Short Story - The Hit

THE HIT

A man waited in an attic room in Srinagar. The room’s only door opened onto a narrow cast-iron spiral staircase to the shop below. The attic was dark with shadows in a dingy half-light. Dust motes danced in the dank air.

The room was filled to overflowing with stacks of cartons and boxes. A nest of hosiery and ready-to-wear garments in transparent wrappings had been carefully arranged on an overturned display case. The man lay almost full-length in the nest, cradling a Kalashnikov AK-74 rifle. A length of twine was taped taut from the edge of the display case to a large gap in the broken slats of the shutters on the front window. An irregular patch of light, striped with bars of shadow, crept down the wall beneath the window and down on to the grimy floor.

The gunman in the back of the room was invisible to any watchers out in the street. He wore a dark gray woolen balaclava mask that revealed only a narrow crescent-shaped area around the eyes, zip-up navy-blue rally jacket over a phiran, dark, baggy pajama trousers and rubber-soled canvas blue Plimsoll shoes.

There was no danger of interruptions from the shop below which was locked from both within and outside, with the shutters rolled down. The gunman aligned the sights of the Kalashnikov with the nearly invisible twine. He rammed down the selector lever to semi-automatic and pulled back the charging handle. The angle was perfect and the target would only be four meters out at the most.

The man he was going to kill was just a target that he could identify but did not know. The gunman didn’t even know why the target had to die. He was a “good” terrorist who obeyed orders, unquestioningly, of course.

From his vantage point, Srinagar could have been any small town in India. The same warren of narrow gullies hemmed in by rickety two-storey houses and hole-in-the-wall shop fronts, festooned with garish signboards and the rotting webs of ancient electric cables. The same noises and smells in his ears and nostrils. Only the air outside was cooler and freer of dust.

The target walked uncertainly down the street and paused in his sights, just ahead of the police escort. The gunman shot him.

“Go for a head shot,” they had said, “he wears a bulletproof vest.”

One high-velocity 5.45mm round. A hole in the head, but to find its fragments in the bloody ruin would take the services of a forensic pathologist. The escorting bodyguards had no way of knowing where the single shot had come from.

Up in the attic, there was a flicker of momentary elation, nothing more. All very mechanical, much like stamping a cockroach. Even shooting people dead can lose its spurious Bollywood glamour over time.

A chop of his hand sent the string spiraling down to the grimy floor. He removed the rally jacket and shoved the balaclava into one of the side-pockets. Working swiftly, the gunman engaged the safety catch, removed the rifle’s magazine and wrapped it with the the AK-74 in the discarded jacket. He threw the bundle out of the open rear window.  The runner below caught the package and vanished into the maze of mohallas.

The terrorist climbed up on to the sill of the rear window. The courtyard below him was criss-crossed with clotheslines. One of these ran in a slope from the eaves above his head to the balcony of the apartment opposite. He hooked a short length of chain over the line, actually a mountaineering rope, easy to come by in J&K. He launched himself off, thighs pulled up tight against his body and went down the line like a cable-car.

He let go one end of the chain on clearing the balustrade, uncoiling his body to dive feet-first onto the tiny balcony. The quilts and pillows, seemingly spread out to air, cushioned his fall. Someone would be around later to scrub away the marks of his landing.

The terrorist staggered in and latched the balcony door shut behind himself. The chain went into a drawer full of odds-and-ends. Being of the kind commonly used to secure bicycles, the chain would not excite any interest even if a search turned it up. There was nobody to see him clatter down the narrow stairs.

The spare key was taped to the inside of the front door, as promised. The terrorist locked the door behind him as he left.  Down below, in the street, a 3-wheeler scooter rickshaw awaited him with a woman passenger.

He wordlessly turned over the fare meter, kick-started the TSR, changed gears, let in the clutch and pulled away from the kerb with the characteristic spluttering roar of acceleration.  As they turned the corner, they were stopped by a police patrol on their way to the scene of the crime. The policemen interrogated the woman, checked her papers and let the scooter rickshaw pass.

They did not look very closely at the man driving the TSR. The driver was nothing and nobody, a hireling.