A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai

by Stephen Hunter

  12

  You’re a little ahead of us,” said Nick. “We don’t even know where to begin.”

  “Someone here knows where to begin. That fellow, there,” said Bob, pointing to a man.

  “I wondered when you’d remember,” said a mild-looking older man, hair gone thin but still combable, sitting at the far end of the table. He looked like the professor at the frat party, among all the young go-getters.

  “How are you, Mr. Jacobs? Are you the lab boss yet?”

  “I’m fine, Mr. Swagger, and yes, actually, I am the lab director. I remember how I tried to send you away; it was like this, all the evidence pointed to you. But you’d figured it out and pulled the rug out from under me.”

  Years ago, in a different lifetime, Walter Jacobs, then a young technician from the lab, had testified for the government in a case in which Swagger had been accused of the murder of a prominent man by long-range rifle fire. It was a complicated thing, and it almost got him killed, but it also got him out of the bitter woods, lifted the anger that had weighed like a yoke across his shoulders, got him married to a fine woman, and got him two of the best daughters a man could dream of.

  “That old lawyer was spectacular, Mr. Swagger. I’ve never forgotten it. But before I answer your question, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Was waiting for it when I saw you.”

  “I’m aware that once again, or so it appears, someone extremely knowledgeable has apparently manipulated ballistic evidence to frame a Marine Corps sniper. Though in the first case the sniper survived—you—and in this one he died—Hitchcock. But you’re playing the same role, aren’t you? You’re still the man who sees through it and on his own goes into the wilderness and puts a conspiracy under the ground, so that justice, in some form, pays out. But it also seems you could be reinventing your biggest triumph. Maybe subconsciously you’re trying to recreate that episode in your life, like Captain Queeg and his strawberries aboard the Caine. Maybe it’s all a delusionary structure that the much older and perhaps less rational Bob Lee Swagger is subconsciously forcing on all of us. Are you Swagger or Queeg?”

  “Has anyone here read Mr. Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny?” Bob asked. No hands went up.

  “See, Mr. Jacobs, I have, so I’m with you. And I’ll let you decide. But before you decide, let me ask you my question. And I bet when you hear it, you withdraw yours.”

  “Well, isn’t this interesting,” said the director. “Nick, you do give a good meeting, very dramatic, even if your coffee sucks. Go ahead, Mr. Swagger.”

  “All right,” Bob said. “Yeah, maybe I am a foolish old coot who’s playing tricks on myself and on you to have a taste of old triumphs. But let’s just examine the technical stuff a little. I’m betting that when that rifle came to your lab, you went over it at a microscopic level. It ain’t got no secrets, not even among the atoms, you don’t know about, is that right?”

  “That is right, Mr. Swagger. Even to the point of measuring the firing pin to make certain that it was up to spec, even to the last two or three thousandths of an inch, so that nobody could have cut it and soldered it back so that it wouldn’t fire. We learned that one the hard way.”

  “Yes sir. Now, is it not true that any object in the world picks up microscopic debris of some sort? A record at the smallest level possible of where it’s been, what it’s done.”

  “Yes sir, just like on the CSI shows.”

  “Never seen one. Figured it out on my own. Now, a sniper rifle would be particularly rich in such a micro record, wouldn’t it? I mean, mostly it’s kept cased or in a safe, so it’s not picking up a lot of random crap. It’s rarely used, and when it’s used, it’s used in some dramatic enterprise. So the stuff aboard ought to tell a straightforward story, yes?”

  “True again.”

  “And a rifle is a particular kind of vacuum then, right? I mean, it’s always slightly lubricated, and lubrication has an attraction factor on its own. It’s like glue. Lot of tiny fragments and stuff sticks. Some can be identified, some can’t.”

  “That’s right.”

  “If it were paint or carpet fibers, you’d have a huge database to compare anything you found against. You could do it by computer in a few seconds. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “But if I’m reading correctly, you came up with an amount of ‘unknown baked paint debris.’ ”

  “That’s what it says. That’s what I wrote.”

  “And it’s unknown because you ain’t got no ‘baked paint debris’ database, nothing to compare it to.”

  “Right again.”

