The Walking Dead

A table had been brought into the room and sheets of old newspaper were laid across it. On the newspaper he had placed what had been bought for him the previous evening from his list. Reaching him were the smells of cooking, not the scents of the Arab food with which he was familiar, but the odour of an Asian curry; he could eat it but would not enjoy it. That door was closed and the curtains of the room given him were pulled tight across.

In the centre of the table, across the middle of a fold in the newspaper, he had placed the artefact of his trade: the stack of explosive sticks that had been retrieved from the cupboard of a boat's kitchen. The slim, shiny detonators lay at the edge of the table. Between the sticks and the detonators and over the rest of the newspaper were what he would need for the construction of the device: a loose waistcoat of cotton fabric and straps cut from a towel, a packet of heavy needles and a reel of thick thread, big batteries for a flashlamp torch, coils of multicoloured wire, a soldering iron, a paper bag of two-inch nails, another of carpet tacks, a small plastic sack of screws, washers, bolts and ball-bearings, and a button switch from the flex of a table light. He could have fashioned the device with greater intellectual skill, but thought it unnecessary.

In his own country, far away and behind him, he built devices of ever-increasing sophistication. He could booby-trap a dead body and cause it to explode when the medical crews came from the Shia hospital. He could use mercury tilt switches that would detonate a device in a car parked close to a barracks, and the vehicle would explode as troops opened its doors. He could place culvert bombs under a road and have an infrared beam flare across the tarmac to catch a Humvee or armoured personnel carrier. He could spend many hours at his work, if his target was an enemy explosive and ordnance disposal officer…or he could spend a minimum of time and still create havoc, chaos and fear. But with every creation, clever or simple, he followed a basic rule of survival and used differing techniques of wiring, positioning of detonators and loading of a vehicle or waistcoat. He left no repetitious signature. All that was constant in his work was the devastation in the aftermath.

The name given him by his father was Tariq, but to all with whom he fought he was the Engineer. He doubted that a photograph of his head and shoulders existed in the headquarters of the intelligence buildings at the airport, but there a ghost's image of him would exist. He loathed his enemy, and where he could find them, he killed them, and that would have created, in their air-conditioned suites, respect.

He came from the Triangle town of Fallujah.

His wife, three children, and his mother had perished in the rubble of the assault on Fallujah, and he had never seen or prayed at the rough, quickly dug graves in which they were buried. His father — insane from the bombing, shelling, shooting and grief — now lived in a world of devastated silence at the home of his brother; he had never visited him. He carried no photographs of that family, only the memory of them and his hatred of those who had killed them and broken his father.

In Iraq, alongside the graves of his family, there were many hundreds more; he and his hatred were responsible for them.

The Scorpion had asked him to travel far from his home. 'For what reason? Am I not more valuable here?' The Scorpion had spoken of the 'underbelly' and its softness. 'I accept it. I will go with you. The underbelly attracts me.' Why did it attract him? 'The town of Fallujah was an underbelly. The home of my wife, my children, my mother and father was an underbelly. They should learn what was done to us in their name. They should be hurt where they are soft.'