I, Sniper

itself to the sun.

He rumbled down the slope, acknowledging the featurelessness of the place. It was all epic space in a shallow bowl of undulating grass, capped by the frosty marble of the western clouds against the bluest blue of all. No animal life was visible, and the push of wind filled the air with the sound of air and the stalks of grass leaning against each other.

He drove to the tree but left the ATV well short of it. He got off, feeling the Sig bang under his left arm, holding the 7-mil Ultra Mag in his right. It was Chuck’s, a hunting rifle for knocking down big animals at long ranges with a cartridge case the size of a cigar, something new cooked up more by the marketing department than the true ballisticians. The industry needed new products. This one was a lulu: kicked like a mule, but it shot fast and flat as anything on the planet, and when it arrived, it had excess power. Chuck said he’d hit an antelope at over five hundred yards, and the poor thing had cartwheeled, it was slapped with such energy.

He squatted, going into a sniper’s stillness, flat out in the open, though in shade, maybe a little to the east of the tree. He presented his back to Anto. He pulled his khaki hat down over his sunglassed eyes.

What would happen next would all come down to character: Anto’s. A true sniper would creep close, take and make the shot. That was duty, that was mission, that was job, even to a merc. He thought of that merc poem: “followed their mercenary calling, took their wages, and are dead.” Which war? Oh, yeah, the first big one. The boys who stopped the Germans for pay. And for professionalism: no vanity, no wasted motion, no ceremony, no self-celebration, no self-pity.

But Anto? Anto had that manic streak in him, that desperate need for approval and attention. His personality might be too big for standard military and then even for a genius outfit like 22 SAS. Maybe it was a death wish. Take the fall from grace in Basra: he’d had to have seen it coming, read the signs, and had plenty of time to back down or readjust-that’s the way the military worked, after all-but he insisted on his way with the aggressive interrogations and the ever-climbing kill count. So the Brits ultimately destroyed him, and you could blame them for their unwillingness to sustain the man who was, ever so distastefully, winning the war, but that was the way of the modern world, and of general staffs and politicians with the guts of puppies. Still, you had to blame Anto too, since a more modest professional, committed to his cause, would have found a way to keep operating, only under a lower profile. Not Anto. He wanted somehow to burn at the stake and give interviews from the flames.

Bob sat and sat and then, finally, Anto spoke through the radio.

“You bastard, you killed me mates!” said the Irishman, and the connect was loud and clear.

Anto cursed and ranted and vented a bit. When he stopped to catch his breath, Bob said, “You left out the part about them set up to kill me. We only shot men about to shoot us. You decided to put them in place; it’s on you, Colour Sergeant, not me.”

“You’re a bastard,” Anto said.

“But Anto still wants the film. Anto has to get the film.”

Anto said nothing for a while.

Finally he asked, “You didn’t send it out with that other fellow?”

“Nope,” said Bob. “Because Bob still wants the money. Bob has to get the money.”

“You’re as mercenary as himself,” said Anto. “When all the flags been put away, and all the speeches done, and all the warriors locked up in mental homes, the only thing left is the money, no?”

“The only thing left is the money.”

“Ha,” said Anto, enjoying his little jest.

“Where are you?” asked Swagger.

“I’m still at the goddamned site of the atrocity. I had to bury me boys proper. You think I’d leave ’em for the jackals?”

Bob knew he had left them for the jackals.

“Where are you? I’ll bring you the money, now I’m confident shooter number two ain’t lurking.”

“Then you know he’s long gone.”

“He broke a crest and I got glass on him. He didn’t have the film, did he?”

“No. He’s an old friend. He did his job. I didn’t want you picking him off, I wanted him out of here. And I wanted it as it should be, you and me.”

“Right and proper,” said Anto.

“You set a course on your GPS roughly radial one-thirty-four east, for four miles. That will put you on the rim of another valley, called Lone Tree. When you look over the rim, you’ll see the tree. There’s only one. I’ll be under it, rifle ready. You radio me, notify me of your position. You’re still naked, by the way?”

“I am not,” said Anto. “Have some bloody decency.”

“When you get to the rim, you’re naked. You’re naked and unarmed all the way in and I’m watching you all the way in. You get here, you pull up fifty yards out, and this time you’re not ten feet from your bike, you’re a hundred feet.”

