Holding the Zero (33 page)

Gus asked, ‘Will you go to see the old man, Hoyshar, for me?’

‘I will.’ Haquim’s hawk eyes beaded on him.

‘Tell the old man everything that has happened.’

Haquim nodded.

‘And he should write about it, and what he writes he should send to my grandfather.’

‘I will do what you ask – but I tell you, Mr Peake, this death wish will achieve nothing.’ There was a choke in Haquim’s voice.

The column had begun to march away. The wounded were carried on the strongest men’s backs and on litters. Over Haquim’s shoulder, Gus could see the long straggle of the fighters. They were slow going, at the start, but he thought that when they sniffed the fine air of the high ground their pace would quicken, and they would have the goal of home to stretch their strides.

Gus said, ‘I am grateful for your advice, and I want your forgiveness.’

‘For what?’ Haquim asked gruffly.

Simply said, ‘For the insults I heaped on you.’

Their hands clasped, locked, the gnarled, blistered hands of the older man and those of the younger man. Gus could see the laid-out lights of Kirkūk and the silhouettes of the higher buildings, the towering flame that had been the unattainable target. It was about respect, which was precious to him.

Haquim said, ‘There is a remote possibility that I can save her. I have to attempt it, but I have little time.’

Their hands slipped apart. Haquim leaned over Gus and whipped his fist against Omar’s face. That, too, was about respect. Then he was on his way. Gus thought that a lesser man than Haquim would have turned, hesitated, waved a final time, but there was no such gesture. There was no stolen moment for the softness of sentiment. He watched Haquim hobbling away into the fading light to catch the tail of the column.

Gus twisted towards Omar and said, ‘You can still go …’

Stubbornly, his face lowered, the boy shook his head.

‘There is a life for you, stealing and thieving and pilfering, looting from the dead, there is still a chance of a life for you.’

‘Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard always needed an observer.’

Gus’s voice shrilled in the dark space under the overhang, into the infuriating calm of the boy’s eyes: ‘You can go, damn you, and feel no shame. You can run, reach them, and live.’

He watched the column merge into the gloom. For Gus, it was like the breaking of a linked chain, which, while secure, led to Hoyshar and on from Hoyshar to another old man, and from his grandfather to his parents, his woman, his work and the long weekend days on Stickledown Range. But the column had disappeared into the last traces of grey light and he could no longer hear the shuffling of their boots, or the scrape of the litters.

A chain was broken, but new chains were fastened. There would be chains on her ankles; a chain held him to her, a chain held the boy to him. He snatched at Omar’s tunic top, caught it at the collar, wrenched the boy up then pushed him hard away from him, away towards where the column had gone. The boy sat beyond his reach. Gus picked up a stone and hurled it savagely at him, then another. They scudded past the small body with his patient, staring eyes.

Gus shouted, ‘Go, you little bastard, and live! Thieve from the dead and the wounded.

I don’t need you. I don’t
want
you. Head away out of here – do as you’re bloody told!

Go.’

His voice, trapped by the overhang, boomed around him. He threw one more stone and hit the boy’s shoulder. He saw Omar wince, but any cry was stifled and the boy did not rub the place where the stone had struck.

‘We are all not happy, Mr Gus, not only you.’ Then the cheek came, and the grin cracked across the boy’s smooth face. ‘Did you fuck her?’

Gus shook his head, slowly and miserably. He could not remember the taste of her or the feel of her. ‘I kissed her, I loved her.’

‘We all loved her, Mr Gus, not only you. Please, tell me a story from Major Hesketh-Prichard.’

Gus jerked his back straight. He recognized that the argument was ended, settled. The link to the past had gone with the column. They would be in Kirkūk by dawn.

