Battle Sight Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  He’d decided they’d walked far enough; he’d done his talk, it was time to be heading back, and there was racing on the TV that Crab would enjoy. It might be that Gary shared Beth with him, but he wouldn’t treat that as a matter to fall out over, as long as it wasn’t blatant, was discreet. They passed some kids, pushed them off the pavement, and he heard the giggling because of his uneasy gait, didn’t bother him. Good to have a deal in place. He noted that Gary’s face was still expressionless.

  ‘Gary, what’s eating? Is it because of who we’re doing business with? Or is it because of the cargo that we’re supplying, they’re buying? Any different to heroin, or coke, or girls? I think we made choices too long ago, Gary, to start acting squeamish now. . . .’

  He laughed out loud, and wiped the rain off his glasses. Crab always laughed at his own cracks. Late to be worrying about ethics. Hadn’t before and wouldn’t start now. And he was off the law’s radar, sure of it.

  The feed had come through from the Counter-Terrorist Command, what they had an eyeball on, and Pegs had grimaced, raised an eyebrow, and Gough had nodded. They’d seen a parked car, two in it, and a languid finger had directed them. They slid into a space, restricted parking for residents, but Pegs was good with intimidation if it came to a spat with a warden: could go high and mighty, could threaten torture and job loss. They watched the door of a convenience store. Pegs had her cigarettes out. Gough grunted. She lit up, using a lighter he’d given her two years back, a clandestine gift. He grunted again.

  She said, ‘Spit it.’

  He cleared his throat, coughed on her fumes, and spat it. ‘It’ll need Risk Assessment. Need Risk Assessment and a Mission Statement. A bloody nightmare.’

  ‘I can massage it . . . Worse than that, a fucking nightmare.’

  Her language was usually fruity and Gough reckoned it the legacy of an independent schooling. Gough said, ‘And, what’s worse than worse, we need “liaison” down there.’

  ‘I hate nightmares.’

  They did their collective moan, competed well with each other. He had a little French and she had some more but not fluent. Language was always a minefield, and French cops rarely spoke English, and if they did they’d not admit it. After the communication matter was the difficulty of breezing in, snapping out a ‘want’ list, this one would need surveillance and backup, and there would be no clear-cut Assessment and Statement because Gough was in the dark, pitch and black as a January night. She was smoking vigorously and tapping her phone, multi-skilled; a grin from Gough, because he was lucky, desperately so in his opinion, to have her alongside him. He saw her first, nudged Pegs, and ash dropped off her cigarette and landed on her lap, went unnoticed, and she kept texting.

  A pretty girl . . . but Gough was supposed to be beyond the age when the curve of hips and bosom and the swing of a stride, and hair flying behind in the wind, was supposed to matter. She had a plastic shopping bag, came out of the store and turned right. One of the guys from the Counter-Terrorist Unit slid out of the car across the street, and started to follow her. He did not need to see her for operational necessity, it was a gratuitous moment. The people doing the tail on her were capable enough. Pegs was edging their car forward: he did not have to preach caution, fret over being noticed; she was as sharp as he was experienced.

  He said, ‘It’s a good plan, I respect it.’

  She said, ‘Call them short at your peril – nobody suggests they’re oafs, talk them down and you’ll lose.’

  ‘They’re in a car, they’re attractive. Where’s the threat?’

  ‘And she flashes her boobs, and . . .’

  ‘They’re waved through – and he’s white, and she’s a clean cookie.’

  Pegs stared bleakly into Gough’s eyes; didn’t watch the girl, left that to him. She said, ‘A big new ballpark if there’s a weapon of choice involved. Worse than a suicide guy’s rucksack. A black suit, a busy night in a city centre, pubs and bars full, and the gook walks in with an assault rifle. We are humiliated, we failed. We lose the public’s confidence. A Kalashnikov assault rifle, even in an amateur’s hands, takes us to a new height of mayhem, on a scale we’ve not yet had – thank the good Lord. In the court of public opinion we will be torn limb from limb if it reached here on our watch. A gook, black kit head to toe, and a rifle spraying around. That is an horrendous scenario . . . Looks a nice girl.’

