Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

Konings, a major in charge of the sniper section of the School of Infantry Tactics at Wunstorf, was flown into the battle from Berlin to redress the balance of death.

‘Stalingrad was the pivotal battle of the war, Mr English Gentleman. You could say it was the turning-point in the history of the century, but at the very point of its fulcrum was the duel between Zaitsev and Konings.’

‘Come on, how did it finish?’ Beside him the boy had knotted the scarf around the papier-mache head, rammed a stick up its throat and had buttoned a tunic across its neck.

Rybinsky smiled. ‘You make a face of paper – an old tactic. For a full week Zaitsev took a place near where his friends, Morozov and Sheykin, had been shot, and he watched and saw nothing. Zaitsev took Kulikov with him as his observer, but they could not identify Konings’ position. On the seventh day of the fourth week of the month after Konings had come to Stalingrad, Kulikov saw the flash from a speck of glass in the rubble of no man’s land – a telescope or the sight on a rifle – but they could not see Konings. They used the old tactic, as old as the one you use. Kulikov raised his helmet on a stick. Perhaps Konings was tired, perhaps uncomfortable, perhaps he wanted to piss, but he made the mistake and fired at the helmet. If the helmet had only dropped back, Konings would not have exposed himself – but Kulikov screamed, as if he were hit.

Konings’ mistake was that the scream aroused his vanity. He thought he had killed Zaitsev. He raised his head to see his success. It was all Zaitsev needed… Are you frightened that you don’t know whether you are Zaitsev or Konings?’

Gus pushed himself up. There was the murmur of voices behind him and the sounds of weapons being armed, and the squeal of the wheels that carried the heavy machine-gun.

He said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Rybinsky, but I don’t care to give myself that significance.’

‘Is he there? Has Major Konings come from Berlin?’

Gus sighed hard. ‘Yes. Yes, he has travelled. If you stick around, you’ll have the grandstand seat.’

Gus and Omar joined the great silent column moving away into the night, and far ahead of them the bright flame burned.

Major Aziz sat in a doorway at the front of a hardware shop. The door behind him, and every other door in the town, was locked, bolted.

He looked down the street in front of him: like every other street in the town, it was barricaded and empty.

He sat with his rifle loose across his knees, fed biscuits to his dog, and waited.

Ken Willet took the key that was passed to him.

Ms Manning had planted her buttocks against the cleared desk. Her arms were folded across her chest and she gazed back defiantly at the source of the tirade that had been halted in its tracks, briefly, to offer up the key.

‘I don’t know what sort of pressure you people, spooks and whatever, have to endure, but if you think you’re hard done by then try half a day in here.’

Around the cleared desk, telephones were ringing and two women were trying to stem a tide of chaos. Outside the office, in the wide tarmac yard, the giant lorries with their trailers were starting up and manoeuvring towards the main gate. Each time the office door opened for a shouted query from a driver, the owner broke off from his lecture to Ms Manning. Willet had the safe door unlocked and pulled it back.

‘If he was here, right now, Gus would be taking care of the Hamburg consignment, which is up the spout because the bloody Germans have filed the wrong customs declaration – can’t be late because that lorry’s got to get back, off-load, then be in Birmingham for a machinery pick-up for Milan – and in Milan there’s a factory on short time because they haven’t got that machinery, and I’m on a penalty if I don’t meet the schedule. I’ve two drivers off with flu, genuine, not skiving, but I’m shuffling the others round so that our supermarket contract doesn’t suffer. I’ve another lorry off the road with gearbox trouble, perishables to lift out of Barcelona, three lorries in the queue at Dover because the bloody French are on strike… and an empty bloody desk where my transport manager should be sitting.’

Willet took the papers from the safe, stacked them neatly beside his knee and began to read.

‘I may own the bloody place, own the lorries, own the bloody overdraft, but I don’t run this office. Be in hospital with a coronary if I had to. Gus runs it – or ran it until three weeks back. He said he wanted to go to Turkey with one of the drivers. That’s agricultural equipment spares going out, and denim jeans coming back. Said he wanted to understand better the drivers’ problems – but he didn’t come back with the jeans. In Ankara, he off-loaded himself… God knows what he was up to, because he’d stowed gear under the seat that wasn’t shown to Customs. He told the driver he’d make his own way home. I’ve not had sight or sound of him since.’

‘What was the gear?’ Ms Manning asked crisply.

Willet, on the floor with the papers, could have answered.

The owner snapped, ‘It was a rucksack, the driver said, and a long carrying bag. The driver said it was camouflaged. It was smuggled so God alone knows what was in it. If Customs had found it, Christ… Didn’t say where he was going, how long he’d be. The least of my problems right now. My problems are pressure, and no bloody transport manager here to sort them.’

‘Good at his job, is he?’

Willet, shuffling through the papers, speed-reading them, didn’t think she understood her capacity to sneer a question.

‘Are you good at your job? If you’re half as good at your bloody job as he is then my taxes are well spent. Course he’s bloody good. Pressure doesn’t faze him, not like me.

There can be fuck-ups from bloody Edinburgh to Eastbourne, from Cardiff to Cologne, and he soaks them up. I don’t get tantrums or shouting from Gus, I get the fuck-ups sorted. He doesn’t bawl out the girls, doesn’t shout at the drivers. He sits there, where your arse is, and sorts it. He does it on his own. Calm – just what I’m not… So, get out of my hair, and leave me to keep this shambles on the road.’

At the bottom of the papers on the floor was a sixteen-page colour sales brochure.

Willet slipped it into his briefcase and replaced the other papers in the safe, swung the door closed and turned the key on it.

The owner didn’t see them out. He had a telephone at each ear, the secretaries were trying to attract his attention, and a driver and a grease-stained mechanic were hovering at his shoulder. Willet followed Ms Manning from the dreary little office and they left behind them the confusion, and the girlie calendars sent out by the tyre companies.

‘What a dreadful man,’ she said.

‘Pays the taxes, doesn’t he, for our salaries?’

She gave him a savage, disdainful look. He wondered how she’d survive the slash-throat world of private enterprise. They paused as a juggernaut drove past them. The tang of the diesel seeped into his nose.

‘We’re wasting our time,’ she said. ‘We’re wasting it on a damn fool idiot with a death-wish.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Really? Then enlighten me.’

They were walking towards her car.

Willet said, ‘We are not wasting our time. We are evaluating Peake’s capabilities as a sniper. That’s what we’ve been briefed to do and that’s what we’re doing. We are learning. We do not yet know what those capabilities are. If he doesn’t have those capabilities, then yes, he is a damn fool, who will be killed. If he does have them, the horizons change.’

The sneer was back. ‘One man? No way.’

They were at her car. Willet stood in front of the door, blocking her.