Holding the Zero (36 page)

‘I’ll get a radio spot,’ Mike said. ‘I’m going to crucify this fucking bullshit place, and the woman, if she ever existed.’

‘I reckon she existed, but only as a myth in these people’s minds,’ Dean said. ‘Being realistic, we’re talking about a foot soldier at best.’

And then they were quiet, struggling to climb, and behind them was the bright yellow Mercedes and the ever falling panorama of the ground.

‘What do you want?’

‘For, God’s sake, Joe, I want to talk.’

‘Talking seldom helped anybody, Sarah.’

‘Because I can’t help, that’s why I have to talk.’

‘I might not listen.’

‘They caught her. She was captured …’

Joe Denton knelt in the rich grass. There were now eleven lines of pegs running the length of the meadow, and he had just begun to work up the second of them. From the pattern of the laying of the mines he had calculated that he could clear a little more than half of each line in a single day’s work. It annoyed him that she was there, distracting him. She had been up and down the road all day looking for any straggling survivors of the final battle in Kirkūk to make it over the hills and ridges. Most had come the previous evening, but she had found six, burdened by two grievously wounded men, early that morning, and had ferried them to hospital. They’d been the last. He looked at her. She was sitting awkwardly on the pick-up’s bonnet. It was dangerous for him to be distracted.

‘Doesn’t that concern you?’

‘Predictable. What concerns me is a thousand V69s, then another field of them, and another.’

‘You helped.’

‘And sometimes my stupidity amazes even me.’

‘That’s not Joe Denton. Joe Denton cared.’

‘I did what I could. Sorry, Sarah, but she’s not my problem. Your problem. You think you can do something, you can’t. Get a look at the map. The map says this is fucking Kurdistan. It is an unforgiving place and when we, outsiders, try to do something we fall on our bloody arses. We think we are important, interfere, but we don’t affect events –we go home. I am busy. I am clearing twenty-five V69s a day, tops, so there are only another ten fucking million left. That’s why I’m busy. You don’t want to talk, you want a shoulder to cry on – like all the other huggers. Go and find the sniper, go and have a cuddle and cry with him, give him a good ride before he flies back home to tell his war stories in the bloody pub. Go away, because I am busy.’

‘Can’t.’

‘Can’t what?’

‘Can’t do anything like that.’

‘Try harder – close your eyes and think of the beach, Sarah, think of where you bloody belong.’

‘He didn’t come out.’

‘What? Is he dead?’

‘He stayed behind, to “do something”.’

She slid off the bonnet of the pick-up. She slipped into the passenger seat beside the driver, in front of the bodyguards. He stared in front of him, at the line of pegs, as the pick-up drove away. He was glad that Sarah hadn’t asked him what would happen to the woman in Kirkūk because he would not have lied to her. He was a long time staring at the line of pegs. After the sound of the truck had gone, drifting away in the bare hills, he began again to probe for the next of the buried V69s and to feel for the tripwires and for the antennae. He tried to shut from his mind the sniper who had stayed to ‘do something’, but he could not because he didn’t know what could be done.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON
PEAKE

7. (Conclusions after interview with Dogsy (
sic
) Jennings of Corporate Survival, Hereford, conducted by self and Ms Manning – transcripts attached.)

ESCAPE & EVASION: AHP, by sharing a course with a management team of bank officials, will have received a minimum of training and advice on survival tactics should he need a fast and improvised retreat from the theatre of operations – I emphasize
minimum
. But Jennings classified him as a ‘crusader’ and I believe such a mental attitude would lead AHP to hang around after the last bus has gone. His E&E

tactical knowledge, as gained from Corporate Survival, would be wholly inadequate.

