Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

‘How far do we go?’

‘Close enough for her to hear.’

‘Hear what, Mr Gus?’

‘Hear that I haven’t abandoned her, Omar.’

‘How does that help?’

‘I hope it gives her strength.’

‘Is it to help you, Mr Gus, that you are killing?’

They were closer to the city’s heart and heard more often the drone whine of the armoured vehicles on the main routes, and the shouts of patrols. They were at the back fence of a villa’s garden when a woman yelled. He saw the blotched face at the upper window and she clasped her hand at her mouth as if to stifle herself, and her dressing gown gaped open. Gus understood. The woman yelled because she saw two figures of a bygone age, primitives, filth-encrusted and armed, camouflaged, tracking across the end of her garden. She would waddle from the window to the telephone. The boy went over the fence first, vaulting it easily, and Gus followed.

As always, the moment before the yell, the boy had bared him. He was glad not to have to answer Omar’s question as they ran down the alleyway.

He stood in the doorway.

The officer looked up, saw Aziz, smiled obsequiously. ‘I promise you, Major, it will only be another two, three minutes, and the car will be ready.’

‘What does it say on the radio?’

‘There is great chaos, Major. I do not mean it disrespectfully but the men on the radio are running around like headless chickens.’

He hissed, ‘What does it say?’

‘Patrols, cordons, lines, and the new casualties. For myself – and I am not a hero as you are, Major – I am happy to be here and organizing an efficient-’

‘How many new casualties?’

‘There are three more – a soldier at the fuel depot, another on patrol, a military policeman. There is a hunt but they cannot find the sniper, he shoots one time at a long distance then moves. Ah, your wait is over, Major.’

The officer gestured. Major Karim Aziz turned and saw a soldier driving a small saloon car to the front of the building.

‘I am happy to have been of service to you.’

Beyond the car was the jeep that had brought him from the headquarters of Fifth Army: the driver was sprawled behind the wheel, dozing in the morning sunshine. He would be beyond the grasp of his sergeant and would hope to while away the rest of the morning before returning to duty. The man offered himself, challenged.

At the desk, Aziz took the typed sheets of paper and tore them in half. The dog followed him from the building. He carried his backpack and the rifle’s box to the jeep, opened the door, and punched the driver awake. As they sped out of the military car-pool yard he was already unfastening the clasp locks of the carrying-box of his rifle. *** ‘I’m not looking back – I never want to see that fucking place again,’ Mike said.

‘No way, I’m happily waving goodbye to the land of broken goddam dreams,’ Dean said.

‘I think we should never have come, never have believed in the nonsense about that woman,’ Gretchen said.

They walked away from the roadside and the big Mercedes. None of them had thanked Rybinsky. They followed the German, Jurgen, up the winding path that led to the ridge, and above that ridge were three more, and beyond all of the ridges were the mountain peaks. Each carried their own personal bags but, as a gesture of comradeship and democracy, the camera gear was shared between the three of them. They would climb in daylight towards the border, then rest, and under cover of darkness make the dangerous crossing into Turkey. Their heads were down: neither of the men or the woman were used to failure. Each, in their own way, grunting with the exertion of the steep trek, expressed the bitterness that went with failure.

‘I’ll get a radio spot,’ Mike said. ‘I’m going to crucify this fucking bullshit place, and the woman, if she ever existed.’

‘I reckon she existed, but only as a myth in these people’s minds,’ Dean said. ‘Being realistic, we’re talking about a foot soldier at best.’

And then they were quiet, struggling to climb, and behind them was the bright yellow Mercedes and the ever falling panorama of the ground.

‘What do you want?’

‘For, God’s sake, Joe, I want to talk.’

‘Talking seldom helped anybody, Sarah.’

‘Because I can’t help, that’s why I have to talk.’

‘I might not listen.’

‘They caught her. She was captured…’

Joe Denton knelt in the rich grass. There were now eleven lines of pegs running the length of the meadow, and he had just begun to work up the second of them. From the pattern of the laying of the mines he had calculated that he could clear a little more than half of each line in a single day’s work. It annoyed him that she was there, distracting him. She had been up and down the road all day looking for any straggling survivors of the final battle in Kirkuk to make it over the hills and ridges. Most had come the previous evening, but she had found six, burdened by two grievously wounded men, early that morning, and had ferried them to hospital. They’d been the last. He looked at her. She was sitting awkwardly on the pick-up’s bonnet. It was dangerous for him to be distracted.

‘Doesn’t that concern you?’

‘Predictable. What concerns me is a thousand V69s, then another field of them, and another.’

‘You helped.’

‘And sometimes my stupidity amazes even me.’

‘That’s not Joe Denton. Joe Denton cared.’

‘I did what I could. Sorry, Sarah, but she’s not my problem. Your problem. You think you can do something, you can’t. Get a look at the map. The map says this is fucking Kurdistan. It is an unforgiving place and when we, outsiders, try to do something we fall on our bloody arses. We think we are important, interfere, but we don’t affect events -we go home. I am busy. I am clearing twenty-five V69s a day, tops, so there are only another ten fucking million left. That’s why I’m busy. You don’t want to talk, you want a shoulder to cry on – like all the other huggers. Go and find the sniper, go and have a cuddle and cry with him, give him a good ride before he flies back home to tell his war stories in the bloody pub. Go away, because I am busy.’

‘Can’t.’

‘Can’t what?’

‘Can’t do anything like that.’

‘Try harder – close your eyes and think of the beach, Sarah, think of where you bloody belong.’

‘He didn’t come out.’

‘What? Is he dead?’

‘He stayed behind, to “do something”.’

She slid off the bonnet of the pick-up. She slipped into the passenger seat beside the driver, in front of the bodyguards. He stared in front of him, at the line of pegs, as the pick-up drove away. He was glad that Sarah hadn’t asked him what would happen to the woman in Kirkuk because he would not have lied to her. He was a long time staring at the line of pegs. After the sound of the truck had gone, drifting away in the bare hills, he began again to probe for the next of the buried V69s and to feel for the tripwires and for the antennae. He tried to shut from his mind the sniper who had stayed to ‘do something’, but he could not because he didn’t know what could be done.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON PEAKE

7. (Conclusions after interview with Dogsy (sic) Jennings of Corporate Survival, Hereford, conducted by self and Ms Manning – transcripts attached.)

ESCAPE amp; EVASION: AHP, by sharing a course with a management team of bank officials, will have received a minimum of training and advice on survival tactics should he need a fast and improvised retreat from the theatre of operations – I emphasize minimum. But Jennings classified him as a ‘crusader’ and I believe such a mental attitude would lead AHP to hang around after the last bus has gone. His E amp;E tactical knowledge, as gained from Corporate Survival, would be wholly inadequate.