Holding the Zero

Chapter Twenty

It was a landscape without pity, a place too barren for the civilization known by the watchers who dribbled towards their positions on the high ground above the valley. Too remote for settlements, too unyielding for cultivation, too boggy or stony or steep for the grass necessary for grazing animals. But each of them, coming to their viewpoints, recognized a savage, cold magnificence.

As they slowly descended, the crows were still wary of the feast presented to them, but were gathering courage as their shadows swept the stone slab, and the body lying on it.

On one side of the valley, facing the watchers, the shadows were lengthening and were darker. On the opposite side, where other watchers searched for a target to hold their attention, the sinking sunlight stripped the ground of cover.

None of the watchers believed that they had long to wait.

The dissembling heat was long gone as Aziz, relentlessly and remorselessly, searched the far slope with his closest focus on the plateau.

It surprised him that he had not yet seen the man. He knew that his own stamina would not survive another night and into another day, that he must force the issue in that late afternoon while the light gave him advantage. The skill of the dog would not last without food through another night, and nor would he. He reflected that the time was close when he must push his luck and his fortune. And he reflected, too, on the core conditions of the counter-sniper. The words he used in the lecture room at the Baghdad Military College, and on the range outside the city, played in his mind. Pro-action or re-action. The counter-sniper could either locate his target and fire the first shot in the combat, or he could lure the enemy into shooting at a false target, identify the firing position, then strike back. It was the great dilemma, but the choice was not his, because he had failed to locate the target, and the issue must be forced.

He ruffled the dog’s collar. The panting was not so fierce, it was now cooler in the cavity under the stone. His tiredness and his hunger worried him. If he did not shoot soon he was anxious that his hands, in fatigue, would shake and his eyes would be misted, and that – from the hunger – his concentration would waver. He talked softly to himself, and to the dog, as if that would calm the shake, clear the mist and hold the concentration. He imagined that he stood at the lectern in the lecture theatre at the Baghdad Military College, with students arrayed in front of him.

‘It is a lonely world, and a world where only the strongest win. It is a world of physical strain and psychological stress. It is a world of vendettas, inhabited by eccentrics and solitary men who have, above all, the hunter’s spirit, who chase the challenge from which they cannot escape.

‘It is a world where time has stood still, where the past is the present and the future is not recognized. More than eighty years ago, a tank first saw combat and in that time the tank has changed beyond belief, in armour protection, mobility, firepower. The artillery has developed since those days and now relies on laser sights, night-vision equipment that highlights targets believing themselves invisible, and the accuracy given by the computer’s chip. But, in my world, the sniper’s world, little has changed.

‘I glory in the age of my art. I am soft-skinned, without armour. My ’scope, the barrelling of my rifle and the quality of my ammunition have changed little in those eighty years. I do not hide behind the advances of technology.

‘I live because I employ the old arts of fieldcraft and concealment, because of the patience I can muster, because of my skill.

‘I belong to myself.’

There were always blank and baffled faces staring at him from the raised seats in the lecture theatre.

He would do it in a few minutes, send the dog, because the lowering sun would make it the optimum time for success.

Aziz could see, when he raised the elevation on his ’scope sight, broke the search at the level of the plateau, a small knot of people – men and a woman in a pink blouse – sitting on the distant ridge, beyond the range of the Dragunov. *** He tried, and tried without success, to control the clutter of his thoughts.

The view through the ’scope’s lens, over the rocks, grass, slopes, shadows, bracken, bushes and a jutting slab of stone, threw up the faces. A shepherd gazed at the peace around him… A lieutenant paused in the sunshine as he emerged from the darkness of a bunker… The officer was going into the command post… But the faces were of the dead.

He was responsible. Was he evil? Psychopathic? Could he shelter behind the comfort of the excuse that he served a cause? He had not known them. He had killed men whose names he did not know. Was it wrong? There was no-one to tell him, no-one to give him an answer. Not his grandfather, or the people who had helped him. No message from good old George, smoking himself to bloody death. No-one could say to Gus Peake whether he had done wrong and he didn’t know himself.