  ‘Most of them do, look like nice girls,’ Gough said quietly.

  She walked briskly along the pavement and Gough reckoned she had little tradecraft. Some of them doing the jihadi bit had a clear and prescient idea of how to avoid foot and vehicle tails. He did not think she had those skills. Most of the ones who did would have learned tradecraft in the top-grade universities offering the course: Her Majesty’s Prisons, either on remand or post-conviction. He thought she seemed confident, assured, and he did not sense that danger was on her list. Pegs had pulled out into the traffic and had kept her hazard lights on, which cut down the annoyance of the traffic building behind their vehicle.

  Pegs murmured, ‘Like butter wouldn’t melt in her bloody chops.’

  ‘The immortal words of our fond allies, the Bundesgrenzschutz, in their manuals. ‘‘Shoot the women first’’, always a good idea. Can’t read them. Would she know that, Pegs?’

  ‘That she’ll be in the cross-hairs? I wouldn’t think so, no.’

  They were grandstanding, had no useful place there other than to cast an eye on a target. Gough watched her head bob amongst other hurrying pedestrians. He had lost sight of the tail, and the car that followed her. She seemed to walk tall and with a purpose, then turned into a coffee bar. Pegs gave him the quick glance, would have known the answer but it was formal and for him to decide. A nod. She pulled into the fast lane and her hand had gone to the satnav controls and she did the business for London . . . she had looked so damned innocent, but innocence – Gough’s creed – was poor defence. The girl had looked pretty, but that wouldn’t help her, not in the big boys’, and big girls’, world. Too much to be getting on with, and all of it French, and all of it a potential disaster zone. Happy days . . . Gough’s hand rested on Pegs’ thigh, and she drove fast and well, and the pace had quickened, what he loved about his work, and her . . . And the threat loomed big: a gook in a black outfit and the weapon of choice in his hand, and the sound of screaming: what Gough had known all his working life.

  September 1958

  The digging had taken most of the morning, and tempers had worn thin.

  The boy had now been in the custody of the Allamvedelmi Hatosag for almost three months. After the uprising and the reoccupation of Buda-Pest by the Soviet military, the local secret police had been given the task of searching out and arresting those who had been principals, and had tried to slide into anonymity. Men had dug several holes in the woodland in their search for the weapon, but he had been a poor guide for them. He barely saw where they dug, with their spades and pickaxes, because the beatings inflicted on him had virtually closed his eyes. They were puffed, the skin around them many-coloured, and cuts and scrapes covered his face, two front teeth were missing, and the gums still bled after a week. He had confessed. In the basement cells after one more session of beatings and kickings, he had admitted shooting the cowering official of state security, then taking away the rifle stolen from the Soviet liberators. Had also admitted using it the next day and the day after in an act of resistance, and then running from the city, going home, taking the Kalashnikov to the woods at his parents’ smallholding, and burying it. He had been dragged from his cell that morning and brought here, handcuffed, and had tried to identify the place, two years later, where he had dug. But the boy, through his puffed eyes could barely see a hand in front of him, let alone recognise an unmarked place in the ground.

  He had confessed, and gilded the story, and tried to stump up excuses and mitigation, and hoped that, at the trial next week, he would be shown clemency by the court.

  Travelling in a closed van, f
rom the prison at Andrassy ut. 60, it had seemed a miracle to him when he had been pitched out near his parents, wooden house. Vaguely and indistinctly he had seen them standing by the porch, and a dog had run forward at the sight of him, but a boot had been aimed at it and it had backed off. He could not see whether his parents disowned him or tried to offer comfort. He knew nothing of the photographer. Did not know that a middle-aged man with a Leica camera was revered in his home city of New York by fellow photo-journalists, and that the picture of the revolutionary and the terrified secret policeman had made a whole magazine page and been widely admired . . . and had been sent by the Hungarian embassy in Washington to Budapest. Painstaking work in the headquarters of the AVH had identified him, and several others. The photographer was a necessary and valued tool in the hands of the counter-revolutionaries.

