It turned off the path, came slowly towards the rucksack and towards Gus, following the trail on which he had made the slug crawl. The care he had used to avoid breaking the twig stems of the bushes was sufficient to have hidden his movements from later discovery by a ’scope at long distance but was wasted effort against a dog coming close.
It knew the source of the smell was near. He recognized the quality of the dog’s training because it did not blunder forward or bound right up to the source of the smell. From a long way back, out with old Billings – and from a short way back, in the pub with the sergeants – he had been told of the difficulty of teaching a dog not to run over the smell source. It hesitated and strained against its instinct, then it went rigid, with the right paw cocked and the eyes wide, its neck stretched out, and it pointed. The body of the dog pointed towards the rucksack. He could see every hair on its head, the claws on the paw, the saliva at its neat little mouth.
The aim of the rifle would be on the dog and on the ground ahead of it.
He thought the man would now be breathing hard, squinting into the ’scope, locking the butt against his shoulder, feeling for the trigger, and searching the shallow area of ground the dog marked for him.
The end of the towel rope was between his fingers. He gripped it, took up the slack until it was taut, then jerked it.
It was a slight movement. The cap filled with stones and embedded with bracken fronds would have juddered. The polished Full Metal Jacket bullets would have rolled.
The rucksack would have swayed. Only the keenest eye, at 750 yards, aided by a sight, would have seen the motions of the hat over the rucksack and the gleam as the low sun caught the twisting bullets.
He hoped, had to, that he had trapped the attention of the man.
The dog’s chest heaved, and it maintained the point.
He pulled sharply. The hat would slide away. The bullets would shimmer and fall. The rucksack would surge sideways as if a hunted target tried better to hide himself from the dog.
Gus did not know whether he had done enough to kill a man.
He was surprised.
He had thought better of his friend.
The dog pointed for him. Ahead of the point was an upstanding rock surrounded by a meld of downed bracken and sprouting bilberry. Aziz’s track through the ’scope sight had gone a minimum of a dozen times past the rock and not lingered on it because it had seemed to him too obvious a place for a sniper of quality to choose for concealment.
But there had been movement at the rock, he had seen it, and there had been two moments of bright reflected light that had caught the lowering sun. He had blinked, then slipped a finger from the trigger guard and wiped hard at his eyes, which were old for the work and starting imperceptibly to fail him, and he saw the olive- green shape.
On the shape, indistinct, bracken and bilberry were set as camouflage.
He thought the clear, angled line of the shape was the shoulder of the man, his friend.
His eyes smarted and he wiped them again. The dog he loved – seldom admitting it -in whom he trusted, had not backed off from the movement, and still pointed at the target.
The wind had not risen and not fallen; no adjustment was necessary to that turret or to the distance turret.
It was said amongst the best of the snipers, those with whom he wished to walk, that they should cultivate the sixth sense, the intuition of danger, but Major Karim Aziz was too tired, too wearied, to recall what he had read or what he knew.
His last thought, before he fired into the chest of the body, where the clear lines did not match the lie of the ground, was that the man had disappointed him by choosing a place to hide as obvious as the upstanding rock.
The crash of the shot burst in his ears, and the butt hammered against the bone of his shoulder.
The crack.
The gabble of syllables in his throat.
The thump.
Gus screamed.
The scream came from deep in his gut, from far down in his throat. The scream was pain, shock. He tilted his head up so that the scream would echo over the space of the valley, and he gave the final ravaging pull to the towel rope.
When the scream died, when the rucksack toppled and was still, there was a small silence. Then the crows rose from the body, chorused the scream and gave it strength.
It was how Major Herbert Hesketh-Prichard would have done it, and Crum and Corbett, and Forbes, and the glassmen who were Lord Lovat’s gamekeepers. It was what Kulikov had done when he lay beside Zaitsev, and Konings had fired.
After the scream, the quiet fell, and the birds circled and dived again.
His ’scope roved close to where he had first seen the dog on the far side of the valley.
He saw the face. It was, because nothing had altered with time, as the old men would have predicted. It was grey against the shadow under the stone slab. Nothing was different since Konings had fired, and Kulikov had screamed, and Zaitsev had seen the face, the target.
Gus took the deep breath to still the beat of his heart, then let the air slowly slip from his lungs, held it – began the slow and steady squeeze of the trigger.
Sarah’s head ducked to her knees and the first tears gleamed on her cheeks.
Joe swigged on the water bottle, and threw it – half full – away from him.
Rybinsky reached in his hip pocket for the roll of American dollars, peeled off a twenty, and passed it to Joe, but it was not taken and fluttered loose, drifting in the wind towards the ridge of the valley.
Further down the slope, the dog still pointed.
At the bottom of the slope, the crows again pecked at their feast, undisturbed by the moment.
Across the valley, the commander swore, turned away, and thought of the children who were precious to him and the enemies who would gather.
The sun teetered on the ridge, blood-crimson red, and its flame seemed dulled.
It was the last moment in which Major Karim Aziz, skilled instructor and failed traitor, husband and father, could touch the present. When the moment of triumph passed – and it was clear in his mind – he must confront the past and the future.
To touch the present, the triumph, he squirmed forward from the cavity, and he felt the aching stiffness, the coming cramp pains.
He could not see, from the back of the cavity, the triumph. He must witness it, indulge himself. Then he would rightfully walk with the great men of history. He could not yet see the body and the now useless rifle of the man he had thought of as his friend. At that great range, Aziz did not realize that the angle of the dog’s head had shifted fractionally, that the line of the dog’s eyes and nose was towards open ground twenty paces beyond the upstanding rock.
Without witnessing it, the triumph was diminished.
He lifted his head higher.
He did not hear the shot, did not see the vortex of the bullet’s swirl, he did not feel the strike of the bullet. He was thrown back into the depth of the cavity.
Gus stood, stretched, then bent down to pick up the ejected cartridge case, and pocketed it.
He trembled.
The bracken he had spread over his body, his head and the rifle barrel cascaded down to his boots.
He left behind him the smoothed hollow where he had lain through a part of a night and the whole of a day, and the length of towel rope that was the mark of a killer’s deceit.
He walked, awkward and swaying, to the rucksack and could not still the shiver in his hand as he untied the towel’s knot to it. Then he dropped the hat and the two polished bullets into it. It was only when he lifted the rucksack to throw it on his shoulder that he saw the clean pencil-sized hole in its fabric.
He walked on, where before he had crawled, with a drunken stride. There would be guns on the far ridge, at the extreme of their range, but he did not care.
It was over.
