Holding the Zero (32 page)

Chapter Fourteen

‘You saw it?’

Gus stood over Haquim. They were under a great overhang of rock where the wounded were sheltered from the sun, and where the survivors crouched silent, beaten in fear.

‘Yes.’

‘And you did nothing?’

Haquim was the only target available to Gus. He had known she would not retreat, and had presumed she was dead. When they had reached the rendezvous, gone into the grey light of the shade, moved through the wounded in search of Haquim, Gus had expected to find a slight, shrouded figure, with the head hidden. It had not been conceivable to him that, while a man of them was left standing, they would fail to retrieve the body.

Haquim, pathetically, shrugged. ‘I did what I could.’

‘Which was nothing.’

‘Don’t insult me.’

‘You did nothing – it’s the truth that insults you.’

‘I gathered a group of men. I went back. I saw her taken away. I could do nothing. I would have given up lives …’

He saw himself far ahead, in the distance of time, in his grandfather’s kitchen making coffee, with the photograph on the window ledge above the sink, and explaining in stuttered words that Meda had been captured, abandoned, that he himself had not protected her. He played the bully.

‘Well done, I congratulate you. Because of the risk involved you abandoned her.’

‘More would have been killed.’

‘You owed it to her to have tried.’

‘I am a
mustashar
with responsibility for my men’s lives. I cannot give up lives for a gesture.’

‘I hope you can live with it.’

He did not know how he could live with it. He had kissed her and there was no longer the feel of her lips on his, and no longer the taste of her. He had nothing by which to remember her – not a bandanna, a handkerchief, not even a soiled field-dressing that carried her stain. In one week, she had come to mean more to him than anyone he had known in his life, and he owned not a single trifle of her. For the first time, Haquim lifted his head, stared back into Gus’s eyes, and bit back. ‘I am not frightened of the weight of responsibility … There was nothing I could have done.’

‘Live with it and sleep at night with it.’

‘If you knew more of war you would not abuse me. The lesson of war, as I have learned, is that you do not throw away what is most precious,
life
, like empty cigarette cartons. Life is not to be wasted. Can I tell you something?’

‘Another damn excuse?’

‘The soldiers held her before she was put in the truck, so that a family could confront her. Each of the family took their turn to spit on her. To you she was the symbol to follow, and to me – against all my judgements. For you she was romance, for me she was a vehicle that gave a small chance of success. For them, those she claimed to speak for, she was a vision of evil. That was the last I saw of her, with their spit on her face.’

He heard his own stumbled answers to the confused persistence of his grandfather’s questions. He saw the steady gaze, and honesty, of Haquim. He bent down, squatted, and reached forward to take the wearied, grizzled face in his hands.

‘How was she?’

‘That is an idiotic question.’

‘Tell me how she was.’

‘The arrogance had gone from her. You saw it, when she contradicted me, the arrogance that each time she was right, and I was wrong. You saw her cheapen my experience – how many times? She was not a fighting woman but a pinioned girl. She was no longer tall, she was small and afraid. She was not a leader, she was ordinary.

When they held her, and the family spat on her, she was without value.’

Gus crawled into the darkest corner of the overhang, and lay on the ground. The power of the rifle was in his hand, but that, too, was without value. His face was to the rock, where he could not see the wounded; he saw nothing but the bewilderment of his grandfather, and heard nothing but his grandfather’s questions, and the thought of her fear was a blow to his heart.

In the early evening, a cloud passing over the face of a full moon casting a shadow, Commander Yusuf reached the headquarters of Fifth Army.

He had the right to be tired, but fatigue was not apparent in this slight, wire-framed man. He had been driven, with his escort, from Basra where he had been engaged on pressing business, but the business in Basra took second place to the developments in the north. It was said of him that, above all, he was a family man, and liked nothing better than to be with his grandchildren, to indulge them, sit them on his knee and tell them stories, stroke their hair with neat-boned fingers.

