Holding the Zero (34 page)

The rain pattered on the small awning over the fire. The young people, sodden wet and mud-spattered, watched, listened. Willet understood why Gus Peake had not let them near. They would be going back to baths and champagne, client investments and pension funds; they would be thinking of themselves as the fucking chosen ones. Dogsy Jennings, ex-Marine, ex-instructor in the Regiment, played to his bloody gallery. Willet thought that the chosen children, the money crunchers, would return to their City world, complacent and important, and laugh for a month at what they’d heard around the bloody smoking fire, and believe they’d fucking well achieved something in getting wet for three days and eating rare rabbit.

‘What did he learn from you?’ Willet asked, without grace.

‘Escape and Evasion. That’s what old Bill said he needed – Billings, that is, a good mate – but what I told him might just have been a waste of time, mine and his.’

‘You’re ahead of me,’ Ms Manning said quietly.

‘If you’ve set out to save the world, gone on a killing spree, then you may hang around too long. If you’re around too long, you lose sight of the way back, you don’t get the chance to escape and evade. He’s gone walking in northern Iraq, right?’

Ms Manning said, ‘There’s a revolt, a tribal uprising. I suppose the target is the city of Kirkūk. The Iraqi Fifth Army is based there.’

There was a whinny of general laughter from the group around them. That would have made their bloody evening, and the week ahead when they were back at their desks, God’s fucking chosen children, and playing with investment figures and exchange rates on their bloody screens before heading down to the wine bar.

‘Then I have to hope he knows when to quit,’ Dogsy said. He was a big man, with long gorilla arms and a well-trimmed moustache. A top-of-the-range Land-Rover was parked behind the tents – Willet could have wept because in his imagination the exhausted Gus Peake sat around the same damp fire and heard the patronizing bastard talk Escape and Evasion, and heard the same laughter ripple from his audience. ‘Do you know how long he’s been in combat?’

There was a flicker in Ms Manning’s voice. She said crisply, ‘Maybe a week, or a few days more.’

‘It has to be a stampede for that sort of thing to work … He’ll be killing every day. The killing would be so frequent that he loses count – how many, how often – and he won’t be in a structure where anyone orders him to stop, quit. He’ll be a changed man. Should he get out, those who knew him before won’t know him – might not, when they meet him and see him,
want
to know him. He’ll be a new man, and it may not be a pleasant sight.

He didn’t tell me what he did, his old life.’

‘He was a transport manager …’

It was like a joke to those around the fire. Willet hated them. The giggles wafted across him.

‘… in a provincial haulage company,’ Ms Manning persisted.

A ponderous smile played at Dogsy Jennings’ face. ‘There’s your answer. Should he come back, he’s hardly going to be able to slip his feet under the desk and start again to move lorries about, like nothing’s happened. He’ll have taken a dozen men’s lives, if he’s any good. If he’s brilliant as a marksman, it could be twenty men’s lives, thirty. Any jerk who’s arrogant enough to think he can change the world won’t just switch off after one dose of it, he’ll have to find more causes, more bloody crusades. I read men. It’s my job to get under the bullshit of human nature. I didn’t like him.’

‘Didn’t you? Why not?’ The sneer rasped in her voice.

‘I didn’t like him, Miss, because that sort craves to belong. Got me? Whatever the motivation, he can’t belong out there, and if he gets back he can’t belong here. I did my best with Escape and Evasion because that’s what old Bill asked of me – but any road I didn’t like him. I don’t like men who go looking to be bloody heroes.’

‘What about loyalty, important things like freedom, heritage? What about sacrifice?’

Willet saw Dogsy’s wink. The circle chuckled. The smoke eddied across the rabbit’s carcass. Ms Manning pushed herself up then rubbed the damp off her backside and Willet saw the anger in her face.

‘Come on, Ken,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave these creeps to their silly bloody games.’

He followed after her, past the tents and the Land-Rover and back towards the track where her car was parked. He hadn’t thought it could happen, that her emotional commitment could be made to Peake and his rifle. Dogsy Jennings’ words seared in his mind. ‘He won’t be in a structure where anybody orders him to stop, quit … Should he get out, those who knew him before won’t know him … He can’t belong out there and, if he gets back, he can’t belong here.’ He thought she’d been magnificent, and he’d tell her.

