hard to make it a happy day for him… and he could tell them nothing.
He resented what they had spent on him. Only at work, only at the Baghdad Military College, was his life not subject to the sapping frustration caused by the shortages. An American had said that Iraq would be bombed back to the Stone Age of history.
And what else was there to talk about around the table? Any conversation inevitably entailed more discussion of the shortages, whether in the street markets, at school or the children’s hospital. He ate little and drank nothing, and the silences around the table grew longer.
The telephone rang. Wafiq ran to answer it, hurrying to escape the quiet of the celebration.
A year after his marriage he had been posted to the Soviet Union for six months to learn infantry tactics. He had written to his wife twice every week while he was away, and babbled conversation to her of what he had seen for days after his return. Two years later he had been in Lebanon’s Beka’a Valley teaching those tactics to militiamen, and he had told her everything when he had come home. On leave from the battle fronts of Khorramshahr and Susangerd, he had written home of the war with Iran – careful letters that would not offend the censors – and he had talked to her on leave, walking on the esplanades beside the Tigris river where he would not be heard, of the horror of the street fighting. He had held back nothing of his times in Kirkuk and Mosul and Arbil in the north. Everything he had seen in Kuwait City, at the start and at the end, when he had fled from the advance of the American tanks on the charnel-house road through the Mutla Pass, he had shared with her, because he loved her. Now, he had nothing to talk of, and he pecked at his food, and her eyes never left the ring she had given him.
The boy came back, said the call was for him.
He pushed aside his plate, scraped back his chair, and went into the hallway. He lifted the telephone and gave his name.
The call was from a duty officer at the al-Rashid camp of the Military Intelligence, the Estikhabarat. He was ordered to attend the al-Rashid camp at nine o’clock the following morning. The call was terminated.
He rocked on his feet. It was a familiar pattern, known about by every officer of his rank and experience but never talked of. The Estikhabarat always summoned a suspect to the al-Rashid barracks, but watched his home through the night to see if he fled, and to block him if he did. He knew of such calls, and of the desks cleared the following day by strangers, then occupied by new men, and of the officers who were never seen again after they had travelled to the al-Rashid complex.
Major Karim Aziz breathed hard, and the sweat ran on his stomach and down the small of his back.
Around the table, beyond his sight and reach, his family – everyone he loved – was waiting for his return and wondering why he was so troubled.
He went into the bedroom, took his heavy coat from the hook on the door, and knelt to pull the sports bag out from under the bed. From the small cupboard beside the bed, always locked and closed from the sight of his wife and his sons, he took a Makharov automatic pistol and a single hand grenade. It was possible, with planning, for a general to cross the frontier if he used his authority, or his relatives, or a dignitary, but for a major at the Baghdad Military College, with his family, it would be a journey of exceptional difficulty. He put the hand grenade under his shirt, tightened his belt so that it could not slip down, and reassured himself that his fingers could feel the loop of the pin.
He went back into the dining room. The table had been cleared. Leila was coming out of the kitchen with the cake her mother had made that day. It was iced, decorated, it would be sugary sweet, the cake he liked best. He kissed Wafiq, and the boy stared down at his table place; then he kissed Hani and the tears ran on the child’s cheeks; then his wife; then her mother and father.
He could tell them nothing.
All of them, the officers who went under orders to the al-Rashid camp, believed in the faint hope of survival, went with the hesitant innocence of lambs herded to the butcher’s knife, deluding themselves that the anxiety was unfounded.
He stood in the kitchen doorway, holding the sports bag, and faced them. Behind him was the hallway, the front door, the concrete pad where the car was parked, the shadows of the poorly lit street. If the anxiety was well founded, the agents of the Estikhabarat would already be in those shadows, watching his house. Sometimes the bodies were brought back, if their families paid a few dinars for the bullets that had been used.
He turned away from them, switched off the kitchen light, then went out through the back door. He slipped past the new building where her parents slept, and scrambled over the wall at the end of the yard.
He would spend one more night beside the water tank on the flat roof. And, if they were waiting for him, if they were there to take him, he would pull the pin from the RG-42 high-explosive fragmentation grenade. Major Karim Aziz knew of no other road he should follow.
He thought it was his duty, in the name of Arab nationalism, socialistic modernism and his country, to go to the roof and pray that all was not known and that the bastard would step into the handkerchief of light on the driveway. He wondered if, without him, they would eat the cake… He walked briskly. Alone, without the responsibility of his family, he could again cloak himself with the assurance, confidence, self-esteem that marked him down as a master of the military science of sniping. It was why he had been recruited.
AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE.
Profile of subject compiled by K Willet (capt.), seconded MoD to Security Services.
Role of K Willet (capt.): In liaison with Ms Carol Manning (Security Service), to assess AHP’s capability as a marksman, and the effect of his presence in northern Iraq on military/political situation in that region.
AHP is British national, born 25-10-1965. Resident at 14D, Longfellow Drive, Guildford, Surrey.
Background: AHP’s presence in northern Iraq witnessed by Benedict Curtis (Regional Director of
Protect the Children registered charity) on 14 April.
AHP seen wearing combat sniper’s camouflage kit, with unidentified sniper rifle. No known past or present links with Ministry of Defence or other government agencies.
1. Conclusions after search of AHP’s home (see above). Subject is a competition marksman of the highest quality using a vintage weapon (Lee Enfield
No. 4). From his undemonstrative lifestyle, I would consider him to be of placid temperament and not subject to personal conceit; necessary characteristics of a champion target shooter. I found, however, no signs of his having made a study of military sniping – no books, magazines etc. – and no evidence of any interest in that area. Also, there were no indications as to the motivation of AHP in going to northern Iraq.
At first sight, he presents the picture of an eccentric enigma.
SUMMARY: Without strong motivation, military background, and a hunter’s mindset, I would rate his chances of medium-term survival as extremely slim.
(To be continued.)
Willet shut down his computer. Had he sold the man short? Without motivation, the background, and the necessary mindset, Gus Peake was as naked as the day he was born.
What a bloody fool…
‘So serious, so heavy…’ The twinkle was in her eyes, as if she mocked him.
Gus had watched her approach. She had moved quietly and effortlessly over the rocks towards him. He had lit a small fire that was deep down and sheltered by the crag stones.
He was wrapped in a blanket. A half-moon was up. She had come amongst her men: some reached up to touch her hand, some brushed their fingers against the heavy material of her trousers, and he’d heard her gentle words of encouragement. Haquim followed her, then the boy.
‘Maybe tired.’
She sat close to him. She had no blanket but she did not shiver. ‘I do not think so, I think angry.’
‘Maybe angry.’
‘It is the start of a journey – why angry?’
‘In fact, it’s the end of a day… and I think you’re probably the reason for my anger.’
‘Me?’ She pouted as if he amused her. ‘Why?’
‘It was just indulgence. You stood on the bunker, you waved your arms around like a kid on a football pitch. Anyone within half a mile could have shot you.’
Haquim hovered behind her, and the boy. She waved them back as a parent would have dismissed children. ‘Were you frightened for me? It is because I lead that I have the strength to make men follow me.’
