Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  He was taken into the headquarters compound of the Fifth Army, driven at speed past smart sentries, and lines of T-72 tanks and ranks of BMP personnel carriers.

  With his dog at his heel, Aziz carried his box into the command bunker.

  He was introduced to a general. He saluted, shook hands. Behind the general was a brigadier who looked up, through him, and returned to the study of the map spread on the table. He knew the brigadier, recognized him, but could not place where he had seen him.

  He struggled to find it, before it was swept from his mind.

  ‘So, Baghdad has sent us a sniper.’ The general spoke scornfully. ‘One man to do with a rifle what an army with tanks and artillery and two divisions of infantry cannot achieve.’

  ‘Against a sniper, the best defence is a superior counter-sniper.’

  The sneer formed. ‘With a dog and the fleas it carries.’

  ‘With my dog, yes.’

  ‘What do you need to know?’

  ‘I need to know the route the incursion has taken, and the exact position of the blocking force you have deployed.’

  The silence hung in the room. The brigadier peered up from the map, then ducked his head and played with a pencil.

  ‘A blocking force has been deployed?’

  The general said, without expression, ‘Your job, Major, is at a level of local tactics. Do not try to teach me strategy.’

  ‘I need to meet the eyewitnesses who saw the enemy’s sniper.’

  They both stared at him before telling him when he could interrogate the witnesses. He was escorted out.

  In a bare room with a small cupboard and an ironframed bed, he took a square of goatskin from his backpack and laid it in the corner as a mat for his dog, then filled the dog’s bowl with water. From a framed photograph on the wall, the President watched him, smiled down on him.

  AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE.

  2. (Conclusions after interview with Wing Co. Basil Peake RAF (Retd.) conducted by self and Ms Carol Manning – transcript attached.) MOTIVATION: A central focus point for AHP in making his journey to northern Iraq is the powerful influence of his grandfather. Ms Manning believes BP used his manipulative arguments to persuade AHP to travel and involve himself. Motivation is important for a sniper in a military theatre, but that importance will diminish quickly once AHP is involved in combat, and will ultimately be of little relevance. BP has old, legally held rifles, and from his youth AHP was, therefore, familiar with handling firearms, but BP was unable or unwilling to offer information concerning the necessary MIND-SET of the hunter that is crucial if the step from target marksman to sniper is to be made.

  SUMMARY: Without that MINDSET, AHP will fail and if he fails he will be killed. No evidence of a military background. My earlier assessment stands: the chances of medium-term survival remain slim to nonexistent.

  TEXT of letter sent to BP by Hoyshar – see transcript above.

  (NB: The letter is the start, and may be the only indication we find as to what AHP hopes to achieve in northern Iraq. In my opinion, the end is a military impossibility.)

  Esteemed brother Basil, I write to you at a time when I have not received any of your valued letters for two years. This letter will be given to SARAH of the Protect the Children, and only God will decide if it shall reach you.

  It is now, esteemed brother, a moment of crisis in the recent history of our people. The Kurdish people, my people, in the mountains and in the towns and in the villages are filled with despair. We believe no longer in the will of the West to protect us from the Great Murderer.

  We think that we are forgotten. When we have been forgotten then the Great Murderer will send his tanks and guns and aircraft to destroy us.

  We understand that very little time is left to us. You will remember my dear granddaughter, my Meda. She now has twenty-five years. For one so young she has the fire of a lion in her breast, and she has power over men. I believe, esteemed friend, that the strength in her is God-given.

  For a year she has visited many villages in our region and talked to women, and to men, of a new moment when the Kurdish people shall rise up to take their freedom from the Great Murderer. At first she could only talk. Then, three months ago, she was heard in Rost, near to the Sar i-Piran mountain, by a military commander of proven courage, the mustashar Haquim. She entranced him as she had the simple village people. He took her to Arbīl and to Sulaymānīyah, and his influence as a fighting man enabled her to meet with agha Ibrahim and agha Bekir.

