By the time Haquim returned, he had drawn the plan. Haquim folded away the map.
Joe asked, ‘Where’s the sniper?’
Haquim shrugged.
‘I need to talk to him,’ Joe said. ‘He’s the one who has to get it right. If he doesn’t get it right, and the tanks come, then everyone’s toast.’
The crossing of the mountains was hard going. There were no lights to guide them and the German hissed a protest each time they kicked a rock or set a stone tumbling down from the path.
Four hours into their march the discipline was fracturing.
‘God, what I’d give for a drink…’ Mike whispered.
‘A bed, a clean bed…’ Dean murmured.
Gretchen soldiered on, her mind apparently elsewhere.
They heard Jurgen’s guttural whisper for quiet. Did they not realize the density of Turkish army patrols?
‘All right for that human fucking parasite, he’s not carrying half a ton of gear.’ Mike’s cameraman, propositioned late in the evening, had flatly refused to take part in a night march over the mountains from Turkey into northern Iraq. Equally resolutely, Dean and Gretchen had declined to help Mike with the camera equipment. If they bounced a patrol they risked being shot out of hand in the darkness, or they faced arrest, thuggery, unpleasant interrogation, and a week’s sojourn in Diyarbakir’s military gaol.
Significantly, the German, Jurgen, carried nothing.
They were at a narrow point in the path, which was good enough for low-life smugglers, but for the journalistic pride of London, Baltimore and Frankfurt it was hell.
There was a cliff wall to the left, a loose-stoned track for them to walk on, and a precipice to the right. Each of them had an idea of the depth of the precipice: the last rock dislodged by Gretchen had slid from under her boot and fallen, fallen for an age before they’d heard its distant impact. The bastard Russian, back at the Hotel Malkoc, with a drink and a clean bed and probably a woman, would meet them in the morning. He’d said it was impossible for them to be hidden in a lorry for the border crossing. They’d walk -maybe get shot, or at least captured – and if they made it through he’d meet them.
‘After we come back, I promise to do that swine proper damage.’
‘ If we come back.’
‘Get positive, Gretchen – Mike, you’ll have me to help you.’
The wind ripped at their clothes, the cold shredded them and all for a story about a woman leading a distant army, talk of freedom, the prospect of air-time and column inches. They held hands and made a chain, and stumbled on after the German. Holding hands was their small gesture to each other of solidarity – if one went over the goddam precipice they’d all go.
‘Why are we doing this?’
‘I am doing this, Gretchen, for my real-estate mortgage.’
‘Anyone who does this, goes into northern Iraq and not for money, is an idiot,’
Gretchen said solemnly.
He saw the man.
The dawn came slowly, layering the light across the ground. Before its arrival, Aziz had crawled for an hour in a network of rain gullies until he had reached a vantage-point where he could conceal himself and watch. It was the furthest forward he could go and he was settled beside the collapsed roof of rusted tin and the broken wooden frame of what had once been a shepherd’s shelter. He could go no further forward because the ground ahead of him was scratched empty and bare by the wind. Not even his dog, resting beside his knee, could have crossed that ground and remained concealed.
The dawn had come from over the high hills to the left of the man. Beyond the wind-whipped, sun-scorched ground that stretched three times the range of the Dragunov was an isolated clump of rocks rubbed smooth by the elements. The man sat on the rocks and made no effort to conceal himself.
Aziz’s eyesight, unaided, was not adequate, but with his telescope he could see him clearly.
As the sun rose, as the heat settled on the ground, his view of the man would become distorted, but the air at dawn was cold enough for him to see the man in sharp focus.
He understood why the man showed himself. It was a challenge.
Through the telescope, Major Karim Aziz watched the man who was his enemy. He saw the dirt and the dust that cloyed the overalls, and the confused tangle of the hessian strips, and he saw but did not recognize the shape of the rifle that was held loosely across the man’s thighs. The face of the man was paint-smeared and daubed with mud, and there was a dark shadow of stubble over his cheeks and chin. Sitting on the rock with his rifle, the man seemed at peace.
Aziz knew from his experience of the battles against the Iranians that there were times when soldiers sought calm, as if at those moments the hate in them for their enemy died.
Later, they would fight… they would stalk… they would kill. In the quiet, killing men looked for the faces of their enemy as if there was a need to prise away the masks, as if to find something of brotherhood. He could not reach the man. The flat, featureless ground between them prevented him from a hidden stalk and a single rifle shot, and the man knew it.
He was disturbed, could not lift away the mask – and, confused, could not make the brotherhood. The challenge mocked him.
Major Karim Aziz knew what he had to do. If he did not do it, the fear would take root.
If the fear was in him, when the peace was gone he would not aim and shoot well. Fear was the true enemy of the sniper. If he did not answer the challenge, he would know his fear had conquered him. The strength of the sun was growing on his back and the dog panted beside him. In a few minutes, a little time, the heat would have settled on the ground and the clarity of his lens would subside to mirage and distortion… He thought of his wife, in the hospital, with the children who had no drugs – and he wondered whether this man, sitting at peace, had a wife. He thought of his children, in the school that had no books – and he wondered whether this man had children.
Aziz put his telescope back into his backpack and stood.
He walked away from the shepherd’s shelter with his backpack looped over his shoulders and his rifle loose in his hands. Far beyond the growing shimmer as the ground warmed was the outline of the rocks, and he did not know whether, at three thousand metres, the man noticed his movement, but it was important to him that he had picked up the challenge.
He turned his back on the man and headed towards the road, Scout skipping beside him.
The next time he saw him, when there was no peace and no calm, he would kill the man.
‘He’s a champion, that’s what you have to realize. He’s a winner.’
Willet had told Ms Manning that they were going to the seaside. It wasn’t strictly true.
The industrial estate east of Southampton allowed them a slight whiff of the sea, but no view of it. The unit that had produced the brochure he’d taken from Peake’s safe in the haulage-company offices was old, uncared-for and drab. It was anonymous: only the steel-plated door and the small heavily barred windows gave evidence of the factory’s product inside. They sat in a small, untidy office and the walls around them were hung with photographs of weapons. The sales director, earnest and bright-eyed, a communicator, had told the outer office to hold his calls.
‘He’s can, will, must. I see enough of them, I recognize them. I call it being “the master of circumstances”. It’s about the ability to withstand pressure, and I’m talking about extreme stress.’
It was the unpeeling of another layer. Willet scribbled his notes, but Ms Manning gazed around her and studied the photographs. He thought he’d brought her to new territory, and her expression showed she thought it disreputable.