I, Sniper

47

The boys, heavily geared up, left at 2100, when the last smear of sun disappeared. Theirs was a hard thing: they had to cover the miles on foot, hung with weapons, ammo, ghillies, knives, water, and protein bars; night-navigate off their GPSs, shortcutting over foothills and down draws to achieve crow-flight directness; arrive in the dark still, low crawl a thousand yards, dig in, camo up, and settle into perfect stillness for four or so hours of perfect snipercraft awaiting the shot. It was more ordeal than job, just barely doable by war athletes at the peak of operational perfection with two hours in the gym and a five-mile run per day behind them for years. But then, this is what you trained for.

Anto was left alone in the house. He didn’t fancy his own agonies: he’d be naked to the elements in harsh weather for a barely survivable length of time, and riding the goddamned ATV fast over rough territory, his bollocks bouncing and squishing, the brutal cold-in the thirties, sure-turning fingers blue and bum white, and when he got there, there being the goal at the end, then a new game started and he’d be thrown this way and that on the radio or the mobile, all of which was getting him into a delicate shooting situation where he’d be so close to the target, a hair’s width of mistake in hold or press would dress him in a 7.62 forever, which might only last the eight seconds it took to bleed him out.

He’d smear his flesh, particularly his feet and hands, with thick grease to fight the cold; he’d wear gloves and socks, surely the bastard wouldn’t complain about that; and he’d stoke on amphetamines, the soldier’s little chemical buddy, that would keep aggression, alertness, and quick thinking at the highest pitch until the natural juices of combat took over.

He tried to sleep but couldn’t; he jacked off to a dirty book, but that didn’t calm him; he didn’t want to mix booze with the recipe of pills he’d take on leaving, so he just tried to sit there, soothing himself with memories of kills.

The best: a squaddie of fellas setting up an ambush in deepest slum Basra, the hide given away by waterboarding that Iraqi lieutenant colonel. So he sets up to the east with Ginger spotting, and Raymond’s shooting from the west with Jimmy on the tube. It’s pure sniper pleasure. He got nineteen in about two minutes, firing, finding a new target, firing again, throwing the bolt in a blur, watching them boys pivot when hit, then go slack as death sent them to paradise, them falling with the thud of jointless collections of bones and meat. The bastards had no place to run that day, because that was their plan, to blow a Coalition Humvee at a place where all the exits was blocked, and shoot down the survivors. Ha! Hoisted on their own petards, was they.

Now that was a goddamn day a sniper lives for. He doubted even Swagger at his finest hit so many so fast. Maybe Swagger did more in a day, but ’twas over time and involved moving about, staying ahead of his hunters, a different game altogether. But he’d never had the intensity of taking that many that fast. A machine gunner might get it, but again, different: blurred, rushed, the working of the gun, the spray of empties flying, the muzzle blast and noise. His was pop, pop, pop, the suppressed AI taking them down, but each image against the reticle was memorable.

Was they all insurgents? He was shooting so fast and Ginger was changing magazines so fast, Anto couldn’t tell if indeed each had a giveaway AK on his back; did it matter? Not really, and what dif could it make if the Rockies howled “atrocity” or “massacre” or “murder” or whatever? The point was to give ’em a taste of obliteration in the boldest of ways, so it would haunt them, and maybe that was the beginning of the turnaround in Basra, even though his teams never got no credit, and soon enough the Clara Bartons had turned on them.

He glanced at his watch. He’d eaten enough time. It was 0430, time to grease up.

Nobody was blown, but Ginger, still fighting the concussion, wasn’t in the best of shape. He breathed raggedly, held his guts in, crouched low. A bit groggy, he swore he was fine, but Jimmy didn’t quite believe it. Eighteen miles is a long haul on the double time with all the stuff aboard, as well as the extra load of Anto’s rifle and pack with clothes, even though they were at acme shape. They’d made the crest, hidden Anto’s stuff where he’d designated, and now crouched just under the ridgeline, looking down on the broad, dark valley. Because he was cautious, Jimmy checked the GPS again and confirmed for himself that this was indeed the valley Anto had selected, the more southern of the two goggle lenses on the map.

Ginger gulped some water from the tube running out from his backpack.

“Easy, mate,” said Raymond. “You may be needing that around noon.”

“I’m fine,” said Ginger. “It’s me goddamned head, hurts so much. That fucker done a fine job on me.”

“He’s a grand one, he is,” said Raymond.

“We’ll see his corpse lying still in the grass tomorrow.”

“For sure we will.”

“Okay, lads, time for a last piss, then to camo up.”

