Holding the Zero

by Gerald Seymour

  Gus thought he was blessed.

  In the scramble of his thoughts, as the residue of sleep was pushed aside, he realized the value of the cloud that sat tightly on him. Faces and voices slipped across his mind, competing for attention. Each gave him an opportunity, and it was no longer possible for Gus Peake to gather together the kit and the rifle and climb to the top of the slope.

  He murmured, ‘I am blessed because I am here and because you, sir, have followed me. There is no hate, no slogans of politics, there is no baggage of distrust. I don’t know what your shooting range is called, I don’t know where you go to pit yourself against opponents and elements. My range is Stickledown. It can be quite a pleasant place in summer – birds, flowers, good light – and it can be a hell of a place in winter, believe me, wind, rain and flat, dead emptiness all the way to the butts and the V-Bulls. Thank you for following me, because it’s like I’m on Stickledown and shooting for a silver spoon, and you’re on your range and shooting for whatever prize is important to you, and for both of us it is real. You could have walked away from me, I could have walked away from you, and both of us would have been left with dried-out lives. Do you understand me, sir, am I making sense? No-one else will understand me or understand you but, then, I don’t think either of us would ask them to. We are blessed, we can only use the blessing. I’d like to have met you, and talked with you, but …’

  He could not hear the rambled words he murmured. It might have been the tiredness, the pain or the hunger, but he felt, to a slight degree, better and more settled for having talked. He thought those other voices – from the kitchen, the factory, on the Common, at the tent camp, in the office, on the bench – would have understood what he said, and why.

  Blessed …

  He shook himself, cleared the chaff from his mind. The talk was finished. He was blessed because he was given time by the density of the cloud hanging in the valley.

  Where he lay there was sparse cover from stubby wind-broken bushes with the first buds of bilberry fruit and a rock that covered his shoulders and flattened lifeless bracken.

  It was a useful place for a firing position. He felt a keening breath of wind on his face: he must use his time because soon the wind would carry away the cloud cover and he would be able to see what lay before him. He rummaged in the rucksack for rounds of his Green Spot ammunition, took two from the tissue paper in which they were individually wrapped to prevent scrape noise. The magazine was already loaded on the rifle, five bullets, and he did not believe he would have an opportunity to fire more than one. He polished the two rounds so that the Full Metal Jackets shone, would catch the light when the cloud was gone. He had no string, or bandages, so he unwound the towel from the barrel and working parts of the rifle, made slits in it with his penknife at the ends then tore off narrow strips of fraying cotton. He knotted them together. Because of the thinness of the strips, the cotton rope he made would not take a weight and would snap at a violent pull, but it would be of sufficient strength for his purpose. He would have liked it longer, but that was not possible. He tied one end of the slim rope to a shoulder-strap of the rucksack and tested the knot with a gentle jerk. The rucksack shivered with a slight movement.

  He was satisfied. His hand dipped again into the rucksack and retrieved a khaki woollen ski hat, and used the penknife to snip off more stems of the bilberry bushes, weaving them between the stitching.

  He placed the rucksack half behind the rock and masked it with bracken fronds. He laid the two rounds of Green Spot ammunition on top, and behind them he put a stone the size of his hand. Over the stone he placed the wool hat.

  He crawled away, paying out the length of towel rope, burying its length under further pieces of bracken. He used the sideways crawl – which they had shown him on the common and called the ‘slug’ crawl – so that the trail was minimal. When he had paid out the towel rope he was some twenty feet away from the rucksack. He was on a flat ledge of broken-down bracken, without stones, rocks or bushes, without serious cover.

  Gus could not tell how long he would have the protection of the cloud. He worked at controlled speed, but not in panic, to snatch at the bracken, tear it up and make a blanket of it over his boots, legs, body and head, and over the rifle, the sight and the barrel. Then he draped the hessian net over the brightness of the ’scope’s lens.

