Holding the Zero (19 page)

Meda was on top of the barricade, balancing her weight on the door of the central car, and again, as she had before, she punched the air. He wondered how many times she had been seen over the open sights of the soldiers’ weapons, how many times they had fired at her and, somehow charmed, she had escaped. She was the symbol, she was the witch.

The men swarmed past her and fanned out into the streets on either side of the police station. Gus lingered at the firing position and watched as Haquim reached up and urged her down.

As he lingered, he hated himself. He waited, ready to shoot, because the sniper on the rooftops or in an upper window might still fire on her and give away his position. But she was down, safe and protected by the barricade.

He started to pack away his equipment, and the telescope the boy had left behind.

He had seen her.

He could have stood on a doorstep, snatched at a packing case from a shop, shot over the heads of the fleeing townspeople, over the emptiness of the street behind them, and over the
peshmerga
beyond the emptiness. He could have hit her as she stood on the barricade of cars.

He could have killed the witch.

And yet he had not considered it. He had known that, if he had fired, every weapon in the hands of the
peshmerga
would have been turned on him and on the flight of the defenceless in reprisal. He had joined the jostling panic of the escape.

He was engulfed in the tide, was swept forward. He held the dog close to his chest. He had been in a desperate flight before, and he disliked the disorder. In the Mutla Pass out of Kuwait City and at the bridge over the Tigris river, with the American tanks behind them and the planes wheeling above them, he had run for his life. The firing of the one shot, his contribution to the battle, did not cause him to feel guilt. The hurt, deep and personal, was that his waiting had not been rewarded … He was out of the town and among the column of civilians. He put the dog down so that it could run beside him.

He saw the disappointment and anger on the faces of those around him and could not tell them why he lived, why they should not have believed in him, or where he had been with his rifle.

The triumph glowed in her. ‘We didn’t see you, didn’t hear you.’

He said dully, ‘I was looking for their sniper …’

‘What? Is that a joke?’

‘If I had fired, after the shot against the dish, I’d have given my position to their sniper.

I waited for him to make the mistake and —’

‘Whatever you say, but make sure you clean it, Gus. There will be a jam because it was not cleaned. We needed you, so clean it.’

He walked away from Meda and rounded the barricade of cars. The bodies were against each other, the soldiers’ and the
peshmerga
’s, locked against each other as if the final struggle for the barricade had been hand to hand. The stink was of opened bowels, spilled fuel and discarded cartridges. Haquim was folding away the box, Josephus, that had blocked the radio after the communications dish had been shot out.

‘Why did you not shoot? Was there a malfunction? We have at least a hundred casualties. I waited for you to shoot – you could have saved so many of our casualties.

You should not blame yourself. Anyone can suffer a malfunction.’

He strode on from Haquim, cursing his low expectations. He went towards the sagging gates at the front of the police station. There was an entry to the left, half blocked by a cart with a dead donkey still in its shafts, and saw the heap of uniformed bodies behind the cart, then the sudden movement as if a rat disturbed rubbish bags. It was Omar. Gus watched as the boy scurried over the bodies and methodically pilfered from them. First a gold chain ripped from a throat, then a ring wrenched from a finger, then a wallet snatched from an inner pocket, the blood wiped off it and the notes taken, a bracelet prised from a wrist.

Gus strode forward.

He stepped over the dead donkey and insinuated himself between the cart and the wall, and he kicked as hard as he could. He felt the shock wave ripple up from his boot to his hip. He kicked Omar off the bodies, and the boy cringed. He struck him with the butt of his rifle. The boy cowered against the wall and the brightness of the loot was in his hands, which were clasped across his face. Again and again, brutally, Gus battered the boy with his rifle butt. He brought blood to the boy’s face, from his forehead and eyes.

Blood was in the boy’s nose, dammed in the wisps of his moustache.

Omar shouted through his hands, ‘At last you have found, Mr Gus, a job for your rifle.

Now you are
brave
with your rifle.’

He left the boy against the wall and walked on into the town.

Aziz looked back.

Behind him was the great straggling column of the survivors, men, women and children, civilians and soldiers, and further behind were the bags, sacks and bundles discarded under the bright heat of the afternoon’s sun.