SUMMARY: I rate his chances of survival in the medium term as … WHO

BLOODY CARES? The bank officials didn’t; Dogsy Jennings didn’t; why should I? He made his bed. His conceit is to go where ORDINARY, DECENT and EXPERTLY TRAINED men would not dream of going. His arrogance is his involvement in a cause from which GOOD, HONOURABLE and CAREFULLY PREPARED men would turn away. AHP

demeans us all. Will he survive? I don’t give a damn. Will I ever meet him? I hope not. Where he has gone, what he has attempted, makes me feel second-rate …

The bell rang as Ken Willet’s fingers rippled on the keyboard. He was losing control, his eyes were misted and he could not see the screen clearly. As he stumbled across the room he glanced at his wristwatch. It was mid-morning; he still wore his pyjama trousers.

He scratched at his bare armpit, then opened the door.

Carol Manning stood on the mat and rolled her eyes in mock astonishment. She was holding a bottle of wine. She walked past him. Tricia refused point blank to come to his flat, said it was a tip and stank, said that if they ever married and he didn’t learn to clean his act up then he’d have to sleep in the coal bunker. Carol Manning was in the centre of the room and he saw the mischievous grin on her face.

She said his desk at the Ministry had told her he’d called in sick, the wine was Australian chardonnay, and cheap.

She said where they were going the next day.

Ken Willet shambled into the kitchen to find a corkscrew and to wash two glasses.

When he came back into the room she was standing over the screen. She handed him the bottle and went on reading. He hadn’t seen her laugh like that before – and her eyes sparkled. He pulled the cork. He would, of course, have deleted the SUMMARY. His head dropped, as if humiliated. He poured the wine. She turned, and still there was the sparkle and the laughter.

She said, ‘I thought it was a good time to get pissed up – any objection? You know that feeling, a cold comes over you, something you can’t touch, can’t see, but something desperate’s happened and however hard you scratch your mind you don’t know what it is

– know it? Something awful? I felt that, so I’m going to get pissed up.’

She emptied her glass and he refilled it. He apologized for what he had written.

‘No cause to – it’s the truth. You hate him because you’re jealous. He’s ruffled your self-bloody-esteem. It’s taken you long enough to catch on that he’s brilliant … Where’s that bloody bottle? Got me? Brilliant …’

A medical orderly peeled from the cab of the marked ambulance and ran towards the casualty.

He recognized the particular fist of death, the small entry wound and the large exit hole. That morning, he had seen a similar wound on the body of a soldier at a road block and another at a rubbish dump. He was not easily unnerved. He had served as a field medic, a stretcher bearer, in the marsh battles to hold the line against the Iranian hordes, and he had been in Kuwait when the bomb loads had fallen from the American aircraft.

He could accept the random death handed down by unseeing artillerymen, machine-gunners and air crews, and the horror they left behind. But this was different somehow.

The chill gripped him. At the road block and the rubbish dump, and here at the corner of an office building, young soldiers had been specifically identified as targets. He seemed to see the bodies magnified in the telescopic sight that would have prised into their lives in the moment before death. Fear, the first he had ever experienced, ran loose in him. A crowd stared vacantly as he felt the corpse’s neck for a pulse and found none. The crashing blow to his back pitched him forward so that he toppled onto the body, and then the blackness came.

The sentry clawed open the heavy steel-plate gate at the main entrance to the headquarters of Fifth Army.

On the gate, being a man with alert ears and eyes, the sentry knew of the stalking death spreading without pattern across the city. He had heard on the squawking radios and from the shouts of officers that a sniper was at work and firing indiscriminately. A dozen times in the last hour he had dragged open the gates, allowed foot and mechanized patrols to speed out of the compound and had heaved the gates shut. But, and it would be fatal to him, he did not know the locations in Kirkūk at which seven soldiers had died; had he known, he might have appreciated that each killing brought the marksman closer to the gate he guarded. The sentry was a big man, from a family of stonemasons working in quarries beyond As Salmān in the desert quarter, and he would go back to the heavy equipment, the heavy hours, the heavy rocks when his army duty was completed. He had broad shoulders above a wide, muscled body, and his very size, too, would be fatal to him. The sentry pushing shut the gates made a fine target, and did not know it. A slimmer, slighter man would have escaped. The bullet, by small miscalculations, was fractionally low and fractionally wide, and caught the sentry in the back at the extremity of his rib-cage, then it yawed and sent crippling shock-waves up to the lungs and down to the kidney and liver. He was on the ground, his blood smeared on the gate he had been pushing shut. He screamed for help, but was not answered by men cowering behind the half-closed gates.

