Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  And then he wondered what damage could be wrought to the enemy by one man with a rifle.

  The dog whined behind the bedroom door.

  Major Karim Aziz, with his family, ate his evening meal, and he talked. He spoke of soccer with his children and their games at school; with his wife he joked about holidays they might take one day in the northern mountains, with tents and picnics; with her parents he laughed about their continuous and never-ending hunt for food at the open markets. He talked and joked and laughed because that night he was not returning to the flat roof, and he felt as though a great weight had been shed from his shoulders. He assumed, perhaps correctly, perhaps not, that a general and two colonels would have heard that Major Karim Aziz of the Baghdad Military College was posted to the north.

  And he had no route by which to pass them any urgent message. He had survived the visit to the al-Rashid camp, which few did, and he had been treated there as a valued expert.

  No suspicion had fallen over him; the shadow of arrest, torture and death did not lie on him.

  The dog scratched at the bedroom door.

  It was a familiar experience for a veteran soldier. He ate with his family around him, and before dawn the next morning he would be gone. He could have listed each of the times that he had eaten a last evening meal with the family – before going to Moscow, or the Beka’a, or to the front lines in the Iranian cities of Khorramshahr and Susangerd where the fighting had been in cellars and sewers, to the north for Operation al-Anfal against the Kurdish saboteurs, to Kuwait City for the first strike then a return in the last days, to the north again for the push into Arbīl and towards Sulaymānīyah – it was a familiar routine for him. Later, before bed, he would visit the home of his own parents and would tell his father, the pensioned civil servant of the Iraqi Railway Company, and his mother that he was going away and that there was no cause for them to worry. He drank more than was normal for him because the weight was off his shoulders.

  In the bedroom, with the dog, was his packed and bulging backpack, and the heavy wooden box in which he always carried the Dragunov rifle when he went to war.

  As the light had fallen on the city, Aziz had gone to collect the dog. It had been lodged with his cousin for two months more than two years, since his wife’s parents had come to live in his home. It had been blamed for aggravating her father’s asthma. It was a brown and white springer spaniel, now nine years old, fast, fit and trained with all the patience he could summon. To go to war without the dog would have been to travel without his eyes and ears.

  Around the table, with the warmth of his family close to him, the north was not spoken of. His detestation of the north, of the Kurds, had little to do with politics and everything to do with blood. Her father’s younger brother had died there in 1974, a dozen kilometres from where he, the young lieutenant in a mechanized infantry brigade, was serving, and he had seen the body and what had been done to it. His cousin’s nephew had been killed there in 1991, a prisoner after the fall of the Military Intelligence headquarters at Arbīl, taken out on the street, shot, and his body dragged round the square from the back of a jeep; that body, too, he had seen when the city was retaken. But, at the table, it was not mentioned.

  Later, when he had walked the spaniel to his parents’ home, and settled him beside their bed, when his wife was in his arms, the master sniper would tell her that she had no cause for anxiety. That night Major Karim Aziz had not the slightest doubt that he would locate, stalk and kill an enemy. He did not entertain the thought that he might fail, that his place in the bed beside her would remain cold, empty.

  He said his name was Omar.

  He spoke with a piping American accent, and told his story.

  He had no mother, no father, no family, no home. His mother had died on the mountainous slopes of the Turkish border, frozen to death with his sister. His father had died a month earlier, killed in Arbīl by Iraqi soldiers. He did not know where his uncles, aunts and cousins were. His family’s homes had been bulldozed in 1991. He said the American servicemen bringing relief supplies to the camps in the mountains had found him and cared for him.

  Gus idly imagined soldiers bound together by a common sense of compassion, finding a half-dead child, numbed by cold and hunger, and taking him back to their tents, food and warmth, as they would a stray, pretty cat. They would have fussed over the child, spoiled him, and taught him their language. When they moved back over the border, consciences salved by the good work, they would have dumped him on aid-workers. Gus thought of Omar hanging about the offices of a foreign charity in Arbīl or Sulaymānīyah or Zākhō, running messages, scrounging, with his childhood irreplaceably snatched from him. When most of the aid agencies had fled in the late summer of 1996, the child would have attached himself with limpet-like strength to a fighting peshmerga unit, helped to carry food and ammunition forward to the sagging front line, and bring the wounded back.

