Holding the Zero (21 page)

Gretchen had her eyes tight shut. She grimaced. ‘I can’t quite believe it is actually true.’

‘Actually true …’ The Russian beamed behind her, then bent to offer the posture of confidentiality. ‘You talk about the woman. Twenty-four hours ago, in Iraq, I was with her. I met her. You have the word of Lev Rybinsky. Look at my feet, look at my clothes, look at the mud. I walked across mountains to meet her, to be with her, and walked back.

I am very sincere with you. The money is not for me, it is to open the door of the route to her. There is no profit in this to me. I have come to you because of my love for the freedom of an abused people. The world should know about her. For me, there would be no financial gain.’

‘You’d take us?’ Mike asked, breathily.

‘Of course.’

‘We’d see combat?’ the American demanded.

‘She is marching to Kirkūk and she will not stop. The storm is gathering – yes, my guarantee, you would see combat.’

‘We would walk with her?’ Gretchen queried nervously.

‘You would walk beside her – for fifteen thousand American dollars – into a liberated Kirkūk. I regret I cannot drop the price. Did you know there was a foreign sniper with her?’

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON
PEAKE
.

4. (Conclusions after interview with Ray Davies (owner of Davies and Sons, haulage company) conducted by self and Ms Carol Manning –transcript attached.) TEMPERAMENT: AHP is an intensely private individual, and is therefore probably best known by his employer. He has worked for the company all his adult life, starting as a teaboy/office runner aged 18, and rising to the position of Transport Manager. Much is made at the company of the stressful pace of the job – much is also made of AHP’s ability to cope with that stress. Words used to describe his TEMPERAMENT are

‘phlegmatic’, ‘patient’ and ‘calm’. They are the descriptions of a character most appreciated by instructors in sniper arts. Interestingly, the owner knew next to nothing of AHP’s life away from the workplace. His shooting passion with the Historic Breech-loading and Small-arms Association was not mentioned. He brought his partner with him to social events, the Christmas party etc., but his personal life was lived behind a closed door. However, importantly, it was made clear that AHP lacks a ruthless side to his character. (The example is minor but indicative of character.) He was unsettled when given the task of sacking a driver who was persistently behind schedule on trans-European journeys, and ‘wriggled’ over clear evidence that a second driver was claiming paid sick leave for a bogus ailment. The TEMPERAMENT is excellent for the role AHP has given himself, but I doubt he has the necessary ‘steel’ for combat. Also, without a long knowledge of MILITARY WEAPONS and MILITARY TRAINING, his chances of medium-term survival remain slim to non-existent.

Willet pondered on that last sentence.

He had found, each time he wrote his notes for Ms Manning’s line manager, an increasing urge to talk up the positive character points of this man. The urge was based, and Willet recognized it, on a growing sense of jealousy. He believed that somehow, and in the most unobtrusive way, he was belittled by Augustus Henderson Peake.

He never moved without an order to do so. In his analysis, he was an automaton and a robot. But Peake had made his own decisions, had packed up and travelled on his own impulses. Willet would never be his own man, not now and not once he had left the military. From the jealousy was born knowledge and admiration.

The concept of a transport manager affecting the course of a faraway war was laughable, of course, yet the worm of doubt ate at him. He remembered an old army video, shown to the sniper course at Warminster in monochrome, that had listed the sort of civilians who might have the required qualities. Not a transport manager among them, but … A
fisherman
can sit all day at a canal bank and not see his float go down: he has the virtue of patience. A
steeplejack
can climb to great and dangerous heights, knows his safety is in his own hands, that a false move will end his life. A
countryman
can shoot straight and move silently, is cunning and thinks ahead to anticipate the movement of his prey. A
clerk
can spend an entire day with columns of figures, has the priceless power of concentration that shuts out distractions.

All ordinary men, and all fashioned into killers by the instructors. That was the answer.

Peake had the necessary virtues, but not the military weapons and tactics. Willet realized that what had started as a tedious, late-at-night instruction to pry into an ordinary man’s life was turning into a search for the Grail.

He printed what he had written and phoned out for a delivery pizza. Waiting for it to arrive, he wondered whether he undersold that ordinary man, whether Peake could survive, whether the forces arrayed against him were too great and whether that enemy was closing in on him.

