Packer was shaking his head. ‘I have to disappoint you again, Sammy. At eight o’clock this morning I was stopped by four Swiss police with guard dogs only 200 yards beyond the Gotschnabahn hut. By 3.30 this afternoon you can bet they had those woods sealed off like the Gulag Archipelago.’
‘There’s the second stage, above the Gotschnaboden,’ said Ryderbeit. He showed no sign of being disheartened; he was already signalling for another bottle of wine.
‘The second stage,’ said Packer, ‘is the Wang. I’m not for one moment questioning your ability as a skier, Sammy, but you’d have to be pretty good to come down holding a Kalashnikov 122 in your hands, firing it as you went — because there’s nowhere to stop on the Wang, where you’d be doing speeds of up to seventy mph.’
Ryderbeit said nothing until his wine arrived, and then drank two glasses straight off. ‘You’re a gloomy sort of sod, aren’t you?’ he said at last, ‘even for a Brit. Supposing you come up with some ideas. That’s what you’re being paid for, isn’t it?’
‘My idea’s been the same all along. If we’re going to get him, it has to be somewhere on that run —’ Packer nodded across the road — ‘between here and the Gotschnagrat restaurant. Or rather, just below the restaurant. In fact, somewhere on the T-bar.’
Ryderbeit frowned. ‘Sorry, soldier, but where I learned to ski we didn’t have any fancy time-saving gadgets. We walked, or rather climbed. What exactly is the difference between a T-bar and a chair lift?’
‘A chair lift carries the skiers in mid-air, suspended from a cable, and would make a much smoother target — while the T-bar is just an inverted T which scoops you up under the arse and pulls you up the mountain with your skis on the ground, following every contour of the track.’
Ryderbeit nodded gravely. ‘So it’s not only going to be a moving target — probably receding — but jerking and bumping all the way. Right?’
‘That’s what we’ll have to find out. Tomorrow morning we’re going up the Gotschnagrat to try those runs. We’ll take as many pictures as we can and compare them with the maps. There’ll be men spotting the slopes with binoculars, and maybe even a few choppers around. So anything under 500 metres is out. I suggest as near 1000 metres as possible.’
Ryderbeit let out a low whistle. ‘Holy Moses! You know what a man looks like through telescopic sights at 1000 metres? Like a tiny bloody tadpole — which means a head shot, or nothing. And that’s not all. If you’re right, and he only goes skiing at four o’clock, wherever we’re stuck overlooking the T-bar, we’re going to have the sun coming in low at around ninety degrees. So we’ll have shadows as well as snow glare.’
‘The more difficult it is,’ Packer said, ‘the more chance we have of getting away. If we can find a spot on any of the parallel runs that gives us a clear range of that T-bar — and we only need a few seconds — we can kill him and get down here to Wolfgang, pick up the car, and be through Klosters even before the alarm’s given.’
He had paused, leaning across the table until he could smell the wine on Ryderbeit’s breath. ‘Now the matter of the guns. I’m talking to Pol at seven this evening. He promises to get what we need by tomorrow night. I suggest a couple of Armalites — 5.56mm assault rifles — with self-adjusting anti-glare telescopic sights.’
The skin round Ryderbeit’s good eye crinkled into a sneer. ‘Those are gimmick guns, soldier — cheap and flashy — typical Yankee toys. Give me the old Lee Enfield .303, or the World War II Browning any day. Those were real guns, even if they don’t make them anymore.’
‘The Armalite isn’t cheap for a start. It’s also small — no longer than a racing ski — and it’s light.’
‘Yeah. It’s made of plastic.’ Ryderbeit spat deliberately between his doeskin boots. ‘No serious gun’s made of plastic,’ he added, and poured himself more wine.
‘The bullet is also plastic,’ said Packer. ‘And as you probably know, instead of the usual spinning motion, the Armalite round has a lobbing trajectory, so that its impact is even more lethal than a soft-nosed bullet or a dum-dum. And that, for us, is the vital factor — that, and the fact that it has a stopping power of up to nearly two miles, and is accurate up to around one mile. You pointed out yourself that the target’s going to be very small, very difficult — moving, shimmering and distorted. With any ordinary rifle, in order to hit him in a fatal spot — the spine, heart, or head — we have to be ninety per cent lucky. And we’re not going to have time for more than three shots each at the most. But with an Armalite, that little plastic bullet has only got to hit him, in the elbow or the ankle, or just wing him, and the lobbing movement sends the bullet tearing round inside his body, ripping his limbs off.’
‘Ah, it’s dirty,’ Ryderbeit growled; then looked up with a bright leer; ‘but I grant you, it’s beautifully dirty! To be truthful, I was being a bit jealous just now. You see, we never got anything fancy like that in the Congo or Biafra — just the usual lousy old hardware. Perhaps it’s made me a little conservative.’ He poured the last of the second bottle of wine. ‘But you think the Fat Man can get hold of a couple of Armalites —
