Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

Through the conduit of a drain hole between two holding cells, the brigadier of the staff of Fifth Army and the peasant woman from the mountains knotted their fingers to give each other strength.

The voice seemed to fail, then rise again.

‘I was to be paid a million American dollars for taking the armoured brigade south from Kirkuk.’

‘I was offered nothing. What would I do with a million American dollars?’

‘I would have put you on the lead tank – washed you, cleaned you, carried you into Baghdad.’

‘Then I would have gone home.’

The commander gestured for the switch to be lifted, and the silence fell on the room.

His smile was easy, affable.

‘Major Aziz, it is standard to allow prisoners in adjacent cells the opportunity to communicate with each other. There is a drain between them, and a microphone in it.

Prisoners who believe they have successfully resisted interrogation always betray themselves when they have been returned to their cells – we learned it from the British, it was their procedure in Ireland. I am surprised that it has taken them so long to find the culvert. It is because we hold her that the sniper, this butcher, has killed so many, yes?’

‘I think it was to tell her that she was not forgotten – and to expiate his shame that he did not or could not protect her.’

‘The sniper is your target?’

He said simply, ‘It is important to me.’

‘I have finished with her. Is she of use to you?’

‘She will be hanged?’

‘Of course – she is a witch. Our brave soldiers ran from her. She is talked of in the bazaars and in the souks. It is necessary to hang her.’

Cold words. ‘She should be hanged in public tomorrow morning at the main gate…’

He said how the gallows should be built. He thought of his wife and children at the petrol station, angry and fretting for him. He thought of the brigadier, the Boot, denied the strength of the grip of her hand, and the names that were secreted in his mind. He thought of the sniper who would be drawn from a hiding place by the sight of the gallows and the peasant woman standing under the beam.

The moth would be drawn to the flame. If a moth flew too close to the flame the wings were singed, and it fell. But he was – himself – walking towards a flame and if he was burned he would fall, and if he fell then he was dead. And there had been the great flame burning above the oilfield outside the city that had drawn her fatally nearer. The flame burned for all of them, bright and dangerous, beckoning them.

A young man, walking back to his village near Qizil Yar, west of the city, had been knifed and his body thieved from. The young man who had thought himself fortunate to find work in Kirkuk, cleaning the tables in a coffee shop, had stayed on in the evening to see a film at a cinema. He had been stabbed in the back, killed, and his identity card stolen. Before his body was cold, while it lay in a road drain and the first of the rats sniffed at it, the identity card was presented at the outer road block on the main route into the city.

In the next hour, the identity card was presented three more times, studied by torchlight, then the beams switched to a young man’s face, and Omar was waved on.

He was the observer in the tradition laid down by Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard.

Everything he saw was remembered: where the tanks were, and the blocks, and the personnel carriers parked in side-streets with the radios playing soft music from the Baghdad transmitter he remembered.

He was another grubby, dishevelled young man with unkempt hair padding the pavements of the city. There were many such as him, drawn to Kirkuk in search of subsistence work. He attracted no attention from the soldiers who were only a few months older. He passed among them, drawn forward towards a distant hammering, nails sinking into wooden planks.

Omar knew he was close to the place where she had been taken. He had heard the mustashar, Haquim, describe the place to Mr Gus and make the excuses. He slipped from the wide main street that led towards faraway arc-lights, the sounds of hammers beating on nails, and drifted through shadows in the narrowed lanes of the Old Quarter. He could smell the burned wood of homes that had been fired in the fighting. There was a line of buildings where the walls were marked by desperate bullet lacerations, a small square, muddy roads leading from it, and a broken wall into which the jeep carrying her had crashed. There was a panel-beater’s shop where men worked to the light of oil lamps. It was as Haquim had described it. He saw an open door beyond the panel-beater’s shop, closer to the wall; through the door a family gathered in a dully lit room and watched the television. There were old men, young men, women, children, in front of the television.

The mustashar, Haquim, had said a family had come from their home and had spat into the face of Meda. He would have liked to have killed them, rolled a grenade through the door or sprayed them with an assault rifle on automatic, but that was not the work of an observer as written down by Major Hesketh-Prichard. He slipped again into the shadows until he could see the lights of the wide street.

The orphan child of the aid agencies, the plaything of American soldiers, the carrier of ammunition for the peshmerga, the thief from the living and the dead, the friend of Mr Gus had no fear when he was close enough to see the high gallows being built by supervised labourers outside the barricaded gates of the headquarters of Fifth Army.

‘Which direction does it face?’

‘To the front, towards the wide street.’

‘Can you see it from the side?’

‘There are screens at the side of canvas. You can only see it from the front, from the wide street.’

‘But above it is open?’

‘No, Mr Gus. It is covered by a roof of more canvas. You cannot see it from high, not from the side, only from the front… Why do they do it so complicated, Mr Gus?’

‘So they can dictate where I will be.’

The sweat of the day’s heat had cooled long ago on his body and the night wind now insinuated the chill into him. The blister was worse on his heel, aggravated by the charge out of the city after the killings. He had the last of the plasters from his rucksack on the wound and the ache of it was inescapable. When the sun had gone down, the stiffness had gripped his shoulders, pelvis and knees, and he had not slept until the boy returned.

‘They do that, the roof and the sides, because of us?’

‘Because of me, not you. You have done your work, Omar. If I want to see Meda brought out, see the rope put on her, see… I have to be in front, because they have covered the sides. I cannot be high, because they have made a roof. They hope to restrict me so that it is easier for them to find me. A man never had a better observer, but it is finished for you – you should go.’

‘Without me you would not even get into the city.’

‘It is not your quarrel.’

‘Do you say that she is only yours, Mr Gus, not mine?’

‘I want you to go.’

‘You are nothing without me – Major Hesketh-Prichard was nothing without his observer. Even he said so.’

As he had waited for the boy to come back he had gone through the checklist he had been given so long ago. Mechanically, in the darkness, by touch, he had cleaned the breech and felt the firmness of the elevation and deflection turrets. He had tightened the screws securing the telescopic sight, he had massaged the lenses with a cloth, and had wiped each of the bullets of. 338 calibre before loading them into the magazine and slotting it back into the rifle’s belly. He could no longer conjure the faces of those who had been important to him so long ago. At each stage of the checklist she had been in his mind, and he had tried to remember the taste of her kiss.