Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, the big clock in his head spun its second hand, draining time from the world, while somewhere people laughed and drank and flirted and fucked and dug ditches or wrote poetry or flew planes. He was a sniper. He sat still, waiting to take or receive the shot. It was what he did. He’d snipered-up young and really lived his whole life that way, taking on the responsibility of doing the state’s dirtiest work and coming back tainted with the smell of murder about him. That was it, that was the way it went. You chose it, asshole. It-what was the goddamned word?-expressed you. Count yourself lucky, blankethead. You got to do what you was born to do. How many can-
“Boyo,” Anto said over the radio.
“I don’t see you.”
“Maybe you’re looking in the wrong direction, Sniper.”
He stood up, began to scan the far horizon.
“See me yet? Maybe look behind you.”
He did. Anto stood, fully dressed at some indeterminate spot in the slope of the featureless plain. He held his rifle cocked against his hip, supported in one hand, the radio earphones and microphone obscuring his face, his shades tight to eyes, his boonie cap low on his brow. He looked like war or death.
“Surprised, mate? Thought you’d see a naked man on a bike putt-putting his way to you and hoping that you showed mercy and knowing you wouldn’t, Sniper?”
Bob was silent.
“Cat’s got his tongue, does it now? We’re in a new game, mate. Here it is. I’m walking at you. You can sit there or not. I was you, I’d walk to me; lessens the range. When you think you got the shot, my advice is, take it. But on that move I take mine. Seeing as how my tech is better than yours, Sniper, I’ve a funny feeling I’m going to be faster and better. This is the beachball game we once played, only we’re the beachballs.”
“You’re a sick motherfucker,” said Bob.
Anto laughed.
“You could surrender. You could toss rifle one way, bolt the second, and handgun still another. Then I’ll have you strip naked and assume the position. Who knows, once I get in there and get the film, I may let you live. I’ll shoot both kneecaps to pulp so I’ll know you’ll never track me, and maybe I’ll blind you so you won’t be scoping me, but you’ll have some kind of life. How’s that for an offer, Sniper?”
Bob threw his radio headphones and mike away.
Anto held all the cards and knew it. His ego thrilled at the sheer theater of the moment he had so shrewdly engineered. He was the best. He’d outthought Swagger, he’d nailed the Nailer, and he’d leave the sniper sniped and the jackals would tussle over his bones. He walked toward his target. It was like High Noon at six hundred yards, snipers in a face-off, approaching each other on the emptiness of prairie until they knew they couldn’t miss, and then it just came down to who was faster on his gear, and Anto knew he was faster.
The wind pressed against his face, and the uppers had him radiating concentration and sense of self, even if, absentmindedly, he felt the sun on his exposed back of neck.
Swagger was oddly quiet. He didn’t move a step. He was just waiting. The fool. The closer he got, the less chance of missing he’d have. It was as if he’d given up already and was just waiting for the dispatch.
Anto guessed, 550? No, maybe closer, maybe 530. I am so close, I am, to my 500, oh, this is the pinnacle, the highest, the best.
And then an odd thing. He noted it first on his face, a difference, and then on his bare arms, another difference. What was it?
The wind. For some damned reason it had dropped to zero.
That was a present from God. That was also a message. God was saying, Anto, dear boy-for some reason God had always been English to Anto-here’s a gift. A still moment. It will only last a bit, but take it, old chap, as my endorsement of you and my thanks for all the mullahs and their camel buggers you’ve sent over.
Now, he thought.
With a fluidity that seemed odd given his bulk but was in fact greased by countless thousands of repetitions until burned into muscle memory, Anto dropped to one knee, the other leg bent stoutly in support underneath him, simultaneously bringing the rifle to his shoulder, feeling the adjusted sling put exactly the right pressure to tighten the whole construction into a perfect support structure, while his finger flew to the iSniper unit, hit the button, and the little genius inside worked the numbers, solved distance and humidity and atmospheric density and what little whiffs of wind might remain, and came back almost instantly with the information 534, 5 down, 1 right, and as his hand closed around the grip and he tugged it back solid as an anvil into the pocket of his shoulder, even as his trigger finger found and began to press the soft curve of that lever, his elbow solid on his planted leg two inches behind the knee in a bone-to-bone lockup, he tracked the hashmarks on the vertical axis properly down, then right and-
He saw that Swagger was still upright but that he was in the standing shooting position, elbow out, head perfectly steady, knees locked like steel bolts, but before he could even process that information, he saw the bright spurt of muzzle flash-
Swagger watched him come, holding steady, feeling the wind lick a little at his face, then go away. He had adjusted his stance slightly and was standing bladed to the approaching man, still such a long way out, though enlarging steadily as he came. He tried to shake his mind free of the past and not put any thought into Carl, with his brains blown out in his underwear, going underground in the rain as witnessed by seven people, or Denny Washington, that good man, his head blown open so that he’d never return to his wife and daughters. He wanted the past to go away but it wouldn’t and then it did, and a mercy came to him, as it came to all snipers great and small, who put themselves not at the point of the spear but way out there beyond it, lonesome and duty-driven but also-what was that word again, goddamnit-expressing themselves, and he felt a wave of peace and from that a confidence rocketing skyward as the palsy fell from his limbs and the pressure from his heart and he wound down in his mind until he was nothing but rifle.
He saw Anto pause, even if Anto himself didn’t feel the pause, and he knew that this was the moment, and he drew the rifle up to him and tight, but not cinched because a stander doesn’t cinch, since he’s linked to nothing solid but instead holds the beauty thing in a light command, as if it’s alive in his hands. The reticle was there before him exactly as his heart seemed to stop pumping and the universe itself froze between instants, and the crosshairs exactly trapped the man far off, who was now himself moving into a kneeling position, and without his telling it to, his trigger finger decided, the rifle somehow was fired by it, and Bob held the head still-it takes years to learn this-in follow-through and held the trigger squished flat back, and waited as the scope came down from its hop, neither hearing report nor feeling recoil.
– somewhere in his mind howisthispossible? seemed to emerge at light speed as the question of the day, and the next thing Anto’d been hit by a shovel and sent pinwheeling through the air.
He landed in a stunned jumble, blinking, thinking to get back to the rifle, but he didn’t see the rifle. He felt no pain at all but his body was somehow not right, and he looked and saw that his left arm had been split away from his body at the root. It hung grotesquely and rivers of blood rushed in black, ceaseless torrent from the astonishing tear that progressed from clavicle down deep into chest. He rolled, instinctively, to his still-whole side, with the inborn mandate in his brain to crawl to safety but, with only one arm to pull him along, made no progress at all, and he tucked his boots up close to his ruptured torso, rolling sideways to the final fetal position.
How the fuck did he make that shot? he wondered as he died.
Swagger got out his cell and punched a key in his menu.