Holding the Zero (23 page)

It was not until they were out of the town that the men began to sing. Again and again, with the deep power of their voices, the refrain of the anthem was howled into the night.

It was the sound of hungry wolves that came in winter from the high ground to stalk beside barricaded homes in search of food. It was the sound of a predator. Omar sang with them, a high shrill note, as if to prove his adulthood.

‘What do they sing?’

He could not see the boy’s face in the darkness.

‘We are the
peshmerga
, brave heroes of Kurdistan, We will never lay down our arms, We fight until victory or death.’

Gus grimaced. ‘That’s bloody cheerful, Omar.’

‘We are not frightened of death, Mr Gus. You cannot be frightened of death or you would not have come. We have the power, we have Meda …’

Gus marched on. It was strange to him that the bold words Meda had used in the town to the
peshmerga
, and the repetition of the anthem, demonstrated a willingness to face death. He had seen her with the aid-worker when he had been receiving the instructions from Joe Denton. He wondered if Meda had shown the flesh wound to her, whether it had been dressed again, whether it was poisoned or clean. His blister hurt but the pace of the march did not allow him to slow and hobble. It seemed a lifetime since he had last slept decently or eaten well. He thought the civilization of an old life was being steadily stripped from him.

When they were well clear of the town, when no torches were used, when they moved in thin moonlight, the singing died. Haquim had been along the line and demanded quiet.

A discipline had settled on the column. Gus wondered, in the quiet broken only by the scrape of weapons’ metal and the tramp of feet, if the men thought of home and families

– or were their minds as empty as the wolves’, the predators’? His own mind, except for the pain of the blister, was void of emotion.

Haquim materialized from the milky darkness. They had reached the point where Gus, Omar, the men carrying the mines and the
mustashar
would break away from the main march towards the crossroads. Meda was beside him.

Meda said, sarcastic, ‘Do you need a chair to sit on?’

‘I’ll send down for room-service and get a beer.’

‘You will be comfortable away from the real work, fighting.’

‘I’ve a good book to read.’

She was brittle, contemptuous. ‘There will be no tanks.’

‘Then I’ll enjoy my beer and get on with my book. It’ll be a pleasant day out.’

She flounced away, strode off up the column, and in a moment was lost among her men. It was a bad parting. If either of them did not survive the day ahead, the last memory would be of contempt and mockery. The column was going south, but the small group edged to the east and started the big loop that would take them to where Joe Denton advised they should be. Omar led. He had no compass, and had never crossed that featureless, dark-shrouded ground before. He had only been shown on the map but did not pause or look around him. Gus thought it the innate genius of the young dog-wolf.

The boy stopped, crouched, his arm held back, hand open, demanding their total stillness and silence. Gus heard the approaching sounds, the wind over dried leaves. They were huddled together, low on the open ground as the sounds grew closer. At first it merged with the night then, clear in the moonlight, a great caravan passed them. Sheep, men, goats, women, donkeys, children, dogs, all slipped by, never wavering in the path of their journey. Gus was awestruck at the simplicity of what he saw. A nomad tribe on the move, as they had whispered over the ground at night in the time of Cyrus and Salah alDin Yusuf, nothing changed, secure against the predators, the newer dictators and demagogues. Maybe they had heard, as their forebears would have, that a battle was to be fought, and they moved on. Their dark line passed. As the sounds faded into the night, Omar started out again.

An hour later, they were near to the road, the bridge and the glow of the sentries’

cigarettes. The iron-hooped sides of the bridge were lit by the lights of the patrolling armoured personnel carrier.

The sacks with the mines were dumped on the scraped earth beside the road.

Haquim said, ‘If the tanks come, if she is wrong, only your skill can save us.’

‘I can do my best, friend, but I do not know whether my best is enough.’

‘I do not ask for more. Let us pray to God she is correct, that the tanks will not come

…’

‘Then I’ll sit in my chair with a beer and a book.’

Haquim hit him hard on the arm. Gus thought that the old soldier equally disliked contempt and frivolity. Haquim was gone, and with him the men who had carried the sacks. He was alone with the boy. The embankment of the road towered above him. He watched the personnel carrier reach the bridge ahead, then reverse and turn, its searchlight spearing the flat, barren ground. They were deep in the ditch below the embankment when it returned, and the searchlight’s beam was far above them. They tracked away from the bridge to a place where the embankment was lowest, and Gus armed the mines, while Omar scratched the holes for them.

