Point of Impact

CHAPTER FOUR

The next day they met at the three-hundred-yard range, but without explanation the colonel was absent. Without his intense presence, his people seemed a little more relaxed. The man Hatcher seemed to be in charge, though only barely. He was a wiry fifty-year-old redhead, with spaces between his teeth, a pocketful of pens nested in some kind of plastic envelope in his breast pocket, and the distracted air of a man who knows too much about one thing and not enough about a lot of things. He herded Bob into a black Jeep Cherokee and with two others, including the stolid Payne, they drove over a network of back roads, around the hilltop, to another area.

What he saw shocked Bob some – a large, clear field on the down slope of a hill, at one end of which stood a jerry-built scaffolding, pipes bolted together, the whole mad structure held stable by guy wires sunk into the ground at a variety of points around its perimeter. It looked like a circus tent without the canvas, or the skeleton of a building without the cement.

Bob saw a series of ladders to its upper reaches, and up there he saw a platform where a shooting bench and a chair had been installed.

“It’s a building in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” said Hatcher. “Or, rather, the height and the distances equal exactly the height and distances of a building in Tulsa, Oklahoma. See the car?”

At one end of a dirt road that ran before the whole ridiculous structure there was an old limousine chassis, its engine long since gone, its body rusty, but its passenger compartment reasonably intact; it was attached by chain and winch to what must have been an engine a half mile away.

“Now what the hell is this?”

“It’s our SWAT scenario,” said Hatcher. “We’ve gamed out a situation where we’re going to ask you to fire on a moving target in a hostage situation. You’ll be operating off cues – you’ll be earphoned into a network and you’ll get an okay to fire at a bank robber who’s fleeing the scene surrounded by hostages. You’ll have an envelope of about five seconds to go for a head shot. It’s based on an event that took place in Tulsa in 1986, where an FBI sniper had to take the same shot.”

“What happened?”

“Ah, he hit a woman hostage in the spine, paralyzing her. The bad guy shot two other hostages to death and then killed himself. It was a horrible thing, just a horrible thing. Man, that agent trained for that shot his whole life, and when it came, he blew it. A shame.”

“They were in a limo?”

“No. It was the back of a pickup. We got a deal on the limo.”

The Cherokee parked, and various people stopped scuffling about and came over to greet the team. Hatcher checked with technicians, radios were issued and handed out and they took Bob to a blackboard under a lean-to.

“You know, Mr. Swagger, in the past fifteen years, by our computations, law enforcement authorities, federal and local, have taken over eight hundred fifty precision shots. That is, through scopes at armed felons at ranges from between thirty-five and three hundred fifty yards. Do you know what the one-shot stop ratio is?”

“I’d bet it’s low.”

“Thirty-one percent one-shot drops. Hell, just last year in Sacramento, California, a police sniper took a clear shot at an unmoving gunman through the door of an electronics store and missed him completely. The guy shot three hostages to death before they settled his hash. Do you know why?”

Bob thought a while, took his time, and then delivered an answer.

“Some tiny percentage of the misses might be due to round deviation or equipment failure. But I’d bet the most usual cause is shooter failure. In the ’Nam, I missed my first shot. And my second. It takes practice to get used to staying relaxed while taking the trigger slack out on a man.”

You have to find a little cold place and be there by yourself for a while, he was thinking.

“That’s right,” Hatcher sang out cheerily. “So our theory is that if we can increase their confidence factor even by a tiny margin, it’s a great thing. You want that guy on the rifle knowing what he’s got in his chamber’s going to do its job if he does his. And one reason he’ll believe it, we’re hoping, is because you’ve told him so and showed him how.”

Bob nodded.

“Can I see the vehicle?”

