Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  Rybinsky said, ‘She is saying that she will take them into the headquarters of Fifth Army tomorrow, and they are arguing about whose foot should be first through the gate.

  That’s the sort of shits they are.’

  The two aghas sat on metal-framed deckchairs. She was between them, on her knees, with the maps held down by stones. Gus watched them, animated in distrust or sulking.

  ‘You know what she said? She said she’d tie Bekir’s left foot to Ibrahim’s right foot, and they would go into Fifth Army together – then she’d tie Bekir’s right foot to Ibrahim’s left foot, and they’ll go into the governor’s offices. Look at the hatred behind the smiles, because she’s leading them where they cannot lead themselves. And she’s a woman, that is very painful for them – on that they are united, the one thing. And they have a very great fear of Baghdad, but if they get to Kirkūk they will be famous in Kurdish history. They want to believe her, but still they have the fear.’

  She had ripped the bandanna from her forehead, and her hair hung loose. She gripped their ankles, above their smart polished footwear. With a decisive movement she tied her bandanna around one’s left leg and the other’s right. She stood. She held out her arms as if to demonstrate to the circle the unity of their commanders. Above the whistle of the shells and the rumble of the detonation, there was a creeping growl of approval.

  ‘It is always the same with army commanders, the jealousy. I know, I was in the army.

  I was in Germany, in Minsk, I was in Afghanistan – always commanders of men have an envy. Then I transferred to Strategic Nuclear Forces. I was at Krasnie Sosenki guarding the SS-25 intercontinental ballistic missiles – perhaps one was targeted on where you lived, worked. The only thing good about Krasnie Sosenki was that it was not Chechnya.

  I left, I walked out six years ago. I had not been paid for eight months, so I went my own way, into import–export.’

  Gus saw Haquim on the far side of the circle. There was a great sadness in Haquim’s eyes. He was squatted down and his hand cupped his ear so that he could hear better. If he survived, came through, he would tell his grandfather about Haquim and about a boy who climbed onto the hulks of tanks. There would be much to tell his grandfather, but import and bloody export would not be a part of it.

  ‘In import–export in Kurdistan, I have no competitors. I have the market. That is why I am here. For me there is a big opportunity. These are a very unsophisticated people: for a percentage they will sign anything. Around the Kirkūk oil fields there is chrome, copper, iron, coal. I will get the licence to exploit the wealth of Kirkūk – an honourable financial agreement, of course. Then I can retire …’

  She was back on her knees, very close to them and their tied ankles. He watched the softness of the movement of her hands and the persuasion in her eyes. He could not look away from her, and neither could the tied men. He knew it, he would follow her where she led.

  ‘Do you know Cannes? Do you know the South of France? I would like a little apartment over the harbour, with a view of the sea, when I retire. I have never been there but I have seen the postcards. I think an apartment over the harbour in Cannes is very expensive. Are you a rich man, tank killer?’

  There was a bank account that had been emptied, and a job that he had walked out of.

  Three days before, or it might have been five – because those days now slipped by unnoticed, merged with each other, and he no longer knew the day of the week or the date – the mortgage payment would have been triggered, and would not have been paid.

  Perhaps Meg used her key, came in, sorted his post on the mat and made a pile of the brown envelopes, but her teaching salary was not enough to meet the gas, electricity, tax and water. In terms of the life he had turned his back on, he was as destitute as the men who crowded shop doorways, when the light fell and the businesses closed in Guildford’s high street, with blankets and carton boxes. He had nothing but his rifle, the kit in the rucksack under his head, and his love.

  ‘What do they pay you for killing tanks? Five thousand a week, dollars? No, that is not enough – ten thousand a week? Will you have a bonus for reaching Kirkūk? What’s the package, fifty thousand?’

  It would not have happened unless she had done it. She took agha Bekir’s hand and agha Ibrahim’s hand. She held their two hands up high, so that each man was jerked off his chair and the handkerchief and the umbrella they held were dropped. Slowly, so that every man in the circle could see it, she brought their hands together, and the fingers clasped. The great circle bayed their names. It was a moment of power. The men kissed

  … Gus thought that the next day he would stand in Kirkūk.

