Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  In the scrape Gus could not take his usual firing position with his legs splayed out behind him. He used the Hawkins position, lying sideways with his upper body twisted so that he could aim out to the extreme left. It was neither comfortable nor satisfactory, but the rule of a marksman was to accept the conditions as he found them. Each time Omar wriggled, the movement reverberated through Gus’s body and disturbed his aim, and each time he kneed hard against the back of the boy’s legs and hoped he felt it.

  In front of Gus, magnified through the telescopic sight, was the Victory City of Darbantaq. He could see the upper casings and the mounted guns on the BMPs behind their earthen walls, women starting to form a queue at a building close to the command post, the machine-gun crew on the roof of the command post, men fussing around their penned goats and sheep beside their concrete homes, soldiers shivering in the watchtowers, and children playing with a deflated football behind the wire.

  Behind him and to his right, waiting on his first shot, were four hundred peshmerga men, and Meda. They would be crouched, nervous and fidgeting, holding tight to their weapons, waiting for the signal of his first shot.

  The boy was more restless, his movements more frequent. Gus could not fault the way he had been led forward, partly at a crouch, and then at the leopard crawl. The last three hundred yards down the slope had taken them a full hour, scraping the ground in the half-light, because the Israeli had said one of the personnel carriers had thermal imaging, and if they were not flat to the ground they would make a signature. The boy had done well but now shifted more often as he raked a greater arc of ground with the telescope.

  ‘Our approach was good, Omar,’ Gus whispered, ‘but now we must be patient.’

  ‘Then the chance comes to kill them, Mr Gus.’

  ‘Where did you learn to stalk?’

  ‘Going into Iraqi camps, and going past the guards into the compounds of the charities, to take—’

  ‘To steal, Omar.’ Gus laughed soundlessly, and his eye never left the scope’s lens, which covered the entrance to the command post.

  ‘It is necessary to live, Mr Gus. And to live I have to take.’

  She had ignored the father’s question. ‘Didn’t his grandfather teach him to shoot?’

  ‘God, no. He was into partridges and pheasants, semi-tame birds being driven towards the guns – he calls it sport, I call it murder.’

  ‘Did you teach him to shoot?’

  ‘Never been in the slightest bit interested. It’s all down to Harry Billings, a rogue who lived in the village, dead now, and no tears shed. We’d sent Gus away to school, of course, but he was a loner, didn’t mix well, and a bit of an under-achiever. I’d hoped that boarding school would make him more sociable. It didn’t. When he was home on holiday we hardly saw him. He virtually lived with Billings, just came home late at night to sleep, and was gone again at first light. His grandfather alternately said Billings should be horsewhipped or locked up, never seemed quite sure of the remedy.’

  ‘What was the nature of Mr Billings’ roguishness?’

  ‘Poacher.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  A grin creased Willet’s face, which she would not have seen. He knew from her monologues in the car that Ms Manning lived in Islington, that her parents were also close by in north London, that she had been to local schools and to university down a bus route. She was an urban person: she would know damn all of a country poacher’s life. His pen was poised.

  ‘A low-life ignorant poacher. Game birds, rabbits, the occasional deer. It wasn’t all illegal, there’s a big area of common ground up to the north of the village where they could shoot, but it was decidedly criminal when they were on the Vatchery estate. They were never caught by the gamekeeper there, though not for want of trying. That man used to sit half the night outside the Billings house waiting for the old devil to creep home with the pheasants or a fallow deer carcass. There was a bond between that uncouth man who’d not an iota of education or ambition and my son – I have to say it, a much closer bond than ever existed between Gus and his mother and me. Billings had a son, younger than Gus, a proper little tearaway, quite unsuitable company … Anyway, Billings was finally arrested and given three months inside by the bench. The police stopped him with a van full of pheasants. At the time I thanked God that Gus was away at school. When he was released the whole dreadful family moved away, good riddance, never heard of again. You give freedom to a youngster and hope common sense prevails. Sadly, parents are not always rewarded.’

