He turned around to look at Farid, standing a few feet away from him.

‘You want some?’

Farid smiled and nodded, ‘Thank you.’

He held out the bottle to him and then shot another glance at the burned-out remains of pump station IT-1B.

There was nothing worth salvaging, just a shell of breeze blocks and twisted piping that would need to be pulled down before a replacement could be built. IT-1B, along with three other sibling stations, serviced the north-south pipeline leading to Turkey. The whole thing, pipeline, connection nodes, pretty much everything, was screwed-up beyond belief in so many places.

Utterly fubar.

Farid handed the bottle of water back. Andy noticed the old man had only taken a small amount of water, just a few sips.

‘Have some more if you want,’ he said, miming washing his face. After all, the old translator was just as covered with dust and dried-on sweat as anyone else.

Farid shook his head. ‘Not know when you will need the water only for drink,’ he replied in the weak, cracked, high-pitched voice of an elderly man. His command of English was pretty good, better than the last translator, who had just decided to vanish without warning a few days ago.

‘Okay,’ Andy nodded. That was a fair point. Finding regular clean water was still an ongoing concern for many Iraqis. Water scarcity was what they had grown accustomed to over the last few years.

Parked up nearby, in a rough approximation of a defensive laager, was another Land Cruiser, used by the other civilian contractors, and three modified Nissan pick-up trucks manned by a dozen men from the Iraqi Police Service, who were warily scanning the irregular horizon of building carcasses around them.

The caution was well placed; the militia had been this way only a few days ago - not to destroy the pumping station, that was old damage - but instead to make an example of some of the men at the local police station. Four men had been taken from outside the police building the day before yesterday, friends and colleagues of the men standing guard. Their bodies had yet to be discovered, but undoubtedly right now, they were lying out in the afternoon sun at some roadside waiting to be found.

According to Farid, for now, they were relatively safe. The militia had been, done their work and moved on. They’d be back again of course, but not for a while. There were so many other places that needed their special attention.

Andy picked up his hat; a well-worn, sun-bleached turquoise fishing cap, that he wouldn’t dare don in public back in England, but over here it cast merciful shade over his head, face and neck. His pale scalp, inadequately protected by a sandy-coloured mop of hair, was beginning to burn as he pulled on his cap and tugged it firmly down.

He wandered across the densely packed, sun-baked clay ground towards the other engineers surveying the remains of IT- 1B. He approached the engineer he had shared the Land Cruiser with on the way up, a big, round-shouldered American with a dense black beard called Mike. He reminded Andy of a bigger, less cuddlier version of Bob Hoskins.

‘It’s totally fucked,’ Mike offered analytically as Andy drew up beside him.

Andy nodded. ‘I don’t see anyone getting much out of the Kirkuk fields until this mess is sorted out.’

Mike shrugged. ‘That isn’t going to happen for a while.’

Too true.

As they all well knew, it really didn’t take much to trash an overland pipeline; hundreds of miles of thin metal casing riding across the ground. It only took one small improvised explosive device placed anywhere along its length, and that would be a done deal until the damage could be repaired. In a country like Iraq, you could forget about using overland pipelines, especially up here in the Salah Ad Din region where every single mile of pipeline would need to be guarded day-in, day-out. Of course it had been a different story thirty or forty years ago when most of the pipelines were laid down. Iraq had been an ordered, prosperous country back then.

‘Who’re you working for?’ asked Mike.

‘A small risk assessment consultancy in the UK. But it’s Chevroil-Exxo who’s paying them. What about you?’

‘I’m freelancing for Texana-Amocon.’

Andy smiled. They all seemed to be hyphenated now, the oil companies. It was a sign of the times; struggling companies merging their dwindling reserves, all of them desperately consolidating their assets for the end-game.

‘They want to know how long it’s going to be before we can get something out of this damned country,’ the American added. ‘I mean, what the hell do you tell them?’

Andy half-smiled and cast a glance at the darkened shell of the building in front of them.

‘Not for years.’

Mike nodded. ‘It’s sure looking that way. So,’ he turned to look at Andy, ‘we haven’t done full names yet. I’m Mike Kenrick.’

