Holding the Zero (38 page)

‘My colleague, Dr Williams, did most of the talking and I did most of the listening. Fred, that’s Dr Williams, wanted a witness. Fair enough – it’s not every day a civilian comes in off the street to learn about the Iraqi armed forces. It could have been a can of worms for Fred if he’d turned out to be a mercenary, looking for kicks from killing people, so I sat in.’

It was still dark outside the building. Ken Willet could hear the chatter in other offices of the early-morning work of the cleaners, muffled by the Hoovers. He knew the block, Centre for War Studies, from his own years at the Royal Military Academy, but the psychiatrist had not been there at that time. Rupert Helps had pleaded a busy day, a first lecture at 8 a.m. then a filled, sacrosanct diary, and an evening engagement. Dr Williams was at NATO in Belgium for the week, but the psychiatrist had heard – on a routine visit to the Commando Training Centre at Lympstone – of the interest in Augustus Henderson Peake and had offered his help. Willet would have bet that Rupert Helps would have run barefoot over broken glass to
help
.

Ms Manning asked, ‘What did Dr Williams tell him?’

‘I didn’t listen that closely – Fred’s the expert, you see. We hear it every lunchtime in the mess, his views on the Iraqi armed forces – myself, I think he’s slightly overrated.

Anyway, a résumé to give an idea of the usual lecture. The Iraqis are a defensively minded and centralized military machine. Faced with the unexpected, they will be slow to react because middle-ranking officers are not able to take field decisions. So, at first, they can be caught out, lose ground and positions. Once they’ve steadied their nerve and had orders from on high they are efficient. That was the germ of it – a sudden attack will make early advances, then there will be a regrouping, consolidation, counter-attack …

then reprisals. I don’t think he’d thought of that. He was jolted. I’d wager my shirt on Fred having the right appraisal of that scenario, but it is pretty obvious. The insurgents –

Kurds, yes? – would go through villages and towns, and think they were a force of liberation, but God help the poor bastards who cheered them. It’s the same through history – do you know your ‘Forty-five rebellion? The Young Pretender marched south and took Carlisle, Lancaster, Manchester, and idiots cheered him to the roof, but they were backing a loser. There’s always some nasty little creature who remembers who cheered the liberators loudest, who is going to dangle from a rope when the tables are turned – there were a great number of hangings in those northern English cities when the Highland army retreated … Back in Iraq, the same is true – the reprisals would be brutal.

He went very quiet, like the wind was out of his sails. Fred told him about the terrain he’d be in, a little about how to cope with hunger, thirst, lack of sleep, heat. Then I chipped in.’

‘What exactly was your contribution?’ Willet asked drily. He had taken a fast and certain dislike to the psychiatrist. Perhaps it was the time in the morning, dawn not yet on them, perhaps it was the man’s flamboyant bow-tie of vivid green and primrose yellow, perhaps it was the long hair gathered at the back of his head with an elastic band.

‘If I’d reckoned him a mere psychopath, I’d have stayed quiet.’

Willet persisted, ‘What would interest a psychiatrist like you?’

Rupert Helps beamed, and preened pleasure at being asked for his expert opinion.

‘He’s not a rounded man. I assessed him as an innocent, rather juvenile – a child, unwilling to grow up and shed a world of romance, but
decent
. You with me? Peter Pan syndrome. The talk of reprisals was the give-away.’

‘Sorry, but you haven’t told me what your contribution was.’

‘I told him to forget it. He should nurse his own problems and ignore other people’s difficulties. I said he should put himself first.’

Ms Manning gazed into the psychiatrist’s face. ‘Did you expand on that opinion?’

‘You know—’

‘No, certainly I don’t.’ Willet thought she was a cat, about to pounce, ready for the kill.

‘Be so kind as to tell me.’

‘Well, because he seemed to be searching for fulfilment, I suggested he should push at work for promotion, never said what his job was. I didn’t gather that he was in a very meaningful relationship – he could put more effort into that. He should find a hobby and develop it further. He could move home, get a garden, have a larger mortgage and therefore self-inflict the pressure to earn more through greater endeavour. If he needed to do good works I told him to drive at weekends for the elderly or the sick … I was trying to help. Did he go?’

She said brutally, ‘Oh, yes, he went, completely ignored you.’

‘Has he survived?’