  ‘She is fantastic. She is incredible. I think she is a virgin. I, myself, would trade in all that package, fifty thousand dollars, to take away that virginity. Would you? I tell you, tank killer, if you want to trade in the package then you should first find a bath or a shower, and some soap. I wish it were me – I think I have to be satisfied with the licences to exploit the chrome at Kirkūk, and the copper, iron and coal.’

  Gus closed his eyes. If he had not shut his eyes, lost sight of the Russian’s leering face, he would have hit him.

  ‘I suppose I’ve been expecting you – someone like you and like the lady.’

  The sergeant sat on a camping stool. The rain drove in from the west and the sea. The slope of the Common ran away and up in front of him. His binoculars were up to his eyes, never left them, as he scanned the gorse, dead bracken and heather.

  ‘I was expecting to meet you. That’s why I asked for you by name,’ Willet said.

  It had been a dreadful drive down from London. Two coned-off roadworks on the motorway and the start of the Easter holiday had snarled the traffic. He and Ms Manning hadn’t talked much, and mostly he’d relied on the radio for company. When they had finally turned off the road south of Exeter and reached the guarded main gate of the Commando Training College – Royal Marines, they’d been eighty minutes late for their appointment. A pleasant-faced major had met them, given them coffee, accepted Ms Manning’s grudging apology, then shaken his head in puzzlement and said, without equivocation, that he’d never heard of Augustus Henderson Peake – and, anyway, it was quite impossible for a civilian to receive the advanced sniper training conducted by the Lympstone base. Ms Manning had sworn, and Willet had proffered a name.

  ‘Does this drop me in the shit?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, Mr Billings, I wouldn’t have thought there’s any call for that.’

  The major had driven them out to the Common. The rain came from low cloud that settled on the ridge a thousand yards or so from where Sergeant Billings sat. There was little to see and Ms Manning stood back, with the major, and had opened a brightly floral umbrella. Willet crouched beside the sergeant and watched the observers, who stood like old fence posts in the dead foliage on the slope and waited for Sergeant Billings to direct them. Willet had seen no movement, and he’d been passed a pair of binoculars, until the sudden murmur of Billings’ voice into a pocket radio sent the left-side observer tracking fast into a clump of flattened ochre bracken. The weird shape of a man in a gillie suit, covered with bracken sprigs and heather, emerged from under the observer’s feet.

  ‘Wrong mix of camouflage – he rushed it,’ Billings mouthed. ‘Too much bracken when he was in the heather, too much heather in the bracken. Shouldn’t have used bracken until he was out of the heather. He’s failed. Actually, he’s lucky. If he’d been in the field and I’d been the counter-sniper, he’d be dead.’

  ‘How long was Peake here?’

  ‘Three days.’

  ‘Is that long enough?’

  ‘It was all the time Gus had. Yes, it was long enough.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem long.’

  The failed sniper, who would be dead if he had been in the field, tramped miserably towards them.

  ‘That jerk’s been here a month, great on the written stuff, useless on the practical. It depen
ds where you’re coming from. Gus was coming from the right direction, Gus had my dad to teach him, like he taught me. Dad understood ground, understood the animals he stalked …’

  ‘I was told he was a poacher, your father.’

  ‘What the landowners called him, and the magistrates. Dad could have got up close enough to undo your bootlaces. He told me he was going to northern Iraq. It was about his grandfather, he said. I remember his grandfather, a good old boy, but Gus’s father was crap. He said my dad was a bad influence – but at least my dad might just keep him alive

  …’

  There was another murmur into the radio and the right-side observer plunged off into a low gorse thicket and identified the target, spotted through the sergeant’s binoculars at 624 yards. Again Willet had seen nothing.

  ‘What was his mistake?’

  ‘He’s got hessian net over the lens of his ’scope. He let the net get snagged in the gorse. I saw the lens.’

  ‘So, he’s dead.’

