Battle Sight Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  The atmosphere in the library, supposedly where study and learning flourished, seemed of little importance to her. A tutor might recognise that she had struggled with the workload during the last two semesters but was hardly going to risk playing the ‘race card’, and threaten her with the big boot. She did what she had to, the minimum . . . Other matters concerned her, but failed to frighten her.

  Not often, and not regularly, it could have been once a month, or every six weeks, she would be walking back from school, a bright pupil and from whom great things were expected, and a clucking approval from her parents, and the car would ease up beside her, and the window would come down. How was she? How was she doing? Bold talk that rubbished Dewsbury; they laughed at the humbleness of the area that was Savile Town, and how nothing ever happened there . . . The last time she had seen them, these vague cousins, it had been raining and the wind was whipping at the hem of her ankle-length clothing, and the car had stopped and the back door was opened. From behind her veil she had watched their faces, and most of the laughter was lost, and nervousness had played on their faces. She had thought then that she might have been one of the very few who knew that they would be gone within a week, taking a rucksack, and going out from Leeds/Bradford, changing flights anywhere in Europe, then the leg into Turkish territory, and the scramble over the frontier. The older of them, only for a moment, had held her hand, blinked, had done a sort of sheepish goodbye, and the younger had taken the same hand and had brushed his lips across it. Incredible . . . and she was out of the car, and running down the street, through the rain, buffeted by the wind, and had shut herself in her bedroom.

  She despised the subject and the words on the pages in front of her had no meaning.

  Not quite ‘nothing’ happened in Dewsbury . . . three of the boys who had gone down on to the underground trains in London had come from Dewsbury. A teenager had been arrested and charged with terror offences, and been convicted. Two more boys had disappeared from Savile Town and one had driven a vehicle at the enemy and then detonated a bomb, and the other was missing, assumed dead. Not nearly ‘nothing’. It had been on the local radio. Two boys from that part of Yorkshire were reported killed in the defence of Raqqa, the caliphate city. Their home was raided by police. Zeinab had thought it a cruelty, and without justification, but the street where they had lived had been cordoned, and families evacuated, and their parents taken away, and a bomb team had gone through the house, grotesque in huge kit. She had bridled in anger. They had been gone nearly two years, by then. Would they have left a live explosive device in the home of their mother and father? She had thought the high visibility search was to inflict fear on the community. As if ownership of the street and their homes were was confiscated, taken from them, and they might, all of those who lived there, have been declared ‘pariahs’, all intimidated and scared and humiliated, and she believed that was the intention. Other homes had been raided, those of the friends of the boys’ parents. Not hers. Perhaps because the connection between the families was not proven on the computers, the police detectives did not visit her house and interrogate her parents. She thought often of those boys. Walked home in sunshine and rain and found herself straining to hear the note of that car’s engine on the road behind her, and the scrape of the window and the casual way in which she was greeted; almost, still, she could smell the smoke from their cigarettes. No funeral, no repatriated bodies, no confirmation of what had happened to them.

  In the Students’ Union buildings, across a piazza from where she played at studying, were notice-boards that advertised seminars against radicalism. Kids were urged to report attempts to recruit them to extremism . . . and life had gone on in Savile Town on the south west side of Dewsbury, and the cousins seemed forgotten and were no longer talked of: Zeinab did not forget.

  There was a cemetery out of town and across the Calder river. A part of the cemetery was given over to a muslim burial area. A stone wall separated the cemetery from the Heckmondwike Road. Zeinab had taken to going in darkness with a handful of flowers and reaching over the wall and leaving them on the grass. A mowing team came each week and trimmed the grass but she noticed that her flowers, if still in bloom, were always left there . . . It might have been that she was followed, certainly she would have been watched. There were people who looked for recruits, for sympathisers, for activists, for supporters . . . It could have been, before they went on their journey, that the cousins had mentioned her name and that it had been stored in a memory. She left the flowers and would look across the darkness of the cemetery, and she had not forgotten the cousins and an anger had grown in her.

  She had been approached. First term at university. She had worn correct dress then, but not the full face veil. Two boys, one materialising on her right and one on her left, engaging her, and using the names of the cousins. Support had been teased from her. Not at one meeting, not at two or three; these boys were patient and respectful, never sought to hurry her. She would launch into monologues of resentment because of the deaths of the boys, and the value of their ‘martyrdom’, and their bravery . . . step by small step. They were not her friends but were associates, and showed a road ahead. Then, the big step.

  No more dressing to advertise her modesty. All consigned to a cupboard in her room in the Hall. Down to second-hand clothing shops, and buying cheap, worn jeans, making the rips in the knees, and loose fitting T-shirts and sweaters and fleece tops, and a toggle hat from which her hair fell. She was no longer the dutiful daughter of her parents. And there was reason for it. Of course, there were spies on the campus. Of course inside the university buildings, watchers scrutinised any person thought to demonstrate faith in ‘strikeback’ or belief in the armed struggle. She was one of the few and had thrown aside the constraints of her upbringing, another girl hardly worth noticing. The boys had nurtured her, as if there would be, ultimately, at a time of their choosing, a use for her . . .

