Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

‘Joe, I need help. Please.’

His voice came softly back to her. ‘What sort of help?’

‘There’s a load of casualties coming back from the other side. I don’t have the vehicle space. Can I borrow your trucks, and drivers, please?’

‘Feel free. Bring them back.’

‘You can spare them – great.’

‘I’m not going anywhere… Wash ’em out before you bring them back.’

In the culture of Joe Denton, and she knew it, she was just a tree hugger. She was a stupid bloody woman, interfering, adding to the dependency culture of Kurdish villagers, achieving bloody nothing, like all the rest of the huggers, the aid-workers. He put down the probe and started to work with a small trowel, the same as her mother used in the garden at home. She never saw his eyes, but she could picture them behind the visor.

Very clear, and very certain, eyes that could have looked right through her at that moment.

God knows how, but they did it. They squashed, forced, pushed fifty-two casualties into five pick-ups… Not all of them would make it to the hospital. There would be more room for the survivors by the time they reached Arbil.

In the late afternoon, when the stillness had settled, Omar found Gus, sitting against the low wall, gazing out over the slope of the hill that fell away from him. He saw the boy first, searching, then felt the glow of relief when the boy reached him. Behind the wall goats were penned, restless but quiet. He hadn’t waved to the boy, or called to him, but allowed himself to be found. Omar’s battered face showed his nervousness.

‘I did not know where you were.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘I have been through the town to find you.’

‘Have you?’

‘Are you very angry, Mr Gus?’

‘I am not angry, Omar, not any more.’

He could not have explained it to the boy, or to anyone he knew, how the early morning of the battle for Tarjil had changed him. The inner man was altered.

The boy squatted down beside him. ‘I have to take, Mr Gus, or I do not have anything.’

‘I understand.’

‘Because I have no father to give to me, and no mother.’

‘Yes.’

‘Worse than not having anything is to have your anger, Mr Gus.’

The boy shifted up to be against Gus’s shoulder. Back where he came from, because he was changed, none of them would have wanted to know him. The boy’s sharp smell against him was mingled with the stench of his own body. They would not have known his eyes, which were brighter, colder, staring out from his paint-streaked face. His trousers were torn alongside the reinforcement strips at the knees, and the foliage knitted into the hessian strips of the gillie suit was old and as dead as the man they had known.

‘They say your rifle jammed, Mr Gus.’

‘Do they?’

‘That you beat me in anger because your rifle jammed.’

He did not know where he could have started to explain to the boy, who had nothing, that it was wrong to steal from the dead. But if he had started, he would still have been the same man, would not have been changed. He thought that now there was no place for him to criticize the boy. He no longer had that right, or the inclination to exercise it.

‘Is that what they say?’

In the far distance was the flame. He made the promise to himself that he would walk to the flame, and offer no judgements on the boy, and the men who marched with him.

‘I told them, Mr Gus, that your rifle jammed.’

He sat in the last sunlight, which beat low against his eyes, and he slipped his arm over the narrow bony shoulders of the boy. He watched the flame burning close to the dipping sun. By comparison it was dimmer, less substantial. The boy wriggled and reached into his pocket, then took Gus’s hand and prised it open. In a small cascade the chains of gold, the bracelets, the dull rings and a thin wad of banknotes fell into Gus’s palm. He let them drop through his fingers. They lay in the dried dirt between his legs.

He looked down at the tawdry chains and rings. The grey dusk was slipping over the sloped ground that ran to the high, spurting flame, gaining ascendancy once more.

Gus held the boy close, because again the boy had nothing. He thought of the sniper, the man without a face. To himself, he laughed, and wondered whether the sniper, too, with his own people, claimed that his rifle had jammed.

‘I didn’t fire because I did not see the man I came for… You dispute my orders? Then, please, immediately, call the barracks at al-Rashid of the Estikhabarat, and my orders will be confirmed to you. You ask why I did not fire on random targets. My skill is as a sniper, I am not an artillery officer, I don’t play with tanks. You ask why I shot the commanding officer of the regiment. He was fleeing in the face of the enemy and abandoning his troops, he disgusted me. Myself, I was the last officer to leave the town.

Do you have any more questions for me, General?’

The general would never countermand an order given by the Estikhabarat. Not even he would dare to take action against an officer who had shot down a coward.

‘Did you see her?’

‘I saw her.’

‘But you did not have the opportunity to shoot her?’

He saw the general’s sly smile, which invited him to lay his foot on the mantrap. Major Aziz wondered where the brigadier was; he did not understand why, at a time of military movement and confusion, he was not in the communications bunker. He had not seen the brigadier at the crossroads, or on the road between the crossroads and Kirkuk. He thought that he stood among mirrors that distorted all of the images. He did not know who was his friend and who was his enemy.

He retorted, ‘I could have shot her. If I had shot her a minimum of a hundred civilians would have been cut down in the counter-strike. You were not there, General, you did not see those people fleeing. If I had shot I would have condemned them. They are citizens of our republic, yes? They have the protection of our President?’

He stood in front of the laundered general. He could smell the scent of the lotions on the man’s body. His own was streaked with sweat, the smears of camouflage paint dripped into his eyes and down his stubbled cheeks. The dust from his smock and the mud from his boots flaked to the floor around him.

The map was exposed on the table. At the centre of the map was the crossroads. The lines were drawn in bold Chinagraph from Kirkuk to the crossroads. It was what he understood. The lines were clarity. The mirror images were distortion. At that moment, if he had been able to telephone his wife, speak to her, explain to her, beg her for guidance, she would have told him that he was a simple man and that he should perform his duty.

The mirrors twisted his perspective, made ugly his sense of duty. He had never known the mirrors before he had allowed himself to be recruited and gone to lie each night on the flat roof waiting to take his shot. The plan was explained.

‘I lose a town for a few hours. I lose a Victory City for a few days, and here I destroy them.’ The general stabbed his finger for emphasis on the map. Stained with nicotine, it rested on the ground between the crossroads and Tarjil, at the furthest point of the Chinagraph lines. And the question was silkily put. ‘Do your orders permit you to fight there, Major?’

Aziz nodded and stumbled out of the bunker. In the last light of the day he went to find food for his dog and put behind him the images of mirrors that distorted simplicity.

‘Hi, Caspar, had a good day?’

‘How’d the shopping go?’

Luther was black, cheerful and had joined them four months before at Incerlik from time in Venezuela. Across the office space, Bill and Rusty were clearing their desks and shutting down their consoles for the evening. Luther was scheduled for night duty, and should have been sleeping in the day, but he’d caught a late ride into town. Three plastic bags were slapped down on the desk, which was dominated by the framed photograph of the guy’s family. The packages, wrapped in newspaper, poked out from them.