The burden crushed him. They depended on him.

There were many who saw him go.

The logistics officer in the command bunker, puzzling over the reasoning behind the decision to withdraw two of the three infantry battalions to Kirkūk and even more about the complex manoeuvre to achieve it at night and in secrecy, saw him kick himself up from the chair where he had dozed, hitch on his backpack, sling his rifle, call his dog and go out into the night.

The logistics officer called after him, ‘Hit the bastards, Karim, hit them so they scream.’

The sentry ran from behind the sandbag wall and wrenched open the wood-framed wire gates. He was about to scurry back to the security of the sandbags when he realized that the officer stood erect as if no danger could confront him. He saluted clumsily. The officer thanked him, as if he were a friend, and he walked through the gate with the dog.

His bulky over-suit dripped with fresh grey mud, and the same mud was embedded in the dog’s coat. The sentry saw him unhook his rifle from his shoulder, then hold it loosely across his body as he slipped through a pool of light and away into the shadows. He knew the bandit army coming towards them was led by a woman; it was said, in the tent where he slept when not on sentry duty, that bullets could not harm her, that she was the devil’s child. He thanked his god for sending the officer with the big rifle who went to break the magic of the witch.

While Isaac Cohen, Mossad man, slept in his eyrie, the wind-bent antenna sucked down signals, which the computers decrypted.

He slept without a care.

Chapter Eleven

The brigadier, dressing in the darkness before dawn, had selected his best uniform with the medal ribbons of three decades of military service. The orderly had made a fine job of polishing his boots. He had chosen to wear his brigade’s scarlet cravat, which hid the heave in his throat. In the shining holster on his webbing belt was his service pistol, loaded and armed. His heart pounded, dinned in his ears, and he did not at first hear the shout from his orderly, a man he would trust with his life.

While he had slept, men had flown north from Baghdad, had come in secrecy to Kirkūk.

He had rehearsed his speech, again, while showering, shaving, dressing. Ahead of him were the opened double doors to the briefing room. He had tried twice, the evening before, to make secure telephone contact with the general commanding the armoured division to the south, but had failed. That had not distressed him. Since the American bombing and the imposition of sanctions, secure communications were haphazard, replacement parts rarely available. He heard the shout repeated, but his mind was far away in the detail of his speech.

All of the officers of the brigade, equipped with T-72 tanks and BMP armoured personnel carriers, would now be waiting on him in the briefing room. He had served with the older men, the more senior, most of his adult life. The younger men were the sons and nephews of officers, now retired from active duty, whom he had fought alongside in the Iranian, Kurdish and Kuwaiti wars. The brigadier believed the senior and junior officers owed primary loyalty to him, not to the regime. His speech, practised alone in his room, would appeal to that ingrained loyalty. The shout and the running feet were a barely noticed distraction as he approached the double doors.

From the Kirkūk military airfield, the men had been driven to Fifth Army headquarters, had taken an office behind a steel reinforced door, had established a radio link to the al-Rashid barracks and had prepared to talk to him about loyalty.

The brigadier paused at the double doors. He heard the scrape of chairs as the officers were ordered to stand. He smoothed his hair, and his tongue flicked at his lips. In no battle he had fought, and the medal ribbons on his chest showed there had been many, had he felt such gut-wrenching tension. Had the brigadier been a gambler, a dice-thrower, he would have been better able to control that tension – but he believed in loyalty. They stood in ranks in front of the lectern he would use … A fresh tension intruded on his thoughts. He had instructed the technical officers and NCOs to work through the night, to scavenge and cannibalize, to get the maximum number of the brigade’s fighting vehicles to combat readiness. The tanks and personnel carriers made an imposing parade-ground army but spares were at a premium. The speech returned to his mind, melded with the repeated shout and the drum of approaching feet.

The first moments of his speech, the first words they heard, would be the most important. He steadied himself. He would say, decisively: ‘Officers, friends, our brigade is a family. A family stands together – a family will make the supreme sacrifice in blood.

In the history of this family, united by selfless dedication, this is now a time of critical importance. The loyalty of this family is to the proud and honoured state of Iraq, not to the criminal clique that has for too long abused this family’s trust. Today we are given, by God, the chance to rid our beloved people from the rule of the felons, which has brought misery down on us … ’ The shout and the footfall were clearer. The doors would be locked behind him. If there was a weasel complaint from any officer, he would draw his pistol and shoot dead the callow bastard who made it.

