Again, only a few dozen men in the world knew it.
And the rifle itself. Where do you get a rifle so tight that you can count on it to send a 200-grain.30 caliber into, say, four inches, from twelve hundred yards? You’re talking about.333 minute of angle at over half a mile. He knew a master gunsmith could build a rifle technically capable of such a thing, if a human could be found to get all that could be gotten out of it. Then he remembered the Model 70 he’d fired at the Accutech place, the last one, late in the day, when he’d fired the exercise that had more or less been the duplicate of Donny’s death with a Model 70 he still yearned for; a rifle with a stock so dense and rigid it felt as if it was manufactured from plastic and an action so slick and a trigger so soft you could breathe on it to make it fire. He remembered: Number 100000. That was such a rifle. There couldn’t be but one or two or three or four out of the millions of Model 70’s that Winchester made that were that fine.
Who would own such a rifle? Then he remembered that somebody told him a man had won a bunch of thousand-yard championships with that rifle.
And as he thought he began to puzzle the one aspect that had so far evaded him, the piece that was somehow wrong.
It was the bullet.
If they were going to hit the archbishop, they’d have to assume the police would recover the bullet. And that the bullet would have the imprint of the bore it had been fired down, as irrevocable as a fingerprint. They couldn’t know the bullet would be mangled; that was a one in a thousand chance.
Why wouldn’t this perturb them? It would screw up their entire plan. When the bullet didn’t match the bore in Bob’s rifle, the whole ruse would collapse. Somehow they’d figured a way to beat it. Somehow he had figured a way to beat it.
The bullet, he thought.
The mystery of the goddamn bullet, just as tantalizing in its way as the famous Kennedy assassination 6.5mm that had passed through one man’s body, another man’s chest and wrist, and yet was undamaged and unmistakably bore the imprint of Lee Harvey Oswald’s bore.
It was as if the two mysteries were mirror opposites of one another, or different sides of one coin.
But they had bullets, he thought. They had bullets from my rifle.
He’d provided them with sixty-four bullets fired from the bore of his rifle, in Maryland.
He sat back.
“Bob?”
“Shhh.”
“Bob, what are – ”
He held up a hand to quiet her.
Then it was gone.
“Dammit.”
“What?”
“Oh, I – ”
Then he had it. It might be possible. He’d never heard of anyone doing it and there was no reason for anyone to do it, but…yes, it was possible.
You dig a fired.308 bullet out of the sand, scored with the imprint of a bore, but otherwise pristine and possessing the same ballistic integrity as a new bullet. You can reload that.308 bullet into a.300 H & H Magnum shell, a much longer shell with a much greater powder capacity and therefore a much longer range. You’d have to protect the bullet somehow, and this puzzled him, until he remembered an old technique called paper-patching, by which a fellow could wrap a bullet in wet paper before he loaded it on a shell; the paper would harden and form a sort of protective sheath. The trick was, you had to fire it down a slightly larger bore, maybe a.318. But even that was so simple: rebarrel the rifle with a custom bore, and refire Bob’s bullet down the bore. The paper patching protects the ballistic signature; then burns off in the atmosphere; Bob’s bullet, fired from this other rifle, arrives to do its terrible damage.
Oh, you were a smart boy, he thought.
But…if you were so smart, how come I had to bird-dog it out for you? I was your legs, wasn’t I? That was part of it. I wasn’t just there to be used as a dupe but I did the thinking, the seeing, the planning. Why? Why couldn’t you do it? Why couldn’t you go to the sites yourself and see what I saw?
One day he drove to Tucson, and concealed behind his new beard and sunglasses, stopped in a rummy old Gun and Pawn store in the Mexican section of the town. Didn’t even look at the rifles that were on the wall, but went on and found in the back, as usually these places have, a big pile of old gun magazines. Guns & Ammo and Shooting Times, a long though tattered run of The American Rifleman. The mags were of little use to him, being far too full of pictures of new guns. But there was one that was usefuclass="underline" Accuracy Shooting, which was about benchrest shooting, those boring technocrats who worked on rifles so fine they could throw bullets in the same hole all day long. He himself had subscribed since the late seventies. But these were earlier, from the mid-sixties.
Benchresting was the R & D lab of all shooting; if you were at all serious about the game, you had to bank your time at the loading bench and the shooting bench; all other things stemmed from it. If his boy learned his stuff anywhere, he learned it in benchresting. The magazine, he learned, had begun as the newsletter of the first American benchrest shooter’s club, which started up in the early fifties in upstate New York, following on the work of men like Warren Page, Harvey Donaldson and P. O. Ackley in the twenties and thirties. They were loaded with tabular matter, with long and dreary accounts of shooting matches of years ago, obscure names of great shooters and obsolete calibers like the.222½ and the 7 × 61 Sharpe and Hart.
He bought them all and that night he began to read them. When he’d read them all, he found more, and read them too. He haunted the secondhand shops, looking for old copies. When he found them, he read them, looking for something but what it was, he couldn’t say.
I’ll find you, you old bastard, he thought, for he assumed his quarry was old. Only old men could shoot like that, for it’s a dying skill, not practiced by the young much; there was only one younger man who could have made that shot, but he was an illusion. Bob tried to put it out of his mind, because it spoiled things for him.
It’s not T. Solaratov, he said to himself. It’s not. It can’t be.
In the evenings they made love. They made love for hours. Sometimes he felt like a piston that just kept on going.
And finally, several times, after he’d fallen through the last of his floors and lay there as if every atom in his body was at rest, he felt himself yielding to the fatigue. He couldn’t move a thing.
“God,” she said. “You must have saved up all that time at Walden Pond.”
He snorted.
“I seem to be doing okay.”
“I’ll say,” she said.
They lay there, breathing their way back to earth.
The terror of her was that she carried in her the seed of possibility. In her, he saw an alternate life. It occurred to him that he didn’t have to live in solitude, hating the world, and that he didn’t have to give himself to his rifles, like some kind of mad Jesuit. Didn’t have to live in a little trailer off in the misty mountains, and face each visitor with mistrust.
The world was full of things that could be. He had a flash of them together somewhere, just enjoying each other, no complications. Somehow it had to do with water; he saw them at a beach, maybe Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, or maybe outside Biloxi or Galveston or some such; anyway, sand, water, sun, and nothing else in the world.
“What are you thinking of?” she asked. “You almost had a smile on your face. What was it?”
He knew if he told her he was lost. There would be no turning back from the softness. He lay there and the temptation to give in rose and rose in him. He wanted to let it swallow him up. He could feel himself disappearing in the wanting.