Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  Commander Yusuf heard the crowd’s voices. She would be on the ladder to the platform of planks. She would be seen. His composure returned as the silence ended with the shouts, jeers, yells of the crowd outside the gate.

  He stood by the closed cell door. ‘Do you hear it?’ he murmured, in his soft singing voice. ‘She is alone, as you are alone. She is beyond help, as you are beyond help.’

  ‘One one six zero.’ Omar was looking through the binoculars.

  ‘One thousand one hundred and sixty yards, check?’

  ‘That’s what I said, Mr Gus.’

  He had never fired at that distance. The furthest target on the Stickledown Range was at a thousand yards. His finger made the final adjustment to the sight’s elevation turret.

  At its maximum height in flight, the bullet would be on a line that was 135 inches above the aiming point, then it would drop.

  ‘Wind isn’t so strong, maybe three to five miles per hour at our point, coming from the side. From smoke, between the office and the apartment block – four two zero yards – it is more strong, five to eight miles per hour. At three-quarters distance, by the governor’s house, it is again as strong. I can see from the flag there.’

  ‘If the flag’s on top of the building that’s too high for trajectory, doesn’t count.’

  ‘I know that, Mr Gus. The flag is from a window balcony, at her height.’

  ‘What is it, at her?’

  ‘It is again more gentle, from the side.’

  The bullet, at that range, would be in the air for the time it would take to speak, not gabble, two phrases of seven syllables each. ‘Point three three eight ca-lib-re. Point three three eight ca-lib-re.’ He must allow for wind deflection at the muzzle point when the velocity was greatest, then twice more during its flight … Two clicks of deflection on the windage turret. Before the wind straightened it, the bullet would fly on a course that was initially eighteen inches to the left of the target.

  ‘Check.’

  He thanked God that the wind at the muzzle point was not moderate but gentle, not fresh and not strong. He could not see her. Men were clustered around her. The reticule lines of the sight were on the noose. There was no traffic on Martyr Avenue and he sensed the swelling quiet of the crowd, who had jeered as she was led out but now stood in hushed silence.

  Then, two of the men in dun olive uniforms bent in front of her, and he thought they pinioned her legs. She stood so still. He breathed in hard, filled his lungs, and waited for them to lift her feet onto the chair.

  The commander was outside the cell block. He had no need to be there, he could not have counted the number of executions he had witnessed, and with minor variations they were all the same. The quiet had drawn him out of the block. He did not know why the Party men, the Ba’athists, did not lead the cheering and shouting. He could see her through the open gates, small and hemmed in by big men, below the noose. He looked hard and expected to see her back and shoulders quiver, but her head had not dropped. Away past her was the length of Martyr Avenue, and then the foothills of the mountains. He saw the hands grip her body, to raise her, and he turned away as if he had no stomach for it.

  There were open windows with curtains flapping in them, roofs with lines of washing, the shadows thrown by water tanks, and the dark recesses in unfinished buildings where the sun did not penetrate. Using the magnification of the telescopic sight, Major Karim Aziz roved over the windows, roofs and the skeletal sites.

  When the first light had peeped over the high distant ground he had sent the woman inside. He was calm. He had made the necessary calculations. For the sniper to have a view of the scaffold, between the side screens, he must be on Martyr Avenue. As he had requested, the street below him was blocked with armoured cars. It was, and he had paced the distance, 525 metres from the balcony to the scaffold. The sniper must be further back, but Aziz did not believe the man would trust himself to shoot at a greater range than 850 metres. He believed himself to be within 325 metres of the greatest prize his life had yet offered him.

  There was no sound to distract him. Not a car moved on the street, not a hawker cried out, and the great crowd was stilled as if it held, guarded, its breath. The quiet was good and brought him the peace he needed.

  He knew they had led her out, the crowd had told him, but in the quiet he did not know whether they had lifted her yet onto the chair. He could not turn to see. It might be the flash of light from the rifle’s sight, or the brief brilliance of the firing gases, or the dispersal of dust on a window sill. He thought the target would be the hangman. It would be the sad and stupid gesture of a man demented by helplessness to shoot the hangman.

