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The Longest Kill
The Story of Maverick 41, One of the World's Greatest Snipers
By Craig Harrison St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2016 Craig Harrison
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-08524-5
CHAPTER 1
Guns Are a Boy's Best Friend
I was crouching behind a small bush in a copse, struggling to bring my breathing under control. My heartbeat was thumping in my ears, so loud I was convinced the sound would give me away. I clutched my rifle close to my chest. The smell of gun oil was strangely soothing and it steadied me.
The footsteps were getting closer now. I turned my head an inch or two until I could see my companion, hidden behind a nearby tree. He gave me a nod — he was ready. I waited until the last moment, forcing myself not to move, staring through the branches until I saw the outline of a man to my front. Then I stood, raised my rifle and pointed it straight at him.
"Bang!" I shouted. The dog walker jumped in the air, clutching his chest in fright.
"You little shits!" he screamed at my brother and me, as we tore off into the woods, laughing.
My brother and I rarely saw eye to eye, but we did come together for our favorite game of scaring dog walkers and other unsuspecting ramblers in the woods near our home in Cheltenham. The gun, a deactivated bolt-action rifle, was a present from my dad.
We had been living at the Lincoln RAF base when he came home with it one day. "It's from the Second World War," he'd told me, before handing it over as a present. My brother got a PKM machine gun, but he wasn't that interested in it. I, on the other hand, loved that Springfield rifle like an old friend. Dad taught me how to strip the rifle down in order to to oil and clean it, and I carefully looked after it. I'd spend hours outside with it, playing on my own in the woods, pretending I was a soldier.
* * *
I was born at Cheltenham Hospital in November 1974, the younger of two brothers. I was a small kid with big ears — something the bullies liked to pick on as I grew up. When I was young we moved around a lot, as my dad was a dog handler in the RAF. Mum had been a kennel maid in the RAF, but the rules back then meant she had to leave the Forces when she married my dad.
Dad split when I was little. I can't actually remember how old I was but it was probably for the best. He made Mum miserable, although I didn't see any of their problems at the time; they kept all that from me.
With Dad gone, the three of us finally settled in a caravan park in Cheltenham and Mum got herself a job as an ambulance driver. Her true love was dogs — and it showed. I didn't have a bad childhood, but my brother and I definitely ranked below the family pets.
My mum had taken the rifle off me by then. "You need to grow up," she told me. I was devastated but I still managed to get into mischief without it. We lived in the caravan site for about a year and a half and I remember the elderly caretaker, a miserable old sod who was always having a go at the kids on the site for riding our bikes or walking on the grass. In retaliation some of us — me included — used to jump out at him. He had a heart attack and died while we were still living there and I've always assumed we scared him to death!
We moved again, to a flat above a chip shop, which had some obvious bonuses. Our neighbors were a woman called Liz and her son Jamie, who was about the same age as me. She used to hang a sign around his neck when he'd done something wrong. The first time I met him, he was wearing a sign saying: "I must not steal biscuits." The awful thing was that this first meet actually took place at school. His mum used to ring the headmaster and tell him to make Jamie wear the sign all day. If Jamie had done a number of things wrong, he had to wear multiple signs.
After school, Mum would instruct me and my brother to go out and play by ourselves, so that she could have the flat to herself. Mum sometimes treated us as a hindrance and then it was best to keep out of her way. We never sat around as a family watching TV or having dinner. I remember one night being woken up by a fireman while I was in bed; an alarm had gone off in the chip shop and they were evacuating the building. He got me outside and on the lawn, where Mum, my brother, the dogs and the budgie were all waiting alongside Liz and Jamie, who had a sign round his neck that said: "I must not shout, 'Fuck.'" I looked at Mum as I ran up to them.
"Shit, I forgot about you," she said.
To be fair, though, I was no angel when I was young and my mum did work hard to provide for us. She just used to snap every now and then. I remember not folding my trousers properly and she started smacking me. I literally pissed myself and had to sleep in my stained clothes. She came in during the middle of the night and said sorry. The next morning, she realized you could see her handprints and she packed me off to my granddad's house for a week to hide.
My granddad, Reg Harrison, became a father figure to me. My grandma died when I was young and I don't really remember her, but my granddad I will never forget. I loved him with all my heart; he provided the stability and love in my somewhat turbulent life. He had been in the RAF as well, leaving as a sergeant, and he was one of the most decent and kind people I have ever met.
