Battle Sight Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘I’m good.’

  ‘It was delivered?’

  ‘It was.’

  Karym had washed himself in a fountain in a little square off the main road coming down the hill from the police blockade. It was the evening when the Credit Union stayed open late, when men came to bank their wages – those with work – to save up for the annual pilgrimage to the family in Tunisia or Morocco, or any fucking place that people who lived in La Castellane had come from. He had crouched over the stagnant rainwater in the fountain’s bowl and had rinsed his face, had seen the blood stain the water. He had lodged the cash. The girl behind the secure barrier had not queried why a kid with water dripping from his hair, who had wild eyes, filth on his clothing, should bank that sort of sum, but had counted it and had given him a receipt. He had left the building, had sat astride his scooter and had begun to shake. Could feel the pressure of the pistol barrel on his throat, and the warmth of the blood on his face. Stiffness trapped his legs, his hands trembled. He could not have steered the Peugeot scooter. He had heard the growl of the Ducati’s approach. His brother had found him.

  ‘I need to ride with you.’

  ‘Is your bike broken?’

  A hesitation . . . he had asked often enough for his brother to buy him a new scooter, the Piaggio MP3 Yourban would be the best, with the tilting front wheels . . . he would not have dared to lie to his brother. ‘Just that I do not feel well.’

  ‘You ride with me. I’ll send kids down for the Peugeot. Good that it is not broken. Okay, we move, we are missing trade.’

  He sat behind his brother. The wind scoured his face, where the blood had been. He was not thanked, not congratulated, not praised for his effort in getting clear of the site so that the police did not take possession of the satchel. They went back, fast and noisily, to La Castellane. Only when they were near to the project did his brother slow the bike and tilt his head back so that he could speak, so that Karym could hear him.

  ‘It was Samson who killed the thief. You were lucky. Anyone other than Samson and you, too, would be dead. He is formidable. You do not want, ever again, to be in the sights of Samson’s rifle. Never again.’

  Karym heard the squeal of laughter, and the engine was gunned and they made an entry back into the estate, like it was just another evening, and trading had already started, and they were late.

  ‘Welcome to my distinguished friend.’

  ‘Greetings, my old cocker.’

  ‘You look grand.’

  At the Arrivals gate, hugging him, Tooth laid kisses on each of Crab’s cheeks. Not that Crab was tall, but Tooth needed to be up on his toes to do it. Crab did not respond with his lips, but held his friend fervently.

  ‘Don’t deserve to be. It’s been a journey from hell and back and hell again. Good to be here.’

  Many hours late, Crab had arrived. First, the late arrival of the aircraft in Manchester, then the rostered crew being out of hours, then a light flashing when it should not have, then a delay with one passenger’s baggage and the need to offload everything in the hold. It had been a litany of disaster. Crab had suffered. He did not read, nor listen to music, did not drink, and the hours had gone slowly, then a storm over central France, then big crosswinds coming off the sea when they were on the final approach and being tossed . . . Tooth would not want to know.

  ‘But you are here.’

  ‘I am here. I cannot imagine anyone and anywhere, Tooth, that I’d prefer to be, to be with . . . On course, our little matter?’

  They were walking towards Tooth’s car, predictably a Mercedes, and Crab pulled behind him the case that Beth had packed.

  A quiet reply, lips barely moving. ‘I assume. What I have heard. All sick as dogs in the weather out there, but keeping to the schedule.’

  ‘Like being back in harness, Tooth, waiting for a freighter. Doesn’t matter what it’s carrying, just that it’s coming. Keeps the blood running in those old veins.’

  The keys were flashed, the bag went in the boot, and Tooth walked Crab to the front passenger door, then paused and laid a hand on Crab’s arm. The lights over the parking area showed a fraction of a frown on Tooth’s forehead.

  ‘You said, “Doesn’t matter what it’s carrying”, you said that. You have no problem, what it’s carrying, no problem?’

  ‘Business is business, Tooth, no problem at all. Bring it on.’

