Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

Gough said, ‘We are all professionals, all trying to do a bloody difficult job. The old saying, “Better we hang together than hang separately.” We did a bit of work, know about you, know why you were transferred down here, know of endemic corruption in the Brigade anti-criminalité , know all that. Know how difficult it is, and that it’ll all get worse before it gets worse. I understand your position.’

Pegs said, ‘It’s called Rag and Bone because the target comes from a town that used to be the capital market-place in UK for the rag trade. Great heaps of stained or filthy or discarded rags, a couple of centuries ago – back in history. Where we are today, living in the past, and hemmed in with bloody regulations. Guarding our precious territory… Come on, Goughie, getting nowhere and bloody fast.’

Gough said, ‘Sorry and all that for wasting your time, Major. Hope your meeting goes well.’

Pegs said, ‘We don’t intend, not on our watch, if we can possibly help it, to let the bastards win. Have a nice evening, Major, and enjoy the drink.’

The telephone rang and was picked up. Pegs was standing, taking her coat off the back of the chair. The Major listened, impassive. Gough stood, saw the dusk coming fast through the window, and saw also that uniformed men – overalls, vests, firearms, helmets – were running from the building to their vehicles. The phone was put down.

The Major was behind them, had dragged on his harness and holster, then his coat, then his vest, and was pushing Gough to the door and using a free hand to pull Pegs along with him.

Out in the corridor, and more men and women stampeded ahead and behind them. The Major said, ‘Whatever is “fuck this for a game of dominoes”, I would like to show you how matters play in our city, and maybe where you wish to put your Undercover, and why I am a busy man.’

A smile had broken on his face, and they moved well and Pegs hitched up her skirt higher so that she went faster. Didn’t bother with the lift, careered down the stairs. Gough panted but kept up. In the yard, no ceremony, they were pitched into a wagon. No explanation. The sirens started.

Why? Because a gang in Saint-Barthélemey had screwed up. A car had speared from a side turning and come into the traffic flow, scattering a group of scooter riders.

How? The gang had screwed up by losing the cash required for payment of a consignment already delivered. How was it ‘lost’? The sum of 120,000 euros, which would meet the necessary payment to a Morocco-based group, had been in the hands of the gang treasurer and he had vanished, was a memory, a fleeting shadow, and might now be in the north of France or anywhere in Germany or might be in the Netherlands where there was a sizable and well-established Somali community. When? Had all happened in the last 72 hours, and the very minimum that the Somalis remaining in Saint-Barthélemey needed – by that evening or dawn the following morning at the very latest – was a clear 100,000. What? The answer, as determined by the Somalis, was to get their hands on that sort of money in that sort of time-frame: not easy, required good planning and good intelligence. Which? It was important they understood, without doubt, which gang of Moroccan suppliers had delivered and was now waiting for payment. They would not be easily fobbed off with a promise of meeting the debt ‘as soon as was possible’. The Somalis would be dead. Death would not be easy. Dying would be hard and painful… A way out was finding cash, bank notes – credit was not issued to those Somalis – and taken to a rendezvous up beyond Saint-Antoine at a viewpoint in the hills that overlooked the city and the harbour. Had to be there… or face war. The Somalis did not have the fire-power to survive such a feud.

The car had skidded to the far side of the road and a back door had opened and one guy out fast, armed with a pistol, and sprinted towards a scooter, a Peugeot that seemed on its last legs, ready for a breakers’ yard.

Who else had that amount of money that might be available? Which other group? Not ring-fenced in security, vulnerable? Gossip, rumour, masquerading as intelligence, identified a guy in the neighbouring project of La Castellane who ran a good stairwell, made a decent profit, and moved his takings either himself by powerful motorcycle, or using his crippled brother to take a satchel to a Credit Union. To fight another gang was high risk, but the alternatives for the Somalis were probably harsher. Those escorting the Peugeot, seeing the pistol, fled down the street.

The scooter was on its side and, under it, its full weight pinioning him, was the courier, the strap of a satchel over his shoulder and the bag, bulging with cash, beneath him.

The Somali with the pistol had reached the boy trapped under his Peugeot scooter, the boy did not have the strength in his free arm to shift the machine’s weight, to extricate himself and try to make his escape, with the satchel. Down the road the Somali’s car waited, the door still open. It was not a part of the northern sector of Marseille, the 14th arrondissement , where another motorist would intervene; certainly no pedestrians on the pavement would be so lunatic as to involve themselves.

The boy pinioned to the road was Karym.

It was one of those moments when any individual – young or old, brave or not, heroic or cowardly – was faced with two options and must make a choice. The pistol was waved at him. The satchel was demanded. The Somali stood above him. It was a Somali confronting a Tunisian, no one else’s business. Now the pistol was aimed at him. The boy was thin, with a concave chest, brittle legs and skeletal arms, and a gaunt, unhealthy narrow face, no spare flesh and his belt loose at the waist, and no evidence of strength. The options beckoned at him. The Somali might have been five years older than Karym, with a fuller fatter face. Traffic was going round them, hooters blasting, and the sound of the horn of the car parked down the road outside the internet café. No one, no school teacher who had ever had charge of him, had ever accused Karym of stupidity; everyone acknowledged a keen mind that could focus attention on what interested him, like a pistol did. The Somali was shouting and his free hand reached towards Karym and took hold of the strap. Looking into each other’s eyes, snarling, full of loathing and defiance. Karym managed to get traction with his feet, but could not lift the bulk of the Peugeot scooter. But he could propel it up and over with the use of his feet.

He pushed and heaved, and could see every stitch in the collar of the Somali’s shirt, and the design of his track-suit bottoms and the embossed badge of Real Madrid on his fleece, and the scratches on the barrel of the pistol, and the nails of the fingers clutching it, and the forefinger wrapped on the trigger, inside the guard. He could see all that, and thrust with his legs… and could see the face of his brother, and the pride spreading and the praise, and the respect that would come to him in his quarter of La Castellane, and would walk tall… he saw all that. The bike rose, then slewed over and wavered, and the Somali dived to get a better grip on the strap, and the Peugeot fell again, and two-stroke fuel was sloshing on the tarmac. The weight of the scooter, well in excess of a hundred kilos, came down on the Somali’s ankle, and the snap was as clear as a lightweight gunshot, and the break would have been complete. The protruding bone lifted the track-suit leg, there was blood, and the boy howled.

The car that was to have taken away the Somali, happily clutching the stolen satchel, pulled out and disappeared down the hill. The kids on the scooters who had been given the job of escorting Karym, were close enough to see the pistol, and to hear the scream, and stayed back. The Tunisian and the Somali were entwined. Might have been a couple of kids enjoying an illicit coupling. Arms and legs were spread and locked, and the scooter’s bulk crushed them, and the pain must have been too acute for the Somali boy to shout for long. Neither moved. The pistol was steady, its fore-sight lodged in a slim fold of skin on Karym’s throat. The street had cleared.