‘Were we close enough?’

‘She would have heard.’

‘It is enough?’

‘It is enough because she would have known.’

‘Can we get out now?’

‘We can.’

‘You have seen sufficient – Mr Gus, the tourist – of the sights of Kirkūk?’

‘No, when it is necessary I will return.’

‘For her? Fuck you, Mr Gus. You’re mad.’

‘So that she knows she is not alone … With you, Omar, or without you.’

‘Without me you are dead,’ the boy spat scornfully.

They ran from the open concrete floors of the uncompleted apartment block. Twice they were seen and erratic shooting followed them. Without Omar’s intuition, gathered from thieving and fleeing, Gus would have blundered into the closing net of patrols and into the path of the personnel carriers that criss-crossed the city.

‘Mr Gus, have you been helped?’

In the space of almost two hours he had probed into the city and fired eight shots. He had felt no remorse as he saw the vortex of air and the speck of the bullet speeding towards a chosen target, a man doomed because he was available and wore the uniform.

He had felt only a brutal anger he had not known before. They went through ditches, gardens, yards, sewer-pipes, on their stomachs or running. They left behind them road blocks, checkpoints, house searches, cordon lines of soldiers, blundering chaos, and the anger never abated.

He shouted, ‘If this gate is not opened immediately, you bastards will answer to me with your lives.’

With a full swing, full force, Major Karim Aziz kicked the steel plate of the gates. The screams of the soldier filled his ears. The wounded man, drowning in his own blood, flapped the ground. ‘Open the gate and have a stretcher with you, or I will have all of you cowards hanged before the night’s out.’

He went back from the gate and crouched over the young soldier. Behind him the square and the road leading towards the office and apartment blocks had emptied. There were troops in firing positions, down and finding cover. He sensed the terror all around him, created by a single man who fired the bullets. He cradled the soldier’s head. He could not have ignored the challenge. He heard the gate scrape open. The sniper’s trademark was on the bare chest of the soldier where, frantic to kill the pain, his fingers had torn away the tunic and shirt buttons. In the well of the blood was a cleanly drilled entry-hole. As the stretcher-bearers sprinted from the safety of the gate, he lifted the soldier and noted the exit pit large enough to take two field-dressing pads to cover it. The soldier was taken from his arms, thrown down onto a stretcher, and stampeded inside. A single man who made such fear was an opponent worthy of him. There was a small glint on the tarmacadam below the gate that caught his eye. On his hands and knees he crawled to it, picked it up. In his palm was the misshapen piece of lead antimony crushed by the impact on the gate. It had been cased in cupro-nickel when it was recognizable as a bullet. He gazed at it for a moment, then dropped it and thought of his wife, who would be in the car with their children, trusting him …

He walked across the square towards the side-street into which the driver had swerved the jeep. He found the man half hiding under the vehicle, stood over him, exposed, and gave the instruction that his backpack and the box should be returned to his old room.

With his rifle in his hands, his dog beside him, Major Karim Aziz stood in the centre of the square and stared up the length of the road at a thousand windows and a hundred roofs.

She heard the boots and the dragging slither as if a weighted sack were brought down the corridor, and the weight collapsed beside the darkness of the drain hole. The door slammed and the boots receded. Her mouth was beside the hole.

‘Did you hear it?

‘I heard only their questions – and I did not answer. I had the strength …’

‘Did you hear the shot?’

‘You had given me the strength, your love …’

‘He was there, with his rifle. He is coming.’

‘Give me your hand … No-one is coming, only death. Give me your hand, I beg you.’

‘I heard the shot …’

‘A man makes a gesture, clears his conscience, then goes … Only I can help you, child, only you can help me.’

