Holding the Zero (39 page)

The man would be coming off the ladder, would be weaving between stacked heaps of pipes, blocks and cables. At the back of the site, he would be running, for the plank wall or the wire fence, whichever was there. Aziz ducked along the side length of the palisade, covered with fly-posters and exhortations from the Party, and reached the corner of the wall.

The alleyway was empty. Facing the high chain-mesh fence were little lock-up businesses, all closed because their owners had gone to the execution. Three hundred metres down the fence, a boy appeared on the top and rolled and fell. From his run, Aziz could barely stand. He trembled with the effort. The boy saw him, covered him with an assault rifle, but did not fire. The man followed him. For a moment his weight was hooked on the top of the wire and then he dropped down.

Aziz thought the boy had shouted something to the man, who looked up. He would have seen Aziz at the corner of the palisade and the fence. He was a big man and the sunlight threw gaunt lines on his face that was cream-smeared above the stubble. He wore the big sniper’s smock. He seemed to measure the scale of the threat of Aziz at the corner of the palisade and the fence, then to reject it as an irrelevance. The boy caught the arm of his smock, pulled him across the alleyway, and they were gone.

Still heaving, trembling, still trying to draw air into his body, Aziz could not have fired. It would have been a wasted shot. He could no longer run but he pushed himself to trot forward.

He reached the point where they had come down off the fence. He was very careful now that he should not contaminate the scuffmarks made by their boots and bodies as they had dropped down. He gestured for the dog to sniff at the broken soil beside the wire, and cooed his encouragement.

‘Find them, Scout … Hunt them, Scout … Search, Scout, search … Find them.’

His faith in the quality of the dog’s nose was total. The dog led him into an entry between the shuttered businesses, and then into a maze of shallow streets. They would have run. He did not need to. He walked briskly after the dog. He would follow his dog, wherever it led, until he had the chance to shoot. Repeatedly, from his dried lips, he whistled for the dog to slow so that it was not too far ahead of him, but the dog held the scent.

They were in a storm drain and ahead was light. Omar had found it and brought them into Kirkūk through it, bypassing a checkpoint. They were crawling in the drain and could hear cars close by and the thunder of lorries and personnel carriers. In places they were on their hands and knees, but when debris clogged the tunnel they crawled on their stomachs. At the end, where the light was, when they emerged, they would be beyond the city and the open ground would be in front of them all the way to the hills. The spirit had gone from Gus. He had no sensation of success, no pride in having made the calculations correctly for what anyone would have described as a supreme shot. Near the end of the tunnel, when he was lagging behind the boy, Omar turned, caught his coat and wrenched him forward. His hands slithered on the drain’s floor, his head went down and the foul stale water was in his mouth. He flailed out at the boy. They had not spoken – other than the boy’s shout for him to hurry when he had fallen from the top of the fence – since he had fired.

As if believing Gus hid behind an excuse, Omar rasped, ‘You missed.’

‘I did not.’

‘You hit her, you missed the hangman.’

‘I wasn’t aiming at him.’

‘You fired at her?’ He heard in the darkness of the tunnel the bewilderment of the boy.

Gus nodded tiredly.

‘Do you tell me the truth, Mr Gus? In fifteen seconds, half a minute, or five minutes, she was dead.’

‘She was my target,’ Gus said.

‘Why – if she was dead?’

Flat words, without emotion, leaden words. ‘So that she died at the hand of someone who loved her, and not theirs. In our time, not their time. It’s why we came back … The only thing I could do.’

They reached the tunnel’s end. The bright light washed over them. Two hundred yards away, in Gus’s estimation, to the right was a raised road on which were personnel carriers and troops jumping down from trucks. The drone of a helicopter was overhead. There was open ground then rock-strewn cover, but that was a mile distant. The boy crawled forward and Gus followed him.

From the side of his mouth, the boy whispered, ‘I thought it was to shoot the hangman.

I do not understand, and …’

‘I don’t ask you to understand.’

‘… and, I do not think Major Hesketh-Prichard would understand.’

The body had been dragged into the compound.

