Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

There! Again, something about a magazine fully loaded. You held it, feeling its density, feeling the pressure of its compressed spring, feeling its urgency to offer its cargo up to the slide of the bolt, which would pluck them, one by one, into the chamber, like a burnt offering of some kind.

He rocked the magazine into place, felt it catch, rotated it upward, felt it lock in place with a satisfying reverberant click. He had only to ram the bolt home, to insert the first of the ten into the chamber, and wait until at last his target came into view, a small human speck in the lens from so far away, who, as he would have to, would go to stillness, not knowing he was setting himself for the shot that would kill him.

Juba checked his watch.

More than an hour to go.

Now to relax, perhaps pray again, perhaps let serenity and will roll through his body, until he became one with the rifle, one with the ammunition, one with the mission.

Something moved in front of him. But it was only a helicopter, a speck in the sky miles away, vectoring in for some kind of rooftop landing in the far, magnificent city across the river.

1350

She tried. You could see her trying. She gave it her all, her belief, her imagination, the intelligence leveraged into her brain by the weight of a mother’s endless grief, all the pain of back alley beatings and rapes, all the subsequent pain in the recovery, all the willed forgetting. She tried.

Still, the message was clear: no sale.

“You don’t have to say a thing,” said Mr. Gold. “I can read your face.”

“It’s magnificent,” she said. “You’re so brilliant, each of you. I sense your intellect in every stroke, in every inference, in every leap. And it makes sense. It follows so logically, one point to another, one clue to the next, all of it coheres, makes policy sense, makes world-historical sense, makes religious sense, even by their standards. As a Moslem, it makes sense to me. As a tourist in Baghdad, it makes sense. As an amateur spy, it makes sense. As a rape victim, as a pauper who’s spent a fortune on the same goal — on all of that — it makes sense. I applaud you.”

“But,” said Mr. Gold, “you do not buy it?”

She smiled, though deep in that smile was the weight of loss, and the whole room read it: Mrs. McDowell regrets to inform you that you are full of shit.

Silence in the room. One of the fluorescents had gone out, so shadows haunted the place. The batch of them faced the woman, who wore no makeup, as she hadn’t had time to put it on, who sat before them in dumpy jeans and a Boys’ Latin T-shirt, her cheap reading glasses slightly askew. Her hair had looked better, as had she. But none of that mattered. Only her reaction mattered.

“Is it a feeling you have?” asked Nick. “Or is it something specific?”

“It’s that I love everything about it except it .” Then she said, “Do all of you love it? Do you have any doubts?”

“I will not let them answer,” said Nick, “because that would give you a frame in which to couch your own objections, and that is of no use to us. What is only of use to us is what you bring to it.”

“I will try to put into words what I feel,” she said. “If you find value in it, that’s well and good. How much time do we have?”

“Don’t worry about that. Time is our concern, not yours. No one here will look at a watch, no one will sigh.”

Swagger realized how professional Nick could be. It must have killed him to say such a thing, for indeed time was clicking away, remorselessly, as it was now 1440, and the thing would happen — or so they reckoned — at 1500. Each second made any kind of response to anything she said more unlikely.

“Do you want a Coke? A cup of coffee?” asked Nick.

“Get the Coke,” said Swagger. “The coffee here sucks.”

Everybody laughed. Maybe that helped a little.

“I’m fine,” she said. Then she said, “His mind doesn’t work like that.”

They waited for an amplification, but nobody said a word to rush her. They found the discipline to let her form her own words in her own time.

“I have been on this guy since he killed my son. That’s over fifteen years. I have learned a little. Not much.”

What had she learned?

“It’s too straightforward. You’ve concluded he wants to kill Mogul. Even if you didn’t want to say it, or were prevented from saying it, your country’s history forced you to think that he wanted to kill Mogul.”

She was right. Maybe Nick had been wrong. Maybe in suppressing that interpretation he had made it all the more inevitable.

“But if he really wanted to kill Mogul,” she said, “you would be all set up to prevent him from killing somebody else. You wouldn’t know it was Mogul. You’d think it was, say — oh, I don’t know — Hillary. There would be indicators all along — hints, subtle suggestions, the whole shadow show — all of it to convince you that it was Hillary. And the shot on Mogul would come as a complete surprise. It would utterly stun you. You’d have invested everything in saving Hillary from a threat that didn’t exist.”

Again, silence. Not a single Hillary joke.

“Think how he did it in Baghdad. The IED detonations drove the marines back to what they thought was safety. But what they thought was safety was the kill box. Lure and distraction: that’s his specialty. He lures you into one situation, twists it against you.”

“We thought we were hunting him,” Bob said. “He was hunting us.”

“Exactly,” she said.

The room went still.

“He’s very tricky. It’s not what you think it is. He’s come up with something else.”

Finally, Nick spoke — but not to her.

“What have we missed? Anybody?”

Swagger said, “All the gun stuff is hard. He will shoot at 1,847 over water in close to fifty-degree humidity with very little wind. He will use a .338 Lapua Magnum of a certain powder load, case preparation, and bullet choice and weight. You can’t argue that away.”

“So what isn’t hard? What is interp, as opposed to fact?”

“Behavior,” said Gold, from his well of ancient experience. “The hardest thing. You count on one thing, another happens. Always. ”

“Let’s ID the behavior, then,” said Nick.

“Mogul will show up today at 1500. Juba’s known it. It seems solid. They believed it to be solid enough to plan on,” said Chandler.

“Mogul will address the crowd,” said Neill. “It isn’t planned, it isn’t announced, it’s on paper nowhere, but it’s his behavior: give him a friendly crowd and there he is, screwing Renegade out of attention and getting big pleasure from that, big as life, ready for a bullet.”

“Ready for a bullet,” said Chandler. “Meaning ‘still.’ He has to be still because of Swagger’s time in flight data. Time in flight is not negotiable. It’s the iron law of physics.”

“Stillness,” said Gold. “The young woman is onto something.”

“Go on,” said Nick.

“The time in flight,” continued Mr. Gold, “demands that he must be still. We assume that stillness is a speech near a body of water, and it turns out that Mogul indeed had a long-settled speech planned for that day right at the banks of the East River. Knowing that, anyone could plan backwards from it, could see what a brilliant bodyguard of lies it would make, how perfectly it might cover the real operation at about the same time, but which would turn on another form of stillness.”

“Stillness,” said Nick. “Anybody?”

“Eating?” said Neill.

“Inside a restaurant. Not likely.”

“No joke: going to bathroom?” Bob said.

“Again inside, not available to a long shot from far away across a river.”