“proxy”. Other people do the dirty work, get the shit on their boots, follow the myth of a martyr, and we achieve – at minimum cost – the aims of our policy. Please, my dear, don’t look so squeamish.’
Willet interjected. ‘Are you telling us that there were two snipers in Kirkuk – and one of them was Gus Peake?’
‘That is a fair assumption.’
‘How long ago?’ A hoarse question.
‘Twenty-four hours. Probably while I was sitting here yesterday and poisoning myself
… Do you know about snipers?’
‘I failed the course.’
‘Bad luck. My father was a sniper in Normandy, 1944, but not a very good one. I rang him last night, to get a viewpoint. What he said, about the best of them that he’d met, they’re proud, solitary and elitist, and they never did understand when it was time to wander graciously home. I go as often as I can to see friends in Scotland. Sometimes it’s the time of year when the big stags are rutting and fighting off the young pretenders -basic machismo sexual stuff. I’ve that image in my mind of locked antlers. Up there you find the skeletons of massive beasts, antlers entwined, who fought too long, went on with a dispute ages after the combat should have ended, were mortally weakened, could not disengage, starved to death together. It is glorious and pointless. The Iraqi is a Major Karim Aziz who instructs on sniping at the Baghdad Military College. He wouldn’t know when to quit. Augustus Peake, in my opinion, has the temperament of a hunter. A gambler never walks away from a final throw of the dice, a hunter never turns his back on a target. More than courage, it is about obsession. Just before I came down to meet you, I spoke with my esteemed American colleagues at Incerlik for an update. There’s no word of Peake having crossed the ceasefire line… Let’s mix the metaphors. The gamblers have probably locked antlers.’
‘Did you like Peake?’ Willet asked softly.
‘Did I say I knew him? I didn’t hear myself say that.’
‘You knew him because you had met him, and you must have encouraged him.’
A cigarette end was discarded. The packet was retrieved from the pocket, another cigarette was lit. The packet was pitched expertly into a rubbish bin beside the bench.
George stood.
‘My advice, young man, learn to walk before you try to run.’
‘You encouraged him, and you may have helped to kill him.’
‘So nice to have met you, Carol. Something for you to remember, Ken. Policy is our god. If little people, silly people, stray off a safe path and into the territory of policy, they will be exploited. Policy is a long game. This game has only recently started – but if we already have a martyr and a myth, it has started promisingly. Good morning.’
When the dawn came, both men – too tired to dream – slept. Between them was the river and the wide stone on which the carcass of the boy lay.
Chapter Nineteen
Abruptly, suddenly, the dreamless sleep was finished.
Gus woke. He jerked up, blinked, and did not understand. He was wrapped in a grey-white shroud.
For a moment, no thought, he flailed at the sheet, beat at it because it seemed to suffocate him, and could not move it. His fists punched the sheet, were absorbed, and it pressed down on him.
He sagged back.
He wiped hard at his eyes. The sheet was pegged just below his feet and just beyond his head, and the memory of where he was, what he had done, filtered back to him.
The rain had stopped. There was a stillness. The cloud nestled over him, but the thunder had rolled on. The sleep had not rested him. Together with the understanding that the cloud over the valley covered him came the tiredness and the slow, aching pains and the hunger.
At that moment, because he had lost hold of the emotion, he could have gathered together his kit and the rifle, and used the cloud as protection to crawl away up the slope towards the hidden ridge. He could put it all behind him and start out on the journey to the frontier, to an airport or to a lorry park.
Gus thought he was blessed.
In the scramble of his thoughts, as the residue of sleep was pushed aside, he realized the value of the cloud that sat tightly on him. Faces and voices slipped across his mind, competing for attention. Each gave him an opportunity, and it was no longer possible for Gus Peake to gather together the kit and the rifle and climb to the top of the slope.
He murmured, ‘I am blessed because I am here and because you, sir, have followed me. There is no hate, no slogans of politics, there is no baggage of distrust. I don’t know what your shooting range is called, I don’t know where you go to pit yourself against opponents and elements. My range is Stickledown. It can be quite a pleasant place in summer – birds, flowers, good light – and it can be a hell of a place in winter, believe me, wind, rain and flat, dead emptiness all the way to the butts and the V-Bulls. Thank you for following me, because it’s like I’m on Stickledown and shooting for a silver spoon, and you’re on your range and shooting for whatever prize is important to you, and for both of us it is real. You could have walked away from me, I could have walked away from you, and both of us would have been left with dried-out lives. Do you understand me, sir, am I making sense? No-one else will understand me or understand you but, then, I don’t think either of us would ask them to. We are blessed, we can only use the blessing. I’d like to have met you, and talked with you, but…’
He could not hear the rambled words he murmured. It might have been the tiredness, the pain or the hunger, but he felt, to a slight degree, better and more settled for having talked. He thought those other voices – from the kitchen, the factory, on the Common, at the tent camp, in the office, on the bench – would have understood what he said, and why.
Blessed…
He shook himself, cleared the chaff from his mind. The talk was finished. He was blessed because he was given time by the density of the cloud hanging in the valley.
Where he lay there was sparse cover from stubby wind-broken bushes with the first buds of bilberry fruit and a rock that covered his shoulders and flattened lifeless bracken.
It was a useful place for a firing position. He felt a keening breath of wind on his face: he must use his time because soon the wind would carry away the cloud cover and he would be able to see what lay before him. He rummaged in the rucksack for rounds of his Green Spot ammunition, took two from the tissue paper in which they were individually wrapped to prevent scrape noise. The magazine was already loaded on the rifle, five bullets, and he did not believe he would have an opportunity to fire more than one. He polished the two rounds so that the Full Metal Jackets shone, would catch the light when the cloud was gone. He had no string, or bandages, so he unwound the towel from the barrel and working parts of the rifle, made slits in it with his penknife at the ends then tore off narrow strips of fraying cotton. He knotted them together. Because of the thinness of the strips, the cotton rope he made would not take a weight and would snap at a violent pull, but it would be of sufficient strength for his purpose. He would have liked it longer, but that was not possible. He tied one end of the slim rope to a shoulder-strap of the rucksack and tested the knot with a gentle jerk. The rucksack shivered with a slight movement.
He was satisfied. His hand dipped again into the rucksack and retrieved a khaki woollen ski hat, and used the penknife to snip off more stems of the bilberry bushes, weaving them between the stitching.
He placed the rucksack half behind the rock and masked it with bracken fronds. He laid the two rounds of Green Spot ammunition on top, and behind them he put a stone the size of his hand. Over the stone he placed the wool hat.
He crawled away, paying out the length of towel rope, burying its length under further pieces of bracken. He used the sideways crawl – which they had shown him on the common and called the ‘slug’ crawl – so that the trail was minimal. When he had paid out the towel rope he was some twenty feet away from the rucksack. He was on a flat ledge of broken-down bracken, without stones, rocks or bushes, without serious cover.