I, Sniper

13

He didn’t introduce himself. He simply strode to the front of the small group of shooters assembled in the bleachers next to the benches under the bright Wyoming sun and said, “Your insert was at 2200, you got to the target zone at 0500 in the dark after a long uphill, over-rock belly crawl, so you’ve no time to range the target area by light. You’re in a hole. You’re bleeding everywhere. The scorpions are crawling over your backside, looking for the breakfast you yourself ain’t had. It’s cold. There are Taliban all over the place. The light comes up, and that’s when you see the Cherokee. It putters along and finally stops at a hut in the valley, and out pops the tall fellow for his dialysis. You’ve maybe two to three seconds clear shooting when he stops to talk to a kid. You’d also like to go home afterwards and have tea with the boyos, right? Oh, you fellows would have a Bud and a steak, but you take my point. How do you do it?”

He stood in front of them, burly, with a bristle of dark hair and a taut NCO’s face from any army in the world, his seemingly an Irish one. He was muscular, powerful, built for war or football, little else. His small eyes burned darkly and it was clear he was high clergy in the church of the sniper. He wore the uniform of the trade-the tac pants, a military-cut shirt and jacket, assault boots-and his eyes ran from man to man. His cadre stood to the right at parade rest, same uniforms, same burly men, or at least two were, the third being scrawny and dark and feral, all fast-twitch muscle.

“You, Blondie? How do you make that shot?”

Blondie was actually redheaded, about thirty, with his own set of sniper’s hard eyes. He was one-seventh of this quarter’s iSniper five-day tutorial, out here in the wastes to learn how to run the tech. Like his six colleagues, and like the speaker, and like the three other silent members of the teaching cadre, he was sunburned, tattooed, thick-armed, and he knew the drill as to kit, appearing in the de rigueurs of the tactical trade, complete to assault boots from Danner, khaki cargo pants from 5.11, polos from Blackhawk, scrunched boonie hats or weatherbeaten LaRue Tactical dusky green baseball caps, and a whole sales rack of tear-shaped, mucho-dinero sunglasses including Wiley Xs, Gargoyles, and Maui Jims.

The site was a thousand-yard rifle range twenty miles outside Casper, Wyoming, a featureless blank of land that could have been the backdrop for a play by Beckett, just nothingness under a bright sky, with a lean-to sun shade on a cattle ranch hunted for prairie dogs and mule deer in other months but in the cool fall fallow. Six of the students came from unnameable military units. If they told you which one, they had to kill you, but they’d do it fast so it wouldn’t hurt so much, and they’d smile so you wouldn’t feel disliked. The seventh looked like a gentleman cowboy.

“I’d pass,” said Blondie. “Without the range, there’s no shot. How the hell am I going to range, then go to Kestral for temp, altitude, wind, and humidity numbers, then figure in the ballistics, then run the algorithms on my Palm Pilot, then go clickety-clickety-click dialing the scope this way and that, hoping I get ’em right? In three seconds? No way. By the time I’m done, he’s inside. Meanwhile, there’re more and more people around till the area’s thick with ’em. So when he leaves, even if I’m suppressed when I take the shot, they can gauge where I am and put a lot of shit in that area, and that makes me bacon. If I got a big kill out of it, maybe I’d pay that price. But I’d have to think on it, and all the time I’m thinking, he’s getting smaller, and by the time I’ve got it all thought out, he’s gone. Mama didn’t raise me to be no dead hero. Ain’t no virgins waiting for me where I’m headed.”

“Exactly,” said the lecturer. “Now, possibly Mr. Swagger here,”-he pointed to the gentleman cowboy-“possibly Mr. Swagger could make that shot cold-bore. But he’s not human, he’s mythical. I’m simply human, so I couldn’t make it. Could you make that shot, Mr. Swagger, as I’ve described it? You made so many others.”

“Doubtful,” said Bob. “Not now, at any rate, I’ve lost too much. When I was as young as these fellows, there’s a possibility. I never worried about humidity because where I was it was consistent, and there wasn’t much wind, except during monsoon. I don’t know, though. Some men have a knack for distance. I never did.”

