Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  Nobody came back to help him as he struggled forward. He was bathed in self-pity. With his rifle and his skill, he was of critical importance to them. He didn’t have to be there …

  Gus heaved the rucksack off his back and carefully lowered the carrying case to the ground, onto the tufted yellow grass and the weathered rock. He untied the laces of his right boot, pulled off the sock, and examined the reddened welt of the blister. He rummaged in his rucksack for the small first-aid box, and selected a square of Elastoplast to cover the broken skin. He let the freshness of the air bathe his bare foot.

  ‘Put your sock and boot back on.’

  He hadn’t heard Haquim’s approach, was not aware of him until the man’s shadow fell on him.

  ‘It needs to breathe.’

  ‘Put them back on.’

  ‘When we’re ready to move.’

  ‘You need to do it now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If the Iraqis ambush us, we will not ask them to stop and wait, while one amongst us pulls his sock and his boot back on.’

  He felt hurt, as if degraded. ‘Yes. Right.’

  ‘And, Mr Peake, you do not question what I tell you.’

  ‘My foot hurts.’

  ‘Do you see others complaining? If it is such a big matter to you that your foot hurts, perhaps you should not have come.’

  His head down, Gus heaved on his sock and his boot. Haquim was turning away. Gus said, ‘I want somebody to be with me, to help me.’

  ‘To carry your sack? Have all the men not enough to carry already?’

  Gus said evenly, ‘I want someone with me when I shoot.’

  ‘I will choose someone.’

  ‘No.’ Gus’s voice rose. ‘I do it, it has to be my choice.’

  ‘You give yourself great importance.’

  ‘Because it is important.’

  ‘Later, then, when we stop for the next rest.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Gus had finished retying his bootlace.

  The column moved forward again. He heaved on his rucksack, lifted the rifle in its bag onto his shoulder, and gingerly put his weight on his right foot.

  When the line of men passed through a small gully that broke the ridge, a great vista was laid out in front of them. Gus’s eyes travelled over the sloping ground, the lower ridges, the distant curls of smoke above a faraway cluster of buildings, and on towards the single flame burning bright in a haze of lighter grey. Twenty miles away, and it was still a beacon, the flame at Kirkūk. He looked down on the ground that was to be the battlefield he would fight over.

  Once again, the target had not come in the night.

  On a bright, crisp morning, before the heat of the day settled over it, Major Karim Aziz reached the al-Rashid camp.

  He showed his identification to the sentries at the gate, his name was checked off a list and he was shown where to park.

  He’d known many who had come here on similar bright, crisp mornings in their best uniforms, who had been picked up by camp transport and who had never been seen again.

  He had shut out the picture of the disappeared men and their families from his mind.

  The transport pulled up beside his car. He had driven out to al-Rashid in a daze of tiredness and now he sleepwalked to the van.

  Since the bombing of 1991 the camp had been rebuilt, the rubble removed, the craters filled in. The van took him past the many complexes of the Estikhabarat. There were the buildings occupied by the headquarters personnel of the second-in-command, a staff major general, those that liaised with Regional Headquarters, those that controlled the Administration Section, the Political Section, the Special Branch and the Security Unit.

  He saw the batteries of anti-aircraft guns, and the clusters of ground-to-air missiles.

  The van stopped outside a squat building. From the set of the windows he could see the thickness of the reinforced-concrete walls, painted in camouflage colours, and on the roof was a farm of aerials and satellite dishes. The armed guard opened the door for him and smiled. He wondered whether the guard always smiled at an officer summoned early in the morning to this building.

  When he had reached home again after the night on the flat roof, he had clung to his wife briefly, then she had shrugged him off. It was unspoken, but she blamed him for the fiasco of his birthday celebration. The children had gone to school, her parents had stayed in their lean-to annexe at the back of the house. His wife, without a backward glance at him, had gone for the bus to the hospital. Then, alone in his home, he had checked through every item in the sports bag under the bed to satisfy himself that nothing incriminating could be found there … He did not know how he would resist torture …

  What could have damaged them, him, he had buried in the garden.

  At the inner guard desk of the building he was asked to enter his name. There was another smile, and a finger jabbed towards his belt. He unhooked the clasp, passed the webbing belt over the desk, and with it the holster holding the Makharov pistol.

  He was led down the corridor, then up a flight of stairs, then on to another corridor.

  He had to make the effort to kick his legs in front of him. The panic was growing, the urge to turn and run insistent, but there was nowhere to turn and no-one to run to. He heard the boom of his boots on the smooth surface of the corridor’s floor.

  With each step towards the closed door at the far end he remembered the path he had taken towards joining the conspiracy. In February, two generals and a brigadier had come to a firing range to watch his progress in teaching marksmanship to his students, junior officers and senior NCOs. The course, like so much of the tactics learned in the Iraqi military, was based on old British army manuals. As he did, the students had used the Russian-made Dragunov SVD sniper’s rifle. It was not the best rifle available in the international market, but he had a curious and almost emotional attachment to the weapon that had been with him for a year less than two decades. His students had had good shots at 400 metres, but at 500 metres none had hit the inner bulls on the targets, a man-sized cardboard shape, when they should have had an 80 per cent probability of doing so.

