much that they almost filled the lenses. The friend was unloading a long black rifle case from the back of the car.
‘I don’t suppose Carl Rivers is the one with the glasses,’ Ben said.
Maggie laughed. ‘No, that’s Andy; I don’t think he’d be much of a shot.’
Carl was in the middle of an animated discussion with his gawky-looking friend, and hadn’t seen them approaching. He was leaning with his right hand against the side of the car as Andy laid the rifle case down on the grass. Whatever they were joking about, Carl suddenly threw his head back and burst out laughing. Andy was laughing too, his big eyes creased up with mirth behind the glasses. Then he reached up quickly and slammed the car boot lid shut. Right on Carl’s fingers.
Carl’s laughter suddenly became a scream. He thrust his injured hand between his legs, hopping around in a circle.
Miss Vale went rushing over to him. ‘Dear child, let me take a look.’
‘Shit, what happened?’ Maggie said in alarm.
Carl was obviously in a lot of pain. Ben examined the damage. The first three fingers of his right hand were mashed and bleeding.
‘Can you flex them?’ Ben asked.
Carl tried, and whimpered.
‘Could be broken,’ Ben said.
‘There’s a first-aid tent not far away,’ Miss Vale said, shooting a look at Andy, who was standing to one side biting his lip in distress. ‘They can take a look at it, but I think you need to get this seen to by a doctor.’
‘She’s right,’ Ben said.
‘Yeah, but I’m supposed to be shooting here today,’ Carl protested.
Just as he said it, there was an announcement over the loudspeakers that the fullbore rifle event would be starting shortly, and would the competitors please make their way to the firing line.
They walked him quickly to the first-aid tent, where a nurse examined the fingers as best she could, bandaged him up and told him he needed to get to a hospital soon for an X-ray.
‘I can’t. I’ve got to shoot,’ he argued.
‘Not with those fingers, you can’t,’ the nurse said, tight-lipped. ‘Unless you can learn to shoot left-handed, son, you can forget it.’
Carl left the first-aid tent almost in tears with pain and frustration, and they headed back towards the car. Andy trailed in their wake, all penitent and full of useless suggestions. Miss Vale was calm, though the disappointment was clear in her eyes. ‘The important thing is that you get to the hospital and get that seen to.’
‘But the money,’ Carl said. ‘The money for the charity.’
‘Nothing you can do, child,’ she said resignedly. ‘We’ll see if we can reorganise it next year.’
‘Is there nobody else who could shoot in his place?’ Harriet asked. ‘What about Carl’s friend?’
‘Andy couldn’t hit the side of a house at twenty feet,’ Carl muttered. He kicked a stone in disgust.
The percussive detonations of rifle shots were coming from the direction of the range, as the shooters started warming up and making their last-minute zero adjustments.
‘They’re starting,’ Carl groaned.
‘Maybe I could help,’ Ben said.
Carl turned and looked at him.
‘You, Benedict?’ Miss Vale said in astonishment. ‘Can you shoot?’
‘I’ve done a little,’ he replied.
They were nearly back at the Pontiac. The rifle case was still lying on the ground behind the car, and Ben walked over to it.
‘The range goes out to a thousand yards,’ Carl said, nursing his hand, frowning. ‘Any idea how small a target is at that distance?’
Ben nodded. ‘Some idea.’
‘If you want to give it a go, I have no problem with that,’ Carl said. ‘You’re welcome to use my rifle. But you’d be up against guys like Raymond Higgins. And Billy Lee Johnson from Alabama. He’s an ex-Marine sniper school instructor. These are world-class shooters. They’re gonna walk all over you.’
Ben unslung his bag and dropped it on the grass. He squatted down next to the rifle case and flipped the catches. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got in here,’ he said.
Chapter Thirty
Ben opened the case and peered down at the scoped rifle inside. ‘May I?’
‘All yours,’ Carl said.
Ben lifted the weapon out of the foam lining and checked it over. It was a bolt-action Winchester Model 70, chambered in.300 H &H Magnum, an extremely potent calibre that launched its slim, tapered bullet at well over two thousand feet per second. The kind of rifle that, in the hands of a gifted shooter, could reach out to incredible distances. A top-flight instrument, with probably hundreds of hours invested in bringing it as close to perfection as was humanly and mechanically possible. It had a heavy competition-grade barrel. The action was slick, and the scope alone was worth as much as the Chrysler he was driving.
He took out a cigarette, clanged open his Zippo and thumbed the wheel. It had run out of fuel. He swore softly and patted his pockets for the book of matches he remembered taking from the hotel. Finding it, he struck a match and lit up. ‘Anything I need to know?’
‘Trigger’s awful light,’ Carl said. ‘Watch out for accidental shots.’
‘What’s it zeroed to?’
‘Point of aim at three hundred yards,’ Carl said.
Ben nodded, turning the rifle over in his hands and peering through the scope. He laid it back in the case, opened Carl’s ammunition box and inspected one of the long, tapered cartridges. ‘You handload your own ammunition?’
Carl nodded. Ben could see in his eyes the love he had for his sport, shining through the pain. Target shooters like Carl devoted a huge amount of time and energy to handcrafting their own match-grade ammunition, selecting the best combination of case, bullet and powder and putting it all together with extreme precision and attention to detail on the most expensive handloading presses they could afford, striving for the ultimate perfection in performance and accuracy. And it was all so that the shooter could drill a little round hole in a piece of paper. Their whole world was a little black circle on a white background. The closer together they could group those little round holes in the dead centre of the circle, the more trophies they could take home.
That was where the huge gulf opened up between the pure target shooter like Carl, and those men who were trained to use these rifles on a real target, a human target. Ben had been one of those men, once. He wondered if the young shooter had any idea of the nightmarish destruction a round like this could inflict on a man, when used for that more applied purpose. At a thousand yards, the descending arc of the bullet as it ran out of kinetic energy meant that it would strike its target from above. Aim at a man’s forehead from that extended kind of range, and the shot would take him on the crown of his skull and drill downwards through his whole body.
Ben had been a young SAS trooper when he’d first seen the remains of a man shot that way. The Iraqi soldier had been hit in the head by a.50 calibre sniper round at twelve hundred yards. He had been peeled apart, exploded into pieces by the bullet and the hydrostatic shock that followed in its wake. One of his arms had been found nearly a hundred yards away.
The sight of the shattered corpse had haunted Ben a long time. What had haunted him more was that the sniper who had taken that extreme long-shot, dug into the dirt on the top of a hill after hours of waiting in absolute stillness, had been him.
Today, the only casualties would be tattered pieces of paper. It made the fearsome weapon seem almost benign.
‘You think you can do it, Benedict?’ Miss Vale asked, standing over them with a worried expression.
‘I can try,’ he said. ‘It’s been a while since I did any rifle shooting.’