  Gus thought of his own childhood, of its calm and its safety. The orphan would have seen horror, and would be feral and savage as a result.

  The boy stank. His pillow was a stone. He lay on the ground, without a blanket to cover him, close to Gus’s sleeping-bag, and the rifle with the double magazines taped to each other lay across his stomach. He wore drab American army fatigues, torn and still too large for him, and a pair of yellow trainers that had gone at the toes. He had brought Gus food from the cooking pot and watched him eat until Gus had passed him the bowl.

  He had gulped down the last of the food and licked the bowl till it shone in the evening sunshine.

  The camp was quiet and Gus spoke softly. ‘The man we have to remember is Herbert Hesketh-Prichard. There had been others before him, but as far as our army is concerned, he was really the father of sniping. He was a big-game hunter before the first war with Germany – he shot lions and elephants, and he turned those skills to shooting Germans.

  He went to France, where the war was with the Germans, and took with him big-game rifles and telescopes. At first, none of the generals would listen to him, but he kept emphasizing the importance of a quality sniper on the battlefield. The sniper was more effective in breaking the enemy’s morale than an artillery barrage. Kill the officer, kill his spotters, kill his machine-gunners, and your troops feel good, they live. Almost everything we know today is based on what was taught by Hesketh-Prichard to his snipers eighty-five years ago …’

  The boy, Omar, snored in his sleep.

  Chapter Five

  The helicopter had come in at first light, flying low like a hawk hunting, hugging the contours of the ground. It came smoothly over a ridge to the north, all the time looking for gullies along which to fly, then hovered. For a moment it was a predator, black and without identification, over a prey. The prey was Meda … and she had waved it down.

  Four men had immediately jumped clear from the open fuselage hatch. Two carried machine-guns, one had an assault rifle, and one held a grenade launcher; all wore a common uniform of jeans, anoraks, face masks and baseball caps, and they had scattered to secure a perimeter area round the big bird. Gus thought that after the guards the next man out was also American. Under his windcheater, his tie was whipped up from his throat as he bent to run clear of the downdraught of the blades, he had a lavatory brush of cropped grey hair, and carried maps in plastic covering. He’d shaken hands perfunctorily with Meda, then turned back and helped two more men, Kurds, down from the hatch.

  The American, the Kurds and Meda had settled down amongst stones, the maps spread out across their legs, and Gus saw a Thermos flask passed between the men. Meda refused to drink from it.

  The pilots kept the turbines running. Where he had been told to stay, with the peshmerga, the boy and Haquim, Gus was a full three hundred paces from the meeting-point and the helicopter.

  Haquim said bitterly, ‘I am not important enough to be a part of the negotiation.’

  Through his binoculars, Gus watched them. He could recognize the body language of the Kur
ds – one in a suit and one in laundered but old tribal dress. The American was between them, the conduit. Gus sensed deep-held suspicion. Meda faced them and her arms alternated between gestures of frustration and the softer movements of persuasion.

  He passed the binoculars to Haquim.

  Haquim said, ‘In the suit, dressed as the Westerner he wants to be, is agha Bekir. He controls the west of the enclave. I trust him as I trust a scorpion. Three weeks after the Iraqi attack of 1991, in which his people were murdered, left destitute to starve in the mountains, agha Bekir was shown on Baghdad’s television hugging Saddam as if he were a favoured cousin. He looks only for power and money. He would sleep with a snake to gain them.’

