Gerald Seymour: Holding the Zero

Gus did not know whether he had done enough to kill a man.

He was surprised.

He had thought better of his friend.

The dog pointed for him. Ahead of the point was an upstanding rock surrounded by a meld of downed bracken and sprouting bilberry. Aziz’s track through the ’scope sight had gone a minimum of a dozen times past the rock and not lingered on it because it had seemed to him too obvious a place for a sniper of quality to choose for concealment.

But there had been movement at the rock, he had seen it, and there had been two moments of bright reflected light that had caught the lowering sun. He had blinked, then slipped a finger from the trigger guard and wiped hard at his eyes, which were old for the work and starting imperceptibly to fail him, and he saw the olive-green shape.

On the shape, indistinct, bracken and bilberry were set as camouflage.

He thought the clear, angled line of the shape was the shoulder of the man, his friend.

His eyes smarted and he wiped them again. The dog he loved – seldom admitting it -in whom he trusted, had not backed off from the movement, and still pointed at the target.

The wind had not risen and not fallen; no adjustment was necessary to that turret or to the distance turret.

It was said amongst the best of the snipers, those with whom he wished to walk, that they should cultivate the sixth sense, the intuition of danger, but Major Karim Aziz was too tired, too wearied, to recall what he had read or what he knew.

His last thought, before he fired into the chest of the body, where the clear lines did not match the lie of the ground, was that the man had disappointed him by choosing a place to hide as obvious as the upstanding rock.

The crash of the shot burst in his ears, and the butt hammered against the bone of his shoulder.

The crack.

The gabble of syllables in his throat.

The thump.

Gus screamed.

The scream came from deep in his gut, from far down in his throat. The scream was pain, shock. He tilted his head up so that the scream would echo over the space of the valley, and he gave the final ravaging pull to the towel rope.

When the scream died, when the rucksack toppled and was still, there was a small silence. Then the crows rose from the body, chorused the scream and gave it strength.

It was how Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard would have done it, and Crum and Corbett, and Forbes, and the glassmen who were Lord Lovat’s gamekeepers. It was what Kulikov had done when he lay beside Zaitsev, and Konings had fired.

After the scream, the quiet fell, and the birds circled and dived again.

His ’scope roved close to where he had first seen the dog on the far side of the valley.

He saw the face. It was, because nothing had altered with time, as the old men would have predicted. It was grey against the shadow under the stone slab. Nothing was different since Konings had fired, and Kulikov had screamed, and Zaitsev had seen the face, the target.

Gus took the deep breath to still the beat of his heart, then let the air slowly slip from his lungs, held it – began the slow and steady squeeze of the trigger.

Sarah’s head ducked to her knees and the first tears gleamed on her cheeks.

Joe swigged on the water bottle, and threw it – half full – away from him.

Rybinsky reached in his hip pocket for the roll of American dollars, peeled off a twenty, and passed it to Joe, but it was not taken and fluttered loose, drifting in the wind towards the ridge of the valley.

Further down the slope, the dog still pointed.

At the bottom of the slope, the crows again pecked at their feast, undisturbed by the moment.

Across the valley, the commander swore, turned away, and thought of the children who were precious to him and the enemies who would gather.

The sun teetered on the ridge, blood-crimson red, and its flame seemed dulled.

It was the last moment in which Major Karim Aziz, skilled instructor and failed traitor, husband and father, could touch the present. When the moment of triumph passed – and it was clear in his mind – he must confront the past and the future.

To touch the present, the triumph, he squirmed forward from the cavity, and he felt the aching stiffness, the coming cramp pains.

He could not see, from the back of the cavity, the triumph. He must witness it, indulge himself. Then he would rightfully walk with the great men of history. He could not yet see the body and the now useless rifle of the man he had thought of as his friend. At that great range, Aziz did not realize that the angle of the dog’s head had shifted fractionally, that the line of the dog’s eyes and nose was towards open ground twenty paces beyond the upstanding rock.

Without witnessing it, the triumph was diminished.

He lifted his head higher.

He did not hear the shot, did not see the vortex of the bullet’s swirl, he did not feel the strike of the bullet. He was thrown back into the depth of the cavity.

Gus stood, stretched, then bent down to pick up the ejected cartridge case, and pocketed it.

He trembled.

The bracken he had spread over his body, his head and the rifle barrel cascaded down to his boots.

He left behind him the smoothed hollow where he had lain through a part of a night and the whole of a day, and the length of towel rope that was the mark of a killer’s deceit.

He walked, awkward and swaying, to the rucksack and could not still the shiver in his hand as he untied the towel’s knot to it. Then he dropped the hat and the two polished bullets into it. It was only when he lifted the rucksack to throw it on his shoulder that he saw the clean pencil-sized hole in its fabric.

He walked on, where before he had crawled, with a drunken stride. There would be guns on the far ridge, at the extreme of their range, but he did not care.

It was over.

Where there had been excitement there was now only a desperate emptiness that numbed him.

He came to the dog and heard the low, throttled growl. If he had died it would have been because of the dog. It did not back away from him and had no fear of him, and the hackles rose on its neck. He had watched the path of the bullet towards the man who had trained the dog, and in two long seconds the excitement had drained, as he saw the man pitched back into darkness, and he did not know whether the man was wounded, in pain, bled, or was dead.

Gus reached down, grasped the scruff of the dog’s neck and lifted it – as old Billings lifted dogs – and he slid its small shape up under the weight of his smock, and he thought that was the least he could do for the man who had hunted him and who had been beaten only by the scream. He was crushed by the emptiness in his soul, and he did not know of the wild, thrilled excitement that he had given to the man he had shot.

He did not know that he would shoot again, in two weeks, on the range at Stickledown and that Bellamy, Rogers and Smyth would crawl off their mats to watch the accumulation of the yellow markers on the V-Bull, and that Cox would pack away his Garand rifle, hover behind him and shake his head in awe, that Jenkins would rummage in his kit for an old, tarnished silver spoon and present it to him, that the report of the vintage Lee Enfield No. 4, Mark 1 (T) would blast out over the familiar heathland.

And he did not know that a young officer, from the Ministry of Defence, would come and grip his hand, mutter apologies to his sun-gaunt and hurt-ravaged face, when he would not understand what offence demanded apology.

And he did not know that for a month the city of Kirkuk would be under military dusk-to-dawn curfew because her name was scrawled on walls and beside her name was painted the crude outline of a rifle shape topped by the bulk of a telescopic sight and that a torturer would be recalled to Baghdad for investigation.