shown his shooting skills. It had been the massage of his conceit by the silky words of the general, in the car cruising at night beside the river in Baghdad, telling him that he, above all men, had the marksman’s expertise.
The dog bounded into the corridor, he closed the door of the bare room and wondered if the President still smiled.
He walked out into the compound.
Men were coming from the shadowy shape of the cell block.
He saw them rubbing their eyes in exhaustion, flexing their fists as if they were bruised, wiping smeared mess off their tunics. But the slightest among them walked briskly as if he had not missed his sleep.
The piping voice sidled across the quiet of the compound. ‘You are leaving us, Major?
Take with you my congratulations.’
He said hoarsely, ‘I accept them, I am grateful… I am a simple soldier, I did what I could.’
‘I never met a simple soldier. Have a good journey back to Baghdad.’
He tried to ask the casual question: ‘Your own work, Commander, is it nearly done?’
‘Near, but not yet there. A few hours, and this preliminary stage of my investigation will be completed… but the trails of treachery run far. You have my assurance, simple soldier, that I will follow the trails wherever they lead… Enough of me. Are you disappointed that your triumph is not total?’
‘I do not understand you.’
‘You were sent to kill a sniper, a foreigner – and you did not.’
Aziz blurted, ‘He is beyond my reach.’
‘Have a good journey, and be assured that those who take responsibility for the security of the state will not rest while traitors live.’
Aziz heard the dog’s low angry growl, flicked his fingers nervously to it and strode out towards the administration building, where he would find a driver to take him across the city to the military car pool. While he walked he felt the small narrow-set eyes on his back, following him.
The soldier stood at the road block.
He was nineteen years old, a conscript in a mechanized infantry unit. The road block was behind him. He had been detailed by his sergeant to wave down the cars, lorries and vans for inspection. He was from a poor family in Baghdad, and his move to the basic training camp before going to Kirkuk had been the first time in his life that he had been away from his mother. He hated the army’s food and hardly ate. He was ghostly thin and his stomach churned as he held his rifle and directed the traffic into the lane where the drivers’ papers could be looked over. He was a lonely youngster, shunned by his colleagues in the barracks hut because the loneliness caused him to wet his bed most nights of the week. Behind the road block, workmen were digging a trench in preparation for the repair of a blocked sewer. The smell was foul but, more importantly, the piledriver the workmen used to break up the tarmacadam had obliterated the sound of a single shot fired half an hour earlier a full kilometre away. He was thinking of his mother when he died. Against the noise of the vehicles’ brakes and gear changes and the hammer of the piledriver, none of the men near to him heard the crack of the rifle’s report or the thump of the bullet’s strike. The soldier subsided, as if the strength was gone from his legs, and blood spilled from deep holes in his chest and his back.
The orderly paused at the back of the truck.
On the flat-bed was a heap of black rubbish bags. He lit a cigarette. The ebony crows were waiting for him, flapping their wings as they strutted on the bags he had brought earlier in the week to the dump, and cried raucously at him. Each morning the orderly cleaned the quarters used by the officers of an armoured unit based at Kirkuk and collected their rubbish in the bags along with the food they had not bothered to eat the previous evening. It attracted the crows, but the brutes could wait while he enjoyed his cigarette. The orderly was from the desert region, near to the small town of an-Nahiya, close to the Syrian border. There were no mountains in that region, but he enjoyed those moments when he could smoke a cigarette and admire the high ground beyond the city.
There was the same emptiness, and he blinked into the sun rising over the faraway ridges.
He was particularly cheerful that morning: his time in the army had nine days to run and then he would be on the slow bus back to an-Nahiya where his father kept a roadside coffee shop. The orderly did not realize that by standing and dragging contentedly on his cigarette he made a good target for a distant marksman. As he fell backwards the crows screamed and rose in a moment of panicked flight over the heap of rubbish bags.
They moved again, fast.
‘Why, Mr Gus?’
‘Because, Omar, they are available.’
‘I do not complain, Mr Gus, but they are not officers, not commanders. They are not helicopters, tanks, communications… Why?’
‘They wear the uniform.’
The boy shrugged. They went through yards, over fences that sometimes collapsed under them. There would have been many inside their homes or outside sweeping away dirt or hanging out clothes to dry who saw them. But those who were inside looked away and those who were outside hurried back through the doors and locked them. They were not in that part of the city where Party members lived, or functionaries of the administration, but where people valued their lives and believed the best preservation was to see, hear and know nothing. The boy carried the Kalashnikov assault weapon, and Gus held hard on to the stock of the big rifle as he ran. As the sun rose, they careered on, hunting for the next position from which he could find a target wearing the uniform. And gradually the pattern of the boy’s route led him towards the heart of the city.
He arrived at the military transport pool.
Major Karim Aziz thanked the driver curtly, hoisted up his backpack and the rifle’s polished wooden box. The dog ran beside him as he walked to the pool office. He gave his name and his rank at the desk, and demanded a self-drive car for his journey back to Baghdad. His name was known, his reputation had moved quickly. Surely, for the major, whose expert marksmanship was responsible for the capture of the witch, there was a place on a flight south to Baghdad?
‘I wish to drive and I want a car immediately.’
Beyond a closed door, behind the desk, he could vaguely hear the military radio net.
He could not distinguish the messages, only the babble of activity.
Forms were produced from below the desk, and carbon sheets. With two fingers, a clerk laboriously typed his name, his rank and his destination. He fidgeted impatiently.
He was asked if he wanted coffee, but irritably shook his head. He paced in front of the desk, and perhaps that increased the clerk’s nervousness and the errors; the papers and carbons were torn out of the typewriter and the work began again. When the typing was complete the papers were passed to him. He scrawled his signature on them, and they were taken from him into the office where the radio was… By now, Leila and the children would have left home, would be on the road towards Sulaiman Bak.
An officer, a major’s insignia on his shoulder, overweight from a life spent welded to a desk, came from the inner room.
‘I am honoured to meet you, Major Aziz. Did these fools not find you a chair?’
‘I don’t want a chair, I just want a car.’
With a flourish the officer countersigned the papers. ‘I apologize that I can only provide a Toyota, Major. As soon as it is valeted, fuelled, it will be at your disposal.’
‘Forget the valeting, give me the keys.’
The officer smiled smugly. ‘You are an expert at marksmanship, I am an expert at running the motor pool of Fifth Army. You have pride in your work, Major, and I have pride in mine. No car issued to a distinguished officer will leave this yard until it has been correctly cleaned and prepared. We are both proud men, yes?’
‘Just get it done.’
He started to pace again. The officer hesitated, then said uncertainly, ‘I am assuming, Major, that you have not been beside a radio for the last three-quarters of an hour.’
‘I have been getting here, in bad traffic.’
‘You do not know of the killings?’
‘What killings?’
‘Three soldiers have been shot dead in Kirkuk in the last three-quarters of an hour. A corporal on the airport road, a soldier at a road block, an orderly taking rubbish to the dump. Not important men, Major, not officers.’
