Holding the Zero (30 page)

‘You should not be frightened, old man. We are not frightened, nor Mr Peake. Trust me. We are two hundred and eighty. We are in groups of twenty men. We are in houses, gardens, alleyways, yards, not in the roads where they have barricades and tanks. They will not have the helicopters to search for us because Mr Peake will not be frightened.

We are going forward. You will sleep, tonight, in the governor’s bed, while I direct Kirkūk’s defence from the governor’s office.’

‘If you get to the governor’s house, how long do you think you can hold it?’

‘Until they come, a few hours, it’s all we need.’

Still, Haquim did not dare to look into the light of her eyes. He rasped, ‘Who comes?’

‘It is because you are frightened, old man, that you are stupid … The pigs will come, of course. Bekir and Ibrahim will come – all of the
peshmerga
will come. They wait a little way off. They need me to give them courage. When I am in the governor’s house they will have the courage and come. It will happen.’

At last, reluctantly, Haquim looked into her face. The sneers and taunts had gone. He was responsible. He had heard talk of her, gone to her village, listened to her, believed in her, promised her grandfather that he would watch over her, had taken her to meet
agha
Bekir and
agha
Ibrahim, and he had watched the little army swell. The smile caught him as surely as the barbed hooks the children used when they caught fish off the dam of the great Dukan reservoir. He took her hand. There were grenades on straps against her chest.

He placed his hand, with hers inside his, on the metal of the RG-5 fragmentation grenade that was closest to her heart.

‘If I am with you and believe you will be captured, then I will shoot you. If I am not with you, and you will be captured,
please
, please, I beg it of you, pull the pin.’

Against the wire that stretched either side of them, limitless until lost in the darkness, Gus used the binoculars and confirmed what he already knew. The range was too great – they had to go through the wire.

So little time … A jeep passed, idled into his view and he was close enough to it to see the faces of the soldiers. There was a tumbler strand a foot above the ground into which the mesh wire was buried, another at the waist height of a standing man, another at the eyeline of a man at full height and just below the stretched coils of razor wire. They began, frantically, to dig with their hands at the dry soil.

There was a growing smear of grey-gold light behind the faraway mountains.

Three helicopters were on the bright-lit apron, slug beasts; he had been told they would be the Russian-built Mi-24 gun-ships, and if they caught her in the open with anti-tank missiles, rockets and the rapid-fire machine-gun, she was gone, and it was finished. He dug, ripped his nails, scraped the skin from his hands.

The tankers backed away. The crews, in loose-fitting flying-suits, were walking round the beasts, approving the fitting of the ordnance stowed under the wings.

They had reached the bottom of the wire, but the deeper earth was harder, drier. The boy used a knife to stab into the ground and Gus scraped it back behind him. The light was growing, the time was slipping away. The hole widened. The boy hacked down into the earth and Gus shovelled it aside. He should have been resting, should have been calm and with the chance to watch for wind variation over the expanse of ground between the fence and the apron area where the helicopters were readied to fly. The boy, eel-like, wriggled down into the hole and then began to chop at the soil on the far side of the wire until it sprouted up as if a maddened mole made the tunnel. Omar was through.

Gus heard the whine of a helicopter engine starting and saw the first lazy turns of the rotors.

He tore off a hessian strip from his suit and gently looped it over the lowest of the tumbler strands.

As he passed the rifle through the cavity, the boy took it. He crawled into the hole and stuck. Omar dragged at his shoulders. Gus was stuck fast. He saw only the darkness of the hole … If the tumbler strand was disturbed the sirens would blast, the jeep would come, and the helicopters would fly … His head burst out into the light.

The pitch of the engines rose.

They crawled, together, on their bellies towards the helicopters.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON
PEAKE
.

6. (Conclusions after interviews with personnel at CTCRM, Lympstone conducted by self and Ms Manning – transcripts attached.) MILITARY TRAINING: The normal duration of a sniping course would be 3 weeks, AHP was given 72 hours (less minimal sleep time) of concentrated Fieldcraft and Tactical training. It is possible he would have absorbed a considerable amount of what he was told, shown and briefed on, but at best the knowledge will remain superficial. Also, he has been educated in procedures that would be adopted by a regular army where he would be provided with all necessary support. AHP is not in such an environment and will be operating alongside irregulars of doubtful quality.

