Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

He went to his car. He drove a VW Polo. The registration said it was eight years old, had about a hundred thousand on the clock, and he’d bought it at auction for close to £3000, and the boys in the depot might fix him some better tyres, do retreads for him. He could not be seen to splash money, and the Polo would get to Marseille and he wouldn’t be on a French autoroute hard shoulder with fumes seeping out.

For this operation, codenamed Rag and Bone, there would have been an examination of three principal parts. Did it have Proportionality to the potential threat? Was there Justification in launching it? Could Necessity be lined up with the danger posed by the target? It would have gone, with the pitiful relevant information available, to the Office of Surveillance Commissioners, and the case would have been put with all the emotion of a guy going down to the High Street bank and pleading for a mortgage. A judge would have warbled about ‘intrusion’ and the sins of ‘trawling’ but he’d have nodded, signed on the dotted line – then gone to lunch. Then the talent contest… Clutching their authorisation, they’d have gone to Specialist Crime and Operations 10. Who was available, who was suitable, who could say what the time parameters might be for Rag and Bone. The chances were that SC&O10 would have had to evaluate the competing bids, and juggle rosters, and decide which of the Level One people was best for what was asked. He had been chosen. Had taken the new name, had gone into the purdah world while a legend of his life was concocted, and the psychologists would have had their say: how to get a white-skinned boy up close and personal with an ethnic sub-continent girl from Savile Town in the depressed little Yorkshire community of Dewsbury. That was how it was done, and he was tasked, and they held him up, the Controller and the Cover Officer, as the best man they could have had… and knew so little.

He went to the car.

Some truths were bigger than others. Truths existed around the area of backup. The biggest truth, up for argument but peddled by every controller, said that backup – guns and intervention, the cavalry coming over the hill – was not negotiable and was guaranteed. A pretty story, and wheeled out often enough, and not believed. For Andy Knight in the little VW Polo and about to head off for foreign parts with the girlfriend, Zed, there would be nominal protection but no intervention if he flagged up suspicion. The smallest truth, not talked about, shrugged at: the thought of leaving an Undercover up the creek, no paddle. Wear a wire? Too easy, and any sort of microphone built into a shirt button or a belt, or posing as a pattern in a tie, sent off a signal, as did any sort of bug worn in a shoe’s heel. Every shop doing security stuff, sold the hoovering kit that could locate microphones and bugs, and any people who were serious about what they did would sweep a room before they met in it. He would be alone. Better accept it. Somewhere down the road and round the corner would be the cars and a van where the boys would be with the H&Ks and the Glocks, and the fags and the coffee flasks, and a bucket to piss in… down the road but too far. Alone and beyond reach. It would take just one slip. Forgetting bugs and microphones, and heading into the territory of the legend, and saying one thing about where he had been to school and then, four months later, contradicting himself, and the school was somewhere else… Saying he had a sister one time but not the next… Claiming he had met someone a year back and it had not featured on the ‘legend’ that a hood had been kept on in prison for assault on an officer and had not been released… Too many times when mistakes could trip off the tongue, and the firearms too far away. And another truth: people on the other side who were targeted did not take kindly to the thought that a guy they might have liked, believed in, joked with, cuddled, was a fraud. The animal people would likely have laid hands on butchers’ cleavers and the druggies would have gone in search of a friend who could rustle up a chain-saw. Zed’s people? He doubted they were short of imagination. A mistake would go badly for him, and he was alone, beyond reach.

It was difficult, impossible – however hard the effort he put in – to lose sight of truths.

Andy Knight was where he was – there because of a rabbit, would have been a big bastard because it had dug a big hole, but hadn’t the time to curse the rabbit because he was in the traffic and this was the last stage of the journey that was predictable. Nothing else would be. She was a good-looking girl, and could be fun when she lightened up, and he would betray her because that was the job – take it or leave it. Had belief in the job? Did, didn’t he? He squeezed his eyes shut, risky when driving but the only way to lose the question, and it was worse in the night when the darkness was around him – worse than bad. When she knew, she would spit at him, curse, hate him, and meantime would kiss him. He drove to the depot.

Krait and Scorpion flanked her. Zed walked in the shopping mall, wide and open, music playing.

She knew the place. Anyone who lived in the city was familiar with it, visited, talked of its good bargains. She knew what the Irish had done to it years ago and how it had been rebuilt. Not that day, but on others, she had seen armed police suddenly materialise out of the crowds, looking at her, into her, past her, then gone. She carried with her the memory of their laden belts of equipment and the weight of the vests covering their chests, and their accessories – worn as easily as a handbag or rucksack or a furled umbrella – were machine pistols while holstered pistols flapped against their thighs.

The guys with her were those who had first briefed her, who had told her, while she was in Manchester, to bin the traditional garments favoured by her father and mother. They had known those distant cousins…

One of them would carry the rifle, not her.

Zeinab could not have picked out either as being more suitable, had no idea who would be more efficient. The crowds were light. It would not be done on a morning such as this, but on a Saturday afternoon, or on the Sunday of a public holiday, or on the last late shopping night before Christmas. She could imagine it… Perhaps they would dress in black, the colour favoured by the defenders of Mosul or Raqqa or any collection of concrete block buildings that was an oasis of sorts in the desert sands of Iraq or Syria. Black was the colour of fear, recognised as a signature of the martyrs. So also was the profile of the rifle, with its curved magazine and distinctive fore-sight. She had never seen an AK-47, had never held one, felt its weight. She did not know whether it was easy to lift, whether the shots needed to be fired with the stock at the shoulder… She looked into the faces that swam past her. Ordinary people… Asians and Africans and swarthy south Europeans. It would not be an opportunity to choose who was innocent and who was guilty. Who lived, who died. Inside the mall the hot air was blown the length of the corridors and she felt sweaty, uncomfortable. Outside it was cold and clean and the wind purged dirt from her skin. Religion, in Zeinab’s mind, was a straitjacket that refused flexibility. When the rifle was brought to this floor of the shopping centre, or another in the city, or carried across the Pennines to Leeds – it would be about her sense of freedom. She thought the guys harboured the same motivations. They did not pray at prescribed intervals throughout the day, get out their mats, face towards the estimate of the direction to the places in Saudi Arabia, did not go to the mosques, as far as she knew, even on the designated days. She was in a commercial shopping zone, not in a seminar presided over by a tutor whose attention would likely have been on the curve of her arse and the weight of her boobs… nothing about religion. In the seminar, she’d have articulated a view of a degree of liberty, with the weight of white persons’ domination off her people’s backs. She could imagine the raw, throat-stripping exhilaration as she pushed towards a bank of TVs in a shop and saw the aftermath. Heard sirens, sobbing eye witnesses, screams and hysterical yelled instructions from security, and maybe even heard the double tap of a weapon – then the silence. Would be a place like this… She gazed into the faces of the shoppers, the old and the young – some used sticks to balance better and some ran and skidded and chorused their shouts. It would be one of the two guys, or a man she had never met, and perhaps he would leave behind, whichever one it was, a recorded message that shouted defiance. And it could not happen without her. Because she knew it, she walked with a firmer stride and the guys sometimes needed to scurry to keep up with her. It did not have to be said. Zeinab understood… and Andy, her besotted lorry driver Her evaluation of him was ‘unimportant but useful’: nothing more. Attractive? Perhaps. She had been brought here, to be in the corridors, pass the huge brightly lit caverns of goods and displays, in order that she might reflect on the high value of a target. That she was brought here was a mark of the reliance they had on her. She wondered which of the two guys it would be, dismissed the idea of another and wondered if they would feel fear, and… round a sharp-angled corner.