He tossed his cigarette away, shrugged, and set off down the mountain, turning a tiny mogul into a needlessly spectacular jump, and then sending a plume of powder into the air as he paralleled a perfect stop on the other side of the run, about a hundred yards further down. He turned away from me, unzipped his suit, and started to urinate against a rock.
I wanted to urinate too. But I had the feeling that if I started, I’d never stop; I’d just keep on pissing away, until there was nothing left of me but a pile of clothes.
I unhitched the lens from the front of the camera, removed the cap, and trained it on the mountain, squinting through the eyepiece. The image was thick with condensation, so I unzipped my jacket and slipped the scope inside, trying to warm it against my body.
It was cold and quiet, and I could hear my fingers shaking as I started to assemble the rifle.
I had him now. Perhaps half-a-mile away. He was as fat as ever, with the kind of silhouette that snipers dream about. If they dream about anything.
Even at that distance, I could tell that Dirk was having a horrible time. His body language came across in short, simplesentences. I. Am. Going. To. Die. Hisbottom was stuck out, his chest was forward, legs rigid with fear and exhaustion, and he was moving with glacial slowness.
Rhonawas making a slightly better job of the descent, but not by much. Awkwardly, jerkily, but making progress of a kind, she trickled down the slope as slowly as she could, trying not to get too far ahead of her miserable husband.
I waited.
At six hundred yards, I started to over-breathe, charging the blood with oxygen so I’d be ready to switch off the tap, and keep it switched off, from three hundred. I exhaled through the side of the mouth, gently blowing away from the scope.
At four hundred yards, Dirk fell for about the fifteenth time, and didn’t look in any hurry to get up. As I watched him panting for breath, I pulled back on the knurled grip of the bolt, and heard the firing-pin cock with a shatteringly loud click. Jesus, this shot was going to be noisy. I suddenly found myself wondering about avalanches, and had to stop myself from spinning into a wild fantasy of being buried under a thousand tons of snow. What if my body wasn’t found for a couple of years? What if this anorak was desperately unfashionable by the time they hauled me out? I blinked five times, trying to steady my breath, my vision, my panic. It was too cold for avalanches. For avalanches, you need a lot of snow, then a lot of sun. We had neither. Get a grip. I squinted through the scope, and saw that Dirk was on his feet again. On his feet, and looking at me.
Or at least, he was looking towards me, peering down into the trees while he scraped snow out of his goggles.
He couldn’t have seen me. It wasn’t possible. I had buried myself behind a drift, digging out the narrowest possible channel in which to rest the rifle, and whatever shape he was trying to make out would have been disguised by the irregular jumble of trees. He couldn’t have seen me. So what was he looking at?
I gently eased my head down below the level of the drift and twisted round, checking for some solitary langlaufer, or an errant chamois, or the chorus-line ofNo, No Nanette -anything that might have caught Dirk’s eye. I held my breath and turned my head slowly from left to right, sweeping the hill for sounds.
Nothing.
I inched back up to the top of the drift, and squinted through the scope again. Left, right, up, down.
No Dirk.
I bobbed my head up, the way they tell you never to do, and desperately searched the stinging, blurring whiteness for some glimpse of him. My mouth suddenly seemed to taste of blood, and my heart was hammering on the inside of my chest, frantic to get out.
There. Three hundred yards. Moving faster. He was having a go at a schuss, on a flatter part of the slope, and it had carried him over to the far side of the piste. I blinked again, settled my right eye to the scope, and closed my left.
At two hundred yards, I drew in a long, steady breath, pinched it off when my lungs reached three-quarters full, and held it.
Dirk was traversing now. Traversing the slope, and my line of fire. I held him easily in the sight - could have fired at any time - but I knew that this just had to be the surest shot of my life. I nestled my finger on the trigger, taking up the slack of the mechanism, the slack of the flesh between my second and third joint, and waited.
He stopped at about a hundred and fifty yards. Looked up at the mountain. Down the mountain. Then turned his body towards me. He was sweating heavily, gasping with the effort, with the fear, with the knowledge. I settled the cross-hairs on the exact centre of his chest. As I’d promised Francisco. As I’d promised everyone.
Squeeze it. Never pull. Squeeze it as slowly and as lovingly as you know how.
NineteenGood evening. This is thenine o’clock news from the BBC. PETER SISSONS
We didn’t leave Mьrren for another thirty-six hours. That was my idea.
I told Francisco that the first thing they’d do would be to check the train departures. Anybody who left, or tried to leave, within twelve hours of the shooting, would be in for a hell of a time, guilty or innocent.
Francisco had chewed his lip for a while, before gently smiling his agreement. I think that staying in the village struck him as the cooler, more daring option, and coolness and daring were qualities that Francisco definitely hoped to see one day, attached to his name in aNewsweekprofile. A moody picture, with the caption: ‘Francisco: cool and daring’. Something like that.
The real reason I wanted to stay in Mьrren was so that I could get a chance to speak to Solomon, but I thought it probably best not to tell Francisco that.
So we hung about, separately, and gawped along with everyone else as the helicopters arrived. First police, then Red Cross, then, inevitably, the television crews. Word of the shooting was round the village in fifteen minutes, but most of the tourists seemed to be too stunned to talk to each other about it. They wandered here and there, watching, frowning, keeping their children close.
The Swiss sat in bars and murmured to each other; either they were upset, or they were worried about the effect on business. It was hard to tell. They needn’t have worried, of course. By nightfall, the bars and restaurants were fuller than I’d ever seen them. Nobody wanted to miss out on an opinion, on a rumour, on any shred of interpretation they could hang on this ghastly, terrible event.
First of all, they blamed the Iraqis, which seems to be standard procedure nowadays. The theory lasted for an hour or so, until wise heads began to suggest that Iraqis couldn’t have done it, couldn’t even have got into the village without people noticing. Accent, skin-colour, kneeling down and facingMecca. These were things that just didn’t get past the nose of your average canny Swiss without attracting attention.
Next came an out-of-control pentathlete; exhausted after twenty miles of cross-country skiing, our man stumbles and falls, causing his.22 target rifle to discharge, killing Herr Van Der Hoewe in an accident of astronomical unlikelihood. Weird though this theory was, it attracted a considerable amount of support; mainly because it involved no malice, and malice was something that the Swiss simply did not want to countenance in their snow-capped paradise.
For a while, the two rumours lay down with each other, giving birth, after a time, to a truly bizarre hybrid: it was an Iraqi pentathlete, said the not-at-all-wise heads. Maddened with envy at the success of the Scandinavians in the last winter Olympics, an Iraqi pentathlete (someone knew someone who had heard the name Mustapha mentioned) had run amok; in fact, was probably still out there somewhere, stalking the mountain in search of tall, blond skiers.