It came low over them, and Gus saw the face of the American peering down. He held the rifle close to him against the blow of the blades.
And the silence came… He felt a sense of great loss. The helicopter had been a lifeline. It had come, he could have walked to it, climbed inside it, could have argued himself a seat and been carried back to his home, his work and his life. The chance had been laid before him, and he had not thought to take it. She was walking back towards them, the big grin of triumph on her face.
The men ran to her, and Haquim hobbled after them. Gus cuffed the boy and said he should go, too, while he sat alone with his thoughts. He could never have turned his back on her: she had trapped him. Everything that was home, work, life, seemed now of minimal relevance. She stood and they sat in front of her. He saw the old and the young faces that had been hardened by cruelty and suffering, that were cold and brutal, and the light in their eyes. She trapped all of them.
The boy returned to where he sat.
‘What does she say?’
‘She says that later today the agha Bekir and the agha Ibrahim will each send one hundred of their best fighting men to join us. In the morning we attack the mujamma’a in the front of us – that is a new village, what is called a Victory City. She says when we have captured it more men will come and we will fight at the town of Tarjil – we will have more men and we will make a battle at the crossroads of the Baghdad road and the Sulaymaniyah road. After that, when more men have arrived, she will lead us past the flame of Baba Gurgur, and into Kirkuk. We are going to Kirkuk. Do you believe her?’
‘I have to,’ Gus said.
‘They believe her, agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim, because they want to fuck her. They can fuck any woman they want to, but they want her because they know they cannot have her.’
‘You are a disgusting child.’
‘Do you want to fuck her, Mr Gus?’
He caught the lobe of the boy’s ear, where it peeped from under the matt of tangled dark curls, and twisted it hard so that Omar yelped like a hurt dog.
He started to tell the boy of the role of an observer working in close harmony with a sniper. Everything he knew about life told him that when a blow was struck there inevitably followed a stinging counter-strike. Mapped ahead of him was a timetable of war, locations on a map that would all be fought for and each would be harder. He talked softly, earnestly, of the work of an observer, as if the boy, Omar, were an equal to him, as if his very survival would rest on the skill of the boy when the counter-strike fell.
The door to the ageing Antonov howled open on poorly oiled hinges. He allowed his eyes to grow accustomed to the brightness beating up from the tarmac, and waited for the steps to reach the aircraft.
Other men he knew in the army would have refused to take a flight in the veteran transport, but Major Karim Aziz had been often enough in combat for the fear of death to be replaced by a comforting fatalism. Everything was behind him now.
He shouted his thanks to the pilot. He had been the only passenger on the flight, with his dog. He gazed around him. It was three years since he had last been at Kirkuk Military. Then, some of the attack aircraft’s hardened bunkers were still under repair, and wooden scaffolding had surrounded the control tower. But there was nothing to see now of the work of the American bombers; the scaffolding and the workmen were long gone.
A jeep was approaching fast from the tower.
Aziz called the dog to heel and went down the steps struggling with the weight of his backpack and the wooden box. When the jeep pulled up he saw from the gaze of the officer deputed to meet him that his reputation had travelled before him. His cheeks were brush-kissed, an offer made to take the box, which was refused. The box was the basis of his reputation and Aziz allowed no other man to take charge of it.
He followed the officer to the jeep. In any unit he worked with, there had never been any love for the sniper. He would be respected for his skill, but not liked. Soldiers in a front line always felt a vague affinity with the enemy across no man’s land; Iraqi soldiers had felt that for Iranian soldiers – and the sniper brought anonymous death to the man in the opposing trench. When a sniper came to a quiet front line, killed, moved on, the hell of artillery fell on those left behind. And the sniper’s killing was premeditated and took away the random, haphazard chance of shell shrapnel with which soldiers could live.
The officer was wary. ‘You had a good flight, I hope?’
‘Good for me, but the dog was sick.’
The officer laughed thinly. ‘Not a good companion.’
‘Oh, yes, the best.’ He lifted his box into the back of the jeep and the dog bounded in after it. They drove away. He had kept the name of the dog, Scout. It had been four months old when he had found it on his third day in Kuwait City. It had had a collar on it, with its name on a tag and an address. Major Karim Aziz had flown in with the first assault troops, by helicopter, to take one of the Emir’s palaces, but the fighting had been slack. The third day he had wandered the streets of Kuwait City and marvelled at the ostentation. He had found the cowering, terrorized puppy whimpering as the tanks growled past. While fellow officers successfully looted that wealth, he had gone to the address on the tag and found the wrecked, emptied home of an expatriate British oil engineer. He had taken the dog back to the hotel where he was quartered. When, two weeks later, he had returned to Baghdad, he had felt a sense of shame that he took with him the dog, a video camera and a bracelet from the famous gold souk. Others had taken back new Mercedes, and BMWs, and had loaded lorries with ‘souvenirs’. They had never used the video camera at home because he had not stolen the cassettes to go with it, and his wife had sold the bracelet for money to buy clothes for the children, but he had kept the dog. Scout was now nine years old, but still had the legs and eyes, nose and ears that made him indispensable to Aziz when he went to war.
From the airport, he was driven through the city.
Kirkuk was home to a million people. The jeep wove through crowded streets, past bustling pavements. The shops were open. He saw nothing that made him sense panic, and yet out in the distant hills to the north, beyond the clear, bright, high flame, an army marched on that city. The jeep’s horn cleared a path through the laden lorries, donkey-drawn carts and the kids careering on bicycles and scooters. There was no atmosphere of danger.
He was taken into the headquarters compound of the Fifth Army, driven at speed past smart sentries, and lines of T-72 tanks and ranks of BMP personnel carriers.
With his dog at his heel, Aziz carried his box into the command bunker.
He was introduced to a general. He saluted, shook hands. Behind the general was a brigadier who looked up, through him, and returned to the study of the map spread on the table. He knew the brigadier, recognized him, but could not place where he had seen him.
He struggled to find it, before it was swept from his mind.
‘So, Baghdad has sent us a sniper.’ The general spoke scornfully. ‘One man to do with a rifle what an army with tanks and artillery and two divisions of infantry cannot achieve.’
‘Against a sniper, the best defence is a superior counter-sniper.’
The sneer formed. ‘With a dog and the fleas it carries.’
‘With my dog, yes.’
‘What do you need to know?’
‘I need to know the route the incursion has taken, and the exact position of the blocking force you have deployed.’
The silence hung in the room. The brigadier peered up from the map, then ducked his head and played with a pencil.
‘A blocking force has been deployed?’
The general said, without expression, ‘Your job, Major, is at a level of local tactics. Do not try to teach me strategy.’
‘I need to meet the eyewitnesses who saw the enemy’s sniper.’