Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  If he was wrong, the bullet would miss, and if the bullet missed, a black hell would fall on the conspirators and on their families. What Major Karim Aziz feared most was that he would shoot and fail.

  But he believed in himself, in his ability, in the certainty of his intuition. If he had not, he would not have been chosen.

  An hour after he had taken up his position, he had seen car headlights sweep in a half-circle on the driveway 545 metres from him. The radio linked to his earpiece had remained silent. He had stiffened – in case the radio malfunctioned – aimed, and rested his finger on the trigger. He had watched the woman go up the steps and through the villa’s door. She’d been flanked by men, but she was tall and they were a step behind her.

  He had seen, through the sight’s lens, the auburn richness of her hair, and the proud swing of her shoulders. She was carrying boutique bags … The target had not been with her, and his finger had slid away from the trigger. A shop, importing Italian or French clothes, would have been opened especially for her in the evening. The dresses she carried in the bags would have cost, each, more than he earned as an army major in a full twelve months. Not that she would have paid, not that the bastard’s most recent mistress would have been asked to delve in her wallet or purse for banknotes.

  If she had new clothes to show off, then perhaps the bastard would come.

  Aziz lay on his stomach on the mat, and the stiffness crept through his limbs.

  The villa in the side road behind Kifah Street was closed off behind road blocks. The pedestrian public of Baghdad were denied access to that side road and to others in the city where high dignitaries lived or kept their women. From the end of the side road, when he had reconnoitred, Major Karim Aziz had seen a wall, a patrolling pair of sentries and a solid gate. There was no chance of inserting a culvert bomb in the streets at either end of the side road, and less chance of putting a marksman closer.

  He had once met the target, in Basra, in the third year of the war with Iran. He had stood in a line and waited for an hour, had been frisk-searched for weapons by agents of the Amn al-Khass. He had shaken the limp wet hand and had gazed for a moment into the cold power of the face, then watched the armour-plated car drive away. Aziz thought of himself as a patriot, but there would be many who would denounce him as a traitor.

  The radio stayed open. In his ear was the constant murmur of static. If the target came, there would be three tone bleeps in his ear. The man with the radio was above a butcher’s shop on Kifah Street, opposite the side road.

  The night wore on, and the streets below him gradually emptied. All the time his skin nestled against the cheek-pad on the butt of his rifle. It was because of his experience and his skill that he could concentrate totally on the small, brightly lit area enclosed by the telescopic sight.

  The concentration dulled the enormity of the risk he took with his life and his family’s lives.

  ‘All I can tell you is that there are no British military personnel – I repeat no – stationed in northern Iraq.’

  ‘Are you calling me a liar?’

  As soon as he’d reached a payphone at Damascus International, the regional director had called the embassy and demanded of the duty officer that someone with the rank of first secretary should be at the airport within an hour.

  ‘It’s best you listen carefully – there are no British military personnel deployed in northern Iraq, period.’

  ‘I saw him with my own eyes. Seven hours and ten minutes ago, I saw a sniper in camouflage gear with a sniper rifle. His name is Peake and he told me he comes from Guildford, Surrey … My people live on the edge there. They fulfil a humanitarian role in circumstances of difficulty and enormous personal risk. I have a responsibility for my people who are beyond the reach of help, most especially when a British marksman – I assume he’s Special Forces – is roaming loose on their territory. If I don’t have your immediate guarantee of action then, on my arrival in London, I’ll be phoning every tabloid newspaper.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary. I hope you have a good flight.’

  They lay beside each other, waiting for the dawn, among the rocks.

  Haquim said that he did not know whether the position, the network of bunkers and trenches, would have thermal-imaging equipment.

