Free Holding the Zero by Gerald Seymour

stick each time they found sparse grass to feed on. He hurried them forward so that he could report what he had seen.

    The lieutenant was woken.
    He cursed viciously at the conscript, no younger than himself, who had woken him and not brought fresh coffee. He threw on his uniform, dragged on his boots, then yelled at the soldier that the boots were not cleaned, and that a fresh shirt had not been laid out for him.
    He bent his head, emerged from the dank shadows of his bunker and strode along the trench connecting it to the command post. Only the lieutenant, because of his rank and education, was permitted to use the radio. He made and received all transmissions. The set bleeped, a red light winked for attention.
    He slotted on the headphones and threw the switches. He responded to the call from Kirkūk. There was anxiety. The forward observer, codenamed Call-sign 17, had now missed three transmissions: probably a malfunction, or maybe storm damage to the booster antenna. He was ordered to check the cause of the malfunction, to retrieve the radio if he believed the fault lay there, or to visit the booster antenna on the summit point to the west if that was the likely area of the problem. He would respond, of course, to the order, and immediately. He ended the transmission.
    The lieutenant cursed again. To reach the location of Call-sign 17 he must go on foot.
    There was no track passable to a vehicle between his own position and the Call-sign’s location. It was six kilometres across country, and it would be six kilometres back. To cover twelve kilometres over that ground of rock and bog, where he could stumble and bark the skin on his knees on the rock or sink to his thighs in hidden mud, would take the entire day, in the company of the peasants he commanded. He was twenty-one. He was the eldest son of a family of the Tikriti tribe. He had a future ahead of him as bright as that of his father who commanded an artillery regiment in the Basra region and his uncle who led an armoured division of the Republican Guard facing the Kuwaiti frontier. But the future, bright and glittering and perhaps one day offering him a place in the Hijaz Amn al-Khass unit that protected the President, was deferred until a year of military service in the north was completed. He hated the place. It was cold, wet, harsh, and he was marooned in a small complex of damp bunkers with only idiots for company. He hoped that one day, soon, the President, the leader of the Tikriti tribe, would give the order for them to mount up in the armoured personnel carriers and ride further north, right to the borders, and bring the bastard Kurds back under the authority of Baghdad.
    There was an old corporal, double his age, in the position, the only man with whom he could talk, and each time he told the corporal of his hope that, one day, the President would unleash the columns of armoured personnel carriers to drive north, the corporal gazed at him as if he were a fool and knew nothing. When his duty was over, when he was posted back to Kirkūk, he would see that the corporal suffered for his silent insolence.
    He came out of the command post. Four men would go with him to the location of Call-sign 17, leaving four and the corporal behind in the bunkers.
    There was coffee now, steaming but failing to improve his temper, and the lieutenant said that he would take his breakfast when he had inspected the position, then start the cross-country trek. And the lazy bastards, with the corporal, would sleep all day without him there to goad them on with their work. The early-morning light was into his face, and sprang little diamonds of brightness from the wire that ringed the areas in front of and flanking the position where the mines were laid.

    The corporal led him on the morning inspection. The corporal always scurried forward, like a hurrying rat, along the communications trenches. He had been in Kuwait nine years before, at the time of the Mother of all