Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

Then came Jerry, last in line, but with a shorty AK as well. That made him one of the boys, that made him killable. Bob tried not to personalize this stuff, but he thought it would be kind of cool to kill Jerry. You could tell he was convinced he was pretty hot stuff, and that Swagger was years beyond effectiveness, an old goat with a bad case of crankiness and a steel ball for a hip. Be nice to blow the smug off his face with eighteen or twenty Sten-gun rounds.

Jerry had added a baseball hat, khaki, and one of those shoot-me-first tactical vests the contractors all wore. All his shit was sand-colored, so he’d spent a lot of time in the sand. He also wore Oakley killer shades, what looked to be a SiG 226 strapped to his thigh in a Tommy Tactical rig, and a nice pair of too-expensive tactical boots. He looked like a model for the iTactical.com site.

At least the six weren’t talking, bullshitting, smoking, joshing, or laughing. They weren’t quite that cocksure, though their postures were far from the kind of Condition Four readiness that kept you alive on combat patrols. It was clear they thought they had this one whipped. An old man with a bad hip, a not quite so old woman, an actual grandma, no weapons, no water, in wilderness about which they knew nothing, mostly moving uphill as fast as possible, but grinding down every step of the way. What was there to worry about?

Reilly couldn’t think of Paris. She couldn’t even think of Ocean City. It wasn’t fear, not as some experience it: weight, dread, air painful to skin, breath raw and raspy and somehow not satisfying. It was more like: Do I really have to do this? And: I can think of a lot of reasons why this is not a good idea. What would Marty say? “You what ? You killed gangsters? Don’t tell Legal.”

So she tried to think of something else, something that she really loved, something that had sustained her over the years. She didn’t want to think of Will or her two daughters or her grandchild, because she feared that would make her shaky and full of remorse.

So she thought of newsrooms.

She knew she had been so lucky to live her life in newsrooms, among funny, ironic, not terribly serious people, some geniuses, some hacks, some fools, some crazy. You got the weirdest memories from a newsroom. There was a reporter who went out on a story and managed to lose a company car. That took some doing, although alcohol was involved. There was a strange old lady, who every day wore a pilot’s leather cap and a dress made from the Maryland flag. There was a failed priest who spent his lunchtime feeding quarters into peep machines in a nearby porn strip. There was a man who slipped off to massage parlors. There were several toupees wearing men beneath them, several princesses of WASP, Jewish, and Asian persuasion, a managing editor whose pants were too high, followed by one whose pants were too low. She’d weathered a storm when one new regime brought in anyone they could hire from Philadelphia, including, she supposed, the delivery drivers. There was a guy who went on to become a TV producer, another who wrote some novels, but most just drifted out of the business into something with regular hours when their wives or husbands wore them down. Then there were the pros who were really good at it and just loved the hell out it, working sixty-hour weeks whether it was necessary or not. They did about 70 percent of the work but never held it against the others who disappeared at the crack of five.

Of course it changed. The corporation took over, the model mutated from pay-the-most-for-the-best to pay-the-least-for-the-worst, and she’d watched it change from loon show to midsize insurance company, with mediocrities typing at monitors all day, so that the dull clackity-clunk of finger on plastic took over for the staccato spatters of fingers on typewriters, with the occasional slam-bang of a bell dinging when Johnny Ace hit the end of a line. She even remembered the hot-metal days, being just old enough to have caught a few years of that particular ancient tech and to work with the surly roustabout printers who actually knew what they were doing, even if most of the actual makeup people who supervised them had no idea, had been its own special kind of initiation. She remembered her first makeup editor, who’d saved her career a dozen times in the composing room, and could play the printers like a violin, knew them all and their kids by first name. Man, he was a newspaperman! She remembered rewrite desks, copy paper pasted together, rolled up, and fired to composing in a pneumatic tube that made a plumph sound that you never forgot if you ever heard it. She remembered a new copyreader saying, “Oh, I see. You put a headline on every story!” She remembered editors with the imagination of hamsters, hamsters who should have been editors, and the odd drunk and the odd suicide (it seemed the coming of computers had wiped out a whole generation of old men with gin-gray skin and shaky fingers who could turn any screamer’s phone call into prose in a minute’s time but were lost in cyberspace). She remembered the affairs, the hatreds, the vendettas, and the passion, the loyalty of people who loved and respected each other helping each other up rung by rung. She’d helped; she’d been helped.

It’s been a wonderful life, she thought. If I have to leave it, at least I had the golden age. The only thing is, none of us had any idea it was a golden age.

“Go!” came the call from Swagger.

She stepped out, assumed the position, and was amazed by how close they were. She pulled the trigger, and the metal machine in her hands became some kind of twitching, energetic pneumatic hammer as it turned the physical world to a storm of disturbed grit, while the noise was terrific. There seemed to be lots of cracking and shattering as the bullets struck whatever they struck and did whatever they did next. The gun’s stock beat sharply into the arms and ribs that locked it into place. A blur of brass refuse spurted from a slot in its side, and at its muzzle, blurring her vision, a rippling pulse of incandescent flash danced crazily. She closed her eyes as the gun rattled itself empty and opened them to get a glimpse of the mayhem she had loosed on the world at the last shot. She saw two men down and crawling and the others rolling or having already disappeared. Best of all, she didn’t see the dog. She hoped it was dead.

Swagger had placed a grenade at each three-yard mark and the Sten at the end of them, thirty yards down. He threw the first as he yelled, “Go!,” then ran down the line to lift, pull pin, and toss over the screen of boulders that separated himself from his hunters. One short toss, one long toss.

The God of Grenade was good that day. He let each of his children achieve its destiny. Five for five. Each lever popped off, each grenade began to hiss and spit, and it was away. Four-point-five seconds later, it became a chaos event, releasing energy and pressure totally out of scale with its size and weight, turning its shielding into bullets and its doughy center into pure killing force. To be near it was to be unlucky. It was very unkind to living things. Only the dog escaped unhurt, turning at the machine-gun burst to flee like its own kind of hell on wheels and sprint at warp speed out of the kill zone, those good dog reflexes giving it advantages at survival that the men around it never had. It darted off and clear to become feral, to acquire a new master, who knew?

Swagger snatched up the Sten and found its one advantage was its easy pointability, its hunger to find and destroy targets. A shape staggered by him and he put a burst into it and it went down. He got around a rock and faced the alleyway of carnage. Visibility nonexistent, just a seething sea of dust and gas, silent because all ears had shut down among killer and killed alike. Another figure appeared before Swagger, severely injured by the look of the walk. But mercy was not on the menu, and he shot it till it went down—this guy took a lot of killing—and as he finished him, still another figure flashed by him, running like hell. Bob pivoted to fire and saw that it was Jerry Renn, absent I-am-cool baseball hat, running like a halfback. Too bad for Jerry. Swagger fired only two shots, both liberating geysers of raw debris at the target’s feet, and the gun had run dry. He raced through a mag change, but by the time he was hot to go, Jerry had vanished. He hunkered down, waited a while as the dust settled, and beheld what he had wrought.