Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

The head seemed to disappear in a sudden flame of motion, a smear across the lens as if the atoms were individually decomposing. In actuality, of course, it was a.308 caliber 200-grain bullet hitting at about fourteen hundred feet per second, breaching the cranial vault, opening like a steel tulip inside, veering crazily through the whorls and confusions of the august archbishop’s gray matter and blowing crazily out his left eye socket and in so doing spattering tissue into the horrified face of the president of the United States.

“He’s a complete rag doll the microsecond the bullet goes through him,” said Hap.

There was a moment of almost holy silence as the man’s death loomed in frozen grandeur on the screen.

“It’s a little tough to tell from this angle, Hap, but are we sure the president was the intended target? Jesus, that’s a dead center hit to me,” somebody said.

“Now I don’t want that kind of talk,” Howdy Duty said, asserting himself for the first time and quick to deal with the apostasy. “That’s exactly the kind of nonsense that got started during 1963 and haunts us to this day. Yes, absolutely the president was the target, you can see the way the head rose into the line of fire.”

But Nick just sat there staring at the moment of death, the brains like a breaking red wave emptying themselves in the face of the president who had not yet begun to react. He’d thought so much about shooting a person at long range – it had been his life once, before Myra, his vanity that he could do it, do it well, save lives, become a hero – and something now reached him that disturbed him.

He tried to fix on it, to sift it out of the data but -

“Nick? Nick? Hey, somebody poke Nick, he’s sleeping!”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, what’s up, Hap?”

“Nick, you did some sniper time on SWAT, any way he’s not shooting at Flashlight?”

“Ahh – ” Nick paused.

“Well, Nick?” asked Howdy Duty.

“Can you get an angle reading from the point of impact and the wound channel and trace it back to a source and make sure it came from that house?”

“No. Just got the report from Washington. They ran it through their big ballistics mainframe program, and the best they can do is pinpoint a rough semicircle of about seven degrees. And there’s over nineteen buildings with windows opening onto the shooting site from there. We’ve been over each of them, though, and the only one that had blood and a rifle in it and an empty shell happened to be the one where Bob the Nailer walked on a nine-mil and took your Smith,” Hap said.

“Well, that’s it then,” said Nick, letting it slide, knowing he’d hoard his doubt at least a little longer, rather than risk Howdy Duty’s ire this early in it, and hanging on to his career by a pubic hair.

“Okay, let’s go on,” said Hap.

Impelled by the force of the bullet, the cleric now plunged forward and smashed into the president, and the two went down in a terrible heap.

“Archbishop Roberto Lopez crashes into Flashlight, after spraying him with tissue and blood, but by this time the bullet has exited and smashed into the wood of the podium slat,” Hap continued to narrate, “where it will be recovered by our ballistic technicians, too damn mutilated for a ballistics signature reading. Still, one bullet, two men down, elapsed time four one-hundreths of a second. It’s a hell of a piece of shooting.”

The drama continued to unfold, now in real time. In seconds, Secret Service men of Alpha Security Team, pulling Uzis from God knows where, are surrounding Flashlight so that no other bullet may reach him. Mere anarchy is loosed around the podium, but the Alpha guys stay very calm and completely purposeful.

“Hey, these Alpha guys know how to operate,” said Hap.

“Too bad they’re such pricks,” came a jokester’s voice.

The drama then seemed to devolve into pulsating patterns of light and color. Evidently, a Secret Service Alpha guy pushed all the cameramen back and for just a moment the world went all to blur. When it came back, a small knot of men is gathered around Flashlight who is supine, but trying to struggle to his feet. Archbishop Roberto Lopez is almost in his lap, that head with its queerly deflated look, as if it were a balloon and not a skull. The Secret Service guys are dancing around; then a medic comes atop the podium, and they bend to let him in. A few seconds later the world dissolves; this time it’s under the torrents of air that the standby medical chopper radiates as it settles with lazy urgency out of the sky. The camera shifts to it as paramedics and stretcher teams race over to Flashlight and the Alpha team. Screams, shouts, confusion. It reminded Nick of a pickup game of basketball, all frenzy and nonsense.

And then he had it, what was weird about the shooting.

“Could we go back to the hit?” he asked.

“What are you, a ghoul?”

“Come on, Hap, let me see the hit.”

There was some grumbling but Hap rewound the tape, then punched PLAY, and the drama reinvented itself up there on the screen, the lurch of the old man, the sudden, stunning, boltlike arrival of the bullet, the sleet of bone and tissue, and Nick was thinking about his own shooting.

I overcompensated, he thought. I knew the bullet, traveling downward, would drop farther. That’s the effect of the angle. So I overcompensated, missed high, and hit Myra. Now this Swagger, he knows shooting like he knows his own two hands and the smell of his own sweat. He knows where the bullet will strike. That means the bullet drift is going to be vertical. He’ll hit high or low on a vertical range; if he’s shooting at the president’s armpit, if the bullet goes too high it hits the president in the neck or head; if it’s too low it goes into his ribs or hip.

But this shooting error was lateral. It was on the same damn level as the president’s armpit, for the man was kneeling…but it was a lateral error, an aiming error, which had nothing to do with the shot’s most difficult aspect, the play of the downward angle over the long eight hundred yards to the target. Could a gust of wind have just nudged it off target?

He remembered that March 1 had been an unusually calm day, with the wind under five miles per hour. It was possible but not probable.

It suddenly occurred to Nick that the shooting error made no sense at all. He would shoot over the president, he would shoot below the president; he would not miss to the right. Not this boy.

Nick swallowed. He’d arrived at a place he didn’t want to be: it could only be that Bob Lee Swagger was shooting for the archbishop all the way.

And then he realized what bad news this was for everybody: currently the only theory available to unify the events was that that mean-ass, sullen, pissed-off Dixie whiteboy Swagger was shooting the president. It made sense. It held together – but only if Swagger were shooting for Flashlight.

If Swagger wasn’t shooting for Flashlight…a dizzying realm of possibility opened up.

Nick had a weird moment here, as his whole life traveled its fucked-up way before him and he suddenly saw that he was about to diverge from the path.

Because he now knew Swagger was innocent, and that the reason he saw compassion in the sniper’s eyes as he stood above him with the big Smith was because the sniper was still, by his own lights, a moral man, an honorable man – a man who did not shoot the innocent and Nick, stupid and bumbling, had been of the innocent.

“Nick?”

It was Howdy Duty.

“Nick, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to see me sometime today. All right?”

Oh, shit, thought Nick.

The cow was not frightened of Colonel Shreck.

Her eyes were placid and dull, though huge. There was something tenderly stupid in them.