‘How many rounds have you fired, Major Aziz, in defence of our positions?’
‘I have fired once. I missed. Sniping is not an exact art, as you will know, Colonel. Do you wish to hear my report now?’
‘Perhaps your mind was resting on your duties as a kennel-boy. Get that fucking animal out of here, then clean yourself up, then make your report.’
Aziz had come back across the dried riverbed, and rejoined the road south of the bridge near to the raised embankment where the engineers still worked under floodlights to recover the last tank, and where the sappers had cleared the last mine. He had been given a ride back to Fifth Army. Then he had been told of the fate of the brigadier, the Boot –and of the general’s suicide. As he’d walked across the open ground towards the command bunker, he’d glanced at the squat cell block, and he had thought of his family.
Where he stood, the floor of the command bunker was scrubbed clean except for the dirt from his boots, but they had not been able to remove the blood spatters from the ceiling.
‘Were you at Susangerd, Colonel?’ He spoke quietly, as if in casual conversation. ‘I do not remember seeing you at Susangerd, nor at Khorramshahr. We did not meet, I think, in Kuwait City. Were you operational in al-Anfal? I look forward to hearing of the rigours of staff work in divisional headquarters.’
He saw the flush in the colonel’s face. Officers looked away. The recklessness was like a narcotic.
‘Forgive me, Colonel, my memory played a trick with me. I have fired twice. I fired at the woman and I missed. At Tarjil I fired at the commanding officer – and did not miss –because he betrayed the soldiers under his command. He was running away. I am prepared to kill any officer, whatever his rank and whatever his position of influence, if he betrays the trust placed in him by the army and, of course, the people of Iraq. Do you want to hear my report, Colonel, or do you want me to go back to the war?’
He bent and ruffled his fingers through the hair at the nape of the dog’s neck, then he looked up at the blood on the ceiling, and the sight of the small, barred windows of the cell block hooked his mind.
‘Make your report.’
Major Karim Aziz spoke of what he had seen. From a good vantage point, with enough elevation for him to look down a slight gradient into the camp, he had settled with his telescope, and the dog had been beside him. He told of the arrival of agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim, then of their abrupt departure. He said that a large proportion of the force of the peshmerga had followed after them in general retreat, but the woman remained at the crossroads with no more than three hundred men. He predicted an attack in the morning because he could see no other reason for her to stay. He described what he had seen in a flat monotone, and where he would be in the morning. He finished, saluted, called for his dog and shambled out of the command bunker.
The brigadier, the Boot, was a proud man but it was hard to have pride when lying in the corner of a cell in the piles of his own excrement and the pools of his own urine.
Maybe they rested, maybe they had gone to Communications to talk with the al-Rashid barracks, maybe they had left him to agonize on the future facing him before death.
The pain racked his body. There would be many, now, who would have heard of his arrest, knew that he faced torture, and who shook in the fear that he would name them.
Pride was the only dignity left to him. If he broke under torture, screamed out the names, then the last of the dignity would be taken. He heard the stamp of feet in the corridor, and the slide of the bolt. In the cell’s doorway, he saw the faces of the men who would try again to steal his pride.
He watched the mustashar hobble towards him.
There had been more than three thousand men at the crossroads, and now there were fewer than three hundred. One jeep still waited, with the engine turning.
Haquim winced as he bent his knee and lowered himself to sit beside Gus.
His voice was dried gravel under tyres, and sad. ‘You should go now. You should walk with me, Mr Peake, to the jeep, and sit with me and leave. You have done what you could.’
Gus looked into the eyes without light and the mouth without laughter and could hear only the sadness.
‘You can be proud that you came and that you tried to help. You are not to blame that the force against you is too great and the force with you is too small. It is the story of the Kurdish people. No man can call you a coward …’
‘May your god ride with you, Haquim.’
‘Do you think I am a coward, Mr Peake, or do you think it is the anger because she does not listen to me? May I ask you, has she made her apology to you for being wrong about the tanks? Has she?’
‘It is not important.’
‘She believes to apologize is to show weakness. The stubbornness is a death wish. She will neither apologize to you, nor accept that a march on Kirkūk with so few is like a death wish – for her and for everyone who goes with her.’