They turned for modesty to hasten a last urination, pulled their own Depends adult diapers tight afterwards, and zipped and buckled up. Then came the squishing of the face paint, easy enough, for all had experience in this theatrical craft. Their features gone gray-green-brown, the next thing on the list was the wretched crawl-squirm-tug-wrestle into their ghillie suits and the button-up that followed as the heavy garment closed, heated, and tightened about them. This was followed by the labor of arising and pulling on packs and hats, and finally seizing rifles.

Each, of course, looked like an animated fluff of greenery, some cartoon-factory creation. It got worse when, three large beasts of war, caparisoned in the texture of the natural world itself, with packs of gear and mean implements of death strapped on, they began the long crawl down. At the halfway point they separated, partners Jimmy and Raymond heading for a shooting site and Ginger veering directly downward, to place himself and his M4 close to the creek and therefore, by design, close to the action.

A chill wind bit. He wore slippers at least to the bike. Above, moonglow but no moon lit a sector of sky, and in others the stars lay out in their millions. He could barely make out landforms, though some of the drugs he’d taken were said to enhance night vision. He felt revved, twitchy, intense. His ears were closed off by the headset leading to the radio, which was affixed to his one garment, a Wilderness belt about his gut.

“Potatohead?”

“Go ahead, bastard,” he said.

A scrambled crackle of mixed syllables responded.

“What?”

“I said, ta-socks off.”

“You bastard. Me feet’ll freeze.”

“An-gloves.”

“What again? I can hardly hear you, this radio transmission sucks. Can we switch to me mobile? It’ll be so much clearer and-”

“No. Gloves. Take off-loves.”

“Ach,” complained the Irishman, and complied. “See, nothing.”

“Ho-ight leg up.”

Anto did. “See, nothing.”

“Ok-going.”

The radio went dead.

“Bastard,” said Anto.

Anto threw his leg over the Honda Foreman, turned the key. At least he didn’t have to kick-start it, as in the old days. The little engine turned over, and with his bare right foot, he threw the gears, slipping once, tearing some skin, but he was so drugged up and so charged with uppers he barely felt it. He settled it, throttled up, and the four-wheeler’s tires, roughly nubbed for backcountry treks, bit into the earth and the thing lurched ahead.

It was easy going, though the wind bit at him, even through the drugged haze, and now and then a pebble or twig flew up and took off a chunk of skin. His bollocks were undisturbed as long as the road was more or less smooth, and in no time he’d gotten it up to forty, which was top speed on the Honda. He roared through the starglow, through the dark forms of mountains, following the directions he’d been given.

The water hole came up, and he circled it, looking for another track that was the High Ridge Trace, found it, and headed along. Here the going was rougher, as this wasn’t a road shared with pickups and Jeeps, but more of a bouncer, and it also took him so close to trees and brush that the limbs and leaves whipped him hard, sometimes very hard, as he rushed along. By now his hands were all but numb and controlling the brake and the throttle was getting harder. His feet, being close to the motor’s warmth, were surprisingly comfortable still and hadn’t begun to edge toward nothingness. He bent at another lash, saw some fine open road, ginned the throttle, and leapt ahead. As he flew, he checked his watch. It was only 0545 and he knew he’d make his destination in plenty of time.

Jimmy and Raymond, breathless and ragged and clotted with bits of grass, burrs, a slathering of dust stuck to sweat after the long crawl, set up about three hundred yards from the center of the valley flat, with a great overlook on the creek below, with no undulations or folds between them and the presumed target zone. It would be easy shooting, especially with the iSniper911 to solve the shot.

They got down in the prone, and rather than exactly digging in against the slight cant of the land, more or less insinuated their way into it, as if it were a crowd, not the planet Earth itself, squirming, adjusting, kicking now and then, trying to do all this without raising telltale signs like clots of thrown earth and dead weeds about themselves. Finally they had enough room to scootch down flat and not at the tilt, and Raymond took up the rifle, unfolded the bipod legs and had a time on the adjustments, getting the height just right, digging into the earth so that the legs of the support would be even, which would make the traverse easier, if indeed that’s what was called for. Meanwhile, Jimmy set up the spotter on its baby tripod, adjusting it for the same presumed target zone three hundred yards and fifteen degrees beneath horizontal out. It was still too dark for him to focus, though in fact a satiny glow had begun to light the eastern horizon across from them. After a bit of busyness, both were as set as they could get, and it was then that Jimmy unfurled a camo tarpaulin, a sheet of canvas threaded heavily with the strips of nature’s-coloring fabric as well as the odd twig or piece of thatch, so that it enveloped them, leaving only a peep slot at the farthest extreme, which left them barely enough room to observe and shoot. They settled in for the long, slow wait in abject stillness, a zen beyond death that was the sniper’s hardest discipline.