‘No man’s land – where there were shell craters and fallen trees – was the best place for observers, where they were most valuable, and any unit with an aggressive commander always tried to dominate there. An intelligence officer with the 4th Battalion of the Royal Berkshire Regiment called Mr Gaythorne-Hardy thought it was necessary to know the exact layout of the German defences on Hill Sixty-three at a place called Messines. There was no point going at night across the four hundred yards of no man’s land because at night he wouldn’t be able to see the plan of their trenches and their defences so he went in daylight. It would have taken him hours to cross the open ground, and all the time the German snipers and sentries would have been watching it, but he was good enough in his fieldcraft to get right up to the enemy wire, to learn everything there was to know about their position. He was under their noses, but they did not see him.

Getting there, learning, was of no value unless he was able to return safely to his own lines and report what he had seen. That was much harder, and he would have been tired.

More difficult to crawl away than to go forward. But Mr Gaythorne-Hardy had the skill.

From what he had seen, the enemy’s trenches could be targeted more effectively by the artillery and our snipers had a better chance of killing Germans. Major Hesketh-Prichard thought him one of the best.’

‘Not as good as me.’ The smile swept the boy’s face.

‘Of course not.’

Then came the puzzlement that creased lines at Omar’s mouth and eyes. ‘Why, Mr Gus, are we staying?’

Gus said, a hoarseness in his throat, ‘Because it is owed her.’

‘What can we do?’

‘Something, anything is better than nothing.’

He heard the scream as he walked across the compound to find the telephone, the same scream as a goat’s when it is tied and held and first sees the knife as the guests gather for a wedding feast.

At the steps of the building that dealt with Fifth Army’s victualling, there would be an empty office and a telephone.

The sentry at the main entrance saluted, unlocked the door and admitted him. The screams would have been heard by the sentry and by every soldier, every non-commissioned officer, every officer in the compound. If the screams destroyed the brigadier’s resolve, if the Boot broke, then any man in the compound whose name stumbled from his lips was doomed. His own name would end the pain, would still the cries.

The clerks who filled the order forms for Fifth Army’s meat and rice, vegetables, fruit and cooking oil had all returned to their barracks. He walked along a half-lit corridor and into a darkened room. He did not switch on the light but groped towards a desk. He found the telephone. The arrival of the torturer had precipitated his course of action. He had lain on his bed and fashioned the plan. He could not abandon them. There was a dialling code that circumvented the switchboard operators and provided access to a direct line. She was distant, faint.

‘Leila, you must listen exactly to what I say, and do it.’

He could hear the television playing behind her, the babble of the children’s voices and her mother’s. She said she was listening.

He was wary of the security of the direct line. ‘Leila, are you listening? Don’t interrupt. I am leaving Kirkūk in the morning. I have the chance to take a short holiday.

You remember that four years ago we camped with the children? I wish to do that again.

You will pack what is necessary and meet me at Sulaiman Bak on the Kirkūk road.’

She said that the weather forecast on the television had warned of freezing nights, and she did not think the conditions were suitable for camping with the children.

‘You should pack clothes for four days, and the children’s best boots. From Sulaiman Bak we will take the road for Kingirban and Kifri, then we will find a place to make a camp.’

She said that tomorrow was a busy day at the hospital, that it was impossible for her to find a replacement at such short notice – perhaps later they could camp, when the weather improved.

‘As you love me, Leila, do as I say. Meet me at Sulaiman Bak. We have to take the chance being offered here.’

She said that Wafiq had an examination at school in the morning – had he forgotten?

And Hani was playing football for the school in the afternoon of the day after tomorrow –had he forgotten that, too? Karim Aziz could not know if the line was routinely monitored, whether it was already listened to. He repressed the desire to shout and block out each of her reasoned excuses for not leaving Baghdad.

‘Leila, it is the best chance we have of a holiday with the children. There will always be busy days at the hospital, many examinations and football games. Pack tonight, be on the road early. It is important to me.’

She said that it was her mother’s birthday two days after tomorrow – had he forgotten that, also?