He remembered the first time he had gone to war, nineteen years old. His division of mechanized infantry, in support of two armoured divisions, had surged out of Jordan and over the frontier to support the battered Syrian tanks in their fight for survival against the Zionists. They had gone with high hopes, brimming confidence, and the Zionists had hit them at the village of Kfar Shams. Crouched behind the thin walls of his personnel carrier, he had witnessed the carnage of defeat in combat. They had limped home to Baghdad. His father had met him at the barracks. The nineteen-year-old had nursed the stench of defeat, but his father had declaimed that they were national heroes who had saved the flank of the Syrian army and protected Damascus from capture. It was what the radio had told the people but he had known the reality of the catastrophe. Then, the teenage Karim Aziz had carried no responsibility.

He walked on towards the brigade at the crossroads.

* * *

They were a force of liberation, but no crowds cheered them from the pavements.

The
peshmerga
, in gangs, kicked down the doors of homes, dragged up the shutters from shop windows, took what they could carry, and smashed what they had to leave behind.

No flowers were thrown down at them from upper windows.

He did not see Meda or Haquim. He thought that they would be far back at the barricades, where they would see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing of how the wave of freedom crashed over the town of Tarjil.

No flags were waved, or scarves.

A man was pulled, struggling from his home, thrown down into the mud of the street and a petrol can emptied over his head. There was the flash flame of a lighter as Gus turned and sleepwalked away. He turned his back on the sizzling death of an agent of the secret police.

A man, an informer, kicked his feet in the air. The noose at his neck was tied to an iron bracket above his shop. A shoe careered across the lane as the man kicked, and his women watched in silent, sullen hatred. Gus did not wait to see the death throes.

He walked right through the town. All about him was retribution and revenge. Far ahead was the empty road that stretched to the horizon where a small dustcloud marked the progress of the refugee column. He sat against a wall and the sunlight played on his face. He shut his eyes to forget what he had seen.

Chapter Nine

She was alone, friendless, far from home.

She sat on the bonnet of the pick-up and waited. She was angry, blamed the tooth –right upper molar – was tired and hot. It was rare for Sarah to feel sorry for herself, but she did that day, and the tooth made it worse. The doctor sat in his own pick-up’s shade, parked behind hers, read a paperback, his Walkman earphones clamped over his head, being no bloody company. She wouldn’t have trusted him with her tooth. The two nurses, local women from Arbīl, were in the cab of the third pick-up, fanning away flies and listening to a wailing singer on Radio Baghdad. Joe Denton, the sour little beggar, was a mile up the road, but what he did would make any bloody man sour. Her bodyguards and the interpreter were under a tree beside the road and sleeping.

She was a failure because she achieved a small damned part of nothing. Sarah could not have said truthfully that, in her time in northern Iraq, she had changed the lives of any of the communities with which she had worked. When she went, when they had found another high-principled lunatic to take her place, she’d be forgotten in a day. Her own high principles had long ago been battered out of her. Build a school, fill it with kids, appoint a teacher – a month later the school’s half empty because the bloody Stone Age fathers won’t permit education for the girls. Build a clinic, equip it, appoint a nurse –three months later the drugs have been stolen for black-market sale, and the nurse has been bought by a UN agency paying better money.

Her charity, Protect the Children, had a two-million-pound budget sloshing into northern Iraq, and the biggest single part of it was for the payment of the goddam loafing bodyguards who watched her, her colleagues, the warehouse, the offices and villas in Arbīl and Sulaymānīyah. And no bloody way they’d give up their lives to protect her if she was targeted by the Iraqis, or fell foul of an
agha.
It was all a bloody mess.

The reinforcements had arrived, spewed from a convoy of lorries, and had set off up the hillside towards the line of disappearing ridges. Sarah had known nothing of guns before she had come to northern Iraq. Guns were what policemen carried, holstered on their hips, at home, and were shouldered by the toytown soldiers outside the palaces in London where she’d au paired for six months. Now she knew about guns. She could have reeled off the names, calibres and qualities of all the weapons carried up the hillside by the reinforcements. She had also seen what such weapons could do. There had been a significant battle – she knew because the word had reached her clinic that she should go to the rendezvous point again to meet casualties. If so many reinforcements were going forward, a bigger battle was copper damn certain.

The previous evening, the meat had been tough, stringy. Her tooth hurt. She might, God willing, only have loosened it; she might, her damn luck, have cracked the filling.

To get a tooth fixed would mean a three-day journey out of northern Iraq into Syria, and then a three-day journey back. She didn’t have a week to lose, not with more casualties forecast.

She saw the column clear the nearest ridge and start to wind down the slope.

She was trained as a paramedic. With her were a doctor and two local nurses. They did not add up to a goddam casualty clearing station. They had three pick-ups. Lorries had been available to bring the reinforcements, but had done an about-turn and disappeared, not waiting for the inevitable casualties. They were for her to clear up. Good old Sarah would cope, always coped.

