Holding the Zero (3 page)

The helicopter had taken the letter, resealed.

The letter handled by the aid-worker, the de-miner, the entrepreneur and the intelligence agent had been delivered four weeks after it had left the mountain village to a vicarage in southern England, and none of its couriers yet knew of the consequences of their actions.

Sometimes their voices were raised, at others they bickered quietly. Gus Peake did not know the cause of the dispute. He sat on his haunches with his back against the wall of the shed, with the map and plan they had drawn across his knees. They were within earshot but out of his sight, around the edge of the shed, and beyond the thorn corral where the goats were. Nor did he know why the advantage from his single shot was not exploited. He had seen with his binoculars how the men had swarmed on the cliff face and run to the building in front of which the body lay. He had seen the main door of the house beaten down, and he had heard the screams, the smashing of the equipment from inside. And she had come back down the cliff, descended nimbly, as easily as a deer, and later she had reached where he waited. He did not understand why they had not, immediately, pushed forward. He tried to shut from his mind the argument raging near to him.

Gus worked on the plan of the bunkers they had given him and married them to the old map. He used a compass to measure distance, because he had been told he should never rely completely on the technology of his binoculars. From the map, he tried to locate a vantage-point amongst the whorls of the contours that he could approach using dead ground. He accepted that luck had been with him that morning, that a clean kill at 785

yards without a sighting shot was more than fortunate. He had little conceit, and less arrogance. He believed in himself and his ability, but he was seldom less than realistic.

He had been lucky, more than fortunate. He tried to find a point on the map that he could reach in darkness, that would offer him cover and protection and give him a range of not more than 650 yards.

Their voices were angry again. He pictured them, toe to toe, eyeball to eyeball. Some of the men had been left on the plateau, some had come down, and they sat in the shade of trees where the vehicles were hidden around a small fire. Their faces were impassive, as if they heard and saw nothing of the argument.

He did not know if the map was accurate, or whether the plan that had been given to him of the bunkers was loosely drawn or to an exact scale. Then he heard the silence. The lines on the map seemed to bounce in front of his eyes. She was walking away, crossing open ground, skirting the clump of trees where the men sat and the vehicles were hidden.

He saw her sink down and her head fall into her hands. Suddenly the smell of the goats seemed revolting. He folded away the map, dumped the plan into the rucksack’s pouch, threw his calculator and the compass in with it. He kicked at a stone and watched it career towards the track.

‘You have a problem?’

Haquim limped the last few strides from the corner of the shed to where Gus sat and used the butt of his rifle as a prop while he clumsily lowered himself down.

‘Only that I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know why we are here. I don’t know what everyone is arguing about. I don’t know why she’s not speaking to me …’

‘Why do we not go forward, Mr Peake? Because we wait for more men. I try to tell her and she abuses me. Why do we wait for more men? Because there are very few who will follow me, and many who follow only the orders of their
agha
. Yes, because of her, because simple people believe in her, illiterate people, people who have old rifles to keep bears and dogs away from their livestock, she can raise an army that would be butchered by machine-guns, artillery and tanks. We need trained men who are familiar with the tactics of battle, who will receive and carry out orders, who know how to use weapons.

The men we need, the
peshmerga
, which in your language means “those who face death”, are controlled by the two
agha
of the Kurdish people. They have promised a few men, only a few. They want to fight a war, yes, but only if they believe they will win that war.

So, the supply of men will be like a drip feed. Each time we advance, a few more men will be sent. I cannot change it. I have to wait for more men … She does not understand

… I tell you, Mr Peake, sometimes I can be angry with her.’

‘I was called, I came, and now I am ignored.’

‘Also, I tell you that without her we would not have started to march, we would not have had the dream. Without her there would be nothing. Being ignored is a small price to pay … I am experienced in war. She has no experience, but at every step she will question me. But without her nothing is possible, and I believe you know it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘We move at last light … You want to hurry to war, Mr Peake. You will be there soon enough . In a week or two weeks, tell me then if you still want to hurry …’

Carried on the wind, he heard, faintly, the sound of the furious revving of a vehicle far down the track, around a gentle sloping escarpment that rose to the valley’s cliff wall, beyond his sight. Haquim had stiffened, lifted his head to hear better, then pushed himself up with his rifle. He said coldly, ‘When you meet a target that can shoot back, Mr Peake, then you will have found a war.’

