ASSHOLE
Times commie
ignoramus
Should have called NRA
Fool
what about seven-day waiting period for YOU!
Can’t tell Winchester from Rem
Not a PSR, clown
DUH
And on and on it went.
He picked one that seemed less incendiary than the others, its topic line reading “Visual vocabulary insufficient.” At least this guy might understand punctuation and capitalization.
Dear Mr. Banjax,
I suppose by now you have been notified you ran a four-column photograph on the front of your newspaper claiming that you had a picture of a crooked FBI agent firing an FN PSR at the FN range in 2006, when what he is actually holding is a Remington VTR 700, a model not introduced until late 2008. You must also realize that the photograph completely invalidates the premise of your story and your investigation, reveals itself to be a fraud, and suggests that the integrity of the Times has been tarnished beyond recovery. All in all, a smashing performance. Congratulations! You couldn’t have done more harm to your cause if you actually TRIED to harm your cause.
This represents a distressing tendency on the part of Mainstream Media. You all are so opinionated on gun matters, gun policies, gun politics, yet you lack even the most fundamental gun knowledge to buttress your implicit claims of expertise. Quite the opposite, you oh so frequently expose your woeful ignorance and laughable grasp of reality. But even by that standard, this morning’s blooper is quite spectacular.
You represent the media assumption that a gun is just a gun. Any gun is any other gun and therefore you of the enlightened, educated ironic classes needn’t trouble yourself with actual facts about it. The facts don’t matter, only something you’re sure you see, called “the truth.” But if there are no facts, there is no truth. It’s a pattern we see repeated over and over again. Someone once defined a newspaper gun story as “something with a mistake in it.”
You idiot. You were incapable of looking at one rifle and distinguishing its differences from another rifle. It’s not rocket science, chum. Thus you publish a picture misidentified that literally millions of people—not all redneck neanderthals listenin’ to CW n’ drinkin’ moonshine in trailer parks, neither, Snuffy—will see through in a second.
The FN PSR is a refined version of the Winchester Model 70 and still bears the hallmarks of that VERY FAMOUS weapon. The most obvious of these is the trigger guard; the Winchester designers of the early 30s who created that piece of metallic (later alloy) genius had a sense of streamline and grace and they managed to come up with a classic interpretation of the oval. That Winchester oval is part of the visual vocabulary of our times, and any hunter recognizes it instantaneously; it carries with it a trace of art moderne, reflecting the fashions of the period of its creation, and, serendipitously or not, it was so slick and eye-appealing and perfectly scaled and brilliantly machined and blued that even now, over 70 years later, its inheritors in South Carolina can’t bear to part with it. That is why all the new FN rifles bear approximations of it, and any rifle claiming to be FN bolt action would feature such an emblem. The rifle you identify as an FN SPR does not.
It contains another equally vivid symbol of an American classic. Remington had a different, though just as distinctive, interpretation of the trigger guard. They knew that their rifle, the Model 700, had to have an immediately apparent visual signature that marked its difference from their main competition, the 70 (do you get the 70/700 dynamic?). They were coming into the market 30-odd years later (1962) and at that time, the Model 70 was the baseline, but they saw an opening because they knew that Winchester was planning an upgrade that would ease manufacture but coarsen the product. So they had to deliver something distinctive. Their trigger guard has a kind of bow to it, an expansive exaggeration that takes it out of the oval, opens it up, out, and downward (some say the function is to allow a gloved finger easier access to the trigger), but again with a harmony and grace that is instantly recognizable to anyone who knows even the slightest thing about firearms.
Evidently, you and your confreres at the Times missed this OBVIOUS distinction, as you missed several other unique hallmarks of the VTR that make it all but impossible to confuse with the PSR.
I could go on to various differences in the nuance of stock and bolt design. I could point out that the scope on the rifle is a Leupold 9X and unlikely to possess the refinement for the kind of shooting (less than MOA at 300 yards) the picture and the story attribute to Mr. Memphis and the “PSR.”