“No. Think of it this way, did the FBI agent see the vehicle any time before he had to fire? No, he didn’t and we want to put you where he was. And we’re not going to tell you the range either, that’s something we’d like you to dope out on your own. No, what we’d like is to put you up there on what’s supposed to be the fifth floor of the Tulsa Casualty and Life Building. It’s October tenth, 1986, and a bank robber named Willie Downing with a cheap Star 9mm and three female hostages is being driven toward Tulsa International Airport where an airliner is waiting, he thinks, to fly him to Africa. You’re Special Agent Nick Memphis of the FBI, SWAT trained, the best rifle and pistol marksman in the office. Sometime in the next few hours, Willie Downing will be before your sights, having killed a policeman and a bank guard and wounded two more, and now demonstrating serious signs of a PCP-induced psychotic episode. Your supervisor has determined that yours is the best shot; you have the angle and the opportunity. The real Nick Memphis was firing a Remington 700 in.308, but without the heavy varmint barrel – ”

“Shouldn’t have mattered,” said Bob, “not for one shot.”

“Anyway, we’re going to tie you into a radio net and a lot of the information you’ll be getting is based on the actual transcripts, so you’ll be in about the same situation as Nick Memphis was. I’ll be on the mike down here, reading you the radio commands to play you just the way his supervisors played Nick Memphis. You’ll have plenty of time to set up, just like he did, and plenty of time to acquire the target while you’re waiting for the green light. So, Mr. Swagger, now that you’ve seen it – do you want to play?”

Bob looked up the teetery structure of rods and lumber. It didn’t seem too damn steady. But it had him. His vanity was pricked. Could he hit this shot, especially where some federal fool had failed, using up several lives in the process?

Suddenly, for the first time in his stay in Maryland, Bob let the tiniest hint of smile crease his face.

“Let’s do it,” he said, for the moment not giving a damn about Accutech but eager to the point of glee to take on Willie Downing and Nick Memphis.

They told him the real Nick Memphis had fired off of sandbags in a fifth-floor windowsill, and way up in the scaffolding, after a long climb, he discovered that setup, necessarily jury-rigged, but stable enough.

He put on the earphones and hands-free mike, and switched as instructed to Channel 14, the FBI Control Channel.

There was the hiss and crackle of static, then he heard, “Ahh, Charlie Four, do you read, Charlie Four, do you read?”

“Am I Charlie Four?” he asked.

“Affirmative,” came the response. “Charlie Four, please advise as to your position.” It was Hatcher, playacting Base.

“Well, I’m up here, dammit.”

“Bob, let’s put ourself in 1986 for the sake of the exercise,” said Hatcher over the earphones. “Just reply in standard radio argot.”

“Read you, Base. Ah, I’m situated in the fifth floor of Tulsa Casualty, I have a clear view east down – ” he tried to remember from the map the name of the street down which Memphis took his shot, “down Ridgely.”

“Ah, okay, that’s an affirmative, Charlie Four, you just hold steady now.”

“What’s the situation?”

“Ah, Charlie Four, we have suspect heading your direction down Mosher. He’s gone through two ambushes but on-site command wouldn’t authorize a go because nobody could get a clear shot at the suspect. He’s surrounded by these damn hysterical women and we think he may have tied himself to them.”

“Read you, Base.”

“Please stand by.”

Bob took a second to look at the rough “street” down which he’d be shooting. The problem, of course, was range. Known-distance shooting was easier, because then you can calculate the bullet drop by the ballistics tables and your own experience. But Bob had no natural feeling for range. Some men could look at something and by the weird mechanics of the brain simply know what the distance was. Not Bob. So he had worked out a crude naked-eye system in Vietnam. If he could make out eyes, he knew he was inside a hundred yards – the rare shot. If he could make out face, he was under two hundred yards. If he could just make out head he was under three hundred. If he could make out only legs, he was under four hundred. If he could make out body, he was under five hundred; if he could only see movement, he was under six hundred.

From his vantage point, he watched as technicians scurried over the killing ground beneath him, examining the chain that would tow the car, fussing with the engine that would pull it, adjusting video cameras mounted on tripods down the roadway. He fixed them in his mind, reading their shape and making his calculations off them. He figured the shooting site would be about 320 yards out.

Meanwhile, the crackle and hiss played against his ears, as he heard other reports from police and FBI units checking in for instruction; it was a constant chatter, a torrent of loose noise. Why hadn’t poor Memphis had a spotter with him, someone to run interference and to shelter him from the hundred distractions?

Though Bob could only see blue-humped mountains and rolling forest and though the breeze played against his skin, cooling it, he had no trouble imagining Memphis in the hot little office behind the sandbags and the rifle, his tension and agitation growing as he waited alone, his excitement bounding as the situation drew nearer and nearer to him.