  He settled, waited on the wind, and wondered what his opponent was doing.

  Through patience, Major Karim Aziz had learnt to hold the present in perpetuity, at the expense of past and future. The patience was based, as if embedded in concrete, on certainty.

  He had slept for three hours. He had woken and immediately felt alert and alive. His resting place, chosen in pitch darkness, was under a flat slab stone that jutted out over a small table of grass that in turn gave way to sheltered ochre bracken fronds. If he had thought of the past or the future, he would have walked down the slope, through the blanket of cloud, and climbed the far side to safety.

  Patiently he had watched the wall of lightening grey mist that was around him until, imperceptibly, it began to fragment. He had confidence in himself, and in the man he thought of as a friend, and confidence in his dog.

  The cloud had started to break above his eyeline.

  First there were lighter points, then blue islands, then a first glimpse of the sun. The cloud served him well, satisfied him. It had blocked out the early-rising sun, which would have peeped over the ridge on the far side of the valley and beamed onto him. He would have been looking into the sun in the early morning and his side of the valley would have been illuminated. It would have been the point of maximum danger when the sun’s strength caught the colouring of his face, penetrating under the stone slab, nicking the lens of his ’scope. Later, when the cloud blanket was burned away and the sun was higher, the stone slab would throw down deep shadow over him and his rifle. Much later, towards the end of the day, the sun would be behind him and its power would fall on the far slope. Then it would search for the man, his friend … That was the present, and all else was forgotten.

  When the sun fell on him, through the cloud gaps, he squirmed as far back as possible into the cavity under the stone slab, and his hand gently, tenderly, ruffled the hair at the dog’s throat. His preparations were made and he had no doubt that the man, his friend and adversary, had stayed.

  As the cloud thinned, pushed away by the wind, so the vista of the valley opened before him. There were gullies of dark rock with silver ribbons of water from the night’s rain; scattered trees, clumps of wild fruit bushes, small patches of gorse, bracken and heather littered the rocky ground. There were dispersed rocks, open stone screes, and pockets of grass. It was good terrain for him and for his friend. He stared out over the carpet of cloud that filled the bottom of the valley, where its dispersal would be slowest, using his binoculars with a cotton net over them. He thought that a lesser man than himself would have peered at the unveiled expanse and harboured doubts.

  He would not want to fire the one bullet, ready in the breech mechanism of the Dragunov, until the sun was behind him, playing on the slope opposite, but he had already made the necessary preparations for that moment, still many hours away. His patience would see him through the waiting. He was on his stomach and his head was behind the ’scope, his body twisted so that his legs could splay out under the slab. He would be hundreds of minutes in that position, without food, without water and without sleep. He was as comfortable as he could make himself as he studied the ground on the valley’s far side. There was a symmetrical shape to it. He estimated that the twin ridges bounding the valley were 1,300 metres apart. Both then fell sharply before flattening to a more gradual incline that in each case, at its limit, almost made a level plateau. On his side, looking across the cloud floor, he was close to the lip of that plateau. He reckoned that its forward edge on the far side, matched and dotted with trees, occasional protruding rocks, bushes and weather-flattened bracken, was 700 metres from his position. Below th
e lip, where he looked from and where he looked to, were cliff faces that fell into the cloud, tumbled stones and rare paths where animals or shepherds had made precarious tracks. There were fissures now in the cloud floor below and he could hear more distinctly the roll of a water torrent among rocks. Directly facing him was a rambling track that led up, across the plateau and then towards the far ridge, similar in every way to the one on his side down which his dog had led him before he had veered off and stumbled into the cavity below the slab.

