Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

SUMMARY: I rate his chances of survival in the medium term as…

WHO BLOODY CARES? The bank officials didn’t; Dogsy Jennings didn’t; why should I? He made his bed. His conceit is to go where ORDINARY, DECENT and EXPERTLY TRAINED men would not dream of going. His arrogance is his involvement in a cause from which GOOD, HONOURABLE and CAREFULLY PREPARED men would turn away. AHP demeans us all. Will he survive? I don’t give a damn. Will I ever meet him? I hope not. Where he has gone, what he has attempted, makes me feel second-rate…

The bell rang as Ken Willet’s fingers rippled on the keyboard. He was losing control, his eyes were misted and he could not see the screen clearly. As he stumbled across the room he glanced at his wristwatch. It was mid-morning; he still wore his pyjama trousers.

He scratched at his bare armpit, then opened the door.

Carol Manning stood on the mat and rolled her eyes in mock astonishment. She was holding a bottle of wine. She walked past him. Tricia refused point blank to come to his flat, said it was a tip and stank, said that if they ever married and he didn’t learn to clean his act up then he’d have to sleep in the coal bunker. Carol Manning was in the centre of the room and he saw the mischievous grin on her face.

She said his desk at the Ministry had told her he’d called in sick, the wine was Australian chardonnay, and cheap.

She said where they were going the next day.

Ken Willet shambled into the kitchen to find a corkscrew and to wash two glasses.

When he came back into the room she was standing over the screen. She handed him the bottle and went on reading. He hadn’t seen her laugh like that before – and her eyes sparkled. He pulled the cork. He would, of course, have deleted the SUMMARY. His head dropped, as if humiliated. He poured the wine. She turned, and still there was the sparkle and the laughter.

She said, ‘I thought it was a good time to get pissed up – any objection? You know that feeling, a cold comes over you, something you can’t touch, can’t see, but something desperate’s happened and however hard you scratch your mind you don’t know what it is

– know it? Something awful? I felt that, so I’m going to get pissed up.’

She emptied her glass and he refilled it. He apologized for what he had written.

‘No cause to – it’s the truth. You hate him because you’re jealous. He’s ruffled your self-bloody-esteem. It’s taken you long enough to catch on that he’s brilliant… Where’s that bloody bottle? Got me? Brilliant…’

A medical orderly peeled from the cab of the marked ambulance and ran towards the casualty.

He recognized the particular fist of death, the small entry wound and the large exit hole. That morning, he had seen a similar wound on the body of a soldier at a road block and another at a rubbish dump. He was not easily unnerved. He had served as a field medic, a stretcher bearer, in the marsh battles to hold the line against the Iranian hordes, and he had been in Kuwait when the bomb loads had fallen from the American aircraft.

He could accept the random death handed down by unseeing artillerymen, machine-gunners and air crews, and the horror they left behind. But this was different somehow.

The chill gripped him. At the road block and the rubbish dump, and here at the corner of an office building, young soldiers had been specifically identified as targets. He seemed to see the bodies magnified in the telescopic sight that would have prised into their lives in the moment before death. Fear, the first he had ever experienced, ran loose in him. A crowd stared vacantly as he felt the corpse’s neck for a pulse and found none. The crashing blow to his back pitched him forward so that he toppled onto the body, and then the blackness came.

The sentry clawed open the heavy steel-plate gate at the main entrance to the headquarters of Fifth Army.

On the gate, being a man with alert ears and eyes, the sentry knew of the stalking death spreading without pattern across the city. He had heard on the squawking radios and from the shouts of officers that a sniper was at work and firing indiscriminately. A dozen times in the last hour he had dragged open the gates, allowed foot and mechanized patrols to speed out of the compound and had heaved the gates shut. But, and it would be fatal to him, he did not know the locations in Kirkuk at which seven soldiers had died; had he known, he might have appreciated that each killing brought the marksman closer to the gate he guarded. The sentry was a big man, from a family of stonemasons working in quarries beyond As Salman in the desert quarter, and he would go back to the heavy equipment, the heavy hours, the heavy rocks when his army duty was completed. He had broad shoulders above a wide, muscled body, and his very size, too, would be fatal to him. The sentry pushing shut the gates made a fine target, and did not know it. A slimmer, slighter man would have escaped. The bullet, by small miscalculations, was fractionally low and fractionally wide, and caught the sentry in the back at the extremity of his rib-cage, then it yawed and sent crippling shock-waves up to the lungs and down to the kidney and liver. He was on the ground, his blood smeared on the gate he had been pushing shut. He screamed for help, but was not answered by men cowering behind the half-closed gates.

‘Were we close enough?’

‘She would have heard.’

‘It is enough?’

‘It is enough because she would have known.’

‘Can we get out now?’

‘We can.’

‘You have seen sufficient – Mr Gus, the tourist – of the sights of Kirkuk?’

‘No, when it is necessary I will return.’

‘For her? Fuck you, Mr Gus. You’re mad.’

‘So that she knows she is not alone… With you, Omar, or without you.’

‘Without me you are dead,’ the boy spat scornfully.

They ran from the open concrete floors of the uncompleted apartment block. Twice they were seen and erratic shooting followed them. Without Omar’s intuition, gathered from thieving and fleeing, Gus would have blundered into the closing net of patrols and into the path of the personnel carriers that criss-crossed the city.

‘Mr Gus, have you been helped?’

In the space of almost two hours he had probed into the city and fired eight shots. He had felt no remorse as he saw the vortex of air and the speck of the bullet speeding towards a chosen target, a man doomed because he was available and wore the uniform.

He had felt only a brutal anger he had not known before. They went through ditches, gardens, yards, sewer-pipes, on their stomachs or running. They left behind them road blocks, checkpoints, house searches, cordon lines of soldiers, blundering chaos, and the anger never abated.

He shouted, ‘If this gate is not opened immediately, you bastards will answer to me with your lives.’

With a full swing, full force, Major Karim Aziz kicked the steel plate of the gates. The screams of the soldier filled his ears. The wounded man, drowning in his own blood, flapped the ground. ‘Open the gate and have a stretcher with you, or I will have all of you cowards hanged before the night’s out.’

He went back from the gate and crouched over the young soldier. Behind him the square and the road leading towards the office and apartment blocks had emptied. There were troops in firing positions, down and finding cover. He sensed the terror all around him, created by a single man who fired the bullets. He cradled the soldier’s head. He could not have ignored the challenge. He heard the gate scrape open. The sniper’s trademark was on the bare chest of the soldier where, frantic to kill the pain, his fingers had torn away the tunic and shirt buttons. In the well of the blood was a cleanly drilled entry-hole. As the stretcher-bearers sprinted from the safety of the gate, he lifted the soldier and noted the exit pit large enough to take two field-dressing pads to cover it. The soldier was taken from his arms, thrown down onto a stretcher, and stampeded inside. A single man who made such fear was an opponent worthy of him. There was a small glint on the tarmacadam below the gate that caught his eye. On his hands and knees he crawled to it, picked it up. In his palm was the misshapen piece of lead antimony crushed by the impact on the gate. It had been cased in cupro-nickel when it was recognizable as a bullet. He gazed at it for a moment, then dropped it and thought of his wife, who would be in the car with their children, trusting him…