“Not Now, Amanda,” the President said. “Not now.”
“Fuck.”
Mike considered the group through his binoculars then hit the range finder. Two thousand seven hundred and ninety eight meters. Winds… pretty touchy. Mostly from the side but shifting… On the other hand it was downhill all the way…
“Hey, Nielson,” Mike said, touching his throat mike and checking the time. “You’d better call higher and tell them if anybody’s eating dinner they might want to turn off the video feed.”
“Mike… ”
Mike switched frequencies.
“Hey, Lasko, you’d better still have the Robar.”
Lasko peered through the NightForce NSX scope of the Robar .50 caliber sniper rifle and considered the shot.
The target was barely a dot even at twenty-two times magnification. The winds were fifteen knots at his position but seemed higher in the air in between. Probably closer to seventeen. He leaned over and looked through the spotting scope then hit the built in inclinimeter. Two hundred and sixty three meters below his position. And nearly three thousand meters. The height difference was the only thing that made the shot even vaguely possible.
The ballistics of a round is a simple function of gravity. Anything dropped in a gravity well has the force of gravity pulling it down. Once the bullet leaves the barrel of the weapon, it is continuously falling towards the ground and just as continuously accelerating, gravity being like that.
Thus the “parabolic” function of anything thrown in a gravity well, from a football to a CD chucked at your sister’s head to… a bullet fired at a target nearly a mile and a half away.
In addition, rounds slow due to air resistance. Winds push them around. A bullet fired from a gun pointed perfectly at a target even a hundred meters away tends to miss. Much less a mile and a half. Mile and a half just simply wasn’t doable. Impossible. Unthinkable.
Lasko knew all this. He’d been a superb “instinctive” shot before the Kildar came along. Since then he’d studied and practiced constantly. The computations of advanced ballistics sometimes took him a while, he had, after all, barely been able to do multiplication before the Kildar, but he had technology to help out there. This shot, though…
Tricky, tricky. Winds…
Normally, Sion would be doing this but Pyotar had no clue how to really spot. So Lasko dialed back the zoom on the spotting scope, checking the winds. Winds seen through a scope at that distance made a “haze” effect similar to the mirage you got on hot days. You could see them rippling by and with practice could figure out direction and probable speed. The wind nearest the target was going to have the most effect because the bullet was going to be going slowest there. Hell, it might be going slowly enough to not have any effect on the target at all.
He checked six points going back, making notes on a pad at each point, then zoomed the scope back to the target. The fucker was still talking and standing nice and still for the cameras.
He pulled out his own C2 device, which had a program for long-range shooting calculations built into it. Plugging the distance, elevation change and wind variables he hit the enter key. The device in less than a second gave him numbers for elevation of the barrel and deflection off target. It also gave him the speed the round was going to be traveling which, fortunately, was more than high enough.
Looking through the scope he snorted. He’d adjusted his scope to the maximum hold-over, was at the bottom of the stadia on the vertical and still needed two mils. He shifted the rifle up and snorted again. About two mils was going to have to do. And the bullet was going to be breaking the sound barrier on the way. That, right there, was going to make this shot more luck than either science or art.
He also was firing with the scope at nearly maximum horizontal. The rifle pointed upwards and sideways at, apparently, thin air. Insane to even try… Oh, well. IF he missed nobody was going to notice. Except the Keldara and, in a way, they were the only ones that mattered.
Shifting the rifle he found the target again and wrapped his arm into the strap, getting a good solid seat. If he thought about the impossibility of the shot for even a second… he might not take it at all. So he just took a slight breath and squeeeezed…
“Colonel, we need to ensure that there is no discussion of our interaction with this,” the president said.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Pierson said. He was sweating. He’d never had an op go this far south in his life. The whole fucking world was watching one of the blackest of black ops on satellite TV. Motherfucker! He shook his head as one of the commo lieutenants looked over at him, waving. “President!” he mouthed.
“I KNOW,” the guy suddenly screamed. “Tell him to turn off the feed! NOW! Or at least get the First Lady out of the FUCKING ROOM!”
The bullet was a Hornady A-MAX, the round of choice for long-distance shooters. The sharp polymer cap over a more or less hollow center gave it excellent ballistic ability because it could knife through the atmosphere and maintain a solid spin over long distances. And the hollow point, well, that meant the round nearly exploded on contact with a target.
It started off at 854 meters per seccond and in a perfect spin, courtesy of high quality manufacture in both the bullet and the rifle. But by the time the 750 grain round reached target it was going barely above the speed of sound and pointed nearly straight downwards. The edges of the sound barrier had caused it to begin “wobbling” and now it was tumbling as well.
It was that angle and wobble that did it as much as anything. The round entered Commander Bukara’s chest going at slightly below the speed of sound, falling at a 75 degree angle and very nearly sideways, transmitting in one brief moment 1804 foot pounds of energy or nearly six times as much as the most powerful .45 pistol round.
At that point, hydrostatic shock took over.
The President watched, wide-eyed, as the man on the screen seemed to explode. His torso separated from his abdomen in a spray of blood and intestines. One arm was ripped off, spinning through the air and hitting the Al-Jazeera reporter hard enough to knock him off his feet.
He just sat there for a moment, his mouth open, as the view from the camera became one of the ground, sideways, then started shaking and moving as the cameraman, smart man, crawled away. It suddenly terminated, showing an empty chair. From the sounds, the newscaster was throwing up into a wastebasket under the desk.
“Can we let the First Lady back in, now, Mr. President?” the Secret Service agent by the door asked.
“Sure,” the president replied.
His wife still had her fork in her hand. When the Service got the word that the First Lady needed to “exit the room” they didn’t mess around. This wasn’t Hollywood. When the Service got the word to move a principle, they stopped being polite; the principle moved at the highest speed the Detail could run with him or her in their arms. Her feet had not hit the floor.
“What happened?” she asked, angrily.
The president looked at the fork and shook his head.
“Nothing,” he said, grabbing at his mouth. “Excuse me!” he muttered, rushing out of the room.
The First Lady looked at one of the younger agents, who was throwing up in a wastebasket, the screen where the anchorman, green-faced, was just straightening up and then at her personal Agent.