knew from the sound of its carry that the bullet had travelled over a great distance, further than his friend’s Kalashnikov was capable of firing. He had left the goats in a small sloping valley and gone on his stomach to a clutch of rocks that gave him a vantage-point above his friend’s home.
His eyesight was as keen as his hearing. From the cool of the early morning, through the heat of the day, into the cold of the evening, he had watched the home of his friend, the body of his friend, and the killer. He had seen the rifle that had taken his friend’s life, and the sight mounted on it. He had waited in his secret place until the killer, and the murderers with him, had moved off into the dusk.
In the darkness, keeping the goats with him by using the reed whistle to which they responded, he had gone slowly and quietly towards the military bunkers. He felt the anger aroused by a blood vendetta – and if he were fortunate, and brought good information, he might be given a new rifle.
The pennant flew slackly over the bunkers, and he whacked his goats’ backs and haunches with a short stick each time they found sparse grass to feed on. He hurried them forward so that he could report what he had seen.
The lieutenant was woken.
He cursed viciously at the conscript, no younger than himself, who had woken him and not brought fresh coffee. He threw on his uniform, dragged on his boots, then yelled at the soldier that the boots were not cleaned, and that a fresh shirt had not been laid out for him.
He bent his head, emerged from the dank shadows of his bunker and strode along the trench connecting it to the command post. Only the lieutenant, because of his rank and education, was permitted to use the radio. He made and received all transmissions. The set bleeped, a red light winked for attention.
He slotted on the headphones and threw the switches. He responded to the call from Kirkuk. There was anxiety. The forward observer, codenamed Call-sign 17, had now missed three transmissions: probably a malfunction, or maybe storm damage to the booster antenna. He was ordered to check the cause of the malfunction, to retrieve the radio if he believed the fault lay there, or to visit the booster antenna on the summit point to the west if that was the likely area of the problem. He would respond, of course, to the order, and immediately. He ended the transmission.
The lieutenant cursed again. To reach the location of Call-sign 17 he must go on foot.
There was no track passable to a vehicle between his own position and the Call-sign’s location. It was six kilometres across country, and it would be six kilometres back. To cover twelve kilometres over that ground of rock and bog, where he could stumble and bark the skin on his knees on the rock or sink to his thighs in hidden mud, would take the entire day, in the company of the peasants he commanded. He was twenty-one. He was the eldest son of a family of the Tikriti tribe. He had a future ahead of him as bright as that of his father who commanded an artillery regiment in the Basra region and his uncle who led an armoured division of the Republican Guard facing the Kuwaiti frontier. But the future, bright and glittering and perhaps one day offering him a place in the Hijaz Amn al- Khass unit that protected the President, was deferred until a year of military service in the north was completed. He hated the place. It was cold, wet, harsh, and he was marooned in a small complex of damp bunkers with only idiots for company. He hoped that one day, soon, the President, the leader of the Tikriti tribe, would give the order for them to mount up in the armoured personnel carriers and ride further north, right to the borders, and bring the bastard Kurds back under the authority of Baghdad.
There was an old corporal, double his age, in the position, the only man with whom he could talk, and each time he told the corporal of his hope that, one day, the President would unleash the columns of armoured personnel carriers to drive north, the corporal gazed at him as if he were a fool and knew nothing. When his duty was over, when he was posted back to Kirkuk, he would see that the corporal suffered for his silent insolence.
He came out of the command post. Four men would go with him to the location of Call-sign 17, leaving four and the corporal behind in the bunkers.
There was coffee now, steaming but failing to improve his temper, and the lieutenant said that he would take his breakfast when he had inspected the position, then start the cross-country trek. And the lazy bastards, with the corporal, would sleep all day without him there to goad them on with their work. The early-morning light was into his face, and sprang little diamonds of brightness from the wire that ringed the areas in front of and flanking the position where the mines were laid.
The corporal led him on the morning inspection. The corporal always scurried forward, like a hurrying rat, along the communications trenches. He had been in Kuwait nine years before, at the time of the Mother of all Victories.
The lieutenant never bent his back. It was not right that an officer of the Tikriti tribe should cower, and he knew of no danger confronting at him as he went along the trench.
He rounded a corner reinforced with sandbags and rocks. A soldier had laid his rifle down in the mud and was urinating onto the side of the trench. With his full strength, the lieutenant punched the man in the back of the head, saw him stagger and crawl away.
He went to the forward bunker of rough concrete, around which were defensive coils of wire where the mines were laid most thickly. He went inside. He thought the soldier on sentry in the bunker had shit there. He could smell it. A candle was guttering low, throwing shadows towards the firing port through which the morning sunshine streamed.
It would have burned all night. It was expressly forbidden to have lights inside the bunkers during the darkness hours. He came behind the sentry, peered over his shoulder and out through the gun port. To the extreme right he saw the distant movement of the goatherd and his animals. To the left and ahead there was nothing, just the rock, the green of the grass over the bog areas, and the wind-flattened small bare trees. He steadied himself and kicked the sentry hard. When the sentry fell to the bunker floor, whimpering, he kicked him again, belted the hands that covered the sentry’s groin, then squeezed out the candle flame with his fingers.
He knew they loathed him, the corporal included. His father had told him, and his uncle, that his men should be more afraid of him than of any enemy.
He stepped out of the bunker. He swore again, because he now had the sentry’s shit on his boot. He was not thinking of home, or of the daughter of his father’s cousin, or of his mother, or of the discotheque music that he played on the radio beside his bed, or of a bright and glittering future… but of the shit on his boot.
The corporal was going on down the trench, bent, scampering.
The lieutenant died, not gloriously, as he wiped the sentry’s shit off his boot, spreadeagled against a sandbag.
The bullet came into the broad width of his back, created an instant hydraulic shockwave through his life organs, yawed in his chest cavity and destroyed the shape of his heart, making a hole the size of a well-juiced orange as it burst out past his tunic buttons. Misshapen, tumbling, it flew past the corporal’s head and splattered into the mud wall at the back of the communications trench.
His life lingered a few seconds before he died. His last sensations were those of a burning numbness through his upper body. His last sight was of the corporal turning to stare at him in wide-eyed shock. His last hearing was the hammer of a machine-gun beginning to fire. His last thought was that, without him, the peasants would break and run.
He was the future of the regime, a favoured son, and he died with a sentry’s shit on his boot.
The goatherd had heard the single shot, as he had heard it the day before. For a moment he froze in his tracks, and the silence settled, then the machine-gun started up.
He watched the bright lines of tracers arc across the open ground and fall on the roofs and walls of the bunkers.
He whistled sharply and started to run. The persistence of the goatherd’s whistling and the clatter of the machine-gun, and the blast of individual rifles firing on automatic, drove his animals in flight after him, as if he were their salvation.
He set off, at the best speed he could muster with the goats, for a long journey across pathless ground. It would take him all morning and most of the afternoon before he reached the next army unit based below the high ground, at the Victory City, where he sold his goats’ cheese and their meat.
The guilt hit him, sea waves of remorse broke over Gus.
He had seen the face of the target, the shoulders and the upper chest, before the target had gone down into the forward bunker, and the face had been that of a young man. A smooth-skinned face, with a dark moustache, and unkempt hair, as if he had just risen from his bed. All the time he had waited, while the target was inside the