  It would be two more hours before they would see, for the first time, the scattered shapes of the bunkers, the radio antenna and the unit’s pennant. There was a single pinprick of light for them to watch, as if one lamp burned in a low cement-hardened bunker and was visible through a firing-port. There were high stars in shapes – he recognized some of the formations – but there was no moon. Ahead of him was the single lamp’s light with an endless seam of blackness around it. Somewhere, close to the light, was the officer that Haquim had told him he would target. He thought the man would be young, still in the first flush of youth, and he would be sleeping, and in his mind would be the image of a girl or his mother, or his home. He never thought, lying still and stiff, feeling the damp creep through the rubber mat, through the reinforced canvas knee and elbow pads of the overalls with the hessian straps, that the target would toss on a camp bed in the horror of a nightmare of fear.

  When he closed his eyes to rest them, when Haquim did not grunt and break the quiet, hallucinations played in his mind of a line of men who had gone before him, the ghosts of his trade.

  He made fantasy pictures of them to go with the remembered words he had read.

  He lay with the Indian fighter, Tim Murphy, who had sniped the British general Fraser in the Hudson river valley. Beside him was Major Wade of the 2nd Battalion 95th Rifles, the marksman who had held the wall of the La Haye Sainte farm barns at Waterloo. Close to him was Jim the Nailer on the makeshift parapets around the Residency at Lucknow …

  and there was Hesketh-Prichard, his favourite, the big-game hunter turned sniper, who had said Germans in their trenches should be treated merely as ‘dangerous soft-skinned game’ … and there was Billy Sing, the Australian who had shot 150 Turks at Gallipoli.

  There was the marine at Saipan in the Pacific, who had destroyed a Japanese machinegun nest at 1,200 yards with his vintage Springfield rifle, and the soldier at Hue in Vietnam who was seen to gain a kill at a measured 1,400 yards. They were all around him, close and near to him. The heritage was passed down to him, hand to hand, rifle to rifle, target to target. Would any of them, in the darkness before dawn, in the cold of a slow wait, have cared whether the chosen target slept easily or shook in the hold of a nightmare?

  ‘I’m Carol Manning. This is Captain Willet.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘If it matters, it’s eight minutes to five. Don’t get any persecuted ideas that I enjoy being out of bed at this time of night. It makes it legally easier if you invite us in.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Security Service, he’s some sort of soldier. Are you inviting us in?’

  ‘If I don’t …’

  ‘Then my foot stays in the door while we ring for the police to come with a search warrant. I wouldn’t advise that – things get broken then.’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Because the electoral roll tells us this is the home of Augustus Henderson Peake.’

  ‘This is Gus’s place, yes.’

  ‘You’re inviting us in? Thank you, that’s being sensible.’

  She stood aside to let them pass. Willet had done dawn raids in the old Belfast days.

  The woman’s confusion, failure to demand credentials and proper explanations, did not surprise him.

  ‘Are you Peake’s wife?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘What are you then? Tenant, lodger, common-law, partner?’

  ‘Girlfriend, I suppose you’d call it, maybe just friend. My name’s Meg. If it matters, I’m divorced, I have no children, I’m a junior-school teacher.’

  ‘It’s not important. Where is he? Where’s Peake?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven
’t the faintest idea.’

  At last, the way it always was, a little spark had come to the woman’s eyes. Ken Willet, captain, detached from his regiment to duty at the Ministry of Defence, heard Ms Manning swear quietly. The woman’s nightdress hung like a heavy, bulky shroud over her body.

  ‘Maybe I should make a cup of tea,’ Willet said.

  ‘No, we will.’

  It was an instruction. Ms Manning turned and gave him the eye. He understood. The kitchen for the women, and for him the search through the living room and the bedrooms.

  Willet had never worked alongside the Security Service before. His telephone had gone an hour and thirty-five minutes earlier. It was about a sniper, he’d been told by the night desk, and he knew a little about sniping – though not as much as he’d have wished – and he’d be picked up. Throwing on his clothes, he’d heard a horn hoot down in the street.

