He scanned, registered this nothingness, but was too intense to feel much in the way of despair, even if he knew he was hung out over the lip of the rock and that Solaratov could take him in an instant.
He waited. A second, then another, finally a third yanked by like trains slowed by the sludgy blood his heart pumped.
Nothing.
Maybe the laser wasn't visible in the spectrum of the goggles. Who knew of such stuff? Maybe the laser ranging device was part of some advanced scope he knew nothing about, and it would announce itself, but be followed in another nanosecond by close to 1,500 foot-pounds of Remington 7mm Magnum arriving to erase him from the earth.
Maybe he's not there. Maybe he's moved, he's working his way up another slope, he's flanked me, and now he's just taking his time.
Two more seconds dribbled by, each encapsulating a lifetime, until Bob knew he could wait no longer, and as he began to duck back into a world of zero possibility, here it came, at last.
The yellow streak was like a crack in the wall of the universe. It pinged right at him from nothingness and lasted but an instant, but there it was, a straight line as the shooter below measured the distance to the shooter above.
Bob locked the source of the brief beam into his muscle memory and his sense of time and space. He could not move a muscle, an atom, he could not disturb the rigidity of his body, for it all depended on holding that invisible point before himself in the infinity of his mind as he brought the rifle up in one smooth, whipping motion and in to his shoulder and did not move his head to find the scope but moved the scope to that precise lock of his vision.
The scope flew before him and he saw nothing, even as his hands locked around the pistol grip and his finger found the curve of the trigger, caressed its delicacy, felt and loved its tension and sought to be one with it. He felt no tension, not now: here was the rest of his life, here was everything.
And as he flung away the goggles with a toss of his head, here was his ancient enemy. Bob saw the sniper, swaddled behind a horizontal trunk, his shape barely recognizable in the swirl of pewter-to-white dappling of the snow and his arctic warfare camouflaging, only the line of the rifle rising as it came toward Bob, hard and regular.
So many years, he thought, as he closed his focus down until he saw only the harsh cruciform of the reticle, made a slight correction to shoot lower to compensate for the downward angle, and then, without willing it as the reticle became such a statement of clarity it seemed to fill the whole universe, the trigger went and he fired.
You never hear the one that gets you.
Solaratov was on his target, racing through the excitement of knowing that at long last he had him, but he hesitated for just a second to compute the new range.
And then he realized that the man above was aimed-incredibly--at him.
He felt no pain, only shock.
He seemed to be in the center of an explosion. Then time stopped, he was briefly removed from the universe, and when he was reinserted into it, he was not an armed man with a rifle boring in on a target but a supine man in the cold snow, amid a splatter of blood. His own breath spurted out raggedly, white cloud and red spray sending broken signals upward.
Someone was drunkenly playing a broken accordion or a damaged pipe organ nearby. The music had no melody, was only a whine with a slight edge or buzz to it. Sucking chest wound. Left side, left lung gone, blood pouring out both exit and entrance wounds. Blood everywhere.
Internal damage total. Death near. Death coming.
Death at last, his old friend, come to pick him up.
He blinked, disbelieving, and wondered at the alchemy by which such a result could have been engineered.
His life flashed and fled, dissolved in a blur, went away and came back.
He thought: I'm gone.
He wondered if he had the strength to gather the rifle, find a position and wait for the man until he bled to death, but the man would not be foolish.
He thought next of how the mission had redefined itself.
To kill the man who had killed him meant nothing.
There was no escape. The only option left was: failure or success.
He pulled himself up, saw the house five hundred yards away through the snowy trees and felt he could make it. He could make it, for the shooter would now lay low, unsure as to whether or not the sniper was dead.
He could make it to the house, get in, and with that little Glock pistol finish the job that had killed him.
That would be his legacy in the world: he finished the last job. He did it. He was successful.
Finding the strength somewhere, amazed at how clear it all seemed, he headed off, bleeding, in a winter wonderland.
Swagger lay close to the rock for a minute or so, recalling the sight picture: the reticle, swollen in the intensity of his focus so that it was big and bold as a fist, held low on the covering tree because you hold low when shooting downward, so that the bullet would hit center chest, a nice big target. But it's tricky: the rifle was zeroed for five hundred yards, according to his shooter's instructions, but maybe the man who zeroed it held it slightly differently than he did, maybe there was a twig, a branch slightly unresolved in the 10X power of the scope. Maybe there was a wind he didn't feel, a sierra blowing around the contour of the mountain.
But the sight picture was as perfect as it could be. It was held where it should be held, and if he had to call the shot, he'd call it a hit.
