The evening was dim and murky. No rain was falling but there was heavy cloud cover, and I could see that darkness was going to fall early. All the same, we had an hour in hand, and I'd been planning to stop in a quiet lane so that we could get in a few minutes' kip. But by the time we cleared the northern outskirts of 1Leading the old adrenalin was running again, and I felt too hepped up to be sleepy.
'Tell you what,' I said, 'I don't want to count any chickens, but we've got time to recce a site for the test- shoot tomorrow. Let's take another look.'
I pulled off the road on to a patch of earth under some big beeches, and we'd hardly started scrutinising the map again when Tony pointed with his forefinger and said, 'Hey! Whaddaya know? A genuine rifle range, all ready for us.'
Sure enough, in a remote, wooded valley a few miles east of our site, the 1:25,000 map showed a narrow rectangular opening in the forest, nearly half a mile long, marked white among the green, and bearing the legend 'Rifle Range'.
'I don't believe it,' I said. 'If it's like the map shows, it's got everything: six or seven hundred yard sight-line and a remote location, no houses for miles. Let's go for it. You drive, though. Those little roads could be private tracks; if we get stopped, you do the talking. We'll be American tourists, lost in the great British jungle.'
'What do I do?' said Tony in mock alarm. 'Act dumb?'
'Act yourself,' I told him, 'and that'll fool anybody.'
He gave me a look as we changed places.
Twenty minutes later, we left the main road and dived down a spectacularly steep lane. At the bottom the ground flattened out, but soon the road swung left- handed into the beginning of the secluded valley. We passed a pair of cottages on our right, then a farm on our left. Beyond the farm the surface suddenly deteriorated from tarmac into pitted gravel, and a hand-painted notice, black on white, proclaimed it a,P, lvArE P, OAD.
'Thought so,' I said. 'Keep going.'
We crawled on, lurching through potholes, with steep grass fields lifting away on either hand. A few minutes later we passed the remains of some ancient building on our left, walls smothered with ivy, standing back from the road.
'Jesus!' Tony exclaimed. 'It's the ruins of a church.
This place is getting spooky.'
Soon we were into the woods, which turned out to be dense beech, with branches hanging over the lane and turning it into a tunnel. In there the light was already so dim that I instinctively glanced at my watch to make sure we weren't running out of time. In fact we were fine, and I could see from the map that we were almost at our objective.
'lkound this next corner, it'll be on our right,' I said.
'I'll believe it when we see it.'
But see it we did. Tony swung left, and after a couple of hundred yards we came upon an opening in the trees on our right, with a red and white barrier pole across it.
We pulled off the track, got out of the car, dodged under the pole and walked throughthe gap, to find ourselves, sure enough, on a rifle range. A long, narrow strip of rough-mown grass sliced through the forest along the contours at the foot of the hill, and ended in a natural butt away to our right. There was a firing point every hundred yards, and although the place had an amateurish, partially-kept air about it, the range was clearly in use. Tyre-marks in the mud showed that quite a few vehicles came and went, the grass had been cut lately, and a couple of poles for flying danger flags had recently been repainted white.
'Incredible!' I said quietly. 'It must be the TA who use it. There's not even a range hut. They must bring everything with them when they do a shoot. But what a place! We've even got the distances marked out for us: no need to step them out.' We'd come out at the 200 yard mark, and away to our left we could see five more firing-points stretching away, giving 700 yards in all.
'That big rifle's going to make one hell of a noise down in here,' said Tony, looking up at the sides of the valley all round. 'It'll sound like a cannon.'
'Won't matter. We'll just take a couple of shots and slip away. I don't fancy driving in along this bottom track, though. We could easily get trapped. There must be some way we can come in on foot.'.
Recourse to the map showed another track running steeply uphill to the north, past the far end of the range, towards a main road on the next ridge. We took it, but soon saw we'd made a mistake: rainwater had carved deep channels out of the mud, and even a four-wheel- drive vehicle would have had problems negotiating the track. Seeing that the Granada wasn't going to make it, Tony eased off and backed carefully down.
'That's our way in for tomorrow, all the same,' I said.
'Park at the top, walk down, shoot, and away on foot.
If anyone turns up we can disappear into the trees. Let's get round there now for a shufti — back the way we came, out along the valley, then up and over. All we need is to find a place where we can park in the morning.'
As I'd forecast, night came early while we were driving towards the transit hide. Full darkness had fallen by the time we reached the lane I'd earmarked. Again we parked under trees, and we hadn't gone fifty metres from the Granada before the car had vanished from sight. Our walk-in to the site was relatively short about a mile — and as we were in no hurry, I took it at a snail's pace. For camouflage purposes we'd pulled on DPM smocks over our civilian gear; we both had pistols in shoulder holsters, and each of us carried an MP 5 with spare magazines. From camp, I'd also brought a night-sight of the kind we'd used in Iraq — an image intensifier that gives really good vision in the dark. I had it slung round my neck on para-cord so that I could bring it up with a single movement. And for the first time since the intercept at Ludlow, we were wearing our covert radios.
Tony and I kept about ten metres apart as we walked uphill over a grass field beside an overgrown hedge, myself leading. Even with my eyes accustomed to the dark I could see very little — but memorised details of our route were printed in my mind.
There was practically no wind, and what there was a breath from the west — was coming from our left, through the hedge.
After four hundred metres, another hedge led off across the hill to the right at ninety degrees to the one we were following. Luckily cattle had pushed their way through it, creating gaps, so that we were able to slip through with scarcely a sound. Another five minutes brought us to the point on the brow of the hill where our guiding row of bushes came to an end. A barbed wire fence ran across our line of advance, just visible on the horizon against the cloudy sky. I beckoned Tony forward and held the top strand down taut while he went over it, to prevent the wire twanging. Then he did the same for me, and we crept on silently over the big field beyond, the last before our target wood.
Still the breeze was steady on my left cheek. I stopped. Ahead and to our left, something pale was showing. The night sight revealed it as a sheep, outlier of a large flock. Hearing Tony move up close behind me, I whispered, 'Sheep. We'll detour right so we don't panic them.'
On we went. Frequent checks with the sight showed that the sheep were aware of our presence — they had their heads up and were looking in our direction — but by skirting round them we persuaded them that we weren't a threat, and they stayed where they were.
Now the southern face of the wood loomed ahead of us like a black wall. We were coming in towards its right-hand corner. About a hundred yards out I stopped and went down on one knee for a thorough scan. The sight revealed fence posts and tree-trunks, but nothing sinister. Thinking back, I remembered the PIll's instructions about a clearing and a disused chalk-pit.
The old well, they said, was just inside the wood, close to the fence, but the clearing and the pit were behind it.
Therefore, I reckoned, I should see some sort of opening in the trees.