by Tom Cain
‘Not to worry, Miss,’ McGuinness replied, placing the gun carefully on the green baize shelf. ‘I should have some thirty-twos available as well. I’ll get them fitted right away.’
‘Thank you, Donald,’ said Zalika with a gracious smile. ‘Would you mind putting full and three-quarter chokes in them, please?’
‘Certainly, Miss.’
Carver’s face remained impassive, but his mind was racing. The choke was a fitting placed into the end of the gun-barrel that restricted the blast of pellets from the cartridge, compressing them into a much tighter spread. This gave the gun much more hitting power, particularly at a distance. But it also placed a huge premium on the shooter’s accuracy because there was far less margin for error than a wider spread of pellets allowed. Zalika Stratten was either a seriously good shot, Carver decided, or she was playing her own personal game of bluff, raising the stakes without the hand to back it up. One way or the other, she was certainly ready to compete with him before a single shot had been fired.
So far he’d thought of her challenge to him as little more than a game, just another flirtation on the way to an inevitable conclusion. But it struck him now that he really wanted to beat her very much indeed. It wasn’t just because she’d made that a condition of having her. It was the fact that she’d been playing him, one way or the other, ever since he’d stepped inside the house, and now he’d had enough. Carver was not a man who sought either conflict or competition. But if anyone insisted on taking him on, then they were going to pay for it. It was time he taught Miss Zalika Stratten a lesson she wouldn’t forget.
‘And you, sir?’ McGuinness said, interrupting Carver’s train of thought.
‘I’ll take a Perazzi too,’ Carver said.
‘Longer barrels?’ McGuinness asked.
‘Sure.’
‘How about choke?’
Zalika had gone to one extreme by being so specific, Carver decided to go to the other. ‘I’ll just take it as it comes, thanks,’ he said.
He was pleased to see Zalika’s brow crinkle into a frown. She would, he hoped, be wondering why he could afford to be casual about his gun. Was he really that good, that confident of victory?
‘Interesting choice you made,’ Carver said.
‘I’ve always liked the trigger-pull on the Perazzi,’ she said. ‘It’s got a nice, even weight. Very crisp, don’t you think?’
Klerk was watching the two of them with detached amusement. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘let’s get out of here. We’ve chosen our weapons. Time we went and used them.’
35
A Range Rover was waiting for them outside the front door. McGuinness loaded the guns and cartridge bags into the back then drove them down one of the private roads that criss-crossed the estate until they came to a massive earthwork, at least thirty feet high, extending in either direction as far as the eye could see. The road led to a tunnel through the earthwork.
When they emerged into the open again, Carver could see that the ground fell away into a gigantic bowl that must have been at least fifty feet deep. The land within was laid out like a golf course, with patches of open grass separated by copses of trees, hedgerows, man-made hills and valleys and even a stream that fed into a small lake. But instead of golf tees, fairways, bunkers and greens, each individual section of land was equipped with a selection of different stands for guns to fire from; traps to launch clay pigeons; a selection of what looked like watchtowers, or mobile telephone masts; and a rifle range.
‘Impressive,’ said Carver.
‘Thank you,’ said Klerk. ‘I’ve taken elements from the finest shoots in the British Isles and reproduced them right here. Different landscapes, different types of game, we’ve got them all.’
McGuinness drove them down to the bottom of the bowl and parked the car. He handed each of the three competitors their gun, a cartridge bag and a set of ear-protectors. Then he stood before them and, abandoning his usual deference, spoke to them as the man who, as keeper, would be taking responsibility for the shoot.
‘You will each be shooting ten clays per stand, at five separate stands,’ he said. ‘So you each have fifty-five rounds: fifty for the competition and five spares in case any shots have to be retaken. Guns will be carried broken and unloaded. Ear-protectors must be worn while shooting is taking place. I will keep score and act as referee. Does anyone have any questions? No? Well, in that case, if you would please follow me, we will go to the first trap.’
