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hospital where she nursed children. Her father stared at the radio while her mother rinsed the plates at the sink; they wouldn’t have understood even if he had been able to tell them. He thought it was better that he had not come home earlier. The previous time, he had slipped into his home, a thief in the night, and snuggled against her back and known that she only pretended to sleep, and he had heard the tossing in their beds of his sons, the cough of her father, then the fear of the consequences he might inflict on them had ravaged in his mind.
    Aziz took the family car, the old Nissan Micra, to his workplace at the Baghdad Military College.

Chapter Two
    After the engine of the distant vehicle had stopped, he saw them come round the escarpment’s bend. There were two men with rifles, the escort, and a man and a woman who were unarmed and European. When they’d passed a small clump of winter-dead trees, the woman pointed to the smoke of the fire near to the track and ahead of them, and their pace quickened. They would have seen the spiral of the smoke, then the vehicles parked in the trees close to the shed.
    They had started to run. The unarmed man, the European, ran badly as if he had wrenched his back, but the woman turned, grabbed his arm without ceremony and heaved him forward to keep up with her. He stumbled and seemed to cry out, but she just tugged harder at him.
    Gathering strength to climb the other side of the valley and witness the result of his shot, Gus sat in the sunshine against the wall of the shed. The sweat ran in faint driblets against his skin under the weight of his gillie suit. The woman saw Meda sitting alone in the pasture grass, released her burden, let him slip then fall, and waved to her. He heard the broad ring of her fierce Australian accent.
    ‘Christ, am I glad to see you. We are in shit, Meda … You might just be a goddam angel … I’m trying to get my regional director to the border. Too much Irish last night –
    Christ, do we have hang-overs. The driver, the arsehole, took the wrong turn – alcohol poisoning’s his bloody problem. Obstinate bastard won’t admit he’s cocked it. We’re in the back end of bloody nowhere and aren’t the Iraqis just round the corner? Christ … We tried to turn but the bloody Cruiser’s stuck over a goddam rock. Do you believe it? We don’t have a bloody rope on board it or on the back-up. Do you have a rope? And maybe some bodies to help? If I don’t get him to the border, it screws everything, all the schedules, the exit visa, the flights, every bloody thing …’
    She was laughing, and Meda with her.
    ‘I mean, Meda, that arsehole was taking us into the Iraqi army checkpoint. Christ, they’d have thought it was bloody Christmas.’
    She was mud-smeared, her hair a flash of blond in the wind. Meda was leading her towards the shed and shouting to her men under the trees. And because she pointed to the shed, and the men ran ahead of her towards where he sat, the European man hobbled faster towards him.
    He didn’t know what he should do. He sat rooted to the ground, his back hard against the wall. A stampede was closing on him. He heard Haquim’s whispered voice, but didn’t respond. And then he saw the way the European man gazed at him with bright, staring eyes. He had been wearing the gillie suit for so many hours that it no longer seemed special.

    Haquim’s fist closed on his shoulder. ‘Get in, Mr Peake, get out of sight.’
    He was wrenched up, pitched inside the windowless shed, and crawled towards the far corner, into the darkness where his rucksack and the rifle he had cleaned earlier were.
    Perhaps he should have been sleeping, perhaps he did not realize the necessity of taking any opportunity to sleep. He had been too captivated by the tranquil beauty of the valley, and the eagle’s soaring flight, and too angered that Meda ignored him. Now, exhausted, he did not know why he was hurled into the back of the shed.
    The