Gerald Seymour: Holding the Zero

With a babble of voices around him he was taken into the home of the carcass, through the door that had been hammered down. The table was toppled over, the food trodden into the floor: there was a woman’s body and a young man’s, and the flies were worse.

They rose in swarms from the bloodied wounds at the corpses’ throats. He understood why the woman and the young man had been killed: they should not be able to carry away news of the attack over the plateau to the military position. He knew why they had been knifed: if they had been killed by gunfire the crash of the shots might have carried in the stillness of the early-morning air across the roll of the hills to the bunkers.

Gus thought of Stickledown. It would be quiet there after the previous day’s shooting, the targets would be lowered and the flags down. Would any of those who had fired the old weapons the afternoon before, his friends and his fellow enthusiasts, the other lunatics, comprehend what he had done, what had brought him to this place?

Perhaps the men around him had seen him rock on the balls of his feet, perhaps they had seen the pallor spread over his face… They took him out and around the building, through the crazily hanging door and into the annexe block. He was shown the smashed screen of the television, the cut cables and the radio. Grimed fingers jabbed at the typed sheets of paper that he presumed carried the codewords, frequencies and schedules of transmission.

Outside, with the sunlight on his face, he too drank at the air, gulped at its purity.

They ate from an iron pot that the boy had heated over the last embers in the stove inside. With his fingers he snatched saffron-flavoured rice, and palmed up the juicy swill of tomato and onion. Twice he found small scraps of meat, goat or mutton.

She had not eaten with them.

As the light sank they moved off.

She was ahead.

In the middle of the straggling column of men was the boy, burdened by the bags of food and the emptied iron pot. He skipped between the men, talking all the time, and stayed with each one until their patience was exhausted and he was cuffed away to dance on, light-footedly, to his next victim.

Gus trudged alongside Haquim at the end of the column, and realized the mustashar, the commander, was finding the going hard over rock and scrub, over shallow gorges and up rock inclines. He saw the pain in Haquim’s grizzled, heavy-boned face and the sharp biting at his lower lip to stifle it. When Haquim stumbled and he put out his hand to offer help, it was pushed away. He wished he had slept more in the day, when the chance had been given. They would march in the evening, then he and Haquim would go forward in the night. The sun was dazzlingly fierce and starting the slide below a rim of granite rock.

Twice, now, Haquim had stopped and steadied himself, breathing hard, then sighed and gone on. At the head of the column, he saw Meda drop down into a gully, near to the last ridge. He stayed with Haquim. He did not know whether he should insist on carrying part of the load balanced in a backpack on Haquim’s spine. The column ahead waited for them in the gully.

Gus hadn’t seen the boy turn when he materialized from among the rocks and wind-bent scrub close to them. All the time that he had been walking alongside Haquim, peering into the sun’s fall, sometimes blinded by it, he had not seen the boy’s charge back towards them. The boy said nothing, came to Haquim, stripped off the backpack, heaved it up alongside his rifle, the food bags and the cooking pot, and there was no protest.

Then, again, with the sun in his face as it cringed below the ridge, he lost sight of the boy between the greying rocks and the darkening trees.

Haquim challenged him. ‘You think I am not able?’

‘I think nothing.’

‘I am able.’

‘If you say it then I believe you.’

‘You, you are the worry.’

‘Why am I the worry?’

‘I doubt your strength. I may have a broken knee but I have strength. When I look down at a body, at a man I have killed, my stomach does not turn, I am not a girl. Let me tell you, Mr Peake, what you saw was as nothing to what the Iraqis would do to any of us, and to you. Do you know that?’

‘Yes, I know that.’

‘Today, for you, it is simple. Tomorrow, perhaps, it is easy. After tomorrow nothing is simple, nothing is easy. After tomorrow you will not look at me as if I am an aged cripple worthy of your sympathy, you will look at yourself.’

The first shadows of darkness cloaked them as they moved towards the second target.

He had showered, cold water to keep himself awake, eaten with the family, and gone out into the evening darkness.

Major Karim Aziz had yearned, again, to give some sign to his wife as to why he went out with his heavy waterproof tunic on and with the sports bag in his hand. There was nothing he could have told her. He could have lied about ‘Special Operations’ or manufactured an excuse involving ‘continuing night exercises’, but she always knew when he was lying. She’d done her best with the cooking for the family meal, and her mother would have spent hours on her slow old feet going round the open market stalls for the vegetables they could afford and a little meat. He had risen from the table, circled it and kissed in turn her parents, his boys and his wife. Then he had dressed for the night and left them.

The colder night air had cleared the smoke and smog. His view of the edge of the driveway, the steps and the villa’s main door was crystal sharp through the sight.

As a trusted professional soldier, with twenty-six years of proven combat experience behind him, Major Karim Aziz had access to any equipment he cared to demand. It would be bought abroad and smuggled by lorry from Turkey or Jordan into Iraq. But his needs were simple. He told the officers and senior NCOs he taught at the Baghdad Military College that in the area of infantry operations the art of sniping was as old and as unchanged as any. They should beware of state-of-the-art technology. He would say that if a child learned only to count with the aid of a pocket calculator, then went into a mathematics examination without it, he would fail – but the child who had learned to add, subtract and divide in his mind would pass that examination. He had learned the measuring of distance as a primitive skill, and had never asked for range-finding binoculars.

The distance from rifle barrel to target was critical, but he was satisfied he had made an accurate measurement. With correct adjustment to the elevation of the sights, the bullet would be two metres above the point he aimed at before dropping for the kill. Too great an estimation of distance, the bullet flew high and the target lived; too low, the bullet dropped too far and the target suffered a non-fatal wound… but he was satisfied with his appraisal of the distance. It was the freshening wind gusting around the edge of the roof’s water tank that bred the anxiety.

In daylight, he could have watched the flutter of the washing hung out on the roofs of the blocks of apartments fronting on to Rashid Street, al-Jahoun Street and Kifah Street.

Through his binoculars, he would have seen the mirage of dust and insects, carried by the wind, and there would have been the drift of smoke and smog. At night, peering through the black curtain of darkness towards the illuminated window of the driveway, the steps and the front door, there was no accurate way he could tell the strength of the wind beyond the blow around the forward edge of the water tank. At that range, his bullet would be in the air for one and a quarter seconds; one surge of wind gusting for two or three hundred metres between buildings would bend the bullet’s flight a few, several, centimetres and make the difference between killing and missing. But, with his experience, he did not require a calculator to make the adjustment to his PSO-1 sight. His intuition told him to compensate for a 75-degree wind direction at a strength of ten kilometres per hour, and his adjustment to the windage turret meant that his actual aim, if the target came, would be some eleven centimetres to the left.