Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

For CPL John Burke, USMC

KIA, I Corps, RSVN, 1967

If any question why we died,

Tell them, because our fathers lied.

–Rudyard Kipling

writing in the voice of his son John,

KIA, the Somme, at the age of sixteen

We are in the presence of a master sniper.

He lies, almost preternaturally still, on hard stone. The air is thin, still cold; he doesn’t shake or tremble.

The sun is soon to rise, pushing the chill from the mountains. As its light spreads, it reveals fabulous beauty. High peaks, shrouded in snow; a pristine sky that will be the color of a pure blue diamond; far mountain pastures of a green so intense it rarely exists in nature; brooks snaking down through pines that carpet the mountainsides.

The sniper notices none of this. If you pointed it out to him, he wouldn’t respond. Beauty, in nature or women or even rifles, isn’t a concept he would recognize, not after where he’s been and what he’s done. He simply doesn’t care; his mind doesn’t work that way.

Instead, he sees nothingness. He feels a great cool numbness. No idea has any meaning to him at this point. His mind is almost empty, as though he’s in a trance.

He’s a short-necked man, as so many great shooters are; his blue eyes, though gifted with an almost freakish 20/10 acuity, appear dull, signifying a level of mental activity almost startlingly blank. His pulse rate hardly exists. He has some oddities, again freakish in some men but weirdly perfect for a shooter. He has extremely well developed fast-twitch forearm muscles, still supple and defined at his age, which is beyond fifty. His hands are large and strong. His stamina is off the charts, as are his reflexes and his pain tolerance. He’s strong, flexible, as charged with energy as any other world-class athlete. He has both a technical and a creative mind and a will as directed as a laser.

But none of this really explains him, any more than such analysis would explain a Williams or a DiMaggio: he simply has an internal genius, possibly autistic, that gives him extraordinary control over body and mind, hand and eye, infinite patience, a shrewd gift for the tactical, and, most of all, total commitment to his arcane art, which in turn forms the core of his identity and has granted him a life that few could imagine.

But for now, nothing: not his past, not his future, not the pain of lying so still in the cold through a long night, not the excitement of knowing this could be the day. No anticipation, no regret: just nothing.

Before him is the tool of his trade, lying askew on a hard sandbag. He knows it intimately, having worked with it a great deal in preparation for the thirty seconds that will come today or tomorrow or the day after.

It’s a Remington 700, with an H-S Precision fiberglass stock and a Leupold 10X scope. It’s been tricked up by a custom riflesmith to realize the last tenth of a percent of its potential: the action trued and honed, and bolted into the metal block at the center of the stock at maximum torque; a new Krieger barrel free-floated after cryogenic treatment. The trigger, a Jewell, lets off at four pounds with the crisp snap of a glass rod breaking.

The sniper has run several weeks’ worth of load experimentation through the rifle, finding the exact harmony that will produce maximum results: the perfect balance between the weight of a bullet, the depth of its seating, the selection and amount, to the tenth grain, hand measured, of the powder. Nothing has been left to chance: the case necks have been turned and annealed, the primer hole deburred, the primer depth perfected, the primer itself selected for consistency. The rifle muzzle wears the latest hot lick, a Browning Ballistic Optimizing System, which is a kind of screw-on nozzle that can be micro-tuned to generate the best vibrational characteristics for accuracy.

The caliber isn’t military but civilian, the 7mm Remington Magnum, once the flavor of the month in international hunting circles, capable of dropping a ram or a whitetail at amazing distances. Though surpassed by some flashier loads, it’s still a flat-shooting, hard-hitting cartridge that holds its velocity as it flies through the thin air, delivering close to two thousand foot-pounds of energy beyond five hundred yards.

But of all this data, the sniper doesn’t care, or no longer cares. He knew it at one time; he has forgotten it now. The point of the endless ballistic experimentation was simple: to bring the rifle and its load to complete perfection so that it could be forgotten. That was one principle of great shooting — arrange for the best, then forget all about it.

When the sound comes, it doesn’t shock or surprise him. He knew it had to come, sooner or later. It doesn’t fill him with doubt or regret or anything. It simply means the obvious: time to work.

It’s a peal of laughter, girlish and bright, giddy with excitement. It bounces off the stone walls of the canyon, from the shadow of a draw onto this high shelf from close to a thousand yards off, whizzing through the thin air.

The sniper wiggles his fingers, finds the warmth in them. His concentration cranks up a notch or so. He pulls the rifle to him in a fluid motion, well practiced from hundreds of thousands of shots in practice or on missions. Its stock rises naturally to his cheek as he pulls it in, and as one hand flies to the wrist, the other sets up beneath the forearm, taking the weight of his slightly lifted body, building a bone bridge to the stone below. It rests on a densely packed sandbag. He finds the spot weld, the one placement of cheek to stock where the scope relief will be perfect and the circle of the scope will throw up its image as brightly as a movie screen. His adductor magnus , a tube of muscle running through his deep thigh, tenses as he splays his right foot ever so slightly.

Above, a hawk rides a thermal, gliding through the blue morning sky.

A mountain trout leaps.

A bear looks about for something to eat.

A deer scampers through the brush.

The sniper notices none of it. He doesn’t care.

“Mommy,” shouts eight-year-old Nikki Swagger. “Come on.”

Nikki rides better than either of her parents; she’s been almost literally raised on horseback, as her father, a retired Marine staff NCO with an agricultural background, had decided to go into the business of horse care at his own lay-up barn in Arizona, where Nikki was born.

Nikki’s mother, a handsome woman named Julie Fenn Swagger, trails behind. Julie doesn’t have the natural grace of her daughter, but she grew up in Arizona, where horses were a way of life, and has been riding since childhood. Her husband rode as an Arkansas farmboy, then didn’t for decades, then came back to the animals and now loves them so, in their integrity and loyalty, that he has almost single-mindedly willed himself into becoming an accomplished saddleman. That is one of his gifts.

“Okay, okay,” she calls, “be careful, sweetie,” though she knows that careful is the last thing Nikki will ever be, for hers is a hero’s personality, built from a willingness to risk all to gain all and a seeming absence of fear. She’s like an Indian in that way, and like her father, too, who was once a war hero.

She turns.

“Come on,” she calls, replicating her daughter’s rhythms. “You want to see the valley as the sun races across it, don’t you?”

“Yep,” comes the call from the rider still unseen in the shadows of the draw.

Nikki bounds ahead, out of the shadows and into the bright light. Her horse, named Calypso, is a four-year-old thoroughbred gelding, quite a beast, but Nikki handles it with nonchalance. She is actually riding English, because it is part of her mother’s dream for her that she will go east to college, and the skills that are the hallmarks of equestrian sophistication will take her a lot farther than the rowdy ability to ride like a cowboy. Her father does not care for the English saddle, which seems hardly enough to protect the girl from the muscles of the animal beneath, and at horse shows he thinks those puffy jodhpurs and that little velveteen jacket with its froth of lace at the throat are sublimely ridiculous.