As Anto had predicted, it was much harder on Ginger. He was alone, and after breaking contact with his colleagues, he was really alone, seemingly on the face of the Earth. He continued his downward slither, swimming against the soil. It ate his energy and got him dirty, sweaty, and breathless in a hurry, exactly as he stayed throughout the downward progress. He persevered, reaching the valley floor, and before venturing out on the flat, tried to pick the best spot. Certainly dead center, right? But then his mind grew confused: he tried to imagine which way to orient himself; Anto hadn’t specified.

Did he want to be on his belly, looking forward to the action, able to haul himself up to his knees, throw the rifle to shoulder, and open up? Or was the best posture on his back, flat, his soles to the action, by which he could simply sit upright as he drew his legs in and fire from that situation? That would be faster by a second, involving less movement and adjustment on his part. On the other hand, he could only see straight up in that position, and he’d be bereft of visual keys. Suppose Raymond hit dirt, to clear the way for his fusillade, and he was just lying there watching the clouds roll by.

But if he were on an incline with his head lower than his feet, sure he might see, but just as sure, with the blood collecting in his damaged skull, he might pass out or endure so much pain that he would begin to involuntarily twitch. Thinking it over, he decided on a compromise and would lie on his left side, facing the creek bed. He could push himself to knees off his left arm and get to firing almost instantly-full auto, safety off, his finger in the guard housing, resting on the curve of the trigger-yet watch the action as well, and best of all, his head wouldn’t be a collection point for all the bad blood that still cruised his veins.

He chose the middle, as near as he could find it, and slid himself down among the higher grass, the knots of brush and bristle, the gnarly little twisted stems of the strange things that grew upon the plains. He settled in possibly twenty-five yards out, with a good view of a hundred yards either way. He felt for comfort and finally achieved what little he could arrange. That done, he threw the camo tarp over himself, like a blanket, so that he only peeped out from the smallest of cracks at the edge, which itself was concealed largely from view by two knots of brush. The matting of fabric strips and leaf clusters stitched to the outside of the tarp vibrated slightly in a soft, predawn wind. His diaper secure, his water source a lick away, his fingers on grip and forearm, the rifle cinched by combat sling close, twenty-eight Corbon 5.56s in the PMAG, and another PMAG so loaded secured to it by a Magpul link for the fastest reload in the game, he allowed himself to settle in and try to relax. As the sun began to paint the limits of his vision, it caught on the tips of trees and the upper reaches of the valley slope across the way.

Ninety hard minutes had passed, and Anto’s balls were now turning blue and his hands no longer belonged to him. An uncontrollable chill wracked his body. The amphetamines seemed to have worn off as well. He felt pain everywhere, the numbness of the cold, the bite of the wind, the sting of all the particles and branches that had pelted and whipped him.

Jaysus, he hated this evil bastard Swagger like the devil hisself. Him a fine strong man, the sniper’s sniper, an NCO in 22, the finest of all units on earth, reduced to nude messenger boy in forty-degree morning, cold and shot through with pain. Aghhhhh, such pleasure ahead, in seeing the man take Raymond’s 168er and ride it hard to ground, not believing it had finally happened to him. Anto hoped for a bit of eye contact there at the extreme moment, so Swagger would know who’d nailed him. But he’d pass that up for a simple sure death, and if this ordeal, by Jaysus, were the price, he’d pay it in hard, cold cash.

At last he rolled into a grove of trees in a narrow valley that announced the presence of a creek; it had to be Big Bend. He pulled up, turned the motor off, and watched as the sun began to light up the higher bits of elevation, turning the tips of the trees bright with warmth and hope. His machine ticked as it cooled; he sat, immobile, waiting, enjoying the cessation of the vibration against his bollocks, the cut of the wind and the branches against his shoulders and arms. Only his feet were warm, and he put his hands down and opened and shut them against the numbness in the soothing radiation from the engine.

“Potato!”

He responded into the microphone held on a strut just beyond his frozen lips.

“You bastard, Swagger, this being one hairy fooking bitch of a tumble. Man, I’d wring your goddamned neck if I had the chance.”

“Not-day,” Swagger said, the transmission just a little clearer. “Set your GPS on a radial two-sixty-five an-distance indicator for one-point-seven miles. When the b-ings for one-point-seven, turn to.109. Go. Fast. Now.” Then of course the radio went to nothing but static.