They’d spoken only briefly this morning as the convoy of vehicles had taken several hours picking their way north-east along the road out of Al-Hadithah. They had talked about the crappy hotel they were both staying in, a dark maze of cold empty rooms, tall ceilings sprouting loose electrical cables, and sporadic power and running water.

‘Dr Sutherland, call me Andy though,’ he replied offering the American a hand.

‘So Andy, where you from anyway?’

‘Originally a Kiwi. But I guess home is England now. I’ve been living there on and off for nineteen years,’ replied Andy. ‘It doesn’t much feel like a home right now,’ he added as an afterthought.

‘Problems?’

‘Yeah . . . problems.’

The American seemed to understand that Andy wasn’t in the mood to elaborate. ‘Shit, this kind of job does that,’ he added gruffly after a moment’s reflection. ‘Time away from home can bust up even the strongest of marriages.’

‘What about you?’

‘Austin, Texas.’

Andy fleetingly recalled seeing this bloke strutting around the hotel the day before yesterday wearing his ‘Nobody Fucks with Texas’ T-shirt and some white Y-fronts.

Nice.

There were two other civilian contractors currently poking through the remains of the building and photographing it with digital camcorders. Andy had seen them around the compound, but not spoken to them yet. One was Dutch or French, the other Ukrainian, or so he’d been told. They had kept themselves to themselves, as had Andy.

In fact, the only person he’d really spoken to since coming out earlier this week was Farid, their new translator. The four-man field party had been assigned a translator along with the two Toyota Land Cruisers and the two drivers. They didn’t get to choose them or vet them, they just inherited them.

‘You been out here before?’ asked Mike.

‘Yeah, a couple of times, but down south - Majnun, Halfaya. Different story down there.’

The American nodded. ‘But that’s changing as well.’

They heard a disturbance coming from one of the Iraqi police trucks. Andy turned to look. One of the policemen was talking on his cell phone, and then turning to the others, relaying something to them. The others initially looked sceptical, but then within a moment, there were half-a-dozen raised voices, all speaking at the same time. The policeman on the phone quickly raised his hand to hush them, and they quietened down.

Andy turned to Farid and beckoned him over.

‘What’s all that about?’ asked Mike.

‘I find out,’ the translator replied and went directly over to the policemen to inquire. Andy watched the older man as he spoke calmly to them, and in turn listened to the policeman holding the mobile phone. And then Farid said something, gesturing towards the driver’s cabin. One of the policemen rapped his knuckles loudly on the roof and shouted something to the man dozing inside. He lurched in his seat and craned his neck out the driver-side, presumably to ask who the fuck had woken him up.

The guy holding the mobile phone repeated what he’d heard, Farid contributed something, and the driver’s expression changed. He pulled back inside, reached to the dashboard and flipped on the radio. There was music which he quickly spun away from, through a wall of crackles and bad signals, finally landing on a clear station and the sound of an authoritative voice; a newsreader.

‘Something’s happened,’ muttered Andy.

The policemen were all silent now, as was Farid. All of them listening intently to the radio. Then out of the blue the American’s Immarsat satellite phone bleeped. Mike jumped a little and looked at Andy, one of his dark eyebrows arched in surprise as he opened up the little hip-case it came in. He walked a few steps away to answer it privately.

Andy instinctively checked to see if his mobile phone was on - it was, but no one was calling him.

Andy, growing impatient, caught Farid’s eye and spread out his palms, what’s going on?

The translator nodded and held up a finger, asking him to wait a moment longer, as he craned his neck to listen to the news crackling out of the radio.

He turned back to Mike, who was frowning as he listened to what he was being told over his phone.

‘For fuck’s sake, what is it?’ asked Andy, exasperated that he seemed to be the only person left in the dark.

A moment later, Farid stepped away from the police truck and wandered over to Andy, his face a puzzle . . . as if he was trying to work out exactly what he’d just heard.

‘Farid?’

Mike snapped the case on his Sat phone shut just as the Iraqi translator came to a halt before them. The American and the Arab looked at each other for a moment.

Andy cracked. ‘Is somebody going to tell me what the fuck’s going on?’