Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

“That’s enough, for Christ’s sake,” Leets called from the ridge.

Roger rose, spattered with blood and tissue.

Leets came tiredly down the slope and over to the body.

“Congratulations,” said Roger. “You get both ears and the tail.”

Leets bent and heaved the body to its belly. He pried the rifle off the shoulder, working the sling down the arm, at the same time being careful not to break the cord to the power pack.

“Here it is,” he said.

“Bravo,” said Roger.

Leets pulled out the receiver lockpin and the trigger housing pin. Taking the butt off and holding the action open, he held the barrel up to the sun and looked through it.

“See any naked girls?” Roger asked.

“All I see is dirt. It’s a mess. All those rounds he ran through it. All that pure, greasy lead. Each one left its residue. The grooves jammed. It’s smooth as the inside of a shot glass in there.”

“Yeah, well, he nearly threaded my needle.”

“Must have been your imagination,” Leets said. “At the end the rounds were veering off crazily as they came out the muzzle. No, the Vampire rifle was useless in the end. It amounted to nothing. A man with a flintlock would have had a better chance this morning.”

Roger was silent.

But something still nagged Leets. “One thing I can’t figure out. Why didn’t Vollmerhausen tell him? They were so good at the small stuff. The details. Why didn’t Vollmerhausen tell him?”

Roger knitted his features into what he imagined was an expression of puzzlement the equal of Leets’s. But he really didn’t give a damn and a more rewarding thought presently occurred to him.

“Hey!” he said in sudden glee. “Uh, Captain. Sir?”

“Yeah?”

“Hey, uh, I did okay, huh?”

“You did swell. You were a hero.” But he had other heroes in his mind at that second, dead ones. Shmuel the Jew and Tony Outhwaithe, Oxonian. Here was a moment they might have enjoyed. No, not really. Shmuel hated the violence; no joy in this for him. And Tony. Who ever knew about Tony? Susan? No, not Susan either. Susan would see only two beasts with the blood of a third all over them.

“Well, now,” said Roger, grinning, “you think I’ll get a medal?” He was supremely confident. “I mean it was kind of brave what I did, wasn’t it? It would be for my folks mainly.”

Leets said he’d think it over.

Red didn’t like what came next. This business was tricky, and always involved the immutable law of unintended consequences, but thank God he’d thought ahead and had good people in place and it could be done neatly and professionally, with maximized chances of success. He thought his father would be proud, for this was an old Ray Bama trick: Avoid violence, avoid force, always negotiate. But when violence is unavoidable, strike fast, unexpectedly, and with total commitment and willpower.

He dialed a number. A man answered.

“Yeah?”

“Do you know who this is?”

“Yes sir.” The voice had a familiar Spanish accent to it, Cuban probably.

“The team is ready?”

“The guys are all in. It’s a good team. Steady guys. Been around. Solid, tough, know their stuff. Some are—”

“I don’t want names or details. But it has to be done. You do it. I’ll get you the intelligence, the routes, and you clear everything through this number. When you’re ready to move, you let me know. I’ll want a look at the plan, I’ll want on-site reports. No slip-ups. You’re being paid too much, all of you, for slip-ups.”

“There won’t be no slip-ups,” the man said.

The man on the other end of the phone, in a farmhouse just outside of Greenwood in far Sebastian County, let the dial tone come up and then he consulted a card and began to dial pager numbers.

Nine pagers rang. Two, one right after another, went off at the Blood, Sweat and Tears Gymnasium on Griffin Park Road in Fort Smith, where two immense men with necks the size of lampshades were hoisting what appeared to be tons of dead weight at separate Nautilus stations. Each was olive in skin tone, with glistening black hair and dark, deep, watchful eyes, identical even to the tattoos that festooned their gigantic arms, though one had a crescent of puckered, bruise-purple scar tissue that ran halfway around his neck, evidence of some grotesque encounter about which it would probably be better not to ask. They had bodies of truly immense mass, not the beautifully proportioned, narcissistic sculptured flesh of bodybuilders but the huge, densely muscled bodies of men who needed strength professionally, like interior linemen or New Orleans mob drug enforcers and hit men.

Another pager rang in the back room of a crib just across the state line in Sequoyah County, Oklahoma, where a sleek black man was enjoying an act of oral sex being performed on him by a blond-haired woman of about thirty. He knew that she was really a man, but he didn’t really care; a mouth was a mouth.

Another pager buzzed on the firing line at the On-Target Indoor Firearms Range over in Van Buren, as its owner stood with a customized Para-Ordnance P16 in .40 S&W, calm and steady as a rock, blowing an ever-widening tattery hole in the head of a B-27 silhouette hanging from a pulley-mounted wire twenty-five yards out. He finished the sixteen-round clip, pulled in the target, and examined the orifice he’d opened. Then he smiled, returned the gun to its case, and checked out. In the parking lot he made a show of putting the case in the trunk, but adeptly slid the .40 into an Alessi inside-the-pants holster, after, of course, inserting a fresh sixteen-round clip and cocking and locking.

Other sites: Ben & Jackie’s Harley-Davidson shop, on 271 South, where a huge man in black leathers and the lush hair of a rock singer, drawn into a ponytail, contemplated a chromeplated extended muffler; the Central Mall Trio Theaters, on Rogers Avenue, where two rangy men who could have been ballplayers but weren’t sat watching an extremely violent and idiotic movie; Nick’s Chicken Shack on Route 71, where a large, pie-faced black man with a great many rings and necklaces ate a second extra-spicy breast, and finally at the Vietnam

Market on Rogers, where a snake-thin Asian, also with a ponytail and a webbing of tattoos that ran from his neck down one arm (and scared the hell out of the proprietors) was trying to decide between diced mushroom and dried asparagus for the three-color vegetable salad he was contemplating for that night. He was a vegetarian.

The team leader, a Marisol Cuban with a gaudy career in Miami behind him, was named Jorge de la Rivera. He was an exceptionally handsome man and spoke in his vaguely Spanish accent to the assembled unit before him.

“We’re thinking mainly of going for the kill from cars. Not a drive-by, not this guy, but a set-up assault off a highway ambush, coordinated and choreographed, with good command and control. Three cars, a driver, two shooters in each car. Body armor. Lots of firepower up front. You want to go at this guy behind a fucking wall of nine millimeter.”

He waited. They were assembling their weapons, a selection of submachine guns stolen in a raid three weeks earlier from the New Orleans Metropolitan Police Property Room. He saw a couple of shorty M-16s, three MP-5s, one with a silencer, another with a laser sighting device, a Smith & Wesson M76 with a foot of silencer, and the rest that universal soldier of the drug wars, ugly and reliable as an old whore, the Israeli Uzi.

Those who had satisfied themselves with their weapons loaded ammunition into clips: Federal hardball, 115 grain, slick and gold for the subs; or Winchester ball .223 for the 16s.