But you get the point: all in all, pathetic, ignorant, transparent. Quite ugly. You think we’re so stupid, while you’re the one who’s stupid. You should be ashamed.
Sincerely,
Neanderthal P. Country-Music Redneck
3d Trailer on Right
Passel O’ Toads, NC
aka
Lawrence M. Fisher, MD, PhD
Director of Oncology
Methodist Hospital
Kansas City, MO
Banjax realized he had been had. He had been faked and ruined and he’d walked right into it.
“David?”
It was the bureau chief’s secretary.
“David, Mel would like to see you.”
“Well, I—”
“David, right away,” she said in a voice that communicated the secret meaning David, right away.
44
Swagger lay in darkness, too focused to sleep. He was curled on the cot, facing the wall under a thin blanket, aware of the TV camera in the corner of the dark room, its red eye signaling its activity. He waited for time to pass, for his torturers to select a guard, then bed down for the night.
His wrists were bound together by the tough plastic of the flex-cuff, impervious to most blades; it took a pair of clippers and a great deal of force to cut through them. Thus, by the configuration of wrist on wrist, his fingers were closely intertwined. With the fingers of his right hand, he went to his index finger, left hand, and began to carefully peel the Band-aid around the base of the finger—“Cut ourselves wanking, have we now?” It was a process made more arduous by its taking place behind him, in the dark, and inside out, with the left to the right and the right to the left, with numb, swollen fingers. But by picking at the edge of the Band-aid, he got it loosened, and by stretching, sliding, manipulating with great focus and energy, he got the Band-aid removed from the base of the finger. There, buried in scab from the skin-cutting tightness with which it had been wound about the finger, a few inches of hard cutting wire used in certain surgical applications rested, coiled tightly. He got the coil off the finger, ran it through his hands to open it and clean off the dried blood, then—again straining at the awkward angles, the stretch of joint, the numbness in his fingertips—he looped the cutting wire over the plastic of the flex-cuff, caught an end in thumb and forefinger of each hand, and began to saw.
It was not easy. He felt the sweat rising, slicking his body in the dark little chamber, and he tried to lie quietly, as a man asleep might lie. Meanwhile, the wire would not bite into the plastic and kept slipping. It would snake out of one hand and was tense with inbred circularity, having been wrapped around his finger for such a long time. He focused everything he had on the ordeal, trying to get his fingers to obey, trying to get the cutting wire to bite into the plastic, trying to hold it taut, trying to keep his whole body still for whoever was watching the television monitor, and it seemed for the longest, the most frustrating time not to be happening, it was not happening goddamnit to hell it was not happening he could not get the wire to catch to—
And then it happened. Why then and not a minute earlier or a minute later he’d never know. Somehow he scored enough into the flex-cuff for the wire to catch and bite, found some leverage in his hands (though they cramped as if being crushed in vices) and, emboldened by his tiny taste of success, began to saw away. On that surge of energy, he got the flex-cuffs cut in less than twenty mi
nutes.
The trick then was not to give in to the temptation to throw out and stretch his cramped arms, to flex and satisfy his tightened fingers, to rub his raw wrists. He lay still, breathing, waiting.
Time passed.
No one rushed in, beat him senseless, and clapped the iron manacles about his limbs.
He squirmed, turned, and still keeping his hands, though now free, behind his back, twisted downward and got the wire looped over the flex-cuffs about his ankles. With free hands, he had better leverage this time and was able to wrap the wire about his fingers instead of pinching it between them; he was done in five minutes.
He flicked his ankles, and each shoelace in his left hiking boot presented itself to him, as if specially weighted. It was weighted; from each he withdrew a two-inch-long piece of titanium needle, extremely strong and unbendable, a millimeter wide. Again, he waited for the sound of footsteps, the crash of the door opening, the arrival of the Irish goons with fists and truncheons to beat him to pulp for his audacity. Nothing happened.
Now, tricky. Was the fellow on the monitor asleep? Was he just drowsing? Was he watching an episode of Star Trek on TV or jerking off to an old copy of Juggs? Or was he enjoying Swagger’s struggle and letting it build in hope until it was time to crush it?
