Inside the thick material of the gillie suit he was cold because of the tiredness. He felt a sickness, a scratching in his throat, from the cold and the stink of the goats. In front of them was the raised roadway leading to the bridge. Beyond the bridge the road led on to the defended crossroads. On the road’s far side, dead ground to him, the embankment was steeper than the incline facing him, and at the far side of the bridge the river’s banks plunged down to a morass of boulders. When the tanks left the road they must turn towards him, then drive towards the one place in the riverbed where the banks were shallow and the stones smaller – if they were to reach the crossroads.
Gus had not slept. He had marched back from the road, said whispered farewells to the men who had carried the mines and helped Omar to bury them. Tracking back over the open ground to find the firing position, he had then dug out the small trench in which he now lay. The light was coming, spreading over the desert landscape before him. His eyes roved over the markers. Wedged against rocks, hooked on to strands of rusted barbed wire, caught against old fence posts were scraps of newspaper and torn plastic bags. Each time he had placed the newspaper and the bags he had remembered the distances of his stride. There was nothing random in their placing: they were his white stones. The goats had been Omar’s idea. They had bleated in the night; they were the missing peg to be slotted in the plan. The light was coming and Gus heard the first distant popping of small-arms fire. He tried to sound calm but his teeth chattered.
‘Remember what I said. Keep clear of officers and white stones.’
Against the scratching of the goats, he heard the boy’s quiet laughter. ‘Are you very frightened, Mr Gus?’
‘Go away, and take those foul stinking creatures with you.’
The light was growing; the popping of the guns had become a rattle. The boy whistled and thwacked his stick on a goat’s back, then the hoofs and Omar’s light tread drifted away. The first golds of the morning caught the ground, flickered on the newspaper pages and the plastic, and Gus tried to remember each distance he had paced out in the darkness. It had been the boy’s idea to steal the goats and then to go forward with them.
He lay in a shallow trench covered by the sacking in which the mines had been carried, and over the sacking was loose dirt and small stones. Away to Gus’s right, the shooting was persistent and no longer sporadic.
Haquim had said they depended on him – if the tanks came. He had a role. Far to his front, where the incline rose to the roadway, was a scene as old as the warning of officers and white stones: a goatherd boy sat and watched his beasts. Gus wriggled his hand under his gillie suit and found the water bottle at his waist. He reached forward, emptied the precious water onto the ground under the end of the rifle barrel, and made a mud pool -that was old, as old as Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard.
Somewhere, out there, was the sniper sent to kill him. *** The water dribbled into the ground. Little rivulets ran from the point where he poured and disappeared. Then he tipped the last of the water from the bottle into the palm of his hand and let the dog drink from it.
Major Aziz lay in a scrape in the dirt and readied himself. The letter with his wife’s name on the envelope was against his heart, but she was nowhere in his thoughts -obliterated, along with his children.
The position he had taken was forward of the crossroads and a full 500 metres to the right flank of the route he reckoned they would use when they attacked. The first skirmish had begun. In front of him was the crisscross of the machine-guns’ tracers, and the blast of mortars.
When they made the encirclement, the tanks would be like a crude fishing-net that scooped up the majority of a catch but which let part of the shoal slip away. His target -he had agreed to it – was the witch. She would be at the forefront of the charge on the trenches and bunkers at the crossroads. He estimated she would pause to regroup her strike force at a distance of around 300 metres from the wire perimeter of the brigade positions. She would have her men around her, would be close to the roadway, and she was his target.
They would not charge against the wire unless she was there to goad them, urge them onwards.
He saw the first men in the advance. The sun beat on his back and he felt the rhythmic pant of the dog’s breathing against his thigh. He wished he had more water for the dog, but the wetted ground under his rifle barrel was more important. A hundred metres ahead of him, on a branch, he had placed a torn-off length from the cotton scarf knotted around his head to prevent sweat running to his eyes. It hung limply and there was no need to make adjustments for wind deflection. The bullet was in the breech, the rifle armed, and his finger was beside the trigger guard.
He looked for the witch and waited.
‘I am about to fight a battle.’ The general spoke with frayed anger. ‘What will handicap my fighting ability is distraction. What I tell you, you will find no treachery with me or the men who serve under me.’
‘It was never suggested.’
‘You will find only loyalty and dedication to the President.’
‘Treachery is a plague.’
‘There is no sickness with me or the men serving under me.’
He had been called from his room. He had been told that officers of the Estikhabarat had arrived in the night from Baghdad. He had been informed that his armoured brigade commander was under close arrest. With four subordinate officers, each carrying loaded side arms, he had marched to the briefing room. He had lectured the officers. He had stood at his full height in front of them. ‘We fight for our President. We go to battle in the name of the Ba’ath Party. We protect the integrity of the Republic of Iraq.’ He had spat on the floor then drawn his pistol and fired a single shot into the spittle. While the smell of the cordite hung in the air, he had said, ‘If any of you wish to follow the traitor then I will first spit in your eye then shoot it out. Are there any who wish to proclaim their loyalty?’ There had been an answering shout, at first hesitant, then raucous: ‘We fight for our President, our Party, our beloved Republic.’ He had briefed them, dismissed them.
‘Allow me to explain the tactical plan.’
‘It is right that you should do so.’
‘There are no traitors here,’ the general said defiantly. He would have said that the brigadier, the Boot, the man with big feet, was his friend. He did not know whether his protestations of loyalty were believed. ‘Traitors should be shot.’
‘Of course. The plan?’
Some would have stayed with his friend, and with the fists and the clubs; only the most senior would have come to the command bunker. The most senior would have no trust for him.
He pointed to the map. ‘I have a holding force, a battalion, in brigade base at the crossroads. Their task is to delay the advance of the woman and her people. We seek to persuade them that the position is weakly defended, to give them encouragement to mass and cross open ground. I send an armoured column forward, to encircle and to destroy.
The rabble will be in the open, without cover. They will be destroyed by the tanks.’
‘How many tanks?’
‘Six.’
‘Why six? Why not twenty-six, or forty-eight?’
‘Six tanks because that is the number that are in working order, plus a reserve of nine, plus seven more that have faults but are nearly serviceable, out of forty-eight. There are forty-eight on the parade ground for inspection – but there are six tanks plus the reserve that are fully operational. Check for yourself.’
The calm voice asked, ‘How would you recognize that the contagion of treachery runs deeper than you now believe?’
‘If we do not encircle them, crush them, that would be evidence of treachery… Do I have permission to issue orders, to make the killing zone?’
The man from the Estikhabarat smiled, and nodded.
The life of the general, and he recognized it, hung on the capability of six tanks of the T-72 class, with nine more in reserve, to encircle and destroy a force of peasant tribesmen caught in open ground. He gave the order.
Gus heard the guttural thunder from down the road, towards the ever-burning flame.
It was like Stickledown Range on a perfect day, clear vision, no wind.
The thunder began as a murmur, and grew.
On a perfect day at Stickledown the sun never shone so brightly that the target was distorted in a mirage, the rain never lashed, the gales never blew.
