Nature’s mood that day. When it was hot, they sweated and itched. When it was wet, they itched more. If they twitched or whined, they risked a rifle butt to the back of their helmets by the rifle master, who was utterly charmless.
They would run ten miles a day to tone their bodies and slow their metabolisms. They cut down on sugars and coffee. Anything to teach the heart not to beat. Slow, slow goes a metronome. Less air, less breath, less life. Anything to keep the sniper still, to keep the scout moving, observing, recording, returning.
This was fifty-eight years ago.
It is all clearer now than it was then. Rhea would say it is the vivid fabrications of an ageing mind. More likely, though, it is the clarity that comes from ageing — from the natural process of releasing the mind from imagined futures, and allowing the present and past to take their rightful place at the centre of our attention.
The past is palpable to Sheldon now, in the way the future is to the young. It is either a brief curse or a gift before oblivion.
It was an especially rainy day once on the firing range, and Hank Bishop was on Sheldon’s left side trying to hit a two-hundred-metre target in a light fog.
Hank Bishop, bless him, was not very smart.
‘I can’t tell if I hit it,’ he’d say after each shot.
‘You didn’t,’ said Donny.
‘I can’t tell if I hit it,’ he said.
‘You didn’t,’ said Donny.
‘I can’t tell if I hit it,’ he said.
‘You didn’t,’ said Donny.
After more of this sort of conversation — of which Sheldon never tired — there was an unexplainable and miraculous event. Hank somehow reflected on his own actions, thus breaking the cycle and stimulating a question.
‘What makes you so sure I didn’t hit it, Donny?’
‘Because you’re shooting at my target, Hank. Yours is over there. Here — I’ll find it for you.’
In the increasingly heavy downpour, Donny silently unzipped his chest pocket and removed a single red- tipped bullet. He ejected the magazine and laid it down next to him. Then he cleared the chamber of the remaining round and slipped in the tracer bullet.
He took a shallow breath, let it out halfway, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.
The red phosphorous round ripped through the fog like a burning dove through an alpine tunnel, then slammed into Hank’s wooden target. It impacted almost dead centre, and the line of Marines started whooping and clapping, causing the rifle master to run down the line with his own rifle butt clanking on the helmets of every man in the squad.
Tracer bullets are not especially designed for penetration. So the burning round wedged itself into the wooden target, which immediately smouldered and hissed and caught fire from the inside out.
‘Horowitz, you numb nuts. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘Wasn’t me, sir.’
‘It sure as shit wasn’t Bishop!’
‘All right, it was me. But Hank couldn’t hit his target, sir, and mine’s already good and dead!’
Sheldon is using these same hands now to sew. He works as quickly as his fingers allow. He threads the fishing line through the needle, and uses the butt of the knife as a thimble to push it through the duffle bag to sew the net onto it.
He is conscious of the time, but he forces his mind not to imagine what might be happening in the summer house.
It takes him more than thirty minutes of deep concentration. He is worried that the needle is too thin to withstand the constant abuse of the task. The duffle bag is made of thick cotton but, thankfully, it is loosely stitched and Sheldon is able to run the needle carefully between the coarse threads.
When he is finished, he looks at his handiwork. It’s reasonable, given how little he has had to work with. Now he needs to complete the Ghillie suit with brush and branches and tufts of earth from his surroundings. He surveys the forest again. He doesn’t want to use only material from his immediate surroundings, and instead wants the camouflage to blend with the widest array of life around him. He wants to become one with the forest — for his suit to be an actual, living part of the world around him.
When he is finished, he digs silently into the soft earth to where it is moist, takes up a small handful of dirt, and then rubs it over his face and the white backs of his hands. He smears it over his shoes and rubs it into the still-green sections of the duffle bag. When he is satisfied, he places the Ghillie suit over him, with his head in the curved section of the bag’s bottom. As a final touch, he punctures the suit to the left and right of his collarbone, and weaves the strap from the duffle bag through the holes. It now rides him like a squire’s cape. And, with this, he is ready.
‘Now what?’ asks Bill.
‘Precisely,’ says Sheldon.
Chapter 20
It was always best to the keep the number of people involved in an operation as limited as possible. Enver had had problems back in Serbia with loose lips. Plans that had been made in darkened rooms after hours were too easily brought into the light and exposed.
‘Loose lips sink ships,’ went the saying.
When he was a young man in his early twenties, it all shocked him. The capacity of the Serbs for horrific violence not only enraged. It… confused him. How could people hate strangers so intensely? Enver never fell entirely into that trap, and he prided himself on it. His militia only assaulted those who were connected to the crimes against his people. He was driven to avenge the dead and to restore the honour of his people. He wasn’t fulfilling some mad ideology, and he wasn’t killing in the name of God. He was perfectly content with the justifications for his actions.
The trouble, towards the end, was that almost every Serbian man was a killer and his wife a devilish harpy, offering up foul whisperings to stir his cold blood. How could it have been any other way? Men kill because they want to. Something makes them want to. But the choice is always theirs, and with that choice lies their fate.
The man who answered the call that Enver placed was well known in the KLA. He was known to Kadri. He was an unremarkable man of average height and no particular strength or speed. There was no special viciousness in his demeanour, or cruelty to his appetites. He did not drink to excess, and he did not justify his actions by wrapping them in words and history and emotion. He did not indulge in conspiracy theories to bond himself with other men.
Those who knew him did not talk to him much, because there was little to say and less to hear. When he was talked about, however, there was one point of common agreement. All believed that he no longer had a soul. He was the living dead. He was called
The Black is Enver’s protection. His bodyguard. His soldier. He was sent to Norway to hide Enver from the Serbs, and to stay close to him and be of service.
To be Enver’s shadow.
The Black is a model citizen in Oslo. He waits for the lights to change before crossing. He signals before he turns. He holds doors open for women with strollers at United Bakeries. He never mumbles over the length of the lines at the Wine Monopoly.
The Serbs know he is here. It is unlikely that the Norwegians do, though. He travels quietly, with false papers. He rents rooms and moves on. He leaves nothing behind. He is a ghost, and knows how to move through Europe as only criminals do.
