Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

More laughter. The black Irishman Grogan had a wit to him.

“Fellows, here’s the why as to your presence here. The scope which don’t need no wizard work to get on target. Why, if a sod like Anto Grogan can do it, you smarter fellows will have no trouble. But you question, can it possibly be worth the seven thousand dollars the bosses are charging for it now, plus five days when you could be with loved ones instead of cooking out here in the cowboy sun?”

He opened the rifle case before him, removing a British L96A1, the Accuracy International job, tricked up all very SAS, dun-colored, bi-pod mounted, barrel an inch thick, with what looked like an oar for a stock with a hole in it where your hand set to reach trigger and bolt, all of it crazily adjustable, and then up top two pounds of optical magic secured in Badger Ordnance tactical rings, thick as a giant’s wedding band. Turrets, nodules, knobs, tabs, dials, even a small TV set, a cube with screen above the eyepiece and decorated up top with a keyboard of buttons, the whole damned kitchen sink crunched into one piece.

“It looks hard. It ain’t. That’s its point. As Sergeant Blondie has said, and since I’ve seen the records, I know you all know and have done this work, but to shoot well far out in the field, you must have three instruments besides a rifle and a scope. You must have a range finder to lase the distance to target, a Kestral 4000 wind indicator to read wind and other atmospheric conditions, and a small computer or Palm Pilot or whatever to feed the distance and weather data into where you’ve already stored your ballistics data so that you can drive it all through an algorithmic equation and come up with your solution, which you must then hand-transfer to the scope itself. If any of those all-tricky and confused things goes wrong, it’s a miss. You give up your hide. You probably buy it. All that training gone to waste. Some camel bunger with a red and white tea cozy wrapped around his noggin has inherited your expensive whiz-bang rifle. No, that ain’t why we’re over there, now is it?”

He paused, waiting for the little eddy of giggles to die down.

“Not with iSniper911. With iSniper911, you prang the tall fellow in his heart and he’s dead before his tongue is in the loam. Everyone jumps around and goes jibberty-jabby. They start shooting wildly. Then they realize it’s they themselves on the target black and off they go, not ready for the virgins yet. You wait till dark, crawl back up the damned hill, and wait for extract. Twenty minutes and a loud helo ride later, you’re in base camp with your mates. ‘Shoulda seen the look on Osama’s face,’ you say, and the colonel opens you another can.”

He let this satisfying scenario play in their minds for a few seconds.

“Rather thought you’d like that one. All right, then, here’s the genius of iSniper911. It combines all the functions of ranging, weather analysis, algorithmic computation, ballistic prediction, and scope correction into but one instrument. There’s little devils inside move all them knobs, smart little leprechauns who can do the calc in their cute little heads in supertime. You simply lase the target and wait for the answer in the TV set up top, and in less than a second you’re on target. I mean completely and wholly on target. Here’s how.”

He turned and threw a cover off a portable blackboard next to him, to show a chart that diagramed the 911 reticle design. Busy, busy, one might say, and all the young snipers involuntarily groaned at the density of it, all the knowing and learning that it demanded and the stress of doing all that while possibly being shot at. The iSniper reticle wasn’t just the old standby crosshair, not even the crosshair with its mil-dot ranging diodes on the hairs; it displayed indeed the central crosshair, its nexus a kind of anchor point. From that spot, a veil of lighter netting seemed to descend, in the shape of a Christmas tree, a sort of delta of interfering imagery. Upon closer inspection by all it became evident that the netting itself consisted of rows and rows of smaller crosses. It looked like a cemetery on a hillside.

“See all them markers?” said Grogan. “Sure, they’re the tombstones of men who’ve stood against iSniper. In a manner of speaking. They’re all points of aim.

“You press the lase button to initiate the targeting sequence. In one tenth of a second, you have distance, while at the same time this little unit”-he tapped a collection of dials mounted behind the bell of the scope-“reads temp, wind, atmospheric density, and humidity and automatically inputs to the minicomputer, where some kind of mysterioso chip runs it through the mathematical universe, also taking into consideration the ballistic template of the weight, speed, design, and trajectory of your chosen round, and when it’s all done, a little voice pipes out, ‘Honey, let’s fuck.’ ”

Laughter, of course, as the boys were used to the metaphorically imagined sexual dynamics of sniping and had heard and issued the cry “Get some,” which had once meant “Get some pussy” and now, in the War Against Global Terror, meant “Get some kills.”

“It does not, of course; even the head university boys at iSniper aren’t that clever. No, instead what happens is that once the solution is produced, automatically again and again in supertime, that data is crunched as target coordinates are impulsed up here on the screen of the monitor, so you get a readout. ‘D thirteen, seven R,’ it’ll say, something like that. You go back to the scope, count thirteen hashmarks down, seven tiny cross-hashes to the right, and that’s your aiming point. You put that little cross, that reticle, that pip, on Johnny Taliban and use your good shooter’s discipline, enjoying all the fundamentals you’ve worked so hard to master, and when you shoot, the thing you shoot dies. Not usually. Not sometimes. Not if luck is with you or God is your copilot and the wind be mild, but always.”

A hand came up, from a thick-necked young man who looked like a linebacker. But then, they all looked like linebackers.

“Yes, mate?”

“Sir, I-”

“Mate, I’m just a sergeant rating, like all you boys are, and ‘sir’ makes me hair stand up. You could call me Colour Sergeant if you can get your tongue around something so Waterloo-sounding, but I’ll settle for Anto.”

“Anto, like all of us here, I ain’t no Bob the Nailer, but I know enough to know that there’s nothing made that don’t get beat to hell in combat in three days or less. I look at that little thing and it looks like an iPod or something. I just get worried that after that long crawl, I turn it on and I get ‘does not compute’ or some such and there ain’t no IT to call and bitch at where I’m hunkered down.”

“Excellent, chum. Most excellent. I imagine you’re all worried, no? Mr. Swagger, yourself same, sir?”

“It’s a concern,” said Bob, trying to wear his designated celebrity status gracefully and not come across to these young men as a pompous asshole. “Busted more than my share of glass in the boonies and they didn’t have no batteries in ’em.”

Anto Grogan smiled at the fellas, all confident and pleased, then at his cadre of three other boys, and then he hoisted the rifle and threw it hard upon the ground.

An involuntary groan arose from the little audience, for all were shooters and knew to cherish the weapon as long habit, and if rough stuff happened to it, you hoped it stayed true, but under no account did you abuse it yourself.

“Let’s give it a right and proper licking,” Anto said, picking it up, turning it wrong side out in his strong hands so that he gripped it like a batsman by the barrel, and whacking its stock three times hard against the beam that supported the roof over the shooting benches, the collisions sending a buzz of vibration through the ramshackle structure.