I had the impression that the hunting was more important to him than the slaughter, though I doubt that applied to Billings.’
‘Is that all there is?’ Ms Manning was already bored and lost.
“Fraid so. What else? Gus left school with pretty average grades, and I managed to pull some strings, got him into a haulage firm in Guildford. I did business with them and was owed favours. He’s been there ever since. I can only talk about his youth because we hardly see him, these days… What do I tell my wife?’
‘Your problem, Mr Peake, not mine,’ she said, without charity.
‘What’s he doing there? Is he driving a relief lorry?’
‘He’s gone to fight, Mr Peake,’ she intoned.
‘But that’s a war zone…’ The man’s mouth gaped.
Gus saw the target. He came slowly towards the command post. His own estimate of the distance was 750 yards, and the binoculars confirmed it at 741. There was a short line of soldiers at attention. A moment before, as Gus had done a fast scan with the binoculars, the crew on the roof with the machine-gun had closed up behind their weapon, and the soldiers in the watchtower ducked below their sandbag parapets. The T-junction of the reticule in his ’scope sight was on the target. He would fire at the next moment that his breath was steadied.
‘Watch the shot, Omar. Don’t move, not a fraction, just watch the shot.’
Gus breathed deeply, then slowly, so slowly, began to empty his lungs. When they were emptied he would relax, then fire. The smoke curled from the homes of the villagers, there was no new adjustment to make for the slight wind’s strength. Above the chest of the target were the gold insignia of rank on the target’s shoulders.
‘No.’
‘What?’ Gus hissed.
‘No. Don’t.’
Gus breathed again, his finger was inside the trigger guard.
‘Why not?’
‘It is not the officer.’
‘He has the rank.’
‘No, Mr Gus. The soldiers are laughing at him.’
Gus stared through the ’scope. Behind the target figure, level with the insignia on the target’s shoulder, a soldier grinned and Gus saw the flash of his teeth, and another man near to him laughing.
‘It is not the officer, it is a pretend. They know about you, trick you. They would not dare to laugh at their officer.’
The breath seeped from Gus’s body. He eased his finger off the trigger. He felt flattened by the simplicity of the trap set for him. Without the boy, he would have walked into it, fired into it. At that moment he saw his own importance. The life of a soldier, with a family and with a mother, was to be snuffed out so that his own life could be taken.
‘Thank you, Omar.’
‘It was easy to see the trick – yes, Mr Gus?’
He kneed the boy savagely. The sun crawled up behind him, over the ridge where the attack force lay and waited on him.
‘Correct, Mr Peake. Maybe you should chat it out with your father as to why your son is currently in a war zone. Good day.’
She was on her feet. Willet had filled the page below the heading of MINDSET. He put the pad into his briefcase. There were no handshakes at the door. Momentarily Willet saw a woman’s face at the kitchen door, grey, lined and harassed. He wouldn’t have known what to say to her that might have been of any comfort. The door slammed shut behind them.
They walked to the car.
‘What a bloody fool,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘Peake, of course.’
‘Which Peake?’
‘The son, that idiot.’
‘Why?’
‘For doing what he’s done – for going where he’s gone.’
Willet felt the anger brimming in his mind. ‘The last weekend you had time off, what did you do? Where did you go?’
‘Actually, I was in Snowdonia, with a group rebuilding footpaths for the National Trust. We were all volunteers.’
Through gritted teeth, Willet said pleasantly, ‘It must have seemed, Ms Manning, important. I suppose rebuilding a footpath is about as important as fighting for the freedom of a subjugated people in a war zone.’
She looked at him curiously. ‘Are you all right?’
He sat with his head down, his chin on his chest. ‘I’m fine – but what about him?’
‘The wind’s changed.’
‘He is coming.’
Gus hissed venomously, ‘You didn’t tell me, it’s veered.’
Omar persisted shrilly, ‘The officer is coming.’
‘The wind has moved from south-west-south to west-south-west – you’ve got to warn me about this sort of thing.’
‘Do you want to know about the wind or the officer?’
‘Both.’
The panic consumed him.
The wind had come up from gentle to moderate strength. A flag on the Stickledown Range would have eased clear of the pole and lethargically flapped free. Its direction had shifted from No Value to Half Value. On that range he could have waited, settled, then tapped into the calculator on the mat beside him and computed whether to alter the windage turret on the ’scope by a full click, or by half a click, or whether to aim off from the centre of the target’s V-Bull. Gus saw the officer. There were no insignia on his shoulder but men straightened to attention as he passed. He was within half a dozen feet of the entrance door to the command post and walking. There was no time to settle or make the necessary calculations. He aimed off, his mind racing for an answer to the equation, to compensate for the fresher wind and for the brisk stride of the officer.
‘Watch the shot’s fall,’ Gus whispered.
But the officer, wide-chested, in fatigues, would pause at the jamb of the command post’s door, and that, too, must go into the equation.
Gus fired. The moment that the recoil hammered into his shoulder, he knew that the breath pattern was wrong, and that he’d squeezed too fast on the trigger. The rifle’s compensator attachment at the barrel end kept the ’scope sight steady. He saw the hazed shapes of single waving grass stems and the flattening climb of the smoke columns, and the eddy of the air disturbed by the bullet’s track, and then he lost the flight.
The bullet would run for more than one and a half seconds. Its trajectory curve would take it to an apex of a fraction more than four feet above the aim point before the sliding fall. The flight, to Gus, was endless.
The target, the officer, at the door of the command post had turned and was issuing an instruction, jabbing with a finger for emphasis. Then he stood as if frozen.
Omar piped, ‘Miss. One metre to the right. Hit the wall. Miss.’
Gus slid the bolt back, eased out the wasted bullet. They were all rooted to the ground.
It was what he had been told. Men stood statue still in the seconds after a bullet had been fired and had missed them. But that moment would pass. It would pass before he had the chance to breathe in, breathe out, and use the respiratory pause. He locked the aim. His mind made the adjustment on intuition and instinct. He fired a second shot. A soldier dived to the ground. A second cowered, another fell to his knees, as if the ice of the tableau had melted. The officer’s jabbing finger was retracted and he seemed to be twisting his hips to turn for safety.
Gus saw him spin, one arm whipped high in the air. He saw the shock on his target’s face and watched him pirouette, fall. The officer was on his back and his legs kicked in the air. No-one came to his aid, and across the open ground came the faint whinnying cry of his scream.
He slid back the bolt, ejected the cartridge case. He tried to steady the post-shoot shake in his hands. He loathed himself for his failure to make a good, clean kill and started to analyse the first total failure and the second partial failure, as he had been instructed. And with the analysis came the calm… He had asked too much of the boy, he had not allowed enough for the wind, he had not reckoned on the pace of the officer’s walk, and he would think about it some more in the evening.