Hard Knocks (11 page)

“One last thing,” Rebanks said as we were each handed our own gun and a box of shells. “Quite a few people who come on these courses decide they’d like to take a couple of live rounds home with them as a souvenir.” He eyed the group. We all tried to look innocent, as though that was the last thing to cross any of our minds.

“If that thought had occurred to you, forget it!” he went on. “For those of you who’ll be going back to the UK, they take a pretty dim view of it over there now anyway and we don’t appreciate you nicking it from us, either. So, at the end of every session here you’ll be required to give what we call a range declaration, right? If you’re then found with anything on you that you shouldn’t have, you take the long walk out of here. Clear?”

We all murmured our understanding. It was the same procedure as I’d followed on every army range I’d ever been on. Except the penalty then was somewhat more severe.

Blakemore, O’Neill and Todd were acting as Rebanks’s assistants for the class. They fitted us out with ear defenders and eye shields, which were loaded into a universal plastic carry tray with a handle in the middle. It was a good way of keeping everything together and also, I acknowledged, it stopped us putting things into our pockets.

I was put into the first group to shoot. We moved through a pair of soundproof doors into the range itself, a low-roofed slot of a room with scarred walls and a huge sand berm heaped up at the far end to catch the fired rounds.

There were eight lanes marked out, with a solid counter about four feet high that ran right the way across the firing position. I picked the far left-hand lane and plonked my carry tray down on the counter top in front of it.

McKenna was in the lane next to me. After his outburst of the previous morning, he seemed quiet and withdrawn.

“OK, I won’t ask you to try and produce groupings at this stage,” Rebanks said, condescending. “Just aim for the target and that’ll be enough for me. Fire when you’re ready.”

I took my time over getting sorted, fussed over making sure my ear defenders were in the right place, aware all the time of Todd standing behind me. I didn’t know if it was my imagination, but the big physical training instructor seemed to be watching me more than the others.

Once my ears were covered, the sound of my breathing became loud and rasping inside my head. I concentrated on slowing the rate for a moment or so before I picked up the SIG and slid the magazine into the grip. As Rebanks had pointed out, there was no conventional safety catch, so as soon as I pinched back the slide to chamber the first round, the weapon became active. I hadn’t fired the P226 model before, but as soon as it settled in my fist it felt right. It fitted.

I held the gun in both hands, bringing it up until I knew by instinct that the front and rear sights had come into alignment. We were using standard military paper targets that showed the head and shoulders of a snarling soldier. They were pasted to a flat board and set at the seven metre distance on the range.

To my right, McKenna fired his first shot, jerking the trigger and only just managing to clip the extreme top edge of the board, which splintered wildly. Out of the corner of my vision, I saw Todd shift to stand behind him instead.

I let out my breath and squeezed the trigger, aiming for the eye of my target. The gun fired with a muffled bang, but very little recoil. The trigger action was smooth and progressive.

When I checked my target, the eye was gone.

I glanced sideways and saw that the rest of the targets were gradually filling with random holes. I carefully emptied the rest of my magazine in what I hoped was a haphazard pattern around the board, deliberately bypassing it altogether with the last two, which I put straight into the berm at the back of my lane.

“OK everyone,” Rebanks called. “Place your weapon on the counter in front of you, pointing
down
range, if you don’t mind, and let’s have a look how you’ve done.”

We all did as ordered, pulled off our ear defenders and eye shields and the outside world suddenly got brighter and louder again. There was a wisp of smoke drifting inside the range, even with the extractor fans switched on. I breathed in the faintly familiar cocktail of cordite, gun oil, and nervous sweat.

Rebanks sauntered along the line, dishing out comments and criticism. Mostly the latter.

The standard varied enormously. Shirley must have been holding her gun with the barrel drooping, because she’d only managed to get two onto the target at all, right at the bottom edge. After her poor performance in the driving session that morning, she was looking thoroughly dispirited.

Hofmann came out on top, placing all his shots within a four-inch square area right in the centre of his target, and he was looking pretty smug about it. Rebanks made much of him, but to be honest I would have expected better from an ex-military shooter, particularly at such close quarters.

“OK, that was only mildly horrible,” Rebanks said cheerfully when he’d finished. “Now let’s try and get some groupings going, shall we?”

We reloaded and fired again. Two lanes down Declan had a stoppage which he struggled to clear. He didn’t have the brute strength to force the slide back to eject the jammed round. In his desperation he started getting careless about where he was pointing the business end of the barrel as he wrestled with the gun.

Rebanks stopped us all shooting immediately while he tore the Irishman off a strip. “You have a problem, you keep the pistol pointing down the range
at all times
, is that clear, Mr Lloyd?” he yelled. “This is not a toy, it’s a deadly fucking weapon. We’ve never had an accident yet where anybody’s been injured on this range, but you do that again and I’ll shoot you myself. D’you understand me?”

Declan mumbled his reply. Rebanks took the gun away from him, cleared it in one movement, and thrust it back into his hands with a darkly contemptuous look.

We’ve never had an accident yet where anybody’s been injured . . .

I turned the words over as I resumed my slapdash firing. Their choice was an interesting one, and they’d been delivered with just a hint of self-consciousness. Almost as if Rebanks was trying to convince himself, rather than the rest of us. I wondered how, in the face of that statement, I was going to be able to throw in my casual question about Kirk’s death.

I found to my alarm that I hadn’t been concentrating on the last three rounds and I’d planted them so close together in the centre that the holes overlapped each other. Damn. I was going to have to be more careful.

