for the crime of proclaiming the First Republic of Kurdistan. I have good recall, I remember what I’ve read. A Foreign Office man wrote, in bloody Whitehall, about their freedom: “Their mode of life is primitive.
They are illiterate, untutored, resentful of authority and lacking in any sense of discipline.
The United Kingdom should not offer encouragement to the sterile idea of Kurdish independence.” We used to talk about freedom.
‘I went back to Lyneham, then to Germany, then was retired. I wrote two letters a year to him till 1979, and had two letters back, then I went out there again to see him. It was pretty hard to get the visa, but the British Museum was helpful. It had all changed…
That damned man had taken power. There were soldiers everywhere. I sensed the subjugation of the people. There was a French team digging at Nimrud, and we helped them. It wasn’t the same, there was an atmosphere of hate and fear. We continued to exchange letters. I was growing older and visas were exceptionally difficult to come by during the Iraq-Iran war, nigh on impossible, then there was the Gulf War, and the weasel messages sent by the Americans for the Kurds to rise up against the dictator. They did, the promised help never came, they fled.
‘I thought of Hoyshar and his family, refugees in the mountains. I found the comfort of my twilight life obscene. My son wouldn’t accompany me, said he was too busy with work. My grandson came with me. I heard his mother, my daughter-in-law, tell Gus before we set off, “Watch him, he’s a complete lunatic where these wretched Kurds are concerned. Don’t let him make a fool of himself.” I’d have gone anyway, he didn’t have to be with me. We were the original odd couple, me at seventy and him a full fifty years younger. They have a saying, “The Kurds have no friends but the mountains.” That’s where we found them, in their mountains, in the snow. It was incredible, a little piece of fate, that amongst a hundred thousand people we found them. His son had just buried two of Hoyshar’s grandchildren. All they had tried to do was to take what is natural to us, their freedom.’
Willet looked up from the page. He had filled all the space under the heading of MOTIVATION. There was a feeble sunlight on the window behind the old man, but he could see the bright boldness of the flowers on the lawns.
‘When did the letter come?’ Ms Manning asked briskly.
‘A month ago… That day on the mountains Gus met my friend and my friend’s family, and he met Meda, who was then a teenager. When the letter came last month, it was about freedom for a far-away people. Do you think, my dear, I’ve deserved a coffee break?’
She made the coffee while Willet carried the plate, cup, glass and the cutlery from the table and washed them up. The captain’s eyes were drawn to a curled photograph stuck with adhesive tape to a kitchen unit. On the slope of a hill, a thousand blurred faces behind them, a grizzle-faced man sat on a rock with a girl behind him, her hands on his shoulders. Defiance blazed from her eyes, which were compelling and erotic in their power.
Ms Manning carried the coffee mugs back into the living room.
‘Right, so a letter came, and you showed that letter to your grandson… ’
They crossed high, bare ground. Sometimes, rarely, they had the cover of wind-stripped clumps of trees, but the column mostly hugged the little valleys and ravines created by the rainstorms and snow-melt of centuries. Until they reached a flat ridge, pocked with rock outcrops, they were the lone inhabitants of a wilderness.
Gus plodded at the back, weighed down by the rucksack and the rifle bag. The wind diluted the warmth of the sun, and it was hard for him to maintain the pace of the peshmerga because the bulk of the gillie suit impeded him. He was behind Haquim who, even with the disability of his knee, seemed to move more easily over the jagged stones and the small, hidden bogs. Gus felt the sting of a blister on his right heel. Meda was in the leading group, moving fast, never looking behind her to see how he coped.
He had formed in his mind what he wanted to say.
The men and Meda had settled on the ground, amongst the rocks in the lee of the ridge.
Some chewed at food, some bickered quietly, some laughed softly as if they were told an old and favourite joke, some cupped the water from a spring’s source, some lay prone with their eyes closed. Haquim had reached them and sat on a stone and massaged his knee. Gus was going slower, and the tear in the skin at his right heel was opening. The boy was watching two men as they cleaned the breech of their heavy machine-gun…
Nobody came back to help him as he struggled forward. He was bathed in self-pity. With his rifle and his skill, he was of critical importance to them. He didn’t have to be there…
Gus heaved the rucksack off his back and carefully lowered the carrying case to the ground, onto the tufted yellow grass and the weathered rock. He untied the laces of his right boot, pulled off the sock, and examined the reddened welt of the blister. He rummaged in his rucksack for the small first-aid box, and selected a square of Elastoplast to cover the broken skin. He let the freshness of the air bathe his bare foot.
‘Put your sock and boot back on.’
He hadn’t heard Haquim’s approach, was not aware of him until the man’s shadow fell on him.
‘It needs to breathe.’
‘Put them back on.’
‘When we’re ready to move.’
‘You need to do it now.’
‘Why?’
‘If the Iraqis ambush us, we will not ask them to stop and wait, while one amongst us pulls his sock and his boot back on.’
He felt hurt, as if degraded. ‘Yes. Right.’
‘And, Mr Peake, you do not question what I tell you.’
‘My foot hurts.’
‘Do you see others complaining? If it is such a big matter to you that your foot hurts, perhaps you should not have come.’
His head down, Gus heaved on his sock and his boot. Haquim was turning away. Gus said, ‘I want somebody to be with me, to help me.’
‘To carry your sack? Have all the men not enough to carry already?’
Gus said evenly, ‘I want someone with me when I shoot.’
‘I will choose someone.’
‘No.’ Gus’s voice rose. ‘I do it, it has to be my choice.’
‘You give yourself great importance.’
‘Because it is important.’
‘Later, then, when we stop for the next rest.’
‘Thank you.’ Gus had finished retying his bootlace.
The column moved forward again. He heaved on his rucksack, lifted the rifle in its bag onto his shoulder, and gingerly put his weight on his right foot.
When the line of men passed through a small gully that broke the ridge, a great vista was laid out in front of them. Gus’s eyes travelled over the sloping ground, the lower ridges, the distant curls of smoke above a faraway cluster of buildings, and on towards the single flame burning bright in a haze of lighter grey. Twenty miles away, and it was still a beacon, the flame at Kirkuk. He looked down on the ground that was to be the battlefield he would fight over.
Once again, the target had not come in the night.
On a bright, crisp morning, before the heat of the day settled over it, Major Karim Aziz reached the al-Rashid camp.
He showed his identification to the sentries at the gate, his name was checked off a list and he was shown where to park.
He’d known many who had come here on similar bright, crisp mornings in their best uniforms, who had been picked up by camp transport and who had never been seen again.
He had shut out the picture of the disappeared men and their families from his mind.
The transport pulled up beside his car. He had driven out to al-Rashid in a daze of tiredness and now he sleepwalked to the van.
Since the bombing of 1991 the camp had been rebuilt, the rubble removed, the craters filled in. The van took him past the many complexes of the Estikhabarat. There were the buildings occupied by the headquarters personnel of the second-in-command, a staff major general, those that liaised with Regional Headquarters, those that controlled the Administration Section, the Political Section, the Special Branch and the Security Unit.