It was the excitement that fucked him, Bob thought. You don’t shoot from excitement or haste or urgency. You shoot out of calm professional confidence, rooted in the belief, built up over a thousand hours’ practice and a hundred thousand bullets fired, that if you can see it you can hit it.

“Charlie Four, you there?”

“Affirmative, Base.”

“Command advises that suspect vehicle has just turned down Lincoln, entering your district.”

“I have that, Base.”

“ETA four minutes.”

“Read you, Base, back to you.”

“Ah, Charlie Four, I’m getting real bad reports from people in the field, they’re telling me this guy is waving his gun and screaming at the hostages and that every time he sees a police vehicle he acts a little crazier. He’s bad news, bad, bad news.”

“Reading you, Base.”

“Charlie Four, you think you’d be able to make that shot?”

Bob squinted through the scope at the road down which the hostage vehicle would travel.

“I have it big and clear, Base. The shot is there for me if it’s there for you.”

“Charlie Four, this guy could go off at any moment and hurt some more people.”

“I read you, Base. You got an ETA for me?”

“He’s at Lincoln, Charlie Four, Lincoln and Chesley, and a uniformed officer says he’s really flipped out. Makin’ me nervous, very nervous.”

“Base, I make the shot three hundred twenty yards. I can put it in a fifty-cent piece at that range. Confidence is high here.”

“Ah, Charlie Four, I’ve been in contact with command and it’s getting real hairy in that car. We’re, um, we’ve decided to authorize a green light for you, Charlie Four.”

“I’m reading you, Base, and making ready to shoot. I’ll be off the air now.”

“Ah, Charlie Four, that’s a negative. I’ve got two spotters here; I’ll be notifying you when suspect gun is pointed in safe direction and you can go for a head shot, Charlie Four. We can’t risk a spasm shot, do you read?”

“Negative, Base, I can’t be concentrating on anything but my shooting.”

“Then, stand down, Charlie Four, I won’t authorize a green light unless I’ve visually verified suspect’s gun position, just like the book says.”

So there Nick Memphis had had it. Caught right on the horns. He’d have some guy yelling in his ear as he was shooting, or he’d have to stand down and walk away from it.

“All right, Base, you talked me into it. I’m sliding into shooting position now. You sing out when your people say it’s clear.”

Bob slid the rifle into his shoulder, watched as the scope came up big and bright and clean, a movie-screen world, all in primary colors bold and furious.

“Charlie Four, he’s turned down Ridgely, he’s coming into your kill zone right about now.”

Bob threw the bolt, feeding one of the Accutech.308’s into his chamber. He drew the rifle to him, found the hands-free mike got in the way of his spot-weld, and thus quickly and savagely bent it out of the way, to take his place behind the gun.

It was a modified sitting position, with the weight on his left ham, his body canted slightly as the rifle was pulled to him, while resting solidly on the sandbag barricade. It felt completely moored to the bags, its weight entirely on them. His upper body supported itself on elbows, and the rifle rode a fulcrum of the sandbag, guided by his hands pulling it tight against his shoulder. His hip flared a bit under the strain, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle.

As he looked through the scope, Bob made subtle corrections in his grip and body position, trying to find, given the circumstances, an equipoise: one position where everything was tucked just right, where he felt most comfortable, less stressed, where his breathing was natural and loose, and yet through it all he still felt anchored into his chair and the bench and the bags.

Through the scope, he watched the slight tremble of the cross hairs, matching his breathing. That was the enemy, really: not Willie Downing or Nick Memphis or Accutech or anything – no, it was his own heart, which he could not quite control (nobody could) and which would send random messages of treachery to the various parts of his body. At these last moments, the heart could betray anyone, firing off a bolt of fear that would evince itself in a dozen tragic ways: a trigger finger hitch, a breath held too long, a weirdly detonating synapse that caused the eye to lose its sharpness or its perspective; an ear that suddenly heard too much or not enough; a foot that fell asleep and distracted its owner from the serious business at hand.

