Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

He froze.

The darkness seemed tight around him. On the checklist was the circle back. He did not know how close they had been, so tired, to each other. He could not know whether the man and the burden had been fifty paces from him, or two hundred and fifty. Had they passed each other? Had the man seen him, and hesitated? Had he made a silhouette, and had the man reached to unhook his rifle from his shoulder, and had the moment then passed? The dog worked over two loops. Could they have shouted to each other? The circle back was predictable. Could they have blundered into each other?

By going into the water, and the circle back, the man had tried each of the principal evasion tactics. They had been used and had failed and the dog now tracked along a straight, true path – as if the man struggled in desperation to reach the ceasefire line, with his burden, before dawn.

‘Did you tell me the story of Wilibald the Hun?’

‘I did.’

‘Can you tell me the story of Mr Gaythorne-Hardy of the 4th Battalion of the Royal Berkshires?’

‘How he crawled in daylight to the German wire at Hill Sixty-three, Messines? I did.’

‘I must have slept – please, tell me the story of the cat.’

The lake water sloshed in his boots but he had lost too much time to stop and empty them, and wring out his socks. He thought that the boy lapsed into and out of unconsciousness. More time had slipped away in the long circle back. Once, the dog had scurried on the loop run and he had seen its grey-white coat in the moonlight, but the scent had held its attention and it had gone by him. Once, too, he had seen a straight standing figure – a tree-trunk, a rock, the hunter – and he had held his hand over the boy’s mouth to shut out the wheeze of his breath and the bubble in it.

There would be no more attempts at evasion. Omar had given him the star that was his guide. He had failed to break the track that the dog followed. It would be the same star that had watched him and Meda, the same star that had been above his grandfather and her grandfather at the ruins of Nineveh. He lurched on. It was darker now behind him and the gathering clouds obliterated the washed-out light of the moon.

‘What has our father done?’

She could not answer her younger son’s demand for an explanation. Men swarmed through the house. She knew what he had done because they had shown her the papers dug up in the garden. She had been shown plans of the city’s north-west sector, with a ruler-straight line drawn from the outline of an apartment block to the outline of a villa, and with sentry-points arrowed and road blocks circled. She sat at the table in the kitchen with her mother, who wept, and her father, who held his head in his hands, and her sons, and watching over them was the barrel of a machine-gun. She had told the men of her previous day, the drive to the fuel station on the Kingirban and Kifri road outside Sulaiman Bak; they had written what she said. She had told them that her husband had said she was to bring boots for rough walking and food and a small tent; they had pointed on a map to the ceasefire line within an hour’s drive of the fuel station. The kindnesses he had shown her over many years were now forgotten, and the intimacies. She told them, flat-voiced, how he had been away from her bed every night in the week before he had been ordered north, and of his distraction and nervous temper. Quietly – as her home was searched, stripped, she chased survival for herself, her parents and her children. She denounced him. She heard her elder son cruelly respond to the question.

‘Our father is a traitor… I hate him, as you should… Our father deserves to die.’

His family were not in his thoughts.

He whistled again for the dog to wait.

Each step was harder. The hours were crawling away but he could sense no end to the night. Aziz had had to crawl on his stomach from a bog into which he had strayed. Those had been nightmare moments. The sinking mud had clung to his legs, higher than his knees, and he had only been able to use the one hand to claw his way free because the other had held the rifle clear of the filth of the bog. He could have died there, exhausted, watched by the dog, unable to pull himself out. The nightmare had edged towards panic before he had been able to get a grip on a stone at the edge of the bog and lever himself out. He did not think of his family, but the panic had surged because he had thought he would not fire the Dragunov again. Everything in his life, which might have ended in waste in the bog, was preparation for the long hunt of the fugitive and then the long shot on the target.

Aziz looked more often now behind him. He watched for the encroaching mass of cloud. It had not yet reached the moon’s half-light, which enabled him most of the time to avoid the bogs and the stones, and to see the dog ahead of him, but twice he had heard the thunder peal and once the ground had been lit by a sheet of lightning. In its flash, he had seen the man perhaps half a kilometre ahead. It had been a fleeting glimpse. He had seen the weight on the man’s shoulder and the narrow outline of the rifle barrel stretching up past the hooded head. The man had not taken advantage of the moment to look behind him, and had trudged on, bent under the burden. He already had respect for the man’s skill – the shooting, the fieldcraft and the dedication – but Aziz did not understand why the man had not dropped off the burden, laid it down, put a handgun or a grenade in the child’s fingers, and moved faster and freer.

The bog’s mud, clinging to his boots and his trousers, further slowed him, as the clouds closed behind him. The panic of the struggle to escape the bog was replaced by a new fear: of the clouds and the rain that could wipe out the scent the dog followed.

He murmured, ‘Is that what you are hoping for, friend, the rain? Do you hope that the rain will cheat me?… How do you find the strength – in the name of God, where do you find it? If the rain does not come you will have to turn… You understand, friend, that it is not personal? I believe that a man such as you, a man I respect in all sincerity, would know that it is not personal…’

There was no past in his mind and no future. There was nothing of his family, and nothing of his own salvation. The present ruled him, was each slow step forward, and the bounce of the dog ahead of him, the struggle to hold the pace, and the glimpse of the burdened man in front of him, the massing of the clouds behind.

‘It is the last ridge, Mr Gus.’ The voice was beside his ear, quiet.

‘Say that again.’

‘It is the last ridge.’

A coal-black line was ahead of him and above it was the grey mass of the mountains.

He had not noticed the dawn come. The whistle was in the air some way behind him. He did not know how far he had gone in the night hours, how many miles of slopes, screes and muddy pools he had climbed and crossed. He had lost the pain, killed by his tiredness.

‘He is still with you, Mr Gus.’

‘He is still with me.’

‘To shoot you, Mr Gus… I am so cold.’

‘We must keep you awake. It’s time for another story.’

The wind gusted abruptly onto his back. It seemed to knife into Gus’s shoulders, through the weight of the rucksack and the dangling legs of the boy. The wind went from moderate strength to fresh to strong… He would take the boy home. There was no clarity in his thoughts, and no clutter of passports, visas and immigration. He would take the boy home and put him in the spare room, find a chair for him at work, walk him on Saturday mornings in the high street, and drive him on a Sunday to Stickledown Range… The rain blustered on to his back. He would teach the boy to read the pennants that marked the wind on the range and the boy would call the deflections for the alteration on the windage turret of the old Lee Enfield No. 4, Mark 1 (T), and would lie beside him on the mat. The lightning split the skies around him – he did not look back because he knew that he was still followed – and the thunder boomed in its wake. With the boy beside him, he would win the silver spoons.