  ‘You echo me, my friend – no problem. I’m not a preacher, I just go where the market is.’

  ‘I think it’s going to go very smoothly. What we call a “piece of cake” . . . So good to be back with you, Tooth. It’s a good person our customer is sending, well spoken of. Piece of cake, yes.’

  The train pulled into the station at Avignon. Zeinab slung her bag on her shoulder. Where it all started, became real.

  A few others, half asleep, followed her. She crossed the platform. Had there ever been a chance to turn back? Not now. Turning back was crossing a bridge and going to the far platform and checking the departures and finding the first train heading north, and never going home, where Krait and Scorpion knew her, and never being within reach of the men she had met in the London park, changing her name and changing the whole identity of her life, disappearing. The lights were dimmed inside the station and the magazine stand was shuttered and the fast-food outlet was closed. She went into the night. A police car was facing the main entrance and she saw the glow of cigarettes: the doors did not explode open. A couple of druggie kids were squatting against the outside wall.

  She had directions, knew where to go. The main street leading to central Avignon was the Rue de la République, and she had been told that it led to the road and the hotel she was booked into.

  Zeinab was shown by the concierge to a first-floor room, minimal furnishing, a double bed and no view, and opened her bag and took out the nightdress . . . it was where it started.

  January 1987

  A one-legged boy had positioned himself in the cover of a rock, some thirty metres above the road and not more than fifty metres back from it, where the exchange of gunfire would be extreme. He was already, a couple of minutes after the first land-mine had detonated and brought the convoy to a halt, on his third magazine. In spite of the surprise gained by the mujahideen when the explosion had halted the soft-top trucks after the armoured vehicles had been allowed through undisturbed, the battle in the killing zone remained undecided. Many of the Soviet troops who had spilled out from the lorries had been killed, or were wounded, but none of them who lived – damaged or not – would surrender. Tales of their fate were legion – to have the penis and testicles rammed down a throat while still alive was not a reason to hoist a white flag. The boy, with some expertise, fired an old AK-47 assault rifle, tried to go only for aimed targets and at that range had the sights at their lowest point, what he had been told was called Battle Sight Zero, a phrase it was said, taken from old British army sergeants, who had fought and been defeated here. He had some hits and had some misses – he was always with this tribal group when they went forward, across the mountains on narrow paths, into defiles, along river-beds, and hunted for convoys . . . and had not long to do the job.

  He was, he thought, twelve years old. He could not ask his mother because she had been killed, decapitated in a rocket attack, and could not ask his father because he had been injured, fatally, when a Hind helicopter had turned its awesome firepower on a small caravan of mules. Could not ask his brother who had been shot in the leg and could not be carried and had been finished by his own people. But the brother’s weapon had been snatched, taken away, and given to this child, who had one natural leg and one of crudely carved wood.

  The boy’s left leg stopped just below the knee. The lower leg had been shattered by a personnel mine scattered randomly in a dried watercourse. No chance of proper medical attention, of hospital care, of anaesthetic, and the surgery had been as brutal and as immediate and as successful as that performed on the injured more than a century before – tol
d among the mujahideen when camping at night – when the fight was against British occupiers. A wad of leather to bite on. Men showing harsh kindness in holding him down as an older leader hacked with a blunt knife. Fire to seal the wound. A length of dried birch wood had been carved and whittled into the necessary length for a limb, with a place padded by leather and cloth for the stump to nestle in, and straps attached that could be knotted round the fragile child’s waist to hold it in place. There were days of heavy marches when the tears ran on the boy’s face as he fought to keep up with the speed of advance, but he would not cry out, nor would any man diminish him by helping: there would be blood seeping from the wound after excessive friction, and it would be washed in a stream, and they would go on. The child had his elder brother’s rifle. The child slept with it, ate with it beside him, marched with it, and used all his skills and hatred to kill with it.

