Holding the Zero (9 page)

Willet looked up from the page. He had filled all the space under the heading of MOTIVATION. There was a feeble sunlight on the window behind the old man, but he could see the bright boldness of the flowers on the lawns.

‘When did the letter come?’ Ms Manning asked briskly.

‘A month ago … That day on the mountains Gus met my friend and my friend’s family, and he met Meda, who was then a teenager. When the letter came last month, it was about freedom for a far-away people. Do you think, my dear, I’ve deserved a coffee break?’

She made the coffee while Willet carried the plate, cup, glass and the cutlery from the table and washed them up. The captain’s eyes were drawn to a curled photograph stuck with adhesive tape to a kitchen unit. On the slope of a hill, a thousand blurred faces behind them, a grizzle-faced man sat on a rock with a girl behind him, her hands on his shoulders. Defiance blazed from her eyes, which were compelling and erotic in their power.

Ms Manning carried the coffee mugs back into the living room.

‘Right, so a letter came, and you showed that letter to your grandson … ’

They crossed high, bare ground. Sometimes, rarely, they had the cover of wind-stripped clumps of trees, but the column mostly hugged the little valleys and ravines created by the rainstorms and snow-melt of centuries. Until they reached a flat ridge, pocked with rock outcrops, they were the lone inhabitants of a wilderness.

Gus plodded at the back, weighed down by the rucksack and the rifle bag. The wind diluted the warmth of the sun, and it was hard for him to maintain the pace of the
peshmerga
because the bulk of the gillie suit impeded him. He was behind Haquim who, even with the disability of his knee, seemed to move more easily over the jagged stones and the small, hidden bogs. Gus felt the sting of a blister on his right heel. Meda was in the leading group, moving fast, never looking behind her to see how he coped.

He had formed in his mind what he wanted to say.

The men and Meda had settled on the ground, amongst the rocks in the lee of the ridge.

Some chewed at food, some bickered quietly, some laughed softly as if they were told an old and favourite joke, some cupped the water from a spring’s source, some lay prone with their eyes closed. Haquim had reached them and sat on a stone and massaged his knee. Gus was going slower, and the tear in the skin at his right heel was opening. The boy was watching two men as they cleaned the breech of their heavy machine-gun …

Nobody came back to help him as he struggled forward. He was bathed in self-pity. With his rifle and his skill, he was of critical importance to them. He didn’t have to be there …

Gus heaved the rucksack off his back and carefully lowered the carrying case to the ground, onto the tufted yellow grass and the weathered rock. He untied the laces of his right boot, pulled off the sock, and examined the reddened welt of the blister. He rummaged in his rucksack for the small first-aid box, and selected a square of Elastoplast to cover the broken skin. He let the freshness of the air bathe his bare foot.

‘Put your sock and boot back on.’

He hadn’t heard Haquim’s approach, was not aware of him until the man’s shadow fell on him.

‘It needs to breathe.’

‘Put them back on.’

‘When we’re ready to move.’

‘You need to do it now.’

‘Why?’

‘If the Iraqis ambush us, we will not ask them to stop and wait, while one amongst us pulls his sock and his boot back on.’

He felt hurt, as if degraded. ‘Yes. Right.’

‘And, Mr Peake, you do not question what I tell you.’

‘My foot hurts.’

‘Do you see others complaining? If it is such a big matter to you that your foot hurts, perhaps you should not have come.’

His head down, Gus heaved on his sock and his boot. Haquim was turning away. Gus said, ‘I want somebody to be with me, to help me.’

‘To carry your sack? Have all the men not enough to carry already?’

Gus said evenly, ‘I want someone with me when I shoot.’

‘I will choose someone.’

‘No.’ Gus’s voice rose. ‘I do it, it has to be my choice.’

‘You give yourself great importance.’

‘Because it is important.’

‘Later, then, when we stop for the next rest.’

‘Thank you.’ Gus had finished retying his bootlace.

The column moved forward again. He heaved on his rucksack, lifted the rifle in its bag onto his shoulder, and gingerly put his weight on his right foot.

