One Shot Kill - Robert Muchamore Page 0,45
range and armoury had no lock at all.
The armoury hut was split in two. One half was behind a locked steel mesh, with boxes of ammunition and unissued service weapons stacked on shelves. The larger half had slotted wooden gun racks along the walls, coat hooks, a few benches and three large workbenches, each with built-in slots for the lubricants, polishing cloths and brushes used to clean weapons.
In most cases these guns kept in the armoury were the personal property of shooting enthusiasts in the USAF, so almost all of the weapons lived in bags or wooden boxes. The four trainees’ sniper rifles were stacked near the main entrance in zipped canvas bags.
Marc and Paul’s guns were next to each other, and Sam’s was distinctive now that it had the shorter stock, but it was Luc’s weapon Marc was interested in. He felt a twinge of guilt as he unzipped Luc’s rifle and laid it across the nearest bench, but Luc was a nasty piece of work and Marc reasoned that this mission would be better off without him.
Every gun comes with its own cleaning and maintenance kit, but Marc ignored Luc’s kit and took a small screwdriver from a wooden drawer beneath the worktop.
A rifle is more accurate than a short weapon such as a pistol because its long barrel is bored with a spiral pattern that spins a bullet. Marc expertly removed the bolt handle and receiver from Luc’s gun, then jammed the screwdriver into the near end of the barrel and roughed up the surface with the sharp end.
The scraping left several silver gouge marks in the oiled metal, so Marc dripped gun oil on to a cloth and smeared it over to disguise them. The result wasn’t invisible, but while you’d have had to look hard to find the scratches Marc hoped they’d be enough to reduce the spin of the bullet leaving the gun and make Luc miss a couple of his more difficult shots.
*
As usual Pippa the cook fed her French boys with a hearty English breakfast. The four lads on the sniping course were nervous and sick of each other’s company, so Luc sat alone, Sam joined his big brother Joel, and Marc sat with PT.
Marc had seen Paul get out of bed, but didn’t see him again until he walked into the toilet. Paul was emerging from a cubicle, looking weak, with the tang of sick hanging in the air.
‘You OK?’ Marc asked.
‘Nerves,’ Paul said weakly, as he put his mouth under a cold tap and rinsed.
‘I’ll bet you do better than you’re expecting,’ Marc said, grinning and half tempted to tell Paul what he’d done the night before.
‘It’s doing well that I’m scared of,’ Paul confessed.
Marc looked baffled. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Goldberg’s had us shooting car tyres, alarm clocks, paper targets, dead chickens and rugby balls,’ Paul said. ‘But if I get the mission, it’s going to be real people I’m seeing through my scope.’
‘You can do what it takes,’ Marc said. ‘You killed Germans and saved Rosie’s life in Lorient two summers back.’
‘This is different,’ Paul said. ‘Lining up someone a thousand feet away and executing them. It’s cold-blooded. Part of me hopes Luc does beat me this morning. This job suits a cruel bastard like him.’
Marc looked crestfallen. ‘How can you start this up?’ he blurted. ‘People always call you a wimp, but I never thought it was true until now.’
Paul looked wounded and Marc immediately felt bad.
‘Try your best today and we’ll talk this through afterwards, yeah?’ Marc said.
Paul was used to people calling him a wimp, but Marc was his best friend so this was different. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words formed so he barged Marc and stormed towards the stairs.
Marc yelled from the top landing, ‘Paul, I’m sorry.’
But Paul ignored him and Marc felt like crap as he headed off to the armoury to get his weapon.
*
The atmosphere stayed tense as Goldberg drove the quartet out to the woods in a canvas-sided Royal Navy truck. The boys set off from the starting point at ten-minute intervals so that they didn’t reach the shooting zones at the same time. To minimise the chances of catching each other up, they went in order of speed, with fastest runner Marc going first, then Luc, Sam and Paul last.
Until now all the training had been in pairs because snipers most commonly work that way in the field. Marc enjoyed being able to move without Paul holding him