Sniper in the Dust-Flue

Dawn over the scrub ridge at Wadi-Malik tasted of wood ash and copper scale. I knelt in the gravel beside Gun Three, cinching the rawhide straps on my instrument case before Captain Larbi-ani sounded the limbering bugle. In a retreat of eighty thousand men, a range-pointer without his glass was merely an infantryman who had forgotten how to shoulder a musket. The folded vellum with Colonel Smail-bara’s blue seal rested flat against my ribs, and the memory of the hangman’s knot found on the caisson latch six hours earlier kept my spine rigid.

A lead ball struck the limber box with the slap of an axe hitting green oak.

The shock wave snapped past my left ear. My secondary brass quadrant, sitting on the tool plank two inches from my knuckles, vanished in a spray of shattered mirrored glass and sheared thumbscrews. Brass teeth pinged off my water flask.

I dropped flat into the chalk dust before the sound of the discharge reached the ridge.

The gunshot rolled across the dry river terraces half a second later—a tight whip-thud, distinct from the dull boom of smoothbore muskets. It had the dry bite of rifled ordnance pushing a tight-patched ball under double powder.

Mourad-bara threw his bulk against the caisson wheel beside me, sending grit into my collar. He held his iron-banded rammer upright, scarred forearms smeared with horse tallow. His teeth were black with the charcoal mash he chewed at sunrise to settle his stomach.

"That wasn't coalition horse," Mourad growled against the timber trail. "Coalition lancers carry short carbines. They don't hit brass fittings at three hundred paces."

"Keep your head under the wheel hub," I said. My fingers worked across the oak lid of the chest.

I pulled out my pocket plumb-line. The secondary quadrant was ruined; its glass hung in two jagged triangles from the cracked arm. If they killed me here, nobody in the battery remained who could distinguish a true deflection coordinate from a deliberate massacre.

Another ball cracked into the caisson’s iron wheel tire. The lead flattened against the banded rim with a shrill screech, leaving a silver smear three finger-widths above the nave.

"He's using the morning glare," I said, squinting through the spokes. "Look at the sun. East-northeast, fifteen degrees above the salt pan. We are silhouetted against the crest."

"Where is he sitting?" Mourad asked, spitting black saliva into the dust. "Show me the ditch, Spotter. I'll take three drivers and circle the brush."

"You won't reach him," I answered. "A rifled tube gives him four hundred paces of clear dirt. If you stand, you take an ounce of lead through the throat."

I set the brass bob against the fresh gouge on the oak plank where the first round had bitten. The hole ran at an inward rake of eleven degrees, angled downward from the northwest terrace.

Across the dried gully stood an abandoned lime kiln. Its cylindrical chimney rose forty feet above the scrub, its circular flue vent pointing down the ridge like a slit eye. A faint wisp of white sulfur smoke drifted out of the stone flue, dissolving in the dry morning air.

"There," I pointed through the spokes. "The kiln flue. He crawled inside the firing chamber. The stone walls protect him, and the chimney vent gives him a covered loop over our gun park."

"We can't bring the battery to bear," Mourad said. "The trail-spades are packed for march. If we drop Stake Four to bend a shot into that ditch, the glass will burst into our faces. You told me last night the crystal has eight cracks."

"We don't bend this round," I said. "We lay the gun true."

"Direct bore?" Mourad stared at me. "Gun Three is pointed twenty degrees south of the gully. Larbi-ani will have our skins if we fire a loose twelve-pounder without an Ordnance dispatch."

"Larbi-ani is down at the horse picket arguing over grain sacks," I said. "And the man in that kiln is trying to put a bullet through my forehead before the horses are hooked. Hand me the lifting bar."

Mourad spat on his palms and reached under the carriage frame for the iron handspike. Two drivers from the ammunition team crouched behind the neighboring wagon, pale and trembling as another rifle round chipped the limestone ledge above their heads.

"You two," Mourad barked at them. "Stop pissing on your gaiters. Crawl up here and take the right spoke. When I say heave, turn the wheel until the hub screams."