He saw the pale features of Omar and then they were blocked from him by the fluttered wingspan of the boldest crows. Then he saw the beak rise and fall on the face, and others came and fought around the boy’s head.

He tilted the sight savagely and the view ravaged over the valley wall and the plateau, up to the ridge beyond. There were soldiers in combat uniform there, and a small slightly built man in olive fatigues who stood apart.

He knew again that he had much for which to be grateful to the boy. The faces were gone, and the guilt at their deaths had been put aside.

‘Come on, sir. I think you are hurt worse than I am… And you have travelled with a reputation, while I have only silver spoons. I think the reputation must make it harder for you. Be quick, because soon the sun is in my lens. Hurry it…’

Rybinsky had the sandwiches and passed them round, but Sarah watched the crows at the body and refused. Joe ate and shared his water bottle with the Russian.

Rybinsky, between mouthfuls, said, ‘They are here, I know that because the body is here. The body is the glove of the challenge. I have two to one against the foreigner from the Mossad on the hill, I am prepared to take other bets. Sarah, I give you evens on the Iraqi, I think that is fair. What do you want, Joe, Augustus or the Iraqi? The odds I offer are good. The Mossad wagered fifty American dollars.’

‘You are a pervert, Rybinsky,’ Sarah said.

‘I am merely a man who enjoys an entertainment. Joe?’

Joe thought for a moment, as if he weighed the form. ‘Twenty on the Iraqi.’

Sarah grimaced. ‘I feel ashamed of myself and disgusted by you but twenty-five on our man at two to one against, yes?’

Their hands met; the bets were sealed.

Rybinsky frowned. ‘What confuses me, why is he here? Why is the foreigner here -for what? I am here to make money, Sarah is here because she has compassion, and she can smoke grass, Joe is here because his inflated wage is tax-free and he lessens a little the chance of children being maimed. The Mossad on the hill is here because Iraq is the enemy of his country. We all have the best of reasons for being here, except him. Why is he here? I do not understand.’

Joe took a sandwich and offered his water. He said grimly as he gulped, ‘If either of you sees him, makes a gesture, points, identifies or distracts him, I’ll kill you – with my own hands.’

It had been a long journey for the commander. He had travelled by car on the metalled road, then by jeep up rough tracks, then on foot. That he had embarked on the journey was a record of his nervous anxiety. He recognized the vulnerability of his own situation.

The man had been in his hand, had slipped through his fingers. If the man escaped him, it might be whispered by the many who hated him that the escape had been facilitated. The many who had cause to loathe him could whisper that the loyalty to the regime of Commander Yusuf should be questioned. If his loyalty were to be investigated, his life was threatened. Suspicion was sufficient for the taking of a life, and those of a family. He thought, in his extreme anxiety, of the men searching a room, stripping the possessions of two sweet small children.

‘Who will win?’

Perhaps the officer hated him. Perhaps – and he would not know it – he had interrogated the father, brother, cousin or friend of the officer and was loathed.

‘It is not in our hands,’ the officer said quietly. ‘It is in God’s hands.’

He had known where he would find him, and was not disappointed.

Willet saw the solitary figure on the bench and the wreath of smoke blowing from his face. He strode forward, along the embankment, through the crowds who pressed around him and scuttled for their trains and buses home.

He thought that what he had done that day was what was owed to Augustus Henderson Peake. He had phoned those individuals who had helped Peake, and told them where he was and why they were, in all likelihood, responsible for his death.

A cigarette was thrown away; another was lit.

‘Ah, the telephone freak – the man with the conscience. I’ve been hearing what you’ve been up to.’

‘I came because I wanted you to know that I hold you in contempt.’

‘That’s trite.’

