Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

“I hate these guys,” said Nick.

“I hate ’em too,” said Price. “But that’s neither here nor there. What’s here and now is this guy is levering for a meet, off the record. He’s angling for a scoop, and the Times always feels entitled to scoops, so he wants his so he can get sent to the London Bureau or something.”

“Agh,” Nick said again, his gorge full of bile.

“Nick, in case you’re wondering, let me tell you he didn’t get this out of Public Information. We do not release background on special agents, not ever, certainly not in the age of terror. So I don’t know how he got it.”

“I do,” said Nick. “It seems I’ve displeased Joan Flanders’s big-foot ex-hubbo Tom Constable, that is, ‘T. T.’ Constable. His guy tried to nudge me in a certain direction, and I wouldn’t play. So this is their first move, and this guy, this David Banjax, he’s just a rube, a pawn, being run by a guy named Bill Fedders. Banjax doesn’t know how he’s being used.”

“Don’t tell him that. He’s Harvard, Harvard Law; he thinks he’s important.”

“Ugh,” Nick said. “Now I really hate him.”

“But they do hold cards, Nick. I can’t tell him to fuck off. I’d love to, then raid his crib for the ’ludes and pot he probably has stored in a waterproof baggie in the toilet, convict him, and send him to some hard ugly federal hotel where he and his new fiancé LeRoy could live happily ever after in anal cowboy bliss, guess who’s the gal? But I can’t do that. I have to play nice. And you can see how it might look. It could look bad or at least questionable. It could reflect poorly on the Bureau. And that’s what they pay me to watch.”

Nick shook his head. “Tulsa,” he said again.

He remembered being in an office window in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1992, his second year on the street. He was crouched behind and held securely a then state-of-the-art Remington 700 sniper rifle in.308, on a Harris bipod. He watched reality through a ten-power Leupold scope as a crackhead skank bank robber named Nathan Bowie rode down an empty street in the back seat of a convertible. Unfortunately, surrounding him were three women, cashiers in the Tulsa State Bank and Trust Morgan Avenue branch, while the bank manager drove slowly. Nathan was tripping wilder and wilder, waving his pistol around, addressing God, the whole evil white race, the Martians who spoke to him through his dental fillings, the various bitches who’d left him before he was done kicking the shit out of them. He was going to go firecracker at any second and it was Nick’s duty to put a 168-grainer into his cranial vault before that happened.

But Nick also had an FBI agent in charge in his earphones, a guy, now long gone, named Howard Utey, and Howard was one of the worst combinations: he wanted you to do exactly what he told you, except he didn’t know what that was, and if he told you one thing, he could very easily change his mind, and it was your fault you didn’t quite get that he hadn’t meant “Shoot” when he screamed “Shoot,” he’d really meant “Don’t shoot.” Any idiot would know that.

Howard was as flippy as Nathan Bowie, as the tapes later revealed, not that it mattered, because Howard had contacts on the Seventh Floor and was supposedly headed up there.

“Are you ready, are you ready, get ready, Nick, I can’t hear you, tell me are you ready are you ready, do you have him, do you have him, wait till he stops moving, now no not now, no, no the one on the left she moved, she’s crying, why the hell won’t she shut up, what is-”

Nick should have thrown the earphones with their little microphone on the pedestal, all cool SWAT TV-like, across the room and just buckled down, cinched in, made the fucking shot. But he didn’t; that wasn’t Nick. Howard was authority, and Nick had been drawn to, had respected and believed in the church of authority. Howard was boss, he was agent in charge, he was day-to-day a very decent guy, if a little moody when he thought he wasn’t moving fast enough, but he got good results out of his people and he was well liked, if thought a bit callow and overambitious. But he was-and this was well known-absolutely no good in an action situation.

“Do you have him, I can see him, Nick, acknowledge please, I have to-”

“Howard, the girl on the left, she’s-”

“Take him down, take him down!”

“No shot, Howard, goddamn, it’s not clear.”

It had to be clear. No other SWAT people were on call, the state police team couldn’t get set up in time, the city people were in their usual sullen fit about being overruled (by Howard) in their own town, so it was a mess, and behind him, nobody was quiet, there was a lot of moving around and chatting.

“You have to shoot!” Howard screamed.

But Nick couldn’t. There wasn’t gap enough between the two girls, one of whom kept leaning over, as if she was losing bodily control, so great was her fear, and her head kept swimming into Nick’s sight picture and the car would be turning in a second and he knew, he knew he had to shoot.

“Shoot, shoot, don’t shoot, don’t shoot, shoo-”

Nick thought he had it. The crosshair quadrasected Nathan’s head just behind the ear and it was clear. His finger did what it had been trained to do. He fired, the buck of the rifle, the largeness of the shot, it felt good, and when the scope came down-

“Oh God oh God you missed oh God he’s shooting stop him!”

– Nick saw one of the girls twisted left, blood on her back, her body in a heartbreakingly broken posture. Nathan Bowie shot the girl on the right, then shot the girl in the front, then put the gun in his mouth and blew the roof of his head off.

That was it. Med techs and cops with guns drawn raced to the vehicle, and from his perch Nick watched as the med team worked the fallen. He wanted to puke. He felt a surge of depression melt the strength out of his bones and fill his brain with self-loathing and remorse. Howard was there yelling, “Nick, Nick, my God, why did you shoot, didn’t you hear me? I told you not to shoot, God, it’s such a tragedy.”

God, what a fuck-up. What a total disaster. Nick had thought he’d be the guy with the strength and the coolness and the good decision. But no. He had to play the goat, the mistake, Quantico’s shame.

Poor Myra. He’d hit her in the spine, the bullet actually passing through her arm first, bouncing laterally off the metal of the car and clipping her spine. It paralyzed her in an instant. She never walked again and spent the next few years in her motorized wheelchair. She had deserved so much better than Nick and the FBI had given her that day, and he tried to give it to her, to somehow make amends, by marrying her. He discovered her to be a wonderful person, bright, funny, without a shred of self-pity. Once her father had gotten drunk and accused Nick.

“Why? Why did you do that to my baby girl? Oh, Nick, why, she didn’t-”

“Daddy, you stop that. I’ve said many a time that if the only way I could have met Nick Memphis was to get shot by him and lose my mobility, I’d take it even with that foreknowledge, because Nick is the best man I’ve ever met, kind and generous and gentle and honest and moral. You cannot blame Nick. You blame Nathan Bowie or the man who sold him the crack, but do not blame Nick. He was only doing his duty.”

Of the other two girls, one died, the other recovered and moved away. The bank manager recovered but died the next year, early, of a heart attack. Really, what had it proved? You take the shot and the shot goes off. It’s so amazing how much pain can be released into the world by the little six-ounce press of the trigger, how it changes everything, totally and forever.