Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

‘The situation as I see it… First, your man is inside, has been denounced as a covert agent, is in a place of maximum danger through his own actions, but I am obliged to consider his wellbeing. I have a security perimeter around the project. Second, one of your nationals has purchased an AK-47 rifle, presumably with the intention of smuggling it into the UK, and that is a very small priority for me. Thirdly, we deal with suppliers of narcotics, those in the Class B category and I have no interest in them; if they were not here the economies of places such as La Castellane would collapse. There would be a crime wave of endemic proportions as a substitute for that economy. Last, and important, this is not a Disney theme park. You do not walk around, ask questions, get in the way. I will do my best to get your man into a place of safety. If I am successful, you and your colleague and your agent will be driven at speed to the airport and put on a plane, destination immaterial, and taken off my patch. There are no questions from you, of course. But one from me.’

‘Fire it,’ the man said and the woman glowered at him.

‘The girl in there, how will she be? Can she kill? Without an audience and without cameras, will she shoot him?’

The woman answered, ‘Have to wait and see, won’t we? Which will make for an interesting evening. My promise, Major, if you fuck up then we’ll make double damn certain you field no blame, no recrimination. Just so as we understand each other.’

He thought it would rain soon, and be dark sooner, and the added complications screwed each other in his mind.

December 2018

He came out of the Consulate building, clasping the print-out given him, and began to dance a clumsy jig.

Then collected himself and regained his outward calm, unable to harness his inner elation, only disguise it, and walked across the car park, then went through a gate in the concrete walls deemed necessary to protect any United States of America mission abroad, then weaved through the concrete anti-tank teeth that were another layer of defence for the few American nationals in the recently opened building on the outskirts of his home city, Alexandria. Next was the long walk in the stifling heat to the distant area where visitors – applying for entry visas – were permitted to park.

His cup, brimful and slightly overflowing, contained good news, the best news, and was relayed to him in the dry language of the print-out. As a Christian Egyptian national he was to be awarded refugee status: he and his family were to be welcomed in that distant country. They would go quickly, without fanfare, no farewell parties and no wringing of hands with neighbours. Would pack a few of their choicest possessions, would leave the rest in the apartment – furniture, fittings, unexceptional pictures, out-dated clothing, and the keys would go to a cousin and he would dispose of the remnants of their Egyptian life: if he was lucky there would be work for this harbourmaster’s office pilot in a port along the Atlantic seaboard, or on the Great Lakes in the north, and the children would have education and the family could worship on a Sunday morning without fear of death, mutilation, any atrocity weapon detonated by the fanatics of his city. He did not go straight home, nor did he phone his family.

The pilot had other pressing business.

Near to his home on the eastern side of Alexandria was a line of poorly constructed lock-up garages and storerooms. Most were used by men who traded in fruit and vegetables in the open-air markets of the city, but he had one on which his father had long ago taken a lease. He had failed to find the courage to bring the weapon into his own home. The risk of its discovery, or of the children finding it and gossiping to others, was too great. Still in the wrapping in which it had been given him by the navigating officer; he warily took it from the garage and stowed it in his car, under his own seat, and drove away.

He went west. He felt a conspirator and his mind was clouded in guilt and nervousness, because he carried the weapon.

Went out on the international coastal road, followed the signs for Alamein and Marsah Matruh and Sidi Barrani. For his work as a pilot he needed certainty and precision. Professional disciplines. Through the middle of that day, in the glare of the sun and against a backdrop of endless, featureless desert, he drove away from all he knew, and all of the people who knew him. He could not go as far as the Libyan border, five hours’ drive, but he went for a clear hour and 40 minutes until he spied the caravan. They were a part of the great Bedouin tribe. They had camels. They had desert tents and cloaked women, and still moved across frontiers in search of grazing. Their world was pressured by Japanese-built pick-up trucks, and by the ‘sophistication’ of TV, by narcotics, by the bureaucrats who needed them corralled into the authority of the state… They moved languidly at the pace the camels wished to go under the burden of their load.

He stopped the car beside the road.

The pilot lifted out the weapon in its packaging. Hopefully, in years to come, inside the safety of the United States, he would remember what he had done and might try to explain to new friends how great had been the fear he’d carried both as a Christian and as a man owning an illegal weapon. One might have brought a lynch mob down on him, the other might have had him climb the scaffold’s steps. He covered the rifle with the cloth always in the car which he draped over the windscreen when the vehicle was parked in sunlight. To other drivers on the road, past the battlefield cemetery of the British and their allies, forty minutes out of Alamein, he would have looked like a man hurrying towards a dip in the sand where he could hide and relieve his bowels.

He should never have accepted it, should have refused the gift. It had never been in his house. Now, with his visa granted, there were no circumstances when he might have needed its protection. He would be glad to be rid of it.

Kids came running towards him, might have wanted to see if he carried sweets or would give them coins. His shoes had filled with sand which grated on his socks and if he went farther he would start blisters.

No comment, nothing said, he gave up the package, his burden, let it slide into hands that might not yet have lost an innocence, without explanation, and he waved them away. He stood and watched the swarm of youngsters sprint barefoot back to the line of camels and adults. A cluster of men examined what had been brought them, were now 200 metres from him. An arm was raised, to acknowledge the gift, and shoulders shrugged but the stride of the camels never shortened. He watched them go, the package buried in a beast’s load, and soon the heat’s haze claimed them. He had lost the thing, and thanked his God for it, and went back to his car. In a few days the caravan would have crossed into Libya, well south of the border crossing.

The pilot shook the grains from his shoes, massaged his feet and took more sand from his socks. He would drive home and in the evening when the children were in their beds he would tell his wife of their new future, show her the print-out from the Consulate… he believed that their days of living with terror were almost over, that he had no further requirement for a killing machine, a Kalashnikov.

‘What did you want?’ It was the motorcycle rider, who had exchanged the money belt for the weapon. He did not answer. ‘You came here because you wanted something, what?’

He sensed this was a man who made decisions that affected a cash flow of tens of thousands of euros, who would have – in a limited space – the power of life and the power of death over opponents. He would have snapped instructions and lesser creatures would do his bidding: there had been people at the heart of the courier conspiracy when he was Norm Clarke and busy betraying them who would have had such power. If this man decided him better dead and gone, then it would happen, and he would leave the apartment in a body bag, and it would be hard going for the mortuary people to get him down the stairs. He did not help, no answer given. He would speak when he was ready, not wheedle, give nothing… his way.