He settled on the floor of his room, in a corner where he faced the door. The dog was on his lap and the rifle in his hands.
The screams continued, and he knew the torturer did not yet sleep or rest behind the barred windows of the cell block. If his name was given he would hear the stamping footfall in the corridor and the door would burst open … What hurt him most, sitting through the night, watching the door, was that the sniper had turned, gone back, had in some way cheated him.
‘He was cold, trying to focus, but wasn’t doing it well because he was too tired.’
She had driven, and Willet had navigated. In her small car they had bumped up a dark forest track on a shale and chipstone surface, weaving amongst the ruts, following the crude painted arrows in the headlights. It had been a good drive down from London until they’d turned off the main road and onto the forest track. Willet had folded away the map. She had snapped twice that she was damn certain she was going to get Resources to pay for a car wash, but he’d sensed – and it was new – a staccato excitement in Ms Manning. He’d wondered if plain little Carol had been to a place like this on a Security Service training course and found fulfilment. Willet himself had not sploshed around on Survival in deep wet woodland for more months than he cared to remember. The rain had come on more heavily, was sluicing over the windscreen, when the lights had found the blurred image of the little camp of tents.
‘I had a small group here then, merchant-bank people,’ Dogsy said. ‘I told Peake I’d give him as much time as I could, but he’d have to muck in with them, get into line in the queue.’
The rain had eased since they’d arrived at the tent camp. There was a small square of canvas over a low, smoking fire. A London-based insurance company, a corporate giant, had sent five men and four women out into the woods, into Dogsy’s care, to learn self-esteem, self-help, self-control. On a spit of stripped hazel over the fire was a skinned rabbit, and Willet thought that it wouldn’t be much short of midnight before the bloody thing was heated through, half cooked, and ready for eating. They’d done abseiling over a torrential river gorge before finding the rabbit in a snare they’d set the day before. Line managers and regional directors, bright-eyed and sharp, they took it all as serious fun, as the people from the bank would have done. The fact that Willet was from the MoD, and Ms Manning was out of the Security Service, hadn’t fazed Dogsy, and the two new arrivals were sat down in the circle round the fire as if they hadn’t any rights to privacy.
‘What interested me, I reckoned that the young ’uns from the bank would welcome a fellow sufferer. They made the effort but Peake didn’t let them close … They didn’t take to him, and he rejected them. If you know what I mean, they rated him as just a wannabe.
He was trying too hard. He didn’t laugh, didn’t joke, like that was beneath him … I’ve seen that sort before. When I came out of the marines and transferred into the Regiment, I was put on the recruit-induction programme. Most of the recruits were too bottled-up, the type that fail. It’s a character problem. A few like that get through, but you know the way they’ll go. If they slip into the Regiment then, at first, they think they’re going to save the world. Saving the world means killing. Killing gets to be a habit, makes a man lonely, isolated. Killing becomes addictive, can’t be given up.’
The rain pattered on the small awning over the fire. The young people, sodden wet and mud-spattered, watched, listened. Willet understood why Gus Peake had not let them near. They would be going back to baths and champagne, client investments and pension funds; they would be thinking of themselves as the fucking chosen ones. Dogsy Jennings, ex-Marine, ex-instructor in the Regiment, played to his bloody gallery. Willet thought that the chosen children, the money crunchers, would return to their City world, complacent and important, and laugh for a month at what they’d heard around the bloody smoking fire, and believe they’d fucking well achieved something in getting wet for three days and eating rare rabbit.
‘What did he learn from you?’ Willet asked, without grace.
‘Escape and Evasion. That’s what old Bill said he needed – Billings, that is, a good mate – but what I told him might just have been a waste of time, mine and his.’
‘You’re ahead of me,’ Ms Manning said quietly.
‘If you’ve set out to save the world, gone on a killing spree, then you may hang around too long. If you’re around too long, you lose sight of the way back, you don’t get the chance to escape and evade. He’s gone walking in northern Iraq, right?’
