The Alex King Series, A BATEMAN [good books for high schoolers .TXT] 📗

house for confirmation, then lifted the plant out of the way. There were tiny chips of stone on the edge of the patio where it met the wall. He looked up at Amanda. “Here, hold this out of the way,” he said. “And bring your bag of tricks.”

“What is it?” Amanda hurried over, glanced over her shoulder at the two behind the glass of the patio doors. They seemed impassive. Helena still watching, tapping her fingers. Bukov’s eyes must have been hurting now from maintaining the menacing stare. She looked back at King. “What have you found?”

King took out his pocket knife, thumbed open the blade and dug it into the rock. The deformed bullet dropped onto the patio. It was flattened like a mushroom, the copper torn up into shards, the soft lead underneath grooved and textured from hitting the rock. “I’d say this was the first shot fired,” he said. He pulled back the tendrils of the plant without care and laid it flat on top of the wall.

“That would have made a hell of a racket, hitting the granite wall like that,” Amanda said. She picked up the bullet with a pair of plastic tongs and dropped it into an evidence bag.

“And here’s the next one,” King said. He looked back at the house across the valley and then down at the stain on the patio. “Right a click, up a couple more.”

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said.

The wind had been crossing the valley from the Carrick Roads yesterday. A westerly. Two to three miles per hour. Just enough to send the .338 bullet a few inches in front of Ian Snell’s face as he drank his coffee, read his paper.

“You mean sight calibrations?”

King frowned at her. “You know about those?”

“Sort of,” she replied.

“Right,” he said. “So, the first bullet went low and wide. The rifle is sighted and accurate, so you don’t just aim a bit right and high. That’s winging it. Alright in a fast-moving combat zone, where you want to keep your weapon calibrated for multiple scenarios. Not at two-thousand-five-hundred metres. You can’t just hold the cross-hairs high and right and hope at that range. You need minute adjustments, and if you don’t have a spotter…”

“A spotter?”

“Yes. A partner watching and feeding the information back to you. So, if you’re on your own, you adjust the sight turrets and compensate. Right a click, up a couple more. The next shot gets closer, you identify the bullet strike. Another shot, another adjustment. Then…”

“Bullseye,” Amanda interrupted.

“Essentially, yes,” agreed King. “But on a range, that’s fine. Out in the open, say, Afghanistan, yes.”

“So, what about here?”

King dug the blade in between two rocks and prised out a less misshapen bullet. It dropped, like the first, onto the patio. “Snell wasn’t going to have two, three-three-eight calibre bullets travel past him and slam into that wall with a closing speed of four-hundred miles per hour and not look up from his paper. The three-three-eight Lapua Magnum isn’t a suppressible calibre. Not practically at least. It still makes a hell of a racket. So, no suppressor, or what most people will know as a silencer. Not for a two-thousand-five-hundred-metre shot. The suppressor robs too much muzzle energy and velocity. As well as two bullets slamming into the wall, Snell would have heard at least two gunshots before a third one took his head off. Enough for him to move, look across the valley and present himself as a more difficult target.”

“But he was shot, nonetheless,” Amanda said. She put the second bullet into another bag and stood up.

King stood up too, looked at the two behind the glass. Bukov was still staring at him, King returned a jovial wave and smiled as the Russian looked to implode. He turned back to Amanda. “He was,” he said. “But I have my reservations on the cause of death.”

26

 

Pollsmoor Prison

Tokai, South Africa

 

“You have to get me out of here!”

“Mister Badenhorst,” Caroline replied calmly. “Tell me what you know, and I will have a word to the South African government. “But first, you need to tell me about the man who killed your brother.” She looked at his stump of an arm. It was wrapped in a bandage that was both grimy and discoloured. “And, did that to you.”

Vigus Badenhorst flung himself back in the chair, tears in his eyes, his face ashen. “Look, you don’t understand!”

“Mister…” she stopped herself, realised the man had started to sob. She glanced at Kruger, who shrugged benignly.

“Listen Badenhorst,” Kruger said, his accent broad and thick. “It’s tough here, I get it.”

“You don’t get shit!” the man snapped. “I got asked for, requested by the leader of the Twenty-Eights - do you know what that means? No, of course not,” he paused, attempted to wipe his eyes with the end of the stump. “It means I’m his fucking bitch!”

“Mister…” Caroline trailed off as he snapped again.

“I don’t have a choice! I tried to refuse, but they pulled out my cell mate, held him down and gauged out one of his eyes. They told me they would do the same to me. It was so horrible, the poor man screamed for hours. There were six of them, they beat me up, then held me down.” He tried to wipe his eyes again, but the stump restricted him, and the other hand was clamped firmly to the table with the handcuffs.

Caroline pulled a clean handkerchief out of her pocket and reached across the table. She dabbed his eyes for him, left the handkerchief on the table in front of him.

He looked at her, nodded. “Thank you.” He shrugged, then said quietly, “When they had all finished, they told me I’d been broken in, was a proper woman now. Not a butt-virgin anymore. They