Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

“So he’s military. Carl was military. That seems to prove our point, not yours,” Ron said.

“No sir. Carl started military, Carl was great military, one of the best marines that ever lived, but in the last twenty years, Carl has been putting on seminars for police all over the country.”

“That’s how Chandler found him,” said Nick.

Chandler seemed to be the young woman taking notes; she smiled but didn’t look up.

“So Carl had to learn the ins and outs of your kind of shooting as well as his own. That’s why he didn’t have no.408 CheyTac, ’cause he wasn’t working with young snipers headed out to the sand to pop ragheads at fifteen hundred long ones, he was working with police sergeants who might have to take down a crazy husband who has a knife to his baby’s head. That’s why he stayed with the.308. Y’all go through his logbook and see that he’s been working almost entirely in a police environment for about ten years now. That’s another reason why he wouldn’t know and couldn’t have learned fast enough to master that high-tech, software-driven thing. But there’s another thing. You, sir, you were a police marksman. You were called out, I’m guessing, even if you never pulled down on anyone. You recall lying there in the dark, worrying. What were you worrying about? What was your biggest problem?”

“Well,” Ron started, his eyes going troublesomely vague as he looked back through hazy memory, “as I recall it was… well, glass.”

“That’s it,” said Bob. “What’s the situation of a man with a knife at a baby’s throat? What’s the situation of a bank robber with hostages? What’s the situation of a gangbanger who won’t come out? What’s the situation of a kidnapper with a gun to his victim’s head after a car chase? The answer ain’t ‘indoors.’ The answer is ‘behind glass.’ ”

Again, the pause.

“That’s something Carl had to know if he was going to help law enforcement boys with their rifle shooting. That’s something that military snipers pay no attention to. They’re almost always dropping people outdoors. They never have hostage situations. They scan, they locate, they calculate, they drop, and if it’s in town, most of the windows have been blown out, if they was there at all. The guy with the AK or the RPG. The guy with the cell phone, whatever. Glass ain’t in their plans. Sir, how do you shoot through glass?”

Ron nodded. It was as if he was conceding a clever checkmate that he hadn’t seen coming.

“Yeah,” he said, “I get it. To shoot through glass, every police marksman knows, you don’t shoot that Federal 168-grain match hollow point. You shoot a hunting round, a 165-grain Federal Trophy Bear Claw, it’s called. It’s a much stronger bullet structurally, which means it won’t break, shatter, or deviate on glass, particularly the heavy glass in an automobile. But this guy didn’t know that.”

“Carl would have. But this guy didn’t,” said Bob. “But he wasn’t no dummy. He had an uninformed idea on glass and his solution was improvised, as a military sniper would impro out in bad-guy land. His solution was to minimize the angle of deflection by actually moving the gun in the Reilly shooting. He was, what, over two-hundred-odd yards out, the next block over, and he knew that he didn’t want to try and go through the back window of that Volvo at an angle, because there’s no predicting how the bullet would deviate. It might not even penetrate, it might skid off. So he-he had to have help, I’m guessing-he just pushed his sandbags or shooting pedestal eighteen inches to the right so his angle to the glass would be zero degrees. That’s why there was no beveling on the second shot. Both were straight-throughs.”

The room was quiet.

Bob finally said, “A sophisticated team set this up. They watched Carl, they knew Carl’s weaknesses, his strengths, his tendencies. One night, when they had their intelligence set up, they took Carl down, injected him with something strong; he probably never came awake again, as they kept him stewed under a fast alcohol drip for the next week. They had someone who resembled him in some vague way take over his identity, buy the van, rent the rooms, establish his bona fides, drive to the shooting site. Their shooter did the killing, while some people rigged that room in his house. When the ID was made, they hauled poor Carl to that room and blew his brains out. Then they vanished. It was set up so you couldn’t help but think it was Carl. They’s running a game on you and they almost got away with it. Only thing is, their sniper didn’t think rigorously about the hits he was making. Too bad for him.”

“So who are we looking for?” Nick asked.

“Lots of military experience, no civilian experience. Superb technician. He’s got to be a grad of some service sniper school, lots of kills in the war. Thinks he’s pretty damn good.”

“What do you recommend we do now, Mr. Swagger?”

“Just one thing: you want to catch a sniper, there’s only one way. Get another sniper.”

In the town of Cold Water, there lived an outlaw by the name of Texas Red. He kicked open the swinging slatted door to the Spotted Dog saloon and slid through as it rode its hinges back and forth. The piano man stopped his tinkling, and cowboys cleared away from the bar. He stood, tense, as the crowd cleared, leaving but three, who seemed not in the least perturbed.

They were the Mendoza brothers, Mexicans. They had greasy mustaches, bandoliers crossed on their chest, guns worn low, gunfighter style.

Red appraised them. He was thin and wiry with a straw mustache. He had hard black eyes. He wore a tall, round-topped Stetson, pale gray, a lot of hat. He wore a faded red placket shirt, a pair of suspenders to sustain the weight of his tight wheat-colored jeans, a pair of well-beaten boots with silver, jingly spurs. Across his waist, in a Mexican flap holster, engraved beautifully in a floral motif by the folks in El Paso after the artist-gunman Bob Meldrum, he wore a first-generation Colt Peacemaker in.44-40 with yellowed, ancient ivory grips. It contained five cartridges because he had carefully loaded by pattern so that the hammer of the old revolver, with its fierce prong of firing pin, now rested on an empty cylinder. It was a safety measure. You wouldn’t think at nut-cutting time with the Mendozas a fella would think about gun safety. But Red had.

“Bastards,” said Red under his breath.

The Mendozas said nothing, not because they were tongue-tied but because they were black metal plates.

He heard the buzz of a timer, signifying go!

Texas Red drew, and he was smooth and that meant he was fast, and he cocked as the gun came up, fired from instinct honed on practice, and sent a wad of lead to bang hard off and knock down José Mendoza’s black-plate chest, another to gut the black-plate belly of Frank Mendoza, and-dammit-a third which just missed Jimmy Mendoza in the black plate. Then Texas Red thumbed back the hammer fast-this had taken months to learn-and in the same motion tried to ride the gun up to his eyes and fired a fourth time, hitting Jimmy in the center of the black plate. The black plate fell. Cottony swirls of old-time black powder smoke rolled in the air.

“Goddamn,” he said. “Goddamn, goddamn.”

“I think Jimmy might have toasted you, Mr. Constable,” said Clell Rush, the legendary Hollywood gun coach. “I saw you go to sights on the fourth shot. Because you missed the third shot. And the reason you missed the third shot was the gun didn’t set up in your hand correctly on the recoil after the second shot. And the reason that happened is that after each shot, the gun was a little higher in your hand. The first two shots were good, though. But if you go to sights, you’re thinking, and all the time you’re thinking, that black plate is shooting back.”