The steel was in her voice. ‘We don’t know. We have very little access to intelligence from that region. Tomorrow I have a meeting at which I may find something out. Isn’t there more to living than work, loving, hobbies, mortgages, charities? Shouldn’t we rejoice that one man, alone among the dross, climbs towards further horizons?’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘What don’t I understand?’

‘If he survives, he’ll be damaged. He won’t win, can’t. Should he make it back, he’ll be a damaged, altered man. I was just trying to help, damn you. He can’t win, and it will all be for nothing – dead or damaged.’

She rose imperiously, ‘Thank you. Perhaps that’s a worthwhile sacrifice. Come on.’

Willet followed her out. They passed a column of cadets starting out on a cross-country run.

‘The pompous bastard didn’t even offer us coffee, gets us out of bed as though he’s the only one with an important day, and no bloody coffee,’ he said. ‘Well done for putting him down, laying him out on the floor like that.’

‘Don’t patronize me.’

It was a brilliant dawn of ochre and gold and red thrown up from behind the mountains in the west. The dawn was a flame to which two men were drawn.

Chapter Seventeen

‘Will you send my body back to the mountains?’

The commander seemed to ponder that last request. They were in her cell, the door open behind him. He seemed to think on it as if he were slightly confused. He had taken no part in the stripping of her military clothes, and army boots, and had looked to the ceiling when she was naked, before the smock of white cotton was lifted over her head and her arms were threaded into the sleeves. She was calm, stiff and awkward but he had heard on the speakers in the office the mewling of the wretch in the adjacent cell and he had heard the last faint words of comfort she had given him. Most men, officers in the army, asked for a cigarette and panted on it before it was taken from their mouths, discarded on the cell’s floor and they were led out. The cigarettes lay on the floor half-smoked, still burning by the time the execution had been completed. He would not have admitted to being a man invested with cruelty, but he was keen on the bureaucracy entailed in his work as a shield to the state.

He looked into Meda’s face. Her hair was held close against her head with a cloth bandanna. He could understand why men had followed her. If the shield he held was lowered, if the regime became vulnerable, if he – himself – were about to be led out, he would not be given an opportunity to make a last request. There would be sons, fathers, uncles and nephews, cousins of those he had sent to their deaths that the regime might survive, crowding around him and kicking, punching, spitting. No cigarette would be lit for him before he was lifted up under the lamp-post or the telegraph pole. He thought of what she asked. If the regime fell he knew what would become of his beloved grandchildren. It was her very calmness that disturbed him.

He answered her quietly, ‘I promise your body will be sent back to the mountains …’

‘Thank you.’

‘… when your family have paid the price of the rope.’

There was a titter of laughter from the men who held her and fastened the thong on her wrists behind her back. He had sought to destroy the calm, but her eyes were unwavering and beading into his. He saw the contempt, and understood better why men had followed her – and why
agha
Ibrahim in Arbīl and
agha
Bekir had not lifted the telephone and pleaded with Baghdad for her life. He broke the hold of her eyes and looked at the wall where other wretches had written their names and the dates on which they had been taken from the cell, but noticed that she had not bothered to do so.

‘It is time,’ he said brusquely. ‘Move her.’

They took her out quickly and her feet, in plain plastic sandals, scraped the floor. They dragged her from his sight.

He heard her cry out in the corridor, ‘Be strong, friend, be brave. Remember those who depend on you …’

He thought that one of the escort would then have clamped a hand over her mouth. He heard their boots and the scrape of her sandals, then the squeal of the unlocking of the cell block’s outer door and the clang as it was shut again.

There was a deep, limitless silence around him. He stood alone in the cell and the walls seemed to close around him, the ceiling to slide down on him. He saw the high window, the grime on the glass that repulsed the brightness of the low sunlight, and the bulb that burned dully above the protective screen of wire. An hour before he had come to the cell to see her stripped, dressed in the white cotton smock that was too large for her, made for a man, which had been soiled with the excrement of the last traitor whose bowels had burst as he had kicked under the rope, he had been telexed from the al-Rashid barracks. A general of mechanized infantry, commanding a division, had crossed the Jordanian frontier and had reached Amman. A brigadier of anti-aircraft artillery defences, and two colonels of the Engineer Corps – with their families – had fled their homes. A colonel in an armoured regiment had driven his car into the cover of trees beside the Tigris river, sealed the windows, squeezed a pipe on to the exhaust and was dead … There would be others, there always were. A few escaped, but others stayed, believed it was possible to disguise their guilt from him, the shield of the regime.

