Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

Bob knew he had left them for the jackals.

“Where are you? I’ll bring you the money, now I’m confident shooter number two ain’t lurking.”

“Then you know he’s long gone.”

“He broke a crest and I got glass on him. He didn’t have the film, did he?”

“No. He’s an old friend. He did his job. I didn’t want you picking him off, I wanted him out of here. And I wanted it as it should be, you and me.”

“Right and proper,” said Anto.

“You set a course on your GPS roughly radial one-thirty-four east, for four miles. That will put you on the rim of another valley, called Lone Tree. When you look over the rim, you’ll see the tree. There’s only one. I’ll be under it, rifle ready. You radio me, notify me of your position. You’re still naked, by the way?”

“I am not,” said Anto. “Have some bloody decency.”

“When you get to the rim, you’re naked. You’re naked and unarmed all the way in and I’m watching you all the way in. You get here, you pull up fifty yards out, and this time you’re not ten feet from your bike, you’re a hundred feet.”

“You’re so smart; that was a big mistake, Sniper. I got to it in a second, and off in another.”

“Easier with the late Ginger there to cover for you. But yeah, sure, I made a stupid mistake. I’m old, do it all the time. This time, you go flat spread-eagled in the grass. I’ll take the money.”

“And leave the film.”

“No.”

“Bastard.”

“I’ll take the film and I’ll go out to the east. You’ll see a tree on the horizon at roughly one-twenty-two from the lone tree. I’ll leave the film there. By the time you get there, I’m long gone.”

“And suppose there’s no film?”

“You think I want you dogging me? I’m as sick of this shit as you. I want my dough and I want a vacation. I’ll disappear and be in contact in two or three months while I set up the big exchange. Take it or leave it.”

Anto paused.

Then he said, “Okay, I’ll be taking it.”

“Buzz me then when you’re on the rim, though I’ll probably see you first.”

The radio went silent.

Now it was waiting time. How long? Maybe an hour. No, it couldn’t be an hour. Swagger knew Anto was close. Now was the question of character: shoot or chatter? Smart or stupid? Professional or self-indulgent?

Can I make the shot from here? Anto wondered.

He was at the rim, in a good prone, almost directly behind the position Swagger had taken. He could see the man crouched down, working his binocs in the wrong direction but not too intensely. The poor sod thought he had at least an hour before the play resumed. He had no idea he was sitting on the bloody bull’s-eye.

Anto was in a good shooting position. He was relaxed, the Accuracy International.308, on its bipod, solid into the earth. As a kind of prelim, he drew it to him, took up almost exactly the position from which he’d fire, though keeping his finger indexed along its green plastic stock, put the complex iSniper reticle on Bob’s blue-shirted back, and fired-fired the range-finding function, that is.

He read the answer on the screen: 927.

He’d made 927-yard shots before, and many longer. But he’d missed a few too. He waited for the target acquisition solution to run through the chip-driven computer and got his instructions: nine down, three to the right.

He went back to scope, counting out the nine hashmarks notched on the central vertical axis, then the three to the right. There it was. A tiny reticle, about the size of the + on a word-processing program, lay athwart the prick of blue just barely recognizable as a man at this range, despite the 15X magnification.

He felt his muscles begin to tighten, his tremors to cease, his breathing to shallow out; he felt the soft curve of the trigger, and then it began to slide almost of its own desire.

B-R-A-S-S , the from-time-immemorial shooter’s mantra.

Breathe.

Relax.

Aim.

Slack.

Squeeze.

He didn’t fire.

Nine-twenty-seven was way too far out there. A puff of wind, even a twitch by Swagger after the bullet was launched-its time in flight at this range would be over a second-would compute to a miss, and then he’d be in a duel at over nine hundred yards with a man who was still maybe the best, or second- or third-best in the world. No percentage in that.

He’d shoot from five hundred.

Five hundred would minimize wind, minimize trajectory, minimize time in flight. From five hundred he could make the shot on iron sights; with the iSniper911 he could make it a hundred times out of a hundred, in one second if need be.

Next question: How long will it take to low-crawl over the 427 yards to his shooting position? The answer was close to an hour, and none of it much fun, unless you liked crawling, and almost no one did. He sure didn’t. Also, everything in him said, Get it done. Finish it. You have the advantage, press it.

He looked at Bob all that way off, steadily gazing at the wrong horizon.

I could walk up to him and shoot him behind the ear with me Browning.

Well, probably I could not. But I could walk five hundred yards and quite possibly he’d never see me, looking as he is to the east, convinced as he is that I’m still miles away, bouncing naked across the plains.

He rose. He felt liberated. He did a rifle check for about the thousandth time, opening the bolt to see the glint of the Black Hills 168-grain Sierra match HPBT cartridge nested snugly just where it should be, repressed the bolt to lock up, then touched the safety, making triple certain it was off so he could fire the fast one if needed. He looped his forearm through the cinch of the sling, tightened it so that it tugged against his arm and body and left just enough play so that, when he dropped to prone or sitting, it would be held firm against him and, by virtue of the position, against the solidity of earth itself. With his right hand, he performed a battery check on the iSniper911, reassuring himself he was all fired up with power to spare.

That done, he adjusted his boonie cap, his tear-shaped Wiley X shooting glasses, and began the big walk toward Bob Lee Swagger.

Swagger waited, still as a rock. Some living thing finally came, a white moth, flitting in this and that direction. Eventually it moved off.

He felt ticks of sweat running down his face from under his hat. His ears, encased in the radio pads, itched. His breathing came shallowly. He yearned to turn, to see if the Irishman was there, but the longer he waited, the closer Anto got, and the closer he got, the easier the shot that took him down would be. If he was stuck shooting it out at nine hundred yards, he’d lose. Anto’s technology trumped his more powerful rifle. He wouldn’t have time to lase the range, figure the clicks, crank the scope, assume the position. Anto would kill him. He’d have to guess at the range, and that wasn’t a talent he had, as some did. So if he guessed wrong, read the wind wrong, so easy to do at the extended ranges, Anto would kill him.

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, the big clock in his head spun its second hand, draining time from the world, while somewhere people laughed and drank and flirted and fucked and dug ditches or wrote poetry or flew planes. He was a sniper. He sat still, waiting to take or receive the shot. It was what he did. He’d snipered-up young and really lived his whole life that way, taking on the responsibility of doing the state’s dirtiest work and coming back tainted with the smell of murder about him. That was it, that was the way it went. You chose it, asshole. It-what was the goddamned word?- expressed you. Count yourself lucky, blankethead. You got to do what you was born to do. How many can-