Stephen Hunter: I, Sniper

All military units with sniper deployment had to be reached; the same was true of all law enforcement units with precision shooters as part of the team. Then there were all cadres and students, recent and otherwise, of the many sniper schools, not merely professional, such as the Marine Sniper School at Quantico, but also the literally dozens of private schools, because as of late sniping had taken on a kind of glamorous aura and many citizens wanted training in the art. But beyond sniper culture lay the broader shooting culture itself, and this generally involved the many dedicated high-power shooting teams affiliated with gun clubs and administered at some level by the NRA, which ran the national matches at Camp Perry, Ohio, every late summer. There were firearms schools that taught hunting techniques too, and there was a niche in the hunting community built around men who became proficient at taking out game animals at long range. There were varmint hunters, who also shot at long range and were truly superb shots, capable of, after much refining of their instruments and much investment in range and loading bench time, hitting twelve-inch-tall prairie dogs at ranges of over a thousand yards with regularity. There was a bench rest culture, in which men, again with highly customized rigs, shot for group size at over a thousand yards (the current thousand-yard champ had been able to put ten rounds into 4.5 inches from that distance). All had to be surveyed and the same questions answered.

Is someone messed up? Is someone bitter, irrational, nearly out of control? Is someone angry? Does someone talk a lot about how the lefties lost the war in Vietnam? Has someone’s health declined suddenly? Is someone on drugs? Did a marriage break up, a child die, a job disappear? Has someone vanished? Is someone pissed off about something that happened in Iraq? Was there a flutter, a tremble, a twitch, a glitch, an anomaly in the community? The task was huge; there were a lot of people who could shoot well at long range in America, and it seemed for a while as if the investigators would have to shake out all of them.

Meanwhile, in the media, the immediate suspicion fell on him , as in the Great American Gun Nut.

That was the narrative, from the start. You know the guy; we all do. Something a little “weird” about him, no? Makes his office buddies a little uneasy, the women especially, with his dullness on all subjects save firearms, about which he lights up like a Christmas tree. Can be seen hunched at the keyboard not with secret Japanese teen nudes but with rifles on his screen. Goes a little nuts when the Second Amendment comes up, and in time people learn to stay away from the topic when he’s around. Maybe he’s got a house full of heads or a shelf full of trophies with small gold men holding weapons atop them. Ew, creepy. Maybe he knows the difference between.30-06 and.308 or that a “thirty caliber” can be a.30- 06, a.308, a.300 Win Mag, a.300 Remington Ultra Mag, a.307, a 7.62X39, X51, X54, and so on. Maybe he spends time in the basement with his little mechanical devices and like some dark alchemist of medieval times is capable of fabricating his own cartridges. Maybe he’s an amateur gunsmith who’s got an eerie engagement with the clever mechanics that underlie the mesh of pins, levers, springs, valves, and tubes that constitute the interior of all firearms. All these things suddenly became suspect, and at a certain point, the reporters even started going through the Internet and calling gun stores for hints on recent bizarre behavior by otherwise nondescript customers.

It was the third death, poor Mitch Greene in midsentence, that narrowed the field. Anyone could have killed Joan Flanders, for she was hated as much as she was loved; hatred of her was too broad-based to be of any help at all. And anyone could have killed Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly, for they were hated, perhaps even more passionately, by just as many, for their smugness, moral superiority, fancy education, contempt for authority, unconvincing contrition, reentry into society, low-watt fame, and so forth and so on. The fact that both Joan and the Jack-Mitzi crimes could be connected to the Vietnam War and the rages of the sixties was tantalizing but of itself not revelatory, not yet anyway.

But nobody really hated Mitch Greene, then or now. He was a clown, a comedian, a cornball; he made people laugh. He probably had never met the other three, for he was really several tiers below them in radical chic circles. He had more or less gone mainstream; he was the one-man answer to the question “Which one of these doesn’t belong?”

He only belonged, if barely, by virtue of the Vietnam connection. Like the other three, he was famous in those years and got a lot of TV time. But was he a real radical, like the others, or was he just a guy riding history’s currents as a way to a gig, getting laid, and doing a little self-expression at the same time? In fact, he’d never really done much for the movement except exploit it for his own ends. There were others, many others, who’d done a lot more, who could be held accountable for a lot more, if those were your politics and “punishment” or “vengeance” were your motive.

“He’s a lightweight,” said Ron Fields, Nick’s number two, an institutionally famous Tommy Tactical type who’d won five gunfights but was known not for brains so much as loyalty and guts. “The only reason for whacking him would be unsophisticated. To a certain type of person upset with the Movement, he would be one of them, maybe even a face, although in reality he was never one of the key apparatchiks. He needed too much attention to do the hard work of revolution.”

“Is that anything?” Nick asked. “Does it tell us anything? Are we learning anything?” He looked around the table, his staff of three or four stars like Ron who’d hitched themselves to him, hoping he’d rise, a New York State Police detective, repping the Hampton sector of the investigation, two smart guys each from Chicago and Shaker Heights, except one of the smart guys in each team was a smart girl. The group was clustered in a large, dreary room in the upper reaches of the Shaker Heights Police Station on the day after Mitch’s death, sitting at a Formica table littered with dead cups of joe, half-eaten doughnuts, sugar grains everywhere, all of it rotting under the nurtureless light of an overhead fluorescent.

One of the women now said, “Here’s what I’m getting: He’s gifted technically but politically naive; he hasn’t done his homework, he’s just gone after the simplest, most obvious symbols of the Movement forty years ago, as he would know it or as he remembered it.”

“So he’s an old guy?” Nick asked.

“I think he has to be.”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “Shooting at that level is a young guy’s game. Muscle, stamina, discipline, all young guy stuff. Then there’s the moving around. He’s probably not flying, not with the rifle, and all the localities are within driving distance of the time differential. Lots of driving, lots of movement-again, that’s all young guy stuff.”

“Maybe he’s a real good old guy,” someone said. “I mean really good.”

“Anybody know a really good old guy?”

Silence.

“Well, I do. The best. ’Nam sniper, operator, gunman. He’d be the logical candidate.”

“Do you want us on it, Nick?”

“I already called him. First day, by landline, in Idaho, verifying for my own ears he was not in play but out on his ranch caring for his horses. He was. There was a one-in-a-jillion chance he snapped. It happens. He knew why I was calling. He was pissed. But I wanted a clear head to run this show, and that’s what I got. So does anybody know of any other really good old guys?”