‘Do you shoot much?’ Klerk asked Carver as they walked away. ‘For sport, I mean, rather than business.’
‘Every now and then. Been a while since I shot any clays.’
Carver wasn’t paying too much attention to Klerk. He was watching Zalika, who was walking ahead of them. She’d put her hair back into a ponytail and changed into jeans and a Beretta ladies’ shooting vest. The vest, in theory a purely functional garment, was cut to follow every curve of her upper body and to stop just high enough to reveal the contours beneath her jeans. As she walked, the sway of her body seemed designed to tantalize, giving Carver just a hint of the pleasures in store if he was man enough to match her challenge.
Zalika half-turned to look at him over her shoulder, a teasing smile on her face, and for a second Carver felt another surge of anger at her blatant tactics and irritation at himself for falling for them so easily. She’d meant to distract him, and it had worked. It was time to concentrate on the matter in hand: winning the shooting match.
They were walking through heather now. A short way ahead of them, Carver saw three circular butts, or shooting hides, constructed of dry-stone walls, topped with turf. Ahead of the butts the heather-covered ground rose gradually, simulating the slope of a grouse moor.
‘Thought we’d start with grouse,’ said Klerk. ‘We’ll be shooting one at a time from the centre butt. Sam, why don’t you shoot first, hey?’
It was an obvious tactic to put Carver at a disadvantage. The other two had shot there a hundred times and knew all the quirks of the land and the positions of the traps from which the clays would be fired like miniature black Frisbees, precisely 108mm across. As the newcomer, Carver would have benefited hugely from watching the others go first. Instead, he would have to shoot sight unseen, trust his reactions and hope for the best.
Carver transferred ten cartridges from his cartridge bag to a pocket of his shooting vest then walked into the butt. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a few seconds, trying to clear his mind of everything but the thought processes required to hit a small, fast-moving target. Then he loaded two cartridges into the twin barrels of his gun and raised it to his shoulders.
McGuinness was standing behind him, slightly to one side, holding a control box.
‘Would you like to see a pair, sir?’ he said.
He was offering to release two of the clays before the shooting began so that Carver could see where they came from and at what distance and angle they flew. The obvious response was, ‘Yes please.’ But some perverse refusal to be seen to need outside help prevented Carver from doing the sensible thing. Instead he replied, ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’
He concentrated his vision on the air just above the artificial moor, directly in front of him, and said, ‘Pull!’
McGuinness pushed a button on his control box and Carver heard the sound of a spring being released as the trap slung the first clay pigeon into the air. Then came the fluttering whirr of the clay as it cut through the air. It came low and fast from a point about forty yards away, just as a real grouse would do, flying towards him but slanting right-to-left across his line of fire.
Carver fired.
The clay pigeon kept flying, entirely untouched, until gravity pulled it to earth.
He’d missed.
Appalled by his stupidity and incompetence, he barely heard the release of the second clay, was late getting back into position, and missed that one as well.
Carver could not remember the last time he’d felt so humiliated, so exposed
. Behind him, the other three stood in stunned, embarrassed silence for several seconds until Klerk called out, ‘Jesus Christ, Carver, you ever fired a gun before in your life?’ It was meant as banter, pulling his leg. But there was nothing funny about Carver’s shooting. It wasn’t just that he had missed. He had done so like a rank amateur.
He ejected the first two cartridges from his gun, resumed his stance and called ‘Pull!’ once again. This time he hit both clays. They broke into a few large fragments – a sure sign that he’d not struck them dead-centre – but they were hits nonetheless. So were the next three pairs. Carver walked away from the butt with a score of eight out of ten. He only cared about the two dropped shots.
Klerk went next. He shot with the metronomic style of a man who has spent a lot of time and money on lessons from an excellent teacher. Technically, he was faultless, but he wasn’t a natural marksman. Even so, he too scored eight, and seemed perfectly happy to have done so.
