Stephen Coonts - Pirate Alley

The rifle was chambered in.338 Lapua Magnum, which fired a 250-grain very-low-drag bullet at a muzzle velocity of 3,000 feet per second. In the warm African air, the bullet remained supersonic for about 1,500 meters; in the hands of an expert, which I wasn’t, this rifle/bullet combination could take down a man-sized target about 80 percent of the time at that distance, penetrating five layers of ballistic material to do it. It had more capability than the 7.62 mm NATO bullet, and less than a.50 caliber Browning machine-gun round. Even though it weighed almost thirteen pounds with the scope, the gun kicked pretty good, so it was no rifle for anyone suffering from flinching.

To maintain expert proficiency with a sniper rifle, you should fire about two thousand rounds a year through your weapon, making every shot count. Needless to say, camping out with the CIA part of the year and doing the usual burglaries, safecracking and bug planting they expected of me the rest of it, when I wasn’t doing paperwork, I didn’t have that kind of time.

Nor had I ever had expert proficiency. At anything. In my whole life.

Still, I liked the rifle. If you were going to murder someone, this Sako was just the tool for the job. You could comfortably hunker down a goodly distance away, like a kilometer, set up with a tripod or bean bags, measure the range with a laser rangefinder, adjust your scope, and have a good chance to assassinate your man when and if he showed. Suck down water, shoot from a shady spot … all in all, this was the rifle for the gentleman sniper, which of course was the category I tried to fit into. No diapers, no camouflage, no lying motionless while insects chewed on your parts. Then, after you had done the dirty deed, you had an excellent chance of getting away clean since the unhappy people who had witnessed their friend’s death were a kilometer or more away. Snipers always worried about the getaway. Being a burglar, I did, too.

The Sako carried a 24-power telescopic sight that had turrets for changing the vertical and horizontal settings. Back when we were younger, my team members and I had shot this rifle and developed a table for the various ranges and possible wind conditions. The crosshairs were adjusted with the turret settings so that the shooter could put the crosshairs precisely where he wanted the bullet. The rest was breath and trigger control. Sounds simple, and at five hundred yards it was no great feat to hit a man-sized target. That’s military-ese for hitting a standing man holding stone stock-still just to make your task easier. Few of them do.

Beyond a thousand meters, which was about as far as a guy with my skill level should attempt a shot at our theoretical suicidal standing man, the rifle required a master’s touch. Sniper rifles defined the phrase “precision instrument.”

Today in Africa I concentrated on holding the crosshairs steady despite the heat mirage. I took a breath, exhaled, then ever so gently squeezed the trigger just the way those marine gunnery sergeants told me to in sniper school. The trigger on our rifle was adjusted for a feather-light two-pound let-off, so she went off while you were still thinking about it.

When I recovered from the recoil and steadied the scope on the target again, I could see the bullet hole. The round-spot target was roughly an inch in diameter, and the hole was about a half inch outside at the 10:30 position. Hmmm.

My second shot was just touching the circle at 3:00.

Good ol’ Number Three. Squeeze ever so gently … and it was maybe an inch below the spot. Like a two-and-a-half-inch group. Sigh.

“Your turn,” I told Travis Clay. He was the best shot we had, and he was no expert either. Still, he could routinely hit targets that I could only dream of whacking. Second best was a former Special Forces sergeant named Elvis Duchene. We called him Erectile Dysfunction, or E.D. He would answer to E.D., but not the other.

When we finished with the short-range stuff, just to verify the scope hadn’t been knocked out of zero, we took boxes to five hundred and a thousand meters and left them there. Then we got serious.

We had two rifles, both of which had been packed in aluminum cases along with ammo, logbooks and data sheets. We played with the range finders, ensured they were working properly and we knew how to use them, then settled down to some serious shooting at a dollar a shot.

I heard a buzzing sound, faint, while I was concentrating on a shot. I tried to ignore it. A good shooter gets in the zone, concentrates on the mechanics, sight picture, trigger squeeze, wind, target movement, all of it. A burglar never gets in the zone. Ever. A burglar must be constantly aware of everything in his universe, sights, sounds, smells, heat, light, searching for the most minute warnings of things not the way they should be. Unfortunately I was a burglar first, shooter second.

I looked up. Couldn’t find the buzzing. Then I saw it. Twelve feet above me. A maple seed, rotating … floating on the breeze … no. Not floating. Flying against the breeze. It dropped down, hovered just two feet in front of me. A drone, weighing less than an ounce. I knew the operators, Wilbur and Orville, were a hundred yards away, watching me on the drone’s sensor. I stuck my tongue out at the thing, then settled in again with the rifle.

I heard the buzzing growing fainter, until it was lost in the African day.

Two shots later I saw another drone. The guys were working with our big night flyer, a Dragonflyer X6. It had six counter-rotating props arranged in three pods, each pod sporting a top and bottom rotor. It measured thirty-six inches from rotor tip to rotor tip and weighed about two pounds. Carried a good digital video camera with a zoom lens and an IR sensor, plus a transmitter.

Wilbur and Orville were making sure their toys were in working order. Sand and dust were the enemies of precision machinery and electronics; in this desert we had plenty of both. The other guys were cleaning weapons and doing routine maintenance on our com gear. When they finished that, there were the usual camp chores.

We gunnies finally knocked off for beer. I had a sore shoulder and tried not to show it. I owed E.D. twelve dollars and Clay eighteen. We didn’t have any money here and would have to settle up later. I wasn’t flustered because I intended to welsh.

“So, E.D., you did this for a living back in the day,” I said. “How many kills did you get with a sniper rifle?”

E.D. was from New Jersey and still had the accent. “None. I wasn’t a sniper.”

“Any long-range shots at Taliban, bomb planters, suiciders…?”

“Nope.”

“Don’t even ask,” Travis Clay said. “I ain’t ever fired a bolt gun at anybody, near, far or in between.”

I contemplated my toes.

“Not even going to bother asking you, Carmellini. I can see it in your face.”

“Three fucking amateurs,” Erectile summed up succinctly.

“Hey,” I said, remembering that I was supposed to be the leader and in charge of morale and all that, “we’re the good guys. Truth, justice and the American way. That’s our edge.”

“Pot, chicks and porno flicks,” E.D. sneered and drained the rest of his beer. He crushed the empty can in his fist and threw it as far downwind as he could. It was still flying through the air when he got his first shot off with his Kimber 1911. Missed. Then the can hit the dirt and he used both hands and kept it skittering along until the slide locked open.

EYL, SOMALIA

Sultan of the Seas crept across the underwater sandbar that the river had formed two miles from the mouth. Once over, the cruise ship moved slowly toward the river mouth. There was a cape to the north that gave the harbor rudimentary shelter and a promontory several hundred feet high to the south, but that was about it. The city sprawled on both sides of the river, which wasn’t much, a trickle of water coming down to the sea from a jagged tear in the caprock. A sandbar essentially choked the river, which had just a small cut to flow through. The fishing boats and pirate skiffs were pulled up on the beaches to the right and left and the sandbar willy-nilly, above the high tide mark.