Holding the Zero (40 page)

The sun’s orb – bloody and red – teetered on the ridge of the escarpment.

When they reached the base of it, where the rock faces rose up from the rough slope of trees and bushes, Gus pleaded, ‘Can’t we stop? Can’t we rest?’

The boy peered past him, then snatched at his smock and pulled him into the deep shadow of a crevice.

‘Can’t we stop – if not to rest, just for water?’

‘We have to climb, Mr Gus, we cannot climb in darkness – no, I can, you cannot.’

‘I have to rest. My heel …’

‘Climb.’

‘Omar, I am not a bloody goat. I don’t spend my bloody life on bloody hills. I need rest and water.’

Gus looked into Omar’s face. The eyes gazed away over his shoulder. He heard the faint whistle, the distant kestrel, and he saw the savagely cut frown on the boy’s forehead.

He turned, took the line of the boy’s sight down through the rocks and trees and bushes, and saw the small glimmer of white. He raised the rifle and peered into the telescopic sight, but his shoulders shook with exhaustion and it was hard for him to focus on it and recognize it. The reticule lines in the sight were blurred. For a moment, before the shudder in his body jerked the aim away, he saw a sitting spaniel. It was a dog like Billings had had, always at his heel; a dog like the gentry used for picking up shot pheasants in the fields around the vicarage. Far below the dog, at three times the range of his rifle, was a slow-moving line of soldiers. The soldiers did not threaten him. He tried again to aim the rifle and find the dog but could not hold the stock steady – and he failed again even when he leaned against a warm stone face for support.

‘How long?’

‘The dog has followed us since we left the tunnel, near to the road.’

‘All bloody day, then.’

‘It has followed us and behind it is a hunter. He whistles for it to stop, so that it does not come close to us.’

‘Why didn’t you bloody well say?’

‘What would you have done, Mr Gus?’

‘I’d have shot it.’

‘You could not shoot the sky,’ Omar snapped at him. ‘Get on, climb. Climb fast.’

The boy had led them to a point where a fissure split open the escarpment wall, and the angle of the sun above the ridge created a darkness in the cranny. Gus understood the boy’s skill in spotting the fissure from a great distance and leading them to it without detour and a search. There was a hundred feet to climb and the angle of it allowed him to crawl up. Stunted tree roots and heathers in the fissure made good holds and good boot-

rests … He remembered what the Israeli had said, a long time ago, a lifetime. The hunter was a sniper, the sniper was Major Karim Aziz, who travelled with a reputation. He remembered how he had waited in the roof at the town and watched for him. He had forgotten the man until he had seen the dog. It was a lifetime back to when the Israeli had warned him of the sniper, as far back as his home and his work and the friendly firing on Stickledown Range. The past, the sniper, surged back into Gus Peake’s life. His mind was rambling. The past was before he had killed Meda, and before he had kissed her. The voice of the boy drilled into him.

‘You have to go over open rock. I cover you with shooting.’

At the top of the fissure was a smooth stone with lichen patches. He would be silhouetted, without the protection of the recess when he went over it, before he reached the safety of the ridge.

He heard the whistle. He did not know how he had been so stupid as to think it was a kestrel.

‘Hurry. Be quick, Mr Gus.’

There was a blast of firing, on rapid, below him. He reached up, caught at the top of the stone, the lichen making his grip slip, and he sagged, then grabbed again, heaved himself up and over and into the light of the low sun. The boy was firing to distract the man who travelled with a reputation. His boot scrabbled to find a fresh foothold, his rucksack snagged – and he was over. He lay for a moment on smooth wind-scorched grass, and the panic caught him. The boy had exposed himself to draw the attention of the hunter. He wriggled round, lay on his stomach with the weight of the rucksack and the rifle pinioning his shoulders and reached out, over the rim, to catch the boy’s hand.

Far back in the rocks, trees and bushes, caught by the last of the sun, he saw the flash of the glass of a ’scope. The boy had his hand. At that moment, the sniper would have a clear view of his head and Omar’s back. He pulled the boy towards safety.

The boy shook. The weight of the boy was in his hand. The crack rang in his ears. He dragged at the boy’s wrist. He heard the thump.

Gus pulled Omar over the ridge, the boy screamed, and then the quiet fell around them.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON
PEAKE

8. (Conclusions after interview with Dr Rupert Helps, consultant psychiatrist at Centre for War Studies, RMA Sandhurst, conducted by self and Ms Manning – transcripts attached.)