The quiet burdened him, and the emptiness of the cell. Her calm had made the silence that seemed to crush him. He could not escape the gaze of her eyes. He felt the weakness at his knees and he would have fallen had he not reached out and steadied himself against the door of the cell. He had seen many men taken from the cells, and afterwards he had gone to the home of his son and sat the children on his knee and told them stories or played with them with their toys on the rugs, but that morning he was far from his son’s home and his grandchildren. He staggered out of the cell and leaned, breathless, against the corridor wall.

Commander Yusuf heard the crowd’s voices. She would be on the ladder to the platform of planks. She would be seen. His composure returned as the silence ended with the shouts, jeers, yells of the crowd outside the gate.

He stood by the closed cell door. ‘Do you hear it?’ he murmured, in his soft singing voice. ‘She is alone, as you are alone. She is beyond help, as you are beyond help.’

‘One one six zero.’ Omar was looking through the binoculars.

‘One thousand one hundred and sixty yards, check?’

‘That’s what I said, Mr Gus.’

He had never fired at that distance. The furthest target on the Stickledown Range was at a thousand yards. His finger made the final adjustment to the sight’s elevation turret.

At its maximum height in flight, the bullet would be on a line that was 135 inches above the aiming point, then it would drop.

‘Wind isn’t so strong, maybe three to five miles per hour at our point, coming from the side. From smoke, between the office and the apartment block – four two zero yards – it is more strong, five to eight miles per hour. At three-quarters distance, by the governor’s house, it is again as strong. I can see from the flag there.’

‘If the flag’s on top of the building that’s too high for trajectory, doesn’t count.’

‘I know that, Mr Gus. The flag is from a window balcony, at
her
height.’

‘What is it, at her?’

‘It is again more gentle, from the side.’

The bullet, at that range, would be in the air for the time it would take to speak, not gabble, two phrases of seven syllables each. ‘Point three three eight ca-lib-re. Point three three eight ca-lib-re.’ He must allow for wind deflection at the muzzle point when the velocity was greatest, then twice more during its flight … Two clicks of deflection on the windage turret. Before the wind straightened it, the bullet would fly on a course that was initially eighteen inches to the left of the target.

‘Check.’

He thanked God that the wind at the muzzle point was not moderate but gentle, not fresh and not strong. He could not see her. Men were clustered around her. The reticule lines of the sight were on the noose. There was no traffic on Martyr Avenue and he sensed the swelling quiet of the crowd, who had jeered as she was led out but now stood in hushed silence.

Then, two of the men in dun olive uniforms bent in front of her, and he thought they pinioned her legs. She stood so still. He breathed in hard, filled his lungs, and waited for them to lift her feet onto the chair.

The commander was outside the cell block. He had no need to be there, he could not have counted the number of executions he had witnessed, and with minor variations they were all the same. The quiet had drawn him out of the block. He did not know why the Party men, the Ba’athists, did not lead the cheering and shouting. He could see her through the open gates, small and hemmed in by big men, below the noose. He looked hard and expected to see her back and shoulders quiver, but her head had not dropped. Away past her was the length of Martyr Avenue, and then the foothills of the mountains. He saw the hands grip her body, to raise her, and he turned away as if he had no stomach for it.

There were open windows with curtains flapping in them, roofs with lines of washing, the shadows thrown by water tanks, and the dark recesses in unfinished buildings where the sun did not penetrate. Using the magnification of the telescopic sight, Major Karim Aziz roved over the windows, roofs and the skeletal sites.

When the first light had peeped over the high distant ground he had sent the woman inside. He was calm. He had made the necessary calculations. For the sniper to have a view of the scaffold, between the side screens, he must be on Martyr Avenue. As he had requested, the street below him was blocked with armoured cars. It was, and he had paced the distance, 525 metres from the balcony to the scaffold. The sniper must be further back, but Aziz did not believe the man would trust himself to shoot at a greater range than 850 metres. He believed himself to be within 325 metres of the greatest prize his life had yet offered him.

There was no sound to distract him. Not a car moved on the street, not a hawker cried out, and the great crowd was stilled as if it held, guarded, its breath. The quiet was good and brought him the peace he needed.

He knew they had led her out, the crowd had told him, but in the quiet he did not know whether they had lifted her yet onto the chair. He could not turn to see. It might be the flash of light from the rifle’s sight, or the brief brilliance of the firing gases, or the dispersal of dust on a window sill. He thought the target would be the hangman. It would be the sad and stupid gesture of a man demented by helplessness to shoot the hangman.

