by Chris Ryan
'I'm coming out then.'
Hurryi'ng now, I brought out my knife again, cut the cradle of rope round the container, dropped the severed ends down the well, replaced the circular lid, swept the grass back and forth a couple of times to mask the edge of the cover, picked up the pipe by the webbing cradle round it, and nipped back to the fence.
Seconds later Tony and I were away across the middle of the field at a fast walk; but only when we got back to our marker hedge, out of sight and hearing of the wood, did he burst out with, 'Boy, was that a close one! The bastard was standing with his. heels three feet from my head!'
We ran the other lads to ground at the new safe house not far from Great Missenden. Whinger guided us in on the phone, calling the turns, until finally we pulled round the back of a farmyard to find a hideous modem bungalow built alongside the biggest heap of shit in Buckinghamshire - or so it seemed: there was a mountain of old straw and manure piled up right in front of the turn-around, and the air was full of the stink of cows.
'What have they done to us?' I yelled as I walked in.
'What a shower!'
'Close the door, for fuck's sake,' said Whinger. 'The only hope is to keep the smell outside.'
Cowshit apart, the place was nothing like as good for
us as the cottage in the Dean. For one thing it was too close to the main road and to the farmyard; for another, it had big plate-glass windows, so that anyone passing could see in. A third defect was that the internal walls were paper-thin, so people could hear what was going on in the room next-door. And to make matters worse the telephone was insecure; there hadn't been time to instal a new one.
'Oh, well,' I said. 'At least it's in the right area, and we're not going to be here long. Nothing new from Fraser, I suppose?'
Whinger shook his head. 'All quiet on the western front, I'm afraid.'
'All fight, then. Let's suss out this damned rifle.'
In the past I'd done quite a bit of sniper work, and at one stage I'd worked as commander of the sniper detachment on the Regiment's SP team. Stew, also, had been on the team. But for that work we'd used 7.62 calibre PM rifles - far smaller, lighter weapons. The only one of us with experience of a .50 was Tony, who'd trained on it in the States.
The carrying case for this one was home-made but practical: a tube of rigid grey polythene, like a length of outsized drainpipe, with a cap on each end carefully sealed with parcel tape. Inside, we found the rifle cocooned in a jacket of bubble-wrap. As I drew it out on to the kitchen table, everyone crowded round, including Farrell, who was now cuffed to Stew.
'Are those curtains good enough?' I gestured at the window behind me. 'They look bloody thin to me.'
'No, no. They're OK,' said Whinger. 'I've checked from outside and you can't see through.'
Afterwards, I wished I'd been watching Farrell's face when the wrappings came off the weapon. As it was, I kept my eyes on the job in hand, but when the. angular grey metal flame appeared, he gave a low whistle.
'What the hell is it?' I said. 'Not a Barrett at all. No woodwork.'
'No,' said Farrell. 'It's a Haskins. I know that feller.'
'You mean you know this actual rifle?'
'Ah… I mean, no. It's the type. I've seen the type before.'
Even in the excitement of unveiling the fearsome beast I had noticed that odd hesitation, but I carried on peeling off: the layers of bubble film until the weapon lay revealed. The rifle comprised a long, thick barrel with a sound-deflector at the muzzle, a skeletal action, a bipod hinged under the fore-end, a high-grade telescopic sight on top, and, strangest of all, a short metal stock joined to the action by twin hydraulic shock-absorbers, clearly designed to soak up some of the recoil. The rifle had seen service - its metalwork was scratched here and there - but it looked beautifully clean, and when I drew the heavy bolt back it moved sweetly in its oiled bed. I noticed that there was no magazine: single shots only.
Also in the pack were two short belts of rounds, twelve in each, every cartridge six or seven inches long, as big and menacing as an anti-tank shell.
'Bloody hell!' said Whinger. 'That thing would kill a fucking elephant.'
'So it would,' said Farrell. 'And leave a big hole in the bastard, too.'
I picked the rifle up - it weighed at least twenty
pounds - and flicked down the legs of the bipod to set the weapon up on the floor. Then I lay down behind it, brought the stock into my shoulder and shuffled myself into an easy position. Of course I couldn't see much through the sight, because it was out of focus, pointing straight at a wall about five feet away, but I liked the look of the reticle: crossed bars, thick at the edges, thin in the middle. I imagined it centred on the distant figure of a man, probably wearing a loose, woolly dumper.
Altogether the rifle felt comfortable and solid. I opened and closed the bolt to cock the mechanism and applied the first pressure on the trigger. At the second pressure it went off crisp and clean, giving a loud click, with a pull I estimated to be four pounds.
When Tony also got down for a trial, I told him, 'Don't touch the sight. It's suppose to be set at six hundred yards, which is dust right. We'll try it in the morning.'
'No sweat,' he grunted. He too took a couple of dry pulls on the trigger and said, 'Yeah - it feels quite nice.
I could hit something with that.'
