Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

“That was me,” said Ginger.

“Someone around here has to have some brains. Anyhow, they’ve been out wasting time on those names. I knew it was you on the trigger, Anto, when I saw you nail those beachballs. You know how? You hit ’em dead center. That was your mistake, you shot too well.”

“I told you that,” said Ginger.

“Go on,” said Anto. “I’m listening hard.”

“So I realized all the sniper bullshit was camouflage to run a mission on the Strongs. I used a cop connection I had to get into their house and I found evidence that their mood had suddenly gotten real good. They were going to get big money just ahead. It tracked back to the death of a guy named Ozzie Harris. They got something from Ozzie Harris, and as I reasoned and later proved, it gave them leverage over Tom Constable. They thought he was going to move a chunk of dough into their Swiss account and they could live happily ever after in the land of chocolates and ski bunnies. Instead, they got 168ers through the central medulla, courtesy of one Anto Grogan, along with two other poor souls, including the babe Constable once was married to, and her presence emptied tons of irrelevant bullshit into the case so thick you need a pitchfork. I knew that underneath it, under all the crap about movie stars and stand-up comics, all that yellow smoke, there was something, I don’t know what it was, but some little object, maybe a photo or a letter, whatever, that was worth billions to Constable. I thought it had to be here at this ranch, in this house once I saw it. My deal was I’ll crack that place, I’ll recon, I’ll see what I need, for next time. Then I’ll blow and put a team of professionals together. When we come back, we’ll take whatever it was and we’ll leave a yardful of dead Irishmen, payback for Carl and Denny. Then I’ll run the deal with Constable, and because I’m a professional and have been around the block a bit, I won’t end up with my brains on the windshield. My guess was it’s here. So I’m here.”

“Don’t believe him, Anto,” said Ginger. “I smell the constabulary all over him. Them FBI fellas would never have pulled no strings to get him into our tutorial if he weren’t working for them. He’s with them, they’re waiting for a callback, and if he don’t give it to ’em soon, they’ll hit this place and we’ll have a gunfight on our hands, twenty dead garda and the Americans after us till forever turns to cheese.”

“I think Ginger sees through you, Bobby Lee, friend. I don’t for a second believe you’d go for money. Your kind doesn’t need money. Your type gives it all to king and country, no matter who’s king. You’re rotten with honor, that’s you, sniper. You stink of the shit. I always hated your type because the bloody smell of virtue just made you stronger, and the more pain you racked up, the more you loved it.”

“I say, work him hard now,” said Ginger. “Get his callback and get him to use it, and make sure we don’t get the SWAT boys in their little Johnny Ninja outfits tossing them bangers in and trying to be all herolike.”

“That’s good advice,” said feral Raymond. “Anto, Ginger’s got the point. He’ll be tough, but we have to snap him now.”

“Wonder if he’ll go as long as the lieutenant colonel,” said Jimmy, contributing for the first time.

“Good question, Jimbo. Bobby, the lieutenant colonel rode the board for close to three hours. He was a believer, head boy in al-Sadr’s militia. Strong and tough he was, hard inside as he was outside. Lord, the man fought us. Remember, fellas? But in the end, even Lieutenant Colonel Abu Sha-heed broke, and he gave us a coupla caches and we set up upside and dropped them sand niggers for a day and a half before we called in sappers to blow the joints. Got me nineteen in the first hour alone, great sniper shooting it was too.”

Swagger said nothing while the Irishman recalled his day of killing, probably the episode that got him nicknamed Lord High Death.

“All right, sniper,” Anto finally said. “I hate to do this, but I only half believe what you said. I have to know the other half. It’s time for the water.”

Constable was precise, organized, immaculate. He left little to chance. He knew what was important: that was his talent. He cut to the core, acted swiftly and decisively, and made endless preparations.

Now the thing was coming to a climax. The forces he had set in motion were brewing and would explode. He had to be at his best, he had to be ready. Two days hence, the Cold Water Cowboy Action Shoot, at Cold Water, Colorado, would commence and he would-there was no doubt in his mind-win the Senior Black Powder Duelist Shooter championship.

To that end, he sat at a table in the rear of his gigantic rec-V and tested cartridges. They were.44-40s, for his two Clell Rush-tuned six guns, painstakingly assembled by Custom Cartridges of Roswell, New Mexico, 14.5 grains of Goex FFFg over 250-grain semi-wads from Ten-X. CC was the best in the business, and they’d weighed each and every piece of brass (from Starline), reamed the primer holes, squared the primer pockets, measured the rim thickness, and segregated the two thousand rounds by that thickness into four lots, so that he’d always be shooting cartridges in the same lot together, for continuity of point of impact.

But that wasn’t enough. Constable now sat with the two thousand cartridges and a Wilson.44-40 cartridge gauge-that is, a replica chamber precise to the nanomeasurement-and now he inserted each cartridge into that chamber, making sure that it fit, that it slid in easily, that no rogue burrs or lead smears in any way defiled the circumference of the shells. When he loaded, over the next few days, he’d load fast, and he didn’t want some unseen microscopic chip of metal screwing him up.

He worked intently, some might say insanely. When he was done he would do the same with the.44-40s for his rifle and 12-gauges for his 1897 Winchester pump, just like the fellows in The Wild Bunch had carried. Everything would be tested; any shell that was in the slightest out of spec would be discarded. He would have the best and it would be up to him to be the best.

He loved the way the cartridges slid neatly into the chamber; that was one of the joys of guns, the way parts fit, meshed, clicked, moved in syncopation, smoothly and efficiently. He had a gift for the mechanics of it and saw the big picture, the way the rods and pins all worked together, powered by the mechanical energy of the springs. It was such genius old Sam Colt had rendered onto earth all those decades ago when he ushered the modern revolver into existence in 1836, and in that way, Tom Constable felt a part of a great American tradition, totally and completely.

Totally and completely could have been his creed. Tom never did things halfway. He was a creature of obsessions, and when he discovered a new one, whether it was sailing, radical politics, billions making, movie star courting, book writing, network starting, old movie colorizing, whatever, he hammered it with the full force of will and intelligence until it became his, he beat it into the shape he desired. This cowboy gunfighter business: stupid, sure, with the aliases-“Texas Red”-the costumes, his being jeans, leather vest, red placket shirt, and ten-gallon Stetson, as he was of the realistic school, whereas some were of the fanciful school and still others of the character school (Hoppy was big, and so were Marshal Dillon and Paladin) and some of the Wild Bunch school. Yet the culture, the challenges, the guns-all of it was incredibly satisfying.

He loved being Texas Red. Wild as a pony, fast, loose, beautiful, proud, dangerous, all the things that Tom himself had once aspired to be and that, even though he was a buccaneer of business, he felt he’d never really let out. He’d always played by their rules, and somehow Texas Red, the twenty-four-year-old gunman with twenty notches, was his way of imagining a life, of touching a life, lived by his own rules.