‘Allow me to explain the tactical plan.’
‘It is right that you should do so.’
‘There are no traitors here,’ the general said defiantly. He would have said that the brigadier, the Boot, the man with big feet, was his friend. He did not know whether his protestations of loyalty were believed. ‘Traitors should be shot.’
‘Of course. The plan?’
Some would have stayed with his friend, and with the fists and the clubs; only the most senior would have come to the command bunker. The most senior would have no trust for him.
He pointed to the map. ‘I have a holding force, a battalion, in brigade base at the crossroads. Their task is to delay the advance of the woman and her people. We seek to persuade them that the position is weakly defended, to give them encouragement to mass and cross open ground. I send an armoured column forward, to encircle and to destroy.
The rabble will be in the open, without cover. They will be destroyed by the tanks.’
‘How many tanks?’
‘Six.’
‘Why six? Why not twenty-six, or forty-eight?’
‘Six tanks because that is the number that are in working order, plus a reserve of nine, plus seven more that have faults but are nearly serviceable, out of forty-eight. There are forty-eight on the parade ground for inspection – but there are six tanks plus the reserve that are fully operational. Check for yourself.’
The calm voice asked, ‘How would you recognize that the contagion of treachery runs deeper than you now believe?’
‘If we do not encircle them, crush them, that would be evidence of treachery… Do I have permission to issue orders, to make the killing zone?’
The man from the Estikhabarat smiled, and nodded.
The life of the general, and he recognized it, hung on the capability of six tanks of the T-72 class, with nine more in reserve, to encircle and destroy a force of peasant tribesmen caught in open ground. He gave the order.
Gus heard the guttural thunder from down the road, towards the ever-burning flame.
It was like Stickledown Range on a perfect day, clear vision, no wind.
The thunder began as a murmur, and grew.
On a perfect day at Stickledown the sun never shone so brightly that the target was distorted in a mirage, the rain never lashed, the gales never blew.
The murmur was a rumble.
The perfect day was a mindset. The champion isolated himself in a bubble cocoon.
When he shot well, at the limit of his powers, Gus never sweated, was never wet or cold.
The rumble was a roar.
For that perfect day, he was not tired, not hungry, not cold, not frightened. He went through the routine, as he would have done on any of the perfect days at Stickledown Range when he fired at the V-Bull to win a silver spoon. His breathing was good, relaxed. His eyes were clear focused, not blinking. His body was loose, the muscles not tensed. The rifle was firmly against his shoulder.
The roar was the thrash of a club on a drum.
In the aim of the rifle, through the telescopic sight, was a goatherd, a mere boy. The boy ran around the goats and seemed not to know what he should do as the animals milled on the raised road in the path of the advancing tanks. Joe Denton had told him that a T-72 tank weighed 38 tons and had a maximum road speed of 39 m.p.h., and the boy with his goats was on the road and in their path. They might slow, they might shoot, they might drive straight through and over the goatherd and his animals. The boy seemed, in panic, to run round and round the goats as if he did not know how to drive them off the road. Gus thought the boy was quality. He took his eye from the ’scope and looked back along the road.
They were bunched close, a sea of dust around them. The clanking of the tracks pierced his ears. They were squat, low profile, painted in a dirty sand yellow, and the main armament barrels protruded out ahead of them. In each of them, he counted six, a man stood in the turret. They were bellowing leviathans, closing on the boy and his goats, as he ran round and round the frightened flock. The soldier in the turret of the lead tank waved, gestured for the boy to jump clear.
He settled again with the rifle. They were not going to slow for the boy and his animals, they would crush them. Gus neither hated his enemy nor felt any remorse at what he planned. His mind was clear, as on any perfect shooting day. The lead tank appeared in the edge of the circle of his ’scope. In the sight’s centre, at the T-junction of the reticule lines, was the boy and his goats.
The boy fled, the goats scattered. The boy dived down the incline and into the ditch.
Gus could see the tops of two of Joe Denton’s mines that had been obscured behind the goats.
The lead tank, its engine thundering, squirmed on the narrow elevated road to avoid the TM-46s that were Joe Denton’s gift, but there was nowhere for the driver to go. Gus saw a thunderflash of light, then smoke and the climbing debris of a tank track, and heard the scream of its brakes. The lead tank lurched across the width of the road, stabilized and stopped.
The second tank rumbled into the lead tank. To Gus, the leviathans seemed to couple.
He had his target.
At the intersection of the ’scope sight’s lines was the head and chest of the machine-gunner, reeling from the impact. The second tank’s tracks were climbing as if to straddle the lead tank’s body, and the gunner clung to the edge of the hatch for support.
Gus did not hear the noise. On Stickledown Range, he never heard the noise of voices and other rifles’ reports. He fired the shot and, as the bullet reached the target, jerked it up, he was sliding the bolt action back, ejecting and aiming again.
In a lithe loose movement, Omar climbed out of the ditch, scrambled up the incline and jumped. He cleared the spinning wheels of the tracks of the second tank and stumbled onto the superstructure of the brute. He reached at his belt; his arm seemed to rise as if in a gesture of triumph, and something small dropped from his hand into the cavity of the hatch through which the machine-gunner had slumped. Gus had no image in his mind of a hand grenade bumping with a death rattle to the iron floor of the darkened hulk then rolling to a stop beside or under the buried seats of the driver and the main armament gunner; did not consider that moment of terror in the cavern as the brief seconds of the grenade’s fuse frittered away.
His aim was on the third tank.
It was predictable. He did not see the little puff of grey smoke that followed the explosion in the second tank’s bowels, nor the first licks of flame from the body of the lead tank; nor did he see the boy leap down and run to the ditch.
The third tank had stopped, then – coughing diesel fumes – swung in a crabbing gait towards the safety of the incline. It was a frantic thrashing creature seeking its escape down the incline. Through the ’scope, Gus saw the sheets of newspaper and the scattered shreds of the plastic bags hanging from the wire and the old fence post. The wind had not risen. He had no need to alter the windage turret.
Gus had never, in his shooting life, attempted anything so difficult.
The beast yawed on the rim of the incline. Below the turret, in the shadow of the flange that fastened the gun to it, was a strip of bright glass. The ’scope showed him every rivet in the metal around the glass and the smears across it. The glass was wider than a man’s forehead and as deep as the forehead of a bald man. He breathed, sucked in the air, let it slip, held it, then fired. He had a good, sharp view because there was no dust thrown up from the mud earth under the tip of his barrel. The tank lurched over the incline… It was a moment of Gus’s childhood. Like a small boy’s birthday party. Short trousers, grey ankle socks, school sweaters, and the birthday game of Blind Man’s Buff… The tank was blind. Perhaps the armour-piercing bullet had hit the side flange of the driver’s vision aperture and frosted it; perhaps the bullet had driven through the glass and was a small molten core of lead flying without control around the the interior of the tank and through the bodies of the driver, the gunner and the commander; perhaps the driver’s face was lacerated by a mist of glass fragments… Little children, blindfolded, groped for each other, tried to find each other, and did not know where they were… It was the greatest shot that Gus Peake had ever attempted. The tank engine cut. Below the incline, the beast was blinded. He did not think of the dark horror that little children felt when they were blindfolded, or in the interior of the beast of the three men who were sightless.