Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

Gough bridled. He felt the stress. Neither he nor Pegs was trained up to the standards required for full surveillance tasking. Didn’t have to do it, and there were sufficient specialists from Five or the Counter-Terrorist Command to do the usual play-acting – changing clothes, riding fast motorcycles, wandering around with a water board gilet on, just standing in a street and looking around and having a dog lead hanging in the fist. Not their job. A disaster if they showed out and the girl saw them, identified them as a threat. They hung back… Then the couple swung. Quick movement, as if she had seen enough of a bridge, useless for hundreds of years, and she gave her boy’s hand a sharp tug. They moved quickly and there was nowhere for Gough and Pegs to go, no hole to crawl into. In front of them was a rubbish bin. In Andy Knight’s hand was a slip of paper. No eye contact from him, but the girl saw them, allowed a short smile to cross her face. Yes, they made a ‘pleasing couple’. And what did he and Pegs look like…? Not worth considering. They passed by the rubbish bin. The pieces of paper fluttered from his hand, then was dropped. Pegs talked, would have the first word and the last, quietly in Gough’s ear.

‘Then you have to line up the consequences… if he didn’t shag her last night then he will when they get into bed this evening. She’ll get a rough ride and enjoy it. Worth a punt down at the bookies’ shop, Gough… All right, all right, what could you have done? Not much. Could hardly kick him off the agenda.’

Neither Gough nor Pegs responded to the girl’s smile. Their man did not look at them. Gough waited until they had passed, then put his hand deep into the bin, felt the paper, clamped on it, brought it up and into the light. The wind caught it, snatched it and it was carried up the path. She went after it, stamped on it, gave it back to him. Her glance described him as a burden to her, then she laughed. He read it: Do not know where we stay in Marseille this evening. Do not know her schedule. Will make contact when possible . He told her. She snorted. His was a lifetime of work handling agents, assets, men and women who worked on the perimeter of safety, most often beyond the Golden Hour in which it was hoped rescue or help would reach them if they were corralled in danger. He thought such a man, at the end of his tether, straining it taut, would easily have the impulse to jack it in – if he were not humoured. There was no other game in town. Gough could have bullied. He had seen the girl and noticed the language of their bodies: young peoples’, and he was old, tired, and his confidence in ultimate victory was dented, badly.

‘Not possible – a pleasing couple, what I said. I’ve more faith in him than… Ever answered, Pegs, the question? What we ask of them, is that too much?’

‘Pretty puerile. They do a job, they’re volunteers, get well paid, can fiddle their expenses. No need to bleed for them… It’s bloody closed.’

What was ‘bloody closed? The cathedral was closed for lunch. And the café was closed. And the Papal Palace had been abandoned six and a half centuries before – decamped back to Rome and Vatican City – and entry to it was eleven euro each… forget it. How would it end? The weapon would be carried home in a VW Polo, would be doctored during the ferry crossing, bugged. It would travel uninterrupted through Customs, then tailed in a huge surveillance operation. It would be delivered to the individuals in this sprouting conspiracy who mattered… the guns would go in, armed police, and the network would be for the cage. Arrest warrants in Yorkshire, and later a trial, and the Undercover behind a screen for his evidence. A triumphant drink after sentences were handed down, but unlikely that the star man would show. They rarely appeared for the post-game binge, were never seen again. That was how it would be if he could hold tight to his man… could no longer see him. Could no longer get an ‘eyeball’ on a boy and a girl who walked hand in hand. He lit a cigarette, gasped on it.

Pegs said, ‘Sod it, let’s go and find some lunch.’

Gough said, ‘The Kalashnikov, it’s a symbol of their power. They will walk tall if they have weapons with that hitting power. We are groping in the dark. It’s why it’s important, on a whole new and lofty level. It matters.’

February 2008

She was widowed. She wore black and a veil covered most of her face, but her eyes were visible: like those of a she-cat caught against a vertical cliff, towering up and over her as predators closed in. They blazed defiance. Her hands were uncovered; one held the emptied magazine of her AK assault rifle, and the other rummaged in the drape of her clothing for the opening that would allow her to reach the two loaded magazines held in webbing against her body. She could not defend herself, could only rely on her eyes to spit anger at the advancing enemy.

At that altitude in the mountains west of Jalalabad, the rain-bearing clouds were low over the crags and valleys and it was an optimum time for that small force of mujahideen to confront the patrol of a section of American troops – Marines. Excellent weather conditions, the rain was heavy and on the verge of drifting to sleet, and in the night it would fall as snow. The widow was not tactically trained, had never attended a course run by military instructors, but she had been a member of that tribal group since her father and brother had been killed soon after the Americans had arrived, almost seven years before. A weapon had been given to her. It had belonged to a cousin, also killed, and she had held it – battered, scraped with two rows of notches cut on the wood of the stock, somehow almost invisible – at her wedding in the mountains, aged seventeen, to the son of their leader and principal tactician. She had been with him, when the American helicopters had come around a curve in a valley, the wind blowing away the sound of their engines, the surprise total, and an Apache had strafed the group. She had fired at the beast, hovering, almost contemptuously, long enough to exhaust the magazine and doubted she had achieved even one strike against its armour plate, and when it had gone, banking away, she had realised her husband was dead. Peaceful in death, his face calm, but his stomach and chest had taken machine-gun rounds. They had not taken precautions against pregnancy, but no child had been born: now no one else looked for her hand in the group. She was a fighter and lived with them, ate with them, was the same as each of them except that, when darkness came, she would move a little away from the men, wrap herself in her blanket, and sleep alone and isolated until the morning. And that day, excellent weather for the ambush because the cloud was low enough on the rock-face to prevent the helicopters from flying, the Marines would not have the protection from above on which they seemed, to her, so dependent. At the moment the first shots were fired, and some Americans already down, and the fierce, anguished shouts of those unhurt or only lightly wounded bouncing from the granite walls, they had scattered.

The widow had believed, as the rain whipped into her face and her veil hung sodden across her mouth, that she had identified a particular rock, 25 or 30 metres from her, behind which an enemy had taken refuge. She had blasted an entire magazine at one side of the rock to shift him, then had reloaded with the second magazine already taped to the first, and had fired another thirty shots, but as the weapon clicked feebly, telling her the ammunition was finished, magazine empty, she had realised she had lost him. She was attempting to reload. Perhaps with more instruction she would have been more cautious in how much she had fired with the selector on automatic. She did not know where he was, and it was difficult to get her hand under the fold of the material enveloping her because it hung heavy from the soaking by the rain.