Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

Willet looked up from the page. He had filled all the space under the heading of MOTIVATION. There was a feeble sunlight on the window behind the old man, but he could see the bright boldness of the flowers on the lawns.

‘When did the letter come?’ Ms Manning asked briskly.

‘A month ago… That day on the mountains Gus met my friend and my friend’s family, and he met Meda, who was then a teenager. When the letter came last month, it was about freedom for a far-away people. Do you think, my dear, I’ve deserved a coffee break?’

She made the coffee while Willet carried the plate, cup, glass and the cutlery from the table and washed them up. The captain’s eyes were drawn to a curled photograph stuck with adhesive tape to a kitchen unit. On the slope of a hill, a thousand blurred faces behind them, a grizzle-faced man sat on a rock with a girl behind him, her hands on his shoulders. Defiance blazed from her eyes, which were compelling and erotic in their power.

Ms Manning carried the coffee mugs back into the living room.

‘Right, so a letter came, and you showed that letter to your grandson… ’

They crossed high, bare ground. Sometimes, rarely, they had the cover of wind-stripped clumps of trees, but the column mostly hugged the little valleys and ravines created by the rainstorms and snow-melt of centuries. Until they reached a flat ridge, pocked with rock outcrops, they were the lone inhabitants of a wilderness.

Gus plodded at the back, weighed down by the rucksack and the rifle bag. The wind diluted the warmth of the sun, and it was hard for him to maintain the pace of the peshmerga because the bulk of the gillie suit impeded him. He was behind Haquim who, even with the disability of his knee, seemed to move more easily over the jagged stones and the small, hidden bogs. Gus felt the sting of a blister on his right heel. Meda was in the leading group, moving fast, never looking behind her to see how he coped.

He had formed in his mind what he wanted to say.

The men and Meda had settled on the ground, amongst the rocks in the lee of the ridge.

Some chewed at food, some bickered quietly, some laughed softly as if they were told an old and favourite joke, some cupped the water from a spring’s source, some lay prone with their eyes closed. Haquim had reached them and sat on a stone and massaged his knee. Gus was going slower, and the tear in the skin at his right heel was opening. The boy was watching two men as they cleaned the breech of their heavy machine-gun…

Nobody came back to help him as he struggled forward. He was bathed in self-pity. With his rifle and his skill, he was of critical importance to them. He didn’t have to be there…

Gus heaved the rucksack off his back and carefully lowered the carrying case to the ground, onto the tufted yellow grass and the weathered rock. He untied the laces of his right boot, pulled off the sock, and examined the reddened welt of the blister. He rummaged in his rucksack for the small first-aid box, and selected a square of Elastoplast to cover the broken skin. He let the freshness of the air bathe his bare foot.

‘Put your sock and boot back on.’

He hadn’t heard Haquim’s approach, was not aware of him until the man’s shadow fell on him.

‘It needs to breathe.’

‘Put them back on.’

‘When we’re ready to move.’

‘You need to do it now.’

‘Why?’

‘If the Iraqis ambush us, we will not ask them to stop and wait, while one amongst us pulls his sock and his boot back on.’

He felt hurt, as if degraded. ‘Yes. Right.’

‘And, Mr Peake, you do not question what I tell you.’

‘My foot hurts.’

‘Do you see others complaining? If it is such a big matter to you that your foot hurts, perhaps you should not have come.’

His head down, Gus heaved on his sock and his boot. Haquim was turning away. Gus said, ‘I want somebody to be with me, to help me.’

‘To carry your sack? Have all the men not enough to carry already?’

Gus said evenly, ‘I want someone with me when I shoot.’

‘I will choose someone.’

‘No.’ Gus’s voice rose. ‘I do it, it has to be my choice.’

‘You give yourself great importance.’

‘Because it is important.’

‘Later, then, when we stop for the next rest.’

‘Thank you.’ Gus had finished retying his bootlace.

The column moved forward again. He heaved on his rucksack, lifted the rifle in its bag onto his shoulder, and gingerly put his weight on his right foot.

When the line of men passed through a small gully that broke the ridge, a great vista was laid out in front of them. Gus’s eyes travelled over the sloping ground, the lower ridges, the distant curls of smoke above a faraway cluster of buildings, and on towards the single flame burning bright in a haze of lighter grey. Twenty miles away, and it was still a beacon, the flame at Kirkuk. He looked down on the ground that was to be the battlefield he would fight over.

Once again, the target had not come in the night.

On a bright, crisp morning, before the heat of the day settled over it, Major Karim Aziz reached the al-Rashid camp.

He showed his identification to the sentries at the gate, his name was checked off a list and he was shown where to park.

He’d known many who had come here on similar bright, crisp mornings in their best uniforms, who had been picked up by camp transport and who had never been seen again.

He had shut out the picture of the disappeared men and their families from his mind.

The transport pulled up beside his car. He had driven out to al-Rashid in a daze of tiredness and now he sleepwalked to the van.

Since the bombing of 1991 the camp had been rebuilt, the rubble removed, the craters filled in. The van took him past the many complexes of the Estikhabarat. There were the buildings occupied by the headquarters personnel of the second-in-command, a staff major general, those that liaised with Regional Headquarters, those that controlled the Administration Section, the Political Section, the Special Branch and the Security Unit.

He saw the batteries of anti-aircraft guns, and the clusters of ground-to-air missiles.

The van stopped outside a squat building. From the set of the windows he could see the thickness of the reinforced-concrete walls, painted in camouflage colours, and on the roof was a farm of aerials and satellite dishes. The armed guard opened the door for him and smiled. He wondered whether the guard always smiled at an officer summoned early in the morning to this building.

When he had reached home again after the night on the flat roof, he had clung to his wife briefly, then she had shrugged him off. It was unspoken, but she blamed him for the fiasco of his birthday celebration. The children had gone to school, her parents had stayed in their lean-to annexe at the back of the house. His wife, without a backward glance at him, had gone for the bus to the hospital. Then, alone in his home, he had checked through every item in the sports bag under the bed to satisfy himself that nothing incriminating could be found there… He did not know how he would resist torture…

What could have damaged them, him, he had buried in the garden.

At the inner guard desk of the building he was asked to enter his name. There was another smile, and a finger jabbed towards his belt. He unhooked the clasp, passed the webbing belt over the desk, and with it the holster holding the Makharov pistol.

He was led down the corridor, then up a flight of stairs, then on to another corridor.

He had to make the effort to kick his legs in front of him. The panic was growing, the urge to turn and run insistent, but there was nowhere to turn and no-one to run to. He heard the boom of his boots on the smooth surface of the corridor’s floor.