Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘Not my problem,’ he blurted, ‘the problem of the men, the problem of Haquim, the problem of the villagers. Maybe only the dead don’t have a problem.’

  She flared. ‘Because I meet an Iraqi?’

  ‘Because you go secretly to meet an Iraqi.’

  Her hands caught at the hessian loops at his shoulders. ‘Do I have to tell you, like a child has to be told, everything? You tell me! Why was the village not reinforced? Why have not new tanks and new personnel carriers been sent to Tarjil? If you cannot tell me then say nothing.’ Her mood swung: she was again the innocent. ‘If he had tried to trap me, to take me, would you have shot me?’

  ‘I try to keep my promises.’

  ‘You know what they call me?’

  ‘I imagine they call you friend.’

  ‘He said that at Fifth Army they call me the witch.’

  He set a fast pace back towards the village, and never looked behind him to see how well she followed.

  Major Karim Aziz had come back to a place that was like home to him. It was old ground, familiar territory.

  The driver had taken him to Tarjil. In the police station he had studied the maps, talked with the commanding officer, slept on the floor with his dog cuddled against him, and he had left the town long before dawn.

  At first he had tracked north, towards the Little Zab river, shadowing the Arbīl–Kirkūk road, keeping in the lee of a ridge-line.

  It was twenty-five years since he had first been posted to the region, and the fifth time that he had returned there. Nothing had changed except that trees he knew were taller, and the Victory Cities he skirted were more permanent and weathered, the hulks of abandoned personnel carriers more rusted.

  He had slipped past a small gorge where a unit had been blocked in the al-Anfal operation, eleven years before. They had only been able to go forward after he had identified then shot the saboteurs’ commander.

  In the early morning, from higher ground, he had seen the track where three armoured vehicles had been ambushed twenty-one years before. He had been with the relief force that had driven off the bastards as they looted the vehicles, and they had found the bodies of the vehicles’ crews; he could see the overgrown ditch beside the ochre hulks where he had vomited when he had seen the mutilation of the bodies.

  By mid-morning he had looked down on a shepherd’s hut of stone and corrugated iron from the same position he had taken nine years back. It had been the furthest point of the saboteurs’ advance when they had swarmed south in the belief that the Americans would fly in support. The hut had been a night shelter for a reconnaissance group; with his Dragunov, he had shot their chief when he came out of the hut and stretched in the sunlight. The shot had been at the top of the Dragunov’s range, one of the best he had ever achieved, and had made a stomach wound. In his mind he could still hear the screaming of the chief man as he lay outside the hut for an hour while none dared expose themselves to pull him inside.

  By late morning he had reached a division of the shepherds’ trails and he had gone to the west but, four years before, he had taken the eastern path on a forced march in the failed attempt to intercept the fleeing American spies who abandoned their Arbīl villa base. Everything he saw, every step he took, was as he remembered it. The ground had eroded but each footfall was an echo in his memory.

  He took a position and settled. The dog had moved well with him. It ran when he scurried forward, slithered on its stomach when he crawled, lay motionless when he stopped, kneeling to scan the ground ahead. In the manuals it was written, by the Soviets, the British and the Americans, that a sniper must always be accompanied by an observer.

  In his long years in the army, Karim Aziz had not met a man he would have trusted sufficiently to accompany him; but he would trust the dog with his life.

  The position he had chosen was amongst haphazardly shaped stones that offered him a clear view of the ground between the Victory City of Darbantaq and the town of Tarjil.

  Behind him were the tight-packed homes, the mosque’s minaret, the faint outline of the communications equipment on the police station’s roof. Further behind him, and barely visible, were the brigade’s tents at the crossroads, the burning flame, and the conurbation of Kirkūk. Ahead of him was Darbantaq, five kilometres distant, with small smoke columns to identify it. Around him were the hills and valleys, and the silence.

  Major Karim Aziz was at peace.

