Holding the Zero (14 page)

His body slackened and he eased his hands from the rifle. The fighting was hand to hand, body to body. Like swarms of ants, the
peshmerga
fanned out to hunt down the last defenders. He saw a soldier emerge from a building holding high a white strip of torn sheet, before crumpling, his blood spattered across on the whiteness. Two more were running, only to be engulfed by the mob. He saw a soldier dragged from a bunker and the flash of knives. One of the BMPs coughed exhaust fumes and drove at speed towards the gate, crashed through it, then swerved into a ditch.

There was nothing more for Gus to fire at. He started to ease himself clear of the hiding place then turned and methodically started to pack away his rifle.

She was on the roof of the command post now, strutting her triumph.

‘Come on, Mr Gus. If we do not hurry, the killing will be finished.’

It was always the same in every communications bunker behind the lines when contact was lost with a forward position. The stunned quiet as if, buried tomblike in the bunker, each man considered the last seconds of a garrison’s life. Then there was shuffling movement and hushed voices to show that the living lived and the dead were abandoned.

The general clapped his hands for attention and barked out a series of orders: the battalion force at Tarjil should be alerted and should go to maximum readiness; brigade at the crossroads of the Sulaymānīyah and Baghdad routes should be warned; a situation report should be prepared for his approval before it was despatched to the Defence Ministry with copies to the al-Rashid command and the Abbasio Palace. Quiet conversation was followed by banter, then noisy laughter.

At the back of the bunker, away from the map table, Major Aziz noted that no order had been given for the advance into the hills of a column of tanks and armoured personnel carriers, either from Fifth Army headquarters or from brigade at the crossroads.

The lack of that order at first confused him, but then it slipped back in the heap of his own priorities.

His was a sense of private, covert exhilaration.

He slapped his thigh, a gesture for the dog, slipped from the bunker and climbed the steps to the freshness of the morning air. With no thought for the men of a defeated garrison, he went to his quarters to ready his gear. His time was coming.

When there was no more killing to be done Gus had brought Omar down to the village.

Near to the gate they reached Haquim packing away the cables of the box. Gus nodded abruptly to the
mustashar
, should have congratulated him, and did not, should have been congratulated for his shooting, and was not. He was learning. It was not Stickledown Range: Jenkins wasn’t there to slap him on the back. He walked through the gate, close to where a thick leather coat was hanging, ripped, from the top of the wire. He passed a sentry, whose body lay stupidly over a low wall of sandbags.

In the sheep scrape he had been protected from what he now saw.

He walked past the homes built of concrete blocks, Omar following. Some were on fire, some smouldered, some were pocked with bullet-holes. He saw dazed mothers walking aimlessly, holding their babies. One mother carried a bundle from which only a single tiny foot protruded at a broken angle. Another sat in front of the fractured door of her home and rocked in a chilling grief. In front of her were the corpses of two children.

Away to his right were the fathers and adult sons. Some were already digging the pit; some came to join them with spades hoisted on their shoulders. Near by was a toppled corner watch-tower, half of the body of the fallen sentry covered by it.

There was a trail for Gus to follow through the village: the trail of her voice. It led him along a sporadic line of death, towards the command post. The soldiers’ bodies had been robbed of everything of value: pockets had been ripped open, chains torn from their throats, their wallets discarded with the money gone and the photographs of their loved ones stamped into the dirt. She was on the roof, hectoring the men of the
peshmerga
, and he did not have the stomach to tell Omar to translate. He didn’t need to. He saw the dried blood on the thigh of her combat trousers. There were many corpses near the command post’s door, as if it had been a final rallying-point when the
peshmerga
had come over the perimeter fence.

On the ground in front of his boots, by the entrance to the command post, the face of the officer was barely related to the face he had seen through the ’scope. The vomit rose in Gus’s chest. The first of the
peshmerga
to reach him had not finished the officer’s life with a clinical head shot, but had slit his throat. Gus went into the command post and skirted through the detritus of broken tables and upturned chairs, stepped over the bodies, passed a man whose dead fingers were locked on the dials of the radio, and climbed the ladder to the roof.