‘Brigadier, please, there is a call from Tuz Khurmātū – the general commanding the Republican Guard armoured division. He must speak with you personally – a matter of national security.’

He needed the support of the general commanding the Republican Guard armour at Tuz Khurmātū. He gestured to his second-in-command standing beside the lectern – two minutes.

He did not see his orderly’s face. He was led from the corridor on to the parade ground where the maintenance teams sweated under arc lights over the tanks and the personnel carriers. There was the roar of revving engines and choking clouds of diesel fumes. He did not see the tears of betrayal running on his orderly’s face. He was led into a small brick building with high barred windows and through an opened steel reinforced door. In a bare room, on the the wood table, the telephone was off the cradle. He snatched it up.

He said hoarsely, ‘We are about to move, in an hour we move. Do I have your support?’

He recognized the voice on a crackling line. ‘You are a traitor. I am a servant of the President. You are a traitor and will die like a traitor – like a dog.’

The pistol barrel was against his neck. In the moments before his arms were pinioned, he struggled to get a hand to his holster and failed. When his arms were pinioned, when his service weapon had been taken, when the cotton hood was over his head, the beating started.

In his own leisurely fashion, and after an untroubled night’s sleep, Isaac Cohen began his day. He shaved with an old blade that barely scraped the stubble from his cheeks and chin, sluiced his body in cold water, dressed in faded jeans, a T-shirt, two sweaters and worn sneakers, ate an apple and a carton of yoghurt, flicked the pages of
Maariv
, which he had read the night before, made football small-talk with the commander of the Turkish troops who guarded him, and went to the building that housed the computers.

At the door, the key to the padlock in his hand, he looked down over the land lightening in the dawn.

There was snow on the highest peaks, and the deeper ravine valleys were still in black shadow, but the first shafts of the sun caught the lower hillsides beyond the mountains.

With binoculars, if he had steadied himself against the door, he might have seen the brightness of the flame that burned at Kirkūk, but he did not have his binoculars. Below him, over the crag faces, an eagle glided, hunted. He blinked and unlocked the padlock.

He seldom lingered at dawn or in the middle of the day or at dusk to strain his eyes and look over the falling ground. The eyes that mattered in the life of Isaac Cohen, that gave him vision, were in the dishes and the loosely slung aerials and the antennae that were riveted down on the roof of his communications den.

Inside, with the murmur of the machines for company, he filled, then switched on his electric kettle.

When he had made himself instant coffee, he would use the eyes that bored deep across the lands he could not see, and scan the decrypted messages the computers had gobbled in the night.

Later, where his own eyes could not see, the computers would give him a clear view of a fighting ground. He had done what he could, was now no more than a spectator, but he thought of them as he started to read the overnight radio traffic and he whispered a short private prayer.

AUGUSTUS HENDERSON
PEAKE
.

5. (Conclusions after interview with Brian Robins (sales director of AI Ltd, rifle manufacturers) conducted by self and Ms Carol Manning –transcript attached.) ABILITY: As a marksman, AHP is as good as any. He has the ability to shoot under all conditions and can absorb the stress of competition. He is regarded by this source as a WINNER. He has the inner steel that prevents him from accepting second best as an adequate outcome.

KNOWLEDGE OF MILITARY WEAPONS: AHP has wisely purchased the most complete sniper rifle on the market (paid in cash, £3,500).

He has travelled to northern Iraq with an
AWM .338 Lapua Magnum
.

The rifle has a maximum range of 1,200 yards to 1,400 yards. The AWM has greater range and hitting power than the standard AW using 7.62 NATO ammunition, and is more manoeuvrable and covert than the heavier AW50 version.

The AWM is classified as a ‘basic’ weapon. It is not sophisticated; fewer technical problems in rugged terrain and battlefield conditions.

The armour-piercing rounds, Green Spot ball, give the AWM a versatility not present with more conventional sniper rifles. It can kill personnel, but will also destroy equipment. It has the penetrative power, using FMJ (Full Metal Jacket) rounds, to be used successfully against a variety of targets – ammunition dumps, grounded aircraft, radar installations, bunkers and armoured vehicles (with the sniper in an offensive or defensive mode).

The AWM creates COMBAT POWER. It can degrade key equipment and gain psychological battlefield advantage.