  The peace came because he was far from Baghdad – from the pace and fumes, the noise and lifebeat of a city. He was anonymous in Baghdad, a pygmy figure. Even waiting endlessly on the flat roof with the Dragunov, he had never been able to gather up the sensation of power that was with him now. In the city he was one man against a million, one man against a regime, one man against an army. Here, it was hunter against hunter, a single marksman against a single marksman. It was his territory into which an intruder had strayed.

  He looked towards Darbantaq across the slope of the valleys and over the swollen water-filled gullies. Bright green patches of ground, surrounded by yellowed grass, marked the peat marshlands. The dog growled softly, a whisper in its throat.

  He was cautious with the telescope and he had draped a small square of grey cloth over the end of the lens glass. The sun beat down on him. If it caught the glass then his position was betrayed. He could see the roofs of Darbantaq, the smoke, and the personnel carrier skewed off the track leading to the village. Sometimes he could see figures moving between the buildings. At last light, with the sun sinking behind him, he would move closer.

  He laid down the telescope, put it beside his rifle, and slowly turned his head. There should be no sudden movements to break the pattern of his camouflage. He slipped his hand back, ruffled the fur on the dog’s neck, and felt the vibration of the growl. The work of an observer was to protect a sniper’s back from attack from the flank or the rear. The dog lay facing away from him, and growled. It was on its stomach, head between its front paws, ears flattened, nose pointing the way for him.

  There was a trellis of small valleys. One went north to south, another ran on a parallel line, and another east to west. He scanned each of them, and the further valleys, before he saw the movement that had alerted the dog.

  A single man moved along on a herdsman’s track at furtive speed in the second valley from him.

  He reached for his telescope.

  The man wore an officer’s uniform. On the shoulders, magnified thirty times, was the gold-braid insignia of a ranking brigadier.

  Of course, Aziz had checked with the regimental commander at Tarjil that no patrols would be out in the sector. A brigadier would not personally check forward positions, would not walk, and would not be alone. The man half ran and looked behind him as if pursued by demons.

  He remembered … The brigadier in the communications centre of Fifth Army headquarters, and no reinforcements deployed, the lines of motionless tanks and personnel carriers … A demonstration of shooting power on a range. Two generals and a brigadier had come to the firing range and witnessed him accrue six hits from six shots at 700 metres when the probability of a kill at that range was listed as only 60 per cent. He saw that brigadier hurrying along the track on the valley floor. He lost him … Three weeks after the demonstration on the range he had received the invitation to a meeting.

  He had sat in the general’s car, and the proposition of assassination had been made to him.

  He was held in the tentacles of conspiracy. He heard the distant whine of a jeep’s engine, and lay on his stomach, numbed.

  ‘Did you see an army?’

  ‘What sort of bloody army?’

  Joe Denton had been standing with his bodyguards and the local men he’d trained, and was studying the fall of a well-grassed meadow between the village and the road. It was the best meadow available to the village, but the edge of the grass area was pocked with a small disturbance of earth, where the child had lost his leg. There should have been a wire fence round the meadow but som
e goddam greedy idiot from the village had taken the warning wire to corral his animals. The stupidity had cost a child’s leg, and maybe even the child’s life. It might have been a 72A, could have been a POMZ 2M, but it was most likely that a fucking V69 anti-personnel mine had exploded.

  Denton was well paid by a British charity to clear old Iraqi mines, close to fifty thousand sterling a year, tax-free, but it was a bloody lonely life. Had it not been he would never have mixed in the UN club in Arbīl with a crook like Lev Rybinsky. The mud-caked car had pulled up on the road behind him.

  ‘Joe, my friend, did you see an army led by a woman?’

  ‘What are you talking about, Lev? The usual old crap?’

  ‘You call me crap when you want cigarettes, Joe, when you want whisky? Hey, did you see a woman leading an army?’

  ‘No.’

  The car drove away down the road. Denton laughed mirthlessly: a woman leads an army in northern Iraq, and next week pigs fly. He thought of how many mines were buried there, at what depth, what density, and he started to draw a plan of the meadow.

  ‘Did you see an army?’

