I, Sniper

by Stephen Hunter

  “I have a dozen. Very fine guns, the old ones at any rate.”

  “Yes, well FN has started manufacturing Model 70s again at a plant it built in South Carolina. Now if FN could get the FBI sniper rifle contract from Remington to replace the 700 with the 70, it would be an incredible coup.”

  “What does this—”

  “Nick Memphis, an ex-sniper, is on a committee to pick the next rifle. It seems there’s some internal feeling that it’s time to shake things up by going to the FN product, and according to Banjax’s source, Nick is in the forefront of that move. Now, it turns out he accepted an all-expenses-paid trip to South Carolina—”

  “Good God, I can see selling out for a trip to Brussels, but South Carolina!”

  “Hard to believe. But they flew him down there to talk to the big shots at FN, which is a big no-no without prior executive permission. It seems also that there’s a long track of ‘gifts’ made to Agent Memphis from his good friends at FN that may well be in violation of FBI guidelines. There’s lots of receipts for dinners at a local Ruth’s Chris and some mysterious checks for a place called the Carousel. And here’s the best part: there may be—and Banjax has a line on it—a photo of Nick at the FN range in South Carolina, with the new FN rifle; there’s even a date visible in the picture, if you blow it up, because he’s holding a target where he’s just fired a .321-sized group, or whatever, and signed and dated the target.”

  “Where did all this come from?”

  “In my opinion, it came from Remington. These guys play rough and they are very worried about losing this contract. So they hired a security firm to monitor the process, and one of their guys evidently came up with it.”

  “So, Memphis is dirty. The Bureau can’t stay with him then, right? He’s out, he’s gone, he’s history.”

  “He’s definitely history.”

  “And the Times will run this story?”

  “They’re way out ahead of everyone, and in that business, that’s the greatest thing. They can feel it so close it’s driving them nuts with desire. A scoop. A big, government-humiliating, career-wrecking scoop. That’s how Pulitzers are won. Corruption and misjudgment, sniffed out by a vigilant press—it’s the cocaine that makes them insane. You’re damn right they’ll run it.”

  “So that’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. Or the rifle that shot out the camel’s spine.”

  “That’s right, Tom. When Banjax gets the photo and it’s vetted by the photo experts the Times hires, we’ll have him. Memphis has to go. And I’ll make sure the next guy is more cooperative.”

  28

  Swagger hit the floor hard amid a spray of glass sleet from the windshield as the burst atomized the glass, a bullet flying so close by his neck he felt the breeze. He wedged himself low into the cave under the dash, thanking God he’d forgotten to buckle up for safety, hearing the bullets bang hard off the hood, the engine block, back again to the windshield as the gunner dumped his mag into the vehicle. He blinked hard to force himself to face the reality of what was happening, knowing that if he stayed there in the fetal curl on the floor, the gun boy would come out, stick the snout of his subgun through the window, and dump the next mag entirely into Mr. B. L. Swagger, late of planet Earth.

  Inspiration came from—well, who knows? God? Intelligent design? A hundred previous gunfights? The obviousness of what was before his nose, which was Denny’s gigantic foot resting on the gas pedal? Swagger craned upward, spun the wheel against Denny’s dead hands hard to the left, then elbowed Denny’s dead foot, pushing pedal to floor. The car leaped and, as the distance was short, built no killing momentum, but still it hit the killers’ car on the oblique with a clanging charge of energy, enough to spin Bob himself almost backward against the seat.

  But now he had a plan, and a man with a plan is a man with a chance. He reached up, pushing Denny’s jacket aside, and plucked the Sig 229 from his hip holster, unsnapping it and making sure to pull it straight out, duplicating the draw angle so that the sights wouldn’t get caught in the holster and no security device would pin it. Out it slid, and now he had a plan and a gun, and he had his opponents possibly in a daze from the unexpected smash of car one into car two. He squirmed back to his own off-driver’s-side door, hit the latch, and tumbled out. Crawling madly down the length of the car, ripping knees and hands to shreds on the pavement, he emerged over the right front wheel well, putting tire and heavy axle and brake system as well as engine block between him and the killers, and saw the enemy car at an angle, slightly askew, its door caved and wearing his own car’s left front as its new fashion accessory. A figure behind the wheel struggled with his seat belt, clumsy from the shock of the collision, mind a stew of confusions.

