Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

Always been a street fighter, and knew when to kick and punch to get through a close crowd, and ignored the protests, and was panting, quite breathless, when his stomach barged against the front of the desk where a girl sat, flustered.

A mirror reflected his appearance. He saw himself, saw what she saw. His question must have been garbled, and she looked at him as if she were dealing with an idiot. Something about ‘engine trouble’, and something about ‘malfunction’ and she was looking over his shoulder and waiting for the next passenger’s query; she had told him fuck all. Did she not know who he was? Not know who Crab used to be? Not know that men’s chins used to go slack if they’d annoyed him? He was pushed aside. No apologies and no requests for him to move. Shoved out of the way, like he was old garbage: wet old garbage. All a disaster. The board flickered, the announcement was made.

The flight had a new schedule, would take off in three hours… trouble was that nobody knew, any longer, who he used to be.

‘You should know what happens… When we find a police spy, it is what happens. My brother will do it…’ Karym hissed at the man who sat on the floor, back against the bedroom wall, and who never met his eye. He felt a growing frustration. Behind him, Zeinab paced, backwards and forwards across the window where the curtains were still not drawn, and there would have been sufficient light from the corridor and the TV for Zeinab to have made a silhouette. He could not tell her, imagined that if he criticised her she would have snarled at him. Wanted so much to help her, and did not know how and it was dark outside and the rain came hard.

‘…If there is a police spy, and he is identified and taken, then he is dead. His mother can scream and his aunts and his sisters, but they waste their words. His father may send an imam to plead for his life, but my brother will be deaf. And not just Hamid, but any leader in the project will be the same. A police spy is a dead man… That will be you.’

His brother had gone. Not hostile but seeming confused. Karym would have liked his brother to go rough on the police spy, beat him and kick him, spill blood, make him cry out. The spy had not replied to any of his brother’s statements, which was an astonishing display of contempt and should have been rewarded: real pain, and real injury should have been done to him… It annoyed him that the girl – the most extraordinary person he had met in his life, though he had barely spoken to her, and the best looking and far ahead of any teenage kid he knew in La Castellane – paced across the room, but he had not the courage to risk her anger: she should not show herself. Would Samson be there by now? Might be, likely to be. He threatened, in the hope of seeing weakness in the spy. He had no reason to hate or despise him, but it would satisfy.

‘We take a car. My brother will send people to find one, then to hotwire it, then to drive it down to the back wall of the school, where the rubbish is stored. The owner may complain, cry that he needs his car for work. He will not be heard. Then fuel. We will have gasoline ready. When my brother is ready, he will send for you. Send boys to bring out the police spy.’

He knew the procedure of the ‘barbecue’, knew it because several times he had watched it, and the smell of it had stayed with him, in his mind and on his body and over his clothes, for days. He took especial care with his language, spoke slowly and he believed he was clear, so that his threat was understood. She stayed on the move and he wondered if Samson had arrived and had adjusted his sight, followed her each time she crossed the window space, was on Battle Sight Zero. He tried a last time to win a reaction.

‘Bound and needing the boys to drag you, and a gag in your mouth, but no cloth across your eyes, and you will see where they take you, then you will smell the fuel. You will be put inside the car, across the back seat, which is already soaked. You will see the flame which is brought to the car. A big crowd watches. The flame is thrown in. It is what my brother arranges for a police spy… Do you say nothing? You will burn and nobody will care… What do you want of us?’

His voice beat back from the walls and ceiling, he understood the depths of his failure. She walked behind him and carried the weapon, and he heard the game show on the TV and the patter of the rain and the beat of her feet.

He was settling in for a long night. Had few other options. Had to wait and take what he thought the best chance for survival. He studied the bedroom, but it was hard to concentrate because of her restless movement, and the boy nibbled at his resolve, with talk of the ‘barbecue’. In the centre of the ceiling, was a single light flex holding a low-wattage bulb and cheap shade, brittle plastic already cracked, with no pattern to relieve its boredom. Parts of it were more stained than others, and they’d have been immediately above where the boy might have sat when he smoked, fags or dope. It needed paint, was shabby and tired.

‘Even with the gag you will scream after the fuel is lit. Everyone hears the scream but no one comes to help. If the police have a patrol car going by and hear the scream they will not come into the project. You burn and many will come to watch but no one will weep for you. My brother will organise it.’

On the shelves were volumes on the Kalashnikov rifle… he knew about people who were fanatic collectors of libraries detailing the working parts of a firearm, and perhaps they played weekend games with decommissioned weapons, or went on paint-ball manoeuvres, or collected the memorabilia that American companies marketed on the internet: underpants with an AK image printed across the crotch, or mugs and pins, ashtrays and posters that might show North Vietnamese soldiers holding them in a jungle, or Iraqi forces in a desert, or Soviet military exercising in the Arctic, or ISIS people who were bodyguards for an executioner in Raqqa. He did not read such stuff, thought it puerile. He had no requirement to fantasise on a war and rubber-neck from the sidelines… He was a paid-up member, had the season ticket for the proper business – as had Norm and Phil. And he saw places where there had been adhesive fastenings on the walls but what they held up had been ripped off, out of date or because of a mood swing, and left behind were the scabs where the plaster had come away, and the blue lights from the street caught those places and highlighted them.

‘It is what you want, yes? I tell you, you will get what you want.’

The boy was close enough to him. Could have kicked him, maybe felled him… but had no reason to. Only a little voice droning on, and unlikely to affect the outcome. Could have felt sorry for the boy. Was not supposed to have sympathies for either targets or those who strayed into the lines of the cross-hairs – also, was not supposed to take targets to bed, and feel affection for them, nor try to find a way out which left them free, clean, with a future worth living. Much that SC&O10 rule books would have said was outside the limits.

‘You will get the fire because you are a spy and because my brother will…’

The voice faded. Perhaps, at last, enthusiasm for describing the fate of a police agent had palled, and perhaps he had turned towards Zed for endorsement and she had mouthed – her face in shadow – something like ‘shut the fuck up’. The boy buttoned it, and turned away. He thought both of them, the boy and Zed, were close now to the mix of exhaustion and fear, knowing the plot was lost, and looking to the irrational. The psychologists who swarmed like a rash over the Undercovers always predicted that a hostage situation deteriorated rapidly, and then was most dangerous to a trussed prisoner. Likely to be close now, the crisis moment, but he stayed quiet.