  ‘What if I did?’

  ‘Was the army led by a woman?’

  ‘And if it was?’

  Sarah was at the co-ordinates given over a radio link because the message had said there were injured children to be met. The mud-caked car had stopped at the roadside behind the small convoy of pick-up trucks she had organized to make the rendezvous.

  The big fight had been to get the doctor to leave the clinic at Koi Sanjaq and come with her. She’d built the bloody clinic. That the doctor had a clinic to work in was bloody well down to her and Protect the Children funds – so, she’d told him he could bloody well get off his bum and come with her.

  ‘I’ve got morphine.’

  ‘Then hang around, Lev.’

  ‘And I’ve got penicillin.’

  ‘Make yourself comfortable. Is it that stuff you promised me weeks ago?’ She laughed, a wild bitter laugh. The last load of medical supplies trucked across the border had been stopped at a road block by peshmerga of agha Ibrahim’s faction, and bloody hijacked.

  The lorry had been cleared out. The food had not been touched in the second lorry, and the third lorry with the building tools had made it through. She thought it often enough, that northern Iraq was the loneliest corner of the earth for an expatriate, which was why she knew Lev Rybinsky, and drank with him in the UN bar. If she had met the shit at home in Sydney, she would have looked right through him, walked right past him, and not noticed.

  ‘What’s her name, Sarah?’

  ‘Meda.’ Sarah saw Lev Rybinsky salivate, and his stomach quivered.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Do I get the penicillin and the morphine?’

  He was out of the car and scurrying to the boot. She thought him loathsome. He wore what she assumed was an Italian-made silk shirt, grubby, top button undone, the tie dangling loose, and a suit from Milan that was at least a size too small for him; the jacket wouldn’t have fastened and the trousers’ belly button was loose. The stubble on his face was creased by his jowl lines and the bald summit of his head glistened in the sunlight.

  He was repulsive but she needed him, as everybody did. He lifted two cardboard boxes from the boot and carried them to her. She saw that the donor labels had been ripped off.

  She didn’t know whether they were from Protect the Children or another bloody charity.

  They were probably hers to begin with.

  She smiled sweetly, and pointed. ‘Up there. That’s where she is.’

  There was a slope and a distant clear-cut line of a ridge. Behind it were another three, softly hazy, barely visible in the high altitude. She’d hoped he’d gape and shrivel, but his pudgy face lit in triumph.

  A line of men materialized over the nearest ridge. She put the boxes of morphine and penicillin in her pick-up, and Lev let her swig at the flask of whisky from the glove compartment of the Mercedes. She always needed whisky when the wounded were children. The column of men came down the slope with the casualties of battle.

  One day each month a helicopter came to the eyrie in northern Iraq, collected Isaac Cohen, flew him back across the Turkish border to the base at Incerlik, and in the evening returned him to the isolation of his mountain home. On that one day he was debriefed by the Mossad officers stationed in Ankara who flew in to meet him. The contact was valuable and broke the impersonal monotony of radio intercepts – but even better was the chance to lie in a bath of warm water and to eat good cooked food. For a whole month he yearned for the comforts of that single day. The helicopter would not come for another twenty-four hours but already he was packed, ready for its arrival.

  Haquim said, ‘He is a snake, but a snake that has no venom. I asked him what was the price of the machine-gun, and he said it was a gift. I asked why he wished to travel so far to make a gift, and he said that the gift was proof of his friendship.’

  Breaking the rule Haquim had set, Gus had been lying in the sunshine by the fence and cleaning the blister on his heel when he had seen the return of the men who had carried down the wounded. An overweight, elderly civilian was among them, carried on one of the litters that had been used for the casualties. Behind him more men carried a heavy machine-gun and ammunition on a stretcher. At the broken gate of the village, the man had slid heavily off the litter, wiped the sweat from his forehead and taken charge of the machine-gun. He had wheeled it into the village, grunting from the weight of it, and Haquim had met him.

