Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

Swagger had picked a zigzag approach, meaning a long night’s crawl in the bulk of a ghillie suit. His entry point was the basement window, southeast corner. The building wasn’t properly speaking patrolled or guarded, except by the presence of those living within. There seemed no steady, regular surveillance, no pattern of lights. He could pick out no motion detectors or Doppler radar screens. Security developmentwise, it was mid tech, definitely late twentieth century. Constable had laid out the bucks for it fifteen years ago, and that was that; maybe an upgrade was on his to-do list but he hadn’t gotten to it yet.

The problem was the window. Kick it in? Noise, alarm. Cut the wires? Probably couldn’t reach ’em. Set some sort of diversionary element-a charge, a fire, an alarm? Get too many cowboys awakened. Pick the lock? He had picked locks before and knew how to do it, and this lock was probably pretty easy; it was just wired.

No, the only way was to cut a hole in the glass, reach in, and cut the wire, then get through the lock.

Then he’d slide in and see what was what. He had no weapons, but he had five smoke grenades and five flashbang munitions, all of which would create considerable confusion if necessary. Here was the official version of the plan, the one he had to convince himself he’d believe in, the one they’d try to beat him away from, and he knew, if he gave it up, it was the first step toward losing this one. The idea seemed to be to find “it,” booby-trap the place with smokers and flashbangs, disable most of the vehicles-not exactly high tech, he’d just pierce each tire with an icepick-and disappear with one. By the time they got the vehicles up and running, he’d be long gone and they’d have to call in the big boys, the trackers and the snipers, the Graywolf pros, to hunt him down.

But he knew that hope was a dream. The reality: this’ll be a bad one.

There’s going to be a lot of pain ahead, getting through this one.

You’re going to pay for this one.

Then he thought, man, I am too old for this shit. I do not need this shit. I saw the six-zero a few years back and I ought to be rocking this way, then that, not putting gunk on my face and slithering in a suit that looks like a bush downhill a thousand yards to try to get in and out and away and gone, but instead probably getting my ass kicked hard and long until I ain’t hardly human no more.

I do not want to do this.

But he looked around, and as usual, nobody else was there. If not him, who? Tell the feds. Telling the feds just opens a can of worms and lets lawyers and politicians and bullshit artists of all stripes into what is essentially clear-cut and demands action and justice.

So here I am and here I go.

His face blackened, he began the long crawl down.

It took six hours and he arrived at 0230. The temp had dropped, and a keening wind knifed down from the mountains. There was no moon, but tides and pinwheels of stars splattering the vault of dark threw off enough dim glow to let him navigate, and he’d committed the plan of the place, the location of the trees, the spotlights, the shadows, to memory. He slid between cones of light, riding the shadows, moving with a kind of slow swimmer’s urgency as if through mud. You’d have to look hard at him to see movement at all, and he doubted the cameras were high-res enough to pick him out of the shadows in what was undoubtedly black-and-white. Every time he heard some odd noise, he froze, waiting to see if anything would develop, and of course it never did. At one point, around eleven, a couple of cowboys came out and smoked on the porch, had a good laugh at a supervisor’s expense, and one took a nip from a secret flask. Then they ducked back in. At two-hour intervals, there was some clambering as a security shift climbed into vehicles, tested engines and lights, then left for a perimeter patrol, making a lot of noise as they went. Each circuit took four hours, so the first crew was back while the second and third were still out, prowling around inside the barbed wire in the dark in far distant places. It was a hell of a big spread.

Now he scooted the last few feet until he was flush against the house. He lay, stifling his breathing, waiting for discovery. Why didn’t they have dogs? A dog might pick up scent, where a man never would. But maybe Tom Constable, ever conscious of his image, didn’t want the world to see him as guarded by baying howlers, long in teeth, red in fang; he was the modern billionaire, too cool and streamlined and ironic for that. So his muscle was hidden under down-home cowboy wardrobes, townies and locals in jeans just like in olden days. It made him more interesting for the celebrity magazine people whom he always had out for his big parties.

Bob touched the low-lying window. And what if he got through it and came across that drunken cowboy? Did he kill him? Choke the life out of him? Some nineteen-year-old townie punk who just needed a job and ended up on the night shift at Big Tom’s. That wasn’t right. Oh, “knock him out,” that good one from the movies. Yeah, and brain-damage him forever, or siphon off IQ points the boy couldn’t spare? What then? Cross that one when he came to it. He had a couple of Kimber pepper sprays aboard, which wouldn’t put a man out but should put him down. But if it came to that, the whole thing had gone to hell anyway.

He slid out of the ghillie until he felt like he was lying next to a dead buffalo, a puffy weaving of silks and cottons configured to look like the great outdoors. With a good one you could go to ground and a hundred men could walk right by you and never catch on that you were the sniper, you were here to kill them. This one was very good. He hated to leave it behind, even if he had others.

The wind cut his cotton shirt, which was sweat-soaked after the long, hard creep, and the cold penetrated as he finally came free. He nestled next to the low window. He pulled a small waist pack around from his backside, unpeeled the Velcro fasteners to display a cache of small tools and one piece of Double Bubble bubble gum. He opened the gum and threw it in his mouth-it was cold and hard, dusted with sugar-and began to knead it to something malleable with his jaws. He took out a small SureFire and checked each corner for wires and went four for four. He went to the latch, saw that it snapped shut. He ran the cone of illumination across the room he was about to penetrate and saw that happily it didn’t contain sleeping men but mostly housed stacked junk-some kind of storeroom. Very good.

He removed a glass cutter’s tool from his pouch, tapped the glass to make certain it was no super security plastic, and was rewarded with the vibration of regular window pane. He turned the tool so that the auger installed at the other end of the grip was upmost and crudely drilled deep into the glass, feeling it yield to powder as he rotated, until finally he’d opened enough edge for the cutter to bite. Quickly he sliced a four-inch wound in the glass, cranked the thing horizontally and cut another. In short enough time, he’d cut a four-by-four square in the window. He plucked the gum from his mouth, applied it to the window gently, pressing hard enough to make it stick but not hard enough to break. Then he pulled, and the sixteen-square-inch glass rectangle plopped out. He gently set it down.

Wire cutters snipped the central wire to which each of the corner devices was linked; then he popped the lock, opened the window, jimmied his body, and slid through. He closed the window behind him, though a breeze now pulsed through the open square in the glass. Nothing could be done about that; the cowboys wouldn’t notice, or so the theory went.

He waited, his eyes adjusting to the quality of indoor darkness, with no starlight or far-off spotlights. It was clear he was in the kitchen supply depot, as industrial-sized plastic bottles of ketchup, mustard, and relish stood everywhere, as did other wrapped-in-plastic foodstuffs. A glowing stainless steel door admitted the cookie to the walk-in freezer where perishables were kept. Bob ignored it, slid to the door, unlocked it, and opened it a crack. Not much to see: institutional green walls, a few other closed doors probably giving admittance to other storage facilities, at the far end a hold tank, where drunks or paparazzi could be secured until LE came out from town to haul them away. At the close end he saw stairs, slipped quietly to them, eased halfway up-would there be a crack as the old wood adjusted to weight bearing? no, not this time-and slipped up a bit further.