The rifleman fired a fourth time. The shot whistled through the spokes, clipping the bottom fringe of Mourad’s blue wool tunic. Mourad didn't flinch. He wedged the handspike beneath the trail transom and threw his weight against the lever.

"Heave!"

The bronze twelve-pounder groaned as forty hundredweight of metal pivoted in the dry silt. I crawled along the trail on my belly, ignoring the flint shards digging into my bruised knee, and brought my face to the breech ring.

Without my secondary quadrant, I couldn't use the tangent slide. I wiped the chalk grit from the bronze vent with my thumb, rested my cheek directly against the metal casing, and looked through the bore sight.

"Hold the trail!" I hissed.

Mourad locked his boots into the gravel, neck muscles corded like ropes. The two drivers clung to the spokes, their knuckles white.

Through the sightline between the breech notch and the front muzzle swell, the black aperture of the kiln flue slid into alignment. The distance was two hundred and eighty yards—well within the lethal envelope of direct canister, but narrow enough that a half-inch deviation would strike the boulders flanking the chimney.

"Elevation screw down two turns," I commanded.

Mourad cranked the brass wheel beneath the cascabel. The bronze barrel tipped downward, the mouth of the kiln settling dead center against the horizon.

"Load canister," I said. "Double charge. No fuse."

Mourad pulled the tin canister cylinder from the ready-box. The casing held sixty iron balls packed in sawdust. He shoved the canister down the muzzle, followed by the greased wad, driving the rammer home with two bone-jarring strokes.

"Bore is seated," Mourad grunted. He jammed a priming quill down the touchhole, piercing the powder bag within.

Up the slope, a muzzle glint flashed inside the stone flue. The sniper was swinging his long barrel around to correct his aim.

"Linstock!" I said.

Mourad grabbed the slow-match clamp from the carriage hook. The match-cord tip glowed cherry-red in the dawn shadows. He blew on the ember until it flared bright orange.

"Fire on my mark," I said. "Three... two... touch."

Mourad dropped the glowing cord onto the primed quill.

The twelve-pounder roared with a concussive hammer-blow that knocked the breath from my lungs. The recoil drove the carriage back three feet, the iron-shod wheels cutting deep furrows into the chalk ledge. A dense cloud of sulfur smoke rolled across the gully, choking out the morning light.

Before the smoke cleared, the crash of disintegrating masonry thundered across the wash.

Sixty iron balls struck the lime kiln at nine hundred feet per second. The old mortar shattered instantly. The stone chimney buckled in the middle, folding inward in an avalanche of white powder and shattered limestone blocks.

Silence fell over the gully, broken only by the snorting of panicked draft horses down in the picket line.

Mourad lowered the smoking linstock and looked at me, a dry grin cutting through his charcoal-stained whiskers. "That solved the draft in his chimney."

"Get your musket," I said, pushing myself up from the gravel. My ears rang with a shrill whistle, but my legs held. "We check the rubble before Larbi-ani brings the provost picket."

We scrambled down the dry terrace, boots sliding through loose shale, and climbed the opposite bank to the collapsed kiln.

Beneath a pile of shattered limestone slabs lay the sniper. He had taken two canister balls through the ribs. Beside his limp hand rested an imperial rifled musket—a fine, octagonal-barreled piece with an adjustable leaf sight, far superior to anything issued to common line infantry.

Mourad rolled the corpse onto its back with the heel of his boot. The man wore a plain gray cloak, but underneath it, his blue collar bore no regimental numbers.

Mourad bent down and seized a silver chain looped around the dead man's neck. He gave it a sharp yank, snapping the link, and held the pendant up to the rising sun.

Dangling from the silver loop was a flat bronze signet faced with blue enamel. Stamped cleanly into the center was the crescent and crossed dividers—the private monogram of Colonel Smail-bara’s personal provost escort.

Mourad’s grin vanished. He stared at the blue seal, then looked at me, his eyes wide in the morning light.

"He wasn't hunting the battery," Mourad whispered.

"No," I said, taking the heavy rifled musket from the dust and checking its lock. "He was hunting the man holding the quadrant."