Bob blinked quickly, ordered himself to chill out, and tried to see in the lazy tremble in the cross hairs not something to hate (his own weakness) but something to make peace with – something to forgive. Self-forgiveness was a large part of it: you can’t be perfect all the time. Nobody can: accept your weakness, try to tame it and make it work for you.

Bob breathed slowly, letting the air hum half into his lungs, then humming it half out. He didn’t want a lot of oxygen in them, ballooning out on him at the awkward moments. But dammit, he still didn’t quite feel comfortable. It was all so strange: sitting up there in the pretend building, pretending to be an FBI agent, pretending it was 1986, trying to pretend it was real.

There is nothing to pretend, he told himself. There is only shooting, and that’s never pretend.

He’d figured the math out much earlier. Having memorized the ballistics table, he knew that at 320 yards the 150-grain bullet was programmed to drop about ten inches and would have slowed, by this distance, to a velocity of about 2,160 feet per second. But he also knew that this Accutech stuff was a bit hotter than the standard. And so he figured it would only drop eight inches. But he was shooting downhill, a slightly different problem than shooting flat; this meant he’d add more of a drop, because bullets fired at an angle fall farther; he took another inch out of the equation. That put him nine inches low at 350 yards, except that the wind, just a slight breeze, would move the bullet as it traveled perhaps four inches to the left. So he had to hold nine inches lower and four inches to the left. Then he had to lead to compensate for the speed of the car; and he had to do it on cue, when he got the green light command over his earphones.

“Charlie Four, do you read?”

Fuck it, thought Bob, what does he want?

He said nothing. The mike was bent under his chin and to pull it back into place was to blow his spot-weld, his hold and his peace. He would not give that up.

“Charlie Four, goddammit, where are you?”

Bob was silent, awaiting the arrival of the vehicle in the bottom right quadrant of his scope.

“Charlie Four, goddammit, get on the air! Do you acknowledge? Call in, goddammit, Charlie Four, I need you authenticated.”

Bob was silent, trying to flatten out that bit of tremble from the reticle. He tried to make his mind blank and cool and drive out any sensation of his own body. There should be only two things: finding the right hold and preserving it through the trigger pull.

“Charlie Four, you don’t call in, I’m not gonna green light you, goddammit, I have to have you on the air so I know you’re reading my commands!”

Bob held silent. His breath was rougher now; he felt like tossing the earphones away! Talking to him! Now!

He tried to clear his head, to make everything go away except the shot. He could not.

“Charlie Four, green light canceled. Abort it. Hang it up, if you’re there, Charlie Four. Do you read? Shot authorization is canceled. There’ll be no shooting, goddammit, Charlie Four.”

And now he saw it.

The limo body, hauled by the chain, slid into view. Its angle from him was not acute but more like forty degrees; the car appeared to be moving at about twenty miles per hour; Bob had no trouble pivoting the rifle on the bag through a short arc as he tracked the car, looking for his hold. He tried not to note the details, but he could hardly help it. Downing, for example, was, preposterously, a watermelon; the four hostages around him were balloons. It was crude but effective, especially in the way the wind made the balloons waver in unpredictable ways and the bump and grind of the two made the melon queerly elastic, nearly human. Bob almost laughed. All this money to shoot a melon! And he knew it was absurd, too. A hundred men could hit a melon like this, but only one of them could hit a head.

And then that was gone too, as, suddenly, Bob had the position, had it, knew it, had the shot, had it right, had it perfect. He held as the car continued to slide and involuntarily, without having consciously decided to disobey orders, he began to take the trigger slack out. He was going to shoot anyway, fuck it.

“Charlie Four, gun is down, green light, green light, green li – ”

But Bob had fired already by then, having already made the decision at some subconscious level. His brain had yielded to his finger; his finger had decided and in the instant before the blur took it all away from his eye, he saw the melon detonate into a smear of red against the green Maryland countryside as the bullet tore through it and mushroomed. And when the scope came back from the recoil he saw all four ballons still waving in the wind and the melon blown in half.

“Congratulations,” said Hatcher. “You win all the marbles. You solved it.”

Bob said nothing, just fixed him with a cool eye. He had climbed down from the tower, to be surrounded by admirers.

“When did you decide to shoot?”

“It just happened.”