  Bob found the Sig a blocky little piece of guncraft that fit his hands glove-smooth and went to target hungrily; he locked his elbows as he put the front sight smack on the target twelve-odd feet away, fired four times on the angle and watched as the windshield fogged into quicksilver as the penetrating bullets left their legacy of fractured abstraction. Behind those smears, the dark figure kicked taut, then slumped sideways.

  Bob withdrew, and a good thing too, as in seconds, maybe nanoseconds, a burst of automatic fire came hurtling his way to spall off the hood and spray randomly into the air, chewing up metallic debris, paint dust, and friction-driven sparks. He saw now what was so strange about all this—the absence of the other man’s percussions, as his weapon was clearly suppressed. The bursts had a low, wet, rattly sound, as if made by a child playing at tommy gun with a throatful of phlegm.

  Swagger started to rotate right, to get around the bumpers of both cars, flank the shooter, and take him down from the low defilade, even as he knew that if the guy was no idiot, he too would now be on the move, rotating also to the right. So he stopped, reversed his direction, and began a journey to the left, the long way around, to find and kill his man.

  Rat watched the bullets take out the windshield and all behind them in a long sparkly rip, right to left, horizontal, but had a kind of inkling of disaster as the dancing web of punctures didn’t seem to catch up quite to the rapidly disappearing number two target. He realized he should have gone left to right, goddamnit, and cursed himself for fearing the cop’s handgun more than the agility and quickness of the unarmed but highly experienced man. He ate up the rest of the magazine—once you start shooting these things it’s hard to stop, so seductive is the rhythm, the power of the recoil, the imagery of the world dissolving before the godlike reach of your bullet stream—shooting out more windshield glass, tearing up the hood, hoping to start a fire or send something through to take out the quick mover, but he knew: Houston, we have a problem.

  The gun ran dry. If he’d more experience, he could have dumped the empty in a second and been back on target in the next, but he wasn’t sure where the mag release was, and by the time he got it tripped to drop the empty box, found another, heavier box, got it inserted and locked into place, he raised his eyes just in time to experience astonishment.

  The Impala piled into their car. The clang sent him thundering against the door, and the gun slipped from his grip. Holy fuck, where’d that come from? Spangles, fireworks, flashbulbs, all kinds of optic disturbance filled his tiny, concentrated mind, and he had to head-shake hard to get himself back to reality. He reached, felt for the gun, got it up, checked intelligently to see if the mag was still locked in place, checked again that the bolt was back and locked open, and came up to rejoin the fight just in time to blow his night vision on the four fast, bright muzzle flashes of his guy firing across both hoods through his front windshield, where dazed Tino struggled with seat- belt confusion. Too late for Tino; the bullets found him in chest and head, and Rat felt the hot spray of blood splattering from a high-velocity impact on flesh as Tino made some indecipherable sound of regret and slumped to the left like a sack of apples. Rat got the subgun—now it seemed so long—up and oriented in that direction and squeezed off a burst that ripped hell out of a
t least three panes of thick auto glass—his own right front, the guy’s left front and, going through and out, what remained of the windshield; the bullets left a galaxy of spatter-pattern fissures as they flew, and many hit the hood where the other shooter had been but was no longer, spanging off in a spray of sparks and pulverized auto paint.

  With his elbow he knocked the handle on the door behind him and spilled out. He hit the ground, gathered himself quickly into a shooter’s crouch, and looked for targets. It was so quiet. All street sounds had died, all traffic had stopped, the many civilians had frozen or slunk away to let the players work out their gun drama on their own. For the first time in his life, Rat felt fear. His bowels almost came loose and the ice water that he’d thought filled his veins churned into his lower colon instead.