TACTICAL TRAINING: AHP, at CTCRM, received specialist advice from 5 sergeant instructors – but I consider that given by Sgt Stevens, MM, to be the most important. Sgt Stevens served in northern Iraq in 1991 in the Safe Haven operation for Kurdish refugees, and therefore had a first-hand knowledge of the terrain; he stressed to AHP that the further south the irregular force probed, so would increase the technical superiority of Govt of Iraq forces. Emphasis was placed on the use of the AWM Lapua Magnum rifle’s armour-piercing capability against helicopter gun-ships, and the need for bold and imaginative counter-measures against such a threat. (The fact that AHP is a civilian, not hidebound by standard military procedures, leads me to believe that boldness and imagination would be expected from him. KW) In the use of such tactics, the LOYALTY spoken of by Sgt Billings would probably cause AHP to push home an attack in situations where his personal safety is directly threatened.

Willet paused, his fingers lying limply alongside the keyboard. He wanted to push himself up from his chair, go to the window, pull back the curtains and open it. He wanted to shove his head out into the night air and shout over the roofs and the streets, over the crawling cars and the last stragglers going home from the clubs, to throw his voice far beyond and far away. He wanted to be heard by a man who sat huddled in the warmth of a gillie suit, who held the long barrel of the rifle, who waited for the dawn.

He wanted to yell, ‘Turn back, don’t be a stupid bastard … Walk away. It’s for nothing

… Come home, come back to where people love you … Live a life, a fucking boring life, but live it … Be like me, be a bloody coward, be like me and find an excuse to turn …’

He knew that if he screamed into the emptiness of the night, he would not be heard.

Willet began, again, to type.

The binoculars told him the lead helicopter was 670 yards in front of him, the second helicopter was 705 yards from him, and the third helicopter in the line was 740 yards from his aiming position.

The windsock beside the control tower hung lifelessly against the flagpole. Gus had the range and did not need to concern himself on windage deflection.

The helicopters shuddered in line as the engine power grew.

If such a beast was his target, he had been told where it was vulnerable and where the Mi-24 was protected by armour plate. The earnest Doug Stevens had laid the sheet of paper on the table among the spilled beer and the ashtray’s garbage, drawn the outline of the beast, scribbled in the shaded areas where it was armour-plated, and highlighted the parts where, if it were hit, it could be killed. A technician scrambled up the side of the lead helicopter, and the pilot’s hatch door was opened. Might be a fuel gauge playing up, or oil pressure, might be the navigation system. The pilot, high in the forward end of the fuselage, was protected – on the drawing on Doug Stevens’ paper – by armour and a bulletproof glass canopy, but his door was open and lit by the high lights.

Gus fired.

Flat on his stomach, the boy close beside him, Gus watched the vortex of the bullet’s passage through the dawn air.

The technician fell back, dropped away from the ladder. At the same moment, the pilot slumped. The core of an armour-piercing bullet would then have careered on inside the cockpit and struck glancing, spinning blows against the armour that was supposed to keep a bullet outside the womb in which the pilot sat, but not inside.

He heard the boy squeal in excitement, but his eyeline had moved on. He raked back the bolt and his fingers felt for the elevation turret of the ’scope. He twisted it the minuscule correction of one half-click.

The sides and the underpart of the fuselage of the Mi-24 were protected, Doug Stevens had said, but the gearbox in the mounting under the rotors was not. Stevens had said that Special Forces and spooks had trained the Afghan mujahedin to shoot down from the valley’s cliffs on to the gun-ships’ superstructures. They wouldn’t have heard the shot in the second and third helicopters, but they’d have seen the technician fall and the statue posture of the ground-control man with his outstretched signal batons.

Gus had a window of seconds: such an opportunity would not come again.

He fired at the gearbox of the second helicopter, immediately below the outstretched sweep of the rotors. Metal parts dropped away.

Bolt back, cartridge case ejected, and the sweep of the ’scope towards the third of the beasts. It was already lifting. He could see the pilot secure inside the casing. It rose, tilting away from him and he lost the sight of the gearbox below the rotors. He locked his aim on the blurred shape of the vertical tail rotor. He sucked in a breath, exhaled, caught the last of the air – and held it.