‘Listen to me – he was decent and honourable. He may have been immature and ill-equipped, but he didn’t deserve the open doors that will kill him for nothing.’

‘Trite and romantic.’

‘He was sent to his death, and you knew that was the way it would end,’ Willet barked.

‘I think, from within your little army shell, that you have learned surprisingly little of human nature.’

‘I know about exploitation and manipulation.’

There was a small smile, that of an older man forced to explain the obvious to a juvenile. ‘Hear me out. We deal in the commodity of grown men who make their own choices. Around the world, in the darker corners, at any day of the week, there are a hundred men like Peake. They work for aid agencies, they are businessmen, tourists, journalists, academics, whatever. They paddle around, and if they come back they are debriefed. They are volunteers. We’re not nannies and he’s not a victim. He is an adult, and he is grateful to me – not that he knows it – because I gave him a chance of personal fulfilment.’

A tired grin, and the cigarette was tossed towards the clutch of pigeons.

‘I think you’ve shortchanged him, Captain Willet, and have not recognized the dream in us all, and the utter thrilling excitement, which so few of us are ever fortunate enough to feel. I believe that Augustus Peake would find you rather dull company… Ah, my last one.’

The empty packet was thrown skilfully into the rubbish bin, and the cigarette was lit.

‘You know so little. Did his grandfather tell you about blood spilled a half-century ago? Were you told that men died in a mountain village so that his grandfather would live? No? There was a debt handed down, grandfather to grandson, and an obligation that it be, someday and somehow, repaid. If you think it was exploitation and manipulation you are merely naive. Before he left, he sat where you sit and thanked me for the chance given him – you wouldn’t understand.’

George wandered away, as though further explanations were no longer necessary, leaving Ken Willet behind him, bruised.

At that moment, Aziz thought of the future. The future – if he waited for the darkness and climbed back the way he had come – was his family being made to pay for the bullet or the rope, and was his body in the hands of the torturers, and was his life. The future was also – if under the darkness he went down to the river then up the far side and out of Iraqi territory – the existence without dignity or pride of the rootless exile. In the future, he would never walk with great men. This would be the last opportunity.

He pulled the dog from behind him, grasping tightly at the nape of its neck and dragging it into his body. It was only an animal, a trained beast that was eager to please, but it had the power to destroy the future and maintain the present. He held it against his chest and murmured the commands in its ear. It was the moment for which, over many hours, he had trained the dog.

He trusted the dog, as he trusted his rifle. He trusted that the dog and the rifle would hold the zero. He had no other chance but to lay his life with the animal. He saw the bright light in the eyes of the dog and felt the whip of its tail.

With a sudden movement, as he whispered to the dog, he threw it out from the cover of the cavity under the stone slab and towards the track he had come down in the night. It landed, stumbled, then pounded away from him. He could not know whether the dog would respond to what he had whispered in its ear. A great void settled around him, with its warmth and its breathing gone.

He could not see it. Lying under the slab, its descent on the track was hidden from him.

The void was filled. Aziz had never known such pumped-up, electric excitement.

As Gus tracked over the lengthening shadows, there was a fleeting movement at the extreme edge of the lens’ view. He breathed hard, then edged the ’scope back. His breathing came faster. He found the spaniel.

The end had started and, if he missed the trick of it, he was the loser, and dead.

Its head was low on the path as it came down, as if there was still a scent to be found after the rain, and still bootmarks to be recognized. It came fast, without hesitation. He thought it a fine animal, but pushed the distraction from his mind. His view was off the slope and the plateau across the valley, where the man waited with his rifle. Gus must follow the dog’s run. Everything that had seemed of importance to him now rested with the dog.

It came to the stream and the crows scattered from the body, rose above the bloodied carcass. It leaped into the fast-water pool beside the smooth stone and he saw that it cooled itself, bathed, and drank. The crows shouted at the interruption and flew circles round the dog.

