Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

This hadn’t occurred to Swagger, and, in a second, he realized why.

“No possibility. Because whoever he was, he died the happiest man on earth. You could read it on his face. When the lighter flicked on, he knew he’d won. He’d done his job. I’d guess that job was destroying the evidence, and he knew also that Juba had not been taken. He was happy to face his god. You don’t see that much in the West. Then he was gone in flame. As to the implications, I don’t know. But I can read the signs for indicators, if you want.”

“That is exactly what we want, Sergeant Swagger.”

“Sure,” he said. “I didn’t get a clear look, and it was a little hot to be taking notes — the pen would have melted. Still, I think I got something. I was in a place I’d been before. I was in the shop of a dedicated shooter, and he was in the midst of, or possibly had finished, a serious project.”

“And that is?”

“He was trying to find a load.”

“The meaning evades us,” said Gold. “Can you be more specific? We are not NRA members.”

“Sure,” said Bob. “Most folks think shooting is divided into two components. You have a bullet, number one, which you put in a gun, number two. Pull the trigger, and a hole appears somewhere, wanted or not.”

“I take it there’s more.”

“A bit,” said Swagger.

“Is this going to be long and boring?” asked Cohen.

“I’ll certainly try to make it so, sir,” said Bob. “Turns out each gun — not each type of gun, but each individual gun off the assembly line — has peculiarities of construction: screw torque, variation in machine tool setting, metallic composition of barrel, precision of fit of moving parts, and on and on. This is where it can get really long and boring, Mr. Cohen, so I am cutting you some slack here.”

“You are a humanitarian,” said Cohen.

“All these little things affect accuracy. In most applications, it don’t matter. In most applications, you’re just trying to hit the target in the fat part — man, beast, or paper. In three applications, it does. Those would be hunting, benchrest shooting, and sniping. So people who do those things pay special attention to details.”

“Fascinating,” said Cohen, as his face said the opposite.

“What they have learned — and remember that the gun and its ballistics is one of the most studied, engineered areas in human behavior — is that these elements can make an immense difference in accuracy. In the rifle itself, it can be the barrel, the rifling in the barrel, the trigger pull, the fit of the stock to the action — all of these can make a difference in determining whether the rifle is just accurate enough, accurate, or superaccurate. Questions?”

The rabbis appeared to be paying attention but had no questions.

“But that’s even more true of the ammunition. Thus, what’s called reloading . It gives the shooter control over many more factors. He takes a spent shell, pops the spent primer, cleans the case. He reshapes it under pressure, primes it, puts a new and different kind and amount of powder into it, and loads a new and different type of bullet — same caliber, different shape, design, weight, material, whatever — and assembles it in a press. He documents all this carefully. It’s about recording each step in the process. Then he shoots it, usually in groups of five. He wants all five to go in one hole, or close enough to it. He very carefully documents the results of the shooting — that is, group size, response to wind, velocity, muzzle energy — and he compares it to factory ammo or, more likely, his other attempts. Maybe it’s better, maybe it’s not. The point of this trial-and-error process is that he is searching for a combination — it’s almost a musical thing, hunting for a chord — that gets the absolute most out of the rifle’s potential. Usually one load — a certain brand or make of shell, a certain ritual of preparation, a certain bullet weight, a certain bullet design, a certain powder, a certain amount of powder, a certain length of cartridge, a certain high degree of concentricity, and maybe half a dozen other empirical things — will produce the best load. That is the cartridge that meets its goal for accuracy, velocity, perhaps lack of muzzle flash, in combat considerations. Anyway, that would be his ideal, and it would be his round of choice. It would be significantly better than factory ammunition, across the board, for any usage.”

“And there is an industry that supports such behavior?” asked Gold.

“Yep. Chemical companies make dozens of different powders — different burning rates, different-shaped crystals, different fillers — while gun accessory companies make measuring devices, powder scales, reloading dies, primers, primer loaders, and bullet companies make different weights, shapes, interior structures, tips, composition materials. He’s just trying to find that right chord and build his harmony around it.”

“Superb,” said Cohen. “The Mozart of the sniper world. But do you also have a point?”

“Given that he had pounds and pounds of different kinds of smokeless powder, boxes and boxes of bullets, boxes signifying Wilson reloading dies, an arbor press for squishing all the stuff together, it seems to me he was doing a methodical search for a certain round for a certain task that would be far more efficient than anything he could obtain on the market.”

“He’s setting up for an extra-hard shot where maximum accuracy is mandatory?” said Gold.

“It gets worse,” said Swagger. “You haven’t asked about caliber. I am all but certain — remember, I was in Hell, and the Devil himself was trying to turn me into a marshmallow — that the bullets were of a diameter of three hundred and thirty-eight hundredths of an inch. This would mean the load in question was a caliber called the .338 Lapua Magnum. It’s currently the go-to sniper round in Afghanistan for long-distance situations — which are most situations in Afghanistan. In 2009, a British sniper named Craig Harrison used the .338 Lapua to hit the longest documented shot in history. He popped a Taliban machine gunner at over twenty-three hundred yards. That’s a mile and a half. That’s the point of the .338 Lapua: it lets you strike from a different time zone. So I would conclude that Juba is putting together a .338 Lapua Magnum load to put someone down from a long, long way out. He’s methodical, skillful, dedicated. He’s going about it the right way. However jazzed up his jihadi half is, his shooter half is professional, cool, cunning, taking no chances, no shortcuts. They’ve spent a lot of money and a lot of effort getting him exactly what he wants. There don’t seem to be no limit on the purse strings. My guess is, he’s got either a stolen or a recovered Accuracy International Magnum — the best sniper rifle in the world — and all the gadgets to support it. All that stuff had to be somehow gotten and smuggled into Syria. So you’re looking at a major effort by someone’s intelligence agency. Only one conclusion: he’s going after a high-value target.”

“This news is extremely bad,” said Gold.

“One small advantage we may have: the distance of the range he was practicing on was only 1,023 yards, if I recall. There’s not really any advantage to the .338 Lapua over any one of a dozen other long-range cartridges at 1,023. The point of the Lapua is the long, long shot. No point in going to all the trouble they’ve gone to if it wasn’t a long one they were planning. So my thought is, he ain’t done. He’ll have to find somewhere to test his stuff out to Harrison’s range, another thousand yards or so. He’ll need to have made that shot a hundred times in practice before the real thing. So maybe that gives us a little time. He’s got to find someplace to shoot where the distance, the climate, the wind patterns, the weather all match up with his target zone. But it’s taken him a bit of time — we don’t know where in his program he is — to get to 1,023. If he’s planning to take someone further, he’s got to move on to that next stage and become friends with it. Seems like in Syria there wouldn’t be too much trouble finding fifteen hundred or two thousand yards to go shooting.”