Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

‘Went well. I got some good bronze stuff that’ll look nice on the walls at home, and a couple of drapes, and a bit of jewellery for Annie that a little oily mother-robber swore was out of a Van grave – you know, the Ararat mountain and Noah story. But what the hell? It was a decent price.’

‘Pleased to know that. I’ve had a poor sort of day.’ Bill and Rusty were gone. ‘Pull up a chair.’

Luther gangled towards him. The guy was tall enough for basketball. He sat. ‘Sorry to hear that, Caspar.’

‘I am talking about RECOIL.’

‘You have my full attention.’

‘I hate the Need-to-Know bullshit. There are three strands to RECOIL. I have the three, for my sins. Bill has one, Rusty has one, you have one.’

‘I have one, correct.’

Bill was briefed on the movement of an armoured column, Rusty on the uprising led by a woman, Luther covered the plan’s third element – the same in the Agency’s posts in Amman and Riyadh, a three-way split for the watchers.

‘Not any more. You had Major Karim Aziz and his goddam rifle down in Baghdad -but not any more. I hear, sadly on the best authority, that he’s been deployed to Kirkuk.’

‘Shit.’

‘Aptly said, Luther. It’s like a strand is cut.’

‘Frankly, Caspar, are two strands enough?’

‘Maybe, maybe not. I just don’t know…’

The last time Caspar Reinholtz had known the quivering, gut-turning apprehension as a plan went to the wire had been three years before. Two strands then. The promise of a culvert bomb near to the Abbasio Palace to catch the motorcade, and a mutiny by the 14

July Battalion. The cars hadn’t come, the culvert bomb hadn’t been fired, but the battalion had moved on the Baghdad Radio transmitters and a heliport used by the President – poor bastards. The arrest, torture, mutilation, execution of a cousin had provoked a general to lead the battalion in mutiny. One strand hadn’t been enough to carry the weight. The troops with their tanks had been massacred, the general had killed himself. That night, he’d written his report in frustrated anger, and known that, once again, the President sat in his goddam palace and laughed at a failure of American policy.

He’d sent further reports of the round-up arrests, the hangings in the Abu Gharib gaol, and hated writing them because he knew they all reeked of failure.

‘What I can tell you, if another strand goes, RECOIL is fucked sideways.’

‘You’ve been here for ever, Caspar. How many times have we been to the brink, had a really good scene in place, had the Boss for Life in the sights, had all the players lined and ready to go, and seen it all go down?’

Not a week went by without his superiors pursuing him for details of the chance of insurrection, mutiny, treachery in Iraq that would topple the President, the Boss for Life.

They waited at Langley, champagne on ice, for the day they could dance and sing on the man’s grave. Every photograph of the President, out of Baghdad, showed the shit laughing.

‘More times than I’d like to count, Luther. I have to play positive, it’s what I’m paid to be, but if either of the other two goes belly-up, it’s over. And I’m getting a bad feeling in my gut. That’s why I’ve had a poor sort of day.’

A plan of mutiny must spread.

In the last days, before execution, it must breathe and move beyond a cabal of key conspirators whispering in secrecy. At a crucial moment of maximum risk, the plan must be shared if the recruitment of others is to be won and it is to reach critical mass.

The brigadier was a hard, tempered fighting man.

His staff car drove him past the sentries and into the compound of an armoured division of the Republican Guard. It was said, in the eddy of whispered rumours that passed amongst the chosen families of the regime, that the niece of the general commanding the division of the Republican Guard had been propositioned for sex by a nephew of the President, had declined the overture, and had been insulted. The rumour said the nephew of the President had called the niece of the general a ‘barren useless goat’. When it happened and the drive south began, down the highway from Kirkuk to Baghdad, the brigadier’s armour must pass through Tuz Khurmatu, the garrison camp he now entered.

He was without fear. As a battalion commander he had survived the ferocious battles to hold the Basra road against the Khomeini zealot hordes, coming at his bunkers in human waves. As a brigade commander, he had been widely praised by his peers for keeping his unit intact as a cohesive fighting force confronting the American 1st Armoured Division. No-one had ever doubted his courage or his tactical skill to his face

… but no promotion had come his way. He should have had command of a division; he should have had the riches that were the reward of a divisional commander. The months had turned to years, the festering resentment had grown, and he had welcomed his recruitment to the plan. When it succeeded he would receive – it was promised him – the Defence Ministry. Also promised was a draft of one million American dollars.

He was saluted and ushered with deference up the steps of the general’s villa. If he had been a man who knew fear there would have been a slight crease of anxiety on the brigadier’s face, because a sniper had been transferred abruptly from Baghdad to Kirkuk.

Fear was not a sector of his character.

His boots beat on a marble floor, a door was opened for him.

The plan must be shared.

Joe Denton thought she’d probably done it herself. He walked round the two pick-ups with a surly stride. The seats in the front and the floor in the back of each vehicle had been hosed, scrubbed, wiped clean. Joe had heard the vehicles arrive at the roadside by the village, but he’d worked in the meadow until there was no longer light to continue.

Then he’d crawled back along the peg-marked path that was cleared. It had been a slow day, but the pace was the same as every other. Beside the road was the return for his work. He had extracted and made safe fourteen VS50s and three V69s. Next week he would allow the locally employed de-miners to start, not before; he was not yet satisfied, from his own expert skill, that the mines hadn’t shifted from the straight rows in which they had been planted. It would be at least three weeks before he could take a beer with the villagers and tell them they could use that meadow of best grazing grass. He finished the inspection of the vehicles.

‘Thanks.’

‘Thanks for loaning them.’

‘Do you want something to eat.’

‘Wouldn’t mind – like to hear about my day, what I heard?’

‘If you want to tell me,’ Joe said gruffly.

They were as lonely as each other. Neither had a friend amongst the Kurds they worked with. They were both employers, there to maintain discipline, had the authority to dismiss their workers and take the decisions that mattered. Without friends they existed in a vacuum of trust. They had little in common other than proximity and loneliness. She was the blond, weather-tanned girl from a Sydney suburb; Joe was the straggly built one-time soldier from the west of England. No point of their cultures intersected. She needed company, and with bad grace he needed the same.

They sat under a tree.

Sarah said, ‘We started with fifty-two casualties. There was every sort of wound you could imagine. We had brain damage, livers, spinal cords, stomachs, lungs, main arteries

– we had the lot – and they’d only brought the worst. Christ knows about the people left behind. We started with them all squashed in. There was room when we finished the journey.’

She laughed.

He thought it was the shock that made her laugh.

‘You know, Joe, when we finished we had them all bedded down in the pick-ups, nice and restful, thirty-seven when we reached Arbil. We had dropped off fifteen. The ones I was with told me about the battle. There’s a town called Tarjil over the ridges there and it was defended by a regiment, a whole bloody regiment. I’m not a soldier, Joe, but I would have thought soldiering is about watching your arse. They went frontal, up the main street. They ran against machine-guns – is it me or is that just dumb?’