  A spade struck metal.

  He had not dug deep. A bare half-metre into the ground, and then had covered it, scattered leaves over the scar in the ground, and dumped manure from the family’s pigs, and had beaten that down with the flat of a spade. He supposed his father knew, but it had never been spoken of. The secret policemen had come at dawn, had kicked in the door and found him in his bed . . . The killing of their colleague had been long ago, and he had dared to hope that time had ebbed away, and secrets would not be solved. He should have gone, as others had, across the border into Austria, and turned his back on his country and on his parents, made a new life, but he had not.

  Men were on their hands and knees, staining their trousers and manhandling wet sods of earth, and the rifle was exposed. He stared at it. His focus was on the barrel and the stock; he remembered how it had felt in his hand, its weight, and remembered the kick against his shoulder when he had fired on the thug who writhed on the ground. He had felt a power and a strength that had never been part of him before, that he had never felt since. He had been shown the work of the photographer, but did not recall seeing the man himself. He could see the faces of the men and women who had pressed close around him when he had shot the policeman, and could almost hear the clamour of jeering when the man had wriggled a few more times, hurrying to his death.

  One of them took a handful of grass, bundled it together and started to scrub at the metal body of the weapon. The number was called out. Only the last digits . . . 16751 . . . Another man flicked over pages on a clipboard, found what he searched for, and nodded, called that he had the match. A fast exchange – it was confirmed? Confirmed that this was the serial number of a weapon lost by a Soviet soldier in mechanised infantry. The magazine was still attached. Mud was brushed from the casing of the barrel and the selector lever and around the trigger, but some was still deeply embedded in the groove of the wooden stock. He looked for what he had done and saw where he had gouged out a small hole, his own record of killing the secret policeman. Another notch was dug the next day: he had fired on a tank commander in a turret and had claimed the hit, and argued with another boy as to which of them had taken the life: each had cut a mark on his own weapon. A short line, neatly cut, designated the Kalashnikov’s killing life.

  The weapon was fired. The sound of it echoed among the trees and was heightened by the low ceiling of cloud, then it was made safe, and the magazine was detached. One of them said it was remarkable that the Kalashnikov worked – as it was boasted it would – after close to two years buried amongst the oak’s roots where the rain was sucked down. He was led away. His parents held each other but did not move from the porch; the dog had been put inside and he heard it scrabbling with its claws at the other side of the door. Perhaps, for amusement, if the dog had been free and able to bound towards him they’d have shot it. He was not thanked for his help. The rifle went ahead of him, carried with all the due care and attention of an item of near worthless junk.

  And he cursed it.

  In the gaol, some mornings before dawn, he would hear the procession of boots and the locking and unlocking of doors, and the little whimpering cries of a condemned man, and the rattle on flagstones when a chair was kicked away. He cursed the weapon, thought it damned. They would take him out of his cell, lead him into a yard, hoist the noose over his head, lift him on to a chair, and let him swing. The rifle was carried in front of him and silently, he swore at it. His eyes misted in tears, he could no longer see the oak trees that grew around his home. He had no answer from the dulled and dirt-cased carcase of the rifle.

  He’d been working, done two deliveries, and was late for their rendezvous. She looked sourly at the face of her watch, and he tried to explain that he was late for her because of a problem with the number of cement bags that needed dropping off. Might as well have told the moon. She had been there fifteen minutes.

  Andy apologised. She had shrugged. Andy told her about the volume of traffic. A deep breath, and her eyes were hard on him. Had he squared it?

  He had. He was starting to tell her that they were not too pleased at him swanning off, and that it meant the driver roster was going into a melt, and . . . he had done it, was ready to go. She oozed relief. Was that the reaction of a girl when her boy said he could make a journey all the way to the south of France, a sunshine holiday thrown in. The boss had wanted to know what sort of a trip it would be; he said it lightly and with some irony. She flared. None of their business. Nothing that involved them. He sought to calm her.

