Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

Willet pondered on that last sentence.

He had found, each time he wrote his notes for Ms Manning’s line manager, an increasing urge to talk up the positive character points of this man. The urge was based, and Willet recognized it, on a growing sense of jealousy. He believed that somehow, and in the most unobtrusive way, he was belittled by Augustus Henderson Peake.

He never moved without an order to do so. In his analysis, he was an automaton and a robot. But Peake had made his own decisions, had packed up and travelled on his own impulses. Willet would never be his own man, not now and not once he had left the military. From the jealousy was born knowledge and admiration.

The concept of a transport manager affecting the course of a faraway war was laughable, of course, yet the worm of doubt ate at him. He remembered an old army video, shown to the sniper course at Warminster in monochrome, that had listed the sort of civilians who might have the required qualities. Not a transport manager among them, but… A fisherman can sit all day at a canal bank and not see his float go down: he has the virtue of patience. A steeplejack can climb to great and dangerous heights, knows his safety is in his own hands, that a false move will end his life. A countryman can shoot straight and move silently, is cunning and thinks ahead to anticipate the movement of his prey. A clerk can spend an entire day with columns of figures, has the priceless power of concentration that shuts out distractions.

All ordinary men, and all fashioned into killers by the instructors. That was the answer.

Peake had the necessary virtues, but not the military weapons and tactics. Willet realized that what had started as a tedious, late-at-night instruction to pry into an ordinary man’s life was turning into a search for the Grail.

He printed what he had written and phoned out for a delivery pizza. Waiting for it to arrive, he wondered whether he undersold that ordinary man, whether Peake could survive, whether the forces arrayed against him were too great and whether that enemy was closing in on him.

Late at night, another simple man – who knew only his chosen trade – went back to the war.

He had not taken the chance of a bath, or gone to the officers’ quarters to eat, or telephoned his wife.

In Aziz’s backpack was more food for the dog, and for himself there was the filled water canteen, goat’s cheese and bread.

He was driven in an open jeep towards the crossroads, away from the flame. When next he saw her, whether there were a hundred or a thousand between them, he would shoot her. It was the decision of a man who craved simplicity. He would shoot her, over the heads of a hundred or a thousand, regardless of the consequences of a counter-strike, then go with his dog to hunt the sniper who opposed him. With the clean wind on his face, he thought that he had broken the distortion of the mirrors. He was well read. There were many books in English on military history in the library of the Baghdad Military College. If he wanted to learn their secrets, he had to have the language and over the years he had taken the chance to read textbooks, pamphlets and manuals of the British army. A book had told him of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. It had troubled the simple soldier and, perhaps, had led him along the road of recruitment and mirrors.

Stauffenberg had lost faith in his Fuhrer, did not believe in a hopeless war. Stauffenberg was the bomb carrier and had failed, was shot like a dog in the hooded headlights of lorries. How was he regarded by those who lived and fought in Normandy and in the Russian marshes? The mirrors did not make him a hero but a traitor. To troops remorselessly retreating, Stauffenberg was the man who betrayed his fellow soldiers…

He would shoot her.

He broke the mirrors in his mind, and after he had shot the witch he would hunt down the sniper.

Gus had slept, woken, started, and at that moment not known where he was.

‘Did you dream, Mr Gus?’

‘No. I dreamed nothing.’

He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. His hand dropped to the dirt beside his legs. The small, cold shapes of the chains, bracelets, rings, and the rolled notes were still there. The boy could have pocketed them in the darkness while he slept, and had not. He hadn’t dreamed of home. Home was behind him. Home would not have understood that a boy thieved from bodies because he had nothing. The boy had not pocketed the trinkets and Gus felt a humble love for him, and couldn’t have told them at home about that love. Far away, the flame burned at Kirkuk. Between him and the flame was the infinite spread of the darkness.

‘Will you be angry again?’

‘That’s in the past.’

‘Will the rifle jam again?’

‘No, not this time.’

‘It is what I said. The mustashar came with Meda. They wanted to talk to you about the rifle, but I would not let them wake you. I said that you had cleaned the rifle and it would not jam again. They wanted to hear it from you but I did not let them wake you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Will you tell me, Mr Gus, a story of Hesketh-Prichard?’

He closed his eyes. He let the quiet seep against him. ‘Right, yes

… It’s a story that Major Hesketh-Prichard tells about a man whose bravery and dedication he much admired – and that man was an enemy. The troops may have hated the enemy. Snipers weren’t taken prisoner by those in the trenches, they were shot in cold blood there and then. But a sniper doesn’t hate his opponent. There is respect for the skill of the other. He will try to kill him, hope to succeed, but there is always respect.’

‘Please, Mr Gus, the story.’

‘You’re an impatient little sod… There was a big-game hunter, Jim Corbett -elephants and lions were what he killed before the war – he told this story to Hesketh-Prichard. Corbett always gave names to the enemy’s snipers and he called this one Wilibald the Hun. Wilibald the Hun was credited with killing more than twenty British soldiers. For days they looked for Wilibald across the turnip field in no man’s land but couldn’t find him. There had to be a trick to make him fire when the snipers on the British side were all looking for him. On a cold winter’s morning, with a frost over the field, they put up a heavy steel plate with an observation slit in it. He fired at the slit, shot right through it, but that wasn’t Wilibald’s mistake. The mistake he made, and it cost Wilibald his life, was to fire early on a cold morning. The gas from the rifle, when there’s cold air and no wind, hangs for a few moments. It makes a marker. All the snipers fired into the gas. They went forward. Wilibald was in the turnip field only seventy yards from the British line, way out in front of his own trenches. He was covered in turnip leaves. He was middle-aged, very ordinary, rather fat, and he was respected for his courage and his skill… but Wilibald the Hun made the one mistake and that’s all it takes.’

‘The tanks will not be used,’ Meda said.

A fire still burned in the roof of the police station’s main block and the tang of the smoke caught in Joe Denton’s nostrils. He had hiked blindly across the mountains all through the night; in an hour it would be dawn. Other than when he had smacked his girlfriend’s father’s face, he had never in his adult life done anything as stupid as leave the safety of northern Iraq and travel through the punched hole into government territory.

The thanks he received were, he felt, bloody minimal.

‘They will not use the tanks they have in Kirkuk.’ She turned on her heel and stalked off.

Arrogant cow. Arrogant good-looking cow, though, none the less. Joe watched her, saw the firm roll of her hips as she walked away from him, and before that he’d seen the clean-cut lines of her chest where her blouse was unfastened.