Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“Ain’t that something?” said Fellows. “That is the true West, the one they write about, yes, sir.”

Swagger had aged, as all men do, even as the sniper himself had aged. But he was still lean and watchful and there was a rifle in the scabbard under his saddle. He looked dangerous, like a special man who would never panic, who would react fast and shoot straight, which is exactly what he was. His eyes darted about under the hood of his cowboy hat. He rode like a gifted athlete, almost one with the animal, controlling it unconsciously with his thighs while his eyes scanned for signs of aggression.

He would not see the sniper. The sniper was too far out, the hide too carefully camouflaged, the spot chosen to put the sun in the victim’s eyes at this hour so that he’d see only dazzle and blur if he looked.

The crosshairs rode up to Swagger, and stayed with the man as he galloped along, finding the same rhythm in the cadences, finding the same up-down plunge of the animal. The shooter’s finger caressed the trigger, felt absorbed by its beckoning softness, but he did not fire. He knew the range perfectly: 742 meters.

Moving target, transversing laterally left to right, but also moving up and down through a vertical plane. By no means an impossible shot, and many a man in his circumstances would have taken it. But experience told the sniper to wait: a better shot would lie ahead, the best shot. With a man like Swagger, that’s the one you took.

Swagger joined his wife, and the two chatted, and what Swagger said made her smile. White teeth flashed. A little tiny human part in the sniper ached for the woman’s beauty and ease; he’d had prostitutes the world over, some quite expensive and beautiful, but this little moment of intimacy was something that had evaded him completely. That was all right. He had chosen to work in exile from humanity. Seven hundred thirty-one meters.

He cursed himself. That’s how shots were blown, that little fragment of lost concentration which took you out of the operation. He briefly snapped his eyes shut, absorbed the darkness and cleared his mind, then opened them again to what lay before him.

Swagger and his wife had reached the edge: 722 meters. Before them would run a valley, unfolding in the sunlight as the sun climbed even higher. But what this meant to the sniper is that at last his quarry had ceased to move. In the scope he saw a family portrait: man, woman and child, all at nearly the same level, because the child’s horse was so big it put her up with her parents. They chatted, the girl laughed, pointed at a bird or something, seethed with motion. The mother stared into the distance. The father, his eyes still seeming watchful, relaxed just the tiniest bit.

The crosshairs bisected the square chest.

He stroked the trigger and the gun jarred and as it came back in a fraction of a second, he saw the tall man’s chest explode as the Remington 7mm Magnum tore through it.

It was a moment of serene perfection, until she heard a sound that reminded her somehow of meat dropping on a linoleum floor — it had a flat, moist, dense reverberation to it, somehow — and at that same instant felt herself sprayed with warm jelly. She turned to see Dade’s gray face, his eyes lost and locked on nothingness as he fell backward off his horse. His chest had been somehow eviscerated, as with an ax, its organs exposed and spewing blood in torrents, his heart decompressing with a pulsing jet of deoxygenated, almost black liquid spurting in an arc over the precipice. He hit the ground, in a cloud of dust, landing with the solidity of a sack of potatoes falling off a truck as his horse panicked and bucked, hooves flailing in the air. As a nurse, from too many nights in a reservation ER, Julie was no stranger to blood or to what mysteries lay inside of bodies, but the transformation was so instantaneous that it shocked her, even as, from far off, the report of a rifle shot finally arrived.

The sound seemed to unlock her brain from the paralysis into which it had blundered. She knew in the next nanosecond that they were under fire, and in the nanosecond after that her daughter was in danger, and she found the will to turn and yell “Run!” as loud as possible, and yanked hard to the left on her reins, driving her horse into Nikki’s to butt it about.

My daughter , she thought. Don’t kill my daughter .

But like hers, Nikki’s reflexes were fast and sure, and the girl had already reached the same conclusion, reeled her horse to the left, and in another second, both horses were free of the ruckus caused by Dade’s plunging animal.

“Go!” shrieked Julie, kicking and lashing her horse with the reins. The animal churned ahead, its long legs bounding over the dirt toward the narrow enfilade of the pass. She was to the left of and a little behind Nikki, that is, between Nikki and the shooter, which is where she wanted to be.

The horses thundered along, careering madly for safety, and Julie was bent over the neck of hers like a jockey, but she could not keep up with Nikki’s, which, a stronger animal with a much lighter load, began to gun away and ahead, exposing the child.

“Nikki!” she screamed.

Then the world went. It twisted into fragments, the sky was somehow beneath her, dust rose like a gas, thick and blinding, and she felt herself floating, her heart gathering fear for the knowledge of what would come next. The horse screamed piteously and she slammed into the ground, her head filling with stars, her will scattering in confusion. But as she slid through the dust and the pain, feeling her skin rip and something in her body shatter, and the horse scampered away, she looked to see that Nikki had halted and was circling around toward her.

She rose, astounded that she could move through all the fire that was eating her skin, and had a moment when she noticed the blood pouring across her shirt. She staggered, went to one knee, but then rose again, and screamed at Nikki, “No! No! Run! Run!” waving her away desperately.

The girl pulled up, confused, the fear bright on her face.

“Run for Daddy!” Julie screamed, then turned herself and began to scramble for a ravine to the right, a copse of rough vegetation and tough little trees, hoping that the shooter would follow her and not the girl.

Nikki watched her mother run toward the edge of the shelf, then turned herself, lashed the horse, felt it churn into a gallop. The dust of the slashing hooves floated everywhere, clotting her breathing, and the tears on her face matted up with it, but she stayed low and whipped the horse and whipped it again, and though it neighed in pain, whipped it still a third time, gouging it with her English boots, and in seconds, the dark shadows of the enfilade covered her and she knew she was safe.

Then she heard a shot.

He fired and the sight picture at the moment of ignition — the stout, heroic chest quadrisected perfectly by the crosshairs zeroed exactly for a range of seven hundred meters — told him instantly that he had hit. As the scope came back, he saw red from the falling body, just a fraction of a second’s worth, but square in the full chest, until it was lost in the dust.

Then he shifted to the woman but—

He was astonished by the swiftness with which the woman responded. His whole shooting scenario was based on her utter paralysis when her husband’s chest exploded. She would be stupefied and the next shot would be easy.

The woman reeled her horse about almost instantaneously and he was astounded at how much dust floated into the air. You cannot anticipate everything, and he had not anticipated the dust. He had no shot for almost a second, and then, faster than he could have begun to imagine, she and the child were racing hellbent and crazed toward the pass and safety.