Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

“And I’m guessing there’s no further intercept data on that phone. Surely Juba would be smart enough to destroy it.”

“That’s correct.”

“And there’s no intercept intelligence from the phones or emails to Akim’s parents or any of the seven friends we’ve identified?”

“Nothing, chief.”

“Mr. Gold, do you think he’ll split up from the kid? He’s used to operating alone.”

“He’s used to shooting alone. He’s used to escaping alone. But in all his operations, even going back to his housecleaning for Assam’s henchmen, he was serviced, transported, and sustained by an in-place network. He is used to having a chaperone. He is a star, in other words, and is used to people doing things for him. He’s the artist, he has to be free to create.”

“He sounds more like a director than a sniper,” said Nick, but ‘Director’ had a different meaning to the staff than to movie-crazed Nick, so nobody laughed.

“I believe he already has a new network in place and will work quickly to find it,” continued Gold. “This situation would be among the eventualities he planned for. As I see this, I think he has to go from network to network to keep advancing. Might I suggest you assign someone to find organizations capable of sustaining him over the next month or two, getting him what he needs, transporting him, assisting him in his movements and his logistical needs. I could guess, furthermore, that it will be a criminal organization, but it won’t be radically Islamic in tone or tendency.”

“Yeah, good,” said Nick. “And that’s also more indication of the money behind this op. If he’s got a criminal organization helping him, that kind of work doesn’t come cheap.”

Gold nodded.

“I’ll forward a memo to our gang intelligence people to be on the lookout for any kind of pattern of unusual activity.”

“I agree.”

“Meanwhile, we wait. But we have to anticipate. Mr. Swagger, what’re your thoughts?”

“Well, gun stuff, for one,” said Swagger. “I believe he’s prepping up a .338 Lapua Magnum shot. Those rifles are damned expensive, and they’re prized by people with passionate urges to shoot from a long way out. It’s a small community. Someone — me, I guess — ought to canvass it and see if anything has happened and left tracks in that community.

“I also — not sure of the legality here — but it’s a community serviced by just a few retail outfits, some mail order only, some brick-and-mortar, and the gear is very specific, very well made, very expensive, mostly from specialized machine shops. He — or somebody — would have to make some purchases to get him set up. Can we monitor or question those limited outlets, again looking for unusual patterns? Also, there’s a series of competitions where fellows shoot over a mile. I don’t think he’ll be competing, but those boys might have picked something up — rumors, odd patterns of purchase, questions coming in from an odd source, stuff like that. It could all lead us to Juba through a different route.”

“That’s good. Don’t you think that’s good, Mr. Gold?”

“I do, yes.”

“Other than that,” Swagger continued, “I remember that Mrs. McDowell said he was not a great one for improvising. So I think it’s fair to assume that now that he’s on the run, he’ll try to get back to his plan as quickly as possible. He only knows we know about him, but he has no idea the extent to which we’ve penetrated. He will get back on schedule.”

“Okay, lay out the schedule. As you see it.”

“I believe he has to find an area with at least a mile of clear space to get zeroed in. He has to work with his reloading program until he’s satisfied he’s found a load that will get him on target from the appropriate distance with the appropriate killing velocity still left in the bullet. He’s got to shoot and score five hundred times so he’s comfortable. I also think at a certain point he’ll move on to living targets. He’ll want to see what the bullet does. He might find an accurate load and bullet, but not be pleased with its penetration and expansion powers, and know, from that, that if he don’t hit heart or lung, the boy he’s shooting at will probably survive. So he’s got to have a bullet that deforms or mushrooms or bursts into splinters and cuts everything to ribbons. No point coming all this way, spending all this money, time, and energy, only to knock whoever-it-is down for a two-day stay in the hospital. He’s got to know he’s got a one-shot kill package. So he’ll shoot at something alive from this distance, and somehow we might be able to connect by finding such a site.”

“Satellite recon, as with Mr. Gold’s operation in Israel, would seem in order,” said Nick. “Unfortunately, the United States is a lot bigger than southern Syria, so we can’t just send the drones and satellites out. Can you put together for me a profile of what he’d need? Then we can task a recon satellite to look for it. Or maybe we have computer programs that can do such a thing.”

“Yep.”

“I’m going to hook you up with a Cyber Division hotshot we have named Jeff Neill. Lots of big-case experience. Maybe if you tell him what you need, he’ll be able to put something together that could facilitate finding it fast.”

“Now we’re perking,” said Swagger.

“Chandler?”

“Well, we’re not all drones and boy-genius hackers. Manhunt principles: flood the world with photos of quarry, run commo intercepts on likely allies, find a track, then raid. That’s how they’ve done it since Rome, and it’s worked before.”

“Sure, I agree, bu—”

Her phone rang.

“Detroit Metro, Homicide,” she said, looking at the dial.

“Take it,” said Nick.

The crime scene was indeed a crime scene: standard urban tragedy, case number 1,708,887. Bodies, blood in lakes and tributaries, the shooter’s progress written in the trail of shotgun shells he left as he took out all living things that crossed his path. Style points for the guy with the stick in his eye — the cops had never seen that and thought it was pretty funny — and the poor woman, so pulped her face looked like it had been taken over by malignancy. That, under the mashed and merged features, she still breathed lowered the score a bit, but a special bonus had to be awarded for the twisted false teeth in the blood.

“You’ve seen this shit before?” Nick asked the boss detective. “What are you getting?”

“Out-of-towners. No Detroit crew would hit this house. It’s a Black Pagans franchise, and the Pagans are the biggest, toughest gang in the city. They’ve got about eighty percent of the hard trade. Hard being Motownese for heroin. So if you hit them, they will go medieval on your ass and wipe out all the living generations of your family. If your parents are dead, they’ll dig them up and kill them all over again. Whoever did this didn’t give a shit about the Pagans.”

“What do you make of the shooting?” Bob asked the detective.

“It got the job done.”

“No, I mean as skill.”

“High-quality. The Pagans and their competitors, all four of them still alive, aren’t known for their finesse. That’s why so many innocent bystanders go down when they’re settling scores. But this shooter put all his blasts into kill zones. The first shot was about forty feet, dead center to the chest, and it had to be made fast. He came around the door low on Reggie, put one into his knee, to bring him under the table, then the other into his balls. A fourth shot, close-range, finished him. Muzzle distance: zero feet. Ejected shells were all twelve-gauge double-aught Remington. We also found an empty box of shells in Reggie’s room, so presumably one of the bad guys filled his pockets.”