Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

No idea what it would be like to face troops down the length of a station corridor, or across a concourse at an airport, along the aisles in the shopping centre in Manchester. She imagined that above the noise of screaming shoppers or passengers, would be the shouting of the soldiers. The young one who had raised an appreciative eyebrow at the sight of her, would have had a good voice coming from a strong chest, would have tried to dominate her with its authority. The chance that he – any of them – had ever fired in anger before, shot to kill, was negligible. Nor would she have if it were her, Zeinab from Savile Town who nobody knew of, if she had the Kalashnikov. She sat on a train and it rolled into the darkness of a tunnel. Shouting and screaming around her, and the hammer of her heart and the panting of her breathing, and the finger on the trigger… it was that sense of excitement that gripped her. And she was trusted… not just by Krait and Scorpion, but the older man and the one with the scars on his neck… and she was the enemy that was not recognised.

She remembered how it had been at home. Weeping from her mother, abuse from her father, and doors slammed in their fury, impotent, when she had announced that she would leave home and go to university across the Pennines, and neither had realised that it was part of her march towards this new role, chosen by her, to be a fighter… With the weapon in her hand, could she have aimed at that soldier, seen his face, seen his eyes, seen the shake of the barrel’s tip, and fired at him? She had no doubt of it.

Liberated… in good time for her train to the south… free.

‘I will treat you, of course, with respect, and listen to your requests, but…’

They had been escorted to the second floor of the city’s police headquarters, L’Évêché, and might have come from another planet, a different civilisation, from the way their ID and passports had been scanned at the ground-floor reception desk.

‘… I have a full schedule, and your approach comes outside the correct protocols. I run the affairs, criminal, of the northern sector of France’s second city. Am I supposed to end normal duties, and go back to them when you have finished your assignment?’

In the taxi from the airport, Pegs had suggested some initial ‘bluster’ was predictable, and the man they’d meet would soon soften. She had launched into her schoolgirl French, and made a fair fist. He was a major, and had replied in flawless English, and both she and Gough had ducked their heads in appreciation. So it had started on a poor footing.

She said, ‘Any help that we can have would be gratefully received.’

They had been brought up to the office via a creaking elevator and then along gloomy painted corridors; men and women, some in uniform gazed at them as if they were an alien force… probably justified. Gough was familiar with French investigators coming to London who received short shrift in terms of welcome, and cooperation with the Italians was rationed more tightly, barely existed for the Germans. The Major was behind a small desk in a spartan office and both of his visitors were perched on hard chairs. There was a family photograph on a wall, him with a wife and a child, another of the Republic’s current President, and a map that his eyes had wandered to that showed the northern sector of the city. On his desk were a screen and a keyboard and model cars in the livery of the carabinieri and the New York City police, and a toy wagon in the colours of the Guardia Civil. Against a wall was a hatstand that doubled as a coat-hanger, and it was skewed at an angle under the weight of a harness for a shoulder holster, pistol included, and a flak-jacket… at Wyvill Road there were no firearms on display, and protective vests were issued from stores in the cramped basement. No coffee offered but Gough thought that was an oversight, not rudeness. By his feet was the duty-free bottle in a plastic bag that he had protected through the journey, and the building’s security procedures.

The Major answered her. ‘I have delayed a meeting this afternoon to see you. When we have finished I go to that. Then we have the end of the day – I go home. Perhaps tomorrow we can look more fully at the situation confronting you… Where are we? You are working on codeword “Rag and Bone”, you believe a weapon is to be brought by a new route into this city, you believe also that this is a test run for future shipments. You have an Undercover trailing a female target – except that he and you have lost her. You are confident of regaining contact. It is vague, yes? One weapon, yes? Perhaps only one – or two or three. A very few. A trial, and the hope that if the system is satisfactory more will be ordered, and you are nervous that extremely potent weapons will replace knives on your streets. We know about such firearms, we have that experience, and Marseille is awash with assault rifles… But you do not know the contact with whom the female target deals. You don’t…’

Gough said, never good with words and not crisp, not slick, ‘We want to – hope to be able to – have the target and our boy take delivery, then drive it across your country to a ferry port in the north, and our intention is to have people, our people, on the boat who can fix a tracker, a tracking bug, inside the stock – or several, whichever – and we will then follow it. We intend, hope, to uncover – through the bug – a network.’

Pegs said, to the point and brief, ‘Getting the bug in represents success for us… We have a duty of care.’

‘As we do.’

‘We must provide protection.’

‘And myself also… Recently, I had investigators inside one of the housing projects and to get them there, with the possibility of making a significant narcotics arrest, we had those officers, men, dressed in the female style, a burqa full veil, but behind them I had a fast response unit, a dozen men from the GIPN. Never more than four hundred metres away, and a limited incursion into that area. But you understand the manpower required to safeguard an officer. You appreciate?’

‘I appreciate it.’

‘Any trade in weapons involves the senior echelon of a principal crime clan… It may be that you do not know our city. We have serious players, they have a reputation for grave cruelty, excessive violence, and they settle disputes in a barbaric way. Last night a boy who had transgressed the rules of his gang was burned alive in a vehicle fire. Horrific… Do we have informants who tell us who was responsible, where there is evidence to be gathered? We do not. Not even the kid’s mother will talk to us… The people your target will need for association, to take delivery, are spare with morality, live in districts known for their barbarity… That is where your target may go, and your Undercover, I presume, will not be far behind. I cannot provide the necessary force, open-ended, for you… and anywhere in the city, any place, they have the arm’s reach to touch. I am sorry but…’

‘Well, fuck this for a game of dominoes.’

She interrupted. He stopped in mid-flow, and a frown broke on his forehead and he looked across at her as she ducked down below the level of his desk. Gough felt her hand grope at his socks, his shoes, then there was a rustle as her grip caught the plastic bag. She heaved it up.

‘Going nowhere,’ she said. Round in circles and nowhere.

The plastic bag was slapped down on the table. It had been paid for from the float of petty cash received from the accountant down the corridor and beyond Three Zero Nine. Good quality whisky, ten years old.

She mimicked a formal response: ‘Don’t want, “I really cannot accept that, it is against our code of ethics to accept gifts in return for favours done. I am sorry, I cannot.” Don’t want that shit.’