Jack Coughlin - An Act of Treason

S WANSON RETURNED TO HIScabin, took a quick shower, and slid into the neat bed. He grabbed a Robert B. Parker Western novel to read until he was drowsy enough to sleep, but his mind refused to return to the Old West and its sturdy gunfighters. He kept thinking about the gunfighters of today, and how he had become one. Instead of being a sheriff calling out bad guys to duel in streets outside of saloons, Swanson preferred never to let his quarry get anywhere near him, and also to never know the end was imminent. A well-placed shot from a hide that was hundreds of meters away did the job just fine, and the sniper would then slip away to do the same thing on some other day. Swanson saw no point in standing toe-to-toe and having a quick-draw contest. Too much was uncertain. If he wanted a man dead, he would kill him, which was, after all, the point of the whole thing. It would be good to be working with Jim, someone he had known for many years and whom he trusted without question.

He put the book aside and clicked off the light, feeling the Vagabond sweeping through the water and letting it rock him like a baby in a seagoing cradle. If he had ever had a real mentor in the Marine Corps, it was Jim Hall, who spotted something special in Kyle when he was just a pup in training and had groomed him for bigger things.

Soon, sleep came, and with it a remembrance from seventeen years ago, at the sprawling Marine base at Camp Pendleton in California, when Kyle had been young and talented, but with an attitude problem that was driving Jim Hall nuts.

L ANCE C ORPORAL S WANSON SLITHEREDthrough the dirty drainage pipe beneath the wide road. He knew he was going out of bounds, and didn’t care. To him, the popular motto of the Marine sniper, “One shot, one kill,” was just public relations bullshit. Out here, he steered by a much truer compass, the much more relevant axiom of “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying; if you are caught cheating, then you ain’t trying hard enough.”

That was what he was doing right now, cheating, but he was not going to be caught. Swanson had been busting tens, maximum scores in the stalking trials, since he began the phase. Nobody could see the invisible man until he wanted them to, and the instructors were getting pissed at how his success was feeding his already cocky attitude. The youngster was an absolute loner, and he was scoring the max while simultaneously throwing the lesson plan on the trash heap.

“S EE ANYTHING ?” G UNNERY S ERGEANTJim Hall, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the training, had three Marines scanning the scrubby field with powerful binos and spotting scopes. Out in the stalking course were a couple of walkers, who were merely tools for the day’s exercise. Since they wandered around a specifically outlined course, they could easily spot any irregularities up close, but they were not allowed to give the spotters help, advice, or information. The spotters had to find something unusual, then guide the walkers onto the students. The walkers just went to where they were told to go. If there was a sniper at that spot, then the student failed.

“Nothing,” said one of the spotters.

“Nope.”

“Not yet.”

Stalking was the hardest phase of the Scout Sniper School and was responsible for a large percentage of the dropouts. That damned boot Swanson was making a mockery of the difficult training. Hall decided to put an end to that.

There were a total of ten stalk sites on the vast military reservation, and this morning, on a thousand-yard course with clearly defined boundaries on each side, he had paired Swanson with a student who was really on the ropes. The kid was a Navy SEAL doing a remediation stalk because of an earlier failure on another course. If he did not make it this time, the guy was gone.

The task was to crawl unseen through the high grass, dotted with occasional big bushes and scrawny trees, and get to within 250 to 200 yards of the spotters, well within shooting range. It would take at least four hours, because progress was extremely slow. The snipers, wearing bulky ghillie suits that matched them perfectly with the foliage, moved so carefully and slowly that they made snails look fast. The spotters at the other end of the course were looking for any changes in the landscape.

S WANSON WENT THROUGH THEbig drainage pipe with ease, ignoring the debris but being careful not to accidentally dislodge a rock that would bump against the metal tube. Any sound was to be avoided. It took him ten minutes. He crawled out into the sunlight with all the speed of a growing bush, and ten minutes later he was almost a part of the large ditch on the east side of the two-lane paved road that marked one of the side boundaries of today’s exercise. Life became easier there, and instead of wiggling on his belly, he rose slowly to his hands and knees and moved forward. Another drainage ditch up ahead would bring him out behind the spotters. They could not see him if they were looking the wrong way. He found the pipe, went in, and took a break. He planned to hook out from his hiding place and reenter the course approximately fifty yards from the spotting platform. For now, he had about three hours to kill, so he went to sleep, telling himself not to snore.

“I’ VE GOT SOMETHING ,” ONEof the spotters called out to Gunny Hall. “Dust plume about six hundred meters out and fifteen meters from the west boundary.”

Hall put his binos on the area. Somebody’s boot had probably been moved too quickly across a stretch of bare ground. Easy mistake to make. “Put the walkers on it,” he ordered, and the radio chatter began.

The walkers moved toward the target, which appeared to be a lump in the ground. It was really one of the sniper candidates. “Bang, you’re dead,” said the walker. “Motherfucker!” said the young SEAL. This could be his ticket back to the fleet.

Hall checked off the name. “Now find that little son of a bitch Swanson,” he snapped to the spotters.

T HE EARLY MORNING HAZEhad burned away, and the California sun was promising a hot day, but a slight breeze channeled through the pipe as Swanson lay on his stomach with his chin resting on his folded hands. He was awake again but did not move other than to breathe, not even to take a drink of water; he just lay motionless in one of the only shadows around the entire course. It amused him that Gunny Hall, the spotters, and the walkers were sweating out there.

Even before arriving at the school following basic training at Parris Island, South Carolina, Swanson had started a careful study of the topography of Camp Pendleton. During days off and after hours, when the other Marines were out getting drunk and partying and hunting girls, Kyle was in the local libraries, even on the base itself, and in the offices of the county clerks. He drank not with other Marines but with old Seabees and contractors whose bulldozers and heavy equipment had helped mold Pendleton into one of the largest Marine Corps training bases in the world. Such an ongoing project required hard work by a lot of people, and Kyle found plenty of maps in the public domain and in the hands of people who liked to talk about the area’s history. Old guys were better sources of information than the young guys. It was not hard to figure out what was where, all the way from the Pacific coastline inland to the Santa Margarita Mountains, from Oceanside to San Clemente. That wasn’t cheating. It was homework.