Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

You dig a fired.308 bullet out of the sand, scored with the imprint of a bore, but otherwise pristine and possessing the same ballistic integrity as a new bullet. You can reload that.308 bullet into a.300 H & H Magnum shell, a much longer shell with a much greater powder capacity and therefore a much longer range. You’d have to protect the bullet somehow, and this puzzled him, until he remembered an old technique called paper-patching, by which a fellow could wrap a bullet in wet paper before he loaded it on a shell; the paper would harden and form a sort of protective sheath. The trick was, you had to fire it down a slightly larger bore, maybe a.318. But even that was so simple: rebarrel the rifle with a custom bore, and refire Bob’s bullet down the bore. The paper patching protects the ballistic signature; then burns off in the atmosphere; Bob’s bullet, fired from this other rifle, arrives to do its terrible damage.

Oh, you were a smart boy, he thought.

But…if you were so smart, how come I had to bird-dog it out for you? I was your legs, wasn’t I? That was part of it. I wasn’t just there to be used as a dupe but I did the thinking, the seeing, the planning. Why? Why couldn’t you do it? Why couldn’t you go to the sites yourself and see what I saw?

One day he drove to Tucson, and concealed behind his new beard and sunglasses, stopped in a rummy old Gun and Pawn store in the Mexican section of the town. Didn’t even look at the rifles that were on the wall, but went on and found in the back, as usually these places have, a big pile of old gun magazines. Guns & Ammo and Shooting Times , a long though tattered run of The American Rifleman . The mags were of little use to him, being far too full of pictures of new guns. But there was one that was useful: Accuracy Shooting , which was about benchrest shooting, those boring technocrats who worked on rifles so fine they could throw bullets in the same hole all day long. He himself had subscribed since the late seventies. But these were earlier, from the mid-sixties.

Benchresting was the R & D lab of all shooting; if you were at all serious about the game, you had to bank your time at the loading bench and the shooting bench; all other things stemmed from it. If his boy learned his stuff anywhere, he learned it in benchresting. The magazine, he learned, had begun as the newsletter of the first American benchrest shooter’s club, which started up in the early fifties in upstate New York, following on the work of men like Warren Page, Harvey Donaldson and P. O. Ackley in the twenties and thirties. They were loaded with tabular matter, with long and dreary accounts of shooting matches of years ago, obscure names of great shooters and obsolete calibers like the.222½ and the 7 × 61 Sharpe and Hart.

He bought them all and that night he began to read them. When he’d read them all, he found more, and read them too. He haunted the secondhand shops, looking for old copies. When he found them, he read them, looking for something but what it was, he couldn’t say.

I’ll find you, you old bastard, he thought, for he assumed his quarry was old. Only old men could shoot like that, for it’s a dying skill, not practiced by the young much; there was only one younger man who could have made that shot, but he was an illusion. Bob tried to put it out of his mind, because it spoiled things for him.

It’s not T. Solaratov, he said to himself. It’s not. It can’t be.

In the evenings they made love. They made love for hours. Sometimes he felt like a piston that just kept on going.

And finally, several times, after he’d fallen through the last of his floors and lay there as if every atom in his body was at rest, he felt himself yielding to the fatigue. He couldn’t move a thing.

“God,” she said. “You must have saved up all that time at Walden Pond.”

He snorted.

“I seem to be doing okay.”

“I’ll say,” she said.

They lay there, breathing their way back to earth.

The terror of her was that she carried in her the seed of possibility. In her, he saw an alternate life. It occurred to him that he didn’t have to live in solitude, hating the world, and that he didn’t have to give himself to his rifles, like some kind of mad Jesuit. Didn’t have to live in a little trailer off in the misty mountains, and face each visitor with mistrust.

The world was full of things that could be. He had a flash of them together somewhere, just enjoying each other, no complications. Somehow it had to do with water; he saw them at a beach, maybe Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, or maybe outside Biloxi or Galveston or some such; anyway, sand, water, sun, and nothing else in the world.

“What are you thinking of?” she asked. “You almost had a smile on your face. What was it?”

He knew if he told her he was lost. There would be no turning back from the softness. He lay there and the temptation to give in rose and rose in him. He wanted to let it swallow him up. He could feel himself disappearing in the wanting.

“Something from the Marines.”

“That’s a lie,” she said.

“Sure. I was thinking how much I like this. It’s a life I could love. But I have to tell you square-up: maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it costs me too much or gives me too much to hold on to. I have to be able to let go of things. It’s like I’m bargaining; I have to be able to walk away from the deal at any time, elsewise I can never win. I have to be willing to die at any time, or I can’t ever win. Any man in a war will tell you that; you must be willing to give up your life at any chance. If you’re thinking about what’s at home, you lose your edge.”

She looked at him with those gray, calm eyes.

“I was right. I knew. Give me a taste. Then pull away. Go off on your crusade.” She almost laughed. “I wish I could hate you, Bob. You are a true and deep son of a bitch. But hating you would be like hating the weather. No point to it at all.”

“I’m sorry. There was never a better time. It was the best. It was special. Another time or two and I’d never leave.”

“No. That’s a lie. You’d leave. I know your type. You always leave.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I’d leave. I have to.”

She found this one a laugh.

“You are a bastard.”

Bob nodded. Not much passed on his grave face.

“When?”

“I think it has to be tomorrow.”

“So soon?”

“Yeah. It’s time. I’ve got some ideas. I’ve got something of a plan, even.”

“I just never thought it would be so soon.”

“The sooner I leave, the sooner I come back.”

“You’re lying again, Bob. You’re not coming back. You’ll be dead in a week.”

“More than likely,” he said. “It’s a shaky plan. But it’s the only one I could come up with. But first, I’ve got a couple of things to do.”

“And what’re they?” she said, trying to show no pain.

“I’ve got to dig up my cache in the mountains where I’ve got thirty thousand dollars and some guns stashed, so I can pay my own way and defend myself. And then,” he said, “I’ve got to bury my dog.”

Shreck never walked through doors; he exploded through them like a grenade, blowing them nearly off their hinges as he blasted through, bent forward, his gait rock-steady and determined.

Dobbler looked up at the noise, and Shreck was already on him, having crossed the ten feet from threshold to desk front in about a half a second and no more than two paces.

“Colonel Shreck, I – ”

Feeling rousted as if by a bull on a snap inspection, Dobbler made a clumsy attempt to rise but the stern man motioned him down impatiently.