She reached the car. Her eyes blazed at him, and she spat her words. ‘When you write this up, do me a favour, leave out all that pompous crap about survival chances. Spare me that shit.’

They moved in darkness, in total silence, towards the lights and the flame.

The boy led. Gus had given Omar authority over his life and safety. They went at a steady pace past patrols that he had not heard but the boy had. They crossed roads along which personnel carriers cruised, and the boy found the hidden ground into which they could duck as the searchlights roved over the ground, and he would not have sensed where the shallow earth scrapes offered them that protection. When there was a ditch into which he would have stumbled, the boy gently held his hand and guided him. Where men, talking softly, guarded their goats, they slipped by and the boy had read the wind so that they did not alert the goatherds’ dogs.

They went towards the lights where the chains held her.

Chapter Fifteen

Early each morning an elderly corporal, with a driver and an escort of two riflemen, collected the packages of urgent, sensitive material for Fifth Army flown into Kirkūk from the capital.

Although he had lost an arm in the defence of Basra fifteen years earlier, his birthright from a tribe that gave unquestioned allegiance to the regime ensured that a position in administration was available to him for as long as he wanted it. His daily routine was the run to the airfield, the collection from the Antonov transport plane, the drive back into the centre of Kirkūk, coffee and cigarettes, then the government’s newspaper, then a game of dice with matchsticks as the stakes, a meal, a siesta, then a gossiping evening with other corporals, the ironing of his uniform, the cleaning of his boots and bed. He had little cause for complaint – and it was safe. All the other corporals in administration could expect to be transferred every two months, for a week, to the forward strong points in the hills to the north, but not him. His disability protected him.

When the jeep slowed to a stop at traffic lights, one of the few sets working in Kirkūk, on the wide carriageway into the city from the airfield, the corporal’s orderly life was ended. A single shot, fired at great range, exploded into his head and the remnants of bone, blood and brain peppered the body of his driver.

They were running.

‘Where next?’

‘Doesn’t matter where – anywhere I can aim from.’

Omar led and Gus followed. The low shafts of sunlight threw deep shadows in the narrow lanes between the shanty-town of haphazardly built shelters on the edge of the city. Men, women and children, just risen from their beds, scattered as the wraithlike figures pounded past their homes.

When the dawn came he was so tired.

Major Karim Aziz dragged himself up from the floor as the first light seeped into the room, and felt his forty-five years for the first time since he’d come to Kirkūk as the aches, pains, stiffness ran through his body. He had not slept but had watched the darkness and the ribbon of light under the door, had listened for the boots. The cries and screams had come, not often, in the long hours and he had known that the torturer was tireless.

He packed his few belongings, scattered across the floor, down into the belly of his backpack.

Leila, too, would now be filling the boys’ rucksacks and telling them that an examination at school did not matter and a football match was unimportant. She would have telephoned the hospital and lied that she was unwell. Perhaps already she had told her mother, shuffling in slippers in the kitchen, that there would be no party to celebrate her birthday. Through the night he had wondered when he would tell her of their future.

He put the last of the dog’s biscuits on the floor and they were wolfed down.

The future, in the darkness hours, had been nightmarishly with him. It might be a patrol on the ceasefire line between government territory and the Kurdish enclave; on his own, without difficulty, he could evade the patrols – but he would not be alone, he would be with his wife and his sons. It might be capture by a warlord’s men, and the Estikhabarat would pay fifty thousand American dollars for him to be returned to them, bound and blindfolded, across the line; on his own, with his rifle and his dog, he could fight his way through the danger of capture – but he would not be alone. Should he succeed, it might be the stagnant life of an exile without money in the embittered Iraqi communities of Amman or Istanbul; on his own, perhaps, he could burrow into the tawdry life of the exiles he had read of in the newspapers and heard of on the radio and exist – but he would have responsibility for his wife and children, who would be lost flotsam. Soon she would be on the road north.

He folded the dog’s rug and put it into the backpack.

At the petrol station, or in the car, or when they started to walk, he would tell them. He would say that he was a traitor to the President who smiled with warmth at him from the photograph on the wall, that he had sided with the enemies of the President. He would say that all the struggle of their lives was for nothing because he had betrayed it. In the night he had shivered because of what he had done to those he loved.

The dog was by the door and waited for him.