IRAQI ARMED FORCES: (From briefing given to AHP by Dr Frederick Williams, Senior Lecturer, as recalled by Helps.) Because of centralized command & control systems, the Iraqis will be slow to respond to initial attacks. Once initial surprise has been lost, the Kurdish irregular forces will face a tough experienced enemy that will quickly roll up their advance. A fighting retreat will put AHP in maximum danger of death or – worse – capture. It would provide grave embarrassment to Her Majesty’s Government should AHP be taken alive and subjected to a show trial.

AFTERMATH: In the predictable ‘roll up’, there would be inevitable harsh reprisals against Kurdish civilians. This was pointed out to AHP; he may not fully comprehend the scale of such reprisals before he sees them, in retreat, at first hand. They will shock him and weaken his resolve to escape.

HELPS’ ANALYSIS OF AHP: A romantic, decent and immature

individual, and quite unsuited to the rigours of mercenary warfare …

He should have stayed at home. He will have achieved nothing of value.

SUMMARY: A sane man would have rejected the emotional nonsense drip-fed to him by his grandfather. It is to be regretted that others – the rifle manufacturer, Royal Marines instructors, the freelancing

‘Survival’ expert, the lecturers at RMA – co-operated with this lunatic idea … They have all contributed to AHP’s likely death or possible capture. Isn’t any man better off when he’s chasing after job promotion, searching for a more satisfying sexual relationship, pursuing hobbies, increasing his mortgage, and offering himself for good works? Isn’t he?

He had never been adept at the use of sarcasm. Rather desperately, Ken Willet wanted to shrug off the envy he felt. He wondered if, ever, he would walk up to this man, take his hand and wring it, hold it, shake it – but he didn’t think he would have the chance.

By the time Dean returned from the travel agent’s office to confirm their flight out the next morning, Mike had the drinks on the table. There was a beer for Mike, a bourbon on the rocks for Dean, and a brandy sour for Gretchen when she came down. They were both showered and shaved, and wore the faded safari jackets with all the pocket pouches for pens and film canisters that were their uniform. Upstairs their bags were packed. Because it was unlikely that they would meet again, here or anywhere – because the world moved on, Mike was retiring from the combat field, Dean’s editors no longer cared about little wars in remote corners of the world where nothing happened, Gretchen’s magazine wanted glamour without misery – it would be a nostalgic evening. There would be a good session, long in the bar and late into the dining room, and each would tell the familiar cobwebbed anecdotes, josh each other, laugh on the same cues, and be a little thankful that it was over.

Gretchen came into the bar. She was still in her drab, dust-coated trousers and sweat-stained shirt, her face and hair unwashed since the trip into Iraq, but her eyes were red and her cheeks smeared as if she’d wiped away tears.

‘What the hell …?’

She said faintly, ‘Just tuning the radio, when I was running the bath, caught the Baghdad station, didn’t mean to … They hanged her in Kirkūk this morning … They did it in public … They called her a traitor. The radio said they hanged her …’

‘You mean she was real?’

‘Real enough to be hanged in public, in front of a crowd outside Fifth Army’s gates,’

Gretchen stammered. ‘She actually existed, and we didn’t believe it.’

‘That is some fucking story.’

‘She led an attack into the city. She was captured, and tried by a military court. She was hanged – we doubted her – she is dead.’

‘OK, OK, it’s not fucking personal.’ Mike had his notebook on the table. ‘I can get radio on this.’

‘You’re going to get radio, I’m going for the front page.’

‘Let’s go, let’s fucking hack it,’ Mike murmured. ‘“The Kurdish people have lost today the brightest symbol of their heroic fight to rid themselves of the yoke of Saddam Hussein’s terror. The symbol was a Maid from the Mountains, whose brief life was ended by public execution on a gallows in the centre of the Kurdish city of Kirkūk.” How are we doing?’

‘Going great …’ Dean took it up, scribbling on his own pad. ‘Para two … “Known only by her given name of Meda, this illiterate peasant girl had led a small force of courageous guerrilla fighters in a desperate attack against the might of Saddam’s military machine. She was hanged in front of a huge weeping crowd, rushed to the gallows to forestall a rescue attempt.” End para.’

‘Para three … “Kurdish warlord, the veteran fighter
agha
Ibrahim, said this evening, quote, I feel that I have lost a daughter. Not only me, but the whole Kurdish nation is in mourning. She was a wonderful example of the supreme bravery of our people. She will not be forgotten. She has, today, lit a flame that will never be extinguished, end quote.” I think that’s reasonable licence – they’ll never know.’

