There was a whinny of general laughter from the group around them. That would have made their bloody evening, and the week ahead when they were back at their desks, God’s fucking chosen children, and playing with investment figures and exchange rates on their bloody screens before heading down to the wine bar.
‘Then I have to hope he knows when to quit,’ Dogsy said. He was a big man, with long gorilla arms and a well-trimmed moustache. A top-of-the-range Land-Rover was parked behind the tents – Willet could have wept because in his imagination the exhausted Gus Peake sat around the same damp fire and heard the patronizing bastard talk Escape and Evasion, and heard the same laughter ripple from his audience. ‘Do you know how long he’s been in combat?’
There was a flicker in Ms Manning’s voice. She said crisply, ‘Maybe a week, or a few days more.’
‘It has to be a stampede for that sort of thing to work… He’ll be killing every day. The killing would be so frequent that he loses count – how many, how often – and he won’t be in a structure where anyone orders him to stop, quit. He’ll be a changed man. Should he get out, those who knew him before won’t know him – might not, when they meet him and see him, want to know him. He’ll be a new man, and it may not be a pleasant sight.
He didn’t tell me what he did, his old life.’
‘He was a transport manager…’
It was like a joke to those around the fire. Willet hated them. The giggles wafted across him.
‘… in a provincial haulage company,’ Ms Manning persisted.
A ponderous smile played at Dogsy Jennings’ face. ‘There’s your answer. Should he come back, he’s hardly going to be able to slip his feet under the desk and start again to move lorries about, like nothing’s happened. He’ll have taken a dozen men’s lives, if he’s any good. If he’s brilliant as a marksman, it could be twenty men’s lives, thirty. Any jerk who’s arrogant enough to think he can change the world won’t just switch off after one dose of it, he’ll have to find more causes, more bloody crusades. I read men. It’s my job to get under the bullshit of human nature. I didn’t like him.’
‘Didn’t you? Why not?’ The sneer rasped in her voice.
‘I didn’t like him, Miss, because that sort craves to belong. Got me? Whatever the motivation, he can’t belong out there, and if he gets back he can’t belong here. I did my best with Escape and Evasion because that’s what old Bill asked of me – but any road I didn’t like him. I don’t like men who go looking to be bloody heroes.’
‘What about loyalty, important things like freedom, heritage? What about sacrifice?’
Willet saw Dogsy’s wink. The circle chuckled. The smoke eddied across the rabbit’s carcass. Ms Manning pushed herself up then rubbed the damp off her backside and Willet saw the anger in her face.
‘Come on, Ken,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave these creeps to their silly bloody games.’
He followed after her, past the tents and the Land-Rover and back towards the track where her car was parked. He hadn’t thought it could happen, that her emotional commitment could be made to Peake and his rifle. Dogsy Jennings’ words seared in his mind. ‘He won’t be in a structure where anybody orders him to stop, quit… Should he get out, those who knew him before won’t know him… He can’t belong out there and, if he gets back, he can’t belong here.’ He thought she’d been magnificent, and he’d tell her.
She reached the car. Her eyes blazed at him, and she spat her words. ‘When you write this up, do me a favour, leave out all that pompous crap about survival chances. Spare me that shit.’
They moved in darkness, in total silence, towards the lights and the flame.
The boy led. Gus had given Omar authority over his life and safety. They went at a steady pace past patrols that he had not heard but the boy had. They crossed roads along which personnel carriers cruised, and the boy found the hidden ground into which they could duck as the searchlights roved over the ground, and he would not have sensed where the shallow earth scrapes offered them that protection. When there was a ditch into which he would have stumbled, the boy gently held his hand and guided him. Where men, talking softly, guarded their goats, they slipped by and the boy had read the wind so that they did not alert the goatherds’ dogs.
They went towards the lights where the chains held her.
Chapter Fifteen
Early each morning an elderly corporal, with a driver and an escort of two riflemen, collected the packages of urgent, sensitive material for Fifth Army flown into Kirkuk from the capital.
Although he had lost an arm in the defence of Basra fifteen years earlier, his birthright from a tribe that gave unquestioned allegiance to the regime ensured that a position in administration was available to him for as long as he wanted it. His daily routine was the run to the airfield, the collection from the Antonov transport plane, the drive back into the centre of Kirkuk, coffee and cigarettes, then the government’s newspaper, then a game of dice with matchsticks as the stakes, a meal, a siesta, then a gossiping evening with other corporals, the ironing of his uniform, the cleaning of his boots and bed. He had little cause for complaint – and it was safe. All the other corporals in administration could expect to be transferred every two months, for a week, to the forward strong points in the hills to the north, but not him. His disability protected him.
When the jeep slowed to a stop at traffic lights, one of the few sets working in Kirkuk, on the wide carriageway into the city from the airfield, the corporal’s orderly life was ended. A single shot, fired at great range, exploded into his head and the remnants of bone, blood and brain peppered the body of his driver.
They were running.
‘Where next?’
‘Doesn’t matter where – anywhere I can aim from.’
Omar led and Gus followed. The low shafts of sunlight threw deep shadows in the narrow lanes between the shanty-town of haphazardly built shelters on the edge of the city. Men, women and children, just risen from their beds, scattered as the wraithlike figures pounded past their homes.
When the dawn came he was so tired.
Major Karim Aziz dragged himself up from the floor as the first light seeped into the room, and felt his forty- five years for the first time since he’d come to Kirkuk as the aches, pains, stiffness ran through his body. He had not slept but had watched the darkness and the ribbon of light under the door, had listened for the boots. The cries and screams had come, not often, in the long hours and he had known that the torturer was tireless.
He packed his few belongings, scattered across the floor, down into the belly of his backpack.
Leila, too, would now be filling the boys’ rucksacks and telling them that an examination at school did not matter and a football match was unimportant. She would have telephoned the hospital and lied that she was unwell. Perhaps already she had told her mother, shuffling in slippers in the kitchen, that there would be no party to celebrate her birthday. Through the night he had wondered when he would tell her of their future.
He put the last of the dog’s biscuits on the floor and they were wolfed down.
The future, in the darkness hours, had been nightmarishly with him. It might be a patrol on the ceasefire line between government territory and the Kurdish enclave; on his own, without difficulty, he could evade the patrols – but he would not be alone, he would be with his wife and his sons. It might be capture by a warlord’s men, and the Estikhabarat would pay fifty thousand American dollars for him to be returned to them, bound and blindfolded, across the line; on his own, with his rifle and his dog, he could fight his way through the danger of capture – but he would not be alone. Should he succeed, it might be the stagnant life of an exile without money in the embittered Iraqi communities of Amman or Istanbul; on his own, perhaps, he could burrow into the tawdry life of the exiles he had read of in the newspapers and heard of on the radio and exist – but he would have responsibility for his wife and children, who would be lost flotsam. Soon she would be on the road north.
He folded the dog’s rug and put it into the backpack.
At the petrol station, or in the car, or when they started to walk, he would tell them. He would say that he was a traitor to the President who smiled with warmth at him from the photograph on the wall, that he had sided with the enemies of the President. He would say that all the struggle of their lives was for nothing because he had betrayed it. In the night he had shivered because of what he had done to those he loved.
The dog was by the door and waited for him.
In his mind he had seen – again and again – the shock spreading on their faces at the petrol station, or in the car, or when they started to walk, as they learned the future. The worst of the nightmarish thoughts had been of her clutching her children to her, turning and abandoning him… It had been his vanity on the range when he had
