by Peter Barry
I watched the man for a few minutes before raising my rifle. My hands were shaking. Seeing he was making no attempt to keep under cover, he’d be an easy target. The nerve of the fellow surprised me. I was adjusting the SSG’s sights – windage, five-to-seven east–west, distance four hundred yards – not, I have to admit, with much enthusiasm, when he reached into his jacket pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. He lit one, as calm as anything, as if he were in a commercial extolling the virtues of this particular brand. There was a certain theatricality about his movements, as if he were acting this ever-so-cool part. It was too bizarre and, to tell the truth, I was fascinated. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. It was so crazy, this man enjoying his last cigarette, he had me captivated. He made me smile. I decided to join in the fun.
The dust kicked up just to his left, right at his feet, but he never moved, never turned round, didn’t even flinch. All he did was take another puff of his cigarette. I could see it clearly. I adjusted the rifle, took careful aim and put a shot to the other side of him, just to his right. Again I saw the dust kick up, but the man continued to puff away, leaning on the railings, staring down into the water as if these bullets cracking into the stone around him were of no concern or interest to him whatsoever. He treated the bullets like they were flies, some minor irritant, except that he was not even bothered to brush them aside. I’ll say that for him, he was cool, really cool. I liked him, he didn’t give a fuck about anything. I fired three or four more shots around him, the ricochets of which must have almost deafened him, but he never flinched. By this time it was as if we’d reached an agreement together; simultaneously agreeing, even though we were several hundred yards apart, that this was some kind of amusing game we were involved in, a game of bluff, a little joke between ourselves and, on my part at least, nothing fatal was about to occur. He finished his cigarette, dropped it on the pavement, ground it beneath his foot, raised his collar a little higher against the cold – as if he were the lead part in some B-grade detective movie – put his hands in his pockets and strolled off towards the city.
And there was this argument raging in my head as I tracked the man with my rifle. I couldn’t afford to let him go … could I? But nor was I too happy about shooting someone who was simply offering himself as a target. Why didn’t he keep under cover? It was too cold-blooded to shoot him like this. By now my heart was beating so violently, I could scarcely hold the SSG steady. I had my finger on the trigger. I held my breath … I was struggling with indecision. And as I hesitated, the man suddenly jerked forwards, his body hit with such force that he spun sideways and landed face up on the road. I was shocked. For a fraction of a second I thought I’d squeezed the trigger, then realised it must have been another sniper, possibly someone in the adjoining apartment block.
I had suspected there was one of our snipers nearby. It’s scarcely surprising. There’s no coordination of sniper positions as far as I can see: we don’t get together every morning to be allocated places to go. It’s totally haphazard, people heading off from camps around the city in any direction they want, many staying where they are overnight. But this other sniper was too close. Snipers are like large predatory animals. We need a lot of space between each other. Birds, small mammals, squirrels and suchlike can live surprisingly close to each other, even in adjoining trees. They don’t need a lot of territory. But lions, tigers, hippos, elephants – even the bears that are said to still roam these hills – they’re not keen to brush up against their neighbours. They need their space, they want air. It’s the same with snipers: we like a few hundred yards between us, then there’s no overlapping of interests, no conflict, and we’re not a menace to each other.
Work it out. The telescopic sight I’m using magnifies by the power of six. It places someone who is three hundred yards away from me just fifty yards away. Someone who is fifty yards from me might as well be in the same room. I can see the colour of his eyes and the stubble on his chin. So I’m not too happy being that close to another killing machine, even if he’s on the same side as me. I never forget: all that can beat a sniper is another sniper. Already I’ve learnt not to trust anyone.
The fact is, we had our own targets, my neighbour and I. I always divide up my area of operations as if I were slicing a cake. I’m at the centre, and the thin slices fan outwards as far as the eye can see. There were the bus and train stations, the National Museum, the Holiday Inn hotel, the mustard-yellow hotel where overseas journalists stay, and behind that, twin office towers. If I could shoot someone near the hotel and on Snipers’ Alley – so-called because it’s the main road that leads out of town to the airport and is open to all of us up in the hills – there was a good chance of making it onto the evening news back home. It was even possible that my parents, sitting in front of their telly, might see one of my victims crumple to the pavement. Look at our son. Doing a fine job, isn’t he? Gone and hit another one. Makes you proud. Some of the overseas news cameramen, I’ve been told, leave their videos running all day, covering the intersection in front of the Holiday Inn hotel, hoping they’ll catch the actual moment someone is shot and killed. Ideally, they’d like to recreate Robert Capa’s photograph of the soldier killed in the Spanish Civil War. They’d make a tidy sum for such a scoop, a well-paid, legitimate snuff movie.
My neighbouring sniper must have been facing the city proper, including the old town, the main post office, the City Hall and the National Library, and mosques and offices. This means he’d definitely shot someone in my sector. What’s more, and even more worrying, is the fact he obviously saw me shooting around the cigarette smoker, intentionally missing him. I wondered what would happen if he told everyone back in camp.
