shooting one beyond a thousand yards. Sometime in the late Sixties, 1967 I think, Marine Corps snipers began using the Remington 700 with an M-40 scope. They used the same 7.62 ammo that the M-14 rifle used but it had more than its fair share of problems, not the least being it wasn’t really up to taking the sort of hard knocks a rifle gets out in the field, and neither the stock nor the barrel were camouflaged. The boys at Quantico ended up modifying it to come up with the M-40A1. It had a modified stock of pressure-moulded fibreglass and a twenty-four-inch stainless-steel barrel with a large diameter. I’ll tell you, Agent Howard, with that weapon you could hold your shot group inside a twelve-inch circle at almost fifteen hundred yards. If you were up to it. But for the really long shots we’d use the M-2.50-calibre machine gun, it’s got a stable trajectory for almost three thousand yards. The bullets are so much bigger, you see, 700 grains, so they get more momentum. You could fire one of those babes well over two thousand yards, and with a ten-power telescopic sight like a Lyman or a Unertl you’d have a high degree of accuracy. Maybe not as accurate as the M-40A1, but close. Certainly enough to hit the target and, with the man- stopper bullets, that’s all you’d need.”
Howard nodded. He had the computer-enhanced photographs of the Arizona snipers in his briefcase but he wanted to get a general idea of how snipers operated before showing them to Kratzer. “Joe said that only military- trained snipers can make the really long shots.”
“Damn right,” said Kratzer. He took the matchstick from his mouth, examined the moist end and then chewed it again. “SWAT teams don’t have the space, not in the urban environment. But in a war zone, the further you are from the target, the better. You don’t want the enemy to hear or see you.”
“And long shots create special problems?”
“Sure do. Gravity and wind. When you shoot at point-blank range they’re relatively unimportant, but over long distances they’re as vital as the type of gun and ammunition. Do you want the short explanation, or the detailed one?”
Howard felt like asking for a price breakdown first, but instead he told the former Marine that he wanted as much detail as possible. Kratzer swung his legs up on the desk. His shoes gleamed as if he’d spent all morning polishing them.
“A bullet is just like a baseball being thrown through the air,” he said. “As it travels, gravity pulls it down, so to throw a long distance you have to throw it up and along. It follows a parabolic path, moving up to a peak and then down as it travels through the air. A bullet is the same: the path it travels depends on its initial velocity, the rate it loses velocity, and the distance it has to travel. Over one hundred yards, a 650-grain bullet will probably fall about six inches. So to hit the target you’d have to aim six inches high. And over that distance the bullet’s velocity would probably fall from twenty-eight hundred feet per second to about twenty-six eighty feet per second. Over five hundred yards the drop would be about eighty-two inches. Almost seven feet. And the bullet would slow to twenty-one hundred feet per second. Still not much of a change in the velocity.”
Howard nodded. He scribbled the numbers into his notebook because he knew he’d never remember them.
“Now, suppose you’re trying for the really long shot. Two thousand yards, say. Over that distance the bullet will slow to under a thousand feet per second, about one-third of the velocity it had as it left the barrel of the rifle. And the drop is of the order of two thousand inches.”
“Two thousand inches?” said Howard, in disbelief.
Kratzer smiled, pleased by the FBI agent’s response. “Uh-huh. That’s one hundred and sixty-seven feet,” he said, “give or take.”
“So you’re saying that the sniper would have to aim one hundred and sixty-seven feet above his target?”
“It’s not quite as simple as that, because like I said, the bullet follows a parabolic path. And you’d have to take into account if the target was above or below the sniper. But that’s the basic idea. Is that what you’re after, a sniper who’s planning a two thousand yard hit?”
Howard nodded and Kratzer’s eyes widened. “You know that it’ll take a bullet four seconds to travel that distance?” Kratzer asked. “Four full seconds. He’d have to be sure of his shot, he’d have to know that his target wouldn’t move. Even at a slow walk the target could easily get out of the way.” Kratzer steepled his fingers under his chin. “It’d be one hell of a long shot,” he mused. To Howard, the man sounded almost envious.
“So any sniper attempting such a shot would probably have a number of practice shots first?” asked Howard.
“Absolutely. He’d be crazy not to. But not everything can be planned in advance. A sniper has to be able to calculate the wind velocity in the field at the instant he shoots: he looks for drifting smoke, the movement of grass or the waving of tree branches. There’s a sort of Beaufort scale for wind. A wind under three miles an hour, you wouldn’t feel it but it’d make smoke drift. Between three and five miles an hour and you’d feel it on your cheek. Between five and eight miles an hour and you’ll see leaves on trees moving all the time, between eight and twelve and dust is raised from the ground, and a wind of between twelve and fifteen miles an hour will make small trees sway. Those figures are pretty accurate.”
The words were rattling from Kratzer’s mouth like bullets, as if the man was charging by the word rather than the minute. Most of the numbers went right by Howard.
“Now, say the range is one thousand yards. You multiply the wind velocity, say it’s four, by ten, the range in hundreds of yards. That gives you a figure of forty. You divide that number by a constant, in this case it’s ten, and that gives you the number of minutes of angle you have to take into account as the windage factor. Four. You understand about MOA?”
Howard frowned and shook his head.
“MOA is Minute of Angle,” explained Kratzer. “It’s a measure of the accuracy of a weapon. Basically, if a rifle has one MOA it means that over a hundred yards a test firing will give you a grouping of about one inch. For serious sniping, one MOA is the minimum. Okay, so two clicks on the scope compensate for one minute of angle. Eight clicks puts you right on the target if the windage factor is four. Now, I’ve made that sound simple.”
Howard smiled ruefully. “Yeah, right.”
“Back in Nam we either did the sums in our head or used charts we carried with us. These days there are pocket calculators that can work it all out for you.”
Howard tapped his notebook with his pen. “It seems to me that there’s a dehumanising effect in all this,” he said. “The sniper becomes so focused that he’s no longer aware of what he’s shooting at. The target almost becomes abstract.”
Kratzer nodded enthusiastically. “That’s probably true,” he agreed.
“So to what extent would a sniper concern himself with the nature of the target?”
“I’ve killed three women, and it doesn’t keep me awake at night, if that’s what you mean.” Kratzer seemed proud of the achievement.
Howard opened his briefcase and handed the photographs to him. “I’d like your opinion on the weapons being used here. And if you recognise any of the faces, I’ll not only be amazed, I’ll be eternally in your debt.”
Kratzer studied the faces. “I see what you mean,” he said. “These were taken with a hell of a long lens, right?”
“Something like that,” said Howard.
“These three guys were all shooting at the same target?”
“Yeah.”
Kratzer tossed one of the pictures back to Howard. “This one was furthest away, right?”
Howard was impressed. The man had picked out the sniper who had been two thousand yards from the dummies. “How did you know?” he asked.
Kratzer grinned. “That there is a Barrett 82A1 semiautomatic rifle. Short recoil operated, magazine-fed, air- cooled. Takes.50 calibre ammunition. If my memory serves me well it has a maximum range of more than seven thousand yards but for sniping you wouldn’t go much beyond two thousand. It’s American made, the firm is based in Virginia, I think.”
“It looks almost futuristic.”
“Yeah, they used one in the movie
“Does the army use it?”
“Yeah, all the armed forces use it. It was responsible for a lot of long-range kills in Iraq and Kuwait during Desert Storm. The UK uses them, too, and they’ve got them in France, Italy, and Israel, I think. The company’ll give
