Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

He settled again with the rifle. They were not going to slow for the boy and his animals, they would crush them. Gus neither hated his enemy nor felt any remorse at what he planned. His mind was clear, as on any perfect shooting day. The lead tank appeared in the edge of the circle of his ’scope. In the sight’s centre, at the T-junction of the reticule lines, was the boy and his goats.

The boy fled, the goats scattered. The boy dived down the incline and into the ditch.

Gus could see the tops of two of Joe Denton’s mines that had been obscured behind the goats.

The lead tank, its engine thundering, squirmed on the narrow elevated road to avoid the TM-46s that were Joe Denton’s gift, but there was nowhere for the driver to go. Gus saw a thunderflash of light, then smoke and the climbing debris of a tank track, and heard the scream of its brakes. The lead tank lurched across the width of the road, stabilized and stopped.

The second tank rumbled into the lead tank. To Gus, the leviathans seemed to couple.

He had his target.

At the intersection of the ’scope sight’s lines was the head and chest of the machine-gunner, reeling from the impact. The second tank’s tracks were climbing as if to straddle the lead tank’s body, and the gunner clung to the edge of the hatch for support.

Gus did not hear the noise. On Stickledown Range, he never heard the noise of voices and other rifles’ reports. He fired the shot and, as the bullet reached the target, jerked it up, he was sliding the bolt action back, ejecting and aiming again.

In a lithe loose movement, Omar climbed out of the ditch, scrambled up the incline and jumped. He cleared the spinning wheels of the tracks of the second tank and stumbled onto the superstructure of the brute. He reached at his belt; his arm seemed to rise as if in a gesture of triumph, and something small dropped from his hand into the cavity of the hatch through which the machine-gunner had slumped. Gus had no image in his mind of a hand grenade bumping with a death rattle to the iron floor of the darkened hulk then rolling to a stop beside or under the buried seats of the driver and the main armament gunner; did not consider that moment of terror in the cavern as the brief seconds of the grenade’s fuse frittered away.

His aim was on the third tank.

It was predictable. He did not see the little puff of grey smoke that followed the explosion in the second tank’s bowels, nor the first licks of flame from the body of the lead tank; nor did he see the boy leap down and run to the ditch.

The third tank had stopped, then – coughing diesel fumes – swung in a crabbing gait towards the safety of the incline. It was a frantic thrashing creature seeking its escape down the incline. Through the ’scope, Gus saw the sheets of newspaper and the scattered shreds of the plastic bags hanging from the wire and the old fence post. The wind had not risen. He had no need to alter the windage turret.

Gus had never, in his shooting life, attempted anything so difficult.

The beast yawed on the rim of the incline. Below the turret, in the shadow of the flange that fastened the gun to it, was a strip of bright glass. The ’scope showed him every rivet in the metal around the glass and the smears across it. The glass was wider than a man’s forehead and as deep as the forehead of a bald man. He breathed, sucked in the air, let it slip, held it, then fired. He had a good, sharp view because there was no dust thrown up from the mud earth under the tip of his barrel. The tank lurched over the incline… It was a moment of Gus’s childhood. Like a small boy’s birthday party. Short trousers, grey ankle socks, school sweaters, and the birthday game of Blind Man’s Buff… The tank was blind. Perhaps the armour-piercing bullet had hit the side flange of the driver’s vision aperture and frosted it; perhaps the bullet had driven through the glass and was a small molten core of lead flying without control around the the interior of the tank and through the bodies of the driver, the gunner and the commander; perhaps the driver’s face was lacerated by a mist of glass fragments… Little children, blindfolded, groped for each other, tried to find each other, and did not know where they were… It was the greatest shot that Gus Peake had ever attempted. The tank engine cut. Below the incline, the beast was blinded. He did not think of the dark horror that little children felt when they were blindfolded, or in the interior of the beast of the three men who were sightless.

He watched the fourth tank. It was as Joe Denton had said it would be. The tracks screwed across the road then dipped down the incline into a dense duststorm. There were new spurts of dust and thick black smoke as the tracks lumbered across the ground where the mines were laid. The beast was crippled.

They would be screaming now, Joe Denton had said, into their radios. They were halted, bunched and hurt. Some no longer had the power to manoeuvre, some had lost the power to see. With the best shooting of his life, Gus had made a hell for them and there was no-one to cheer him as there would have been on a perfect day on Stickledown Range.

He fired at the join of the open turret hatch of the fourth tank and the impact rocked the metal flap and tilted it down. The machine-gun on the sixth tank was rotating fast towards him. Joe Denton had said that the machine-gun beside the turret could be fired from inside the hulk. It was his perfect day. He hit the machine-gun itself, the box holding the ammunition beside the breech, and watched the spray of the tracers igniting.

Omar rose out of the ditch. The boy carried the last of the anti-tank mines that had not been buried beside the road. Omar ran beside the tracks of the fourth and fifth tanks in the line, under the jutting main armament barrels that swirled round towards the source of their prickling pain and past them. The sixth tank had started to reverse. The boy ran along its length. The two big guns fired, dreadnoughts marooned in shallows, and the shells howled far beyond him. The boy was behind the sixth tank as it slewed back towards him, then Gus saw him falling and rolling back down the incline and his hands were empty. The rear tank detonated the mine. The broken track rose in the air and fell into the black cloud.

Joe Denton had said it could be done.

On the far side of the road the incline was too steep. At the front and the rear the road was blocked by the hulks. On the near side of the road, down the incline, were the mines.

The trap was sprung.

The tanks put up smoke. Little canisters flew in the air, arched, fell back and burst. A wall of smoke protected them. He did not consider the panic of the men immured in the hulks. He wondered if – in that autumn fog he had known so well in Hampshire as a child, blinding and constricting – Omar crawled over the superstructures of the beasts and looked for cavities into which to squeeze grenades.

Gus had fired the greatest shot of his life and there was no applause and he didn’t care.

When he saw her first she was beyond the Dragunov’s range.

She was in the ’scope, but at that distance he would not have had a better than fifty-fifty chance of a hit. He always told the recruits at the Baghdad Military College whom he’d taught to snipe that a prime virtue was patience, and a prime defect was to shoot too early and give away position.

She was smaller than he remembered her. She was with a group of men and her head bobbed between their shoulders. The group was close to the road, dragging the wheeled heavy machine-gun. There was a girlish twist in her hair that fanned out behind her when she ran then fell back on to her narrow shoulders.

The dog shifted suddenly beside his leg. He turned, annoyed, and saw the fly settle on the dog’s nostrils, then dance away. He swatted at it.