Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  If he fought he would shoot against the conspiracy he had joined. If he did not fight, he would betray the trust of those who depended on him. He went slowly through the town, past the sandbag positions and cars that had been driven across the streets to make barricades, hugging the shadows and harbouring his torment.

  The man had no face.

  He lay against a rock, but had no face. Or he was in a ditch, or had tunnelled out a hide, or was back in trees, buried in shadow … but there was never a face to bring a character to the man.

  The meeting droned on.

  He needed to give a face to the man. He did not know whether it was cold or carried warm humour, whether the face had charity or parsimony. He did not know whether the face of the man was bearded, moustached, or clean-shaven, whether it was topped with hair, whether the eyes shone without mercy or with kindness. The man had come north to find him and to kill him, and he could not give him a face.

  Meda, with the map spread in front of her, talked, and the men listened.

  He could not escape from his search for the face. In the morning the man would be waiting for him. He had come north to take one life. Gus heard not a word that Meda said. Nothing he had been told, had read, that he had experienced, had prepared him for the bleak certainty that a master sniper was at that moment making his preparations for the morning.

  ‘Gus?’

  All through the day he had been able to shut out the thought of the man, but no longer.

  He was drawn, a lemming to a cliff, towards Tarjil, where a fate of sorts awaited him.

  The chill was on his body.

  ‘Gus, is that all right?’

  Who would tell his grandfather, his father and mother? Who would tell Meg? Who would clear his desk? Who would tell Jenkins? And would they pause on Stickledown Range to remember him?

  Meda snapped, ‘Gus, are you listening? Do you agree?’

  He pinched his nails into the palm of his hand. He asked quietly that she should run through it once more, so that he was certain he understood.

  ‘It is a battle against a regiment. There is more to interest me than what you have to do.’

  Haquim glanced sourly at him. ‘I will explain it to him afterwards.’

  When the meeting finished and the commanders fanned out into the darkness to brief their own small cabals of men, Haquim walked with him. He was told of a town of three thousand souls on flat ground just below the lip of a hill. In the heart of the town was the largest mosque, and beside the mosque was the police station, which was the headquarters of a regiment of mechanized infantry.

  ‘The regiment has not been reinforced, she says. She does not tell me how she knows.

  If she is right then there will be a garrison of four hundred men, if she is right.’

  Gus told him of the man without a face. Gus told Haquim, stampeded through the interruption, what the Israeli had said to him, and he saw the fury boil in the mustashar.

  ‘We go in a line, because she says so. We do not feint to the left, avoid the predictable, then attack from the right. Our route is a straight line, and across the line is Tarjil, where a regiment is placed. They have defended positions. Tomorrow you will lie on your stomach. You are permitted to hang back. What of the men who have to cross open ground? What of them? How many will be killed? How many will live without arms, legs, eyes, testicles? Think of her, think of me, think of the men going against defended positions. Do not, Mr Peake, dare to think of yourself.’

  Gus hung his head.

  A column of men was coming through the gate of the village, loaded with weapons. He saw their tired, serious faces and wondered how many would survive the next day.

  He found Omar beside the wire amongst a small mountain of old newspapers, kneading the sheets of paper together in a metal bathtub by the light of a hurricane lamp.

  The boy grinned happily at him.

  ‘Show me,’ Gus ordered.

  Cheerfully, Omar lifted the pulped paper from the bathtub. Gus doubted the boy, in his cut-short life as a kid, had ever played with papier-mâché. Childhood had been denied him. The water splashed down the boy’s arms and over his battledress and he held up the shape of a man’s head … The face was without features.

  ‘The cat, Mr Gus – while it dries, before we paint it – tell me about the observer and the cat.’

  ‘Major Hesketh-Prichard wanted to write about the importance of the observer. He thought too much emphasis was given to the sniper, and not enough credit to the observer.’

  ‘I am the observer, so I am important.’

