‘If you used your eyes, Sarah, you’d see that I’ve got a job of work here.’
‘Please, Joe, it’s important to me – and I think it’s important to him.’
He swore under his breath, pushed himself up, gathered together his probes and the shovel and the roll of white tape, and walked back up the cleared path. She showed him the map and gave him the grid-reference figures. He climbed into the passenger seat and planned a route.
The dog’s panting was worse. Aziz, himself, even in the heat when the sun was high, could fight thirst and endure a dried-out throat and the aching in the stomach.
He had no water for the dog. Even if he had had water in his bottle, if he had remembered to fill it from puddles or the rushing streams during the night, he would not have been able to retrieve it from his backpack because that would have created too great a disturbance. With gentle movements of his trigger hand, he tried reaching behind him, to soothe the dog’s heaving motion, but his eye never left the ’scope as he tracked it across the far wall of the valley.
The crows were lower in their wheeling flight. He found now that they came into view, and sometimes he allowed them to lead him in effortless slow arcs. When he followed them, raking the ground against which they flew, he was more relaxed, his eyes less tired.
But the crows, wary and wild, were dangerous to him. The crows, with their suspicion and their needle-sharp eyesight, were on level flight with the stone slab at the plateau’s rim. If they saw him move, they would twist away. If they spotted his head moving or his body turning, they would scream their warning. They were his enemy and his ally.
‘My friend, how goes it with you? How is the hunger, and the stiffness? Are you well, my friend, or are you suffering? If you move the crows see you, if they see you I see you
… but it is the same for the two of us. It is my dog that suffers worse than me and I cannot tell him that his suffering is not for a great time longer.’
In front of Aziz, where he had cleared the bracken, there was a small patch of shadow thrown from the stone slab. The shadow reached, now, to the muzzle brake that reduced the flash signature on firing. When the sun had lowered behind him, when the light of it shone with force onto the far valley wall, when it covered the cleared space in front of the brake, then he could loose the dog to tumble down the path and drink in the stream on the valley floor. Then it could go to its work. If he was to win, and earn the right to walk with the great men, then the dog was the key.
Aziz soothed the dog, and watched the crows floating lower.
It pecked at a worm, sodden, lifeless, drowned in the dirt.
The bird strutted in front of Gus, holding the worm in its beak, and gobbling it down.
He had watched the drifting tilt of the sun and in his ’scope there were now small shadows in front of the rocks on the far side of the valley, and in front of the bushes. The advantage was ebbing towards the man across the valley as the haze of the heat cleared.
Gus knew why the crows flew lower, but he could shut that from his mind and the mass of flies that swirled round him. The ants had reversed their march and came back over him, eagerly searching for flesh to bite. Some had crawled into his socks, down the ankle support of his boot, had found the open blister, had used their teeth on it and their venom. He could dismiss that pain and that raw irritation, the stiff ache of his body and the growl of his stomach, the stink of urine in his trousers – but it was the small bird that frightened him.
The instructors who had been with him on the Common then sat with him in the pub bar had said that all wildlife should be avoided, but birds above all. There had been a sniper in the First World War, an Australian – and even eighty-odd years later the instructors had seemed to know the story by heart, searching for his Turkish opponent in a field of ripe barley. It had been extraordinary to Gus that their stories were old, as if past history carried relevance to today’s present… The sniper, crawling so slowly and so carefully through the barley, had seen a lark. There was no panic about the small bird as it flew for food and came back to one point in the field. On the death stalk, the Australian had been drawn towards the bird and gone close enough to see its nest and the fledglings it fed. Near to the nest, so still as not to disturb the bird and send it chattering away, was the profile of the enemy’s face. The Australian had killed the Turk, one shot, and felt no remorse, only ‘hot pride’. The lark had made the kill possible, had drawn the sniper’s eye to the target.
The bird had finished its feast on the worm.
It pirouetted on its spindly legs then twisted back to preen its wing feathers with its beak, then hopped up.
The bird was the size of the sparrows, robins, chaffinches and tits for which his mother put out seeds, nuts, lard. It had bright colours and a piping call. The bird’s new perch was on the foresight of the rifle. He was frightened because he did not know whether a man peering into a ten-times magnification telescopic sight, hundreds of yards away, would be drawn to follow those bright colours, as the Australian had been.
His survival, and he knew it, was about small things. With a newer, harsher intensity he began, again, the search of the imagined squares his mind made across the width of the valley.
The crows were lower, the sun was fiercer in his face, and the end of the towelling rope was close to his hand.
It would be soon.
Chapter Twenty
It was a landscape without pity, a place too barren for the civilization known by the watchers who dribbled towards their positions on the high ground above the valley. Too remote for settlements, too unyielding for cultivation, too boggy or stony or steep for the grass necessary for grazing animals. But each of them, coming to their viewpoints, recognized a savage, cold magnificence.
As they slowly descended, the crows were still wary of the feast presented to them, but were gathering courage as their shadows swept the stone slab, and the body lying on it.
On one side of the valley, facing the watchers, the shadows were lengthening and were darker. On the opposite side, where other watchers searched for a target to hold their attention, the sinking sunlight stripped the ground of cover.
None of the watchers believed that they had long to wait.
The dissembling heat was long gone as Aziz, relentlessly and remorselessly, searched the far slope with his closest focus on the plateau.
It surprised him that he had not yet seen the man. He knew that his own stamina would not survive another night and into another day, that he must force the issue in that late afternoon while the light gave him advantage. The skill of the dog would not last without food through another night, and nor would he. He reflected that the time was close when he must push his luck and his fortune. And he reflected, too, on the core conditions of the counter-sniper. The words he used in the lecture room at the Baghdad Military College, and on the range outside the city, played in his mind. Pro-action or re-action. The counter-sniper could either locate his target and fire the first shot in the combat, or he could lure the enemy into shooting at a false target, identify the firing position, then strike back. It was the great dilemma, but the choice was not his, because he had failed to locate the target, and the issue must be forced.
He ruffled the dog’s collar. The panting was not so fierce, it was now cooler in the cavity under the stone. His tiredness and his hunger worried him. If he did not shoot soon he was anxious that his hands, in fatigue, would shake and his eyes would be misted, and that – from the hunger – his concentration would waver. He talked softly to himself, and to the dog, as if that would calm the shake, clear the mist and hold the concentration. He imagined that he stood at the lectern in the lecture theatre at the Baghdad Military College, with students arrayed in front of him.