Holding the Zero (7 page)

The officer had come out of the bunker and stopped. Gus’s aim was on his back. It was as if the target stopped to blink in the sun after the darkness inside the bunker. He had fired. The rifle was fitted with a muzzle brake that reduced the recoil and the jump of the barrel to a minimum. His view through the sight had been constant. He could follow the flight of the bullet. Some called the vortex of the bullet’s journey the ‘wash’, others called it the ‘contrail’. Whatever it was, he could see it, a swirl and disturbance that fluttered the air. He had seen the bullet’s track all the way across the valley and he had seen it strike. Arms had gone high into the air, and the target had fallen.

Then the chatter of the machine-gun had begun.

He had tried and tried again to clear the face of the officer from his mind … The machine-gun that Haquim had sited played a pattern of fire onto the bunker above which was the radio antenna. There had been sporadic return fire. He understood why Haquim had left him, alone and with his guilt, to go back and position the machine-gun. With the officer gone, only a very brave man would have risked exposing himself to the battering of the machine-gun shells on the bunker. The
peshmerga
had pushed forward in a straggling line.

He had watched her, then lost her as she descended into the valley, and had seen her running up the far slope towards the ridge, the wire and the pennant. Through the telescopic sight, he could see her urge the men forward with a wild sweep of her arm. He had raked back across the ground, through the line of men with whom the boy ran, then found open ground and had seen Haquim limping behind them. When they were close to the wire and bunching to go through the corridors between the mines, slashing the view of his telescopic sight, he had seen the soldiers in flight from their bunkers. Weapons and helmets were thrown down. They took their wounded with them, but not the corpse of their officer.

She was on the roof of the command bunker snatching down the pennant. It was then that the guilt died, when he, Augustus Henderson Peake, shed the last trace of remorse.

She stood on the bunker’s flat roof, punching the clean, clear air around her in triumph.

He felt a desperate state of exhilaration, and was not shamed by it. Time after time, as the
peshmerga
gathered around and below her, she raised her fist to the skies.

The lines of the sight were on her in her moment of victory. If a marksman as good as himself had had that aim then she was dead. He collected up his equipment, stood and massaged the muscles in his legs to restore the circulation and stretched, arching his back to ease the stiffness.

Slowly, with an uneven, unsteady stride, Gus walked towards the bunkers.

The life of the corporal hung on a slender thread.

If he were believed his flight would be forgiven. If he were not, he would be shot as a deserter.

Across an endless wilderness of rock plains and marshes, up escarpment cliffs, down into gullies with swollen streams, he had led his men to safety. As the sun fell, he had reached the village and the company-sized unit of mechanized infantry.

He sat in the corridor outside the captain’s room in the biggest house in the village that was classified by the regime as a Victory City. The cries of his two wounded men echoed down the corridor. He sat on the floor with his hands clasped on his head. If his hands moved the guard kicked him. He recited in his mind, over and over, the story he had told the captain.

‘I often said to him that he should always use the cover of the communications trenches. I do not wish to speak ill of a martyred hero but he did not listen. Major Aziz of the Baghdad Military College can confirm that I attended his course two years ago. He taught us about the sniper. It was what he called “crack and thump”. You hear the crack beside you, then you hear the thump from the firing position. If the crack and the thump are together then the sniper is close. The major said that you would know how far away the sniper was by the time between the crack and the thump. It was between one and two seconds – so I think that is about seven hundred metres. We all fired but none of us, even with a good Dragunov, could hit the targets at that range. Only he, and he is the best, was accurate. It was a very expert sniper that killed the lieutenant. We are forbidden to use the radio, but it was impossible anyway to reach it because there was heavy machine-gun fire at the approach trench to that bunker. We had wounded, we were about to be overrun.

There were many scores of saboteurs attacking us. I have many times served my country in northern Iraq, but I never heard of a “primitive” who could shoot so straight at seven hundred metres with a rifle. It was my duty to report it.’