Swagger’s hard combat mind banished doubt and speculation. No purpose was served, except to slow his directness, and he needed speed, decisiveness, surprise for what lay ahead.
Easily, he slid off the cot, coming to rest on the floor. He was aware of the red light as if it were a red eye, a dragon’s eye, staring at him. But he pressed on, snaking his way across the dark floor to the door, where he slid upward, leaning against the hard metal, and found the key hole. He probed, a pick in the fingers of each hand. The job required delicacy, and after thirty-six hours of bound torture, he had none; his fingers felt like stone, when they weren’t atremble like the wings of a butterfly. The process seemed to devour time. It seemed hours, as he probed, felt the give of levers inside, the weight of tumblers, the dense cylinder that was the core of the lock, whose flanges had to be manipulated properly, while he held a spring down by pressing hard against it with strength he no longer had. Hours passed, then days and nights, then months. Somehow the years changed, and decades later, the door at last yielded, not with a click but with a whisper. He eased it open, stepped into the well-lit hallway, blinked for focus and clarity, looked each way for a weapon, saw none. He did exactly what he’d done earlier when he’d first entered the house, but he did it more artfully this time, using the sniper’s gift for silent movement, the sniper’s patience for goals reached surely but without rushing, and he came at last to the steps and then to the doorway atop the steps, and he slid through, hearing heavy snoring. His trip took him through the kitchen; he quietly pulled a drawer, then another, and finally a third until he located a butcher’s crude blade with enough point and length to reach blood-bearing organs in a single cut.
He eased around a corner into the security office and there saw on a screen his own empty cot and the door of his own cell half ajar. Alas, no one was awake to notice, for Ginger, the smartest of the Irishmen, lay sound asleep in a chair, his feet up on a desk under the TV monitor. No time for deliberation now, as Swagger’s trembly, weakened muscles were pumped by the pressure of adrenaline foaming into his bloodstream, and in three swift steps he was upon Ginger, had the man’s neck wrapped in the crook of his elbow, securing it, and with the other hand, drove the knife point into the delicate skin of the neck just tenths of an inch from the river of red blood known as the carotid.
“Wake up, you Irish fuck,” he said sharply, jerking on the neck as if to break it, for that was another of his options, given the leverage he had attained.
“Ggggg—kkk,” was all his crushed passages allowed Ginger to mutter.
“You listen to me, I’d just as soon cut you open”—he put pressure so that the tip of the butcher’s tool sank another tenth of an inch or so into skin entirely too fragile to offer it anything of an impediment—“and watch you bleed dry on the floor, but what’s going to happen is I’m going to roll you to the vault just like this and you’re going to open it. And if you pretend you don’t know the combination, I’m cutting your carotid clean through and you die vomiting blood and shitting and pissing, while I go upstairs and get myself another Irish artery to split. I will kill all night if I have to. I’m only letting you live because I want some dough, and you’re the messenger.”
The softness of surrender flashed through Ginger’s big body, and Bob rolled him on the strength of his shoulders, and in a few seconds they’d arrived at the heavy door. This time it was locked, but Ginger got his hands to the dial, a silver disk the size of a destroyer day-room clock, and spun and clicked the knob back and forth half a dozen times, and a vibration announced that he’d opened it, and then the door, of its own volition, unlinked and opened an inch.
Bob rode Ginger to his feet, not wanting to give the bigger, younger, stronger man any space to acquire leverage; Bob could not afford a fight now, even if he won it. When Ginger was upright, Swagger said, “Open it,” and the door flew wide, and Bob pushed Ginger in. He saw stacks of rifles, bins of ammo, and just where it had been, the film, safe in its cardboard package on the shelf.
“Knees,” said Bob, and Ginger went down.
Kill him, Bob thought. One fewer of the bastards. Murder his ass and send the message that this is to the death.
But cutting a half-strangled thug’s throat was not a thing he could do; instead, he released the clamp on the neck, quickly seized a rifle—it was a Remington 700—inserted the butt into the cleft between skull and shoulder against the neck, and forced Ginger facedown.
