He was a jungle shooter of course, an outdoorsman. But it seemed to him nevertheless that a city was a different kind of jungle, so that the same lessons would apply. A shooter would need the same requirements, the same perfect harmony of elements before taking a shot. And by this knowledge, he steered himself.
A shooter would need, first off, a clean theater of fire. By that Bob meant more than just a lane of fire. He’d need a line to the target, of course, but equally important he’d not want a formation of buildings either to the east or the west, to funnel the prevailing winds and generate unpredictable shears of energy that could take the fragile trajectory of the shot and make a pretzel of it. He’d want the sun behind him when he shot to kill the possibility that his scope would pick up a beam of light from the sun in front of it and toss it somewhere someone was looking – and the Secret Service would certainly be looking.
And then there was range. The Secret Service Worry Zone, tragically nonexistent in 1963, would almost certainly be a half mile out by this time – that’s 880 yards where no windows could be open, where there’d be cops on every rooftop, circling helicopters, security checkpoints. The Russian would be at least a thousand yards out, maybe more like twelve hundred. He’d need a place to shoot from three-quarters of a mile away. And it would have to be a secure place, too, with an easy, unobservable entrance and exit, with access to an escape route. And it would have to be high for visibility to the target, but not too high. Shooting downward on an angle always played tricks on bullet trajectory too, particularly at extended ranges, but there was a cutoff point beyond which the trajectory became too irrational and was uncontrollable. Bob figured Solaratov would be at least three stories high, but could not be any more than five.
And the temperature was important too. A heavily humid climate could affect bullet trajectory too, but a frigid one would be even chancier, the near-to-zero weather making the gun’s action stiff and awkward and subtly transforming the vibratory patterns of the wood of the stock and the metal of the barrel to say nothing of the fiber of the man behind the trigger. Bob had heard a hundred stories of good men taking that most important shot at a twelve-point buck on a frozen winter day and watching in horror as the bullet puffed harmlessly against the bluff ten yards away, and the beast took flight, leaving the hunter to face a bitter winter. He didn’t think the Russian would shoot in any kind of cold weather, or in a particularly damp climate – too many ifs, too many maybes. If you’re going to do it right, you do it where the earth itself is your ally, where the climate and the land and the sun and the sky are your friends.
He looked for a shot to take place where it was between fifty and seventy degrees out, on an overcast day, but a coastal city, where the wind was tempered by offshore fronts, and didn’t howl in off a frozen midwestern plain or a frozen lake.
Then there was the question of noise. No matter what weapon Solaratov chose this time, he could not use a silencer that would only work with a subsonic round; he’d have to be at velocities of over two thousand feet per second with a weight of at least 150 grains and more likely 200 to have a chance of making a twelve-hundred-yard head or torso kill. They’d have to build him some sort of nearly soundproof room or chamber, a shooting bunker with acoustic baffling and only the smallest aperture for sighting and shooting; but he himself would have to be back from the aperture, so that the muzzle blast would be absorbed by the acoustic baffling, with some sound leakage from the aperture, but not enough to get a real fix on, as the sound would be generalized and diffuse. So Bob thought of a rooftop structure, a disguised heating plant; and from that he calculated there’d have to be nothing jerry-built about it; they were working on it even now, a structure of some sophistication and complexity, easy to disassemble perhaps, but nevertheless convincingly stable.
They could use any thousand-yard rifle, from a.308 on up to a.50 caliber sniping rifle of the sort now said to be in the inventory of elite units. Surely the Russian would have access to a.50. That possibility blew the distance factor out close to seventeen hundred yards, and it opened up the circle of possibility even further.
Bob moaned, rare enough for him; the job seemed huge; his head ached. He looked and couldn’t tell if it was day or night, checked the jungle Seiko he’d worn since he’d bought it for twelve dollars in an Army PX in 1971 and saw that it was almost midnight. He sighed, and went back to work.
Location, time, distance, weapon. These were the points of his compass. As he studied the documents and tested a hundred shooting sites against them, he came up dry the first time through. He tried again, harder, sinking deeper into it. He tried to imagine the man, a shooter like himself, sunk in his sandbags, in a little dark room a mile out, watching through the scope as the president of the United States did this thing and that thing, and then his head blew off in a big red gout of tissue, a blizzard of bone and blood and brain. It would take weeks to find the room if he were firing from a mile out. They might never find it.
He worked it through, over and over and over, in slow, grinding degrees, sinking so far beneath the surface he wondered if there was a surface. Was there a solution? Could it be done? Where could he find everything. He -
Hey!
He watched it appear, watched it organize itself before his very eyes, saw it all fit together.
He saw in that instant how it would happen, how it had to happen. He knew where.
It was the third day, late, well past midnight. All right, he thought. You motherfuckers think it’s 1972, fourteen hundred yards outside the Da Nang wire as Sniper Team Alpha slides over the berm.
It won’t be.
Because this time I’ll be waiting.
CHAPTER NINE
“Nicky, Nicky,” said Tommy Montoya, “oh, my boy, this is not like you.”
Montoya was Cuban, deep into spook life, who occasionally came across tips that he passed Memphis’s way as he did his jobs for various agencies of the federal government and perhaps for other customers as well. He was one of those edge-masters, a bit too clever for his own good, who’d some day be found in the Big Muddy or Lake Pontchartrain with a diesel crankcase wired to his ankle and a school of guppies living in a thoracic wound cavity. But until then, Tommy Montoya would lick the oyster dry and now he smiled, holding an opened bivalve in one fat hand, and his thick tongue darted out to nudge the gelid thing loose from its tray of shell, so that he could suck it down in one intense, sensuous moment.
Nick tried to avert his eyes. Christ, how could anyone eat one of those things? Nick was of the opinion that if it didn’t bleed when you cut it, you didn’t put it in your mouth. But the Cuban still had his uses. He knew things nobody else knew – the business, for example.
“Nicky,” he said again, “you know you go through channels. DEA’s got priority on those big eavesdropping rigs, you apply through – ”
“Come on, Tommy,” said Nick, in a hurry to get through Tommy’s coy games, because Howdy Duty was due in that afternoon and he wanted to be ready when the old Base got there, because if you got off on the wrong foot with Utey, you never got back to the right one, as Nick knew only too well.
So he was nervous and not handling this brilliantly. Besides, the bar on the riverfront was dark and seething with exotic men, and Nick, in a Stay-Prest blue poplin suit and a white shirt, felt as if he had FED stenciled between his hairline and his eyebrows in letters three inches tall and knew the long grip of his Smith 1076 was printing through the coat.