Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

The one with the rifle was clearly Nick Memphis, sleeves rolled up, tie loosened. He held a big gun, a rifle, with a tube along the top, an imposing-looking gadget with turrets and markings that sort of resembled a camera, if a camera were a tube instead of a box. The gun looked massive, and it wasn’t the machine gun type of thing, with handles and bolts and cooling ventilation and curved magazines, but more like a hunting rifle, though somehow swollen, as if it had been ingesting steroids. It was black, like the scope, and lay against Nick’s knee as Nick posed kneeling by the cluster of holes, five of them, a little constellation. Next to the cluster, as David bent and squinted to see, someone had written in magic marker, “Nick Memphis, 300 yards, FN Model PSR,.308 Black Hills 168, 1.751!, June 23, 2006, Columbia, S.C.” David didn’t know what the 1.751 referred to and why it bore an exclamation point. He didn’t recognize the two men flanking Nick on each side, their sleeves also up, their ties loosened, each with an earphone pushed up on their heads, as were earphones pushed up on Nick’s. In fact, it was like a glimpse into a strange world, maybe on a distant planet or a million years in the past or future, full of protocols that were mysterious, full of traditions that were meaningless, pride that seemed arbitrary, and most of all that big, immutable gun right in the middle, the center of it all, as if these three guys worshipped it. Very odd.

But the point was, here was visual, dramatic proof that Nicholas Memphis, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation, had journeyed to South Carolina in June of 2006 to examine FN’s entry in the FBI Sniper Rifle Selection, against FBI regulations, especially, as the documents already obtained and proven authentic had revealed, at the expense of the Belgian arms manufacturing concern.

If it was real.

David leaned over as he opened his desk drawer and removed a magnifying glass bought two days earlier for exactly this purpose. Not knowing just what he was looking for, he ran his eye, through the magnified lens, over every square centimeter of the photo. He certainly saw nothing obviously fake, like a shadow going the wrong way or a subtly incorrect relationship of head to neck or a line around this or that figure or object. But who knew what they could do these days?

“Is that it?” Jack Sims asked, leaning over. Jack was of the old-professor type, usually a study in tweeds, jowls, horn-rims, rep-striped bow tie, blue Brooks Brothers button-down even though, regrettably, Brooks now had its shirts made in China, a man with whiskey breath and a memory for arcane political minutiae that was legendary in DC.

“Yeah. Jack, were you in the Army?”

“I was. A thousand years ago. No guns then, we used spears. I was in the 235th Spearchucking Regiment.”

“Seriously, see where he’s written ‘1.751’ here, with an exclamation point and an arrow to the cluster of bullet holes. Any idea what that means? Is it a score or something?”

“No,” said Jack, “it’s not a score. Not with the decimal point.”

“Could it be a caliber? Is the gun a 1.751 caliber?”

“Hmm, when I was in in the sixties, we shot something that had millimeters. I don’t know what the inch measure would be. Wait, I know a photographer who’s a gun guy. For some reason photogs are gun nuts, more often than not. Maybe it’s the love of small, well-machined little gizmos. Anyway, let me Rolodex his cell and see if I can get an answer.”

Jack disappeared, not that David noticed, so absorbed was he in the drama of his examination, and it seemed that Jack came back in a second, when it was really twenty minutes.

“Okay,” he said, “the 1.751 is a group size. In other words, the guy fired five rounds at the target and the five made up a group. They’re trying to figure out the mechanical accuracy of the gun, not the shooter, and they get that from the group. So they use calipers to measure from center to center of the two farthest shots, and it comes out to be one and seven hundred fifty-one thousandths of an inch.”

“Is that good?”

“At three hundred yards, that’s magnificent. My guy says an inch per hundred yards is very good, so at three hundred it ought to be three inches. It’s one and three-quarters of an inch. That’s a wow.”

“Okay,” said David. “Thanks, Jack, big help. Now I get the exclamation point.”

Just at that moment the bureau chief came over.

“I see you guys acting like teenage girls at the mall. Did it come?”

“It sure did,” said Jack. “David’s Pulitzer, gift-wrapped. He’s taking the office to Morton’s for dinner tonight, right, David?”

“It did come,” said David, modestly.

“Okay, bring it in, we’ll see what we’ve got.”

David trekked into the chief’s office, and just about everybody important in the bureau followed. He laid the photo out on the glass table as they crowded around.

“That’s Memphis,” somebody said.

“It sure is. Does anybody know who those other two guys are? David, was there any information with it?”

“No, Mel. It was just the-”

“Sir,” came a voice; it had to be an intern. They were everywhere, ambitious little reptiles, incredibly smart and industrious, desperately wanting to eat the flesh of anyone who stood in their way. Little show-offy monsters.

This one’s name was Fong, but his ethnicity wasn’t Asian, it was ambition. David hated them, even though he realized he’d been one himself.

“I stopped at a gun store in Silver Spring. It’s called Atlantic Guns. Anyhow, they were giving away catalogs of all the gun makers and I thought we needed the FN catalog, so I picked one up.”

“Good, Fong.”

“Let’s fire David and give Fong his job,” said Jack Sims, and everybody laughed.

“David, we don’t need you anymore. Fong’s here, he’ll take care of things.”

“Fong, you’ve just been appointed bureau chief in place of Mel,” Janie Gold said. “Mel, can you be out of your office by five?”

When the laughter died down, they let Fong do his thing, and naturally he worked at a speed beyond the comprehension of everyone older.

“The guy on the left, see, that’s a fellow named Jeff Palmyrie, head of operations, FN of America, and on the right, that’s Pierre Bourre, President, FN International GMBh, Brussels. Here, look, make sure I’m right.”

He put the slick paper catalog, opened to the executive page, down right next to the photograph, and yes, it was clear indeed that those were the two others in the picture.

“Did you call FN today?” asked Mel.

“No, not yet,” said David. “But they’ll have no comment. They’ve had no comment for eight days; I can’t believe they’d change now.”

“Still, you should do it.”

“I will, Mel. Right after the meeting.”

“What’s the gun?” somebody asked.

“It’s what they call their PSR,” David said. “Police Special Rifle. I got that from the Web site. It’s in the catalog too. It’s a three-hundred-eight-caliber rifle. In the catalog you see the rack where they attach the telescope, yeah, but of course the one Nick is holding has a telescope. See, look, the stock, the handle, the trigger thing-it’s all there just like in the picture, dead center. That’s the one FN wants to get the sniper contract, and this proves they brought Nick in early, to get him on the team.”

“He’s not a very good shot,” someone said. “I thought he was a sniper.”

“No, he’s a very good shot,” David said. “See, he’s shooting what they call a ‘group,’ meaning he aimed at one place and tried to put all the bullets as close together as possible. See, all of them went into a group at three hundred yards.”