  ‘But he has men …’

  ‘And agha Ibrahim has more men. He is more simple but more cunning, which is why he wears the clothes of his people, and he has more greed. He controls the north and the east, and therefore can take the toll money from the lorries that cross the Turkish frontier to go to Baghdad. He should know Saddam, because Saddam tried on many occasions to kill his father. Once Saddam sent Shi’a clerics from Baghdad to talk peace with agha Ibrahim’s father, and Saddam told the clerics they must wear a hidden tape-recorder so that he could know what was said. When the meeting had started, one of the government drivers outside threw a switch, with radio control. The tape-recorder was a bomb. At the moment the bomb exploded a servant was leaning across in front of agha Ibrahim’s father and filling his glass with lemon juice. The servant died, and the cleric with the tape-recorder, and many others. But agha Ibrahim’s father survived to tell his son of the treachery of Saddam. Did he listen? Three years ago, agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim fought full-scale war over the division of the money from the smugglers, and when agha Ibrahim was losing, being driven back, he called to Saddam for help. He was rescued by Saddam’s tanks. It was when I was wounded … He has many men, fighting men, because he has the money to pay them. It is the miracle of Meda that has brought them together.’

  ‘I think they both want to fuck her,’ the boy said.

  Haquim lashed out behind him, but Omar laughed and leaped back as a boxer avoids a tiring opponent’s punch.

  ‘What is being decided?’ Gus asked quietly.

  ‘They are deciding what they will risk. Meda has to persuade them, again, of her vision.’

  Gus had taken back his binoculars and watched her. There was something of virginal innocence about her. She smiled and scowled. Her head would drop as if sulking, then would be lifted and a child’s happiness would break across her face. Without her, nothing would happen. She wove a spell over them. It was as if, Gus thought, her very innocence

  – her enthusiasm, her optimism, her certainty – persuaded them. Omar, the vulgar little wretch, had spoken the truth. She sat facing them with her legs splayed out in the combat trousers, and with the upper buttons of her tunic unfastened so that they could see the skin of her chest. He saw, so clearly, Ibrahim’s leering smile and the way Bekir gazed into her eyes. The American wore an older man’s frown, as though anxiety – for her –raged in him.

  After he shook her hand, he stood and shouted to the guards, who backed towards the helicopter and covered the ground ahead with their weapons. Hands were held and shaken, then all were gone into the belly of the helicopter.

  She stood with her hands on her hips against the growing power of the rotors. The blast threw back her hair, and thrust her tunic and trousers against the shape of her body, slender and young, without fear. As the helicopter lifted, she didn’t wave to them, as if to affirm her independence.

  It came low over them, and Gus saw the face of the American peering down. He held the rifle close to him against the blow of the blades.

  And the silence came … He felt a sense of great loss. The helicopter had been a lifeline. It had come, he could have walked to it, climbed inside it, could have argued himself a seat and been carried back to his home, his work and his life. The chance had been laid before him, and he had not thought to take it. She was walking back towards them, the big grin of triumph on her face.

  The men ran to her, and Haquim hobbled after them. Gus cuffed the boy and said he should go, too, while he sat alone with his thoughts. He could never have turned his back on her: she had trapped him. Everything that was home, work, life, seemed now of minimal relevance. She stood and they sat in front of her. He saw the old and the young faces that had been hardened by cruelty and suffering, that were cold and brutal, and the light in their eyes. She trapped all of them.

  The boy returned to where he sat.

  ‘What does she say?’

  ‘She says that later today the agha Bekir and the agha Ibrahim will each send one hundred of their best fighting men to join us. In the morning we attack the mujamma’a in the front of us – that is a new village, what is called a Victory City. She says when we have captured it more men will come and we will fight at the town of Tarjil – we will have more men and we will make a battle at the crossroads of the Baghdad road and the Sulaymānīyah road. After that, when more men have arrived, she will lead us past the flame of Baba Gurgur, and into Kirkūk. We are going to Kirkūk. Do you believe her?’

  ‘I have to,’ Gus said.

  ‘They believe her, agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim, because they want to fuck her. They can fuck any woman they want to, but they want her because they know they cannot have her.’

  ‘You are a disgusting child.’

  ‘Do you want to fuck her, Mr Gus?’

