He thought that what he had done that day was what was owed to Augustus Henderson Peake. He had phoned those individuals who had helped Peake, and told them where he was and why they were, in all likelihood, responsible for his death.
A cigarette was thrown away; another was lit.
‘Ah, the telephone freak – the man with the conscience. I’ve been hearing what you’ve been up to.’
‘I came because I wanted you to know that I hold you in contempt.’
‘That’s trite.’
‘Listen to me – he was decent and honourable. He may have been immature and ill-equipped, but he didn’t deserve the open doors that will kill him for nothing.’
‘Trite and romantic.’
‘He was sent to his death, and you knew that was the way it would end,’ Willet barked.
‘I think, from within your little army shell, that you have learned surprisingly little of human nature.’
‘I know about exploitation and manipulation.’
There was a small smile, that of an older man forced to explain the obvious to a juvenile. ‘Hear me out. We deal in the commodity of grown men who make their own choices. Around the world, in the darker corners, at any day of the week, there are a hundred men like Peake. They work for aid agencies, they are businessmen, tourists, journalists, academics, whatever. They paddle around, and if they come back they are debriefed. They are volunteers. We’re not nannies and he’s not a victim. He is an adult, and he is grateful to me – not that he knows it – because I gave him a chance of personal fulfilment.’
A tired grin, and the cigarette was tossed towards the clutch of pigeons.
‘I think you’ve shortchanged him, Captain Willet, and have not recognized the dream in us all, and the utter thrilling excitement, which so few of us are ever fortunate enough to feel. I believe that Augustus Peake would find you rather dull company… Ah, my last one.’
The empty packet was thrown skilfully into the rubbish bin, and the cigarette was lit.
‘You know so little. Did his grandfather tell you about blood spilled a half-century ago? Were you told that men died in a mountain village so that his grandfather would live? No? There was a debt handed down, grandfather to grandson, and an obligation that it be, someday and somehow, repaid. If you think it was exploitation and manipulation you are merely naive. Before he left, he sat where you sit and thanked me for the chance given him – you wouldn’t understand.’
George wandered away, as though further explanations were no longer necessary, leaving Ken Willet behind him, bruised.
At that moment, Aziz thought of the future. The future – if he waited for the darkness and climbed back the way he had come – was his family being made to pay for the bullet or the rope, and was his body in the hands of the torturers, and was his life. The future was also – if under the darkness he went down to the river then up the far side and out of Iraqi territory – the existence without dignity or pride of the rootless exile. In the future, he would never walk with great men. This would be the last opportunity.
He pulled the dog from behind him, grasping tightly at the nape of its neck and dragging it into his body. It was only an animal, a trained beast that was eager to please, but it had the power to destroy the future and maintain the present. He held it against his chest and murmured the commands in its ear. It was the moment for which, over many hours, he had trained the dog.
He trusted the dog, as he trusted his rifle. He trusted that the dog and the rifle would hold the zero. He had no other chance but to lay his life with the animal. He saw the bright light in the eyes of the dog and felt the whip of its tail.
With a sudden movement, as he whispered to the dog, he threw it out from the cover of the cavity under the stone slab and towards the track he had come down in the night. It landed, stumbled, then pounded away from him. He could not know whether the dog would respond to what he had whispered in its ear. A great void settled around him, with its warmth and its breathing gone.
He could not see it. Lying under the slab, its descent on the track was hidden from him.
The void was filled. Aziz had never known such pumped-up, electric excitement.
As Gus tracked over the lengthening shadows, there was a fleeting movement at the extreme edge of the lens’ view. He breathed hard, then edged the ’scope back. His breathing came faster. He found the spaniel.
The end had started and, if he missed the trick of it, he was the loser, and dead.
Its head was low on the path as it came down, as if there was still a scent to be found after the rain, and still bootmarks to be recognized. It came fast, without hesitation. He thought it a fine animal, but pushed the distraction from his mind. His view was off the slope and the plateau across the valley, where the man waited with his rifle. Gus must follow the dog’s run. Everything that had seemed of importance to him now rested with the dog.
It came to the stream and the crows scattered from the body, rose above the bloodied carcass. It leaped into the fast-water pool beside the smooth stone and he saw that it cooled itself, bathed, and drank. The crows shouted at the interruption and flew circles round the dog.
As the dog came onto his bank of the stream, there was a sudden rainbow cloud over it as it shook the water beads, diamonds, from its coat. He thought that the dog was the man’s last throw. The dog was there to be shot, to be sacrificed, had been loosed for Gus to fire at, and show himself. When it had shaken itself it squatted and defecated, then began to circle and to search. The dog was a decoy, as important as a plastic pigeon in corn stubble, as valuable as a papier-mache head poking up over a parapet. He wondered how long the dog had been with the man, how much love had been given it, how much care, and how much misery the man now felt having loosed it, or if the life of the dog did not matter to him.
The crows were back again on the body, their feast resumed.
The dog found the scent in rocks and mud and grass. It came up the path that shepherds had made over generations with their goats and on towards the plateau. Gus was torn: he must follow the dog, watch its progress. He had not seen the point from which the dog was sent, but he had taken note of the strata of the plateau where he had first seen it.
Which trail must he follow? The one that would lead him to the man, or the one that would save himself? Near to where he had first seen the dog was bracken, a bush and a bilberry patch; close by was a stone slab with a dark curtain of shadow beneath it.
The dog came up the path and followed his boots’ tread from the night.
His attention, concentration, was divided and he knew that that was the man’s intention. The sun teetered on the far ridge. If he should lift his gaze, he would be blinded by it.
Gus held the rifle so that the ’scope sight covered the ground where he had first seen the dog, but he twisted his head fractionally so that he could watch its approach. He thought he was losing and was out-thought.
… The memory came back – he should have shut it out and could not – of the officer who had come to the school in his last year. Gus, the sixth-former – Gus in the current-affairs session – Gus listening to the paratroop officer, a Falklands veteran of the previous year – the officer talking about combat, but dressing the reality up in the jargon of duty, stoicism, patriotism because that’s what he would have thought was right for the kids to hear – Gus realizing that the officer was using fantasy bullshit, not telling them the truth of clinging to life, game time over, survival – Gus, afterwards, alone beside the cricket pitch, wondering if the ultimate truth, never spoken of by the officer, was total and exhilarated, heart-pounding ecstasy…
Across the valley, did he feel the mind-bending, addictive, narcotic excitement – or was he sad that the dog might die?
The dog paused at the point on the path where Gus had come off it, where he had started to crawl away from it, and searched, and Gus’s finger tightened on the towel rope.
Sarah said faintly, ‘It’ll find him, the dog will find him.’
Joe said, ‘Don’t interfere, just watch. It’s like nature, it takes its course. You are not a part of it.’
Rybinsky said, ‘If you interfered you would break the bet. And, more important, if you interfere you destroy the supreme moment in the lives of them both.’
The dog – Gus was forty yards from it and saw it clearly – scampered in a small loop round that place on the path. Its nostrils were up, flared.
He had been told that a dog could find ground scent and air scent; there wouldn’t be much from the ground for it to work off after the night rain, but the air scent would be heavy with his sweat and urine where he lay, and from the rucksack, which lay ten yards away.