In his mind he had seen – again and again – the shock spreading on their faces at the petrol station, or in the car, or when they started to walk, as they learned the future. The worst of the nightmarish thoughts had been of her clutching her children to her, turning and abandoning him … It had been his vanity on the range when he had shown his shooting skills. It had been the massage of his conceit by the silky words of the general, in the car cruising at night beside the river in Baghdad, telling him that he, above all men, had the marksman’s expertise.

The dog bounded into the corridor, he closed the door of the bare room and wondered if the President still smiled.

He walked out into the compound.

Men were coming from the shadowy shape of the cell block.

He saw them rubbing their eyes in exhaustion, flexing their fists as if they were bruised, wiping smeared mess off their tunics. But the slightest among them walked briskly as if he had not missed his sleep.

The piping voice sidled across the quiet of the compound. ‘You are leaving us, Major?

Take with you my congratulations.’

He said hoarsely, ‘I accept them, I am grateful … I am a simple soldier, I did what I could.’

‘I never met a
simple
soldier. Have a good journey back to Baghdad.’

He tried to ask the casual question: ‘Your own work, Commander, is it nearly done?’

‘Near, but not yet there. A few hours, and this preliminary stage of my investigation will be completed … but the trails of treachery run far. You have my assurance, simple soldier, that I will follow the trails wherever they lead … Enough of me. Are you disappointed that your triumph is not total?’

‘I do not understand you.’

‘You were sent to kill a sniper, a foreigner – and you did not.’

Aziz blurted, ‘He is beyond my reach.’

‘Have a good journey, and be assured that those who take responsibility for the security of the state will not rest while traitors live.’

Aziz heard the dog’s low angry growl, flicked his fingers nervously to it and strode out towards the administration building, where he would find a driver to take him across the city to the military car pool. While he walked he felt the small narrow-set eyes on his back, following him.

The soldier stood at the road block.

He was nineteen years old, a conscript in a mechanized infantry unit. The road block was behind him. He had been detailed by his sergeant to wave down the cars, lorries and vans for inspection. He was from a poor family in Baghdad, and his move to the basic training camp before going to Kirkūk had been the first time in his life that he had been away from his mother. He hated the army’s food and hardly ate. He was ghostly thin and his stomach churned as he held his rifle and directed the traffic into the lane where the drivers’ papers could be looked over. He was a lonely youngster, shunned by his colleagues in the barracks hut because the loneliness caused him to wet his bed most nights of the week. Behind the road block, workmen were digging a trench in preparation for the repair of a blocked sewer. The smell was foul but, more importantly, the piledriver the workmen used to break up the tarmacadam had obliterated the sound of a single shot fired half an hour earlier a full kilometre away. He was thinking of his mother when he died. Against the noise of the vehicles’ brakes and gear changes and the hammer of the piledriver, none of the men near to him heard the crack of the rifle’s report or the thump of the bullet’s strike. The soldier subsided, as if the strength was gone from his legs, and blood spilled from deep holes in his chest and his back.

The orderly paused at the back of the truck.

On the flat-bed was a heap of black rubbish bags. He lit a cigarette. The ebony crows were waiting for him, flapping their wings as they strutted on the bags he had brought earlier in the week to the dump, and cried raucously at him. Each morning the orderly cleaned the quarters used by the officers of an armoured unit based at Kirkūk and collected their rubbish in the bags along with the food they had not bothered to eat the previous evening. It attracted the crows, but the brutes could wait while he enjoyed his cigarette. The orderly was from the desert region, near to the small town of an-Nahiya, close to the Syrian border. There were no mountains in that region, but he enjoyed those moments when he could smoke a cigarette and admire the high ground beyond the city.

There was the same emptiness, and he blinked into the sun rising over the faraway ridges.

He was particularly cheerful that morning: his time in the army had nine days to run and then he would be on the slow bus back to an-Nahiya where his father kept a roadside coffee shop. The orderly did not realize that by standing and dragging contentedly on his cigarette he made a good target for a distant marksman. As he fell backwards the crows screamed and rose in a moment of panicked flight over the heap of rubbish bags.

They moved again, fast.

‘Why, Mr Gus?’

‘Because, Omar, they are available.’

‘I do not complain, Mr Gus, but they are not officers, not commanders. They are not helicopters, tanks, communications … Why?’

