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David Hewson

The Sacred Cut

The third book in the Nic Costa series, 2005

Prologue

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.

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.