The Network - Jason Elliot [48]
We need to know these things, and we go over them in detail.
Several hours later H gathers up our paperwork and locks it in a small safe. Then, when it’s time to turn in, he waves a hand over his bookshelves and invites me to have a browse.
‘You might like this one.’ He pulls down a book about the Regiment and fans the pages until he reaches the chapter devoted to the campaign in Oman. There’s a selection of photographs taken at the height of the conflict, but the images of the soldiers don’t look like conventional portraits. The men wear beards, ragged-looking uniforms and frayed caps or Arab shemaghs; cigarettes dangle from their lips, and many of them look too old to be soldiers in any case.
H points to a photograph of a fearsome-looking bearded man with a sunburned face under a combat cap. A bulky general purpose machine gun and dangling belt of gleaming ammunition hang from his shoulder.
‘That’s the Ditch,’ says H, looking fondly at the photograph. ‘Gentle as a kitten. And that’s the Monk.’ There’s another photograph of a man wearing what looks like a monk’s hooded cassock. From the shadows of the woollen hood, a faint and enigmatic smile on the lean face does seem to confirm a contemplative temperament. Only the M16 assault rifle cradled protectively in his arms suggests a different calling.
He turns the pages again to show me a photograph of a young man peering over the sights of an 81-millimetre mortar in a dusty-looking sandbagged gun pit. His bare upper body is deeply tanned and he looks very fit. It’s H, twenty-five years earlier, up on the Jebel near Medinat al-Haqq.
‘We used to play with that mortar a lot.’ He smiles. ‘Just to let the Adoo know we could put down a round on a sixpence if we wanted to.’
It’s very strange. As a teenager I owned the same book and pored over its pages, never imagining that one day I might know the names of the anonymous soldiers who looked out from them.
‘Those blokes were the real deal,’ says H, nodding solemnly. ‘They don’t make them like that any more.’
We leave the house in the morning while it’s still dark. The Brownings are hidden in the go bags at our feet, and the AK under the rear seat. We’re heading for an abandoned quarry about half an hour west of Hereford, practising the anti-ambush drill on the way, throwing the car onto the verge and positioning it between us and our imaginary attackers. Then, as the sky is beginning to brighten, we turn from the main road onto an unsurfaced track. At the end of it the ground opens out into a wide flat stretch of chalky subsoil, criss-crossed by waterlogged bulldozer tracks. Beyond it rises a pale amphitheatre of stone about sixty feet high.
I cut the engine and H takes two rolled-up targets from the car. We walk across the open ground and fix the targets to the soft stone with tent pegs. We count a hundred paces and I stand on the spot we mark, while H takes the AK from the back of his car. He clears the mechanism, hands me the weapon and feeds three rounds into the magazine. From his pocket he takes a small box of yellow foam earplugs, which we squeeze into our ears.
‘Let’s zero the sights. Put three rounds on the black circle.’
The black circle, the size of a small plate up close, looks tiny. I line up on the speck of black and squeeze the trigger. The rifle bucks as if knocked by a hammer from below. I’ve forgotten how loud guns are.
‘One,’ says H. I fire again. ‘Two.’ And again. ‘Three. Clear it.’
We jog to the target. One round is a foot off to the left. This is probably the first. The other two are a few inches apart, in line with the centre but six inches too high. We jog back to our firing position, where H makes an adjustment to the foresight and feeds five more rounds into the magazine.
‘Centre of the target. Five rounds rapid.’
The AK rises and falls. I fire at the end of each downward lull and try to keep