Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  By the frail light of a small torch, a child was buried beside the road going south to Kirkūk, her legs taken off by a V69 Italian-made anti-personnel mine laid by Iraqi army sappers.

  The girl’s legs had been severed at the knees when her running footfall triggered the tripwire. She had been gambolling ahead of her father towards a meadow of yellowed grass where the family’s four goats grazed. He had known there were mines close to the small collection of homes that made a village, but it was the first day of April, it was eleven days after the sparse celebration of the Kurdish New Year, Newruz, and the winter fodder for the goats was exhausted. They must find their own food if they were to fill their udders and give the family the milk of life. Had there been a hospital close by, had there been a four-wheel-drive vehicle in the village to take the child to it, then a life might have been saved. As it was, the child had died of trauma and blood loss.

  Her father and brothers paused by the pit they had dug beside the road under the shelter of battered, stormtossed, leafless mulberry trees. The father slid down into the hole on his backside, and the eldest of the brothers took the small wrapped bundle from the mother and passed it to him. The tears ran on the father’s cheeks, dribbled with the rain on his face, and all the time the mother cried the dirge that was familiar to all women, all mothers, in northern Iraq.

  ‘Saddam! Saddam! Why do you sow mines in our fields?

  ‘Why do you hang our sons, why do you bulldoze our villages?

  ‘Why do you bury us alive? … We beg you, America!

  ‘We beg you, United Nations! We beg you, God!

  ‘Help us and save us …

  ‘For our lives are destroyed, and we have become beggars.’

  The small convoy of vehicles passed her as she sat swaying her shoulders and crying her song. Her hands were folded tightly against the emptiness of her chest, where she had held her dead, desecrated child. The vehicles were travelling slowly along the rutted track on dulled sidelights. The torch that lit the burial of her child, with a weakened, failing battery, threw a wide cone of grey light into the first dun-painted, mudscarred truck that passed her. She did not recognize the man who drove, or the men squashed into two rows of seats behind him, but she recognized the young woman sitting beside the driver. The mother had never before seen the young woman, but she recognized her from the rumour slipping through the villages. It had been brought, as surely as the leaves of autumn eddied from the orchards, by nomads. She saw the young woman’s face, the combat fatigues on her upper body, the rifle against her shoulder, and the chest harness to which the grenades were hooked. All the mothers in her village had heard the whispered rumour of the young woman who had come from the north, many days’ walk away, where the mountains were highest.

  She shouted at the limit of her voice: ‘Punish them. Punish them for what they have done to me.’

  More vehicles passed.

  Her child’s father and brothers were pushing the clods of wet soil and the stones back into the pit. Then the father stood and held up the torch so that the brothers might better see stones to heap on top of the shallow grave to protect it against wild dogs and foxes.

  There should have been a man of God there, but they lived too far from any mosque to receive that comfort. There should have been neighbours and friends and cousins, but they were too close to the positions of the Iraqi murderers and the front line of their bunkers for any but the close family to venture into the darkness. The boys gasped under the weight of the stones.

  The light of their father’s torch caught the last vehicle in the convoy. It had a closed cab and an open back in which were huddled men in fighting clothes who clutched weapons to their bodies. The men saw the mother, they saw the father and the brothers, they saw the stones that marked the grave, and all but one raised their fists, clenched, in a gesture of sympathy.

  One man, squatting in the back of the last vehicle, was different. He gazed at the mother but his hands remained firmly on the straps of a many-coloured container, green and black, white and deadened yellow, and his rucksack. The beam of the torch caught the smeared lines on his face. He was different because he was not of their people. The mother saw the strange garment that the man wore, bulky, covered with the little strips of hessian net in the colours of the hills and earth, foliage and stones among which she lived. She thought he came from far away.

  ‘Kill them,’ she shouted into the night. ‘Kill them as vengeance for taking my child.’

  And the line of lights drifted into the distance. She knew nothing of history and nothing of politics, but she knew everything of suffering, and she knew what the rumour had told her of the young woman who had come from the distant north.