‘I wish you well.’
‘The spell of her holds you … and you think of me as a coward. I cannot run fast enough to be with her and to shield her. I have no reason to be here, to go into Kirkūk, to die under the light of the flame. I was not always a coward.’
‘I will remember you as a good and true friend.’
‘Listen to me. It is important, if I am to live with myself, that I tell you of the days when I was not a coward. I was a junior officer of artillery. For five years I was with an artillery regiment in support of the ground forces defending the Basra road. We were safe, we had deep bunkers to go into when the Iranians shelled us, but in front of us were our infantry. There was as much barbed wire behind our forward positions, where our infantry were, as there was to the front. They were trapped there, peasant boys, and behind the barbed wire were minefields to prevent them breaking and fleeing from the attacks. Behind the minefields were security troops to round up the deserters and shoot them. They were fodder for the cannons of the Iranians. At the end of the fifth year that I served there, in the heat and with the smell of death, I went alone in an evening into the marshes to see if I could find a forward position for an artillery spotter. I found them.
They were all Kurds. They were from Arbīl and Rawāndiz, Dihok and Zākhō, and there was one from the mountains near to my home at Birkim. I saw their terror of me. They thought I would call for security troops. My own blood, little more than boys, of my own people. I took off my badges of rank and threw them into the water. When the day ended we started out. I took them home, Mr Peake. We walked for a month, always at night.
There were eleven of these Kurdish boys, and I led them home to their mountains. We moved in darkness and hid in the days. We stole food, we avoided the road blocks. If we had been seen or captured, we would have died before firing parties or on the hangman’s rope. I brought them out of the marshes and across deserts, through fields, around cities, in the heat and in the cold. I delivered them, each of them, to their homes, to their mothers, to the mountains. I was not always as you see me now …’
‘May your god go with you and watch you.’
‘Should I tell you when I fought with the rearguard when the Iraqis came in the Operation al-Anfal – the name was taken from a sura in the Koran, the chapter that describes holy war against infidels – that name was used to legalize the murder and rape and looting of Kurds? Should I tell you how I fought to win time for the refugees in 1991, after the Coalition’s great betrayal? They will see what you have done against tanks –they will fly against you with the helicopters … I want to be with my children. I do not want to die for nothing.’
The tears streamed on Haquim’s face. Gus took his grimy handkerchief from his pocket, wiped them away and made smears on the other man’s cheeks.
The handkerchief was wet in his hand as he watched the jeep leave, watched it until it was small then gone into the mist that was thrown up at the cooling end of the day, and he thought of the helicopters.
They saw the cars speed through the road block
with their escorts, then came the bigger column of lorries, pick-ups and jeeps, laden low with men.
‘What’s going on here? The fucking yellow bastards are running!’ Mike exploded.
‘Looks like the stakes have gotten too high,’ Dean whined.
‘It was madness, we should never have tried. Expensive madness!’ Gretchen cried.
The dust from the wheels of the column spattered over them. The faces of the men told a story of defeat.
‘I haven’t seen her,’ Gretchen said.
‘Probably long gone, probably gone to wash her goddam hair,’ Dean said.
‘I’ll wring her neck with my own fucking hands, if I ever get sight of her,’ Mike said.
The Russian came and spilled down from the back of an open vehicle. They swarmed around him. He shouted that it was a matter beyond his control, that the war was over, finished.
‘Where is she?’
He did not know. Maybe they cared to go and look for themselves, to walk down the road through the artillery bursts and search for her. Himself, he was leaving. He reached into his back pocket and heaved out the bulging roll of banknotes, unwound the elastic band holding the roll tight, and threw the notes high in the air for the wind to catch. He let them scrabble for them.
The cheeks and jowl of Lev Rybinsky quivered in misery. ‘Your loss is that of a distant cousin, a mere story – my loss is that of a son. I have lost the chance of gaining the licences to exploit the minerals here. If you want to go and look for her then go. I am leaving.’
When they had collected all of the money they climbed into his car and joined the tail of the long column heading north towards the mountains.
