Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

‘But you are here.’

‘I am here. I cannot imagine anyone and anywhere, Tooth, that I’d prefer to be, to be with… On course, our little matter?’

They were walking towards Tooth’s car, predictably a Mercedes, and Crab pulled behind him the case that Beth had packed.

A quiet reply, lips barely moving. ‘I assume. What I have heard. All sick as dogs in the weather out there, but keeping to the schedule.’

‘Like being back in harness, Tooth, waiting for a freighter. Doesn’t matter what it’s carrying, just that it’s coming. Keeps the blood running in those old veins.’

The keys were flashed, the bag went in the boot, and Tooth walked Crab to the front passenger door, then paused and laid a hand on Crab’s arm. The lights over the parking area showed a fraction of a frown on Tooth’s forehead.

‘You said, “ Doesn’t matter what it’s carrying ”, you said that. You have no problem, what it’s carrying, no problem?’

‘Business is business, Tooth, no problem at all. Bring it on.’

‘You echo me, my friend – no problem. I’m not a preacher, I just go where the market is.’

‘I think it’s going to go very smoothly. What we call a “piece of cake”… So good to be back with you, Tooth. It’s a good person our customer is sending, well spoken of. Piece of cake, yes.’

The train pulled into the station at Avignon. Zeinab slung her bag on her shoulder. Where it all started, became real.

A few others, half asleep, followed her. She crossed the platform. Had there ever been a chance to turn back? Not now. Turning back was crossing a bridge and going to the far platform and checking the departures and finding the first train heading north, and never going home, where Krait and Scorpion knew her, and never being within reach of the men she had met in the London park, changing her name and changing the whole identity of her life, disappearing. The lights were dimmed inside the station and the magazine stand was shuttered and the fast-food outlet was closed. She went into the night. A police car was facing the main entrance and she saw the glow of cigarettes: the doors did not explode open. A couple of druggie kids were squatting against the outside wall.

She had directions, knew where to go. The main street leading to central Avignon was the Rue de la République, and she had been told that it led to the road and the hotel she was booked into.

Zeinab was shown by the concierge to a first-floor room, minimal furnishing, a double bed and no view, and opened her bag and took out the nightdress… it was where it started.

January 1987

A one-legged boy had positioned himself in the cover of a rock, some thirty metres above the road and not more than fifty metres back from it, where the exchange of gunfire would be extreme. He was already, a couple of minutes after the first land-mine had detonated and brought the convoy to a halt, on his third magazine. In spite of the surprise gained by the mujahideen when the explosion had halted the soft-top trucks after the armoured vehicles had been allowed through undisturbed, the battle in the killing zone remained undecided. Many of the Soviet troops who had spilled out from the lorries had been killed, or were wounded, but none of them who lived – damaged or not – would surrender. Tales of their fate were legion – to have the penis and testicles rammed down a throat while still alive was not a reason to hoist a white flag. The boy, with some expertise, fired an old AK-47 assault rifle, tried to go only for aimed targets and at that range had the sights at their lowest point, what he had been told was called Battle Sight Zero, a phrase it was said, taken from old British army sergeants, who had fought and been defeated here. He had some hits and had some misses – he was always with this tribal group when they went forward, across the mountains on narrow paths, into defiles, along river-beds, and hunted for convoys… and had not long to do the job.

He was, he thought, twelve years old. He could not ask his mother because she had been killed, decapitated in a rocket attack, and could not ask his father because he had been injured, fatally, when a Hind helicopter had turned its awesome firepower on a small caravan of mules. Could not ask his brother who had been shot in the leg and could not be carried and had been finished by his own people. But the brother’s weapon had been snatched, taken away, and given to this child, who had one natural leg and one of crudely carved wood.

The boy’s left leg stopped just below the knee. The lower leg had been shattered by a personnel mine scattered randomly in a dried watercourse. No chance of proper medical attention, of hospital care, of anaesthetic, and the surgery had been as brutal and as immediate and as successful as that performed on the injured more than a century before – told among the mujahideen when camping at night – when the fight was against British occupiers. A wad of leather to bite on. Men showing harsh kindness in holding him down as an older leader hacked with a blunt knife. Fire to seal the wound. A length of dried birch wood had been carved and whittled into the necessary length for a limb, with a place padded by leather and cloth for the stump to nestle in, and straps attached that could be knotted round the fragile child’s waist to hold it in place. There were days of heavy marches when the tears ran on the boy’s face as he fought to keep up with the speed of advance, but he would not cry out, nor would any man diminish him by helping: there would be blood seeping from the wound after excessive friction, and it would be washed in a stream, and they would go on. The child had his elder brother’s rifle. The child slept with it, ate with it beside him, marched with it, and used all his skills and hatred to kill with it.

He had already scratched notches on the stock. Had added more to those cut out by his brother, and further scrapes in the wood would be made that evening after they had retreated from the ambush site, at least three more. They should hurry, do the killing business fast because by now the armoured vehicles, with their radios, surviving the attack, would have called up to the Jalalabad airbase, and the helicopters would soon be in the air, coming as fast as eagles.

Others in the mujahideen , fit and strong and lithe, would move their firing positions, never permit the loathed Soviets from fixing their location – which gully they were in, behind which rock, in which crater where a tree’s roots had been taken out by the winter gales. The boy did not move. There was a sharp whistle behind him. The older fighters thought of the boy as a talisman of good fortune, were loath to lose him, watched for him and cared for him. It might have been that the noise of gunfire obscured the shrill sound of the whistle, or it might have been that he cared not to hear the summons to fall back. He did not move. He did not know that a corporal of the mechanised infantry battalion had hunkered down in a ditch that carried rainwater off the road and had seen a point of fire, and a small head that peeped around a rock to search for targets. The whistle was louder, fiercer… A new magazine was slapped into the underbelly of the old rifle.

It was realised the child was a sure shot. That he detested the Soviet invaders who had taken his family to paradise, would kill at any opportunity, and dreamed of coming close to the wounded and the helpless and having the knife in his hand. He fired, and fired again, and did not hear the whistle, nor the bellow of anger, nor his name called. But might have heard, different to the close-combat thunder, a softer and more gentle sound, but did not yet recognise it as helicopter engines. Like that of a bee homing in on the heart of a flower, there to make the finest honey. The child was not aware of the approach of the gunships, always flown in a pair; not aware of rockets slung on pods and a gunner controlling a machine-gun and a four-barrelled Gatling type weapon: devastating fire-power. The child was caught up in the elation of combat; small hands gripped the rifle, and the stock rested against a small shoulder, and his eyes searched for a target. He stood.