Before that morning in the sales director’s office, Ken Willet had never seen a sniper’s rifle the size and power of the AWM .338 Lapua Magnum. When he had tried, and failed, the course at Warminster, he had used the Parker Hale weapon, which was smaller, lighter and did not have the capacity to fire the armour-piercing bullet. What had been aimed at him by Ms Manning was a rifle altogether more deadly than anything he had himself ever handled. He was confused. Was a professional’s weapon in the hands of an amateur or an expert? With the confusion came the problem. His adult life was steeped in the lore of the military. He had been taught to believe that only the men who made a total study of military tactics and were subject to military discipline could achieve results in a military theatre of operations. If the reason for his confusion was valid then he might just have wasted the last dozen years of his life. Could an amateur, a transport manager in a haulage company, gain the same combat successes as a professionally trained sniper? He was too tired to find the answer, to end the confusion.

When he went to bed the dawn was coming up. But he could not sleep. Inside his mind, thundering and reverberating, was the roar of tank tracks.

‘Keep clear of officers and white stones.’

‘What, Mr Gus?’

‘Major Hesketh-Prichard would have known that – it was the advice given by sergeants to fresh troops in South Africa. The British army was fighting there a hundred years ago.’

‘Because officers get shot?’

‘Correct, Omar, and because the sniper uses landmarks, any light-coloured stones, as points for measuring distance.’

‘Why do you tell me?’

‘Everything in the skill is old, everything we do has been done before, everything is learned from the past …’

Gus was deadened by tiredness. It was only something to say to help him to beat it.

Inside the thick material of the gillie suit he was cold because of the tiredness. He felt a sickness, a scratching in his throat, from the cold and the stink of the goats. In front of them was the raised roadway leading to the bridge. Beyond the bridge the road led on to the defended crossroads. On the road’s far side, dead ground to him, the embankment was steeper than the incline facing him, and at the far side of the bridge the river’s banks plunged down to a morass of boulders. When the tanks left the road they must turn towards him, then drive towards the one place in the riverbed where the banks were shallow and the stones smaller – if they were to reach the crossroads.

Gus had not slept. He had marched back from the road, said whispered farewells to the men who had carried the mines and helped Omar to bury them. Tracking back over the open ground to find the firing position, he had then dug out the small trench in which he now lay. The light was coming, spreading over the desert landscape before him. His eyes roved over the markers. Wedged against rocks, hooked on to strands of rusted barbed wire, caught against old fence posts were scraps of newspaper and torn plastic bags. Each time he had placed the newspaper and the bags he had remembered the distances of his stride. There was nothing random in their placing: they were his white stones. The goats had been Omar’s idea. They had bleated in the night; they were the missing peg to be slotted in the plan. The light was coming and Gus heard the first distant popping of small-arms fire. He tried to sound calm but his teeth chattered.

‘Remember what I said. Keep clear of officers and white stones.’

Against the scratching of the goats, he heard the boy’s quiet laughter. ‘Are you very frightened, Mr Gus?’

‘Go away, and take those foul stinking creatures with you.’

The light was growing; the popping of the guns had become a rattle. The boy whistled and thwacked his stick on a goat’s back, then the hoofs and Omar’s light tread drifted away. The first golds of the morning caught the ground, flickered on the newspaper pages and the plastic, and Gus tried to remember each distance he had paced out in the darkness. It had been the boy’s idea to steal the goats and then to go forward with them.

He lay in a shallow trench covered by the sacking in which the mines had been carried, and over the sacking was loose dirt and small stones. Away to Gus’s right, the shooting was persistent and no longer sporadic.

Haquim had said they depended on him – if the tanks came. He had a role. Far to his front, where the incline rose to the roadway, was a scene as old as the warning of officers and white stones: a goatherd boy sat and watched his beasts. Gus wriggled his hand under his gillie suit and found the water bottle at his waist. He reached forward, emptied the precious water onto the ground under the end of the rifle barrel, and made a mud pool –that was old, as old as Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard.

Somewhere, out there, was the sniper sent to kill him.

* * *

The water dribbled into the ground. Little rivulets ran from the point where he poured and disappeared. Then he tipped the last of the water from the bottle into the palm of his hand and let the dog drink from it.

Major Aziz lay in a scrape in the dirt and readied himself. The letter with his wife’s name on the envelope was against his heart, but she was nowhere in his thoughts –obliterated, along with his children.

The position he had taken was forward of the crossroads and a full 500 metres to the right flank of the route he reckoned they would use when they attacked. The first skirmish had begun. In front of him was the crisscross of the machine-guns’ tracers, and the blast of mortars.