Gerald Seymour - At Close Quarters

With the compass from his belt he could estimate that he would be firing on a line east south east. He followed the smoke trail, he matched the trail to his compass.

This was the crucial calculation. If he made the wrong calculation then he would betray the memory of Noah Crane. He reckoned that the trail of the smoke was moving east north east. Burrowing down into his recollection of figures that he had once been told, he dragged out the figures showing a bullet's deviation with wind blowing at ten miles an hour at a deflection of 45 degrees. At 1000 yards the wind deflection would push the bullet a matter of five feet and two and a half inches off course. But at 900 yards the wind deflection would be four feet and a quarter of an inch. And at 1,100 yards the wind deflection would be six feet and seven inches.

Crane had said that the lying up position was a thousand yards from the centre of the camp. If Crane had it wrong, was 100 yards too long, then Holt would shoot 14 inches wide. If Crane had it wrong, was 100 yards too short, then Holt would shoot 16 inches wide. It was the difference between a killing shot and a wounding shot, and a shot that missed altogether.

The target had to be still, and not about to move. To cover one thousand yards the bullet would need two seconds of time. If the target took one step in that two seconds… God… miss.

The distance of a thousand yards had to be exact, because that was what the sights would be set to. If in reality the distance was 900 yards then the bullet would reach its target 18 inches too high. If in reality it was 1,100 yards then the bullet would drop to a target point 20 inches too low.

All of these minute calculations had to be correct. If any were wrong, he would be breaking his bargain.

Holt grinned at the lizard. The lizard was his only friend.

He checked that his Safety was on. He eased back the greased bolt. He gazed for a moment at the bullet that lay in the palm of his hand. He thrust the bullet into the breach of the Model PM, then drove the bolt handle forward.

He had seen two of the recruits fighting, teeth and boots and fists. He could remember the queues that he used to see outside the GUM store in Simferopol. Men and women queued outside the G U M in Simferopol without knowing what they were queuing for. Two of his recruits were fighting, and more were arguing, and they could not know for what the ten had been chosen.

They sidled around him, those ten that he had selected. Inside the ten were four to whom he had assigned responsibility as squad leaders at the camp. Two of the other six were considered to be proficient soldiers on an all round evaluation. There was one who had scored five consecutive hits in training with the RPG-7. There was one who played with wires and the forces of electricity and who understood the workings of a radio.

There was one whose twin brother had been killed by the Israelis in 1982, he would fight hard. There was one who would make Abu Hamid laugh, and who could write in Hebrew and in English, and speak the Jewish tongue.

Perhaps they thought they were going to be sent to Simferopol.. .

He waved for them to sit.

It was the centre of the camp. It was between the cooking area and the first line of the bell tents. He had prepared what he was going to say. In Simferopol the Russian instructors had always said that a commander should prepare his statement of orders and tactics.

The low sun was warm on his shoulders, on the back of his neck, the sun that was soon to dip into dusk behind the great escarpment of the Jabal el Barouk.

He was a changeling.

No longer the graduate and the diplomat, Holt was the technician.

He had no love in his heart, he had no hate in his mind.

The fine cross hairs of the Schmidt and Bender PM 12 x 42 telescopic sight did not flicker over the back of a sitting, living, breathing human being. The cross hairs lay upon a target.

He had no thought of his girl, no thought of his dead ambassador. His thoughts were on the time of a bullet in flight, and the angle of wind deflection, and the distance between the lying up position and the centre of the tent camp as measured by Crane from his aerial photographs.

With his thumb, Holt drew back the Safety.

None who had known him before would have recognised the changeling at that moment. Not his parents, not the men and women at FCO, not the staffers who had been his colleagues in Moscow… not Jane, certainly not Jane Canning.

He held the stock forward, just behind the bipod, with his left hand. The butt was pulled hard into his shoulder. His right eye was locked against the circle of the sight. His index finger searched for the trigger guard, and inside the guard to the trigger.

He took a long singing breath, forced the air into his lungs.

As Noah Crane would have done it..

"It will be a mission that will bring anguish to our enemy. It will bring pride to our people. Each one of you, of us, has known the cruelty of our enemy. We are honoured to have the chance to strike a blow at that enemy… "

He saw the glow in their eyes, he saw the fervour in their faces. He felt the swelling pleasure that he was their leader.

Half the breath heaved out.

Trigger squeeze to first stage.

"Wish me luck, as you wave me goodbye, Cheerio, here I go, on my way,

Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye… "

He hummed. The breath was pressing for release in his throat. The cross hairs were steady.

He squeezed.

Holt fired.

The path of a bullet in the Beqa'a.

"Our target is Tel Aviv… "

He seemed to rise up. He seemed to be lifted from his haunches and then punched forward. There was a force that drove him.

Abu Hamid fell, bursting blood, against the body of the recruit who had scored five consecutive hits with the RPG-7 and against the recruit who understood the workings of a radio.

Abu Hamid fell and he did not move.

The economic sub-committee of the Cabinet had ended.

It was a full fifteen minutes since the secretary had slipped silently into the room and laid the message form beside the Prime Minister's papers.

The chairman of the sub-committee, the Chancellor, was neatly packing away his papers at the far end of the table.

"You'll forgive the presumption, Prime Minister, but you are displaying a certain cheerfulness that I can hardly put down to our business of the last two hours."

"That obvious, Harry?"

"Very obvious, Prime Minister."

The Prime Minister leaned back, there was a comfortable smile. The meeting hushed.

The Prime Minister said, "One of the hardest features of my office is to exercise real power, to exercise real influence. I try often enough, and I rarely succeed."

"But this time you have succeeded?" The Chancellor was adept at the unsubtle prompt. "Can you say?"

The Prime Minister glanced down at the cryptic handwritten message. "Not yours, not mine, but Abu Hamid's, on the salver."

"You'll keep this to yourselves of course When Ben Armitage was shot dead in Yalta, and an aide also died, we let a lie be known, that the murderer was a local criminal. We knew in fact that the killer was a member of the Palestinian Popular Front. I put in hand an Intelligence operation that located the killer in the Beqa'a valley of east Lebanon. I took the decision, not lightly, to send a covert team into the Beqa'u valley in that a precisely calculated vengeance should be wrought upon this murderer. It would be the clearest indication to his Syrian masters that we will never be attacked with impunity Last night, gentlemen, at dusk, that vengeance was exacted."

"That's first class, Prime Minister."

"I'll not deny that I agonised over the decision, over the consequences of failure, for which of course I would have taken the blame, but if you venture nothing then you win nothing. This government, our government, has shown that we are in the forefront of the war against international terrorism."