One round. That was all they had given Ernst Bloch. One solitary bullet, just in case he decided to turn his Mauser on his captors. Why would he do that? Why would he thwart the one chance he had to get back to Hilde? No, he was going to carry out this mission, this state-sanctioned execution, unless they had been lying to him. He had to face up to that possibility, be alert to the chance that the perfidious British were toying with him, manipulating him into a situation where he would strike a blow against his own side.
But that was for later. Now, as he climbed the metal ladder up the crane, he had to concentrate on making his one shot count. A truculent wind snapped at him as he ascended, his hands chilled by the icy metal rungs.
He wasn’t sure where he was exactly. Gravesend, they had said, although he had never heard of the place – his British geography was poor. The morbid-sounding town was on the English coast somewhere, obviously. To his right were docks, where a score of cranes were busy unloading freight from merchant ships, dockworkers swarming over a pair of trawlers, probably being converted to mine-sweeping duties. A trio of destroyers rode at anchor just beyond the mouth of the harbour. Below him was a canal and set back from it rows of warehouses. The surrounding area was completely deserted, cleared of both civilians and military personnel while he carried out the exercise.
Bloch paused to catch his breath at the first of the platforms. He had been instructed to fire from the next one, which mimicked the height of the watchtower on the German/Dutch border that was to be his perch on the actual day. That day would be ‘soon’, according to Carlisle.
Which meant he could see Hilde ‘soon’.
A shouted prompt from below instructed him to keep climbing. On the ground, peering up, was Carlisle and, next to him, the bull-necked Sergeant Balsom. How he wished he had an extra bullet for him. Whenever the pair had time alone the sergeant made snide remarks about Hilde, hoping, he said, that Bloch wouldn’t return to find her pinned on a Prussian officer’s pork bayonet. Or carrying a cavalryman’s bastard child. But the jibes didn’t hit home; Bloch knew from the tone of her letters that Hilde had stayed true. Still, the image of what one of his old S.m.K. armour-piercing rounds would do to the thuggish sergeant helped him keep an even temper.
As the wind tugged harder at his tunic, with the rifle slung over his back he scampered up the next section of ladder at double-quick speed until he made the perforated steel platform. Here, he walked to the rail and surveyed the scene. To the right was the bridge that, Carlisle claimed, more or less matched the one crossing the River Meuse. The scale was different – this was a much shorter span over the canal – but the distance was about right.
Bloch pulled the strap of his Mauser over his head and slipped off its protective muzzle cover. He then removed the metal caps from either end of the telescopic sight. Even without the magnification he could make out the target at the end of the bridge nearest to him. He shouldered the rifle and adjusted the optics. The man came into sharpened focus.
It was, in truth, only an approximation of a human being, the sort of dummy the British liked to use for bayonet practice. This one was dressed in a long black woollen coat and a low-crown top hat, as if ready for a night at the opera.
Bloch put down the rifle and examined his options. The wind was gusting intermittently, which was far from ideal. He was confident he could make a clean kill standing up, but decided it would be better to use the railings as support. Would there be any such resting point on the actual tower? He couldn’t be certain, so he made a note to ask for a stand for the rifle like the British snipers used, a single pole that clamped to the foregrip.
Bloch dropped to one knee and rested the rifle on the rail. He took his time getting comfortable, positioning the stock in his shoulder and distributing his weight carefully. He timed the peaks and troughs of the breeze coming from the sea, finding a ragged pattern in the gusts. He put his eye to the rubber bell that surrounded the ocular lens. A series of minor adjustments followed, to the zoom ring, the focus on the objective lens and the top, elevation, turret. Finally, the windage compensation, although with a single shot to his name this was guesswork.
Stop and breathe. Through the sights he could see the torso and the head. It had to be a body shot in these conditions, he decided. A tiny miscalculation in the sighting or drift of the bullet and, at that range, he could miss altogether. No, it was a chest shot. Even if he missed the heart, it was unlikely the victim would survive a high-powered round slicing through bone and blood vessels.
He snapped his head back, away from the sights and blinked hard, his mouth unexpectedly dry. It had been a long time since he had dealt with such considerations. At one time, it was all he thought about – angles, trajectories, penetrations, kill shots and incapacitating wounds. It had been a form of madness, the mania of mass killing that had gripped the whole of the Western Front. And now here he was, embracing all that again. But in a good cause, he reminded himself. One last kill for Hilde. And this wasn’t a man in his crosshairs. It was a stuffed dummy. So take the damned shot.
He put his eye back to the rubber bell, waited for the next gust of wind to peak, riding its coat-tails down to the moment when he squeezed the trigger, watched the world blur under the recoil, then resteadied and repositioned so he could see that the round had ripped out the spot where, in a few days’ time, Sherlock Holmes’s heart would be.