Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘He’s can, will, must. I see enough of them, I recognize them. I call it being “the master of circumstances”. It’s about the ability to withstand pressure, and I’m talking about extreme stress.’

  It was the unpeeling of another layer. Willet scribbled his notes, but Ms Manning gazed around her and studied the photographs. He thought he’d brought her to new territory, and her expression showed she thought it disreputable.

  ‘Look, if Gus Peake had not decided to interest himself in firing a half-century-old sniper rifle, if he’d focused on the modern equipment, he’d be right up in the top flight of the Queen’s Hundred. I’d go as far as to say that he’d be challenging for the Queen’s Prize. Instead he chose the sort of demanding discipline that will not produce celebrities, but he’s still the best at that discipline. He won’t get a chair ride at Bisley, won’t have a cabinet of display cups, but I’ll wager he has a drawerful of spoons, if you know what I mean.’

  Afterwards Willet would have to explain to Ms Manning about Bisley, about the annual shoot that was the showpiece for the year, the choosing of the hundred best marksmen for the last day’s competition, and the lifting of the winner onto a chair so that he could be hoisted to receive the Queen’s Prize as the band played ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’. He might tell her that in 1930 a woman had sat in the chair and been serenaded … He cursed himself for allowing distraction to cloud his thoughts. It was why Ken Willet was not a champion and never would be, and why he’d failed the sniper course.

  ‘I liked his mind management. He’s very quiet. When he was down here he only spoke when he had something to ask. Some customers talk the whole time, think that’ll impress me. He’s not afraid of silence. That’s important – it marks a man down as one who doesn’t have conceit.’

  Ms Manning frowned. Willet wondered, after they’d gone, whether the pair of them, the investigators, would be dissected by the sales director to his colleagues – whether he and Ms Manning would be categorized as conceited or confident, or simply from a second division.

  ‘Confidence and conceit are very different things. Conceit is failure, confidence is success. A conceited man cannot abide failure and turns away from any area where he may lose. But a confident man thinks through the ground conditions then backs his intuition. Champions are confident, not conceited – that’s why Gus Peake is a champion.

  I’ve known him for the last three years. You see, we make military and civilian rifles, so I go to Bisley. Target-shooting with modern rifles can be about as dull as watching paint dry – I usually wander over to the HBSA people for a chat and a coffee, it’s how I met him. I’m not a friend, I doubt he has any, he didn’t seem the type – but I’ve watched him shoot and talked through shooting problems. He has my respect. What’s he up to?’

  ‘You don’t have to know that,’ Ms Manning said coldly.

  Willet cut in, offering a little truth for something more, ‘He’s in northern Iraq. It’s a long story, doesn’t affect you, but he’s with a group of Kurdish tribesmen. He’s gone to war.’

  ‘It might just affect me. What he purchased from me was sale or return. I promised him a good price if he brought the kit back.’

  Ms Manning asked, ‘What did he buy?’

  ‘Just so that there are no misunderstandings, he produced a section 1 firearms certificate, so he is quite entitled to purchase a bolt-action rifle, and it was quite legal for me to sell it to him. Obviously he’s passed all the necessary user tests, he’s a member of a recognized club, he’s satisfied the police that he owns a secure gun box. Do you want to see what I sold him?’

  Manning nodded. He swung round his chair and darted for a side door, leaving them at the table. She sipped her coffee; Willet reached for the last of the biscuits that had come on a plate with the coffee mugs.

  The rifle was slapped down on the table in front of them. Ms Manning spluttered on her coffee.

  It was a killing machine, she could recognize that, as Willet could. It was nothing about sport, but was for killing men. The butt, stock and barrel were painted a dull olive.

  It was tilted upwards by a fixed bipod, and the polished glass of the telescopic sight winked malevolently. The sales director didn’t ask her, but picked it up and dumped it in Ms Manning’s hands.

  ‘That’s it, that’s what Gus bought. The grand title is AWM .338 Lapua Magnum. I say it myself, it’s the best thing we make and the best sniper rifle that anyone makes, anywhere.’