  The gesture would leave her, in terror, on the platform for another minute or another five minutes before an officer had the courage to crawl forward, lift her, set her feet on the chair, the noose on her neck and kick the chair. To shoot the hangman would not help her. He had no complaint, as long as the sniper fired and, through firing, exposed himself.

  There was a low moan from the crowd, wind on wire, and he thought they lifted her.

  He stared through the sight at the windows and roofs and the open floors of unfinished buildings.

  She was on the chair.

  Hands steadied her.

  She stared ahead of her, across the crowd and up the length of the street. He wondered whether she looked for him.

  He let the breath slip. His words were silent. ‘Don’t move. I am here. Don’t move your head. My love …’ He squeezed gently on the trigger.

  This was not Stickledown. He was on the third floor of an unfinished office block facing down the Martyr Avenue in the city of Kirkūk. He was in the bubble where it never rained, was never too cold and never too hot, and the wind never freshened. The boy was beside him but he no longer knew it.

  A hand reached up for the noose. Her head was still, and he thought she heard him.

  Gus Peake fired, as if he were on Stickledown Range, at the centre of the V-Bull of his target.

  ‘Kill her … Kill her …’

  He watched the speck of the bullet and the early-morning air burst away from it.

  ‘Kill her … Kill her … Kill her …’

  When he could no longer see the bullet, he saw the buffet vortex of the air.

  ‘Kill her … Kill …’

  His lips made the fourteenth syllable as her head pitched apart.

  Gus lay with the shock of the rifle burning in his shoulder and closed his eyes to shut out the sight of what he had done.

  He had heard the bullet go past him.

  It was part of the discipline of Major Aziz that he did not twist his body to follow the path of the bullet to see what target it had hit, or if it had missed. The moment after he had registered the crack of the bullet’s supersonic flight, he heard the thump. Through his

  ’scope sight he studied the windows and roofs that were between 300 and 350 metres from him, but there was nothing. His search covered two or three seconds. He did not believe that the shot had been fired from closer than 300 metres, but there was that instant nagging suspicion that it had been loosed at a greater distance. His viewpoint, magnified and centred on the cross-lines of the Dragunov’s sight, raked up the length of Martyr Avenue, over office windows and apartment balconies and more roofs. There was so little time. Beyond the office housing the Oil Company of Iraq, beyond the block with balconies and flower-pots, beyond the office of the Agriculture Ministry (Northern Region) was a construction site of concrete floors and reinforced steel pillars, open to the winds.

  He would have tracked on with the sight had it not been for what he saw from the lowest point of the sight’s circle – the workmen.

  The workmen – and his mind raced to the calculation that they were a minimum of 1,000 metres from the scaffold – were the sign. A gasp of exhilaration slipped his lips.

  He found them in the ’scope at the moment the tableau broke. There were four of them, day labourers, the fetchers and carriers
of the cement blocks, the men who placed the crane’s cable hook onto the steel beams, but the crane was idle and the operator had gone with the architects, surveyors and supervisors to see the hanging. Perhaps the workmen were Kurds and not willing to watch the slow, strangled death. They were on the first floor’s bare plateau of concrete. They had frozen at the proximity of the shot. When he saw them their shock was fading and they cringed down, then looked up. It was what men anywhere would have done if a rifle was fired close to them, above them.

  He had found his man.

