Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  He yawned hard, and that broke the walls of the bubble. He yawned again, then swore to himself. The Iraqi would be on the plateau across the valley at his level, not on the steeper slopes above because there the range would be too great, and not among the rocks below, because there the cover would be harder to use. He searched and could not find, and he knew he should rest his eyes but he did not dare. He looked for light on metal or for a clean line where there should be only a broken one.

  When the sun dipped, sank, then the haze over the valley would be gone. The light would be into his tired eyes, and the gentle slope of his plateau would be clearly lit to the man on the far side. He had to believe that inside the bubble his eyes would not tire, or he would lose.

  He heard the crows calling, above him, high over the valley floor as they circled the smoothed stone on which he had laid the body.

  Did they have doubts, the men he had read of and whom he believed he walked with?

  Aziz knew the names of some with whom he believed he walked, but some were anonymous to him except for the reputation of what they had achieved. It was unsettling that he had doubts that gnawed at his patience … There was an American marine who had confirmed a kill at 1,290 metres across the river at Hue; and another marine with a known-distance range map who had hit at 1,150 metres, witnessed and written up by his officer, in the Vietnam Central Highlands; and there was Carlos Hathcock who had taken seventy-two hours to move just one kilometre and then had killed a general of the North Vietnamese army at 650 metres. He knew their stories, but did not know whether they had harboured doubts at the moment when they squeezed the trigger.

  Had the rifle held the zero? He lay under the jut of the slab and the worry fretted at him. The Dragunov, with the PSO-1 telescope sight, had held the zero the last evening when he had fired on the man and hit the boy, but the doubts lingered because he remembered each stumble in the night and every jolt on the rifle. He had tried to protect it, because the rifle was his life, but he could not be certain he had succeeded. The ’scope seemed solid on the stock, but if it had shifted half a millimetre, he would miss and he would lose, and he would not walk with the great men.

  His mind flitted on, sifting the doubts. He had sunk in the bog; the mud had cloyed round him, he had cleaned the outside of the rifle and the inner parts of the breech. What if a speck of mud was in the rifling of the barrel? The round would go high or low or wide, and he would lose.

  In front of the muzzle of the barrel, he had cleared a small area of bracken fronds so that he had a clear shot ahead. To the sides he had thinned the bracken. What if, when he identified the position of his friend, a single frond blocked a clear shot? Billy Sing, the Australian – and Aziz knew of him from his reading in the library at the Baghdad Military College – had killed 150 Turks at Gallipoli. He would have squirmed in anxiety lest his bullet nicked a single frond or blade of grass or twig. A bracken frond close to the muzzle, unseen through the focus of the ’scope, would deflect a bullet travelling at 830

  metres a second and he would fail.

  He thought of the great men of the Civil War in America – Virginius Hutchen, Truman Head and Old Thousand Yards, who was the buffalo hunter – and he believed they would all, in inner secrecy, in their lying-up positions, have entertained nagging doubts about their equipment. He would not know the answer to any of his doubts, or whether he would ever walk with the great men, until he fired.

  He heard the crows, and that pleased him. He watched them circling, and he thanked them because they turned his mind from the doubts, and he started again, through the heat haze, to search the far wall of the valley, and the plateau.

  Once a month, Lev Rybinsky drove his Mercedes up the winding stone track and brought Isaac Cohen a twelve-bottle crate of whisky and gossip, and was paid for both commodities in crisp new dollar bills.

  That midday, mopping his head with a handkerchief and pocketing the money, he told the Israeli of new gun positions on the peshmerga side of the ceasefire line, and of what was said in the bazaar in Arbīl about the hanging of the woman in Kirkūk, and of the pillow talk of the agha Bekir’s treasurer that he had learned from a whore in the UN club at Sulaymānīyah, and of … but the Jew hardly seemed to listen.

  ‘Do you remember, Rybinsky, the sniper with her?’

