Dictator

35

A Range Rover was waiting for them outside the front door. McGuinness loaded the guns and cartridge bags into the back then drove them down one of the private roads that criss-crossed the estate until they came to a massive earthwork, at least thirty feet high, extending in either direction as far as the eye could see. The road led to a tunnel through the earthwork.

When they emerged into the open again, Carver could see that the ground fell away into a gigantic bowl that must have been at least fifty feet deep. The land within was laid out like a golf course, with patches of open grass separated by copses of trees, hedgerows, man-made hills and valleys and even a stream that fed into a small lake. But instead of golf tees, fairways, bunkers and greens, each individual section of land was equipped with a selection of different stands for guns to fire from; traps to launch clay pigeons; a selection of what looked like watchtowers, or mobile telephone masts; and a rifle range.

‘Impressive,’ said Carver.

‘Thank you,’ said Klerk. ‘I’ve taken elements from the finest shoots in the British Isles and reproduced them right here. Different landscapes, different types of game, we’ve got them all.’

McGuinness drove them down to the bottom of the bowl and parked the car. He handed each of the three competitors their gun, a cartridge bag and a set of ear-protectors. Then he stood before them and, abandoning his usual deference, spoke to them as the man who, as keeper, would be taking responsibility for the shoot.

‘You will each be shooting ten clays per stand, at five separate stands,’ he said. ‘So you each have fifty-five rounds: fifty for the competition and five spares in case any shots have to be retaken. Guns will be carried broken and unloaded. Ear-protectors must be worn while shooting is taking place. I will keep score and act as referee. Does anyone have any questions? No? Well, in that case, if you would please follow me, we will go to the first trap.’

‘Do you shoot much?’ Klerk asked Carver as they walked away. ‘For sport, I mean, rather than business.’

‘Every now and then. Been a while since I shot any clays.’

Carver wasn’t paying too much attention to Klerk. He was watching Zalika, who was walking ahead of them. She’d put her hair back into a ponytail and changed into jeans and a Beretta ladies’ shooting vest. The vest, in theory a purely functional garment, was cut to follow every curve of her upper body and to stop just high enough to reveal the contours beneath her jeans. As she walked, the sway of her body seemed designed to tantalize, giving Carver just a hint of the pleasures in store if he was man enough to match her challenge.

Zalika half-turned to look at him over her shoulder, a teasing smile on her face, and for a second Carver felt another surge of anger at her blatant tactics and irritation at himself for falling for them so easily. She’d meant to distract him, and it had worked. It was time to concentrate on the matter in hand: winning the shooting match.

They were walking through heather now. A short way ahead of them, Carver saw three circular butts, or shooting hides, constructed of dry-stone walls, topped with turf. Ahead of the butts the heather-covered ground rose gradually, simulating the slope of a grouse moor.

‘Thought we’d start with grouse,’ said Klerk. ‘We’ll be shooting one at a time from the centre butt. Sam, why don’t you shoot first, hey?’

It was an obvious tactic to put Carver at a disadvantage. The other two had shot there a hundred times and knew all the quirks of the land and the positions of the traps from which the clays would be fired like miniature black Frisbees, precisely 108mm across. As the newcomer, Carver would have benefited hugely from watching the others go first. Instead, he would have to shoot sight unseen, trust his reactions and hope for the best.

Carver transferred ten cartridges from his cartridge bag to a pocket of his shooting vest then walked into the butt. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a few seconds, trying to clear his mind of everything but the thought processes required to hit a small, fast-moving target. Then he loaded two cartridges into the twin barrels of his gun and raised it to his shoulders.

McGuinness was standing behind him, slightly to one side, holding a control box.

‘Would you like to see a pair, sir?’ he said.

He was offering to release two of the clays before the shooting began so that Carver could see where they came from and at what distance and angle they flew. The obvious response was, ‘Yes please.’ But some perverse refusal to be seen to need outside help prevented Carver from doing the sensible thing. Instead he replied, ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’

He concentrated his vision on the air just above the artificial moor, directly in front of him, and said, ‘Pull!’

McGuinness pushed a button on his control box and Carver heard the sound of a spring being released as the trap slung the first clay pigeon into the air. Then came the fluttering whirr of the clay as it cut through the air. It came low and fast from a point about forty yards away, just as a real grouse would do, flying towards him but slanting right-to-left across his line of fire.

Carver fired.

The clay pigeon kept flying, entirely untouched, until gravity pulled it to earth.

He’d missed.

Appalled by his stupidity and incompetence, he barely heard the release of the second clay, was late getting back into position, and missed that one as well.

Carver could not remember the last time he’d felt so humiliated, so exposed. Behind him, the other three stood in stunned, embarrassed silence for several seconds until Klerk called out, ‘Jesus Christ, Carver, you ever fired a gun before in your life?’ It was meant as banter, pulling his leg. But there was nothing funny about Carver’s shooting. It wasn’t just that he had missed. He had done so like a rank amateur.

He ejected the first two cartridges from his gun, resumed his stance and called ‘Pull!’ once again. This time he hit both clays. They broke into a few large fragments – a sure sign that he’d not struck them dead-centre – but they were hits nonetheless. So were the next three pairs. Carver walked away from the butt with a score of eight out of ten. He only cared about the two dropped shots.

Klerk went next. He shot with the metronomic style of a man who has spent a lot of time and money on lessons from an excellent teacher. Technically, he was faultless, but he wasn’t a natural marksman. Even so, he too scored eight, and seemed perfectly happy to have done so.

Now it was Zalika’s turn. She didn’t just hit the first pair of clays, she dusted them, striking them so perfectly that they disintegrated in mid-air, vanishing in what looked like little puffs of smoke.

When she broke open the gun, she caught the cartridges one-handed as they sprang from the barrels before placing them in a little bin that stood inside the butt. The catch was a nice touch, Carver thought, a clever, deceptively casual way of letting him know how at ease she was around guns. He noticed something else as Zalika reloaded: she rotated her cartridges in the barrels so that the writing on the brass base of each shell was the right way up. It was a telling little ritual, designed to prepare her for action, like a tennis player bouncing a ball, or a golfer practising his swing.

It worked. Zalika vaporized the next four pairs as efficiently as she had the first. She walked away with a perfect ten. If it wasn’t obvious before, Carver knew for sure now that he had a fight on his hands – one he could easily lose. If he were going to stand any chance at all he had to shed the look of a loser and regain some sense of authority.

As they walked away to the next stand, he asked McGuinness, ‘Just out of curiosity, what chokes have I got?’

‘Quarter and cylinder,’ the gamekeeper replied.

‘Interesting,’ said Carver.

He hoped he sounded relaxed, even a little blase. But inside he was cursing himself. A quarter-choke was the least restriction available; ‘cylinder’ meant an entirely clear barrel. That gave him a much wider spread of shot. At short range that was an advantage; it might have been the only reason he’d been able to hit any clay at all in that disaster of a first round. But the further the shot went, the more holes opened up in the air between the scattered pellets and the tougher it became to get a kill. If they had to shoot at clays flying high, or any distance away, Carver was going to be in trouble.