Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

He fired at the gearbox of the second helicopter, immediately below the outstretched sweep of the rotors. Metal parts dropped away.

Bolt back, cartridge case ejected, and the sweep of the ’scope towards the third of the beasts. It was already lifting. He could see the pilot secure inside the casing. It rose, tilting away from him and he lost the sight of the gearbox below the rotors. He locked his aim on the blurred shape of the vertical tail rotor. He sucked in a breath, exhaled, caught the last of the air – and held it.

Gus fired three times, at 740 yards mean distance, into the spinning shape of the third helicopter’s tail rotor.

He did not hear the boy’s shout. He did not see the jeep, at the distant end of the wire, reversing and turning. He twisted up onto his knee, caught at the boy’s collar, and pitched him back towards the wire. Then Gus was running.

There was no longer a pain in his heel, an ache in his body and exhaustion in his eyes.

Gus ran for his life and the boy stampeded beside him. If he had not hung the hessian strip on the wire he would have lost precious moments, finding the hole under the wire.

He threw himself down into the hole and the boy pushed, levered him through the gap.

Then he was running again, weaving, gasping for air, bent low. Behind him, the pilot of the third helicopter fought an unequal battle with his machine and lost.

The immediate goal was the airfield’s rubbish tip where the crows, startled by the gunfire, wheeled and screamed. The secondary goal, when the piled rubbish tip covered their backs, was a dried river gully. The final goal, far ahead, was to link with Meda and the attack.

Machine-guns had started up, but without a target.

Only when he was in the gully, when the pain, the ache and the tiredness surged back to him, did Gus bleat his question.

‘Can they fly?’

‘You killed them, Mr Gus, they cannot fly.’

They ran on down the gully, as the dawn lightened. It was, Gus thought, the decisive day of his life, the day he had dreamed and dared, but there was nothing of the taste of her in his mouth, just a dry dusty film.

The attack went well, made good ground – at first.

They had advanced in silence through ditches, drains, through gardens and small vegetable fields to the edge of the city’s limits. They had scurried, crawled, run from shadow to shadow, in their small groups, and waited for the signal.

The report of the first shot, then the second, then the third, fourth and fifth, had come muffled to them across the breadth of the city, and before the sound of the fifth shot had died there had been the blast of the heavy machine-gun and the rip of its tracers – the signal.

The assault on Kirkuk was like that of mosquitoes on an ailing man. The weight of a man’s hand might fall on a biting insect, but in that moment of distraction another mosquito bit and drew blood. The barricades, with the tanks and personnel carriers in support, were ignored. Martyr Avenue and 16th July Avenue were empty. The attack was through the yards, homes and alleyways of the Old Quarter. When gaps were plugged, new points of weakness emerged. Pockets of resistance were cut off, left isolated.

To those in the Fifth Army command bunker there was no coherent pattern to the attack: as the radios from the forward positions shouted for help, the officers trained in defensive warfare at the Baghdad Military College did not know where they should stiffen the line. And they had no serviceable helicopters. Inside the safety of the bunker, as the counters were moved remorselessly back over the map towards the red circle marking Fifth Army headquarters, the first doubts – anxieties – had surfaced. The defence line would not have been stabilized, however temporarily, if the colonel had not ordered a killing zone of fire to be put down on the Old Quarter. Mortars, machine-guns, rocket-propelled grenades hammered the small homes of those who were expendable.

In the smoke, noise and chaos, Meda sought to restore the impetus of the advance. In an alleyway between a panel-beater’s shed and a cheap clothes shop was an abandoned jeep with a machine-gun mounted and the belt of ammunition lying in the breech. She must show herself, and goad her small groups of separated fighters to press on. She must be everywhere. Without her, and she knew it, the advance would stall. They had come through the yard and into the panel-beater’s shed. The roof was ablaze. The door was destroyed. Four men were close to her, Haquim was somewhere behind. If she was to be everywhere, she needed the jeep.

He peered into the maelstrom of smoke and fire.

Many times he had seen the little darting movements of men, emerging and disappearing, but it was harder now to see them because of the smoke’s pall.

With his old trusted patience, he waited for her to show herself.

He lay on the pink coverlet, his circulation good, his stomach comfortable. He had not fired. He had seen soldiers try to surrender and had watched as they were engulfed, knifed. He had seen, also, a young officer castrated and left to writhe on the ground smearing a spray of blood from his groin onto cobblestones. He had seen three soldiers who manhandled away a wounded colleague shot in the back at close range – but he had not fired.

He had no doubt that the time would come when he would see her.

Major Karim Aziz sensed that a line formed. It stretched across the Old Quarter, its median point at a range of 450 metres, and he adjusted his elevation for that point. The smoke helped him, its billowing spirals told him the wind factor was minimal, but that was outweighed by the greater problem of its interference with his vision of the fighting ground. That median point was an abandoned jeep. Once he had taken it as his point, he tracked along the line on either side of it, slowly, so that the view through the lens would not distort.

It was a blurred movement at the extremity of the lens.

First he saw the figures running from the collapsed doorway and jumping into the jeep.

A man was bent over the steering wheel, reaching down, magnified, desperate to start it. Another man, turbaned, bearded, swathed in ammunition, was behind the mounted machine-gun. Only when the jeep jerked forward, when her body was thrown back against the support of the front passenger seat, did he see her.

The jeep had moved forward, then it was reversing, then it was lost behind a swathe of smoke. He could not follow it, but he had seen her face. He felt a great calmness. He had seen her face and the anger at her mouth. He wondered if she doubted herself, if she knew that it was over, not how it would end, but that it was finished.

The jeep emerged from the smoke, and Aziz’s finger made the intuitive adjustment to the elevation turret, one click, an additional 50 metres of range, watching as it swerved to the right at a tight junction.

He saw the jeep, her face, the driver’s, the shop behind them from which flames licked, as the steering was wrenched hard over. He could not hear the distant scream of the tyres, or the blast in his ears as he fired.

Strangely, slowly, the jeep toppled over after it had crashed against the wall. For a few moments, a seeming eternity, it was supported by the machine-gun and there was a gap from which the gunner and the driver scrabbled to free themselves, but then the mounting on the machine-gun collapsed: the jeep rocked and was still but for the spinning wheels.

His finger was on the trigger, slight pressure. He watched for her and did not see her. The gunner, delirious with shock, ran. The driver twitched and died.

He recognized the older man running forward from the ditch at the crossroads. He could have shot him – afterwards he would be unable to analyse why he had not fired on him as he limped forward and tried to lift the upturned jeep alone. He watched him stagger away, heaving for breath, then cup his hands to his mouth and bellow at the fire and the smoke for help.