Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

‘Don’t ever do that again,’ Willet hissed. ‘Don’t ever point a weapon…’

She laughed in his face.

‘That’s what Gus has taken. In the right hands it’s a serious weapon. Sale or return, as I said. Am I going to see it back here? I suppose that depends on what he learned down in Devon.’

‘You sat out there?’ There was an accusing note in Haquim’s voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Alone? Without protection?’

‘Yes,’ Gus said.

‘Where you could be seen?’

‘Where I could be seen.’

‘For why? For what?’

‘I can’t explain.’

‘You talk serious rubbish… Meda says there will be no tanks.’

‘Does she?’

‘If Meda says it the men will believe her.’

‘Will they?’

‘You think yourself amusing, Mr Peake…’

He was light-headed, as if drunk with alcohol.

As the sun had climbed Gus had tramped back to the outskirts of the town and to the low wall that penned the goats where he had left Omar. He had had to shout at the boy to drill home the instruction that he was not to be followed. There had been a purpose to his long, lonely walk, to evaluate the ground over which they would fight in the morning. He had sat on a rock and soaked the place into his body and his mind. He had wanted to test his powers of observation and to reckon out the camouflage he would need and to measure the visibility that would be available to him as the heat grew… He had known he was being watched. Gus had not seen him, but at one point there had been the flash of sunlight striking the prism of a lens. It was the knowledge that he had been watched from a great distance that induced the impertinence he threw back at Haquim. The mustashar sobered him, jolted him.

‘Have you thought that you might be taken, Mr Peake? Not killed clean – captured, dirty.’

‘No.’

‘Perhaps that is what you should think. It is all a bluff. We must create an illusion of energy, strength. We have to go forward on a narrow thrust. Each step we go forward takes us further from the protection of the mountains. Tomorrow that protection is behind us. We are in the open. We go forward, and every step we advance we make the salient deeper and we expose the flanks. Do you know about flanks, Mr Peake? The most important thing is that they can be pinched. I put it very simply to you, when you make a salient with flanks you can be cut off, you can be surrounded, and squeezed. You wonder that I am worried? I carry the worry alone. She has no idea of the danger of encirclement.

She has no military experience. Meda believes only in the certainty of her destiny, and she says there will be no tanks. I’m not asking for sympathy, but I have the right to demand that you do not make fun of me. She says there will be no tanks, but it is for me to consider whether she might be wrong. She does not ask it of me but I fear for her, for those who follow her, for myself, for you – if the tanks come and we are not killed cleanly.’

‘I apologize,’ Gus said quietly. ‘I apologize sincerely.’

‘You have to meet a man who has brought mines to hear how a sniper should use the mines – if she is wrong and if the tanks come.’

Gus followed Haquim back through the town towards the police station to listen to another expert.

The brigadier was a strong man, and he shivered as he watched the tanks being armed and fuelled. He had shared, spread the conspiracy, and the promises were piled behind him. He had the promise of the witch and her peshmerga army, and the promise of the Americans, and the promise of men in Baghdad. But – and he knew the sort of promises that wafted around men committed to insurrection – there were always more promises.

Never had sufficient promises been heaped behind the officers planning a coup d’etat.

With insufficient promises there was a short walk to the gallows. He needed the promise of the general at Tuz Khurmatu.

The huge tank shells, 125mm calibre, were being lifted into the hatches. The fuel lorries were alongside the leviathans, loading the diesel. In the morning he would address the officers of the armoured brigade and demand their loyalty to him as their commander, and the promises that they would follow him.

He would be a great man if the promises were kept, and a dead man if they were broken.

The brigadier could not shed the chill from his body as the sun beat down on him, and on his tanks.

Present at the meeting were all the male members of the general’s extended family.

Inside the barracks compound of the Republican Guard armoured division at Tuz Khurmatu, the windows of the villa were curtained and the door to the salon locked on the inside. The mahogany-framed television set was tuned to a satellite channel from Germany and played promotional music videos, with the sound turned high. They were of the Sunni religion, and of the Dulaimi tribe. Their territory stretched from Fallujah on the Euphrates river, across the desert wasteland to Al Qaim near the Syrian border. The Dulaimi tribe held second place in the regime’s favours and trust after the President’s own tribe, the Takriti. They were men hardened by an upbringing in the harsh desert territory of sun-scorched days and bitter night frosts. They were fighters. The sons, cousins and nephews of the general crowded the salon. They wore the insignia on their shoulders of armoured units, artillery, infantry and Special Forces. The general was the head of the family and they listened in silent respect, craned to hear what he said. He was known to his family and his tribe and his tank crews as ‘the Hammerfist’. No man had ever doubted his courage.

He explained his dilemma. The general, the Hammerfist, told them of the visit he had received from a brigadier of Fifth Army in Kirkuk, and the proposition put to him.

Did they join the conspiracy, or did they destroy it?

To know of treason, and not to denounce it, was to commit treason. Should the conspiracy founder, should the brigadier be captured and interrogated, should he be broken under torture, should he speak of a meeting with a general that had not been reported to the relevant authorities, then the general too was a conspirator – and all of them who now attended the meeting in the villa’s salon. There was no middle way.

If they joined the conspiracy and it succeeded, each of them would be rewarded. If it failed, however, they would be hanged after they had been tortured. Faced with the dilemma, the general asked for advice as to which course he should follow. He could arm the tanks of his division, or he could pick up the telephone and make a call to the al-Rashid barracks of the Estikhabarat. Which?

The quiet clung around them.

Each man considered insults thrown at him by the regime, and benefits they had gained from it. They thought of the consequences to their families, pondered the reliability of the Kurds, and of an American promise to create a no-fly zone and a no-drive zone above the tanks roaring towards Baghdad.

Straight-backed, hands clasped behind him, the general – the Hammerfist – waited for them to make known their reaction to a devil’s dilemma.

At brigade, at the crossroads, five miles north-east of Kirkuk, Major Aziz did what all soldiers do in the last hours before a battle. He cleaned his weapon and wrote a letter to his wife.

They were not dirty, but from habit he cleaned the bolt and the breech, the PSO-1 telescopic sight mounted directly above the trigger, the interior of the magazine, and then he wiped hard at each of the ten rounds of 7.62mm ammunition before returning them to the magazine. All around him, in the gathering darkness, soldiers checked their weapons.

When he was satisfied that there was no possibility of a malfunction caused by dirt, he wound the loose rough cloth strips round the butt, stock, ’scope and barrel of the Dragunov.