Gerald Seymour: Holding the Zero

So, the supply of men will be like a drip feed. Each time we advance, a few more men will be sent. I cannot change it. I have to wait for more men… She does not understand

… I tell you, Mr Peake, sometimes I can be angry with her.’

‘I was called, I came, and now I am ignored.’

‘Also, I tell you that without her we would not have started to march, we would not have had the dream. Without her there would be nothing. Being ignored is a small price to pay… I am experienced in war. She has no experience, but at every step she will question me. But without her nothing is possible, and I believe you know it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘We move at last light… You want to hurry to war, Mr Peake. You will be there soon enough. In a week or two weeks, tell me then if you still want to hurry…’

Carried on the wind, he heard, faintly, the sound of the furious revving of a vehicle far down the track, around a gentle sloping escarpment that rose to the valley’s cliff wall, beyond his sight. Haquim had stiffened, lifted his head to hear better, then pushed himself up with his rifle. He said coldly, ‘When you meet a target that can shoot back, Mr Peake, then you will have found a war.’

The first fires of the day pushed up a pall of hanging smoke that merged with the fumes of cars’ exhausts, which hung as a thickening carpet across his view of Baghdad awakening.

He had stayed too long, should have been gone before the sun was up. It was suicidal for him to have remained there until daylight broke over the city.

He had stayed too long because, for the fifth night, the target had not appeared. The frustration bit into him. He should have been gone an hour earlier, at least, while the shadows still hugged the streets. Although the sun’s early warmth was on the flat roof beside the water tank, Major Karim Aziz shivered. Throughout the last hour he had known that the chance of the target coming diminished with each passing minute, and yet he had stayed.

His legs were cramped and stiff, all feeling gone. His eyes watered from the long hours of gazing into the aperture of the sight’s lens. His shoulders ached from holding the rifle butt at his shoulder for so long. He realized that for the last fifteen minutes, as the smoke and fumes had formed a cloudy haze, he had barely been able to see the driveway, the steps and the door on which his telescopic sight was locked.

He took a last look through the sight, cursed, then began to pack his gear quickly. He wrapped the sight in a loose towel, snapped the butt-release button and reduced the weapon’s length so that it would fit easily into the anonymous sports bag, then his binoculars, then his bottle of water, and his box for salad and bread, then the larger bottle, tightly corked, to hold urine passed during the night. He rolled up the thin rubber mat on which he had lain motionless for eleven hours and dropped it inside, zipped the bag and stood up. As he had calculated it from the city’s maps, it was a distance of 545 metres from the leading edge of the building’s water tank to the front door, across which, up which, through which, he had now waited five full nights for the target to come.

He checked around him. His life and the lives of those he loved depended on the care with which he checked the concrete of the roof beside the water tower for scraps of paper and drops of urine or water.

Below him were the sounds of radios, shouting children and banging doors. He pulled the hood of his army windcheater up over his head so that his features were masked, and hurried towards the service door to the roof of the block. Behind him was the view across the apartment blocks between Rashid Street and al-Jamoun Street, past Wahtba Square, across lower blocks between al-Jamoun Street and Kifah Street, and into a gap on the far side of Kifah Street that offered a small window view of the few yards of driveway to the villa.

He took the rough concrete service steps three at a time, clattered down them. He had spent a week searching out his vantage-point, trudging into building after building, gaining access by his military uniform, giving a false name on a forged identity card, claiming he was looking for accommodation for himself and his family. He had made a great circle around the villa to which he had been assured the target would come, and found only the one rooftop, of a seven-storey building, which was between 400 and 700 metres from the villa and offered a view over the surrounding wall of the short way the target must walk between his bomb-proof car and the front door.

Maybe the bastard’s penis did not itch enough: when it itched, when it needed stroking, sucking, then the bastard would come. He passed two smoking, gossiping maids on the service stairs. They saw him, looked for a moment at his army coat, then flattened against the wall and averted their gaze. They would have assumed that he, too, had an itching penis, and they would not dare to speak of an army officer’s assignation for fear of a beating from the Military Security Service… It was all about the President’s itch, and the visits to the villa of his current mistress.

Major Karim Aziz let himself out of the side fire exit of the building, and joined the pavement throng heading for the Shuhada Bridge that crossed the Tigris.

He walked quickly, imagining that every eye was on him, believing that every eye was in the head of an agent of the regime. The weight of the sports bag banged against his thigh. At every step, he expected a hand to grab him, a body to block him, and the bag to be snatched and opened. He crossed the bridge over the wide, slow-flowing mud brown of the river, swollen from the thaw of the snow in the mountains far to the north. The tiredness bred the fantasies of danger.

He reached Haifa Street, crossed it near to the central railway station, and came to his home.

Major Karim Aziz’s home was a modest two-storey house, with a muddy front garden where the roses that Leila tended would bloom in a month’s time, where Wafiq and Hani played football, where her parents would sit in the summer months. They were all in the kitchen. The boys were gathering their books together for school. His wife was shuffling through papers she would need in her day’s work at the hospital. Her father was listening to the radio’s news bulletin, and her mother was clearing the table. His own place was laid, a piece of melon, a slice of bread, a square of cheese. They all looked away from him and he gave no explanation as to why he had, for the fifth time, been away from his home for the night. It was impossible for him to give any.

He kissed the boys sharply, touched the arm of his wife and nodded to her parents.

They would have seen the tiredness in his eyes, and they would have looked down and wondered what he carried in his sports bag.

It was too late for him to sleep.

He showered, shaved. By the time he had changed into a clean uniform and come back into the kitchen, the boys had left for school and Leila had gone to the hospital where she nursed children. Her father stared at the radio while her mother rinsed the plates at the sink; they wouldn’t have understood even if he had been able to tell them. He thought it was better that he had not come home earlier. The previous time, he had slipped into his home, a thief in the night, and snuggled against her back and known that she only pretended to sleep, and he had heard the tossing in their beds of his sons, the cough of her father, then the fear of the consequences he might inflict on them had ravaged in his mind.

Aziz took the family car, the old Nissan Micra, to his workplace at the Baghdad Military College.

After the engine of the distant vehicle had stopped, he saw them come round the escarpment’s bend. There were two men with rifles, the escort, and a man and a woman who were unarmed and European. When they’d passed a small clump of winter-dead trees, the woman pointed to the smoke of the fire near to the track and ahead of them, and their pace quickened. They would have seen the spiral of the smoke, then the vehicles parked in the trees close to the shed.