Tom Cain - Dictator

Carver saw the confidence flooding back into Zalika as she dusted the next pair. She was in the final straight now, the finishing line in sight.

The final pair were released. Over they came, the right-hand clay slightly higher than the left, the angle between them widening all the time. Zalika hit the right one first then swung her gun in an arc towards her left shoulder. The swing was smooth, her movements controlled, both her eyes open to give her optimum vision and depth perception.

And yet she missed.

Carver couldn’t believe it. He’d have put any money in the world on Zalika getting the pair. Yet, for the second time, she’d been let down by the final shot in a sequence. Zalika looked equally incredulous, staring at the untouched clay as it continued its gentle arc to the ground as if she could dust it by sheer force of will. She gave a final shake of the head, then snapped the gun open, caught the cartridges with an irritated snap of her fingers and hurled them in the bin before turning and walking back towards the others.

As she walked past Carver, her eyes blazing with defiance, she hissed, ‘Well, you still can’t beat me,’ quietly enough that only he could hear.

Carver said nothing. He had no intention of getting ahead of himself. The end result was just a distraction. He had a job to do first.

He strode towards his firing position not hoping he would shoot well, or even believing that he would. He demanded it.

He banished all thoughts of Zalika, dismissed any worries about the height and size of the clays, or the fact that he’d be firing with unrestricted barrels that would spray his shots across the sky like confetti. He concentrated purely and simply on the element he could control: the quality of his shooting.

The first four clays were obliterated.

When the third pair flew from the traps, Carver hit the first clay smack in the middle, but only caught the leading edge of the second, very nearly missing to the front. Now he was the one who had to fight the temptation to change his technique, the one who had to have faith enough to stick with what he’d been doing.

Carver felt the pounding of his heart against his chest and the itchy stickiness of sweat beneath his armpits. He told himself to get a grip.

‘Pull!’ he called.

The clays were flung from their traps, and at that precise moment the wind, which had blown steadily all day, suddenly flurried. The gust only lasted for a second or two, but it was enough to disturb the flight of the clays. The right-hand one slowed in mid-air and lost height, making the left clay appear to race away from it. Now their courses were radically different, and Carver had to adjust his shot in mid-swing as he locked on to the dropping clay. Somehow he managed to hit it and then jerk his gun left and up, his sights scrabbling across the sky to find the other clay.

Where the hell had it got to?

His spine was arched like a tightly pulled bow and the weight of his head was so far back that he was almost toppling over when he finally found his target. He had no balance, no stillness. He was as ragged as hell.

Carver fired.

The crack of the shot slapped the summer air like a palm to a face, closely followed by a frustrated cry of ‘No!’

Zalika Stratten had not been able to contain her frustration at Carver’s absurd good fortune. The clay had been blown to pieces. Somehow, he’d got everything wrong about the shot except the end result.

After that, the last pair was a formality. Carver came away with a perfect ten.

‘So we tied,’ said Zalika, coldly.

‘You sure?’ Carver replied.

She frowned at him uncertainly. But before she could say anything else there was the sound of a polite cough.

‘I have the scores,’ said McGuinness.

He was holding the score cards in one hand, divided into boxes for each pair of clays. The shots were marked down as ‘kills’ and ‘losses’, a diagonal line across a box indicating that both shots had been kills.

‘Mr Klerk, you came third. I’ve never seen you shoot so well, sir. Good enough to win, I reckon, nine times out of ten. And you, Miss Zalika, well, I cannae imagine how anyone could shoot like you did and not come out on top.’

She gave a weary smile. ‘Thank you, Donald.’

‘But the winner,’ he continued, ‘is Mr Carver by one.’

‘What?’ Now Zalika’s eyes blazed with furious energy. ‘That’s not possible! It was a tie!’

‘I’m afraid not, Miss. You lost two shots in the final five pairs.’

‘I know, but one of them was in the pair that I had to reshoot. It didn’t count. You said so yourself: the score from the first bird is counted. I killed the first bird.’

‘Aye, so you did. And the score is counted… when you are shooting on report. But these pairs were simultaneous. And I’m afraid the rules are very clear, Miss. If a “no bird” is called in a simultaneous pair, the score for the other bird does not count. You start from scratch when the pair is released again. And you lost the first bird of that pair, as well as the very last bird of all. When Mr Carver killed all ten, he overtook you.’

Zalika sighed. ‘I see.’ She switched her attention back to Carver. ‘So you win, then.’

‘Yes.’

‘But only on a technicality.’

‘A win is a win. That’s how it works.’

She narrowed her eyes and stared at him. ‘You knew that rule all along, didn’t you? When I said you couldn’t win, you knew.’

‘Yeah, I knew I had the beating of you. But I still had to get all ten.’

The look in Zalika’s eye was as cold as bare steel on a frosty morning. But as she turned and walked away from him, Carver swore he could see the beginnings of a smile spreading across her face, almost as though she, not he, were the real winner.

Justus Iluko had spent the day at a UN World Food Programme supply centre, trying to persuade officials there to double the size of their deliveries of maize to the refugee camp that had sprung up on his farm. ‘You bring enough food for ten thousand people, but there are many times that number now. You must send more,’ he begged.

The official’s name was Hester Thompson. She could not remember the last time she had stepped into a hot bath, or grabbed more than four hours’ sleep. Her greasy, unwashed hair was pulled back into a bedraggled ponytail, held in place by a rubber band.

She looked at Justus through eyes made red by fatigue and dust. ‘We don’t have more food,’ she said. ‘The UN has cut its food aid budget. We’re giving you all we’ve got.’

‘But people are dying of starvation. There is no fresh water, no sanitation. Yesterday we had twenty new cases of cholera, but we have no doctors, no medicine to treat them.’

‘I understand, and I sympathize, really I do. But even if I had all the money in the world to spend on food it wouldn’t make any difference because your government-’

‘They are not my government,’ Iluko snapped. ‘They are hyenas, feeding on my country’s corpse.’

Thompson sighed wearily. ‘Whatever, the Gushungo regime refuses to import more than a hundred thousand tons of maize into Malemba. The President says he does not need any more than that. In fact the minimum amount required to keep this country alive is close to six hundred thousand tons. Last week we cut our basic maize allowance to five kilos per person, per week. That works out at six hundred calories a day. And yeah, I know, that’s a starvation ration.’

‘So you will not help…’

‘Not unless I suddenly develop superpowers, no.’

Justus drove home empty-handed. He tried to call his family from the Toyota Land Cruiser he had bought, second-hand, with half the money Samuel Carver had sent him a decade earlier. There was no reply.