  Aziz grabbed his backpack, stampeded off the balcony and into her bedroom. He careered into her, flattened her and ran for the door. The dog scampered beside him. He charged down the staircase of the block. The man, too, would be running, but he would not have a wide staircase to go down, three steps at a time, but would be groping for a loose, swaying ladder. He burst out of the building and ran up the pavement. He never looked back towards the scaffold. It was a panting sprint but the adrenaline gave him speed and the dog was always a couple of metres ahead of him, as if doing the work of a pacemaker. He passed soldiers in a doorway, ignored them, and was crossing the further traffic lanes of Martyr Avenue as a personnel carrier swerved to avoid him. In his youth, in spiked shoes and shorts, he could have covered the distance in seventy seconds. Now he was middle-aged, and there was no crowd to cheer him towards a tape. He had the weight of the backpack hooked on one shoulder and the awkwardness of the rifle in his hand, but the scent of the chase was with him. He reached the palisade of planks fronting the construction site, heaving and fit to vomit, a minute and a half after the single shot had been fired.

  The man would be coming off the ladder, would be weaving between stacked heaps of pipes, blocks and cables. At the back of the site, he would be running, for the plank wall or the wire fence, whichever was there. Aziz ducked along the side length of the palisade, covered with fly-posters and exhortations from the Party, and reached the corner of the wall.

  The alleyway was empty. Facing the high chain-mesh fence were little lock-up businesses, all closed because their owners had gone to the execution. Three hundred metres down the fence, a boy appeared on the top and rolled and fell. From his run, Aziz could barely stand. He trembled with the effort. The boy saw him, covered him with an assault rifle, but did not fire. The man followed him. For a moment his weight was hooked on the top of the wire and then he dropped down.

  Aziz thought the boy had shouted something to the man, who looked up. He would have seen Aziz at the corner of the palisade and the fence. He was a big man and the sunlight threw gaunt lines on his face that was cream-smeared above the stubble. He wore the big sniper’s smock. He seemed to measure the scale of the threat of Aziz at the corner of the palisade and the fence, then to reject it as an irrelevance. The boy caught the arm of his smock, pulled him across the alleyway, and they were gone.

  Still heaving, trembling, still trying to draw air into his body, Aziz could not have fired. It would have been a wasted shot. He could no longer run but he pushed himself to trot forward.

  He reached the point where they had come down off the fence. He was very careful now that he should not contaminate the scuffmarks made by their boots and bodies as they had dropped down. He gestured for the dog to sniff at the broken soil beside the wire, and cooed his encouragement.

  ‘Find them, Scout … Hunt them, Scout … Search, Scout, search … Find them.’

  His faith in the quality of the dog’s nose was total. The dog led him into an entry between the shuttered businesses, and then into a maze of shallow streets. They would have run. He did not need to. He walked briskly after the dog. He would follow his dog, wherever it led, until he had the chance to shoot. Repeatedly, from his dried lips, he whistled for the dog to slow so that it was not too far ahead of him, but the dog held the scent.

  They were in a storm drain and ahead was light. Omar had found it and brought them into Kirkūk through it, bypassing a checkpoint. They were crawling in the drain and could hear cars close by and the thunder of lorries and personnel carriers. In places they were on their hands and knees, but when debris clogged the tunnel they crawled on their stomachs. At the end, where the light was, when they emerged, they would be beyond the city and the open ground would be in front of them all the way to the hills. The spirit had gone from Gus. He had no sensation of success, no pride in having made the calculations correctly for what anyone would have described as a supreme shot. Near the end of the tunnel, when he was lagging behind the boy, Omar turned, caught his coat and wrenched him forward. His hands slithered on the drain’s floor, his head went down and the foul stale water was in his mouth. He flailed out at the boy. They had not spoken – other than the boy’s shout for him to hurry when he had fallen from the top of the fence – since he had fired.

  As if believing Gus hid behind an excuse, Omar rasped, ‘You missed.’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘You hit her, you missed the hangman.’

  ‘I wasn’t aiming at him.’

  ‘You fired at her?’ He heard in the darkness of the tunnel the bewilderment of the boy.

  Gus nodded tiredly.

  ‘Do you tell me the truth, Mr Gus? In fifteen seconds, half a minute, or five minutes, she was dead.’

  ‘She was my target,’ Gus said.

  ‘Why – if she was dead?’

