Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero

He heard the crows, and that pleased him. He watched them circling, and he thanked them because they turned his mind from the doubts, and he started again, through the heat haze, to search the far wall of the valley, and the plateau.

Once a month, Lev Rybinsky drove his Mercedes up the winding stone track and brought Isaac Cohen a twelve-bottle crate of whisky and gossip, and was paid for both commodities in crisp new dollar bills.

That midday, mopping his head with a handkerchief and pocketing the money, he told the Israeli of new gun positions on the peshmerga side of the ceasefire line, and of what was said in the bazaar in Arbil about the hanging of the woman in Kirkuk, and of the pillow talk of the agha Bekir’s treasurer that he had learned from a whore in the UN club at Sulaymaniyah, and of… but the Jew hardly seemed to listen.

‘Do you remember, Rybinsky, the sniper with her?’

‘I met him. I talked to him. He said that a big sniper had been sent from Baghdad for him. I told him of the duels between snipers in my city, Stalingrad.’

‘You are so full of shit, Rybinsky.’

‘How people in the city watched the duels, wars within wars, primitive, and took grandstand seats and would bet… Did he run away, too, and leave her? I have not heard of him since she was taken.’

‘I have it from the radio intercepts – you should get yourself there.’ Cohen went to the wall map, used his pointer and gave the six-figure reference. ‘That is where they are, to duel.’

‘He was not experienced.’

‘Then you should bet on the Iraqi.’

‘I told him about Zaitsev and Konings, at Stalingrad, how they watched for each other, stalked each other. Zaitsev had the experience, as does the Iraqi.’

‘I give you fifty dollars, Rybinsky at two to one against, that the Iraqi sleeps tonight with God.’

They shook hands, Rybinsky wrote down the grid reference and hurried to his car.

Commander Yusuf was brought a transcript of the radio signal from the ceasefire line.

‘Where is this place?’

He was shown it on the map, a finger prodding into an area of wilderness. He pondered, gazed at the harsh whorls of the contours and the shaded empty spaces without marked roads. He was a man of streets, buildings, restaurants, wide parade grounds, prison yards and cells, and he had no familiarity with such a place.

‘How can it be reached?’

Lev Rybinsky found Sarah at the clinic she held each week in the schoolhouse at Taqtaq, and pushed his way past the queue of waiting pregnant women. He shooed out the patient on the couch and ignored her protest.

He told Sarah why he had come.

Her face widened in astonishment.

‘Not only do I give you morphine and penicillin, I give you sport.’

‘You are sick, Rybinsky, fucking sick and warped.’

But she wrote down the map reference, closed the clinic for the day, and ran out into the sunlight to her pick-up. *** ‘Is that Davies and Sons, the haulage company? I’d like to speak with Mr Ray Davies -it’s Willet, Ministry of Defence.’ He waited, listened to the tinny music over the telephone, then heard the voice. Willet said brusquely, ‘I’d like to congratulate you, Mr Davies, because you damn nearly fooled me. I thought you were merely stupid. I now know better. I assume that, with lorries running all over Europe, you quite often do little courier jobs for the intelligence people. I assume that you had a call before Gus Peake said he wanted to travel to Turkey and gave that preposterous story about needing to understand better the drivers’ problems. You made available a lorry with a secret compartment where the rifle could be hidden from foreign Customs. To a degree you are responsible for Mr Peake’s present situation – he is lost in northern Iraq with half of their regular army chasing him. Well done. My suggestion, you put a notice in the trade magazines for a new transport manager because you’ll be needing one.’ Willet paused, listened to the question from the other end. ‘Why are you responsible? Instead of opening the door you could have slammed it on him, and saved his life. You ingratiated yourself in the hope of a future favour – probably a blind eye turned to another of your dodgy consignments. Good-day.’

He slammed the telephone down hard, and his hand shook. Then, again, he pecked into the file for a number.

‘Mr Robins, please. It’s Willet of MoD. No, it’s not urgent, it’s not a matter of life and death – it’s past that time…’ He was told that Mr Robins was unavailable because he was on business in America. He left no message and limply set down the telephone. If the connection had been made, he would have said, ‘Mr Robins, good to speak to you. I thought you would like to know that in the report I am writing on the journey by Mr Peake to northern Iraq, and what we believe will be his subsequent death there, I hold you partially responsible. I have reason to assume that you were told by SIS to give what help you could to Peake. Of course, you didn’t demur – you were advised by a faceless bastard that an opportunity now presented itself to gain Green Role battlefield experience for your. 338 calibre Lapua Magnum rifle at a time when it is still under trial. What a heaven-sent chance to find out how the bloody thing stands up to combat conditions. You could have told them at Fort Bragg or Leavenworth or Benning or Quantico, and at Warminster and Lympstone, all of the damned rifle’s tested qualities – good for the old export business, yes? Right now, his situation behind the lines is quite desperate. Sale or return, wasn’t it? I don’t think it will be returned – such a bloody shame.’ He would have liked to say that.

‘What’s it to me?’

‘It would be like standing with him, for God’s sake.’

Joe Denton knelt in the minefield with his back to her. She had shouted from the road to him what the Russian had told her. The line of V69s where he worked was particularly difficult because they were dispersed into a gully, and over the years sediment had covered them. It was a place too complicated for local men, even those he’d trained. He looked after himself, and thought he did not need emotional baggage.

‘If you used your eyes, Sarah, you’d see that I’ve got a job of work here.’

‘Please, Joe, it’s important to me – and I think it’s important to him.’

He swore under his breath, pushed himself up, gathered together his probes and the shovel and the roll of white tape, and walked back up the cleared path. She showed him the map and gave him the grid-reference figures. He climbed into the passenger seat and planned a route.

The dog’s panting was worse. Aziz, himself, even in the heat when the sun was high, could fight thirst and endure a dried-out throat and the aching in the stomach.

He had no water for the dog. Even if he had had water in his bottle, if he had remembered to fill it from puddles or the rushing streams during the night, he would not have been able to retrieve it from his backpack because that would have created too great a disturbance. With gentle movements of his trigger hand, he tried reaching behind him, to soothe the dog’s heaving motion, but his eye never left the ’scope as he tracked it across the far wall of the valley.

The crows were lower in their wheeling flight. He found now that they came into view, and sometimes he allowed them to lead him in effortless slow arcs. When he followed them, raking the ground against which they flew, he was more relaxed, his eyes less tired.

But the crows, wary and wild, were dangerous to him. The crows, with their suspicion and their needle-sharp eyesight, were on level flight with the stone slab at the plateau’s rim. If they saw him move, they would twist away. If they spotted his head moving or his body turning, they would scream their warning. They were his enemy and his ally.