Gus fired three times, at 740 yards mean distance, into the spinning shape of the third helicopter’s tail rotor.

He did not hear the boy’s shout. He did not see the jeep, at the distant end of the wire, reversing and turning. He twisted up onto his knee, caught at the boy’s collar, and pitched him back towards the wire. Then Gus was running.

There was no longer a pain in his heel, an ache in his body and exhaustion in his eyes.

Gus ran for his life and the boy stampeded beside him. If he had not hung the hessian strip on the wire he would have lost precious moments, finding the hole under the wire.

He threw himself down into the hole and the boy pushed, levered him through the gap.

Then he was running again, weaving, gasping for air, bent low. Behind him, the pilot of the third helicopter fought an unequal battle with his machine and lost.

The immediate goal was the airfield’s rubbish tip where the crows, startled by the gunfire, wheeled and screamed. The secondary goal, when the piled rubbish tip covered their backs, was a dried river gully. The final goal, far ahead, was to link with Meda and the attack.

Machine-guns had started up, but without a target.

Only when he was in the gully, when the pain, the ache and the tiredness surged back to him, did Gus bleat his question.

‘Can they fly?’

‘You killed them, Mr Gus, they cannot fly.’

They ran on down the gully, as the dawn lightened. It was, Gus thought, the decisive day of his life, the day he had dreamed and dared, but there was nothing of the taste of her in his mouth, just a dry dusty film.

The attack went well, made good ground – at first.

They had advanced in silence through ditches, drains, through gardens and small vegetable fields to the edge of the city’s limits. They had scurried, crawled, run from shadow to shadow, in their small groups, and waited for the signal.

The report of the first shot, then the second, then the third, fourth and fifth, had come muffled to them across the breadth of the city, and before the sound of the fifth shot had died there had been the blast of the heavy machine-gun and the rip of its tracers – the signal.

The assault on Kirkūk was like that of mosquitoes on an ailing man. The weight of a man’s hand might fall on a biting insect, but in that moment of distraction another mosquito bit and drew blood. The barricades, with the tanks and personnel carriers in support, were ignored. Martyr Avenue and 16th July Avenue were empty. The attack was through the yards, homes and alleyways of the Old Quarter. When gaps were plugged, new points of weakness emerged. Pockets of resistance were cut off, left isolated.

To those in the Fifth Army command bunker there was no coherent pattern to the attack: as the radios from the forward positions shouted for help, the officers trained in defensive warfare at the Baghdad Military College did not know where they should stiffen the line. And they had no serviceable helicopters. Inside the safety of the bunker, as the counters were moved remorselessly back over the map towards the red circle marking Fifth Army headquarters, the first doubts – anxieties – had surfaced. The defence line would not have been stabilized, however temporarily, if the colonel had not ordered a killing zone of fire to be put down on the Old Quarter. Mortars, machine-guns, rocket-propelled grenades hammered the small homes of those who were expendable.

In the smoke, noise and chaos, Meda sought to restore the impetus of the advance. In an alleyway between a panel-beater’s shed and a cheap clothes shop was an abandoned jeep with a machine-gun mounted and the belt of ammunition lying in the breech. She must show herself, and goad her small groups of separated fighters to press on. She must be everywhere. Without her, and she knew it, the advance would stall. They had come through the yard and into the panel-beater’s shed. The roof was ablaze. The door was destroyed. Four men were close to her, Haquim was somewhere behind. If she was to be everywhere, she needed the jeep.

He peered into the maelstrom of smoke and fire.

Many times he had seen the little darting movements of men, emerging and disappearing, but it was harder now to see them because of the smoke’s pall.

With his old trusted patience, he waited for her to show herself.

He lay on the pink coverlet, his circulation good, his stomach comfortable. He had not fired. He had seen soldiers try to surrender and had watched as they were engulfed, knifed. He had seen, also, a young officer castrated and left to writhe on the ground smearing a spray of blood from his groin onto cobblestones. He had seen three soldiers who manhandled away a wounded colleague shot in the back at close range – but he had not fired.