“You’re so smart; that was a big mistake, Sniper. I got to it in a second, and off in another.”

“Easier with the late Ginger there to cover for you. But yeah, sure, I made a stupid mistake. I’m old, do it all the time. This time, you go flat spread-eagled in the grass. I’ll take the money.”

“And leave the film.”

“No.”

“Bastard.”

“I’ll take the film and I’ll go out to the east. You’ll see a tree on the horizon at roughly one-twenty-two from the lone tree. I’ll leave the film there. By the time you get there, I’m long gone.”

“And suppose there’s no film?”

“You think I want you dogging me? I’m as sick of this shit as you. I want my dough and I want a vacation. I’ll disappear and be in contact in two or three months while I set up the big exchange. Take it or leave it.”

Anto paused.

Then he said, “Okay, I’ll be taking it.”

“Buzz me then when you’re on the rim, though I’ll probably see you first.”

The radio went silent.

Now it was waiting time. How long? Maybe an hour. No, it couldn’t be an hour. Swagger knew Anto was close. Now was the question of character: shoot or chatter? Smart or stupid? Professional or self-indulgent?

Can I make the shot from here? Anto wondered.

He was at the rim, in a good prone, almost directly behind the position Swagger had taken. He could see the man crouched down, working his binocs in the wrong direction but not too intensely. The poor sod thought he had at least an hour before the play resumed. He had no idea he was sitting on the bloody bull’s-eye.

Anto was in a good shooting position. He was relaxed, the Accuracy International.308, on its bipod, solid into the earth. As a kind of prelim, he drew it to him, took up almost exactly the position from which he’d fire, though keeping his finger indexed along its green plastic stock, put the complex iSniper reticle on Bob’s blue-shirted back, and fired-fired the range-finding function, that is.

He read the answer on the screen: 927.

He’d made 927-yard shots before, and many longer. But he’d missed a few too. He waited for the target acquisition solution to run through the chip-driven computer and got his instructions: nine down, three to the right.

He went back to scope, counting out the nine hashmarks notched on the central vertical axis, then the three to the right. There it was. A tiny reticle, about the size of the + on a word-processing program, lay athwart the prick of blue just barely recognizable as a man at this range, despite the 15X magnification.

He felt his muscles begin to tighten, his tremors to cease, his breathing to shallow out; he felt the soft curve of the trigger, and then it began to slide almost of its own desire.

B-R-A-S-S, the from-time-immemorial shooter’s mantra.

Breathe.

Relax.

Aim.

Slack.

Squeeze.

He didn’t fire.

Nine-twenty-seven was way too far out there. A puff of wind, even a twitch by Swagger after the bullet was launched-its time in flight at this range would be over a second-would compute to a miss, and then he’d be in a duel at over nine hundred yards with a man who was still maybe the best, or second- or third-best in the world. No percentage in that.

He’d shoot from five hundred.

Five hundred would minimize wind, minimize trajectory, minimize time in flight. From five hundred he could make the shot on iron sights; with the iSniper911 he could make it a hundred times out of a hundred, in one second if need be.

Next question: How long will it take to low-crawl over the 427 yards to his shooting position? The answer was close to an hour, and none of it much fun, unless you liked crawling, and almost no one did. He sure didn’t. Also, everything in him said, Get it done. Finish it. You have the advantage, press it.

He looked at Bob all that way off, steadily gazing at the wrong horizon.

I could walk up to him and shoot him behind the ear with me Browning.

Well, probably I could not. But I could walk five hundred yards and quite possibly he’d never see me, looking as he is to the east, convinced as he is that I’m still miles away, bouncing naked across the plains.

He rose. He felt liberated. He did a rifle check for about the thousandth time, opening the bolt to see the glint of the Black Hills 168-grain Sierra match HPBT cartridge nested snugly just where it should be, repressed the bolt to lock up, then touched the safety, making triple certain it was off so he could fire the fast one if needed. He looped his forearm through the cinch of the sling, tightened it so that it tugged against his arm and body and left just enough play so that, when he dropped to prone or sitting, it would be held firm against him and, by virtue of the position, against the solidity of earth itself. With his right hand, he performed a battery check