She put her hand, her wrist and arm, back into the drain.

Chapter Sixteen

His family would be pulling into the fuel station – hot, tired, fractious and looking for him.

Major Karim Aziz came out of the medical unit. The gate sentry might live and he might die. He was escorted by a doctor who thanked him sheepishly, and explained again, uselessly, why a wounded man had been left in the road to bleed without help. The doctor said that the sniper had made a corridor of fear that ordinary men did not have the courage to enter. The doctor wheedled congratulations at the major’s bravery, but Aziz walked on and left the man babbling behind him. He had a fresh, urgent step as if a reason for living had again been given him.

The boys would be spilling from the car and complaining to their mother; her temper would be short and she would be barking at them.

He was walking towards the command bunker when his name was shouted from behind him. He walked on, but his name was called again in a thin, nasal voice. He stopped, turned slowly. He thought that Commander Yusuf, the man who was said to harbour an obsessive love of his grandchildren, was breaking again for coffee or for biscuits. There were more blood spatters on the tunics and trousers of the brutes with him; they would not have changed into new uniforms because it was part of the terror they strewed around them that the pain they inflicted should be seen in the bunker and in the officers’ quarters.

‘You came back, Major.’

‘I had thought my duty here was finished, Commander Yusuf. I returned when I realized that was not the case.’

‘You are a sniper, Major,’ the torturer said, with distaste. ‘You understand the psychology of this cowardly killing.’

Aziz stood his ground. ‘The man who came into Kirkūk this morning was not a
coward
.’

‘Soldiers without military significance were butchered – a fox amongst chickens. Is that not the work of a coward?’

‘I came back to shoot him but he is not a coward, Commander. He is no more a coward than the man who, in the name of the state, tortures and mutilates the body of a defenceless prisoner.’

His words died. The men around the commander, the heavy-set, cold-faced beasts, stiffened, and he saw the menace in their eyes, but the commander laughed. The dog bared its teeth.

‘Is he, Major, as much a hero as yourself?’

Major Karim Aziz said quietly, ‘He is a brave man, Commander, but I am also certain that it requires great courage – in the name of the state – to
interrogate
a bound captive.’

The eyes watching him were amused.

‘Come.’

The commander took his arm, gripped it with his narrow fingers. The hand was against the body of the rifle that he carried loosely in the crook of his elbow. The dog scampered warily beside him, and the brutes made a phalanx behind him. He thought he was as much of a prisoner as the wretches in the cells. His vanity had made him turn.

Pacing around the petrol station, she would be telling the children their father would come soon and wondering where he was.

He did not try to break the grip of the fingers. He was led, taken, into the building used by the Estikhabarat. The boots stamped in rhythm behind him. He was brought into a room that was fragrantly scented with air-freshener, and there were flowers on the table.

He saw a desk with papers from files piled on it, and beside the files was a framed photograph of the commander sitting on a sand beach with near-naked children beside him. On the far side of the room a tape-recorder’s spools turned, and another of the brutes, headphones on a shaven skull, sat at the table and wrote busily. Aziz was offered an easy chair and settled into it. Did he want coffee? He shook his head, but asked if water could be brought for his dog.

The commander walked to the tape-recorder and threw a switch. The sound burst into the room. As if confined in a minuscule space, a guttering, hacking cough came from the speakers, then a slow moan of pain.

‘Be strong. We are together. Together we are strong.’

‘I told them nothing.’

He heard the wheezed words of the brigadier, the Boot, and her small, timid voice. He stared expressionlessly ahead of him. The commander had lit a cigarette and was glancing with studied casualness at the front page of the regime’s morning newspaper.

His conceit had brought him back, and his wife and his children were waiting, would now be anxious because he was late meeting them.

‘They ask me, always, who gave me my orders – which officers? The Americans? The pigs, Ibrahim and Bekir? I can tell them nothing because the pigs and the Americans gave me no orders. I have not told them of when we met …’

He forced himself to listen to the whispered, frightened, hurt voice.