  He had already scratched notches on the stock. Had added more to those cut out by his brother, and further scrapes in the wood would be made that evening after they had retreated from the ambush site, at least three more. They should hurry, do the killing business fast because by now the armoured vehicles, with their radios, surviving the attack, would have called up to the Jalalabad airbase, and the helicopters would soon be in the air, coming as fast as eagles.

  Others in the mujahideen, fit and strong and lithe, would move their firing positions, never permit the loathed Soviets from fixing their location – which gully they were in, behind which rock, in which crater where a tree’s roots had been taken out by the winter gales. The boy did not move. There was a sharp whistle behind him. The older fighters thought of the boy as a talisman of good fortune, were loath to lose him, watched for him and cared for him. It might have been that the noise of gunfire obscured the shrill sound of the whistle, or it might have been that he cared not to hear the summons to fall back. He did not move. He did not know that a corporal of the mechanised infantry battalion had hunkered down in a ditch that carried rainwater off the road and had seen a point of fire, and a small head that peeped around a rock to search for targets. The whistle was louder, fiercer . . . A new magazine was slapped into the underbelly of the old rifle.

  It was realised the child was a sure shot. That he detested the Soviet invaders who had taken his family to paradise, would kill at any opportunity, and dreamed of coming close to the wounded and the helpless and having the knife in his hand. He fired, and fired again, and did not hear the whistle, nor the bellow of anger, nor his name called. But might have heard, different to the close-combat thunder, a softer and more gentle sound, but did not yet recognise it as helicopter engines. Like that of a bee homing in on the heart of a flower, there to make the finest honey. The child was not aware of the approach of the gunships, always flown in a pair; not aware of rockets slung on pods and a gunner controlling a machine-gun and a four-barrelled Gatling type weapon: devastating fire-power. The child was caught up in the elation of combat; small hands gripped the rifle, and the stock rested against a small shoulder, and his eyes searched for a target. He stood.

  He stood because he no longer had a target, and would not be denied one. The child did not see the corporal in the rainwater ditch, nor the RPG-7 launcher. The weapon carried an effective range of 300 metres, was expected to hit and kill at that distance, but the corporal lined up the sights on the small body of the child who was well inside that area of limitation.

  A flash of light and a storm of dust and the projectile hurtled towards him. Too late to turn and duck away behind the shelter of the rock, too late to identify the engines of the hurrying helicopters, and no chance to respond to the calls of an older man.

  Debris was hurled in every direction clear of the impact point. A piece of rock the size of a football – not that the child, before losing a leg or after, had ever kicked a football – speared away from the main body of the rock and careered into the child’s stomach. He had no protection.

  He was swept up. Still breathing, and with ferocious pain in his stomach but not crying out, and with a pallor settling on his cheeks, the child was taken as fast as sandalled feet could go over the rock and stone. The helicopters’ engines came closer and the surviving troops put down a barrage of firing, but the tribesmen melted. He was carried to the next valley, and among the stones of the next river-bed, and up a track that only goats and the most sure-footed mule could have managed. His life had passed by the time they rested and no longer heard the sound of the helicopters.

  It was done gently, but needed the strength of a grown man. The child’s grip was broken, his fingers prised back, and the old rifle was taken from him. It was thought reasonable to assume he had been responsible for two more fatalities, and those notches were cut with a bayonet’s point. A brief prayer was said and the body laid under a cairn of stones so that a wolf or a hyena or a fox would not be able to feast off the child, nor a vulture ravage the carcase. The rifle, with its much scarred stock was kept; the tribal group regarded it with pride, would hand it on.

  A nondescript freighter ploughed through a gathering swell.

  A detective chief inspector and a civilian analyst who was his bag carrier – both from the national Counter Terrorist Command – arrived in the tourist city of Avignon, checked into their hotel, did a reconnoitre walk of what was billed as the rendezvous point for Operation Rag and Bone, and looked for their target, spotted her, checked her clothing, went for lunch.

  A major of the Marseille city police laboured over paperwork following an overnight killing, and eyed his mobile that rested on his desk and that rang frequently but not with a panic in the caller’s voice.