  “Now,” said Swagger, “here’s where I am. That baked paint debris—my thought is that it’s some kind of peelings, fragments, dust, motes, whatever you call it—”

  “We call it ‘microscopic shit,’ Mr. Swagger,” Jacobs said, and everyone laughed, even Bob. Good one for Mr. Jacobs, and the laugh let a little tension out of the room.

  “My read is that some of it came from the scopes. In other words, whenever you tighten the rings on a scope to mate it to the rifle, you leave microscopic trace amounts, ‘shit’ ”—another laugh—“off the finish of the scope. You do it a lot, you have a lot of shit. You do it rarely, you don’t have much. But it’s always there, right? However, since rifles with scopes are so seldom used in crimes, no one’s bothered to accumulate a database, when of course paint samples from cars and carpet fibers are always found at crime scenes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” said Swagger. “Here I am. Here’s what the old man is driving at. This kind of scope I described—as I said, there’s only six makers in the world. Well, in America. They are Horus; the Tubb DTAC, which is made by Schmidt & Bender; Nightforce, an American outfit actually manufactured in Australia; Holland, which has a contract through both Leupold and Schmidt & Bender to manufacture a scope with a ranging reticle and a series of aiming points; the BORS from Barrett, which fits on and adjusts the scope itself; and finally a company out west called iSniper, which makes a top-dollar variant called the iSniper911, said to be the best of the bunch. One of those brands of scopes this joker used. Therefore, you have to go to a big firearms wholesaler who has all these scopes in stock, you have to obtain one of each and test them. And one of them will yield baked paint debris identical to the microscopic baked paint debris you found on Carl’s rifle. And that’s the kind of scope this sniper used, while Carl was all alcohol-stupored up. Then his old scope was remounted and zeroed. So my question is, if you find it and make that match, would you withdraw your question about this thing being a Swagger fantasy? In other words, ain’t that your, whatchyoucallit, objective evidence?”

  “Once again, Mr. Swagger, you’re the smartest boy in the class.”

  Nick said, “We can track the sales records of the scope. Someone on that list—and I’m guessing there can’t be many because it’s new and it costs a lot of money—someone who’s bought one of these things, he’d be our person of interest.”

  “So why again do we need to send an undercover, Mr. Swagger?” asked Ron Fields.

  “This is why,” said Swagger. “The flaw in this system is that it’s tricky. That’s why an old guy like Carl never could have mastered it, and that’s why these things will always be primarily for the government, because they demand basically a professional, highly trained shooter to get them to do what you’re paying all that money for them to do, which is head-shoot Taliban field commanders at sixteen hundred meters cold-bore. You got to be good with numbers, good with small machinery, confident with higher logarithms and minicomputers, familiar with software, all that tech-weenie stuff, plus be able to use it all in the dark or the cold or the jungle or after three days of sitting in a hole in the ground under a net on a mountain slope in someplace that ends in ‘stan.’ It’s a highly refined skill. So most of these companies run schools to teach potential shooters—mostly special ops people, or high-contact military like Rangers or some government SWAT outfits, highl
y trained contract operators like Blackwater or Graywolf, people who need to know, your elite professionals—to teach them how to run the stuff under pressure and in field conditions. Our man will have gone through that training.”

  “We get the records—”

  “You have to subpoena the records. The records can be diddled or destroyed. You don’t know who or what is behind this, what the point is, where the trail leads. You need to send a man who can play in that league to the shooting school to see what he can come up with. You need to do it fast. I have a recommendation.”

  He couldn’t believe he was about to say this, but there it was. In for a penny, in for a pound. Last mission of a long-dead war. And as in all wars, who else was there to send?

  “I recommend me. Let me hunt this bastard.”

  13

  He didn’t introduce himself. He simply strode to the front of the small group of shooters assembled in the bleachers next to the benches under the bright Wyoming sun and said, “Your insert was at 2200, you got to the target zone at 0500 in the dark after a long uphill, over-rock belly crawl, so you’ve no time to range the target area by light. You’re in a hole. You’re bleeding everywhere. The scorpions are crawling over your backside, looking for the breakfast you yourself ain’t had. It’s cold. There are Taliban all over the place. The light comes up, and that’s when you see the Cherokee. It putters along and finally stops at a hut in the valley, and out pops the tall fellow for his dialysis. You’ve maybe two to three seconds clear shooting when he stops to talk to a kid. You’d also like to go home afterwards and have tea with the boyos, right? Oh, you fellows would have a Bud and a steak, but you take my point. How do you do it?”

