Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

“At least it ain’t a circus,” said Bob.

“Their plan is discretion, not a show of force,” said Nick. “Chandler, how are you doing back there? Okay?” She was alone in the backseat.

“I’m fine,” she said. “No State cops are asking me out for a drink.”

Around this tiny convoy, the mild and pleasant streets of the Kansas city passed, and Bob for some reason kept his scan running hard, his concentration cranked up to eleven. Of course he had no firearm, so what good would it have done if he’d spotted anything anyway?

“Okay?” asked Nick. “We’ll catch him after testimony. He’ll have thought about it. He’ll see what being a stand-up guy will cost him and he’ll come home to us.”

“Hope you’re right,” said Bob, eyes catching on the sudden spurt of a Dodge Charger, but it signaled, then turned left, as it passed the Marshals’ vehicle.

“He’s a kid,” said Chandler. “Behind the bravado, he’s scared and fragile. Plus, he misses his mom. He’ll see the light.”

The courthouse was a New Deal monolith, all vertical lines and right angles, art moderne by way of a let’s-build-shit-to-get-the-economy-going zeitgeist. It was built to withstand tornados and angry peasants with pitchforks and torches. The Marshals’ SUV pulled through the gate, obediently opened by a guard, eased into the lot, and pulled up to the curb, which accessed the six broad stairs, which, in turn, accessed the double-wide brass doors. Two more Marshals stood at the doorway, like sentinels. So much drama.

Nick parked in a precleared nearby space, and the cop car closed the gap on the SUV, nudging up to it, fender to fender.

As he exited, Bob scanned for threat. Nothing, no movement, no parked cars on the street, no suspicious traffic on 4th Street. Just America: trees, sunlight, a bit of a breeze, a few folks across the street, meandering their way through errands and visits, nobody paying any attention to anybody’s business but their own. Swagger did notice one tall structure on the horizon, the dome of a church or some kind of sacred structure, off to the northwest, three hundred or so yards away. He marked it, but it was too far for his eyes to pick out details. It occurred to him that he should have had binoculars, but he also should have had a pistol, earphones, and a link to the ’Net, body armor and more comfortable shoes, and been twenty years younger.

The FBI folks reached the SUV, which had remained closed until they got there. Now the front door opened, a large man in a blazer emerged, miced and phoned up, Sig bulging over his right kidney, regulation-issue crew cut, and, like Bob, did his own threat scan. Satisfied, he nodded, and the back door opened.

Scrawny Jared got out, the puppy at the center of all this arranging. He was dressed as if for his English class at Princeton, in jeans, sneaks, and a sweater, sleeves rolled up. No cuffs, no shackles, since for this part of the operation he was a cooperating witness, not a felon. He had a pair of wire-rimmed glasses on, and he seemed like a feral beatnik cat next to the two Marshals, who quickly fell in beside him. In comparison to his boho insouciance, they were like Kansas football coaches. He did not look at, nor did he receive any acknowledgment from, the FBI party that waited for him to walk up the stairs and fell in behind him.

The stairs were gentle in incline, low in height, broad in depth, and ceremonial in execution. Everybody covered them easily, and up the party of six went.

Okay, on Fourth Street,” said Alberto. “You should have them any second.”

Juba gave the focus ring of the Leupold a last tweak, and it brought the scene into startling clarity, much bigger, because he was so used to tiny dot-like targets at over a mile through the Schmidt & Bender 25×. Now it seemed like a movie, blazing with color, crisp to the edges of the frame, and he saw the steps, the terrace up top, the two Marshals flanking the doors, the ornate bas-relief pictographs of Labor and the Eternal Prairie etched lovingly into the building’s walls seventy-odd years ago.

“Okay, on-site,” said Alberto. “Do you have them?”

“I do. Now, shut up,” commanded Juba. “Wait for my command.”

He didn’t care to track them, preferring to let them rise as they ascended the steps into his crosshairs.

At the bottom of the perfect circle that was his field of vision, he could see motion: heads, as the party assembled itself outside the black vehicle. It seemed to take some time, as if it were a parade being set up, not a mere trudge to an appointment. But finally they arranged themselves as they preferred and they began the climb.

Three in front, three in back, the target obviously in the middle of the first rank. They moved without hurry or ceremony, totally unaware they were being observed by the predator from afar, not even in step or cadence, just an unruly batch of people heading inside.

“Now!” said Juba.

Somewhere someone pushed something — phone key, TV remote button, professional wireless detonator, whatever — and half a block down the street a KEEP WICHITA CLEAN garbage can, placed a foot off the sidewalk in a gilded frame, exploded. It was not a destructive blast — perhaps two ounces of Semtex or C-4 crushed into a Dixie cup, with detonator and signal receiver, as the point wasn’t to destroy but to stun. The can, plastic, shattered as it rose upward, propelled by a plume of energy and oxygenation, and for however tiny amount of damage the detonation did, it indeed produced the sound of a world ending, in one one-thousandth of a second.

And it stunned totally. All six principals froze, as their human brains, being hardwired and acculturated to the noise of any blast, reacted as threat messages overcame all mental processes.

The Marshal on the left and one of the three trailers had begun to recover already, but Juba, without tremble, tremor, doubt, or reluctance, had his crosshairs square on the right-hand edge of the Marshal’s haircut as his target, but, by the incomprehensible unpredictability of spontaneous movement, the Marshal had shifted slightly to the right at the noise, and his head was now obscured.

Time moved in atomic increments. Juba’s finger lay into the trigger, and he felt it move, move, move, yielding a tenth of an ounce by a tenth of an ounce, but he still had no goddamned target — Allah, help me! Allah, do not forsake me!—and, in a nanosecond, the man’s face began to clear, and the crosshairs exactly defined the edge of the Marshal’s head and about a third of his emerging face when the trigger, obedient to its administrator’s beliefs, went.

Blur and whirl, the odd no-noise of the suppressor turning the muzzle blast into generic muffled obscurity, the rifle rising off the tripod as it drove back just a bit by the recoil, and then falling again to stability, and since he had not come off the stock or out of the eye box during the recoil cycle, it restored the movie that was this chaotic event, and at that second Juba saw the face of the man in the flash of an instant before the great destruction.

There is no sound quite like the sound of a high-velocity bullet striking a human head. It’s wet yet solid, repulsive, and full of odd aural subtexts: some cracking, some sibilance of the spray phenomenon, some twisted mach-speed splats. Of the people standing next to Jared as the bullet, sliding off the skull of the Marshal, took him dead-on flush beneath the eye, only Swagger had heard it before.

He wasted no time. The sound carried terminal information. No need to look at the results, though he involuntarily snatched a glimpse of the Marshal, also toppling, also issuing copious outflow, to determine that that man was probably not fatally hit but had a year of headaches in store for him.