Holding the Zero (27 page)

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 Kirkūk 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.

Every emotion of anguish was on the boy’s features.

‘What do they say?’

The boy piped, ‘They say it is finished. Meda will not believe them … They have the courage of sheep … They say it were better that it had never begun. Meda says tomorrow she will take them to Kirkūk. They say there is no air cover, that there is no mutiny in the Iraqi tanks, as they were promised. They say they are going home.’

Meda gripped their clothes in turn. She was ferocious in her attack, and she pleaded with them, but neither would catch her eye, as if they dared not, as if they feared her reproach.

The boy said, ‘They say that if they go now it is possible the revenge of the government will not be so great. The Americans’ promises are broken, they say they will never see Kirkūk. Meda says there is a place in history for them. They are worse than sheep when wolves come.’

For a moment, she hung on to the men, but they pulled clear of her.
Agha
Bekir and
agha
Ibrahim shouted their orders at the sectors of the circle. Meda was pleading with their men.

The boy’s passion was squeezed from him. ‘They say they are taking their men with them. Meda says she will be in Kirkūk in the morning, on her own if no man will follow her.’

On each side, the circle parted to allow the departure of the chieftains. Gus sat against the wheel of the jeep and held the big rifle across his legs. He felt a sense of calm because it was still a part of his perfect day.

Great shuffling columns of men passed her. She gazed on them with contempt. Gus saw the men who had used the wheeled machine-gun abandon it and walk on. He saw those who had run to the wire with her at the Victory City, and those who had gone down the road with her towards the barricade at Tarjil. A few broke the regimen of the columns and dropped down to sit in the dirt at her feet. He saw the big cars spurt away with their escorts of pick-ups and jeeps, and clinging in the back of one of them, amongst the men with guns, was the Russian. So, the bastard turned his back on licences for chrome, copper, iron and coal – and a small bitter smile hovered at Gus’s lips. He saw Haquim go to Meda, argue with her and try to pull her away, but she pushed him from her and his weight went on to his injured leg. He slipped to the dirt, and crawled away in his humiliation. Many went and only a few were left.

‘What are you going to do, Mr Gus?’

‘You should walk, Omar, you have a life to live.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Perhaps go and find something to eat.’

‘I cannot leave you, Mr Gus.’

They hugged each other. They were the transport manager and the urchin thief, and they clung to each other, were tied to each other as tightly as the chieftains’ ankles had been.

‘I am honoured to meet the sniper who does not fire.’

‘Do you wish to hear my report, Colonel?’

The new man, flown in from Baghdad, was rake thin. His uniform was immaculately creased and the medal ribbons on his chest were a kaleidoscope of colours. Major Aziz knew his name and his face from the photographs in the newspapers. The photographs always showed him at parades standing a pace behind the President. He wore the flash on his shoulder of the brigade of Amn al-Khass, the unit of the Special Security Service tasked with the protection of the President. It was predictable that a new commander would seek to belittle the men over whom he had authority, to demonstrate his power. In his filth, tired, hungry, Aziz stood loosely, not at attention, in the command bunker, and the dog lay in the dirt from his boots.

‘How many rounds have you fired, Major Aziz, in defence of our positions?’

‘I have fired once. I missed. Sniping is not an exact art, as you will know, Colonel. Do you wish to hear my report now?’

‘Perhaps your mind was resting on your duties as a kennel-boy. Get that fucking animal out of here, then clean yourself up,
then
make your report.’

Aziz had come back across the dried riverbed, and rejoined the road south of the bridge near to the raised embankment where the engineers still worked under floodlights to recover the last tank, and where the sappers had cleared the last mine. He had been given a ride back to Fifth Army. Then he had been told of the fate of the brigadier, the Boot –and of the general’s suicide. As he’d walked across the open ground towards the command bunker, he’d glanced at the squat cell block, and he had thought of his family.

Where he stood, the floor of the command bunker was scrubbed clean except for the dirt from his boots, but they had not been able to remove the blood spatters from the ceiling.

‘Were you at Susangerd, Colonel?’ He spoke quietly, as if in casual conversation. ‘I do not remember seeing you at Susangerd, nor at Khorramshahr. We did not meet, I think, in Kuwait City. Were you operational in al-Anfal? I look forward to hearing of the rigours of staff work in divisional headquarters.’

He saw the flush in the colonel’s face. Officers looked away. The recklessness was like a narcotic.

‘Forgive me, Colonel, my memory played a trick with me. I have fired twice. I fired at the woman and I missed. At Tarjil I fired at the commanding officer – and did not miss –because he betrayed the soldiers under his command. He was running away. I am prepared to kill any officer, whatever his rank and whatever his position of influence, if he betrays the trust placed in him by the army and, of course, the people of Iraq. Do you want to hear my report, Colonel, or do you want me to go back to the war?’

He bent and ruffled his fingers through the hair at the nape of the dog’s neck, then he looked up at the blood on the ceiling, and the sight of the small, barred windows of the cell block hooked his mind.