The drone was in his ears. He had his back to the road but it was bad for Joe Denton to try to work while he was distracted. Over his shoulder, on the road, was the grind of the vehicles. The minefield was more difficult to work in than he had expected. A part of the meadow had a shallow dip in it, from long years of winter rain. The soil had been pushed by the rain flow to the side, and had buried the tripwires of the V69s. The Italian ones were the most dangerous of all the mines he cleared, and particularly dangerous when the tripwires were buried. The killing range was a radius of 27 yards. When the tripwire was touched – and the tension in the buried wires gave them a hair-trigger condition – the initiator charge hurled the V69’s core vertically upwards to a height of 18 inches above the ground, then a restraining wire detonated the core, throwing out thousands of tiny metal cubes. If he fired a V69 then the helmet with the visor covering his face would be lacerated, and his protective vest would be shredded. More than any of the mines he worked on, Joe detested the V69s: too many times he had seen the child amputee who had wandered out over other meadows to pick flowers, and men and women who had gone to round up cattle herds and now limped on crutches, or to harvest apples from orchards and now wore the hideous lifeless artificial legs. Clearing the long-laid mines was not work for a man suffering distraction.
All the time the approaching drone had been in his ear he had been excavating the lie of a tripwire with a trowel and a slim metal probe. He stopped, caught his breath and watched the column on the road, then crawled back along his cleared channel between the pegs.
The lorries, pick-ups and jeeps lumbered along the narrow track. He saw the faces of many men, quiet and without passion. He stood at the side of the road, scanned those faces and looked for Gus.
At the end of the convoy was a mud-spattered Mercedes, then came Sarah’s two pickups with the bright new paint of Red Crescents on the doors and bonnets. Joe waved her down. He saw casualties on stretchers in the vans, but they were not full – and yet the army retreated.
‘What happened?’
She was tough, old Sarah, the one who liked to say she’d seen everything misery could throw at her, and she gibbered.
‘They took the crossroads. The Iraqis fell back, damn nearly gave it to them. She was wrong, she – the woman, Meda – promised there would be no tanks. It was a trap, the soldiers fell back and left the peshmerga out in the middle of a killing zone, with the tanks to do the killing. Your sniper – and your mines – together they stopped the tanks.
The pick-ups would have been full, and some more, if your sniper hadn’t listened well to what you said. The casualties stayed minimal … They should have been going for Kirkūk tomorrow morning, but the warlords called the whole bloody thing off. They’ve quit and taken their people with them.’
‘Have you seen him?’
Sarah said, ‘Most didn’t, but some stayed – that’s what I was told. The some are the misfits, the useless and the thieves, what the warlords don’t have on their payroll. She hasn’t come out, and he’s with her.’
‘How many are left, to go to Kirkūk?’
‘What I was told, it’s around three hundred.’
‘Then they’re best forgotten,’ Joe said. ‘You won’t see them again. When you forget, it doesn’t hurt.’
The pick-up pulled away. He saw that she bit her lip. The dusk was coming on, and he went back, so carefully, into the minefield to collect the gear he had left there. In the morning he would finish with the buried tripwire.
* * *
He had lain a long time on his bed, until the darkness blacked out the beaming smile of the President on the wall in front of him.
Alone, but for his dog, his sense of duty burdened him.
Major Karim Aziz tried to analyse the priorities of duty. Was his first duty to his wife and children, and their safety? Was it to the soldiers who would stand at barricades in the Kirkūk suburbs and fight the woman and her remnant force, regardless of their own future? Was his supreme duty to the great and historic people of Iraq?
If his duty was to his family, he should slip away, drive in the night to Baghdad and take them as fugitives on the hazardous journey to the Turkish or Iranian frontiers. If he failed they would all be killed. If he succeeded he abandoned his duty to the soldiers at the barricades, and to the people of Iraq. Duty was his life, the prop on which he had leaned for so long. He drifted close to exhausted sleep. The dog snored contentedly on the mat by the far wall. Above his duty to his family and his soldiers and his people was the image of the sniper – faded at first, then clearing – sitting and watching and mocking him.
