Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

He saw the painted head, and the binoculars.

He counted seventeen holes in the roofing where the tiles had been forced away.

His eye never left the ’scope, and his finger stayed with an infinite gentleness on the Dragunov’s trigger, and he spoke softly to the dog.

‘He tells us that he knows we have come to hunt him. Maybe the Americans told him or the Zionists, maybe they picked it off the radio. He wants me to know where he is. Do you find that peculiar, little man? It is an old game. You put up a bogus target and the sniper shoots it, and then you look for him, and you kill him. Very old, and not even a good head. He does not have sufficient respect for us…’

The machine-guns on either side of him had started to fire. The battle was joined. At the edge of the circle of his ’scope sight were the first running and crawling columns of men closing on the furthest barricade. There was an answering thundercrack, repeated, and repeated again, from a heavy machine-gun and great chunks came careering off the parapet wall. Had Aziz shifted his aim fractionally, there would have been fine targets among the columns, but his eyes were locked on the seventeen holes in the house’s roof.

He could see the men behind the barricade scurry between different shooting positions.

Two machine-guns from the roof of the police station fired over the barricades on the road, with lazy running tracers that died among the two columns of peshmerga hugging the ditches either side of the tarmac.

It would have been easy for Gus to knock away the machine-gun crews on the police-station roof or to devastate the defence of the forward barricade. He held his fire. He searched for the sniper among the rooftops and the windows, the high points of the police station and the minarets, the heaps of rubble and rubbish beside the road. He saw men go down, some poleaxed, some writhing, in the charge for the barricade. He saw men he had hiked alongside, and eaten with, washed with, slept close to – men with familiar faces -stand and blast back at the firing from behind the barricade, then throw up their arms like helpless idiots and crumple. He saw her… She had a bandanna of torn cloth around her head to hold her hair away from her eyes, grenades tied to her body, and she carried an assault rifle. She came out of the right-hand ditch and ran low across the road towards the other side against which the firing was most concentrated. She dived for the ditch where the men were pinned down. He saw her grab two, three, by their shirts and heave them forward. She stepped over those who had fallen in the ditch, and those who flailed their arms in agony.

He watched Meda’s crabbing dash towards the barricade, and the firing slackened. He saw the soldiers break. Again and again, her arm waved above her head for the columns to come forward. Gus could have shot several of the running soldiers, aimed at their backs, but he searched instead for the position of the sniper.

The battle was fought around him, but Major Karim Aziz played no part in it.

It was beneath him, beside him, but his focus was on the house. He watched the crude head in the upper window, and he scanned the missing tiles that were spread at differing heights along the length of the roof. From his elevated position, protected by the parapet, there were many targets he could have taken. At that range, he could have picked off enough of the peshmerga to have slowed, if not halted, the advance. He was trapped by the obsession to locate and kill the sniper confronting him. He could have given covering fire to the soldiers who ran back from the furthest barricade. The course of the battle was vaguely apparent to him in the bottom of the arc of vision through his ’scope. The dog shivered against his leg. He was comfortable within himself. If he had given the cover, he would have betrayed his position. He watched the house, waited for the chance, as the concentrated fury grew below him.

‘Aren’t you going to shoot?’ Omar shouted.

‘Search the rooftops, and don’t show yourself,’ Gus murmured.

Through the magnification of the ’scope, he watched the roofs. The sun was rising behind him and he hoped its low line would catch the glass of a rifle-sight or a telescope’s lens or binoculars. Below, across the road, there was thickening smoke from fires started by the tracers, but above that grey carpet the roofs, where a sniper could have taken his position, were clear. The firing was a cacophony of noise, but Gus watched the rooftops.

‘When will you shoot?’

‘If I see him I’ll shoot, but not until then.’

He was aware that a defence line held at the further barricade. At moments when his concentration wavered, he saw the soldiers milling behind the cars and in doorways, but he cut them out because they were distractions. Some days, when he fired on Stickledown Range, not the major meetings for which silver spoons were presented, there was chatter and laughter around him, distraction, but he had learned to ignore them and to concentrate only on his own shooting.

‘You have to shoot!’ Omar yelled.

‘It’s all about patience,’ Gus said quietly. ‘His patience and mine. The one whose patience goes first is the one who loses.’

He watched chimneys and television aerials and satellite dishes, windows that were slightly ajar, the flat roofs and the crenellated parapet of the upper part of the mosque’s tower. He saw her, fleetingly, through the smoke haze at the lower extremity of his

’scope sight, emerge from a side lane to hurl a grenade towards the barricade, but then his eye wafted away and slipped back to cover the roofs and windows that were bathed in bright sunlight.

‘If you don’t shoot, I will!’ Omar screamed. Gus ignored him.

He could have disrupted the defence of the barricade, could have shot the soldiers who lurched towards the far side of it with boxes of fresh ammunition, could have dropped the soldier who rose and fired from the hip as Meda made her last charge, hemmed in by her men, on the overturned cars. To have fired would have been to betray his position. There was no conflict in his mind. He realized that the boy had left him. He never took his eye from the ’scope sight, but he reached out with his trigger hand and felt the emptiness.

Then his hand touched the discarded telescope. He thought he had explained it very clearly, reasonably, to the boy, why he did not fire. Then he settled again to resume his watch. He saw the wave of men break against the barricade, but the sniper still did not show himself.

The resistance at the barricade crumbled. The smoke swirled around him. More often now his body was spattered with the dust and rubble of the fractured concrete wall behind which he sheltered. He saw the movement at the door of the house and his rifle’s aim edged sideways to cover it. The moment of opportunity had come, the smile played on his face. His finger rested on the trigger. Major Karim Aziz swore in frustration. A boy hesitated in the doorway, then ran for the ditch and the road. He was little more than a child and carried an assault rifle. He felt a surge of anger as his aim traversed back to the windows of the house and the roof’s seventeen holes. His eyeline again shifted, away from the sight, over the barrel of the Dragunov, towards the charge at the barricade below him. He realized then the fate of the battle in which he had taken no part. When the barricade fell, the last struggle would start – for the police station. So little time was left to him. He shouted to the machine-gun crew on his right to fire on the house, rake the roof, flush the bastard. He watched the roof and the upper window where the head was displayed and waited for the bullet burst to impact on the tiles, to move the bastard… and he saw nothing. He waited. He was shouting again, angry because his order was not obeyed, he turned his head. The machine-gun crew were dead, the blood from their bodies running in little merging dribbles. He heard the thunderous beat of the rounds from the heavy machine-gun firing on the main gate of the police station. They had died beside him and he had not noticed.