  From the side of his mouth, he whispered to the dog, ‘You have to be very strong and very patient, but I think my friend is there. In this life, nothing can be guaranteed, but I do not think the man, my friend, would run from me. My concern is the casualty he carried and his desire to find help for the child guide, but he is very tired. He has carried the child, who must have been precious to him, for a great distance – I could not have done that – but I cannot believe he would have had the strength in the time that was available to him to take the casualty up the first difficult climb, then across the easier plateau, then up the second climb. But, more important, I do not think that such a man would pass over the chance to face me. We are solitary people – I laugh when I say it, we are also possessed of a great arrogance – and we wait for the day when we can confront an equal.

  What else is there, in this life, but to take up a challenge that is offered? I do not think he will have cheated me.’

  He passed a biscuit to the dog, the last and damp from the bottom of the backpack, and apologized that he had not brought more food for it.

  A shaft of sunlight broke the mist cover below him.

  He saw the body, laid out on a smoothed wide stone around which the swollen river funnelled.

  There was a dark stain high on the shoulder. It had been laid there with dignity and he saw, through the binoculars, that the eyes had been closed and that the arms had been laid at rest at the sides, and he thought the young face was at peace, the pain gone.

  The body was where he was guaranteed to see it. The sun blazed down, destroyed the mist. He had not been cheated. He had not doubted the man, his friend.

  Very carefully, concerned that he should not make sudden movements, Major Karim Aziz began to scan the steep slopes and the plateau across the valley, over the body.

  ‘Oh, by the way – I should have told you this morning, just didn’t get round to it – last night on my voicemail, my leave has come through,’ Ms Manning said. ‘All the days in lieu that I’m owed, two weeks – thank God.’

  ‘What are you going to do with it?’ Willet looked up from the console that he had just switched on.

  ‘I’ve got to see my mother, she’s had a bit of bronchitis, and I thought of a week’s sunshine break, Tenerife or—’

  ‘That’ll be nice,’ he said heavily. He pointed to the screen. ‘What do I do with this?’

  ‘Slam it in, and get on with other things. It’s finished, as far as I can see – look, it’s been good working with you, but there’s no-one else to see. We did what we were asked to do.’

  Willet said coldly, ‘I don’t suppose there is anyone left to see.’

  ‘This sort of business always ends with a whimper. I don’t like it any more than you, but it’s what happens. Maybe we’ll meet up again.’

  Willet gazed into her face. ‘He’s a victim. Won’t anything be done about the people who used him?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so,’ she said. ‘They’re always forgotten, always hidden, always protected, those people.’

  ‘A victim, for Christ’s sake …’

  She fidgeted for a moment, awkward, then said, ‘I don’t deal the cards. It’s been good knowing you. My advice, meant kindly, type it up, hand it in, and start at something else.’

  ‘He deserves more …’

  She pulled the door closed behind her with the firmness of finality.

  His fingers rattled on the keyboard.

  AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE

  9. (Conclusions after interview with George — (identity unknown), SIS

  Vauxhall Bridge Cross, conducted by self and Ms Manning, transcript attached.)

  VICTIM: AHP in my opinion was manipulated by SIS. A man of limited intelligence and sparse experience, he was encouraged to travel to northern Iraq and involve himself in a harebrained scheme where other more powerful forces might win, where he would most certainly lose.

  BLAME: There was a trail of Open Doors. SIS was at the heart of a programme aimed at deceiving AHP. The trail, and direct responsibility for it, leads to SIS. They and many others should take accountable responsibility for the utter precariousness of AHP’s position.

  SUMMARY: For a raft of reasons, AHP was allowed to travel to northern Iraq with a ‘slim to non-existent’ chance of survival, in order to push forward matters of HMG policy. He was an innocent. His inevitable fate is a matter of public scandal.

  TO BE COMPLETED

  Irritably and impatiently, he flicked into the file for the number. When he had dialled it, and it had been answered, Willet had to wait a full four minutes for the junior-school teacher, Meg, to be brought to the telephone in the headmistress’s office.

