The Walking Dead

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.

He did not hurry. The gloves would have made his finger movements clumsy if he had rushed his work. His devices were manufactured to a foolproof standard…but he yearned to be away from this place. He hated it, feared it. He would be long gone before the boy walked with the waistcoat secreted under the leather jacket.

The farmer asked his wife, 'What do they do down there, all day every day?'

'Don't know and don't particularly care.' She was wrestling at the kitchen table with accounts.

He sipped his coffee. 'I'm not complaining. Their money was useful…It's just, well, what do they do?'

'Does it matter?'