They had died from hunger, thirst, cold, exhaustion, from wounds into which gangrene gas had spread infection, and from the cruelty of eccentric accidents. She had been with him as he had toured the panorama of the dead, always behind him and never speaking, never interrupting her father and grandfather, never weeping, never crying out. Her gaze had been impassive as her father had drawn back blankets and sacking to show the crushed faces of her sister and brother killed by a pallet of grain bags parachuted down from an American mercy flight. He had witnessed her strength.
Before they had left, then, the mountain slope of tents and plastic sheeting, the shivering living and the cold dead, he had said the unthinking words that he had mouthed several times before and since. At the doors of English crematoria and at the gates of cemeteries, he had taken the hands of mothers, widows and daughters, and murmured, ‘If there’s anything I can ever do to help, absolutely anything, then make contact, and I’ll do my best…’ It had been the decent thing to say. Empty words spoken before he had turned his back and hurried for the border, the car, the hotel and a damn great drink, all long ago, and the chance to put the dead from his mind.
Again, he saw the dead.
Again, the plucking hands pulled him forward.
The flies were on the face. They flew, buzzed, settled around the gaping mouth and the wide stare of the eyes and over the stubble set in the opaque skin. He saw a fly go into the man’s mouth while another rested on his eyeball.
Gus was brought closer.
He wanted to shrug their hands off him but he did not, could not. There was a pool of blood on the chest and more blood, which had earlier seeped from the hole in the corpse’s back. That, too, was a focus of the flies’ feeding frenzy. The coat and shirt that the living body would have dragged on in the dawn cold a few minutes before its owner’s death were pulled back to reveal the matted chest hair and the neatly drilled hole into which a pencil or a biro, of less than. 338 diameter, would have fitted comfortably. He remembered the moment at which he had fired, as the target had seemed to arch his back and his head had tilted to face the heavens and his god, to drink the freshness of the air. A man clawed a hand around his shoulder and cackled, squeezing his flesh as if to offer congratulations at the accuracy of the shot. He thought he belonged. A bullet of. 338 calibre moving at supersonic velocity, killing, had won him the respect of the men crowded close to him.
With a babble of voices around him he was taken into the home of the carcass, through the door that had been hammered down. The table was toppled over, the food trodden into the floor: there was a woman’s body and a young man’s, and the flies were worse.
They rose in swarms from the bloodied wounds at the corpses’ throats. He understood why the woman and the young man had been killed: they should not be able to carry away news of the attack over the plateau to the military position. He knew why they had been knifed: if they had been killed by gunfire the crash of the shots might have carried in the stillness of the early-morning air across the roll of the hills to the bunkers.
Gus thought of Stickledown. It would be quiet there after the previous day’s shooting, the targets would be lowered and the flags down. Would any of those who had fired the old weapons the afternoon before, his friends and his fellow enthusiasts, the other lunatics, comprehend what he had done, what had brought him to this place?
Perhaps the men around him had seen him rock on the balls of his feet, perhaps they had seen the pallor spread over his face… They took him out and around the building, through the crazily hanging door and into the annexe block. He was shown the smashed screen of the television, the cut cables and the radio. Grimed fingers jabbed at the typed sheets of paper that he presumed carried the codewords, frequencies and schedules of transmission.
Outside, with the sunlight on his face, he too drank at the air, gulped at its purity.
They ate from an iron pot that the boy had heated over the last embers in the stove inside. With his fingers he snatched saffron-flavoured rice, and palmed up the juicy swill of tomato and onion. Twice he found small scraps of meat, goat or mutton.
She had not eaten with them.
As the light sank they moved off.
She was ahead.
In the middle of the straggling column of men was the boy, burdened by the bags of food and the emptied iron pot. He skipped between the men, talking all the time, and stayed with each one until their patience was exhausted and he was cuffed away to dance on, light-footedly, to his next victim.
Gus trudged alongside Haquim at the end of the column, and realized the mustashar, the commander, was finding the going hard over rock and scrub, over shallow gorges and up rock inclines. He saw the pain in Haquim’s grizzled, heavy-boned face and the sharp biting at his lower lip to stifle it. When Haquim stumbled and he put out his hand to offer help, it was pushed away. He wished he had slept more in the day, when the chance had been given. They would march in the evening, then he and Haquim would go forward in the night. The sun was dazzlingly fierce and starting the slide below a rim of granite rock.
Twice, now, Haquim had stopped and steadied himself, breathing hard, then sighed and gone on. At the head of the column, he saw Meda drop down into a gully, near to the last ridge. He stayed with Haquim. He did not know whether he should insist on carrying part of the load balanced in a backpack on Haquim’s spine. The column ahead waited for them in the gully.
Gus hadn’t seen the boy turn when he materialized from among the rocks and wind-bent scrub close to them. All the time that he had been walking alongside Haquim, peering into the sun’s fall, sometimes blinded by it, he had not seen the boy’s charge back towards them. The boy said nothing, came to Haquim, stripped off the backpack, heaved it up alongside his rifle, the food bags and the cooking pot, and there was no protest.
Then, again, with the sun in his face as it cringed below the ridge, he lost sight of the boy between the greying rocks and the darkening trees.
Haquim challenged him. ‘You think I am not able?’
‘I think nothing.’
‘I am able.’
‘If you say it then I believe you.’
‘You, you are the worry.’
‘Why am I the worry?’
‘I doubt your strength. I may have a broken knee but I have strength. When I look down at a body, at a man I have killed, my stomach does not turn, I am not a girl. Let me tell you, Mr Peake, what you saw was as nothing to what the Iraqis would do to any of us, and to you. Do you know that?’
‘Yes, I know that.’
‘Today, for you, it is simple. Tomorrow, perhaps, it is easy. After tomorrow nothing is simple, nothing is easy. After tomorrow you will not look at me as if I am an aged cripple worthy of your sympathy, you will look at yourself.’
The first shadows of darkness cloaked them as they moved towards the second target.
He had showered, cold water to keep himself awake, eaten with the family, and gone out into the evening darkness.
Major Karim Aziz had yearned, again, to give some sign to his wife as to why he went out with his heavy waterproof tunic on and with the sports bag in his hand. There was nothing he could have told her. He could have lied about ‘Special Operations’ or manufactured an excuse involving ‘continuing night exercises’, but she always knew when he was lying. She’d done her best with the cooking for the family meal, and her mother would have spent hours on her slow old feet going round the open market stalls for the vegetables they could afford and a little meat. He had risen from the table, circled it and kissed in turn her parents, his boys and his wife. Then he had dressed for the night and left them.
The colder night air had cleared the smoke and smog. His view of the edge of the driveway, the steps and the villa’s main door was crystal sharp through the sight.
As a trusted professional soldier, with twenty-six years of proven combat experience behind him, Major Karim Aziz had access to any equipment he cared to demand. It would be bought abroad and smuggled by lorry from Turkey or Jordan into Iraq. But his needs were simple. He told the officers and senior NCOs he taught at the Baghdad Military College that in the area of infantry operations the art of sniping was as old and as unchanged as any. They should beware of state-of-the-art technology. He would say that if a child learned only to count with the
