Page 20 of The Words Beneath the Noise

I stared at him. He was looking at me now, steady and unreadable, waiting for an answer with the patience of a man who'd learned to wait for things that mattered.

“It means awful,” I said carefully, testing each word. “Rubbish. Not worth the trouble.”

“Fits.” His mouth curved, just slightly. “I’ll remember that one.”

Something in my chest loosened. He wasn't asking where the phrase came from. Wasn't demanding explanations or cataloguing it as evidence of something suspicious. He'd simply accepted it, filed it away, moved on.

Such a small thing. Such an enormous mercy.

“It does fit,” I agreed, and my voice came out steadier than I expected. “Finch is the very definition of naff.”

Tom snorted, an almost-laugh that transformed his face for half a second. “Could think of stronger words, but that'll do.”

We sat there in the warmth, the fire crackling low, and I felt something shift between us. Not friendship, exactly. Not yet. But the sharp edges of our earlier argument had softened into something more like understanding. Two men who'd seen the worst of each other's defences and chosen not to press the advantage.

FIVE

GHOSTS ON THE RANGE

TOM

Cold metal kissed my palm like an old lover returning.

The Lee-Enfield settled into my hands with the inevitability of tide, weight and balance so familiar that my body adjusted before my mind registered the movement. Lieutenant Morris had asked, in that polite way that meant it wasn't really a request, if I'd run a training exercise with the estate guards. “Show them what proper fieldcraft looks like,” he'd said. “Most of these lads have never seen combat. They could use some perspective.”

What he meant was: prove you're still useful. Prove we didn't waste resources pulling you off the front.

So here I stood on the small training range behind a copse of bare trees, eight guards arranged in a loose semicircle, waiting to see if the stories about the sniper from Normandy held any truth.

“Right,” I said, keeping my voice flat, professional. “First thing you need to understand is that shooting isn't about the gun. It's about everything that happens before you pull the trigger.”

I walked them through the basics: reading wind by watching grass and snow drift, estimating distance by known references, understanding how cold affected barrel performance and round trajectory. Most of them listened with the glazed attention of men who'd heard lectures before and expected this to be more of the same.

Then I showed them.

“Corporal Davies.” I nodded toward a stack of empty tins someone had set up at varying distances. “Pick a target. Any target. Don't tell me which one.”

Davies, the nervous corporal who'd met me at the station my first day, pointed at a tin roughly three hundred yards out, partially obscured by a wooden frame.

I didn't look where he pointed. Instead, I watched his eyes, the direction of his gaze, the subtle shift of his body weight. Read the target from his reaction rather than his gesture.

Then I brought the rifle up, found the tin through the scope, and fired.

The tin jumped off its perch and disappeared into the snow.

“Again,” I said. “Different target. Try not to look directly at it this time.”

Davies picked another, being more careful, but his shoulders still telegraphed the direction. I put a round through that tin too.

“How the hell did you do that?” one of the younger guards blurted.

“I watched him, not the targets. People give away more than they realise.” I lowered the rifle. “A sniper's job isn't just shooting. It's observation. Reading the environment, reading people, understanding patterns. The shot itself is the easy part.”

I spent the next hour working them through exercises: spotting movement at distance, estimating range without equipment, understanding how to use cover effectively. Practical skills that might keep them alive if the war ever came to theirdoorstep. By the end, the glazed looks had been replaced by something sharper. Attention. Respect.

One guard in particular caught my notice. Corporal James Whitmore, mid-twenties, with the kind of calm competence that suggested he'd actually been paying attention his whole life, not just today. He asked good questions, the kind that showed he was thinking beyond the immediate lesson.

“Sergeant Hale,” he said as the others were packing up. “That trick with reading where Davies was looking. Can that work in reverse? Can you tell when someone's watching you?”