  Very slowly, bulging the biceps under her blouse, Manning lifted it to her shoulder.

  She’d tilted her spectacles up on to her forehead. Her eye peered into the sight, her finger was on the trigger. Willet wondered whether she’d ever held a rifle before. Her aim moved round the office, from the leave chart to the computer screen in the corner, from the computer screen to an American presented plaque, from the plaque to the window and wavered as a seagull flew close, from the seagull to Ken Willet’s head and chest. It was the first time he had seen her grin in that way. She had the power, given her by the size, weight, sleekness of the rifle. He looked into the small, dark abyss of the barrel. She squeezed. He felt sick, his stomach twisting. She put the rifle on the table and dropped her spectacles back over the bridge of her nose.

  ‘Don’t ever do that again,’ Willet hissed. ‘Don’t ever point a weapon …’

  She laughed in his face.

  ‘That’s what Gus has taken. In the right hands it’s a serious weapon. Sale or return, as I said. Am I going to see it back here? I suppose that depends on what he learned down in Devon.’

  ‘You sat out there?’ There was an accusing note in Haquim’s voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Alone? Without protection?’

  ‘Yes,’ Gus said.

  ‘Where you could be seen?’

  ‘Where I could be seen.’

  ‘For why? For what?’

  ‘I can’t explain.’

  ‘You talk serious rubbish … Meda says there will be no tanks.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘If Meda says it the men will believe her.’

  ‘Will they?’

  ‘You think yourself amusing, Mr Peake …’

  He was light-headed, as if drunk with alcohol.

  As the sun had climbed Gus had tramped back to the outskirts of the town and to the low wall that penned the goats where he had left Omar. He had had to shout at the boy to drill home the instruction that he was not to be followed. There had been a purpose to his long, lonely walk, to evaluate the ground over which they would fight in the morning. He had sat on a rock and soaked the place into his body and his mind. He had wanted to test his powers of observation and to reckon out the camouflage he would need and to measure the visibility that would be available to him as the heat grew … He had known he was being watched. Gus had not seen him, but at one point there had been the flash of sunlight striking the prism of a lens. It was the knowledge that he had been watched from a great distance that induced the impertinence he threw back at Haquim. The mustashar sobered him, jolted him.

  ‘Have you thought that you might be taken, Mr Peake? Not killed clean – captured, dirty.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps that is what you should think. It is all a bluff. We must create an illusion of energy, strength. We have to go forward on a narrow thrust. Each step we go forward takes us further from the protection of the mountains. Tomorrow that protection is behind us. We are in the open. We go forward, and every step we advance we make the salient deeper and we expose the flanks. Do you know about flanks, Mr Peake? The most important thing is that they can be pinched. I put it very simply to you, when you make a salient with flanks you can be cut off, you can be surrounded, and squeezed. You wonder that I am worried? I carry the worry alone. She has no idea of the danger of encirclement.

  She has no military experience. Meda believes only in the certainty of her destiny, and she says there will be no tanks. I’m not asking for sympathy, but I have t
he right to demand that you do not make fun of me. She says there will be no tanks, but it is for me to consider whether she might be wrong. She does not ask it of me but I fear for her, for those who follow her, for myself, for you – if the tanks come and we are not killed cleanly.’

  ‘I apologize,’ Gus said quietly. ‘I apologize sincerely.’

  ‘You have to meet a man who has brought mines to hear how a sniper should use the mines – if she is wrong and if the tanks come.’

  Gus followed Haquim back through the town towards the police station to listen to another expert.

  The brigadier was a strong man, and he shivered as he watched the tanks being armed and fuelled. He had shared, spread the conspiracy, and the promises were piled behind him. He had the promise of the witch and her peshmerga army, and the promise of the Americans, and the promise of men in Baghdad. But – and he knew the sort of promises that wafted around men committed to insurrection – there were always more promises.

  Never had sufficient promises been heaped behind the officers planning a coup d’état.

