Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

Jorge had trouble with “gauche,” but Juba didn’t care. Menendez handed him the gun.

It was an AK-74, but plated in gold. It was also encrusted with diamonds and rubies in a somewhat primitive array along the receiver, as if dribbled into place by a child. It glittered with surreal brilliance, the two themes — lethality and decadent bad taste — making even less sense than the mistranslated word.

“It was presented to me by my former competitors, now vassals, when my absorption of their organizations became complete. It is an object of veneration, respect, and, I suppose, fear. The gems, by the way, are real, and the gold is indeed twenty-four karat. Estimated value: about three million dollars. A fighter like you would think, what a waste of rifle! A connoisseur like me would think, what a waste of three million in diamonds! But to the men who gave it to me, it had real meaning, and, thus, I keep it, enjoying it both literally and ironically.”

This made no sense whatsoever to Juba, but much of what the slick and sophisticated Menendez said made no sense. He did get that it was in some sense special.

“Magnificent,” he said. “But, then, I would expect no less from a man of such accomplishment.”

“Yes, yes, appreciated. But I know you yearn to see the shop we have built and equipped for your work and the ranges to which you will have access. But first”—he gestured emphatically—“this fellow will be seen lurking about. He is my body man, my most trusted bodyguard, my assistant, a very large part of what I do and how I do it.”

A lithe but powerfully built man appeared at a door, advanced to Menendez, and bowed. Like the others, his duty uniform was a well-fitted black suit; like the others, a radio wire ran to his ears; like the others, he crackled with messages of skill and intensity; but, unlike the others, he was wearing a tightly fitted black hood, its tightness more akin to a sock than a hood. Only his eyes showed.

“As a part of his commitment to his craft, Señor La Culebra prefers to keep his face mysterious. He values his anonymity. He will always see you before you see him. He has the gift of cunning, stealth, and grace. He would have made an extraordinary sniper, but his hunger is to kill at more intimate levels, with the blade, at which he excels. His skill level is perhaps the world’s most dangerous. Policemen, detectives, journalists, competitors — they have all been awakened by the hiss of their own throat being cut. His very presence at my shoulder is an extraordinary asset when I am in meeting with my peers. Of course, when I meet with, say, my fellow suburban Los Angeles Subaru dealers and Carl’s Jr. franchise holders, I leave him in the car, behind tinted glass. He is not for the bourgeois.”

“My respects to such a talented man,” said Juba, nodding in greeting.

The hooded man nodded back, his eyes intense behind the slits of the hood.

That ceremony completed, Menendez led Juba first to a bedroom — nice, but Juba had no interest in bedrooms — and laid out eating arrangements, as well as laundry and maid service, and then out a back entrance, through a garden, across a stable yard, where Mexican boys could be seen exercising and otherwise caring for some beautiful horses, and finally to a small, corrugated prefab cottage, clearly temporary.

“Sir,” said Menendez. “To your liking, I hope. If not, corrections will be made.”

Juba took the key and entered.

It appeared perfect. Every item he ordered was displayed on a heavy worktable against the wall. He went quickly to the heart of it, the yellow packaging from L.E. Wilson, and saw several containers of neck bushings that ran from .366 to .368, as well as the crucial boxes containing neck sizer and bullet seater. Another box contained a Whidden bullet-pointing die, to sharpen the tips of the missiles themselves, and they were close by, boxes of Match bullets from Sierra, Nosler, Hornady, and other makers, all .338 Match grade. Next to the bench was packaging from Oehler, signifying a high-grade chronograph, to measure velocity. And an iPhone 8, lying on the bench. Seemingly innocuous, it had been programmed by its original owner with data onto a ballistic app, the Hawkins Ballistics FirstShot software, which offered instant solutions to the equations that ruled the universe of long-range. Canisters of smokeless powder, bright as pennants leading the Saracen army, stood on higher shelves, and a brand-new arbor press, as well as boxes of Federal 215M large-rifle Magnum primers, chamfer tools for both neck and primer hole, seven reloading manuals — all had been placed around the central icon in what was almost a crèche of infidel devotion.

And its icon was a rifle.

Eighth-floor conference room, Zombieland

The zombies were hungry. Pink-faced, blue-suited, white-shirted, red-tied — they sat around the conference room table, champing their jaws, screaming for flesh, starved for protein to be washed down by blood.

They were the creatures Bob had always hated. So far away from it, so sure, so absolute, so magnificent, so clean of fingernail: who could not hate them? If you lived behind wires and sandbags, and shit in a hole and got shot at a lot, it was mandatory to hate zombies — not these particular ones but zombies as a class. Yet where would the world be without its zombies?

“All right, Nick,” said the head zombie, “who, what is, and why should we care about a Brian A. Waters of Albuquerque, New Mexico, who has no record and no footprint, and, by all accounts, is a pleasant, accomplished, well-respected fellow?”

“Mr. Gold, would you speak to that?” Nick said, then checked for zombies who had trouble keeping up. “Swagger found Brian Waters, but Mr. Gold identified him as only a theoretical possibility, so Swagger worked off that, isn’t that right, Bob?”

“Completely,” said Bob.

Gold was not a zombie. Somehow being an Israeli meant you could never be a zombie. Swagger wasn’t sure by what principle this was, but it was a principle nevertheless, perhaps having to do with all the shit they’d been through, their tenuous grasp of survival, and perhaps most of all the subtle intensity that underlay the Israeli faces, as opposed to the theatricality of these American intelligence and enforcement executives.

“Gentlemen,” said Gold, “it has to do, eschatologically, with the different meanings of terror in the Middle East and here in the West. In the Middle East, terror is force. It is about killing lots of people as efficiently as possible. In the West, terror is metaphor. This is a feature of asymmetrical warfare at its purest. It is not the act itself, tragic though it may be, but the resonance of that act in the public imagination. The West cannot be destroyed through numbers; it must be destroyed through its imagination. Its capacity to fight will not be eliminated, but its will to fight can be, and that is the object.

“Thus, this operation against the United States, extravagantly budgeted, extravagantly planned, extravagantly slow in gestation, is not merely about killing a certain high-value target. It is about subverting via its brutal didacticism. It means to be ‘a Big Event,’ in the way the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a Big Event. It means to resonate for decades, to haunt and cripple and dispirit. In order to do that, its execution is not enough. It must have arrived caparisoned in legend, and it must reveal a perpetrator of legendary proportions.”

“A patsy, is that what you mean?” asked zombie 4.

“Exactly,” said Gold.

“How does Mossad see it accomplishing this goal?”

“It’s not merely that the sniper kills. It’s that the blame is put upon a certain figure, and that figure must have status and meaning of disturbing weight.”