If they did not believe him he would be kicked again, hit around the head with a rifle butt, taken out of the building, stood against the wall and shot. It was the truth: in all the years he had fought in the north he had never confronted a ‘primitive’, a tribesman, who could shoot with accuracy at such a distance. He could hear the low voices behind the door as the captain and his two lieutenants discussed what he had told them. He had not mentioned that a woman led the final charge towards the bunkers because that would not have been believed.

The door swung open.

The captain stood over him, took the final breath from a cigarette, then ground it out against the corporal’s forehead. He screamed. He heard the rasping voice denounce him as a coward, as a disgrace to his unit. The kicks came fast and hard into his body. He had betrayed the sacred trust of the Iraqi army. The rifle butt crashed down on to the hands that protected his scalp. And then he smelled the stale old stench of the animals.

The goatherd had been brought into the corridor by two soldiers. His arms were held tight.

The corporal believed that his ribs were broken and he felt the blood on his face. He listened to what the goatherd told the captain, and it was a second thread on which his life rested.

‘It was a long shot that killed my friend who was a true and loyal servant of the Iraqi army, and the same long shot this morning took the honoured life of the officer. I saw the man who fires the long shots. Yesterday afternoon, before he went to walk in the night towards the place where he shot the officer, he sat outside my friend’s house. He has a big rifle, the devil’s rifle, bigger than I have and you have. I do not think he is a
peshmerga
. He wore clothes that also I have never seen before. It is only when he moves that you see him. If he does not move then he is like a rock or a pile of earth. I have never seen a man like this devil before.’

The corporal reached forward and took the ankle of the goatherd and held it tight, as if to thank him for the saving of his life.

He crawled to his feet and he was not kicked, not hit. He heard the captain inside his room shouting on the radio.

He whispered to the goatherd, ‘You did not tell them about the woman …’

‘I told them what would be believed.’

It was his birthday, and he had forgotten it.

When he had woken that morning, after three hours’ sleep, the children had been round the bed and had shaken him so that he could open the presents they had brought him. His elder son had given him a pen of sterling silver, and he had unwrapped the white shirt offered by his younger son. His wife’s present was a narrow gold ring that fitted easily onto the little finger of his right hand. He had kissed each of them, and thanked them hoarsely.

Major Karim Aziz had gone to work in his office at the Baghdad Military College, and in the afternoon he had locked his door, pulled down the blinds, put his feet on the desk and slept for two and a quarter precious hours. As he slept, the fingers of his left hand clutched the gold ring. Before drifting off, he had thought that it was as though Leila sought to bring him back to her, to wrestle him from the grasp of devils. It had been a good, deep sleep, free of dreams and nightmares.

He had returned home refreshed for the family meal in celebration of his forty-fifth birthday. The children had changed from their school uniforms to their best clothes, his wife wore a fine blouse of Indian silk, her father was in his favourite suit and her mother in the dress she took out of the cupboard only on special occasions. At another time, on another day, he would have criticized his wife for the extravagance of the presents and the cost of the food she served, and there was a bottle of Lebanese wine that had been imported across the Jordanian border. But the wine poured for him stayed in his glass, because he did not dare to cloud his mind. He picked at the rice and cubes of curried beef and ate little, because he didn’t dare to fill his stomach with food. What hurt most, they all tried so hard to make it a happy day for him … and he could tell them nothing.

He resented what they had spent on him. Only at work, only at the Baghdad Military College, was his life not subject to the sapping frustration caused by the shortages. An American had said that Iraq would be bombed back to the Stone Age of history.

And what else was there to talk about around the table? Any conversation inevitably entailed more discussion of the shortages, whether in the street markets, at school or the children’s hospital. He ate little and drank nothing, and the silences around the table grew longer.

The telephone rang. Wafiq ran to answer it, hurrying to escape the quiet of the celebration.