  This guy was a pro. He was so fucking good. How could he get to guns so fast? Usually when the bullets flew, even the most hardened cops went into a kind of daze and it took seconds, sometimes minutes, before they were functioning efficiently, and it was in that gap that Rat made his living.

  But not tonight.

  Move! he ordered himself, rising slightly, again peering over the horizon of shattered glass, bullet-pierced vehicles, drifting smoke, and lights diffused in the drizzle for a target and saw none. He realized: he’s coming to get me, meaning he’ll be coming around the front of the locked cars, and when he gets to my bumper, he’s got cover and I don’t.

  That got his ass moving. He scrambled left down the side of the car, dipped behind its tail, and felt vaguely secure, when the second brilliant idea hit him.

  Shoot under the car.

  He dropped to his knees, inserted the K under the car horizontally and squeezed out an arc of 9-mil, the gun spurting, the muzzle flaring, the bullets digging up dust and earth from the pavement as they swept right to left in search of the legs of the other man. Surely they’d take him down hard, and Rat could advance from the rear, put some finishers into him, and disappear down an alleyway. He wondered, Will I get Tino’s ten long?

  But the gunman wasn’t crouched behind the car. His legs were not available for Rat’s strategy. Instead, guessing it, he’d climbed upon his own hood, and in six agile steps bounded over his own roof to his trunk, where he stood above Rat, whose gun remained planted underneath the vehicle.

  “Drop it,” he said, though both were aware that Rat could no more drop it than he could drop his trousers, and as Rat pulled back to free his weapon, the tall cowboy shot him three times expertly in the chest so fast it sounded like he was the machine gunner.

  The shots hit like hammer blows and scattered Rat’s mind. He thought of all kinds of extraneous bullshit and had a kind of memory dump as half- or quarter-images from his twenty-six years fluttered through his brain like a fast shuffle of cards, and the next thing he knew he was choking on blood and looking into the close-up face of his slayer, who pressed the gun muzzle hard into his throat, to fire the spine breaker if that were necessary, though both realized by now it wasn’t.

  “Go to hell,” said Rat.

  “No doubt,” Rat heard the reply, “but not before you.”

  Gunsmoke and silence hung in the air.

  Swagger kicked the machine pistol further under the car, where the cops would find it.

  He walked around the tilted Impala, looked in and saw Denny, ruined head back against the headrest, eyes unblinkingly open, blood like a broken bottle of wine down his shirt.

  “I’m so sorry, Captain,” he said to nobody. “You were the best; you deserved so much more. I swear to God there will be justice for this.”

  Then he reached into his pocket, made sure the plastic bag with Ward Bonson’s coded letter to Ozzie Harris was still secure.

  He stood. All along the street people were emerging from shadows.

  Now what?

  If I stay, I’m hung up in Chicago cop paperwork for a week, and these bad guys hunting my ass know exactly where I am. I have to give up the letter and wait for the Bureau to save my ass, assuming the Bureau, meaning Nick, can save my ass.

  If I disappear, I have no resources, I am probably wanted as a witness, I am fleeing the scene of a crime, though I didn’t commit it, and there will be questions to answer for months when and if we finally get this goddamn mess settled.

  But there is one thing I can do on my own that I can’t do in police custody.

  I can hunt.

  With that, he fired a shot in the air, to drive the peepers back to cover, turned down an alley, and was on the next block in total darkness before he heard the first siren.

  29

  Late night DC, traffic down, the city full of shadows, even parking available, most of the food joints that depended on lunch trade closed, few pedestrians. David Banjax found a space on the street, wandered around the buildings along Fifteenth Street between M and K, noted that the one on the southeast corner belonged to the competition. It was some seventies monstrosity, characteristic of the horrors of Big Paper architecture the world over. The places, even his own, all looked like midrange insurance agencies, both inside and out these days. At any rate, he kidded himself that they were working late at the Washington Post, maybe trying to keep up with him and the Sniper scandal. But they never would. He was so far ahead.