He used to take me driving in his blue Ford Escort; when we drove around a disused quarry, he'd let me steer. I remember being at his house one Halloween, looking out of the window, when I thought I saw a ghost. It frightened the life out of me. I grabbed a walking stick, ran outside and started beating it. It turned out to be my granddad in costume. When he came back in, he had a cracked nose and a black eye — but he was still laughing. He thought the whole thing was hilarious. That was my granddad all over.
* * *
By the time I was seven, we'd moved home a few times. As a result, I changed schools a lot, which really didn't help me. I was constantly the new kid and therefore constantly picked on. I became more and more of a loner.
Luckily, Mum then met Keith, whom she married when I was ten. He was in the RAF but you really wouldn't have put the two of them together. He was fun and very "country"; he would take us to game fairs, where I'd be engrossed by the guns and the strange leafy get-ups. These turned out to be something called ghillie suits — a uniform with which I would, in time, become very familiar.
It was around this age that I started to develop a real interest in nature. Just as I had in Cheltenham, I loved being out in the woods, and I now spent more and more of my time there. I saved up money and bought a Black Widow catapult, which I kept hidden behind the shed. I used to go into the woods and shoot cans with it. Never animals; I had a genuine respect for animals.
Mum was working as a dog warden in Cheltenham when a better job offer came in. Keith's brother ran an animal shelter for a charity but was moving away — and Mum was asked if she wanted to take on responsibility for the shelter. It had two on-site bungalows, stables, three massive kennels for ten to fifteen dogs, ten sheds, outbuildings and a lot of land. It was a fantastic opportunity for all of us, but for me in particular there was one added bonus. As well as homing cats and dogs, it also cared for horses.
It must have been through the country shows that I had developed a real thing for horses. Not long after we moved into the animal shelter, Mum gave me my first one: Kipling. Just like that old Springfield rifle, Kipling and I were inseparable. I'd gladly get up early to sort him out, sit impatiently through my lessons at school counting the minutes until I could race home and then take him out across the fields. He was a great horse, very loyal. Once we were out in the countryside, I'd dismount and walk, and he would just follow me; he never ran off.
It wasn't long before I started to compete in jumping and team-racing events. Kipling was just a hacking pony, unsuited to jumping, so I decided to borrow a bigger horse for my competitions, and I lent Kipling to a girl called Helen.
"Please don't jump him; he's only a hacking pony," I pleaded with her.
She jumped him and jumped him. By the time I got him back he was fucked and we had to put him down. I hated her for that.
Next, we got a bigger horse called Ginger, a thoroughbred with a showjumping background. That's when my skill really took off and I entered more and more competitions — and actually started to win. All this brought Mum and me closer together. There had always been a barrier between the two of us but our love of horses was the one thing that could break through.
We ended up with more horses, a donkey and a Shetland pony, plus all of the dogs and cats. I used to spend most of my time in the sheds mucking out. Mum paid me £5 a week in return, which was good money for a kid.
One day at the shelter, I walked in to find that Keith's brother had come to say hello with his other half and their son Richard, who was a year older than me. For some reason, I started calling him Tom — and it stuck. He was also a bit of a loner yet we instantly clicked and from the moment we met, we started doing everything together. He would spend every weekend at our bungalow and we'd go out riding and walking. His mum didn't really like him hanging out with me, as she thought I was a bad influence, but that didn't stop us. In hindsight, I was a bad influence but, regardless, we stayed (and remain) very close friends.
We added shooting to our weekend activities after I stumbled across a huge rifle with a telescopic sight and a silencer leaning against the living room wall. I knew that Keith had a rifle for vermin control around the shelter, but had only ever seen it from a distance; I'd never had the chance to touch it. He usually kept it in a secure cabinet and must have forgotten to put it away. Knowing Keith was safely asleep in bed (he had been working nights), I picked up the rifle and started to examine it. Thoughts of my Springfield came flooding back as I turned it over, looked through the scope and then touched the trigger.
Boom.
It had been loaded. The shot wasn't too loud due to the silencer but I stood there dumbfounded, staring at the rifle and waiting for Keith to leap out of bed and come racing in. Luckily, he hadn't heard the shot — but I wasn't out of the woods yet. Mum had a collection of Beatrix Potter and Wind in the Willows plates that were worth quite a bit of money, and one of them was now in bits on the floor. I spent the next hour trying to glue it back together but I've always been crap at jigsaws. It ended up with the rat's head on the mole's body and the frog upside down, so I threw it away instead. Somehow I got away with it!
Over the next few weeks I craftily worked on Keith and eventually he agreed to let Tom and me use the rifle. We'd grab some eggs for targets, and gradually work further and further back as our aim improved. It took a while to figure out how the scope worked but once I had that sussed I became quite a good shot. Tom would wrap the rifle in cloth and strap it to his bicycle handlebars so we could take it further afield. How we didn't get caught I will never know.