  He stood in front of them, burly, with a bristle of dark hair and a taut NCO’s face from any army in the world, his seemingly an Irish one. He was muscular, powerful, built for war or football, little else. His small eyes burned darkly and it was clear he was high clergy in the church of the sniper. He wore the uniform of the trade—the tac pants, a military-cut shirt and jacket, assault boots—and his eyes ran from man to man. His cadre stood to the right at parade rest, same uniforms, same burly men, or at least two were, the third being scrawny and dark and feral, all fast-twitch muscle.

  “You, Blondie? How do you make that shot?”

  Blondie was actually redheaded, about thirty, with his own set of sniper’s hard eyes. He was one-seventh of this quarter’s iSniper five-day tutorial, out here in the wastes to learn how to run the tech. Like his six colleagues, and like the speaker, and like the three other silent members of the teaching cadre, he was sunburned, tattooed, thick-armed, and he knew the drill as to kit, appearing in the de rigueurs of the tactical trade, complete to assault boots from Danner, khaki cargo pants from 5.11, polos from Blackhawk, scrunched boonie hats or weatherbeaten LaRue Tactical dusky green baseball caps, and a whole sales rack of tear-shaped, mucho-dinero sunglasses including Wiley Xs, Gargoyles, and Maui Jims.

  The site was a thousand-yard rifle range twenty miles outside Casper, Wyoming, a featureless blank of land that could have been the backdrop for a play by Beckett, just nothingness under a bright sky, with a lean-to sun shade on a cattle ranch hunted for prairie dogs and mule deer in other months but in the cool fall fallow. Six of the students came from unnameable military units. If they told you which one, they had to kill you, but they’d do it fast so it wouldn’t hurt so much, and they’d smile so you wouldn’t feel disliked. The seventh looked like a gentleman cowboy.

  “I’d pass,” said Blondie. “Without the range, there’s no shot. How the hell am I going to range, then go to Kestral for temp, altitude, wind, and humidity numbers, then figure in the ballistics, then run the algorithms on my Palm Pilot, then go clickety-clickety-click dialing the scope this way and that, hoping I get ’em right? In three seconds? No way. By the time I’m done, he’s inside. Meanwhile, there’re more and more people around till the area’s thick with ’em. So when he leaves, even if I’m suppressed when I take the shot, they can gauge where I am and put a lot of shit in that area, and that makes me bacon. If I got a big kill out of it, maybe I’d pay that price. But I’d have to think on it, and all the time I’m thinking, he’s getting smaller, and by the time I’ve got it all thought out, he’s gone. Mama didn’t raise me to be no dead hero. Ain’t no virgins waiting for me where I’m headed.”

  “Exactly,” said the lecturer. “Now, possibly Mr. Swagger here,”—he pointed to the gentleman cowboy—“possibly Mr. Swagger could make that shot cold-bore. But he’s not human, he’s mythical. I’m simply human, so I couldn’t make it. Could you make that shot, Mr. Swagger, as I’ve described it? You made so many others.”

  “Doubtful,” said Bob. “Not now, at any rate, I’ve lost too much. When I was as young as these fellows, there’s a possibility. I never worried about humidity because where I was it was consistent, and there wasn’t much wind, except during monsoon. I don’t know, though. Some men have a knack for distance. I never did.”

  “But you had a knack for knowing the hold. Genius possibly more than ‘knack.’ A feel for it, something subconscious. All of you Vietnamers who scored in the nineties or better had to have that subliminal gift.”

  “Well, maybe we did. I never talked with any of the others about it, because both Chuck and poor Carl were long gone before I started my third tour, and I never ran into ’em here neither. So, if the question is, would I take that shot, the answer is probably no. Turns out I ain’t so mythical after all.”