  Perhaps they were made more nervous by the presence of the generals and the brigadier.

  He had then fired his own Dragunov, but at 700 metres. From behind him the generals and the brigadier had watched his shooting through telescopes. Six rounds, six hits, when the probability of a ‘kill’ was listed as only 60 per cent, and after each shot he had heard the grunted surprise from behind the telescopes.

  He reached the door at the end of the corridor.

  His escort knocked with quiet respect.

  He heard the gravel voice call for him to enter.

  Three weeks after the shoot Major Karim Aziz had received a telephone call from the more senior of the two generals. He was invited to a meeting – not in the general’s quarters, not in a villa in the Baghdad suburbs, but in a military car that had cruised for an hour with him, the general and two colonels along the city’s roads flanking the Tigris river. He could, he supposed, have said that he had no interest in the proposition put to him in the car. He could also have lied, given them his support, then the next morning gone to the Estikhabarat, in this building, in this camp, and denounced them. They wanted a marksman. He had agreed to be that marksman. The general had said that an armoured brigade in the north would mutiny and drive south, but only after word was received that the bastard, the President, was dead. He had been told of the villa, of the bastard’s new woman. The detail had been left to him – but without their esteemed leader’s death, the armoured brigade would not move. The general had talked of a domino effect inside the ranks of the regular army once the bastard was killed.

  The general had been a big and powerfully built man, but he had stammered like a nervous child as he explained the plan. Aziz had agreed, then, there; only afterwards, when he had been dropped from the car, did he consider that he might have been set-up, stung, and he had been sick in the gutter. He had dismiss
ed that thought because he had witnessed the precautions taken to preserve the secrecy of the meeting and seen the nervousness of the officers in the car.

  He had tracked for days around the villa and had found the place from which to shoot.

  He had met the general again, cruised the same route in the same car, and the general had embraced him.

  He went inside. His stomach was slack and his bladder full. He tried to stand proud, to pretend that he was not intimidated, was a patriot surrounded by cowards. He thought of his wife and his children, and of the pain of torture.

  A colonel had his back to the door and stared at a wall map, but turned at his approach.

  ‘Ah, Major Aziz. I hope there was nothing important in your schedule that had to be cancelled.’

  He looked up at the photograph of the smiling, all-powerful President. He stuttered his answer. ‘No, my schedule was clear.’

  ‘You are the marksman, the sniper, that is correct?’

  ‘It is my discipline, yes.’

  ‘You understand the skills of sniping?’

  He did not know whether he was a toy for their amusement, whether the colonel played with him. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Two men dead, two rounds fired, on consecutive days, each shot at a range of at least seven hundred metres in Fifth Army sector. What does that tell you about the sniper?’

  ‘That he is trained, professional, an expert.’ He felt the tension draining from him. He was limp, a rag on a washing-line.

  ‘How do you confront a professional sniper, Major?’

  ‘Not by turning rocks over with artillery or tanks or heavy mortars. You send your own sniper to confront him.’

  The colonel said sharply, ‘You go tomorrow, Major Aziz, to Kirkūk.’

  ‘The north? The Kurds are not snipers.’ He wanted to laugh out loud as the lightness broke into the tightness of his mind. He bubbled, ‘They cannot hit targets at a hundred metres.’

  ‘I am from the Tikrit people, Major. Yesterday my cousin’s son was shot at seven hundred metres in a defence position near Kirkūk. Perhaps a foreigner is responsible.’

  ‘Whatever the nationality, the best defence against a sniper is always a counter-sniper.’

  ‘Be the counter-sniper, then. Your orders will be waiting for you when you reach the garrison at Kirkūk.’

  Aziz saluted, turned smartly and marched out of the room. Outside, with the door closed on him, he could have collapsed in a huddle on the floor and wept his relief. He steadied himself against the arm of his escort, and walked away.

  A few moments later, the warm air brushed his face, washed it of fear.

  Gus sat on a rock and scanned the ground ahead of him with his binoculars, looking for movement.

  It was the best place he could find, had the nearest similarity to the terrain of the Common in Devon. It was a practice but it was still crucial. The arguments were finally over, had finished when Haquim had struck a man and knocked him flat, when the knife had flashed, and Haquim had kicked the knife from the man’s hand. Before then, the argument had raged savagely. Meda had chosen not to intervene, but had sat apart with an amused smile on her face. He needed an observer to help him with distance and windage and, most important, to guide him in on the stalk to the targets ahead and to work out the exit routes after each snipe. It could not be Haquim – too slow and too involved in the mess of strategy and tactical problems.

  The arguments were because each man in the column, old and young, believed he was the best at moving unseen across open ground. The bitterness was inspired by pride, when Haquim had selected the dozen men from the hundred in the column – from agha Ibrahim’s men, or from agha Bekir’s men. The older men who had fought for the most years, or the younger ones with more agility than experience. The larger group, not chosen, sat behind Gus, and scowled or watched the slope of ground ahead with a sullen resignation.