The first fires of the day pushed up a pall of hanging smoke that merged with the fumes of cars’ exhausts, which hung as a thickening carpet across his view of Baghdad awakening.

He had stayed too long, should have been gone before the sun was up. It was suicidal for him to have remained there until daylight broke over the city.

He had stayed too long because, for the fifth night, the target had not appeared. The frustration bit into him. He should have been gone an hour earlier, at least, while the shadows still hugged the streets. Although the sun’s early warmth was on the flat roof beside the water tank, Major Karim Aziz shivered. Throughout the last hour he had known that the chance of the target coming diminished with each passing minute, and yet he had stayed.

His legs were cramped and stiff, all feeling gone. His eyes watered from the long hours of gazing into the aperture of the sight’s lens. His shoulders ached from holding the rifle butt at his shoulder for so long. He realized that for the last fifteen minutes, as the smoke and fumes had formed a cloudy haze, he had barely been able to see the driveway, the steps and the door on which his telescopic sight was locked.

He took a last look through the sight, cursed, then began to pack his gear quickly. He wrapped the sight in a loose towel, snapped the butt-release button and reduced the weapon’s length so that it would fit easily into the anonymous sports bag, then his binoculars, then his bottle of water, and his box for salad and bread, then the larger bottle, tightly corked, to hold urine passed during the night. He rolled up the thin rubber mat on which he had lain motionless for eleven hours and dropped it inside, zipped the bag and stood up. As he had calculated it from the city’s maps, it was a distance of 545 metres from the leading edge of the building’s water tank to the front door, across which, up which, through which, he had now waited five full nights for the target to come.

He checked around him. His life and the lives of those he loved depended on the care with which he checked the concrete of the roof beside the water tower for scraps of paper and drops of urine or water.

Below him were the sounds of radios, shouting children and banging doors. He pulled the hood of his army windcheater up over his head so that his features were masked, and hurried towards the service door to the roof of the block. Behind him was the view across the apartment blocks between Rashid Street and al-Jamoun Street, past Wahtba Square, across lower blocks between al-Jamoun Street and Kifah Street, and into a gap on the far side of Kifah Street that offered a small window view of the few yards of driveway to the villa.

He took the rough concrete service steps three at a time, clattered down them. He had spent a week searching out his vantage-point, trudging into building after building, gaining access by his military uniform, giving a false name on a forged identity card, claiming he was looking for accommodation for himself and his family. He had made a great circle around the villa to which he had been assured the target would come, and found only the one rooftop, of a seven-storey building, which was between 400 and 700

metres from the villa and offered a view over the surrounding wall of the short way the target must walk between his bomb-proof car and the front door.

Maybe the bastard’s penis did not itch enough: when it itched, when it needed stroking, sucking, then the bastard would come. He passed two smoking, gossiping maids on the service stairs. They saw him, looked for a moment at his army coat, then flattened against the wall and averted their gaze. They would have assumed that he, too, had an itching penis, and they would not dare to speak of an army officer’s assignation for fear of a beating from the Military Security Service … It was all about the President’s itch, and the visits to the villa of his current mistress.

Major Karim Aziz let himself out of the side fire exit of the building, and joined the pavement throng heading for the Shuhada Bridge that crossed the Tigris.

He walked quickly, imagining that every eye was on him, believing that every eye was in the head of an agent of the regime. The weight of the sports bag banged against his thigh. At every step, he expected a hand to grab him, a body to block him, and the bag to be snatched and opened. He crossed the bridge over the wide, slow-flowing mud brown of the river, swollen from the thaw of the snow in the mountains far to the north. The tiredness bred the fantasies of danger.

He reached Haifa Street, crossed it near to the central railway station, and came to his home.

Major Karim Aziz’s home was a modest two-storey house, with a muddy front garden where the roses that Leila tended would bloom in a month’s time, where Wafiq and Hani played football, where her parents would sit in the summer months. They were all in the kitchen. The boys were gathering their books together for school. His wife was shuffling through papers she would need in her day’s work at the hospital. Her father was listening to the radio’s news bulletin, and her mother was clearing the table. His own place was laid, a piece of melon, a slice of bread, a square of cheese. They all looked away from him and he gave no explanation as to why he had, for the fifth time, been away from his home for the night. It was impossible for him to give any.

He kissed the boys sharply, touched the arm of his wife and nodded to her parents.

They would have seen the tiredness in his eyes, and they would have looked down and wondered what he carried in his sports bag.