The title ‘Commander’ was self-given. He had no rank in the echelons of the army, nor the need of it. His authority ranged over the lowliest, most humble of soldiers in the slit trenches facing the Kuwaiti border, and over the most senior generals of the High Command. He was a man who hunted for signs of dissent against the regime he served, who searched night and day for evidence of treason. There were few of any status in uniform, from bottom to top, who would not have shivered at his arrival in the camp where they were based.

Commander Yusuf saw himself as a shield behind which the regime and, above all, the President could feel secure. The work of that shield was torture. The same fingers that caressed and smoothed the hair of his grandchildren were equally adept in the arts of inflicting crude pain on those who were assumed to be enemies of the state. He was always busy. His work left little time for him to enjoy the youth of his grandchildren. He was rarely at home. His life was lived at pace because the twin threats of dissent and treason were ever present. Before he had been in Basra he had been in Karbalā, before Karbalā he had been in Ar Ramādī, before Ar Ramādī he had been in Ba’qūbah. Because he would be among the first hoisted up under any conveniently close lamp-post if the regime fell, he devoted his waking hours to the search for dissenters and traitors.

He had the appearance of a junior functionary, the look of a man who organized railway timetables or administered a minor section of a hospital, as he carried his briefcase from his car and walked to that part of the compound that housed the section of the Estikhabarat. It was said of him, in bitterness, that where he came the birds no longer sang.

He sat alone in a far corner of the mess. He had turned the high-backed chair round so that he faced the drawn curtains of the window and the wall.

An orderly had brought Major Karim Aziz a plate of bread and cheese, an apple, a glass of milk, and had asked if he wished to drink whisky. He had declined. He shared the bread and cheese with his dog, and gave it the apple core. He was sipping the milk when Scout growled. Then Aziz heard low voices and the shuffle of feet on the carpet behind him.

He shunned company because the earlier elation was gone and he thought himself a man who had been cheated. The force of the
peshmerga
was in flight. The former brigade position at the crossroads was reoccupied. At first light, the next morning, units of Fifth Army would move back into Tarjil, and by the afternoon probing patrols would have reached the Victory City of Darbantaq. By the end of the next day the narrow corridor would have been emptied of the saboteurs. The chance to hunt the sniper – one to one, skill to skill, eye to eye, bullet to bullet – was lost to him.

The growl had become a snarl.

He stared at the curtain and the wall and imagined the man tramping back towards the distant mountains, walking in a ragged column bowed by defeat. He would be gone in the morning. There was no work for him in Tarjil or at the Victory City. And then the future hit him. The future was …

The snarl was a yelp of pain.

He started up in his seat and his sudden movement, as he twisted to look behind him, knocked the table and spilled the milk. A small man, older than himself, with flecked, cropped grey hair and a complexion of extraordinary smoothness, was crouched by the back legs of the chair. Aziz had not heard his approach. The narrow, fleshless fingers of one hand held the skin at the nape of the dog’s neck, while the other played gently over the fur on its head. His uniform of drab olive green had no rank insignia on the shoulders and no ribbons on the chest. In his breast pocket was a neat line of ballpoint pens, as though he were a bureaucrat, but he held the dog with expert power so that it did not dare to struggle, and stroked its head as if it were a child. Four men stood behind him, sweat staining their armpits and blood spattered on their tunics and trousers.

The dog quivered.

‘I am Commander Yusuf, and I am honoured to meet the sniper who has delivered to us this misguided peasant woman. I almost feel sympathy for her because she is not more, not less, than a plaything for others. It must be comforting to be able to shoot with such accuracy even when the target is a person of so little worth.’

‘Would you let go of my dog?’

‘I call her “worthless” – do I offend you? I assure you that offence is not intended.

There are some here who believe she was of importance, but I do not share that opinion.

It is the mark of our Arab society that some of our heroic forces feel demeaned by fighting against saboteurs led by a
woman
. It is an affront to their dignity and manhood that a woman should better them in combat.’

‘You are hurting my dog. Please, let go of it.’

‘They call her a witch. It is understandable. A witch has supernatural powers. Our heroic forces wish to offer her such powers as an excuse for their own failure, and their own treachery. She will be a victim, and it will give me no pleasure to hang her, but that will be necessary to satisfy the simple minds of our soldiers. I need to know from her only the extent of the treachery of officers who betrayed their trust. Then she hangs. The officers, Major Aziz, concern me.’