  They are cunning men, men of deceit. They have fought the Great Murderer and they have kissed his cheeks. They bend when the wind is against them, and they go forward when the wind is behind them. They are corrupt dogs but they have power. Meda met them and talked to them about freedom. She looked in their faces, each in turn, Haquim told me, and she asked them did they want to live as the servant of the Great Murderer and in fear, or as proud men who had led their people to freedom? Did they want to be remembered as cowards or heroes?

  She is just a young woman, and she demanded their answer. They could not refuse her. She promised them that she would bring them past the flame of Baba Gurgur, and into the square of Kirkūk.

  Esteemed friend, she has the power over men and they did not dare to refuse her. It will be a small army at the beginning, but it will grow.

  Each time she wins, more men will be given to her. She will have Haquim, whom I love like a son, at her side to guide her. She will be in God’s care. I cannot say whether this letter will reach you. If it is delivered with success to you, please, esteemed friend, look at your newspapers and your television and discover the day that she reaches Kirkūk.

  This is not, of course, the calling-in of a debt, or for you to feel there is an old obligation that you carry, but any assistance you can offer would be a gift of the highest generosity. It is a great journey that she is beginning. She is the last chance of the Kurdish people. With pride, I pray for her.

  I am, as always, honoured to call myself your friend, Hoyshar.

  * * *

  Ken Willet had read the letter many times. It reached him, touched him. Each time he’d read it, scanned through the clear copperplate handwriting, he remembered the photograph in the kitchen of the old man sitting and the young woman standing beside him. He had patrolled in Northern Ireland before the ceasefire, he had heard shots fired in anger, but all he knew of combat was what had been taught him on the training grounds of the Welsh mountains. From his posting to the Ministry of Defence, he would move on to an administrative position at a barracks, then probably try his luck in the civilian world. He would never know about combat at first hand.

  He felt, and he was not ashamed of it, a very great sadness. The force of the words played in his mind: ‘chances of medium-term survival remain slim to nonexistent’.

  He’d let Omar lead him forward.

  For Gus that was the act of faith, the first step.

  ‘You do it well and you stay with me, you do it poorly and you go back to cooking and carrying. There are no second chances, Omar,’ Gus had said, at the start of the stalk. He had tried to sound ruthless and brutal, but it was not in his nature. Omar had grinned back at him, then led.

  They had come over a ridge and looked down on what Omar called the mujamma’a, what Haquim had called the Victory City, his lip curled in sarcasm, and what Gus thought of as a concentration camp. Far beyond the village was a town, then a crossroads, then the flame and Kirkūk, but all were hidden by the heat-haze of the afternoon. He had seen the original village, which had been flattened by explosives. Now he saw the replacement, sited in the centre of a desolate plateau of rock and bogland. No fields had been made, no strips cultivated. Outside a wire perimeter fence were groups of sheep and goats, pathetically thin, hunting for sustenance. Behind the fence, closed in by it, regimented rows of concrete block-houses were linked only by washing lines. Gus made a plan of the fence, the gate, the watchtowers and the single large building that dominated from the cent
re the ranks of block-houses. There was no grass to brighten the vista, and no flowers. The gate had been opened to admit a water tanker and a lorry.

  Very carefully he drew the plan of the village and he began to understand: it had been built away from a source of water and away from good grazing land, so that the village people were dependent on their guards to provide them with life support. Without it they starved. The boy had good eyes and revelled in the power of the telescope. Twice he had pointed to small sandbagged bunkers that Gus had missed. Everything he saw, and that Omar found for him, Gus marked on his plan. He studied the command post. He saw an officer, a machine-gun placed behind a parapet on the flat roof, and the queue of shuffling villagers form at the main door to receive their small packages of food. It was a place of dreary certainty, and he thought that one day would be the same as another …

  but not tomorrow.

  While he made the plan, he whispered to Omar about the work of an observer. He was not good at sharing even the little information he knew. All his knowledge of shooting was based on his taking supreme responsibility for his own skills and shortcomings. But tomorrow he could not be alone. He was searching for a vantage-point to the side, where there was sufficient elevation for his eyeline to clear the block-house roofs, from which he could see the entrance door to the command post. Away to his left, several hundred yards from where he and the boy lay, was a barren hillside, without obvious cover. If they were there and the machine-gun found them, they would die. If they did not live, the attack would fail.

