Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  At first the dog had been a companion against the loneliness of his work, then he had started to recognize the potential qualities held in its twig-thin body. By the time he had gone north four years earlier, when the Kurdish saboteurs were pushed off the plains and hills into the mountains, he had understood the abilities of the animal.

  It was ahead of him in the darkness.

  He could list the qualities and abilities, and exploit them. The dog was inquisitive, intelligent, energetic and brave. Its low profile as it moved enabled it to see skyline silhouettes that he was unable to spot. Its hearing located movements, clothing against equipment or boots through mud, that were quite inaudible to him. Its nose was crucial, several hundred times keener than his own. Once Scout had found a scent – in the air or on the ground – a chain was established that was almost impossible for a fugitive to break.

  He had made a study of scent: the strongest was given by sweat from the human body, the product of physical exertion and stressed tension. Unseen and unheard, hidden by darkness, the man ahead of him carried his wounded guide, and there would be exertion and tension that could not be disguised. Aziz did not believe the man would have been so careless as to smell of shaving lotion or cosmetic sprays, but there would be oil on his rifle and that, too, would leave a signature for the dog to follow. On the ground there would be disturbed dust, broken grass and earth scraped by a skidding boot, which Aziz would not see but which the dog would find. Beyond the range of his vision, the dog would scurry on a seemingly erratic course, with its nose down on the ground and then with its head up to sniff the evaporating scent in the air, which was special to the night and hung low in the chill of darkness.

  The moon was up, and the stars. If Aziz had stepped out of a lighted building, he would have been blind, but his eyes were now accustomed to the blackness around him.

  He never saw the man he followed, but he kept the dog within his short horizon. The pace of the fugitive surprised him but he never doubted that Scout would hold the chain linking him to the man. Many times he slipped on smooth stones and stumbled into the secret dips in the ground, but he maintained his advance.

  Aziz assumed the man knew he was followed and had by now registered the whistles, and he thought that, as the night hours elapsed, the man’s exhaustion would grow and he would seek to lose the ever-present tail, but he had faith in his dog.

  Later, as the burden became heavier and the man more desperate, Aziz expected to see the signs of evasion, but he did not think the man could trick his dog.

  He was walking more slowly, but every few minutes he heard the clear, distant whistle.

  Gus carried the rucksack, the rifle and the boy. He did not know what his rucksack weighed, but the rifle was fifteen pounds, and he guessed the boy was 125 pounds. The rucksack was on his back and the sling of the rifle was looped over his neck so that it hung down on his chest. Omar was draped over his shoulder. He did not know how long he could go on with the burden. He fell twice, but the boy never cried out, and each time Gus staggered to his feet and pushed forward.

  The whistle was an infuriating constant, never closer or more distant.

  The boy would tell him, in a small, weedy voice, which way he should go. He thought it extraordinary that, unschooled, Omar could read the moon’s passage and the lie of the stars, and know when he was off course. Those he had met at the commando training centre, and the man who ran the survival school for the arrogant bastards and bitches on corporate adventure, would have needed state-of-the-art Magellan positioning handsets and readings off three or four satellites. Omar guided him. Without the boy he would have blundered in circles. If the boy died on him then the dawn would come and he would be short by miles of the safety line.

  The whistling tracked him.

  They had talked to him about dogs at the commando training centre, and he scanned in his mind for the memory of what they had said. What he had seen of it, at last light, the boy’s wound was high in the chest. There was only one. The bullet had not exited. The bleeding was also inside the boy, oozing from the wound against the rough cloth of the gillie suit … They had told him that water was the key to breaking the scent trail.

  ‘I have to find a stream, a lake.’

  ‘Go right.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Can you not smell the water?’ The question seemed to bubble in the boy’s throat and Gus knew the lungs were damaged.

  ‘I can’t smell anything.’

  ‘Go right, and you will find water.’

  ‘Then we go away from the line – you have to be sure.’