“But you had a knack for knowing the hold. Genius possibly more than ‘knack.’ A feel for it, something subconscious. All of you Vietnamers who scored in the nineties or better had to have that subliminal gift.”

“Well, maybe we did. I never talked with any of the others about it, because both Chuck and poor Carl were long gone before I started my third tour, and I never ran into ’em here neither. So, if the question is, would I take that shot, the answer is probably no. Turns out I ain’t so mythical after all.”

Bob was a crash attendee at the tutorial under his own name because there was no time to put a legend together, and unless you immerse yourself in the details of your fictional narrative, you’ll make a mistake sooner or later. So he was here, publicly, as Bob Lee Swagger, of Boise, Idaho, Gny. Sgt. USMC (Ret.), on government contract as a consultant for the Department of Energy security sector. It was all Nick could come up with quickly, once the forensics people had determined that the baked paint debris had come from an iSniper911 unit and nothing else, and quickness was important, for the iSniper911 was produced in such small numbers that the tutorial that taught it ran but once every two or three months, depending. So Nick called in a favor at Energy; Energy ran the paperwork top speed and got the special exception to iSniper’s usual procedures on the basis of Swagger’s well-known name in the community. The premise was Energy’s security teams, known as very well trained operators in charge of guarding vulnerable, volatile Energy Department sites the nation over, were going to upgrade their sniper capabilities to make shooting out to military ranges possible in the new age of terrorism and were looking for an optics system to handle the task. They’d hired the ex-sniper Swagger to run an R and D on what was available and to make a recommendation; the story would stand up to any kind of vigorous examination, unless Bob let it slip he’d never seen a Department of Energy installation and wasn’t too sure what the Department of Energy did, anyway.

“Anyhow,” Bob allowed, “if you want I could bore all these young guys with stories about how different it was for us, how much more primitive the equipment was, how the landscape favored snipers in a way high desert don’t, but it would be just an old man’s gas. I’m here like them to see if you can do this stuff way out there without a head for numbers.”

Some laughter, even from the Irishman.

“Grand, fellows,” he said, “I’m here to teach you how to make that shot, and any others that may come your way. The name’s Grogan, but you can call me ‘Anto,’ as we of the Irish tribe shorten ‘Anthony.’ I’ve done this work too, with a well-known British unit, and then I saw the way to endless riches by jumping to Graywolf Security, where it was my pleasure to handle caravan and bodyguard gigs in many other sandy places. Now I teach for iSniper, and enough with intros, shall we turn to the toy?”

More laughter. The black Irishman Grogan had a wit to him.

“Fellows, here’s the why as to your presence here. The scope which don’t need no wizard work to get on target. Why, if a sod like Anto Grogan can do it, you smarter fellows will have no trouble. But you question, can it possibly be worth the seven thousand dollars the bosses are charging for it now, plus five days when you could be with loved ones instead of cooking out here in the cowboy sun?”

He opened the rifle case before him, removing a British L96A1, the Accuracy International job, tricked up all very SAS, dun-colored, bi-pod mounted, barrel an inch thick, with what looked like an oar for a stock with a hole in it where your hand set to reach trigger and bolt, all of it crazily adjustable, and then up top two pounds of optical magic secured in Badger Ordnance tactical rings, thick as a giant’s wedding band. Turrets, nodules, knobs, tabs, dials, even a small TV set, a cube with screen above the eyepiece and decorated up top with a keyboard of buttons, the whole damned kitchen sink crunched into one piece.

“It looks hard. It ain’t. That’s its point. As Sergeant Blondie has said, and since I’ve seen the records, I know you all know and have done this work, but to shoot well far out in the field, you must have three instruments besides a rifle and a scope. You must have a range finder to lase the distance to target, a Kestral 4000 wind indicator to read wind and other atmospheric conditions, and a small computer or Palm Pilot or whatever to feed the distance and weather data into where you’ve already stored your ballistics data so that you can drive it all through an algorithmic equation and come up with your solution, which you must then hand-transfer to the scope itself. If any of those all-tricky and confused things goes wrong, it’s a miss. You give up your hide. You probably buy it. All that training gone to waste. Some camel bunger with a red and white tea cozy wrapped around his noggin has inherited your expensive whiz-bang rifle. No, that ain’t why we’re over there, now is it?”