  ‘Don’t interrupt. I thought you wanted to hear it. This young lieutenant of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment was watching a German trench that was thought to be disused and he saw this big cat. It was a tortoiseshell, orange and black and white, a fine well-fed animal, and it was sitting on some sandbags sunning itself. Many others had studied that section of trench, but the lieutenant was the first to see the cat and realize its importance.

  Rats plagued the British trenches as well as the German ones. The lieutenant decided that this fine cat could only belong to a senior officer, at least a major, and had been brought to the trench to kill the rats. If the cat belonged to a major then the bunker over which the cat was sunning itself must be a command post. The lieutenant spoke to the artillery and the next morning there was a barrage of howitzers, the bunker was blown up and all the officers in it were killed. That shows the importance of a good observer, Omar … Oh, Major Hesketh-Prichard said the cat survived, it wasn’t killed.’

  ‘I think tomorrow, Mr Gus, many will be killed.’

  He looked at the drying features of the shape, which by the morning would have been given a painted face.

  Chapter Eight

  By the hurricane lamp’s light, Omar daubed the dried face with paints liberated from the wrecked school building: grey, red and white for the flesh on the face, brown for the moustache and the eyebrows, a pink mix for the lips, grey and blue for the eyes.

  When the paint set, Gus sent him to find a scarf in khaki or olive green, a good strong stick and a combat shirt. The boy disappeared into the darkness. Gus should have been sleeping, resting and regaining the strength he would need in the morning. He wondered if Meda slept, or Haquim. Beyond the wire, in front of him, the night held its silence.

  While the boy had made a face and while he had told him how to paint it, he thought that a great game was played out, but that he was only a small part of it. The painted face was not that of his enemy, it was his own.

  ‘So, I find the sniper …’ a voice boomed, then a cascade of laughter. Gus peered back, and saw the Russian.

  ‘I am told you are English. I bow to an English gentleman.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To pass the night hours in the company of civilization.’

  Gus growled, ‘Find it somewhere else.’

  ‘Are you frightened?’

  ‘I am not frightened.’

  ‘Let me tell you, Mr Gentleman, about myself. Then when you have heard me with English politeness, I will ask the question of you again. I am from Volgograd, but then it had the name of our great leader, Stalin. I was two years old when the Germans came to Stalingrad. My father and my uncle fought there, my mother was in the cellars and basements with her baby son. It was a battle without etiquette or regulation, a fight for survival … Perhaps you believe, if this battle goes badly, you can still go back to the green pleasant land of England. There was no retreat for my father, my uncle and my mother from Stalingrad. Across the river were fifteen thousand troops whose military task was to prevent retreat – they shot those who fell back.’

  ‘I have no interest in the battle for Stalingrad.’

  ‘Listen to me. The battlefield bred the great snipers of history, and great sport for those who watched. Which would you prefer to see: a boxing fight, a race around a stadium, a football game, or two men with rifles hunting for each other? The sport at Stalingrad was to watch the du
els of the snipers, and to bet on them – half a loaf on the Russian, a quarter of a chocolate bar on the German. The best of them were known throughout their armies. As soon as a sniper became famous he was tracked by an enemy who was also a celebrity … And you tell me you are not frightened. You are, Mr English Gentleman, already famous. The word spreads here, as in Stalingrad. Half a million men, in the third month of the battle, watched the fight to the death between the two master snipers.’

  ‘Your story is not relevant to me.’

  ‘You are famous. A man will have come because he has heard of your fame. The great duel was between Major Konings and Vasili Zaitsev. Zaitsev was a hunter from the Ural mountains, who had killed three hundred German soldiers in the battle for Stalingrad.

  Konings, a major in charge of the sniper section of the School of Infantry Tactics at Wunstorf, was flown into the battle from Berlin to redress the balance of death.

  ‘Stalingrad was the pivotal battle of the war, Mr English Gentleman. You could say it was the turning-point in the history of the century, but at the very point of its fulcrum was the duel between Zaitsev and Konings.’

  ‘Come on, how did it finish?’ Beside him the boy had knotted the scarf around the papier-mâché head, rammed a stick up its throat and had buttoned a tunic across its neck.