‘It’s bullshit, but reasonable bullshit. Last para, “Your correspondent had the privilege of meeting this remarkable young woman, deep inside Iraqi-held territory, a few hours before she launched her last attack against overwhelming odds. She told me, quote, I want only the freedom of my people. I appeal for American – and British – help, end quote. Slightly built, stunningly beautiful, wearing a red rose pinned to her tunic, she slipped away to fight and to die.” That’s it.’

They drained their drinks, asked Gretchen to get the next round in and went to their rooms to telephone. They were each in time, and grateful for it, to instruct their editors to bin the earlier pieces of shit they had sent before descending to the bar. It would be seventy-seven seconds for the radio and four paragraphs for the paper. It might get transmission and into print, and it might not – who cared?

It had been a fine shot, into the sunlight and with the elevation making the distance hard to judge, but he knew that he had missed his target.

He had waited until the darkness fell, then had sent the dog up the fissure, scrambling and dislodging stones, and had climbed himself. He had only had half of the head of the man, at an estimated distance of 520 metres, to aim at and he had hit the child.

He had heard the scream and, at the top of the escarpment, his fingers felt the clammy wet pool of blood, which he could not see.

He set the dog on the trail. There would be more spots of blood and a good scent for the dog.

As the night thickened around him, carrying the boy on his shoulder, Gus plodded forward towards the darkest line that was the mountains.

Chapter Eighteen

There was no emotional bond between Major Karim Aziz and the dog, Scout. He recognized the animal as a tool of his trade, less important than the old Dragunov, more important than his own eyes and ears. As the years had passed since he had picked up the abandoned, hungry puppy in Kuwait City, his sight had lost its edge and his hearing become more cluttered. Just as it was important to him to maintain the rifle to the highest possible state of perfection, he kept up an ever more rigorous training schedule for the dog. The affection he gave it was merely to guarantee its efficiency.

At first the dog had been a companion against the loneliness of his work, then he had started to recognize the potential qualities held in its twig-thin body. By the time he had gone north four years earlier, when the Kurdish saboteurs were pushed off the plains and hills into the mountains, he had understood the abilities of the animal.

It was ahead of him in the darkness.

He could list the qualities and abilities, and exploit them. The dog was inquisitive, intelligent, energetic and brave. Its low profile as it moved enabled it to see skyline silhouettes that he was unable to spot. Its hearing located movements, clothing against equipment or boots through mud, that were quite inaudible to him. Its nose was crucial, several hundred times keener than his own. Once Scout had found a scent – in the air or on the ground – a chain was established that was almost impossible for a fugitive to break.

He had made a study of scent: the strongest was given by sweat from the human body, the product of physical exertion and stressed tension. Unseen and unheard, hidden by darkness, the man ahead of him carried his wounded guide, and there would be exertion and tension that could not be disguised. Aziz did not believe the man would have been so careless as to smell of shaving lotion or cosmetic sprays, but there would be oil on his rifle and that, too, would leave a signature for the dog to follow. On the ground there would be disturbed dust, broken grass and earth scraped by a skidding boot, which Aziz would not see but which the dog would find. Beyond the range of his vision, the dog would scurry on a seemingly erratic course, with its nose down on the ground and then with its head up to sniff the evaporating scent in the air, which was special to the night and hung low in the chill of darkness.

The moon was up, and the stars. If Aziz had stepped out of a lighted building, he would have been blind, but his eyes were now accustomed to the blackness around him.

He never saw the man he followed, but he kept the dog within his short horizon. The pace of the fugitive surprised him but he never doubted that Scout would hold the chain linking him to the man. Many times he slipped on smooth stones and stumbled into the secret dips in the ground, but he maintained his advance.

Aziz assumed the man knew he was followed and had by now registered the whistles, and he thought that, as the night hours elapsed, the man’s exhaustion would grow and he would seek to lose the ever-present tail, but he had faith in his dog.

Later, as the burden became heavier and the man more desperate, Aziz expected to see the signs of evasion, but he did not think the man could trick his dog.

He was walking more slowly, but every few minutes he heard the clear, distant whistle.

