Ken Willet read it back to himself in the quiet of his London living room. It would be on the desk of Ms Manning’s line manager in a few hours, would be read and then filed into dusty oblivion.
Four years earlier he’d failed a sniper’s course at the Infantry Training School at Warminster. It had been the only minor setback to his army career, and at the time it had hurt. Not any more. There were five parts to the final examination and he had passed in two, Camouflage and Concealment along with Observation, and failed in three, Marksmanship, Stalking and Judging Distance. To have won a sniper badge he’d needed passes in all disciplines. From his own teenage years he already had the mindset, he’d also been a good shot against rabbits and pigeons, but had realized in the second of the course’s five weeks that his temperament was inadequate. And there was nothing he’d yet found, as the character of Augustus Peake was laid bare, to convince him that this civilian had a temperament to withstand the physical and psychological pressures that would close on him.
Ken Willet had failed the course, along with nine others out of the dozen starters. He’d had a fast beer, and driven away from the Infantry Training School. Forty-eight hours later he had been back with his platoon in Belfast. Easy. If Peake failed, there was no beer and no commiserations, and no drive out. He would be dead in a bloody foreign field.
As he started for bed, Willet thought that the man must be damned arrogant to imagine that, without a sniper’s temperament or training, he could waft into a faraway war and make any sort of difference.
They had left Omar and the mustashar behind, sulking and resentful. No explanations offered, she had walked out of the village at first light. Only Gus was with her. A dozen men had pressed forward, claiming in a babble that they should go with her, and she had flashed her wide smile, then told them they were not needed.
They had walked for two hours, then crawled forward. She had walked well, but the crawling was tough. They had crossed two ridges and the valley separating them. The further valley, now ahead, was steep-sided and rock-sprayed. She should have been in bed, or at least resting, but he didn’t bother to tell her. She’d stumbled once, the wound taking the force of her fall against a stony outcrop, and had let out a shrill cry. When they had pressed forward on their knees, she had twice had her backside in the air to keep her weight off the wound, and each time Gus had belted her buttocks without ceremony.
They were at the rim. Below, there was a track on the valley floor, insufficient for a vehicle, perhaps used by a goatherd or shepherd but not since the last summer. He soaked up the wild quiet of the place, and the small clumps of flowers.
‘Watch for me.’
It was an instruction. He was no longer the man who had tended her wound. ‘What am I looking for?’
‘If there is a threat to me, to take me, then shoot.’
‘Yes.’
‘Your promise, Gus, if they try to take me, shoot me.’
‘I promise.’
‘Shoot me – promise it, on your grandfather’s life.’
‘I will shoot you, Meda. Don’t move, stand still, don’t break my aim. Don’t make it hard for me to get a clean kill.’
Could he shoot her? Circumstances had shifted once more. From killing an enemy to shooting a friend. And each time they changed, he was further involved. She had not told him who might take her, or what was the threat. Could he measure the distance, make the windage adjustment, find her body on the T-junction of the reticule in the ’scope, hold his hands steady and squeeze the trigger?
She slipped away. He crawled off to his left, then began a slow search with his binoculars to find a position where he could lie up. She slithered down the sloped wall of the valley, kicking up dust, carelessly cascading stones in her wake. There was a place that was blanketed by old yellowed grass – well away from a tree stump that was the obvious position of concealment, two dozen paces from a small cluster of rocks that was the second most obvious. He spent several minutes tearing up similar strands of the grass and wove them into the hessian loops of his gillie suit, over his back, his shoulders, onto the hood, and put the last pieces into the hessian bandaging the rifle.
He armed the rifle and depressed the safety. She was on the floor of the valley, sitting on a smoothed rock with a child’s innocence. She was picking tiny flowers and he saw her slide them across her nose. The one thing she feared, he thought, was capture. He had been brought with her because she could not show the men, or the mustashar , the smallest sign of fear… She started up, no longer the child. He watched as she transformed herself once more into the warrior. He could not see who approached her. As he had told her, she did not take a step forward. The sight was on her. She was unbending, magnificent. Gus’s finger rested on the trigger guard.
The gloved hands came first into the tunnelled vision of the ’scope, reaching for her, then Gus saw the arms in drab military olive green, then the insignia of rank on the shoulders, and then the pocked sallow face with the black brush of the moustache, the beret.
Gus’s finger lay on the cold metal of the trigger. He watched as Meda’s cheek was kissed by a senior officer of the Iraqi army. They sat together and a map case was opened between them.
His cook-boy came with two buckets filled with dried earth as Lev Rybinsky unravelled the hosepipe at the side of his bungalow home. The water gushed out, he doused the buckets, hurled the mud at his car and sent the cook-boy for more.
His car was a 500SL Mercedes saloon. With old newspaper Rybinsky smeared the dripping dirt over the panelwork, the lights, the bumpers and the windows. When more mud was brought to him, he threw it against the body of the car. The day before, the cook-boy had spent the whole afternoon cleaning and polishing the Mercedes, but that was before Rybinsky had heard the whispered rumour.
Eight buckets of mud went onto the car before he was satisfied that every trace of polish had been removed. Rybinsky wiped a small part of the windscreen clear, enough for him to see through, shouted for the cook-boy to follow him and went back inside the bungalow. The hall and the living room were filled with packing cases. There were more in the kitchen, each stamped with the names of aid organizations. He skirted around them, went into the rear yard and unlocked the heavy padlock on the steel door of a concrete shed. His two Alsatians leaped at him from their chain tethers.
From the shed, with the cook-boy’s help, he carried out a new, never-fired DShKM
12.7mm heavy machinegun. The cook-boy took most of the weight, and would return to the shed to bring out the ammunition, while Rybinsky had the light wheels as his second load.
Preparing to set out on a journey, Rybinsky would ordinarily have filled his Mercedes with oil, crates of corned-beef, sacks of pasta or flour, packets of computer chips or cases of whisky. He had them all, but because of the rumour he took only the machine-gun, which had an effective range of 1,500 metres and the ability to penetrate 20mm-thick armoured plate, from the arsenal of military weapons stored in the shed.
He supervised the lifting of the gun and its wheels into the back of the Mercedes where they covered the medicines he always travelled with. Lev Rybinsky was a week from his sixtieth birthday; his wife, his children, would be in their home at Volgograd when the date fell. He checked his jacket pockets – he needed to be clear exactly where the documents were. On the left side he kept the passes and letters of authorization supplied to him by agha Bekir, and on the right were the papers given him by agha Ibrahim. He tapped his bulging buttock and felt the reassurance of the roll of banknotes, American dollars. As a trader, a provider, a milch-cow, needed by everybody and loved by nobody, the roll of notes gave him access, influence and the ability to trade. The rumour he’d heard offered the possibility of a major commercial opportunity. He left a short letter for his junior partner, Jurgen, in the living room on the stacked crates that held an X-ray scanner for a hospital – donated by an Italian charity – and as an afterthought picked up a carton of Marlboro cigarettes.