Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

A hand reached up for the noose. Her head was still, and he thought she heard him.

Gus Peake fired, as if he were on Stickledown Range, at the centre of the V-Bull of his target.

‘Kill her… Kill her…’

He watched the speck of the bullet and the early-morning air burst away from it.

‘Kill her… Kill her… Kill her…’

When he could no longer see the bullet, he saw the buffet vortex of the air.

‘Kill her… Kill…’

His lips made the fourteenth syllable as her head pitched apart.

Gus lay with the shock of the rifle burning in his shoulder and closed his eyes to shut out the sight of what he had done.

He had heard the bullet go past him.

It was part of the discipline of Major Aziz that he did not twist his body to follow the path of the bullet to see what target it had hit, or if it had missed. The moment after he had registered the crack of the bullet’s supersonic flight, he heard the thump. Through his

’scope sight he studied the windows and roofs that were between 300 and 350 metres from him, but there was nothing. His search covered two or three seconds. He did not believe that the shot had been fired from closer than 300 metres, but there was that instant nagging suspicion that it had been loosed at a greater distance. His viewpoint, magnified and centred on the cross-lines of the Dragunov’s sight, raked up the length of Martyr Avenue, over office windows and apartment balconies and more roofs. There was so little time. Beyond the office housing the Oil Company of Iraq, beyond the block with balconies and flower-pots, beyond the office of the Agriculture Ministry (Northern Region) was a construction site of concrete floors and reinforced steel pillars, open to the winds.

He would have tracked on with the sight had it not been for what he saw from the lowest point of the sight’s circle – the workmen.

The workmen – and his mind raced to the calculation that they were a minimum of 1,000 metres from the scaffold – were the sign. A gasp of exhilaration slipped his lips.

He found them in the ’scope at the moment the tableau broke. There were four of them, day labourers, the fetchers and carriers of the cement blocks, the men who placed the crane’s cable hook onto the steel beams, but the crane was idle and the operator had gone with the architects, surveyors and supervisors to see the hanging. Perhaps the workmen were Kurds and not willing to watch the slow, strangled death. They were on the first floor’s bare plateau of concrete. They had frozen at the proximity of the shot. When he saw them their shock was fading and they cringed down, then looked up. It was what men anywhere would have done if a rifle was fired close to them, above them.

He had found his man.

Aziz grabbed his backpack, stampeded off the balcony and into her bedroom. He careered into her, flattened her and ran for the door. The dog scampered beside him. He charged down the staircase of the block. The man, too, would be running, but he would not have a wide staircase to go down, three steps at a time, but would be groping for a loose, swaying ladder. He burst out of the building and ran up the pavement. He never looked back towards the scaffold. It was a panting sprint but the adrenaline gave him speed and the dog was always a couple of metres ahead of him, as if doing the work of a pacemaker. He passed soldiers in a doorway, ignored them, and was crossing the further traffic lanes of Martyr Avenue as a personnel carrier swerved to avoid him. In his youth, in spiked shoes and shorts, he could have covered the distance in seventy seconds. Now he was middle-aged, and there was no crowd to cheer him towards a tape. He had the weight of the backpack hooked on one shoulder and the awkwardness of the rifle in his hand, but the scent of the chase was with him. He reached the palisade of planks fronting the construction site, heaving and fit to vomit, a minute and a half after the single shot had been fired.

The man would be coming off the ladder, would be weaving between stacked heaps of pipes, blocks and cables. At the back of the site, he would be running, for the plank wall or the wire fence, whichever was there. Aziz ducked along the side length of the palisade, covered with fly-posters and exhortations from the Party, and reached the corner of the wall.

The alleyway was empty. Facing the high chain-mesh fence were little lock-up businesses, all closed because their owners had gone to the execution. Three hundred metres down the fence, a boy appeared on the top and rolled and fell. From his run, Aziz could barely stand. He trembled with the effort. The boy saw him, covered him with an assault rifle, but did not fire. The man followed him. For a moment his weight was hooked on the top of the wire and then he dropped down.

Aziz thought the boy had shouted something to the man, who looked up. He would have seen Aziz at the corner of the palisade and the fence. He was a big man and the sunlight threw gaunt lines on his face that was cream-smeared above the stubble. He wore the big sniper’s smock. He seemed to measure the scale of the threat of Aziz at the corner of the palisade and the fence, then to reject it as an irrelevance. The boy caught the arm of his smock, pulled him across the alleyway, and they were gone.

Still heaving, trembling, still trying to draw air into his body, Aziz could not have fired. It would have been a wasted shot. He could no longer run but he pushed himself to trot forward.

He reached the point where they had come down off the fence. He was very careful now that he should not contaminate the scuffmarks made by their boots and bodies as they had dropped down. He gestured for the dog to sniff at the broken soil beside the wire, and cooed his encouragement.

‘Find them, Scout… Hunt them, Scout… Search, Scout, search… Find them.’

His faith in the quality of the dog’s nose was total. The dog led him into an entry between the shuttered businesses, and then into a maze of shallow streets. They would have run. He did not need to. He walked briskly after the dog. He would follow his dog, wherever it led, until he had the chance to shoot. Repeatedly, from his dried lips, he whistled for the dog to slow so that it was not too far ahead of him, but the dog held the scent.

They were in a storm drain and ahead was light. Omar had found it and brought them into Kirkuk through it, bypassing a checkpoint. They were crawling in the drain and could hear cars close by and the thunder of lorries and personnel carriers. In places they were on their hands and knees, but when debris clogged the tunnel they crawled on their stomachs. At the end, where the light was, when they emerged, they would be beyond the city and the open ground would be in front of them all the way to the hills. The spirit had gone from Gus. He had no sensation of success, no pride in having made the calculations correctly for what anyone would have described as a supreme shot. Near the end of the tunnel, when he was lagging behind the boy, Omar turned, caught his coat and wrenched him forward. His hands slithered on the drain’s floor, his head went down and the foul stale water was in his mouth. He flailed out at the boy. They had not spoken – other than the boy’s shout for him to hurry when he had fallen from the top of the fence – since he had fired.

As if believing Gus hid behind an excuse, Omar rasped, ‘You missed.’

‘I did not.’

‘You hit her, you missed the hangman.’

‘I wasn’t aiming at him.’

‘You fired at her?’ He heard in the darkness of the tunnel the bewilderment of the boy.

Gus nodded tiredly.

‘Do you tell me the truth, Mr Gus? In fifteen seconds, half a minute, or five minutes, she was dead.’

‘She was my target,’ Gus said.

‘Why – if she was dead?’