One Shot Kill (15 page)

Changing a sniper’s weapon so late in the course was a risk, but after a few rogue shots Sam began hitting targets at five to seven hundred yards. Nobody took score, but by the time they broke for lunch Sam’s smile looked like it had been glued on.

‘I’m real competition for the second slot now,’ Sam said, as the quartet downed an unappetising lunch of tinned beef stew tipped over mashed potato.

Paul smiled. Marc liked anything that reduced the possibility of his having to do the mission with Luc. Inevitably, Luc himself looked annoyed.

It all came out after lunch, when Sam went upstairs for a pee and Luc bundled him against the tiled wall.

‘What’s your problem?’ Sam shouted.

‘I thought we were partners,’ Luc said. ‘I’ve carried half your kit for the best part of two weeks.’

Half was an exaggeration, but Luc had carried some of Sam’s stuff because he was faster and much bigger.

‘We’ve always been fighting for the same job,’ Sam said.

‘You’re younger,’ Luc said, as he gave Sam another shove. ‘Your time will come, but this is my mission.’

Sam didn’t want to make an enemy of a thug like Luc. ‘If I throw a couple of shots, you’ll owe me a big favour.’

‘That’s fair,’ Luc said, nodding. ‘I’ll beat someone up for you, or whatever.’

Sam’s jubilant mood was gone as he walked down to a ground-floor classroom for their afternoon session. He tried telling himself that he hadn’t expected to make it on to the mission when he got out of bed that morning and his situation was no worse now. But he hated the fact that he’d let Luc get his way.

The classroom-based afternoon session was all about calculations. Over normal distances, shooting is about taking a good aim and pulling a trigger, but for sniping the steadiest hand and perfect technique are useless unless you’re also able to grasp the physics of a flying bullet.

‘Range six hundred and forty yards north-east,’ Goldberg said, as he rapidly chalked figures on the blackboard. ‘Wind gusting three to seven knots, heading south, temperature eighty degrees, humidity high, target eighty metres above the firing position.’

The trainees each had pieces of chalk, a handheld slate and a selection of pre-printed range tables.

‘Time,’ Goldberg said, after about forty seconds.

The four boys held up their slates, each with figures for vertical and horizontal aim-off chalked on them.

‘The good news is that you’ve all got similar figures,’ Goldberg said. ‘The bad news is that you’re all going to send bullets ploughing into the dirt well short of the target. High humidity makes air more dense, which means?’

Sam raised his hand. ‘The arc of the bullet is less pronounced and the denser air makes the trajectory decay faster, sir.’

‘Correct,’ Goldberg said. ‘So why didn’t you take that into account in your calculation? Assuming you don’t have a barometer handy, how can you judge humidity?’

Paul raised a hand, ‘You can expect high humidity after rainfall, sir. Humidity is more likely to be high if you’re near to large bodies of water …’

Goldberg interrupted. ‘I didn’t ask
where
humidity was, I asked how you judge it.’

Paul hesitated. ‘The amount you sweat is a clue, and if you fog a piece of glass such as the back of your scope, or breathe on a cold mirror, rapid evaporation means that humidity is low, sir.’

‘Good,’ Goldberg said. ‘But it’s going to be different depending on which mirror you use. Your breath will have less moisture in it if you’re breathing heavily. So if you’re in a climate where it’s hot and humidity is likely to affect your shooting, you’ve got to practise. Find a barometer with a humidity gauge, test your mirror under different circumstances.’

Sam raised his hand again. ‘Can you get little humidity gauges that you can carry around, sir?’

Goldberg nodded as he walked towards Marc, who’d apparently lost concentration. He flicked Marc’s ear, before grabbing all the velocity and distance charts on his desk.

‘When you’re working in near dark, you can’t stand around looking at charts, or squinting at a mercury bar on a tiny humidity gauge,’ Goldberg said. ‘A good sniper knows the underlying physics so well that he
feels
his shot. Senses the wind, temperature and humidity, and rattles off the maths as easily as you’d do your two times table.

‘That level of skill only comes with years of experience. So when this course ends tomorrow I want you to keep memorising your charts. Take your weapon out and practise regularly, in rain, snow and heat. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ the boys barked.

