water, but he’s got them out to eight hundred yards. The gooks never knew what hit them. They couldn’t get a read on the sniper’s hide because there was no sound. They couldn’t believe he could see them, but through the scope, bright as daylight, he could put them down. Lots of kills. It was easy. One boy got a hundred fifteen kills in about five months. They was getting six, seven kills a night. Were they hitting soldiers? Hell, from eight hundred yards out on a Starlight, who the hell can tell? If they’re moving at night, I guess they’re soldiers, but maybe they were kids going to the john or families trying to move at night so they wouldn’t get bounced by our Tac Air. Who knew? Then, at 0700, a chopper evacs the team the fuck out of there and it’s back to base camp for pancakes and a good night at the body-count factory.”
“I see,” said Russ. “You don’t—it wasn’t—”
“I don’t know. I haven’t sorted it out yet. But it’s different.”
“It isn’t war,” said Russ, “and I’ll say it if you’re reluctant. It was straight execution work.”
“Yeah, well, you hide that. You got me? You hide that, and don’t be so quick to judge unless you walked in the man’s shoes. Now, this is how it’s going to work. I’m going to tell him how much we-all in the Marine Corps
“He’ll know you’re bullshitting.”
“Like hell he will. He’s a general, ain’t he? He’s used to being buttered up. He’ll want his place in history set straight. He’ll want to show us some hardware. Son, I was a sergeant in the Marine Corps for fourteen years. I know how these birds work.”
“There,” said the general. “There, do you see them?”
He did. The phantasms rose in the green gloom, two, three, then four, dancing ever so softly, their movements fired by incandescent phosphors in the tube of the device, which was a Magnavox thermal sniperscope. It was the latest thing, a lens that truly penetrated the darkness. No living thing could pass unnoticed in its view through the night.
The figures danced and one of them came at last to the red dot reticle in the center of the view.
“Go ahead,” said the general. “Take them.”
It was too easy. Bob was welded to the scope and felt the stock against him, his finger on the trigger. It was some kind of M-16, only swollen, enlarged. His hold was rock-solid and the weapon itself secured against the sandbags beneath it; he pressed the trigger and the rifle spoke once with a sound somewhere between a cough and a sneeze, or maybe a hiccup. There was no recoil, no sense of having fired, yet the action cycled and an empty shell was jettisoned and the first target went down. He moved the red dot ever so slightly and fired again: same thing. Twice more.
“End of mission,” said the general, snapping on the lights that filled a long shooting tunnel off of this sandbagged position. “Let’s see how you did.”
He turned to a computer terminal and punched in a command. The computer answered immediately.
“Superb shooting,” said the general. “Exactly as expected. You X’d the bull’s-eye on the first two cleanly, you broke a line on the third and you X’d the fourth again. Four kills. Elapsed time, 3.2 seconds. Recorded noise, ah, under one hundred decibels, about the sound intensity of someone firing a BB gun.”
The general reached over and hit a switch and the thermal scope died; Bob set the rifle, which looked oddly distended with the huge gunmetal-gray tube atop it, on the sandbags; he looked downrange at his targets and at the end of the tunnel, saw flattened metal silhouettes, clearly on some kind of uneven conveyer belt that gave them the lurching movement of human beings on patrol.
“How do you heat them?” said Bob.
“Essentially, you were shooting at a common household appliance. You just got four toasters. Or, rather, their heating elements. Congratulations.”
“There’s no infrared-light source on this piece,” Bob said.
“No sir,” said the general. “We’re beyond that. We’re beyond even ambient light, the Starlight scopes. That’s passive infrared; no infrared beam and it doesn’t need illumination. The problem with the ambient-light pieces was that they didn’t work in total darkness, they didn’t work in smoke, fog or rain, they didn’t work in daylight, even. They were limited. The Magnavox collects all the infrared energy from the target scene by a single-element silicon aspheric lens. The emerging convergent beam is horizontally scanned by an oscillating mirror and then focused on a vertical linear array of sixty-four lead solenide detector elements which traduce the IR energy into electrical signals. Each detector’s output is fed to a high-gain pre-amplifier. The signals from the sixty-four pre-amplifiers are then multiplexed to a single composite video signal. The composite video signal is then amplified and applied to a miniature cathode-ray tube that is viewed through the monocular eyepiece. It’s MTV for snipers.”
“Pretty goddamned slick,” Bob said. The box did in fact look like a television set, a long rectangular 6?6 tube with the huge round eye up front for a screen, leading back to the eyepiece.
“Well, we’ve come a ways. The Germans used to shoot at concentration camp prisoners. That’s how they tested their first-generation
“Can the boy try it?”
“No, that’s all right,” said Russ.
“You sure, son?” asked the general.
“It’s fine,” said Russ.
The general turned back to Bob. “It’s not just that the thermal sniperscope is the highest refinement in the night-vision electronics. But what we sell is a whole system. We wholesale from Magnavox, we mount it to the rifle, we manufacture our own suppressor, we pack it into a kit, and we provide trainers and a constant technical hot line and emergency system. That’s not an M-16.”
“It felt heavier than one.”
“It’s a Knight-Stoner SR-25 in .308, shooting a subsonic load. And our JFP MAW-7 suppressor. Unbelievably silent, accurate, lethal, isn’t it? Muzzle blast is caused by high-pressure gases suddenly escaping from the end of the barrel as the bullet exits. Reducing the pressure results in less sound generated. We reduce the pressure by increasing the volume for gas expansion, reducing the gas temperature, delaying gas exit by trapping and turbulence. Damn, it’s a good unit!”
“Yes, it is,” said Bob.
“Nothing like your old 700 Remington?”
“I’d hate to be matched with my old rifle against a fellow with that outfit.”
“You wouldn’t have a chance. The night belongs to the man who can see through it. Imagine the kills you could have gotten in combat with this outfit.”
Bob rose; the demonstration was over.
“Come on back,” said the general. “We’ll talk in my office.”
Jack Preece was a stocky man, with the short neck that was common to many championship shooters; he was handsome and rather slick, with a mane of silver hair and a smooth way about him. He radiated confidence and charm; his skin was tan and his teeth, capped, were white and perfect.
He led them back from the firing range through workshops where the system—the Knight rifle, the night- vision device, the sound suppressor—was being assembled into kit form, a single plastic case, after assembly, zeroing and disassembly, for shipment at no doubt a pretty penny to the elite marksmanship units of the world— Delta, various special forces units, SEAL Team Six, a Ranger battalion, the FBI’s HRT, various big-city SWAT units.
“That Knight rifle gives us an enormous advantage over even the M-21s. We can get minute-of-angle accuracy out of a semiauto; we can get second or third shots without breaking the shooter’s spot-weld with a bolt gun’s accuracy. Bob, the days of the bolt gun are over. By the decade’s end, all the world’s elite sniper teams will be shooting semiauto.”
“I think I’ll keep mine awhile,” said Bob, and the general laughed.
He ushered them into his office, a small paneled warren, one wall of which was filled with marksmanship trophies from a hundred forgotten high-power rifle championships the world over, as well as photographs of men with rifles standing or kneeling around a trophy, each with a fancy target rifle in his hands. Bob glimpsed and read a shooting history etched on brass plates: Interzonal U.S. Army Champion, 1977; Panama Games, Standing Rifle, 1979; NRA High Master; Alabama High Power, Sitting Champion, 1978; and on and on.