He paused, waiting for the little eddy of giggles to die down.

“Not with iSniper911. With iSniper911, you prang the tall fellow in his heart and he’s dead before his tongue is in the loam. Everyone jumps around and goes jibberty-jabby. They start shooting wildly. Then they realize it’s they themselves on the target black and off they go, not ready for the virgins yet. You wait till dark, crawl back up the damned hill, and wait for extract. Twenty minutes and a loud helo ride later, you’re in base camp with your mates. ‘Shoulda seen the look on Osama’s face,’ you say, and the colonel opens you another can.”

He let this satisfying scenario play in their minds for a few seconds.

“Rather thought you’d like that one. All right, then, here’s the genius of iSniper911. It combines all the functions of ranging, weather analysis, algorithmic computation, ballistic prediction, and scope correction into but one instrument. There’s little devils inside move all them knobs, smart little leprechauns who can do the calc in their cute little heads in supertime. You simply lase the target and wait for the answer in the TV set up top, and in less than a second you’re on target. I mean completely and wholly on target. Here’s how.”

He turned and threw a cover off a portable blackboard next to him, to show a chart that diagramed the 911 reticle design. Busy, busy, one might say, and all the young snipers involuntarily groaned at the density of it, all the knowing and learning that it demanded and the stress of doing all that while possibly being shot at. The iSniper reticle wasn’t just the old standby crosshair, not even the crosshair with its mil-dot ranging diodes on the hairs; it displayed indeed the central crosshair, its nexus a kind of anchor point. From that spot, a veil of lighter netting seemed to descend, in the shape of a Christmas tree, a sort of delta of interfering imagery. Upon closer inspection by all it became evident that the netting itself consisted of rows and rows of smaller crosses. It looked like a cemetery on a hillside.

“See all them markers?” said Grogan. “Sure, they’re the tombstones of men who’ve stood against iSniper. In a manner of speaking. They’re all points of aim.

“You press the lase button to initiate the targeting sequence. In one tenth of a second, you have distance, while at the same time this little unit”-he tapped a collection of dials mounted behind the bell of the scope-“reads temp, wind, atmospheric density, and humidity and automatically inputs to the minicomputer, where some kind of mysterioso chip runs it through the mathematical universe, also taking into consideration the ballistic template of the weight, speed, design, and trajectory of your chosen round, and when it’s all done, a little voice pipes out, ‘Honey, let’s fuck.’ ”

Laughter, of course, as the boys were used to the metaphorically imagined sexual dynamics of sniping and had heard and issued the cry “Get some,” which had once meant “Get some pussy” and now, in the War Against Global Terror, meant “Get some kills.”

“It does not, of course; even the head university boys at iSniper aren’t that clever. No, instead what happens is that once the solution is produced, automatically again and again in supertime, that data is crunched as target coordinates are impulsed up here on the screen of the monitor, so you get a readout. ‘D thirteen, seven R,’ it’ll say, something like that. You go back to the scope, count thirteen hashmarks down, seven tiny cross-hashes to the right, and that’s your aiming point. You put that little cross, that reticle, that pip, on Johnny Taliban and use your good shooter’s discipline, enjoying all the fundamentals you’ve worked so hard to master, and when you shoot, the thing you shoot dies. Not usually. Not sometimes. Not if luck is with you or God is your copilot and the wind be mild, but always.”

A hand came up, from a thick-necked young man who looked like a linebacker. But then, they all looked like linebackers.

“Yes, mate?”

“Sir, I-”

“Mate, I’m just a sergeant rating, like all you boys are, and ‘sir’ makes me hair stand up. You could call me Colour Sergeant if you can get your tongue around something so Waterloo-sounding, but I’ll settle for Anto.”

“Anto, like all of us here, I ain’t no Bob the Nailer, but I know enough to know that there’s nothing made that don’t get beat to hell in combat in three days or less. I look at that little thing and it looks like an iPod or something. I just get worried that after that long crawl, I turn it on and I get ‘does not compute’ or some such and there ain’t no IT to call and bitch at where I’m hunkered down.”

“Excellent, chum. Most excellent. I imagine you’re all worried, no? Mr. Swagger, yourself same, sir?”