“You were so fast when you got the green light. Damn, you were so fast!”

Bob didn’t tell them he was halfway through the pull when the word came.

“Here, you can read the transcripts yourself.” He handed them over to Bob, who looked at them briefly, enough to satisfy himself that yes, indeed, Base had been on the earphones to poor Memphis until almost the last second.

BASE: Have you acquired the target?

AGENT MEMPHIS: Yes, sir, uh, he’s at the bottom of my scope, he’s rising into my cross hairs, uh, he’s -

BASE: Hold your fire, Charlie Four, until I have a confirmation that his piece is down.

AGENT MEMPHIS: Base, goddammit, I have him, I have him, I -

BASE: No authorization. Hold it, Charlie Four, I can’t let you shoot, I -

AGENT MEMPHIS: [garbled] – have it, dammit, I can -

BASE: Negative, negative, Charlie Two, can you give me a visual?

AGENT O’BRIAN: I can’t see his gun, Base, I, oh, Christ, he’s going to fire -

BASE: [garbled] Shoot, green light, fire, goddammit, take his ass down -

AGENT MEMPHIS: [garbled]

BASE: God, you hit the girl, he hit a girl, oh, Jesus, in the back -

AGENT O’BRIAN: Suspect is firing on his hostages, Jesus, will somebody hit him, Nick, hit him, hit him, hit him!

AGENT MEMPHIS: I can’t see, he’s behind, oh, Jesus, he’s shooting them, I can’t get another shot, oh, Jesus, help them, help them, somebody, help them!

AGENT O’BRIAN: He just blew his own head away. [obscenity], Nick, he put that gunbarrel in his mouth and blew his [obscenity] head away, he -

BASE: Get those people medical aid, get those people medical aid, Jesus Christ, get those -

AGENT MEMPHIS: Shit.

That was enough. Why hadn’t Memphis had a spotter, someone sitting next to him up there? Sniping was a two-man job, or it was a one-man, on his lonesome, job. It wasn’t for a guy with a radio playing in his ear. And Base. Base was the real enemy; Base had made it impossible for the guy to hit that shot, blabbering away like an old woman.

“They fucked him, but good,” said Bob through tight lips. He thought of the poor jerk, watching the great Tulsa massacre through his scope, helpless, enraged, and most of all unforgivingly furious at himself for having missed the shot and hit the woman.

“What happened to him?”

“He married the woman he hit. He quadded her, and he married her. Still in the Bureau, with a poor woman in a wheelchair to care for the rest of his life.”

Well, here’s to you, Nick Memphis, thought Bob. If I were still a drinking man, I’d lift a glass to you, and if I ever become one another time, then I’ll lift one for you too.

“It’s remarkable how institutions reveal themselves under stress,” said Hatcher. “See, the Bureau is basically a bureaucracy, and under everything it does, there’s a bureaucratic imperative. So Base had to monitor Memphis, even at the moment of firing. Had to, neurotically, pathologically. That was Base’s first operating principle, to cover his own ass. And poor Memphis, being a team guy, even though the solo artist, poor Memphis played along. And in so doing, completely compromised his shot.”

There was a pause.

“But Mr. Swagger, you didn’t. Because you’re not a member of a team, and you have no norms and traditions to live up to. You can just go for it. You see through to the necessary which is utmost concentration. That shot was probably within the furthest reaches of Memphis’s envelope, and under perfect circumstances, he’d have made it. But he got fucked. We tried to fuck you, and you just sailed on through it. Man, you whacked Willie Downing good.”

There were several other fans clustered around Bob, besides the gooney Hatcher. He could sense their admiration, and despised them for it.

“Now, Mr. Swagger, we’ve got one more test for you. Do you still want to play?”

Bob launched another gob into the dust, queerly uncomfortable but not entirely displeased with the awe that was being thrust upon him.

“I’ll take another shot,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get lucky again.”

“This one is straight up your alley. It’s pure sniper war. This one is based on an incident that took place outside Medellín, in Colombia, in 1988. It’s highly classified so I’ve got to ask you never to disclose specifics to anybody. Fair enough?”

“I’m just here to shoot, not talk.”

