‘I’m thinking of all that shit going on out there, while all I do is sit back here and pick up the fucking pieces.’
The food was brought to them. They sat under the tree and the night settled around them.
‘I had toothache this morning, Joe. What I saw today made me forget it. Toothache just doesn’t compete. It’s all in the mind.’
‘My last war… What a hell of a way to finish.’
‘Prizes, awards – hey, and rises. I hear cash registers.’
‘You want to get killed, Mike? Try somewhere to get killed that people care about, Dean. It’s the way the world works.’
They were still in Diyarbakir’s premier league watering-hole, the bar of the Hotel Malkoc, huddled around a table by the window.
‘It’d be the ultimate bow out.’
‘I might get a professorship in media studies, out in the Midwest.’
‘Don’t kid yourself. People wouldn’t even bother to look in the atlas to find where you were killed.’
It had been the end of another fruitless day of obstruction and failure, capped by a lousy meal. Mike, Dean and Gretchen had swapped their sob stories, and had moved on to the inevitable – the pull-out, the booking of air tickets – when the Russian had sidled up and greeted them as old friends.
‘How did he know about us? I mean, how?’
‘Because we talk too much, Mike.’
‘That German, I say it myself, he is a complete sod.’
Gretchen pulled a face, her mouth curled in disgust. So, they had been talking flights out from Diyarbakir when the stiletto-thin German, Jurgen, had intruded into their group and made the introduction. The proposition had been put. The German and the Russian were behind them, leaning comfortably at the bar. Fifteen thousand dollars was the price.
‘I’d be putting my reputation on the line, asking the office for a guarantee of five thou.’
‘They’d crucify me if they paid up and he was a conman.’
‘It’s not the point. The point is the danger. Don’t you see that? It’s the danger of going in there, and nobody caring.’
‘Then we’ll just have to make them care,’ Mike said boldly. It had been written of him in a television rag that he’d dodged more bullets than John Wayne. The image was there to be maintained. He twisted and waved to the Russian to join them.
Gretchen had her eyes tight shut. She grimaced. ‘I can’t quite believe it is actually true.’
‘Actually true…’ The Russian beamed behind her, then bent to offer the posture of confidentiality. ‘You talk about the woman. Twenty-four hours ago, in Iraq, I was with her. I met her. You have the word of Lev Rybinsky. Look at my feet, look at my clothes, look at the mud. I walked across mountains to meet her, to be with her, and walked back.
I am very sincere with you. The money is not for me, it is to open the door of the route to her. There is no profit in this to me. I have come to you because of my love for the freedom of an abused people. The world should know about her. For me, there would be no financial gain.’
‘You’d take us?’ Mike asked, breathily.
‘Of course.’
‘We’d see combat?’ the American demanded.
‘She is marching to Kirkuk and she will not stop. The storm is gathering – yes, my guarantee, you would see combat.’
‘We would walk with her?’ Gretchen queried nervously.
‘You would walk beside her – for fifteen thousand American dollars – into a liberated Kirkuk. I regret I cannot drop the price. Did you know there was a foreign sniper with her?’
AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE.
4. (Conclusions after interview with Ray Davies (owner of Davies and Sons, haulage company) conducted by self and Ms Carol Manning -transcript attached.) TEMPERAMENT: AHP is an intensely private individual, and is therefore probably best known by his employer. He has worked for the company all his adult life, starting as a teaboy/office runner aged 18, and rising to the position of Transport Manager. Much is made at the company of the stressful pace of the job – much is also made of AHP’s ability to cope with that stress. Words used to describe his TEMPERAMENT are
‘phlegmatic’, ‘patient’ and ‘calm’. They are the descriptions of a character most appreciated by instructors in sniper arts. Interestingly, the owner knew next to nothing of AHP’s life away from the workplace. His shooting passion with the Historic Breech-loading and Small-arms Association was not mentioned. He brought his partner with him to social events, the Christmas party etc., but his personal life was lived behind a closed door. However, importantly, it was made clear that AHP lacks a ruthless side to his character. (The example is minor but indicative of character.) He was unsettled when given the task of sacking a driver who was persistently behind schedule on trans-European journeys, and ‘wriggled’ over clear evidence that a second driver was claiming paid sick leave for a bogus ailment. The TEMPERAMENT is excellent for the role AHP has given himself, but I doubt he has the necessary ‘steel’ for combat. Also, without a long knowledge of MILITARY WEAPONS and MILITARY TRAINING, his chances of medium-term survival remain slim to non-existent.
Willet pondered on that last sentence.
He had found, each time he wrote his notes for Ms Manning’s line manager, an increasing urge to talk up the positive character points of this man. The urge was based, and Willet recognized it, on a growing sense of jealousy. He believed that somehow, and in the most unobtrusive way, he was belittled by Augustus Henderson Peake.
He never moved without an order to do so. In his analysis, he was an automaton and a robot. But Peake had made his own decisions, had packed up and travelled on his own impulses. Willet would never be his own man, not now and not once he had left the military. From the jealousy was born knowledge and admiration.
The concept of a transport manager affecting the course of a faraway war was laughable, of course, yet the worm of doubt ate at him. He remembered an old army video, shown to the sniper course at Warminster in monochrome, that had listed the sort of civilians who might have the required qualities. Not a transport manager among them, but… A fisherman can sit all day at a canal bank and not see his float go down: he has the virtue of patience. A steeplejack can climb to great and dangerous heights, knows his safety is in his own hands, that a false move will end his life. A countryman can shoot straight and move silently, is cunning and thinks ahead to anticipate the movement of his prey. A clerk can spend an entire day with columns of figures, has the priceless power of concentration that shuts out distractions.
All ordinary men, and all fashioned into killers by the instructors. That was the answer.
Peake had the necessary virtues, but not the military weapons and tactics. Willet realized that what had started as a tedious, late-at-night instruction to pry into an ordinary man’s life was turning into a search for the Grail.
He printed what he had written and phoned out for a delivery pizza. Waiting for it to arrive, he wondered whether he undersold that ordinary man, whether Peake could survive, whether the forces arrayed against him were too great and whether that enemy was closing in on him.
Late at night, another simple man – who knew only his chosen trade – went back to the war.
He had not taken the chance of a bath, or gone to the officers’ quarters to eat, or telephoned his wife.
In Aziz’s backpack was more food for the dog, and for himself there was the filled water canteen, goat’s cheese and bread.
He was driven in an open jeep towards the crossroads, away from the flame. When next he saw her, whether there were a hundred or a thousand between them, he would shoot her. It was the decision of a man who craved simplicity. He would shoot her, over the heads of a hundred or a thousand, regardless of the consequences of a counter-strike, then go with his dog to hunt the sniper who opposed him. With the clean wind on his face, he thought that he had broken the distortion of the mirrors. He was well read. There were many books in English on military history in the library of the Baghdad Military College. If he wanted to learn their secrets, he had to have the language and over the years he had taken the chance to read textbooks, pamphlets and manuals of the British army. A book had told him of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. It had troubled the simple soldier and, perhaps, had led him along the road of recruitment and mirrors.