‘They wear the uniform.’

The boy shrugged. They went through yards, over fences that sometimes collapsed under them. There would have been many inside their homes or outside sweeping away dirt or hanging out clothes to dry who saw them. But those who were inside looked away and those who were outside hurried back through the doors and locked them. They were not in that part of the city where Party members lived, or functionaries of the administration, but where people valued their lives and believed the best preservation was to see, hear and know nothing. The boy carried the Kalashnikov assault weapon, and Gus held hard on to the stock of the big rifle as he ran. As the sun rose, they careered on, hunting for the next position from which he could find a target wearing the uniform. And gradually the pattern of the boy’s route led him towards the heart of the city.

He arrived at the military transport pool.

Major Karim Aziz thanked the driver curtly, hoisted up his backpack and the rifle’s polished wooden box. The dog ran beside him as he walked to the pool office. He gave his name and his rank at the desk, and demanded a self-drive car for his journey back to Baghdad. His name was known, his reputation had moved quickly. Surely, for the major, whose expert marksmanship was responsible for the capture of the witch, there was a place on a flight south to Baghdad?

‘I wish to drive and I want a car immediately.’

Beyond a closed door, behind the desk, he could vaguely hear the military radio net.

He could not distinguish the messages, only the babble of activity.

Forms were produced from below the desk, and carbon sheets. With two fingers, a clerk laboriously typed his name, his rank and his destination. He fidgeted impatiently.

He was asked if he wanted coffee, but irritably shook his head. He paced in front of the desk, and perhaps that increased the clerk’s nervousness and the errors; the papers and carbons were torn out of the typewriter and the work began again. When the typing was complete the papers were passed to him. He scrawled his signature on them, and they were taken from him into the office where the radio was … By now, Leila and the children would have left home, would be on the road towards Sulaiman Bak.

An officer, a major’s insignia on his shoulder, overweight from a life spent welded to a desk, came from the inner room.

‘I am honoured to meet you, Major Aziz. Did these fools not find you a chair?’

‘I don’t want a chair, I just want a car.’

With a flourish the officer countersigned the papers. ‘I apologize that I can only provide a Toyota, Major. As soon as it is valeted, fuelled, it will be at your disposal.’

‘Forget the valeting, give me the keys.’

The officer smiled smugly. ‘You are an expert at marksmanship, I am an expert at running the motor pool of Fifth Army. You have pride in your work, Major, and I have pride in mine. No car issued to a distinguished officer will leave this yard until it has been correctly cleaned and prepared. We are both proud men, yes?’

‘Just get it done.’

He started to pace again. The officer hesitated, then said uncertainly, ‘I am assuming, Major, that you have not been beside a radio for the last three-quarters of an hour.’

‘I have been getting here, in bad traffic.’

‘You do not know of the killings?’

‘What killings?’

‘Three soldiers have been shot dead in Kirkūk in the last three-quarters of an hour. A corporal on the airport road, a soldier at a road block, an orderly taking rubbish to the dump. Not important men, Major, not officers.’

‘Perhaps the remnants of the saboteurs from yesterday are still holed up, hiding.’

‘Each without any warning, each from an unseen rifle, each with a single bullet.’

She would be on the road coming north. She would be driving with their sons, and with her trust in him. Behind him was the cell block. He had thought the sniper had fled back to the mountains, beyond reach. He remembered the sun-hazed mirage of the man sitting on the rock at too great a range for the Dragunov. If she did not have trust in him she would not have taken the car, loaded it, and driven north.

‘Get the fuelling and the cleaning done quickly. I need to leave.’

* * *

She heard him cough, then hack the spittle from his throat.

Meda was sprawled in the furthest corner of the cell from the door. She heard him, then the long painful wheeze.

She twisted, each slight movement hurting her, and heard the gasps. She lay on a foul-smelling bed of old straw in a sleeve of stained cotton. She had not heard him so clearly before, but the last time they had brought her back to the cell, as she fell to the concrete floor, she had found that the bed had been moved from the left side of the cell to the right. Close to her face was warmth, a wet heat. Against the back wall of the cell, under the high, barred window where the dirt filtered the light, was a channel in the concrete, where water could run out when the floor was sluiced. The warmth and the heat were from urine dribbling out of a hole in the wall beside her head.