As the dog came onto his bank of the stream, there was a sudden rainbow cloud over it as it shook the water beads, diamonds, from its coat. He thought that the dog was the man’s last throw. The dog was there to be shot, to be sacrificed, had been loosed for Gus to fire at, and show himself. When it had shaken itself it squatted and defecated, then began to circle and to search. The dog was a decoy, as important as a plastic pigeon in corn stubble, as valuable as a papier-mache head poking up over a parapet. He wondered how long the dog had been with the man, how much love had been given it, how much care, and how much misery the man now felt having loosed it, or if the life of the dog did not matter to him.

The crows were back again on the body, their feast resumed.

The dog found the scent in rocks and mud and grass. It came up the path that shepherds had made over generations with their goats and on towards the plateau. Gus was torn: he must follow the dog, watch its progress. He had not seen the point from which the dog was sent, but he had taken note of the strata of the plateau where he had first seen it.

Which trail must he follow? The one that would lead him to the man, or the one that would save himself? Near to where he had first seen the dog was bracken, a bush and a bilberry patch; close by was a stone slab with a dark curtain of shadow beneath it.

The dog came up the path and followed his boots’ tread from the night.

His attention, concentration, was divided and he knew that that was the man’s intention. The sun teetered on the far ridge. If he should lift his gaze, he would be blinded by it.

Gus held the rifle so that the ’scope sight covered the ground where he had first seen the dog, but he twisted his head fractionally so that he could watch its approach. He thought he was losing and was out-thought.

… The memory came back – he should have shut it out and could not – of the officer who had come to the school in his last year. Gus, the sixth-former – Gus in the current-affairs session – Gus listening to the paratroop officer, a Falklands veteran of the previous year – the officer talking about combat, but dressing the reality up in the jargon of duty, stoicism, patriotism because that’s what he would have thought was right for the kids to hear – Gus realizing that the officer was using fantasy bullshit, not telling them the truth of clinging to life, game time over, survival – Gus, afterwards, alone beside the cricket pitch, wondering if the ultimate truth, never spoken of by the officer, was total and exhilarated, heart-pounding ecstasy…

Across the valley, did he feel the mind-bending, addictive, narcotic excitement – or was he sad that the dog might die?

The dog paused at the point on the path where Gus had come off it, where he had started to crawl away from it, and searched, and Gus’s finger tightened on the towel rope.

Sarah said faintly, ‘It’ll find him, the dog will find him.’

Joe said, ‘Don’t interfere, just watch. It’s like nature, it takes its course. You are not a part of it.’

Rybinsky said, ‘If you interfered you would break the bet. And, more important, if you interfere you destroy the supreme moment in the lives of them both.’

The dog – Gus was forty yards from it and saw it clearly – scampered in a small loop round that place on the path. Its nostrils were up, flared.

He had been told that a dog could find ground scent and air scent; there wouldn’t be much from the ground for it to work off after the night rain, but the air scent would be heavy with his sweat and urine where he lay, and from the rucksack, which lay ten yards away.

It turned off the path, came slowly towards the rucksack and towards Gus, following the trail on which he had made the slug crawl. The care he had used to avoid breaking the twig stems of the bushes was sufficient to have hidden his movements from later discovery by a ’scope at long distance but was wasted effort against a dog coming close.

It knew the source of the smell was near. He recognized the quality of the dog’s training because it did not blunder forward or bound right up to the source of the smell. From a long way back, out with old Billings – and from a short way back, in the pub with the sergeants – he had been told of the difficulty of teaching a dog not to run over the smell source. It hesitated and strained against its instinct, then it went rigid, with the right paw cocked and the eyes wide, its neck stretched out, and it pointed. The body of the dog pointed towards the rucksack. He could see every hair on its head, the claws on the paw, the saliva at its neat little mouth.

The aim of the rifle would be on the dog and on the ground ahead of it.