I lifted the rifle back on to the table, and over a brew
we all got talking about long-range shoots, not least the effect of wind on the bullet.
'The thing is,' said Tony, 'even if there's no wind at
the firing point, there can be some farther out. You need to watch for that - anything like leaves or grass moving near the target.'
'Yes,' Farrell said, 'and you have to look out for mirage, too.'
'Mirage?' said Whinger. 'What the hell's that?'
'You know when you get a heat-haze, and see the air kind of boiling? If there's no wind the air will be rising vertically, and you get what's known as a boiling mirage. Lateral movement - what you might call drift looks like a stream of clear water rippling over a bed of pebbles. That canaffect the bullet quite badly, so you've to learn how to judge it.'
'OK,' I said, 'but we're not going to get that in the early morning, are we?'
'Probably not,' Farrell agreed. 'But then term perature's going to be a factor. A high temperature will increase your muzzle velocity and throw your bullet high.'
'Yeah. But again, early morning's likely to be cool.'
'Sure, so you may need to aim fractionally high.
Humidity's another thing. If you get a mist, that means the air's more dense. Your bullet meets greater resistance and drops - so again, you need to give it more elevation.'
'Light,' said Tony. 'That's important. If it's dull and cloudy like today, you're liable to shoot high. Dunno why, but that's how it seems to work.'
'It probably will be like that at seven in the morning,'
I said. 'Anyway, we can try it tomorrow.'
'Have you got somewhere lined up for a practice shoot?' Whinger asked.
'Yep. We found a place.' Because Farrell was with us I didn't describe the little range in the woods. I turned to him. 'It's amazing how your people find the sites for hides. I mean, the one where we collected the rifle - it was miles from anywhere. How the hell would they know about a place like that?'
'Easy,' Farrell replied. 'Some Paddy gets a job working on the farm. Maybe he does a bit of pigeon- shooting or something. Gets to know the woods, finds the old well. Next thing he's in the pub, blathering about it, and there's a man listening. Or maybe the Paddy falls out with the farmer. Maybe he gets the sack and thinks, I'll luck this fellow up a bit. Use his property without him knowing.'
'Is that how guys get drawn into the organisation? As simple as that?'
'Sometimes, yes.'
I stared at our prisoner, with his heavy but still handsome face and his thick, wiry black hair. The swelling on his lip had gone down, and his eye
s were back to normal, so that he looked quite presentable again.
'Don't you ever feel guilty about some of the things you do?' I asked.
'Guilty?' He gave a kind of snort. 'What about? It was those stupid fuckers of ancient Greeks who invented the idea of guilt. They thought there were creatures called the Furies who came after you if you did something bad. They called them the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, to try and make them seem less frightening. It was all a load ofbollocks, of course - but people 5have been foolish enough to go on believing it ever since.'
'Some people call it conscience,' Ton7# said drily.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask why the dickers had been out, watching the approaches to the hide, but instead I said, 'How does someone like you get into the PIP, A? I mean, you went to university. You're an educated guy. You could have a good job and a settled life. If you'd gone straight you could be making a good living by now.'
'Making a living!' Again Farrell gave that derisive snort. 'What d'you think you'd be like if you'd been brought up in Belfast? You'd be the worst fucking killer of the lot. I know. That's all you army fellers are, anyway - trained killers. Are you not? A tribe of murdering bastards.'
As Farrell glared at me and I glared back at him, I suddenly realised that we'd all started chatting over the weapon and listening to his advice as if he were one of us. The way he'd been talking, he could have been a sniper instructor. Obviously he was hot on the subject; but not only that - it had sounded as if he'd had training from Americans. Some of the phrases he'd used were out of American text books.
In a flash it occurred to me that maybe it was he who had done all that damage in Ulster. Maybe he was the mysterious long-range assassin who'd harassed the security forces so badly. To my disgust I realised I'd been drawn into discussion with him in a way I'd vowed I would avoid. It was bad enough that for a few minutes I'd been treating him as an ordinary human being; far worse was the fact that I'd talked things over as though speaking with an acknowledged expert.
Once again I felt that he was casting some sort of spell over me. To break it I stood up and said, 'There's one thing certain. Once this is over, if I ever come across you again, make no mistake, you'll be going down.'
'The same yourself,'. Farrell spat back. 'If you ever set eyes on me again you'll need to start saying your prayers.'
I took a deep breath and moved away. 'Let's spruce up the barrel,' I said. 'We need a target, too.'
The PIRA had included a cleaning kit within the tube: a springy steel rod with a jag on the end, and a roll of white flannel four inches wide, marked off by red lines every two inches. For smaller calibres, like 7.62mm or 9mm, a single piece of four-by-two is enough to make a tight fit in the bael; but for this cannon I cut a double piece, a four-by-four, and wrapped it round the jag. Even that lump went through the barrel without too much friction, and when it came out at the other end it was perfectly clean. With the bolt out, I held the rifle up and looked straight through the barrel towards a lamp. The swirl of the rifling gleamed in the light, and I could see that the PIRA had taken good care of their prized weapon. I also had a close look at the telescopic sight, a high-quality optic with magnification variable up to the power of nine.
