The Protector by Duncan Falconer Read Free Book Online Page B

surrounded by a wide black scorch mark was a few metres in front of Abdul near the centre of the junction. Like most of the other bomb holes in the city it would not be repaired in the foreseeable future, thus adding to the increasing deterioration of road conditions.
    Abdul was holding the butt of an old AK47 against his hip, resting the tip of the barrel on the ground. The tattered, knotted shoulder strap attached at either end of the weapon had broken twice since he had been issued with the gun and it was too heavy to carry all day. He wore black trousers and the sky-blue long-sleeved shirt of the Iraqi Police with the letters ‘IP’ stencilled on a white band tied over his left shoulder. Abdul had been a police officer for three months after completing a six-week training course in Amman, the capital of Jordan, followed by another week at the Stadium School, the former international football arena, near the centre of Baghdad.The training fell short of the Academy’s pre-war standards but the necessity to produce high numbers of officers and get them onto the streets as quickly as possible was paramount. But lack of proper skills and discipline among the police was only one of the problems causing Abdul anxiety in his newly chosen profession - which, it had to be said, had never exactly been a vocational ambition for him. In his younger days Abdul’s main feature had been his bright, cheerful smile and although he was a quiet-spoken, introverted young man who tended to daydream when he should have been listening, the little he had to say suggested an above-average level of intelligence. But the smile had rarely been seen since the war and probably not at all since he had joined the police.
    The main reason for Abdul’s glum feelings while at work was the poor quality of some of the other police officers: there had been a marked lack of vetting procedures when they’d been selected. This was no more evident than in the squad of which he was a member. Abdul’s immediate colleagues on the force were, to a man, all Ali Babas, crooks and villains, and one or two of them were possibly far worse than that.
    Abdul had been brought up as a good Muslim - the word itself meant ‘one who submits’, a concept which he fully embraced - and by his late teens he was by far the most religious member of his family, the only one who prayed five times a day. But since the war his faith had slipped, at least as far as his regular acts of worship were concerned. This dilution of his belief was also at the core of his distress since, much as he wanted to re-establish a full commitment to Allah, possibly even in a more active way than before, he felt unable to. For Abdul believed that he was no longer worthy of Allah’s attention. He had allowed an obstacle to come between him and God and was too weak to do anything about it. This obstruction on the divine path was a result of allowing himself to be drawn into a perk of the job, for want of a better term, that had seemed innocent enough at first but had developed into something that in his heart he wholly disapproved of, a disapproval shared by the person he admired most in his life, his sister.
    Abdul was a dichotomy. He had never been very strong, physically or mentally, but there were occasions when he was painfully contrary and displayed such levels of determination as to cause suspicion among members of his family, his father in particular, that, as a baby, the boy had been exchanged for an impostor. These moments of defiance were seen as uncharacteristic by everyone else but it was his beloved sister, Tasneen, who was always supportive and read them as evidence of Abdul’s great potential. He always showed promise when it came to family duties and honour, motivated as he was by his heritage: tribal, ancestral and, of course, religious. He was unaffected by politics. But it was the ordinary pressure of everyday life that revealed Abdul’s character flaws and lack of force-fulness