“It’s a concern,” said Bob, trying to wear his designated celebrity status gracefully and not come across to these young men as a pompous asshole. “Busted more than my share of glass in the boonies and they didn’t have no batteries in ’em.”

Anto Grogan smiled at the fellas, all confident and pleased, then at his cadre of three other boys, and then he hoisted the rifle and threw it hard upon the ground.

An involuntary groan arose from the little audience, for all were shooters and knew to cherish the weapon as long habit, and if rough stuff happened to it, you hoped it stayed true, but under no account did you abuse it yourself.

“Let’s give it a right and proper licking,” Anto said, picking it up, turning it wrong side out in his strong hands so that he gripped it like a batsman by the barrel, and whacking its stock three times hard against the beam that supported the roof over the shooting benches, the collisions sending a buzz of vibration through the ramshackle structure.

Then he held it up and began to spin the windage and elevation knobs randomly in one direction, then the other.

“Gentlemen, if you could see your own faces now you’d be laughing yourselves. Ever see a man treat a fine rifle so poorly? No, and I don’t recommend it neither, but let’s see what we’ve done. I’ll take two volunteers please, that would be you and you. Jimmy, get the boys the ATV.”

Jimmy detatched himself from the line of cadre and went to a parked ATV, keyed it to life, and brought the three-wheel rough-ground bike up to the bleachers. In its cargo tray behind the second seat, everyone could see three bright round objects, red, yellow, and blue, beachballs actually.

“Now here’s the drill. You two boys are going to go on a little drive out into the field, and whenever the spirit moves you, though I hope it’s beyond five hundred yards, you’ll kick a beachball out, with the last one way far out there. Maybe the wind will come along and move ’em even further about. I, meanwhile, will sit here and continue to talk to the other lads, with the somewhat odd situation being that I’ve been tightly blindfolded”-he pulled a red bandana out of his back pocket-“by Mr. Swagger; that is, after Mr. Swagger has checked the bandana to make certain it’s up and fine. The point is, I can have no idea at what ranges the beach balls have been placed. When all is done, I will turn, Mr. Swagger will pop off my blindfold, and using iSniper, I’ll shoot cold-bore offhand and bang all three in under five seconds. I’ll range, compute, acquire, and fire on three unknown-range targets and hit ’ em dead-on. Sure, I’ve practiced some, and sure, I’m deft with the thing, but not at a level any man here willing to work and follow instructions can’t himself achieve over the next five days. And when you see that, imagine your same selves in that hole, only it ain’t beachballs, it’s boys with RPGs moving against your site, and enjoy watching me pop them. And mind, this is after all the abuse you’ve just seen.”

“Anto?”

“I am.”

“Anto, seems like you’re taking the sport out of it,” someone said.

“True, I am, but for sport I butt heads in Irish football and chase a chesty whore now and then, or curl up for a nice read with a book by Agatha Christie. For shooting infidels, by that I mean ‘non-Irish,’ I want no sport at all, just piles of dead Johnny Muhammads feeding flies and scorpions fast as possible. Gentlemen, shall we?”

There was no point in “examining” the bandana; it was just a bandana, and Bob folded it in thirds, looped it about the Irishman’s eyes, and tied it tightly, Grogan going, “Say, that fella’s going to squish me head; easy, old man,” to much laughter, while two of the young operators took their ride on the ATV, this also ginning up laughter because like all young men with too much IQ and too much testosterone all stirred up in a lethal mix and driving them forward, the man piloting the bike took it to the limits, while his bud hung off it, waiting till he was way out there, and then gave each beachball a wicked toss until it came to rest at the farthest reaches of the range. Then they sped back, just barely in control, and came up short in a slithering, too-much-damn-brake powerslide that kicked dust and grass a hundred feet.

“Did anyone die?” asked Anto from behind his blindfold.

“Colour Sergeant, all will live to fight again,” said Jimmy.

“Excellent. We lose a man now and then that way. If someone will guide me to the rifle, please.”

Bob and an operator brought Grogan to his rifle. Bob lifted it and handed it to the man.

“Mr. Swagger, the ammunition, if you please.”

