Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

‘He was shitting himself… You know, Tooth, when I was a kid there was a guy in gaol who looked, each morning, as if he’d just wet his pants – fear. We still hanged people then, and there was this guy who had bad sweats because a man he’d shot was in hospital and had relapsed, and if he died short of a year after he was hit then it would be murder. Murder then, in this category, was an execution job, rope and a scaffold. He was counting off the days willing the man to live through the next week. He’d taken a turn for the worse… What I saw of that Arab of yours, he was shitting and sweating. What’ll it be like out there?’

‘Don’t think about it…’ A low laugh. ‘Nowhere you’d want to be. I put the bar high for him. Either he is a punk or he is someone I can use. You test a man before you trust him.’

‘We are going to do well out of this, and even better once the route north is tested, proven. You ever fired one, Tooth?’

‘No, wouldn’t want to. It’s what little bastards do. Losers and failures, and the Baumettes gaol is full of them, and all of them thought shooting with an AK made them a big man and gave them status. Me, I say that firearms are for the ignorant.’

October 2013

Dazzer looked around him. He had survived… with little to spare.

Had to hand it to the chopper people. The helicopters had arrived when ammunition was low, when the opposition was beginning to creep forward, little gooks ducking and weaving between the stones of a dried-out watercourse, and inside fifteen minutes they would have been gearing themselves up for the final charge.

He saw bodies, saw a couple of the lorries alight and, rare good fortune, they were loaded with food and general supplies and not the ammunition and ordnance they often carried, and saw an old man who half sat and half crouched and had lost any ability to fight on, and saw the rifle.

Dazzer, operating out of Bagram and doing runs towards the Pass, down beyond Jalalabad, was no longer military. Had been once. Now in his 40s and with a stomach to prove it, along with a shaven head, a few steroid squits livening his complexion, and tattoos over much of his skin, had served with an infantry battalion, then made the sensible choice. The rifle was near the old man but out of his reach. Dazzer was one of the scores who had chucked the Queen’s Shilling and gone for the better pay offered by the host of private military contractors who picked up the military load during governments’ downsizing of the Afghan quicksand. He had a good eye for such things and reckoned it an old weapon, a collector’s piece. He had not shot the old man himself. The two helicopters, Yanks, had done the damage and lifted the possibility of this being Dazzer’s final day as part of the ‘mortal coil’ business. Could have been a bad day for him except that he was a survivor, with the scars and scrapes to prove it, and a couple of times during his Afghan pay days, the medical teams had wondered if it was appropriate with this guy, given the bawdy nature of the ink work on the cheeks of his backside, to call for a priest. They hadn’t, no padre had administered last rites. One of the boys, a scouser, had been hit but a medivac bird had taken him out, not that the regular military ever fell over themselves to get PMCs clear of harm’s way and into a surgery tent, but the civilians put food on their tables and bedding on their cots, and often enough it was bullets going into their magazines. They waited now for an armoured escort that would push a burned-out lorry, written off, over the edge of the tarmacadam road and into a gully. He reckoned the weapon the old man had dropped would earn him something.

He’d seen him from the start of the attack. Dazzer reckoned the old man had rheumatism, or arthritis, had mobility problems and had gone as far forward as the factor of surprise would permit. From the first exchange of gunfire, Father William had been at the front… good name for the guy, Father William, as good as any. Dazzer had kids in a couple of cities in the UK, might have had more he didn’t know of, and there were two more that his wife cared for. There had been times at home when he had read his kids – the legit ones and the illegits – bedtime stories, and he reckoned he did a star turn when it was You are old, Father William, the young man said, And your hair has become very white: And yet you incessantly stand on your head – Do you think at your age it is right? And he would do the full act beside the bed and read the next two verses upside down, head on the floor, and the kids would howl with laughter… Not that he saw them anymore because they were older and didn’t need stories, and their mums didn’t want him back in their lives. It was a Father William who lay, very small and seeming to be no threat, on the roadside. He’d fired the rifle. Dazzer had seen him, and it had near knocked his shoulder away. He knew most versions of the AK-47, but did not think, a cursory glance, that he had handled this one before, a vintage piece.

Perhaps Father William had bad legs and perhaps he’d had poor eyesight, and there was a broken pair of spectacles, heavy black frames twisted and snapped, in the dust of the hard shoulder. He had not been a first: a ‘first’ for Dazzer would have been when a mujahideen , old or young, took off and did a runner. This old boy, a good old boy, had not broken the mould. Dazzer dragged on his cigarette and would have murdered for a beer. The convoy leader was trying to hurry the bulldozer, because this was an idiot place to be hanging about. He walked over to the body. Gave Father William a quick glance, and picked up the weapon.

Worth a bit, or more than a bit… It wasn’t for Dazzer to interfere with the body, but permitted to handle the weapon, make it safe. He thought him ‘a good old boy’, Father William, because he had approached without being able to duck and weave, too stiff in the joints, and the Kalashnikov stock had been at his shoulder, and he’d only fired aimed shots, but his eyesight must have been heavily impaired if the thickness of the lenses was a judge. Had come on ahead, the mob of skilled fighting men behind him. Dazzer reckoned that the guy had felt it necessary to prove himself, show that he was not a burden. Father William had fired three times at Dazzer and the gun had been wavering and it would have been pure chance if one had hit. He was rakishly thin and his clothes hung on him, like he was a scarecrow, and his beard was loose and tangled, and strands of hair protruded from under his cap. There had been two spare magazines in a pocket: nothing else marked him as an enemy, willing and able if his eyesight had held up or he had been lucky enough to blast Dazzer to oblivion… who would have cared if he had? Answers on a postcard… He’d tell them about the old boy when they reached their fortified camp, had had a couple of tins each… there must be a story about the age of the weapon that Father William had carried.

It looked to be worth money. He’d heard about dictators and the like, those who had milked their own treasuries, lived in grand sprawling palaces, or did well on the narcotics trails, and they’d bought AK-47s that were gold-painted, real gold, like a bloody fashion accessory. But he reckoned there were others who’d be only too happy – if they were a war groupie or wanted a souvenir of their combat days – to have something that looked to have done business at the coalface. Dazzer had been shot at often enough with Kalashnikovs, and had twice suffered wounds that the field medics had patched, and he knew that age meant no loss of effectiveness. The bloody thing would last for ever. It looked to be 50 years old, but Herbie, who he’d meet up with once the road was cleared and they moved on with a reinforced escort, would be at the stay-over camp, and he’d know if it were even older. Dazzer didn’t do souvenirs. Some of the drivers and the guys riding shotgun used to collect anything they could pull or chop off a dead fighter, but not him. Didn’t do mementoes but did do the sale of anything that looked to have value stamped on it. And, added value was the blood on the stock that leaked into the notches and the bit where a sliver of wood had long been detached, made a tiny puddle there: blood would stain well and would be a talking point for a prospective purchaser.