  Rybinsky smiled. ‘You make a face of paper – an old tactic. For a full week Zaitsev took a place near where his friends, Morozov and Sheykin, had been shot, and he watched and saw nothing. Zaitsev took Kulikov with him as his observer, but they could not identify Konings’ position. On the seventh day of the fourth week of the month after Konings had come to Stalingrad, Kulikov saw the flash from a speck of glass in the rubble of no man’s land – a telescope or the sight on a rifle – but they could not see Konings. They used the old tactic, as old as the one you use. Kulikov raised his helmet on a stick. Perhaps Konings was tired, perhaps uncomfortable, perhaps he wanted to piss, but he made the mistake and fired at the helmet. If the helmet had only dropped back, Konings would not have exposed himself – but Kulikov screamed, as if he were hit.

  Konings’ mistake was that the scream aroused his vanity. He thought he had killed Zaitsev. He raised his head to see his success. It was all Zaitsev needed … Are you frightened that you don’t know whether you are Zaitsev or Konings?’

  Gus pushed himself up. There was the murmur of voices behind him and the sounds of weapons being armed, and the squeal of the wheels that carried the heavy machine-gun.

  He said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Rybinsky, but I don’t care to give myself that significance.’

  ‘Is he there? Has Major Konings come from Berlin?’

  Gus sighed hard. ‘Yes. Yes, he has travelled. If you stick around, you’ll have the grandstand seat.’

  Gus and Omar joined the great silent column moving away into the night, and far ahead of them the bright flame burned.

  Major Aziz sat in a doorway at the front of a hardware shop. The door behind him, and every other door in the town, was locked, bolted.

  He looked down the street in front of him: like every other street in the town, it was barricaded and empty.

  He sat with his rifle loose across his knees, fed biscuits to his dog, and waited.

  Ken Willet took the key that was passed to him.

  Ms Manning had planted her buttocks against the cleared desk. Her arms were folded across her chest and she gazed back defiantly at the source of the tirade that had been halted in its tracks, briefly, to offer up the key.

  ‘I don’t know what sort of pressure you people, spooks and whatever, have to endure, but if you think you’re hard done by then try half a day in here.’

  Around the cleared desk, telephones were ringing and two women were trying to stem a tide of chaos. Outside the office, in the wide tarmac yard, the giant lorries with their trailers were starting up and manoeuvring towards the main gate. Each time the office door opened for a shouted query from a driver, the owner broke off from his lecture to Ms Manning. Willet had the safe door unlocked and pulled it back.

  ‘If he was here, right now, Gus would be taking care of the Hamburg consignment, which is up the spout because the bloody Germans have filed the wrong customs declaration – can’t be late because that lorry’s got to get back, off-load, then be in Birmingham for a machinery pick-up for Milan – and in Milan there’s a factory on short time because they haven’t got that machinery, and I’m on a penalty if I don’t meet the schedule. I’ve two drivers off with flu, genuine, not skiving, but I’m shuffling the others round so that our supermarket contract doesn’t suffer. I’ve another lorry off the road with gearbox trouble, perishables to lift out of Barcelona, three lorries in the queue at Dover because the bloody French are on strike … and an empty bloody desk where my transport manager should be sitting.’

  Willet took the papers from the safe, stacked them neatly beside his knee and began to read.

  ‘I may own the bloody place, own the lorries, own the bloody overdraft, but I don’t run this office. Be in hospital with a coronary if I had to. Gus runs it – or ran it until three weeks back. He said he wanted to go to Turkey with one of the drivers. That’s agricultural equipment spares going out, and denim jeans coming back. Said he wanted to understand better the drivers’ problems – but he didn’t come back with the jeans. In Ankara, he off-loaded himself … God knows what he was up to, because he’d stowed gear under the seat that wasn’t shown to Customs. He told the driver he’d make his own way home. I’ve not had sight or sound of him since.’

  ‘What was the gear?’ Ms Manning asked crisply.

