‘I apologize,’ Gus said quietly. ‘I apologize sincerely.’
‘You have to meet a man who has brought mines to hear how a sniper should use the mines – if she is wrong and if the tanks come.’
Gus followed Haquim back through the town towards the police station to listen to another expert.
The brigadier was a strong man, and he shivered as he watched the tanks being armed and fuelled. He had shared, spread the conspiracy, and the promises were piled behind him. He had the promise of the witch and her peshmerga army, and the promise of the Americans, and the promise of men in Baghdad. But – and he knew the sort of promises that wafted around men committed to insurrection – there were always more promises.
Never had sufficient promises been heaped behind the officers planning a coup d’etat.
With insufficient promises there was a short walk to the gallows. He needed the promise of the general at Tuz Khurmatu.
The huge tank shells, 125mm calibre, were being lifted into the hatches. The fuel lorries were alongside the leviathans, loading the diesel. In the morning he would address the officers of the armoured brigade and demand their loyalty to him as their commander, and the promises that they would follow him.
He would be a great man if the promises were kept, and a dead man if they were broken.
The brigadier could not shed the chill from his body as the sun beat down on him, and on his tanks.
Present at the meeting were all the male members of the general’s extended family.
Inside the barracks compound of the Republican Guard armoured division at Tuz Khurmatu, the windows of the villa were curtained and the door to the salon locked on the inside. The mahogany-framed television set was tuned to a satellite channel from Germany and played promotional music videos, with the sound turned high. They were of the Sunni religion, and of the Dulaimi tribe. Their territory stretched from Fallujah on the Euphrates river, across the desert wasteland to Al Qaim near the Syrian border. The Dulaimi tribe held second place in the regime’s favours and trust after the President’s own tribe, the Takriti. They were men hardened by an upbringing in the harsh desert territory of sun-scorched days and bitter night frosts. They were fighters. The sons, cousins and nephews of the general crowded the salon. They wore the insignia on their shoulders of armoured units, artillery, infantry and Special Forces. The general was the head of the family and they listened in silent respect, craned to hear what he said. He was known to his family and his tribe and his tank crews as ‘the Hammerfist’. No man had ever doubted his courage.
He explained his dilemma. The general, the Hammerfist, told them of the visit he had received from a brigadier of Fifth Army in Kirkuk, and the proposition put to him.
Did they join the conspiracy, or did they destroy it?
To know of treason, and not to denounce it, was to commit treason. Should the conspiracy founder, should the brigadier be captured and interrogated, should he be broken under torture, should he speak of a meeting with a general that had not been reported to the relevant authorities, then the general too was a conspirator – and all of them who now attended the meeting in the villa’s salon. There was no middle way.
If they joined the conspiracy and it succeeded, each of them would be rewarded. If it failed, however, they would be hanged after they had been tortured. Faced with the dilemma, the general asked for advice as to which course he should follow. He could arm the tanks of his division, or he could pick up the telephone and make a call to the al-Rashid barracks of the Estikhabarat. Which?
The quiet clung around them.
Each man considered insults thrown at him by the regime, and benefits they had gained from it. They thought of the consequences to their families, pondered the reliability of the Kurds, and of an American promise to create a no-fly zone and a no-drive zone above the tanks roaring towards Baghdad.
Straight-backed, hands clasped behind him, the general – the Hammerfist – waited for them to make known their reaction to a devil’s dilemma.
At brigade, at the crossroads, five miles north-east of Kirkuk, Major Aziz did what all soldiers do in the last hours before a battle. He cleaned his weapon and wrote a letter to his wife.
They were not dirty, but from habit he cleaned the bolt and the breech, the PSO-1 telescopic sight mounted directly above the trigger, the interior of the magazine, and then he wiped hard at each of the ten rounds of 7.62mm ammunition before returning them to the magazine. All around him, in the gathering darkness, soldiers checked their weapons.
When he was satisfied that there was no possibility of a malfunction caused by dirt, he wound the loose rough cloth strips round the butt, stock, ’scope and barrel of the Dragunov.
Aziz found a place close to the command bunker where a small shaft of light spilled out from a narrow firing slit. Also, a part of his routine was to carry in his backpack a few sheets of crumpled writing-paper, with envelopes. He was hunched down so that the spear of light was on his raised thigh, where the paper rested. He wrote only a half-dozen lines. He had written the same letters many times, for fear of not saying goodbye, in Kirkuk, in Basra, and in Kuwait City. The following morning, or a week afterwards, each of those letters had been destroyed, ripped to shreds, because he had lived. He wrote of his love for her, and for the boys – they were jewels on which fell the golden sun – and he thanked her for the happiness she had given him. When he had finished he sealed the sheet of paper in an envelope, put her name on it and placed it in the breast pocket of his shirt, where it would be close to his heartbeat. If he were killed, if he died the next day, or the day after, he held the hope that the letter would be retrieved from his body, perhaps stained in blood, and that it would be taken back to her. Once it was in his pocket, the moments of self-doubt evaporated, the time for reflection was finished.
He slipped into the command bunker. It was buried in the sandy soil, roofed by heavy timbers that were, in turn, covered with bulldozed earth. There was quiet inside, as if the staff officers had already made their preparations. Aziz asked for the plan for the morning, and guidance as to where he and his Dragunov should be positioned. He explained where he believed the enemy’s sniper would be. *** Joe Denton’s voice dripped at him – where he should be, how he should lay the mines, and how and at what point he should arm them.
The column had formed in the darkness outside the police station. Gus said that he understood the plan and thanked Joe for it. Denton reached up, caught at the hessian straps on Gus’s shoulders and kissed his cheek, not wet but a brush of the lips against the stubble and the patina of dirt and paint, then turned away. He saw Denton climb into a truck beside the aid-worker. The headlights led a convoy of lorries away to the north; more wounded from the battle for Tarjil were being moved to safety. If he had been able to see the man’s face, Denton’s, then he thought there might have been tears in the eyes.
It was Gus’s duty to go forward, but not Denton’s, nor was his the responsibility of a grandfather’s friendship: he was the victim of destiny, but Joe Denton was not.
After the convoy’s lights had slipped away into the darkness, he heard Meda’s hectoring voice at the front of the column. When she paused for breath, there was the coughed, spluttered echo of approval. There was a last declaiming shout from her, an exhortation, and the answering bellow of loyalty.
Shuffling at first, but growing in speed, the column surged out of the town. There were no doors open, no upper windows unshuttered, no knots of civilians to watch them go. It was as though they had come as liberators and left as a conquering army of occupation.
He remembered the tide of vengeance that had accompanied them. The tramping feet of the column marched over the place where the tarmacadam had been scorched, and under the doused light on the lamp-post over which the noose had been hooked. He walked with Omar and the four men carrying the grain sacks that held the mines. Whether they were liberators or occupiers was the judgement to be made by the people who did not wish them well. Their judgement hammered him. If they were victors they would be liberators; if they were losers they would be occupiers. It hammered him because the people of Tarjil had branded them, sunk the fire into the flesh, as losers. No man or woman would shout support for a loser and wish them well. Dirty, fetid, the column left the town and its darkened, empty streets.