  He walked around the corner, past a Radio Shack and a Korean lunch joint, and turned into a parking lot entrance, a wide, descending driveway, in the corner building, which adjoined the Post. It was deserted but not dark, and he wound down the spiral two levels, past a helter-skelter of the medium-price sedans that reporters and copy editors preferred, until he finally reached the bottom. He didn’t like it: no escapes, not that there should be any danger. Still, his breath came hard, the air tasted icy, his lungs felt too small. He licked dry lips with a dry tongue. Are you sure this is how Bob Woodward got his start?

  In a row of cars ahead of him, headlights winked on and off. He made his way to that vehicle, a Kia, clearly a rental, and made out the figure of a man in the front seat, behind the wheel. David nodded, the figure nodded back, but at that moment, across the way, an elevator door opened, a blade of light penetrated the dimness, and a couple of people walked out, laughing. David dropped between cars and waited as the two made it to a nearby car—“He actually thought ‘disinterested’ meant ‘uninterested’! He must be in his fifties! How stupid is that?” he heard—climbed in, started up, and pulled out. Copyreaders! The same everywhere!

  When the car had disappeared, David approached the mystery vehicle and noted with both approval and a chortle that the man was wearing a fedora and a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses. He opened the off-side front door and heard a voice say, “Rear, please, that side. I will look at you in the mirror. You do not look back; keep your eyes down.”

  Now the convening literary master seemed to be John le Carré. It was turning into a spy novel. Wasn’t this the part where the pawn gets murdered by a silenced .22? Or does the pawn miraculously escape the assassination, go on the run, and somehow still bring down the government and put the bad CIA cell in prison and win the Pulitzer Prize and write a best seller, all in 350 pages.

  He obeyed.

  “This is a little melodramatic, isn’t it?”

  “Look, pal, I don’t need snark. I know you people like wisecracks, but stow the fucking wisecracks and be dead literal and we will get along a lot better. This isn’t a fucking movie.”

  “I understand.”

  “Throw the tape recorder in the front seat.”

  “I—”

  “Throw the tape recorder in the front seat.”

  Banjax threw the tape recorder in the front seat.

  “Now throw the other tape recorder in the front seat.”

  “Hey, I—”

  “Throw the other tape recorder in the front seat.”

  Banjax threw the other tape recorder in the front seat.

  “I may have to prove this meeting took place, you know.”

  “I didn’t turn ’em off. I’ll return ’
em if I conclude you’re straight and that I didn’t give something away I didn’t mean to give away.”

  “Okay. Sensible. Now what have you got for me? And who are you?”

  “Who I am is not relevant. I may be this, I may be that. I may be a courier or a controller or a rogue. You will never know. But I have a gift for you, as I said I did. It’s amazing how successful you’re about to be on my generosity.”

  “I’m sure you’re getting something out of it. Nothing’s free in this town.”

  “Hmm, fast learner,” the spy guy said. Then, with a kind of practiced insouciance, as if he’d done this many times, he tossed a manila envelope over the seat to the rear, and it landed exactly in the space next to Banjax. Banjax noted the man was wearing gloves.

  “Okay,” he said. “Should I open?”

  “Not here. What you have is Xeroxes of internal FN documents, from their South Carolina headquarters, recording their courtship of, their involvement with, their bribes to, their payoffs to, and finally their comments on Nick Memphis, FBI.”

  “How the hell—”

  “We’re good. We’re not amateurs. You are not dealing with self-dramatizing whistle-blowers who are trying to get a segment on 60 Minutes. You get to go on 60 Minutes, not us.”

  “How can I authenticate? I have to authenticate.”

  “That’s your problem. Our mole didn’t have time to get affidavits.”

  “Well, there’s a time thing here. I—”

  “Jesus. Let’s see, you might use Freedom of Information to get FN’s original cover letter to the FBI seeking submission paperwork for the sniper rifle contract trials. Then run a typefont comparison. Or I’ll tell you what, since time is a factor, find someone in the Bureau to leak those documents to you to shortcut the FOI process. You pick ’em, not us; that’s your guarantee of integrity. Run the typefont comparison. If you get a match, you’ve proven that the FN official submission and the internal memorandum came from the same printer.”