Anto struggled to get his GPS out of the bag with the money- actually, old magazines and TV dinner packaging-and with his clumsy fingers found the proper buttons and set the heading, then switched modes and set the distance. It was the Garmin trail-marking model, set to ring when he went the 1.7. Looking at the route, it looked as if he was going straight over the foothills, not around them, and that would be a lot of jostling, a lot of barefoot shifting, a lot of diddling with the throttle and the brake for leverage and control.

Fooking bastard.

He set the GPS onto its neat little bracket affixed to the handlebars for that purpose exactly, gunned the engine to life, and set out, cursing all the way.

Nothing. It was nearly ten now, and the sun was bright and hot. Under the tarpaulin the sniper team did what ninety-nine percent of sniping is: they waited. In the flashy books and movies, the waiting part is always skipped. Alas, for Jimmy and Raymond it could not be. They just felt the numbness spread through their bodies, the warmth of the morning meeting the chill from the ground beneath, and were soon enough miserable, too cold from below, too hot from above. They knew: best not to think of time or check watches, best not to anticipate action, contemplate the future, make plans, hope it would end soon. Best to concentrate on the now, confront the suck in its pristine suckiness, attempt to engage it without letting it destroy the mind, not fret, whine, think of what could have been, refight old fights, discuss anything with meaning, comment on the situation in their adult diapers, profess either hunger to kill or fear of death. Just endure, as snipers had since the first Chinaman threw charcoal, saltpeter, and stinky sulfur together in a bowl and mashed them up.

“Think I’ll light a nice cigar, have a piss, open a bottle of stout, and go for a little stretch-it-out walk,” said Jimmy, the joker.

“You will not,” said Raymond, who was cursed with an earnest, literal mind, “that would completely blow our-” and then he saw it was Jimmy’s joking and pulled up.

“Had you, boyo,” said Jimmy.

“That you did,” said Raymond.

“You poor sod, believing everything that’s said. That’s why you shouldn’t buy nothing till you run it by me, ’cause you’re such a gentle, trusting fool, you’ll be taken ad of every time.”

“I wasn’t raised to no fast ways in a city like,” said Raymond. “Out in the country, all was what was said, and all you city lads, you play these damned games on me.”

“If yis wasn’t the best shot in Ireland, what woulda become of ya, I’ll never know.”

They settled down again, for their spurts of conversation came about every twenty minutes and lasted but a few seconds.

Each rode the optics before him. On the spotting scope, Jimmy’s was by far the wider view, and he patrolled the valley floor, then up and down the opposing slope in calm, orderly fashion, as he had been trained, never rushing, never tiring, never blinking, apprehending each and every detail, hunting for some kind of change-the straight line, the shadow falling in the wrong direction, a quick movement, a puff of dust where there was no wind, a dead branch amid bright green sprigs. But there was no change at all, only the lapping of the grass under the pressure of the steady, slight wind and, above the horizon of the valley, the slow, magnificent rush of the clouds, boiling cumulus that looked like frozen explosions with utterly detailed fretwork in their tumbles.

“Look,” said Raymond, who’d seen them first.

A flock of strange beasts had moseyed in, with white tails and throats, the size of goats, their horns like the arms of a lyre for a Greek god to pluck a melody on.

“Jaysus, what craytures them be?” wondered Jimmy.

“Did we take a wrong turn and go to Africa, I’m wondering, Jimmy,” said Raymond.

“We did, sure of it. No, we did not. Them’s antelopes of the American type. Good eating, so I’m told. Hunted hard, the more you kill, the more they breed.”

“Who could kill a beauty thing like that?” wondered Raymond.

Agh. How much longer? And how had it gotten so hot so fast? And where did the left half of me butt go?

Ginger lay, like any sniper, hard and calm in the hide. But this was no ordinary hide. In all the fighting he’d been in-considerable, what with Gulf I, Gulf II, the odd secret tiff in times of alleged peace, the long hard pull at Basra during the insurrection, all the security jobs for Graywolf after the fall-the hides offered a bit more comfort and movement. An apartment, an arroyo, a station on an outpost sandbag wall looking across a valley of heathen for movement. He’d never been asked before to pretend to be the earth itself, silent, abiding, unmoving.

Not an easy role to play. Thank God for the water, he could not stop drinking it, and what happened if it went too soon, by midafternoon say? He was out here till well after dark if nothing happened.

And of course his head. The Yank had battered him good. Hit him hard; you could understand it, the fellow paying him back for the water procedure. But still. A doctor would have put stitches in and given him light duty for a week, as well as the best painkillers Irish medicine could produce. But no such niceties existed here in wild America. No stitches, so under the bandages, he could feel the wet of blood seepage. The painkillers were over-the-counter, and any more Advil and he’d be a walking Advil himself, all brown and bluntlike, a six-three, 240-pound pill of ache medicine.

