Gerald Seymour: Holding the Zero

‘I came round two weeks ago. I thought that if he was here I could cook a meal for him. He was packing. It wasn’t a suitcase but the rucksack, and everything he put in was old, should have been thrown away years ago. I never did get round to cooking anything.

We made love on the bed beside the rucksack, and I wept all through it – it’s none of your business, but it was the best loving we ever did. He seemed to need it. I woke up early, and he’d gone… I don’t know why because he didn’t tell me, and I don’t know where he is.’

The music beside the stereo was bland, popular classics and easy listening. The books on the shelves were all technical shooting volumes. The pictures were anonymous prints of dull, well-worn country views. He thought that target marksmanship with an historic rifle consumed the man’s life – but there was nothing to tell Ken Willet, from what he rummaged through and saw, of the soul of the man. But there had to be something more, or he’d be here, not slogging in the missing boots through northern Iraq.

‘He’s just a nice man, a good man. I can’t tell you anything more.’

They left her.

Carol Manning drove the car away, down the road below the cathedral, from a cramped and unremarkable two-bedroomed maisonette.

‘Well?’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Is he a military wannabe – into all that Rambo crap?’

‘No. He shoots at targets with an historic weapon, and with great skill. His rifle is fifty-plus years old. He’s an enthusiast.’

‘A bloody anorak? Like one of those idiots on a platform writing down train numbers?’

Willet said evenly, ‘He shoots very straight. He wins prizes for hitting targets at a range of up to a thousand yards.’

‘It’s one thing to hit targets. What about killing people?’

‘I found nothing to indicate that he has the slightest interest in the military situation in-’

‘So what the hell’s he doing there?’

‘She said the letter was passed on by his grandfather. Ask him.’

‘Can’t today. Health and Safety says we’re entitled to a full day off after a night call-out. I’ve a lieu day tomorrow. Have to be the day after.’

‘I thought it was urgent.’

‘We do have entitlements. Doesn’t the army?’

‘Do you mind if I have a cigarette?’ Willet was reaching into his jacket pocket for the packet and his lighter.

‘It’s Service policy that no cigarettes, cigars or pipes are to be used in our vehicles.’

Willet said brightly, ‘Aren’t we lucky? Where he is, stomping through northern Iraq, passive smoking would seem low down on the problem list.’

It was a cheap point. He should have, but hadn’t, apologized. He wanted, rather desperately, to know more of a man who had packed up his life and gone without training and without military background to fight in someone else’s war.

‘I’d like, Ms Manning, to be with you on this one and follow it through. I’d like to learn about him.’

Her eyes never left the road. She asked brutally, ‘How long do you give him?’

‘Not long. Sorry, not long at all, but he’d be an idiot not to know that. If he’s gone to fight, front line, as a sniper, alongside irregulars, against a trained modern army, then he won’t survive. No chance at all.’

‘I have to leave you, Mr Peake,’ the voice whispered in his ear.

Gus had not been thinking of Meg, or of the office at Davies amp; Sons, or of his parents and the old wing commander (retired) who was his grandfather, and he had not been thinking of the Stickledown crew. They were all erased from his mind, as if a new life had replaced them.

He did not care whether Meg had slept that last night in bed at her home or whether she had been in his bed. He did not consider that his parents might have tossed through the last night, and those of the weeks before, in anxiety for his safety, or that they held his grandfather responsible for his going.

‘You have what you need, Mr Peake. You know what you will do?’

His view, through the fine netting over his face, stretched away from the rocky outcrop where he lay with Haquim across a slope of yellowed grass in which were set clumps of bright flowers, mauve, white and blue. There was then a ridge where the wind had eroded the soil and exposed more of the grey stone, then a valley gorge from which he could hear the tumble of a stream, then the further slope of the valley, pocked with more outcrops and more flower clusters. The sun was behind him, and intruding against the gentle blue of the sky was a single military pennant. Gus had a moment of doubt.

‘What if he doesn’t come?’

Gus could see a clean-cut low slit in the forward bunker’s facing wall of pale grey concrete, and further back was a similar shape over which the pennant flew. Between the forward bunker and the pennant was a narrow column of smoke, drifting haphazardly, but the pennant gave Gus an indication of the wind strength at what would be the end of the bullet’s flight, if he had a target to aim for. When his eye was off the sight, he watched the colours of the flowers and the movement of grass tufts, because the sway of the petals and the waft of the grass stems told him what would be the deflection of the bullet when it left the barrel at 2,970 feet per second, at 2,640 revolutions per second, if he had a target.

‘I know the way of officers. Each morning, however junior, if he has responsibility, he will inspect all his positions.’

‘What if I don’t see him? What if he’s going low through the communications trench?’

‘He is an officer of the Iraqi army. He will not permit his soldiers to see him cower.’

‘The radio?’

‘Do you think I have nothing more to do than to place you in position? Of course there is the radio. My problem is the radio, the wire, the mines, and my problem is wondering whether you make a hit. You have one chance. Everything depends on you taking that chance.’

Haquim’s hand caught at the back of his hood and held his hair, vice-like, then loosened it. It was not a gesture of friendship, or of support. Gus thought the man had tried to reinforce what he had said. They depended on him and there would be the one chance with the one shot. If Gus missed there would not be a second. The radio would be used to call up reinforcements; the advantage of surprise would be lost.

A different man, one from Augustus Henderson Peake’s past, might have crumpled under the burden of that responsibility. But the past was obliterated. A man had told him about positive thinking – can, will, must – the critical importance of mental conditioning, and the corrosive effect of stress. He had no time to wallow in the past. First, at dawn, he had estimated the distance, then confirmed his estimate with the range-finding binoculars, and all the time he had studied the flowers and the grass fronds, the smoke and the pennant for the wind. His mind was as tunnelled as his view through the ten-times magnification of the sight. Alone, spread-eagled among the rocks behind his rifle, his concentration only settling on the clear window through the sight’s lens, Gus never saw the goatherd and his flock’s slow progress far to the right.

The goatherd understood weapons. Hooked across the width of his back was a Russian-made SKS46 carbine, mass-manufactured half a century before. Its worn barrel was incapable of accurate shooting. If a wild dog was harrying his goats he could drive it off by firing over it, but to hit it he would have to be within fifty paces, and he could have thrown a stone that far. But the rifle was as much a part of him as the knife at his belt or the heavy footwear that carried him between the high grazing lands; it was a segment of his manhood. His friendship of more than twenty years with a shepherd was the most likely source of a new weapon.