“As I explain it to you, I think you’ll understand the need for delicacy in the matter. It involves a DEA agent who took a fourteen-hundred-yard shot at a drug dealer who was responsible for the murder of a DEA team. The guy had fantastic security, bunches of Colombians packing a lot of automatic heat. And the word was out, if anybody tried to take the guy down, the Colombians would just start blasting. So, reluctantly and unofficially, DEA decided to take the guy out with a minimum of fuss. Highly illegal, but it was felt a message had to be sent to certain parties in Colombia.”

“So it was a straight hit?” Bob asked.

“Yes. Your kind of work. No hostages, nothing. Just a man and a rifle and a hell of a long shot.”

“You’re not making any fourteen-hundred-yarder with a.308, I’ll tell you that.”

“You’re anticipating us again. The DEA shooter used a.300 H & H Magnum, with a Sierra 200-grain slug. Here, here’s the rifle. The same one.”

He nodded, and one of the technicians brought a rifle case over and opened it. Bob only saw a rifle.

But what a rifle.

“Goddamn,” he said almost involuntarily, “that’s a honey of a piece. Damn!”

It was a bolt-action Model 70 target, pre-’64, with a fat bull barrel and a Unertl 36× scope running nearly along its entire barrel length. Its dark gleam blazed out at him in that high sheen that was now a lost art but had reached its highest pitch in the great American gun-making days of the 1920s and ’30s. It was almost pristine, too, clean and crisp, well tended, much loved and trusted. But it was the wood that really hit him. The wood, in that slightly thicker pre-’64 configuration, was almost black; he’d never seen a walnut with such blackness to it; but it wasn’t like black plastic for it had the warm gleam of the organic to it. Black wood?

“That’s a hell of a rifle,” he said. He bent quickly to look at the serial number: my God, it was a one followed by five beautiful goose eggs! 100000. The hundred-thousandth 70! That made it infinitely desirable to a collector and marked it as having been made around 1950.

“From the Winchester plant in 1948. The metal was heat-treated at higher temperatures to give it the strength to stand up to a thousand-yard cartridge.”

“Okay, let’s give it a whirl. You have the ammo?”

Hatcher handed over a box of Accutech Sniper Grade.300 H & H Magnum.

LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY, it said in red letters.

Bob opened the box, took out one of the long.300 H &H’s: it was like a small ballistic missile in his hand, close to four inches of shell and powder and bullet, heavy as an ostrich’s egg.

“What kind of ballistics?”

“It’s a thumper. We’re kicking it out off 70 grains of H4831 and our own 200-grain bullet boattail hollowpoint. About three thousand feet per second.”

Bob thought numbers and came up with a 198-inch drop at a thousand yards; figure maybe 355 for fourteen hundred yards.

Bob took the rifle. His first love had been a Model 70, often called the Rifleman’s Rifle, and he now owned several, including that recalcitrant.270 that had consumed him before coming up to Maryland, and whose problems he hadn’t quite mastered. So the rifle was like an old friend.

“Where can I take it to zero?”

“Uh, it’s zeroed. One of our technicians has worked it out to the yard. It’ll shoot to point of aim at the proper range.”

“Hold on, there, sir. I don’t like to shoot for money with a rifle I haven’t tested.”

“Ah – ” said Hatcher, embarrassed at Bob’s flinty reluctance. “I can assure you that – ”

“You can’t assure me of a thing if I haven’t done it myself.”

“Would you like me to get the colonel?”

“Why don’t you just do that?”

“All right. But I can tell you that the man who zeroed the rifle to that load and range – he won a thousand-yard championship with it in the mid-fifties. It’ll shoot. I guarantee you it’ll shoot. He’s got the trophies to prove it.”

Bob squinted.

Finally he said, “Goes against my principles, but, goddammit, if it says Winchester, I’ll take a crack at it.”

Bob lay in a spider hole. It was cramped and dirty. The walls seemed to press in. His view of the world consisted of only a slot, maybe six inches by four inches, and through it he saw a series of low ridges. Far, far away, there was a raw wall where the earth had been bulldozed up to form a bulwark.

“He waited in that hole for two weeks,” Hatcher had told him. “Just be glad we don’t put you through that. And after all that waiting the shot came, and he missed it. A shame.”