  He had been writing hard, taking a note that was almost verbatim. For Willet, it was as if a small light illuminated the darkness. He looked up. ‘What was the ultimate for your son, Mr Peake, when he was with Billings?’

  ‘A clean shot. I was once bawling him out, the way fathers do with teenage sons – he’d come home quite filthy from the fields and ditches, and we’d guests in for drinks. His response, as if he were talking to an idiot, was “You have to be prepared to lie up, Dad, so’s you get a clean shot under your own terms. Otherwise all you’ve done is wound a rabbit, break a pigeon’s wing. The worst sound in the world is a rabbit in pain, screaming, when you can’t reach it, hurt because you rushed your shot, Dad. It has to be a good kill.”

  I had the impression that the hunting was more important to him than the slaughter, though I doubt that applied to Billings.’

  ‘Is that all there is?’ Ms Manning was already bored and lost.

  “Fraid so. What else? Gus left school with pretty average grades, and I managed to pull some strings, got him into a haulage firm in Guildford. I did business with them and was owed favours. He’s been there ever since. I can only talk about his youth because we hardly see him, these days … What do I tell my wife?’

  ‘Your problem, Mr Peake, not mine,’ she said, without charity.

  ‘What’s he doing there? Is he driving a relief lorry?’

  ‘He’s gone to fight, Mr Peake,’ she intoned.

  ‘But that’s a war zone …’ The man’s mouth gaped.

  Gus saw the target. He came slowly towards the command post. His own estimate of the distance was 750 yards, and the binoculars confirmed it at 741. There was a short line of soldiers at attention. A moment before, as Gus had done a fast scan with the binoculars, the crew on the roof with the machine-gun had closed up behind their weapon, and the soldiers in the watchtower ducked below their sandbag parapets. The T-junction of the reticule in his ’scope sight was on the target. He would fire at the next moment that his breath was steadied.

  ‘Watch the shot, Omar. Don’t move, not a fraction, just watch the shot.’

  Gus breathed deeply, then slowly, so slowly, began to empty his lungs. When they were emptied he would relax, then fire. The smoke curled from the homes of the villagers, there was no new adjustment to make for the slight wind’s strength. Above the chest of the target were the gold insignia of rank on the target’s shoulders.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?’ Gus hissed.

  ‘No. Don’t.’

  Gus breathed again, his finger was inside the trigger guard.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It is not the officer.’

  ‘He has the rank.’

  ‘No, Mr Gus. The soldiers are laughing at him.’

  Gus stared through the ’scope. Behind the target figure, level with the insignia on the target’s shoulder, a soldier grinned and Gus saw the flash of his teeth, and another man near to him laughing.

  ‘It is not the officer, it is a pretend. They know about you, trick you. They would not dare to laugh at their officer.’

  The breath seeped from Gus’s body. He eased his finger off the trigger. He felt flattened by the simplicity of the trap set for him. Without the boy, he would have walked into it, fired into it. At that moment he saw his own importance. The life of a soldier, with a family and with a mother, was to be snuffed out so that his own life could be taken.

  ‘Thank you, Omar.’

  �
��It was easy to see the trick – yes, Mr Gus?’

  He kneed the boy savagely. The sun crawled up behind him, over the ridge where the attack force lay and waited on him.

  ‘Correct, Mr Peake. Maybe you should chat it out with your father as to why your son is currently in a war zone. Good day.’

  She was on her feet. Willet had filled the page below the heading of MINDSET. He put the pad into his briefcase. There were no handshakes at the door. Momentarily Willet saw a woman’s face at the kitchen door, grey, lined and harassed. He wouldn’t have known what to say to her that might have been of any comfort. The door slammed shut behind them.

  They walked to the car.

  ‘What a bloody fool,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Peake, of course.’

  ‘Which Peake?’

  ‘The son, that idiot.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For doing what he’s done – for going where he’s gone.’

  Willet felt the anger brimming in his mind. ‘The last weekend you had time off, what did you do? Where did you go?’