‘Right,’ Goldberg said. ‘New calculation. Range one thousand three hundred and thirty feet. Shooting north, wind twenty-two knots, gusting south by south-west. Target is eighteen yards above your shooting position, and you’re lying in thick snow, with your breath visible.’

*

After a morning of shooting and an afternoon of brain-numbing maths, Goldberg had devised an evening potato hunt that would raise morale, while testing the four recruits’ stealth and camouflage skills.

A sack of potatoes had been distributed in the area around the old village school, Henderson’s cottage and the nearby church graveyard. The trainees worked alone and had to collect as many spuds as possible, while Goldberg had mustered more than a dozen staff and fellow trainees to hunt them.

If a trainee was caught, they had five potatoes taken out of their sack and had to run back to a starting position near the campus gates before resuming the hunt.

The first round of the game only lasted ten minutes, at which point Henderson’s wife Joan emerged from their cottage and began yelling. She was trying to get her two-year-old to sleep, but it was proving impossible because he kept running to the window every time he heard something exciting going on outside.

After that little glitch, all potatoes were moved away from the Hendersons’ cottage and the game resumed. When ninety minutes running around in twilight were up, Paul surprised everyone by winning. His cunning strategy had been to hide all the potatoes he’d collected until the end of the game, which meant he didn’t have to worry about losing five of them every time he got caught.

Goldberg had thrown himself into his role as a hunter, and his uniform was wet and streaked with grass stains as he walked up to the dormitory rooms on the first floor. All the kids who’d taken part were in high spirits, and a new battle had broken out with pillows, flying boots and balled-up socks as they got changed for bed.

‘I’ve enjoyed working with you four,’ Goldberg told his trainees, once they’d gathered around. ‘People your age learn fast, which makes my job easier. There’s going to be one final exercise tomorrow morning. Kindhe and I are driving out early to set up four shooting points in the woods.

‘You’ll each work alone, four shots per target and you’ll lose a point if you don’t reach each shooting zone within twenty minutes. I want you at the front door ready to shoot at 9 a.m., so I’d suggest you all get a good night’s sleep. The two trainees who score highest will parachute into France with Henderson.’

The Group A dorm was full of snores and nasal whistles as Marc opened one eye and peered at his bedside clock. It was 2:30 a.m. He rolled out of bed, dressed in underpants and grubby from all the running around he’d done the previous evening.

After sweeping his boots, shirt and trousers from under the bed, Marc did a furtive three-sixty glance before dashing through the open door, along the hallway and down to the ground floor. The main door creaked alarmingly as he pulled it open; then he ran on bare, blistered, feet to the side of the building.

Marc leaned against a cold wall as he stepped into his trousers. He did his shirt up in the wrong button holes, pushed grit-covered soles into his boots and dashed off towards the graveyard with his laces trailing behind.

Cutting across the graveyard brought him out on to a path, and he reached the armoury after a three-minute jog. It seemed empty, but he nervously circled the building to make sure.

The main door was padlocked, but it was an easy climb over a shoulder-height fence on to the pistol shooting range and once he’d dropped into the compound the door between the pistol range and armoury had no lock at all.

The armoury hut was split in two. One half was behind a locked steel mesh, with boxes of ammunition and unissued service weapons stacked on shelves. The larger half had slotted wooden gun racks along the walls, coat hooks, a few benches and three large workbenches, each with built-in slots for the lubricants, polishing cloths and brushes used to clean weapons.

In most cases these guns kept in the armoury were the personal property of shooting enthusiasts in the USAF, so almost all of the weapons lived in bags or wooden boxes. The four trainees’ sniper rifles were stacked near the main entrance in zipped canvas bags.

Marc and Paul’s guns were next to each other, and Sam’s was distinctive now that it had the shorter stock, but it was Luc’s weapon Marc was interested in. He felt a twinge of guilt as he unzipped Luc’s rifle and laid it across the nearest bench, but Luc was a nasty piece of work and Marc reasoned that this mission would be better off without him.

Every gun comes with its own cleaning and maintenance kit, but Marc ignored Luc’s kit and took a small screwdriver from a wooden drawer beneath the worktop.