  ‘There is water.’

  Each step hurt. Each breath was harder to find. Each jolt scraped the pain from the blister on his heel, merged it with the ache in his limbs and the emptiness of his lungs and the numbing pressure on his shoulder. Each pace was worse. He heard the tinkle of water running on stones.

  ‘Can you go on, Mr Gus?’

  ‘I can go on.’

  He could go on because he still had the chance to live, and did not have a wound without an exit. He could go on because he had only the blister, the ravaged muscles and the burden, not a squashed rough fragment of lead in his body. He had to throw off the scent, lose the dog. He slipped down into a narrow stream and went against its flow. The stones under his boots were smoothed, as if greased, and the whistle was away to his left.

  The stream took him into a small lake. The ripples were illuminated by the moonlight on the water and he waded close to the bank. The water was cold heaven on the pain of the blister.

  The boy’s voice croaked in Gus’s ear. ‘I am cold.’

  ‘I’ll do something about it when I can.’

  ‘I am not frightened, Mr Gus.’

  ‘No cause to be.’

  ‘You can leave me and have a better chance.’

  ‘I would not leave you as I could not leave her.’

  ‘Tell me a story, Mr Gus, from Major Hesketh-Prichard.’

  His voice, however quiet, would carry in the darkness, but so would the sounds of his movement through the water.

  Gus whispered, ‘I always liked best the story of when they searched for Wilibald the Hun …’

  Over and over again, Commander Yusuf read the reply from Baghdad, and the name of a

  ‘simple soldier’. The man had been in his hand, but the hand had opened and the man had slipped away from him.

  It was dangerous for a servant of the regime to be wrong.

  He went to the door of the inner room and opened it. They were vulgar thugs, still wearing the same blood-spattered uniforms, and there was a near-emptied bottle of whisky on the table and filled ashtrays. He would not have allowed any of them to touch the sweet innocence of the grandchildren he loved. He had been fooled by a simple soldier with a record of distinguished combat in Kurdistan, along the length of the Iranian border and in Kuwait. When he had met him, he had seen nothing of ambition, cunning, access to the élite or vanity, and he could be blamed for opening his closed fist and allowing the supreme sniper in the ranks of the Iraqi army to walk away from him.

  ‘The marksman, Major Aziz, where is he? Find where he is.’

  They were drunk. They leered back at him. Could it wait until the morning? They were slumped in their chairs.

  He walked to the table and kicked it over. The fury blazed in him. The whisky dribbled into the rug, the cigarette ash clouded them, and they cringed away from him. If the order came from a higher authority, they would carry the chainsaw towards him, and his hands.

  ‘Now. Find him now. Where is Aziz?’

  He went back into his room and dictated his instructions over the telephone to the night-duty staff at the al-Rashid barracks in Baghdad. It would be a bad night for him, he thought, and long.

  He had stood by the high stretch of the water while the dog had searched the bank, careered between rushes and rocks and then had picked up the scent again.

  It had been a predictable ploy, but he thought that
the man had done well to find the water in the darkness, and he marvelled at his endurance. Aziz understood why the man pressed on in desperation.

  If he had not had the burden of a casualty, and not felt the responsibility to carry the casualty back, then the man could have gone to a rocky outcrop and hidden himself and waited. The dog would have pointed to him, but the man would have given himself the chance, at dawn, when the light flickered across the ground, to search for his tracker and shoot and rid himself of the pursuit. But the man carried a casualty – the child guide –who was in need of medical attention if his life were to be saved. He thought that the fugitive must be a fine man: only a fine man would have accepted the responsibility of the casualty. He had met hunters, who went after deer, boar and wolves, who spoke with gruff awe of the evasion skills of the beasts they hunted – but the respect did not stop them stalking, killing.

  Three or four kilometres behind him, a speck of white light climbed, then burst and fell. It was his link with the world he had left behind him, the struggling line of spread-out, wearied soldiers, making a rallying-point for the line to contract and come together for the rest of the night. He would not rest, not sleep, nor would the man he followed.

