position, were clear. The firing was a cacophony of noise, but Gus watched the rooftops.

‘When will you shoot?’

‘If I see him I’ll shoot, but not until then.’

He was aware that a defence line held at the further barricade. At moments when his concentration wavered, he saw the soldiers milling behind the cars and in doorways, but he cut them out because they were distractions. Some days, when he fired on Stickledown Range, not the major meetings for which silver spoons were presented, there was chatter and laughter around him, distraction, but he had learned to ignore them and to concentrate only on his own shooting.

‘You have to shoot!’ Omar yelled.

‘It’s all about patience,’ Gus said quietly. ‘His patience and mine. The one whose patience goes first is the one who loses.’

He watched chimneys and television aerials and satellite dishes, windows that were slightly ajar, the flat roofs and the crenellated parapet of the upper part of the mosque’s tower. He saw her, fleetingly, through the smoke haze at the lower extremity of his

’scope sight, emerge from a side lane to hurl a grenade towards the barricade, but then his eye wafted away and slipped back to cover the roofs and windows that were bathed in bright sunlight.

‘If you don’t shoot, I will!’ Omar screamed. Gus ignored him.

He could have disrupted the defence of the barricade, could have shot the soldiers who lurched towards the far side of it with boxes of fresh ammunition, could have dropped the soldier who rose and fired from the hip as Meda made her last charge, hemmed in by her men, on the overturned cars. To have fired would have been to betray his position. There was no conflict in his mind. He realized that the boy had left him. He never took his eye from the ’scope sight, but he reached out with his trigger hand and felt the emptiness.

Then his hand touched the discarded telescope. He thought he had explained it very clearly, reasonably, to the boy, why he did not fire. Then he settled again to resume his watch. He saw the wave of men break against the barricade, but the sniper still did not show himself.

The resistance at the barricade crumbled. The smoke swirled around him. More often now his body was spattered with the dust and rubble of the fractured concrete wall behind which he sheltered. He saw the movement at the door of the house and his rifle’s aim edged sideways to cover it. The moment of opportunity had come, the smile played on his face. His finger rested on the trigger. Major Karim Aziz swore in frustration. A boy hesitated in the doorway, then ran for the ditch and the road. He was little more than a child and carried an assault rifle. He felt a surge of anger as his aim traversed back to the windows of the house and the roof’s seventeen holes. His eyeline again shifted, away from the sight, over the barrel of the Dragunov, towards the charge at the barricade below him. He realized then the fate of the battle in which he had taken no part. When the barricade fell, the last struggle would start – for the police station. So little time was left to him. He shouted to the machine-gun crew on his right to fire on the house, rake the roof, flush the bastard. He watched the roof and the upper window where the head was displayed and waited for the bullet burst to impact on the tiles, to move the bastard… and he saw nothing. He waited. He was shouting again, angry because his order was not obeyed, he turned his head. The machine-gun crew were dead, the blood from their bodies running in little merging dribbles. He heard the thunderous beat of the rounds from the heavy machine-gun firing on the main gate of the police station. They had died beside him and he had not noticed.

The streets on either side of the police station were filled with scrambling civilians in desperate flight, carrying bundles or sacks or bags, and some dragging children behind them.

He looped his backpack over his shoulders and crawled away towards the far side of the roof where the iron ladder led down to the vehicle yard.

He saw the commanding officer of the regiment charged with the defence of the town.

The yard was thick with the choking smoke of fumes from two personnel carriers and five jeeps. The officer was running heavily towards the forward jeep, which faced the opened gates of the yard, burdened by his packed bags, a rolled carpet flopping under his arm.

Already in the jeeps were the second-in-command, the operations officer, the intelligence officer, the political officer, more bags, more carpets and pictures.

He raised his rifle, as the line spurted forward, and aimed at the coarse clipped hairs on the back of the commanding officer’s neck, the sweaty stain between the shoulders, and fired.

The man slumped onto the bags and the rolled carpet, and the jeep was gone through the back gate of the yard. He ejected the used cartridge case, picked up the dog and climbed quickly down the ladder into the deserted yard.

The firing had died.

Gus eased himself up from his prone position and started to massage the stiffness from his legs.

Meda was on top of the barricade, balancing her weight on the door of the central car, and again, as she had before, she punched the air. He wondered how many times she had been seen over the open sights of the soldiers’ weapons, how many times they had fired at her and, somehow charmed, she had escaped. She was the symbol, she was the witch.

The men swarmed past her and fanned out into the streets on either side of the police station. Gus lingered at the firing position and watched as Haquim reached up and urged her down.

As he lingered, he hated himself. He waited, ready to shoot, because the sniper on the rooftops or in an upper window might still fire on her and give away his position. But she was down, safe and protected by the barricade.

He started to pack away his equipment, and the telescope the boy had left behind.

He had seen her.

He could have stood on a doorstep, snatched at a packing case from a shop, shot over the heads of the fleeing townspeople, over the emptiness of the street behind them, and over the peshmerga beyond the emptiness. He could have hit her as she stood on the barricade of cars.

He could have killed the witch.