Bob went to a red box of fresh Black Hills.308 match loaded with the 168-grain Sierra boat tail hollow point, that sniper’s preferred number one, slid three out, and said, “Want me to load it?”

“No sir,” said Grogan, “and the loading can count in the five seconds.”

Everyone watched.

“Gentlemen, ears on, glasses on. Me too, Jimmy,” and Grogan’s boy slipped earmuffs over his head. All the muffs, of course, were miked up to allow normal conversation, yet were engineered to close down instantly when the decibel count spiked upon a shot.

“Now, Mr. Swagger, pull off the bandana, and you other fellows count to five in your head and see where you are.”

Bob put his hands on the bandana and-

“Oh, wait,” said Grogan.

He paused, milking the theater of the moment.

“Won’t it be more fun with some stress? Let’s do a game. Since Mr. Swagger is a champion, let’s let him shoot against me. Blondie, you’re his spotter. You go ahead now, work your range finder, tinker the Kestral, run the numbers and the proper ballistics through the Palm Pilot, get coordinates and click ’ em into Mr. Swagger ’s scope. Then when the bell goes up, Anto goes up against Bob the Nailer, not man on man-no doubt who’s the better man-but system on system, so we may learn which is the better system.”

“It ain’t necessary,” said Bob.

“Mr. Swagger, sir, them smart boys who run iSniper have instructed me to do all I can to sell 911 to the Energy teams, and this is part of my initiative, begging the gentleman’s pardon. I’m after showing the toy in game against the best.”

“Well, that ain’t me now, if it ever was. And outshooting an old goat like me ain’t going to get you much in this world,” Bob said, “but if it’s what you want.” He turned to Blondie.

“Okay by you, son?”

“Be an honor, Mr. Swagger.”

“You good on the numbers?”

“I can run ’em fast as anyone and have done a fair amount of it under incoming.”

“Then you’re the hero here. You run the brainy stuff and diddle the scope and I’ll just pull the trigger.”

Bob took a seat, wedged himself close to the bench, as Blondie placed his own M40A1, by which Bob knew him to be a fellow marine, and watched as the young man swiftly loaded and locked three 168s. Bob squinched behind the rifle, and it was all familiar. He settled in, feeling the tension in the trigger, finding his stockweld, sliding to the eyepiece, and seeing the world through the mil-dot-rich reticle of the Unertl 10X Marine Corps-issue scope, a unit overbuilt so powerfully you could use it to break down doors. He diddled with the focus ring, waiting for it to declare the world pristine and hard-edged at five to eight hundred yards, and when it did, he nodded to Blondie.

“I’m gittin’ bored, me just standing here like a fella on a pier, watching ships,” said Anto, drawing laughter.

“Almost ready, Sergeant Anto,” said Blondie, and then went all serious pro on them, first laser-ranging the three distant brightly colored dots in the thousand yards of green beyond them with his small Leica unit, then pulling out his Kestral 4000 weather station and noting the wind, humidity, and temperature. Then he ran the data through his Palm Pilot and came up with three solutions. He dialed the first into the scope of the rifle, clicking mostly elevation but some windage, for there was a drift of light wind that rustled undulations in the grass.

He whispered to Bob, “Okay, you’re set up on the first target, which is 492 yards out, in a quarter value left to right wind. When you take that shot, I’m quickly turning you eighteen clicks up for the next one, which is at 622 yards, and then up fifteen for the last one, at 814 with a wind correction of five clicks. Are you ready?”

“Good work, son,” said Bob. He was firing off a bench on sandbags while Grogan stood to do his offhand.

“Sure you don’t care to sit, Colour Sergeant Anto?”

“Nah, I’m fine this way. Some other fellow come up and pull the bandana when you’re ready.”

Bob realized that Anto would pass the first target because he himself was already set up to that range and Anto would have no advantage. Instead he’d lase and shoot the second, then the third, while Blondie worked the clicks up for Bob’s second. He had a rogue impulse toward anarchistic victory: he’d shoot the second one first, taking away Anto’s advantage, then shoot the farthest, them come down to pick up the closest. That would be the way to win.

But what would that prove? That he was smarter at a stupid game? That he was an asshole? That he couldn’t go with the agenda out of some petty vanity?

