‘I told them, Mr Gus, that your rifle jammed.’
He sat in the last sunlight, which beat low against his eyes, and he slipped his arm over the narrow bony shoulders of the boy. He watched the flame burning close to the dipping sun. By comparison it was dimmer, less substantial. The boy wriggled and reached into his pocket, then took Gus’s hand and prised it open. In a small cascade the chains of gold, the bracelets, the dull rings and a thin wad of banknotes fell into Gus’s palm. He let them drop through his fingers. They lay in the dried dirt between his legs.
He looked down at the tawdry chains and rings. The grey dusk was slipping over the sloped ground that ran to the high, spurting flame, gaining ascendancy once more.
Gus held the boy close, because again the boy had nothing. He thought of the sniper, the man without a face. To himself, he laughed, and wondered whether the sniper, too, with his own people, claimed that his rifle had jammed.
‘I didn’t fire because I did not see the man I came for… You dispute my orders? Then, please, immediately, call the barracks at al-Rashid of the Estikhabarat, and my orders will be confirmed to you. You ask why I did not fire on random targets. My skill is as a sniper, I am not an artillery officer, I don’t play with tanks. You ask why I shot the commanding officer of the regiment. He was fleeing in the face of the enemy and abandoning his troops, he disgusted me. Myself, I was the last officer to leave the town.
Do you have any more questions for me, General?’
The general would never countermand an order given by the Estikhabarat. Not even he would dare to take action against an officer who had shot down a coward.
‘Did you see her?’
‘I saw her.’
‘But you did not have the opportunity to shoot her?’
He saw the general’s sly smile, which invited him to lay his foot on the mantrap. Major Aziz wondered where the brigadier was; he did not understand why, at a time of military movement and confusion, he was not in the communications bunker. He had not seen the brigadier at the crossroads, or on the road between the crossroads and Kirkuk. He thought that he stood among mirrors that distorted all of the images. He did not know who was his friend and who was his enemy.
He retorted, ‘I could have shot her. If I had shot her a minimum of a hundred civilians would have been cut down in the counter-strike. You were not there, General, you did not see those people fleeing. If I had shot I would have condemned them. They are citizens of our republic, yes? They have the protection of our President?’
He stood in front of the laundered general. He could smell the scent of the lotions on the man’s body. His own was streaked with sweat, the smears of camouflage paint dripped into his eyes and down his stubbled cheeks. The dust from his smock and the mud from his boots flaked to the floor around him.
The map was exposed on the table. At the centre of the map was the crossroads. The lines were drawn in bold Chinagraph from Kirkuk to the crossroads. It was what he understood. The lines were clarity. The mirror images were distortion. At that moment, if he had been able to telephone his wife, speak to her, explain to her, beg her for guidance, she would have told him that he was a simple man and that he should perform his duty.
The mirrors twisted his perspective, made ugly his sense of duty. He had never known the mirrors before he had allowed himself to be recruited and gone to lie each night on the flat roof waiting to take his shot. The plan was explained.
‘I lose a town for a few hours. I lose a Victory City for a few days, and here I destroy them.’ The general stabbed his finger for emphasis on the map. Stained with nicotine, it rested on the ground between the crossroads and Tarjil, at the furthest point of the Chinagraph lines. And the question was silkily put. ‘Do your orders permit you to fight there, Major?’
Aziz nodded and stumbled out of the bunker. In the last light of the day he went to find food for his dog and put behind him the images of mirrors that distorted simplicity.
‘Hi, Caspar, had a good day?’
‘How’d the shopping go?’
Luther was black, cheerful and had joined them four months before at Incerlik from time in Venezuela. Across the office space, Bill and Rusty were clearing their desks and shutting down their consoles for the evening. Luther was scheduled for night duty, and should have been sleeping in the day, but he’d caught a late ride into town. Three plastic bags were slapped down on the desk, which was dominated by the framed photograph of the guy’s family. The packages, wrapped in newspaper, poked out from them.
‘Went well. I got some good bronze stuff that’ll look nice on the walls at home, and a couple of drapes, and a bit of jewellery for Annie that a little oily mother-robber swore was out of a Van grave – you know, the Ararat mountain and Noah story. But what the hell? It was a decent price.’
‘Pleased to know that. I’ve had a poor sort of day.’ Bill and Rusty were gone. ‘Pull up a chair.’
Luther gangled towards him. The guy was tall enough for basketball. He sat. ‘Sorry to hear that, Caspar.’
‘I am talking about RECOIL.’
‘You have my full attention.’
‘I hate the Need-to-Know bullshit. There are three strands to RECOIL. I have the three, for my sins. Bill has one, Rusty has one, you have one.’
‘I have one, correct.’
Bill was briefed on the movement of an armoured column, Rusty on the uprising led by a woman, Luther covered the plan’s third element – the same in the Agency’s posts in Amman and Riyadh, a three-way split for the watchers.
‘Not any more. You had Major Karim Aziz and his goddam rifle down in Baghdad -but not any more. I hear, sadly on the best authority, that he’s been deployed to Kirkuk.’
‘Shit.’
‘Aptly said, Luther. It’s like a strand is cut.’
‘Frankly, Caspar, are two strands enough?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. I just don’t know…’
The last time Caspar Reinholtz had known the quivering, gut-turning apprehension as a plan went to the wire had been three years before. Two strands then. The promise of a culvert bomb near to the Abbasio Palace to catch the motorcade, and a mutiny by the 14
July Battalion. The cars hadn’t come, the culvert bomb hadn’t been fired, but the battalion had moved on the Baghdad Radio transmitters and a heliport used by the President – poor bastards. The arrest, torture, mutilation, execution of a cousin had provoked a general to lead the battalion in mutiny. One strand hadn’t been enough to carry the weight. The troops with their tanks had been massacred, the general had killed himself. That night, he’d written his report in frustrated anger, and known that, once again, the President sat in his goddam palace and laughed at a failure of American policy.
He’d sent further reports of the round-up arrests, the hangings in the Abu Gharib gaol, and hated writing them because he knew they all reeked of failure.
‘What I can tell you, if another strand goes, RECOIL is fucked sideways.’
‘You’ve been here for ever, Caspar. How many times have we been to the brink, had a really good scene in place, had the Boss for Life in the sights, had all the players lined and ready to go, and seen it all go down?’
Not a week went by without his superiors pursuing him for details of the chance of insurrection, mutiny, treachery in Iraq that would topple the President, the Boss for Life.
They waited at Langley, champagne on ice, for the day they could dance and sing on the man’s grave. Every photograph of the President, out of Baghdad, showed the shit laughing.
‘More times than I’d like to count, Luther. I have to play positive, it’s what I’m paid to be, but if either of the other two goes belly-up, it’s over. And I’m getting a bad feeling in my gut. That’s why I’ve had a poor sort of day.’
A plan of mutiny must spread.
In the last days, before execution, it must breathe and move beyond a cabal of key conspirators whispering in secrecy. At a crucial moment of maximum risk, the plan must be shared if the recruitment of others is to be won and it is to reach critical mass.