Ms Manning said, ‘There’s a revolt, a tribal uprising. I suppose the target is the city of Kirkūk. The Iraqi Fifth Army is based there.’
There was a whinny of general laughter from the group around them. That would have made their bloody evening, and the week ahead when they were back at their desks, God’s fucking chosen children, and playing with investment figures and exchange rates on their bloody screens before heading down to the wine bar.
‘Then I have to hope he knows when to quit,’ Dogsy said. He was a big man, with long gorilla arms and a well-trimmed moustache. A top-of-the-range Land-Rover was parked behind the tents – Willet could have wept because in his imagination the exhausted Gus Peake sat around the same damp fire and heard the patronizing bastard talk Escape and Evasion, and heard the same laughter ripple from his audience. ‘Do you know how long he’s been in combat?’
There was a flicker in Ms Manning’s voice. She said crisply, ‘Maybe a week, or a few days more.’
‘It has to be a stampede for that sort of thing to work … He’ll be killing every day. The killing would be so frequent that he loses count – how many, how often – and he won’t be in a structure where anyone orders him to stop, quit. He’ll be a changed man. Should he get out, those who knew him before won’t know him – might not, when they meet him and see him, want to know him. He’ll be a new man, and it may not be a pleasant sight.
He didn’t tell me what he did, his old life.’
‘He was a transport manager …’
It was like a joke to those around the fire. Willet hated them. The giggles wafted across him.
‘… in a provincial haulage company,’ Ms Manning persisted.
A ponderous smile played at Dogsy Jennings’ face. ‘There’s your answer. Should he come back, he’s hardly going to be able to slip his feet under the desk and start again to move lorries about, like nothing’s happened. He’ll have taken a dozen men’s lives, if he’s any good. If he’s brilliant as a marksman, it could be twenty men’s lives, thirty. Any jerk who’s arrogant enough to think he can change the world won’t just switch off after one dose of it, he’ll have to find more causes, more bloody crusades. I read men. It’s my job to get under the bullshit of human nature. I didn’t like him.’
‘Didn’t you? Why not?’ The sneer rasped in her voice.
‘I didn’t like him, Miss, because that sort craves to belong. Got me? Whatever the motivation, he can’t belong out there, and if he gets back he can’t belong here. I did my best with Escape and Evasion because that’s what old Bill asked of me – but any road I didn’t like him. I don’t like men who go looking to be bloody heroes.’
‘What about loyalty, important things like freedom, heritage? What about sacrifice?’
Willet saw Dogsy’s wink. The circle chuckled. The smoke eddied across the rabbit’s carcass. Ms Manning pushed herself up then rubbed the damp off her backside and Willet saw the anger in her face.
‘Come on, Ken,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave these creeps to their silly bloody games.’
He followed after her, past the tents and the Land-Rover and back towards the track where her car was parked. He hadn’t thought it could happen, that her emotional commitment could be made to Peake and his rifle. Dogsy Jennings’ words seared in his mind. ‘He won’t be in a structure where anybody orders him to stop, quit … Should he get out, those who knew him before won’t know him … He can’t belong out there and, if he gets back, he can’t belong her
e.’ He thought she’d been magnificent, and he’d tell her.
She reached the car. Her eyes blazed at him, and she spat her words. ‘When you write this up, do me a favour, leave out all that pompous crap about survival chances. Spare me that shit.’
They moved in darkness, in total silence, towards the lights and the flame.
The boy led. Gus had given Omar authority over his life and safety. They went at a steady pace past patrols that he had not heard but the boy had. They crossed roads along which personnel carriers cruised, and the boy found the hidden ground into which they could duck as the searchlights roved over the ground, and he would not have sensed where the shallow earth scrapes offered them that protection. When there was a ditch into which he would have stumbled, the boy gently held his hand and guided him. Where men, talking softly, guarded their goats, they slipped by and the boy had read the wind so that they did not alert the goatherds’ dogs.
