Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

“Good shooting, Red,” said the range officer, reading off the time-29.2-to the scorekeeper, adding, “all targets down, no penalties.”

Red sat back, smelling the gunsmoke, watching the white gas drift and seethe until a light breeze took it and it dissipated.

Soon enough Clell would be there to tell him how well he’d done, urge him to stay cool and collected-no rush, no sweat, no nerves, no expectations, just there, in the zone-and a nice round of applause rose to congratulate his efforts, some of it from people who surely recognized him and were sucking up as if he’d give a clapper a mil just for kicks, but much of it genuine, from those who didn’t know.

But he knew it best of all: Texas Red has it.

Anto slowly revved the ATV, then slipped into gear and took it down the gentle slope of the valley toward the center. He had a black-comic thought of accidentally running over the heads of his own sniper team as he progressed, and had to fight a grin in case Swagger, from his own hide, was eyeballing him.

He switched back, left then right, eating up the distance, came in out of the high grass onto shorter, where ugly prairie things-they looked like turds but were some kind of cancerous vegetation-littered the ground, along with the odd low scrub of bush, the scraggily but unspectacular cacti, stones, smallish boulders, what have you. He was a man who’d spent many days in action and had taken more fire than even the many professional soldiers of his culture, with the scars to prove it, and he wore that time in hell well. In fact it was not even hell to him, as it is to most men. The truth is, high-level professionals like Anto and his mates from 22 SAS and most commandos in the forces and Seals and various foreign alphabet-soup high-contact teams don’t fear battle at all; they relish it. To them it’s an exhilaration like a drug high, and they truly savor the act of taking life, at close range or by rifle through optics; it’s like scoring baskets or goals in the sports-driven youths that most had.

So Anto was far from scared, far from choked with dread, far from concerned with his own death, which, through many wounds and much recovery time, had nevertheless only seemed like a final joke. He was pure alpha, the war dog in its most distilled form. Oh, this one would be so damned much fun!

He got to the creek where advised, eased down the throttle to an idle, came out of gear, and slipped into neutral. He let the motor run on general principle. Although unlikely, a mechanized getaway would be a lot more efficient than a barefoot one, running uphill nude for nine hundred yards among prickers and buffalo shit.

As instructed, he scissors-stepped off the vehicle, moving ten feet away. At that spot, he assumed the position, faced east, hands up, legs spread. Now where was that bad boy Swagger? Would he come over the hill on an ATV and take his time, letting Anto bake even redder in the sun as he trekked down for the exchange? Raymond knew: don’t shoot until he’s still, and he and I have had a chat. That was the sign. Then take him, because of course Anto wanted to watch him die from as close as possible, possibly even having a word or two with the mortally stricken man.

Jimmy had gone to binoculars, so much easier to manipulate than the tripod-mounted spotter’s scope, if somewhat less steady. He fixed on Anto as he came down the hill, watched him course this way and that, detected no nervousness. And what happened if Swagger simply killed Anto, shot him dead on the spot? Then he, Jimmy, would find the sniper’s hide and give the site to Raymond and talk Raymond into the shot, and Raymond, steady as an ingot, would put the man down.

Then they’d bring their fallen Michael Collins back and give him a burial Irish style that he’d deserve. There’d be drinking and keening and piping, with the banshees howlin’ of a great man’s death on the glens and in the bogs. But it would be all right: that was Anto, giving himself up for the team and the mission, without even a thought to the sadness of it all.

“Would you see anything?” asked Ray, stuck in the smaller field of vision of the iSniper911 atop the AI.

“I do not,” said Jimmy, “only fat Anto’s fat arse scrunched up on the bike’s seat. Not a pretty vision, I’m telling yis.”

“No man should have to look on Anto’s great ass, sure,” said Raymond, and Jimmy couldn’t tell if it was Raymond’s first joke or if he meant that with his customary earnestness.

Anto arrived at his designated location, stilled his machine, and slid off. He moved to the side in odd steps, keeping his hands high. From the site of the boys, he was on a slight oblique.

Raymond, as practiced on the iSniper as any of them, shot the distance and reported it to be 297 yards in 0-5 wind, a downward angle of 13 degrees over the yardage, not enough to require any correction. The device then told him three down,.5 to left, and so he went back to the scope, traced three lines down the axis of the center of the reticle from the larger reticle, adjusted the rifle ever so slightly until the fat, slightly angled, red-dappled shape that was Anto’s naked back rested exactly in the space between the third hashmark of the vertical axis of the crosshair and the first small + to its left, and there he rested. He could kill Anto easy enough, but that wasn’t the point then, was it?

Jimmy ran the binoculars over the known world fast enough to make time, slow enough to see what he was looking at. He was just on the edge of blur. It should be happening soon enough now.

Suddenly he saw Anto jump, not as if hit, but startled. All of Anto’s muscles became tense, even his buttocks, clenching in the drama, and he turned, stopped as if commanded, and began to speak.

“What the fuck,” said Jimmy, shifting his binocs after concluding from the evidence that somehow the sniper was close to but behind Anto. “Raymond, Raymond, look at where the bastard is!”

Ginger didn’t jump when Anto appeared at the edge of his vision; nor did he twitch, tighten, or kick. He was professional. He just let the scene unfold. He saw Anto arrive at the creek, not thirty yards away.

So it begins, it does, he thought.

He double-checked his weapon under the camo tarpaulin, ran his thumb up to the safety to see it was indeed swung all the way around to full-auto, then broke contact with the grip to crawl his fingers up the receiver to test the cocking handle, pulling it back toward the butt to find it loose, which signified the weapon was cocked fully with a round in the chamber. He slid his hand up higher on the receiver to the face of the Eotech holographic sight, a clever tactical enhancement that looked like a small TV set mounted in a smooth plastic streamline bolted tight on the receiver’s Picatinny rail. Activated-Ginger did that, pushing a button first for power-up, then pushing it a dozen more times to elevate the brightness-it beamed a holographic circle on its screen of glass, a powerful icon glowing red against the clear, so perfect for close-quarter battle because you didn’t even have to look for it, it was just there to your eye, and you put it on target and squeezed and sent a fleet of 5.56s off to do the job right and proper. Now he was ready and sure that what might happen to need his assistance in settling would be occurring soon enough, and he said a brief prayer to Jesus to grant him the favor of putting a mag into the Yank, to pay him back for the fooking cracked skull he took and the embarrassment of being the fella to let the team down.

That done, he screwed up his focus, his concentration, his war persona, and watched as poor naked Anto just stood there, his bollocks all loose, his shoulders red, waiting for whatever.

Surely soon the American would appear, coming on down the far hill, approaching for the exchange, and it would all-