  He caught the lobe of the boy’s ear, where it peeped from under the matt of tangled dark curls, and twisted it hard so that Omar yelped like a hurt dog.

  He started to tell the boy of the role of an observer working in close harmony with a sniper. Everything he knew about life told him that when a blow was struck there inevitably followed a stinging counter-strike. Mapped ahead of him was a timetable of war, locations on a map that would all be fought for and each would be harder. He talked softly, earnestly, of the work of an observer, as if the boy, Omar, were an equal to him, as if his very survival would rest on the skill of the boy when the counter-strike fell.

  The door to the ageing Antonov howled open on poorly oiled hinges. He allowed his eyes to grow accustomed to the brightness beating up from the tarmac, and waited for the steps to reach the aircraft.

  Other men he knew in the army would have refused to take a flight in the veteran transport, but Major Karim Aziz had been often enough in combat for the fear of death to be replaced by a comforting fatalism. Everything was behind him now.

  He shouted his thanks to the pilot. He had been the only passenger on the flight, with his dog. He gazed around him. It was three years since he had last been at Kirkūk Military. Then, some of the attack aircraft’s hardened bunkers were still under repair, and wooden scaffolding had surrounded the control tower. But there was nothing to see now of the work of the American bombers; the scaffolding and the workmen were long gone.

  A jeep was approaching fast from the tower.

  Aziz called the dog to heel and went down the steps struggling with the weight of his backpack and the wooden box. When the jeep pulled up he saw from the gaze of the officer deputed to meet him that his reputation had travelled before him. His cheeks were brush-kissed, an offer made to take the box, which was refused. The box was the basis of his reputation and Aziz allowed no other man to take charge of it.

  He followed the officer to the jeep. In any unit he worked with, there had never been any love for the sniper. He would be respected for his skill, but not liked. Soldiers in a front line always felt a vague affinity with the enemy across no man’s land; Iraqi soldiers had felt that for Iranian soldiers – and the sniper brought anonymous death to the man in the opposing trench. When a sniper came to a quiet front line, killed, moved on, the hell of artillery fell on those left behind. And the sniper’s killing was premeditated and took away the random, haphazard chance of shell shrapnel with which soldiers could live.

  The officer was wa
ry. ‘You had a good flight, I hope?’

  ‘Good for me, but the dog was sick.’

  The officer laughed thinly. ‘Not a good companion.’

  ‘Oh, yes, the best.’ He lifted his box into the back of the jeep and the dog bounded in after it. They drove away. He had kept the name of the dog, Scout. It had been four months old when he had found it on his third day in Kuwait City. It had had a collar on it, with its name on a tag and an address. Major Karim Aziz had flown in with the first assault troops, by helicopter, to take one of the Emir’s palaces, but the fighting had been slack. The third day he had wandered the streets of Kuwait City and marvelled at the ostentation. He had found the cowering, terrorized puppy whimpering as the tanks growled past. While fellow officers successfully looted that wealth, he had gone to the address on the tag and found the wrecked, emptied home of an expatriate British oil engineer. He had taken the dog back to the hotel where he was quartered. When, two weeks later, he had returned to Baghdad, he had felt a sense of shame that he took with him the dog, a video camera and a bracelet from the famous gold souk. Others had taken back new Mercedes, and BMWs, and had loaded lorries with ‘souvenirs’. They had never used the video camera at home because he had not stolen the cassettes to go with it, and his wife had sold the bracelet for money to buy clothes for the children, but he had kept the dog. Scout was now nine years old, but still had the legs and eyes, nose and ears that made him indispensable to Aziz when he went to war.

  From the airport, he was driven through the city.

  Kirkūk was home to a million people. The jeep wove through crowded streets, past bustling pavements. The shops were open. He saw nothing that made him sense panic, and yet out in the distant hills to the north, beyond the clear, bright, high flame, an army marched on that city. The jeep’s horn cleared a path through the laden lorries, donkey-drawn carts and the kids careering on bicycles and scooters. There was no atmosphere of danger.