‘Tell me something new.’
‘It’ll be a difficult fight in Tarjil, Caspar, with or without fresh armour.’
‘She’s got to get through Tarjil or she’s dead in the water. For the big play to start, she has to get all the way to Kirkuk.’
‘It’s a big play – am I hearing you?’
‘Telling it frankly, Isaac, as big as it gets. It’s her and the armour and the sniper?’
‘He seemed a good guy, the sniper, I met him.’
‘I don’t think so, Isaac. I’m not talking about the guy in the column – I met him, too.
This is very confidential. There’s a sniper in Baghdad…’
‘Do you have a name?’
‘That is very sensitive confidential. I’d like to share on that one, but…’
The Israeli gazed into the American’s eyes. ‘Aziz? Major? Baghdad Military College?
Chief instructor in sniping? Major Karim Aziz? Sorry, Caspar, he’s not in Baghdad. He was transferred to Fifth Army three days ago. Is that important? I wouldn’t want to spoil your day but doesn’t that make a difference to your plan?’
The American rocked on the lavatory seat. His hands went up to his face as if to block out the news. His body shook. He stood and tossed the towel for the Israeli to catch and went towards the bathroom’s door, his cheeks ashen.
‘You could just say, Isaac, you spoiled my day. You’ve screwed it big-time.’
Cohen stared at the taps, heard the door open then close, and wondered whether the first strand of the big plan was unravelling. *** For Gus, it was a simple shot. Any of the Sunday-morning amateurs on Stickledown Range would have made the hit.
In the hour before dawn, he had followed Omar to the house that was set back from the road into the town. It had been empty but the lights were on, there was still food on the table and toys lay on the kitchen floor. The cupboard doors upstairs were open. He thought the father had finally decided on flight after the children had been put to bed, and that the parents had packed frantically what they could carry with the children into a car.
He had gone up the stairs, led by Omar, and had wedged the pulped-paper head into the corner of the main bedroom’s window so that the features would appear to gaze back at the town, and had put the binoculars on the windowsill immediately below the head.
They had pushed aside the cover of the ceiling hatch, and levered themselves up among the rafters. Before first light he had dislodged a roof tile for the firing position, then removed a second tile for the telescope Omar would use.
Gus had stared down on to a battlefield swathed in grey mist. When he’d settled he told Omar to knock out a minimum of another fifteen tiles, and heard them slide crazily down to the guttering.
The house he had chosen was set in a wide plot. The ground was already dug and hoed and the first vegetables were sprouting. Beyond a low wire fence, against which children’s bicycles lay, was the garden of the next house, which had a lower roof. A hundred yards further down the road a lorry was slewed across as a barricade. Then the houses formed close-set streets, and rising above them were the minarets and the dull, plastered facade of the police station, topped by a communications dish. In front of the police station, where the road widened, was another barricade of three overturned cars.
He had taken his aim. The range was four hundred yards. The flare was fired from behind them, arched over the rooftop, then burst above the first barricade.
Gus fired.
The communications dish on the roof of the police station disintegrated and its frame collapsed.
He waited.
It was as though he had thrown down a glove into the mud in the path of his opponent, or slapped the face of his enemy.
Paint flakes and metal fragments had fallen on him when the dish was hit.
There was a waist-high parapet on the roof of the police station, but at two of the corners there were higher sandbag emplacements that covered the road into the town and the two barricades blocking it. Aziz had chosen the centre point of the wall facing the road and, as he lay on his stomach, his view was through a rainwater gully. The furthest house from him, along the road, was held in the Dragunov’s sight.
He had heard crack and, a second later, thump. The firing position was between 350 metres and 450 metres from him. First, down the road, he made football pitches in his mind, and counted four. There were two houses in the sighting distance, the nearest was lower and he did not believe offered the elevation to clear the parapet and still hit the communications dish. He started his study of the further house. He was back from the gully, offered no target. He made a further calculation from the vertical lines in the reticule of the sight that were the equivalent in height of an average-sized man, then the conversion between the height of a man and the height of a window. The size of the windows told him that the house was 400 metres from him. There was no other building of sufficient height from which the shot on the communications dish could have been fired.
He saw the painted head, and the binoculars.
He counted seventeen holes in the roofing where the tiles had been forced away.
His eye never left the ’scope, and his finger stayed with an infinite gentleness on the Dragunov’s trigger, and he spoke softly to the dog.
‘He tells us that he knows we have come to hunt him. Maybe the Americans told him or the Zionists, maybe they picked it off the radio. He wants me to know where he is. Do you find that peculiar, little man? It is an old game. You put up a bogus target and the sniper shoots it, and then you look for him, and you kill him. Very old, and not even a good head. He does not have sufficient respect for us…’
The machine-guns on either side of him had started to fire. The battle was joined. At the edge of the circle of his ’scope sight were the first running and crawling columns of men closing on the furthest barricade. There was an answering thundercrack, repeated, and repeated again, from a heavy machine-gun and great chunks came careering off the parapet wall. Had Aziz shifted his aim fractionally, there would have been fine targets among the columns, but his eyes were locked on the seventeen holes in the house’s roof.
He could see the men behind the barricade scurry between different shooting positions.
Two machine-guns from the roof of the police station fired over the barricades on the road, with lazy running tracers that died among the two columns of peshmerga hugging the ditches either side of the tarmac.
It would have been easy for Gus to knock away the machine-gun crews on the police-station roof or to devastate the defence of the forward barricade. He held his fire. He searched for the sniper among the rooftops and the windows, the high points of the police station and the minarets, the heaps of rubble and rubbish beside the road. He saw men go down, some poleaxed, some writhing, in the charge for the barricade. He saw men he had hiked alongside, and eaten with, washed with, slept close to – men with familiar faces -stand and blast back at the firing from behind the barricade, then throw up their arms like helpless idiots and crumple. He saw her… She had a bandanna of torn cloth around her head to hold her hair away from her eyes, grenades tied to her body, and she carried an assault rifle. She came out of the right-hand ditch and ran low across the road towards the other side against which the firing was most concentrated. She dived for the ditch where the men were pinned down. He saw her grab two, three, by their shirts and heave them forward. She stepped over those who had fallen in the ditch, and those who flailed their arms in agony.
He watched Meda’s crabbing dash towards the barricade, and the firing slackened. He saw the soldiers break. Again and again, her arm waved above her head for the columns to come forward. Gus could have shot several of the running soldiers, aimed at their backs, but he searched instead for the position of the sniper.
The battle was fought around him, but Major Karim Aziz played no part in it.