  A marksman from the GIPN spent the day in his apartment, alone because his wife was working, and he watched a succession of wildlife films and dreamed of being there, seeing those creatures of beauty and feral magnificence.

  It was a good day, and the sun shone – and two old men lay on recliners with tweed rugs covering them and gazed out to sea, bathed in nostalgia.

  New supplies arrived in the projects, including La Castellane, and one boy with a withered arm was, for a few hours, the centre of attention.

  The car hammered the last kilometres on the A7 before the turn-off to Avignon.

  He parked by the river.

  Near dusk and, had it been the season, Andy Knight would not have had a prayer of getting into a car park. But the tourists would not be here for another two months, would start arriving for the Easter holiday. He saw the bridge that stretched out into the river, then seemed to have been snapped off. Everybody knew about the bridge at Avignon. He looked for her, and did not find her.

  Somewhere close by would be the two people to whom he reported. He assumed they’d the sense to stay out of sight. There had been an awkward atmosphere last time they had spoken and he sensed their increasing stress that he was easing away from their control. He did not see them – nor did he see her.

  The river was wide and high, and occasional tree trunks were washed down in the force of the flow. If she had acquired sufficient tradecraft then she also would be in a vantage-point and would be scanning the parking area, looking for a tail car, and they might have sent foot soldiers who had such skills and they’d be watching him, hawk-eyed. She would have trusted him, he thought, not those who directed her. He locked the car and strolled across damp grass towards the river. Behind him were the old city walls. He shivered; the wind came hard up the river and he was jostled by its strength. He thought it natural, after the long drive south from the service station, to stretch and touch his toes and arch his back and roll his neck. He no longer smoked: Phil had, and Norm, and a Marine far back and forgotten, almost . . . and he saw her.

  There was an opening in the tower built into the wall across the road from him.

  What came fast in his mind was that she was short of tradecraft. Should have spent longer studying him and the area, but she came towards the road, started to quicken, hardly looked for traffic, walked straight across. She looked bloody
good. He was trained to see small things . . . she had been to a hairdresser, had her hair cut and it feathered out behind her. He pretended he had not seen her, looked away and saw a tree branch snag on a pillar in the truncated bridge, then work free. Her coat was open and he could see her blouse: scarlet and navy stripes bold for her, as if she was far from Savile Town. He turned back, faced her, feigned surprise. She did a hell of a smile, wide and open and trusting . . . was she acting? Was she just pleased, far from home – and marginally scared – to see him? His arms out, and hers. They locked, her tight against him, and hugged and held each other. And kissed . . . If she acted then she did well. And Andy Knight would not have said what he was going to do about the edict laid down to Level Ones by the commanders of SC&O10 about the development of relationships between officers and targets . . . It was a great kiss. Not a moment for an evaluation of rule books and manuals – might be later, not then.

  Nothing to say, just held each other.

  Chapter 11

  Andy sat opposite Zeinab.

  What had happened in the night was raw, like a fretsaw had hit a sunk nail.

  He maintained the minimum of eye contact and she had her head sunk low and stared down at the plate in front of her and ate a croissant untidily, let tiny flakes of pastry litter the tablecloth, and more caught on her lips. He had not slept well, had tossed in sleep and while pretending to, had manufactured a steady, soft snore. An apple did for him. Had not peeled it, or quartered it. Had chewed it down to the core, then left the last piece on his plate, and had drunk three cups of coffee. They had come down together from the first floor after he had knocked on her door. She’d opened it and he’d seen that her bag was already packed and zipped shut, and he had led the way down the stairs, had seemed easier than waiting for the elevator. He’d muttered something about whether she had slept well, and she had nodded: a lie. She would have slept as badly as he had. She wore the same blouse as the previous evening. Colourful, happy, supposedly expressing a mood that might not exist. He was neutrally dressed, nothing that stood out and made him instantly recognisable: dark jeans and a grey shirt. How he was trained to be: out of any limelight and not attracting attention.