Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

Humiliated, could not immediately pay for it. Had not enough money in her purse to buy the two buns she had chosen and the latte , and her teeth ground in anger. Cash she had been given was in her passport, zipped securely in her bag. People behind were pushing her, trying to buy and still catch their train. Confused and panic fuelling embarassment. She was groping in the pockets of her jeans and finding screwed-up paper handkerchiefs, and her ticket, and there was £3.78 in her purse and she needed £7.08, and she heard behind her a man’s voice, accent smart and southern and English: Oh, for fuck’s sake … Then… Take it out of this, please . A note was on the counter, pushed towards the girl. Zeinab flushed. The till was rung, the coffee was capped, the buns were bagged. Embarassment soared. She was a nuisance, in the way, and the inconvenience could be bought by the man for £7.08, and he was ordering a croissant and a regular cappuccino . Her package was in front of her, pushed towards her, she stammered gratitude but was ignored… she flared.

Anger soared. The feeling was sharp as a nail. She was an obstruction, ethnic, easy to buy out, patronised. It was not about a belief in the caliphate, and not about the Gardens of Paradise. She was third-Class or fourth. A dreary little creature who stood in a queue and did not have enough to pay for what she wanted. She snatched up her bag, turned on her heel and strode away. The two buns and the coffee left behind. She heard it clearly: Stroppy little cow, that’s thanks for you . And kept walking, had now regained the route of the boys who had all known Dewsbury, and her street.

Fury engulfed her. She had been told what station she was to head for, and by what line. She wondered how long each of the three of them who had taken a train had waited for the lights to spear out of the tunnel and the clanking carriages come to a halt. They would have had anger, fury, and the fourth – later – would have found his train cancelled and gone up into the fresh summer air and have looked for a crowded bus at that rush-hour time, and she thought him the bravest of all of them… She wondered where Andy Knight was, bit her lip, tried to slide him out of her thoughts. She stood on the packed train and it rocked on uneven tracks… She would fight them; uttered a single silent prayer that she would have the chance… somewhere on this stretch of tunnel one of them had pressed a button, had gone to his God, was at peace. She was not.

Karym’s phone went. His brother.

The project was quiet. The few with outside work were gone, some women had left with their shopping bags to spend the money filtered to them through the tentacles of La Castellane’s nightly trading – guarding money and weapons and hashish, getting a percentage of the profits from dealing and enforcing which paid well, watching the perimeter of the project which was rewarded less generously. Late morning and a brittle sunshine and the wind scouring the ground and bending the few surviving trees in what had once been proud landscaping. The police and the forensic technicians had pulled out, and the burned car had been hoisted on to a flat-bed and taken away. The smell still hung close to where the fire had been, but that was from the tyres, not the burning flesh. School would soon be finished and the young kids would spill back into the project, and the older ones who still bothered to attend the big lycée down the road towards the city. Karym was owed some respect because of the blood-line to his brother: had his brother not owned his stairwell business then Karym, with his weakened arm, would have been a pitiful creature, hounded and bullied. As long as his brother lived, he had protection… He would talk to him again, to Hamid, about his wish for them to go together into the hills, where the scrub was dense, and place some bottles and some cans on a rock, and have an AK-47 with two filled magazines, and fire them at Battle Sight Zero range, close enough for him to hit and feel the sucking of pride in his chest, and have his ears ring with the sound of it. He would not beg, would request, and would hope… he had no girl or the chance of one, had no rifle or the opportunity to fire one. He would ask his brother.

He answered. Karym was told what his brother wanted. He agreed, of course.

Karym did not ask about a session in the mountains, with the rifle: another occasion. He was told at what time that afternoon he should do the run. It was part of what was regular in Karym’s life. Every four or five days, he took the satchel from his brother and rode on his small Peugeot scooter out of the project and along the back roads, not the main highway, to St Exupéry, to a Credit Union branch. He would bank the cash, receive a chit, lodge it, and within a few hours his brother would have transferred it electronically out of that branch and away into the cyber world of lost money. The cash was usually measured in tens of thousands of euros. Sometimes he went alone and sometimes he would have an escort of kids, his age, riding close to him on their scooters… about the only time that Karym felt important. It was said that stocks were low in the project, that a new shipment was coming that afternoon. The events of the previous evening were gone from his thoughts, and the smells, and very soon – within hours – the place would await the next bout of theatre, to which the community was addicted.

He wandered and the wind was on his face… He saw her. She walked heavily. She carried a shopping bag. He could not see her face because of the shadows thrown by the sunlight. He thought it likely that his brother, through an intermediary – an imam or a school teacher or a social worker – would send her money. Her son’s funeral would be the next day and there would be a good attendance from the project, and some flowers. Karym did not think that she would have seen the brilliance of the flames from the torched car or that the smell would have reached her windows. It was the way of the place, and she would accept it… A nice morning, and little in his life changed and he did not wish for anything to alter that. He went to buy a cake. There was one area of change that bothered him, was unfamiliar. His brother had been across the city, had ridden his Ducati Monster down to the centre of Marseille and through it and out on the far side; had gone to a meeting with a man of prominence, otherwise would not have bothered, and Karym did not know why. He was unsettled when he did not know the immediate future, even on a pleasant morning.

‘Can a woman fire it, shoot with it easily?’ Andy Knight’s question.

‘No problem – should there be?’ A corporal’s answer.

‘The shape of it, the recoil, whatever?’

‘A woman can shoot with it, period.’

He was off the main armoury. He had been told that most of the weapons that had been captured on active service had now been shipped out, but the guys who ran the place had managed to squirrel away some prize parts of the original collection, and reasons had been given that satisfied those above, enough to square a circle. At his feet were half a dozen AK-47s from Serb factories and Iraqi-made, an Egyptian version, one from a Chinese factory, and what was laughed at as a museum piece, five decades old from a Soviet era production line and picked up in prime working order from an Afghan fire-fight. He was alone with the corporal, and a Do Not Disturb note was pinned to the outer door. The corporal, long past his retirement date and it would have required a flame-thrower to shift him from this cramped area, was a veteran of most of the recent conflicts where the UK had pitched up.

‘I thought I needed to know.’

‘Look at the Kurd battles, Mosul and Raqqa. There were women enough on the front parapets, and most had crap AKs from Iraqi stocks, or Syrian, and they were efficient, brave… some say they are harder.’