  ‘He is Lev Rybinsky, a Russian. He would not know about friendship. Everything for him is a negotiation for influence and financial gain. Where there is a closed border, he has access because he has bought the guards, he owns the customs men of the Syrians and the Turks and, perhaps, of the Iraqis. You want a tanker of fuel, he gets it for you.

  You want fruit from America, he supplies it. You want an artefact of antiquity from Nineveh or Sāmarrā, he provides it. Now, he comes to us with a gift of friendship and will not talk about a price.’

  ‘It would have a hell of a hitting power.’

  ‘At a range of a thousand metres it can pierce the armour on any part of a personnel carrier. Of course it is useful, but I ask, what is the price? What does he want that we can give him?’

  They watched.

  The Russian dragged the machine-gun towards the command post, from which Meda emerged. He stopped, wiped an old handkerchief over his head and face, straightened his tie, then bowed elaborately to Meda. She was laughing, and he reached forward, touched her arm, as if to discover that she was real. Haquim turned away.

  ‘You know, Gus, that we attack Tarjil tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You understand that to attack Tarjil we must come further down from the mountains?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The real friends of the Kurds are not a man who brings a machine-gun – or a man who brings a sniper’s rifle. They are the mountains. And now we are leaving our friends behind us.’

  ‘What do I do at Tarjil?’

  ‘There will be a briefing at dusk, then you will be told. Then, perhaps, I will be told.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where were you this morning, when you went with Meda?’

  ‘Don’t ask me because I can’t tell you.’

  He saw the beaming face of the Russian amongst the tight-pressed shoulders of the men and he heard Meda’s voice. He saw the adoration of the men for her and the sunlight played on her mouth, which, in dark secrecy, had kissed the cheek of a senior Iraqi officer. Her hands moved high in emphasis, and they had shaken the hand of the officer.

  He sat on the ground and began to unwind the hessian bandage roll from the body of the rifle so that he could, again, enjoy the distraction of cleaning it.

  The sergeant said, ‘I am from Basra, Major, and my young brother is with me here, and my cousin. Will the saboteurs attack in the morning? It is good that you are here, Major, wit
h your rifle.’

  Karim Aziz turned away from him. He was still in shock from the extent of the conspiracy, and struggling to comprehend what he’d seen. His legs ached from the long day’s walk, but the dog still bounded at his side. The darkness on the streets of Tarjil was broken by pockets of light from curtained or shuttered windows and from fires lit by the soldiers beside their bunkers. He had seen the gleam of confidence in the eyes of the men behind the sergeant as they noted his paint-smeared face and the heavy hanging camouflage smock, the rifle balanced in the crook of his arm.

  An old man hurried from the shadows carrying a small can of heating oil, then saw him and blocked him.

  ‘I am retired now, Major, but I was professor of the economics faculty of the University of Mosul. This is my home. My wife pleaded that we should flee south, I said the army would protect us. It is good to see you, Major, with your rifle.’

  The man kissed his cheek and stumbled on into the darkness. In the last light of the day, before Aziz had turned, he had been close to the village of Darbantaq – four hundred metres from it – and had lain on his stomach with the dog beside him, and watched. He had seen her – the witch – once, but she was hemmed in by a crowd and was crossing, fast, the gap between a row of homes and the command post. He had watched as a paunchy European had brought a DShKM heavy machine-gun into the village. He had noted the way the men sat in quiet clusters, as men always did in the hours before they went into battle. He had seen a part of the body of the officer at the entrance to the command post, and had tilted his head to study the ground from which the shot would have come. He had found, at the sufficient elevation to clear the roofs, the scrape on the slope made by the sheep. He had trekked back, his mind in turmoil.

  Wandering alone in the streets of the town that would be attacked in the dawn, confused and troubled, tugged between the extremes of loyalty and conspiracy, he had seemed to have become a beacon towards which the hope of frightened people was drawn.

  ‘You are the master sniper, Major. Through the length of the regiment you and your skill are spoken of. We are not forgotten by Baghdad, Major, if they have sent you and your rifle. Shoot her! Shoot the witch.’