A rifle is more accurate than a short weapon such as a pistol because its long barrel is bored with a spiral pattern that spins a bullet. Marc expertly removed the bolt handle and receiver from Luc’s gun, then jammed the screwdriver into the near end of the barrel and roughed up the surface with the sharp end.

The scraping left several silver gouge marks in the oiled metal, so Marc dripped gun oil on to a cloth and smeared it over to disguise them. The result wasn’t invisible, but while you’d have had to look hard to find the scratches Marc hoped they’d be enough to reduce the spin of the bullet leaving the gun and make Luc miss a couple of his more difficult shots.

*

As usual Pippa the cook fed her French boys with a hearty English breakfast. The four lads on the sniping course were nervous and sick of each other’s company, so Luc sat alone, Sam joined his big brother Joel, and Marc sat with PT.

Marc had seen Paul get out of bed, but didn’t see him again until he walked into the toilet. Paul was emerging from a cubicle, looking weak, with the tang of sick hanging in the air.

‘You OK?’ Marc asked.

‘Nerves,’ Paul said weakly, as he put his mouth under a cold tap and rinsed.

‘I’ll bet you do better than you’re expecting,’ Marc said, grinning and half tempted to tell Paul what he’d done the night before.

‘It’s doing well that I’m scared of,’ Paul confessed.

Marc looked baffled. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Goldberg’s had us shooting car tyres, alarm clocks, paper targets, dead chickens and rugby balls,’ Paul said. ‘But if I get the mission, it’s going to be real people I’m seeing through my scope.’

‘You can do what it takes,’ Marc said. ‘You killed Germans and saved Rosie’s life in Lorient two summers back.’

‘This is different,’ Paul said. ‘Lining up someone a thousand feet away and executing them. It’s cold-blooded. Part of me hopes Luc does beat me this morning. This job suits a cruel bastard like him.’

Marc looked crestfallen. ‘How can you start this up?’ he blurted. ‘People always call you a wimp, but I never thought it was true until now.’

Paul looked wounded and Marc immediately felt bad.

‘Try your best today and we’ll talk this through afterwards, yeah?’ Marc said.

Paul was used to people calling him a wimp, but Marc was his best friend so this was different. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words formed so he barged Marc and stormed towards the stairs.

Marc yelled from the top landing, ‘Paul, I’m sorry.’

But Paul ignored him and Marc felt like crap as he headed off to the armoury to get his weapon.

*

The atmosphere stayed tense as Goldberg drove the quartet out to the woods in a canvas-sided Royal Navy truck. The boys set off from the starting point at ten-minute intervals so that they didn’t reach the shooting zones at the same time. To minimise the chances of catching each other up, they went in order of speed, with fastest runner Marc going first, then Luc, Sam and Paul last.

Until now all the training had been in pairs because snipers most commonly work that way in the field. Marc enjoyed being able to move without Paul holding him back and reached his first shooting zone after an eight-minute uphill run.

It had rained heavily that morning and his thighs grew soggy as he settled into a firing position where a boulder served as cover. As it was daylight, he had an easy time spotting a pair of circular targets set at four-eighty and six hundred yards.

The instructions stapled to his map said he had to take two shots at each target. Goldberg’s point system only distinguished between hit and miss, but Marc still took pride in two hits on the centre of the nearer target.

A wind gusted strongly into his face as his first shot at the more distant target punched the earth several metres short. He corrected upwards by half a degree to compensate for the wind and got his final shot dead on.

The route to the second shooting zone involved doubling back, and Marc and Luc exchanged grunts as they passed on a steep slope. Marc got slightly lost on his way to the second target, but scraped inside the twenty minutes he needed to avoid losing a point.

The firing position for the second target was down at a sharp angle, but he still hit with four out of four. He missed two shots on the third target, but the range was over seven hundred yards and he was the only one of the four trainees who could regularly hit targets over that sort of distance.

The final shooting zone was more than five kilometres from the third. Rather than kill himself trying to run it in under twenty minutes, Marc walked, trading the loss of a point for being in good shooting condition when he arrived.

The final target was two hundred and fifty yards away, but the shooting position was a muddy riverbank and late morning sunlight reflecting off fast-moving water meant he saw nothing but golden blurs when he tried using his split-image rangefinder.