‘Be there, I beg of you. Bring tents, warm clothes, food. On the Kifri road there is a fuel station, about a kilometre from the Kirkūk road. I ask little of you. It is about the love that I have for you and for our children. It is the chance of a short freedom. It is for us. Please, be there …’

She said that it was difficult. Aziz replaced the receiver. He knew she would be at the fuel station. They had been married too long for her not to be there. He walked out of the building and across the compound, ringed by high lights. He was beyond middle age. She was plump and wide at the hips and her youth had gone. They had only each other, and their boys. He heard the cry in the night. He wondered if the torturer would need to sleep, would go to a cot bed to rest, wondered if the torturer’s need to sleep and rest would win him the time to drive south to a fuel station eighty-five kilometres away and meet those he loved, take them towards Kifri then strike out for the
jebel
ridge, and cross the lines.

He knew of many who had failed to find an unguarded track, and he had heard of a few who had successfully crossed the lines and then been captured by the
peshmerga
and handed back to the soldiers at an outpost for a cash reward. The wife he loved tolerated the regime in helpless resignation, never complained at the shortages of equipment and drugs in the hospital, merely stoically endured. The children he loved went to the school, believed implicitly what their teachers told them of the evil of Iraq’s enemies, stood each morning facing the smiling image of the President and chanted their support, were proud that their father served him. He would tell them, on the road beyond the fuel station, that their tolerance and pride was a fraud. He would lead them, as fleeing refugees, towards the patrols and the strong points and he did not know whether they would curse him.

He settled on the floor of his room, in a corner where he faced the door. The dog was on his lap and the rifle in his hands.

The screams continued, and he knew the torturer did not yet sleep or rest behind the barred windows of the cell block. If his name was given he would hear the stamping footfall in the corridor and the door would burst open … What hurt him most, sitting through the night, watching the door, was that the sniper had turned, gone back, had in some way cheated him.

‘He was cold, trying to focus, but wasn’t doing it well because he was too tired.’

She had driven, and Willet had navigated. In her small car they had bumped up a dark forest track on a shale and chipstone surface, weaving amongst the ruts, following the crude painted arrows in the headlights. It had been a good drive down from London until they’d turned off the main road and onto the forest track. Willet had folded away the map. She had snapped twice that she was damn certain she was going to get Resources to pay for a car wash, but he’d sensed – and it was new – a staccato excitement in Ms Manning. He’d wondered if plain little Carol had been to a place like this on a Security Service training course and found fulfilment. Willet himself had not sploshed around on Survival in deep wet woodland for more months than he cared to remember. The rain had come on more heavily, was sluicing over the windscreen, when the lights had found the blurred image of the little camp of tents.

‘I had a small group here then, merchant-bank people,’ Dogsy said. ‘I told Peake I’d give him as much time as I could, but he’d have to muck in with them, get into line in the queue.’

The rain had eased since they’d arrived at the tent camp. There was a small square of canvas over a low, smoking fire. A London-based insurance company, a corporate giant, had sent five men and four women out into the woods, into Dogsy’s care, to learn self-esteem, self-help, self-control. On a spit of stripped hazel over the fire was a skinned rabbit, and Willet thought that it wouldn’t be much short of midnight before the bloody thing was heated through, half cooked, and ready for eating. They’d done abseiling over a torrential river gorge before finding the rabbit in a snare they’d set the day before. Line managers and regional directors, bright-eyed and sharp, they took it all as serious fun, as the people from the bank would have done. The fact that Willet was from the MoD, and Ms Manning was out of the Security Service, hadn’t fazed Dogsy, and the two new arrivals were sat down in the circle round the fire as if they hadn’t any rights to privacy.

‘What interested me, I reckoned that the young ’uns from the bank would welcome a fellow sufferer. They made the effort but Peake didn’t let them close … They didn’t take to him, and he rejected them. If you know what I mean, they rated him as just a wannabe.

He was trying too hard. He didn’t laugh, didn’t joke, like that was beneath him … I’ve seen that sort before. When I came out of the marines and transferred into the Regiment, I was put on the recruit-induction programme. Most of the recruits were too bottled-up, the type that fail. It’s a character problem. A few like that get through, but you know the way they’ll go. If they slip into the Regiment then, at first, they think they’re going to save the world. Saving the world means killing. Killing gets to be a habit, makes a man lonely, isolated. Killing becomes addictive, can’t be given up.’