Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

A few mumbles seemed to acknowledge reluctant assent.

“I begin with the shooting. You noted the shooter was a fellow of some experience. This boy knew what he was doing. Twice he made brain shots through heavy back window auto glass from what looks to be two-hundred-plus yards out. He drilled the actress between the ribs and into her heart. He shot Mitch Greene through the open mouth from a hundred yards out through glass. Carl Hitchcock clearly had the capacity to make those shots. So did his rifle. So did his ammunition. With that rifle and that ammunition and that skill, y’all are thinking, as I did at first, it’s a piece of cake. Cold-bore kill shot. Yes, you could have made the cold-bore kill shot, Nick could have made the kill shot, I could have made the kill shot. But these shots weren’t no cold-bore kill shots. These weren’t bull’s-eyes. These weren’t center-target hits. These, all four of them, were abnormally perfect shots.”

He let that sink in.

“He didn’t hit the target. He didn’t hit the bull’s-eye. He didn’t hit the center of the bull’s-eye. He didn’t hit the X at the center of the bull’s-eye. Four times running, he hit exactly the spot where the two slashes cross to form the X in the center of the bull’s-eye. He hit the exact mathematical center of the target, and you can verify that by checking the locations as figured by the coroners who measured. All four shots are centered right on the goddamned button by measurement.”

Instantly, a hand shot up.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said the New York State Police detective, “but that isn’t what I see at all. What I see is a hole in the ribs to the left of the left breast, a hole in the center of the back of the skull, a hole in the left side of the head two inches above and a little ahead of the left ear, and a hole in the back of the mouth. I give you, maybe, the hole in the center of the back of the head and the mouth shot, possibly , but the other two are way off-center. They’re not bull’s-eyes at all.”

“Good point. However, you’re thinking of the targets as if they’s lying still. You’re thinking of them as two dimensions on a mount and looking for equal measurements top and bottom, right and left. But these was human and they’s in motion. They are dead center, dead bang Fourth of July center, to the body at the angle it was at the time of the shooting. It’s easiest to see on Reilly. Her husband got blasted, right next to her. She turns her head to look at it, pivoting to the left. As she turns longitudinally, her head gets longer. The shooter shoots exactly for the center of the head and at that angle, with the head cranked around forty-five or so degrees to the left, the exact mathematical center is four inches up and one inch in front of the left ear.”

He looked at his notes.

“At a forty-five-degree angle, her head would have been 425 millimeters wide. I called a fellow to run it through the computer. Our asshole put the bullet exactly at 212 millimeters from the extreme furthest point of the skull and 132 millimeters from the crown and 132 millimeters from the jawline. Do you need the figures on Flanders? It’s the same. Dead center side to side and top to bottom, given the angle of the bullet to the target. If he were shooting groups, he would have put those four bullets from varying distances in varying conditions into one hole of about.312 inches. Moreover, the group size, measured from center to center of the four bullet holes, would have been less than one-tenth of an inch. Ain’t no man alive can shoot like that. Only God could.”

He tried to let it sink in but in most cases saw confusion.

“How did he do it?”

He waited for an answer.

“Here’s the funny thing. If you asked him, he wouldn’t know. He wasn’t trying to do it. It was a mistake. If he’d figured it out in advance, he’d have shot less well, just for kills, not for the center of the center. He actually did it by mistake. How?”

No answer.

“The answer is the scope. Don’t you see? Carl had-and the rifle was found with-a Leupold 2.5-10x Mark 4 mil-dot sight, state of the art to the year he had his rifle built, which was 2005. It could hit head, heart, mouth, sure, but it would put its bullets in a random pattern across a couple of inches over three hundred yards. The group is maybe an inch per hundred, two inches for two hundred, three for three, called ‘minute of angle.’ It ain’t refined enough, no way is it refined enough to make shots that accurate into a group less than a quarter of an inch. The killer did it because that’s what the scope let him do.”

“He used a target scope?” somebody asked.

“No sir. The wars have pushed the technology of scopes hard since 2005. There’s military money in it now, because we’re fighting in sniper campaigns, we have to tag people way out there before they can tag us. Our shooter had access to this stuff. Our guy used some new generation software-driven piece of equipment that allows amazing cold-bore first shot accuracy. The manufacturers are Horus, Holland through Leupold, Tubb through Schmidt & Bender, Nightforce, the BORS system from Barrett, and an outfit calling itself iSniper. Whoever did this job took Carl’s scope off, mounted one of these babies, did the shooting, then replaced the Leupold Mark 4. He sat there in the dark in that truck, he figured the distance, the temperature, the wind, all went into an equation, which he then ran through the software program preinstalled and precalibrated to bullet weight, powder amount, primer influence, and his little baby computer give him a solution. It said something like seven down, four-three to the right. He looked in the scope, and instead of one crosshair like you think you know, it has a kind of Christmas tree of points of aim-reticles, in the trade-descending from the scope center, and he found the one that was seven down and four point three to the right and pressed the trigger. Instant super bull’s-eye. Okay, let me tell you, first thing, Carl was an old guy, and there was no way that technology meant a goddamned thing to him. He couldn’t have begun to have used that thing to make those shots. I doubt he used a cell. I called seven folks who knew him to verify that.”

Of course, silence. He was beyond them. Then Nick said, “But maybe he just made those shots out of luck. I mean there’s no physical reason he couldn’t have had a very good day. Four times in a row. It happens. Nothing evidentiary sustains your presumption. In other words, there’s just no proof except your reading of the bull’s-eyes, your subjective interpretation.”

“No,” said Ron Fields, ever the bull in the porcelain museum, “I have to agree with him. I shot designated marksman on the St. Louis SWAT team for six years. I got very, very good, but I could never ever shoot like that. I could hit anybody, bring ’em down dead in a second, and thank God I never had to, but my shots were all in what he called minute of angle. This guy is shooting second of angle. Tenth of second of angle.”

“Mr. Director?” asked Nick.

“Nick, I’m just listening. Go on, Mr. Swagger, do you have anything else?”

“Well, let’s think about who’d use a sight like this. There’s basically two sniping communities, military and police, with some interchange. But for a fact, most police teams never shoot beyond a hundred yards.”

“That’s right,” said someone. “Our Quantico people put out a report last year that found the average police marksman shot takes place at seventy-seven yards.”

“It’s only the military that needs to take people out way beyond a hundred yards. That’s what they’re doing in the sandbox right now with calibers like.338 Lapua Mag,.300 Winchester Magnum,.408 CheyTac,.416 Barrett, and of course the.50 BMG. They’re dumping bad actors out to a mile, maybe even farther.”