The thought of the sniper caught him. He tossed. His hand found the shape in his breast pocket of the letter written to his wife. He shook on the bed. His chance to fulfil his duty lay upon the courage of the wretch in a cell. The wretch would know of him, could denounce him to staunch the pain. His duty was to confront the sniper. It was his supreme indulgence to crave the aloof, alone, personal battle with the sniper – if the wretch gave him time.
He pushed himself off the bed. With his Dragunov, his backpack and his dog, he went out into the night – past the dull lights illuminating the cell block – to find the woman who would lead him to the sniper, if he was given the time.
‘Still here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not running?’ A chuckle whipped her voice.
‘No.’
‘Should I apologize?’
Gus said calmly, ‘Not necessary.’
‘Apologize because my judgement was wrong?’
‘The tanks came, you were wrong.’
‘But you, the hero, stopped them,’ she taunted.
‘I did what I could.’
‘If I don’t apologize, if my judgement was wrong, why do you stay?’
‘I don’t think I could explain.’
He had not moved all day. He had allowed the tiredness to seep from his body into the ground. He could not see her face, but the strut of her body was in bold outline above him and the bulk of her seemed greater because her hands were set on her hips. It was Gus’s own small piece of defiance that he had sat all through the day and into the evening darkness against the jeep’s wheel. If she wanted to come to him she could; if she did not, he would not go in search of her. Small fires were burning and around them w
ere little clusters of men, some in earshot and some beyond. In the middle of the night he would move. Haquim had talked of helicopters . . . Omar had left him, and sometimes he saw his slight silhouette drift close to the fires then disappear. He thought the boy craved the company of adult fighters, as if that took away his youth. He was sorry that the boy had stayed.
The anger rippled in her. ‘I did everything for them, and they gave me trifles. At the moment I needed them, the swine – Bekir and Ibrahim – turned away from me because the final victory has to be earned and is not set in stone. When I am in Kirkūk …’
‘What will they do when you are in Kirkūk?’
She snorted. ‘Come, of course, what else? Come to take the rewards for what I have done for them.’
‘Yes.’
Gus jacked himself up. He used the butt of his rifle to push himself off the ground, and he hitched his rucksack onto his shoulder. He took her hand. He wondered if she would fight him. He took it loosely, then tightened his grip to jolt her forward. She dug in her heels, but his grip was the same as when he held the rifle ready to shoot, firm and strong.
As Gus took the first strides she held back but with each step he jerked harder, and after the first strides she accepted and walked beside him. They went past the sentries, sitting and smoking cigarettes, out into the black darkness beyond the perimeter of the crossroads camp.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Towards Nineveh,’ Gus said.
‘That is more than a hundred kilometres, and backwards.’
He said patiently, ‘We are going where we can imagine we are at Nineveh.’
‘If we could reach it, and we cannot, all we would find are old rocks and old stones.’
‘It’s where it began – it’s why I am here. It started at Nineveh.’
‘That is rubbish.’
‘We are going towards Nineveh.’
He led and she no longer fought him. They walked away from the wire and left the flickering fires behind them. They were under stars and a thin moon’s crescent. From the time he could sit on his grandfather’s knee and smell the stale whiff of tobacco on his breath, he had known of the palace, and the friendship made there. Deep in the memory of childhood was the story of King Sennacherib who had died 2,680 years ago, when the same stars and the same thin moon made a pallid dullness of the ground, and the same stars and moon had watched over the friendship of men now aged. Grafted in his mind, from the days when he could first read, were the pictures in the books of the throne room in the palace and the bas-reliefs and the shallow outline of the excavated city gates. There was a figure in relief that he remembered above all, a crouching archer. In an album of faded photographs, two men stood outside a tent, posed beside a car, larked in the ruins, knelt and helped the archaeologists: one was tall and wore an open shirt, and a wide-brimmed hat, ludicrous baggy shorts and battered sandals; the other was shorter and seemed heavier in the folds of the long-tailed tribal shirt and the shapeless trousers, with curled unruly hair under a cloth wound as a turban. And the same quiet, the same stars and moon had blessed that friendship, at Nineveh.
Holding the Zero Page 27