  ‘I met him. I talked to him. He said that a big sniper had been sent from Baghdad for him. I told him of the duels between snipers in my city, Stalingrad.’

  ‘You are so full of shit, Rybinsky.’

  ‘How people in the city watched the duels, wars within wars, primitive, and took grandstand seats and would bet … Did he run away, too, and leave her? I have not heard of him since she was taken.’

  ‘I have it from the radio intercepts – you should get yourself there.’ Cohen went to the wall map, used his pointer and gave the six-figure reference. ‘That is where they are, to duel.’

  ‘He was not experienced.’

  ‘Then you should bet on the Iraqi.’

  ‘I told him about Zaitsev and Konings, at Stalingrad, how they watched for each other, stalked each other. Zaitsev had the experience, as does the Iraqi.’

  ‘I give you fifty dollars, Rybinsky at two to one against, that the Iraqi sleeps tonight with God.’

  They shook hands, Rybinsky wrote down the grid reference and hurried to his car.

  Commander Yusuf was brought a transcript of the radio signal from the ceasefire line.

  ‘Where is this place?’

  He was shown it on the map, a finger prodding into an area of wilderness. He pondered, gazed at the harsh whorls of the contours and the shaded empty spaces without marked roads. He was a man of streets, buildings, restaurants, wide parade grounds, prison yards and cells, and he had no familiarity with such a place.

  ‘How can it be reached?’

  Lev Rybinsky found Sarah at the clinic she held each week in the schoolhouse at Taqtaq, and pushed his way past the queue of waiting pregnant women. He shooed out the patient on the couch and ignored her protest.

  He told Sarah why he had come.

  Her face widened in astonishment.

  ‘Not only do I give you morphine and penicillin, I give you sport.’

  ‘You are sick, Rybinsky, fucking sick and warped.’

  But she wrote down the map reference, closed the clinic for the day, and ran out into the sunlight to her pick-up.

  * * *

  ‘Is that Davies and Sons, the haulage company? I’d like to speak with Mr Ray Davies –it’s Willet, Ministry of Defence.’ He waited, listened to the tinny music over the telephone, then heard the voice. Willet said brusquely, ‘I’d like to congratulate you, Mr Davies, because you damn nearly fooled me. I thought you were merely stupid. I now know better. I assume that, with lorries running all over Europe, you quite often do little courier jobs for the intelligence people. I assume that you had a call before Gus Peake said he wanted to travel to Turkey and gave that preposterous story about needing to understand better the drivers’ problems. You made available a lorry with a secret compartment where the rifle could be hidden from foreign Customs. To a degree you are responsible for Mr Peake’s present situation – he is lost in northern Iraq with half of their regular army chasing him. Well done. My suggestion, you put a notice in the trade magazines for a new transport manager because you’ll be needing one.’ Willet paused, listened to the question from the other end. ‘Why are you responsible? Instead of opening the door you could have slammed it on him, and saved his life. You ingratiated yourself in the hope of a future favour – probably a blind eye turned to another of your dodgy consignments. Good-day.’

  He slammed the telephone down hard, and his hand shook. Then, again, he pecked into the file for a number.

  ‘Mr Robins, please. It’s Willet of MoD. No, it’s not urgent, it’s not a matter of life and death – it’s past that time …’ He was told that Mr Robins was unavailable because he was on business in America. He left no message and limply set down th
e telephone. If the connection had been made, he would have said, ‘Mr Robins, good to speak to you. I thought you would like to know that in the report I am writing on the journey by Mr Peake to northern Iraq, and what we believe will be his subsequent death there, I hold you partially responsible. I have reason to assume that you were told by SIS to give what help you could to Peake. Of course, you didn’t demur – you were advised by a faceless bastard that an opportunity now presented itself to gain Green Role battlefield experience for your .338 calibre Lapua Magnum rifle at a time when it is still under trial. What a heaven-sent chance to find out how the bloody thing stands up to combat conditions. You could have told them at Fort Bragg or Leavenworth or Benning or Quantico, and at Warminster and Lympstone, all of the damned rifle’s tested qualities – good for the old export business, yes? Right now, his situation behind the lines is quite desperate. Sale or return, wasn’t it? I don’t think it will be returned – such a bloody shame.’ He would have liked to say that.