‘Tell me something new,’ she muttered.

She started to try to count the litters being carried down the hill, then hitched herself off the pick-up’s bonnet and marched, big steps, to the tree where her bodyguards and the interpreter rested in the shade. She snatched a pair of binoculars from her senior bodyguard’s neck without bothering to ask and leaned against the tree to steady her view.

Sarah swore.

She had three pick-up vehicles, all fitted with carrying slots for stretchers. Three pickups could take eighteen casualties. With the binoculars she counted forty litters being carried down the hill, then snapped her fingers for the bodyguards and the interpreter to follow and walked back to her vehicle.

She knew what she needed to do and said where she wanted to be driven.

It was a short ride. Around two bends, along a straight stretch flanked by stone-strewn hillsides, past a clump of trees beside which wild flowers grew, and they came to the place where the two pick-up vehicles were parked off the road near to the small village of stone homes with iron roofing. Normally she’d have had time for the kids who ran to greet her. She tossed her hair back, and strode briskly through them, ignoring their expectant faces.

She saw Joe Denton. In the green meadow beyond the village were five lines of bright white pegs. Sitting in a small knot, short of the meadow, were his own guards and his own interpreter, and the local men to whom he was teaching his trade.

She thought him a miserable little man, but from what she knew of him it was typical that he would not allow any other man into the minefield until he had first been into it himself and made his evaluation.

He wouldn’t have seen her arrival. Facing away from her, he lay on his stomach, his weight on his elbows, his eyes on his fingers. He wore a biscuit-coloured pair of overalls, but there was a heavy armour-plated waistcoat over his chest, shoulders and back. A helmet with a Perspex visor covered his eyes. Sarah had seen mines detonated often enough from safe distances, and she’d seen all too often the mutilations they made. She didn’t think the waistcoat and the helmet would be of too much use to him if his fingers didn’t get it right.

She knew about mines: they were a part of the education she had received in northern Iraq, were not on any curriculum in Sydney or London. Even from this distance she could see that Joe Denton was carefully unscrewing the top cover of a VS50. She knew about the VS50: pressure on the pad in the top cover activated a firing pin into a stab-sensitive detonator, range of 24–30 feet. His hands were holding it and his eyes were nine inches from it. Purchasers of the product could tell the Italian factory whether or not they wanted a metal or a plastic plate inside it – a bastard for a de-miner to find and make safe, easy for a kid to step on. She watched as he unscrewed the top, the painstakingly slow movements of his fingers. He laid the detonator aside, then the disarmed mine. Bloody good – one down, about another ten million to go.

Sarah shouted, ‘Joe – Christ, I am sorry to disturb you. It’s Sarah. Please, I need a favour, like now.’

He didn’t turn to look at her. He was crawling forward and spiking the grass in front of him, probing for his next target.

‘Joe, I need help. Please.’

His voice came softly back to her. ‘What sort of help?’

‘There’s a load of casualties coming back from the other side. I don’t have the vehicle space. Can I borrow your trucks, and drivers, please?’

‘Feel free. Bring them back.’

‘You can spare them – great.’

‘I’m not going anywhere … Wash ’em out before you bring them back.’

In the culture of Joe Denton, and she knew it, she was just a tree hugger. She was a stupid bloody woman, interfering, adding to the dependency culture of Kurdish villagers, achieving bloody nothing, like all the rest of the huggers, the aid-workers. He put down the probe and started to work with a small trowel, the same as her mother used in the garden at home. She never saw his eyes, but she could picture them behind the visor.

Very clear, and very certain, eyes that could have looked right through her at that moment.

God knows how, but they did it. They squashed, forced, pushed fifty-two casualties into five pick-ups … Not all of them would make it to the hospital. There would be more room for the survivors by the time they reached Arbīl.

In the late afternoon, when the stillness had settled, Omar found Gus, sitting against the low wall, gazing out over the slope of the hill that fell away from him. He saw the boy first, searching, then felt the glow of relief when the boy reached him. Behind the wall goats were penned, restless but quiet. He hadn’t waved to the boy, or called to him, but allowed himself to be found. Omar’s battered face showed his nervousness.

‘I did not know where you were.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘I have been through the town to find you.’

‘Have you?’

‘Are you very angry, Mr Gus?’

‘I am not angry, Omar, not any more.’

He could not have explained it to the boy, or to anyone he knew, how the early morning of the battle for Tarjil had changed him. The inner man was altered.

The boy squatted down beside him. ‘I have to take, Mr Gus, or I do not have anything.’

