He had then fired his own Dragunov, but at 700 metres. From behind him the generals and the brigadier had watched his shooting through telescopes. Six rounds, six hits, when the probability of a ‘kill’ was listed as only 60 per cent, and after each shot he had heard the grunted surprise from behind the telescopes.
He reached the door at the end of the corridor.
His escort knocked with quiet respect.
He heard the gravel voice call for him to enter.
Three weeks after the shoot Major Karim Aziz had received a telephone call from the more senior of the two generals. He was invited to a meeting – not in the general’s quarters, not in a villa in the Baghdad suburbs, but in a military car that had cruised for an hour with him, the general and two colonels along the city’s roads flanking the Tigris river. He could, he supposed, have said that he had no interest in the proposition put to him in the car. He could also have lied, given them his support, then the next morning gone to the Estikhabarat, in this building, in this camp, and denounced them. They wanted a marksman. He had agreed to be that marksman. The general had said that an armoured brigade in the north would mutiny and drive south, but only after word was received that the bastard, the President, was dead. He had been told of the villa, of the bastard’s new woman. The detail had been left to him – but without their esteemed leader’s death, the armoured brigade would not move. The general had talked of a domino effect inside the ranks of the regular army once the bastard was killed.
The general had been a big and powerfully built man, but he had stammered like a nervous child as he explained the plan. Aziz had agreed, then, there; only afterwards, when he had been dropped from the car, did he consider that he might have been set-up, stung, and he had been sick in the gutter. He had dismissed that thought because he had witnessed the precautions taken to preserve the secrecy of the meeting and seen the nervousness of the officers in the car.
He had tracked for days around the villa and had found the place from which to shoot.
He had met the general again, cruised the same route in the same car, and the general had embraced him.
He went inside. His stomach was slack and his bladder full. He tried to stand proud, to pretend that he was not intimidated, was a patriot surrounded by cowards. He thought of his wife and his children, and of the pain of torture.
A colonel had his back to the door and stared at a wall map, but turned at his approach.
‘Ah, Major Aziz. I hope there was nothing important in your schedule that had to be cancelled.’
He looked up at the photograph of the smiling, all-powerful President. He stuttered his answer. ‘No, my schedule was clear.’
‘You are the marksman, the sniper, that is correct?’
‘It is my discipline, yes.’
‘You understand the skills of sniping?’
He did not know whether he was a toy for their amusement, whether the colonel played with him. ‘Of course.’
‘Two men dead, two rounds fired, on consecutive days, each shot at a range of at least seven hundred metres in Fifth Army sector. What does that tell you about the sniper?’
‘That he is trained, professional, an expert.’ He felt the tension draining from him. He was limp, a rag on a washing-line.
‘How do you confront a professional sniper, Major?’
‘Not by turning rocks over with artillery or tanks or heavy mortars. You send your own sniper to confront him.’
The colonel said sharply, ‘You go tomorrow, Major Aziz, to Kirkuk.’
‘The north? The Kurds are not snipers.’ He wanted to laugh out loud as the lightness broke into the tightness of his mind. He bubbled, ‘They cannot hit targets at a hundred metres.’
‘I am from the Tikrit people, Major. Yesterday my cousin’s son was shot at seven hundred metres in a defence position near Kirkuk. Perhaps a foreigner is responsible.’
‘Whatever the nationality, the best defence against a sniper is always a counter-sniper.’
‘Be the counter-sniper, then. Your orders will be waiting for you when you reach the garrison at Kirkuk.’
Aziz saluted, turned smartly and marched out of the room. Outside, with the door closed on him, he could have collapsed in a huddle on the floor and wept his relief. He steadied himself against the arm of his escort, and walked away.
A few moments later, the warm air brushed his face, washed it of fear.
Gus sat on a rock and scanned the ground ahead of him with his binoculars, looking for movement.
It was the best place he could find, had the nearest similarity to the terrain of the Common in Devon. It was a practice but it was still crucial. The arguments were finally over, had finished when Haquim had struck a man and knocked him flat, when the knife had flashed, and Haquim had kicked the knife from the man’s hand. Before then, the argument had raged savagely. Meda had chosen not to intervene, but had sat apart with an amused smile on her face. He needed an observer to help him with distance and windage and, most important, to guide him in on the stalk to the targets ahead and to work out the exit routes after each snipe. It could not be Haquim – too slow and too involved in the mess of strategy and tactical problems.
The arguments were because each man in the column, old and young, believed he was the best at moving unseen across open ground. The bitterness was inspired by pride, when Haquim had selected the dozen men from the hundred in the column – from agha Ibrahim’s men, or from agha Bekir’s men. The older men who had fought for the most years, or the younger ones with more agility than experience. The larger group, not chosen, sat behind Gus, and scowled or watched the slope of ground ahead with a sullen resignation.
He had four ‘walkers’ out, as he had seen it done on the Common. Each time he saw a man, magnified through the binoculars, crawling, Gus shouted to the nearest ‘walker’ and pointed, and the man was tapped on the head by the ‘walker’, and eliminated. Each time a man was eliminated there was a growl of jealous approval from behind Gus.
Gus counted those he had spotted and eliminated. Some had taken the obvious route for their stalk, along a meandering river trail, some had headed for the single tree in the centre of the open ground, some had tried to use a broken mess of buildings to the right.
The river, the tree and the ruins were all obvious points for a stalk and were therefore poorly chosen… He saw the last man: his head and chest were low, but his buttocks were up. The ‘walker’ went to him, and the last man stood.
He had asked too much of them. He had tried to bring an alien culture of warfare from the Common in southwest England to the foothills of the Zagros mountains. He had asked them to crawl, concealed, across a thousand yards of open ground, and none had reached the finish line he had set. Gus cursed. Was it better to take the best of the failures, or was it better to work alone? He pushed himself up.
‘It’s my fault, my bloody fault,’ Gus said to Haquim.
There was a single shot, the crack of it high above him, then the thump of the following sound. The sounds were almost simultaneous. Behind him there was brief pandemonium. As the moment of silence settled he heard the rasped arming of weapons.
A dozen men had gone forward and stalked back towards him, and he had identified that same dozen. He had the binoculars up to his eyes and tracked over the ground, across the grassland, over rocks, between the narrow height of the tree trunks, into and out of the stones of the ruins, and he still could not see the man who had fired. They were the best binoculars he had ever used, and he saw nothing.
Gus said to Haquim, ‘Tell him to stand.’
Haquim shouted at the emptiness in front of them. Then the silence fell again. At first Gus felt a sense of excitement, but that was whittled to annoyance because nothing moved. He covered the ground again for the outline of a face, the shape of a shoulder.