Garcia Diego, for this was the dope dealer’s name, was a careful man, and had extended his security arrangements out a thousand yards from his hacienda. He was the most hunted man in Colombia after wiping out the team in Miami. Now DEA had tracked him down and knew that if he slipped out, it would be at dawn, over the back wall of his hacienda, and he’d be visible for just a second or two before he scurried away to his ATV and disappeared into the jungle.

“What you’ll see, Bob,” said Hatcher, “is a remarkably lifelike human form. It’s an anatomically correct dummy. We’re pulling it over the ridge on guy wires that won’t be visible to you, and it’s suspended in a frame, but it should, from this distance, look startlingly like a man. You’d best go for a center body shot.”

Now, alone, Bob settled in behind the rifle. The old Winchester was the rifle he’d learned to shoot on all those deer seasons back in Arkansas. It was like a letter from home, or from the early fifties, and it made him think of his old dad. Earl Swagger was a dark and hairy man, with a voice like a rasp being drawn over bare iron, a man of solemn dignity and quietude, well packed in muscle, who nevertheless never ever raised his voice or struck anybody who hadn’t first broached the issue of violence himself and who treated all men, including what in those days everybody called niggers, with the same slow-talking courtesy, calling everybody, even the lowest scum of earth, sir.

He stood over Bob patient as the summer sun, endlessly still and steady.

“Now, Bob Lee,” Bob could remember him saying, “now, Bob Lee, rifle’s only as good as the man using it. You use it well, it’ll stand by you come heaven or hell. You treat it mean and rotten like an ugly dog, or ignore it like a woman who complains too much, and by God it’ll find a way to betray you. Hell hath no fury, the good book says, like a rifle scorned. Well, the good book don’t say that exactly, but it could, Bob Lee, you hear me?”

Bob Lee nodded, swearing that he’d never mistreat a rifle, and these many years later, that was, he felt, the one claim he could make: he’d never let a rifle or his father down.

He looked down to the firing ground.

There was no movement at all. It was quiet, except that the wind had picked up; he could hear it thrumming like a cicada, low and insistent.

Beyond a thousand yards, you’re in a different universe. The wind, which under three hundred yards can be a pain in the butt, becomes savage. The bullet loses so much velocity on its down-range journey that its trajectory becomes as fragile as a child’s breath. The secret is to make the wind work for you, to read it and know it; it’s the only way to hit.

Beyond a thousand yards, even with a scope, there’s no chance of bull’s-eye, no talk of X-rings; you’re just trying to get on the target, though an exceedingly gifted shooter with the best rig in the world can bring his shots in within four inches.

With his thumb, he snicked the safety off the Winchester, locked his hands around the grip and pulled it in tight to his shoulder, and ordered his body to relax as he looked for his spot-weld.

Scrunched into the spider hole among the stench of loam and mud, he was in something as close to the classic bench shooter’s position as he could get, rifle braced on sandbags fore and aft, with just the softest give in the rear bag so he could move the piece in the brief period of time he’d have to track the moving man. His breath came in soft wheezes, half a lung in, half a lung out, as he adjusted to the lesser stream of oxygen.

Finding the spot-weld at last, he was amazed at how bright and clear the world looked through a Unertl 36.

Good thing he was indexed in the right direction. The bigger the scope, the smaller the field of view; if he’d had to hunt for it through the little bit of world the scope allowed him, it could take all day.

And then he saw it. It was just a shimmer of motion, right at the crest line of the earthen wall fourteen hundred long yards away. A man’s head peeped over, and peeped back. He was coming.

Bob felt the tension in him begin to rise.

And then he realized, suddenly, though not in words, for there was no time for words in the blaze of the moment, that this shot was what it was all about. The rest of it, Accutech, Sniper Grade ammo, Nick Memphis in Tulsa, a DEA mission against a dope king – all that was prelude. This was the moment they’d been nursing him toward, by slow degrees, an inch at a time, coming onto it the way a man would come upon a final, and much waited for, much anticipated, threshold.

