Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

‘Yes.’

‘It’s what I came to give you.’

‘Thank you. What do you call it?’

‘It’s just a box of tricks. You want a name for it? Try “Josephus”. Josephus will do nicely. He died one thousand, nine hundred years ago, and he was a big man in the last Jewish revolt against the Romans. Josephus will work well for you… That was a joke, that you’re really not a veteran?’

Gus said simply, ‘I have never in my life done anything like this before, nor wanted to.’

Cohen reached out and his fingers caught Gus’s cheek. He held it tight enough to hurt.

‘You picked a bad place to learn. Your opposition knows about you and takes you seriously, which is not healthy news for a beginner… I sit on a mountain and I hear everything. They’ve sent a man from Baghdad for you.’

‘Have they?’

‘They have sent a master sniper to track you. He is Karim Aziz, a major, and they think he’s one of their top guys.’

‘Do they?’

‘He’s coming to track you and to kill you.’

Gus batted the fingers from his cheek. ‘I hope you get back safely to where you came from, and I hope your ankle’s better soon.’

Cohen said grimly, ‘Sniper against sniper. Secure your front, secure your flank, secure your back. I’ll listen for you, I’ll hear each step he takes and you take, until he finds you or you find him… It’s like something from the intestines of history. I’ll be listening, but I hope, and you’d better hope too, that your god watches for you.’

He heaved the backpack up onto his shoulders.

Gus watched the wavering, diminishing light from the Israeli’s torch. When it was gone, he called Haquim forward and repeated everything he had been told about the box, Josephus, and the positioning of the BMP personnel carriers, but he said nothing of a man sent from Baghdad to track and kill him.

The cold was around him. In an hour he would go forward with Omar. He felt a suffocating sense of loneliness.

They sat in the cold dining room, at the table, and Ms Manning kept her outdoor coat on.

On his pad, at the top of the blank page, Willet had written and underlined the word MINDSET.

‘His grandfather told us nothing of this.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t, would he?’

After another early start, after another early pickup by Ms Manning, they’d hammered at the door of the vicarage. Henry Peake had not been dressed, had told them firmly to wait. They’d sat in the car for fifteen minutes before being allowed inside. There were sounds of movement in the kitchen, but they were neither taken there, nor offered tea or coffee.

‘I don’t know – you tell me.’

‘We’re not responsible for our parentage and I am certainly not responsible for my father’s prejudices.’

Henry Peake was a slimmer man than his father, and already more gaunt. He had little of the certainty that the old man in the bungalow behind the big house had shown. But he talked in response to the prodding questions rattled at him by Ms Manning. ‘You’ll have to explain.’

He was lighting his third cigarette. He retched a cough, then launched. ‘Gus’s grandfather, my father, wouldn’t have talked to you about his grandson’s child-hood. He didn’t approve, you understand me? I was brought up in a service household. I made a crystal-clear decision, and Fiona was right with me on this, that Gus would not be reared as I had been. We let the child run. He was a free spirit. He wasn’t hidebound by the diktat of meaningless traditions. It was only later, when my father needed Gus, that he quite shamelessly involved him in this nonsense about northern Iraq. It’s where he is now, isn’t it?’

They were in a sheep scrape Omar had found. The ground would have been weakened by years of rain, and then the sheep in the last summer, or the summer before, had used that weakness and with their bodies had insinuated a narrow cavity on the slope of the hill.

The depth of the scrape was sufficient shelter from a summer squall for four or five sheep pressed close to each other, but was barely big enough for the boy and Gus. To use it and still be hidden by its lip of earth, the two were huddled close against each other.

In the scrape Gus could not take his usual firing position with his legs splayed out behind him. He used the Hawkins position, lying sideways with his upper body twisted so that he could aim out to the extreme left. It was neither comfortable nor satisfactory, but the rule of a marksman was to accept the conditions as he found them. Each time Omar wriggled, the movement reverberated through Gus’s body and disturbed his aim, and each time he kneed hard against the back of the boy’s legs and hoped he felt it.

In front of Gus, magnified through the telescopic sight, was the Victory City of Darbantaq. He could see the upper casings and the mounted guns on the BMPs behind their earthen walls, women starting to form a queue at a building close to the command post, the machine-gun crew on the roof of the command post, men fussing around their penned goats and sheep beside their concrete homes, soldiers shivering in the watchtowers, and children playing with a deflated football behind the wire.

Behind him and to his right, waiting on his first shot, were four hundred peshmerga men, and Meda. They would be crouched, nervous and fidgeting, holding tight to their weapons, waiting for the signal of his first shot.

The boy was more restless, his movements more frequent. Gus could not fault the way he had been led forward, partly at a crouch, and then at the leopard crawl. The last three hundred yards down the slope had taken them a full hour, scraping the ground in the half-light, because the Israeli had said one of the personnel carriers had thermal imaging, and if they were not flat to the ground they would make a signature. The boy had done well but now shifted more often as he raked a greater arc of ground with the telescope.

‘Our approach was good, Omar,’ Gus whispered, ‘but now we must be patient.’

‘Then the chance comes to kill them, Mr Gus.’

‘Where did you learn to stalk?’

‘Going into Iraqi camps, and going past the guards into the compounds of the charities, to take-’

‘To steal, Omar.’ Gus laughed soundlessly, and his eye never left the scope’s lens, which covered the entrance to the command post.

‘It is necessary to live, Mr Gus. And to live I have to take.’

She had ignored the father’s question. ‘Didn’t his grandfather teach him to shoot?’

‘God, no. He was into partridges and pheasants, semi-tame birds being driven towards the guns – he calls it sport, I call it murder.’

‘Did you teach him to shoot?’

‘Never been in the slightest bit interested. It’s all down to Harry Billings, a rogue who lived in the village, dead now, and no tears shed. We’d sent Gus away to school, of course, but he was a loner, didn’t mix well, and a bit of an under-achiever. I’d hoped that boarding school would make him more sociable. It didn’t. When he was home on holiday we hardly saw him. He virtually lived with Billings, just came home late at night to sleep, and was gone again at first light. His grandfather alternately said Billings should be horsewhipped or locked up, never seemed quite sure of the remedy.’

‘What was the nature of Mr Billings’ roguishness?’

‘Poacher.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

A grin creased Willet’s face, which she would not have seen. He knew from her monologues in the car that Ms Manning lived in Islington, that her parents were also close by in north London, that she had been to local schools and to university down a bus route. She was an urban person: she would know damn all of a country poacher’s life. His pen was poised.