Blacklands

triggers.

Instead, he drew another bead on his target and relaxed his breathing. His finger hardened on the trigger and—with difficulty—he took it away entirely, fearing a reflexive squeeze that would mean an unauthorized discharge of his weapon and all kinds of shit pouring down on his head once they were back in Plymouth.

He lined his sights up with one of the four small targets on the card, knowing he could hit it, waiting, waiting for his turn to come round again.

A crack, a zing, and scattered laughter to his left meant someone had hit something so off target that it merited derision. Gary Lumsden didn’t bother taking his eye off his card. Both eyes open—the way they’d been taught. Ignoring the left, using the right.

Something moved in his blurred eye’s vision. Lumsden refocused and saw a man walking across the firing range—a long way behind the targets, maybe a quarter of a mile away, heading north.

Lumsden frowned, lifted his head minutely, and glanced left and right to see whether anyone else had spotted the man. His nearest colleague, Private Hall, was twenty yards to his right, facing his own target, so he was turned slightly away from Lumsden. Hall was black, which meant he suffered at the hands of the bigots in the platoon. To his left he could see only the boots and wet camouflage fatigues of Private Gordon, who had red hair and so suffered at the hands of pretty much everyone else. Neither was looking towards the man.

Lumsden swung his SA80 so he could look at the man through the sights, but even then he was too far away to fill them. The man was walking but didn’t look like a walker. Lumsden could see no stick, no backpack. Instead the man was carrying what looked like a plastic bag! Like he’d just popped down to Tesco’s! The man didn’t even have a waterproof jacket on—just a shirt that looked blue from this distance, and jeans. Jeans were the worst thing a walker could wear. Hot in the sun and cold, heavy and slow to dry in the much more frequent mist and rain. It confirmed Lumsden’s first opinion that the man was out of his depth on the moor. For a start, he couldn’t have checked the firing notices that were bread and butter to every experienced walker on Dartmoor. With a single call on their mobile phones they could find out when live firing was taking place on the ranges that covered the northeast quadrant of the moor. This man couldn’t have checked. And if he’d seen the red and white warning signs, then he’d either ignored them or been stupid enough to cross them into the Danger Range.

Private Lumsden’s finger slid gently back over the trigger of his own personal SA80A2.

The guy was just asking to get hit by a stray bullet. Or a not-so-stray one.

Lumsden followed the man’s progress under the crosshairs, his hands steady, his breathing calm.

If he were to pull the trigger now, he might even hit him, he realized with a thrill. He wasn’t going to shoot, but the sensation of holding the man in his sights while the cold steel warmed itself under his finger was almost dizzying.

Off to his left, another crack and he heard Private Knox say “Fuck” quite loudly, but he didn’t flicker for a moment.

Every cell of his body was focused on the walker. Every ounce of his self-control kept his finger from squeezing the trigger the way it wanted to.

Discharging a round without authority was serious trouble. Discharging it in the direction of another person outside a war situation was grounds for court-martial. Deliberately firing on a civilian out for a stroll on Dartmoor would almost certainly mean prison. And he’d battled so hard and so long not to follow his father and Mark down that road. There was no way he was going to blow it now—not now he’d finally got the gun.

Lumsden sighed inwardly—to sigh outwardly would have made his aim waver.

Four hundred yards. That was the range of his weapon. The walker was probably beyond that. Despite the ease with which he held the man in his sights, Lumsden knew that the chances of hitting him, if he were to fire, were slim. Although the weather was good by Dartmoor standards, there was rarely less than a stiff breeze to contend with. After four hundred yards, the round would begin to lose thrust, lose direction, become unpredictable.

The man disappeared behind some rocks and Lumsden gently moved his gun to anticipate his reappearance, feeling another thrill as the man walked straight back into his sights.

He was approaching a small tor about fifty yards ahead of him. If he reached it, Lumsden would lose him.

A sense of urgency made his finger tighten on the trigger and he had to make a conscious effort to relax it again. His breath hissed between his ears and, although the platoon were still firing at their targets, the shots sounded thick and distant to him.

Lumsden admired his own self-control. He was still young, but the basic training had knocked the remaining child clean out of him, hardened him up, shaped him into a man. He knew he was already a better person than his father or brother or any of his half brothers would ever be.

Here in his hands he held the power of life and death. Gary Lumsden, the boy, would have fired; Private Gary Lumsden, the soldier, was tougher than that. He felt an unaccustomed swell of pride.

The man walked on, head down, through a patch of sunlight and Gary Lumsden held him in his sights, steady and careful. The tor was approaching, the kill shot would be lost, but it wasn’t about the kill shot, he told himself; it was about being in control, doing the right thing, growing up and being a man.

The walker clambered onto the first of the big grey rocks. Two more and he’d be lost from view behind the tor.

For less than two minutes, Private Gary Lumsden had been in possession of the power to inflict instant death, but had chosen instead to allow life to continue. It was godlike.

Lumsden’s angelic blue eyes stung with heat at the thought of how far he’d come as he watched the distant, stupid man reach to pull himself onto the next rock. So small, so vulnerable, so oblivious to how close it had been …

Private Lumsden’s entire being thrummed with the knowledge that this meant something; that this was pivotal; that he’d remember this moment forever.

And then—in a sudden, sneaky triumph of nature over nurture—he pulled the trigger anyway.

Arnold Avery opened his eyes to a blank white sky, a wet back, and a sharp ache in his left arm.

His first fuzzy thought was that a bird had flown into him. A big bird. All he remembered was clutching at the fresh Devonshire air as he fell off the rock he’d been standing on.

He turned his head creakily to one side, and sharp grass pricked his cheek. There was a disc of pure white something with two red dots in it beside his head; it took him several blinking seconds to work out it was a Mr. Kipling cherry Bakewell tart, spilled from his bag of stolen shopping. One red dot in the white icing was the cherry, the other was blood.

Avery groaned as he sat up and saw his left sleeve dark and red. He winced as he moved his arm. It hurt, but it wasn’t broken.

He looked around and could see nothing and nobody. But then, nothing and nobody could see him; he’d fallen into a shallow dip behind the tor. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious for, or what had happened to him. His bird theory was shit, he already knew, but he had no others. The moor stretched around him for miles, looking yellow grey now under the lowering clouds.

He pulled his arm from his sleeve, wiping away blood with the tail of his shirt, and saw the gory crease through the top of his biceps, as though someone had dragged a forefinger through the flesh of his arm, removing the skin and leaving a bloody groove in its place.

It looked as though he’d been shot, although he knew that wasn’t possible. This was England, after all, and the screws they sent to hunt down escapees were likely to be armed with little more than expense vouchers for their petrol costs.

He shook his head to clear it, and slowly started to gather his stolen goods together. There was no point in hanging about trying to solve the mystery of what had happened to him. He doubted it was relevant anyway. If it had been an armed, overenthusiastic screw, then he’d be back in custody by now; if it had been a bird, there would be feathers. It didn’t matter. What mattered was keeping going. He tried to find the sun behind the clouds but couldn’t. It wasn’t getting dark yet, but that meant nothing; it was June, and would stay light until well after ten at night.

Although he didn’t know it, Arnold Avery had been unconscious only long enough to miss the very faint, outraged shouts of Private Gary Lumsden’s military career coming to an abrupt but almost inevitable end.