And yet he had not considered it. He had known that, if he had fired, every weapon in the hands of the peshmerga would have been turned on him and on the flight of the defenceless in reprisal. He had joined the jostling panic of the escape.

He was engulfed in the tide, was swept forward. He held the dog close to his chest. He had been in a desperate flight before, and he disliked the disorder. In the Mutla Pass out of Kuwait City and at the bridge over the Tigris river, with the American tanks behind them and the planes wheeling above them, he had run for his life. The firing of the one shot, his contribution to the battle, did not cause him to feel guilt. The hurt, deep and personal, was that his waiting had not been rewarded… He was out of the town and among the column of civilians. He put the dog down so that it could run beside him.

He saw the disappointment and anger on the faces of those around him and could not tell them why he lived, why they should not have believed in him, or where he had been with his rifle.

The triumph glowed in her. ‘We didn’t see you, didn’t hear you.’

He said dully, ‘I was looking for their sniper…’

‘What? Is that a joke?’

‘If I had fired, after the shot against the dish, I’d have given my position to their sniper.

I waited for him to make the mistake and -’

‘Whatever you say, but make sure you clean it, Gus. There will be a jam because it was not cleaned. We needed you, so clean it.’

He walked away from Meda and rounded the barricade of cars. The bodies were against each other, the soldiers’ and the peshmerga ’s, locked against each other as if the final struggle for the barricade had been hand to hand. The stink was of opened bowels, spilled fuel and discarded cartridges. Haquim was folding away the box, Josephus, that had blocked the radio after the communications dish had been shot out.

‘Why did you not shoot? Was there a malfunction? We have at least a hundred casualties. I waited for you to shoot – you could have saved so many of our casualties.

You should not blame yourself. Anyone can suffer a malfunction.’

He strode on from Haquim, cursing his low expectations. He went towards the sagging gates at the front of the police station. There was an entry to the left, half blocked by a cart with a dead donkey still in its shafts, and saw the heap of uniformed bodies behind the cart, then the sudden movement as if a rat disturbed rubbish bags. It was Omar. Gus watched as the boy scurried over the bodies and methodically pilfered from them. First a gold chain ripped from a throat, then a ring wrenched from a finger, then a wallet snatched from an inner pocket, the blood wiped off it and the notes taken, a bracelet prised from a wrist.

Gus strode forward.

He stepped over the dead donkey and insinuated himself between the cart and the wall, and he kicked as hard as he could. He felt the shock wave ripple up from his boot to his hip. He kicked Omar off the bodies, and the boy cringed. He struck him with the butt of his rifle. The boy cowered against the wall and the brightness of the loot was in his hands, which were clasped across his face. Again and again, brutally, Gus battered the boy with his rifle butt. He brought blood to the boy’s face, from his forehead and eyes.

Blood was in the boy’s nose, dammed in the wisps of his moustache.

Omar shouted through his hands, ‘At last you have found, Mr Gus, a job for your rifle.

Now you are brave with your rifle.’

He left the boy against the wall and walked on into the town.

Aziz looked back.

Behind him was the great straggling column of the survivors, men, women and children, civilians and soldiers, and further behind were the bags, sacks and bundles discarded under the bright heat of the afternoon’s sun.

He remembered the first time he had gone to war, nineteen years old. His division of mechanized infantry, in support of two armoured divisions, had surged out of Jordan and over the frontier to support the battered Syrian tanks in their fight for survival against the Zionists. They had gone with high hopes, brimming confidence, and the Zionists had hit them at the village of Kfar Shams. Crouched behind the thin walls of his personnel carrier, he had witnessed the carnage of defeat in combat. They had limped home to Baghdad. His father had met him at the barracks. The nineteen-year-old had nursed the stench of defeat, but his father had declaimed that they were national heroes who had saved the flank of the Syrian army and protected Damascus from capture. It was what the radio had told the people but he had known the reality of the catastrophe. Then, the teenage Karim Aziz had carried no responsibility.

He walked on towards the brigade at the crossroads. *** They were a force of liberation, but no crowds cheered them from the pavements.

The peshmerga, in gangs, kicked down the doors of homes, dragged up the shutters from shop windows, took what they could carry, and smashed what they had to leave behind.

No flowers were thrown down at them from upper windows.

He did not see Meda or Haquim. He thought that they would be far back at the barricades, where they would see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing of how the wave of freedom crashed over the town of Tarjil.

No flags were waved, or scarves.

A man was pulled, struggling from his home, thrown down into the mud of the street and a petrol can emptied over his head. There was the flash flame of a lighter as Gus turned and sleepwalked away. He turned his back on the sizzling death of an agent of the secret police.

A man, an informer, kicked his feet in the air. The noose at his neck was tied to an iron bracket above his shop. A shoe careered across the lane as the man kicked, and his women watched in silent, sullen hatred. Gus did not wait to see the death throes.

He walked right through the town. All about him was retribution and revenge. Far ahead was the empty road that stretched to the horizon where a small dustcloud marked the progress of the refugee column. He sat against a wall and the sunlight played on his face. He shut his eyes to forget what he had seen.