  With insufficient promises there was a short walk to the gallows. He needed the promise of the general at Tuz Khurmātū.

  The huge tank shells, 125mm calibre, were being lifted into the hatches. The fuel lorries were alongside the leviathans, loading the diesel. In the morning he would address the officers of the armoured brigade and demand their loyalty to him as their commander, and the promises that they would follow him.

  He would be a great man if the promises were kept, and a dead man if they were broken.

  The brigadier could not shed the chill from his body as the sun beat down on him, and on his tanks.

  Present at the meeting were all the male members of the general’s extended family.

  Inside the barracks compound of the Republican Guard armoured division at Tuz Khurmātū, the windows of the villa were curtained and the door to the salon locked on the inside. The mahogany-framed television set was tuned to a satellite channel from Germany and played promotional music videos, with the sound turned high. They were of the Sunni religion, and of the Dulaimi tribe. Their territory stretched from Fallūjah on the Euphrates river, across the desert wasteland to Al Qāim near the Syrian border. The Dulaimi tribe held second place in the regime’s favours and trust after the President’s own tribe, the Takriti. They were men hardened by an upbringing in the harsh desert territory of sun-scorched days and bitter night frosts. They were fighters. The sons, cousins and nephews of the general crowded the salon. They wore the insignia on their shoulders of armoured units, artillery, infantry and Special Forces. The general was the head of the family and they listened in silent respect, craned to hear what he said. He was known to his family and his tribe and his tank crews as ‘the Hammerfist’. No man had ever doubted his courage.

  He explained his dilemma. The general, the Hammerfist, told them of the visit he had received from a brigadier of Fifth Army in Kirkūk, and the proposition put to him.

  Did they join the conspiracy, or did they destroy it?

  To know of treason, and not to denounce it, was to commit treason. Should the conspiracy founder, should the brigadier be captured and interrogated, should he be broken under torture, should he speak of a meeting with a general that had not been reported to the relevant authorities, then the general too was a conspirator – and all of them who now attended the meeting in the villa’s salon. There was no middle way.

  If they joined the conspiracy and it succeeded, each of them would be rewarded. If it failed, however, they would be hanged after they had been tortured. Faced with the dilemma, the general asked for advice as to which course he should follow. He could arm the tanks of his division, or he could pick up the telephone and make a call to the al-Rashid barracks of the Estikhabarat. Which?

  The quiet clung around them.

  Each man considered insults thrown at him by the regime, and benefits they had gained from it. They thought of the consequences to their families, pondered the reliability of the Kurds, and of an American promise to create a no-fly zone and a no-drive zone above the tanks roaring towards Baghdad.

  Straight-backed, hands clasped behind him, the general – the Hammerfist – waited for them to make known their reaction to a devil’s dilemma.

  At brigade, at the crossroads, five miles north-east of Kirkūk, Major Aziz did what all soldiers do in the last hours before a battle. He cleaned his weapon and wrote a letter to his wife.

  They were not dirty, but from habit he cleaned the bolt and the breech, the PSO-1

  telescopic sight mounted directly above the trigger, the interior of the magazine, and then he wiped hard at each of the ten rounds of 7.62mm ammunition before returning them to the magazine. All around him, in the gathering darkness, soldiers checked their weapons.

  When he was satisfied that there was no possibility of a malfunction caused by dirt, he wound the loose rough cloth strips round the butt, stock, ’scope and barrel of the Dragunov.

  Aziz found a place close to the command bunker where a small shaft of light spilled out from a narrow firing slit. Also, a part of his routine was to carry in his backpack a few sheets of crumpled writing-paper, with envelopes. He was hunched down so that the spear of light was on his raised thigh, where the paper rested. He wrote only a half-dozen lines. He had written the same letters many times, for fear of not saying goodbye, in Kirkūk, in Basra, and in Kuwait City. The following morning, or a week afterwards, each of those letters had been destroyed, ripped to shreds, because he had lived. He wrote of his love for her, and for the boys – they were jewels on which fell the golden sun – and he thanked her for the happiness she had given him. When he had finished he sealed the sheet of paper in an envelope, put her name on it and placed it in the breast pocket of his shirt, where it would be close to his heartbeat. If he were killed, if he died the next day, or the day after, he held the hope that the letter would be retrieved from his body, perhaps stained in blood, and that it would be taken back to her. Once it was in his pocket, the moments of self-doubt evaporated, the time for reflection was finished.

