‘In the American Civil War, at the Battle of Spotsylvania, the last words spoken by General John Sedgwick were, “What, what, men, dodging? I am ashamed of you. They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” He didn’t say any more, he was dead. Someone shot him.’
‘Who else can make the men follow them? Haquim? I do not think so
… Agha Bekir, agha Ibrahim. They won’t lead. I lead. Because I am at the front, not frightened, I will lead all the way to the flame of Baba Gurgur that burns over Kirkuk. The simple people pray to the flame as if it were God, and I will lead them there. Kirkuk is the goal. If we must die, then we must die for Kirkuk. We will sacrifice everything that we have -everything, our lives, our homes, our loved ones – for Kirkuk. It is only I who can take the people there. Do you believe me?’
Her eyes never left him. She was, he thought, neither beautiful nor pretty. There was a strange simplicity about her. He would have been hard put to describe it to a man who had never seen her. Her nose was too prominent, her mouth too wide. She had high, pronounced cheekbones, and a jaw that showed nothing of compromise. To a man who had never met her, he would have talked of her eyes. They were big, open, and at the heart of them were the circles of soft brown. With her eyes, he thought, she could win a man or destroy him. He had seen the way the peshmerga clustered around her to win a single short spasm of approval from her eyes, which never wavered, stared into his. Gus looked down and tried to snatch a tone of bitterness.
‘I have to believe you, I have no choice – but the “simple people” won’t get to see their flame if you are shot, prancing on a bunker.’
‘Is that the limit of your anger?’
‘You’ve been ignoring me…’
‘Oh, a criticism because I have forgotten my social manners. That is a very serious mistake. My grandfather tells me that the Iraqi Arabs in Baghdad used to say that all the British taught them was “to walk on the pavements and iron our trousers”, to behave like them and you, Augustus Peake. I apologize for my rudeness. Between my duties of raising and leading an army, I must speak to my newest recruit. Don’t sulk. If I spend time with you, favour you, then the peshmerga believe I bend my knee to a foreigner.
Because of foreigners, where are we? We are hopeless, lost, destitute. We were abandoned by the foreigners in 1975, in 1991, in 1996 – is that enough for you? You saw in 1991 what was our fate when we trusted the word of foreigners – on the mountain, starved, dying, fighting for food thrown down from the sky, for a few hours you saw it. If you believe you are superior, should have special attention – sheets to sleep on, comfort, food to your liking – go home. Turn round, take your rifle, go back, and read of me when I take my people to Kirkuk. Is there any other cause for anger?’
She lectured him gently, tauntingly, but with a soft sweetness at her mouth. It was as if she manipulated him, and dragged the irritation from him.
Gus said, surly, ‘You treat Haquim badly. He’s a good man.’
‘He is old.’ She shrugged. ‘Has he shown you his wound? The wound took the fire from him. He is a good man at arranging for the supplies of food for the men, and the ammunition they will use, and he knows the best place to site a machine-gun. Without the fire the simple people will not follow him. Always he is cautious, always he wants to hold back. He will never take us to Kirkuk. I will. Is there more, Gus?’
He would have said that he loathed arrogance above everything – a man with arrogance could not shoot. Sometimes at work it was necessary for him to deal with arrogant men and afterwards, in the privacy of his car or the quiet of the small office, he despised them. If written down, her words would have reeked of arrogance, and yet…
Her spoken words, he thought, were the simple truth. They would all, and himself, follow her because she believed with a child’s simplicity that she would win. Her confidence was mesmeric. He remembered when he had first met her, nine years before, and had thought her silence sullen, had not understood the strength her god had given her.
‘If you reach Kirkuk…’
‘ When – and you will be with me.’
‘When you reach Kirkuk what will you do then?’
‘Return to my village. Tell my grandfather what I have done. And I will be a farmer.
We have goats there, and a pig. Kurdistan will be free, my work will be done, and I will collect the fruit from the mulberry bushes and the pomegranate trees. I will be a farmer.
May I tell you something?’
‘Of course.’
The boy came with a plastic bowl of food for her, but she waved him away. Her hand rested on Gus’s shoulder, the gesture of an older man to an inexperienced youth. ‘If you had not fired the first shot and killed the officer, if you had not come, we would still have taken their bunkers. A few of the men behind me would have been killed, and some would have been wounded, but we would still have taken the bunkers – and whether you are with us or not, we will march to Kirkuk where the flame burns over the oilfield. Can we forget about your anger now?’
‘Yes.’ Every criticism he had made had been ignored.
‘And will you follow me to Kirkuk?’
‘Yes.’ Gus laughed and saw her eyes flash.
‘Do not be so solemn. How is your grandfather’s health?’
Chapter Four
‘I suppose I’d better start at the beginning. That would be the orderly way to do it.’
‘Yes, start at the beginning,’ Ms Carol Manning said.
Ken Willet sat at a table behind her. Among the plates, the empty glass and the cup with dregs of coffee in it, he opened a foolscap notebook. At the top of the page he wrote,
‘WING CO BASIL PEAKE’. Immediately underneath the page heading he scrawled ‘LETTER’, and half-way down the page ‘MOTIVATION’. Ms Manning’s temper had sounded grim at midnight when she’d rung to tell him that her lieu day was postponed; there was no improvement now.
‘It all began at Habbaniyah – I don’t suppose, my dear, you’ve ever heard that name.’
‘I haven’t, but I’d be grateful if you’d get on with it.’
Willet thought the old man’s eyes glittered in covert amusement.
They’d come up the drive to the vicarage, found it locked, shuttered, and a solitary cat had run from their approach. After circling the darkened building, late Georgian or early Victorian, they’d seen the modern bungalow – where a dull light burned – set back amongst trees beyond lawns covered with the winter’s leaves. But the daffodils were up, and made a show with beds of crocuses. It was five to eight when she pressed the bell button.
‘Habbaniyah is just north of the Euphrates, about forty-five miles west of Baghdad. Of course, there’s a vegetation belt alongside the river, but where we were was surrounded by desert dunes, flat, horrible, lifeless. It’s 1953, before you were born, my dear, I think.
There was an RAF base there. It was ghastly. There was a single runway of rolled dirt reinforced with perforated metal plate. There were only three permanent buildings: administration, sick quarters and a damn great control tower. Everyone, men and officers, right up to the CO, lived in tents. We were “in the blue” – that’s colloquial, my dear, in the forces for being posted out to the back end of nowhere. I was one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine penguins – you know what they call the RAF? The penguins, only one in a thousand flies… Sorry, just joking…’
‘Best you stick to the point,’ she said.
‘As you wish. I was a wing commander, in charge of movements. The control tower was mine. We were a little island in hostile territory. The King and his government in Baghdad were marionettes for our ambassador to play with, but increasingly there was resentment from the civilian population and the younger army officers about our presence
– so we lived on camp. All the food was flown in. We had a swimming-pool of sorts, a marquee dropped down into a sand scrape, and we had sports pitches – we didn’t play the locals, we’d go as far as Nairobi, Aden or