  Andy said, ‘It’s all going to be fine. I have the time off from work. It’s agreed. I told them I was dead lucky, told them I was going away across France with a super girl, a really pretty one – don’t blush, it’s the truth – and we had some family business of yours to settle, and I was going to drive. Hey, Zed, I tell you the truth, all the guys are just dead jealous. It’s going to happen, and I’ve fixed for the vehicle, my motor. The mechanics in the depot will go over it tomorrow, tune it up a bit. It’s a hell of a drive and won’t be the newest lady on the autoroute. They’ll get it going and smooth, do a good job.’

  It was a good little speech and it satisfied her. She’d leaned across the width of the table and had kissed him on the lips. Not lingering but better than usual. She was good at rationing affection, like it came with coupons: he was rewarded because he had put in place what was demanded of him.

  She would see him tomorrow. Where would he be when the car was fixed? He said where he’d be, at the Hall of Residence. She didn’t want that. Too public, and too much CCTV with lenses that recorded faces and registration plates. There was a park half a mile away from the Hall. He wanted to know when they would be on the road and going south. Why did he want to know, why?

  He sensed she was primed, had a crib sheet of questions to ask and answers she was to get. He was smiling, he was the happy boy, and he thought her tight as a damned bowstring which he had not seen before. He needed to know the time they’d cross the Channel, or travel under it, so that the tickets could be booked. She hesitated.

  Zed said, ‘Not your problem, Andy. I’ll do that. I’ll fix that . . . What’s the registration? They’ll want it for the booking. I can do that.’

  ‘Of course you can. And pay for it? I think I should . . . you want to pay, your shout – I won’t argue.’

  And did not argue, and would have told anyone who’d asked that, in his view, she would be hard put to buy a ticket for a tram in the city, or to use the automatic vendor for the train going over the Pennines and back home. He told her the make and the year and the colour and the registration and she wrote them carefully on the back of a notepad. He let his hand rest on her wrist . . . so innocent and so vulnerable, and quite pretty, and screwed up, and not knowing how it would be. Join the club, my love, he might have said. He gazed at her, looked earnest, and honest. He’d learn, all in good time, what the family business was, why she needed a simple boy – with a Labrador’s devotion – to drive her the length of France and back. Interesting times.

  The winds came off the Sahara and climbed above the mountains and gathered force when they came back down to cross the beaches and the fi
shing villages and reach the western Mediterranean. The freighter was the Margarethe. She flew a Dutch flag of convenience, was registered in Rotterdam, but at that point her connections were severed. Her master and navigation officer, along with the engineer, were Egyptian; her deck crew and mess stewards Tunisian. The journey she had set out on was some 900 nautical miles and she rolled and rocked in the swell that the wind stored up, and would make poor time on her journey towards the great bite that formed the coastline of southern France.

  The captain was resting in his cabin. He was spread-eagled on the bunk bed awarded him, with a decent mattress and good storage space underneath for his personal baggage. Behind his rucksack and his grip bag was the package. It had been well wrapped up but, from its length and its general shape, though hard edges were disguised by the bubble-wrap, he had a fair idea of what it was: and only one. The looted antiquities that his boat carried, to be sold on the clandestine market to high-value collectors – in secrecy – were of far greater value than one rifle. He had been told that future cargo would be put his way, all of it paid for in the crisp currency of used American dollar bills, if this mission was performed satisfactorily. He had met a fearsome elderly man, of short stature and with a thick and blunt-trimmed grey beard, who had worn dark glasses even though the light on the quayside at Misrata was pitiful. He had thought it in his interests to perform satisfactorily, or at a higher standard, but wished – a little – that the introduction had not been made. The Margarethe pitched in the swell, rolling him from one side of his bunk to the other, and they made slow progress. It was extraordinary to him that one rifle was an important piece of cargo.

  A tension weighed heavy in the air under the Mediterranean sun.

  They all recognised it, including Karym. At nineteen years old, with a haircut that represented the fashion of the day – styled on the scalp and shaved close at the sides – wearing cast-off clothing from the big store in the shopping mall across the valley where his sister worked and had concessions, and with a weak, diseased arm, carrying a lit cigarette – permanent, Karym had good antennae for approaching danger. Not for him, for another.