Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

An hour later, they were near to the road, the bridge and the glow of the sentries’ cigarettes. The iron-hooped sides of the bridge were lit by the lights of the patrolling armoured personnel carrier.

The sacks with the mines were dumped on the scraped earth beside the road.

Haquim said, ‘If the tanks come, if she is wrong, only your skill can save us.’

‘I can do my best, friend, but I do not know whether my best is enough.’

‘I do not ask for more. Let us pray to God she is correct, that the tanks will not come

…’

‘Then I’ll sit in my chair with a beer and a book.’

Haquim hit him hard on the arm. Gus thought that the old soldier equally disliked contempt and frivolity. Haquim was gone, and with him the men who had carried the sacks. He was alone with the boy. The embankment of the road towered above him. He watched the personnel carrier reach the bridge ahead, then reverse and turn, its searchlight spearing the flat, barren ground. They were deep in the ditch below the embankment when it returned, and the searchlight’s beam was far above them. They tracked away from the bridge to a place where the embankment was lowest, and Gus armed the mines, while Omar scratched the holes for them.

The burden crushed him. They depended on him.

There were many who saw him go.

The logistics officer in the command bunker, puzzling over the reasoning behind the decision to withdraw two of the three infantry battalions to Kirkuk and even more about the complex manoeuvre to achieve it at night and in secrecy, saw him kick himself up from the chair where he had dozed, hitch on his backpack, sling his rifle, call his dog and go out into the night.

The logistics officer called after him, ‘Hit the bastards, Karim, hit them so they scream.’

The sentry ran from behind the sandbag wall and wrenched open the wood-framed wire gates. He was about to scurry back to the security of the sandbags when he realized that the officer stood erect as if no danger could confront him. He saluted clumsily. The officer thanked him, as if he were a friend, and he walked through the gate with the dog.

His bulky over-suit dripped with fresh grey mud, and the same mud was embedded in the dog’s coat. The sentry saw him unhook his rifle from his shoulder, then hold it loosely across his body as he slipped through a pool of light and away into the shadows. He knew the bandit army coming towards them was led by a woman; it was said, in the tent where he slept when not on sentry duty, that bullets could not harm her, that she was the devil’s child. He thanked his god for sending the officer with the big rifle who went to break the magic of the witch.

While Isaac Cohen, Mossad man, slept in his eyrie, the wind-bent antenna sucked down signals, which the computers decrypted.

He slept without a care.

The brigadier, dressing in the darkness before dawn, had selected his best uniform with the medal ribbons of three decades of military service. The orderly had made a fine job of polishing his boots. He had chosen to wear his brigade’s scarlet cravat, which hid the heave in his throat. In the shining holster on his webbing belt was his service pistol, loaded and armed. His heart pounded, dinned in his ears, and he did not at first hear the shout from his orderly, a man he would trust with his life.

While he had slept, men had flown north from Baghdad, had come in secrecy to Kirkuk.

He had rehearsed his speech, again, while showering, shaving, dressing. Ahead of him were the opened double doors to the briefing room. He had tried twice, the evening before, to make secure telephone contact with the general commanding the armoured division to the south, but had failed. That had not distressed him. Since the American bombing and the imposition of sanctions, secure communications were haphazard, replacement parts rarely available. He heard the shout repeated, but his mind was far away in the detail of his speech.

All of the officers of the brigade, equipped with T-72 tanks and BMP armoured personnel carriers, would now be waiting on him in the briefing room. He had served with the older men, the more senior, most of his adult life. The younger men were the sons and nephews of officers, now retired from active duty, whom he had fought alongside in the Iranian, Kurdish and Kuwaiti wars. The brigadier believed the senior and junior officers owed primary loyalty to him, not to the regime. His speech, practised alone in his room, would appeal to that ingrained loyalty. The shout and the running feet were a barely noticed distraction as he approached the double doors.

From the Kirkuk military airfield, the men had been driven to Fifth Army headquarters, had taken an office behind a steel reinforced door, had established a radio link to the al-Rashid barracks and had prepared to talk to him about loyalty.

The brigadier paused at the double doors. He heard the scrape of chairs as the officers were ordered to stand. He smoothed his hair, and his tongue flicked at his lips. In no battle he had fought, and the medal ribbons on his chest showed there had been many, had he felt such gut-wrenching tension. Had the brigadier been a gambler, a dice-thrower, he would have been better able to control that tension – but he believed in loyalty. They stood in ranks in front of the lectern he would use… A fresh tension intruded on his thoughts. He had instructed the technical officers and NCOs to work through the night, to scavenge and cannibalize, to get the maximum number of the brigade’s fighting vehicles to combat readiness. The tanks and personnel carriers made an imposing parade-ground army but spares were at a premium. The speech returned to his mind, melded with the repeated shout and the drum of approaching feet.

The first moments of his speech, the first words they heard, would be the most important. He steadied himself. He would say, decisively: ‘Officers, friends, our brigade is a family. A family stands together – a family will make the supreme sacrifice in blood.

In the history of this family, united by selfless dedication, this is now a time of critical importance. The loyalty of this family is to the proud and honoured state of Iraq, not to the criminal clique that has for too long abused this family’s trust. Today we are given, by God, the chance to rid our beloved people from the rule of the felons, which has brought misery down on us… ’ The shout and the footfall were clearer. The doors would be locked behind him. If there was a weasel complaint from any officer, he would draw his pistol and shoot dead the callow bastard who made it.

‘Brigadier, please, there is a call from Tuz Khurmatu – the general commanding the Republican Guard armoured division. He must speak with you personally – a matter of national security.’

He needed the support of the general commanding the Republican Guard armour at Tuz Khurmatu. He gestured to his second-in-command standing beside the lectern – two minutes.

He did not see his orderly’s face. He was led from the corridor on to the parade ground where the maintenance teams sweated under arc lights over the tanks and the personnel carriers. There was the roar of revving engines and choking clouds of diesel fumes. He did not see the tears of betrayal running on his orderly’s face. He was led into a small brick building with high barred windows and through an opened steel reinforced door. In a bare room, on the the wood table, the telephone was off the cradle. He snatched it up.

He said hoarsely, ‘We are about to move, in an hour we move. Do I have your support?’

He recognized the voice on a crackling line. ‘You are a traitor. I am a servant of the President. You are a traitor and will die like a traitor – like a dog.’