Late at night, another simple man – who knew only his chosen trade – went back to the war.

He had not taken the chance of a bath, or gone to the officers’ quarters to eat, or telephoned his wife.

In Aziz’s backpack was more food for the dog, and for himself there was the filled water canteen, goat’s cheese and bread.

He was driven in an open jeep towards the crossroads, away from the flame. When next he saw her, whether there were a hundred or a thousand between them, he would shoot her. It was the decision of a man who craved simplicity. He would shoot her, over the heads of a hundred or a thousand, regardless of the consequences of a counter-strike, then go with his dog to hunt the sniper who opposed him. With the clean wind on his face, he thought that he had broken the distortion of the mirrors. He was well read. There were many books in English on military history in the library of the Baghdad Military College. If he wanted to learn their secrets, he had to have the language and over the years he had taken the chance to read textbooks, pamphlets and manuals of the British army. A book had told him of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. It had troubled the simple soldier and, perhaps, had led him along the road of recruitment and mirrors.

Stauffenberg had lost faith in his Führer, did not believe in a hopeless war. Stauffenberg was the bomb carrier and had failed, was shot like a dog in the hooded headlights of lorries. How was he regarded by those who lived and fought in Normandy and in the Russian marshes? The mirrors did not make him a hero but a traitor. To troops remorselessly retreating, Stauffenberg was the man who betrayed his fellow soldiers …

He would shoot her.

He broke the mirrors in his mind, and after he had shot the witch he would hunt down the sniper.

Gus had slept, woken, started, and at that moment not known where he was.

‘Did you dream, Mr Gus?’

‘No. I dreamed nothing.’

He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. His hand dropped to the dirt beside his legs. The small, cold shapes of the chains, bracelets, rings, and the rolled notes were still there. The boy could have pocketed them in the darkness while he slept, and had not. He hadn’t dreamed of home. Home was behind him. Home would not have understood that a boy thieved from bodies because he had nothing. The boy had not pocketed the trinkets and Gus felt a humble love for him, and couldn’t have told them at home about that love. Far away, the flame burned at Kirkūk. Between him and the flame was the infinite spread of the darkness.

‘Will you be angry again?’

‘That’s in the past.’

‘Will the rifle jam again?’

‘No, not this time.’

‘It is what I said. The
mustashar
came with Meda. They wanted to talk to you about the rifle, but I would not let them wake you. I said that you had cleaned the rifle and it would not jam again. They wanted to hear it from you but I did not let them wake you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Will you tell me, Mr Gus, a story of Hesketh-Prichard?’

He closed his eyes. He let the quiet seep against him. ‘Right, yes … It’s a story that Major Hesketh-Prichard tells about a man whose bravery and dedication he much admired – and that man was an enemy. The troops may have hated the enemy. Snipers weren’t taken prisoner by those in the trenches, they were shot in cold blood there and then. But a sniper doesn’t hate his opponent. There is respect for the skill of the other. He will try to kill him, hope to succeed, but there is always respect.’

‘Please, Mr Gus, the story.’

‘You’re an impatient little sod … There was a big-game hunter, Jim Corbett –elephants and lions were what he killed before the war – he told this story to Hesketh-Prichard. Corbett always gave names to the enemy’s snipers and he called this one Wilibald the Hun. Wilibald the Hun was credited with killing more than twenty British soldiers. For days they looked for Wilibald across the turnip field in no man’s land but couldn’t find him. There had to be a trick to make him fire when the snipers on the British side were all looking for him. On a cold winter’s morning, with a frost over the field, they put up a heavy steel plate with an observation slit in it. He fired at the slit, shot right through it, but that wasn’t Wilibald’s mistake. The mistake he made, and it cost Wilibald his life, was to fire early on a cold morning. The gas from the rifle, when there’s cold air and no wind, hangs for a few moments. It makes a marker. All the snipers fired into the gas. They went forward. Wilibald was in the turnip field only seventy yards from the British line, way out in front of his own trenches. He was covered in turnip leaves. He was middle-aged, very ordinary, rather fat, and he was respected for his courage and his skill … but Wilibald the Hun made the one mistake and that’s all it takes.’