He thought the man would now be breathing hard, squinting into the ’scope, locking the butt against his shoulder, feeling for the trigger, and searching the shallow area of ground the dog marked for him.

The end of the towel rope was between his fingers. He gripped it, took up the slack until it was taut, then jerked it.

It was a slight movement. The cap filled with stones and embedded with bracken fronds would have juddered. The polished Full Metal Jacket bullets would have rolled.

The rucksack would have swayed. Only the keenest eye, at 750 yards, aided by a sight, would have seen the motions of the hat over the rucksack and the gleam as the low sun caught the twisting bullets.

He hoped, had to, that he had trapped the attention of the man.

The dog’s chest heaved, and it maintained the point.

He pulled sharply. The hat would slide away. The bullets would shimmer and fall. The rucksack would surge sideways as if a hunted target tried better to hide himself from the dog.

Gus did not know whether he had done enough to kill a man.

He was surprised.

He had thought better of his friend.

The dog pointed for him. Ahead of the point was an upstanding rock surrounded by a meld of downed bracken and sprouting bilberry. Aziz’s track through the ’scope sight had gone a minimum of a dozen times past the rock and not lingered on it because it had seemed to him too obvious a place for a sniper of quality to choose for concealment.

But there had been movement at the rock, he had seen it, and there had been two moments of bright reflected light that had caught the lowering sun. He had blinked, then slipped a finger from the trigger guard and wiped hard at his eyes, which were old for the work and starting imperceptibly to fail him, and he saw the olive-green shape.

On the shape, indistinct, bracken and bilberry were set as camouflage.

He thought the clear, angled line of the shape was the shoulder of the man, his friend.

His eyes smarted and he wiped them again. The dog he loved – seldom admitting it -in whom he trusted, had not backed off from the movement, and still pointed at the target.

The wind had not risen and not fallen; no adjustment was necessary to that turret or to the distance turret.

It was said amongst the best of the snipers, those with whom he wished to walk, that they should cultivate the sixth sense, the intuition of danger, but Major Karim Aziz was too tired, too wearied, to recall what he had read or what he knew.

His last thought, before he fired into the chest of the body, where the clear lines did not match the lie of the ground, was that the man had disappointed him by choosing a place to hide as obvious as the upstanding rock.

The crash of the shot burst in his ears, and the butt hammered against the bone of his shoulder.

The crack.

The gabble of syllables in his throat.

The thump.

Gus screamed.

The scream came from deep in his gut, from far down in his throat. The scream was pain, shock. He tilted his head up so that the scream would echo over the space of the valley, and he gave the final ravaging pull to the towel rope.

When the scream died, when the rucksack toppled and was still, there was a small silence. Then the crows rose from the body, chorused the scream and gave it strength.

It was how Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard would have done it, and Crum and Corbett, and Forbes, and the glassmen who were Lord Lovat’s gamekeepers. It was what Kulikov had done when he lay beside Zaitsev, and Konings had fired.

After the scream, the quiet fell, and the birds circled and dived again.

His ’scope roved close to where he had first seen the dog on the far side of the valley.

He saw the face. It was, because nothing had altered with time, as the old men would have predicted. It was grey against the shadow under the stone slab. Nothing was different since Konings had fired, and Kulikov had screamed, and Zaitsev had seen the face, the target.

Gus took the deep breath to still the beat of his heart, then let the air slowly slip from his lungs, held it – began the slow and steady squeeze of the trigger.

Sarah’s head ducked to her knees and the first tears gleamed on her cheeks.

Joe swigged on the water bottle, and threw it – half full – away from him.

Rybinsky reached in his hip pocket for the roll of American dollars, peeled off a twenty, and passed it to Joe, but it was not taken and fluttered loose, drifting in the wind towards the ridge of the valley.

Further down the slope, the dog still pointed.

At the bottom of the slope, the crows again pecked at their feast, undisturbed by the moment.

Across the valley, the commander swore, turned away, and thought of the children who were precious to him and the enemies who would gather.

