Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

“Which brings us at long last,” said Gold, “to the incident of the bus.”

Outside Tel Aviv

June 15, 2013

The old Arab’s pony pulled his cart through the streets of Herzliya, a leafy suburb of well-appointed, well-landscaped houses, as well as luxury high-rises with ocean views, for the Israeli professional classes. Many lawyers, many engineers, many dentists, many doctors lived here, people far insulated from war and want and the anger of the Islamic entities. Twice the cart had been stopped by police patrols, and the old man offered to give them some of the fruit he had left over. They laughed, and one young policeman took a ripe banana. They checked his papers, checked his cart, warned him not to be out so late, and sent him on his way.

Somewhere between Yefet Street and Harmony Cove, the wagon drifted wide until it almost reached the sidewalk, and there a shadowy figure slipped off the vehicle’s underbelly, rolled swiftly to a thicket of bushes, and slid deep into them. The wagon continued its meandering ways to a central road, which took it out of Herzliya, then it disappeared into the maze of streets in the city’s Arab section.

The man who had slipped out lay flat in the brush for a good hour, not moving. Patience in these matters was everything. Possibly this site had been discovered. Perhaps it was an elaborate Israeli ruse, and perhaps capture and interrogation and ultimately surrender — no one held out forever — lay ahead. Having penetrated the Zionist homeland, he was risking everything, knowing himself to be a high-priority target.

But nothing happened. No commandos swept in for the arrest. Once or twice, late-returning citizens drove by, one in a BMW, the other in a Mercedes. He heard car doors slam, and a wife yell at a husband. But that was all.

When at last he felt secure, he slid back farther into the undergrowth. He knew the layout only from photos and diagrams. As usual, design diverged considerably from reality. The night was darker, the trees thicker, the turf spongier, the night smell of shrubbery and the sea more intense. His fingers probed, and for a second he experienced a whisper of panic. Suppose it wasn’t here? Suppose he couldn’t find it? Suppose he failed? Suppose—

But the supposition exercise became moot in the next second as his fingers came across, an inch or so under some low accumulation of loose dirt, the heavy canvas of a gun case. He pulled, the thing emerged, and he drew it to him.

Without needing to see, he unzipped the canvas bag and removed the object it concealed and protected. His fingers closed on the familiar configuration of the Russian-designed Dragunov sniper rifle, a semi-automatic beast that shot the old tsarist 7.62×54R rounds, same as they had used in the Russo-Japanese War of a hundred-odd years ago. He knew it as well as one could know a thing. He had always loved the Dragon, from his first glimpse many years ago, such an improvement over the claptrap junkiness of the AK-47.

This Dragon, one of his best, was purely a parts gun, assembled from recovered battlefield castoffs. It had a Romanian receiver, a Polish stock, and a Russian barrel. An irony utterly lost on him was that it was universally called the Dragon, but its naming had nothing to do with that mythical beast. It was simply prosaic Russian policy to designate firearms by their designer’s name, and the designer happened to be named Dragunov. This gun was highly tuned for accuracy, with minute filing of the trigger sear arrangements, the springs cut to a minimum for less vibration, the barrel cleansed to the atomic level, all of it lovingly reassembled, each screw torqued to the appropriate weight for maximum accuracy. It was perfect and it was untraceable and, therefore, expendable.

The scope, called a PSO-1, was Russian, of course, of highest optical quality. It was affixed to the rifle by a clamp bolted to the side of the receiver, which held it, solidly and perfectly, over the piece, perfectly vectored to his dominant eye when he was in the prone position. He slid the rifle to his body, his right hand easing onto the familiar contours of the pistol grip, the buttstock tight, hard, without mercy, against the pocket of his shoulder, the support arm running directly under the rifle, jutting upward at the elbow so that the hand could grasp the wooden forestock, but not tightly, for a shooter’s enthusiasm could compress the forestock so that it touched the free-floating barrel and thus bring imperfection to the system. He twisted, tested, squirmed, and wiggled, as any shooter will do, building the perfect position, so that the weapon was supported off bone, not muscle, and the legs splayed behind him, in full contact with the support of the planet itself. He lifted the rifle to his eyes from the ground a dozen times just to make sure he’d found his natural point of aim. He tested the electronics of the scope, switching them on to see the reticle etched in glowing red against the night, the chevron denoting point of impact, the crude range finder, an inverted arc in the right-hand quadrant, which denoted the height of a six-foot-tall man at eight ascending ranges, unnecessary to him because he’d already zeroed the chevron to two hundred and thirty-four meters, appropriate to task.

Now he attached the suppressor. Another battlefield pickup, possibly found still screwed to the muzzle of a marine M40 destroyed along with its owner in a roadside bombing and salvaged for use against its inventors. It was a well-machined tube that was something like a nautilus shell, encasing a series of chambers that ran its eight-inch length, each chamber leading to the next by a small orifice. The gases released by the shot emerged at supersonic speed from the muzzle but expanded into the surrounding tube, and raced, chamber to chamber, through the apparatus, so when they emerged at the end of the trip, they had lost most of their energy. The result could be measured in decibels by a sophisticated electronic device, but the number meant nothing. What mattered was that the blast of the rifle was reduced, not to the pfft! so beloved of the movies but a generic snap, like that of a door closing stoutly, not merely quiet but so diffused it was impossible to track. A small-arms genius somewhere in the Islamic State apparatus had machined a kind of linking device that united the rifle and the suppressor, which bore the name Gemtech.

That appliance threaded and screwed tight, he reached back to the gun case, found a zipper denoting a pouch, unzipped. And removed three ten-round magazines with the Bulgarian yellow-tipped heavy ball. He left nothing to chance. Each of the thirty rounds was selected from a larger cache of them, all weighed and measured to exact sameness, each tested for runout and found to have come out of the manufacturing process with perfect circularity. No group of mass-produced cartridges could be more accurate. He laid two magazines under his right hand so they’d be easy to access. The third he placed into the magazine well, rotated it into the gun until it clicked and was stable, then drew back the bolt and eased it forward, setting shell in chamber and firing pin at full cock. He was as ready as he could be.

He tried to relax, letting his body settle, letting his lungs oxygenate, letting his heart still. The moral aspects of that which he was about to do had been utterly replaced by the technical aspects. Before it was anything else, and after it was everything else, it was a pure shooting exercise, and he knew that Allah had put him on the planet to shoot infidels, he knew that his mission was blessed.

He prayed himself toward the nullity of complete relaxation and concentration, where he wanted his mind to be. Praise be to Allah, the wise, the benevolent, the merciful. Praise be to He who watches over and favors His people so that they will always be under His protection no matter the ordeal. Praise be to the mission to which He has assigned me through his mullahs. Praise be to my training, my experience, my will, and my belief in Allah. Praise be to them all. And praise be that which is about to happen, and may its purpose be achieved.