  He had four ‘walkers’ out, as he had seen it done on the Common. Each time he saw a man, magnified through the binoculars, crawling, Gus shouted to the nearest ‘walker’ and pointed, and the man was tapped on the head by the ‘walker’, and eliminated. Each time a man was eliminated there was a growl of jealous approval from behind Gus.

  Gus counted those he had spotted and eliminated. Some had taken the obvious route for their stalk, along a meandering river trail, some had headed for the single tree in the centre of the open ground, some had tried to use a broken mess of buildings to the right.

  The river, the tree and the ruins were all obvious points for a stalk and were therefore poorly chosen … He saw the last man: his head and chest were low, but his buttocks were up. The ‘walker’ went to him, and the last man stood.

  He had asked too much of them. He had tried to bring an alien culture of warfare from the Common in southwest England to the foothills of the Zagros mountains. He had asked them to crawl, concealed, across a thousand yards of open ground, and none had reached the finish line he had set. Gus cursed. Was it better to take the best of the failures, or was it better to work alone? He pushed himself up.

  ‘It’s my fault, my bloody fault,’ Gus said to Haquim.

  There was a single shot, the crack of it high above him, then the thump of the following sound. The sounds were almost simultaneous. Behind him there was brief pandemonium. As the moment of silence settled he heard the rasped arming of weapons.

  A dozen men had gone forward and stalked back towards him, and he had identified that same dozen. He had the binoculars up to his eyes and tracked over the ground, across the grassland, over rocks, between the narrow height of the tree trunks, into and out of the stones of the ruins, and he still could not see the man who had fired. They were the best binoculars he had ever used, and he saw nothing.

  Gus said to Haquim, ‘Tell him to stand.’

  Haquim shouted at the emptiness in front of them. Then the silence fell again. At first Gus felt a sense of excitement, but that was whittled to annoyance because nothing moved. He covered the ground again for the outline of a face, the shape of a shoulder.

  They said on the Common that the stalk didn’t count unless the sniper had a clear view of his target when he fired … Some clever bastard in hiding, loosing off into the air.

  ‘Shout again.’

  Haquim yelled, and the voice bellowed back off the hillside. From clear ground, ground on which there were no rocks, no trees, no fallen buildings, away from the small river, the boy rose to his feet.

  There was a sod of earth with grass growing from it, a turf square, on the boy’s head.

  The boy, grinning like an ape, had reached the finish line. Gus reckoned he’d covered that area of grass five, six times with his binoculars, and still hadn’t seen him.

  ‘I’ll have the boy.’

  ‘You cannot,’ Haquim said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The boy is not a person of consequence.’

  ‘I’ll have him because he is the best stalker.’

  ‘He has no connection – no father, no family. It will cause resentment.’

  ‘I’ll have him, and when it gets harder – as it will, you tell me, and I believe you – then I will shoot better.’

  He thought he was already a harder man, as if stones in a torrent battered against his body and forced the softness from it, than he had been three weeks before on the Common. They needed to make further ground before dusk. He walked in the heart of the column and ignored the blister on his right heel. The boy skipped along beside him and had offered to take his rucksack, but Gus had refused.

  They went past the ruins of the village. The roofs, of concrete and tin, were collapsed inside the sunken walls, and Gus knew that each building had been dynamited. The grass grew up between the debris abandoned by a fleeing people, pots, pans, clothes faded by wind, rain and sunshine. The old village had been destroyed so that there was nothing for its people to return to. There were two men dead behind him but, passing the ruins of the village, Gus felt for the first time that he was
a part of the quarrel. He was a changed man, and in the failing light he imagined that the flame far ahead burned brighter.

  The Israeli, in his eyrie where the winds blew, under the sharp light of the stars and forty miles into northern Iraq from the Turkish border, heard the radio transmission from the al-Rashid camp to the Estikhabarat offices at Fifth Army headquarters in Kirkūk.

  The computers in the building low slung on the mountain summit had long ago deciphered the Iraqi military codes. The previous evening Isaac Cohen had listened to a signal reporting the activities of a sniper operating in the area north of the Fifth Army’s sector. Now, a counter-sniper, a man with a reputation, was being sent to Kirkūk. The old Mossad man chuckled. He worked with the most modern electronic equipment that the factories at Haifa and in the Negev could produce, and before induction into the Mossad he had served as a captain in a tank unit that boasted the supreme technology in the sensors that sought out the enemy … The messages revealed archaic warfare – a man against a man, a rifle against a rifle, two men scrabbling on their bellies to within range of the other. Not slings and stones, not bows and arrows, but rifles that only marginally increased the distance of combat. But as the evening wore on, Cohen’s amusement was stilled. How could a sniper be so important that a counter-sniper had been sent against him?

  Isaac Cohen was a methodical man. As the night settled around him, he began to track back through messages held in his computers. The calls, made at dawn and dusk over the last forty-eight hours, traced a line into, through and beyond the defence lines of the Fifth Army north of Kirkūk. He saw the trail of an incursion, and the decrypting power of his computers broke into the conversations of a satellite telephone that had spoken with agha Bekir in Arbīl and agha Ibrahim in Sulaymānīyah, the time and place of a meeting.

  He no longer laughed. A small army marched across the God-forsaken wilderness. The adage of the Mossad was ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’