Gus carried the rucksack, the rifle and the boy. He did not know what his rucksack weighed, but the rifle was fifteen pounds, and he guessed the boy was 125 pounds. The rucksack was on his back and the sling of the rifle was looped over his neck so that it hung down on his chest. Omar was draped over his shoulder. He did not know how long he could go on with the burden. He fell twice, but the boy never cried out, and each time Gus staggered to his feet and pushed forward.

The whistle was an infuriating constant, never closer or more distant.

The boy would tell him, in a small, weedy voice, which way he should go. He thought it extraordinary that, unschooled, Omar could read the moon’s passage and the lie of the stars, and know when he was off course. Those he had met at the commando training centre, and the man who ran the survival school for the arrogant bastards and bitches on corporate adventure, would have needed state-of-the-art Magellan positioning handsets and readings off three or four satellites. Omar guided him. Without the boy he would have blundered in circles. If the boy died on him then the dawn would come and he would be short by miles of the safety line.

The whistling tracked him.

They had talked to him about dogs at the commando training centre, and he scanned in his mind for the memory of what they had said. What he had seen of it, at last light, the boy’s wound was high in the chest. There was only one. The bullet had not exited. The bleeding was also inside the boy, oozing from the wound against the rough cloth of the gillie suit … They had told him that water was the key to breaking the scent trail.

‘I have to find a stream, a lake.’

‘Go right.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Can you not smell the water?’ The question seemed to bubble in the boy’s throat and Gus knew the lungs were damaged.

‘I can’t smell anything.’

‘Go right, and you will find water.’

‘Then we go away from the line – you have to be sure.’

‘There is water.’

Each step hurt. Each breath was harder to find. Each jolt scraped the pain from the blister on his heel, merged it with the ache in his limbs and the emptiness of his lungs and the numbing pressure on his shoulder. Each pace was worse. He heard the tinkle of water running on stones.

‘Can you go on, Mr Gus?’

‘I can go on.’

He could go on because he still had the chance to live, and did not have a wound without an exit. He could go on because he had only the blister, the ravaged muscles and the burden, not a squashed rough fragment of lead in his body. He had to throw off the scent, lose the dog. He slipped down into a narrow stream and went against its flow. The stones under his boots were smoothed, as if greased, and the whistle was away to his left.

The stream took him into a small lake. The ripples were illuminated by the moonlight on the water and he waded close to the bank. The water was cold heaven on the pain of the blister.

The boy’s voice croaked in Gus’s ear. ‘I am cold.’

‘I’ll do something about it when I can.’

‘I am not frightened, Mr Gus.’

‘No cause to be.’

‘You can leave me and have a better chance.’

‘I would not leave you as I could not leave her.’

‘Tell me a story, Mr Gus, from Major Hesketh-Prichard.’

His voice, however quiet, would carry in the darkness, but so would the sounds of his movement through the water.

Gus whispered, ‘I always liked best the story of when they searched for Wilibald the Hun …’

Over and over again, Commander Yusuf read the reply from Baghdad, and the name of a

‘simple soldier’. The man had been in his hand, but the hand had opened and the man had slipped away from him.

It was dangerous for a servant of the regime to be wrong.

He went to the door of the inner room and opened it. They were vulgar thugs, still wearing the same blood-spattered uniforms, and there was a near-emptied bottle of whisky on the table and filled ashtrays. He would not have allowed any of them to touch the sweet innocence of the grandchildren he loved. He had been fooled by a simple soldier with a record of distinguished combat in Kurdistan, along the length of the Iranian border and in Kuwait. When he had met him, he had seen nothing of ambition, cunning, access to the élite or vanity, and he could be blamed for opening his closed fist and allowing the supreme sniper in the ranks of the Iraqi army to walk away from him.

‘The marksman, Major Aziz, where is he? Find where he is.’

They were drunk. They leered back at him. Could it wait until the morning? They were slumped in their chairs.

He walked to the table and kicked it over. The fury blazed in him. The whisky dribbled into the rug, the cigarette ash clouded them, and they cringed away from him. If the order came from a higher authority, they would carry the chainsaw towards him, and his hands.

‘Now. Find him
now
. Where is Aziz?’

He went back into his room and dictated his instructions over the telephone to the night-duty staff at the al-Rashid barracks in Baghdad. It would be a bad night for him, he thought, and long.

He had stood by the high stretch of the water while the dog had searched the bank, careered between rushes and rocks and then had picked up the scent again.

It had been a predictable ploy, but he thought that the man had done well to find the water in the darkness, and he marvelled at his endurance. Aziz understood why the man pressed on in desperation.

