Gerald Seymour: Holding the Zero

He went out into the dawn light. He cut along the side of his home, shielding his eyes from the low slant of the sunlight, and hurried to the small building of concrete blocks that protruded from the end of the one-room house. He rapped three times on the wood door, the signal, heard the footfall within, then the grate of a bolt being withdrawn. The door was opened. As he did every day at the end of the night watch, his son embraced him, kissed both his cheeks.

The shepherd stepped inside. There were no windows in the room. The generator chattered in the corner. In the dim light the dials of the military radio glowed brightly.

The television on the table beside the radio showed the same picture of the valley floor.

His son shrugged, as if to say, as always, nothing had moved on the track below in the night, then ran for the door. His son always went first to the pit at the back to shit and piss, then to his mother for his last meal of the day; his son would sleep during the daylight hours then resume watch as night fell.

It was a few minutes before the time when the shepherd was scheduled to make his morning call on the radio. There would be another call as dusk fell but there was, of course, a frequency he could use in an emergency. He threw the switch that killed the television picture, and the second switch that governed the alternative camera capable of thermal imaging, and the last switch that controlled the sound sensors at the floor of the valley. He did not know the age of the equipment or its origins, but he had been taught how to operate it by men of the Estikhabarat in the headquarters of the Military Command at Kirkuk. Everything he owned – the gold, the money in the biscuit tin, the stove, the fresh coffee, the oven for baking bread, his flock – was his because he had agreed to work the equipment they had given him.

He went outside and padlocked the door behind him.

On the south side of the valley, above a sheer cliff face, was a plateau of good grazing grass covering an area of a little more than eleven hectares. Though he did not have the education to measure it, the shepherd was some 150 metres above the valley floor along which the rough track ran. To the left and right of the plateau were higher, impassable cliff faces. Three kilometres down the track, past two sharp bends in the valley’s narrow passage, was the nearest Iraqi checkpoint. The cliff below the plateau was climbable, with great care, by a sure-footed man, if he followed the trails used by the shepherd’s animals. The shepherd was a tripwire, an early-warning system for the troops at the checkpoint.

He was not aware that the summit of the valley on the far side was exactly 725 metres from the front door of his house, but he knew it was a distance far greater than a Kalashnikov rifle was capable of firing. He believed himself impregnable, safe from his own people, and he had the big radio to back him, if men tried to climb the sheep trails to the plateau.

He stood by the door of his home, drinking the air. He watched an eagle making slow circuits above the summit of the far valley wall. He had strong, clear vision. The far side of the valley was as it had been, exactly, the day before and the day before that. He raked his eyes across the landscape of yellow grass tufts, grey stone, brown, exposed earth and the sharp greens of the bilberry leaves. If anything had changed, if man or animal were on the summit across the void, the shepherd would have seen it. His stomach rumbled, called on him to return inside, take his first food of the day and more coffee. But he stayed the extra moments and gazed at the simple peace around him. Later, while his son slept, he would lead the sheep towards the west of the plateau, but always he would have his rifle with him and his binoculars, always he would be able to see the track along the valley floor and he would be a few seconds’ hard running from the room of concrete blocks and the live radio. He had lost sight of the eagle. He blinked as the sun was in his eyes… and then the blackness came. He heard nothing.

The shepherd felt as though he had been hit by a great iron hammer full in the centre of his chest. He slid, against his will, down onto the short, sheep-cropped grass in front of the door.

His life had passed within a second. He had no knowledge of a. 338 bullet fired at a range of 725 metres and fracturing his spinal column between the second and third thoracic vertebrae. He could not know that his wife and his son would cower under the table of their home and be too terrorized to open the door, run to the radio and send the coded signal summoning immediate help. Nor would he know that, as the dawn spread light on the paths made by his sheep over the precipice face of the cliff, men would scramble up the heights, break his radio, smash his television, cut the cables to the cameras, drink his coffee, find his biscuit tin and the smaller box holding four gold chains, and he could not know what the men did to his wife and son – the jahsh, the little donkeys, the traitor Kurds who sided with Saddam. And he would not know that amongst the men was a young woman, sweating and panting from the exertion of the climb, who summoned the spittle in her mouth and spat down onto his still-open eyes.

The first hour of the day shift was the busiest for the technicians in Kirkuk working at the radios of the Estikhabarat al-Askariyya. Early in the morning the new shift handled the volume of check calls and radio signals sent to the Military Intelligence Service. At the end of the day, the new night shift would be deluged by a similar number of calls. There were transmissions that were classified as important, and there were the regular checks that had low priority because nothing of worth was ever reported on them. In a cubicle compartment, four yawning, scratching, smoking technicians listlessly ticked off radio calls received, and wallowed in boredom.

The role tasked to the regional office of the Estikhabarat in Kirkuk was to provide military intelligence on armed Kurdish factions north of the army’s defence line, and to infiltrate the factions so that a peshmerga commander could not shit, could not screw his wife, without it being known and reported on down the line to national headquarters in the Aladhamia area of Baghdad. Low priority, bumping the bottom of the barrel, was given to Call-sign 17, Sector 8.

Call-signs 1 to 16 had reported in, nothing of significance. Call-signs 18 to 23 had been received on clear transmission. Only Call-sign 17 in Sector 8 was not ticked off.

The technician who should have received the call alerted his supervisor when the transmission was forty-eight minutes late.

‘Probably poking sheep,’ the supervisor said, and walked away. ‘He’ll come through in the evening.’

But the technician, a conscript who would follow military service with an electronics course in higher education in Basra, was not satisfied until he had personally checked the file for Call-sign 17. Call-sign 17 was issued with a Russian-made R-107 radio. It had a four-to-six-kilometre range, which meant it relied on a booster antenna in the mountains.

The radio, in the opinion of the conscript technician, was poor and the antenna, during the night, would have been battered by the storm that had raged over the high ground north of Kirkuk. He made a note to refer it to the technician taking over from him at the end of the day. Of course, the sheep poker was low priority or he would have been given more sophisticated equipment than the R-107 radio.

At dawn that day, a little crack had been opened in the many-layered lines of defence separating the Kurdish enclave from their spiritual capital of Kirkuk, and it was not seen by the technician, or by his supervisor.

They had all played a part in moving the letter. Written in a spidery hand by Hoyshar, the father of Jamal, father-in-law of Faima and grandfather of Meda, it had begun its journey six weeks earlier, while the snow was still falling in the northern mountains and valleys.