  He slipped into the command bunker. It was buried in the sandy soil, roofed by heavy timbers that were, in turn, covered with bulldozed earth. There was quiet inside, as if the staff officers had already made their preparations. Aziz asked for the plan for the morning, and guidance as to where he and his Dragunov should be positioned. He explained where he believed the enemy’s sniper would be.

  * * *

  Joe Denton’s voice dripped at him – where he should be, how he should lay the mines, and how and at what point he should arm them.

  The column had formed in the darkness outside the police station. Gus said that he understood the plan and thanked Joe for it. Denton reached up, caught at the hessian straps on Gus’s shoulders and kissed his cheek, not wet but a brush of the lips against the stubble and the patina of dirt and paint, then turned away. He saw Denton climb into a truck beside the aid-worker. The headlights led a convoy of lorries away to the north; more wounded from the battle for Tarjil were being moved to safety. If he had been able to see the man’s face, Denton’s, then he thought there might have been tears in the eyes.

  It was Gus’s duty to go forward, but not Denton’s, nor was his the responsibility of a grandfather’s friendship: he was the victim of destiny, but Joe Denton was not.

  After the convoy’s lights had slipped away into the darkness, he heard Meda’s hectoring voice at the front of the column. When she paused for breath, there was the coughed, spluttered echo of approval. There was a last declaiming shout from her, an exhortation, and the answering bellow of loyalty.

  Shuffling at first, but growing in speed, the column surged out of the town. There were no doors open, no upper windows unshuttered, no knots of civilians to watch them go. It was as though they had come as liberators and left as a conquering army of occupation.

  He remembered the tide of vengeance that had accompanied them. The tramping feet of th
e column marched over the place where the tarmacadam had been scorched, and under the doused light on the lamp-post over which the noose had been hooked. He walked with Omar and the four men carrying the grain sacks that held the mines. Whether they were liberators or occupiers was the judgement to be made by the people who did not wish them well. Their judgement hammered him. If they were victors they would be liberators; if they were losers they would be occupiers. It hammered him because the people of Tarjil had branded them, sunk the fire into the flesh, as losers. No man or woman would shout support for a loser and wish them well. Dirty, fetid, the column left the town and its darkened, empty streets.

  Gus thought the mood of the town, its judgement, had caught many of the peshmerga.

  It was not until they were out of the town that the men began to sing. Again and again, with the deep power of their voices, the refrain of the anthem was howled into the night.

  It was the sound of hungry wolves that came in winter from the high ground to stalk beside barricaded homes in search of food. It was the sound of a predator. Omar sang with them, a high shrill note, as if to prove his adulthood.

  ‘What do they sing?’

  He could not see the boy’s face in the darkness.

  ‘We are the peshmerga, brave heroes of Kurdistan, We will never lay down our arms, We fight until victory or death.’

  Gus grimaced. ‘That’s bloody cheerful, Omar.’

  ‘We are not frightened of death, Mr Gus. You cannot be frightened of death or you would not have come. We have the power, we have Meda …’

  Gus marched on. It was strange to him that the bold words Meda had used in the town to the peshmerga, and the repetition of the anthem, demonstrated a willingness to face death. He had seen her with the aid-worker when he had been receiving the instructions from Joe Denton. He wondered if Meda had shown the flesh wound to her, whether it had been dressed again, whether it was poisoned or clean. His blister hurt but the pace of the march did not allow him to slow and hobble. It seemed a lifetime since he had last slept decently or eaten well. He thought the civilization of an old life was being steadily stripped from him.