When I was fourteen I started competing in tetrathlons, which involve running, swimming, riding and shooting. As I'm left-handed, Mum got me a left-handed pistol for my events, and after that Tom and I quickly forgot about the rifle.
We'd often blow off lessons to go shooting. Being "late developers" at school, stuck in the special-needs classes and picked on by everyone else, we preferred to head out into the country to shoot rabbits, not for fun but to eat. My grandfather had given me a small pocket knife, and that, along with a box of matches, was all I needed. We'd get water from a stream, light a fire and then boil the rabbits up. We learned our skills through trial and error. I was developing a good education out in the country.
One day, Tom and I were exploring a farmer's field when I noticed a blue pipe. I stabbed it with my knife and it must have been under pressure because a stinking liquid sprayed out all over Tom. He walked around like a zombie, groaning and trying to get chemicals out of his eyes. Eventually he tripped over and fell face down in the river, where he started to float off. I couldn't control my laughter but eventually managed to fish him out and get him cleaned up.
I lit a fire and we tried to dry his clothes. Good old Tom got his trousers too close to the flame and, as they were polyester, they went straight up.
"How am I going to explain this?" he asked me, staring in disbelief.
"Bad day at school?" was all I could come up with.
If ever we went down the high street, we'd head to the lower end, which was full of secondhand shops, the only places Tom and I could afford. One day I found a book called Sniper. The title appealed to me so I bought it. Both Tom and I devoured that book, which was full of photos, and I started to dream that one day I would be a sniper.
As practice, we started to stalk each other in the long grass. I used rubber bands to attach grass to my clothing, like it said in the book, and then we would both work toward each other and see who was spotted first.
One afternoon out in the country, we spied a couple kissing and cuddling on a blanket out in a field, so we decided to stalk up on them. It was a great feeling, silently creeping up on someone and them having no idea that we were there. It was also a great feeling that we might see some breasts. As we got closer, I realized that the woman was the mum of one of the lads from school.
"It's Smithy's mum," I whispered to Tom.
"What should we do?" he whispered back.
"Smithy is one of the wankers who picks on us for going to special needs — so let's keep watching."
We didn't see any breast but we did see some bra, which was better than nothing.
As the couple headed off, Smithy's mum dropped a letter. We read it: it was to Smithy's dad, saying that she was leaving him and taking her son with her.
The next day at school, breaktime saw us, as per usual, being picked on. People were calling me and Tom names and shoving us around for being "retards." I spotted Smithy in the group of bullies — and marched straight up to him.
"Sort your own life out before picking on others, you cunt," I told him, and thrust the letter in his hand. I had no idea what the "C" word meant but I'd heard it on TV and thought it had a good ring to it.
Unsurprisingly, that didn't make me more popular with Smithy or his mates.
It was just as well that the headmaster boarded his dog and cat at our kennels so Mum was friendly with him. I think that was the only reason he let me stay, rather than excluding me for truancy. When I did go to school, I used to spend all day staring out of the window, waiting for lessons to end. I hated every minute I spent there. The "special needs" part of the senior school was in the middle of the building, in a large glass classroom, so everyone could see you, which gave the bullies plenty of ammunition.
In our spare time, Tom and I started weight training and we both got big quickly. We thought that if we gained muscle it would stop people picking on us.
At last our purgatory came to an end. We both left school at sixteen and Tom immediately joined the Army. There wasn't much discussion; he just did it. Without him, I felt like my right arm had gone and the house suddenly felt very, very empty.
CHAPTER 2
Joining the Army
"Get fucking moving. You're not on your mummy's tit now!"
I was standing with a group of new recruits on the platform at Brookwood Station while the welcoming committee — a line of soldiers — screamed at us. Chaos quickly ensued as they shepherded us over to the waiting trucks, still yelling. Our bags were thrown on roughly and we clambered in after them. Everyone sat in silence, nervously glancing at their feet, as the vehicle moved off. Eventually, the truck squealed to a halt in the car park at Pirbright Barracks — and then the shouting started again.
"Grab your bags and follow me!" a soldier barked at us before running off.
We scrambled to obey.
"You run everywhere. Don't let us catch you walking!" he yelled over his shoulder as we hurried to keep up.
Once inside, they lined us up and asked which regiments we were going to. I was joining the Cavalry, and us Cav soldiers were made to stand in a separate group while a short fat officer who looked like a relic from the Boer War walked down the line.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Longest Kill by Craig Harrison. Copyright © 2016 Craig Harrison. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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