The sun was climbing into the sky, and the heat was cranking up with every minute that passed. The landscape was spartan and homogenous, dunes as far as the eye could see, with the asphalt ribbon of the road the only sign of human interference. Beatrix drove for another ten minutes until she was satisfied that the long view in both directions would give her plenty of notice should anyone approach. She slowed, turned off the road and followed a narrow track into the dunes.
No time for doubt now.
She stopped, killed the engine and took the bag from the back seat.
“Come on,” she said.
They walked a little way from the jeep. She dropped the bag and opened it, taking out the watermelons.
“Wait here.”
She walked on, dropping the first watermelon on the sand fifteen paces from where Isabella was standing and the second another five paces farther. She walked back to her daughter, collected the nylon duffle from the ground and took out the MP-5, three full magazines and another box of 9mm rounds.
“Here,” she said, handing it to her daughter.
Isabella took it in careful hands.
Beatrix held up a magazine. “Show me how to load it.”
The girl hadn’t used an H&K before, but she was smart, and after fumbling the magazine in the receiver for a moment, she found the right position and snapped it home.
“This is an MP-5,” she said. “They are very powerful submachine guns. You need to get used to firing them.”
Isabella grinned with anticipation.
“What should I fire at first?”
“First of all, you need to set the gun to automatic. You know how to do that?”
The girl pointed to the selector on the side of the gun. “Here?”
“That’s right. Click it around to F.”
Beatrix watched as Isabella did as she was told.
“You know what some people say the F stands for?”
“Continuous fire?”
“Yes, that’s one meaning. The other is fun. Ready?”
“Yes. What am I shooting at?”
“The first watermelon.”
Isabella opened the retractable metal stock and took up a confident stance.
“It fires eight hundred rounds a minute. That’s thirteen rounds a second. Think about that before you pull the trigger.”
“I can do it.”
“Go on, then. Show me.”
She fired, the rounds going high and wide and throwing up little plumes of sand that jagged away in a rough diagonal.
“Bend your knees and lean forward. You can’t pussyfoot with it. You’ve got to manhandle it. Line up the sights on the watermelon and then hold the trigger down. Two seconds.”
Isabella straightened her shoulder, lowered her stance and pressed her cheek against the gun, sighting the target. She held down the trigger and sent twenty-six rounds up range. The watermelon exploded in a fountain of juice and wet flesh.
“There you go,” Beatrix said.
She looked at her daughter and the confident way in which she handled the weapon. She was so young, just barely a teenager, and yet she was completely comfortable with an automatic machine gun. Beatrix had given her that confidence, and she should have been able to extract a measure of pride from it, but that was not an easy thing to do. The doubts kept nagging away at her. At Isabella’s age, she should have been interested in innocent things: music or clothes or boys. She should not have been able to field-strip a pistol, arm and throw a fragmentation grenade, run ten kilometres in less than forty minutes or know the best pressure points to disable a man.