He saw the batteries of anti-aircraft guns, and the clusters of ground-to-air missiles.
The van stopped outside a squat building. From the set of the windows he could see the thickness of the reinforced-concrete walls, painted in camouflage colours, and on the roof was a farm of aerials and satellite dishes. The armed guard opened the door for him and smiled. He wondered whether the guard always smiled at an officer summoned early in the morning to this building.
When he had reached home again after the night on the flat roof, he had clung to his wife briefly, then she had shrugged him off. It was unspoken, but she blamed him for the fiasco of his birthday celebration. The children had gone to school, her parents had stayed in their lean-to annexe at the back of the house. His wife, without a backward glance at him, had gone for the bus to the hospital. Then, alone in his home, he had checked through every item in the sports bag under the bed to satisfy himself that nothing incriminating could be found there… He did not know how he would resist torture…
What could have damaged them, him, he had buried in the garden.
At the inner guard desk of the building he was asked to enter his name. There was another smile, and a finger jabbed towards his belt. He unhooked the clasp, passed the webbing belt over the desk, and with it the holster holding the Makharov pistol.
He was led down the corridor, then up a flight of stairs, then on to another corridor.
He had to make the effort to kick his legs in front of him. The panic was growing, the urge to turn and run insistent, but there was nowhere to turn and no-one to run to. He heard the boom of his boots on the smooth surface of the corridor’s floor.
With each step towards the closed door at the far end he remembered the path he had taken towards joining the conspiracy. In February, two generals and a brigadier had come to a firing range to watch his progress in teaching marksmanship to his students, junior officers and senior NCOs. The course, like so much of the tactics learned in the Iraqi military, was based on old British army manuals. As he did, the students had used the Russian-made Dragunov SVD sniper’s rifle. It was not the best rifle available in the international market, but he had a curious and almost emotional attachment to the weapon that had been with him for a year less than two decades. His students had had good shots at 400 metres, but at 500 metres none had hit the inner bulls on the targets, a man-sized cardboard shape, when they should have had an 80 per cent probability of doing so.
Perhaps they were made more nervous by the presence of the generals and the brigadier.
He had then fired his own Dragunov, but at 700 metres. From behind him the generals and the brigadier had watched his shooting through telescopes. Six rounds, six hits, when the probability of a ‘kill’ was listed as only 60 per cent, and after each shot he had heard the grunted surprise from behind the telescopes.
He reached the door at the end of the corridor.
His escort knocked with quiet respect.
He heard the gravel voice call for him to enter.
Three weeks after the shoot Major Karim Aziz had received a telephone call from the more senior of the two generals. He was invited to a meeting – not in the general’s quarters, not in a villa in the Baghdad suburbs, but in a military car that had cruised for an hour with him, the general and two colonels along the city’s roads flanking the Tigris river. He could, he supposed, have said that he had no interest in the proposition put to him in the car. He could also have lied, given them his support, then the next morning gone to the Estikhabarat, in this building, in this camp, and denounced them. They wanted a marksman. He had agreed to be that marksman. The general had said that an armoured brigade in the north would mutiny and drive south, but only after word was received that the bastard, the President, was dead. He had been told of the villa, of the bastard’s new woman. The detail had been left to him – but without their esteemed leader’s death, the armoured brigade would not move. The general had talked of a domino effect inside the ranks of the regular army once the bastard was killed.
The general had been a big and powerfully built man, but he had stammered like a nervous child as he explained the plan. Aziz had agreed, then, there; only afterwards, when he had been dropped from the car, did he consider that he might have been set-up, stung, and he had been sick in the gutter. He had dismissed that thought because he had witnessed the precautions taken to preserve the secrecy of the meeting and seen the nervousness of the officers in the car.
He had tracked for days around the villa and had found the place from which to shoot.
He had met the general again, cruised the same route in the same car, and the general had embraced him.
He went inside. His stomach was slack and his bladder full. He tried to stand proud, to pretend that he was not intimidated, was a patriot surrounded by cowards. He thought of his wife and his children, and of the pain of torture.
A colonel had his back to the door and stared at a wall map, but turned at his approach.
‘Ah, Major Aziz. I hope there was nothing important in your schedule that had to be cancelled.’
He looked up at the photograph of the smiling, all-powerful President. He stuttered his answer. ‘No, my schedule was clear.’
‘You are the marksman, the sniper, that is correct?’
‘It is my discipline, yes.’
‘You understand the skills of sniping?’
He did not know whether he was a toy for their amusement, whether the colonel played with him. ‘Of course.’
‘Two men dead, two rounds fired, on consecutive days, each shot at a range of at least seven hundred metres in Fifth Army sector. What does that tell you about the sniper?’
‘That he is trained, professional, an expert.’ He felt the tension draining from him. He was limp, a rag on a washing-line.
‘How do you confront a professional sniper, Major?’
‘Not by turning rocks over with artillery or tanks or heavy mortars. You send your own sniper to confront him.’
The colonel said sharply, ‘You go tomorrow, Major Aziz, to Kirkuk.’
‘The north? The Kurds are not snipers.’ He wanted to laugh out loud as the lightness broke into the tightness of his mind. He bubbled, ‘They cannot hit targets at a hundred metres.’
‘I am from the Tikrit people, Major. Yesterday my cousin’s son was shot at seven hundred metres in a defence position near Kirkuk. Perhaps a foreigner is responsible.’
‘Whatever the nationality, the best defence against a sniper is always a counter-sniper.’
‘Be the counter-sniper, then. Your orders will be waiting for you when you reach the garrison at Kirkuk.’
Aziz saluted, turned smartly and marched out of the room. Outside, with the door closed on him, he could have collapsed in a huddle on the floor and wept his relief. He steadied himself against the arm of his escort, and walked away.
A few moments later, the warm air brushed his face, washed it of fear.
Gus sat on a rock and scanned the ground ahead of him with his binoculars, looking for movement.
It was the best place he could find, had the nearest similarity to the terrain of the Common in Devon. It was a practice but it was still crucial. The arguments were finally over, had finished when Haquim had struck a man and knocked him flat, when the knife had flashed, and Haquim had kicked the knife from the man’s hand. Before then, the argument had raged savagely. Meda had chosen not to intervene, but had sat apart with an amused smile on her face. He needed an observer to help him with distance and windage and, most important, to guide him in on the stalk to the targets ahead and to work out the exit routes after each snipe. It could not be Haquim – too slow and too involved in the mess of strategy and tactical problems.
The arguments were because each man in the column, old and young, believed he was the best at moving unseen across open ground. The bitterness was inspired by pride, when Haquim had selected the dozen men from the hundred in the column – from agha Ibrahim’s men, or from agha Bekir’s men. The older men who had fought for the most years, or the younger ones with more agility than experience. The larger group, not chosen, sat behind Gus, and scowled or watched the slope of ground ahead with a sullen resignation.
He had four ‘walkers’ out, as he had seen it done on the Common. Each time he saw a man, magnified through the binoculars, crawling, Gus shouted to the nearest ‘walker’ and pointed, and the man was tapped on the head by the ‘walker’, and eliminated. Each time a man was eliminated there was a growl of jealous approval from behind Gus.
