Within twenty minutes, they passed through the gate on the western border of the ranch, and Gil stopped to roll another cigarette. As he sat in the saddle smoking, he took a Milk-Bone from his pocket and tossed it down to Oso, who immediately dug a shallow hole with his forepaws and dropped the bone in, using his nose to cover it over. Then the dog sat down and barked, wanting another.
Gil smiled, drawing deeply from the cigarette and tossing down another bone. Oso ate it immediately.
Two hours later, they made the crest of a high ridge where Gil dismounted and stood holding the reins as he overlooked the Spencer Valley below. He knew there were elk down there, moving carefully among the brush. Rut would be starting soon, and they would grow careless, but for now, they were still lying low, and this was when Gil preferred to hunt them. For him, there wasn’t much of a trick to shooting an animal hopped up on hormones, bugling its ass off, almost daring you to squeeze the trigger.
A large bull elk stepped from the trees to his left, roughly a hundred yards off down the slope, and Oso lowered himself to the ground to signal that he had spotted their prey.
Gil took the rifle from its scabbard, popping the lens caps and shouldering the weapon for a closer look. The bull was mature and well racked with ten points, chewing a mouthful of grass without a care in the world. He capped the lenses and returned the rifle to the scabbard. At a hundred yards, he could almost take it out with a stone. He never wasted a bullet on game at less than five hundred yards, valuing the challenge far more than the kill itself.
He tied Tico’s reins off to a dead tree standing nearby and removed her saddle. Then he poured water into a canteen cup for Oso and cleared a spot on the ground for himself to settle in behind the saddle. When the firing position was prepared, he retrieved the rifle and settled in to wait. He spent his time gauging the slight breeze, unconsciously doing the math in his head for different target areas within the valley. He almost never dealt in actual numbers anymore, the calculations as automatic in his brain as 2 + 2 equaling 4.
After forty minutes, Oso stood up and stared straight down into the valley.
Gil took up the rifle and searched far below their position, spotting the young, four-by-four-point bull standing broadside at the edge of the tree line a thousand yards off down the 30-degree slope. The scope on the rifle was set to compensate for the drop of the bullet over flat terrain, so Gil knew without even thinking that he would need to aim slightly lower than he normally would, in effect compensating for the preset compensation of the drop. This concept was often one of the toughest for raw SEAL Team recruits to wrap their brains around.
He placed the reticle on the ridge of the bull’s spinal column just behind the shoulder blades where he wanted the 7.62 mm round to strike. Then he lowered his aim slightly, as if he were about to engage a target at just over 800 yards instead of 1,000. There was no real way to teach this kind of shooting. This was the kind of precision developed over thousands of rounds fired downrange. Had there been any concern at all in Gil’s mind the round would maim the animal or cause it any pain, he would simply have aimed for the much easier-to-hit heart.
As he drew a shallow breath, preparing to squeeze the trigger, it happened again — the memory of his first kill in combat coming back in living color…
The Second Iraq War was only a month old. Gil and his partner Tony had been called into a small town outside of Baghdad to relieve the pressure on two companies of Marines who were being decimated by enemy sniper fire. One of the Marine snipers was already dead, and their morale had begun to flag in a way that only enemy sniper fire can cause. So their CO had called for tactical support, and half an hour later a Cayuse helicopter dropped Gil and Tony in the Marines’ rear. It was during their march forward over five blocks of hell that the two SEALs were able to collect real-time intel from the grunts on the ground.
By the time they reached the Marines’ forward positions, Tony had marked the locations of all thirteen wounded and dead Marines on his map. He grabbed Gil by the elbow and pulled him into a concrete garage with good cover.
“Okay, look,” Tony said, dropping to his knee and laying out the map. “See the kill pattern here? This isn’t random. That means one guy, Gil. And he’s falling back in a kind of zigzag. See—?” He ran his finger back and forth along the grid to clarify his point. “He’s moving corner to corner to maintain a clear field of fire — and all our head-shot Marines are inside this same diminishing kill zone. The fucker’s bleeding them out, and by the time these boys work their way to the far side of town, they’ll lose ten more. And then this haji prick is just gonna fade the fuck away — only we ain’t gonna let that the fuck happen!” He quickly folded the map away inside his body armor. “So now we gotta find that jarhead CO and get him to halt this fucking advance before the sun starts to set — or better yet — get these guys to fucking pull back a block or two. That’ll lure this haji motherfucker right back to us. Then you’ll step on his dick, and I’ll hack it off at the balls!”
As they were stepping out of the garage, a Navy corpsman and pair of stretcher-bearers rounded the corner carrying a young Marine with his face shot completely off.
“Put ’im down!” the corpsman shouted. “I gotta restore his fucking airway!”
Gil stood over the dying Marine, gaping at the shapeless mass of flesh where the boy’s face had once been, unable to believe that a man without a face could even still be alive.
The corpsman hurriedly performed a tracheotomy to restore the Marine’s airway, then the bearers hefted the stretcher back up between them, and they took off down the street in the direction of the incoming medevac.
“Ruck up!” Tony said, busting Gil on the shoulder, and the two of them took off to find the Marine major in charge of taking the town.
It took some hard convincing on Tony’s part before the major would agree to give up two blocks of hard-earned real estate. “Look, major, with respect—sir. You called us. Now, I’m telling you how we can kill this haji bastard. If you’ll withdraw just two blocks, sir, those motherfuckers will think they’re winning this goddamn battle. And that fucking sniper of theirs won’t be able to resist moving to retake this prime position.” Tony indicated the position on the aerial photograph posted on the wall of the command post. “Sir, I’m fucking positive that’s where he was when he took out six of your Marines in under ten minutes.”
“Where do you intend to lay for him?” the major wanted to know.
Tony indicated a tall building in the center of the block south of the suspected sniper position. “We’ll take up an elevated position here, sir, with an excellent view overlooking his nest.”
The major looked to his captain. “What do you think, Steve?”
The captain looked at Tony. “You do realize that building will go back over to the enemy after we withdraw. You’ll be cut off and surrounded.”
Tony smiled. “Only for a little while, Captain.”
The captain nodded, turning to the major. “If I was in command, sir, I’d take his advice. He seems to know what he’s talking about.”
“Okay,” the major said. “How much time do you need to get in position?”
“Shouldn’t take us more than fifteen minutes to get set, sir,” Tony replied. “After that, you can begin your withdrawal. The enemy sniper should approach from one of these two alleys to reoccupy the position. And when he does, sir, we will bag his ass.”