  When his bed was cold, long after his woman had left it, the shepherd crawled from under the blankets.

  He heard the sound of the generator throbbing, and he smelt the rich coffee that she had already placed in the pot for heating. The fire was lit but its warmth had not yet spread through the room. With the coffee was the scent of bread baking. She worked hard to look after him, but he deserved a good woman because he had brought her the electricity generator and fuel for the fire, ground coffee and sugar and food and money to spend in the bazaar in Kirkūk away beyond the checkpoints and road blocks. He gave her the money to buy carpets for the floors, and bedclothes and drapes for the walls, which were dry under a roof of new corrugated iron.

  He waved to her and she scurried from the stove to the window and pulled back the drape. He saw the slow-moving clouds against the light gold sky of the dawn. He knew the colour of gold, the best gold, because sometimes he could buy it at the bazaar in Kirkūk. It had been a bad night, but the storm buffeting his home had moved on. The shepherd usually slept well. He was a contented man. He had a fine house, a fine flock of sheep, he had a generator for electricity, he had food, he had an old biscuit tin filled with dinar notes issued by the Central Bank that he kept against the wall under his bed, and a smaller box beside it held four chains of eighteen-carat gold … and he had their equipment.

  By taking their equipment, the shepherd had sold himself.

  He pulled on his loose-fitting trousers, knotted the string at the waist, then drew over his head that week’s shirt and a thick woollen sweater, gently unravelling where the thorns had plucked at it, then a heavy coat. He sat on the bed and slid into his still-wet shoes. He wound a turban loosely around his head. From a hook beside the door he took the Kalashnikov and the binoculars that had come with the equipment. She gave him his first coffee of the day in a chipped cup. He grunted, drank it, belched, and returned the cup to her. He lifted an old television set from the floor – wires snaked from it across the room and climbed the walls before disappearing into the ceiling – pressed down the button and waited for the picture to form. It showed, in black and white, a steep-sided valley, and at the bottom of it were the gouged lines of a vehicle track. It was the same each day, and each night, deserted. But he checked it many times each day. The shepherd was conscientious because he valued the things given him when he had sold himself.

  He went out into the dawn light. He cut along the side of his home, shielding his eyes from the low slant of the sunlight, and hurried to the small building of concrete blocks that protruded from the end of the one-room house. He rapped three times on the wood door, the signal, heard the footfall within, then the grate of a bolt being withdrawn. The door was opened. As he did every day at the end of the night watch, his son embraced him, kissed both his cheeks.

  The shepherd stepped inside. There were no windows in the room. The generator chattered in the corner. In the dim light the dials of the military radio glowed brightly.

  The television on the table beside the radio showed the same picture of the valley floor.

  His son shrugged, as if to say, as always, nothing had moved on the track below in the night, then ran for the door. His son always went first to the pit at the back to shit and piss, then to his mother for his last meal of the day; h
is son would sleep during the daylight hours then resume watch as night fell.

  It was a few minutes before the time when the shepherd was scheduled to make his morning call on the radio. There would be another call as dusk fell but there was, of course, a frequency he could use in an emergency. He threw the switch that killed the television picture, and the second switch that governed the alternative camera capable of thermal imaging, and the last switch that controlled the sound sensors at the floor of the valley. He did not know the age of the equipment or its origins, but he had been taught how to operate it by men of the Estikhabarat in the headquarters of the Military Command at Kirkūk. Everything he owned – the gold, the money in the biscuit tin, the stove, the fresh coffee, the oven for baking bread, his flock – was his because he had agreed to work the equipment they had given him.

  He went outside and padlocked the door behind him.

  On the south side of the valley, above a sheer cliff face, was a plateau of good grazing grass covering an area of a little more than eleven hectares. Though he did not have the education to measure it, the shepherd was some 150 metres above the valley floor along which the rough track ran. To the left and right of the plateau were higher, impassable cliff faces. Three kilometres down the track, past two sharp bends in the valley’s narrow passage, was the nearest Iraqi checkpoint. The cliff below the plateau was climbable, with great care, by a sure-footed man, if he followed the trails used by the shepherd’s animals. The shepherd was a tripwire, an early-warning system for the troops at the checkpoint.

