Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

“We get the records-”

“You have to subpoena the records. The records can be diddled or destroyed. You don’t know who or what is behind this, what the point is, where the trail leads. You need to send a man who can play in that league to the shooting school to see what he can come up with. You need to do it fast. I have a recommendation.”

He couldn’t believe he was about to say this, but there it was. In for a penny, in for a pound. Last mission of a long-dead war. And as in all wars, who else was there to send?

“I recommend me. Let me hunt this bastard.”

He didn’t introduce himself. He simply strode to the front of the small group of shooters assembled in the bleachers next to the benches under the bright Wyoming sun and said, “Your insert was at 2200, you got to the target zone at 0500 in the dark after a long uphill, over-rock belly crawl, so you’ve no time to range the target area by light. You’re in a hole. You’re bleeding everywhere. The scorpions are crawling over your backside, looking for the breakfast you yourself ain’t had. It’s cold. There are Taliban all over the place. The light comes up, and that’s when you see the Cherokee. It putters along and finally stops at a hut in the valley, and out pops the tall fellow for his dialysis. You’ve maybe two to three seconds clear shooting when he stops to talk to a kid. You’d also like to go home afterwards and have tea with the boyos, right? Oh, you fellows would have a Bud and a steak, but you take my point. How do you do it?”

He stood in front of them, burly, with a bristle of dark hair and a taut NCO’s face from any army in the world, his seemingly an Irish one. He was muscular, powerful, built for war or football, little else. His small eyes burned darkly and it was clear he was high clergy in the church of the sniper. He wore the uniform of the trade-the tac pants, a military-cut shirt and jacket, assault boots-and his eyes ran from man to man. His cadre stood to the right at parade rest, same uniforms, same burly men, or at least two were, the third being scrawny and dark and feral, all fast-twitch muscle.

“You, Blondie? How do you make that shot?”

Blondie was actually redheaded, about thirty, with his own set of sniper’s hard eyes. He was one-seventh of this quarter’s iSniper five-day tutorial, out here in the wastes to learn how to run the tech. Like his six colleagues, and like the speaker, and like the three other silent members of the teaching cadre, he was sunburned, tattooed, thick-armed, and he knew the drill as to kit, appearing in the de rigueurs of the tactical trade, complete to assault boots from Danner, khaki cargo pants from 5.11, polos from Blackhawk, scrunched boonie hats or weatherbeaten LaRue Tactical dusky green baseball caps, and a whole sales rack of tear-shaped, mucho-dinero sunglasses including Wiley Xs, Gargoyles, and Maui Jims.

The site was a thousand-yard rifle range twenty miles outside Casper, Wyoming, a featureless blank of land that could have been the backdrop for a play by Beckett, just nothingness under a bright sky, with a lean-to sun shade on a cattle ranch hunted for prairie dogs and mule deer in other months but in the cool fall fallow. Six of the students came from unnameable military units. If they told you which one, they had to kill you, but they’d do it fast so it wouldn’t hurt so much, and they’d smile so you wouldn’t feel disliked. The seventh looked like a gentleman cowboy.

“I’d pass,” said Blondie. “Without the range, there’s no shot. How the hell am I going to range, then go to Kestral for temp, altitude, wind, and humidity numbers, then figure in the ballistics, then run the algorithms on my Palm Pilot, then go clickety-clickety-click dialing the scope this way and that, hoping I get ’em right? In three seconds? No way. By the time I’m done, he’s inside. Meanwhile, there’re more and more people around till the area’s thick with ’em. So when he leaves, even if I’m suppressed when I take the shot, they can gauge where I am and put a lot of shit in that area, and that makes me bacon. If I got a big kill out of it, maybe I’d pay that price. But I’d have to think on it, and all the time I’m thinking, he’s getting smaller, and by the time I’ve got it all thought out, he’s gone. Mama didn’t raise me to be no dead hero. Ain’t no virgins waiting for me where I’m headed.”

“Exactly,” said the lecturer. “Now, possibly Mr. Swagger here,”-he pointed to the gentleman cowboy-“possibly Mr. Swagger could make that shot cold-bore. But he’s not human, he’s mythical. I’m simply human, so I couldn’t make it. Could you make that shot, Mr. Swagger, as I’ve described it? You made so many others.”

“Doubtful,” said Bob. “Not now, at any rate, I’ve lost too much. When I was as young as these fellows, there’s a possibility. I never worried about humidity because where I was it was consistent, and there wasn’t much wind, except during monsoon. I don’t know, though. Some men have a knack for distance. I never did.”

“But you had a knack for knowing the hold. Genius possibly more than ‘knack.’ A feel for it, something subconscious. All of you Vietnamers who scored in the nineties or better had to have that subliminal gift.”

“Well, maybe we did. I never talked with any of the others about it, because both Chuck and poor Carl were long gone before I started my third tour, and I never ran into ’em here neither. So, if the question is, would I take that shot, the answer is probably no. Turns out I ain’t so mythical after all.”

Bob was a crash attendee at the tutorial under his own name because there was no time to put a legend together, and unless you immerse yourself in the details of your fictional narrative, you’ll make a mistake sooner or later. So he was here, publicly, as Bob Lee Swagger, of Boise, Idaho, Gny. Sgt. USMC (Ret.), on government contract as a consultant for the Department of Energy security sector. It was all Nick could come up with quickly, once the forensics people had determined that the baked paint debris had come from an iSniper911 unit and nothing else, and quickness was important, for the iSniper911 was produced in such small numbers that the tutorial that taught it ran but once every two or three months, depending. So Nick called in a favor at Energy; Energy ran the paperwork top speed and got the special exception to iSniper’s usual procedures on the basis of Swagger’s well-known name in the community. The premise was Energy’s security teams, known as very well trained operators in charge of guarding vulnerable, volatile Energy Department sites the nation over, were going to upgrade their sniper capabilities to make shooting out to military ranges possible in the new age of terrorism and were looking for an optics system to handle the task. They’d hired the ex-sniper Swagger to run an R and D on what was available and to make a recommendation; the story would stand up to any kind of vigorous examination, unless Bob let it slip he’d never seen a Department of Energy installation and wasn’t too sure what the Department of Energy did, anyway.

“Anyhow,” Bob allowed, “if you want I could bore all these young guys with stories about how different it was for us, how much more primitive the equipment was, how the landscape favored snipers in a way high desert don’t, but it would be just an old man’s gas. I’m here like them to see if you can do this stuff way out there without a head for numbers.”

Some laughter, even from the Irishman.

“Grand, fellows,” he said, “I’m here to teach you how to make that shot, and any others that may come your way. The name’s Grogan, but you can call me ‘Anto,’ as we of the Irish tribe shorten ‘Anthony.’ I’ve done this work too, with a well-known British unit, and then I saw the way to endless riches by jumping to Graywolf Security, where it was my pleasure to handle caravan and bodyguard gigs in many other sandy places. Now I teach for iSniper, and enough with intros, shall we turn to the toy?”