Gerald Seymour: Holding the Zero

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.