Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

Years ago, in a different lifetime, Walter Jacobs, then a young technician from the lab, had testified for the government in a case in which Swagger had been accused of the murder of a prominent man by long-range rifle fire. It was a complicated thing, and it almost got him killed, but it also got him out of the bitter woods, lifted the anger that had weighed like a yoke across his shoulders, got him married to a fine woman, and got him two of the best daughters a man could dream of.

“That old lawyer was spectacular, Mr. Swagger. I’ve never forgotten it. But before I answer your question, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Was waiting for it when I saw you.”

“I’m aware that once again, or so it appears, someone extremely knowledgeable has apparently manipulated ballistic evidence to frame a Marine Corps sniper. Though in the first case the sniper survived-you-and in this one he died-Hitchcock. But you’re playing the same role, aren’t you? You’re still the man who sees through it and on his own goes into the wilderness and puts a conspiracy under the ground, so that justice, in some form, pays out. But it also seems you could be reinventing your biggest triumph. Maybe subconsciously you’re trying to recreate that episode in your life, like Captain Queeg and his strawberries aboard the Caine . Maybe it’s all a delusionary structure that the much older and perhaps less rational Bob Lee Swagger is subconsciously forcing on all of us. Are you Swagger or Queeg?”

“Has anyone here read Mr. Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny?” Bob asked. No hands went up.

“See, Mr. Jacobs, I have, so I’m with you. And I’ll let you decide. But before you decide, let me ask you my question. And I bet when you hear it, you withdraw yours.”

“Well, isn’t this interesting,” said the director. “Nick, you do give a good meeting, very dramatic, even if your coffee sucks. Go ahead, Mr. Swagger.”

“All right,” Bob said. “Yeah, maybe I am a foolish old coot who’s playing tricks on myself and on you to have a taste of old triumphs. But let’s just examine the technical stuff a little. I’m betting that when that rifle came to your lab, you went over it at a microscopic level. It ain’t got no secrets, not even among the atoms, you don’t know about, is that right?”

“That is right, Mr. Swagger. Even to the point of measuring the firing pin to make certain that it was up to spec, even to the last two or three thousandths of an inch, so that nobody could have cut it and soldered it back so that it wouldn’t fire. We learned that one the hard way.”

“Yes sir. Now, is it not true that any object in the world picks up microscopic debris of some sort? A record at the smallest level possible of where it’s been, what it’s done.”

“Yes sir, just like on the CSI shows.”

“Never seen one. Figured it out on my own. Now, a sniper rifle would be particularly rich in such a micro record, wouldn’t it? I mean, mostly it’s kept cased or in a safe, so it’s not picking up a lot of random crap. It’s rarely used, and when it’s used, it’s used in some dramatic enterprise. So the stuff aboard ought to tell a straightforward story, yes?”

“True again.”

“And a rifle is a particular kind of vacuum then, right? I mean, it’s always slightly lubricated, and lubrication has an attraction factor on its own. It’s like glue. Lot of tiny fragments and stuff sticks. Some can be identified, some can’t.”

“That’s right.”

“If it were paint or carpet fibers, you’d have a huge database to compare anything you found against. You could do it by computer in a few seconds. Right?”

“Right.”

“But if I’m reading correctly, you came up with an amount of ‘unknown baked paint debris.’ ”

“That’s what it says. That’s what I wrote.”

“And it’s unknown because you ain’t got no ‘baked paint debris’ database, nothing to compare it to.”

“Right again.”

“Now,” said Swagger, “here’s where I am. That baked paint debris-my thought is that it’s some kind of peelings, fragments, dust, motes, whatever you call it-”

“We call it ‘microscopic shit,’ Mr. Swagger,” Jacobs said, and everyone laughed, even Bob. Good one for Mr. Jacobs, and the laugh let a little tension out of the room.

“My read is that some of it came from the scopes. In other words, whenever you tighten the rings on a scope to mate it to the rifle, you leave microscopic trace amounts, ‘shit’ ”-another laugh-“off the finish of the scope. You do it a lot, you have a lot of shit. You do it rarely, you don’t have much. But it’s always there, right? However, since rifles with scopes are so seldom used in crimes, no one’s bothered to accumulate a database, when of course paint samples from cars and carpet fibers are always found at crime scenes.”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” said Swagger. “Here I am. Here’s what the old man is driving at. This kind of scope I described-as I said, there’s only six makers in the world. Well, in America. They are Horus; the Tubb DTAC, which is made by Schmidt & Bender; Nightforce, an American outfit actually manufactured in Australia; Holland, which has a contract through both Leupold and Schmidt & Bender to manufacture a scope with a ranging reticle and a series of aiming points; the BORS from Barrett, which fits on and adjusts the scope itself; and finally a company out west called iSniper, which makes a top-dollar variant called the iSniper911, said to be the best of the bunch. One of those brands of scopes this joker used. Therefore, you have to go to a big firearms wholesaler who has all these scopes in stock, you have to obtain one of each and test them. And one of them will yield baked paint debris identical to the microscopic baked paint debris you found on Carl’s rifle. And that’s the kind of scope this sniper used, while Carl was all alcohol-stupored up. Then his old scope was remounted and zeroed. So my question is, if you find it and make that match, would you withdraw your question about this thing being a Swagger fantasy? In other words, ain’t that your, whatchyoucallit, objective evidence?”

“Once again, Mr. Swagger, you’re the smartest boy in the class.”

Nick said, “We can track the sales records of the scope. Someone on that list-and I’m guessing there can’t be many because it’s new and it costs a lot of money-someone who’s bought one of these things, he’d be our person of interest.”

“So why again do we need to send an undercover, Mr. Swagger?” asked Ron Fields.

“This is why,” said Swagger. “The flaw in this system is that it’s tricky. That’s why an old guy like Carl never could have mastered it, and that’s why these things will always be primarily for the government, because they demand basically a professional, highly trained shooter to get them to do what you’re paying all that money for them to do, which is head-shoot Taliban field commanders at sixteen hundred meters cold-bore. You got to be good with numbers, good with small machinery, confident with higher logarithms and minicomputers, familiar with software, all that tech-weenie stuff, plus be able to use it all in the dark or the cold or the jungle or after three days of sitting in a hole in the ground under a net on a mountain slope in someplace that ends in ‘stan.’ It’s a highly refined skill. So most of these companies run schools to teach potential shooters-mostly special ops people, or high-contact military like Rangers or some government SWAT outfits, highly trained contract operators like Blackwater or Graywolf, people who need to know, your elite professionals-to teach them how to run the stuff under pressure and in field conditions. Our man will have gone through that training.”