  She had been walking, then was scrambling, now was running . . . the boys, Krait and Scorpion, had shown her the body. She had seen the face. Dead lips and a dead tongue between them and dead eyes above them, and fingers that were splayed out but held nothing, and she understood for the first time the stakes of the hidden world she had joined, understood also what happened to an informer, the lowest of the worst . . . she was running and the wind might have caught her hair, dragged it out behind her, as had happened when she had walked on a moor with him, and the boys had said that there was a purpose to them being together.

  Unremarkable, an open-air conversation. ‘You are sure about him?’

  She was sure.

  A young woman huddled against the weather and clutching her pile of books and talking with two young men, unnoticed. ‘You could travel in two days or three?’

  She would travel when they needed her to.

  ‘He will do it?’

  Their question, her answer. He would do what she told him to do.

  ‘You are so sure?’

  Not an issue. She was certain of it. He would do as she told him, and she had laughed lightly, had left the boys, had gone in search of a place in the library. She would have liked then to have been able to lean across the stone wall on the Heckmondwike Road, above where she laid her flowers, feel the night cold on her face and tell her cousins what she was tasked to do and imagine them nodding in admiration.

  The city of Marseille . . . more than two and a half millennia ago, Greek traders had arrived here from an Ionian town in Turkey, had established a trading post, had quickly discovered a perfect climate for the cultivation of vines and olives. They developed an extraordinary depth of culture, moved inland but also established trading routes by sailing west out into the Atlantic and then south along the coastline of continental Africa. Next to exploit the safe anchorage of the harbour were the Roman colonists. Later, under Julius Caesar, veteran legionaries were awarded plots of land as reward for loyal service. Next to come were the barbarians, Visigoths and Ostrogoths, and after them Arab
armies sailing north across the Mediterranean. And then there was chaos and a breakdown in authority and Marseille was overrun by pirates. There were famines and plagues and disasters for centuries until papal power subjugated the unruly territory. Then prosperity, then absolute monarchy, then the construction of two of the finest fortresses in Europe – the Bas-Fort Saint-Nicolas and the Fort Saint-Jean, and the building of cathedrals to the glory of God, and fine public buildings. Marseille became the second city of France, but one that always showed a pithy, bitter, stubborn attitude to any form of subjugation from distant Paris. History, ancient and modern, drips from the civic buildings along with hedonistic streaks of rebellion. A visitor can stroll along bustling boulevards, always staying aware and keeping a firm grip on a bag and the zip fastened on a pocket with a wallet or purse, can visit magnificient museums, can take excursions to a coastline of amazing beauty, can eat well, feel a sense of anarchic freedom, can slip inside the dark quiet beauty of the Cathédrale de la Major and speak a few words of contemplation and feel purged and at peace. Those are a collection of aspects of Marseille.

  The marksman had a target in his sights. The rifle was mounted with a telescopic sight and gave him a good, sharp view of the kid. He was entitled to shoot because his target sauntered along the walkway between the apartment towers, north of Marseille, and openly displayed a weapon, a Kalashnikov, and an hour earlier, had blasted shots into the air over a team of undercover detectives who were arresting a small-time dealer, a charbonneur. The low-life, peddling hashish, had wriggled free and run. The detectives had done the same, got the hell away, and the marksman had been called out. The marksman was known as Samson.

  Samson was the name awarded him by many and tolerated by his commander, Major Valery. The name was abroad in the unit, Groupe d’Intervention de Police Nationale, among those level in rank with him and those recently recruited and far junior. He had chosen a position where he had elevation and could look down into the estate, and he followed the kid. The magnification on the scope was powerful enough for him to check how much of his cigarette was smoked, and how badly his face was affected by a dermatological complaint. There was a bullet in the breech and his safety catch was off, but he had his finger loose against the outside of the trigger guard . . . Samson was also the name given to him by a new generation of tricoteuses who would have spotted a single rifle and GIPN sharpshooter and his position behind the bench, and would have recognised the build of his body and the distinctive naval blue of the balaclava that he always wore. He was watched, and with an uncanny and prescient sense of impending drama, women of middle to older age would come out on to the little balconies of their apartments and would wait, would look, would watch for the target the marksman, Samson, had chosen: best if he was unaware, always better entertainment if the target stayed in ignorance.

  Below Samson, away to his left, was the sea. It was a cool January day and the wind blew hard from across the mountains to the south, then whisked over the Mediterranean waves, and the washing on the short lines between the buildings billowed and surged. Big cargo ships nudged away from the Marseille docks, and a few trampers lurched in the swell as they came the other way and sought safe anchorage. He was entitled to shoot. His superiors would not have intervened and forbidden him to draw a bead and loose off a round. Police officers going about their work had been obstructed and rounds fired, and that was reason enough for retaliation. It was hard policing in this housing project, La Castellane, and the restraints that would have been required in Lille or Lyons, Orléans or Paris, were not thought obligatory in Marseille’s outer suburbs.

