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 on the iSniper911, reassuring himself he was all fired up with power to spare.
That done, he adjusted his boonie cap, his tear-shaped Wiley X shooting glasses, and began the big walk toward Bob Lee Swagger.
Swagger waited, still as a rock. Some living thing finally came, a white moth, flitting in this and that direction. Eventually it moved off.
He felt ticks of sweat running down his face from under his hat. His ears, encased in the radio pads, itched. His breathing came shallowly. He yearned to turn, to see if the Irishman was there, but the longer he waited, the closer Anto got, and the closer he got, the easier the shot that took him down would be. If he was stuck shooting it out at nine hundred yards, he’d lose. Anto’s technology trumped his more powe
rful rifle. He wouldn’t have time to lase the range, figure the clicks, crank the scope, assume the position. Anto would kill him. He’d have to guess at the range, and that wasn’t a talent he had, as some did. So if he guessed wrong, read the wind wrong, so easy to do at the extended ranges, Anto would kill him.
Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, the big clock in his head spun its second hand, draining time from the world, while somewhere people laughed and drank and flirted and fucked and dug ditches or wrote poetry or flew planes. He was a sniper. He sat still, waiting to take or receive the shot. It was what he did. He’d snipered-up young and really lived his whole life that way, taking on the responsibility of doing the state’s dirtiest work and coming back tainted with the smell of murder about him. That was it, that was the way it went. You chose it, asshole. It—what was the goddamned word?—expressed you. Count yourself lucky, blankethead. You got to do what you was born to do. How many can—
“Boyo,” Anto said over the radio.
“I don’t see you.”
“Maybe you’re looking in the wrong direction, Sniper.”
He stood up, began to scan the far horizon.
“See me yet? Maybe look behind you.”
He did. Anto stood, fully dressed at some indeterminate spot in the slope of the featureless plain. He held his rifle cocked against his hip, supported in one hand, the radio earphones and microphone obscuring his face, his shades tight to eyes, his boonie cap low on his brow. He looked like war or death.
“Surprised, mate? Thought you’d see a naked man on a bike putt-putting his way to you and hoping that you showed mercy and knowing you wouldn’t, Sniper?”
Bob was silent.
“Cat’s got his tongue, does it now? We’re in a new game, mate. Here it is. I’m walking at you. You can sit there or not. I was you, I’d walk to me; lessens the range. When you think you got the shot, my advice is, take it. But on that move I take mine. Seeing as how my tech is better than yours, Sniper, I’ve a funny feeling I’m going to be faster and better. This is the beachball game we once played, only we’re the beachballs.”
“You’re a sick motherfucker,” said Bob.
Anto laughed.
“You could surrender. You could toss rifle one way, bolt the second, and handgun still another. Then I’ll have you strip naked and assume the position. Who knows, once I get in there and get the film, I may let you live. I’ll shoot both kneecaps to pulp so I’ll know you’ll never track me, and maybe I’ll blind you so you won’t be scoping me, but you’ll have some kind of life. How’s that for an offer, Sniper?”
Bob threw his radio headphones and mike away.
Anto held all the cards and knew it. His ego thrilled at the sheer theater of the moment he had so shrewdly engineered. He was the best. He’d outthought Swagger, he’d nailed the Nailer, and he’d leave the sniper sniped and the jackals would tussle over his bones. He walked toward his target. It was like High Noon at six hundred yards, snipers in a face-off, approaching each other on the emptiness of prairie until they knew they couldn’t miss, and then it just came down to who was faster on his gear, and Anto knew he was faster.
The wind pressed against his face, and the uppers had him radiating concentration and sense of self, even if, absentmindedly, he felt the sun on his exposed back of neck.
Swagger was oddly quiet. He didn’t move a step. He was just waiting. The fool. The closer he got, the less chance of missing he’d have. It was as if he’d given up already and was just waiting for the dispatch.
Anto guessed, 550? No, maybe closer, maybe 530. I am so close, I am, to my 500, oh, this is the pinnacle, the highest, the best.
And then an odd thing. He noted it first on his face, a difference, and then on his bare arms, another difference. What was it?
The wind. For some damned reason it had dropped to zero.
That was a present from God. That was also a message. God was saying, Anto, dear boy—for some reason God had always been English to Anto—here’s a gift. A still moment. It will only last a bit, but take it, old chap, as my endorsement of you and my thanks for all the mullahs and their camel buggers you’ve sent over.
Now, he thought.