  ‘Failed or dead, take your pick. I spotted Gus morning and afternoon the first day, morning and afternoon the second day, morning on the third day, and each time he was closer to me. The third afternoon, I didn’t get him. What I can say to you, Mr Willet, it would take a real class counter-sniper, as good as me, to bust Gus.’

  ‘Why did you help him? You put your career on the line, your pension with it. You were in flagrant abuse of Queen’s Regulations. Why?’

  For the first time, the sergeant’s eyes flicked away from his binoculars. He had a strong, weathered face and piercingly clear eyes. ‘It was owed him, because of his loyalty.’ The eyes were back to the binoculars. ‘I had a debt to him because of his loyalty to Dad. You called my dad what the landowners and the magistrates called him, a poacher. A poacher is a thief in the eyes of those turds. He got sent down, my dad did.

  He was locked up in Horfield – that’s the gaol at Bristol – for three months. Mum and I, we hadn’t any money, we only got to see him twice. The first time, my dad was pathetic.

  They might just as well have put him down as cage him. He was a free spirit, had to have the wind on his face, had to be out in the pissing rain. I cried all the way home and Mum wasn’t much better. The second time he was brighter, changed, and he said that Gus had been to see him. My dad thought he had plenty of friends before they locked him up, but Mum and me, and Gus, were the only ones who visited him. He’d taken the day off school, told his teachers he was going home for a family funeral, but he hitched rides up to Bristol and saw my dad. All the other friends had turned their backs on him. Not Gus.

  That’s loyalty. He wouldn’t run out on you. He never saw my dad again … We moved and Dad was dead within the twelvemonth. Why? To me, loyalty is important. It’s the mark of a true friend, when you’re down the back’s not turned. What’s he doing there?

  Will he make it through?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Behind them, the major called out that he was taking Ms Manning to the shelter of his car. Willet seemed not to feel the rain dripping off his face. There was another failure, another death, another soldier tramping disconsolately forward after his position was identified. He told the sergeant that he would make damn certain that no blame accrued to him for helping the civilian, Augustus Henderson Peake, understand the trade of killing, and surviving.

  ‘What else did he learn here?’

  ‘I took him into the library, showed him what we had on sniping and signed them out in my name. In the evenings, off camp, I got the specialist instructors to meet him. There was Sergeant Williams who’s into dogs, because dogs are big for snipers, that’s tracker dogs. Sergeant Browne is weapons maintenance, Sergeant Fenton is camouflage, Sergeant Stevens is the top man for the tactics of using the AWM Lapua Magnum against armour, communications and helicopters. Sergeant—’

  ‘Did you say helicopters? You mean gun-ship helicopters?’

  ‘It’s not a cake-walk he’s gone on, Mr Willet. That’s why I passed him on to an old friend. Whatever they throw at him, he won’t back off. It’s a powerful thing, loyalty.’

  He’d sent the signals first, then steadied himself and opened the secure voice link to Langley.

  Caspar Reinholtz was alone in his office. The overall picture that he would share with the disembodied voices on the link was not for Luther, Bill and Rusty to hear.

  He allowed few interruptions. The inquest would come later, a commission of inquiry, but his job now was merely to put flesh on the bones of another disaster in Iraq. Beside the receiver for the link was a sat-phone he would use as soon as he had finished with the link.

  While he spoke, however hard he tried to cut her from his mind, the picture of the young woman was in his thoughts.

  The great circle was tighter around agha Bekir, agha Ibrahim and Meda, but held at a respectful distance.

  Gus heard the warbling pulse of the sat-phone, heard it because the men in the circle were quiet as they watched the feast of celebration. The chairs had been pushed aside and a rug laid out for the dishes of lamb and rice, and spicy vegetables. He knew what they ate because the scent of the food drifted across the open space of the circle. He sat against the wheel of the jeep and the boy was crouched beside him. The sat-phone cried to be answered. They would eat later, with all the men in the circle, then be briefed, then march in the dusk towards distant Kirkūk and the flame. The persistence of the sat-phone was silenced.

