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.