Worse, at least Jimmy and Raymond had visuals to amuse them. His vision was locked on to a spread of a few dozen yards about the creek, and even when the strange craytures came down to drink, he hadn’t a good look at them because they never quite came into his zone of vision. Ach, what was they? Some kind of-

He heard something.

Low and far off at first, then it rose. He waited for it to clarify, and presently it did. His heart leapt in actual joy, a rare thing for a man so stoic and duty-bred as he. He knew it to be the sound of the ATV Anto was driving.

His hands tightened on the pistol grip of his M4, he said a quick Hail Mary; he wished he had time to pop another upper for a jolt of energy and concentration; he flexed what he could flex and got ready for the action.

The ATV climbed a ridge and a bell sounded and Anto was happy to see from the GPS that this was where, according to previous radioed instruction, he turned from radial 265 to 109, that is, along the rim of this ridge. He had been worried at first, with all the this-way and that-way until he was confused, but he had a general idea he was trending away from the valley he’d designated as the spot for the final play, toward which he’d bet Swagger would guide him, and where, obedient to his wishes, the Spartans Jimmy, Raymond, and Ginger now lay concealed in ambush.

That sense of despair increased as the game progressed and the clock wound its way onward, but now, finally, he was oriented correctly, or so he believed.

He felt like he was on the moon, as on each side of his ridge, a wide-to-forever stretch of undulating hills, dips, crescents of shadow, outcrops of rock yielded spectacle but little information. Beyond in a distance too far to be measured, he saw snaggled peaks arise, some even snowcapped. But here in the high grasslands, it was all dips and humps, a frozen sea of waves dappled in shadow.

He followed the heading and might have gone to eternity or at least dark when he heard the buzz of the radio signal. He dropped to idle, twisted, got the radio out. Of his clothes, now that he’d adjusted to nakedness, what he missed most was pockets.

“Potato?”

“I am here, goddamnit,” he said.

“Stop. Re-ent to heading zero-nine-six, go for one-iles and stop. It’ll be-”

“How many miles, goddamnit?”

“One-point-six. Stop. Stay on the scooter-isappear on me. Ro-r?”

“Roger that, ye slabber.”

As usual, the voice didn’t rise to any provocations but merely disappeared. Anto reset the GPS and followed its guidance, pleased to see that now indeed it seemed to be taking him where he thought his designated valley ought to be.

The 1.6 passed quickly over bare ground and slopes that weren’t quite hills until, at 1.5, he found himself on a steep upgrade, rising to a rim that, examined from a distance, seemed larger than the others. The machine chugged stubbornly against the incline, and in a few more minutes he halted.

The promised land. The valley was vast and he saw in it the same features that had been represented pictorially on the geodesic survey map. It took him a second to orient himself, then he realized he was at the south edge, which meant that of the slopes before him, the right hid his ambushers, and the left would in time present Swagger for the killing.

He was certain that at this moment he was under observation, and so he fought the impulse to show emotion at the success of his strategy, and he fought the instinct to double-check his placements by looking for signs of his hiding men. He kept his face impassive and registered no excitement, no recognition, nothing but the sullen war face of his breed.

He knew he’d wait a bit. Wherever he was, Swagger himself had just arrived, for just as certainly as Anto had been moved about, Swagger, monitoring him, had to be moving too, to get from place to place and watch for followers. But now Swagger would study the valley, for perhaps as much as an hour, examining every tuft, every rill, every knoll, every bush, every rise, every fall, looking for signs that Anto had somehow done exactly what Anto had indeed done-that is, guess the spot and place men there. So this was where the boys’ snipercraft had to be at its highest.

The day seemed to disconnect from time. The only noise was the persistence of the wind; otherwise the surface of the earth seemed devoid of life except for the naked, now red-shouldered man on the odd four-wheeled vehicle, which looked more like a toy than anything of serious purpose. A bird rode wind funnels in circles, hunting for prey-another sniper, in his way. Some kind of yowl rose briefly and disappeared as briefly, as something ate something else. The time passed, second by second. Anto sat alone on the bike seat, straddling the engine, buck nekkid as the day he was born but now used to it and not feeling shame at all.

Finally a voice crackled through the earphones.

“See the creek running through the valley?”

“I do.”

“Aim for its center. Bisect it-fectly. Within fifty feet, halt. Climb off-ike on the right side. -ands are up, you sidestep ten feet, and stop-n grass. Any sudden mo-ullet in the brain. Whe-dy, I come out of hide.”

“I read.”

“Now do it.”

Anto turned the ignition key.

As the vehicle jumped to life, he tried to fight the grin that split his face, but he was thinking, Dead bang center.