Jack Coughlin: Kill Zone

“Screw me? Now there’s a thought,” Kyle replied in the same language. His smooth line wasn’t working, but the evening held promise. Swanson splashed water on his face, wiped it with a soft towel, and stole a few sips from the glass of iced tea at Shari’s side.

On the deck above, Jeff herded the potential investors to the railing and explained what was going to happen.

Kyle glanced at them. Soft men in shorts and bright shirts. “I gotta go to work now,” he said. “Blow up some shit for Jeff’s pals.”

“So go,” Shari ordered. She opened her eyes and gave him a smile.

Lady Pat lowered her steamy novel, peered at him above her sunglasses for a moment, and also got in a barb. “And Kyle, dear, please remember that these ladies and gentlemen are Sir Geoffrey’s dear friends, important guests and investors. So do be a good boy and try not to kill anyone, at least until after dinner, would you please?”

“Does that include smartass broads, m’lady?”

THEY WERE FAR OUT IN OPEN WATER, the horizon an unbroken straight line all around. Through an optical illusion, it appeared to be above them, as if they were at the bottom of a saucer.

Swanson made his way to the broad lower aft deck, where he found a tall, thin man working beside three fifty-five-gallon drums. “Hey, Tim,” he said, and opened the protective, cushioned box in which a pristine big rifle lay like a jewel. “You ready?”

Timothy Gladden had been a captain with the elite British Parachute Regiment for more than a decade, leaving the Paras only because a broken right leg did not heal properly and doctors would not allow him to continue jumping out of airplanes. He resigned his commission and launched a vigorous new hobby as a triathlete, principally to prove the British Army diagnosis wrong. There was nothing wrong with his leg, nor with his Oxford-trained brain, and Sir Jeff had hired him into the corporate side of his growing weapons development business. Once a poor farm boy in Wales, Tim was now deputy chairman.

“Of course, old boy,” he said. “I’ll toss in the blue barrel first, then the red and the yellow at fifteen-second intervals, steadily increasing the visibility problem. The blue one is going to present you with a very difficult shot.” He thumped one barrel, which gave back a hollow clanging echo. It contained only ten gallons of gasoline, so the remaining space was packed with explosive fumes. “The captain is making a steady twenty knots and will hold her course straight whenever you are ready. Make all three shots from prone, if you will.”

A section of the aft railing had been removed, and Swanson slid into the familiar position flat on his stomach and dug the toes of his deck shoes into the rubberized mat. One problem with designing a new generation of sniper rifle was that he had not been allowed to actually shoot an enemy soldier with it in a combat situation, which made all the difference. Range targets cannot think and react or shoot back, while a human being might turn, duck away, trip, or break into a run in a microsecond and spoil an otherwise perfectly good solution. This field test was designed to duplicate those sorts of unexpected movements, as the floating colored barrels would rise, fall, spin, and bounce unpredictably in the waves.

Jeff came down the ladder, his eyes bright with excitement. “The lads upstairs are primed and hungry for adventure, so don’t get nervous on me now, Kyle,” he said in a tight voice.

Kyle pushed the cool fiberglass stock of Excalibur, the best sniper rifle in the world, hard into his shoulder. It had been molded to fit him like a custom-made Armani suit. “Be quiet, Jeff,” he said.

The aristocratic British voice repeated, “Really, there is no pressure, Kyle. Just take your time, lad, and do it right.”

He brought his eye to the scope and clicked a button with his thumb. That activated a BA229 lithium battery and engaged the heads-up display, and the scope came alive with numbers that paraded in a steady, changing readout. The range to the target, measured in meters by an infrared laser, showed in the upper right-hand corner, while digits at the top left gave the wind compensation. Barometric pressure was in the lower right, and the bottom left figures summed up all of that and gave the exact setting to dial in the scope. The weapon was doing the algorithms that he normally would have had to do in his head.

“We will be videotaping this test,” Jeff said, rubbing his hands in anticipation.

It had taken a while for Kyle to become familiar with the moving avalanche of numbers, but with practice, they had become part of the background and did not distract from his concentration. He took a deep breath and steadied Excalibur in his left palm, exhaling slightly and tightening his finger on the trigger. He did not want to move in any way that might change his position. “I got it, Jeff. No pressure! Videotape! Now will you please be quiet?”

No pressure. Only that he was being watched by a line of venture capitalist vultures along the stern rail of the yacht with drinks in their hands and fat checkbooks in their pockets. If Swanson could make Excalibur sing today, they would invest millions of dollars and pounds with Jeff to build secret weapons with dream-world technology. Even so, Kyle thought, this was just dollars and cents. Pressure came in battle, when if you missed, your buddies died.

“I can’t believe I’m putting the future of my entire corporation in the hands of a bloody Marine,” Jeff complained.

“The SAS eats shit for breakfast,” Swanson growled. “Now shut the fuck up, get this tub steady, and drop the barrels.” He wiped the world from his mind and concentrated on the scope, settling into his personal cone of silence. Things slowed down, his senses increased, and background noises became whispers. He was becoming one with his rifle.

Tim Gladden said, “Trust the numbers, Kyle. Trust the numbers.” He felt the big yacht, which handled like a sports car, settle into a smooth glide.

Kyle had gotten to know Jeff Cornwell while running joint special operations, and their friendship had grown tight over the years. When Cornwell had set his engineers and scientists to work designing a state-of-the-art weapon for long-range precision firing, he asked the Pentagon to loan him Kyle Swanson as a consultant periodically when he was not on other assignments, and the generals had agreed.

Swanson had loved the weapon from the moment he saw the raw diagrams, and Jeff knew how to speak sniper talk. Together with the engineers in a span of three years, they built a sniper’s wet dream.

It was a very smart weapon, and fired a hand-crafted.50-caliber round that increased the power of a punch over longer distances. Developing experimental material, with Kyle and Jeff insisting on a lightweight weapon that would be easy to carry in the field, the engineers had developed a super epoxy for the stock and a special alloy for the trigger assembly. The rifle was surprisingly light, only 19.9 pounds with a full magazine, a critical factor for the man who would have to lug it around all day in combat. The normal.50-caliber sniper rifle weighs in at 37 pounds unloaded. The free-floating barrel provided space and could whip up and down when fired but not throw off the sight, which was further strengthened with an internal gyrostabilizer. The gyrostabilized infrared laser worked with a small geopositioning satellite transmitter and receiver in the stock to triangulate the precise distance between the rifle and the target. The GPS provided a further element of safety by letting a sniper know his exact position anywhere in the world. When the sniper is out there all alone, that little bit of information can mean a lot. The rifle, therefore, was more than the sum of its mechanical parts. It was an incredibly accurate weapon system that reduced the chance of a miss by at least 75 percent. In many tests, Kyle put a shot group within a half-minute of angle, an eight-inch circle, at up to 1,600 meters in daylight and 1,000 meters at night. The average human head measures ten to twelve inches. If he could see an enemy a mile away, he could kill him with a shot right to the head.