  Bob was a crash attendee at the tutorial under his own name because there was no time to put a legend together, and unless you immerse yourself in the details of your fictional narrative, you’ll make a mistake sooner or later. So he was here, publicly, as Bob Lee Swagger, of Boise, Idaho, Gny. Sgt. USMC (Ret.), on government contract as a consultant for the Department of Energy security sector. It was all Nick could come up with quickly, once the forensics people had determined that the baked paint debris had come from an iSniper911 unit and nothing else, and quickness was important, for the iSniper911 was produced in such small numbers that the tutorial that taught it ran but once every two or three months, depending. So Nick called in a favor at Energy; Energy ran the paperwork top speed and got the special exception to iSniper’s usual procedures on the basis of Swagger’s well-known name in the community. The premise was Energy’s security teams, known as very well trained operators in charge of guarding vulnerable, volatile Energy Department sites the nation over, were going to upgrade their sniper capabilities to make shooting out to military ranges possible in the new age of terrorism and were looking for an optics system to handle the task. They’d hired the ex-sniper Swagger to run an R and D on what was available and to make a recommendation; the story would stand up to any kind of vigorous examination, unless Bob let it slip he’d never seen a Department of Energy installation and wasn’t too sure what the Department of Energy did, anyway.

  “Anyhow,” Bob allowed, “if you want I could bore all these young guys with stories about how different it was for us, how much more primitive the equipment was, how the landscape favored snipers in a way high desert don’t, but it would be just an old man’s gas. I’m here like them to see if you can do this stuff way out there without a head for numbers.”

  Some laughter, even from the Irishman.

  “Grand, fellows,” he said, “I’m here to teach you how to make that shot, and any others that may come your way. The name’s Grogan, but you can call me ‘Anto,’ as we of the Irish tribe shorten ‘Anthony.’ I’ve done this work too, with a well-known British unit, and then I saw the way to endless riches by jumping to Graywolf Security, where it was my pleasure to handle caravan and bodyguard gigs in many other sandy places. Now I teach for iSniper, and enough with intros, shall we turn to the toy?”

  More laughter. The black Irishman Grogan had a wit to him.

  “Fellows, here’s the why as to your presence here. The scope which don’t need no wizard work to get on target. Why, if
a sod like Anto Grogan can do it, you smarter fellows will have no trouble. But you question, can it possibly be worth the seven thousand dollars the bosses are charging for it now, plus five days when you could be with loved ones instead of cooking out here in the cowboy sun?”

  He opened the rifle case before him, removing a British L96A1, the Accuracy International job, tricked up all very SAS, dun-colored, bi-pod mounted, barrel an inch thick, with what looked like an oar for a stock with a hole in it where your hand set to reach trigger and bolt, all of it crazily adjustable, and then up top two pounds of optical magic secured in Badger Ordnance tactical rings, thick as a giant’s wedding band. Turrets, nodules, knobs, tabs, dials, even a small TV set, a cube with screen above the eyepiece and decorated up top with a keyboard of buttons, the whole damned kitchen sink crunched into one piece.

  “It looks hard. It ain’t. That’s its point. As Sergeant Blondie has said, and since I’ve seen the records, I know you all know and have done this work, but to shoot well far out in the field, you must have three instruments besides a rifle and a scope. You must have a range finder to lase the distance to target, a Kestral 4000 wind indicator to read wind and other atmospheric conditions, and a small computer or Palm Pilot or whatever to feed the distance and weather data into where you’ve already stored your ballistics data so that you can drive it all through an algorithmic equation and come up with your solution, which you must then hand-transfer to the scope itself. If any of those all-tricky and confused things goes wrong, it’s a miss. You give up your hide. You probably buy it. All that training gone to waste. Some camel bunger with a red and white tea cozy wrapped around his noggin has inherited your expensive whiz-bang rifle. No, that ain’t why we’re over there, now is it?”

  He paused, waiting for the little eddy of giggles to die down.

  “Not with iSniper911. With iSniper911, you prang the tall fellow in his heart and he’s dead before his tongue is in the loam. Everyone jumps around and goes jibberty-jabby. They start shooting wildly. Then they realize it’s they themselves on the target black and off they go, not ready for the virgins yet. You wait till dark, crawl back up the damned hill, and wait for extract. Twenty minutes and a loud helo ride later, you’re in base camp with your mates. ‘Shoulda seen the look on Osama’s face,’ you say, and the colonel opens you another can.”