‘You’re wrong.’
She laughed in his face. ‘I am right, always right. You are wrong, always wrong.’
‘It is madness.’
Haquim heard the hostile rumble in the throats of the men around her. He fought for their lives and they did not recognize it. She danced on him. Everything he had achieved in a lifetime of soldiering she danced on, as if it were worthless. He had told the Englishman of his long march across the country when he had brought the peasant boys back to their homes, and at least the Englishman had listened with respect. He had held the pass with the rearguard so that the refugees could reach the safety of the frontier; without value. He did not dare to look into her eyes for fear that she would entrap him, too… but he would lay down his life to protect her.
‘You should not be frightened, old man. We are not frightened, nor Mr Peake. Trust me. We are two hundred and eighty. We are in groups of twenty men. We are in houses, gardens, alleyways, yards, not in the roads where they have barricades and tanks. They will not have the helicopters to search for us because Mr Peake will not be frightened.
We are going forward. You will sleep, tonight, in the governor’s bed, while I direct Kirkuk’s defence from the governor’s office.’
‘If you get to the governor’s house, how long do you think you can hold it?’
‘Until they come, a few hours, it’s all we need.’
Still, Haquim did not dare to look into the light of her eyes. He rasped, ‘Who comes?’
‘It is because you are frightened, old man, that you are stupid… The pigs will come, of course. Bekir and Ibrahim will come – all of the peshmerga will come. They wait a little way off. They need me to give them courage. When I am in the governor’s house they will have the courage and come. It will happen.’
At last, reluctantly, Haquim looked into her face. The sneers and taunts had gone. He was responsible. He had heard talk of her, gone to her village, listened to her, believed in her, promised her grandfather that he would watch over her, had taken her to meet agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim, and he had watched the little army swell. The smile caught him as surely as the barbed hooks the children used when they caught fish off the dam of the great Dukan reservoir. He took her hand. There were grenades on straps against her chest.
He placed his hand, with hers inside his, on the metal of the RG-5 fragmentation grenade that was closest to her heart.
‘If I am with you and believe you will be captured, then I will shoot you. If I am not with you, and you will be captured, please, please, I beg it of you, pull the pin.’
Against the wire that stretched either side of them, limitless until lost in the darkness, Gus used the binoculars and confirmed what he already knew. The range was too great – they had to go through the wire.
So little time… A jeep passed, idled into his view and he was close enough to it to see the faces of the soldiers. There was a tumbler strand a foot above the ground into which the mesh wire was buried, another at the waist height of a standing man, another at the eyeline of a man at full height and just below the stretched coils of razor wire. They began, frantically, to dig with their hands at the dry soil.
There was a growing smear of grey-gold light behind the faraway mountains.
Three helicopters were on the bright-lit apron, slug beasts; he had been told they would be the Russian-built Mi-24 gun-ships, and if they caught her in the open with anti-tank missiles, rockets and the rapid-fire machine-gun, she was gone, and it was finished. He dug, ripped his nails, scraped the skin from his hands.
The tankers backed away. The crews, in loose-fitting flying-suits, were walking round the beasts, approving the fitting of the ordnance stowed under the wings.
They had reached the bottom of the wire, but the deeper earth was harder, drier. The boy used a knife to stab into the ground and Gus scraped it back behind him. The light was growing, the time was slipping away. The hole widened. The boy hacked down into the earth and Gus shovelled it aside. He should have been resting, should have been calm and with the chance to watch for wind variation over the expanse of ground between the fence and the apron area where the helicopters were readied to fly. The boy, eel-like, wriggled down into the hole and then began to chop at the soil on the far side of the wire until it sprouted up as if a maddened mole made the tunnel. Omar was through.
Gus heard the whine of a helicopter engine starting and saw the first lazy turns of the rotors.
He tore off a hessian strip from his suit and gently looped it over the lowest of the tumbler strands.
As he passed the rifle through the cavity, the boy took it. He crawled into the hole and stuck. Omar dragged at his shoulders. Gus was stuck fast. He saw only the darkness of the hole… If the tumbler strand was disturbed the sirens would blast, the jeep would come, and the helicopters would fly… His head burst out into the light.
The pitch of the engines rose.
They crawled, together, on their bellies towards the helicopters.
AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE.
6. (Conclusions after interviews with personnel at CTCRM, Lympstone conducted by self and Ms Manning – transcripts attached.) MILITARY TRAINING: The normal duration of a sniping course would be 3 weeks, AHP was given 72 hours (less minimal sleep time) of concentrated Fieldcraft and Tactical training. It is possible he would have absorbed a considerable amount of what he was told, shown and briefed on, but at best the knowledge will remain superficial. Also, he has been educated in procedures that would be adopted by a regular army where he would be provided with all necessary support. AHP is not in such an environment and will be operating alongside irregulars of doubtful quality.
TACTICAL TRAINING: AHP, at CTCRM, received specialist advice from 5 sergeant instructors – but I consider that given by Sgt Stevens, MM, to be the most important. Sgt Stevens served in northern Iraq in 1991 in the Safe Haven operation for Kurdish refugees, and therefore had a first-hand knowledge of the terrain; he stressed to AHP that the further south the irregular force probed, so would increase the technical superiority of Govt of Iraq forces. Emphasis was placed on the use of the AWM Lapua Magnum rifle’s armour-piercing capability against helicopter gun-ships, and the need for bold and imaginative counter-measures against such a threat. (The fact that AHP is a civilian, not hidebound by standard military procedures, leads me to believe that boldness and imagination would be expected from him. KW) In the use of such tactics, the LOYALTY spoken of by Sgt Billings would probably cause AHP to push home an attack in situations where his personal safety is directly threatened.
Willet paused, his fingers lying limply alongside the keyboard. He wanted to push himself up from his chair, go to the window, pull back the curtains and open it. He wanted to shove his head out into the night air and shout over the roofs and the streets, over the crawling cars and the last stragglers going home from the clubs, to throw his voice far beyond and far away. He wanted to be heard by a man who sat huddled in the warmth of a gillie suit, who held the long barrel of the rifle, who waited for the dawn.
He wanted to yell, ‘Turn back, don’t be a stupid bastard… Walk away. It’s for nothing