Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

‘Sort of down to the wire… I hear you.’

She removed her arm. He heard the rumble of a motorcycle’s engine, fiercer than a smoker’s cough, and spitting power… and he wondered what the girl, the focus of Rag and Bone, understood of the reality of her life and its future, and saw her in his mind, and almost cared.

He had the bike started.

The noise of it blasted at her ears. Fumes spat from its exhaust and the rain and the wind pushed the smell of it against her where it clung. The boy, Karym, faced her. It was her last throw, not that she had ever rolled dice, but that was a phrase her tutor had used to her face: ‘Your last throw, Zeinab, and one where I learn of your commitment to the future.’ He had been talking the crap about her course-work, but here – in a wretched estate in a corner of a foreign city – it had a truth.

She lifted her leg, swung it over the pillion, and steadied herself. She put her left arm around his stomach and caught at his top, was inside his coat and then had a handful of clothing and a fold of his stomach skin and felt him stiffen, and he turned to face her, and a grin split open his face.

He shouted, ‘I wanted to know how it would be, sister, to work the beast, have it against me and do the trigger squeeze, and have done. Felt the hit of it against my shoulder – wanted that and have had it. Another thing I wanted was to be on the bike. This is a Ducati 821 Monster. It is prime quality. Power output at 112hp. He never let me ride it, my brother. Top speed of 225 kilometres an hour, range 280 klicks on a full tank. We are going places, sister, only caring about now , not caring about tomorrow, whether we are clever, or fools. Just for now , not any other time. You listening to me, sister?’

And she smiled, private, rueful, and considered what else – before that day – he had not done before, and she squeezed the flesh, pinched it hard, and heard the little yelp he gave. There was a roar beneath her and he eased the bike away and he took it over a sodden area of mud and grass tufts, and past a snapped off tree and a rubbish bin that had overflowed and toppled. Dirt kicked up from the wheels and spattered the kids who watched them go. Never before had he been cheered. A cohort of them ran alongside Zeinab and Karym and had to sprint to keep abreast with him. She thought they called his name… an expression flashed into her mind, what she heard girls say on the corridor of the Residence in Manchester: everyone ‘famous for fifteen minutes’, like the boy would be… not her. Her fame would last, sure of it, as long as there was breath in her body, and there would be, not minutes, but days and weeks, months and years. The kids running, heaving and panting with them, wanted to touch the shoulder of Karym, and those who managed it were shaken off.

She was strong. She had the rifle in her right hand, and the palm of her fist was around the pistol grip behind the trigger guard and her index finger was inside and against the trigger itself and she knew the amount of pressure required. They bumped over more rough ground and split a dumped can and slid on a slope and he had to hold the bike from toppling with his outstretched leg… Something she remembered, and they were within sight now of the exit point from the estate, where more kids were and the crude blasted rocks that were there for security, and he slowed and was gunning the engine. Remembered an afternoon at home, a wet one and the cloud low over Dewsbury, and her mother gone to a friend, and a neighbour come to sit and watch TV with her father, and an old film that the neighbour wanted to see, monochrome. Could not help herself but recall the memory. A film about a warship that had put into a South American port after an action with the Royal Navy, and the German boat was damaged, but was ordered by the local authorities to leave the harbour. All the quaysides were lined with people watching for drama and certain they’d not go short, and the British boats were waiting out at sea for the single German ship. Remembered it all, and the sight of her father staring at the screen and the neighbour wetting his lips in anxiety. Something tragic and lonely and unequal about it. Going towards a certain… and trying to kill the memory. She did not know how it had ended because she had gone to her room to complete her homework, nor had she thought it right for her father and her neighbour to watch a film glorifying the British military, nor had she ever asked what happened – only remembered the film showing the huge crowds and their excitement as the battleship had sailed.

Engine at full throttle. Wiped the memory of it. Darkness plunged around them, the brake was off. She was nearly jerked from the pillion but clung to him.

