Gerald Seymour: Holding the Zero

There was a shocked, stunned silence, then the phone rang off.

He would deal first with those who were without blame. He dialled the number of a vicarage built in the countryside under old trees, but the phone was not picked up. Then he rang the number for the modern bungalow behind the vicarage, and heard a faint, aged voice.

‘Wing Commander Peake? It’s Willet, from MoD – I came to see you with Ms Manning of the Security Service. I have to tell you that I have a very poor view of elderly men sending the young to their deaths. Your grandson is somewhere, at this moment, behind Iraqi lines and hunted like a dog – because of you. You indoctrinated him with that rubbish history of your “friendship” with Hoyshar, the Kurd. You fed it like bacteria into his system. You took him back there ten years ago and further infected him. You passed on to him the letter that has probably killed him. You, because of your background at Habbaniyah and in the Kurdish region, had occasional contact with the Secret Intelligence Service, and I believe that you informed them of the letter. You set this process in motion. Where doors should have been locked in the face of your grandson, they were opened and his journey was made possible. What you couldn’t achieve yourself, you sent someone else to do. I hope you can live with that, what you’ve done to your own blood. Good-day, Wing Commander.’

The line of troops had bivouacked in small cluster knots for the night, and endured the storm.

At dawn they’d been caught in the cloud and had had to wait until it dispersed.

The line had formed again, and pressed on. They had reached the ridge and seen the body. The officer, on the radio, reported back to Fifth Army in Kirkuk that, beyond boot marks in the mud at the summit of the ridge, there was no sign of the foreign sniper, or of Major Karim Aziz, and that the valley below him seemed at a cursory glance to be empty

… except for the body. The officer said that the body confused him: it was not abandoned, not dumped, but laid out as if it were a sign or a symbol that he did not understand.

The troops around the officer squatted down and began to eat their rations.

He lay across the line they took.

They had red-brown bodies and were twice the size of what Gus knew from home.

Each of them, each of the thousands, found him blocking their track, crawled onto his body, then diverted in search of his flesh, and bit him. Every last one of the little bastards bit him fiercely. They had fangs and venom, and they bit his ankles and the skin at his waist, and were up under the gillie suit. They found the skin at his throat and his face, and they bit his hands.

The bites, the injections of the venom, were all over his body, itching and hurting.

Anywhere else he would have paused from lining up his aim on the target and would have swept the little bastards to oblivion. He could not move. He could not swat them and could not scratch the wounds they left him with. When he eased his glance to the right he could see them coming for him in a long, limitless line.

It might have been for half an hour that the ants crossed him and crawled on the rifle, and after them it was the turn of the flies.

The sun was high and had settled a haze over the valley when the flies came in the wake of the ants. There would have been his sweat to attract them and the raw pimple wounds with the blood, and the urine that he had leaked into his trousers. They flew against his hands and face, hovered in front of his blinking eyes, insinuated under his face net, up his nostrils and into his ears. The flies inflicted more wounds and drew more blood. After them were mite-sized creatures from the bilberry bushes, then spiders from the bracken circled him and feasted.

He remembered the bubble. Inside it, where it never rained and was never too hot, where the wind never blew, there were no ant columns, no flies, no mites and no bloody spiders. He imagined himself to be inside the bubble’s comfort.

The sun at its height, with its haze, seemed to burn steam off the floor of the valley.

His eyes were tiring from the long hours of searching through the ’scope. He whose eyes lasted best would win. It was hard to see the detail on the valley floor through the steam mist and sometimes the body of the boy was reduced to a blurred outline. Hard, too, to gaze across the valley and identify individual rocks, particular bushes and isolated clumps of vegetation that made cover.

He yawned hard, and that broke the walls of the bubble. He yawned again, then swore to himself. The Iraqi would be on the plateau across the valley at his level, not on the steeper slopes above because there the range would be too great, and not among the rocks below, because there the cover would be harder to use. He searched and could not find, and he knew he should rest his eyes but he did not dare. He looked for light on metal or for a clean line where there should be only a broken one.

When the sun dipped, sank, then the haze over the valley would be gone. The light would be into his tired eyes, and the gentle slope of his plateau would be clearly lit to the man on the far side. He had to believe that inside the bubble his eyes would not tire, or he would lose.

He heard the crows calling, above him, high over the valley floor as they circled the smoothed stone on which he had laid the body.

Did they have doubts, the men he had read of and whom he believed he walked with?

Aziz knew the names of some with whom he believed he walked, but some were anonymous to him except for the reputation of what they had achieved. It was unsettling that he had doubts that gnawed at his patience… There was an American marine who had confirmed a kill at 1,290 metres across the river at Hue; and another marine with a known-distance range map who had hit at 1,150 metres, witnessed and written up by his officer, in the Vietnam Central Highlands; and there was Carlos Hathcock who had taken seventy-two hours to move just one kilometre and then had killed a general of the North Vietnamese army at 650 metres. He knew their stories, but did not know whether they had harboured doubts at the moment when they squeezed the trigger.

Had the rifle held the zero? He lay under the jut of the slab and the worry fretted at him. The Dragunov, with the PSO-1 telescope sight, had held the zero the last evening when he had fired on the man and hit the boy, but the doubts lingered because he remembered each stumble in the night and every jolt on the rifle. He had tried to protect it, because the rifle was his life, but he could not be certain he had succeeded. The ’scope seemed solid on the stock, but if it had shifted half a millimetre, he would miss and he would lose, and he would not walk with the great men.

His mind flitted on, sifting the doubts. He had sunk in the bog; the mud had cloyed round him, he had cleaned the outside of the rifle and the inner parts of the breech. What if a speck of mud was in the rifling of the barrel? The round would go high or low or wide, and he would lose.

In front of the muzzle of the barrel, he had cleared a small area of bracken fronds so that he had a clear shot ahead. To the sides he had thinned the bracken. What if, when he identified the position of his friend, a single frond blocked a clear shot? Billy Sing, the Australian – and Aziz knew of him from his reading in the library at the Baghdad Military College – had killed 150 Turks at Gallipoli. He would have squirmed in anxiety lest his bullet nicked a single frond or blade of grass or twig. A bracken frond close to the muzzle, unseen through the focus of the ’scope, would deflect a bullet travelling at 830 metres a second and he would fail.

He thought of the great men of the Civil War in America – Virginius Hutchen, Truman Head and Old Thousand Yards, who was the buffalo hunter – and he believed they would all, in inner secrecy, in their lying-up positions, have entertained nagging doubts about their equipment. He would not know the answer to any of his doubts, or whether he would ever walk with the great men, until he fired.