Chapter Ten

‘The tanks will not be used,’ Meda said.

A fire still burned in the roof of the police station’s main block and the tang of the smoke caught in Joe Denton’s nostrils. He had hiked blindly across the mountains all through the night; in an hour it would be dawn. Other than when he had smacked his girlfriend’s father’s face, he had never in his adult life done anything as stupid as leave the safety of northern Iraq and travel through the punched hole into government territory.

The thanks he received were, he felt, bloody minimal.

‘They will not use the tanks they have in Kirkūk.’ She turned on her heel and stalked off.

Arrogant cow. Arrogant good-looking cow, though, none the less. Joe watched her, saw the firm roll of her hips as she walked away from him, and before that he’d seen the clean-cut lines of her chest where her blouse was unfastened.

Scattered through the police-station yard were huddles of men who waited without protest for her to find the time to come, hear their problems, talk to them. He had tried to help. He had joined a column of reinforcements, walked through the goddam night, unloaded the mines from the backs of two mules and believed he would be welcomed, thanked. On the hike across the high wilderness, Sarah had talked of the woman, said she was the last best chance, was unique, not said she was an arrogant cow. So, they didn’t want his bloody mines … There had been an older man near to her, a pace behind her.

When the woman had dismissed the chance of tanks being deployed out of Kirkūk, the older man had gazed to the heavens as though argument were pointless – and then had trailed away after her.

Joe settled himself against a truck’s wheel and closed his eyes. Sarah had gone to the town hospital to get busy and executive and organize a convoy to take more wounded back north where they could receive better treatment. She knew where he was. He sat close to the heap of mines, cold, hungry, his pride punched. For her and her march south, he had broken the inviolate rule of the charity that employed him. He had taken sides. He had stepped off the lofty pedestal on which he was supposed to stand. He had only been a corporal in the Royal Engineers, but he’d learned enough about military tactics to believe that he would have been of some use to these bloody peasants.

‘Godforsaken fucking place!’ he spat.

‘I thought you were sleeping.’ There was a gravelly chuckle above him.

Joe stared into the darkness, blinked and saw the shadowed outline of the older man.

It came in a torrent. ‘Don’t mind me – I’ve only put my job on the line. I came here to do something that is almost criminal, to bring you mines. I’ve dug them up and now I’m offering them to you to bury them again. Stupid or criminal, take your pick. I thought I was helping. But it appears I’m surplus to requirements.’

‘You have our gratitude.’

‘It’s a hell of a way to show it. She—’

‘She is what takes us forward.’

‘She is an arrogant cow.’

‘She is what has brought us here. I am Haquim, the
mustashar
. I am, if I am listened to, the adviser on tactics. You are a military man, Mr Denton?’

Joe said bitterly, ‘Not an officer, not a bloody Rupert. Corporal, ex, Royal Engineers, if it matters …’

The older man squatted beside him. ‘Would you know, Mr Denton, how – where – to lay mines for the maximum effectiveness, with an expert sniper, against tanks?’

‘She said there would be no tanks.’

‘That’s what she said …’

Joe took a deep breath, as if it were a moment when his involvement firmed. ‘Yes, I might be able to help you in that area.’

The older man unfolded a map, shone his torch down on it and pointed to the position of Fifth Army in Kirkūk and the crossroads outside the city. His finger traced a line on the route that linked them. He remembered what he had said to Sarah, a few minutes less than twelve hours before: the tanks would mince them. He was told what weapon the sniper carried, the calibre and capability of the ammunition the rifle fired. His face was close to the ragged map. Joe talked softly, carefully, asked for paper and a pencil, and for the man to give him a couple of minutes to think it through. He had an idea but it would be a betting man’s throw.

By the time Haquim returned, he had drawn the plan. Haquim folded away the map.

Joe asked, ‘Where’s the sniper?’

Haquim shrugged.

‘I need to talk to him,’ Joe said. ‘He’s the one who has to get it right. If he doesn’t get it right, and the tanks come, then everyone’s toast.’

The crossing of the mountains was hard going. There were no lights to guide them and the German hissed a protest each time they kicked a rock or set a stone tumbling down from the path.

