‘It’s my damn business. Don’t bloody laugh at me, I worry about you more than any other of Protect the Children’s field-workers. That’s honest, more than the guys in Afghanistan or Somalia. Yes, you’re protected by goons, but we all know that’s just show. The Iraqis could take you any day they want.’
‘You’re a bag of bloody fun today, Benedict. It’s best you forget it.’
‘No way. If the British military is deploying expert snipers in northern Iraq, that jeopardizes the safety of British-employed aid-workers.’
‘Leave it.’
‘I’m raising the roof when I get back.’
She turned away, shut her eyes. Her head throbbed. It was a good place to be drunk, pity was it didn’t happen often enough. She heard his breath hissing through gritted teeth.
She knew he would raise the bloody roof, and she knew the Iraqis could kidnap her at any time they chose.
‘And who was that woman?’
She didn’t open her eyes. ‘You don’t need to know, so don’t ask.’
They crowded around Gus.
Haquim said they had all seen Russian-made sniper rifles, but never a weapon as large as the one he carried.
The hands groped towards it, but he did not let any of them touch it for fear that they might jolt the mounting of the telescopic sight.
Four days before, he had zeroed the sight. He had gone off alone on to a flat, sheltered meadow of grass and spring flowers. He had paced out a distance of 100 yards and left a cardboard box there with a bull blacked in with ink. He had paced out a further 100 yards, and left another cardboard box, and a final one at 300 yards. He had gone back to his firing position, turned the clicks on the distance turret of the sight to the elevation for 100 yards, fired, examined the target with his binoculars, found the shot low, had made adjustments to the mounting, fired again, checked with his binoculars where the shot had clipped the top edge of the four-inch bull, had made more adjustments, fired and been satisfied. Then he had moved to the 200-yard target, and then to the 300-yard target. Only when he was completely satisfied with the accuracy of his shooting had he packed away the rifle. Then, an hour later, he had met Meda. No talk, no gratitude, no curiosity as to how he had made the great journey, nothing about family, no recall of the past. She had handed him on to Haquim, and had not spoken to him since.
Gus let them look at the rifle, but he would not let them touch, feel or hold it.
He counted forty-two of them. There were forty-one men and a boy. He was slim, had stick-like wrists and a thin throat. On the smooth complexion of his cheeks and upper lip there was a haze of fluff, as if he was trying to grow a man’s beard. Most of the men were middle-aged, some shaven and some bearded, some in fatigues and some in their own tribal clothes. There was one who pressed closer than the others – turbaned, an old torn check shirt under a grey-blue anorak with a face masked by stubble and dangerous flitting eyes. They were bad, hostile eyes, and they raked him. His mouth had narrow lips, between which the tongue was turned and rolled in the mouth to gather the spittle. It was directed down between his boots. There was the single croaked word, spoken with contempt: ‘American.’
Gus stared back into the man’s face, shook his head and said, ‘English.’ He saw the eyes and mouth relax, then the man turned his back on him.
He thought them proud men, but with the common features of cruel eyes and brutal mouths. His grandfather would have described them, in the language of long ago, as
‘villains’. They carried assault rifles and grenade launchers; one had a light machine-gun and was wrapped with belts of ammunition. Then, in a moment, he was no longer the centre of attention because they had seen her, Meda.
They were around her. She spoke softly, with the glow in her eyes. They hung on her words. The one who’d spat, his mouth gaped open as if the foul old bastard had found the light of God and was mesmerized. Gus thought they danced for her.
Haquim, at his shoulder, said, ‘I can tell them about the tactics of frontal attack, and about clearing trenches with grenades, and about enfilading fire, and they tolerate me.
She tells them of destiny and freedom, and they will follow wherever she leads. I fear where she will lead us, Mr Peake.’
‘When are we leaving?’
Haquim said dully, ‘We go when she says we go.’
‘I counted forty-two new men – is that enough?’
‘Forty-one men and a boy, Mr Peake. Forty-one fighters and a boy to wash and cook for them. And there were eighteen of us, and you, and her. You go to war, Mr Peake, with fifty-nine men, a boy and her… It is what we have, it has to be enough. I told you it would be a drip feed. Today, agha Bekir has sent us forty-one men and a boy from the slum camps of Sulaymaniyah. In Arbil, agha Ibrahim will watch to see if we are successful. If we are he will not wish to lose status and he will send a hundred men, who will also be the scum from the slums. I told you how it would be.’
Her hands moved, outstretched, as she spoke. They seemed capable of carrying the weight of the world. He watched the power with which she held them, then ducked inside the shed.
When he came out, the rucksack and the carrying case hooked over his shoulders, Meda was leading and they were following up the narrow paths on the cliff face that generations of sheep had made. He heard their singing, in quiet, throaty voices. Haquim was ahead of him, labouring over the rocks. He climbed slowly and carefully, never looking back or down. Around him, he heard the songs of men going to war.
Sarah stood by the two Landcruisers, the bodyguards crowded around her. The customs men on the Syrian side of the river were waving urgently for him to hurry, and the man in the ferry-boat was shouting for him. Her regional director kissed her awkwardly on the cheek. She didn’t know whether she believed what he’d said, that he worried more about her than any of his other field people. When he was back in his London home, with his wife or partner or boyfriend, would he be worrying about her? The visits were little light lines in the darkness of her everyday life, but they unsettled her. It would take a week to reassemble her existence, fall back into the routine of the isolation and exposure to suffering that were commonplace.
‘Keep safe, Sarah.’
‘Give my love to the office,’ she said flatly.
‘I’m going to do what I said I’d do.’
‘What’s that?’
‘British snipers hazarding your safety… raise hell.’
Under the glare of the afternoon sun he scrambled down the track towards the ferry.
She waved desultorily. She watched him climb aboard and the ferry carried him across the Tigris, towards Syrian territory, towards safety. Tomorrow she would be back in the high villages and her concern would be for children who had no school, no clinic and no hope. What could one sniper do, however fucking expert, however big his fucking rifle, to give the children hope, a clinic and a school? The ferry reached the far side of the river, and he ran to the car that would drive him to the airstrip for the feeder flight to Damascus.
She shouted after him, ‘I hope your back’s better in the morning. Don’t tell them in the office that you did it getting the Cruiser back on the road. Tell them you were escaping from a battalion of the Republican Guard…’
Gus had made the climb up the far side of the valley his bullet had crossed.
Only once before had he stood, silent, and looked down on the dead. Then, more than nine years before, he had steeled himself, erect, tall, and adopted a concerned expression.
Hands had plucked at the sleeves of his coat and led him between the clusters of wrapped shapes. He had tried, then, to close his ears to the persistence of the sobbing of the living.
Men had wept and women had cried out in their anguish and the tears had rolled down children’s cheeks. He could remember, then, that he had worried how they would bury so many bodies because there was little earth between the rock outcrops and that was frozen under the sporadic patches of snow. He could remember the endless crawling line of people coming down a track on a far slope towards the swaying rope bridge with their bundles, bags, cases and more dead. Sometimes, that was clear in his mind, the cloths that wrapped the corpses had been unwound so that he could see the faces of the dead, as if it was important to those who lived that he should share with them the agony of their loss.
