It was little, and it was late.
The general believed that his career of distinction had been broken by a sniper who had outwitted him. By his own words he had given a definition of the evidence of treachery
… His orders were broadcast on the radios linking the units.
The senior man from the Estikhabarat beckoned to him. There would be more of them in the corridor outside the bunker, and more on the steps.
Rather casually, so as not to create alarm among the staff officers round him, he dropped his hand to his holster, drew his service pistol, held it for a moment beside his trouser leg, then pulled it up, poked the barrel into his mouth, and squeezed the trigger.
They were at a road block.
‘All my fucking life, from the first fucking war I went to, to the fucking last, I am fucking blocked by ignorant, fucking illiterate peasants,’ Mike said.
‘What’s killing me is that the goddam money is in that fucker’s pocket,’ Dean said.
They sat on the road beside the wheels of the Mercedes. The Russian had left them.
He’d flashed greenbacks, their bloody greenbacks, he’d been allowed through the block after he’d paid off the thugs there. He’d hitched a ride on a jeep mounted with a machinegun, and no doubt lost a few more of their bloody greenbacks. He was long gone up the road.
‘To be so near to a story and not to be able to touch it, that is very, very painful,’
Gretchen said.
‘Is there anything more fucking depressing than being stopped at a fucking road block, with the fucking story in sight?’
‘When your wallet’s empty, no.’
‘But, there again, no story is worth being killed for.’
There was a distant thud of artillery fire and a long way ahead were palls of hanging smoke. The men at the block grinned venomously and repeated that it was too dangerous for honoured visitors to go up the road. They were into the third hour at the road block, and the second hour after the Russian had left them.
‘Do they know who we fucking are?’
‘Perhaps the fat crook only told them who we used to be.’
‘We are nobody, we represent people who do not care.’
Each of them, caught the wrong side of the road block, knew what they were missing.
They could hear it and, with it, fifteen thousand dollars burning up.
‘I bet nobody’s told the bitch that she could be leading tomorrow night’s news.’
Mike and Dean and Gretchen smoked, chewed gum, ate melting chocolate, did nothing, waited.
The sun was not yet at its zenith, but it was already the end of a perfect day.
Gus and Omar watched the line of tanks and armoured cars fan out beside the road.
They were among the great glacial smoothed rocks of the riverbed. He could have fired again but he had long learned on Stickledown Range that a perfect day could not be repeated so soon. With the tanks and armoured cars, toys in the distance, were cranes to drag clear the disabled T-72s… He imagined the spitting anger of the unit’s commander when he found the handkerchief scale of the minefield, and the slightness of the mantrap.
He wondered also when he would next see Joe Denton – if ever – to talk him through it, and thank him. Away to his right, a straggling column of soldiers crossed the bridge.
As he crawled up from the river and started to walk away towards the crossroads, the shivering began in Gus’s body. He lurched and might have fallen, but the boy caught him, supported him.
When the shooting had died, and the anguish of trying to protect her, Haquim took some men and went to search.
There was little for him to find.
He stood beside the discarded marker, the scrap of cloth draped over the branch. If he had looked for it in the battle, from the ditch beside the road, he would not have seen it. If he had seen it he would have thought it had been blown there on the wind. It was a short link with death, her death.
His knee hurt fiercely, but he strode on briskly away from the road and from the hanging cloth.
The single discarded cartridge case caught his eye when he was almost upon it. It was a shorter link with death, Meda’s death. Behind it was a shallow depression in the ground in which a man’s body could just have been concealed. In front of it was a plate-sized piece of cracked earth with a small gouge in the centre of it. It was a new form of warfare for him. Her life, all their lives, hung on a scrap of cloth that he had not seen, and the amount of water poured onto the ground under a barrel tip.
There was nothing more to find. Haquim left the watered ground, the cartridge case and the strip of cloth behind him – and reflected that one sniper had lost a battle, and another sniper had won it.
Willet woke.
The dream had been a nightmare. He was sweating. The last moments of his sleep, while the nightmare was rampant, had pitched and tossed him in the bed… He was the sniper, lying in a shallow ditch covered with sacking and earth. He was deafened by the clanking rumble of the approaching tanks. He was screaming for help from his mother and from Tricia as the crushing tracks came closer. He was trying to crawl from the ditch, under the great shadow of the tank. He was pulped, mashed, by the tracks, and his mother did not answer his screams; neither did Tricia.
He sat on the bed, shook, then staggered to the small bathroom and flushed cold water over his face.
He turned on the radio to find that statistics were running riot: home owners’ mortgage rates were being lowered by a half of 1 per cent; waiting lists for hip-replacement operations were up by 3.25 per cent; truancy in a school serving a sink estate in the northeast had risen by 5 per cent; travel companies reported that bookings by retired
‘greys’ going after spring sunshine in the Mediterranean had increased from the previous year by 9 per cent; the government’s popularity had dipped by 1 per cent… Life was about fucking percentage points. Life was about money in the pocket, non-critical illness, loutish kids, holiday breaks, and the rulers’ ratings. It was not about Mr Augustus Henderson Peake or his rifle in combat against tanks. Money, ailments, kids, holidays, politics were the spider’s web that constricted Ken Willet’s life, and the lives of everyone he knew.
He went back to his computer. He felt a deep resentment for Peake, the transport manager who had broken free of the web. He could not have done what Peake had, gone into combat. His innermost thought, which he would not share: the survival of Peake would belittle him, the professional soldier.
He typed briskly.
MILITARY TRAINING: This interview, however, failed to provide evidence of the necessary expertise in utilizing to the full the AWM’s capability. I can imagine situations where AHP will gain short-term successes. Without the necessary training, I would believe it unlikely that AHP can influence any important combat situation. Excitement, battlefield adrenaline, commitment are insufficient substitutes for extensive training under the guidance of experts.
I continue to rate medium-term survival chances as slim to nonexistent.
Willet shut down the machine.
He pulled his road atlas off the shelf and looked for the best route to south Devon.
Chapter Twelve
‘Do you know that you stink? I hear that you are a tank killer.’ The Russian stood over him.
Gus lay on the sandy ground, his head on his rucksack, propped against a jeep’s wheel.
The boy was sitting cross-legged beside him. The jeep was a few paces inside the wide circle of men. Some squatted, some crouched, some stood, and they held their weapons and watched. In the centre of the circle with Meda, with the maps, were agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim. The great ring around them listened in silence to the bickering between the warlords, and the interventions of Meda as she stabbed her finger at the maps. Each time the Russian spoke there were concerted grunts and hisses from the peshmerga nearest to him, protests at his voice, but he ignored them.