  Willet, on the floor with the papers, could have answered.

  The owner snapped, ‘It was a rucksack, the driver said, and a long carrying bag. The driver said it was camouflaged. It was smuggled so God alone knows what was in it. If Customs had found it, Christ … Didn’t say where he was going, how long he’d be. The least of my problems right now. My problems are pressure, and no bloody transport manager here to sort them.’

  ‘Good at his job, is he?’

  Willet, shuffling through the papers, speed-reading them, didn’t think she understood her capacity to sneer a question.

  ‘Are you good at your job? If you’re half as good at your bloody job as he is then my taxes are well spent. Course he’s bloody good. Pressure doesn’t faze him, not like me.

  There can be fuck-ups from bloody Edinburgh to Eastbourne, from Cardiff to Cologne, and he soaks them up. I don’t get tantrums or shouting from Gus, I get the fuck-ups sorted. He doesn’t bawl out the girls, doesn’t shout at the drivers. He sits there, where your arse is, and sorts it. He does it on his own. Calm – just what I’m not … So, get out of my hair, and leave me to keep this shambles on the road.’

  At the bottom of the papers on the floor was a sixteen-page colour sales brochure.

  Willet slipped it into his briefcase and replaced the other papers in the safe, swung the door closed and turned the key on it.

  The owner didn’t see them out. He had a telephone at each ear, the secretaries were trying to attract his attention, and a driver and a grease-stained mechanic were hovering at his shoulder. Willet followed Ms Manning from the dreary little office and they left behind them the confusion, and the girlie calendars sent out by the tyre companies.

  ‘What a dreadful man,’ she said.

  ‘Pays the taxes, doesn’t he, for our salaries?’

  She gave him a savage, disdainful look. He wondered how she’d survive the slash-throat world of private enterprise. They paused as a juggernaut drove past them. The tang of the diesel seeped into his nose.

  ‘We’re wasting our time,’ she said. ‘We’re wasting it on a damn fool idiot with a death-wish.’

  ‘You’re wrong.’

  ‘Really? Then enlighten me.’

  They were walking towards her car.

  Willet said, ‘We are not wasting our time. We are evaluating Peake’s capabilities as a sniper. That’s what we’ve been briefed t
o do and that’s what we’re doing. We are learning. We do not yet know what those capabilities are. If he doesn’t have those capabilities, then yes, he is a damn fool, who will be killed. If he does have them, the horizons change.’

  The sneer was back. ‘One man? No way.’

  They were at her car. Willet stood in front of the door, blocking her.

  ‘A sniper can change the course of a battle – no other soldier has so much influence.

  I’ll tell you what a sniper can do. A brigade-size manoeuvre I was at on Salisbury Plain

  … the acronym is TESEX, that’s Tactical Evaluation and Simulation Exercise. All the weapons have the capability to fire a laser beam, and every man has a device on his uniform that’ll register the laser. A rifle shoots the laser and if there’s a hit the device bleeps. With me so far? A brigadier, a high-flier, was in charge of the attack side of the exercise, been planning it for weeks, probably months. The defending force, commanded by a colonel with a proper sense of humour, pushed a sniper forward towards the brigadier’s command post. It was going to be a three-day exercise and the brigadier thought it would notch him up to major-general level. Five minutes into the first of the three days, the sniper “shot” the brigadier. The old bleeper went … all the planning out of the window, all the promotion hopes dumped. The brigadier shouted, “This can’t happen to me,” but the observer controller told him it could and it had. He yelled and argued, didn’t make any difference. “Do you know who I am?” was his last throw, and the observer controller told him, “Yes, you’re a casualty and you’re going into a body bag, sir.” The attack failed.’

  He stepped aside. She unlocked the door.

  ‘It’s a ridiculous story – just men playing kids’ games.’

  ‘Actual war, that’s the same game. It’s what he can achieve if he’s good enough, which is why Peake is worth learning about. Cheer up, things are looking rosy: we’re going to have a day at the seaside.’