  ‘Actually, I was in Snowdonia, with a group rebuilding footpaths for the National Trust. We were all volunteers.’

  Through gritted teeth, Willet said pleasantly, ‘It must have seemed, Ms Manning, important. I suppose rebuilding a footpath is about as important as fighting for the freedom of a subjugated people in a war zone.’

  She looked at him curiously. ‘Are you all right?’

  He sat with his head down, his chin on his chest. ‘I’m fine – but what about him?’

  ‘The wind’s changed.’

  ‘He is coming.’

  Gus hissed venomously, ‘You didn’t tell me, it’s veered.’

  Omar persisted shrilly, ‘The officer is coming.’

  ‘The wind has moved from south-west-south to west-south-west – you’ve got to warn me about this sort of thing.’

  ‘Do you want to know about the wind or the officer?’

  ‘Both.’

  The panic consumed him.

  The wind had come up from gentle to moderate strength. A flag on the Stickledown Range would have eased clear of the pole and lethargically flapped free. Its direction had shifted from No Value to Half Value. On that range he could have waited, settled, then tapped into the calculator on the mat beside him and computed whether to alter the windage turret on the ’scope by a full click, or by half a click, or whether to aim off from the centre of the target’s V-Bull. Gus saw the officer. There were no insignia on his shoulder but men straightened to attention as he passed. He was within half a dozen feet of the entrance door to the command post and walking. There was no time to settle or make the necessary calculations. He aimed off, his mind racing for an answer to the equation, to compensate for the fresher wind and for the brisk stride of the officer.

  ‘Watch the shot’s fall,’ Gus whispered.

  But the officer, wide-chested, in fatigues, would pause at the jamb of the command post’s door, and that, too, must go into the equation.

  Gus fired. The moment that the recoil hammered into his shoulder, he knew that the breath pattern was wrong, and that he’d squeezed too fast on the trigger. The rifle’s compensator attachment at the barrel end kept the ’scope sight steady. He saw the hazed shapes of single waving grass stems and the flattening climb of the smoke columns, and the eddy of the air disturbed by the bullet’s track, and then he lost the flight.

  The bullet would run for more than one and a half seconds. Its trajectory curve would take it to an apex of a fraction more than four feet above the aim point before the sliding fall. The flight, to Gus, was endless.

  The target, the officer, at the door of the command post had turned and was issuing an instruction, jabbing with a finger for emphasis. Then he stood as if frozen.

  Omar piped, ‘Miss. One metre to the right. Hit the wall. Miss.’

  Gus slid the bolt back, eased out the wasted bullet. They were all rooted to the ground.

  It was what he had been told. Men stood statue still in the seconds after a bullet had been fired and had missed them. But that moment would pass. It would pass before he had the chance to breathe in, breathe out, and use the respiratory pause. He locked the aim. His mind made the adjustment on intuition and instinct. He fired a second shot. A soldier dived to the ground. A second cowered, another fell to his knees, as if the ice of the tableau had melted. The officer’s jabbing finger was retracted and he seemed to be twisting his hips to turn for safety.

  Gus saw him spin, one arm whipped high in the air. He saw the shock on his target’s face and watched him pirouette, fall. The officer was on his back and his legs kicked in the air. No-one came to his aid, and across the open ground came the faint whinnying cry of his scream.

  He slid back the bolt, ejected the cartridge case. He tried to steady the post-shoot shake in his hands. He loathed himself for his failure to make a good, clean kill and started to analyse the first total failure and the second partial failure, as he had been instructed. And with the analysis came the calm … He had asked too much of the boy, he had not allowed enough for the wind, he had not reckoned on the pace of the officer’s walk, and he would think about it some more in the evening.

  Gus said evenly, ‘The old stalkers in Scotland knew it. They’d have a guest fire at a stag and miss, and the stag always stays exactly still for two or three seconds. Then it runs. But, if it is winged, it runs immediately, until the wound kills it. I was lucky with that second shot.’

