Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 1

He was an old man in a dry month. Swagger sat on his rocker on the porch, hard, stoic, isolate, unmelted. Nothing much engaged him these days. Indifferently, he watched sun and moon change, he watched the variations of the clouds, the flocks of birds, the far prairie dog, occasionally the antelope on the horizon. He watched the wind blow across the prairie, and saw the mountains in the distance. It meant nothing.

He drank the coffee his wife left brewed every morning. He played with his laptop until he got bored, and then he watched the wind in the grass until he got bored. He sat, he rocked. He was lonely.

Jen gone most of the day, one daughter a TV correspondent in Washington, D.C., the other at a summer riding program in Massachusetts where she would try to turn her western grace into eastern swank, his son the assistant director of the FBI sniper training school in Quantico, Virginia, Swagger spent most of his time on the porch in the company of ghosts and memories.

Dead friends, forgotten places, calls too close to call close, long shots paying off, luck by the ton, a lost wife, a found son, a murdered father, some justice here and there, all of it purchased with enough scars to carpet a house, the smell of fire and gun smoke eternally in his nostrils: it didn’t seem like anything that could be called an odyssey, just one mess after another.

“You are depressed,” said his wife.

“I got everything I ever wanted. I have friends, a fine wife, wonderful children. I survived several wars. Why would I be depressed?”

“Because you never cared about any of those things. Getting them is incidental and meaningless. You cared about something else. You cared about pleasing your goddamned father because he died before you could, and it has never left you. That is why you are depressed. You haven’t pleased him lately. You will never please him enough. You have issues. You need to see somebody.”

“I am fine. I ride every day, I don’t eat too much and never collected a gut, I can still put a bullet near anyplace I can see. Why would I be depressed?”

“You need a mission. Or a new young woman to fall in love with and never touch. I notice those things seem to come together. You need a war. You need someone to shoot at you, so you can shoot back. You need all those things, and as beautiful as this place is and as much as it’s everything a man could want, it’s not enough. For most, maybe. Not for Bob Lee Swagger, sheriff of dry gulches and high noons every day of the week.”

But then an e-mail had arrived that actually had been authored by a human being: J. F. Guthrie, an ex — British service armorer who had made a career writing books about sniper warfare through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and had approached Bob about telling the Bob story. Bob turned him down flat cold — he had no urge to refight old fights, since he visited them every night in his nightmares — but the man was so charming that a friendship had developed and the Internet allowed it to blossom.

It would be fun. It would be a goal, something to organize and prepare for. It would reengage him in the world, and prove to him that at sixty-eight, he still had some fuel left in the tank.

But: it would also put him into contact with people who were drawn to the killer. He knew, he understood. Certain folks, though they might never admit it, dreamed of killing and in some unsavory way were powerfully attracted to an artist of the craft, which Swagger certainly was. Not for sex, not for wisdom, not for fantasy or even, really, friendship; just in some soft-vampire way to feed on his aura. Maybe Jimmy himself was such a man; maybe if so, he hid it better. Swagger always felt a little debased by such transactions, not that there was any ill spirit in them, but they just felt wrong. They made too much of the killing, as if the killing itself were the point, when the truth was nobody could last in the profession for the killing alone. You had to believe in something bigger, and in service to that — duty, honor, country, the kid in the next foxhole, the will to survive, to win, something never clearly understood called the Big Picture, something never talked of called honor — you could persevere, even occasionally flourish. Whatever it was, it was not shared easily, particularly since he had made the big mistake of reading way too much on the subject and understood he possessed a dangerous amount of data that opened him up to the horror of self-knowledge.

He made his typical decision on Jimmy’s invite: I’ll think about it.

Oh, hello, another e-mail, a nice long one from his daughter Miko at riding camp in the Berkshires, where she’d gone because everyone said she was so smart it was wrong not to send her to an eastern school and open a new life for her, and it followed from that that if she had eastern-style riding in her background, it would make entrance easier and give her a culture to belong to.

He took pleasure in the long answer he sent her, but when it was gone, he was still on his porch, his hip still ached (it always did), the wind still blew across the prairie, and it was time for another cup of coffee.

He fetched it, returned, tried to imagine where he’d ride this afternoon, contemplated maybe getting up earlier tomorrow for breakfast at Rick’s in Cascade, a ritual he always enjoyed, listening to the boys talk about Boise State football or the Mariners. Otherwise, not much seemed to be going on. And then there was.

That’s how it happens sometimes, just that fast. A new message from Kathy Reilly, off in Moscow, where she was the correspondent for The Washington Post. They’d had a Moscow adventure some years back, and found themselves simpatico, and stayed in touch. She had that dry humor, a needler and subtle provocateur like he was, and smart, and they liked to prod each other.

What the hell? Never in hundreds of e-mails had the subject of firearms come up, and maybe that’s why he liked her so much. The possibilities more or less tantalized him, and for a time he thought it was a kind of joke. But no, she wasn’t joking about the Mosin.

He played it straight, or as straight as he could with Reilly.

He waited, but the clarification was not forthcoming. Soon it was time to ride, and he got his lanky frame up, went to the barn, saddled up a new roan called Horse — he called all his horses Horse — and rode south, then west, then north again, three hours’ worth. It felt good to have Horse under him and the rolling meadows around him and the purple mountains on three sides blurring the horizon. You couldn’t feel sorry for yourself on a horse or you’d fall off. It was hot and sunny and that always improved his mood, and it helped that his imagination locked itself on the Mosin-Nagant and reviewed what he knew about it, what he thought he knew about it, what he assumed he knew about it. He knew, for example, that he had been shot at with it. First tour, platoon sergeant, Vietnam, 1964–’65, the later flood of Chinese AKs hadn’t begun so the VC were using anything they could get their hands on, and the Mosin from the Chinese was prominent. But they learned their lesson fast, realizing that the old warhorse, with its five-round mag and its slow bolt, was no match for the M1 carbines the southerners used, nor his own M14. Slowly the AKs and the SVDs began coming in, and you could feel the guerrillas learning the new tactical possibilities of the modern weapons. Good news for them, bad for us.

He got back, put up Horse, took a shower, and repaired to his shop. Current project: a round called 6.5 Creedmoor, from the Hornady shop, super-accurate. Possible future sniper round? That filled his mind, as it always did, saved him from the self, gave him something to plan and anticipate. He reloaded 150 cartridges, using five different weights of powder (varying by.1 grain); he’d shoot groups to find the best through a custom 6.5 a gunsmith in Redfield, Washington, had built for him. Then he showered, greeted Jen, who had arrived, and they had a light dinner. He didn’t get back to e-mail until the sun had fallen.

Reilly again.

He got the ref to “Grass,” part of his World War I project from years back. Carl Sandburg: “I am the grass; I cover all. Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo…. Two years, ten years and people ask the conductor, ‘What place is this? Where are we now?’ ” She didn’t know how appropriate it was and how not a joke.

It didn’t take long for the reply. Five minutes.

So another full day passed, then at last came word from Reilly.

He did as instructed, looked carefully at the woman.

Then he called his wife.

“I’m going to Moscow as soon as the paperwork clears,” he said.

Then he went to Amazon and bought about six hundred dollars’ worth of books on the Eastern Front.