  It was difficult, because of his tiredness, for Aziz to concentrate, but it would be worse for the man with the burden … He could respect him, and still kill him … To stall the tiredness he worked through the checklist. They had tried the water, and only delayed the dog. They could not climb up or down vertical rock to break the scent because the man could not do so with the casualty. They could not scale a tree, then crawl along a branch, then jump. The man could not run steadily, no sweat and no deep bootprints. He was going lethargically over the checklist when the dog came back past him.

  He froze.

  The darkness seemed tight around him. On the checklist was the circle back. He did not know how close they had been, so tired, to each other. He could not know whether the man and the burden had been fifty paces from him, or two hundred and fifty. Had they passed each other? Had the man seen him, and hesitated? Had he made a silhouette, and had the man reached to unhook his rifle from his shoulder, and had the moment then passed? The dog worked over two loops. Could they have shouted to each other? The circle back was predictable. Could they have blundered into each other?

  By going into the water, and the circle back, the man had tried each of the principal evasion tactics. They had been used and had failed and the dog now tracked along a straight, true path – as if the man struggled in desperation to reach the ceasefire line, with his burden, before dawn.

  ‘Did you tell me the story of Wilibald the Hun?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Can you tell me the story of Mr Gaythorne-Hardy of the 4th Battalion of the Royal Berkshires?’

  ‘How he crawled in daylight to the German wire at Hill Sixty-three, Messines? I did.’

  ‘I must have slept – please, tell me the story of the cat.’

  The lake water sloshed in his boots but he had lost too much time to stop and empty them, and wring out his socks. He thought that the boy lapsed into and out of unconsciousness. More time had slipped away in the long circle back. Once, the dog had scurried on the loop run and he had seen its grey-white coat in the moonlight, but the scent had held its attention and it had gone by him. Once, too, he had seen a straight standing figure – a tree-trunk, a rock, the hunter – and he had held his hand over the boy’s mouth to shut out the wheeze of his breath and the bubble in it.

  There would be no more attempts at evasion. Omar had given him the star that was his guide. He had failed to break the track that the dog followed. It would be the same star that had watched him and Meda, the same star that had been above his grandfather and her grandfather at the ruins of Nineveh. He lurched on. It was darker now behind him and the gathering clouds obliterated the washed-out light of the moon.

  ‘What has our father done?’

  She could not answer her younger son’s demand for an explanation. Men swarmed through the house. She knew what he had done because they had shown her the papers dug up in the garden. She had been shown plans of the city’s north-west sector, with a ruler-straight line drawn from the outline of an apartment block to the outline of a villa, and with sentry-points arrowed and road blocks circled. She sat at the table in the kitchen with her mother, who wept, and her father, who held his head in his hands, and her sons, and watching over them was the barrel of a machine-gun. She had told the men of her previous day, the drive to the fuel station on the Kingirban and Kifri road outside Sulaiman Bak; they had written what she said. She had told them that her husband had said she was to bring boots for rough walking and food and a small tent; they had pointed on a map to the ceasefire line within an hour’s drive of the fuel station. The kindnesses he had shown her over many years were now forgotten, and the intimacies. She told them, flat-voiced, how he had been away from her bed every night in the week before he had been ordered north, and of his distraction and nervous temper. Quietly – as her home was searched, stripped, she chased survival for herself, her parents and her children. She denounced him. She heard her elder son cruelly respond to the question.

  ‘Our father is a traitor … I hate him, as you should … Our father deserves to die.’

  His family were not in his thoughts.

  He whistled again for the dog to wait.

