Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

When the jeep slowed to a stop at traffic lights, one of the few sets working in Kirkuk, on the wide carriageway into the city from the airfield, the corporal’s orderly life was ended. A single shot, fired at great range, exploded into his head and the remnants of bone, blood and brain peppered the body of his driver.

They were running.

‘Where next?’

‘Doesn’t matter where – anywhere I can aim from.’

Omar led and Gus followed. The low shafts of sunlight threw deep shadows in the narrow lanes between the shanty-town of haphazardly built shelters on the edge of the city. Men, women and children, just risen from their beds, scattered as the wraithlike figures pounded past their homes.

When the dawn came he was so tired.

Major Karim Aziz dragged himself up from the floor as the first light seeped into the room, and felt his forty-five years for the first time since he’d come to Kirkuk as the aches, pains, stiffness ran through his body. He had not slept but had watched the darkness and the ribbon of light under the door, had listened for the boots. The cries and screams had come, not often, in the long hours and he had known that the torturer was tireless.

He packed his few belongings, scattered across the floor, down into the belly of his backpack.

Leila, too, would now be filling the boys’ rucksacks and telling them that an examination at school did not matter and a football match was unimportant. She would have telephoned the hospital and lied that she was unwell. Perhaps already she had told her mother, shuffling in slippers in the kitchen, that there would be no party to celebrate her birthday. Through the night he had wondered when he would tell her of their future.

He put the last of the dog’s biscuits on the floor and they were wolfed down.

The future, in the darkness hours, had been nightmarishly with him. It might be a patrol on the ceasefire line between government territory and the Kurdish enclave; on his own, without difficulty, he could evade the patrols – but he would not be alone, he would be with his wife and his sons. It might be capture by a warlord’s men, and the Estikhabarat would pay fifty thousand American dollars for him to be returned to them, bound and blindfolded, across the line; on his own, with his rifle and his dog, he could fight his way through the danger of capture – but he would not be alone. Should he succeed, it might be the stagnant life of an exile without money in the embittered Iraqi communities of Amman or Istanbul; on his own, perhaps, he could burrow into the tawdry life of the exiles he had read of in the newspapers and heard of on the radio and exist – but he would have responsibility for his wife and children, who would be lost flotsam. Soon she would be on the road north.

He folded the dog’s rug and put it into the backpack.

At the petrol station, or in the car, or when they started to walk, he would tell them. He would say that he was a traitor to the President who smiled with warmth at him from the photograph on the wall, that he had sided with the enemies of the President. He would say that all the struggle of their lives was for nothing because he had betrayed it. In the night he had shivered because of what he had done to those he loved.

The dog was by the door and waited for him.

In his mind he had seen – again and again – the shock spreading on their faces at the petrol station, or in the car, or when they started to walk, as they learned the future. The worst of the nightmarish thoughts had been of her clutching her children to her, turning and abandoning him… It had been his vanity on the range when he had shown his shooting skills. It had been the massage of his conceit by the silky words of the general, in the car cruising at night beside the river in Baghdad, telling him that he, above all men, had the marksman’s expertise.

The dog bounded into the corridor, he closed the door of the bare room and wondered if the President still smiled.

He walked out into the compound.

Men were coming from the shadowy shape of the cell block.

He saw them rubbing their eyes in exhaustion, flexing their fists as if they were bruised, wiping smeared mess off their tunics. But the slightest among them walked briskly as if he had not missed his sleep.

The piping voice sidled across the quiet of the compound. ‘You are leaving us, Major?

Take with you my congratulations.’

He said hoarsely, ‘I accept them, I am grateful… I am a simple soldier, I did what I could.’

‘I never met a simple soldier. Have a good journey back to Baghdad.’

He tried to ask the casual question: ‘Your own work, Commander, is it nearly done?’

‘Near, but not yet there. A few hours, and this preliminary stage of my investigation will be completed… but the trails of treachery run far. You have my assurance, simple soldier, that I will follow the trails wherever they lead… Enough of me. Are you disappointed that your triumph is not total?’

‘I do not understand you.’

‘You were sent to kill a sniper, a foreigner – and you did not.’

Aziz blurted, ‘He is beyond my reach.’

‘Have a good journey, and be assured that those who take responsibility for the security of the state will not rest while traitors live.’

Aziz heard the dog’s low angry growl, flicked his fingers nervously to it and strode out towards the administration building, where he would find a driver to take him across the city to the military car pool. While he walked he felt the small narrow-set eyes on his back, following him.

The soldier stood at the road block.

He was nineteen years old, a conscript in a mechanized infantry unit. The road block was behind him. He had been detailed by his sergeant to wave down the cars, lorries and vans for inspection. He was from a poor family in Baghdad, and his move to the basic training camp before going to Kirkuk had been the first time in his life that he had been away from his mother. He hated the army’s food and hardly ate. He was ghostly thin and his stomach churned as he held his rifle and directed the traffic into the lane where the drivers’ papers could be looked over. He was a lonely youngster, shunned by his colleagues in the barracks hut because the loneliness caused him to wet his bed most nights of the week. Behind the road block, workmen were digging a trench in preparation for the repair of a blocked sewer. The smell was foul but, more importantly, the piledriver the workmen used to break up the tarmacadam had obliterated the sound of a single shot fired half an hour earlier a full kilometre away. He was thinking of his mother when he died. Against the noise of the vehicles’ brakes and gear changes and the hammer of the piledriver, none of the men near to him heard the crack of the rifle’s report or the thump of the bullet’s strike. The soldier subsided, as if the strength was gone from his legs, and blood spilled from deep holes in his chest and his back.

The orderly paused at the back of the truck.

On the flat-bed was a heap of black rubbish bags. He lit a cigarette. The ebony crows were waiting for him, flapping their wings as they strutted on the bags he had brought earlier in the week to the dump, and cried raucously at him. Each morning the orderly cleaned the quarters used by the officers of an armoured unit based at Kirkuk and collected their rubbish in the bags along with the food they had not bothered to eat the previous evening. It attracted the crows, but the brutes could wait while he enjoyed his cigarette. The orderly was from the desert region, near to the small town of an-Nahiya, close to the Syrian border. There were no mountains in that region, but he enjoyed those moments when he could smoke a cigarette and admire the high ground beyond the city.