  He was not aware that the summit of the valley on the far side was exactly 725 metres from the front door of his house, but he knew it was a distance far greater than a Kalashnikov rifle was capable of firing. He believed himself impregnable, safe from his own people, and he had the big radio to back him, if men tried to climb the sheep trails to the plateau.

  He stood by the door of his home, drinking the air. He watched an eagle making slow circuits above the summit of the far valley wall. He had strong, clear vision. The far side of the valley was as it had been, exactly, the day before and the day before that. He raked his eyes across the landscape of yellow grass tufts, grey stone, brown, exposed earth and the sharp greens of the bilberry leaves. If anything had changed, if man or animal were on the summit across the void, the shepherd would have seen it. His stomach rumbled, called on him to return inside, take his first food of the day and more coffee. But he stayed the extra moments and gazed at the simple peace around him. Later, while his son slept, he would lead the sheep towards the west of the plateau, but always he would have his rifle with him and his binoculars, always he would be able to see the track along the valley floor and he would be a few seconds’ hard running from the room of concrete blocks and the live radio. He had lost sight of the eagle. He blinked as the sun was in his eyes … and then the blackness came. He heard nothing.

  The shepherd felt as though he had been hit by a great iron hammer full in the centre of his chest. He slid, against his will, down onto the short, sheep-cropped grass in front of the door.

  His life had passed within a second. He had no knowledge of a .338 bullet fired at a range of 725 metres and fracturing his spinal column between the second and third thoracic vertebrae. He could not know that his wife and his son would cower under the table of their home and be too terrorized to open the door, run to the radio and send the coded signal summoning immediate help. Nor would he know that, as the dawn spread light on the paths made by his sheep over the precipice face of the cliff, men would scramble up the heights, break his radio, smash his television, cut the cables to the cameras, drink his coffee, find his biscuit tin and the smaller box holding four gold chains, and he could not know what the men did to his wife and son – the jahsh, the little donkeys, the traitor Kurds who sided with Saddam. And he would not know that amongst the men was a young woman, sweating and panting from the exertion of the climb, who summoned the spittle in her mouth and spat down onto his still-open eyes.

  The first hour of the day shift was the busiest for the technicians in Kirkūk working at the radios of the Estikhabarat al-Askariyya. Early in the morning the new shift handled the volume of check calls and radio signals sent to the Military Intelligence Service. At the end of the day, the new night shift would be deluged by a similar number of calls. There were transmissions that were classified as important, and there were the regular checks that had low priority because nothing of worth was ever reported on them. In a cubicle compartment, four yawning, scratching, smoking technicians listlessly ticked off radio calls received, and wallowed in boredom.

  The role tasked to the regional office of the Estikhabarat in Kirkūk was to provide military intelligence on armed Kurdish factions north of the army’s defence line, and to infiltrate the factions so that a peshmerga commander could not shit, could not screw his wife, without it being known and reported on down the line to national headquarters in the Aladhamia area of Baghdad. Low priority, bumping the bottom of the barrel, was given to Call-sign 17, Sector 8.

  Call-signs 1 to 16 had reported in, nothing of significance. Call-signs 18 to 23 had been received on clear transmission. Only Call-sign 17 in Sector 8 was not ticked off.

  The technician who should have received the call alerted his supervisor when the transmission was forty-eight minutes late.

  ‘Probably poking sheep,’ the supervisor said, and walked away. ‘He’ll come through in the evening.’

  But the technician, a conscript who would follow military service with an electronics course in higher education in Basra, was not satisfied until he had personally checked the file for Call-sign 17. Call-sign 17 was issued with a Russian-made R-107 radio. It had a four-to-six-kilometre range, which meant it relied on a booster antenna in the mountains.

