Gerald Seymour - Battle Sight Zero

He thought Rag and Bone was near the end.

He watched the weapon.

Occasionally, if light flickered on it he saw the notches cut. He had tried to count them but the stock was never still for long enough. She had it wedged against her hip and the end of it was firm between her elbow and the curve of her pelvis. Once he had counted seventeen, and for a long time that was the best he’d managed, but more recently he had totted up, off two rows, nineteen. He supposed it a sort of ritual… Shoot. Kill. Open a penknife, or detach a bayonet. Scratch. Flick away loose wood. Feel good. Look to kill again, or be killed. Many owners. A colourful history, caused a bucket of tears.

It came very suddenly. He had not predicted that moment, that reaction. His backside hurt from sitting on the linoleum-covered floor. His face itched from stubble forming but he did not want to scratch, move. He was sitting still, quiet… She exploded. Not at him, at the boy. Passing each other, him going to sneak a look through the window, from the side and masked by the curtains, and her passing the window and fully exposed and they collided. Ridiculous. Hostage-takers in confusion and walking into each other. Almost laughable. The boy swung his foot and kicked her shin. Her reaction was to club him, a short swing, with the body of the weapon, and the magazine would have clipped his chin. And him going to kick her again, and her looking for space to strike a heavier and more significant blow and both missing and both tumbling. A weapon was underneath them, and she was swearing at him and he at her: English words and French words. They wrestled. She was stronger, but he could fight dirtier. She had him pinioned. Beneath her, he lifted his knee into the pit of her stomach. Her hands were on his throat, her knees on his arms. The boy used his kneecap again and she gasped and freed his throat and her weight shifted off his arms and he was scratching at her face, trying to find her eyes.

He watched. He thought it nearly a good time to make his pitch, not yet but nearly the right moment. They broke apart. Were sheepish. Enough light came in for him to see two faces, and their eyes had dropped and their anger was doused, and she pushed back her hair and coughed, and he was snivelling as if the struggle had loosened the muck down in his lungs. The boy was first on his feet and her legs were entangled in the rifle’s barrel, then he bent and helped her up and she used her free hand to push herself from the side of the unmade bed. Light, for a moment, flooded the room. She shrugged away from him, rejected the help. Andy could measure his feelings for her: not lust. Not loving. A degree of pity, something of sympathy. She would not achieve her target as a jihadi courier; she was neutered, no longer represented a danger. His feeling for her, he supposed, was affection – would not be less, could be more… There would be an inquest, in-house and confidential, and his actions would be picked over and he might try to explain that his emotions had been jumbled by events, were not clear-cut. He would look into the interrogators’ pitiless faces, and might just rasp at them, ‘But you weren’t there. Don’t know how it is, was. Your sort, sit in judgement, are never fucking there.’ He thought she had started to crack under the pressure.

She had shown weakness. The boy was not supposed to know that she had no plan, had failed in what it was intended she should do. Pretty damn simple… play the field with a simple guy who drove lorries. Enmesh him, dangle him, get him to drive to the Mediterranean coast and pick up a package and come back to a ferry port where the sleuths and watchers would wave them through. Nice-looking girl with a bit of cleavage hanging out, and a guy who looked like he’d lapped at the cream bowl, and given a thumbs-up by the Border people and the Customs and the security staff who were supposed to ferret out the jihadis coming home, and the weapons they’d need for fighting their bloody war. She was the star girl, and she would have told people near to her cause and dear to it that she could cope with what was asked… Where was she? On the floor, scratching and kicking with a kid from a high-rise block where they dealt in cannabis, and she’d no way out.

He thought she had reason, plenty of cause, to have lost the rag. And, getting near to that moment when self-control was lost and crisis blitzed her. He said nothing.

What he reckoned peculiar was that no link had been established. The kid must have a mobile phone. The girl who watched the game shows, and who sometimes shifted on a noisy chair and sometimes coughed and sometimes moved from the next door room to the bathroom, or opened and closed a fridge door, must have a mobile phone. He would have imagined by now that a hostage negotiator would be in place, busy pouring sweet syrup into Zed’s ear, and the boy’s. He knew something of the negotiation process: it was smooth talk, dripping reason, quiet and patient, trying to build trust and never accepting deadlines and attempting to bore the guys or girls with the hardware into a state of tired surrender. ‘We want cigarettes, or sandwiches, or chocolate, or a passage out… want it, or we start shooting.’ Which was crap, because he was the only person they could kill and that would mean losing their shield and the one bargaining chip they possessed. And the answer would come back that the one official who could authorise the little luxuries had gone home, would not be back until the morning, and they’d delay, obfuscate. No negotiation had started. Next step was the threat that he, star boy on the scene, would be shot. Simple enough. In fifteen minutes, in ten minutes, in five minutes, maybe in half a minute, he’d be dead… Not a good prognosis, because at that point, usually the outer door caved in and the flash-and-bangs rolled down the corridor and the storm squad came calling, and were always trigger happy, and high on adrenaline. The chances were good that he’d stop more than half a dozen rounds. He would have expected by now to hear, very faint, the sounds of a drill’s bit eating through the thin walls, usually from the apartment next door, or the ceiling, so that a probe microphone, better if it were a camera, could be shoved through to give the boss a clear indication of what was happening inside. He had strained to hear the drill and had not.

She started up again. It was part because of what he felt for her – a kaleidoscope of emotions – that he was there… and part from the desire harboured in his stubborn streak, pure obstinacy, to see the Rag and Bone mission to conclusion. Her bark was close.

‘Was it all just deceit, all of it?’

Nothing said, his eyes staying low, finding somewhere on the rug, amongst the boy’s clothes, and amongst the food wrappers. Zed shouted,‘All false, everything?’

From the start, of course. From when she had walked down the darkened street and the thugs had bounced her, and she had been on the pavement and trying to hold the strap of her bag as it was dragged off her, and attempts made to punch and kick her – and him coming from nowhere, a stranger off the street, and what had seemed a ruthless, selfless effort to protect her… all a lie.‘The men who attacked me, pretended to, they were your friends? Police? More deceit?’

And Zeinab remembered being in her room, struggling with an outline for the essay she was supposed to write, and cursing her tutor who had made it obvious that she was an unsatisfactory student, without sufficient interest in her subject… and her phone ringing, and being told to come down. Him being there, and his flowers. First flowers ever brought her. A trick to delude her.‘The flowers were a lie, and the kiss was a lie, and walking with our fingers joined was a lie, and because you were so clever I did not see the lie.’