  He’d expected a smelly old blighter in a dirty raincoat, his image of a counter-intelligence officer, and she’d reached over, held open the door for him, then accelerated away before he’d settled, before he’d belted up. She’d grumbled all the way down about the assignment, the time, the condition of the car, her rates of pay, the weather … but she drove well and fast.

  He started to search. He heard the whistle of the kettle and the clatter of mugs. Carol Manning was expert at her work, and the talk had already begun. He heard the murmur of the woman’s voice.

  ‘Everything in Gus’s life is about shooting at targets with that old rifle. I’m not complaining, but I come after shooting, way after … I suppose we need each other. We go to the cinema, we watch television, we eat together. Sometimes I stay over, sometimes I don’t – never on a Friday because that’s the night before shooting, never on a Saturday because that’s cleaning the rifle after shooting. I’m just around, whether he notices, whether he doesn’t. It suits me and it suits him, but the shooting’s what matters.’

  The silver spoons were thrown carelessly at the back of a drawer, and he didn’t think they’d been polished since the day they were handed out as prizes.

  ‘He cut his hair short four years ago, not because I asked him to, but because he hadn’t shot well one day and he thought the wind blowing his hair across his face had distracted him. Three years ago, he gave up smoking overnight, not because I wanted him to but he thought it affected his breathing pattern in the moment of aiming and firing. We jog three evenings a week, but that’s because a target marksman needs to be at top fitness. Look, up there, there’s a diet sheet. He barely eats before he shoots so that his stomach’s comfortable. He lives for his shooting. For pure happiness, he should just put up a tent on Stickledown Range, at Bisley, and live there. He’s in this club, the Historic Breech-

  loading and Small-arms Association, and they fire these old rifles. There’s a Martini-Henry and a Mauser, a Mosin-Nagant M1891, a Garand, and the secretary shoots a Sharp’s breech-loader. I know what they’re called because I take a picnic and go with him most times, not that I get any conversation. They’re funny people – nothing wrong with them, they’re decent – and they’re obsessed with these rifles that are a hundred years old. All they talk about when they’re shooting is wind-deflection and the humidity that affects the fall of the bullet, ammunition quality, and holding the zero. Do you know?

  They were quite upset when he didn’t turn up for the last club shoot. Jenkins, that’s the secretary, rang me – rather aggressively, I thought – to find out where Gus was, why he hadn’t been there. Was he ill? Why hadn’t he phoned? There’s been complaints from the group that they’d shot poorly because Gus wasn’t there. They shoot at eight hundred yards, right up to a thousand, and Gus wasn’t there, no explanation, and they couldn’t perform – and that was Gus’s fault. He’s the best one amongst them, you see, far and away the best, and they need him. I wouldn’t call them friends, but they lean on each other. They’re all a little sad, really, to an outsider – not that they’d think so.’

  In the back of another drawer, not hidden away, was a packet of photographs that showed posed groups of men who held old rifles and stood or knelt as a celebration of comradeship. They were not sorted, not in order, as if they were unimportant and seldom looked at.

  ‘He’s very ordinary – that’s not a criticism – no interest in making an impression. I met the people he works with at last year’s Christmas party. I think they were quite surprised to see him turn up with a woman … I didn’t tell them, and none of them mentioned the shooting, didn’t know about it. He hardly shares it with me. We were drifting along, a boat on a canal, and then the letter came – you know about the letter, do you?’

  First he discovered the keyring, hanging from a thin nail on the underside of the bed’s wooden leg, then the gun cabinet bolted to the wall at the back of the wardrobe. He recognized the Lee Enfield No. 4, with the telescopic sight, and the box of ammunition of match grade with the Full Metal Jacket of cupro-nickel casing. He locked the cabinet, returned the keyring to its hiding place.

