Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

Very carefully he drew the plan of the village and he began to understand: it had been built away from a source of water and away from good grazing land, so that the village people were dependent on their guards to provide them with life support. Without it they starved. The boy had good eyes and revelled in the power of the telescope. Twice he had pointed to small sandbagged bunkers that Gus had missed. Everything he saw, and that Omar found for him, Gus marked on his plan. He studied the command post. He saw an officer, a machine-gun placed behind a parapet on the flat roof, and the queue of shuffling villagers form at the main door to receive their small packages of food. It was a place of dreary certainty, and he thought that one day would be the same as another… but not tomorrow.

While he made the plan, he whispered to Omar about the work of an observer. He was not good at sharing even the little information he knew. All his knowledge of shooting was based on his taking supreme responsibility for his own skills and shortcomings. But tomorrow he could not be alone. He was searching for a vantage-point to the side, where there was sufficient elevation for his eyeline to clear the block-house roofs, from which he could see the entrance door to the command post. Away to his left, several hundred yards from where he and the boy lay, was a barren hillside, without obvious cover. If they were there and the machine-gun found them, they would die. If they did not live, the attack would fail.

‘Omar, don’t move, don’t point, don’t move your head fast. The hill to the left…’

‘Where there is nowhere to hide, Mr Gus?’

‘Yes, where there is nowhere to hide. Can you see a place for us?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Not perhaps. Yes or no?’

‘Of course, Mr Gus.’

‘Really, yes or no. Which?’

‘There are better places.’

‘It’s where we have to be, Omar. Yes or no?’

The boy was learning. He moved the hessian-covered telescope, netting over the lens, so slowly. Then he settled and his eye was locked to it. Every bush on the hillside had been cut down for firewood, every tree felled. The slope was of dull brown, winter-dead earth, as if the snow and the rain had eroded the life from it.

‘If we are on the ridge, above the hill…’

‘Too far for me to shoot.’

There was silence between them. Gus tilted his head to watch every movement around the command post, as if each moment that he saw the villagers and the soldiers, tramping in the mud around the building, was precious. The water tanker and the lorry left. He focused on the machine-gun position. Was the officer more important, or the machinegun? Omar tugged his arm. ‘There is a place.’

‘I can’t see it. Are you sure?’ Gus had his binoculars on it, but saw only the featureless slope of the hillside.

‘Yes, Mr Gus… ’

‘Omar – do you love Meda?’

‘I love her, Mr Gus – not fuck-love, but love.’

‘If you haven’t got a place, if the machine-gun finds us and Meda is leading the attack, afterwards it will kill her… So you have to be sure.’

‘Very sure, Mr Gus.’

‘Can you get me there in the dark, no light, and can you get me out in the day?’

The boy nodded soberly. ‘I think so, Mr Gus.’

‘If you can’t, Omar, Meda is dead.’

He knew tomorrow would be different from any experience in his life. The thought of it chilled him. He wondered how he would sleep that night, if he would sleep.

‘Don’t try to please me,’ Major Karim Aziz had said, to each of them separately. ‘Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear. Do not be definite about anything you are not certain of. I want only the truth.’

He had heard what the corporal and the goatherd had said, then he had told the guards that both were to be fed a full hot meal but in different rooms so that neither knew what the other had told him. While they were eating, he had gone away to the intelligence unit and demanded they produce for him large-scale maps and aerial photographs. When he had pored over them, he had gathered up those that would help him and had returned to talk with each of them again.

The corporal’s story didn’t alter, but the goatherd had seen the man, his man. ‘My friend was shot from across the valley, and I do not lie to you, Major. God strike me if I lie to you, but I have never known of a man who could shoot at such a distance… But I saw him, Major. He was sitting in the sun’s light against the wall of the house of my friend, and the rifle he held was bigger than any rifle I have ever seen. He was dressed in clothes that made him look like the earth and the bushes. He is not a peshmerga, Major, because I never saw one of them with such a rifle or who dressed in such a way.’

He took the maps and the photographs back to his room. He fed Scout, and when he settled at the table the dog nestled against his feet. The Dragunov was laid on the table with the maps and photographs. It was, he reflected, the moment for which he had prepared himself through a military career of twenty-six long years. He had killed many men, but in battle the ultimate conflict of sniper against counter-sniper had always eluded him. Everything else he now stripped from his mind. It would be an elemental struggle for supremacy, himself against an expert. Alone in his room, with the dog’s snoring to calm him, there was no admission in Aziz’s mind that the man confronting him would best him.

It was not for glory, medals, the reward of money, for killing; it was the lure of a primitive struggle between two men for supremacy in the science of fieldcraft and the skill of marksmanship. He thanked his god for the opportunity.

The conflicts began in earnest before the attack. Meda wanted to lead the attack. Haquim insisted she stay with him, in the rear. Meda wanted a frontal assault. Haquim demanded they charge the right flank of the village. Meda wanted their own machine-gun to fire on the watchtowers. Haquim said the concentration of fire should be against the command post. Meda wanted Gus close to her, shooting in support of her dash towards the fences.

Haquim told her that the marksman would decide where he placed himself.

The commentary came from Omar. It was painful to Gus. His carefully drawn plan of the village was laid on the ground between them, illuminated by a shaded torch. He thought everything Haquim said made sense, but Meda rejected it, as if governed by a wild obstinacy. When his suggestion was rejected, Haquim doggedly, fruitlessly, pursued it. It was just a damn waste of time, and Gus played no part in the running sore of their disputes – her arrogance against Haquim’s experience.

‘I know about war,’ Haquim said, and Omar whispered it.

‘You know about losing at war,’ Meda said, and Omar giggled as he translated. ‘The men follow me, not you…’ There was a shout behind her, her name was called. She pushed herself up. ‘I will lead. I will be the first to the fence, the first to the command post, and they will follow me.’

She disappeared into the darkness.

Gus and Haquim studied the plan. Gus sensed the anger of Haquim at the humiliation thrown on him by her. But he knew that the mustashar would not walk away from her, as he would not. They agreed the position to be taken by Gus and Omar, the angle of the machine-gun’s fire, and the direction of the charge.

‘And she will lead?’ Gus asked heavily.

‘What am I supposed to do? Chain her to a rock? Bind her legs? If she goes down, is hit, then everything for us is finished.’ Haquim shrugged. ‘What can I do?’

‘I will watch for her, as best I can,’ Gus said.

‘As I will, as we all will, as best we can, as much as she will allow us.’

There was a growing murmur of voices behind them. Two pinpricks of light were advancing imperceptibly up the incline of the hill, and both took as a beacon the central guttering fire of their camp. Gus watched. It was because of her that the new men tramped across the black wastes of open ground, and came to them. The lights they carried lit their wild, bearded faces and their weapons glinted. They came as gliding, savage caravans in the night, carrying rifles, mortar tubes and ammunition boxes, the silver shimmer of knife blades at their belts. She walked towards them, and Gus saw the way that those at the front quickened their stride, while those at the rear ran to catch up.