He had no doubt that the time would come when he would see her.
Major Karim Aziz sensed that a line formed. It stretched across the Old Quarter, its median point at a range of 450 metres, and he adjusted his elevation for that point. The smoke helped him, its billowing spirals told him the wind factor was minimal, but that was outweighed by the greater problem of its interference with his vision of the fighting ground. That median point was an abandoned jeep. Once he had taken it as his point, he tracked along the line on either side of it, slowly, so that the view through the lens would not distort.
It was a blurred movement at the extremity of the lens.
First he saw the figures running from the collapsed doorway and jumping into the jeep.
A man was bent over the steering wheel, reaching down, magnified, desperate to start it. Another man, turbaned, bearded, swathed in ammunition, was behind the mounted machine-gun. Only when the jeep jerked forward, when her body was thrown back against the support of the front passenger seat, did he see her.
The jeep had moved forward, then it was reversing, then it was lost behind a swathe of smoke. He could not follow it, but he had seen her face. He felt a great calmness. He had seen her face and the anger at her mouth. He wondered if she doubted herself, if she knew that it was over, not how it would end, but that it was finished.
The jeep emerged from the smoke, and Aziz’s finger made the intuitive adjustment to the elevation turret, one click, an additional 50 metres of range, watching as it swerved to the right at a tight junction.
He saw the jeep, her face, the driver’s, the shop behind them from which flames licked, as the steering was wrenched hard over. He could not hear the distant scream of the tyres, or the blast in his ears as he fired.
Strangely, slowly, the jeep toppled over after it had crashed against the wall. For a few moments, a seeming eternity, it was supported by the machine-gun and there was a gap from which the gunner and the driver scrabbled to free themselves, but then the mounting on the machine-gun collapsed: the jeep rocked and was still but for the spinning wheels.
His finger was on the trigger, slight pressure. He watched for her and did not see her. The gunner, delirious with shock, ran. The driver twitched and died.
He recognized the older man running forward from the ditch at the crossroads. He could have shot him – afterwards he would be unable to analyse why he had not fired on him as he limped forward and tried to lift the upturned jeep alone. He watched him stagger away, heaving for breath, then cup his hands to his mouth and bellow at the fire and the smoke for help.
No help came.
The man tried again to lift the jeep, and failed. A mortar shell exploded a little distance beyond it. He could not hear the singing of the shrapnel at that distance, but he saw the man blown over and begin to crawl away on his stomach. He knew that she was under the jeep. Through the ’scope, he fancied he saw tears on the man’s face.
Aziz walked from the balcony into the bedroom. The dog was asleep on the pillows.
He called it. He crossed the living room. He did not look at the old whore from Malmo who had reached Kirkuk, the end of the road. She was slumped in a chair with the bottle beside her and the glass in her hand.
‘Will he come? Will he come tonight?’
He went down the stairs, pride coursing through him. He had made the most important shot of his career. *** She was trapped, in darkness. She had heard Haquim’s shouts: he would have gone for help. When the jeep had overturned she had covered her head with her arms, and now she could not move her arms and her legs were wedged. The weight of the grenades pressed against her chest. She could not see and could not move, and the stench of the fuel engulfed her. She knew that Haquim had gone for help because she could no longer hear him, and the shooting was fainter. She thought that the men must now be near to the governor’s house. When the firing moved away people would come from their houses, where they had sheltered, and they would help to lift the jeep and free her.
Time passed, slipped away from her. She did not know how long, could not see the hands of her watch. Gus would be searching for her now. She tried to remember the touch of his lips. Gus had killed the helicopters, as he had promised he would. He would come to find her.
There was no firing. If the men were near to the governor’s house, she could not understand why she could not hear the firing. There were voices, the scrape of boots.
She heard the grunts and the curses. The jeep was lifted. She blinked in the narrow shaft of sunlight and a post was pushed under the jeep’s door, as if to prop it while they took new grips. They should hurry. She would lead the last assault on the governor’s house. She did not know how they could have gone so far without her.
The jeep rolled back. She clung to the seat as it was lurched over, felt the relief of freedom until she saw the ring of soldiers and the guns pointed at her.
She remembered what Haquim had said… She was slumped in the seat. Her fingers, awkward, clumsy in the moment, groped for the ring of the pin on the grenade that was closest to her heart. A rifle butt smacked into her face and she was dragged clear of the jeep.
There was an officer behind the soldiers who cradled a big rifle like Gus’s, and who wore a smock like his gillie suit. A dog sat disinterested beside his boots. He watched as she was searched, as the grenades were stripped from her chest, as her tunic and blouse were ripped open and dirt-grimed hands patted the skin of her breasts, waist and thighs, and lingered though they found nothing. He turned and walked away.
A family had come out from the door of a house. They wore their nightclothes -grandmother, parents and children. The soldiers held her so that the family could spit on her in turn.
It had taken Haquim a full fifteen minutes to make contact with one of the groups, to extract them from a close-quarters fire-fight, to organize them, to bring them forward towards the upturned jeep. From 200 metres, through the drifting smoke, he saw the family spit on her, then saw her hustled away.
As the word of her capture spread, the attack stalled. The line sagged, then broke. An ordered retreat became the rout of a rabble. By the time they reached the city limits, many had thrown away their weapons and run.
In his life as a Kurdish fighter, Haquim was familiar with defeat – but none hurt him harder than this. The immediate goal was to cross the barren open fields, to leave the fires in the Old Quarter behind them and the flame of Baba Gurgur, and reach the high ground.
They had no friends but the mountains. He had heard her say: ‘We will sacrifice everything that we have – our lives, our homes – for Kirkuk.’ His back was turned on her but he could not forget that last sight, Meda small and without defence, hemmed in by the bodies of the soldiers.
He stumbled on, in his personal agony, towards the safety of the hazy blue line of the high ground.
‘What do you hear, Mr Gus?’
‘I hear nothing.’
‘What do you not hear, Mister Gus?’
‘I don’t hear anything.’
‘Mister Gus, you do not hear the shooting.’
In reverse and faster, they were making the same arced march as in the previous night.
Away to his left was the pall above a part of the city. For several minutes Gus had been aware that the shooting was finished, but he had said nothing and pressed on, had harboured it to himself. He wondered how many minutes it had been since the boy had realized that the shooting – far away, distant but clear – had died. He was a sharp little beggar and Gus thought that Omar would have realized before himself that it was over.
He said savagely, ‘Absolutely correct. There’s no shooting.’
‘If they had reached the governor’s house, then there would still be shooting.’
‘Correct again. You are, Omar, a fount of bloody wisdom.’