Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

“Very good, Mr. Swagger. I must say, decent of you. I don’t know what would have happened to the body otherwise. No survivors. The estate will be tied up for weeks, maybe months. It’s so sad. He deserved so much better. I just don’t know what-”

Swagger didn’t want to hear it. The mortuary director was unctuous, as they tend to be, and trying to say the right things, but Swagger tuned him out, smiled, and when he heard a break in the man’s patter, slipped away.

He was walking to the car, thinking, Get to the airport by six, be back to Boise by ten, get to the house by midnight. Glad it didn’t run long. It’ll be-

“Say, wouldn’t you be the famed paid killer Bob Lee Swagger?”

The voice took him unawares because he’d been so deep into his own internals, he’d lost contact with the real world, always a bad mistake. Now what the hell was this? Some asshole?

He turned, faced another soaked man about his own age, swaddled in rain gear and melted boonie cap but with fewer lines and deeper tan, and something mischievous in his eyes, cluing Bob to the fact that the comment, in a tone of jest and needling, hadn’t been meant in hostility but as evidence of membership in the brotherhood of life takers.

“Who would you be?” Bob asked.

“Gunny, my name’s Chuck McKenzie. Lance corporal, retired. I was in the same line of work for a year plus a month.”

Swagger felt something pulse in his cold, dead heart and realized he was still a little alive.

“Chuck! Damn! Sure, Chuck. You’re the big Mr. Ninety-six, right?”

“That’s what they say. Myself, I never counted. Just figured if it had an AK-47, it was worth shooting.”

“Chuck, I’ll shake your hand gladly. You and me, brother, that’s us out there looking for AKs with targets attached. Glad you made it through your thirteen, glad you made it here.”

“You paid for this, right?”

“I guess so. Somebody had to, and I have a few bucks scraped up. That’s all.”

“Gunny, can we talk? Can I buy you a cup of coffee, a drink?”

Bob thought: there goes the flight plan.

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s find a place. Coffee’s fine. I have a drinking problem just barely beat, and if I take a slug of bourbon, you won’t see me until the next monsoon.”

Chuck turned out to be something rare: the funny sniper. They sat in some imitation Starbucks in a suburb of a suburb, a nondescript warren full of interchangeable boys and girls, two old guys laughing and cackling, like the dry drunks they were, over topics so arcane no man but a sniper could have stayed with them or found it funny.

“It wasn’t the killing I minded,” Chuck said, “it was the paperwork . All them after-action reports. My trigger finger got cramps. I said, ‘Sir, you want me out shootin’, you gotta cut digit number one some slack, that old boy’s gittin’ all tuckered.’ I thought he’s going to say, ‘Corporal, put it on ice, like a pitcher. It’s too valuable to treat lightly. You, go on KP, but that finger, it’s got to be taken care of.’ Really, we wasn’t men, we’s trigger fingers that was unfortunately connected to men.

“What I liked,” he continued, “was the way some officers looked at you like you were Murder Inc. Mankiller, psycho nutcase, piece of dog turd on the shoe. That is, until they’s pinned down by a little guy in the bushes with a ninety-year-old Russian bolt gun, a three-buck scope, and a hunger to kill something big and white, with bars on its collars. Then you’re the man’s best friend! ‘Brother Chuck, so damn glad to see you. Chuck, Chuck, Chuckity-chuck, my closest compadre! Where you been, how’s the wife ’n’ kids, how’d you like a nice promotion, say, do you mind dusting that little feller in the bushes trying to put a squirt of lead up my ass?”

Bob laughed. It was pretty funny and oh so true.

“Ran into that a dozen times,” he said. “What was it? ‘Killer elite,’ something like that. We were more like dip-sucking redneck boneheads too dumb to know we were on the bull’s-eye ourselves, doing what they told us to do. Turned out they didn’t mean ‘Kill all those little bastards.’ What they meant was ‘Kill all those little bastards but don’t tell us about it, because we don’t want to have to think about it.’ ”

“Exactly.” Chuck laughed. “Gunny, that’s it. They didn’t want to think about it, but they didn’t care if we thought about it. Like the man said about whores, it ain’t the sex you’re paying them for, it’s the leaving after the sex. It wasn’t the killing they’s paying us for, it’s the remembering, so that they didn’t have to and could go home and enjoy Christmas with the kids and feel all clean and moral and heroic.”

“Well,” said Bob, “we made a lot of them feel heroic then. Still, with all the shit, we lived lives few men could imagine.”

“Amen, Gunny. Look at all them poodles: they don’t have clue one about the real world, and we lived and fought and died in a world so real they couldn’t imagine it.”

“Here’s to the United States Marine Corps, which gave us three hots, a cot, a rifle, and a target-rich environment.”

“I’ll drink to the target-rich environment, even if the hots wasn’t hot that often and the cot not that comfortable that often. Sure was good shooting, though. Never saw anything like it, and I wish I could feel ashamed like I’m supposed to, but I figure every little yellow guy I sent to Buddha-R-Us didn’t put a 7.62 through PFC Jones, and he got to go home to Passel O’Toads, Tennessee, and go to work in the paint factory.”

“Damn straight,” said Bob, “here’s to all them paint factory personnel departments we helped meet the quota!”

Too bad it was overpriced coffee they were drinking instead of some hard slop-chute poison that would have mellowed them out and made them feel no pain. But it was just caffeine, and in a while, Chuck got around to the real reason he’d struck up chatter with Swagger, as Swagger knew he would.

“Gunny-”

“It’s Bob. All that Gunny shit’s long gone.”

“Bob. I have to tell you, this whole thing doesn’t sit right.”

“No, it don’t.”

“Did you know Carl?”

“Never met him. Knew many who knew him; all said he was the bravest, the straightest, the best marine. I never had any reason to doubt that. You meet him?”

“Well, yes and no. All this stuff about number one and number two? It wasn’t a thing I gave a goddamn about, but when it come out, it did gnaw on me some. Suddenly I have newspaper assholes wanting ‘feature stories’ and I just know who they wanted me to play and I didn’t want to play that guy. I just wanted to be with my family. My daughter’s in the honors program at University of Oregon and my son just signed a minor league contract with the Mariners organization. I put in twenty-five years in the forestry service, had a nice pension, and I wanted to have some good time with my kids and watch them develop. There’s also a great many smallmouths out there signed up to go on my hook and I don’t want to disappoint ’em. Nothing more than that. All this ‘You’re number one’ crap didn’t mean a thing to me. It don’t put fish on the hook. But it got me worrying that it might have meant something to Carl. It just seemed wrong and I worried he’d be upset. If he was. I mean, who knew, really? The numbers was made-up to begin with. The official tags was only seen and confirmed by line squad members or officers and reported. There were hundreds more probables, and you know as well as I do, if you can call your shots, you know that there wasn’t nothing probable about most probables.”

Bob knew. The kills were a lot more than the official tally. A lot more.