‘I have told them nothing. If it were not for your strength I would have broken …’

‘Hold my hand tighter.’

‘I hold it and I love it as if it were my family.’

‘Hold my hand because I am afraid.’

‘When you are close, with me, I can survive the pain.’

‘How long can we last?’

‘Long enough, I pray, for others to escape.’

‘What was your dream?’

‘I was told I would be the Minister of Defence.’ There was the bitter whinge of his laughter, and the slight motion in his body would have hurt him, because he moaned again. ‘I was told I would be a great man in the new Iraq. I was told …’

The pain of his gasp sighed in her ear. She felt the grip of his hand slacken and wondered whether he had drifted towards unconsciousness. The comfort she had felt when she had heard the single shot – the faraway crack and the close-by thump – were long gone. In a wild moment of excitement, she had thought that a crescendo of firing would burst around her, and that there would be the fear-driven cries of men in the corridor as they ran and, in the delirium of her terror, she had seen the cell door open and he would have been there with the rifle and would have caught her up in his arms and carried her from this hellish place … But there had been only the one shot and it was long gone, and she had cursed him for not coming, for being safe.

‘Hold me, you have to, hold me.’

‘I am holding you.’

She felt the tightening of his fingers on hers, as if she had brought him back to the living, as if she were not alone.

‘Hold me because I am afraid, and have nothing to tell them.’

‘What is your dream?’

‘To be in my village, to be a woman, to be free.’

‘Without you, I cannot protect them, buy them their time to escape.’

Through the conduit of a drain hole between two holding cells, the brigadier of the staff of Fifth Army and the peasant woman from the mountains knotted their fingers to give each other strength.

The voice seemed to fail, then rise again.

‘I was to be paid a million American dollars for taking the armoured brigade south from Kirkūk.’

‘I was offered nothing. What would I do with a million American dollars?’

‘I would have put you on the lead tank – washed you, cleaned you, carried you into Baghdad.’

‘Then I would have gone home.’

The commander gestured for the switch to be lifted, and the silence fell on the room.

His smile was easy, affable.

‘Major Aziz, it is standard to allow prisoners in adjacent cells the opportunity to communicate with each other. There is a drain between them, and a microphone in it.

Prisoners who believe they have successfully resisted interrogation always betray themselves when they have been returned to their cells – we learned it from the British, it was their procedure in Ireland. I am surprised that it has taken them so long to find the culvert. It is because we hold her that the sniper, this butcher, has killed so many, yes?’

‘I think it was to tell her that she was not forgotten – and to expiate his shame that he did not or could not protect her.’

‘The sniper is your target?’

He said simply, ‘It is important to me.’

‘I have finished with her. Is she of use to you?’

‘She will be hanged?’

‘Of course – she is a witch. Our brave soldiers ran from her. She is talked of in the bazaars and in the
souks
. It is necessary to hang her.’

Cold words. ‘She should be hanged in public tomorrow morning at the main gate …’

He said how the gallows should be built. He thought of his wife and children at the petrol station, angry and fretting for him. He thought of the brigadier, the Boot, denied the strength of the grip of her hand, and the names that were secreted in his mind. He thought of the sniper who would be drawn from a hiding place by the sight of the gallows and the peasant woman standing under the beam.

The moth would be drawn to the flame. If a moth flew too close to the flame the wings were singed, and it fell. But he was – himself – walking towards a flame and if he was burned he would fall, and if he fell then he was dead. And there had been the great flame burning above the oilfield outside the city that had drawn her fatally nearer. The flame burned for all of them, bright and dangerous, beckoning them.

A young man, walking back to his village near Qizil Yar, west of the city, had been knifed and his body thieved from. The young man who had thought himself fortunate to find work in Kirkūk, cleaning the tables in a coffee shop, had stayed on in the evening to see a film at a cinema. He had been stabbed in the back, killed, and his identity card stolen. Before his body was cold, while it lay in a road drain and the first of the rats sniffed at it, the identity card was presented at the outer road block on the main route into the city.