  The radio, in the opinion of the conscript technician, was poor and the antenna, during the night, would have been battered by the storm that had raged over the high ground north of Kirkūk. He made a note to refer it to the technician taking over from him at the end of the day. Of course, the sheep poker was low priority or he would have been given more sophisticated equipment than the R-107 radio.

  At dawn that day, a little crack had been opened in the many-layered lines of defence separating the Kurdish enclave from their spiritual capital of Kirkūk, and it was not seen by the technician, or by his supervisor.

  They had all played a part in moving the letter. Written in a spidery hand by Hoyshar, the father of Jamal, father-in-law of Faima and grandfather of Meda, it had begun its journey six weeks earlier, while the snow was still falling in the northern mountains and valleys.

  Now in his eighty-fifth year, a remarkable age for a man who had lived the greater part of his life in a village community where the houses clung to the steep slopes, near Bīrkim, of the mountains of Kurdish Iraq, it had been a great effort for Hoyshar to write to an old friend whom he valued as a brother.

  There was no postal service out of the region, and Hoyshar had no access to a facsimile machine or to a satellite telephone. The letter had moved by hand, growing grubbier, accumulating the fingerprints of people Hoyshar did not know. The young woman, Meda, had started her march out of the northern fortress uplands in the week that the letter was written. All of those who had moved it woke that morning unaware of the small fissure opened in the outer extremity of the Iraqi army’s defence line.

  The letter had been given by the old man to Sarah, an Australian working in northern Iraq for a London-backed children’s charity. She had been in the mountains investigating reports of a diphtheria epidemic, and the letter had been pressed into her hand … That morning, an hour after a single bullet had sung across the emptiness of a steep-sided valley, she nursed an aching hangover from the farewell party for her regional director …

  She had passed on the letter.

  Joe had taken it from the aid-worker. He was Scots born, a one-time soldier in the Royal Engineers, and was in northern Iraq to clear minefields. She had pleaded, exp
lained, and he had stuffed it into his shoulder-bag and gone back to the ground around a village well where he taught local men, by example and practice, how to kneel and probe for the anti-personnel mines … That morning, with his bodyguards, interpreter and three Kurdish recruits, he was staking out the pegs round a field of V69s and POMZ 2Ms and Type 72As that had been laid in an orchard of pomegranate trees … Three days later he had handed on the crumpled envelope.

  Lev had taken the letter, been told its history. Everybody knew the overweight and balding Russian. He was equally loved and loathed: loved because he could smooth paths and provide comforts, loathed because of his corrupt amorality … That morning, he spat orders to his houseboy, who carried to the boot of the Mercedes two crates of bourbon, a video-cassette recorder and an Apple Mac computer … He had slid the envelope down into the hip pocket of his trousers, where it wedged against a gross roll of American dollar bills, and delivered it at the end of the week.

  Isaac had been given the letter and had, of course, steamed open the envelope. If it had not interested him, it would have gone into the plastic bag of shredded waste-paper beside the table where the banks of monitoring equipment were stacked. He was an Israeli, an employee of the Mossad, in charge of the most Godforsaken post offered to any agent sent from Tel Aviv. His equipment, his dishes, his antenna, in the high, empty country south of the Arbīl to Rawāndiz road, could eavesdrop on every communication between army headquarters in Baghdad and Fifth Army headquarters in Kirkūk, and the signals of the Estikhabarat, and he could monitor the SIGINT and ELINT operations of the Project 858. As a result of the strange alliances of northern Iraq he was protected in his eyrie by a platoon of Turkish paratroops. That morning, he had listened to Call-signs 1–16 and 18–23, in Sector 8, broadcasting news of nothing to Kirkūk, and he had noted that Call-sign 17 had failed to make scheduled contact. Then he had begun to listen to a radio conversation between armoured corps commanders in the Mosul area … A Turkish air force Blackhawk helicopter, with no navigation lights, came in at night once a week to the small LZ, shaking the roof of his building and tugging at the tents of the paratroops.