The gesture would leave her, in terror, on the platform for another minute or another five minutes before an officer had the courage to crawl forward, lift her, set her feet on the chair, the noose on her neck and kick the chair. To shoot the hangman would not help her. He had no complaint, as long as the sniper fired and, through firing, exposed himself.

There was a low moan from the crowd, wind on wire, and he thought they lifted her.

He stared through the sight at the windows and roofs and the open floors of unfinished buildings.

She was on the chair.

Hands steadied her.

She stared ahead of her, across the crowd and up the length of the street. He wondered whether she looked for him.

He let the breath slip. His words were silent. ‘Don’t move. I am here. Don’t move your head. My love …’ He squeezed gently on the trigger.

This was not Stickledown. He was on the third floor of an unfinished office block facing down the Martyr Avenue in the city of Kirkūk. He was in the bubble where it never rained, was never too cold and never too hot, and the wind never freshened. The boy was beside him but he no longer knew it.

A hand reached up for the noose. Her head was still, and he thought she heard him.

Gus Peake fired, as if he were on Stickledown Range, at the centre of the V-Bull of his target.

‘Kill her … Kill her …’

He watched the speck of the bullet and the early-morning air burst away from it.

‘Kill her … Kill her … Kill her …’

When he could no longer see the bullet, he saw the buffet vortex of the air.

‘Kill her … Kill …’

His lips made the fourteenth syllable as her head pitched apart.

Gus lay with the shock of the rifle burning in his shoulder and closed his eyes to shut out the sight of what he had done.

He had heard the bullet go past him.

It was part of the discipline of Major Aziz that he did not twist his body to follow the path of the bullet to see what target it had hit, or if it had missed. The moment after he had registered the crack of the bullet’s supersonic flight, he heard the thump. Through his

’scope sight he studied the windows and roofs that were between 300 and 350 metres from him, but there was nothing. His search covered two or three seconds. He did not believe that the shot had been fired from closer than 300 metres, but there was that instant nagging suspicion that it had been loosed at a greater distance. His viewpoint, magnified and centred on the cross-lines of the Dragunov’s sight, raked up the length of Martyr Avenue, over office windows and apartment balconies and more roofs. There was so little time. Beyond the office housing the Oil Company of Iraq, beyond the block with balconies and flower-pots, beyond the office of the Agriculture Ministry (Northern Region) was a construction site of concrete floors and reinforced steel pillars, open to the winds.

He would have tracked on with the sight had it not been for what he saw from the lowest point of the sight’s circle – the workmen.

The workmen – and his mind raced to the calculation that they were a minimum of 1,000 metres from the scaffold – were the sign. A gasp of exhilaration slipped his lips.

He found them in the ’scope at the moment the tableau broke. There were four of them, day labourers, the fetchers and carriers of the cement blocks, the men who placed the crane’s cable hook onto the steel beams, but the crane was idle and the operator had gone with the architects, surveyors and supervisors to see the hanging. Perhaps the workmen were Kurds and not willing to watch the slow, strangled death. They were on the first floor’s bare plateau of concrete. They had frozen at the proximity of the shot. When he saw them their shock was fading and they cringed down, then looked up. It was what men anywhere would have done if a rifle was fired close to them, above them.

He had found his man.

Aziz grabbed his backpack, stampeded off the balcony and into her bedroom. He careered into her, flattened her and ran for the door. The dog scampered beside him. He charged down the staircase of the block. The man, too, would be running, but he would not have a wide staircase to go down, three steps at a time, but would be groping for a loose, swaying ladder. He burst out of the building and ran up the pavement. He never looked back towards the scaffold. It was a panting sprint but the adrenaline gave him speed and the dog was always a couple of metres ahead of him, as if doing the work of a pacemaker. He passed soldiers in a doorway, ignored them, and was crossing the further traffic lanes of Martyr Avenue as a personnel carrier swerved to avoid him. In his youth, in spiked shoes and shorts, he could have covered the distance in seventy seconds. Now he was middle-aged, and there was no crowd to cheer him towards a tape. He had the weight of the backpack hooked on one shoulder and the awkwardness of the rifle in his hand, but the scent of the chase was with him. He reached the palisade of planks fronting the construction site, heaving and fit to vomit, a minute and a half after the single shot had been fired.