Now it was Zalika’s turn. She didn’t just hit the first pair of clays, she dusted them, striking them so perfectly that they disintegrated in mid-air, vanishing in what looked like little puffs of smoke.
When she broke open the gun, she caught the cartridges one-handed as they sprang from the barrels before placing them in a little bin that stood inside the butt. The catch was a nice touch, Carver thought, a clever, deceptively casual way of letting him know how at ease she was around guns. He noticed something else as Zalika reloaded: she rotated her cartridges in the barrels so that the writing on the brass base of each shell was the right way up. It was a telling little ritual, designed to prepare her for action, like a tennis player bouncing a ball, or a golfer practising his swing.
It worked. Zalika vaporized the next four pairs as efficiently as she had the first. She walked away with a perfect ten. If it wasn’t obvious before, Carver knew for sure now that he had a fight on his hands – one he could easily lose. If he were going to stand any chance at all he had to shed the look of a loser and regain some sense of authority.
As they walked away to the next stand, he asked McGuinness, ‘Just out of curiosity, what chokes have I got?’
‘Quarter and cylinder,’ the gamekeeper replied.
‘Interesting,’ said Carver.
He hoped he sounded relaxed, even a little blase. But inside he was cursing himself. A quarter-choke was the least restriction available; ‘cylinder’ meant an entirely clear barrel. That gave him a much wider spread of shot. At short range that was an advantage; it might have been the only reason he’d been able to hit any clay at all in that disaster of a first round. But the further the shot went, the more holes opened up in the air between the scattered pellets and the tougher it became to get a kill. If they had to shoot at clays flying high, or any distance away, Carver was going to be in trouble.
36
‘So, we’ve shot grouse, now it’s time for partridge,’ said Klerk as they reached the second stand. It was much simpler than the grouse butt, just a basic square of wooden fencing, hip-high, with a bin for used cartridges attached to the shooter’s side. All the effort had been devoted to creating a classic, mature hedgerow of bushes and trees directly in front of the stand that looked as though it had been a part of the landscape for centuries. Carver marvelled at the effort and cost that must have gone into locating, transporting and replanting the mix of dogwood, spindleberry and hawthorn hedging, as well as the oak and chestnut trees that stood among them.
From behind the hedgerow, Carver heard the noise of a motor starting up followed by a quieter, whirring sound. Somewhere back there at least one mechanized platform was rising into the air, taking with it a trap. So the clays, like the birds they were imitating, would emerge from behind the hedge at a variety of heights.
‘Simultaneous pairs,’ said McGuinness, indicating that both clays would be released at the same time. ‘Mr Klerk to go first.’
Now the strike order had rotated in Carver’s favour. This time he would be the last to shoot.
Klerk took his place behind the fencing and called ‘Pull!’ for the first pair.
The clays emerged from behind the hedgerow, passing over one of the oak trees and rising higher into the air as they flew towards Klerk, angled left-to-right this time. They flew at different heights and on marginally differing courses, adding to the challenge of shooting them both in quick succession.
Klerk tracked the clays as they sped through the sky, swinging his gun round clockwise from twelve o’clock almost to three before he fired. Again his technique was well-schooled and effective. He scored nine out of ten.
Zalika demonstrated once again that she was more gifted than her uncle. She dismissed the first four pairs with her usual accuracy, firing earlier, so that the clays were hit when they had barely passed two o’clock. When the final pair appeared, she destroyed the ninth clay with calm efficiency. But as any serious shot knows, the last bird is often the hardest. It may be a matter of mental fatigue, for even the sternest concentration can slip. Or perhaps complacency is the greater danger, a fractional relaxation brought on by the certainty that the tenth will go down just like the last nine have done. In any event, many a competitor has been undone right at the end of a hitherto perfect sequence. And that was what happened to Zalika Stratten. She looked incredulously at the final clay as it kept flying long after the last echoes of her shot had faded away, then snapped her hand irritably round her cartridges as they sprang from the barrels of her gun.
