Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

The pistol barrel was against his neck. In the moments before his arms were pinioned, he struggled to get a hand to his holster and failed. When his arms were pinioned, when his service weapon had been taken, when the cotton hood was over his head, the beating started.

In his own leisurely fashion, and after an untroubled night’s sleep, Isaac Cohen began his day. He shaved with an old blade that barely scraped the stubble from his cheeks and chin, sluiced his body in cold water, dressed in faded jeans, a T-shirt, two sweaters and worn sneakers, ate an apple and a carton of yoghurt, flicked the pages of Maariv, which he had read the night before, made football small-talk with the commander of the Turkish troops who guarded him, and went to the building that housed the computers.

At the door, the key to the padlock in his hand, he looked down over the land lightening in the dawn.

There was snow on the highest peaks, and the deeper ravine valleys were still in black shadow, but the first shafts of the sun caught the lower hillsides beyond the mountains.

With binoculars, if he had steadied himself against the door, he might have seen the brightness of the flame that burned at Kirkuk, but he did not have his binoculars. Below him, over the crag faces, an eagle glided, hunted. He blinked and unlocked the padlock.

He seldom lingered at dawn or in the middle of the day or at dusk to strain his eyes and look over the falling ground. The eyes that mattered in the life of Isaac Cohen, that gave him vision, were in the dishes and the loosely slung aerials and the antennae that were riveted down on the roof of his communications den.

Inside, with the murmur of the machines for company, he filled, then switched on his electric kettle.

When he had made himself instant coffee, he would use the eyes that bored deep across the lands he could not see, and scan the decrypted messages the computers had gobbled in the night.

Later, where his own eyes could not see, the computers would give him a clear view of a fighting ground. He had done what he could, was now no more than a spectator, but he thought of them as he started to read the overnight radio traffic and he whispered a short private prayer.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE.

5. (Conclusions after interview with Brian Robins (sales director of AI Ltd, rifle manufacturers) conducted by self and Ms Carol Manning -transcript attached.) ABILITY: As a marksman, AHP is as good as any. He has the ability to shoot under all conditions and can absorb the stress of competition. He is regarded by this source as a WINNER. He has the inner steel that prevents him from accepting second best as an adequate outcome.

KNOWLEDGE OF MILITARY WEAPONS: AHP has wisely purchased the most complete sniper rifle on the market (paid in cash,?3,500).

He has travelled to northern Iraq with an AWM. 338 Lapua Magnum.

The rifle has a maximum range of 1,200 yards to 1,400 yards. The AWM has greater range and hitting power than the standard AW using 7.62 NATO ammunition, and is more manoeuvrable and covert than the heavier AW50 version.

The AWM is classified as a ‘basic’ weapon. It is not sophisticated; fewer technical problems in rugged terrain and battlefield conditions.

The armour-piercing rounds, Green Spot ball, give the AWM a versatility not present with more conventional sniper rifles. It can kill personnel, but will also destroy equipment. It has the penetrative power, using FMJ (Full Metal Jacket) rounds, to be used successfully against a variety of targets – ammunition dumps, grounded aircraft, radar installations, bunkers and armoured vehicles (with the sniper in an offensive or defensive mode).

The AWM creates COMBAT POWER. It can degrade key equipment and gain psychological battlefield advantage.

Before that morning in the sales director’s office, Ken Willet had never seen a sniper’s rifle the size and power of the AWM. 338 Lapua Magnum. When he had tried, and failed, the course at Warminster, he had used the Parker Hale weapon, which was smaller, lighter and did not have the capacity to fire the armour-piercing bullet. What had been aimed at him by Ms Manning was a rifle altogether more deadly than anything he had himself ever handled. He was confused. Was a professional’s weapon in the hands of an amateur or an expert? With the confusion came the problem. His adult life was steeped in the lore of the military. He had been taught to believe that only the men who made a total study of military tactics and were subject to military discipline could achieve results in a military theatre of operations. If the reason for his confusion was valid then he might just have wasted the last dozen years of his life. Could an amateur, a transport manager in a haulage company, gain the same combat successes as a professionally trained sniper? He was too tired to find the answer, to end the confusion.

When he went to bed the dawn was coming up. But he could not sleep. Inside his mind, thundering and reverberating, was the roar of tank tracks.

‘Keep clear of officers and white stones.’

‘What, Mr Gus?’

‘Major Hesketh-Prichard would have known that – it was the advice given by sergeants to fresh troops in South Africa. The British army was fighting there a hundred years ago.’

‘Because officers get shot?’

‘Correct, Omar, and because the sniper uses landmarks, any light-coloured stones, as points for measuring distance.’

‘Why do you tell me?’

‘Everything in the skill is old, everything we do has been done before, everything is learned from the past…’

Gus was deadened by tiredness. It was only something to say to help him to beat it.

Inside the thick material of the gillie suit he was cold because of the tiredness. He felt a sickness, a scratching in his throat, from the cold and the stink of the goats. In front of them was the raised roadway leading to the bridge. Beyond the bridge the road led on to the defended crossroads. On the road’s far side, dead ground to him, the embankment was steeper than the incline facing him, and at the far side of the bridge the river’s banks plunged down to a morass of boulders. When the tanks left the road they must turn towards him, then drive towards the one place in the riverbed where the banks were shallow and the stones smaller – if they were to reach the crossroads.

Gus had not slept. He had marched back from the road, said whispered farewells to the men who had carried the mines and helped Omar to bury them. Tracking back over the open ground to find the firing position, he had then dug out the small trench in which he now lay. The light was coming, spreading over the desert landscape before him. His eyes roved over the markers. Wedged against rocks, hooked on to strands of rusted barbed wire, caught against old fence posts were scraps of newspaper and torn plastic bags. Each time he had placed the newspaper and the bags he had remembered the distances of his stride. There was nothing random in their placing: they were his white stones. The goats had been Omar’s idea. They had bleated in the night; they were the missing peg to be slotted in the plan. The light was coming and Gus heard the first distant popping of small-arms fire. He tried to sound calm but his teeth chattered.

‘Remember what I said. Keep clear of officers and white stones.’

Against the scratching of the goats, he heard the boy’s quiet laughter. ‘Are you very frightened, Mr Gus?’

‘Go away, and take those foul stinking creatures with you.’

The light was growing; the popping of the guns had become a rattle. The boy whistled and thwacked his stick on a goat’s back, then the hoofs and Omar’s light tread drifted away. The first golds of the morning caught the ground, flickered on the newspaper pages and the plastic, and Gus tried to remember each distance he had paced out in the darkness. It had been the boy’s idea to steal the goats and then to go forward with them.