it well and reliably because he’d had to. And his having been on the other side
of the scope made his current position that much more nerve-racking.
He knew what they saw. He knew what they thought.
The master sniper’s world would be reduced to the circular image through his
scope, and then to the relation between the darting body and the scope’s
crosshairs. His gun is a Remington 700, or a Galil 7.62, or an M40A1. He would
have found the spot-weld, the contact point between his cheek and the rifle
stock; the rifle would feel like an extension of his body. He would take a deep
breath and let it out fully, and then another breath, and let it out halfway. A
laser range finder could tell him the precise distance: the scope adjusted to
compensate for bullet drop. The crosshairs would settle upon the rectangle that
was the subject’s torso. More breath would be expelled, the rest held, and the
finger would caress the trigger …
Janson dropped to the ground, adopting a sitting position by the crying girl.
“Hey,” he said to her. “It’s going to be all right.”
“We don’t like you,” she said. Him personally? Americans in general? Who could
fathom the mind of a seven-year-old?
Janson gently took her binoculars, lifting the straps from around her shoulders,
and quickly set off.
“Mummy!” It came out somewhere between a scream and a whine.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the mother bellowed, red-faced.
Janson, clutching the binoculars, dashed toward the wooden bandstand, two
hundred yards away. Every time his position changed significantly, the snipers
would have adjusted their sightings. The woman ran after him, puffing but
determined. She had left her child behind, and now stomped after him with a
spray bottle she had extracted from her purse.
An aerosol can of pepper spray. She was striding toward him with a look that
combined disapproval and rage, Mary Poppins with mad cow disease. “Damn you!”
she shouted. “Damn you! Damn you!” There were countless Brits just like her,
their powerful calves stuck into Wellingtons, their bird-watching manuals stuck
into bottomless handbags. They invariably collected string and ate Marmite and
smelled of toast.
He turned to see her holding the bottle of pepper spray at arm’s length, her
features twisted into a vicious grin as she prepared to spray a noxious jet of
capsicum oleoresin into his face.
There was an odd clang a split second before her bottle burst, and a cloud of
pepper exploded around the torn metal of the canister.
A look of utter disbelief passed over her face: she had no experience with what
happened when a bullet destroyed a pressurized container. Then the cloud drifted
over her.
“Defective, I guess,” Janson offered.
Tears streaming from her eyes, the woman spun on her flat-heeled shoes and
rushed away from him, gagging and hacking, her breathing now a reedy stridor.
Then she threw herself into the lake, hoping for relief from the searing heat.
Thwack. A bullet struck the wood of the bandstand, the closest shot yet. Snipers
who used high-precision bolt-action rifles paid for greater accuracy with
reduced frequency. Janson rolled on the ground until he was under the bandstand,
the abandoned concert area, before which plastic chairs were neatly set out for
a concert that evening.
The trelliswork of the base would not protect him from bullets, but it would
make him more difficult to sight. It would buy him a little time, which was what
he most needed right now.
Now he dialed up the binoculars, testing various focal points, avoiding dazzle
from the late-afternoon sun.
It was maddening. The sun lit up the boom derrick of the crane like a match; it
cast a halo over the trees.
The trees, the trees. Oak, beech, chestnut, ash. Their branches were irregular,
the leafy canopies irregular, too. And there were so many of them—a hundred,
maybe two hundred. Which was the tallest, and the densest? A rough eyeballing of
the arboreal clusters suggested a couple of candidates. Now Janson zoomed the
binoculars to maximum magnification and scrutinized just those trees.
Leaves. Twigs. Branches. And—
Movement. The hairs on his neck raised.
A breeze was scurrying through the trees: of course there was movement. The
leaves fluttered; the slender branches swayed, too. Yet he had to trust his
instinct, and soon his rational mind made sense of what had pricked his
intuition. The branch that moved was thick, too thick to have been affected by
the passing gust. It moved—why? Because an animal had shifted its weight on it,
a scampering squirrel? Or a person?
Or: because it was not a branch at all.
The light made it difficult to make out details; though Janson fine-tuned the
scope, the object remained frustratingly indistinct. He imposed different mental
images on it, which was an old field trick he had learned as one of Demarest’s
Devils. A branch, with twigs and leaves? Possible, but not satisfactory. Could
it be that it was a rifle, covered in arboreal-camouflage decals, to which small
twigs had been attached? When he pictured the optical image according to that
mental model, all sorts of tiny irregularities suddenly clicked into place. A
gestalt effect.
The reason that the branch seemed unnaturally straight was that it was a rifle.
The twigs were attached with furred twist-wires. The tiny area of darkness at
the end of a branch was not a tar-healed tree wound, but the rifle’s bore hole.
Five hundred yards away, a man was peering through a scope, just as he was, with
the settled resolve of sending him to his death.
I’m coming for you, Janson thought to himself. You won’t see me when I get
there, but I’ll get there.
A team of soccer players were making their way toward the playing fields, and he
joined them briefly, knowing that, from a distance, he would be hard to pick out
among the dense crowd of tall, athletic men.
The lake thinned into a stream, and as the men crossed the wooden bridge, he
rolled off into the water. Had the marksmen seen him? There was a good chance
that they had not. He expelled all the air from his lungs and swam through the
murky, turbid water, staying near the bottom. If his misdirection succeeded, the
sniper scopes would still be trained on the crowd of athletes. High-powered
scopes inevitably had a narrow field of vision; it would be impossible to keep
an eye on the rest of the terrain and follow the crowd. But how much longer
before they realized he was not in it?
Now he crossed the water to the south bank, pulled himself up the concrete basin
wall, and dashed over to a copse of beech trees. If he had slipped their
purview, the reprieve was only temporary—one mistake could put him in the deadly
snare. It was the most thickly forested area of Regent’s Park, and it brought to
mind training exercises along the ridgelines outside Thon Doc Kinh.
He had studied the formation of trees from a distance and had determined the
tallest one. Now he had to turn a distance map into a proximal map,
corresponding to the very terrain under his feet.
It was the hour when the park emptied out. This had advantages and
disadvantages, and yet everything had to be used for advantage: there was no
choice. Willed optimism was the order of the day. A sober reckoning of the odds
might well lead to defeatism and paralysis, making the dire outcome even more
probable.
He sprinted toward one tree, waited, then rushed toward another. He felt a
tingle in his stomach. Had he been silent enough? Inconspicuous enough?
If his instincts were correct, he was directly below the tree where at least one
of the snipers had positioned himself.
Marksmanship was an activity of intense concentration. At the same time,
concentration required shutting out peripheral stimuli, as he knew from
experience. Tunnel vision was a matter not merely of the narrowness of field
through the scope but of the intensity of mental focus. Now he had to take
advantage of that tunnel vision.
The soccer team had crossed the bridge, then made its way past a brick building,
Regent’s College, a Baptist institution. If he were one of the snipers, that
would arouse suspicions, particularly when the crowd spaced out and he
discovered that his target was not among them. They would have to entertain the
possibility that he had somehow ducked into the brick building. It was not a
terribly worrying possibility: they could wait him out.
The marksmen would be intensely scrutinizing every square yard of the park in
their purview. But one did not scrutinize one’s own feet. Then, too, the snipers
would have radiophones to keep them in touch with their coordinator. Yet these
would further reduce their sensitivity to ambient sounds. So there were elements
in Janson’s favor.
Now he heaved himself up the trunk, as quietly as he could. Progress was slow