Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

The apartment was sparsely furnished with furniture, also rented. The dining room table could be shored up for stability and used as a shooting bench upon which he would execute his mission. Nothing else was memorable, except for a crate that had been delivered a few days before he arrived: it was from a boutique furniture craftsman in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Examined carefully, it revealed no signs of tampering. He disassembled it, first the crate, then the bookshelves themselves, reducing both to wooden slats neatly stacked against the wall. The process revealed the rifle.

Accuracy International Arctic Warfare model, .338 Lapua Magnum, Schmidt & Bender 5.5×25×56 scope calibrated in MOA. He pored over it, checking the fingernail polish marking on each screw to make sure that they remained tightened exactly to the torque he had applied in Wyoming for maximum accuracy. In the kit of tools, he’d packed, along with the ten rounds of ammunition, dedicated wrenches, a lens-cleaning pen, his iPhone 8 with the FirstShot app already calculated to zero on the rifle at eighteen hundred yards, a Kestrel Pocket Weather Meter, and, among other shooter knickknacks, a bore sighter. This instrument allowed him to test for the scope setting for inadvertent alterations against the valuations he’d made in Wyoming. Again, it was unchanged, perfect.

Juba slept on the floor without a problem, took all his meals out, bought a few clothes with cash left over from the trip and washed them out every night, to dry overnight, so that he didn’t attract attention due to shabbiness. Occasionally, he met other tenants in the lobby or in the elevator, but nobody here cared about anybody else’s woes, much less existence. The tenants were in their own world.

In the apartment, he wore a mask, a hairnet, hospital slippers, and tight rubber gloves to safeguard against inadvertent DNA deposits in order to sustain the fiction that the occupant of the room, when it was discovered after the event, was one Brian Waters of Albuquerque, New Mexico, NRA life member, thousand-yard rifle champion, well-known hunter and gun crank, and author of some hideous screeds as yet to be deposited on the Dark Web. He would do that in the aftermath of the shooting with a single keystroke. In the next minutes, Juba would scrub down the rifle with acetone and apply certain biological traces of Brian Waters. Then he would disappear, and what would happen would happen.

He confronted the view. He initially was almost afraid to look, but it was all right. He was on the sixth floor, sixty-seven feet off the ground. He overlooked the building across the street and, beyond that, the roofs of smaller buildings, descending to the broad band of river three blocks away, and, across the river, his target zone.

Everything was as it should be, yet everything was different. It was as if he were confronting the reality of a dreamscape. He had seen this view in his mind, consciously and unconsciously, for over four months. Everything familiar, yet nothing familiar: that was the dynamic. He had to learn it, adapt to it, not let it throw his concentration off.

He understood that to make his shot, he had to be on-site days before. Unlike combat sniping, it wasn’t a case of putting the crosshairs on the target, letting your reflexes squeeze the trigger, scrambling away before they could locate you and send incoming fire after you. It had to be his reality, as familiar as his mother’s face, known in all its nuances, comforting in its exactitude. So he spent hours each day on the rifle, on the scope, on the table, his fingers learning anew — as if they’d forgotten — the shape and feel of the design via the exercise of the dry fire, his muscles learning the weight, his arms reacquiring the sensation of holding the rifle in that perfect merger of strength and gentleness. He had to become one with the rifle, a kind of exalted state of biomechanical intimacy, not easily achieved, not achieved, in fact, except through great effort and with practice, especially on demand. And he had to be able to do it on demand.

He prayed the required five times a day. It was pleasing to be back to such discipline. That was of great benefit. In speaking to Allah, in beseeching His holiness, in putting his petition for assistance before His greatness, he calmed himself. Was he speaking to God? That wasn’t the point. The point was, his brain thought he was speaking to God, and Juba’s respiratory system, his musculature, his digestive track, even his subconscious, felt subdued by the rigor. A great calm spread through him, and his limbs and veins thrummed with energy and confidence. No man in the world could do this thing, save him — not even Bobleeswagger — and his prayers enabled his effort.

Of course, he made sure to be on the rifle, eye locked on the scope, at the same time each day as the shot so that he could learn the play of the light in different weather conditions. Snap! went the dry trigger, over and over again. Maybe the day would be cloudy, maybe bold with sun. Snap! Shadows would cut the image, maybe not. Trees and the rills on the river would describe the wind, and he would have to understand how to read them. Snap!

Each day, afresh, he ran the program on the FirstShot ballistic calculator, and, each time, the solution came up the same for the preset eighteen-hundred-yard zero, arriving at the setting to which the scope was now set, 48 MOA elevation and 24 MOA right windage, which took it all into consideration — the wind, the temp, the humidity, the air density.

In the afternoons, after a brief lunch at a fast-food place and a cup of god-awful American coffee, he walked down as close to the river as he could get. Various barriers prevented actual riverside visits, and he couldn’t risk violating them, for if nabbed by security or police, how could he explain the Kestrel?

He ran the Kestrel to record the exact weather conditions. He marked the waves in the water to match them to wind speed and learn it. There wasn’t much variation, only in the cloud cover. No rain expected, humidity not ominous, wind tepid. It was as if Allah were sending him the ideal conditions. He looked across the river at the cityscape, the skyline. It was, as he expected, majestic, with proud towers and soaring structures, alive with the reflection of the sun off a million windows, humming with power, the dynamo of the West in one image.

He loved it. He hated it. It beckoned him. It sickened him. It mattered so much to him. He mattered so little to it.

Your buildings tell us our place, which is in their shadow, bent and craven. We reject that, and you declare us monsters. We fight that, and you call us murderers. Your airplanes drop bombs guided by technical magic we could not understand and smash our children to jelly, and yet we are the beasts.

Tomorrow, I will destroy you.

Snap!

Zombieland, the sixth floor

Nick was back from the big meeting, and all waited for his account and direction. He’d worn his best suit, blue with banker’s pinstripes, peaked lapel, white shirt, red ancient madder tie, black Alden Long Wings. He looked like a Washington power player.

“Good news, bad news,” he said. “Anybody want to pick the order?”

Nobody did. Maybe the game wasn’t appropriate for them, as they were tired from the hours spent on The Problem, and eager to move on, and had no need for Nick’s charm, though on many other occasions they’d appreciated it.

“Boss,” said Chandler finally, “whatever.”

“Okay, nobody cares,” said Nick. “So I’ll start with the good. And it’s really good.”

He paused, smiled.

“Congratulations to you all, and I suppose to me too. At the top levels, they are extremely pleased and extremely eager. They believe your work represents a major victory over the threat of jihad in the West and the opportunity for a major victory. Not only have we saved a life and prevented the political and cultural chaos that would ensue from a terrorist event against a high-value target, they see a chance to be proactive and turn it into a major advantage. Even as I speak, that response is being organized. There’s just enough time to set the trap, and the people involved are talented and skilled enough to bring it off.”