If the rumour were true, it would be a long journey. He drove away in his mud-spattered car towards a distant war.
The old Israeli had told him to trust nobody, to believe nothing he was told and to accept nothing that he saw. Gus watched Meda shake the officer’s hand as if she were his equal.
The maps were folded away and the officer had slipped from the sight.
Gus burned. Her talk was of destiny. Because of her, the peshmerga had charged a machine-gun. He had watched the dead buried and the wounded taken on bumping litters to the north – and she had met an Iraqi officer. She was climbing the slope of the valley wall, slowly and with effort, and he saw the small stain on her thigh where the wound wept. The tears of anger in his eyes misted his view of her. He thought of betrayal, as he slithered away from his firing position and crawled to the far side of the ridge to intercept her.
Meda came over the rim and looked into his face.
There was the haughty whip in her voice, ‘What is your problem, Gus?’
‘Not my problem,’ he blurted, ‘the problem of the men, the problem of Haquim, the problem of the villagers. Maybe only the dead don’t have a problem.’
She flared. ‘Because I meet an Iraqi?’
‘Because you go secretly to meet an Iraqi.’
Her hands caught at the hessian loops at his shoulders. ‘Do I have to tell you, like a child has to be told, everything? You tell me! Why was the village not reinforced? Why have not new tanks and new personnel carriers been sent to Tarjil? If you cannot tell me then say nothing.’ Her mood swung: she was again the innocent. ‘If he had tried to trap me, to take me, would you have shot me?’
‘I try to keep my promises.’
‘You know what they call me?’
‘I imagine they call you friend.’
‘He said that at Fifth Army they call me the witch.’
He set a fast pace back towards the village, and never looked behind him to see how well she followed.
Major Karim Aziz had come back to a place that was like home to him. It was old ground, familiar territory.
The driver had taken him to Tarjil. In the police station he had studied the maps, talked with the commanding officer, slept on the floor with his dog cuddled against him, and he had left the town long before dawn.
At first he had tracked north, towards the Little Zab river, shadowing the Arbil-Kirkuk road, keeping in the lee of a ridge-line.
It was twenty-five years since he had first been posted to the region, and the fifth time that he had returned there. Nothing had changed except that trees he knew were taller, and the Victory Cities he skirted were more permanent and weathered, the hulks of abandoned personnel carriers more rusted.
He had slipped past a small gorge where a unit had been blocked in the al-Anfal operation, eleven years before. They had only been able to go forward after he had identified then shot the saboteurs’ commander.
In the early morning, from higher ground, he had seen the track where three armoured vehicles had been ambushed twenty-one years before. He had been with the relief force that had driven off the bastards as they looted the vehicles, and they had found the bodies of the vehicles’ crews; he could see the overgrown ditch beside the ochre hulks where he had vomited when he had seen the mutilation of the bodies.
By mid-morning he had looked down on a shepherd’s hut of stone and corrugated iron from the same position he had taken nine years back. It had been the furthest point of the saboteurs’ advance when they had swarmed south in the belief that the Americans would fly in support. The hut had been a night shelter for a reconnaissance group; with his Dragunov, he had shot their chief when he came out of the hut and stretched in the sunlight. The shot had been at the top of the Dragunov’s range, one of the best he had ever achieved, and had made a stomach wound. In his mind he could still hear the screaming of the chief man as he lay outside the hut for an hour while none dared expose themselves to pull him inside.
By late morning he had reached a division of the shepherds’ trails and he had gone to the west but, four years before, he had taken the eastern path on a forced march in the failed attempt to intercept the fleeing American spies who abandoned their Arbil villa base. Everything he saw, every step he took, was as he remembered it. The ground had eroded but each footfall was an echo in his memory.
He took a position and settled. The dog had moved well with him. It ran when he scurried forward, slithered on its stomach when he crawled, lay motionless when he stopped, kneeling to scan the ground ahead. In the manuals it was written, by the Soviets, the British and the Americans, that a sniper must always be accompanied by an observer.
In his long years in the army, Karim Aziz had not met a man he would have trusted sufficiently to accompany him; but he would trust the dog with his life.
The position he had chosen was amongst haphazardly shaped stones that offered him a clear view of the ground between the Victory City of Darbantaq and the town of Tarjil.
Behind him were the tight-packed homes, the mosque’s minaret, the faint outline of the communications equipment on the police station’s roof. Further behind him, and barely visible, were the brigade’s tents at the crossroads, the burning flame, and the conurbation of Kirkuk. Ahead of him was Darbantaq, five kilometres distant, with small smoke columns to identify it. Around him were the hills and valleys, and the silence.
Major Karim Aziz was at peace.
The peace came because he was far from Baghdad – from the pace and fumes, the noise and lifebeat of a city. He was anonymous in Baghdad, a pygmy figure. Even waiting endlessly on the flat roof with the Dragunov, he had never been able to gather up the sensation of power that was with him now. In the city he was one man against a million, one man against a regime, one man against an army. Here, it was hunter against hunter, a single marksman against a single marksman. It was his territory into which an intruder had strayed.
He looked towards Darbantaq across the slope of the valleys and over the swollen water-filled gullies. Bright green patches of ground, surrounded by yellowed grass, marked the peat marshlands. The dog growled softly, a whisper in its throat.
He was cautious with the telescope and he had draped a small square of grey cloth over the end of the lens glass. The sun beat down on him. If it caught the glass then his position was betrayed. He could see the roofs of Darbantaq, the smoke, and the personnel carrier skewed off the track leading to the village. Sometimes he could see figures moving between the buildings. At last light, with the sun sinking behind him, he would move closer.
He laid down the telescope, put it beside his rifle, and slowly turned his head. There should be no sudden movements to break the pattern of his camouflage. He slipped his hand back, ruffled the fur on the dog’s neck, and felt the vibration of the growl. The work of an observer was to protect a sniper’s back from attack from the flank or the rear. The dog lay facing away from him, and growled. It was on its stomach, head between its front paws, ears flattened, nose pointing the way for him.
There was a trellis of small valleys. One went north to south, another ran on a parallel line, and another east to west. He scanned each of them, and the further valleys, before he saw the movement that had alerted the dog.