Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

She held out her arms and the columns broke as they scattered to gather in front of her.

They squatted down and she talked to them. They rippled their approval.

‘What does she say?’

Haquim responded grimly, ‘She says that, through their courage, the Kurdish people will find freedom. That they are the heirs of Salah al-Din Yusuf. And that mercy is shown to an enemy only by a man who is weak. She says the Kurds will not find their freedom before they have killed every Iraqi soldier in the country that is their own. She says

…’

Gus walked away, turned his back on her.

He would be, and he knew it, tomorrow, a changed man – for ever changed.

All day the Israeli had listened to the radios as they sucked down the crypted and clear messages from Fifth Army headquarters to the forward echelon positions.

In the shadowlands of intelligence gathering, Isaac Cohen understood the need to recognize a crucial moment of advantage. The moment might be micro-brief. In a struggle lasting years, the moment of advantage might exist only for a few hours. Many times in a veteran’s career with the Israeli Defence Force, then with the Mossad, the window of advantage had flickered open, sometimes to be exploited and sometimes ignored with heavy and enduring consequences. As a lieutenant in an armoured unit he had been pushed across the Canal in the Yom Kippur war when intelligence had recognized the advantage to be gained from hitting the hinge between the Egyptian Third and First armies. As an operating field agent of the Mossad, he had sat in on those endless debates as to the right time to eliminate activist leaders of the terrorist Hamas organization on the West Bank. Was the better advantage gained from killing the bomb-makers as soon as they were identified, or letting them run under surveillance in the hope of more names or locations surfacing? Once, it had been decided that a man should stay free, and the moment of advantage had been lost: a 10-kilo TNT bomb had killed 13 and wounded 170 more in a bloodbath at the Jerusalem food market. He was now in his isolated posting because of the failure of his superiors to recognize that a moment of advantage had passed. Everything was about advantage.

He believed now that such a moment existed. It was merely a question of identifying it.

It was as though a stiletto had made a short but not fatal stab into the ribcage of an enemy. The knife could be turned – two hundred more men were moving forward, the radio intercepts told him – and then the hole would be larger. As the hole grew, as the stiletto was plunged deeper towards the vulnerable heart, so the risk to the enemy increased. But all that they had done was to send a master sniper from Baghdad. Why had a blocking force not been sent north? Why did the Fifth Army not respond to the threat and cauterize the wound?

He did not understand the reason – but he believed a moment of advantage now existed.

He sent a short message to Tel Aviv. In crisp language, he made a suggestion as to what he should do to exploit the moment.

He was fit for his age, but he still dreaded the prospect of a long night march. When the terse response came on the radio, he was already writing a letter to his wife that would be carried out on the next resupply helicopter. Permission was granted.

‘Hi! You okay, Caspar?’

‘Not too bad, Rusty.’

Caspar Reinholtz was a slave to punctuality. It was seven minutes to ten o’clock. He approved of the young man, who was early for his night shift. If it had been Bill or Luther, they’d have walked in with a half-minute to spare. He had just transmitted his report and the tiredness pulsed in waves across him. He doubted that he’d wander over to the mess where Bill and Luther would be socializing with the pilots and ground crew. He was not in the mood for USAF small-talk.

‘Long day?’

‘Long enough.’

‘But was it a good day?’

‘At best satisfactory.’

Caspar ran his hand through his cropped hair. The day, whatever it had been, had started at five, as the dawn sidled over the runways and bunkers of the Incerlik base where the USAF’s F-16 Falcons shared space with Turkish aircraft, and the helicopter had lifted him off with four marines for close protection duty. A small bungalow compound, inside the USAF security perimeter, was the home base for the Agency team responsible for northern Iraq. Drinking beer with flies in the froth was about as satisfactory as running American interests in northern Iraq from over the Turkish border.

They had flown to collect the fat cat from Arbil, then on to pick up the second fat cat from Sulaymaniyah, then had headed up and high into the mountains for the scary flight into bandit country.

‘You going to tell me?’

‘Don’t take it personal – same old problem – but it’s a Need to Know.’

‘That’s not a difficulty, Caspar. You want some coffee?’

‘I’d appreciate that.’

Rusty was big, strapping, a young man out of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He had an openness that was rare for Agency recruits, and seemed to take it to heart when information was not shared. He’d learn. Long ago, Caspar had learned all that anyone could teach him, and what he knew best was northern Iraq. It had been taught the hard way. He’d been there, first tour of duty, in 1974 – young, like Rusty, and keen -when the Agency, with Iranian and Israeli help, had armed the Kurds to go kick Baghdad’s ass, but the diplomats had signed a treaty, the aid had stopped, and the reprisals of the Iraqi army against the Kurdish hill fighters would have made a less focused man weep and slip to his knees. Caspar had gone home to find new fields.

The second tour, he’d been back across the Turkish border in 1988 when Operation al-Anfal had punished the tribesmen, bombed, gassed and butchered them. Caspar had been posted away. When he’d returned in ’91, he had been in time to set up the radio station that had broadcast the calls for the Kurds to rise up in armed open rebellion against Baghdad. They had, but the promised support hadn’t come: the runways at Incerlik had stayed silent, and the retribution had been repeated.

Caspar had been called back to Langley. But the place was like a damn malarial microbe in his bloodstream. He had requested and badgered for a last time back there – a fourth tour – and he’d made it to the Agency team in Arbil a month before the disaster when Saddam’s tanks rolled over the ceasefire line and ruthlessly drove the Kurds north.

He never spoke – not to colleagues, not to family, of the awfulness of their own escape from Arbil, and what they’d left behind. He’d been at Incerlik ever since, and had five more months to go before they’d call him home a final time. The coffee had been cooking all through the evening as he’d written, encoded and transmitted his report.

‘If you don’t mind my asking, will it work?’

‘What’s that?’

‘The plan, will it work?’

‘I’m tired – sorry, I don’t want to give offence here, Rusty. Look, there is a plan.

There’s lengths of twine that need binding together to make a rope that’ll carry the plan.

They’re not together yet.’

They called the plan RECOIL. RECOIL, in the mind of the author of its name, Caspar Reinholtz, implied the release of a pressured spring of tempered steel with the force to drive back a seemingly immovable object. He was proud of that name. The pressured spring was rebellion, the immovable object was the regime in Baghdad. As station chief, he alone of the Agency team in Incerlik knew the importance of each of the lengths of twine that must be woven to make the rope.

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘I’m not promising to answer.’

‘Did you see her?’