They went towards the lights where the chains held her.
Chapter Fifteen
Early each morning an elderly corporal, with a driver and an escort of two riflemen, collected the packages of urgent, sensitive material for Fifth Army flown into Kirkūk from the capital.
Although he had lost an arm in the defence of Basra fifteen years earlier, his birthright from a tribe that gave unquestioned allegiance to the regime ensured that a position in administration was available to him for as long as he wanted it. His daily routine was the run to the airfield, the collection from the Antonov transport plane, the drive back into the centre of Kirkūk, coffee and cigarettes, then the government’s newspaper, then a game of dice with matchsticks as the stakes, a meal, a siesta, then a gossiping evening with other corporals, the ironing of his uniform, the cleaning of his boots and bed. He had little cause for complaint – and it was safe. All the other corporals in administration could expect to be transferred every two months, for a week, to the forward strong points in the hills to the north, but not him. His disability protected him.
When the jeep slowed to a stop at traffic lights, one of the few sets working in Kirkūk, on the wide carriageway into the city from the airfield, the corporal’s orderly life was ended. A single shot, fired at great range, exploded into his head and the remnants of bone, blood and brain peppered the body of his driver.
They were running.
‘Where next?’
‘Doesn’t matter where – anywhere I can aim from.’
Omar led and Gus followed. The low shafts of sunlight threw deep shadows in the narrow lanes between the shanty-town of haphazardly built shelters on the edge of the city. Men, women and children, just risen from their beds, scattered as the wraithlike figures pounded past their homes.
When the dawn came he was so tired.
Major Karim Aziz dragged himself up from the floor as the first light seeped into the room, and felt his forty-five years for the first time since he’d come to Kirkūk as the aches, pains, stiffness ran through his body. He had not slept but had watched the darkness and the ribbon of light under the door, had listened for the boots. The cries and screams had come, not often, in the long hours and he had known that the torturer was tireless.
He packed his few belongings, scattered across the floor, down into the belly of his backpack.
Leila, too, would now be filling the boys’ rucksacks and telling them that an examination at school did not matter and a football match was unimportant. She would have telephoned the hospital and lied that she was unwell. Perhaps already she had told her mother, shuffling in slippers in the kitchen, that there would be no party to celebrate her birthday. Through the night he had wondered when he would tell her of their future.
He put the last of the dog’s biscuits on the floor and they were wolfed down.
The future, in the darkness hours, had been nightmarishly with him. It might be a patrol on the ceasefire line between government territory and the Kurdish enclave; on his own, without difficulty, he could evade the patrols – but he would not be alone, he would be with his wife and his sons. It might be capture by a warlord’s men, and the Estikhabarat would pay fifty thousand American dollars for him to be returned to them, bound and blindfolded, across the line; on his own, with his rifle and his dog, he could fight his way through the danger of capture – but he would not be alone. Should he succeed, it might be the stagnant life of an exile without money in the embittered Iraqi communities of Amman or Istanbul; on his own, perhaps, he could burrow into the tawdry life of the exiles he had read of in the newspapers and heard of on the radio and exist – but he would have responsibility for his wife and children, who would be lost flotsam. Soon she would be on the road north.
He folded the dog’s rug and put it into the backpack.
At the petrol station, or in the car, or when they started to walk, he would tell them. He would say that he was a traitor to the President who smiled with warmth at him from the photograph on the wall, that he had sided with the enemies of the President. He would say that all the struggle of their lives was for nothing because he had betrayed it. In the night he had shivered because of what he had done to those he loved.
The dog was by the door and waited for him.
In his mind he had seen – again and again – the shock spreading on their faces at the petrol station, or in the car, or when they started to walk, as they learned the future. The worst of the nightmarish thoughts had been of her clutching her children to her, turning and abandoning him … It had been his vanity on the range when he had shown his shooting skills. It had been the massage of his conceit by the silky words of the general, in the car cruising at night beside the river in Baghdad, telling him that he, above all men, had the marksman’s expertise.