“Tell Anto I’m too old to give a fuck about honor. I want dough and lots of it. I’m sick of being poor and noble. But I want to be in control, not him. I want to get paid for my trouble. I want to get paid for that war in something other than nightmares. This is my chance and I won’t let him fuck me like everyone else. I’ll contact him tomorrow and we’ll rig an exchange somehow in the wilderness. And I want dough up front so they best get on the phone to Constable and get a big pile of cash here. You can remember that? Oh, and I hope you don’t suffocate.”
With that he withdrew the buttstock a few inches, then drove it hard into the back of Ginger’s skull, knocking the fellow either out or, more likely, into a grogginess so intense and a pain so heavy he could do nothing for minutes.
Swagger wished he had time to disable the rifles or at least twist all the knobs to hell and gone, but he didn’t. Instead, he snatched the film, slid out, and locked the heavy door behind him. Whether Ginger lived or died did not at this point seem an issue to ponder.
He went quickly to the shelf, plucked off a radio unit next to the blinking receiver by which the professional security people stayed in contact. He looked around until he saw a heavy ring of keys. Then he slipped out the door.
Piles of stars filled the western sky. A wind pushed cold air across the plains, fresh out of the mountains close by, whose darker bulk obliterated the low starlight. Vegetation, moved by that cascade of air from above, filled the sky with the sound of its own rustling. Far off, a coyote howled, and his mate responded.
Swagger sucked the cold air, glad of its plentitude, hoping for energy. Then his adrenaline took over.
He set out on a course to the vehicle compound next to the barn, stopped to retrieve a knapsack he had wedged into a culvert on the way down. He opened it, removed an ice pick.
At the compound, it took a second to find the right key, and then he unlocked the padlock and lifted the gate back. He walked past each vehicle—five four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles, two jeeps, a pickup truck, and a Cherokee—and thrust the penetrating needle of the ice pick into each tire. It sank without difficulty into the tires, and it produced in him a reverie of vengeance as he fantasized it was going into the thoracic cavities of his captors. In a very few seconds had disabled all t
he vehicles save one of the ATVs.
He knelt, used the grip of the tool to shatter the plastic housing of the ignition, found the wires tangled beneath, did some pulling and jiggling before he freed the leads up, then sparked the vehicle to life. Maybe it was loud enough to awaken the sleeping Irishmen, maybe not. It didn’t matter by now.
Throwing the ice pick in the knapsack, he threw the whole thing on his back and his leg over the saddle of the ATV, a thing built by Honda called a Foreman. It was essentially a broader, slower, but more agile four-wheel motorcycle, its broad base giving it stability, designed to negotiate the back country, the vehicle that made hunting fields accessible to lazy, out-of-shape suburbanites. He kicked it into gear and twisted the throttle at the handlebar’s end and peeled out of the compound, turned, and headed out into the wilderness. No noise arose behind him, and he roared onward in the dark, his pains forgotten, his angers quelled, his righteousness unstoked. He was only thinking one thing: time to get my rifle.
45
At five, Raymond’s alarm woke him and told him it was time to relieve Ginger. He rose, dressed, brushed his teeth, ran a wet comb through his hair, smiled at his cheeky beauty in the mirror, and thought of the many gals he’d had and the many more, with all that swag, that awaited. Then down he went, whistling and calling, “Is the coffee hot still, Ginger, or must I make it meself?” and first discovered that Ginger was missing, then saw the empty cell and open door on the security monitor, turned quick to check the vault, saw it locked, then heard the pounding from inside.
Things happened in a blur after that. Raymond pulled Anto and the others from sleep. They got the vault open in time to save the gasping Ginger’s life, though the man was cross-eyed with a skull as bloody as if the red Indians had taken his hair from the pounding the sniper had administered.
The team made quick checks, discovered the useless vehicles, the stolen radio set, got Swagger’s message as relayed by the slow-of-wit Ginger, and realized they’d just inherited a new game.
A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai Page 95