In the next hour, the identity card was presented three more times, studied by torchlight, then the beams switched to a young man’s face, and Omar was waved on.

He was the observer in the tradition laid down by Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard.

Everything he saw was remembered: where the tanks were, and the blocks, and the personnel carriers parked in side-streets with the radios playing soft music from the Baghdad transmitter he remembered.

He was another grubby, dishevelled young man with unkempt hair padding the pavements of the city. There were many such as him, drawn to Kirkūk in search of subsistence work. He attracted no attention from the soldiers who were only a few months older. He passed among them, drawn forward towards a distant hammering, nails sinking into wooden planks.

Omar knew he was close to the place where she had been taken. He had heard the
mustashar
, Haquim, describe the place to Mr Gus and make the excuses. He slipped from the wide main street that led towards faraway arc-lights, the sounds of hammers beating on nails, and drifted through shadows in the narrowed lanes of the Old Quarter. He could smell the burned wood of homes that had been fired in the fighting. There was a line of buildings where the walls were marked by desperate bullet lacerations, a small square, muddy roads leading from it, and a broken wall into which the jeep carrying her had crashed. There was a panel-beater’s shop where men worked to the light of oil lamps. It was as Haquim had described it. He saw an open door beyond the panel-beater’s shop, closer to the wall; through the door a family gathered in a dully lit room and watched the television. There were old men, young men, women, children, in front of the television.

The
mustashar
, Haquim, had said a family had come from their home and had spat into the face of Meda. He would have liked to have killed them, rolled a grenade through the door or sprayed them with an assault rifle on automatic, but that was not the work of an observer as written down by Major Hesketh-Prichard. He slipped again into the shadows until he could see the lights of the wide street.

The orphan child of the aid agencies, the plaything of American soldiers, the carrier of ammunition for the
peshmerga
, the thief from the living and the dead, the friend of Mr Gus had no fear when he was close enough to see the high gallows being built by supervised labourers outside the barricaded gates of the headquarters of Fifth Army.

‘Which direction does it face?’

‘To the front, towards the wide street.’

‘Can you see it from the side?’

‘There are screens at the side of canvas. You can only see it from the front, from the wide street.’

‘But above it is open?’

‘No, Mr Gus. It is covered by a roof of more canvas. You cannot see it from high, not from the side, only from the front … Why do they do it so complicated, Mr Gus?’

‘So they can dictate where I will be.’

The sweat of the day’s heat had cooled long ago on his body and the night wind now insinuated the chill into him. The blister was worse on his heel, aggravated by the charge out of the city after the killings. He had the last of the plasters from his rucksack on the wound and the ache of it was inescapable. When the sun had gone down, the stiffness had gripped his shoulders, pelvis and knees, and he had not slept until the boy returned.

‘They do that, the roof and the sides, because of us?’

‘Because of me, not you. You have done your work, Omar. If I want to see Meda brought out, see the rope put on her, see … I have to be in front, because they have covered the sides. I cannot be high, because they have made a roof. They hope to restrict me so that it is easier for them to find me. A man never had a better observer, but it is finished for you – you should go.’

‘Without me you would not even get into the city.’

‘It is not your quarrel.’

‘Do you say that she is only yours, Mr Gus, not mine?’

‘I want you to go.’

‘You are nothing without me – Major Hesketh-Prichard was nothing without his observer. Even he said so.’

As he had waited for the boy to come back he had gone through the checklist he had been given so long ago. Mechanically, in the darkness, by touch, he had cleaned the breech and felt the firmness of the elevation and deflection turrets. He had tightened the screws securing the telescopic sight, he had massaged the lenses with a cloth, and had wiped each of the bullets of .338 calibre before loading them into the magazine and slotting it back into the rifle’s belly. He could no longer conjure the faces of those who had been important to him so long ago. At each stage of the checklist she had been in his mind, and he had tried to remember the taste of her kiss.