The dog bounded into the corridor, he closed the door of the bare room and wondered if the President still smiled.
He walked out into the compound.
Men were coming from the shadowy shape of the cell block.
He saw them rubbing their eyes in exhaustion, flexing their fists as if they were bruised, wiping smeared mess off their tunics. But the slightest among them walked briskly as if he had not missed his sleep.
The piping voice sidled across the quiet of the compound. ‘You are leaving us, Major?
Take with you my congratulations.’
He said hoarsely, ‘I accept them, I am grateful … I am a simple soldier, I did what I could.’
‘I never met a simple soldier. Have a good journey back to Baghdad.’
He tried to ask the casual question: ‘Your own work, Commander, is it nearly done?’
‘Near, but not yet there. A few hours, and this preliminary stage of my investigation will be completed … but the trails of treachery run far. You have my assurance, simple soldier, that I will follow the trails wherever they lead … Enough of me. Are you disappointed that your triumph is not total?’
‘I do not understand you.’
‘You were sent to kill a sniper, a foreigner – and you did not.’
Aziz blurted, ‘He is beyond my reach.’
‘Have a good journey, and be assured that those who take responsibility for the security of the state will not rest while traitors live.’
Aziz heard the dog’s low angry growl, flicked his fingers nervously to it and strode out towards the administration building, where he would find a driver to take him across the city to the military car pool. While he walked he felt the small narrow-set eyes on his back, following him.
The soldier stood at the road block.
He was nineteen years old, a conscript in a mechanized infantry unit. The road block was behind him. He had been detailed by his sergeant to wave down the cars, lorries and vans for inspection. He was from a poor family in Baghdad, and his move to the basic training camp before going to Kirkūk had been the first time in his life that he had been away from his mother. He hated the army’s food and hardly ate. He was ghostly thin and his stomach churned as he held his rifle and directed the traffic into the lane where the
drivers’ papers could be looked over. He was a lonely youngster, shunned by his colleagues in the barracks hut because the loneliness caused him to wet his bed most nights of the week. Behind the road block, workmen were digging a trench in preparation for the repair of a blocked sewer. The smell was foul but, more importantly, the piledriver the workmen used to break up the tarmacadam had obliterated the sound of a single shot fired half an hour earlier a full kilometre away. He was thinking of his mother when he died. Against the noise of the vehicles’ brakes and gear changes and the hammer of the piledriver, none of the men near to him heard the crack of the rifle’s report or the thump of the bullet’s strike. The soldier subsided, as if the strength was gone from his legs, and blood spilled from deep holes in his chest and his back.
The orderly paused at the back of the truck.
On the flat-bed was a heap of black rubbish bags. He lit a cigarette. The ebony crows were waiting for him, flapping their wings as they strutted on the bags he had brought earlier in the week to the dump, and cried raucously at him. Each morning the orderly cleaned the quarters used by the officers of an armoured unit based at Kirkūk and collected their rubbish in the bags along with the food they had not bothered to eat the previous evening. It attracted the crows, but the brutes could wait while he enjoyed his cigarette. The orderly was from the desert region, near to the small town of an-Nahiya, close to the Syrian border. There were no mountains in that region, but he enjoyed those moments when he could smoke a cigarette and admire the high ground beyond the city.
There was the same emptiness, and he blinked into the sun rising over the faraway ridges.
He was particularly cheerful that morning: his time in the army had nine days to run and then he would be on the slow bus back to an-Nahiya where his father kept a roadside coffee shop. The orderly did not realize that by standing and dragging contentedly on his cigarette he made a good target for a distant marksman. As he fell backwards the crows screamed and rose in a moment of panicked flight over the heap of rubbish bags.
Holding the Zero Page 32