It was a terribly long shot, he now saw: almost nobody in the world could make it. He calculated the ballistics roughly and quickly, because he’d done it a hundred thousand times before, trying at least to bracket what the bullet ought to do at the range from what other bullets of similar weight and trajectory had done, and felt the wind, and tried to dope his way toward a hold, tried to instinct his brain into the shot. But he felt that he was way out there. He was in undiscovered territory. Nobody had ever been where he was before. Who’d risk a shot like this? It was criminally dangerous, dope king or not.

All these thoughts, of course, fired through his head in nanoseconds. The man emerged from the wall, slithered over the top, and stood there, for just a moment, sloppy as shit, happy as a lark. He was a dot, a period, a pill. He was so very far away.

Bob made half a hundred minute corrections in a time span that has no human measure, found his spot in that weird moment of clarity, and felt the trigger go back on itself and break, and lost the picture from the scope in the blur of the rifle’s buck, and knew he’d sent the shot home, for he’d had a flash of the figure going instantly limp on him, and it fell and rolled without dignity down the slope.

Now Bob saw what he had done – what they had made him do.

And for the first time, Bob felt as if he’d blasphemed with a rifle.

Their enthusiasm didn’t mean a great deal.

“Mr. Swagger, by God,” burbled Hatcher, “do you realize we’ve had twenty-eight men in here. We’ve had some ex-Delta Force shooters, some top FBI people, the top gun on LAPD SWAT and half a dozen other big city SWAT teams, we’ve had the top shooters from the NRA thousand-yard championships, and nobody, none of them, not a one of them, has hit that shot! You put that bullet within an inch of the heart. A one-shot kill at fourteen hundred yards.”

Bob looked at him, squint-eyed.

“It’s a nice rifle,” he said. “And whoever you got loading for you knows what the hell he’s doing. Yes, sir.”

Even Payne, so unimpressed yet curious, now looked at him with some strange glint in his eye.

“Hell of a shot,” he said, in a voice meant to suggest that in his time he too had seen, and maybe even taken, some hellacious long shots.

But Bob still felt tainted. It was like waking up after a night with a low woman, and hating yourself for what you sold to have her.

“Mr. Swagger, you all right? Damn, if you’d have been with DEA, Diego Garcia would be historical right now, instead of the richest man in Colombia.”

Bob smiled, trying to pin down the peculiarity he felt.

Daddy, what did I do? he thought, remembering when he’d taken his first shot at a deer, and gut-shot the poor creature and he’d felt shame and hatred for himself. His daddy had told him that it was all right, and tracked the creature down himself to finish it off, three long hours of following blood trails up and down some of the roughest slopes in the Ouachitas. His daddy had told him God forgives the bad shots if God knows that in your heart you were trying to put meat on your family’s table and that you truly loved the creature you were hunting and were making it and yourself a part of nature.

If God didn’t want man to hunt, why did he give him the brains to figure out gunpowder and the Model 70 Winchester rifle?

“Oh, I figure I know where I stand,” he said, because it just flashed into his head and he knew what they’d done to him.

“And what I figure is, you’d best go get that phony colonel of yours, and get him fast, so he can explain to me why it is you went to all this trouble to turn me into the gook who hunted me!”

He turned, glaring.

“You motherfucker, you turned me into the sniper who crippled me and then killed my best friend.”

He felt like fighting. He turned and drove the Model 70 rifle butt into Payne’s mouth, literally lifting the man off the ground with the blow, and driving him to earth leaking shattered teeth and blood. He hated to tarnish the rifle’s glowing wood with such dreadful matters, but certain things demand to be done. The blow sounded like somebody hitting a haunch of beef with a steel pipe and it completely destroyed Payne’s fat ugly face and put fear into his little pig eyes. Then Bob reached down and yanked the hidden cut-down Remington 1100 from Payne’s shoulder holster, jacked the six red shells out into the dust, and tossed the piece behind him.

“My dog doesn’t like you and I don’t like you, Payne. I don’t like a man who carries a sawed-off semi-auto 12-gauge full of double-ought because he doesn’t want to miss.”

He turned back to Hatcher to find the educated man’s stunned disbelief at the rapidity and absoluteness of the violence.

“You still here? Get your colonel or I’ll whip up on old Payne here till the sun goes down.”

Then he watched them scamper.