A year after his marriage he had been posted to the Soviet Union for six months to learn infantry tactics. He had written to his wife twice every week while he was away, and babbled conversation to her of what he had seen for days after his return. Two years later he had been in Lebanon’s Beka’a Valley teaching those tactics to militiamen, and he had told her everything when he had come home. On leave from the battle fronts of Khorramshahr and Susangerd, he had written home of the war with Iran – careful letters that would not offend the censors – and he had talked to her on leave, walking on the esplanades beside the Tigris river where he would not be heard, of the horror of the street fighting. He had held back nothing of his times in Kirkūk and Mosul and Arbīl in the north. Everything he had seen in Kuwait City, at the start and at the end, when he had fled from the advance of the American tanks on the charnel-house road through the Mutla Pass, he had shared with her, because he loved her. Now, he had nothing to talk of, and he pecked at his food, and her eyes never left the ring she had given him.

The boy came back, said the call was for him.

He pushed aside his plate, scraped back his chair, and went into the hallway. He lifted the telephone and gave his name.

The call was from a duty officer at the al-Rashid camp of the Military Intelligence, the Estikhabarat. He was ordered to attend the al-Rashid camp at nine o’clock the following morning. The call was terminated.

He rocked on his feet. It was a familiar pattern, known about by every officer of his rank and experience but never talked of. The Estikhabarat always summoned a suspect to the al-Rashid barracks, but watched his home through the night to see if he fled, and to block him if he did. He knew of such calls, and of the desks cleared the following day by strangers, then occupied by new men, and of the officers who were never seen again after they had travelled to the al-Rashid complex.

Major Karim Aziz breathed hard, and the sweat ran on his stomach and down the small of his back.

Around the table, beyond his sight and reach, his family – everyone he loved – was waiting for his return and wondering why he was so troubled.

He went into the bedroom, took his heavy coat from the hook on the door, and knelt to pull the sports bag out from under the bed. From the small cupboard beside the bed, always locked and closed from the sight of his wife and his sons, he took a Makharov automatic pistol and a single hand grenade. It was possible, with planning, for a general to cross the frontier if he used his authority, or his relatives, or a dignitary, but for a major at the Baghdad Military College, with his family, it would be a journey of exceptional difficulty. He put the hand grenade under his shirt, tightened his belt so that it could not slip down, and reassured himself that his fingers could feel the loop of the pin.

He went back into the dining room. The table had been cleared. Leila was coming out of the kitchen with the cake her mother had made that day. It was iced, decorated, it would be sugary sweet, the cake he liked best. He kissed Wafiq, and the boy stared down at his table place; then he kissed Hani and the tears ran on the child’s cheeks; then his wife; then her mother and father.

He could tell them nothing.

All of them, the officers who went under orders to the al-Rashid camp, believed in the faint hope of survival, went with the hesitant innocence of lambs herded to the butcher’s knife, deluding themselves that the anxiety was unfounded.

He stood in the kitchen doorway, holding the sports bag, and faced them. Behind him was the hallway, the front door, the concrete pad where the car was parked, the shadows of the poorly lit street. If the anxiety was well founded, the agents of the Estikhabarat would already be in those shadows, watching his house. Sometimes the bodies were brought back, if their families paid a few dinars for the bullets that had been used.

He turned away from them, switched off the kitchen light, then went out through the back door. He slipped past the new building where her parents slept, and scrambled over the wall at the end of the yard.

He would spend one more night beside the water tank on the flat roof. And, if they were waiting for him, if they were there to take him, he would pull the pin from the RG-42 high-explosive fragmentation grenade. Major Karim Aziz knew of no other road he should follow.

He thought it was his duty, in the name of Arab nationalism, socialistic modernism and his country, to go to the roof and pray that all was not known and that the bastard would step into the handkerchief of light on the driveway. He wondered if, without him, they would eat the cake … He walked briskly. Alone, without the responsibility of his family, he could again cloak himself with the assurance, confidence, self-esteem that marked him down as a master of the military science of sniping. It was why he had been recruited.