The commander had seen the wound that had scattered the blood and tissue, brain and bone. Already the square in front of the gallows platform was emptied, and the work had begun to dismantle the scaffold. He was asked by one of them who had taken her out, who had the debris of her head on his tunic and picked laconically at it, whether the body was to be sent home, and he said it was to be buried, the grave not marked, and that a chainsaw was to be brought to the cell block.

Commander Yusuf went into the block and the door of the cell was unlocked. He stood against the wall, in silence, as the men with him began to kick the brigadier’s prone body.

Until the chainsaw was brought, he asked no questions.

* * *

The dog was in the drain.

While he waited for the dog to emerge, Major Karim Aziz saw the personnel carriers manoeuvring on the raised road to drive down on to the open ground. He stood tall, so that he would be seen clearly – and he would be known – and waved them back. The personnel carriers, with their heavy engines and stinking fuel fumes, would distract his dog when it emerged from the tunnel and would disturb the scent. He fluttered his handkerchief to the crew of the nearest circling gun-ship helicopter, pointed to the far distance in the west, and the beast veered away. He had no intention of sharing the chase.

Looked at casually, the ground ahead seemed flat, featureless, and without cover.

Nothing was casual when Major Karim Aziz studied ground. There were shallow gullies worn away by the winter rain. One of the rain channels would lead to the tunnel’s mouth.

He waited for the dog to show itself.

The troops from the trucks on the raised road were forming, under their officers’

orders, the line of a cordon behind him. He gestured that they should stay back. He slipped down, sat on a low rock, and watched for the dog.

He did not think of his wife, who would now be at work in the hospital, or his sons; he did not think of the brigadier in his cell, without a hand to hold, who knew his name. Far ahead of him, scurrying and hidden in the network of rain gullies, was the man he hunted.

The bright heat of the day beat down on him, the ground shimmered and distorted his view, but for once his own eyes were not so important because he had the nose of his dog.

Away to the left, the dog came into view. It shook a rainbow of water off its coat. He whistled for it to sit.

An officer stumbled, puffing, across the dirt ground.

Aziz said curtly, ‘You do not come within a thousand metres of me. You are spectators. He is mine.’

He went to the dog and praised it. Without the dog he would not have known where to search. At the mouth of the tunnel he could see the smears where their wet bodies had crawled, and bootprints.

The dog led and he followed.

They had reached the rough ground, where there were rocks, wind-stunted trees and low thorn bushes. They had cover now and could go faster. Sometimes they crawled and the sharp flinty stones worked rips into the padding on his knees and elbows. Sometimes they ran helter-skelter from rock to bush to rock to tree to rock, then paused while the boy made the fast, intuitive decision as to where their next immediate target point was. Gus’s heel hurt worst when they ran, and the pain of it rivered in his boot and up his leg. The boy looked back each time he paused in a shred of cover, but Gus did not. He was aware of a deepening frown of concern on Omar’s forehead, even though he said nothing.

Gus did not look back because he would have seen the sprawl of the city’s suburbs then the high buildings jutting up, then the forest of faintly drawn antennae at the headquarters of Fifth Army. Hidden behind the sprawl, past the buildings, below the antennae, were the gate, the gallows and her.

In his aching tiredness, in the pain, he was aware of a remote but occasional piercing whistling, as if a hawk hunted behind him and called its mate. It was like the cry of the kestrels he had watched with Billings, the poacher. He did not look to see if a bird of prey worked the ground behind and below him. His attention was on the escarpment ahead and the little ribboned ravines set in it. After they had cleared the escarpment they would be on the high ground of the hills, and each nearer and higher hill they climbed would bring them closer to safety, and further from her. He wondered if the bird, the hunter, watched him as he struggled to keep the boy’s pace.

It was theatrical but always effective.

A prisoner was in pain, and the resolve was slipping. The commander had never known it to fail. At the far end of the cell block’s corridor, the cord was pulled and the two-stroke motor of the chainsaw coughed to life. The motor was revved viciously as it was carried towards the open door of the cell. The roar of the motor filled the corridor and hammered into the cell as the saw’s teeth raced on the sprockets.

