Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

Bob realized that Anto would pass the first target because he himself was already set up to that range and Anto would have no advantage. Instead he’d lase and shoot the second, then the third, while Blondie worked the clicks up for Bob’s second. He had a rogue impulse toward anarchistic victory: he’d shoot the second one first, taking away Anto’s advantage, then shoot the farthest, them come down to pick up the closest. That would be the way to win.

But what would that prove? That he was smarter at a stupid game? That he was an asshole? That he couldn’t go with the agenda out of some petty vanity?

Don’t do it, he told himself. Don’t be an asshole.

“Someone start us off,” said Anto.

Someone did.

“Pull on one, ready now, three, two, o-”

Bob was alone in the world of the scope. He was home, really; it was all familiar, the feel of the rifle, the smell of the cleaning fluid, the touch of hand to comb, cheek to fiberglass, finger to trigger, the rifle firm, the breathing stopped, the body nothing but steel except for the littlest tip of the trigger finger, and he saw the bright, tiny dot nesting at the confluence of the crosshairs and, as usual, some inner voice commanded his finger’s twitch and so deep was his concentration that he neither heard the shot nor felt the recoil, just watched the tiny blot of color leap.

With his practiced hand, he got the bolt thrown and felt the vibrations of clickage as, hunched close, the young man called Blondie rocketed through his eighteen clicks. Bob put the hairs on the even smaller dot just in time to see it scoot into the air as Anto nailed it dead solid perfect.

No need to cock then, but some impulse came to him from a trick bag of shooter’s savvy that just seemed to be there when you needed it, and he waved off Blondie and went for the shot on intuition, his gift for hold, knowing that Blondie couldn’t click fast enough. His mind was a blur of numbers. He reasoned that at 800 yards, each mil-dot below the crosshair represented an increment of 35 yards off the last zero at 622, which meant that the 92 yards further out to the third target represented about 2.7 mil-dots, and at a speed that has no place in time, he found the segment of line between second and third mil-dots that represented the 2.7 hold and involuntarily fired, just as did Grogan.

The ball leaped up, then jagged hard right.

“Whoa!”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Damn!”

Grogan’s shot, dead-on, had knocked the ball upwards as it deflated, but Bob’s, arriving a nanosecond later and off-center, had banged it hard to the right, and it squirted off and bled its atmosphere out in the grass, signifying death.

“Well shot, Bob the Nailer,” cried Grogan. “Damn, sir, that’s shooting!”

Applause arose, and Bob was shamed at the vanity of his wanting to win, but at the same time pleased he’d done all right and impressed all the young guys who’d done it for real much more recently than he had, and would be Out There again soon, beyond the point of the spear.

Grogan was all lit up.

“Lord God, many’s the time I’ve done my little trick, yes sir, and no one has ever come even half so close. You was what, a hundredth of a second behind me, and here I am with all the techno gizmos and you just shot on pure instinct. What a shot, what a bloody damned shot.”

For just a second there, it seemed like the point of the whole exercise was to congratulate the old lion on his near-win in a game that proved nothing. But Anto was the leader in this development; he led the celebration.

“Tell me, Mr. Nailer, how you done it. I never could, not in a thousand years, no matter the rifle.”

“He waved me off,” Blondie was saying to anyone who would listen, not that anyone was. “Jesus Christ, can you believe that?”

“When the Marine Corps went to mil-dots in the late seventies with the Unertl, it was something I had to know. Don’t know why. So I learned mil-dots, just beat it all into my head. It’s no good as a system, really, too much dependent on figuring, and so you’ve got to be a mathematician as much as a shooter and a stalker. I just learned it by rote memorization and practice, don’t know why. It kept me off the booze a whole year, I suppose, and maybe the mil-dots saved me from my own black dogs. Anyhow, when Blondie told me the range of the targets, I figured the difference between the two and realized what the subtend value was for the dots at that range. So I was able to come to the point of aim faster using the dots cold off the middle-range zero than I could have with Blondie adjusting the elevation knob. It was 2.7 mil-dots down from the 622-yard zero, so that’s where I held and shot.”

“There’s a professional for all you younger fellows, and I hope in the land of the scorpions you’ve got as much sense.”

“But I was shooting known distance, where you wasn’t. So it don’t really come to much ’cept my vanity. Seems like we lost the point here: the point is, that goddamn thing works like a charm, and I am a believer. Now I will sit back and just watch while you teach these young guys how to use it. They will need that, where they’re going. They will send many bad boys to wherever them kind of people go when they’re sent, and on account of that a lot of good boys will be coming home. If iSniper can up the count on homecomings, then by God, I am a true believer in iSniper and its, whatever you call it, that 911 thing.”

Sally was working on some big case with a team from Treasury involving fraud in the financial meltdown, so she wasn’t around much, which meant that Nick found himself with more spare time to kill than he ever expected. Task Force Sniper was nowhere, just going over more leads, tracking down some of the wilder ideas, all of it more or less make-work, waiting for Nick’s decision to release the report and release the task force’s assets, and he was holding out to see if Swagger came up with something truly interesting. Meanwhile, the reps from the three local departments had all been sent home with nothing to do.

Nick decided, late that night, to have a nice dinner, since he hadn’t eaten real food since this thing had begun. He left the ominous Hoover Building, stepping around the line of cement revetments arranged to keep the mad terrorist car bombers at bay, and dawdled aimlessly around Southeast DC, looking for a spot to eat.

It was getting glamorous around here. In the nineties and early in the following decade, Southeast had been a dump, a crappy zone of once-prosperous retail and apartment buildings gone shabby with neglect, a little too far from the federal triangle to attract the lunchtimers who drove more central city food culture, unserviced by movie houses, bookstores, boutiques, that sort of thing. Then it changed when the Verizon Center opened, a new big cathedral to the religions known as NBA and NHL; with it, restaurants opened, a big multiplex of theaters, a busy and hustling main street of sorts, Seventh Street, and all kinds of snazzy little places. It seemed to fill up overnight with that disturbing tribe of unrecognizable barbarians called “the young,” and as Nick moseyed through the streets, he was astounded by their numbers, their energy, their clothes, their heat, their hubbub, their urge to fill the world with their own centrality. It gave him a headache. Ugh, how’d he get so old, over forty, with a big house in Fairfax he hardly ever saw and a wife who had turned out to be such a hotshot he hardly ever saw her either.

He drew his overcoat a little tighter, as deep fall, threatening winter, had come to the East. He took his ID card on its chain off and stuffed it in his pocket, as he didn’t want to be ID’d as a bureaucratic geek out on a late-night prowl. He felt the Glock.40 against his hip, well back in a Safariland holster, and the counterweight of two mags with twelve apiece on his other hip; he bought his coats a little big so that the gun wouldn’t print, even if it meant he had to have the sleeves taken up.