The Soldier who Said No by Chris Marnewick Read Free Book Online Page B

At that range, six hundred metres, the weapon was accurate to the size of a tennis ball, once all Verster’s calculations and settings had been applied. When they had completed the tests at six hundred metres, their instructors sprang a surprise on them. The shooting range was part of a block of bush with a straight and cleared fence line nearly two kilometres long on the eastern side. That fence line appeared to have been freshly cut and cleared and to the casual onlooker would have looked like a road for the inspection of the fence or for game-viewing drives. From within a small tent, guarded on all sides by soldiers carrying R 4s, De Villiers and Verster tested the weapon on targets which were moved in hundred metre increments further away from them, from one thousand metres up to sixteen hundred metres, all along the fence line. The degree of accuracy hardly changed and a target the size of an adult man was repeatedly hit in the chest even at the maximum range they tried, sixteen hundred metres.
    It was an amazing weapon, a thing of exceptional beauty to a soldier like De Villiers.
    But that was then. In the oppressive tension of the here and the now, De Villiers and Verster continued to wait under their makeshift camouflage of branches and grass. They were one thousand four hundred and sixty-eight metres away from their target, the land sloping gently down towards the town square. The sun was behind the target and there was a light breeze coming at an angle across their left shoulders. At this distance the accuracy of the weapon would depend in equal measures on the correctness of Verster’s calculations and the steadiness of De Villiers’s trigger finger.
    De Villiers had that finger on the trigger now, the target’s breast pocket in the crosshairs of the telescopic sights. The bullet would enter the target’s uniform somewhere within that pocket, right over his heart.
    But the man on the podium was not a soldier, but a politician, onetime terrorist, now President of Zimbabwe. It was Verster who noticed it first. The spotter’s scope was far more powerful than the telescopic sights on the sniper’s rifle.
    ‘Hold it, Pierre. Hold it,’ he said. ‘Is that who I think it is?’
    De Villiers breathed out slowly and eased his finger out of the trigger guard. Equally slowly he raised the telescopic sights slightly to bring the target’s face into the centre of the scope.
    ‘I can’t see clearly through my scope,’ he said.
    ‘That’s Robert Mugabe, I think,’ Verster said.
    De Villiers lay still under the camouflage. ‘Here, come look through my scope,’ Verster offered. ‘See for yourself.’
    They changed positions slowly, with the minimum of movement, not wanting to give any hint of their presence.
    After a while, De Villiers had to agree. ‘Bloody hell! You’re right. It is Mugabe. What do we do now?’
    It was a rhetorical question. He was the leader of their two-man team. He would have to make the decision.
    ‘Let’s contact the major,’ Verster said without hesitation. He activated the small radio in his backpack and started to initiate the emergency call procedure. The conversation was in code and was brief.
    De Villiers could decipher the coded phrases as well as Verster. ‘It is Mugabe. He is the target. Shoot the fucker and get out of there.’
    It wasn’t General van den Bergh’s voice.
    The connection was cut. ‘We have to shoot him,’ Verster confirmed.
    De Villiers lined Mugabe up a second time.
    ‘Wait, the wind has shifted,’ Verster said.
    De Villiers exhaled slightly. He had to slow his breathing to lower his heart-rate to ensure the maximum duration between heartbeats. The shot had to go off between heartbeats when his body was internally as still and unmoving as externally.
    ‘Okay, it’s steady where it was.’ Verster’s voice was calm, the voice of a soldier who knows his onions and can perform in the field.
    De Villiers confirmed, ‘Steady as before.’
    ‘Let’s