Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 43

The mountains offered beauty in every direction, vistas of lyric perfection that touched primal memories of Eden. Neither cared. For each it was just pure ordeal, bathed in sweat, cinched in pain, driven by thirst.

Finally Swagger said, “Okay, let’s take a rest.” He sat down against a boulder, breathed heavily.

“You’re the expert,” she said, “but don’t you think if we rest, we get killed?”

“Good point,” he said. “But a thought just came to me.”

“Go ahead. We’ve got nothing but time.”

“She’s got to zero the rifle. Right?”

Reilly couldn’t help but issue a dry little spurt of a laugh. “As if I’d know? I don’t even know what ‘zero’ means. It’s all secret code to me.”

“Zero the rifle. Adjust the scope so that it’s indexed to the point of impact at the range you’ll be shooting at.”

“Is this the right time for a ballistics lecture?”

“Stay with me a sec. See, she’s got to zero at a thousand. How do you find a thousand clear yards in a forest? Do you just wander until it’s there? But maybe it’s never there.”

“Look,” she said, “it can’t be that hard.”

She pointed up the steep rock-strewn slope. “There, there’s one, right there.”

Indeed, a gap in the trees inclined upward from where they had come to rest. Here and there tall trees interrupted it, but basically there was too much stone on the ground to permit complete forest growth. It was like a scar ripped in the mountainside, as obvious as a nose on a face. How could he have missed it? And then she realized he hadn’t.

“All right,” Reilly said, “what gives? What game are you playing, Swagger?”

“She’s got a rifle. She has to zero it. She needs a thousand yards. This is a thousand yards, right?”

“All right.”

“This is what’s called a scree field. Meaning at some time in the past, a rock slide poured down the side of the mountain and ripped the forest up. Some trees grew back, as you can see, but imagine the place seventy years ago. It’s wide open.”

“So?”

“I was her, I’d be up there.” He pointed. “I’d shoot at a target down here. Maybe there’s a cave up there, she could shoot from inside, cutting down on noise. I’d track my shots and walk ’em into the target. A great shot, she wouldn’t need that many. I’d smear some color on one of these boulder faces about the size of a man’s chest. I’d keep adjusting until I could not only hit the chest at a thousand but put three into it inside ten inches.”

“So your idea is that we should stop fleeing men who are trying to kill us and look for a target? And if we find the target, what then?”

Swagger pointed to the boulder against which he was leaning. There was discoloration of some sort, roughly the shape of a man’s chest. It was faded and peeled, but it was there, definitely.

“Blood, I’m guessing. She or somebody with her killed a rabbit. They cut it open right here, drained its blood on the rock. Like paint. It dried, it stayed. Here it is. See any holes?”

She looked. Three pockmarks were etched in the stone face in the blood zone, two four inches apart and a third perhaps six inches from them but still in the target.

“She or someone with her knew where there was a British C-container with a No. 4 T, five Sten guns, twenty-five grenades, and two thousand or so rounds of ammunition. My guess is, it’s up there. A thousand yards up that scree field in some kind of cave or other.”

“So we have to climb—”

“I’m afraid so. But as you say, we ain’t going to make it outrunning them. Up there is the one thing that’s going to get us out of this jam.”

“And that would be?”

“Same thing that got Mili out of her jam. Same ones, in fact. Guns.”