‘Make your report.’

Major Karim Aziz spoke of what he had seen. From a good vantage point, with enough elevation for him to look down a slight gradient into the camp, he had settled with his telescope, and the dog had been beside him. He told of the arrival of
agha
Bekir and
agha
Ibrahim, then of their abrupt departure. He said that a large proportion of the force of the
peshmerga
had followed after them in general retreat, but the woman remained at the crossroads with no more than three hundred men. He predicted an attack in the morning because he could see no other reason for her to stay. He described what he had seen in a flat monotone, and where he would be in the morning. He finished, saluted, called for his dog and shambled out of the command bunker.

The brigadier, the Boot, was a proud man but it was hard to have pride when lying in the corner of a cell in the piles of his own excrement and the pools of his own urine.

Maybe they rested, maybe they had gone to Communications to talk with the al-Rashid barracks, maybe they had left him to agonize on the future facing him before death.

The pain racked his body. There would be many, now, who would have heard of his arrest, knew that he faced torture, and who shook in the fear that he would name them.

Pride was the only dignity left to him. If he broke under torture, screamed out the names, then the last of the dignity would be taken. He heard the stamp of feet in the corridor, and the slide of the bolt. In the cell’s doorway, he saw the faces of the men who would try again to steal his pride.

He watched the
mustashar
hobble towards him.

There had been more than three thousand men at the crossroads, and now there were fewer than three hundred. One jeep still waited, with the engine turning.

Haquim winced as he bent his knee and lowered himself to sit beside Gus.

His voice was dried gravel under tyres, and sad. ‘You should go now. You should walk with me, Mr Peake, to the jeep, and sit with me and leave. You have done what you could.’

Gus looked into the eyes without light and the mouth without laughter and could hear only the sadness.

‘You can be proud that you came and that you tried to help. You are not to blame that the force against you is too great and the force with you is too small. It is the story of the Kurdish people. No man can call you a coward …’

‘May your god ride with you, Haquim.’

‘Do you think I am a coward, Mr Peake, or do you think it is the anger because she does not listen to me? May I ask you, has she made her apology to you for being wrong about the tanks? Has she?’

‘It is not important.’

‘She believes to apologize is to show weakness. The stubbornness is a death wish. She will neither apologize to you, nor accept that a march on Kirkūk with so few is like a death wish – for her and for everyone who goes with her.’

‘I wish you well.’

‘The spell of her holds you … and you think of me as a coward. I cannot run fast enough to be with her and to shield her. I have no reason to be here, to go into Kirkūk, to die under the light of the flame. I was not always a coward.’

‘I will remember you as a good and true friend.’

‘Listen to me. It is important, if I am to live with myself, that I tell you of the days when I was not a coward. I was a junior officer of artillery. For five years I was with an artillery regiment in support of the ground forces defending the Basra road. We were safe, we had deep bunkers to go into when the Iranians shelled us, but in front of us were our infantry. There was as much barbed wire behind our forward positions, where our infantry were, as there was to the front. They were trapped there, peasant boys, and behind the barbed wire were minefields to prevent them breaking and fleeing from the attacks. Behind the minefields were security troops to round up the deserters and shoot them. They were fodder for the cannons of the Iranians. At the end of the fifth year that I served there, in the heat and with the smell of death, I went alone in an evening into the marshes to see if I could find a forward position for an artillery spotter. I found them.

They were all Kurds. They were from Arbīl and Rawāndiz, Dihok and Zākhō, and there was one from the mountains near to my home at Birkim. I saw their terror of me. They thought I would call for security troops. My own blood, little more than boys, of my own people. I took off my badges of rank and threw them into the water. When the day ended we started out. I took them home, Mr Peake. We walked for a month, always at night.

There were eleven of these Kurdish boys, and I led them home to their mountains. We moved in darkness and hid in the days. We stole food, we avoided the road blocks. If we had been seen or captured, we would have died before firing parties or on the hangman’s rope. I brought them out of the marshes and across deserts, through fields, around cities, in the heat and in the cold. I delivered them, each of them, to their homes, to their mothers, to the mountains. I was not always as you see me now …’

‘May your god go with you and watch you.’

‘Should I tell you when I fought with the rearguard when the Iraqis came in the Operation al-Anfal – the name was taken from a
sura
in the Koran, the chapter that describes holy war against infidels – that name was used to legalize the murder and rape and looting of Kurds? Should I tell you how I fought to win time for the refugees in 1991, after the Coalition’s great betrayal? They will see what you have done against tanks –they will fly against you with the helicopters … I want to be with my children. I do not want to die for nothing.’

The tears streamed on Haquim’s face. Gus took his grimy handkerchief from his pocket, wiped them away and made smears on the other man’s cheeks.

The handkerchief was wet in his hand as he watched the jeep leave, watched it until it was small then gone into the mist that was thrown up at the cooling end of the day, and he thought of the helicopters.

They saw the cars speed through the road block with their escorts, then came the bigger column of lorries, pick-ups and jeeps, laden low with men.