Despite the cold, I was almost blinded by sweat. The cigarette smoker lay motionless. He wasn’t about to inhale again, that was for sure. I looked towards the open door, fearful that my failure, or indecision, had been witnessed. I couldn’t believe I’d failed again. I told myself that I’d been close to succeeding. I’d just been unnerved by the fact the man hadn’t been running, hadn’t been trying to hide. I’d been frozen by his immobility, by his naked vulnerability. It would have been too close to murder. I needed him to have run, to have been like one of those rabbits in Mr Sinclair’s field darting – no, haring – for the safety of its burrow. Then it might have been possible.
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It’s his farm now. I don’t know when Mr Sinclair died, but that Andy now lives there with his mother, his wife and his young son, I do know that. When I last visited my parents, I saw him. Ran into him in the centre of town, doing his Christmas shopping, immediately around the corner from where we used to go to school. He was still red haired and ruddy cheeked, just as he had been sitting next to me in class, but now he totally filled the space in front of me, a giant presence, awkward and silent. He was wearing an open checked shirt – even though the weather was cold – and big boots. He looked like he did as a kid, only bigger, as if he’d been pumped up. He was still self-effacing and shy, almost embarrassed, dancing around on the pavement in front of me, grinning awkwardly. The reason we became friends at school was because he was so quiet: I could boss him around. Andy always did exactly what I told him. He wasn’t simple, like Steinbeck’s Lennie, just eager to please, as if his life depended on helping people. He was a little in awe of me, that’s what it amounted to: despite the fact he towered over me, he looked up to me. When I saw him in the High Street all those years later, so shy I think he’d have tried to walk past unless I’d stepped in front of him and blocked his path, we reverted immediately to our old relationship.
Standing outside the same newsagent we used to visit as kids every Saturday morning with our pocket money, I could once again have grabbed the coins from his podgy hands, prised open the sausage fingers, and told him which sweets and comics we were going to buy with his money. I don’t believe he’d have objected.
It was in our early teens that I became tired of him. It was boredom, I t
hink, the fact we had so little in common. He was dull and tedious, too kind and decent. He wasn’t interesting or fun to be with. And I could see now, more than twenty years later, that I’d been right: he hadn’t moved on at all. His dreams – if he’d ever had any – had stopped at his property’s boundary fence.
Originally, I hung around with Andy because he gave me access to rifles. I don’t think he ever realised this. I’m good at fooling people when I want to. I can lead them right up the garden path while they’re still under the impression they’re standing at the front gate. So he never had any idea it was the rifles that kept me knocking on his farm door, none at all.
I could even claim that Andy’s dad is responsible for me being here today: he taught me to shoot. I liked Mr Sinclair; he was always laughing. ‘Come here, lad,’ he said to me one morning. ‘Let me show you the proper way to hold a rifle.’ We were standing in the courtyard outside the kitchen, and Mrs Sinclair was watching us through the window. She was smiling. I can remember still to this day how I felt they were a real family, not like mine.
‘Keep the butt tight against your shoulder. Pull it in here, that’s it. But keep breathing. Breathe regularly.’
He moved around in front of me. ‘You have to be relaxed when you’re holding a rifle, Milan. Don’t get tense. When you’re nice and ready, as you breathe out, hold your breath, then squeeze the trigger. Don’t pull it, squeeze it.’
I squeezed the trigger and there was a click.
‘You’re a natural.’ He laughed, taking the rifle off me. ‘Did you see that, Andy? Steady as a rock. If you’re not careful, he’ll be as good as you one day.’ Andy grinned. He looked genuinely pleased.
‘The rifle has to be a part of you, lad, an extension, like an extra limb. Remember that and you’ll be right.’
Mr Sinclair also taught me how to clean a rifle and how to be safe and responsible – opening the rifle when carrying it. When he trusted me enough and felt I knew what I was doing, we were allowed to go out and shoot rabbits by ourselves. There were plenty of them around. We’d sneak up to the brow of this hill, overlooking a small field – the Norfolk coast and its slither of sea in the distance – and there were so many rabbits hopping around and nibbling away we could have closed our eyes and fired and we’d have likely hit one. I loved the way rabbits jump in the air when they’re shot, as if they’ve been startled and can’t hide their surprise, then crash to the ground, on their sides, absolutely still. It was like a little dance of death routine, and the contrast always surprised me: between the leap into the air and the finality with which they landed on the grass. As if miming an exclamation mark.
I remember Mr Sinclair once asking me what I wanted to do when I grew up. He never asked Andy. His future was to be the farm, everyone knew that.
‘I want to be a writer.’ I don’t know why I told him, I’d never told anyone, not even my parents. I wanted to impress him, for him to see me as different, I think that’s what it was.
‘Books?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Novels?’ I nodded. He looked sceptical, but said nothing more, just looked doubtful. I decided that he was neither interested nor impressed, and I was disappointed. But one evening, the very first time Andy and I went off alone to shoot rats in the two barns about half a mile from the house, he said to his son as he handed him the rifle: ‘And watch that friend of yours; he’ll be more use with a biro than with one of these.’ They both laughed, and I knew they’d been talking about my dream – together, behind my back. I blushed, and wished I hadn’t told Mr Sinclair.
