Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

He was introduced to a general. He saluted, shook hands. Behind the general was a brigadier who looked up, through him, and returned to the study of the map spread on the table. He knew the brigadier, recognized him, but could not place where he had seen him.

He struggled to find it, before it was swept from his mind.

‘So, Baghdad has sent us a sniper.’ The general spoke scornfully. ‘One man to do with a rifle what an army with tanks and artillery and two divisions of infantry cannot achieve.’

‘Against a sniper, the best defence is a superior counter-sniper.’

The sneer formed. ‘With a dog and the fleas it carries.’

‘With my dog, yes.’

‘What do you need to know?’

‘I need to know the route the incursion has taken, and the exact position of the blocking force you have deployed.’

The silence hung in the room. The brigadier peered up from the map, then ducked his head and played with a pencil.

‘A blocking force has been deployed?’

The general said, without expression, ‘Your job, Major, is at a level of local tactics. Do not try to teach me strategy.’

‘I need to meet the eyewitnesses who saw the enemy’s sniper.’

They both stared at him before telling him when he could interrogate the witnesses. He was escorted out.

In a bare room with a small cupboard and an ironframed bed, he took a square of goatskin from his backpack and laid it in the corner as a mat for his dog, then filled the dog’s bowl with water. From a framed photograph on the wall, the President watched him, smiled down on him.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE.

2. (Conclusions after interview with Wing Co. Basil Peake RAF (Retd.) conducted by self and Ms Carol Manning – transcript attached.) MOTIVATION: A central focus point for AHP in making his journey to northern Iraq is the powerful influence of his grandfather. Ms Manning believes BP used his manipulative arguments to persuade AHP to travel and involve himself. Motivation is important for a sniper in a military theatre, but that importance will diminish quickly once AHP is involved in combat, and will ultimately be of little relevance. BP has old, legally held rifles, and from his youth AHP was, therefore, familiar with handling firearms, but BP was unable or unwilling to offer information concerning the necessary MIND-SET of the hunter that is crucial if the step from target marksman to sniper is to be made.

SUMMARY: Without that MINDSET, AHP will fail and if he fails he will be killed. No evidence of a military background. My earlier assessment stands: the chances of medium-term survival remain slim to nonexistent.

TEXT of letter sent to BP by Hoyshar – see transcript above.

(NB: The letter is the start, and may be the only indication we find as to what AHP hopes to achieve in northern Iraq. In my opinion, the end is a military impossibility.)

Esteemed brother Basil, I write to you at a time when I have not received any of your valued letters for two years. This letter will be given to SARAH of the Protect the Children, and only God will decide if it shall reach you.

It is now, esteemed brother, a moment of crisis in the recent history of our people. The Kurdish people, my people, in the mountains and in the towns and in the villages are filled with despair. We believe no longer in the will of the West to protect us from the Great Murderer.

We think that we are forgotten. When we have been forgotten then the Great Murderer will send his tanks and guns and aircraft to destroy us.

We understand that very little time is left to us. You will remember my dear granddaughter, my Meda. She now has twenty-five years. For one so young she has the fire of a lion in her breast, and she has power over men. I believe, esteemed friend, that the strength in her is God-given.

For a year she has visited many villages in our region and talked to women, and to men, of a new moment when the Kurdish people shall rise up to take their freedom from the Great Murderer. At first she could only talk. Then, three months ago, she was heard in Rost, near to the Sar i-Piran mountain, by a military commander of proven courage, the mustashar Haquim. She entranced him as she had the simple village people. He took her to Arbil and to Sulaymaniyah, and his influence as a fighting man enabled her to meet with agha Ibrahim and agha Bekir.

They are cunning men, men of deceit. They have fought the Great Murderer and they have kissed his cheeks. They bend when the wind is against them, and they go forward when the wind is behind them. They are corrupt dogs but they have power. Meda met them and talked to them about freedom. She looked in their faces, each in turn, Haquim told me, and she asked them did they want to live as the servant of the Great Murderer and in fear, or as proud men who had led their people to freedom? Did they want to be remembered as cowards or heroes?

She is just a young woman, and she demanded their answer. They could not refuse her. She promised them that she would bring them past the flame of Baba Gurgur, and into the square of Kirkuk.

Esteemed friend, she has the power over men and they did not dare to refuse her. It will be a small army at the beginning, but it will grow.

Each time she wins, more men will be given to her. She will have Haquim, whom I love like a son, at her side to guide her. She will be in God’s care. I cannot say whether this letter will reach you. If it is delivered with success to you, please, esteemed friend, look at your newspapers and your television and discover the day that she reaches Kirkuk.

This is not, of course, the calling-in of a debt, or for you to feel there is an old obligation that you carry, but any assistance you can offer would be a gift of the highest generosity. It is a great journey that she is beginning. She is the last chance of the Kurdish people. With pride, I pray for her.

I am, as always, honoured to call myself your friend, Hoyshar. *** Ken Willet had read the letter many times. It reached him, touched him. Each time he’d read it, scanned through the clear copperplate handwriting, he remembered the photograph in the kitchen of the old man sitting and the young woman standing beside him. He had patrolled in Northern Ireland before the ceasefire, he had heard shots fired in anger, but all he knew of combat was what had been taught him on the training grounds of the Welsh mountains. From his posting to the Ministry of Defence, he would move on to an administrative position at a barracks, then probably try his luck in the civilian world. He would never know about combat at first hand.

He felt, and he was not ashamed of it, a very great sadness. The force of the words played in his mind: ‘chances of medium-term survival remain slim to nonexistent’.

He’d let Omar lead him forward.

For Gus that was the act of faith, the first step.

‘You do it well and you stay with me, you do it poorly and you go back to cooking and carrying. There are no second chances, Omar,’ Gus had said, at the start of the stalk. He had tried to sound ruthless and brutal, but it was not in his nature. Omar had grinned back at him, then led.

They had come over a ridge and looked down on what Omar called the mujamma’a, what Haquim had called the Victory City, his lip curled in sarcasm, and what Gus thought of as a concentration camp. Far beyond the village was a town, then a crossroads, then the flame and Kirkuk, but all were hidden by the heat-haze of the afternoon. He had seen the original village, which had been flattened by explosives. Now he saw the replacement, sited in the centre of a desolate plateau of rock and bogland. No fields had been made, no strips cultivated. Outside a wire perimeter fence were groups of sheep and goats, pathetically thin, hunting for sustenance. Behind the fence, closed in by it, regimented rows of concrete block-houses were linked only by washing lines. Gus made a plan of the fence, the gate, the watchtowers and the single large building that dominated from the centre the ranks of block-houses. There was no grass to brighten the vista, and no flowers. The gate had been opened to admit a water tanker and a lorry.