  He blurted breathily, ‘It’s Willet here, I met you on that disgraceful early morning when we barged into Mr Peake’s home. You should know that he is currently in northern Iraq, being hounded by a pursuit force of the Iraqi army. There are many who are culpable for his situation, but you should also know that you are one of the few without blame. I apologize for disturbing you … It’s not your fault but it’s in the hands of the gods now.’

  There was a shocked, stunned silence, then the phone rang off.

  He would deal first with those who were without blame. He dialled the number of a vicarage built in the countryside under old trees, but the phone was not picked up. Then he rang the number for the modern bungalow behind the vicarage, and heard a faint, aged voice.

  ‘Wing Commander Peake? It’s Willet, from MoD – I came to see you with Ms Manning of the Security Service. I have to tell you that I have a very poor view of elderly men sending the young to their deaths. Your grandson is somewhere, at this moment, behind Iraqi lines and hunted like a dog – because of you. You indoctrinated him with that rubbish history of your “friendship” with Hoyshar, the Kurd. You fed it like bacteria into his system. You took him back there ten years ago and further infected him. You passed on to him the letter that has probably killed him. You, because of your background at Habbaniyah and in the Kurdish region, had occasional contact with the Secret Intelligence Service, and I believe that you informed them of the letter. You set this process in motion. Where doors should have been locked in the face of your grandson, they were opened and his journey was made possible. What you couldn’t achieve yourself, you sent someone else to do. I hope you can live with that, what you’ve done to your own blood. Good-day, Wing Commander.’

  The line of troops had bivouacked in small cluster knots for the night, and endured the storm.

  At dawn they’d been caught in the cloud and had had to wait until it dispersed.

  The line had formed again, and pressed on. They had reached the ridge and seen the body. The officer, on the radio, reported back to Fifth Army in Kirkūk that, beyond boot marks in the mud at the summit of the ridge, there was no sign of the foreign sniper, or of Major Karim Aziz, and that the valley below him seemed at a cursory glance to be empty

  … except for the body. The officer said that the body confused him: it was not abandoned, not dumped, but laid out as if it were a sign or a symbol that he did not understand.

  The troops around the officer squatted down and began to eat their rations.

  He lay across the line they took.

  They had red-brown bodies and were twice the size of what Gus knew from home.

  Each of them, each of the thousands, found him blocking their track, crawled onto his body, then diverted in search of his flesh, and bit him. Every last one of the little bastards bit him fierce
ly. They had fangs and venom, and they bit his ankles and the skin at his waist, and were up under the gillie suit. They found the skin at his throat and his face, and they bit his hands.

  The bites, the injections of the venom, were all over his body, itching and hurting.

  Anywhere else he would have paused from lining up his aim on the target and would have swept the little bastards to oblivion. He could not move. He could not swat them and could not scratch the wounds they left him with. When he eased his glance to the right he could see them coming for him in a long, limitless line.

  It might have been for half an hour that the ants crossed him and crawled on the rifle, and after them it was the turn of the flies.

  The sun was high and had settled a haze over the valley when the flies came in the wake of the ants. There would have been his sweat to attract them and the raw pimple wounds with the blood, and the urine that he had leaked into his trousers. They flew against his hands and face, hovered in front of his blinking eyes, insinuated under his face net, up his nostrils and into his ears. The flies inflicted more wounds and drew more blood. After them were mite-sized creatures from the bilberry bushes, then spiders from the bracken circled him and feasted.

  He remembered the bubble. Inside it, where it never rained and was never too hot, where the wind never blew, there were no ant columns, no flies, no mites and no bloody spiders. He imagined himself to be inside the bubble’s comfort.

  The sun at its height, with its haze, seemed to burn steam off the floor of the valley.

  His eyes were tiring from the long hours of searching through the ’scope. He whose eyes lasted best would win. It was hard to see the detail on the valley floor through the steam mist and sometimes the body of the boy was reduced to a blurred outline. Hard, too, to gaze across the valley and identify individual rocks, particular bushes and isolated clumps of vegetation that made cover.