He didn’t set up his equipment immediately, but laid the holdall carefully on the gravel roof unopened. There was a fine view. If you ignored the fact you were standing on a decaying glass-and-concrete rectangle, you could imagine it had been put here for the view, he thought. There were few high buildings around him, just three other similar blocks, slightly lower than this one, and London wasn’t a high city anyway. He could see all the way, unobstructed, the eight miles across town to the highest buildings that housed the banks and office blocks in the City and Canary Wharf.
The nearly one and a half miles between him and the football stadium was clear of anything high. Atop the tower block, he was far above anything in his line of fire.
But it wasn’t as easy as that. The distance was huge for the best sniper shot—close to record-breaking, he knew. And the stadium itself had a roof that curved up and then down, so that all inside it was obscured apart from one small corner of the pitch and one half of the eastern stand. That was fortunate, at least. If the director’s box had been on the western side, there’d be no shot.
Removing the fluorescent yellow council jerkin, he turned it inside out so that a grey lining he’d sewn in himself was all that could be seen. Then he unrolled some grey parachute silk from around his waist and spread it on the roof. He fitted snap-on aluminium struts from regular camping equipment into sleeves in the material that he’d also made and set up this rigid, flat canopy, two feet high, under which he could stretch full length, concealed. Though it was unlikely they would be looking for anything at this distance from the stadium, the police helicopters that monitored the match crowd would see nothing moving on the roof, no human figure.
He settled down under the canopy for the ninety-five-minute wait, and that was just for the match to start. It would require a goal from the home side to be able to make the shot at all. Otherwise the seated figure—his target—was half obscured by a wall. But a goal would undoubtedly bring the target to his feet, and that was the moment—“the moment of truth,” as the bullfighters called it. The mise à mort. He imagined the blade descending through the muscles of the bull’s neck, its shoulder blades opened by the lowered, charging head, a way to the heart exposed. He too would go for a heart shot.
London shimmered, but not with sunlight, just the heavy heat. Thank God the sun was behind clouds. Under the silk on the roof it would have been unbearable with the August sun beating down.
He listened to the faint sound of traffic down below. A seagull perched briefly on one of the heating vents, then flew off again.
Unzipping the holdall, he took out the gun stock first. He stroked it with his right hand; a precision piece, custom-made and then adapted for a left-hander. Left-handed Lars. It was very light, thirty-one pounds without the sight. The semiautomatic could be disassembled and assembled in three minutes with the right tools. It was a long-range rifle used by U.S. Navy Seals, among others.
It had been a difficult choice whether to go for the semiautomatic, with five rapid shots, or the simpler, maybe more accurate single-shot rifle. At this range he might easily need a second shot if there was an opportunity, and reloading would be slow. But he’d had to weigh taking a second or even a third shot against the marginally less accurate nature of the semiautomatic. Either way, there was a risk. The free-floating barrel gave less recoil than a bolt-action rifle, and that was also a consideration. Its accuracy was proven to a range of more than a mile. After that, it was entirely down to the hair’s-breadth expertise of the sniper himself.
He assembled the barrel into the steel receiver and fished out the Bender optical sights from the holdall; three screws either side, tightened with a key. You could take the sight off and fit it back on without it losing the zero. Then he fitted a forward bipod and rear bipod for maximum steadiness. He carefully placed the belt with its five shots, five individual opportunities if there was time, next to the mounted rifle. Then he turned over onto his front and set himself up in a firing position, legs splayed, the right one slightly cocked.
He looked through the sight at the directors’ box thirty streets away and read off the distance on its red digital rangefinder: 2,380 yards. It was a huge shot, but not impossible, not a record after all. The record was held by a Canadian corporal serving in Afghanistan, who’d killed an enemy over nearly a mile and half, and then immediately killed a second at eight hundred yards. Good shooting.
He zeroed in the rifle at a seat in the centre of the box, half obscured though it was. Then he rolled over and stretched his limbs and crawled out from under the parachute silk to spend the next half hour relaxing against a heating vent and watching and listening for the sound of helicopters, glancing at the still cord that disappeared through the trapdoor, and composing himself mentally for the task.
It came as a low hum at first, and he sat up, alert, before realising the sound was the crowd in the stadium, its collective 35,000-strong murmur rising above the stadium roof and wafting across the distance to the tower block. Crawling back under the parachute silk, he lay and waited.
The sound of the stadium’s speaker system sent announcements and rock music through the air. They were cranking up the crowd for the spectacle ahead. He looked down the sight and saw the directors’ box filling up. They were the last to arrive—greetings, handshakes. They were mostly Russians, flown in on private jets from Moscow that morning to watch the first big game amid the high hopes their man’s team carried for the forthcoming season in England and Europe.
He watched the target, standing, clapping one man on the back, shaking another’s hand. At 2,380 yards he could see the gold signet ring on his finger, the stubble on his chin, the colour of his wife’s earrings. But there was no clear shot. Then he watched them take their seats, and a roar went up for the kickoff in the centre of the pitch, which he couldn’t see.
The match coursed to and fro, he guessed, judging from the noises of the crowd, the partisan songs of rival supporters. Occasionally he saw action, down in the corner of the pitch on the eastern side that was visible to him; a corner kick, a long ball followed by an attacking player who trapped it and was then wedged in by defenders to prevent the cross. The target’s side was attacking against the goal mouth at that end, a goal he couldn’t see.
Once, there was a roar from the crowd behind that goal mouth, and the target came to his feet, beginning to clap his hands, only to stop and sit back down, an opportunity missed, both down there in the stadium and up here on the roof of the tower block.
The game had been playing for just over thirty-five minutes, and Lars was getting stiff with waiting, when a huge roar confirmed the goal he and the target had been waiting for. The target jumped to his feet, clapping, then raising his hands above his head in triumph in a sustained celebration of a goal.
Everything stopped. Five minutes before, the reading on the anemometer had been negligible.
Lars took his aim through the sight, marked up three bars above the zero to account for drop. The target remained in position, once turning to hug a man to his left. The celebration was sustained. Lars was still, his breathing utterly stopped. No muscle moved, except the one on his trigger finger. He pulled just enough to feel the resistance. He was composed; the target was in full sight.
He hardly felt the recoil. But he lay still, exactly as he had been to take the shot. Through the sight, he saw the Russian appear to explode. A .50-calibre shell would penetrate two sheets of metal six feet apart; the target didn’t have a chance.