If he had not had the burden of a casualty, and not felt the responsibility to carry the casualty back, then the man could have gone to a rocky outcrop and hidden himself and waited. The dog would have pointed to him, but the man would have given himself the chance, at dawn, when the light flickered across the ground, to search for his tracker and shoot and rid himself of the pursuit. But the man carried a casualty – the child guide –who was in need of medical attention if his life were to be saved. He thought that the fugitive must be a fine man: only a fine man would have accepted the responsibility of the casualty. He had met hunters, who went after deer, boar and wolves, who spoke with gruff awe of the evasion skills of the beasts they hunted – but the respect did not stop them stalking, killing.

Three or four kilometres behind him, a speck of white light climbed, then burst and fell. It was his link with the world he had left behind him, the struggling line of spread-out, wearied soldiers, making a rallying-point for the line to contract and come together for the rest of the night. He would not rest, not sleep, nor would the man he followed.

It was difficult, because of his tiredness, for Aziz to concentrate, but it would be worse for the man with the burden … He could respect him, and still kill him … To stall the tiredness he worked through the checklist. They had tried the water, and only delayed the dog. They could not climb up or down vertical rock to break the scent because the man could not do so with the casualty. They could not scale a tree, then crawl along a branch, then jump. The man could not run steadily, no sweat and no deep bootprints. He was going lethargically over the checklist when the dog came back past him.

He froze.

The darkness seemed tight around him. On the checklist was the circle back. He did not know how close they had been, so tired, to each other. He could not know whether the man and the burden had been fifty paces from him, or two hundred and fifty. Had they passed each other? Had the man seen him, and hesitated? Had he made a silhouette, and had the man reached to unhook his rifle from his shoulder, and had the moment then passed? The dog worked over two loops. Could they have shouted to each other? The circle back was predictable. Could they have blundered into each other?

By going into the water, and the circle back, the man had tried each of the principal evasion tactics. They had been used and had failed and the dog now tracked along a straight, true path – as if the man struggled in desperation to reach the ceasefire line, with his burden, before dawn.

‘Did you tell me the story of Wilibald the Hun?’

‘I did.’

‘Can you tell me the story of Mr Gaythorne-Hardy of the 4th Battalion of the Royal Berkshires?’

‘How he crawled in daylight to the German wire at Hill Sixty-three, Messines? I did.’

‘I must have slept – please, tell me the story of the cat.’

The lake water sloshed in his boots but he had lost too much time to stop and empty them, and wring out his socks. He thought that the boy lapsed into and out of unconsciousness. More time had slipped away in the long circle back. Once, the dog had scurried on the loop run and he had seen its grey-white coat in the moonlight, but the scent had held its attention and it had gone by him. Once, too, he had seen a straight standing figure – a tree-trunk, a rock, the hunter – and he had held his hand over the boy’s mouth to shut out the wheeze of his breath and the bubble in it.

There would be no more attempts at evasion. Omar had given him the star that was his guide. He had failed to break the track that the dog followed. It would be the same star that had watched him and Meda, the same star that had been above his grandfather and her grandfather at the ruins of Nineveh. He lurched on. It was darker now behind him and the gathering clouds obliterated the washed-out light of the moon.

‘What has our father done?’

She could not answer her younger son’s demand for an explanation. Men swarmed through the house. She knew what he had done because they had shown her the papers dug up in the garden. She had been shown plans of the city’s north-west sector, with a ruler-straight line drawn from the outline of an apartment block to the outline of a villa, and with sentry-points arrowed and road blocks circled. She sat at the table in the kitchen with her mother, who wept, and her father, who held his head in his hands, and her sons, and watching over them was the barrel of a machine-gun. She had told the men of her previous day, the drive to the fuel station on the Kingirban and Kifri road outside Sulaiman Bak; they had written what she said. She had told them that her husband had said she was to bring boots for rough walking and food and a small tent; they had pointed on a map to the ceasefire line within an hour’s drive of the fuel station. The kindnesses he had shown her over many years were now forgotten, and the intimacies. She told them, flat-voiced, how he had been away from her bed every night in the week before he had been ordered north, and of his distraction and nervous temper. Quietly – as her home was searched, stripped, she chased survival for herself, her parents and her children. She denounced him. She heard her elder son cruelly respond to the question.

‘Our father is a traitor … I hate him, as you should … Our father deserves to die.’

His family were not in his thoughts.

He whistled again for the dog to wait.