  ‘What’s it to me?’

  ‘It would be like standing with him, for God’s sake.’

  Joe Denton knelt in the minefield with his back to her. She had shouted from the road to him what the Russian had told her. The line of V69s where he worked was particularly difficult because they were dispersed into a gully, and over the years sediment had covered them. It was a place too complicated for local men, even those he’d trained. He looked after himself, and thought he did not need emotional baggage.

  ‘If you used your eyes, Sarah, you’d see that I’ve got a job of work here.’

  ‘Please, Joe, it’s important to me – and I think it’s important to him.’

  He swore under his breath, pushed himself up, gathered together his probes and the shovel and the roll of white tape, and walked back up the cleared path. She showed him the map and gave him the grid-reference figures. He climbed into the passenger seat and planned a route.

  The dog’s panting was worse. Aziz, himself, even in the heat when the sun was high, could fight thirst and endure a dried-out throat and the aching in the stomach.

  He had no water for the dog. Even if he had had water in his bottle, if he had remembered to fill it from puddles or the rushing streams during the night, he would not have been able to retrieve it from his backpack because that would have created too great a disturbance. With gentle movements of his trigger hand, he tried reaching behind him, to soothe the dog’s heaving motion, but his eye never left the ’scope as he tracked it across the far wall of the valley.

  The crows were lower in their wheeling flight. He found now that they came into view, and sometimes he allowed them to lead him in effortless slow arcs. When he followed them, raking the ground against which they flew, he was more relaxed, his eyes less tired.

  But the crows, wary and wild, were dangerous to him. The crows, with their suspicion and their needle-sharp eyesight, were on level flight with the stone slab at the plateau’s rim. If they saw him move, they would twist away. If they spotted his head moving or his body turning, they would scream their warning. They were his enemy and his ally.

  ‘My friend, how goes it with you? How is the hunger, and the stiffness? Are you well, my friend, or are you suffering? If you move the crows see you, if they see you I see you

  … but it is the same for the two of us. It is my dog that suffers worse than me and I cannot tell him that his suffering is not for a great time longer.’

  In front of Aziz, where he had cleared the bracken, there was a small patch of shadow thrown from the stone slab. The shadow reached, now, to the muzzle brake that reduced the flash signature on firing. When the sun had lowered behind him, when the light of it shone with force onto the far valley wall, when it covered the cleared space in front of the brake, then he could loose the dog to tumble down the path and drink in the stream on the valley floor. Then it could go to its work. If he was to win, and earn the right to walk with the great men, then the dog was the key.

  Aziz soothed the dog, and watched the crows floating lower.

  It pecked at a worm, sodden, lifeless, drowned in the dirt.

  The bird strutted in front of Gus, holding the worm in its beak, and gobbling it down.

  He had watched the drifting tilt of the sun and in his ’scope there were now small shadows in front of the rocks on the far side of the valley, and in front of the bushes. The advantage was ebbing towards the man across the valley as the haze of the heat cleared.

  Gus knew why the crows flew lower, but he could shut that from his mind and the mass of flies that swirled round him. The ants had reversed their march and came back over him, eagerly searching for flesh to bite. Some had crawled into his socks, down the ankle support of his boot, had found the open blister, had used their teeth on it and their venom. He could dismiss that pain and that raw irritation, the stiff ache of his body and the growl of his stomach, the stink of urine in his trousers – but it was the small bird that frightened him.