With a fluidity that seemed odd given his bulk but was in fact greased by countless thousands of repetitions until burned into muscle memory, Anto dropped to one knee, the other leg bent stoutly in support underneath him, simultaneously bringing the rifle to his shoulder, feeling the adjusted sling put exactly the right pressure to tighten the whole construction into a perfect support structure, while his finger flew to the iSniper unit, hit the button, and the little genius inside worked the numbers, solved distance and humidity and atmospheric density and what little whiffs of wind might remain, and came back almost instantly with the information 534, 5 down, 1 right, and as his hand closed around the grip and he tugged it back solid as an anvil into the pocket of his shoulder, even as his trigger finger found and began to press the soft curve of that lever, his elbow solid on his planted leg two inches behind the knee in a bone-to-bone lockup, he tracked the hashmarks on the vertical axis properly down, then right and—
He saw that Swagger was still upright but that he was in the standing shooting position, elbow out, head perfectly steady, knees locked like steel bolts, but before he could even process that information, he saw the bright spurt of muzzle flash—
Swagger watched him come, holding steady, feeling the wind lick a little at his face, then go away. He had adjusted his stance slightly and was standing bladed to the approaching man, still such a long way out, though enlarging steadily as he came. He tried to shake his mind free of the past and not put any thought into Carl, with his brains blown out in his underwear, going underground in the rain as witnessed by seven people, or Denny Washington, that good man, his head blown open so that he’d never return to his wife and daughters. He wanted the past to go away but it wouldn’t and then it did, and a mercy came to him, as it came to all snipers great and small, who put themselves not at the point of the spear but way out there beyond it, lonesome and duty-driven but also—what was that word again, goddamnit—expressing themselves, and he felt a wave of peace and from that a confidence rocketing skyward as the palsy fell from his limbs and the pressure from his heart and he wound down in his mind until he was nothing but rifle.
He saw Anto pause, even if Anto himself didn’t feel the pause, and he knew that this was the moment, and he drew the rifle up to him and tight, but not cinched because a stander doesn’t cinch, since he’s linked to nothing solid but instead holds the beauty thing in a light command, as if it’s alive in his hands. The reticle was there before him exactly as his heart seemed to stop pumping and the universe itself froze between instants, and the crosshairs exactly trapped the man far off, who was now himself moving into a kneeling position, and without his telling it to, his trigger finger decided, the rifle somehow was fired by it, and Bob held the head still—it takes years to learn this—in follow-through and held the trigger squished flat back, and waited as the scope came down from its hop, neither hearing report nor feeling recoil.
—somewhere in his mind howisthispossible? seemed to emerge at light speed as the question of the day, and the next thing Anto’d been hit by a shovel and sent pinwheeling through the air.
He landed in a stunned jumble, blinking, thinking to get back to the rifle, but he didn’t see the rifle. He felt no pain at all but his body was somehow not right, and he looked and saw that his left arm had been split away from his body at the root. It hung grotesquely and rivers of blood rushed in black, ceaseless torrent from the astonishing tear that progressed from clavicle down deep into chest. He rolled, instinctively, to his still-whole side, with the inborn mandate in his brain to crawl to safety but, with only one arm to pull him along, made no progress at all, and he tucked his boots up close to his ruptured torso, rolling sideways to the final fetal position.
How the fuck did he make that shot? he wondered as he died.
Swagger
got out his cell and punched a key in his menu.
In a bit, Chuck McKenzie answered.
“Gunny? You’re okay?”
“I seem to be. Don’t see no blood. Let me give you my coordinates.”
He looked at his GPS and read them off.
“We’re leaving right now.”
“Did you give that package—”
“Yep. It’s gone now. The jet took off an hour ago. How are you?”
“Tired. I’m too old for this shit.”
“That last Irishman?”
“What’s the Irish word for toast?”
“I think it’s toast,” said Chuck.
When that was done, Bob put in a call to Nick.
“The package is on the way.”
“I know. And we are all set up here. I’ve got a film restoration team to supervise the process, but they’re sure we can get good clear images off it without damage. I’ve got search warrant teams laid on in three states to hit Constable’s headquarters after we get warrants and subpoenas, and I’ve got a team in Chicago to take possession of the hard drive of Jack Strong’s office computer and the safe in Strong’s office. And I’ve got the Cook County state’s attorney people here; they can issue warrants and we can serve them. I’ve got a guy from the Nyackett, Massachusetts, prosecutor’s office to issue his warrant. If this is everything you say it is, we’ll be all legaled up sometime tomorrow and pick him up at a speech he’s going to give tomorrow night in Seattle.”
“Cool,” said Bob.
“You don’t sound excited.”
“I’m just tired as hell,” said Bob. “Are you sending people here to the ranch?”
“Yes.”
“Make sure to hit the security team headquarters. That’s where his sniper team was based. They all had laptops and were very professional. I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff there, and if you track back to wherever they lived privately, there’s even more.”