Four hours into their march the discipline was fracturing.

‘God, what I’d give for a drink …’ Mike whispered.

‘A bed, a clean bed …’ Dean murmured.

Gretchen soldiered on, her mind apparently elsewhere.

They heard Jürgen’s guttural whisper for quiet. Did they not realize the density of Turkish army patrols?

‘All right for that human fucking parasite, he’s not carrying half a ton of gear.’ Mike’s cameraman, propositioned late in the evening, had flatly refused to take part in a night march over the mountains from Turkey into northern Iraq. Equally resolutely, Dean and Gretchen had declined to help Mike with the camera equipment. If they bounced a patrol they risked being shot out of hand in the darkness, or they faced arrest, thuggery, unpleasant interrogation, and a week’s sojourn in Diyarbakir’s military gaol.

Significantly, the German, Jürgen, carried nothing.

They were at a narrow point in the path, which was good enough for low-life smugglers, but for the journalistic pride of London, Baltimore and Frankfurt it was hell.

There was a cliff wall to the left, a loose-stoned track for them to walk on, and a precipice to the right. Each of them had an idea of the depth of the precipice: the last rock dislodged by Gretchen had slid from under her boot and fallen, fallen for an age before they’d heard its distant impact. The bastard Russian, back at the Hotel Malkoc, with a drink and a clean bed and probably a woman, would meet them in the morning. He’d said it was impossible for them to be hidden in a lorry for the border crossing. They’d walk –maybe get shot, or at least captured – and if they made it through he’d meet them.

‘After we come back, I promise to do that swine proper damage.’

‘
If
we come back.’

‘Get positive, Gretchen – Mike, you’ll have me to help you.’

The wind ripped at their clothes, the cold shredded them and all for a story about a woman leading a distant army, talk of freedom, the prospect of air-time and column inches. They held hands and made a chain, and stumbled on after the German. Holding hands was their small gesture to each other of solidarity – if one went over the goddam precipice they’d all go.

‘Why are we doing this?’

‘I am doing this, Gretchen, for my real-estate mortgage.’

‘Anyone who does this, goes into northern Iraq and not for money, is an idiot,’

Gretchen said solemnly.

He saw the man.

The dawn came slowly, layering the light across the ground. Before its arrival, Aziz had crawled for an hour in a network of rain gullies until he had reached a vantage-point where he could conceal himself and watch. It was the furthest forward he could go and he was settled beside the collapsed roof of rusted tin and the broken wooden frame of what had once been a shepherd’s shelter. He could go no further forward because the ground ahead of him was scratched empty and bare by the wind. Not even his dog, resting beside his knee, could have crossed that ground and remained concealed.

The dawn had come from over the high hills to the left of the man. Beyond the wind-whipped, sun-scorched ground that stretched three times the range of the Dragunov was an isolated clump of rocks rubbed smooth by the elements. The man sat on the rocks and made no effort to conceal himself.

Aziz’s eyesight, unaided, was not adequate, but with his telescope he could see him clearly.

As the sun rose, as the heat settled on the ground, his view of the man would become distorted, but the air at dawn was cold enough for him to see the man in sharp focus.

He understood why the man showed himself. It was a challenge.

Through the telescope, Major Karim Aziz watched the man who was his enemy. He saw the dirt and the dust that cloyed the overalls, and the confused tangle of the hessian strips, and he saw but did not recognize the shape of the rifle that was held loosely across the man’s thighs. The face of the man was paint-smeared and daubed with mud, and there was a dark shadow of stubble over his cheeks and chin. Sitting on the rock with his rifle, the man seemed at peace.

Aziz knew from his experience of the battles against the Iranians that there were times when soldiers sought calm, as if at those moments the hate in them for their enemy died.

Later, they would fight … they would stalk … they would kill. In the quiet, killing men looked for the faces of their enemy as if there was a need to prise away the masks, as if to find something of brotherhood. He could not reach the man. The flat, featureless ground between them prevented him from a hidden stalk and a single rifle shot, and the man knew it.

He was disturbed, could not lift away the mask – and, confused, could not make the brotherhood. The challenge mocked him.

