effective range of 1,300 metres. He was never seen, and he had shot eighteen men in three weeks. A prisoner had said afterwards that a mortar's shrapnel had hit him as he went to his firing position on the banks of the canal in the early morning. It was luck that a random shell had killed him. The birds on the Jasmin Canal were always quiet in the hours before the sniper fired. He sensed the presence of a watcher. He felt a new atmosphere. He believed himself now and he had only the evidence of the quiet to be challenged. A slight frown of apprehension had settled on his forehead. At the fall of the day, as the wind quickened and trembled the reed-heads, he made his plan to go into the water, away from the bank, towards the place he had seen yesterday deep in the beds of old gold reeds and near to the central water channel.
He could not see the watcher, could only sense the new quiet that had settled around him.
Chapter Fifteen.
Sitting with the damp of the ground seeping into the backside of his trousers and with the warmth of his dogs under his jackknifed legs, in his vantage-point, Andy Chalmers listened to the night sounds.
There was no moon, no break in the rain cloud
He was behind thick cover: if there had been light he would not have been able to see the reed-beds and the water channels. It was possible that the man had an image intensifier, night-vision equipment; he would not give him the chance to identify his position. Chalmers did not need to see the land around him. Instead he listened.
There was the quiet, the rumble of the sea on the shore, the call of a distant fox. A policeman two hundred metres away stifled a cough and another one four hundred metres away stood to urinate. He was still, he was silent. When the fox called, his fingers felt the hackles rise on the necks of his dogs and he soothed them where they lay.
If the man was there, Chalmers knew he would hear him.
The wind that came from the west had turned, which pleased Chalmers. It scudded off the distant trees and fields, and came across the marshland riffling the leaves and branches behind which he sat. He could control sight and sound, but not the body odour of smell. Sight, sound and smell all carried great distances over open ground at night but, in the high mountains where he worked, he regarded smell as the worst of the stalker's enemies.
He had left the keys to his caravan, where he lived at the back of the senior keeper's cottage, with Mr. Gabriel Fenton; the few coins from his pocket had been abandoned on the train; he carried nothing of metal in his pockets. It was his routine to make the owner's guests discard everything that could clink, rattle, rub together, before he started the stalk. His dogs were as still and silent as himself. There would be no sound for his prey to hear and no noise to disturb the birds in the reed mass.
The wind was as he would have wanted it and would carry his smell away from the man, if he was there. An American, a guest of his owner, had once brought foul pungent creams with him on a stalk and believed they would block the man-smell that a stag might scent. Chalmers had made him strip and douse himself in a stream to wash the stuff off him; a French guest had rolled in sheep droppings, and that also was useless. The only possibility of hiding man-smell from a target stag was to keep the wind in the stalkers' faces. He had not yet smelt the man, if he was there.
He sat and wrapped himself in his patience, let the night hours drift, and he listened.
He could sit still, silent, but he did not doze, did not allow himself to edge towards sleep.
If he had dozed, slept, then he would not have heard.
In the cold, the rain and the quiet, Chalmers set himself games to play with his memory so that his senses were never less than alert.
Memories of stalks with guests of the owner, and clients who paid for a day what he earned in two weeks… The guest from Holland who had failed at the start of the week, in the disused quarry, to put six bullets out of six, with a telescopic sight, into a four-inch target at a hundred metres he had refused to take him out. Mr. Gabriel had backed him, and the guest had been sent to thrash a river for salmon. The guest front the City of London, with new clothing and a new rifle, good on the target-shooting in the quarry, who had been led for five hours towards an eight-year-old stag with a crown of antlers, been brought to within eighty yards for a side shot. He'd given the guest the loaded rifle, the Browning. 270 calibre, cocked it. He'd been on the telescope, on the beast, and the bullet had struck its lower belly. It had fled, wounded. He had told the guest he was a 'bloody butcher', and had been out half the night and all of the next morning with his dogs to find the beast and limit its misery.
Chalmers was encouraged by the quiet of the reed-banks: there should have been movement and spats over nesting territory and the cries of the birds.
The client from Germany who had demanded to shoot the stag with the greatest crown spread of antlers but that beast was only six years old and in the prime of its breeding life. The client had hissed the sum he was paying and what he needed as a trophy. Chalmers had told him that if he 'showed no respect for the beasts' he could go back down to the glen with his rifle unused. The man had crumpled then, whined about the money, and had been led forward to shoot an old beast at the end of its life. They'd passed within thirty yards of the younger stag as they'd moved towards the target beast, and at the end the client had thanked him for the best stalk of his shooting days. Chalmers had walked away from him because he acknowledged neither gratitude nor praise.
He thought the quiet was because the man was good, was among the birds in the reeds and on the water, and was still.
The guest, panting and unfit, had been in dead ground and had pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. Chalmers had snatched the cigarette from the guest's mouth. He'd made the stalk last ten hours, two of them crawling against the rush of a stream-filled gully. Finally, when the beast was seventy yards from them, he'd told the guest, 'you're not fit to shoot, you're a bloody ruin,' and hadn't given him the rifle.
The memories kept the cutting edge to his senses. The birds were too quiet. He knew that the man was good and that the man was there, in the marsh.
He waited, patient. He felt a respect, brother to brother, for the man out there, in the water, the same respect that he felt for the big beasts he stalked and tracked.
'We've lasted through Monday.'
He'd had to feed the boy and himself. He'd heated the last of the precooked meat pies in the fridge, and taken the remaining tub of ice-cream from the freezer. He'd found a science programme on the television for Stephen, and they'd eaten off their laps. He'd taken the trays back into the kitchen, and gone upstairs. She was on the bed, in darkness. He sat beside her.
'They say he has a week. He can't endure more than a week. It's closing round him. We're on the fifth day. We have to hang on in there…'
'Where is he?' Fenton asked.
'I don't know.' Markham's voice, distorted by the scrambler, echoed back at him.
'I only know that he's sitting out there in the bloody bog.'
'Have you called him, has he sit-repped?'
'I wouldn't dare to call the ungracious little beggar, I'm only the fetcher and carrier I reckon he'd garrotte me if I disturbed him.'
'Doesn't he know the importance of continuous contact?'
'He knows it if you told him it.'
'Geoff, does he realize how much is riding on his back?'
'That, too, I expect you told him. I'll call you when he deigns to make contact.
'Bye, Mr. Fenton.'
Fenton shivered. He was alone, but for the company of a third-year probationer who watched the telephones. It was always late at night, when an operation was running towards climax, that he shivered, not from cold but from nerves. In the day, surrounded by acolytes, the confidence boomed in him. But Parker had gone, the American with her, and the elder of the probationers, the old warhorse from B section. Cox had left early to prepare for a dinner party. It would be the end of him if the boy, Chalmers, failed. He would be a casualty, washed up, sneered at, shown the early-retirement door.
Half-way across the world was another man who would be sweating on the fear of failure. He did not know what an office high in the Ministry of Information and Security would be like, but he seemed to sense that man