It was too late for him to sleep.

He showered, shaved. By the time he had changed into a clean uniform and come back into the kitchen, the boys had left for school and Leila had gone to the hospital where she nursed children. Her father stared at the radio while her mother rinsed the plates at the sink; they wouldn’t have understood even if he had been able to tell them. He thought it was better that he had not come home earlier. The previous time, he had slipped into his home, a thief in the night, and snuggled against her back and known that she only pretended to sleep, and he had heard the tossing in their beds of his sons, the cough of her father, then the fear of the consequences he might inflict on them had ravaged in his mind.

Aziz took the family car, the old Nissan Micra, to his workplace at the Baghdad Military College.

Chapter Two

After the engine of the distant vehicle had stopped, he saw them come round the escarpment’s bend. There were two men with rifles, the escort, and a man and a woman who were unarmed and European. When they’d passed a small clump of winter-dead trees, the woman pointed to the smoke of the fire near to the track and ahead of them, and their pace quickened. They would have seen the spiral of the smoke, then the vehicles parked in the trees close to the shed.

They had started to run. The unarmed man, the European, ran badly as if he had wrenched his back, but the woman turned, grabbed his arm without ceremony and heaved him forward to keep up with her. He stumbled and seemed to cry out, but she just tugged harder at him.

Gathering strength to climb the other side of the valley and witness the result of his shot, Gus sat in the sunshine against the wall of the shed. The sweat ran in faint driblets against his skin under the weight of his gillie suit. The woman saw Meda sitting alone in the pasture grass, released her burden, let him slip then fall, and waved to her. He heard the broad ring of her fierce Australian accent.

‘Christ, am I glad to see you. We are in shit, Meda … You might just be a goddam angel … I’m trying to get my regional director to the border. Too much Irish last night –

Christ, do we have hang-overs. The driver, the arsehole, took the wrong turn – alcohol poisoning’s his bloody problem. Obstinate bastard won’t admit he’s cocked it. We’re in the back end of bloody nowhere and aren’t the Iraqis just round the corner? Christ … We tried to turn but the bloody Cruiser’s stuck over a goddam rock. Do you believe it? We don’t have a bloody rope on board it or on the back-up. Do you have a rope? And maybe some bodies to help? If I don’t get him to the border, it screws everything, all the schedules, the exit visa, the flights, every bloody thing …’

She was laughing, and Meda with her.

‘I mean, Meda, that arsehole was taking us into the Iraqi army checkpoint. Christ, they’d have thought it was bloody Christmas.’

She was mud-smeared, her hair a flash of blond in the wind. Meda was leading her towards the shed and shouting to her men under the trees. And because she pointed to the shed, and the men ran ahead of her towards where he sat, the European man hobbled faster towards him.

He didn’t know what he should do. He sat rooted to the ground, his back hard against the wall. A stampede was closing on him. He heard Haquim’s whispered voice, but didn’t respond. And then he saw the way the European man gazed at him with bright, staring eyes. He had been wearing the gillie suit for so many hours that it no longer seemed special.

Haquim’s fist closed on his shoulder. ‘Get in, Mr Peake, get out of sight.’

He was wrenched up, pitched inside the windowless shed, and crawled towards the far corner, into the darkness where his rucksack and the rifle he had cleaned earlier were.

Perhaps he should have been sleeping, perhaps he did not realize the necessity of taking any opportunity to sleep. He had been too captivated by the tranquil beauty of the valley, and the eagle’s soaring flight, and too angered that Meda ignored him. Now, exhausted, he did not know why he was hurled into the back of the shed.

The doorway was crowded, a torchbeam roved over the floor of stamped dirt and goat droppings. Before they found the length of rope among the ammunition boxes and the stacked heap of armour-piercing grenades, the beam of the torch discovered him. He couldn’t see the face of the European man who was framed in the doorway with fierce sunlight behind him. The beam lit him and the rifle propped against the wall close to him.

‘
Mr Peake?
Is that English, American?’

Without thinking, he muttered, ‘English.’

‘A long way from home. Where is home?’

Still without thinking: ‘Guildford.’

Haquim spat at him, ‘Don’t give them your face. Shut up. Don’t say anything.’

He was startled by the venom of the order, flinched instinctively, turned his head so that the torchbeam fell on his neck, then moved to the rifle and lingered on the camouflage strips of hessian material wound round the barrel and the telescopic sight.