When the line of men passed through a small gully that broke the ridge, a great vista was laid out in front of them. Gus’s eyes travelled over the sloping ground, the lower ridges, the distant curls of smoke above a faraway cluster of buildings, and on towards the single flame burning bright in a haze of lighter grey. Twenty miles away, and it was still a beacon, the flame at Kirkūk. He looked down on the ground that was to be the battlefield he would fight over.

Once again, the target had not come in the night.

On a bright, crisp morning, before the heat of the day settled over it, Major Karim Aziz reached the al-Rashid camp.

He showed his identification to the sentries at the gate, his name was checked off a list and he was shown where to park.

He’d known many who had come here on similar bright, crisp mornings in their best uniforms, who had been picked up by camp transport and who had never been seen again.

He had shut out the picture of the disappeared men and their families from his mind.

The transport pulled up beside his car. He had driven out to al-Rashid in a daze of tiredness and now he sleepwalked to the van.

Since the bombing of 1991 the camp had been rebuilt, the rubble removed, the craters filled in. The van took him past the many complexes of the Estikhabarat. There were the buildings occupied by the headquarters personnel of the second-in-command, a staff major general, those that liaised with Regional Headquarters, those that controlled the Administration Section, the Political Section, the Special Branch and the Security Unit.

He saw the batteries of anti-aircraft guns, and the clusters of ground-to-air missiles.

The van stopped outside a squat building. From the set of the windows he could see the thickness of the reinforced-concrete walls, painted in camouflage colours, and on the roof was a farm of aerials and satellite dishes. The armed guard opened the door for him and smiled. He wondered whether the guard always smiled at an officer summoned early in the morning to this building.

When he had reached home again after the night on the flat roof, he had clung to his wife briefly, then she had shrugged him off. It was unspoken, but she blamed him for the fiasco of his birthday celebration. The children had gone to school, her parents had stayed in their lean-to annexe at the back of the house. His wife, without a backward glance at him, had gone for the bus to the hospital. Then, alone in his home, he had checked through every item in the sports bag under the bed to satisfy himself that nothing incriminating could be found there … He did not know how he would resist torture …

What could have damaged them, him, he had buried in the garden.

At the inner guard desk of the building he was asked to enter his name. There was another smile, and a finger jabbed towards his belt. He unhooked the clasp, passed the webbing belt over the desk, and with it the holster holding the Makharov pistol.

He was led down the corridor, then up a flight of stairs, then on to another corridor.

He had to make the effort to kick his legs in front of him. The panic was growing, the urge to turn and run insistent, but there was nowhere to turn and no-one to run to. He heard the boom of his boots on the smooth surface of the corridor’s floor.

With each step towards the closed door at the far end he remembered the path he had taken towards joining the conspiracy. In February, two generals and a brigadier had come to a firing range to watch his progress in teaching marksmanship to his students, junior officers and senior NCOs. The course, like so much of the tactics learned in the Iraqi military, was based on old British army manuals. As he did, the students had used the Russian-made Dragunov SVD sniper’s rifle. It was not the best rifle available in the international market, but he had a curious and almost emotional attachment to the weapon that had been with him for a year less than two decades. His students had had good shots at 400 metres, but at 500 metres none had hit the inner bulls on the targets, a man-sized cardboard shape, when they should have had an 80 per cent probability of doing so.

Perhaps they were made more nervous by the presence of the generals and the brigadier.

He had then fired his own Dragunov, but at 700 metres. From behind him the generals and the brigadier had watched his shooting through telescopes. Six rounds, six hits, when the probability of a ‘kill’ was listed as only 60 per cent, and after each shot he had heard the grunted surprise from behind the telescopes.

He reached the door at the end of the corridor.

His escort knocked with quiet respect.

He heard the gravel voice call for him to enter.