  ‘Omar, don’t move, don’t point, don’t move your head fast. The hill to the left …’

  ‘Where there is nowhere to hide, Mr Gus?’

  ‘Yes, where there is nowhere to hide. Can you see a place for us?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Not perhaps. Yes or no?’

  ‘Of course, Mr Gus.’

  ‘Really, yes or no. Which?’

  ‘There are better places.’

  ‘It’s where we have to be, Omar. Yes or no?’

  The boy was learning. He moved the hessian-covered telescope, netting over the lens, so slowly. Then he settled and his eye was locked to it. Every bush on the hillside had been cut down for firewood, every tree felled. The slope was of dull brown, winter-dead earth, as if the snow and the rain had eroded the life from it.

  ‘If we are on the ridge, above the hill …’

  ‘Too far for me to shoot.’

  There was silence between them. Gus tilted his head to watch every movement around the command post, as if each moment that he saw the villagers and the soldiers, tramping in the mud around the building, was precious. The water tanker and the lorry left. He focused on the machine-gun position. Was the officer more important, or the machinegun? Omar tugged his arm. ‘There is a place.’

  ‘I can’t see it. Are you sure?’ Gus had his binoculars on it, but saw only the featureless slope of the hillside.

  ‘Yes, Mr Gus … ’

  ‘Omar – do you love Meda?’

  ‘I love her, Mr Gus – not fuck-love, but love.’

  ‘If you haven’t got a place, if the machine-gun finds us and Meda is leading the attack, afterwards it will kill her … So you have to be sure.’

  ‘Very sure, Mr Gus.’

  ‘Can you get me there in the dark, no light, and can you get me out in the day?’

  The boy nodded soberly. ‘I think so, Mr Gus.’

  ‘If you can’t, Omar, Meda is dead.’

  He knew tomorrow would be different from any experience in his life. The thought of it chilled him. He wondered how he would sleep that night, if he would sleep.

  ‘Don’t try to please me,’ Major Karim Aziz had said, to each of them separately. ‘Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear. Do not be definite about anything you are not certain of. I want only the truth.’

  He had heard what the corporal and the goatherd had said, then he had told the guards that both were to be fed a full hot meal but in different rooms so that neither knew what the other had told him. While they were eating, he had gone away to the intelligence unit and demanded they produce for him large-scale maps and aerial photographs. When he had pored over them, he had gathered up those that would help him and had returned to talk with each of them again.

  The corporal’s story didn’t alter, but the goatherd had seen the man, his man. ‘My friend was shot from across the valley, and I do not lie to you, Major. God strike me if I lie to you, but I have never known of a man who could shoot at such a distance … But I saw him, Major. He was sitting in the sun’s light against the wall of the house of my friend, and the rifle he held was bigger than any rifle I have ever seen. He was dressed in clothes that made him look like the earth and the bushes. He is not a peshmerga, Major, because I never saw one of them with such a rifle or who dressed in such a way.’

  He took the maps and the photographs back to his room. He fed Scout, and when he settled at the table the dog nestled against his feet. The Dragunov was laid on the table with the maps and photographs. It was, he reflected, the moment for which he had prepared himself through a military career of twenty-six long years. He had killed many men, but in battle the ultimate conflict of sniper against counter-sniper had always eluded him. Everything else he now stripped from his mind. It would be an elemental struggle for supremacy, himself against an expert. Alone in his room, with the dog’s snoring to calm him, there was no admission in Aziz’s mind that the man confronting him would best him.

  It was not for glory, medals, the reward of money, for killing; it was the lure of a primitive struggle between two men for supremacy in the science of fieldcraft and the skill of marksmanship. He thanked his god for the opportunity.

  The conflicts began in earnest before the attack. Meda wanted to lead the attack. Haquim insisted she stay with him, in the rear. Meda wanted a frontal assault. Haquim demanded they charge the right flank of the village. Meda wanted their own machine-gun to fire on the watchtowers. Haquim said the concentration of fire should be against the command post. Meda wanted Gus close to her, shooting in support of her dash towards the fences.

