Gerald Seymour: Holding the Zero

Now in his eighty-fifth year, a remarkable age for a man who had lived the greater part of his life in a village community where the houses clung to the steep slopes, near Birkim, of the mountains of Kurdish Iraq, it had been a great effort for Hoyshar to write to an old friend whom he valued as a brother.

There was no postal service out of the region, and Hoyshar had no access to a facsimile machine or to a satellite telephone. The letter had moved by hand, growing grubbier, accumulating the fingerprints of people Hoyshar did not know. The young woman, Meda, had started her march out of the northern fortress uplands in the week that the letter was written. All of those who had moved it woke that morning unaware of the small fissure opened in the outer extremity of the Iraqi army’s defence line.

The letter had been given by the old man to Sarah, an Australian working in northern Iraq for a London-backed children’s charity. She had been in the mountains investigating reports of a diphtheria epidemic, and the letter had been pressed into her hand… That morning, an hour after a single bullet had sung across the emptiness of a steep-sided valley, she nursed an aching hangover from the farewell party for her regional director…

She had passed on the letter.

Joe had taken it from the aid-worker. He was Scots born, a one-time soldier in the Royal Engineers, and was in northern Iraq to clear minefields. She had pleaded, explained, and he had stuffed it into his shoulder-bag and gone back to the ground around a village well where he taught local men, by example and practice, how to kneel and probe for the anti-personnel mines… That morning, with his bodyguards, interpreter and three Kurdish recruits, he was staking out the pegs round a field of V69s and POMZ 2Ms and Type 72As that had been laid in an orchard of pomegranate trees… Three days later he had handed on the crumpled envelope.

Lev had taken the letter, been told its history. Everybody knew the overweight and balding Russian. He was equally loved and loathed: loved because he could smooth paths and provide comforts, loathed because of his corrupt amorality… That morning, he spat orders to his houseboy, who carried to the boot of the Mercedes two crates of bourbon, a video-cassette recorder and an Apple Mac computer… He had slid the envelope down into the hip pocket of his trousers, where it wedged against a gross roll of American dollar bills, and delivered it at the end of the week.

Isaac had been given the letter and had, of course, steamed open the envelope. If it had not interested him, it would have gone into the plastic bag of shredded waste-paper beside the table where the banks of monitoring equipment were stacked. He was an Israeli, an employee of the Mossad, in charge of the most Godforsaken post offered to any agent sent from Tel Aviv. His equipment, his dishes, his antenna, in the high, empty country south of the Arbil to Rawandiz road, could eavesdrop on every communication between army headquarters in Baghdad and Fifth Army headquarters in Kirkuk, and the signals of the Estikhabarat, and he could monitor the SIGINT and ELINT operations of the Project 858. As a result of the strange alliances of northern Iraq he was protected in his eyrie by a platoon of Turkish paratroops. That morning, he had listened to Call-signs 1-16 and 18-23, in Sector 8, broadcasting news of nothing to Kirkuk, and he had noted that Call-sign 17 had failed to make scheduled contact. Then he had begun to listen to a radio conversation between armoured corps commanders in the Mosul area… A Turkish air force Blackhawk helicopter, with no navigation lights, came in at night once a week to the small LZ, shaking the roof of his building and tugging at the tents of the paratroops.

The helicopter had taken the letter, resealed.

The letter handled by the aid-worker, the de-miner, the entrepreneur and the intelligence agent had been delivered four weeks after it had left the mountain village to a vicarage in southern England, and none of its couriers yet knew of the consequences of their actions.

Sometimes their voices were raised, at others they bickered quietly. Gus Peake did not know the cause of the dispute. He sat on his haunches with his back against the wall of the shed, with the map and plan they had drawn across his knees. They were within earshot but out of his sight, around the edge of the shed, and beyond the thorn corral where the goats were. Nor did he know why the advantage from his single shot was not exploited. He had seen with his binoculars how the men had swarmed on the cliff face and run to the building in front of which the body lay. He had seen the main door of the house beaten down, and he had heard the screams, the smashing of the equipment from inside. And she had come back down the cliff, descended nimbly, as easily as a deer, and later she had reached where he waited. He did not understand why they had not, immediately, pushed forward. He tried to shut from his mind the argument raging near to him.

Gus worked on the plan of the bunkers they had given him and married them to the old map. He used a compass to measure distance, because he had been told he should never rely completely on the technology of his binoculars. From the map, he tried to locate a vantage-point amongst the whorls of the contours that he could approach using dead ground. He accepted that luck had been with him that morning, that a clean kill at 785 yards without a sighting shot was more than fortunate. He had little conceit, and less arrogance. He believed in himself and his ability, but he was seldom less than realistic.

He had been lucky, more than fortunate. He tried to find a point on the map that he could reach in darkness, that would offer him cover and protection and give him a range of not more than 650 yards.

Their voices were angry again. He pictured them, toe to toe, eyeball to eyeball. Some of the men had been left on the plateau, some had come down, and they sat in the shade of trees where the vehicles were hidden around a small fire. Their faces were impassive, as if they heard and saw nothing of the argument.

He did not know if the map was accurate, or whether the plan that had been given to him of the bunkers was loosely drawn or to an exact scale. Then he heard the silence. The lines on the map seemed to bounce in front of his eyes. She was walking away, crossing open ground, skirting the clump of trees where the men sat and the vehicles were hidden.

He saw her sink down and her head fall into her hands. Suddenly the smell of the goats seemed revolting. He folded away the map, dumped the plan into the rucksack’s pouch, threw his calculator and the compass in with it. He kicked at a stone and watched it career towards the track.

‘You have a problem?’

Haquim limped the last few strides from the corner of the shed to where Gus sat and used the butt of his rifle as a prop while he clumsily lowered himself down.

‘Only that I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know why we are here. I don’t know what everyone is arguing about. I don’t know why she’s not speaking to me…’

‘Why do we not go forward, Mr Peake? Because we wait for more men. I try to tell her and she abuses me. Why do we wait for more men? Because there are very few who will follow me, and many who follow only the orders of their agha. Yes, because of her, because simple people believe in her, illiterate people, people who have old rifles to keep bears and dogs away from their livestock, she can raise an army that would be butchered by machine-guns, artillery and tanks. We need trained men who are familiar with the tactics of battle, who will receive and carry out orders, who know how to use weapons.

The men we need, the peshmerga, which in your language means “those who face death”, are controlled by the two agha of the Kurdish people. They have promised a few men, only a few. They want to fight a war, yes, but only if they believe they will win that war.