“Let me tell you who you’re dealing with, so there’s no misunderstanding. This guy is mule-proud Southern, as stubborn as they come. He doesn’t want to be pushed and he won’t stand to be insulted. He’s also still got some gung-ho Marine in him. He’ll be a fucking ramrod; you try and bend him and he may kick your ass. So the way we play him is slow and steady. You don’t push; you don’t order. You just smile and go along. Any questions?”
Shreck’s sudden dramatic appearance had its desired effect: it silenced the troops.
They were fools.
“Sir?”
Someone had leaned in.
“Yeah,” said Shreck.
“Sir, it’s 0730 hours. Surveillance called; subject just left the motel. He’s on his way.”
“Okay,” said Shreck, “I hope you were listening to the doctor, because if anybody screws up I’ll have his ass. Now let’s get cracking, people. First day on a new job.”
If nothing else, it had a comforting feeling. It was, after all, a rifle range, one of those peeling, flaking, sagging, yet grand places where men have always gathered to plunk themselves down before a piece of paper with a black circle imprinted on it and discover the secrets of their own rifles and their own selves. Bob had spent a lifetime, it sometimes seemed, in such a place, and always the talk was good and the feeling among the shooters easy and generous.
He stood on a concrete apron, before a series of T-shaped shooting benches, green, always green, on every shooting range in America they were green. Bob could see the place had been built sometime in the thirties, the private preserve of some hunting and shooting club or other, and he knew that under the sagging roof that shielded the apron and the benches there’d been many tales told of deer that had gotten away and of loads good and loads bad, and rifles worth as much as a good woman and rifles worth as little as a dog with the clap.
The only unusual thing about this place, a mile or so off the main road by a series of convoluted gravel tracks, was a trailer off to one side, which while not new looked as if it had just been dumped there. Before it stood the sign of the sponsors of this day’s labors, Accutech.
He could see the targets across the faintly sloping yellow meadow beyond the line of benches, a black dot at a hundred yards, a black period at two hundred and a black pinprick at three hundred.
“Coffee, Mr. Swagger?” asked the colonel, still in his raincoat. Next to him was the morose little noncom who always looked ready for a fight. Everybody else was a gofer, except one pear-shaped city boy with a goatee who looked like he had a finger up his ass.
“No thanks,” he said. “It jitters the nerves.”
“Decaf?”
“Decaf’s fine,” he said, and Colonel Shreck nodded to a man who quickly poured Bob a paper cupful from a thermos.
It was surprisingly temperate, around sixty, and a gentle breeze pressed over the range; above a pale-lemon sun stood in a pale-lemon sky. It was the false spring, a phony of a day, too sweet to be trusted this month.
“All set, then?” asked the colonel.
“I suppose,” Bob said.
“Do you want to recheck your zero before we start the testing rounds?”
“Yes sir.”
“All right, gentlemen, let’s move away. Eyes and ears on.”
Bob uncased his rifle, lodged it on a sandbag rampart and slid the bolt back. He cracked open a box of the Lake City Match rounds, threaded five, one after the other with a brass clicking, into the magazine, pushed home and locked the bolt which flew forward and rotated shut with the gliding ease of a vault door closing on ball bearings and grease. He pulled his Ray-Ban aviators on, hooking them behind the ears, and slid his earmuffs down across the top of his head, clamping his ears off from the world. He felt the roar of blood rushing in his brain.
Bob slid up to the rifle and found his bench shooter’s position, his boots flat upon the cement apron of the range as if making the magic construction of stability up through his body that would translate to the rock-hard hold of the rifle itself.
He pulled the rifle up, and in, chunking it against his shoulder, placing his hand upon the comb tuned so just the faintest smudge of fingertip caressed the lightened trigger, adjusting a bunny-ear bag underneath the butt-heel. His other arm ran flat along the shooting bench, under the rifle which itself had been sunk just right into the sandbags.
Bob found his spot-weld, and closed his left eye. The image was a bit out of focus, so he diddled with the ring to bring it back to clarity and for his effort was rewarded with the black image of perfect circumference, quartered precisely by the stadia of the scope, ten times the size it had been, now as big as a half-dollar at point-blank range.
He exhaled half a breath, held what he had, and with that wished the end of his finger to contract but a bit and was rewarded with the thrill of recoil, the blur as the rifle ticked off a round. As he was throwing the bolt, he heard a spotter.
“X-ring. Damn, right in the middle, perfect, a perfect shot.”
Bob fired four more times into the same hole.
“I guess I’m zeroed,” he said.
A man called Hatcher briefed him on the test.
“Mr. Swagger, one of my associates will load your rifle with five rounds. You’ll not know if you’re shooting your own handloads, the Federal Premium, the Lake City Match or our own Accutech Sniper Grade ammunition. You’ll fire four groups of five rounds each at a hundred yards, four at two hundred yards and four at three hundred yards. Then we’ll compute the groupings and see how the ammunition stacks up. Then, this afternoon, we’d like to run a similar series of tests, but from offhand or improvised positions, with a stress factor added in. I think you’ll find it quite interesting.”
“You’re paying the bills. Let’s get shooting,” Bob said.
Bob shot with extraordinary concentration. What separated him from other shooters was his utter consistency, his sameness. He was a human Ransom rest, like the mechanical gizmo they use to test pistols, coming each time to the same strained yet perfectly built position, cement to bone to wood, bone to rifle, fingertip to trigger. Each time, the same: his cheek just so against the fiberglass of the stock, the same pull of rifle into shoulder, the same cant to his hand on the grip, the same angle and looseness of his off-hand, the same distance between eye and scope, the same half-breath held, the same three heartbeats in suspended animation, the same infinitesimal backwards slide of trigger as the slack came out, the same crispness like a grass rod snapping as the trigger broke, the same soundless detonation and blur as the rifle shivered under the ignition of its round.
“X-ring, little high, maybe a third of an inch high at two o’clock.”
“X-ring, within an inch.”
“X-ring, inside an inch.”
There were no flyers, no glitches, no mistakes. Bob found the groove and stayed there, throughout the long morning, hardly moving or breathing or wasting a second or a motion. It pleased him queerly that the rifle was taken from him empty, then brought back loaded, that regularly someone ran to record and change the targets.
He lost count. It was like the ’Nam. You just shot and watched the bullet go where you sent it, with the tiniest of deviations. It became almost abstract, completely impersonal; you didn’t brood on it, merely broke it down into small rituals, small repetitions. And on and on the score mounted, so that nobody could stay with him and he got closer and closer to Carl Hitchcock’s legendary figure of ninety-three.
“X-ring.”
“X-ring.”
“X-ring.”
When he was done, had shot all four five-shot strings at all three ranges, he put the rifle down, while technicians ran out to secure the targets and calculate the group sizes.
Of course Bob had made the loads early on, by the slight difference in the kicks. He knew his own rounds right off, and was just a bit slower in marking the difference between the Federal and the Lake City loads, but in time he
