Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

He held it, pressed the HOME button. It blinked awake and asked him for the code behind which lay all its treasures. Expensively, this had been found. He keyed it in and immediately emails came up, not many of late, but a few, saying such things as “Can’t wait to hear your stories, buddy” and “SE Asia! Now, that ’s for the man who’s done everything!” and “Have fun, pal, but I wouldn’t go anywhere that didn’t have Magic Fingers in the motel rooms.”

Juba only went to the icon page and knew exactly where to look. His finger hit the one that said FirstShot, the icon a tiny bull’s-eye.

FirstShot came up, the menu offering him a selection of previously installed load choices, each one of which Waters had run through the program in his search for a winning handload for the matches. The newer were Juba’s experimental loads, the last the load he had selected, simply marked as #12. He clicked on it.

The number 12 load page came up, everything entered. It displayed his previous selections: bullet brand, bullet weight, bullet length, velocity, twist rate of barrel, height of scope above barrel, all the aspects of the bullet that could determine, support, or reduce its accuracy. Additionally, the point of zero was registered, for it would be the baseline off of which all further computations would be calculated. He had selected fifteen hundred yards for zero, verified that synchronization among rifle, scope, and load at that range in his last session.

He poked it again, and a blank menu called CONDITIONS arrived, and this is where the weather aspects under which the shot would be taken were factored in. But it wasn’t necessary to laboriously measure by Kestrel Pocket Weather Meter and enter them, one at a time. The genius of the FirstShot program is that pressing the GET CONDITIONS button at the bottom of the screen, the machine downloaded them from the U.S. Weather Service. Thus, in a second he learned, watching these numbers deploy in their slots, that it was 74 degrees Fahrenheit, with a southwest wind of 4 to 8 miles per hour, the humidity was 51 percent, the sky was generally sunny (18 percent, or intermittent, cloud cover), the altitude 1,457 feet above sea level. All these figures would be factored into the algorithm the little genius inside the box was about to solve in nanotime.

He pressed CALCULATE. Magically, a table rose before him on the screen. The machine decreed the amount in minutes of angle by which the scope had to be moved off its fifteen-hundred-yard zero to put the crosshairs on the target in these conditions. It was indexed by distance. He surfed the lengthy listing via the left-hand distance column until he got to the nearly exact value. It was 1,845 yards. Moving his eye right to left, he came to the elevation column. It read 13 MOA. Since each of his clicks was worth a half of an arcminute, he multiplied by two to come up with the number 26. He carefully turned the elevation knob atop the scope up 26 clicks. In the next column, the windage was listed; it gave him 4 arcminutes left. Factoring 4 times 2 equals 8, he cranked the windage knob eight snicks left on Herrs Schmidt and Bender’s magical tube.

That would do it. Now he found another turret on the tube and illuminated the red dot at the center of the—

His phone rang.

“Yes?”

“Juba, he’s up. Confused. Just discovered the cuffs. Seems to think he can pull his way free.”

“I’ll spare him his effort shortly. You must watch and report to me on the impact of the shot if I miss so that I can make the corrections.”

“I will.”

“I am going to fire now.”

The most sophisticated ballistic software program in the world is of no use if the shooter lacks technique. Juba did not. It’s a thing acquired over long years of practice or, instantaneously, by genius. He had both.

The rifle, solid on its Atlas bipod, came to his shoulder. Important: all shoulder must touch flat and consistent against the crescent of the butt. Without thought, Juba did this. He eased his thumb through the thumbhole, came around with his hand to place his remaining four fingers and as much palm as possible on the grip itself, as well as applying rearward pressure, tightening it to shoulder. The adjustable comb was set to support his cheek weld precisely, given the length of his neck, and, laying his cheek upon it, positioned his eye instantly to the center of the scope. He anchored his left, supporting hand over the grip, pressuring it downward toward the table. He had made himself as solid as the inevitable caliphate of the future.

The world of twenty-five magnifications, centered by a red glowing dot, yielded amazing resolution, though still tiny. It was indeed a tiny world, everything small and perfect. Clear and stable, nevertheless it offered up a man exploring his new reality. Dressed in surgical scrubs, he pulled this way and that against a post. It did not budge. Juba watched as he yelled to off-scope witnesses and grew agitated when they clearly did not respond with anything except indifference. He had unruly hair and a prophet’s beard. He was agitated — and who would not be, going to sleep among garbage cans and in dog shit and awaking in Paradise chained to a stake, offered up for burning.

Behold man: he tugged, he screamed, he addressed God. He was enraged one second, in tears the next, perhaps resigned at the end.

Juba’s heart slowed, and between the beats his fingertip played God by moving the trigger straight back two millimeters. The rifle barked and leapt, a heavy and powerful beast, pushing mightily in its fraction of a second of energy release as its primer fired its powder, which obediently alchemized into an expanding pulse of energy and sent its missile down the launch tube. Its report was muted by the Thunder Beast suppressor screwed to the barrel, tricking its escaping gases to take the long way into the atmosphere and spreading the considerably diminished sound signature over a broad, untraceable area. The rifle rose an inch or two off the legs of its bipod, settled down, and, through this action cycle, Juba’s finger remained stoically against the trigger, pinning it. Little air came into or out of his lungs, his heart was still, his muscles tight, his cheek steady upon the stock.

When the tiny world settled again, and the time in flight had expired, he made out a wisp of dust and the man, having turned at the sharp disturbance in the soil, trying to imagine what had caused such an occurrence.

His phone rang.

“A miss. I would say by a good twenty-five yards. The line to him seemed right.”

“Yes,” said Juba.

He was annoyed. This was the first test at distance, and why had the device not worked as it was supposed to?

He broke his position on the rifle, put his fingers to the elevation knob, calculated quickly that he was at least a full arcminute off, and therefore clicked in the appropriate improvement. One arcminute: two clicks.

He worked the bolt, gently ejecting the spent cartridge case, shoved the bolt forward and locked it down, thereby reloading and cocking. He assumed the same careful position, and when it was time, and he had settled into stilled perfection, his finger rewarded him with a shot.

The same ceremony of recoil and recovery through time in flight. He waited for everything to settle and the phone to ring. He saw dust at the target, roiling and buzzing, eventually clearing to reveal the man, untouched.

“Just a nick off. Hit near his feet. Maybe a whisper to the left.”

“Yes, yes,” said Juba, confident that he had it now.

He made adjustments: one click of elevation up, one click of windage to the left.

Into position, rifle steady, on scope.

And there he was, tiny, human, frail, doomed and knowing it, pulling hard against the stake, his face raised to God for mercy or maybe forgiveness. For this man, the time was now, the place was here, and the next world, whichever it may be, beckoned.