Then it jumped away because the coil of rope had been found. As fast as it had filled, the shed emptied. He sat in the darkness. His mind cleared. He did not need to be told that he had made a mistake, but he knew that when the aid-worker’s vehicle had been pulled back on to the track and had driven away, Haquim would return and batter him with criticism.

When he had climbed down from the cab of the lorry that had brought him from Guildford in south-east England to Diyarbakir in south-east Turkey ten days before, he would have said that he could cope with isolation. He would have said just as firmly nine nights ago, when he had been taken along a smugglers’ route over the mountains, the border and into northern Iraq, that loneliness did not affect him. He sat in the darkness with his head drooping – he had wanted to talk to somebody, anybody, in English and about home, about what was safe. He clenched his fists and ground his fingernails into the palms of his hands so that the pain would wipe out the guilt of making a small mistake … and then he closed his eyes.

It was about visualization. It was about each crawling movement towards the firing position, each moment of preparation, and each controlled breath when he aimed at the forward bunker that was on the plan drawn for him, and each contour of the map over which the .338 bullet would fly.

But it was hard for him to erase the memory of the mistake.

The regional director, Benedict, waited until they were back on the open road.

‘Did you see that man?’

‘What man?’

‘Called Peake. Said he was English, from Guildford.’

‘Didn’t see him.’

‘He was a professional soldier.’

‘I see what’s good for me to see – and I get on with my job.’

‘He had a sniper’s rifle in there.’

‘It’s not my business.’

‘It’s my damn business. Don’t bloody laugh at me, I worry about you more than any other of Protect the Children’s field-workers. That’s honest, more than the guys in Afghanistan or Somalia. Yes, you’re protected by goons, but we all know that’s just show. The Iraqis could take you any day they want.’

‘You’re a bag of bloody fun today, Benedict. It’s best you forget it.’

‘No way. If the British military is deploying expert snipers in northern Iraq, that jeopardizes the safety of British-employed aid-workers.’

‘Leave it.’

‘I’m raising the roof when I get back.’

She turned away, shut her eyes. Her head throbbed. It was a good place to be drunk, pity was it didn’t happen often enough. She heard his breath hissing through gritted teeth.

She knew he would raise the bloody roof, and she knew the Iraqis could kidnap her at any time they chose.

‘And who was that woman?’

She didn’t open her eyes. ‘You don’t need to know, so don’t ask.’

They crowded around Gus.

Haquim said they had all seen Russian-made sniper rifles, but never a weapon as large as the one he carried.

The hands groped towards it, but he did not let any of them touch it for fear that they might jolt the mounting of the telescopic sight.

Four days before, he had zeroed the sight. He had gone off alone on to a flat, sheltered meadow of grass and spring flowers. He had paced out a distance of 100 yards and left a cardboard box there with a bull blacked in with ink. He had paced out a further 100

yards, and left another cardboard box, and a final one at 300 yards. He had gone back to his firing position, turned the clicks on the distance turret of the sight to the elevation for 100 yards, fired, examined the target with his binoculars, found the shot low, had made adjustments to the mounting, fired again, checked with his binoculars where the shot had clipped the top edge of the four-inch bull, had made more adjustments, fired and been satisfied. Then he had moved to the 200-yard target, and then to the 300-yard target. Only when he was completely satisfied with the accuracy of his shooting had he packed away the rifle. Then, an hour later, he had met Meda. No talk, no gratitude, no curiosity as to how he had made the great journey, nothing about family, no recall of the past. She had handed him on to Haquim, and had not spoken to him since.

Gus let them look at the rifle, but he would not let them touch, feel or hold it.

He counted forty-two of them. There were forty-one men and a boy. He was slim, had stick-like wrists and a thin throat. On the smooth complexion of his cheeks and upper lip there was a haze of fluff, as if he was trying to grow a man’s beard. Most of the men were middle-aged, some shaven and some bearded, some in fatigues and some in their own tribal clothes. There was one who pressed closer than the others – turbaned, an old torn check shirt under a grey-blue anorak with a face masked by stubble and dangerous flitting eyes. They were bad, hostile eyes, and they raked him. His mouth had narrow lips, between which the tongue was turned and rolled in the mouth to gather the spittle. It was directed down between his boots. There was the single croaked word, spoken with contempt: ‘American.’