He listened to the purring voice. He had never met the man before, nor seen him, but had heard the name. It was whispered in the corridors of the Baghdad Military College, at the headquarters of the armies, and in the command posts of divisions and regiments. It was said, in the whispers, that none who faced him in the cells, whatever their courage, could resist the persuasiveness of his interrogation techniques.

‘I have no interest in those who betray their trust. I am a soldier, I do my duty. Would you, please, release my dog?’

‘I watch, Major Aziz, for the trail made by the belly of a snake and I follow the slime of that trail. The trail leads me, always, to the nest of the snakes. When the nest has been found, it is best to pour petrol into its hole and set fire to the petrol. The snake is a creature of treachery. It is discovered where least expected, then it must be followed, then killed … I am honoured to meet a man who knows where his duty lies.’

As he stood, the hand released the nape of the dog’s neck. The dog, coiled like a spring, hurled itself at the man’s ankle and bit hard. Commander Yusuf did not flinch, did not cry out. He seemed to watch the dog for a moment as it worried at his ankle. The strength of his kick was sufficient to break the hold of the dog’s teeth and propel it against the wall below the drawn curtains, where it fell back gasping.

‘Why should your dog regard me as a threat, Major Aziz, when all I offer it is kindness?’

The brigadier was on the floor of his cell, crumpled, finished with perhaps for an hour.

The door was left open so that he could hear everything from the adjacent cell. He could not see through the open door because his eyes were closed by swelling, nor could he feel the rough concrete on which he lay because his fingers were numbed by the pain from the extraction of his nails. He was the Boot, a man credited with brutal strength and fortitude.

He had not yet broken, not yet given names.

The brigadier knew of the reputation of the little puny bastard with the voice that was never raised, and with the thin-boned fingers that had held the pliers. The reputation said his patience was great and failure was never accepted. He had tried not to cry out, even when the pain ran like rivers in him, because to cry out was to weaken her as she waited for them to return to her cell. He heard sometimes her whimpered cries, and once he heard her scream, and he thought that they burned her. What they had done to him, what they now did to her, was as nothing to the agony that awaited them both if they did not break, because the bastard’s reputation was for a refusal to be beaten.

When he had seen her first, she had been vibrant and so patronizing of him – but his ears heard her fear and the eyes of his mind saw the cigarettes ground out on her, the fingers prising into her. And when she had cried, screamed, weakened him, they would come back to his cell. He did not know how long he could last, but he knew that when he broke, others, now trusting in his courage, would follow him into the dark cells to await the coming of Commander Yusuf.

Isaac Cohen heard the radio transmissions as they were decyphered by his computers.

He felt a crippling weight of sadness. She was not one of their own, but the grief was as acute as if she had been.

In Tel Aviv, there were old men of the Mossad, retired and gathering now in the pavement cafés on Ben Yehuda, who had spoken of that pitiful and helpless sadness when the news had leaked of Elie Cohen’s capture in Damascus and of his execution in Simiramis Square. So much power at their disposal and none of it able to pluck out a patriot from a cell and from the gallows’ platform … There were the veterans of the Agency, whom he had met on Washington visits, who had spoken of that same burden of sadness when the news had filtered through of the taking in Beirut, and the subsequent death, of Bill Buckley – and a greater power had been worthless.

He remembered her as she had been when he had seen her in the mountains: certain, confident, at the edge of conceit, dismissive of his help. The torches had played on her eyes, and he had known why men followed her. He wanted to remember the certainty, the confidence, because then he did not imagine her in the cells of Fifth Army. The old men that he’d known had said to him that when Elie Cohen was in the cells in Damascus, they could not sleep, rest, laugh, make love to their women, could not live. He would talk to the sniper when the remnant army straggled back and hear how it had happened, and he might curse him for allowing it to happen … He was not the lapdog of the Americans. If his sadness permitted it, he would call them in the morning, but that night he would think of her, and say a prayer for her.