The major had driven them out to the Common. The rain came from low cloud that settled on the ridge a thousand yards or so from where Sergeant Billings sat. There was little to see and Ms Manning stood back, with the major, and had opened a brightly floral umbrella. Willet crouched beside the sergeant and watched the observers, who stood like old fence posts in the dead foliage on the slope and waited for Sergeant Billings to direct them. Willet had seen no movement, and he’d been passed a pair of binoculars, until the sudden murmur of Billings’ voice into a pocket radio sent the left-side observer tracking fast into a clump of flattened ochre bracken. The weird shape of a man in a gillie suit, covered with bracken sprigs and heather, emerged from under the observer’s feet.
‘Wrong mix of camouflage – he rushed it,’ Billings mouthed. ‘Too much bracken when he was in the heather, too much heather in the bracken. Shouldn’t have used bracken until he was out of the heather. He’s failed. Actually, he’s lucky. If he’d been in the field and I’d been the counter-sniper, he’d be dead.’
‘How long was Peake here?’
‘Three days.’
‘Is that long enough?’
‘It was all the time Gus had. Yes, it was long enough.’
‘Doesn’t seem long.’
The failed sniper, who would be dead if he had been in the field, tramped miserably towards them.
‘That jerk’s been here a month, great on the written stuff, useless on the practical. It depends where you’re coming from. Gus was coming from the right direction, Gus had my dad to teach him, like he taught me. Dad understood ground, understood the animals he stalked…’
‘I was told he was a poacher, your father.’
‘What the landowners called him, and the magistrates. Dad could have got up close enough to undo your bootlaces. He told me he was going to northern Iraq. It was about his grandfather, he said. I remember his grandfather, a good old boy, but Gus’s father was crap. He said my dad was a bad influence – but at least my dad might just keep him alive
…’
There was another murmur into the radio and the right-side observer plunged off into a low gorse thicket and identified the target, spotted through the sergeant’s binoculars at 624 yards. Again Willet had seen nothing.
‘What was his mistake?’
‘He’s got hessian net over the lens of his ’scope. He let the net get snagged in the gorse. I saw the lens.’
‘So, he’s dead.’
‘Failed or dead, take your pick. I spotted Gus morning and afternoon the first day, morning and afternoon the second day, morning on the third day, and each time he was closer to me. The third afternoon, I didn’t get him. What I can say to you, Mr Willet, it would take a real class counter-sniper, as good as me, to bust Gus.’
‘Why did you help him? You put your career on the line, your pension with it. You were in flagrant abuse of Queen’s Regulations. Why?’
For the first time, the sergeant’s eyes flicked away from his binoculars. He had a strong, weathered face and piercingly clear eyes. ‘It was owed him, because of his loyalty.’ The eyes were back to the binoculars. ‘I had a debt to him because of his loyalty to Dad. You called my dad what the landowners and the magistrates called him, a poacher. A poacher is a thief in the eyes of those turds. He got sent down, my dad did.
He was locked up in Horfield – that’s the gaol at Bristol – for three months. Mum and I, we hadn’t any money, we only got to see him twice. The first time, my dad was pathetic.
They might just as well have put him down as cage him. He was a free spirit, had to have the wind on his face, had to be out in the pissing rain. I cried all the way home and Mum wasn’t much better. The second time he was brighter, changed, and he said that Gus had been to see him. My dad thought he had plenty of friends before they locked him up, but Mum and me, and Gus, were the only ones who visited him. He’d taken the day off school, told his teachers he was going home for a family funeral, but he hitched rides up to Bristol and saw my dad. All the other friends had turned their backs on him. Not Gus.
That’s loyalty. He wouldn’t run out on you. He never saw my dad again… We moved and Dad was dead within the twelvemonth. Why? To me, loyalty is important. It’s the mark of a true friend, when you’re down the back’s not turned. What’s he doing there?
Will he make it through?’
‘I don’t know.’
Behind them, the major called out that he was taking Ms Manning to the shelter of his car. Willet seemed not to feel the rain dripping off his face. There was another failure, another death, another soldier tramping disconsolately forward after his position was identified. He told the sergeant that he would make damn certain that no blame accrued to him for helping the civilian, Augustus Henderson Peake, understand the trade of killing, and surviving.
‘What else did he learn here?’
‘I took him into the library, showed him what we had on sniping and signed them out in my name. In the evenings, off camp, I got the specialist instructors to meet him. There was Sergeant Williams who’s into dogs, because dogs are big for snipers, that’s tracker dogs. Sergeant Browne is weapons maintenance, Sergeant Fenton is camouflage, Sergeant Stevens is the top man for the tactics of using the AWM Lapua Magnum against armour, communications and helicopters. Sergeant-’
‘Did you say helicopters? You mean gun-ship helicopters?’
‘It’s not a cake-walk he’s gone on, Mr Willet. That’s why I passed him on to an old friend. Whatever they throw at him, he won’t back off. It’s a powerful thing, loyalty.’
He’d sent the signals first, then steadied himself and opened the secure voice link to Langley.
Caspar Reinholtz was alone in his office. The overall picture that he would share with the disembodied voices on the link was not for Luther, Bill and Rusty to hear.
He allowed few interruptions. The inquest would come later, a commission of inquiry, but his job now was merely to put flesh on the bones of another disaster in Iraq. Beside the receiver for the link was a sat-phone he would use as soon as he had finished with the link.
While he spoke, however hard he tried to cut her from his mind, the picture of the young woman was in his thoughts.
The great circle was tighter around agha Bekir, agha Ibrahim and Meda, but held at a respectful distance.
Gus heard the warbling pulse of the sat-phone, heard it because the men in the circle were quiet as they watched the feast of celebration. The chairs had been pushed aside and a rug laid out for the dishes of lamb and rice, and spicy vegetables. He knew what they ate because the scent of the food drifted across the open space of the circle. He sat against the wheel of the jeep and the boy was crouched beside him. The sat-phone cried to be answered. They would eat later, with all the men in the circle, then be briefed, then march in the dusk towards distant Kirkuk and the flame. The persistence of the sat-phone was silenced.
Gus watched idly. He saw agha Bekir put a dripping piece of meat in his mouth, hold the receiver to his face, and chew while he listened. Gus saw the sea-change.
The face clouded. Where there had been a wary smile there was now a concentrated coldness. The lines were back on the features. The boy had seen it and seemed to squirm; the murmur of voices in the circle was stilled and quiet laughter died. Agha Ibrahim was passed the sat-phone receiver and grains of rice slid from his fingers as he took it. He too listened, his face darkening, then threw the receiver away from him. Meda scrabbled on her knees across the rug, tipping aside food bowls and pots, and snatched it up. Gus heard her furious scream, and then she too dropped it. They were all on their feet. Agha Bekir was shouting to one side of the circle, and agha Ibrahim to the other, as if some strange apartheid divided their forces, and Meda was a small, spinning, yelling shape between them, and the rumble of the voices in the circle was confusion.