He had his back to her. Behind him was the pride of her voice. With slow steps, he trudged to the corner where the machine-gun was sighted, and looked away over the bare ground towards the hillside, searching it for the sheep scrape. He could not find it. The boy had chosen well.

In the machine-gun nest, one man lay with the cigarette still clamped between his teeth. The others were more messy in death. On each was a narrow entry wound at the front and a larger wound at the back.

Haquim had crept up behind him. ‘This is not target shooting, it is war. For you it is an intellectual puzzle of distance and wind, the steadiness of your hand, and the quality of your ammunition. To us it is war. For you it is using your very great skills to combat technical difficulties. To us it is survival … No matter, you shot well.’

Haquim had said everything Gus had thought as he stood on the flat roof with her voice dinning in his ears. He turned away. On the far side of the camp, where the personnel carrier had battered a path for its flight, he saw a clutch of bodies, where men had entertained a last, hopeless belief in escape.

‘We have to harden you, Mr Peake. If you are not hardened then you will be like them, dead. Do not criticize us for behaving as barbarians would. It is what they do to us, what we have learned from them. The month that you saw Meda in the mountains nine years ago, with a hundred thousand others, starving, cold, without shelter, I held a pass with the men of
agha
Bekir that allowed them time for flight. We retreated rock by rock, stone by stone, to make time, and we could not take our wounded with us. We left them to the mercy of their soldiers. You don’t want me to tell you what we found when we came back. It is war.’

‘Is she hurt?’

Haquim snapped, ‘Of course she is hurt.’

‘Has she had treatment?’

‘Mr Peake, twenty of our men are dead, but twice that number are wounded and cannot walk as she can. There are many people from the village who are hurt – and there are their dead. She is the inspiration. Can she go to the front of the queue and demand, because of her importance, that her wound is treated? If she had not risen when she was hit the attack would have failed. If the men do not believe she can go forward, the advance is finished. She cannot show weakness. It is the price she must pay.’

Gus climbed down the ladder from the roof, went out through the command-post door and past the body of the officer. He walked briskly around the queue of
peshmerga
and villagers, some standing, some sitting and others just lying in the mud, silent or crying in their pain. He headed away from the grave-pit, and away from the last bodies. Her voice behind him was faint. He squatted down in the dirt, his back to the village, and stared out through the wire at the slope of the hills, and the mountain crests.

From behind him, Omar asked, ‘Do you think, Mr Gus, he is there, searching for you?’

* * *

The brigadier asked him where he was going. Major Aziz shrugged, pointed vaguely to the hills beyond the flame. Because he had been sent from Baghdad on the orders of the Estikhabarat, he did not have to explain himself. He walked out of the bunker; it perplexed him that reinforcements had not yet been sent, that the great lines of tanks and personnel carriers still rested in idle lines. It irritated him more that he could not recall where, or when, he had met the brigadier, but his mind was too clogged with details of his task for him to pursue it.

Behind him, in his bare quarters, on the floor underneath the smiling photograph of his President, he left the polished box and the folded rug on which the dog had slept. On the neatly made bed he had laid out all the spare clothes that had filled his backpack when he had flown north, and the pouch with his razor and toothpaste. On the chest beside the bed was the leather frame that held the pictures of his wife and his sons. He put his wedding ring and the birthday ring beside the frame.

He walked to the jeep and the driver started the engine. Aziz sat beside him, the Dragunov across his legs and the dog beside his feet. In the backpack, stripped down to necessities, were spare ammunition, his telescope, a half-loaf of bread, a quarter-kilo of cheese, his half-filled water bottle, dried biscuits for the dog, what he called the Dennison suit, maps and a folder of aerial photographs. He ruffled the fur at the dog’s collar, saw the pleasure on its face and felt the beat of its cropped tail against his boots.

The jeep drove away from Kirkūk, and passed through the brigade formation at the crossroads for Sulaymānīyah and Baghdad, climbing towards the town of Tarjil. It was as if he were coming home.

‘You know what? It’s my last bloody war zone – thank God.’