So the girl was human, after all.
Zalika had given Carver an opening. He had to make sure he took full advantage.
This time there were no distractions. He did not look around. He did not think about anything but the clays. While the others had been shooting he had studied the clays’ flight patterns, noting precisely where they first appeared, relative to the oak tree, taking his mark from one specific branch. He dusted the first four pairs by the time they reached one o’clock.
As McGuinness pressed the control-button for the fifth time, Carver’s eyes narrowed, his jaw clenched slightly, and in a moment of pure focus he felt as though the whole world had slowed down around him, so that the clays seemed to be drifting as big and lazy as two black balloons and he had all the time in the world to bring them down. He shot them both before anyone else had even realized they were there, when they’d barely passed twelve on that imaginary clock.
As he placed his cartridges in the bin and turned round to face the others, Carver noticed a wry half-smile on McGuinness’s lips. The gamekeeper caught his eye and gave a fractional nod of acknowledgement.
Zalika’s lead had been reduced to one. Carver was back in the game.
37
‘Now let’s bash some bunnies,’ said Klerk.
The third stand wasn’t based on anywhere fancy. There’s nothing fancy about shooting rabbits, no matter where you are. But that doesn’t make rabbit clays any less of a challenge.
They came out of the trap upright, presenting the full face of the clay to the shooters as they scooted along the ground, bouncing up when they hit a bump, or a thick tuft of grass. McGuinness released the clays on report – in other words, pressing the control for the second clay as soon as he heard the first shot – coming first from the right, then from the left.
Zalika went first and shot flawlessly. She swivelled her gun to the right to pick up the first clay, tracked it until it was directly in front of her, then fired. Without pausing, she kept the gun moving to the left, locked on to the second clay, followed it back into the centre and fired again. She scored two hits, then four, six, eight, ten.
When she had finished, she caught the last two spent cartridges, disposed of them and walked away from the stand as though she had never done anything easier in her life. Memo to Carver: whatever you’ve got, I can handle it.
Carver matched her easily enough for the first four pairs. But the first clay of the final pair took a wicked bounce and he missed. The tenth clay was dusted without any trouble, but h
e was still left cursing his luck. So much for making a comeback: he was back to two behind.
Klerk shot eight. He was out of the running now, but for all his natural, ferocious competitiveness, he wasn’t bothered. It was enough for him to watch the other two struggle for supremacy.
‘Walk with me a moment,’ he said to Carver as they moved on to the next stand. He nodded towards Zalika, who was chatting to McGuinness. ‘Impressive young woman, isn’t she?’
‘Certainly seems to be,’ Carver agreed.
‘I’ll tell you something, though: this is all new. For years after the kidnap, Zalika was dead to the world, completely blank. She had no energy, no passion. She hardly said a word to me, surly all the time.’
‘Not surprising. She had an incredibly traumatic experience, lost her whole family.’
‘Survivor guilt, the shrinks called it. Christ knows I paid for enough of them. Bought her anything she could possibly want. Nothing worked, she was stuck in the past. Then this whole Gushungo business started. Now she’s a new woman. Take yesterday, playing the secretary – she’d never have done that before.’
‘Sounds like it’s given her a purpose in life.’
Klerk nodded. ‘Ja, that’s exactly what I think, too. She wants to get her hands on that bastard Mabeki. That’s what’s driving her, you mark my words. That and having you about the place.’
‘I’m not so sure about that.’
‘Trust me, she insisted on you being involved. But I’ll tell you what, you had better beat her today or she will be severely disappointed. She will hold you in contempt.’
Klerk put such relish into the word ‘contempt’ that Carver could not help but smile.
‘One more reason to beat her, then,’ he said.
For the fourth test of skill, they stopped in front of a grassy path, three paces wide, that ran between two high blackthorn hedges, one of which was somewhat taller than the other.