Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

She gave it to Andy, was asked if she wanted it, shook her head. She led and he followed.

The early sunshine lit her face. She blinked, then focused. The knives and firearms in the shop window opposite gleamed at her. She was pushed by the flow of people going to, coming from, the open market, and thought how her mother would have been envious of the chance to buy fruit and vegetables of that quality, and how much better it was than Dewsbury’s market, and ground her nails into the palms of her hand to block the thought. Her parents, spiritually, were gone from her life. She would go home again for a weekend – if the university kept her – or would have to move back if they did not, but she would no longer be the servant of their beliefs, ideals, all changed when she had been straddled on the pillion and gone to the home of the boy in love with the Kalashnikov assault rifle and when she had been over Andy, almost an idiot but caring for her, and helping him.

Opposite the hotel, across the width of the small square, were a couple – middle-aged and probably British – and the man had a map unfolded and pored over it, and they talked busily and the woman had an opened guidebook. He was half a pace behind her.

She said they had an hour. He seemed remote to her. Merely nodded acceptance. And herself? Uncertain, excited, wanting to share but unable. As if she wrestled with herself… arms flailing and hacking with her knees and biting and scratching, and the signs of it suppressed. But above all, superior to the uncertainty, was the excitement. Not about religion as taught in the mosques at home, not about the politics of victimhood as dripped from the TV screens after Westminster or Manchester or the bridge over the river in London. About the adrenaline rush of excitement – not about the denunciations of police chiefs and ministers, or even the stories of the deaths of her cousins. More about the worship of the rifle that the young man with the crippled arm had shown her, and his love for it, and his yearning to hold and fire it… to have that power. Hold that fucking power… an obscenity, and her mother would have near fainted and her father might have taken his belt to her… that power. They strolled, like neither of them had a care. Not the cause but the rifle entrapped her: she went willingly because the weapon had won her… Zeinab knew little, beyond the basics, of counter-surveillance techniques. She did not look behind her… and Andy’s free hand held hers. They walked slowly and climbed the gentle hill and she looked in shop windows.

Abruptly, Andy asked her. ‘Where is it?’

‘Why do you need…?’

‘I have to plan the route out… I’m not an idiot, Zed. What you do, I don’t care. If it’s illegal, not my problem. To me, you are fantastic, brilliant, incredible. I am privileged to know you. What do you come to Marseille for, what does anyone come to Marseille for? For weed, for nothing else. I have no difficulty with it. Obvious. We get it on board, and we go. Going fast, quitting the place, burning the rubber. It is in your hand and we are gone… okay? That’s good? Where do you meet the supplier? I tell you, Zed, I’m not an idiot, and you should trust me.’

She saw only sincerity. She looked into his face and watched the honesty in his eyes and had thought that afterwards, far away, there would be a place, a refuge, remote, and they might be together, safe and hidden – another day.

‘I have to be at the Place de la Major, by the cathedral, beside Quai de la Tourette. I take delivery there.’

‘And I’m not asking what you want… but I’m there, will watch over you. Trust me.’

She would, believed him. In a bookshop they saw a cat comfortably perched on second-hand volumes and the sunshine fell on its face which was calm, content, and without a trace of fear. They climbed and the street widened. And did not look back.

Karym did the tail…

He was captivated by her, amazed that she had come in the night to La Castellane, climbed the stairs of the block, visited him, seen his bedroom, showed interest in his collection of Kalashnikov books. Had held his stomach as he had ridden away to the north with her as his pillion, could still feel her shape against his back, and her softness, and remember the strength of her arms, the sharpness of her nails. Without the experience of the money satchel, and the Samson moment, he would not have dared anything as rash as taking her – a stranger, an outsider – to his home. He was a changed man…

… took the far side of La Canebière and flitted between doorways, lingered when they did. It was what his brother had told him to do. Hamid had returned in the night to the project, had gone to his own apartment where his own girl was. Had called for Karym, kid brother, to come at dawn. Had boasted of his new relationship with the great man, with Tooth. Had told him – like it was a hero’s story, not an imbecile’s – of going into the water, catching a packet before it sank, had been 35 minutes, at least, in the water, had been congratulated. Then had been taken to a hotel on the south side, and a room provided while he showered, cleaning the cold and the seawater off him, and his clothes returned washed and dried and ironed. The driver, Tooth’s, had then driven him back to the quayside and he had ridden away on his bike, and had known his future was secured.

Two hours in his own bed for Karym, and no sleep, just tossing with the memory of her feel against his back and her touch of his stomach, and recalling what he had said of the rifle, and her understanding that he was an expert. What to tell her? Could be how the army of North Vietnam had out-gunned the Americans, their Marines who had the M16, could tell her that, and believed she would be fascinated, interested… if they had the time together.

He followed. Any teenager from La Castellane knew how to look for a tail following, and protecting the girl and her friend. He had not seen one, but it was what his brother had ordered him to do, watch for it. He saw shoppers, saw troops in a patrol of four, saw police in a squad car, saw a tourist couple who seemed continuously to argue over their map, saw no tail.

She had agreed to what he suggested.

His conclusion: her courage was failing her… easy enough to be with other fanatics and close to what was familiar and to play the good calm kid, and with a basket load of necessary resolve. Their sex would by now be out of the window, back in history… It was becoming real, and far from what she knew, and cash was invested in her. Her face had gone sombre. Clear in his mind… her brief’s accusation of entrapment, and him under oath in the box. Denial. Who to believe? Her flickering eyes and wavering gaze and bowed head in the dock, and his straight ahead look into the jury’s eyes. Her blood-lust against his courage. A no-brainer for the judge when he summed up the case… He would lie better than she did. A piece of cake – but not proud of it, seldom harboured pride… And almost, put vulgar, wet herself, he reckoned, when she’d been far beyond any horizon on La Canebière, lost in thought and had failed to shift out of the path of another four squaddie patrol. Pretty near been spiked by the rifle barrel. Her eyes would have focused on the soldier, the weapon, the webbing and grenades and the flak-jacket: he had simply assumed she’d step aside. She had deep lines on her forehead: he read them as acute anxiety. Held tight to her hand.

And he made her laugh. Gave her arm a jerk. He pointed across the tram tracks to a narrow central park that divided the traffic lanes. The sun was pretty on the trees, tables and chairs were outside cafés, and there was a bandstand for the summer season, and it looked good… looked better with the giant shapes of a giraffe and whatever a new-born one was called. They were double life-size at least, had a myriad of meaningless lines painted on the smooth plastic of the bodywork, and it seemed like they had just wandered in off one of the side streets, or out of a bank, or been in a bar, in a café: that’s what he said to her. For a moment she had thought him serious, then had burst out laughing. He supposed most of the kids, in the countdown to a suicide attack and wearing the vest, or any of them who drove the kid to the drop-off point and watched him walk away, first paces to Paradise, or who were just the lowest form of foot soldier, would have felt the stress before playing their part. She held tight to him, might have stumbled if he had not been there, then regained composure. He saw them, back on the pavement, bickering, and him with the map and her with the guidebook. Seemed to come steadily closer. It was a good move and he respected it.