Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

Ahead, one and then a second vehicle emerged from the shimmery mirage. The first was another pickup, black and beat up, and behind it, keeping a steady rate fifty yards behind, another sedan. Russ checked the rearview: The two cars were drawing closer, but not speeding wildly. He made out four big profiles, sitting rigidly in the lead car.

“Don’t stare at ’em, boy,” said Bob as he overcame the last impediment and got free what he was pulling at. In his peripheral vision Russ saw that it was the Ruger Mini-14 and the paper bag. He pulled something compact from the bag; Russ realized it was the short .45 automatic, which he quickly stuffed into his belt on his right side, behind his kidney. He groped for something else.

Russ looked up. The truck drew nearer. It was less than a quarter of a mile away. It would be on them in seconds now.

“Where is it?” demanded Bob of himself harshly, fear large and raspy in his voice as he clawed through the bag. His fear terrified Russ more powerfully than the approaching vehicles.

What is he looking for?

Russ wondered desperately.

Red watched as his masterpiece unfolded beneath him with such solemn splendor. It was all in the timing and the timing was exquisite. De la Rivera in the Mike truck, followed by the four men in Charlie, closed from the front at around forty miles per hour. Meanwhile, the Alpha and Baker vehicles, moving at the speed limit, steadily narrowed the distance between themselves and Swagger. They would be fifty or so yards behind him when de la Rivera hit Swagger’s truck and blew it off the road.

“You’re closing nicely, Alpha and Baker,” he crooned. “You’re looking good there, Mike.”

They had him!

It would work!

Red pulled in his breath, felt his heart inflate and his blood pressure spiral.

De la Rivera was now taking over.

“Okay, muchachos , is so very muy bueno , let’s be very very calm now, let’s stay calm and cool, I see you, Alpha, you’re so very fine, let’s do a quick double check on our pieces, make sure we got our mags seated, our bolts locked, our safeties in the red zone, let’s stay muy glace , icy, icy, very icy, very cool, it’s happening, oh, it’s gonna be so good for all of us.”

The vehicles were closing.

They had reached a flat, high section of the road, where the dwarf, ice-pruned white oak lay gnarled and stunted on either side, yielding swiftly to vistas on either side of other ranges.

“Now, you listen,” said Bob fiercely. “This truck’s going to try and whack you. The split second before you pull even to him, I want you to drop to second and gun this motherfucker. That should carry us by his lunge and cut the two boys off behind us. Then I want a hard left, you rap the rear of his follow car, really mess him up, shake up the boys inside; you continue from that into a hard left panic stop , we skid across the road and come to rest in the shoulder on that side so’s we can fall back and get into them trees and down the side of the mountain if need be. Okay, you’re coming out my side of the vehicle and you’re breaking left to the front wheelwell, where you’re going to cover. You take the bag. Your job is going to be to feed me magazines from the bag as I need them. You watch; when I pop a mag, you hand me the next one, bullets out, so’s I can slap her in and get back to rock and roll.”

“Yes sir,” said Russ, trying to remember it all, desperate that he would forget it, but amazed somehow that already there was a plan, and somehow also calmed by it. And Bob seemed calm too.

“You gotta stay calm, you gotta stay cool,” said Bob.

“I’m okay,” Russ said, and he was.

“Ah,” said Bob, “here the goddamn thing is.” And with that he withdrew something from the bag and Russ could see that it was a long, curved magazine, different from the others, with a red-tipped cartridge seated in its lips.

The truck was on them. It was happening right now.

“What’s that?” Russ had time to ask as the universe unlatched from reality and fell into dreamlike slow motion. He heard Bob seat the magazine and with a clak! let the bolt fly home.

“Forty rounds M-196 ball tracer,” said Bob. “We’re going to light these boys up.”

Red watched in full anticipation of his precisely choreographed envelopment, simultaneously banking to the left and adding power so that he could hold the spectacle beneath him as he circled around it, gull-like. He watched as the vehicles seemed to combine and it was almost magical the way he’d seen it in his mind and it was working out in reality.

But there seemed to be something…

It was happening so fast, there was dust, so much dust, he couldn’t…

Confusion. He’d never seen a battle before except in the movies, but in the movies everything was clear. That was the point of movies. Here nothing was clear, it was a helter-skelter, some new dance, a reinvention.

He heard them on the radio as it unfolded in mircrotime.

“Ah, no, goddamn—”

WHANG! the jarring bang of metal on metal.

“Jesus, what is—”

“Look out, he’s firing, he’s—”

“Oh, fuck, we’re on fire. Christ, we’re burning!”

“I’m hit, I’m hit, oh, shit, I’m hit—”

“The flames, the flames.”

BEOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

A high-pitched scream pierced Red’s ears as he banked around; he winced, shuddered, wondering what the hell that was, and when he saw the geyserlike surge of blazing gasoline, he knew the microphone had melted.

It was happening. The truck’s fender with its cyclopslike headlight was as big as a house falling on him, but at that second Russ slammed the gearshift, punched the pedal, and with a surprising giddy lightness, his own vehicle shot ahead and the oafish rammer missed, veered to correct, and jacked out of control, tumbling savagely backwards amid a sudden huge blast of dust. Bob’s left hand reached for the wheel and wrenched it to the left. With a tremendous jolt the pickup slammed into the follow car, rocked crazily, and continued to spin around, hauling up a shroud of dust as it fishtailed, then came to a rest, crazily canted to one side, half in and half out of the roadside gully.

Through it all, Russ had the ghastly sensation of ghosts, as faces lit up by rage and surprise floated by in the follow car, so close yet so far away. He felt that he was looking at men under ice, in a different world, their mouths working madly, their eyes swollen like his mother’s deviled eggs from so long ago. Then it all went to swirl and blur and vanished in the weird perspective of the canted windshield and the cloud of rolling dust.

He blinked.

Wasn’t he supposed to be doing something?

“Out, goddammit,” barked Bob, and Russ clawed at his safety belt, glad that he’d had it on, felt it fall away and began to slither across the seat after already-vanished Bob and out the door. He remembered the bag, and felt the loaded mags rattling around inside as he disengaged from the vehicle, slid fast down the front fender of the truck to the wheelwell, where Bob had already set up in a taut, hunched shooter’s position. Russ couldn’t dive for cover. He had to see .

When he looked over the hood, the spectacle stunned him.

Upside down, the black pickup had cantilevered onto the shoulder on the other side of the road in its own cloud of dust, cutting off that lane. The two cars following Bob and Russ had slewed to a halt behind it, just coming out of their own panic stops and skids. They appeared to have collided themselves, the rear one smashing into the front one.

The truck’s follower had also slewed to a halt to avoid smashing into the destroyed truck. It was almost directly across the road from Russ. There was a moment of horrified silence. Inside the cars, men fumbled in confusion, trying not to shoot each other, trying to locate their target which wasn’t where it should have been.