The brigadier was a hard, tempered fighting man.
His staff car drove him past the sentries and into the compound of an armoured division of the Republican Guard. It was said, in the eddy of whispered rumours that passed amongst the chosen families of the regime, that the niece of the general commanding the division of the Republican Guard had been propositioned for sex by a nephew of the President, had declined the overture, and had been insulted. The rumour said the nephew of the President had called the niece of the general a ‘barren useless goat’. When it happened and the drive south began, down the highway from Kirkuk to Baghdad, the brigadier’s armour must pass through Tuz Khurmatu, the garrison camp he now entered.
He was without fear. As a battalion commander he had survived the ferocious battles to hold the Basra road against the Khomeini zealot hordes, coming at his bunkers in human waves. As a brigade commander, he had been widely praised by his peers for keeping his unit intact as a cohesive fighting force confronting the American 1st Armoured Division. No-one had ever doubted his courage or his tactical skill to his face
… but no promotion had come his way. He should have had command of a division; he should have had the riches that were the reward of a divisional commander. The months had turned to years, the festering resentment had grown, and he had welcomed his recruitment to the plan. When it succeeded he would receive – it was promised him – the Defence Ministry. Also promised was a draft of one million American dollars.
He was saluted and ushered with deference up the steps of the general’s villa. If he had been a man who knew fear there would have been a slight crease of anxiety on the brigadier’s face, because a sniper had been transferred abruptly from Baghdad to Kirkuk.
Fear was not a sector of his character.
His boots beat on a marble floor, a door was opened for him.
The plan must be shared.
Joe Denton thought she’d probably done it herself. He walked round the two pick-ups with a surly stride. The seats in the front and the floor in the back of each vehicle had been hosed, scrubbed, wiped clean. Joe had heard the vehicles arrive at the roadside by the village, but he’d worked in the meadow until there was no longer light to continue.
Then he’d crawled back along the peg-marked path that was cleared. It had been a slow day, but the pace was the same as every other. Beside the road was the return for his work. He had extracted and made safe fourteen VS50s and three V69s. Next week he would allow the locally employed de-miners to start, not before; he was not yet satisfied, from his own expert skill, that the mines hadn’t shifted from the straight rows in which they had been planted. It would be at least three weeks before he could take a beer with the villagers and tell them they could use that meadow of best grazing grass. He finished the inspection of the vehicles.
‘Thanks.’
‘Thanks for loaning them.’
‘Do you want something to eat.’
‘Wouldn’t mind – like to hear about my day, what I heard?’
‘If you want to tell me,’ Joe said gruffly.
They were as lonely as each other. Neither had a friend amongst the Kurds they worked with. They were both employers, there to maintain discipline, had the authority to dismiss their workers and take the decisions that mattered. Without friends they existed in a vacuum of trust. They had little in common other than proximity and loneliness. She was the blond, weather-tanned girl from a Sydney suburb; Joe was the straggly built one-time soldier from the west of England. No point of their cultures intersected. She needed company, and with bad grace he needed the same.
They sat under a tree.
Sarah said, ‘We started with fifty-two casualties. There was every sort of wound you could imagine. We had brain damage, livers, spinal cords, stomachs, lungs, main arteries
– we had the lot – and they’d only brought the worst. Christ knows about the people left behind. We started with them all squashed in. There was room when we finished the journey.’
She laughed.
He thought it was the shock that made her laugh.
‘You know, Joe, when we finished we had them all bedded down in the pick-ups, nice and restful, thirty-seven when we reached Arbil. We had dropped off fifteen. The ones I was with told me about the battle. There’s a town called Tarjil over the ridges there and it was defended by a regiment, a whole bloody regiment. I’m not a soldier, Joe, but I would have thought soldiering is about watching your arse. They went frontal, up the main street. They ran against machine-guns – is it me or is that just dumb?’
Joe’s hand slipped to her arm to stop her. He waved in the gloom towards his bodyguards and made a gesture of eating. They should bring some food. He touched her again to tell her that he listened. He knew about fighting. His experience of war was close second-hand, moving behind the combat troops in Kuwait and making safe unexploded ordnance. After the guns had gone silent he had been in the Iraqi slit trenches and in their bunkers, dealt with their ordnance, and seen the slaughter’s end-game.
‘I don’t know how I’d be if I’d had half my guts taken away – maybe not too bloody happy. Not one whined. It’s all for freedom. They say they have to fight for their freedom. Is that crap, Joe? There’s this woman leading them called Meda, and she’s told them about freedom. I don’t suppose you’ve met her but I have, and they’d follow her wherever she goes. This morning, dawn, she took them to hell.’
He sat against the tree-trunk. She was beside him. He had his legs pulled up tight and his arms wrapped round them. His chin was down on his knees as he stared at the dark ground in front of his boots.
‘God, I don’t know what freedom is. No way I know what their idea of freedom means. The nearest I know about freedom is when my bloody contract here is finished and I get out and I’ve money in the bank to spend. Can you imagine, Joe, running up an open road into gunfire because that’s the way to find freedom? There’s a part of it that we’re involved in, you and me, Joe. It’s only a small part, but we’re in there.’
He looked up sharply.
Sarah said, ‘I took a letter from an old man. The old man, Hoyshar, is the woman’s grandfather. The letter was addressed to an Englishman. I gave you the letter, you promised you’d hand it on. Did you?’
The memory of what he’d done, and thought nothing of, welled back in him. He nodded. He remembered what he had forgotten, the name on the envelope. He stared into her eyes and didn’t answer.
She pressed. ‘Moving that letter ensured our bloody involvement… Apparently some sniper came out here because of that letter. A guy from England, didn’t have to. You know what they said, those guys who were wounded, with their guts hanging out, without arms, with holes in their lungs? The poor simple bastards say he is the best shot they ever knew, but they were hurt at Tarjil because his rifle fouled up and he couldn’t shoot over them. He came because of that letter I gave to you and you moved on. No-one else came.
After Tarjil they’re going to hit a brigade camp, and then it’s Kirkuk. And the daft fuckers think they’ll win because of one sniper and the woman.’
‘They’ll be out of the mountains,’ Joe said grimly, ‘be in the open. The tanks’ll put them through the mincer.’
‘Makes you feel small, doesn’t it? Involved but not able to help. Fucking small.’
‘I just do my job. That’s what I’m here for. Nothing more.’
Joe Denton, twenty years in the Royal Engineers, specialist in explosives, stared down at the shadowy pile of the seventeen mines he had made safe that day. In the backpack beside him, with his helmet and armoured waistcoat, were the seventeen detonators. If Joe, the corporal, had not been screwing the daughter of a Military Police officer on his last posting in Germany, if he’d not smacked the officer’s chin when ordered to stay away from his little angel, he’d still be in the army, and would be without involvement.