‘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 Sulaymānīyah. In Arbīl, 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 s
hould share with them the agony of their loss.
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 eq
uipment 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 aid of a pocket calculator, then went into a mathematics examination without it, he would fail – but the child who had learned to add, subtract and divide in his mind would pass that examination. He had learned the measuring of distance as a primitive skill, and had never asked for range-finding binoculars.
The distance from rifle barrel to target was critical, but he was satisfied he had made an accurate measurement. With correct adjustment to the elevation of the sights, the bullet would be two metres above the point he aimed at before dropping for the kill. Too great an estimation of distance, the bullet flew high and the target lived; too low, the bullet dropped too far and the target suffered a non-fatal wound … but he was satisfied with his appraisal of the distance. It was the freshening wind gusting around the edge of the roof’s water tank that bred the anxiety.
In daylight, he could have watched the flutter of the washing hung out on the roofs of the blocks of apartments fronting on to Rashid Street, al-Jahoun Street and Kifah Street.
Through his binoculars, he would have seen the mirage of dust and insects, carried by the wind, and there would have been the drift of smoke and smog. At night, peering through the black curtain of darkness towards the illuminated window of the driveway, the steps and the front door, there was no accurate way he could tell the strength of the wind beyond the blow around the forward edge of the water tank. At that range, his bullet would be in the air for one and a quarter seconds; one surge of wind gusting for two or three hundred metres between buildings would bend the bullet’s flight a few, several, centimetres and make the difference between killing and missing. But, with his experience, he did not require a calculator to make the adjustment to his PSO-1 sight. His intuition told him to compensate for a 75-degree wind direction at a strength of ten kilometres per hour, and his adjustment to the windage turret meant that his actual aim, if the target came, would be some eleven centimetres to the left.
Holding the Zero Page 4