Don’t do it, he told himself. Don’t be an asshole.

“Someone start us off,” said Anto.

Someone did.

“Pull on one, ready now, three, two, o-”

Bob was alone in the world of the scope. He was home, really; it was all familiar, the feel of the rifle, the smell of the cleaning fluid, the touch of hand to comb, cheek to fiberglass, finger to trigger, the rifle firm, the breathing stopped, the body nothing but steel except for the littlest tip of the trigger finger, and he saw the bright, tiny dot nesting at the confluence of the crosshairs and, as usual, some inner voice commanded his finger’s twitch and so deep was his concentration that he neither heard the shot nor felt the recoil, just watched the tiny blot of color leap.

With his practiced hand, he got the bolt thrown and felt the vibrations of clickage as, hunched close, the young man called Blondie rocketed through his eighteen clicks. Bob put the hairs on the even smaller dot just in time to see it scoot into the air as Anto nailed it dead solid perfect.

No need to cock then, but some impulse came to him from a trick bag of shooter’s savvy that just seemed to be there when you needed it, and he waved off Blondie and went for the shot on intuition, his gift for hold, knowing that Blondie couldn’t click fast enough. His mind was a blur of numbers. He reasoned that at 800 yards, each mil-dot below the crosshair represented an increment of 35 yards off the last zero at 622, which meant that the 92 yards further out to the third target represented about 2.7 mil-dots, and at a speed that has no place in time, he found the segment of line between second and third mil-dots that represented the 2.7 hold and involuntarily fired, just as did Grogan.

The ball leaped up, then jagged hard right.

“Whoa!”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Damn!”

Grogan’s shot, dead-on, had knocked the ball upwards as it deflated, but Bob’s, arriving a nanosecond later and off-center, had banged it hard to the right, and it squirted off and bled its atmosphere out in the grass, signifying death.

“Well shot, Bob the Nailer,” cried Grogan. “Damn, sir, that’s shooting!”

Applause arose, and Bob was shamed at the vanity of his wanting to win, but at the same time pleased he’d done all right and impressed all the young guys who’d done it for real much more recently than he had, and would be Out There again soon, beyond the point of the spear.

Grogan was all lit up.

“Lord God, many’s the time I’ve done my little trick, yes sir, and no one has ever come even half so close. You was what, a hundredth of a second behind me, and here I am with all the techno gizmos and you just shot on pure instinct. What a shot, what a bloody damned shot.”

For just a second there, it seemed like the point of the whole exercise was to congratulate the old lion on his near-win in a game that proved nothing. But Anto was the leader in this development; he led the celebration.

“Tell me, Mr. Nailer, how you done it. I never could, not in a thousand years, no matter the rifle.”

“He waved me off,” Blondie was saying to anyone who would listen, not that anyone was. “Jesus Christ, can you believe that?”

“When the Marine Corps went to mil-dots in the late seventies with the Unertl, it was something I had to know. Don’t know why. So I learned mil-dots, just beat it all into my head. It’s no good as a system, really, too much dependent on figuring, and so you’ve got to be a mathematician as much as a shooter and a stalker. I just learned it by rote memorization and practice, don’t know why. It kept me off the booze a whole year, I suppose, and maybe the mil-dots saved me from my own black dogs. Anyhow, when Blondie told me the range of the targets, I figured the difference between the two and realized what the subtend value was for the dots at that range. So I was able to come to the point of aim faster using the dots cold off the middle-range zero than I could have with Blondie adjusting the elevation knob. It was 2.7 mil-dots down from the 622-yard zero, so that’s where I held and shot.”

“There’s a professional for all you younger fellows, and I hope in the land of the scorpions you’ve got as much sense.”

“But I was shooting known distance, where you wasn’t. So it don’t really come to much ’cept my vanity. Seems like we lost the point here: the point is, that goddamn thing works like a charm, and I am a believer. Now I will sit back and just watch while you teach these young guys how to use it. They will need that, where they’re going. They will send many bad boys to wherever them kind of people go when they’re sent, and on account of that a lot of good boys will be coming home. If iSniper can up the count on homecomings, then by God, I am a true believer in iSniper and its, whatever you call it, that 911 thing.”