A prisoner would not know whether they would start at the toes or the fingers, then move to the ankles or the wrists, then lop off – as if a prisoner were no more important than an overstretching pear or mulberry tree – the knees or the elbows.

The kicking was over, and no question had yet been put.

Two men held the brigadier with his back to the wall that faced the door and held his head so that he would see the arrival of the chainsaw.

The commander had never interrogated a prisoner who could shut his eyes as the chainsaw was brought down to the corridor and into view through the open cell door. He stood against the furthest wall from the brigadier – as if that, too, were a part of the theatre – so that the blood spurts would not soil his uniform.

It was in the door.

Now, he asked the question. ‘With whom did you plot? With which snakes did you collaborate?’

The arm was held out and the brigadier tried to make his hand into a fist, but the men prised open his grip and exposed his fingers. The chainsaw was carried closer.

The name of a general – but the commander shrugged, dissatisfied, because he knew the general was already in Amman. And closer … The name of a brigadier and the names of two colonels. They were posted as missing and were hunted. The teeth were an inch from the hand. The prisoner was screaming. The name of a colonel, but that was inadequate because the colonel had gassed himself in his car.

Held very delicately, as if it were a scalpel in an operating theatre, and not a chainsaw with a half-metre blade, the teeth brushed the skin of the brigadier’s knuckle and the blood careered up.

‘Please, please … the
sniper
…’

Two fingers had fallen away. The shriek was drowned by the noise of the saw’s motor, but the commander did not raise his voice.

‘Which sniper?’

‘The
best
sniper … He is …’

It was always the risk, when the chainsaw was brought to an older man, that the heart would fail. The commander never heard the name of the
sniper
, the
best
sniper. As the third of his fingers dropped away, the brigadier convulsed and his head sagged back.

‘Cut him into pieces, send him home. Charge them, his family, two thousand dinars for the fuel.’

His soft footfall slithered away down the corridor.

Major Karim Aziz tracked relentlessly after the dog, whistling every few minutes for it to wait for him. He thought that the man, this stranger who had come into his country and given him this ecstatic opportunity of triumph, sweated because the dog had a strong scent to follow.

And the man was tiring, and limping.

The sun was scorching hot above him, but was starting its slide. His own shadow was no longer at his feet but lay behind him. The escarpment, towards which the dog led him, would give the opportunity for him to shoot. Far behind him, in their wide line, the soldiers followed. Each time he whistled the dog sat and waited for him to reach it. Then he fondled the fur at the nape of its neck, whispered sweet things to it, and let it bound away on the trail.

When he stepped over slight seeping springs that would have been small torrents in winter and dried out in full summer, he saw the bootprints of the man, and the slighter prints of the child guide, who did not concern him. A man not near to exhaustion would still have been on the balls of his feet, but the prints were heavy, and one was favoured.

He had not seen them yet, but he would have the chance to shoot when, riddled with the heat and tiredness, they scaled the crevice gullies of the escarpment. The man and his guide would be at the foot of the escarpment an hour before the fall of day, and then the chance would be given him. Before dusk, he would have the man in his sights.

The message was transmitted to Baghdad, to the al-Rashid barracks.

Commander Yusuf knew only of key personnel in the armed forces when their files were handed to him and he started to probe their lives.

Who among the best marksmen serving in the army was considered supreme? Who had the ambition to crawl into the nest of snakes? Who could, with devious cunning, live a double life?

There was a profile in his mind of this marksman rated as the best. He did not yet have the paunch of middle age, he was vainly conceited and would boast of his shooting skill.

He sought out the company of high-ranking officers and enjoyed the privilege their company brought him. He was married into a powerful tribal group that provided access to the élite … From his long experience of smelling out traitors, the commander always believed that he could paint their portraits.

He settled in his chair and closed his eyes, and thought of the love of small children, and did not notice that outside the window, in the compound, the shadows lengthened and that the room around him darkened, and he waited comfortably for the answers to be sent back to him.