‘I understand.’

‘Because I have no father to give to me, and no mother.’

‘Yes.’

‘Worse than not having anything is to have your anger, Mr Gus.’

The boy shifted up to be against Gus’s shoulder. Back where he came from, because he was changed, none of them would have wanted to know him. The boy’s sharp smell against him was mingled with the stench of his own body. They would not have known his eyes, which were brighter, colder, staring out from his paint-streaked face. His trousers were torn alongside the reinforcement strips at the knees, and the foliage knitted into the hessian strips of the gillie suit was old and as dead as the man they had known.

‘They say your rifle jammed, Mr Gus.’

‘Do they?’

‘That you beat me in anger because your rifle jammed.’

He did not know where he could have started to explain to the boy, who had nothing, that it was wrong to steal from the dead. But if he had started, he would still have been the same man, would not have been changed. He thought that now there was no place for him to criticize the boy. He no longer had that right, or the inclination to exercise it.

‘Is that what they say?’

In the far distance was the flame. He made the promise to himself that he would walk to the flame, and offer no judgements on the boy, and the men who marched with him.

‘I told them, Mr Gus, that your rifle jammed.’

He sat in the last sunlight, which beat low against his eyes, and he slipped his arm over the narrow bony shoulders of the boy. He watched the flame burning close to the dipping sun. By comparison it was dimmer, less substantial. The boy wriggled and reached into his pocket, then took Gus’s hand and prised it open. In a small cascade the chains of gold, the bracelets, the dull rings and a thin wad of banknotes fell into Gus’s palm. He let them drop through his fingers. They lay in the dried dirt between his legs.

He looked down at the tawdry chains and rings. The grey dusk was slipping over the sloped ground that ran to the high, spurting flame, gaining ascendancy once more.

Gus held the boy close, because again the boy had nothing. He thought of the sniper, the man without a face. To himself, he laughed, and wondered whether the sniper, too, with his own people, claimed that his rifle had jammed.

‘I didn’t fire because I did not see the man I came for … You dispute my orders? Then, please, immediately, call the barracks at al-Rashid of the Estikhabarat, and my orders will be confirmed to you. You ask why I did not fire on random targets. My skill is as a sniper, I am not an artillery officer, I don’t play with tanks. You ask why I shot the commanding officer of the regiment. He was fleeing in the face of the enemy and abandoning his troops, he disgusted me. Myself, I was the last officer to leave the town.

Do you have any more questions for me, General?’

The general would never countermand an order given by the Estikhabarat. Not even he would dare to take action against an officer who had shot down a coward.

‘Did you see her?’

‘I saw her.’

‘But you did not have the opportunity to shoot her?’

He saw the general’s sly smile, which invited him to lay his foot on the mantrap. Major Aziz wondered where the brigadier was; he did not understand why, at a time of military movement and confusion, he was not in the communications bunker. He had not seen the brigadier at the crossroads, or on the road between the crossroads and Kirkūk. He thought that he stood among mirrors that distorted all of the images. He did not know who was his friend and who was his enemy.

He retorted, ‘I could have shot her. If I had shot her a minimum of a hundred civilians would have been cut down in the counter-strike. You were not there, General, you did not see those people fleeing. If I had shot I would have condemned them. They are citizens of our republic, yes? They have the protection of our President?’

He stood in front of the laundered general. He could smell the scent of the lotions on the man’s body. His own was streaked with sweat, the smears of camouflage paint dripped into his eyes and down his stubbled cheeks. The dust from his smock and the mud from his boots flaked to the floor around him.

The map was exposed on the table. At the centre of the map was the crossroads. The lines were drawn in bold Chinagraph from Kirkūk to the crossroads. It was what he understood. The lines were clarity. The mirror images were distortion. At that moment, if he had been able to telephone his wife, speak to her, explain to her, beg her for guidance, she would have told him that he was a simple man and that he should perform his duty.

The mirrors twisted his perspective, made ugly his sense of duty. He had never known the mirrors before he had allowed himself to be recruited and gone to lie each night on the flat roof waiting to take his shot. The plan was explained.

‘I lose a town for a few hours. I lose a Victory City for a few days, and here I destroy them.’ The general stabbed his finger for emphasis on the map. Stained with nicotine, it rested on the ground between the crossroads and Tarjil, at the furthest point of the Chinagraph lines. And the question was silkily put. ‘Do your orders permit you to fight there, Major?’

Aziz nodded and stumbled out of the bunker. In the last light of the day he went to find food for his dog and put behind him the images of mirrors that distorted simplicity.