Dean thought it was the fourth time that night Mike had made that promise, Gretchen reckoned it was at least the fifth. A week of evenings together in the ground-floor bar of the Hotel Malkoc, and the story that had brought them to Diyarbakir was still beyond reach. The whisper was that the spring thaw would provide an opportunity for Saddam Hussein to advance again into northern Iraq. But they were in Turkey, and the border was closed.

‘Only war zone I’ve found is the goddam bathroom. “As dusk fell tonight, a vista of carnage and destruction was witnessed by your correspondent. Under a flickering light I surveyed, quote, scenes reminiscent of the worst horrors of the French revolution, end quote, in which no prisoners had been taken. After a good stamping session, I counted the corpses on my bathroom floor of forty-three cockroaches, their lives taken in the prime

…” ’ Dean was a roving reporter for a Baltimore paper and had covered every substantial conflagration in the region over the last seventeen years.

‘That’s bollocks.’ Mike was slumped in a rattan chair, swatting at flies and passably drunk. His Turkish cameraman was in the old city hunting women. Mike was a veteran reporter for the BBC, and was in the fast decline towards retirement.

‘You got a better war zone?’ Dean grinned.

‘Did you get on air tonight, Mike?’ Gretchen was conciliatory. She was forty, going on fifty, and worked for the
Der Spiegel
group out of Frankfurt. She was neither a threat nor an attraction to them. At the start of every assignment that brought them together she told them how she missed home and the company of her friend, Anneliese. She dressed like them: chukka boots, trousers with too many zip pockets, open-necked shirts showing their chests, safari tops with loops for pens.

‘No. I am not on the air tonight. I
might
get a showing on breakfast tomorrow, but I’m not holding my breath. What about you, Dean?’

‘Thank you for your kind consideration. I was dropped – “pressure of space”.

Gretchen, how’d they take your feature?’

‘Took it, probably already used it – to clean the lavatory. I am “on hold pending a peg”.’

Mike and his cameraman had tried to film the Turkish army in the streets of Diyarbakir, and been swamped by plain-clothes security men. Dean had filed on the scandal of the decay of the city’s medieval mosques. Gretchen had written six thousand words on child labour in the clothing sweat factories. They had all tried to justify their existence as they waited for the permission that didn’t come to cross the border that remained resolutely closed. Northern Iraq was near and unreachable.

‘If I was to use the word “introverted”, and then the word “self-obsessed”, who would I be talking about?’ Mike finished his drink and slapped the glass down on the table for the waiter’s attention.

‘You would, of course, be talking about our esteemed editors.’

‘It’s my last war zone.’

‘Fifth time.’

‘Wrong, sixth, easy.’

‘Last war zone – fuck you two – if I ever get to it,
if
– because my loved and admired editor is short on interest.’

‘Seem to have heard that record played somewhere before. “Sorry, Dean, but it’s the stock-market that’s playing big right now.”’

Mike banged his glass down again, louder, harder. ‘“Sorry, mate, but we really need something that’ll hook the viewer, like a celebrity visit – that’s if you’re unable to give us combat footage. Has to be an angle, Mike.” Problem is, I shot my mouth off, told them the tanks were going to roll … and I haven’t heard that Julia Roberts is arriving with an orang-utan, or Goldie Hawn up an elephant.’

‘You guys are joking.’

‘Or, Gretchen, we would cry,’ Dean said.

She persisted. ‘It is serious. Nobody cares back home. The editors tell it as it is. We believe that people at home are interested, and troubled, by the world outside their front door. We are old-fashioned, we are not “new”. When I go home, my neighbours are polite and ask where I have been. I tell them I have travelled to Somalia or Iran or Sudan, where people are suffering, and they are embarrassed …’

‘There is no technology to titillate, no smart-bomb videos, no cyber war. That’s why interest is spread thin. Doesn’t faze me – my last time, thank God …’

‘And on he goes.’

‘Fuck you both. Then I’m off to grow roses and sail a boat – and I will be, I promise faithfully, an anecdote-free zone. Not that anybody would listen.’

‘I don’t understand why people don’t care. In affluent societies, with safe lives, there is a duty of caring.’