  Each step was harder. The hours were crawling away but he could sense no end to the night. Aziz had had to crawl on his stomach from a bog into which he had strayed. Those had been nightmare moments. The sinking mud had clung to his legs, higher than his knees, and he had only been able to use the one hand to claw his way free because the other had held the rifle clear of the filth of the bog. He could have died there, exhausted, watched by the dog, unable to pull himself out. The nightmare had edged towards panic before he had been able to get a grip on a stone at the edge of the bog and lever himself out. He did not think of his family, but the panic had surged because he had thought he would not fire the Dragunov again. Everything in his life, which might have ended in waste in the bog, was preparation for the long hunt of the fugitive and then the long shot on the target.

  Aziz looked more often now behind him. He watched for the encroaching mass of cloud. It had not yet reached the moon’s half-light, which enabled him most of the time to avoid the bogs and the stones, and to see the dog ahead of him, but twice he had heard the thunder peal and once the ground had been lit by a sheet of lightning. In its flash, he had seen the man perhaps half a kilometre ahead. It had been a fleeting glimpse. He had seen the weight on the man’s shoulder and the narrow outline of the rifle barrel stretching up past the hooded head. The man had not taken advantage of the moment to look behind him, and had trudged on, bent under the burden. He already had respect for the man’s skill – the shooting, the fieldcraft and the dedication – but Aziz did not understand why the man had not dropped off the burden, laid it down, put a handgun or a grenade in the child’s fingers, and moved faster and freer.

  The bog’s mud, clinging to his boots and his trousers, further slowed him, as the clouds closed behind him. The panic of the struggle to escape the bog was replaced by a new fear: of the clouds and the rain that could wipe out the scent the dog followed.

  He murmured, ‘Is that what you are hoping for, friend, the rain? Do you hope that the rain will cheat me? … How do you find the strength – in the name of God, where do you find it? If the rain does not come you will have to turn … You understand, friend, that it is not personal? I believe that a man such as you, a man I respect in all sincerity, would know that it is not personal …’

  There was no past in his mind and no future. There was nothing of his family, and nothing of his own salvation. The present ruled him, was each slow step forward, and the bounce of the dog ahead of him, the struggle to hold the pace, and the glimpse of the burdened man in front of him, the massing of the clouds behind.

  ‘It is the last ridge, Mr Gus.’
The voice was beside his ear, quiet.

  ‘Say that again.’

  ‘It is the last ridge.’

  A coal-black line was ahead of him and above it was the grey mass of the mountains.

  He had not noticed the dawn come. The whistle was in the air some way behind him. He did not know how far he had gone in the night hours, how many miles of slopes, screes and muddy pools he had climbed and crossed. He had lost the pain, killed by his tiredness.

  ‘He is still with you, Mr Gus.’

  ‘He is still with me.’

  ‘To shoot you, Mr Gus … I am so cold.’

  ‘We must keep you awake. It’s time for another story.’

  The wind gusted abruptly onto his back. It seemed to knife into Gus’s shoulders, through the weight of the rucksack and the dangling legs of the boy. The wind went from moderate strength to fresh to strong … He would take the boy home. There was no clarity in his thoughts, and no clutter of passports, visas and immigration. He would take the boy home and put him in the spare room, find a chair for him at work, walk him on Saturday mornings in the high street, and drive him on a Sunday to Stickledown Range … The rain blustered on to his back. He would teach the boy to read the pennants that marked the wind on the range and the boy would call the deflections for the alteration on the windage turret of the old Lee Enfield No. 4, Mark 1 (T), and would lie beside him on the mat. The lightning split the skies around him – he did not look back because he knew that he was still followed – and the thunder boomed in its wake. With the boy beside him, he would win the silver spoons.

  The rain came hard and sudden. He thought it had come too late, then heard again the whistle and headed towards the last ridge.

  It was his agony: ‘Why does he follow me?’

  ‘You are the best, Mr Gus. If he kills the best then he is supreme. He follows you so that he will be the best.’

  ‘Is that important? Does it bloody matter?’

  ‘I think it mattered to Major Burnham, Distinguished Service Order, in the Matabele war, to be the best.’