Gus thought the mood of the town, its judgement, had caught many of the peshmerga.
It was not until they were out of the town that the men began to sing. Again and again, with the deep power of their voices, the refrain of the anthem was howled into the night.
It was the sound of hungry wolves that came in winter from the high ground to stalk beside barricaded homes in search of food. It was the sound of a predator. Omar sang with them, a high shrill note, as if to prove his adulthood.
‘What do they sing?’
He could not see the boy’s face in the darkness.
‘We are the peshmerga, brave heroes of Kurdistan, We will never lay down our arms, We fight until victory or death.’
Gus grimaced. ‘That’s bloody cheerful, Omar.’
‘We are not frightened of death, Mr Gus. You cannot be frightened of death or you would not have come. We have the power, we have Meda
…’
Gus marched on. It was strange to him that the bold words Meda had used in the town to the peshmerga, and the repetition of the anthem, demonstrated a willingness to face death. He had seen her with the aid-worker when he had been receiving the instructions from Joe Denton. He wondered if Meda had shown the flesh wound to her, whether it had been dressed again, whether it was poisoned or clean. His blister hurt but the pace of the march did not allow him to slow and hobble. It seemed a lifetime since he had last slept decently or eaten well. He thought the civilization of an old life was being steadily stripped from him.
When they were well clear of the town, when no torches were used, when they moved in thin moonlight, the singing died. Haquim had been along the line and demanded quiet.
A discipline had settled on the column. Gus wondered, in the quiet broken only by the scrape of weapons’ metal and the tramp of feet, if the men thought of home and families
– or were their minds as empty as the wolves’, the predators’? His own mind, except for the pain of the blister, was void of emotion.
Haquim materialized from the milky darkness. They had reached the point where Gus, Omar, the men carrying the mines and the mustashar would break away from the main march towards the crossroads. Meda was beside him.
Meda said, sarcastic, ‘Do you need a chair to sit on?’
‘I’ll send down for room-service and get a beer.’
‘You will be comfortable away from the real work, fighting.’
‘I’ve a good book to read.’
She was brittle, contemptuous. ‘There will be no tanks.’
‘Then I’ll enjoy my beer and get on with my book. It’ll be a pleasant day out.’
She flounced away, strode off up the column, and in a moment was lost among her men. It was a bad parting. If either of them did not survive the day ahead, the last memory would be of contempt and mockery. The column was going south, but the small group edged to the east and started the big loop that would take them to where Joe Denton advised they should be. Omar led. He had no compass, and had never crossed that featureless, dark-shrouded ground before. He had only been shown on the map but did not pause or look around him. Gus thought it the innate genius of the young dog-wolf.
The boy stopped, crouched, his arm held back, hand open, demanding their total stillness and silence. Gus heard the approaching sounds, the wind over dried leaves. They were huddled together, low on the open ground as the sounds grew closer. At first it merged with the night then, clear in the moonlight, a great caravan passed them. Sheep, men, goats, women, donkeys, children, dogs, all slipped by, never wavering in the path of their journey. Gus was awestruck at the simplicity of what he saw. A nomad tribe on the move, as they had whispered over the ground at night in the time of Cyrus and Salah alDin Yusuf, nothing changed, secure against the predators, the newer dictators and demagogues. Maybe they had heard, as their forebears would have, that a battle was to be fought, and they moved on. Their dark line passed. As the sounds faded into the night, Omar started out again.
An hour later, they were near to the road, the bridge and the glow of the sentries’ cigarettes. The iron-hooped sides of the bridge were lit by the lights of the patrolling armoured personnel carrier.
The sacks with the mines were dumped on the scraped earth beside the road.
Haquim said, ‘If the tanks come, if she is wrong, only your skill can save us.’
‘I can do my best, friend, but I do not know whether my best is enough.’
‘I do not ask for more. Let us pray to God she is correct, that the tanks will not come
…’
‘Then I’ll sit in my chair with a beer and a book.’
Haquim hit him hard on the arm. Gus thought that the old soldier equally disliked contempt and frivolity. Haquim was gone, and with him the men who had carried the sacks. He was alone with the boy. The embankment of the road towered above him. He watched the personnel carrier reach the bridge ahead, then reverse and turn, its searchlight spearing the flat, barren ground. They were deep in the ditch below the embankment when it returned, and the searchlight’s beam was far above them. They tracked away from the bridge to a place where the embankment was lowest, and Gus armed the mines, while Omar scratched the holes for them.
The burden crushed him. They depended on him.
There were many who saw him go.
The logistics officer in the command bunker, puzzling over the reasoning behind the decision to withdraw two of the three infantry battalions to Kirkuk and even more about the complex manoeuvre to achieve it at night and in secrecy, saw him kick himself up from the chair where he had dozed, hitch on his backpack, sling his rifle, call his dog and go out into the night.
The logistics officer called after him, ‘Hit the bastards, Karim, hit them so they scream.’
The sentry ran from behind the sandbag wall and wrenched open the wood-framed wire gates. He was about to scurry back to the security of the sandbags when he realized that the officer stood erect as if no danger could confront him. He saluted clumsily. The officer thanked him, as if he were a friend, and he walked through the gate with the dog.
His bulky over-suit dripped with fresh grey mud, and the same mud was embedded in the dog’s coat. The sentry saw him unhook his rifle from his shoulder, then hold it loosely across his body as he slipped through a pool of light and away into the shadows. He knew the bandit army coming towards them was led by a woman; it was said, in the tent where he slept when not on sentry duty, that bullets could not harm her, that she was the devil’s child. He thanked his god for sending the officer with the big rifle who went to break the magic of the witch.
While Isaac Cohen, Mossad man, slept in his eyrie, the wind-bent antenna sucked down signals, which the computers decrypted.
He slept without a care.
Chapter Eleven
The brigadier, dressing in the darkness before dawn, had selected his best uniform with the medal ribbons of three decades of military service. The orderly had made a fine job of polishing his boots. He had chosen to wear his brigade’s scarlet cravat, which hid the heave in his throat. In the shining holster on his webbing belt was his service pistol, loaded and armed. His heart pounded, dinned in his ears, and he did not at first hear the shout from his orderly, a man he would trust with his life.