Gus idly imagined soldiers bound together by a common sense of compassion, finding a half-dead child, numbed by cold and hunger, and taking him back to their tents, food and warmth, as they would a stray, pretty cat. They would have fussed over the child, spoiled him, and taught him their language. When they moved back over the border, consciences salved by the good work, they would have dumped him on aid-workers. Gus thought of Omar hanging about the offices of a foreign charity in Arbil or Sulaymaniyah or Zakho, running messages, scrounging, with his childhood irreplaceably snatched from him. When most of the aid agencies had fled in the late summer of 1996, the child would have attached himself with limpet-like strength to a fighting peshmerga unit, helped to carry food and ammunition forward to the sagging front line, and bring the wounded back.
Gus thought of his own childhood, of its calm and its safety. The orphan would have seen horror, and would be feral and savage as a result.
The boy stank. His pillow was a stone. He lay on the ground, without a blanket to cover him, close to Gus’s sleeping-bag, and the rifle with the double magazines taped to each other lay across his stomach. He wore drab American army fatigues, torn and still too large for him, and a pair of yellow trainers that had gone at the toes. He had brought Gus food from the cooking pot and watched him eat until Gus had passed him the bowl.
He had gulped down the last of the food and licked the bowl till it shone in the evening sunshine.
The camp was quiet and Gus spoke softly. ‘The man we have to remember is Herbert Hesketh-Prichard. There had been others before him, but as far as our army is concerned, he was really the father of sniping. He was a big-game hunter before the first war with Germany – he shot lions and elephants, and he turned those skills to shooting Germans.
He went to France, where the war was with the Germans, and took with him big-game rifles and telescopes. At first, none of the generals would listen to him, but he kept emphasizing the importance of a quality sniper on the battlefield. The sniper was more effective in breaking the enemy’s morale than an artillery barrage. Kill the officer, kill his spotters, kill his machine-gunners, and your troops feel good, they live. Almost everything we know today is based on what was taught by Hesketh-Prichard to his snipers eighty-five years ago…’
The boy, Omar, snored in his sleep.
Chapter Five
The helicopter had come in at first light, flying low like a hawk hunting, hugging the contours of the ground. It came smoothly over a ridge to the north, all the time looking for gullies along which to fly, then hovered. For a moment it was a predator, black and without identification, over a prey. The prey was Meda… and she had waved it down.
Four men had immediately jumped clear from the open fuselage hatch. Two carried machine-guns, one had an assault rifle, and one held a grenade launcher; all wore a common uniform of jeans, anoraks, face masks and baseball caps, and they had scattered to secure a perimeter area round the big bird. Gus thought that after the guards the next man out was also American. Under his windcheater, his tie was whipped up from his throat as he bent to run clear of the downdraught of the blades, he had a lavatory brush of cropped grey hair, and carried maps in plastic covering. He’d shaken hands perfunctorily with Meda, then turned back and helped two more men, Kurds, down from the hatch.
The American, the Kurds and Meda had settled down amongst stones, the maps spread out across their legs, and Gus saw a Thermos flask passed between the men. Meda refused to drink from it.
The pilots kept the turbines running. Where he had been told to stay, with the peshmerga, the boy and Haquim, Gus was a full three hundred paces from the meeting-point and the helicopter.
Haquim said bitterly, ‘I am not important enough to be a part of the negotiation.’
Through his binoculars, Gus watched them. He could recognize the body language of the Kurds – one in a suit and one in laundered but old tribal dress. The American was between them, the conduit. Gus sensed deep-held suspicion. Meda faced them and her arms alternated between gestures of frustration and the softer movements of persuasion.
He passed the binoculars to Haquim.
Haquim said, ‘In the suit, dressed as the Westerner he wants to be, is agha Bekir. He controls the west of the enclave. I trust him as I trust a scorpion. Three weeks after the Iraqi attack of 1991, in which his people were murdered, left destitute to starve in the mountains, agha Bekir was shown on Baghdad’s television hugging Saddam as if he were a favoured cousin. He looks only for power and money. He would sleep with a snake to gain them.’
‘But he has men…’
‘And agha Ibrahim has more men. He is more simple but more cunning, which is why he wears the clothes of his people, and he has more greed. He controls the north and the east, and therefore can take the toll money from the lorries that cross the Turkish frontier to go to Baghdad. He should know Saddam, because Saddam tried on many occasions to kill his father. Once Saddam sent Shi’a clerics from Baghdad to talk peace with agha Ibrahim’s father, and Saddam told the clerics they must wear a hidden tape-recorder so that he could know what was said. When the meeting had started, one of the government drivers outside threw a switch, with radio control. The tape-recorder was a bomb. At the moment the bomb exploded a servant was leaning across in front of agha Ibrahim’s father and filling his glass with lemon juice. The servant died, and the cleric with the tape-recorder, and many others. But agha Ibrahim’s father survived to tell his son of the treachery of Saddam. Did he listen? Three years ago, agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim fought full-scale war over the division of the money from the smugglers, and when agha Ibrahim was losing, being driven back, he called to Saddam for help. He was rescued by Saddam’s tanks. It was when I was wounded… He has many men, fighting men, because he has the money to pay them. It is the miracle of Meda that has brought them together.’
‘I think they both want to fuck her,’ the boy said.
Haquim lashed out behind him, but Omar laughed and leaped back as a boxer avoids a tiring opponent’s punch.
‘What is being decided?’ Gus asked quietly.
‘They are deciding what they will risk. Meda has to persuade them, again, of her vision.’
Gus had taken back his binoculars and watched her. There was something of virginal innocence about her. She smiled and scowled. Her head would drop as if sulking, then would be lifted and a child’s happiness would break across her face. Without her, nothing would happen. She wove a spell over them. It was as if, Gus thought, her very innocence
– her enthusiasm, her optimism, her certainty – persuaded them. Omar, the vulgar little wretch, had spoken the truth. She sat facing them with her legs splayed out in the combat trousers, and with the upper buttons of her tunic unfastened so that they could see the skin of her chest. He saw, so clearly, Ibrahim’s leering smile and the way Bekir gazed into her eyes. The American wore an older man’s frown, as though anxiety – for her -raged in him.
After he shook her hand, he stood and shouted to the guards, who backed towards the helicopter and covered the ground ahead with their weapons. Hands were held and shaken, then all were gone into the belly of the helicopter.
She stood with her hands on her hips against the growing power of the rotors. The blast threw back her hair, and thrust her tunic and trousers against the shape of her body, slender and young, without fear. As the helicopter lifted, she didn’t wave to them, as if to affirm her independence.