Soldiers held him on their shoulders, carried him across the square, past the governor’s office, through the gate and into the compound of Fifth Army headquarters.
He was saluted, waved to, cheered.
His dog trotted alongside.
Aziz felt the exhilaration of pride and just before he was set down at the entrance to the command bunker, he punched the fist that held the Dragunov rifle into the air. At that hour, Major Karim Aziz was the hero. He told the men gathered around him that, later, he would go and search for the sniper who had humiliated the armour and destroyed the helicopters. He would hunt him down, they had his word. The colonel came from the bunker, clasped him, kissed his cheeks, told him that the remnants of the bandits were now in flight, and promised that the President would hear of his success. He said that his one bullet had achieved more than a brigade of tanks and a flight of helicopters.
Faces pressed around him, glowing in trust and admiration, but looking up beyond the men he saw the shadowed cell-block windows.
LIBRARY: Sgt Billings withdrew from CTCRM
Library the under-mentioned works:
The British Sniper – Skennerton.
Notes on the Training of Snipers, 1940-41 -
Ministry of Defence.
Scouts and Sniping in Trench Warfare – Crum.
With British Snipers to the Reich – Shore.
Sniping: Small Arms Training, vol. 1, 1946-51 -
Ministry of Defence.
Sniping – Idriess.
Sniping in France – Hesketh-Prichard.
All these works were read by AHP. They are old and deal with historic conflict situations, but the methods of sniping have changed little.
SUMMARY: I believe AHP will perform well when going forward but, through ‘doing well’, he will increasingly attract attention once all elements of surprise are lost. I am not yet satisfied that he has the necessary knowledge of ESCAPE AND EVASION when the going gets harder. He has chosen to embark on a journey of great complexity and extraordinary danger, and the LOYALTY factor may well deny to him the knowledge of when to turn in retreat. I rate his chances of survival in the medium term as slim.
Willet watched as Ms Manning read his report. A rare smile spread across her face. ‘I see you’re cracking up.’
He was tired, and he bit. ‘What exactly do you mean?’
Her eyes flashed. ‘Slim – chances of survival in the medium term – not non-existent.
That’s progress. My God, Augustus Henderson Peake, Esquire, would be happy to know that Ken Willet has changed his bloody mind, if only by a quarter of a crank. These books he read, they seem to come out of the Ark.’
‘Not everything in this world is glitzy and new. Real things, things of value, aren’t achieved at third hand, by damned remote control. We’ve tried to fight at a distance, high-tech, no casualties – good stuff for television but useless for getting things done. If you want to get things done then you have to put your life on the line. You bin the computers, you go body to body. He’d have known that because the sergeants would have told him. It was important for him to read the old books.’
‘Steady, young man, steady.’
‘Myself, if I’d gone where Peake’s gone, I’d have wanted Hesketh-Prichard in my knapsack. It’s about cunning, deviousness, courage, ruthlessness, the skill of killing…
It’s also about old-fashioned virtues. The trouble is that an old-fashioned virtue is loyalty and, at war, loyalty is a killer. “Slim” may not be realistic, I grant you.’
Chapter Fourteen
‘You saw it?’
Gus stood over Haquim. They were under a great overhang of rock where the wounded were sheltered from the sun, and where the survivors crouched silent, beaten in fear.
‘Yes.’
‘And you did nothing?’
Haquim was the only target available to Gus. He had known she would not retreat, and had presumed she was dead. When they had reached the rendezvous, gone into the grey light of the shade, moved through the wounded in search of Haquim, Gus had expected to find a slight, shrouded figure, with the head hidden. It had not been conceivable to him that, while a man of them was left standing, they would fail to retrieve the body.
Haquim, pathetically, shrugged. ‘I did what I could.’
‘Which was nothing.’
‘Don’t insult me.’
‘You did nothing – it’s the truth that insults you.’
‘I gathered a group of men. I went back. I saw her taken away. I could do nothing. I would have given up lives…’
He saw himself far ahead, in the distance of time, in his grandfather’s kitchen making coffee, with the photograph on the window ledge above the sink, and explaining in stuttered words that Meda had been captured, abandoned, that he himself had not protected her. He played the bully.
‘Well done, I congratulate you. Because of the risk involved you abandoned her.’
‘More would have been killed.’
‘You owed it to her to have tried.’
‘I am a mustashar with responsibility for my men’s lives. I cannot give up lives for a gesture.’
‘I hope you can live with it.’
He did not know how he could live with it. He had kissed her and there was no longer the feel of her lips on his, and no longer the taste of her. He had nothing by which to remember her – not a bandanna, a handkerchief, not even a soiled field-dressing that carried her stain. In one week, she had come to mean more to him than anyone he had known in his life, and he owned not a single trifle of her. For the first time, Haquim lifted his head, stared back into Gus’s eyes, and bit back. ‘I am not frightened of the weight of responsibility… There was nothing I could have done.’
‘Live with it and sleep at night with it.’
‘If you knew more of war you would not abuse me. The lesson of war, as I have learned, is that you do not throw away what is most precious, life, like empty cigarette cartons. Life is not to be wasted. Can I tell you something?’
‘Another damn excuse?’
‘The soldiers held her before she was put in the truck, so that a family could confront her. Each of the family took their turn to spit on her. To you she was the symbol to follow, and to me – against all my judgements. For you she was romance, for me she was a vehicle that gave a small chance of success. For them, those she claimed to speak for, she was a vision of evil. That was the last I saw of her, with their spit on her face.’
He heard his own stumbled answers to the confused persistence of his grandfather’s questions. He saw the steady gaze, and honesty, of Haquim. He bent down, squatted, and reached forward to take the wearied, grizzled face in his hands.
‘How was she?’
‘That is an idiotic question.’
‘Tell me how she was.’
‘The arrogance had gone from her. You saw it, when she contradicted me, the arrogance that each time she was right, and I was wrong. You saw her cheapen my experience – how many times? She was not a fighting woman