  ‘I’d met him after work, on Newlands Corner. It’s good for running there – it’s wonderful, because you can go for miles, high up and with the wind on you, and the village lights all below you. You run better in the dark, it’s liberating. He was quite chatty on the way home, and I thought I’d stay. We’re not much good, either of us, at the sex bit, but some nights it’s better than others – why am I telling you this? His post was on the mat. There was a letter from his grandfather, and another letter with it. He just sat in his chair and read the other letter again and again, and never showed it me. I didn’t even bother to cook, there was no point, and I went back to my place.’

  In an old folder in an unlocked desk, held together with a bulged paper-clip, were the scoring charts. Under the heading ‘ALL-IN SCORE DIAGRAM FOR LONG-RANGE

  TARGET’ were the tables for wind-deflection, weather conditions, and the target circles.

  There were no neat crosses in outer, inner, magpie or bull. All the crosses, on every scoring chart, were in the V-Bull circle, which was sixteen inches in diameter, and the ranges for the charts were eight hundred yards, nine hundred yards and a thousand yards.

  He felt a sense of respect.

  ‘He packed up, it was like he was closing down his life here. I’ve never made demands of Gus, certainly I’ve never pestered him with questions, but I did ask, “What’s it about?

  Where’s it from, the letter?” He didn’t answer. I know he went to see his grandfather the next day, but that’s all I know, and that’s nothing … He paid off all his bills. He dealt with everything outstanding. He spent more and more time away, before he finally headed off. I’d be here, and sometimes he’d show up late and dump his stuff in the hall, sometimes his briefcase and sometimes his rucksack. Old people do that, don’t they, when they’re going to go into hospital, deal with everything? We didn’t have much of a life by other people’s standards but, God, I miss him.’

  In the hall, on a line of coat-hangers behind a curtain screen, were old, dry, mud-smeared trousers and a patched all-weather coat that hadn’t been cleaned. On a hook was a wide-brimmed, shapeless hat. He noted that there were no boots on the floor below the hangers. Of course, a man would have taken his boots … Later he found tax documents in the name of Peake, Augustus Henderson, and electricity, telephone and gas bills, cheque book stubs and bank statements. He noted the last withdrawal and whistled to himself in surprise – eight thousand pounds taken out and the deposit account almost cleared.

  ‘I came round two weeks ago. I thought that if he was here I could cook a meal for him. He was packing. It wasn’t a suitcase but the rucksack, and everything he put in was old, should have been thrown away years ago. I never did get round to cooking anything.

  We made love on the bed beside the rucksack, and I wept all through it – it’s none of your business, but it was the best loving we ever did. He seemed to need it. I woke up early, and he’d gone … I don’t know why because he didn’t t
ell me, and I don’t know where he is.’

  The music beside the stereo was bland, popular classics and easy listening. The books on the shelves were all technical shooting volumes. The pictures were anonymous prints of dull, well-worn country views. He thought that target marksmanship with an historic rifle consumed the man’s life – but there was nothing to tell Ken Willet, from what he rummaged through and saw, of the soul of the man. But there had to be something more, or he’d be here, not slogging in the missing boots through northern Iraq.

  ‘He’s just a nice man, a good man. I can’t tell you anything more.’

  They left her.

  Carol Manning drove the car away, down the road below the cathedral, from a cramped and unremarkable two-bedroomed maisonette.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Is he a military wannabe – into all that Rambo crap?’

  ‘No. He shoots at targets with an historic weapon, and with great skill. His rifle is fifty-plus years old. He’s an enthusiast.’

  ‘A bloody anorak? Like one of those idiots on a platform writing down train numbers?’

  Willet said evenly, ‘He shoots very straight. He wins prizes for hitting targets at a range of up to a thousand yards.’

  ‘It’s one thing to hit targets. What about killing people?’

  ‘I found nothing to indicate that he has the slightest interest in the military situation in—’

  ‘So what the hell’s he doing there?’

  ‘She said the letter was passed on by his grandfather. Ask him.’

  ‘Can’t today. Health and Safety says we’re entitled to a full day off after a night call-out. I’ve a lieu day tomorrow. Have to be the day after.’