Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

‘A sniper can change the course of a battle – no other soldier has so much influence.

I’ll tell you what a sniper can do. A brigade-size manoeuvre I was at on Salisbury Plain

… the acronym is TESEX, that’s Tactical Evaluation and Simulation Exercise. All the weapons have the capability to fire a laser beam, and every man has a device on his uniform that’ll register the laser. A rifle shoots the laser and if there’s a hit the device bleeps. With me so far? A brigadier, a high-flier, was in charge of the attack side of the exercise, been planning it for weeks, probably months. The defending force, commanded by a colonel with a proper sense of humour, pushed a sniper forward towards the brigadier’s command post. It was going to be a three-day exercise and the brigadier thought it would notch him up to major-general level. Five minutes into the first of the three days, the sniper “shot” the brigadier. The old bleeper went

… all the planning out of the window, all the promotion hopes dumped. The brigadier shouted, “This can’t happen to me,” but the observer controller told him it could and it had. He yelled and argued, didn’t make any difference. “Do you know who I am?” was his last throw, and the observer controller told him, “Yes, you’re a casualty and you’re going into a body bag, sir.” The attack failed.’

He stepped aside. She unlocked the door.

‘It’s a ridiculous story – just men playing kids’ games.’

‘Actual war, that’s the same game. It’s what he can achieve if he’s good enough, which is why Peake is worth learning about. Cheer up, things are looking rosy: we’re going to have a day at the seaside.’

‘Do you have anything I should know about?’

Both of them were too long in the trade to posture a courtship ritual, like peacock and hen; they wouldn’t waste each other’s time.

‘What are you looking for?’

Isaac Cohen lay in the bath, his flabby stomach protruding from a sea of soapsuds.

Caspar Reinholtz had seen the helicopter land, as it always did on that date of the month, had looked through the windows of his offices as the Mossad man went from the American living quarters to the bathhouse with a towel over his arm. The Israeli’s controller would arrive at Incerlik in the next half-hour and then Cohen would be beyond reach.

‘The woman, the advance, anything that I haven’t got.’

‘They took Darbantaq.’

‘Figured they would.’

‘And didn’t give themselves the burden of prisoners.’

‘Predictable.’

‘Right now they’re hitting Tarjil.’

‘That’s a nut you could break your teeth on.’

If their masters in Langley or Tel Aviv had known of the contacts between Isaac Cohen and Caspar Reinholtz there would have been an immediate order that they be discontinued. Relationships between the Mossad and the Agency were scarred by suspicion. But it was hard enough in the field without letting the bickering of their masters prevent a casual exchange of information.

‘Tarjil wasn’t reinforced.’

‘That’s taken care of.’ Reinholtz sat languidly on the toilet seat beside the bath.

Cohen’s smile of understanding widened. He used the sponge on his chest. ‘The armour hasn’t moved out of Kirkuk.’

‘Tell me something new.’

‘It’ll be a difficult fight in Tarjil, Caspar, with or without fresh armour.’

‘She’s got to get through Tarjil or she’s dead in the water. For the big play to start, she has to get all the way to Kirkuk.’

‘It’s a big play – am I hearing you?’

‘Telling it frankly, Isaac, as big as it gets. It’s her and the armour and the sniper?’

‘He seemed a good guy, the sniper, I met him.’

‘I don’t think so, Isaac. I’m not talking about the guy in the column – I met him, too.

This is very confidential. There’s a sniper in Baghdad…’

‘Do you have a name?’

‘That is very sensitive confidential. I’d like to share on that one, but…’

The Israeli gazed into the American’s eyes. ‘Aziz? Major? Baghdad Military College?

Chief instructor in sniping? Major Karim Aziz? Sorry, Caspar, he’s not in Baghdad. He was transferred to Fifth Army three days ago. Is that important? I wouldn’t want to spoil your day but doesn’t that make a difference to your plan?’

The American rocked on the lavatory seat. His hands went up to his face as if to block out the news. His body shook. He stood and tossed the towel for the Israeli to catch and went towards the bathroom’s door, his cheeks ashen.

‘You could just say, Isaac, you spoiled my day. You’ve screwed it big-time.’

Cohen stared at the taps, heard the door open then close, and wondered whether the first strand of the big plan was unravelling. *** For Gus, it was a simple shot. Any of the Sunday-morning amateurs on Stickledown Range would have made the hit.

In the hour before dawn, he had followed Omar to the house that was set back from the road into the town. It had been empty but the lights were on, there was still food on the table and toys lay on the kitchen floor. The cupboard doors upstairs were open. He thought the father had finally decided on flight after the children had been put to bed, and that the parents had packed frantically what they could carry with the children into a car.

He had gone up the stairs, led by Omar, and had wedged the pulped-paper head into the corner of the main bedroom’s window so that the features would appear to gaze back at the town, and had put the binoculars on the windowsill immediately below the head.

They had pushed aside the cover of the ceiling hatch, and levered themselves up among the rafters. Before first light he had dislodged a roof tile for the firing position, then removed a second tile for the telescope Omar would use.

Gus had stared down on to a battlefield swathed in grey mist. When he’d settled he told Omar to knock out a minimum of another fifteen tiles, and heard them slide crazily down to the guttering.

The house he had chosen was set in a wide plot. The ground was already dug and hoed and the first vegetables were sprouting. Beyond a low wire fence, against which children’s bicycles lay, was the garden of the next house, which had a lower roof. A hundred yards further down the road a lorry was slewed across as a barricade. Then the houses formed close-set streets, and rising above them were the minarets and the dull, plastered facade of the police station, topped by a communications dish. In front of the police station, where the road widened, was another barricade of three overturned cars.

He had taken his aim. The range was four hundred yards. The flare was fired from behind them, arched over the rooftop, then burst above the first barricade.

Gus fired.

The communications dish on the roof of the police station disintegrated and its frame collapsed.

He waited.

It was as though he had thrown down a glove into the mud in the path of his opponent, or slapped the face of his enemy.

Paint flakes and metal fragments had fallen on him when the dish was hit.

There was a waist-high parapet on the roof of the police station, but at two of the corners there were higher sandbag emplacements that covered the road into the town and the two barricades blocking it. Aziz had chosen the centre point of the wall facing the road and, as he lay on his stomach, his view was through a rainwater gully. The furthest house from him, along the road, was held in the Dragunov’s sight.

He had heard crack and, a second later, thump. The firing position was between 350 metres and 450 metres from him. First, down the road, he made football pitches in his mind, and counted four. There were two houses in the sighting distance, the nearest was lower and he did not believe offered the elevation to clear the parapet and still hit the communications dish. He started his study of the further house. He was back from the gully, offered no target. He made a further calculation from the vertical lines in the reticule of the sight that were the equivalent in height of an average-sized man, then the conversion between the height of a man and the height of a window. The size of the windows told him that the house was 400 metres from him. There was no other building of sufficient height from which the shot on the communications dish could have been fired.