The moon was looming over the horizon, huge, like one of those cheap paper lamps with which students like to furnish their digs, and the air was perfectly still. The long grass was soaking, and our footsteps left a trail of dark green through a field of phosphorescence. Andy was whispering excitedly as we left the grown-ups behind us, his breath forming cartoonish thought bubbles above his head, his voice crystal clear in the crisp air. Soon he fell silent because of my lack of response. I followed his chubby legs, white and innocent in baggy shorts, across the field, detesting the complacency of his walk and the fact that he’d never, no matter how long he lived, ever wander off the path.
We were creeping through the sodden grass, quiet as mice, on the hunt for rats. Neither of us said anything as we approached the ghostly structures, perse and menacing against the trees at the end of the field. Then we were pushing open the great wooden doors, trying not to make any noise. The rats were running along the roof supports, and we caught them in the beam of our torch. One of us held the torch, the other did the shooting. The rats kept on running when they were caught in the spotlight, so they weren’t easy to hit. I was good, maybe even a better shot than Andy.
That particular night, I can see it still as clear as anything. One rat was wounded, its rear legs shattered by a bullet. It fell to the ground and tried to drag itself away into a dark corner to escape. I reloaded the rifle in double-quick time and fired a second shot, at almost point-blank range, splattering the rat all over the walls of the barn as I did my best James Cagney impression: ‘You dirty rat, you!’ Then we high fived in the gloom.
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I spend a lot of time watching for people down in the city. The few to be seen scurry everywhere. They’re like rats. They’re caught in a trap, so I guess that’s an accurate simile. They run across intersections, dart from one parked car to the next, and burrow into doorways.
Some of them even skulk behind the armoured vehicles of the UN when crossing intersections. These are driven slowly from one side of an intersection to the other while small crowds of pedestrians huddle behind them, like pilot fish around a shark. How’s a sniper supposed to deal with that? Not only is it unreasonable, I think it’s unsporting.
I realise the people act like this because of me, even though I’ve hardly fired a shot. They’re darting around like rats because I’m inside their heads. I’m infiltrating the minds of an entire city. It’s a psychological game. I’ve worked that out already – a mind game pure and simple. It is like the Chinese proverb: ‘Kill one man, terrorise a thousand.’ They knew what they were talking about, those Chinese. They were saying, people don’t like to gamble with a sniper. With an artillery piece they’re willing to gamble, but not with a sniper. A sniper is too selective, his victims singled out, the elements of chance all but eliminated.
But this new career of mine (which I must remember to tell the school’s Career Advisory Board about on my return to London) isn’t exactly easy. I thought it would be much easier. Sometimes I barely glimpse a figure – looking like a hunchbacked dwarf or deformed cripple – as it springs into view from behind a building, dives into a doorway, or jumps up from beside a parked car and sprints around a corner. By the time it’s registered in my brain, the person has gone, the opportunity has been missed. I haven’t yet worked out the solution. Perhaps I should keep my rifle trained on one spot and hope that someone will eventually appear there, either wander across my line of fire or simply stand and wait to be transformed into a colander. It seems a haphazard way to operate, with too much left to chance and the likelihood I’ll end up dying myself – from boredom.
Once or twice, just so I won’t be forced to return home and tell my father I scarcely fired a shot, I let off a round into the city – often at this lamp post which stands, defiant in its loneliness, on the corner of two main roads near the National Museum. It’s famous. Santo says it can be seen from many of the mountain slopes around Sarajevo, and only from the east is it completely blocked from view by a building. For this reason it’s used as a target by snipers: the perfect way to adjust one’s sights at the start of the day before moving on to human targets. The lamp post is chipped, marked and scarred up its entire length, from the fancy crossbar at the top, to the broad, ornate base which widens out just above the pavement. It reminds me, in its solitariness, of the lamp post in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when the children have pushed
their way through the clothes in the cupboard and reached snow-covered Narnia. I almost expect to see the White Witch in the centre of Sarajevo riding by on her sledge, wrapped in furs and eating Turkish delight. I imagine shooting her, a character in a novel, fictitious, the child of C.S. Lewis, and watching the blood spread, blossoming across her white cape before dripping down onto the snow. It’s obvious I can shoot people in my head, that’s easy enough. No problems there.
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Earlier this evening I was sitting by myself on an upturned packing chest, waiting for Santo. He’d gone to the kitchen area to collect our food. Nikola, the lawyer, wandered up. He nodded. He had a smirk on his face. ‘I shot a guy this afternoon.’
I didn’t say anything, wondering where this was going.
‘He was smoking a cigarette on the Skenderija bridge. I think he wanted to be shot. He was begging for it – like a woman. It happens sometimes.’ He was grinning, not in a friendly way. ‘Some weak-kneed amateur was shooting around him. Didn’t have the balls, I guess. I have no time for that. People like that shouldn’t be here.’