Everything black ahead except for half a dozen pinprick lights from mobile phones that the look-outs, the chouffes , had aimed on the rocks so he would avoid them. All the high street lights were out, as his brother had said they would be. A done deal, and aimed at freeing her. He ploughed through a ring of kids and they staggered back and gave him passage… like a warship going to sea and heading for an enemy. Karym might never have ridden the bike but was sure, and astride the technology, and his weakened arm seemed not to matter to him. There was supposed to be a window of opportunity, and she could not recall in her mind whether it lasted for 30 seconds or a full minute, but it gave them time. They were between the rocks, and the wind and rain lashed at her face, and she went with him, down low and sideways as he did, the fast, sharp left turn into the street and ahead of her was another wall of darkness. Barely heard over the sound of the engine, guttural and magnificent, a warrior call – what the engines of the warship would have made – were the shrieks and yells of the kids, but they did not follow. Full power, up the slope and far in the distance, near the summit of the high ground, were house lights and street-lights; around them was darkness.

She understood. A deal had been made and a promise had been kept. The open window, the darkness, would free her.

‘You good, sister?’

‘I’m good – we go to war, I am happy.’

She thought it incredible that he could hold the bike steady, without being able to see anything in front of him or around him. The darkness covered them, hid them, and she realised that he had wedged his open coat over the dials in front of him, and the headlight had not been switched on. They could not be seen, and the breakout point was close. The police cordon was behind them, and the queue of people who waited in line to buy the filth of cannabis from Morocco, and she had the old rifle and her finger was ready to squeeze on the trigger, tighten on it. The darkness was her friend. Where was Andy? Did she care? And he had her bag with the new nightdress folded away in it, had it in his car, and did it matter to her? Zeinab glanced down but had no light to see the bracelet, and she moved her neck but could not feel the pendant, her two gifts from him. And the speed strained the bike but the window was still open.

The thunder of the engine closed fast on them.

Beside him, the French marksman’s head was low over the Steyr rifle and he had one eye against the sight. Andy Knight – not to be his name for many hours more – heard the whispered command spoken into the microphone clipped to the corner of a bulletproof vest.

‘Okay…’

Just that, nothing more. He saw the shape of the blacked-out motorcycle for a moment as a silhouette against the lights of a tower block behind it. Both of them waited: not long.

The blistering power of the light was switched on. The street ahead was flooded with dazzling illumination. The core point of the light fell directly on to the bike. It was bright enough to clearly see each indent in a tyre, each scuff of dirt on the bodywork, and for the holes in the knees of the front rider, and the rifle that the pillion held. The rider would have been blinded, and swerved, and would have seen nothing ahead… the way it had been told him it was all so simple. Andy, or Phil or Norm, did not do morality checks but played by the book as it was, relevant page open, and others deciding whether the action was a good fit inside the code of conduct laid down for the countering of a terror campaign, or an organised crime shipment, and what was acceptable in a boot-on-the-throat business of inconvenience. Very simple… It was said that the boy would have been too stubborn, too under the spell of the girl, too stupid, to have abandoned the refuge and come out hands raised. Said that the girl would be dreaming of martyrdom and a sort of fame, want to die in a hail of gunfire, and would not surrender. Said that a siege would linger, perhaps for days, and was not worth the death or injury of a single officer. Said that a trade-off was possible through the ‘good offices’ of Hamid, small-time dealer and thug, who would deliver up his brother. Said that trading could restart inside the project within half an hour, and that the police operation would be over and overtime rates kept in check. Said also that the elder brother would – in return for immunity to prosecution – provide evidence that would convict an elderly gangster with a history of corrupting officials in the Town Hall and the headquarters of the detective force beside the cathedral. Simple, but complex, and satisfactory to many: a favourable trade-off. The way it had been told, the marksman would go for a knee shot, or the flesh of the thigh, and would avoid the stomach area where the vital organs were, and not aim for the head where the boy’s thin hair was spiked by the effect of wind and rain, and the bike’s tyres had lost traction and the swerve was becoming a skid.