Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

‘Your kindness overwhelms me, Isaac.’

‘Do you wish you didn’t know?’

‘I’d like not to believe it.’

Bill was in the room. He gestured for him to sit. He felt it like a pain that was personal.

The voice was soft in his ear. ‘Hey, Caspar, if your “big play” is affected, please, this is serious, please do not include a source when you get down to sending signals.’

‘I hear you. Maybe, some day, I can return the gift of some really fucking bad news to you, Isaac. Don’t misunderstand me, I am grateful, but I feel like I’ve been hit with a baseball bat.’

‘If it’s still relevant, the ground force is hitting the brigade at the crossroads out of Kirkuk and going well. They’ve destroyed tanks. Your friend, the sniper…’

‘Not relevant.’

‘Keep smiling, Caspar.’

‘Have a happy day, Isaac.’

He heard the static. He laid down the secure telephone. Bill sat quietly in front of him, would have heard what he said and would be allowing him time to collect himself. He stared down at his desk. Promises had been made, and with the promises had been the expenditure of millions, goddam millions of dollars – for nothing. The bastard, the Boss for Life, laughed. The Boss for Life might just have heard of Caspar Reinholtz, might have been told of Caspar Reinholtz by the low-life of the Special Security Service or the General Intelligence Directorate or the Military Intelligence Service, might have known enough of him to make the laughter personal.

He lifted his head. ‘Where were you, late summer of ’96?’

‘Kicking my heels, Rome.’

‘I was in Arbil.’

‘I know that, Caspar – Arbil, when it was bad.’

‘When we made promises, spent the money, recruited like we were here for ever, and ran.’

‘You still carrying scars?’

‘Till the day I die. We ran from House 23-7, Ain Kawa Street, in Arbil. We ran so fast, with our pants down, that we left behind the computers and the sat-phones and the files.

Can you imagine that?’

‘It doesn’t help, Caspar, to dredge what can’t be changed.’

‘For four years we’d recruited, been the flash guys in town. We’d been free with the high and mighty talk – we were believed.’

‘It’s the past.’

‘We left people behind to be butchered. We made it easy for the butchers. They could tap into our computers, decode the sat-phones to learn who we talked to, read the files.

Good people, brave people, bought the bullshit we gave them, and their reward was that we left their names for the butchers… We gave it a couple of years, let the weeds grow on the graves, and came again with promises.’

‘Is it that bad?’

‘It’s the time to be digging more graves.’

‘The Boot?’

‘Arrested, poor bastard.’

‘That’s kind of unfortunate.’

‘Yes… Get me Langley, probably better if I have a speech rather than a text link…

There were three strands. Two strands might carry the weight. I only have one strand of thread left.’

He would talk to Langley. Langley would talk to State and Defence. Defence would stand down the attack aircraft, order the bombs and missiles unloaded, the fuel siphoned out. He would talk to Langley, then get the message to the young woman, a true goddam heroine, that it was over and she should get back where she belonged, to her home in the mountains. It was over.

It was not a sophisticated interrogation. No attempt was made to win the man, no bogus offers of clemency were offered.

They beat the brigadier, the Boot, near senseless, and when he drifted into unconsciousness, they threw buckets of fetid water over him. Then they beat him again.

There was no gag in the brigadier’s mouth as he sat pinioned to the heavy chair, but he never answered their questions, or screamed, or begged.

The senior man from the Estikhabarat stood in the doorway of the command bunker as the general gave his final orders.

He instructed that the reserve force of nine T-72 tanks was to move north from Kirkuk, within a screen of personnel carriers, to recover the initial armoured force that had been deployed. A defensive line was then to be made south of the bridge. The brigade position at the crossroads was to be abandoned and the troops there should withdraw as best they were able. Concentrated artillery fire was to be put down on the road north of the crossroads to hamper the enemy’s reinforcement.

It was little, and it was late.

The general believed that his career of distinction had been broken by a sniper who had outwitted him. By his own words he had given a definition of the evidence of treachery

… His orders were broadcast on the radios linking the units.

The senior man from the Estikhabarat beckoned to him. There would be more of them in the corridor outside the bunker, and more on the steps.

Rather casually, so as not to create alarm among the staff officers round him, he dropped his hand to his holster, drew his service pistol, held it for a moment beside his trouser leg, then pulled it up, poked the barrel into his mouth, and squeezed the trigger.

They were at a road block.

‘All my fucking life, from the first fucking war I went to, to the fucking last, I am fucking blocked by ignorant, fucking illiterate peasants,’ Mike said.

‘What’s killing me is that the goddam money is in that fucker’s pocket,’ Dean said.

They sat on the road beside the wheels of the Mercedes. The Russian had left them.

He’d flashed greenbacks, their bloody greenbacks, he’d been allowed through the block after he’d paid off the thugs there. He’d hitched a ride on a jeep mounted with a machinegun, and no doubt lost a few more of their bloody greenbacks. He was long gone up the road.

‘To be so near to a story and not to be able to touch it, that is very, very painful,’

Gretchen said.

‘Is there anything more fucking depressing than being stopped at a fucking road block, with the fucking story in sight?’

‘When your wallet’s empty, no.’

‘But, there again, no story is worth being killed for.’

There was a distant thud of artillery fire and a long way ahead were palls of hanging smoke. The men at the block grinned venomously and repeated that it was too dangerous for honoured visitors to go up the road. They were into the third hour at the road block, and the second hour after the Russian had left them.

‘Do they know who we fucking are?’

‘Perhaps the fat crook only told them who we used to be.’

‘We are nobody, we represent people who do not care.’

Each of them, caught the wrong side of the road block, knew what they were missing.

They could hear it and, with it, fifteen thousand dollars burning up.

‘I bet nobody’s told the bitch that she could be leading tomorrow night’s news.’

Mike and Dean and Gretchen smoked, chewed gum, ate melting chocolate, did nothing, waited.

The sun was not yet at its zenith, but it was already the end of a perfect day.

Gus and Omar watched the line of tanks and armoured cars fan out beside the road.

They were among the great glacial smoothed rocks of the riverbed. He could have fired again but he had long learned on Stickledown Range that a perfect day could not be repeated so soon. With the tanks and armoured cars, toys in the distance, were cranes to drag clear the disabled T-72s… He imagined the spitting anger of the unit’s commander when he found the handkerchief scale of the minefield, and the slightness of the mantrap.

He wondered also when he would next see Joe Denton – if ever – to talk him through it, and thank him. Away to his right, a straggling column of soldiers crossed the bridge.

As he crawled up from the river and started to walk away towards the crossroads, the shivering began in Gus’s body. He lurched and might have fallen, but the boy caught him, supported him.