  Gus watched idly. He saw agha Bekir put a dripping piece of meat in his mouth, hold the receiver to his face, and chew while he listened. Gus saw the sea-change.

  The face clouded. Where there had been a wary smile there was now a concentrated coldness. The lines were back on the features. The boy had seen it and seemed to squirm; the murmur of voices in the circle was stilled and quiet laughter died. Agha Ibrahim was passed the sat-phone receiver and grains of rice slid from his fingers as he took it. He too listened, his face darkening, then threw the receiver away from him. Meda scrabbled on her knees across the rug, tipping aside food bowls and pots, and snatched it up. Gus heard her furious scream, and then she too dropped it. They were all on their feet. Agha Bekir was shouting to one side of the circle, and agha Ibrahim to the other, as if some strange apartheid divided their forces, and Meda was a small, spinning, yelling shape between them, and the rumble of the voices in the circle was confusion.

  Every emotion of anguish was on the boy’s features.

  ‘What do they say?’

  The boy piped, ‘They say it is finished. Meda will not believe them … They have the courage of sheep … They say it were better that it had never begun. Meda says tomorrow she will take them to Kirkūk. They say there is no air cover, that there is no mutiny in the Iraqi tanks, as they were promised. They say they are going home.’

  Meda gripped their clothes in turn. She was ferocious in her attack, and she pleaded with them, but neither would catch her eye, as if they dared not, as if they feared her reproach.

  The boy said, ‘They say that if they go now it is possible the revenge of the government will not be so great. The Americans’ promises are broken, they say they will never see Kirkūk. Meda says there is a place in history for them. They are worse than sheep when wolves come.’

  For a moment, she hung on to the men, but they pulled clear of her. Agha Bekir and agha Ibrahim shouted their orders at the sectors of the circle. Meda was pleading with their men.

  The boy’s passion was squeezed from him. ‘They say they are taking their men with them. Meda says she will be in Kirkūk in the morning, on her own if no man will follow her.’

  On each side, the circle parted to allow the departure of the chieftains. Gus sat against the wheel of the jeep and held the big rifle across his legs. He felt a sense of calm because it was still a part of his perfect day.

  Great shuffling columns of men passed her. She gazed on them with contempt. Gus saw the men who had used the wheeled machine-gun abandon it and walk on. He saw those who had run to
the wire with her at the Victory City, and those who had gone down the road with her towards the barricade at Tarjil. A few broke the regimen of the columns and dropped down to sit in the dirt at her feet. He saw the big cars spurt away with their escorts of pick-ups and jeeps, and clinging in the back of one of them, amongst the men with guns, was the Russian. So, the bastard turned his back on licences for chrome, copper, iron and coal – and a small bitter smile hovered at Gus’s lips. He saw Haquim go to Meda, argue with her and try to pull her away, but she pushed him from her and his weight went on to his injured leg. He slipped to the dirt, and crawled away in his humiliation. Many went and only a few were left.

  ‘What are you going to do, Mr Gus?’

  ‘You should walk, Omar, you have a life to live.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Perhaps go and find something to eat.’

  ‘I cannot leave you, Mr Gus.’

  They hugged each other. They were the transport manager and the urchin thief, and they clung to each other, were tied to each other as tightly as the chieftains’ ankles had been.

  ‘I am honoured to meet the sniper who does not fire.’

  ‘Do you wish to hear my report, Colonel?’

  The new man, flown in from Baghdad, was rake thin. His uniform was immaculately creased and the medal ribbons on his chest were a kaleidoscope of colours. Major Aziz knew his name and his face from the photographs in the newspapers. The photographs always showed him at parades standing a pace behind the President. He wore the flash on his shoulder of the brigade of Amn al-Khass, the unit of the Special Security Service tasked with the protection of the President. It was predictable that a new commander would seek to belittle the men over whom he had authority, to demonstrate his power. In his filth, tired, hungry, Aziz stood loosely, not at attention, in the command bunker, and the dog lay in the dirt from his boots.