'I am comfortable,' Ibrahim said hoarsely. 'But the flies are…'
He was interrupted, as if his query was unimportant. 'No matter, there is a spray in the kitchen that will kill them. What concerns me — is it too tight, is it awkward? I can take out a vent at the back if you need it looser.'
'It is not awkward.'
The jacket was lifted off the hack of the chair and passed to him.
'You will wear this? It is a good length. It is heavy enough not to show a bulge on your chest. Try with the jacket, but gently because the connections are not yet finally fastened. Do it.'
He smelt the leather, felt its strength, put his arms into the sleeves and let it settle on him.
'Button it, but not roughly.'
He did as he was told. The fingers were back at his chest and pulled at the jacket's front. He saw a flitting, coarse smile of satisfaction.
'Much room, enough, not too tight…You can take them off, but carefully.'
He dropped the jacket on to the floor, then worked the waistcoat off his shoulders, and felt freedom when he had shed its weight. It was taken from him and laid again on the table, but the flies were still in his face.
'What do I do now?'
'If you have a complaint about the waistcoat, you tell me. If you have no complaint, you go back to your room. Do not misunderstand me, young man. I am not a coffee-house talker. I am not a recruiter who persuades young men to rush towards Heaven. Others talk and others persuade, but I am an expert in ordnance. I am a fighter and I use what weapons are available to me. It was your choice to volunteer and your motivation is not my concern. Do you have a complaint?'
'No.'
'Then go back to your room.'
Ibrahim turned, bent and picked up the jacket that was his prized possession. He told himself, harsh words in silence, that he was not afraid, that he did not need to be comforted. He let himself out of the room and did not look back at the table and the waistcoat.
'If it is a problem, drop your trousers and piss on it.'
Tariq, now the Engineer, had learned the value of the suicide attack, of martyrs to God, as a junior lieutenant aged eighteen, serving in the front line of the Fao peninsula.
The problem was the overheated barrel of a PKMB 7.62mm Russian-built light machine-gun.
What the platoon sergeant had told him, Tariq had done. He had exposed himself, his head and shoulders above the parapet of sandbags. He had crouched over the barrel, loosened his belt, lowered his trousers and urinated on the barrel; steam in a vapour cloud had hissed off the metal. Then he had loaded another belt of ammunition, fired again — and they had kept coming.
The machine-gun position nearest him, thirty paces to his right, was abandoned. In the one to his left, fifty paces from him, the gunner had collapsed over the stock of his weapon and the corporal shook with convulsive sobbing. It was hard to kill kids. One man had run from the children's advance and another had collapsed, but Tariq had continued to shoot with bursts of six to nine bullets each time his finger locked on the trigger.
He knew that their ayatollah had said: 'The more people die for our cause, the stronger we become.'
The assault across open ground, beyond the swamp reeds, towards the machine-gun nests was codenamed Karbala 3 by the enemy. As they ran, the kids shouted in shrill wailing cries, 'Ya Karballah, ya Hussein, ya Khomeini.' They came in dense swarms. Tariq knew, because the Ba'ath officials had dinned it into every soldier on the forward positions, that children were used in the van of an attack so that their drumming feet would detonate the anti-personnel mines laid in front of the wire that protected the sandbag nests. By using children, the regular troops of the enemy and the Revolutionary Guard would not have to advance through minefields. In the opening year of the war, his sergeant had told him that the enemy's commanders had tried to use donkeys to clear the mines but when one had lost its legs in an explosion the rest had proved too obstinate to go on, even when gunfire was put down behind them; and in Iran there were more children than donkeys. He could barely see over the wall of the children's bodies in front of the wire. He fired, changed the belt, fired again. The gunner to his right had fled because his replacement barrel was now worn smooth and useless, as was the first. The gunner to his right had collapsed, traumatized at the killing of so many children.
Above the wall of bodies he saw myriad little heads, on which were bright scarlet bandannas, and faces that were smooth and young but contorted with hatred. He swept his sights over them. At fifty paces' range, the PKMB machine-gun — in the hands of a good, calm gunner — was said in the manual to have a 97 per cent chance of hitting a man-sized target. Harder to achieve that strike rate now because they were so small, but they compensated by bunching into groups, like kids running in a school playground. Some were caught on the wire and blood drenched their T-shirts, on which was printed the message 'Imam Khomeini has given me Permission to enter Heaven'. They screamed then for their mothers, not for their ayatollah, and he could see, over the V sight and the needle sight, the little plastic trinkets hanging on string from their necks.
He knew what the lightweight trinkets were because the Ba'athist official had lectured them on the matter. The children wore plastic keys looped into the string. The keys would unlock the gates of Heaven for them. The official had told his unit that, earlier in the war and during the Karbala 1 campaign, they had been made of metal but there was a shortage of that now in Iran and plastic was more available and cheaper to manufacture.
That day Tariq, who was a teenage lieutenant, had fired in excess of 5,500 rounds of 7.62mm ball ammunition at children. When dusk had come, and the wire in front of him was unbroken, he had ceased firing and the screams had died. In the silence there was only the whimpering murmur of the wounded. He had learned the value of the willing martyr when he had had to piss on a machine-gun barrel, and had not forgotten it. For days afterwards, the crows came to feast and the stench grew. Then the armour had pushed forward, driving back the Iranian enemy, and bulldozers had been deployed to excavate pits and push the children's bodies into them.
A medal had been pinned on his chest by the President, and he had received a kiss on his cheeks, and the lesson of the martyr's awesome power had stayed with him.
Working at the stitching of the waistcoat, he could not recall how many martyrs he had helped on their journey to Paradise. Taping more securely the batteries' terminals to the wire, the Engineer knew with certainty that he created terror in the minds of his new enemy: the Americans and their allies.
The martyrs were merely weapons of war. They had no more significance to him than a shell, a bomb, a mortar round or a bullet. The martyrs performed the task he made for them and in return were given, perhaps, fifteen minutes of fame. Then the satellite television channel that had transmitted the video of them would move to another item.
It was irrelevant to' him whether he liked the boy or not. What mattered to the Engineer was that the boy walked without revealing himself, and that the leather jacket hid the bulges of the sticks of explosives, the bundles of contaminated nails, screws and ball-bearings.