Gus stared back into the man’s face, shook his head and said, ‘English.’ He saw the eyes and mouth relax, then the man turned his back on him.

He thought them proud men, but with the common features of cruel eyes and brutal mouths. His grandfather would have described them, in the language of long ago, as

‘villains’. They carried assault rifles and grenade launchers; one had a light machine-gun and was wrapped with belts of ammunition. Then, in a moment, he was no longer the centre of attention because they had seen her, Meda.

They were around her. She spoke softly, with the glow in her eyes. They hung on her words. The one who’d spat, his mouth gaped open as if the foul old bastard had found the light of God and was mesmerized. Gus thought they danced for her.

Haquim, at his shoulder, said, ‘I can tell them about the tactics of frontal attack, and about clearing trenches with grenades, and about enfilading fire, and they tolerate me.

She tells them of destiny and freedom, and they will follow wherever she leads. I fear where she will lead us, Mr Peake.’

‘When are we leaving?’

Haquim said dully, ‘We go when she says we go.’

‘I counted forty-two new men – is that enough?’

‘Forty-one men and a boy, Mr Peake. Forty-one fighters and a boy to wash and cook for them. And there were eighteen of us, and you, and her. You go to war, Mr Peake, with fifty-nine men, a boy and her … It is what we have, it has to be enough. I told you it would be a drip feed. Today,
agha
Bekir has sent us forty-one men and a boy from the slum camps of Sulaymānīyah. In Arbīl,
agha
Ibrahim will watch to see if we are successful. If we are he will not wish to lose status and he will send a hundred men, who will also be the scum from the slums. I told you how it would be.’

Her hands moved, outstretched, as she spoke. They seemed capable of carrying the weight of the world. He watched the power with which she held them, then ducked inside the shed.

When he came out, the rucksack and the carrying case hooked over his shoulders, Meda was leading and they were following up the narrow paths on the cliff face that generations of sheep had made. He heard their singing, in quiet, throaty voices. Haquim was ahead of him, labouring over the rocks. He climbed slowly and carefully, never looking back or down. Around him, he heard the songs of men going to war.

Sarah stood by the two Landcruisers, the bodyguards crowded around her. The customs men on the Syrian side of the river were waving urgently for him to hurry, and the man in the ferry-boat was shouting for him. Her regional director kissed her awkwardly on the cheek. She didn’t know whether she believed what he’d said, that he worried more about her than any of his other field people. When he was back in his London home, with his wife or partner or boyfriend, would he be worrying about her? The visits were little light lines in the darkness of her everyday life, but they unsettled her. It would take a week to reassemble her existence, fall back into the routine of the isolation and exposure to suffering that were commonplace.

‘Keep safe, Sarah.’

‘Give my love to the office,’ she said flatly.

‘I’m going to do what I said I’d do.’

‘What’s that?’

‘British snipers hazarding your safety … raise hell.’

Under the glare of the afternoon sun he scrambled down the track towards the ferry.

She waved desultorily. She watched him climb aboard and the ferry carried him across the Tigris, towards Syrian territory, towards safety. Tomorrow she would be back in the high villages and her concern would be for children who had no school, no clinic and no hope. What could one sniper do, however fucking expert, however big his fucking rifle, to give the children hope, a clinic and a school? The ferry reached the far side of the river, and he ran to the car that would drive him to the airstrip for the feeder flight to Damascus.

She shouted after him, ‘I hope your back’s better in the morning. Don’t tell them in the office that you did it getting the Cruiser back on the road. Tell them you were escaping from a battalion of the Republican Guard …’

Gus had made the climb up the far side of the valley his bullet had crossed.

Only once before had he stood, silent, and looked down on the dead. Then, more than nine years before, he had steeled himself, erect, tall, and adopted a concerned expression.

Hands had plucked at the sleeves of his coat and led him between the clusters of wrapped shapes. He had tried, then, to close his ears to the persistence of the sobbing of the living.

Men had wept and women had cried out in their anguish and the tears had rolled down children’s cheeks. He could remember, then, that he had worried how they would bury so many bodies because there was little earth between the rock outcrops and that was frozen under the sporadic patches of snow. He could remember the endless crawling line of people coming down a track on a far slope towards the swaying rope bridge with their bundles, bags, cases and more dead. Sometimes, that was clear in his mind, the cloths that wrapped the corpses had been unwound so that he could see the faces of the dead, as if it was important to those who lived that he should share with them the agony of their loss.