  Haquim told her that the marksman would decide where he placed himself.

  The commentary came from Omar. It was painful to Gus. His carefully drawn plan of the village was laid on the ground between them, illuminated by a shaded torch. He thought everything Haquim said made sense, but Meda rejected it, as if governed by a wild obstinacy. When his suggestion was rejected, Haquim doggedly, fruitlessly, pursued it. It was just a damn waste of time, and Gus played no part in the running sore of their disputes – her arrogance against Haquim’s experience.

  ‘I know about war,’ Haquim said, and Omar whispered it.

  ‘You know about losing at war,’ Meda said, and Omar giggled as he translated. ‘The men follow me, not you …’ There was a shout behind her, her name was called. She pushed herself up. ‘I will lead. I will be the first to the fence, the first to the command post, and they will follow me.’

  She disappeared into the darkness.

  Gus and Haquim studied the plan. Gus sensed the anger of Haquim at the humiliation thrown on him by her. But he knew that the mustashar would not walk away from her, as he would not. They agreed the position to be taken by Gus and Omar, the angle of the machine-gun’s fire, and the direction of the charge.

  ‘And she will lead?’ Gus asked heavily.

  ‘What am I supposed to do? Chain her to a rock? Bind her legs? If she goes down, is hit, then everything for us is finished.’ Haquim shrugged. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘I will watch for her, as best I can,’ Gus said.

  ‘As I will, as we all will, as best we can, as much as she will allow us.’

  There was a growing murmur of voices behind them. Two pinpricks of light were advancing imperceptibly up the incline of the hill, and both took as a beacon the central guttering fire of their camp. Gus watched. It was because of her that the new men tramped across the black wastes of open
ground, and came to them. The lights they carried lit their wild, bearded faces and their weapons glinted. They came as gliding, savage caravans in the night, carrying rifles, mortar tubes and ammunition boxes, the silver shimmer of knife blades at their belts. She walked towards them, and Gus saw the way that those at the front quickened their stride, while those at the rear ran to catch up.

  She held out her arms and the columns broke as they scattered to gather in front of her.

  They squatted down and she talked to them. They rippled their approval.

  ‘What does she say?’

  Haquim responded grimly, ‘She says that, through their courage, the Kurdish people will find freedom. That they are the heirs of Salah al-Din Yusuf. And that mercy is shown to an enemy only by a man who is weak. She says the Kurds will not find their freedom before they have killed every Iraqi soldier in the country that is their own. She says …’

  Gus walked away, turned his back on her.

  He would be, and he knew it, tomorrow, a changed man – for ever changed.

  All day the Israeli had listened to the radios as they sucked down the crypted and clear messages from Fifth Army headquarters to the forward echelon positions.

  In the shadowlands of intelligence gathering, Isaac Cohen understood the need to recognize a crucial moment of advantage. The moment might be micro-brief. In a struggle lasting years, the moment of advantage might exist only for a few hours. Many times in a veteran’s career with the Israeli Defence Force, then with the Mossad, the window of advantage had flickered open, sometimes to be exploited and sometimes ignored with heavy and enduring consequences. As a lieutenant in an armoured unit he had been pushed across the Canal in the Yom Kippur war when intelligence had recognized the advantage to be gained from hitting the hinge between the Egyptian Third and First armies. As an operating field agent of the Mossad, he had sat in on those endless debates as to the right time to eliminate activist leaders of the terrorist Hamas organization on the West Bank. Was the better advantage gained from killing the bomb-makers as soon as they were identified, or letting them run under surveillance in the hope of more names or locations surfacing? Once, it had been decided that a man should stay free, and the moment of advantage had been lost: a 10-kilo TNT bomb had killed 13 and wounded 170 more in a bloodbath at the Jerusalem food market. He was now in his isolated posting because of the failure of his superiors to recognize that a moment of advantage had passed. Everything was about advantage.