The third book in the Nic Costa series, 2005

IT WAS NINE MONTHS NOW SINCE SHE’D SLIPPED OUT OF Iraq, six hundred dollars in her pocket, knowing instinctively what she needed: men who owned boats and trucks, men who knew the way to places she’d only dimly heard of and who could take a little human contraband there for the right price. There’d been no work, no money at home, not since Saddam’s soldiers came from Baghdad and took her father away, leaving them alone together in the damp, cold shack that passed as a farm, with its dying crops wilting under the oil smoke of the fields outside Kirkuk.

She’d watched the dry, dusty lane that led to their home every day for hours, waiting for him to come back, wondering when she’d hear that strong, confident adult voice again, bringing hope and security into their lives. It never happened. Instead, her mother went slowly crazy as the hope ran out, wailing at the open door for hours on end, not cleaning anything, not even talking after a while.

No one liked crazy people. No one liked the decisions they forced on others. One day a distant relative came and took both of them away, drove them for hours in a cart behind an old, stumbling donkey, then left them with an old aunt on the other side of the plumes of smoke. Just another tin shack, no money, too many mouths to feed. Her mother was completely silent after that, spent hours with her arms wrapped around herself, rocking constantly. No one talked to them much either. They took her to school only every other day: there was too much work to be done trying to dig a living out of the desiccated fields. Then soldiers came and the school closed for good. She’d watched as boxes of shells got shifted into the classrooms, and wondered how she was supposed to learn anything ever again.

Over all their lives now, bigger than the oil cloud and blacker too, hung the threat of war. The men said there’d been one before, when she was tiny. But this war would be different. This one would end matters, once and for all, make the Kurds free forever in a new kind of Iraq. They told a lot of lies. Either that or they just got things wrong. Men were stupid sometimes.

It was February when the soldiers came to occupy the farm. They were Iraqis. They behaved the way Iraqi soldiers did around Kurds. When they wanted something to eat, they came into the house and took it. When they wanted other comforts, other services, they took them too. She was scared. She was full of an internal fury too real and violent to share. She wanted to escape from this place, go somewhere new, anywhere, so long as it was in the West, where life was easier. There was no point in staying. There’d been gossip when they’d tried to sell what little produce they had in the neighbouring village one morning. About how the Iraqis killed the Kurdish men they took, put them down like animals. These whispered tales of horror turned a key in her head. Her father was dead. She’d never hear the comforting boom of his voice again. She understood now why her mother had retreated to some inner hell where no one could reach her.

So throughout each long day, as it became more and more dangerous to travel, she huddled in the corner of the squalid little shack and listened to the frightened talk around her. About death and war and uncertainty, and always, always, how more soldiers would come. Peshmurga. Americans. British. Men who would, she knew, look much the same as the Iraqis when she stared into their eyes. They would sound different, wear different uniforms, but they were just men, mortal men, bringing death and chaos along with them, invisible, ghostly comrades riding in the dun-coloured jeeps.

It happened on a cold, clear April day. The Iraqis had dug in next to the dank waters of the dead fish pond, by the puny patch of feeble squash plants, blackened by oil smog, at the end of their lane. Five men and a big gun pointed at the sky. They were worse than most: vicious, foul-mouthed, dangerous. Scared men, too, and she knew why. They had just the one shell, nothing more. They were sitting there, wondering how to give themselves up before the Americans came and killed them.

In the middle of the afternoon she’d watched as an ugly dark plane circled the farm, like an old metal bird undecided where to lay down its feet. She’d felt nothing, not even fear for herself. She’d stood outside the shack, ignoring the screams ordering her to hide, watching the fire streak from the black bird’s belly, race through the beautiful blue sky and wrap itself around the upright cylinder of the gun before the Iraqis even had a chance to spit back their single shell.

The plane sent the soldiers screaming out of their sandbagged home, flames licking at their contorted bodies. She wanted to see more, wanted to make sure this memory stayed with her because it was important. So she walked closer, hid in the stinking outside toilet, looking on through the battered palm thatching as the soldiers danced and rolled on the ground.

Even now, nearly a year later, she remembered what she’d thought at that moment. The sight reminded her of the travelling troupe of clowns who used to come through the village from time to time, back when her father was alive. One of her earliest memories was of being in his arms, watching them, almost hysterical with laughter. Even so, she was aware that there was something wrong when the clowns returned again and again, something cruel in their humour, in the way it exaggerated the stupidity and pain of existence and invited their audience to be amused by it. She had thought about laughing at the soldiers trying to save themselves from the flames that consumed their bodies. There were plenty of reasons to. The Kurds hated the Iraqis. The Iraqis hated the Kurds. Everyone hated the Americans. It was a world defined by hatred and perhaps that was, in the end, why people laughed, because it made the pain go away, if only for a little while.

But she didn’t have the time to stare at them, to try to find amusement in their throes. At that moment Laila was thinking of herself, certain that hatred was a luxury she’d have to save for later. Somewhere in this moment there had to be the chance of escape. Of fleeing this dying, parched land where there was nothing left for her anymore, no love and no hope.

When the flames died down she walked over to the soldiers. They were dead, contorted husks now, charred by the fire that had spat at them from the sky. Except for one. He clung on doggedly, trying to breathe through cracked, ruined lips, each attempt coming with pained effort. She thought he wouldn’t last much longer. So she slid her hand inside his jacket, staring all the time into his bright, terrified eyes. He mumbled something, a familiar insult, something about thieving Kurds. Then her fingers found the envelope and he started to sob like a child.

This shocked her. She’d stared at him, affronted, and spoke in good Arabic, since she made a point of learning as many languages as possible in the old school which was now gone, books replaced by munitions boxes. “You should go to God like a man,” she told him. “Not a child.”

Then she took everything she could from him-documents, coins, a pen, a watch, reasoning they would do a dead man no good anyway, and that a world in this condition could scarcely condemn a petty thief.

He must have been rich. Maybe a member of the party. He had close to $1,500 in mixed notes in an envelope. When she checked the other corpses, carefully prising away the burnt uniforms from the flesh beneath, she found more. Some were charred but they were dollars, the magical currency, and you could buy things just by waving the curled, brown sheets at someone. A man at a border post, say. Or the village elder-and there always was one-who knew the way out, the way West, where the rich people lived.