Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

He took a position and settled. The dog had moved well with him. It ran when he scurried forward, slithered on its stomach when he crawled, lay motionless when he stopped, kneeling to scan the ground ahead. In the manuals it was written, by the Soviets, the British and the Americans, that a sniper must always be accompanied by an observer.

In his long years in the army, Karim Aziz had not met a man he would have trusted sufficiently to accompany him; but he would trust the dog with his life.

The position he had chosen was amongst haphazardly shaped stones that offered him a clear view of the ground between the Victory City of Darbantaq and the town of Tarjil.

Behind him were the tight-packed homes, the mosque’s minaret, the faint outline of the communications equipment on the police station’s roof. Further behind him, and barely visible, were the brigade’s tents at the crossroads, the burning flame, and the conurbation of Kirkuk. Ahead of him was Darbantaq, five kilometres distant, with small smoke columns to identify it. Around him were the hills and valleys, and the silence.

Major Karim Aziz was at peace.

The peace came because he was far from Baghdad – from the pace and fumes, the noise and lifebeat of a city. He was anonymous in Baghdad, a pygmy figure. Even waiting endlessly on the flat roof with the Dragunov, he had never been able to gather up the sensation of power that was with him now. In the city he was one man against a million, one man against a regime, one man against an army. Here, it was hunter against hunter, a single marksman against a single marksman. It was his territory into which an intruder had strayed.

He looked towards Darbantaq across the slope of the valleys and over the swollen water-filled gullies. Bright green patches of ground, surrounded by yellowed grass, marked the peat marshlands. The dog growled softly, a whisper in its throat.

He was cautious with the telescope and he had draped a small square of grey cloth over the end of the lens glass. The sun beat down on him. If it caught the glass then his position was betrayed. He could see the roofs of Darbantaq, the smoke, and the personnel carrier skewed off the track leading to the village. Sometimes he could see figures moving between the buildings. At last light, with the sun sinking behind him, he would move closer.

He laid down the telescope, put it beside his rifle, and slowly turned his head. There should be no sudden movements to break the pattern of his camouflage. He slipped his hand back, ruffled the fur on the dog’s neck, and felt the vibration of the growl. The work of an observer was to protect a sniper’s back from attack from the flank or the rear. The dog lay facing away from him, and growled. It was on its stomach, head between its front paws, ears flattened, nose pointing the way for him.

There was a trellis of small valleys. One went north to south, another ran on a parallel line, and another east to west. He scanned each of them, and the further valleys, before he saw the movement that had alerted the dog.

A single man moved along on a herdsman’s track at furtive speed in the second valley from him.

He reached for his telescope.

The man wore an officer’s uniform. On the shoulders, magnified thirty times, was the gold-braid insignia of a ranking brigadier.

Of course, Aziz had checked with the regimental commander at Tarjil that no patrols would be out in the sector. A brigadier would not personally check forward positions, would not walk, and would not be alone. The man half ran and looked behind him as if pursued by demons.

He remembered… The brigadier in the communications centre of Fifth Army headquarters, and no reinforcements deployed, the lines of motionless tanks and personnel carriers… A demonstration of shooting power on a range. Two generals and a brigadier had come to the firing range and witnessed him accrue six hits from six shots at 700 metres when the probability of a kill at that range was listed as only 60 per cent. He saw that brigadier hurrying along the track on the valley floor. He lost him… Three weeks after the demonstration on the range he had received the invitation to a meeting.

He had sat in the general’s car, and the proposition of assassination had been made to him.

He was held in the tentacles of conspiracy. He heard the distant whine of a jeep’s engine, and lay on his stomach, numbed.

‘Did you see an army?’

‘What sort of bloody army?’

Joe Denton had been standing with his bodyguards and the local men he’d trained, and was studying the fall of a well-grassed meadow between the village and the road. It was the best meadow available to the village, but the edge of the grass area was pocked with a small disturbance of earth, where the child had lost his leg. There should have been a wire fence round the meadow but some goddam greedy idiot from the village had taken the warning wire to corral his animals. The stupidity had cost a child’s leg, and maybe even the child’s life. It might have been a 72A, could have been a POMZ 2M, but it was most likely that a fucking V69 anti-personnel mine had exploded.

Denton was well paid by a British charity to clear old Iraqi mines, close to fifty thousand sterling a year, tax-free, but it was a bloody lonely life. Had it not been he would never have mixed in the UN club in Arbil with a crook like Lev Rybinsky. The mud-caked car had pulled up on the road behind him.

‘Joe, my friend, did you see an army led by a woman?’

‘What are you talking about, Lev? The usual old crap?’

‘You call me crap when you want cigarettes, Joe, when you want whisky? Hey, did you see a woman leading an army?’

‘No.’

The car drove away down the road. Denton laughed mirthlessly: a woman leads an army in northern Iraq, and next week pigs fly. He thought of how many mines were buried there, at what depth, what density, and he started to draw a plan of the meadow.

‘Did you see an army?’

‘What if I did?’

‘Was the army led by a woman?’

‘And if it was?’

Sarah was at the co-ordinates given over a radio link because the message had said there were injured children to be met. The mud-caked car had stopped at the roadside behind the small convoy of pick-up trucks she had organized to make the rendezvous.

The big fight had been to get the doctor to leave the clinic at Koi Sanjaq and come with her. She’d built the bloody clinic. That the doctor had a clinic to work in was bloody well down to her and Protect the Children funds – so, she’d told him he could bloody well get off his bum and come with her.

‘I’ve got morphine.’

‘Then hang around, Lev.’

‘And I’ve got penicillin.’

‘Make yourself comfortable. Is it that stuff you promised me weeks ago?’ She laughed, a wild bitter laugh. The last load of medical supplies trucked across the border had been stopped at a road block by peshmerga of agha Ibrahim’s faction, and bloody hijacked.

The lorry had been cleared out. The food had not been touched in the second lorry, and the third lorry with the building tools had made it through. She thought it often enough, that northern Iraq was the loneliest corner of the earth for an expatriate, which was why she knew Lev Rybinsky, and drank with him in the UN bar. If she had met the shit at home in Sydney, she would have looked right through him, walked right past him, and not noticed.

‘What’s her name, Sarah?’

‘Meda.’ Sarah saw Lev Rybinsky salivate, and his stomach quivered.

‘Where is she?’

‘Do I get the penicillin and the morphine?’

He was out of the car and scurrying to the boot. She thought him loathsome. He wore what she assumed was an Italian-made silk shirt, grubby, top button undone, the tie dangling loose, and a suit from Milan that was at least a size too small for him; the jacket wouldn’t have fastened and the trousers’ belly button was loose. The stubble on his face was creased by his jowl lines and the bald summit of his head glistened in the sunlight.