The sun teetered on the ridge, blood-crimson red, and its flame seemed dulled.

It was the last moment in which Major Karim Aziz, skilled instructor and failed traitor, husband and father, could touch the present. When the moment of triumph passed – and it was clear in his mind – he must confront the past and the future.

To touch the present, the triumph, he squirmed forward from the cavity, and he felt the aching stiffness, the coming cramp pains.

He could not see, from the back of the cavity, the triumph. He must witness it, indulge himself. Then he would rightfully walk with the great men of history. He could not yet see the body and the now useless rifle of the man he had thought of as his friend. At that great range, Aziz did not realize that the angle of the dog’s head had shifted fractionally, that the line of the dog’s eyes and nose was towards open ground twenty paces beyond the upstanding rock.

Without witnessing it, the triumph was diminished.

He lifted his head higher.

He did not hear the shot, did not see the vortex of the bullet’s swirl, he did not feel the strike of the bullet. He was thrown back into the depth of the cavity.

Gus stood, stretched, then bent down to pick up the ejected cartridge case, and pocketed it.

He trembled.

The bracken he had spread over his body, his head and the rifle barrel cascaded down to his boots.

He left behind him the smoothed hollow where he had lain through a part of a night and the whole of a day, and the length of towel rope that was the mark of a killer’s deceit.

He walked, awkward and swaying, to the rucksack and could not still the shiver in his hand as he untied the towel’s knot to it. Then he dropped the hat and the two polished bullets into it. It was only when he lifted the rucksack to throw it on his shoulder that he saw the clean pencil-sized hole in its fabric.

He walked on, where before he had crawled, with a drunken stride. There would be guns on the far ridge, at the extreme of their range, but he did not care.

It was over.

Where there had been excitement there was now only a desperate emptiness that numbed him.

He came to the dog and heard the low, throttled growl. If he had died it would have been because of the dog. It did not back away from him and had no fear of him, and the hackles rose on its neck. He had watched the path of the bullet towards the man who had trained the dog, and in two long seconds the excitement had drained, as he saw the man pitched back into darkness, and he did not know whether the man was wounded, in pain, bled, or was dead.

Gus reached down, grasped the scruff of the dog’s neck and lifted it – as old Billings lifted dogs – and he slid its small shape up under the weight of his smock, and he thought that was the least he could do for the man who had hunted him and who had been beaten only by the scream. He was crushed by the emptiness in his soul, and he did not know of the wild, thrilled excitement that he had given to the man he had shot.

He did not know that he would shoot again, in two weeks, on the range at Stickledown and that Bellamy, Rogers and Smyth would crawl off their mats to watch the accumulation of the yellow markers on the V-Bull, and that Cox would pack away his Garand rifle, hover behind him and shake his head in awe, that Jenkins would rummage in his kit for an old, tarnished silver spoon and present it to him, that the report of the vintage Lee Enfield No. 4, Mark 1 (T) would blast out over the familiar heathland.

And he did not know that a young officer, from the Ministry of Defence, would come and grip his hand, mutter apologies to his sun-gaunt and hurt-ravaged face, when he would not understand what offence demanded apology.

And he did not know that for a month the city of Kirkuk would be under military dusk-to-dawn curfew because her name was scrawled on walls and beside her name was painted the crude outline of a rifle shape topped by the bulk of a telescopic sight and that a torturer would be recalled to Baghdad for investigation.

And he did not know that his grandfather would weep an old man’s tears when told where he had been and what he had done.

And he did not know that he would light a candle each evening and set it on the window sill of his home, and sit with a dog on his lap and remember the fire over the oilfield at Baba Gurgur, and a faraway place and faraway people.

And he did not know where the road he had walked would finish.

Gus felt the heartbeat of the dog against him and began to climb the path to the ridge.

His shadow danced in front of him.

Behind him the sun fell and its flame guttered.