  The instructors who had been with him on the Common then sat with him in the pub bar had said that all wildlife should be avoided, but birds above all. There had been a sniper in the First World War, an Australian – and even eighty-odd years later the instructors had seemed to know the story by heart, searching for his Turkish opponent in a field of ripe barley. It had been extraordinary to Gus that their stories were old, as if past history carried relevance to today’s present … The sniper, crawling so slowly and so carefully through the barley, had seen a lark. There was no panic about the small bird as it flew for food and came back to one point in the field. On the death stalk, the Australian had been drawn towards the bird and gone close enough to see its nest and the fledglings it fed. Near to the nest, so still as not to disturb the bird and send it chattering away, was the profile of the enemy’s face. The Australian had killed the Turk, one shot, and felt no remorse, only ‘hot pride’. The lark had made the kill possible, had drawn the sniper’s eye to the target.

  The bird had finished its feast on the worm.

  It pirouetted on its spindly legs then twisted back to preen its wing feathers with its beak, then hopped up.

  The bird was the size of the sparrows, robins, chaffinches and tits for which his mother put out seeds, nuts, lard. It had bright colours and a piping call. The bird’s new perch was on the foresight of the rifle. He was frightened because he did not know whether a man peering into a ten-times magnification telescopic sight, hundreds of yards away, would be drawn to follow those bright colours, as the Australian had been.

  His survival, and he knew it, was about small things. With a newer, harsher intensity he began, again, the search of the imagined squares his mind made across the width of the valley.

  The crows were lower, the sun was fiercer in his face, and the end of the towelling rope was close to his hand.

  It would be soon.

  Chapter Twenty

  It was a landscape without pity, a place too barren for the civilization known by the watchers who dribbled towards their positions on the high ground above the valley. Too remote for settlements, too unyielding for cultivation, too boggy or stony or steep for the grass necessary for grazing animals. But each of them, coming to their viewpoints, recognized a savage, cold magnificence.

  As they slowly descended, the crows were still wary of the feast presented to them, but were gathering courage as their shadows swept the stone slab, and the body lying on it.

  On one side of the valley, facing the watchers, the shadows were lengthening and were darker. On the opposite side, where other watchers searched for a target to hold their attention, the sinking sunlight stripped the ground of cover.

  None of the watchers believed that they had long to wait.

  The dissembling heat was long gone as Aziz, relentlessly and remorselessly, searched the far slope with his closest focus on the plateau.

  It surprised him that he had not yet seen the man. He knew that his own stamina would not survive another night and into another day, that he must force
the issue in that late afternoon while the light gave him advantage. The skill of the dog would not last without food through another night, and nor would he. He reflected that the time was close when he must push his luck and his fortune. And he reflected, too, on the core conditions of the counter-sniper. The words he used in the lecture room at the Baghdad Military College, and on the range outside the city, played in his mind. Pro-action or re-action. The counter-sniper could either locate his target and fire the first shot in the combat, or he could lure the enemy into shooting at a false target, identify the firing position, then strike back. It was the great dilemma, but the choice was not his, because he had failed to locate the target, and the issue must be forced.

  He ruffled the dog’s collar. The panting was not so fierce, it was now cooler in the cavity under the stone. His tiredness and his hunger worried him. If he did not shoot soon he was anxious that his hands, in fatigue, would shake and his eyes would be misted, and that – from the hunger – his concentration would waver. He talked softly to himself, and to the dog, as if that would calm the shake, clear the mist and hold the concentration. He imagined that he stood at the lectern in the lecture theatre at the Baghdad Military College, with students arrayed in front of him.

  ‘It is a lonely world, and a world where only the strongest win. It is a world of physical strain and psychological stress. It is a world of vendettas, inhabited by eccentrics and solitary men who have, above all, the hunter’s spirit, who chase the challenge from which they cannot escape.

  ‘It is a world where time has stood still, where the past is the present and the future is not recognized. More than eighty years ago, a tank first saw combat and in that time the tank has changed beyond belief, in armour protection, mobility, firepower. The artillery has developed since those days and now relies on laser sights, night-vision equipment that highlights targets believing themselves invisible, and the accuracy given by the computer’s chip. But, in my world, the sniper’s world, little has changed.