  The machine-gun had opened up behind him and to his right, the tracer rounds arced across the dead ground, scattering little chasing patterns. The view through the ’scope was a blurred, fluid mess as he searched to find the position on the roof of the command post. And behind him he heard the whooping roar as the line of men began their charge.

  A soldier yelled his name, waved frantically for him.

  Major Karim Aziz was walking the dog alongside the edge of the high wire fence.

  He heard his name and ran towards the soldier. The dog at his heel, he was led to the communications bunker.

  The brigadier was already there, the general bursting in a minute after him.

  He stood at the central map table and listened. The words that came blurted over the loudspeakers, high on the wall, were interspersed with break-up and howl.

  ‘… The captain is hit … Yes, Corporal Ahmad wore the captain’s coat, but was not shot at … Captain Kifaar is hit, is not dead, but they cannot bring a medical orderly to him. There is a general attack. We are waiting for Lieutenant Muhammad to take the place of Captain Kifaar in the command post.’

  The Victory City at Quadir Beg broke across the transmission – their water tanker was late. When could they expect it?

  The Victory City at Keshdan reported the failure of the single-stage air filtration system of a BMP. Could a qualified engineer accompany the next resupply column with a replacement?

  ‘Get those arseholes off the air,’ the general shouted.

  ‘… There is heavy shooting from the front … There are casualties … Lieutenant Muhammad has now reached the command post … They are led by a woman. She is with their forward force. The machine-gun fires at her, no hit yet, she is protected … The medical orderly has not come to the command post to treat Captain Kifaar. The captain is close to death. Are units advancing to help us? In God’s name, send us help.’

  Aziz asked quietly, ‘Please, is it possible to know the circumstances of Captain Kifaar’s wounding? It would be useful for me.’

  The question was relayed.

  ‘… A very long shot, twice. The second shot hit him. We must have help. They are near to us … No-one knows where the shot came from. Is help on its way?’

  Over the loudspeaker came the sounds, staccato, of the firing. But Aziz had been given the answer he had expected and seemed not to hear the deep, distorted terror of the men under fire.

  Gus had hit a man who ran to the nearest of the personnel carr
iers. He had missed another who made a snaky crawl to follow him but had put the next shot right through the gunport of the command post. A fuel drum, close to the earth walls for the personnel carriers, had caught fire and the deep red blaze of the incendiary threw a lowering pall of smoke across much of the village, which ebbed towards the fence. Between gusts of wind, gaps appeared in the grey-black wall of the smoke, and he caught fleeting glimpses of the machine-gun crew on the roof.

  It was a scene of hell. Against him the boy was shivering with excitement.

  She was at the front of the long, straggling line approaching the fence. She had no fear.

  Suddenly, as if a man had punched him, came the realization of her vulnerability. He saw her turn and face the line of crouched men behind her, and give an imperious wave that they should follow.

  Gus saw the machine-gun traverse towards her, then the smoke drifted and thickened.

  The tracers poked through the cloud, firing at random, searching for her. Haquim was behind her, running awkwardly over the rough ground and hugging the metal box to his chest. The hellish cauldron was a small pocket of life and death, in which she stood and demanded that the peshmerga follow.

  ‘Watch for the fall,’ Gus snapped.

  The wind was stronger: it tugged at the grass and wafted the smoke. He waited for the chance. She was a hundred yards from the fence. He had gone to eight clicks on the windage turret, but the wall of smoke was solid and he could not see through it. The tracers swarmed around her.

  The smoke dissipated without warning.

  He was gazing through the ’scope at the machine-gun crew. Three choices: the man who called the aim and was crouched at the back, puffing at a cigarette clamped between his lips; the one who fed the belt and whose helmet strap was undone and hung loosely against his cheek; or the one who pulled the trigger?

  ‘She’s hit,’ the boy gasped. ‘She has fallen.’

  Gus fired, once, twice, a third shot. The smoke closed around his view of the target. He heaved back the bolt, squeezed the trigger again, and again, heard the empty scrape of the action and knew that his magazine was empty.