  The kid was probably high on skunk from Morocco. He meandered and took no care to hide himself, and sometimes the barrel of the Kalashnikov trailed in the dirt. Could have been that the kid had lost his love of life and no longer cared if he was held in the cross-hairs, might have wanted it that way because of the stupefaction of a narcotic. Samson saw a woman advance towards the kid. She was well swaddled against the cold, and slipped twice on the mud. He could just hear her voice. Samson spoke little of the Arabic that was the pigeon language in the project. Her words, carried by the wind, were littered with abuse and anger. He’d had his aim on the target for at least four minutes now. At any moment in that time he could have slid a finger inside the guard, adjusted the aim, tightened his view of the chest and made those small but necessary calculations concerning wind strengths coming between the buildings, and fired. He would not have been criticised, certainly not by Major Valery, nor by any of his colleagues in the GIPN team – but he had not. She strode up to him. It was good theatre. Other kids had now formed a horseshoe around the Kalashnikov kid and they would be presented with a decent show, and the tricoteuses would be short-changed. She reached him. Samson could not decide whether she was the mother or the grandmother. Whichever, she packed a punch. She hit the kid. While she had belted him, while she stood her ground as he reeled, her insults flowed freely, Then she grabbed him by the ear. The spectators laughed, jeered. The women on the balconies would have looked across the open ground, beyond the feeder road, and almost to the commercial park, and would have checked the bench and the marksman there who wore a balaclava, and would have seen him stand, clear his weapon, turn his back. The woman held the kid’s ear and yanked him away and the Kalashnikov was dropped. She had saved his life, if it were a life worth saving. It might have been that the life had less value than the Kalashnikov left in the dirt, and in that housing project its price would not be more than 350 euros. A man came forward, picked up the weapon, was gone.

  He walked back to the roadside lay-by where the trucks were parked. It would have been justifiable for him to fire but he had chosen not to. He had been given the name of Samson, taken from that of Charles-Henri Samson, because on separate occasions he had killed three men in the last five years. No other marksman in the GIPN force located in Marseille had killed more than once. Charles-Henri Samson had been first among equals as the official executioner in the years of the Terror, had become a celebrity after supervising the death by guillotine of both King Louis and Queen Marie-Antoinette. He would have said that he never fired for a trophy, only when it was necessary . . . The kid was lucky, except that he’d get a proper hiding from his mother, or grandmother. He emptied his weapon then put the Steyr-Mannlicher SSG – killing range of 600 metres – back into its carrying case . . . Tomorrow would be another day, and he was seldom impatient.

  The city of Marseille had recently been reshaped as, post World War Two, an empire collapsed. France needed to find accommodation, and in a hurry, for the white settlers fleeing the colonies of north Africa–Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria – after blood-leaching wars of independence. The city fathers built ‘projects’ in an arc around the northern suburbs of old Marseille, shoebox apartments in constricted developments, and a time bomb of criminality was born. There had been older and more weathered organised crime gangs, led by such heroes of the city’s folklore as Francis ‘the Belgian’ Vanverberghe or Paul Carbone and François Spirito, and Tony Zimbert and Jacky ‘Mad Jacky’ Imbert, and Jean-Jé Colonna, and Farid ‘the Roaster’ Berrahma. Respected and feared, and then gone, swept aside by a new force. The old whites had evacuated the projects, and where they had lived now became a dumping ground for the masses of north African immigrants, those from the Maghreb, who descended – some would have said as a locust swarm – and built a life, and milked the system. Previously, the gangsters had marketed heroin, now the trade switched to the various forms of hashish flooding the housing estates. Some small organisations based around a filthy, daubed stairwell could pull in as much as 50,000 euros each day, many scratched a living at 15,000 euros taken every 24 hours. Turf wars achieved a new state of ruthlessness, and the weapon of choice for settling disputes, real or imagined, had become the AK-47 assault rifle: made in the former Soviet Union, modern Russia, China, Serbia, Bulgaria, Egypt or . . . pretty much anywhere. Sub-editors throughout Europe had fun with headines. Bodies pile up in gan
gland Marseille drugs war and In the deprived city of Marseille the French national spirit is nowhere to be seen and Marseille pupils forced to dodge drug gangs’ bullets and Marseille: Europe’s most dangerous place to be young.

  The estates are near no-go areas for the police, and drug dealing is run with sophisticated and military precision, and life is cheap. A police officer would say that it was difficult to identify the worst of the project estates, but in the top echelon – as feared as any and with justification – he would rate La Castellane, out on the northern road leading to the airport. For that status La Castellane holds a formidable reputation, is awash with hard drugs, with weapons, and with killers.

  ‘Marseille? Sorry, Zed, why do we want to go to Marseille?’

  A hesitation, a roll of the eyes, then . . . ‘Family business. Something I have to do.’

  ‘Going when?’

  ‘In a couple of days.’

  ‘It’s that urgent?’

  ‘Something I have to do.’

  They were on a bench in the park near to his depot. She had come out to him, and he was still in his work clothing, the uniform of the haulage driver. The rain had stopped, and snow was not threatening, but there was a cold cut to the wind. A solitary woman walked a toy dog on another path, and ignored them. He’d looked around to see if the boys who had quizzed the Somali from the canteen had showed up, but had not seen them.

  ‘For how long?’