While I worked, watched by Farrell, Doughnut and Tony sorted out a target. The best option was a shallow cardboard box, eighteen inches wide and three feet long, in which some groceries had come up from the cottage. The bottom of the box was unmarked, and in the middle of it they stuck a piece of white paper six inches square, using paste made out of flour and water as glue. The result was a good aiming-mark in the middle of a target about the width of a man's torso. For zeroing purposes we could have done with a broader background. Although above and below the bull there was at least a foot to spare, if the first shot went more than nine or ten inches wide of centre we'd probably never see its point of impact.
Once again we were in for a short night. It was close to one in the morning before we stopped fiddling about, and I'd already set reveille for 0500.
'What about you?' I said to Farrell as Tony was about to chain him to his bed. 'You coming with us in the morning?'
'Sure I am. I need to know the rifle's in order. I wouldn't want to rely on what you fellers might tell me.'
'OK, then. Five o'clock it is.'
I'd known the answer to those questions before I asked them. Tony's prediction about Farrell wanting to witness the practice shoot was spot-on. Even though we seemed to have conned the bastard properly about our intentions, he wanted proof that we'd be able to hit the target.
'He's fired this thing himself,' I said quietly to Tony when we were alone again. 'This actual rifle. I'm sure he has.'
FOURTEEN
In the morning we used our covert radios openly for the first time. I told Farrell we'd been out and bought them specially, as they'd be the only means of coordinating our operations efficiently during the Chequers shoot.
'Bloody ruinous they were, too,' I added.
'How much?' he asked.
'I wouldn't like to say.'
lather than take the Granada, which somebody might have spotted the night before, we drove the dark- blue Opel lekord in which the lads had come upcountry.
As far as our prisoner knew it belonged to Stew, but in fact it had come from the pool at Llangwern. We'd given Farrell a DPM smock to wear over his sweatshirt, and because the grass would be soaked with dew we all wore rubber boots. The Haskins was in the boot, cradled in bubble-wrap alongside our makeshift target, and I'd brought one belt of twelve rounds.
We pulled out of the stinking farmyard soon after five-thirty, and by six, after a twisting up-and-down drive across the hills, we were on the ridge above the- range. It was another dull, murky morning and the light was late in coming, but my intention was that we'd get our rounds off the moment we could see properly, and clear out before any locals came looking to find out what was causing the disturbance.
I planned to walk in down the muddy track which had defeated the Granada the afternoon before, and on the map we'd pinpointed the spot at which the path came up to join the road. As we arrived I did a drive- past, to make sure nobody was hanging about.
Half a mile down the road we found a single, enormous old beech tree standing out from the upper edge of the forest, and the moment I saw it I said, 'OK, if anything happens, that's our EtkV.' With that established, I went back and parked the car out of sight of the road, in the neck of the muddy lane.
The Haskins was an awkward bastard to carry. The easiest way seemed to be to grasp it near the muzzle and hold it with the barrel slung back over my shoulder and the rest of the weapon hanging behind me. So we set off down the steep hill, Tony cuffed to Farrell and holding the target in his spare hand.
Down among the trees in the valley the light was even worse than I'd expected, but it improved marginally as we came out on to the 700-yard firing point. As I looked up the long corridor of grass with my binoculars, I saw some small brown animal standing out in the open.
'What's that?' I asked, handing Tony the glasses.
He watched for a moment and said, 'Some kind of deer. Now there are two of them.'
'Can't be deer, surely.' I took the binos back.
'They're too small. Wait a minute, though. You're right. They're muntjac. Barking deer.'
Tony began asking what in hell a barking deer was when suddenly Farrell exclaimed, 'Shoot one of the fuckers!'
'Why?'
'It's a perfect target! Four hundred yards. If you can hit that it'll show the rifle's bang on. Get down, man!
Shoot!'
I almost agreed. Then my mind skipped back to an episode on an exercise in Africa, when one of our lads had shot some small animal and the local Bushmen had gone ballistic, saying he'd angered the spirits of the mountain. Next day an SAS guy fell off the rocks while climbing and was killed, and the whole troop got so badly spooked that we couldn't get our arses out of that place fast enough.
No, I though
t. I'm not going to run a risk by killing something needlessly. In any case, if we shot one of the deer we'd have a body to dispose of. Luckily, before I could argue, both animals moved offinto cover and the chance was gone.
Farrell didn't hide his disappointment. 'You'd a great chance there,' he griped. 'You were too slow by far.'
Ignoring him, I asked Tony to take the target down range. 'In fact,' I added, peering at the butt in the far distance, 'in this light, our spotter scope's not going to be a lot of use. See if you can tuck yourselves into a niche that's safe, somewhere close to the target. Then call the shots back to me on the radio.'
'Sure,' Tony agreed, then turned to Farrell. 'Come on, Danny Boy.'