Major Karim Aziz knew what he had to do. If he did not do it, the fear would take root.

If the fear was in him, when the peace was gone he would not aim and shoot well. Fear was the true enemy of the sniper. If he did not answer the challenge, he would know his fear had conquered him. The strength of the sun was growing on his back and the dog panted beside him. In a few minutes, a little time, the heat would have settled on the ground and the clarity of his lens would subside to mirage and distortion … He thought of his wife, in the hospital, with the children who had no drugs – and he wondered whether this man, sitting at peace, had a wife. He thought of his children, in the school that had no books – and he wondered whether this man had children.

Aziz put his telescope back into his backpack and stood.

He walked away from the shepherd’s shelter with his backpack looped over his shoulders and his rifle loose in his hands. Far beyond the growing shimmer as the ground warmed was the outline of the rocks, and he did not know whether, at three thousand metres, the man noticed his movement, but it was important to him that he had picked up the challenge.

He turned his back on the man and headed towards the road, Scout skipping beside him.

The next time he saw him, when there was no peace and no calm, he would kill the man.

‘He’s a champion, that’s what you have to realize. He’s a winner.’

Willet had told Ms Manning that they were going to the seaside. It wasn’t strictly true.

The industrial estate east of Southampton allowed them a slight whiff of the sea, but no view of it. The unit that had produced the brochure he’d taken from Peake’s safe in the haulage-company offices was old, uncared-for and drab. It was anonymous: only the steel-plated door and the small heavily barred windows gave evidence of the factory’s product inside. They sat in a small, untidy office and the walls around them were hung with photographs of weapons. The sales director, earnest and bright-eyed, a communicator, had told the outer office to hold his calls.

‘He’s
can, will, must
. I see enough of them, I recognize them. I call it being “the master of circumstances”. It’s about the ability to withstand pressure, and I’m talking about extreme stress.’

It was the unpeeling of another layer. Willet scribbled his notes, but Ms Manning gazed around her and studied the photographs. He thought he’d brought her to new territory, and her expression showed she thought it disreputable.

‘Look, if Gus Peake had not decided to interest himself in firing a half-century-old sniper rifle, if he’d focused on the modern equipment, he’d be right up in the top flight of the Queen’s Hundred. I’d go as far as to say that he’d be challenging for the Queen’s Prize. Instead he chose the sort of demanding discipline that will not produce celebrities, but he’s still the best at that discipline. He won’t get a chair ride at Bisley, won’t have a cabinet of display cups, but I’ll wager he has a drawerful of spoons, if you know what I mean.’

Afterwards Willet would have to explain to Ms Manning about Bisley, about the annual shoot that was the showpiece for the year, the choosing of the hundred best marksmen for the last day’s competition, and the lifting of the winner onto a chair so that he could be hoisted to receive the Queen’s Prize as the band played ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’. He might tell her that in 1930 a woman had sat in the chair and been serenaded … He cursed himself for allowing distraction to cloud his thoughts. It was why Ken Willet was not a champion and never would be, and why he’d failed the sniper course.

‘I liked his mind management. He’s very quiet. When he was down here he only spoke when he had something to ask. Some customers talk the whole time, think that’ll impress me. He’s not afraid of silence. That’s important – it marks a man down as one who doesn’t have conceit.’

Ms Manning frowned. Willet wondered, after they’d gone, whether the pair of them, the investigators, would be dissected by the sales director to his colleagues – whether he and Ms Manning would be categorized as conceited or confident, or simply from a second division.

‘Confidence and conceit are very different things. Conceit is failure, confidence is success. A conceited man cannot abide failure and turns away from any area where he may lose. But a confident man thinks through the ground conditions then backs his intuition. Champions are confident, not conceited – that’s why Gus Peake is a champion.

I’ve known him for the last three years. You see, we make military and civilian rifles, so I go to Bisley. Target-shooting with modern rifles can be about as dull as watching paint dry – I usually wander over to the HBSA people for a chat and a coffee, it’s how I met him. I’m not a friend, I doubt he has any, he didn’t seem the type – but I’ve watched him shoot and talked through shooting problems. He has my respect. What’s he up to?’