  Flat words, without emotion, leaden words. ‘So that she died at the hand of someone who loved her, and not theirs. In our time, not their time. It’s why we came back … The only thing I could do.’

  They reached the tunnel’s end. The bright light washed over them. Two hundred yards away, in Gus’s estimation, to the right was a raised road on which were personnel carriers and troops jumping down from trucks. The drone of a helicopter was overhead. There was open ground then rock-strewn cover, but that was a mile distant. The boy crawled forward and Gus followed him.

  From the side of his mouth, the boy whispered, ‘I thought it was to shoot the hangman.

  I do not understand, and …’

  ‘I don’t ask you to understand.’

  ‘… and, I do not think Major Hesketh-Prichard would understand.’

  The body had been dragged into the compound.

  The commander had seen the wound that had scattered the blood and tissue, brain and bone. Already the square in front of the gallows platform was emptied, and the work had begun to dismantle the scaffold. He was asked by one of them who had taken her out, who had the debris of her head on his tunic and picked laconically at it, whether the body was to be sent home, and he said it was to be buried, the grave not marked, and that a chainsaw was to be brought to the cell block.

  Commander Yusuf went into the block and the door of the cell was unlocked. He stood against the wall, in silence, as the men with him began to kick the brigadier’s prone body.

  Until the chainsaw was brought, he asked no questions.

  * * *

  The dog was in the drain.

  While he waited for the dog to emerge, Major Karim Aziz saw the personnel carriers manoeuvring on the raised road to drive down on to the open ground. He stood tall, so that he would be seen clearly – and he would be known – and waved them back. The personnel carriers, with their heavy engines and stinking fuel fumes, would distract his dog when it emerged from the tunnel and would disturb the scent. He fluttered his handkerchief to the crew of the nearest circling gun-ship helicopter, pointed to the far distance in the west, and the beast veered away. He had no intention of sharing the chase.

  Looked at casually, the ground ahead seemed flat, featureless, and without cover.

  Nothing was casual when Major Karim Aziz studied ground. There were shallow gullies worn away by the winter rain. One of the rain channels would lead to the tunnel’s mouth.

  He waited for the dog to show itself.

  The troops from the trucks on the raised road were forming, under their officers’

  orders, the line of a cordon behind h
im. He gestured that they should stay back. He slipped down, sat on a low rock, and watched for the dog.

  He did not think of his wife, who would now be at work in the hospital, or his sons; he did not think of the brigadier in his cell, without a hand to hold, who knew his name. Far ahead of him, scurrying and hidden in the network of rain gullies, was the man he hunted.

  The bright heat of the day beat down on him, the ground shimmered and distorted his view, but for once his own eyes were not so important because he had the nose of his dog.

  Away to the left, the dog came into view. It shook a rainbow of water off its coat. He whistled for it to sit.

  An officer stumbled, puffing, across the dirt ground.

  Aziz said curtly, ‘You do not come within a thousand metres of me. You are spectators. He is mine.’

  He went to the dog and praised it. Without the dog he would not have known where to search. At the mouth of the tunnel he could see the smears where their wet bodies had crawled, and bootprints.

  The dog led and he followed.

  They had reached the rough ground, where there were rocks, wind-stunted trees and low thorn bushes. They had cover now and could go faster. Sometimes they crawled and the sharp flinty stones worked rips into the padding on his knees and elbows. Sometimes they ran helter-skelter from rock to bush to rock to tree to rock, then paused while the boy made the fast, intuitive decision as to where their next immediate target point was. Gus’s heel hurt worst when they ran, and the pain of it rivered in his boot and up his leg. The boy looked back each time he paused in a shred of cover, but Gus did not. He was aware of a deepening frown of concern on Omar’s forehead, even though he said nothing.

  Gus did not look back because he would have seen the sprawl of the city’s suburbs then the high buildings jutting up, then the forest of faintly drawn antennae at the headquarters of Fifth Army. Hidden behind the sprawl, past the buildings, below the antennae, were the gate, the gallows and her.