Three weeks after the shoot Major Karim Aziz had received a telephone call from the more senior of the two generals. He was invited to a meeting – not in the general’s quarters, not in a villa in the Baghdad suburbs, but in a military car that had cruised for an hour with him, the general and two colonels along the city’s roads flanking the Tigris river. He could, he supposed, have said that he had no interest in the proposition put to him in the car. He could also have lied, given them his support, then the next morning gone to the Estikhabarat, in this building, in this camp, and denounced them. They wanted a marksman. He had agreed to be that marksman. The general had said that an armoured brigade in the north would mutiny and drive south, but only after word was received that the bastard, the President, was dead. He had been told of the villa, of the bastard’s new woman. The detail had been left to him – but without their esteemed leader’s death, the armoured brigade would not move. The general had talked of a domino effect inside the ranks of the regular army once the bastard was killed.

The general had been a big and powerfully built man, but he had stammered like a nervous child as he explained the plan. Aziz had agreed, then, there; only afterwards, when he had been dropped from the car, did he consider that he might have been set-up, stung, and he had been sick in the gutter. He had dismissed that thought because he had witnessed the precautions taken to preserve the secrecy of the meeting and seen the nervousness of the officers in the car.

He had tracked for days around the villa and had found the place from which to shoot.

He had met the general again, cruised the same route in the same car, and the general had embraced him.

He went inside. His stomach was slack and his bladder full. He tried to stand proud, to pretend that he was not intimidated, was a patriot surrounded by cowards. He thought of his wife and his children, and of the pain of torture.

A colonel had his back to the door and stared at a wall map, but turned at his approach.

‘Ah, Major Aziz. I hope there was nothing important in your schedule that had to be cancelled.’

He looked up at the photograph of the smiling, all-powerful President. He stuttered his answer. ‘No, my schedule was clear.’

‘You are the marksman, the sniper, that is correct?’

‘It is my discipline, yes.’

‘You understand the skills of sniping?’

He did not know whether he was a toy for their amusement, whether the colonel played with him. ‘Of course.’

‘Two men dead, two rounds fired, on consecutive days, each shot at a range of at least seven hundred metres in Fifth Army sector. What does that tell you about the sniper?’

‘That he is trained, professional, an expert.’ He felt the tension draining from him. He was limp, a rag on a washing-line.

‘How do you confront a professional sniper, Major?’

‘Not by turning rocks over with artillery or tanks or heavy mortars. You send your own sniper to confront him.’

The colonel said sharply, ‘You go tomorrow, Major Aziz, to Kirkūk.’

‘The north? The Kurds are not snipers.’ He wanted to laugh out loud as the lightness broke into the tightness of his mind. He bubbled, ‘They cannot hit targets at a hundred metres.’

‘I am from the Tikrit people, Major. Yesterday my cousin’s son was shot at seven hundred metres in a defence position near Kirkūk. Perhaps a foreigner is responsible.’

‘Whatever the nationality, the best defence against a sniper is always a counter-sniper.’

‘Be the counter-sniper, then. Your orders will be waiting for you when you reach the garrison at Kirkūk.’

Aziz saluted, turned smartly and marched out of the room. Outside, with the door closed on him, he could have collapsed in a huddle on the floor and wept his relief. He steadied himself against the arm of his escort, and walked away.

A few moments later, the warm air brushed his face, washed it of fear.

Gus sat on a rock and scanned the ground ahead of him with his binoculars, looking for movement.

It was the best place he could find, had the nearest similarity to the terrain of the Common in Devon. It was a practice but it was still crucial. The arguments were finally over, had finished when Haquim had struck a man and knocked him flat, when the knife had flashed, and Haquim had kicked the knife from the man’s hand. Before then, the argument had raged savagely. Meda had chosen not to intervene, but had sat apart with an amused smile on her face. He needed an observer to help him with distance and windage and, most important, to guide him in on the stalk to the targets ahead and to work out the exit routes after each snipe. It could not be Haquim – too slow and too involved in the mess of strategy and tactical problems.

The arguments were because each man in the column, old and young, believed he was the best at moving unseen across open ground. The bitterness was inspired by pride, when Haquim had selected the dozen men from the hundred in the column – from
agha
Ibrahim’s men, or from
agha
Bekir’s men. The older men who had fought for the most years, or the younger ones with more agility than experience. The larger group, not chosen, sat behind Gus, and scowled or watched the slope of ground ahead with a sullen resignation.