“OK, that’s enough for today, I think,” Rebanks said when we’d all ground to a halt. The SIGs were returned to their plastic carry trays, slides locked back on an empty chamber and magazines out. “Under the counter in front of you, you’ll each find a pot of glue, a brush and a bag of paper squares. Go and paste the squares over the holes in your targets so the next lot can use them, then you can go with Mr O’Neill. He’ll show you how to strip your weapons down and clean them.”

We all dutifully went through the door at the far right-hand side of the counter and out onto the range itself with our glue-pots in hand. Shirley was done well before the rest of us, by dint of the fact that she’d managed to create very few holes.

When I’d finished my own target, I walked back down my lane and put the glue onto the counter where I’d been shooting, rather than carry it round.

As I did so, a bright object on the floor caught my eye. It was tucked hard up against the bottom edge of the counter, completely hidden from view from the normal firing position. I dropped the bag of paper squares close to it, quickly stooping to pick it up.

I palmed it quickly and forced myself not to look round to see if anyone had noticed what I’d done. I joined the others, casually wiping my hands. My fingers were black with ingrained powder and oil.

Back on the other side of the counter I picked up my carry tray and headed for the doors out of the range with the others.

“Hold on a moment, Miss Fox,” Rebanks said from behind me. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

I turned slowly, trying not to panic. “Am I?”

“Your declaration, if you please.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. It was hard not to stand to attention as I rapped out, “I have no live rounds or empty cases in my possession,
sir
.”

“All right, all right, on you go,” he said, grinning as he waved me though.

It wasn’t until later that afternoon, when I had chance to examine my discovery more closely, that it really came home to me how easily I’d been able to lie to Rebanks.

Still, he’d lied to us, too, so I suppose that made it evens.

The object I’d picked up and carried away with me, against all the rules, was a single live round. It must have rolled off the front edge of the counter when someone was loading up, or maybe clearing a stoppage, as Declan had failed to do.

But you often find the odd live round on a range. That in itself wasn’t unusual. It was the round itself that gave me pause for thought because, according to Sean’s information, the school didn’t use them, or even list them as being held on the premises.

It was a 9mm Hydra-Shok jacketed hollowpoint.

I was intending to call Sean at the earliest opportunity about my discovery, but when I walked into the dormitory to change before supper, I could tell at once that something was wrong.

Elsa was sitting on Shirley’s bed with her arm around the older woman’s shoulders. Jan was leaning against the wall near the head, looking serious and uncomfortable. All three of them tensed up when I opened the door.

I paused with my fingers still on the handle. “What’s up?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, dear,” Shirley said, and I could tell by the thickness in her voice that she’d been crying. She sat up straighter, opening out a crumpled tissue and blowing her nose fiercely, as though she was annoyed by the need to do so. Elsa let her arm fall away.

“Shirley wishes to leave,” the German woman said bluntly, her voice giving no clue as to whether she was happy about this occurrence or not.

I glanced at Jan, but it was difficult to know what she was thinking at the best of times. She caught my eye and shrugged.

I sat down on the bed opposite Shirley. “Why did you want to come here in the first place?” I asked gently.

Elsa made an impatient gesture. “What is that to do with it?”

I ignored her and held Shirley’s eye instead. I wanted to find out if her reason to stay was stronger than her reason to go. “Well?”

Shirley swallowed, stared up at the corner of the room over my head, biting her lip as though that would keep the tears trapped beneath her eyelids. “I wanted to do something different,” she said at last. “I wanted to get out there into the real world and do something exciting, just for once. Something that would matter.”

She skimmed her gaze over me briefly, then let it fall. “I’ve always been really good at organisation,” she said, now talking to the worn carpet in front of her feet. “I can plan and organise a children’s party, a conference, a fund-raiser.”

She glanced at the three of us briefly and gave what might have been a self-derisory laugh. “All three at once, if you like. It’s easy. Multitasking, my daughter-in-law would call it. Somebody told me that was what ninety percent of close protection work was all about. Organising security during transport, hotels, restaurants. That’s what fascinated me about the job. Not all this running around in the mud and the dark, being screamed at by a bunch of thugs.”

Her face collapsed again, and she brought her hands up to cover it. Elsa put her arm back around Shirley’s shoulders and gave her a helpless squeeze. She flashed me a look of reproof from behind her glasses.

“Anybody on the job would give their right arm to have you co-ordinating all that kind of stuff behind the scenes for them,” Jan said suddenly. “It’s not all gung-ho bullshit. You hang in there, girl, and don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

In spite of herself, Shirley smiled wanly but looked no more convinced. We tried for another half an hour to talk her into finishing what she’d started. When the memories of the cold and the tiredness and the bullying had faded, she’d always berate herself for giving in. What was a few weeks of discomfort, compared to a lifetime of regret?

In some ways, I had done exactly the same thing. Given in when the going had become too difficult. Maybe the sense of disappointment I’d felt then went some way towards explaining some of my actions since. My occasional stubbornness to the point of stupidity. My disinclination to just let things go, however prudent a move that might turn out to be.

When we left her, Shirley seemed more positive, but there was an underlying sense of defeat about her. I knew we hadn’t really got the message through.

***

Shirley wasn’t the only one who was feeling low. There were a lot of subdued faces in the dining hall that evening. Lack of sleep and a punishing regime of exertion and mental fatigue was taking its toll. As I ate I had the chance to quietly observe the people around me. Even Declan was looking miserable.