Bardwell stood a little way back from the byre window and watched Ian Hogg’s old Peugeot disappear down the driveway. Its progress was marked by kicked-up clouds of dried earth. Bardwell had served in plenty of places where such dust was a vital early warning system. He could read its swirling signature as clearly as a written word.
Another few minutes, he thought. Let him get too far for it to be worth turning back.
He stood without impatience, hands relaxed at his sides, face slack. Anyone watching at that moment might have thought him touched or maybe even simple, but he knew there was no-one watching. While some part of his mind held station, the remainder drifted in silent contemplation.
His sight turned inward. Although the image of the distant Lakeland hills was still imprinted on his retinas, it was overlaid by the stark ranges of another landscape altogether. Sheep transmuted into shaggy mountain goats, and the distant rumble of freight on the railway line filtered into the choppy thunder of rotary-wing air support.
Bardwell had killed his first man at nineteen in such terrain, had long since lost count of the others. But for the uniform, they’d have branded him a psychopath. But to his comrades, snipers like Bardwell were magicians, capable of visiting death on a distant enemy who thought to slaughter without fear of retribution. He’d earned the undying respect of the men he’d fought alongside. A bond written in fear and blood.
For years he’d performed the impossible without a murmur. The hierarchy had exploited his temperament and abilities as if he were merely an extension of the gun. Perhaps that was why they’d betrayed him so easily when he’d begun to question. There was no place in the field for equipment considered obsolete, but they’d trained him for this and nothing else. Who were they to say when it was over?
He shook himself, glanced at the clock on the oven and realised fifteen minutes had gone past without registering. He went through to the cramped bedroom, knelt as if in prayer and slid the rifle out from under the bed, wrapped in the ghillie suit.
He carried the gun outside and laid it across the rear seat. Carrying it openly like this had been a calculated risk, and he’d been anxious for the opportunity to minimise his exposure. Its current disguise wouldn’t survive the most cursory inspection. If he’d been stopped yesterday, he would have been unable to explain it away.
It was what it was.
He paused, almost sniffing the air, then bent and carefully rearranged the trailing aubretia Hogg had disturbed while clearing out his pipe. Bardwell’s fingers smoothed the edges of the thin cord, blending it a little further into the corner fold of metal.
He’d said it held a key, and that was half true. There were few locks could not be opened with the .357 revolver that was attached, safe in a waterproof oiled bag, to the other end of the cord. He had buried the ex-French police Manurhin revolver there, fully loaded, the night he’d arrived at the Retreat. Insurance.
He preferred a semiautomatic but, kept dry, the revolver could be relied upon to fire almost without question, no matter how long it remained hidden. He wondered if the former priest would ever know how close he’d come—or how Bardwell might have been forced to respond.
He drove the Land Rover straight up the yard and into the old stone barn next to the farmhouse without wasting any more time. It was cool inside—the thick sandstone walls as effective at keeping out the summer heat as they were the bitter Cumbrian winters—and musty from the stack of mouldering hay at one end.
Two fluorescent tubes strung from the rafters provided the barn’s only artificial light. Bardwell pulled his hair back into a loose ponytail and lifted an inspection lamp off a rickety shelf, clipping one end of the cable to the battery. Squatting down to peer underneath the chassis, his movements were suddenly economical and sure.
There was nothing structurally wrong with the Land Rover. The mainstay of the British Army since their introduction, they’d seen service in every corner of the world. They could take the hammer, were respected for it.
But as soon as Hogg had arrived at Oxenholme to collect him, Bardwell had remembered the circular aperture in one of the Land Rover’s main crossmembers for the power takeoff. It was almost tailor-made to hold the barrel of the rifle, snug and out of sight. All it needed was a quick-release bracket fabricating for the stock and he would have his perfect method of carriage and concealment.
He lifted the gun out, careful of its bulk, carried his burden across to the old scarred workbench along the back wall and set it down, almost reverently, like a child. The rifle was a Barrett M82A1 Light Fifty—one of the last made in ’ninety-two—and still as devastatingly effective as the day it left its Tennessee birthplace.
To Bardwell, the long gun’s purposeful shape and sheer brutal power was a thing of beauty. He’d fallen for it the first time he’d handled one, nearly twenty years before. Fallen harder and faster than he ever had for any flesh-and-blood woman.
An inch over five feet from butt to muzzle-brake and weighing over twenty-five pounds, the gun was a hefty beast. They made some attempts to reduce the overall dimensions on later models, without sacrificing the monumental range and power. But Bardwell was a purist at heart, preferred the original. Besides, he was a muscular six-foot-three—the size and weight of the weapon didn’t bother him.
He’d taken his time tracking down this rifle, revisiting old haunts, stretching the goodwill of old comrades and contacts to its limit and not caring.
There hadn’t been as much time for testing as he would have liked. Hard to find somewhere suitable. Familiarity with the breed was one thing, but each gun was subtly individual. At the kind of distances where the Barrett reigned supreme, even the curvature of the earth played a part in the fall of each shot.
Bardwell knew that when it mattered, he would have no margin for error. He should have had none yesterday. And, if circumstances had been different, he would have found out if he measured up to the task he’d set himself.
The first part of it, at least.