Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

‘A low-life ignorant poacher. Game birds, rabbits, the occasional deer. It wasn’t all illegal, there’s a big area of common ground up to the north of the village where they could shoot, but it was decidedly criminal when they were on the Vatchery estate. They were never caught by the gamekeeper there, though not for want of trying. That man used to sit half the night outside the Billings house waiting for the old devil to creep home with the pheasants or a fallow deer carcass. There was a bond between that uncouth man who’d not an iota of education or ambition and my son – I have to say it, a much closer bond than ever existed between Gus and his mother and me. Billings had a son, younger than Gus, a proper little tearaway, quite unsuitable company… Anyway, Billings was finally arrested and given three months inside by the bench. The police stopped him with a van full of pheasants. At the time I thanked God that Gus was away at school. When he was released the whole dreadful family moved away, good riddance, never heard of again. You give freedom to a youngster and hope common sense prevails. Sadly, parents are not always rewarded.’

He had been writing hard, taking a note that was almost verbatim. For Willet, it was as if a small light illuminated the darkness. He looked up. ‘What was the ultimate for your son, Mr Peake, when he was with Billings?’

‘A clean shot. I was once bawling him out, the way fathers do with teenage sons – he’d come home quite filthy from the fields and ditches, and we’d guests in for drinks. His response, as if he were talking to an idiot, was “You have to be prepared to lie up, Dad, so’s you get a clean shot under your own terms. Otherwise all you’ve done is wound a rabbit, break a pigeon’s wing. The worst sound in the world is a rabbit in pain, screaming, when you can’t reach it, hurt because you rushed your shot, Dad. It has to be a good kill.”

I had the impression that the hunting was more important to him than the slaughter, though I doubt that applied to Billings.’

‘Is that all there is?’ Ms Manning was already bored and lost.

“Fraid so. What else? Gus left school with pretty average grades, and I managed to pull some strings, got him into a haulage firm in Guildford. I did business with them and was owed favours. He’s been there ever since. I can only talk about his youth because we hardly see him, these days… What do I tell my wife?’

‘Your problem, Mr Peake, not mine,’ she said, without charity.

‘What’s he doing there? Is he driving a relief lorry?’

‘He’s gone to fight, Mr Peake,’ she intoned.

‘But that’s a war zone…’ The man’s mouth gaped.

Gus saw the target. He came slowly towards the command post. His own estimate of the distance was 750 yards, and the binoculars confirmed it at 741. There was a short line of soldiers at attention. A moment before, as Gus had done a fast scan with the binoculars, the crew on the roof with the machine-gun had closed up behind their weapon, and the soldiers in the watchtower ducked below their sandbag parapets. The T-junction of the reticule in his ’scope sight was on the target. He would fire at the next moment that his breath was steadied.

‘Watch the shot, Omar. Don’t move, not a fraction, just watch the shot.’

Gus breathed deeply, then slowly, so slowly, began to empty his lungs. When they were emptied he would relax, then fire. The smoke curled from the homes of the villagers, there was no new adjustment to make for the slight wind’s strength. Above the chest of the target were the gold insignia of rank on the target’s shoulders.

‘No.’

‘What?’ Gus hissed.

‘No. Don’t.’

Gus breathed again, his finger was inside the trigger guard.

‘Why not?’

‘It is not the officer.’

‘He has the rank.’

‘No, Mr Gus. The soldiers are laughing at him.’

Gus stared through the ’scope. Behind the target figure, level with the insignia on the target’s shoulder, a soldier grinned and Gus saw the flash of his teeth, and another man near to him laughing.

‘It is not the officer, it is a pretend. They know about you, trick you. They would not dare to laugh at their officer.’

The breath seeped from Gus’s body. He eased his finger off the trigger. He felt flattened by the simplicity of the trap set for him. Without the boy, he would have walked into it, fired into it. At that moment he saw his own importance. The life of a soldier, with a family and with a mother, was to be snuffed out so that his own life could be taken.

‘Thank you, Omar.’

‘It was easy to see the trick – yes, Mr Gus?’

He kneed the boy savagely. The sun crawled up behind him, over the ridge where the attack force lay and waited on him.

‘Correct, Mr Peake. Maybe you should chat it out with your father as to why your son is currently in a war zone. Good day.’

She was on her feet. Willet had filled the page below the heading of MINDSET. He put the pad into his briefcase. There were no handshakes at the door. Momentarily Willet saw a woman’s face at the kitchen door, grey, lined and harassed. He wouldn’t have known what to say to her that might have been of any comfort. The door slammed shut behind them.

They walked to the car.

‘What a bloody fool,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘Peake, of course.’

‘Which Peake?’

‘The son, that idiot.’

‘Why?’

‘For doing what he’s done – for going where he’s gone.’

Willet felt the anger brimming in his mind. ‘The last weekend you had time off, what did you do? Where did you go?’

‘Actually, I was in Snowdonia, with a group rebuilding footpaths for the National Trust. We were all volunteers.’

Through gritted teeth, Willet said pleasantly, ‘It must have seemed, Ms Manning, important. I suppose rebuilding a footpath is about as important as fighting for the freedom of a subjugated people in a war zone.’

She looked at him curiously. ‘Are you all right?’

He sat with his head down, his chin on his chest. ‘I’m fine – but what about him?’

‘The wind’s changed.’

‘He is coming.’

Gus hissed venomously, ‘You didn’t tell me, it’s veered.’

Omar persisted shrilly, ‘The officer is coming.’

‘The wind has moved from south-west-south to west-south-west – you’ve got to warn me about this sort of thing.’

‘Do you want to know about the wind or the officer?’

‘Both.’

The panic consumed him.

The wind had come up from gentle to moderate strength. A flag on the Stickledown Range would have eased clear of the pole and lethargically flapped free. Its direction had shifted from No Value to Half Value. On that range he could have waited, settled, then tapped into the calculator on the mat beside him and computed whether to alter the windage turret on the ’scope by a full click, or by half a click, or whether to aim off from the centre of the target’s V-Bull. Gus saw the officer. There were no insignia on his shoulder but men straightened to attention as he passed. He was within half a dozen feet of the entrance door to the command post and walking. There was no time to settle or make the necessary calculations. He aimed off, his mind racing for an answer to the equation, to compensate for the fresher wind and for the brisk stride of the officer.

‘Watch the shot’s fall,’ Gus whispered.

But the officer, wide-chested, in fatigues, would pause at the jamb of the command post’s door, and that, too, must go into the equation.

Gus fired. The moment that the recoil hammered into his shoulder, he knew that the breath pattern was wrong, and that he’d squeezed too fast on the trigger. The rifle’s compensator attachment at the barrel end kept the ’scope sight steady. He saw the hazed shapes of single waving grass stems and the flattening climb of the smoke columns, and the eddy of the air disturbed by the bullet’s track, and then he lost the flight.