I, Sniper

by Stephen Hunter

  She kept waiting for the day when one of the field agents working the list of new possibles that Swagger had turned up would deliver the key piece of dope that would smash the Hitchcock thesis, but it never happened. One by one the possibles became impossible: out of the country, dead, accounted for during that week, almost all of them, if not killing, off teaching. Jesus, far from being macho gung ho gun boys, professional snipers were like rabbis during the Middle Ages, heading from talmudic center to talmudic center, there to instruct, argue, dispute, spread reputation, enforce the orthodox, denounce the apostates, form and reform cliques, network like young movie actors. Good lord, who would have thought it?

  But now—

  Oh great, the cell in her purse. That was her private number and only her boyfriend had it and her boyfriend was in Kuwait this week going through some Al Jazeera tapes that might have been plants or might be the real McCoy. Only one other person had the number.

  “Swagger, what?” she said.

  “Agent Starling, hello. Consider this an anonymous tip—”

  “Where are you?”

  “If I’m anonymous, I ain’t nowhere, am I? Here’s your tip. You go to the University of Chicago, Department of Education, where Jack Strong was a professor. You subpoena the hard drive on his computer; you open his e-mail. Be sure to do it nice and legal-like so it can go into evidence.”

  “Swagger, what the hell—”

  “Are you getting this, young lady? What you’ll find is an amply documented relationship between him and a fellow named TomC, who you will certainly be able to identify as Tom Constable—”

  “Swagger, I warned you—”

  “You warned me that I had to have something real, not something that was my opinion. This is as real as it gets. Strong and TomC discussed an object which Strong had come up with that gave Strong leverage over TomC. Strong wanted dough, lots of it, tons of it. He wanted a new life in Switzerland, Armani suits, all that fine bullshit. He thought Tom would be oh so happy to give it to him. All this, by the way, was happening in the last few weeks before the killings.”

  She was writing it all down.

  “That will prove that TomC had a motive to eliminate Jack and Mitzi, while hiding it behind the camouflage story of old man Carl having gone nuts.”

  “That’s fine, but without formally verified evidence, we couldn’t get a search warrant to impound. It has to be legal, don’t you see? That’s not legal.”

  “It is true, however.”

  “Unfortunately, there is a difference. I’ll try to figure some way to justify it.”

  “Yes ma’am, I knew you would. Then there’s the boys he hired to make all this happen. I know where they are.”

  “Then you have to give them to us.”

  “If I do, them boys are gone so fast you won’t see the blur. They’s professionals, the very best operators in the world, way above all your pay grades down there. You’ll never git ’em. Nope, if I give you them, I’m letting them git away, scot-free. A lot of people died on account of this and I mean to see the ancient law enforced the ancient way.”

  “Swagger, where are you?”

  “Remember, I said same deal with you as with Nick. If I jumped, you’d know it.”

  “Swagger, I don’t like the sound of that.”

  She swore she could hear the old man laugh from whatever twisted arroyo or stunted tree he now hid himself within and had an image of him in torchlight, gleaming with blades and rifles and bandoliers of ammunition and Molotov cocktails, some kind of coonskin cap on his head, a tommy gun in his left hand and a Winchester in his right, all frontier 24/7.

  “Well, young lady, this is my courtesy call. Here’s the news: I’m jumping.”

  35

  Swagger snapped the folder shut and slipped it into the cargo pants. Then he went back to his Leicas and 15X’ed what lay at the bottom of the hill before him.

  It was not Tom Constable’s big, beautiful Wind River ranch house. That imposing structure, to all appearances manned only by a skeleton crew with its master somewhere else, lay a mile to the west, a strange accumulation of turrets and arbors and roofline nooks and crannies next to the most beautiful streambed in Wyoming, beneath the mountains and the wide blue sky.

  This was the security compound. Tom wouldn’t live way out here without a small army of protection; it wasn’t his way. So Swagger reasoned: whatever he got off the Strongs, that’s where it’ll be. That’s where I have to go.

  He was unarmed. This wasn’t a murder raid, even if the fucking New York Times had essentially decreed him a murderer yesterday. No sir. You could kick the door down way past midnight with an M4 and twenty magazines and try to kill all these boys flat, cold out, and what would it get you? A lot of return fire once they figured out what was going on, a running gunfight on the way out, blood loss, and bleeding out in a ditch. You’d never recover what it was that was at the heart of this thing. You might shoot the right shooters, but in the dark and the mayhem, who could tell?

  No, the way you took this unit down was you got what they were here protecting. You got that and you made off. That got their attention. They had to get it back; that was why they existed, and if they didn’t get it back, it wasn’t just failure, it was something worse, some professional shame that only the best can feel, some place beyond shame. So they came looking for you somewhere out there—out there lay behind Bob, and it was the largest parcel of privately owned land in America, a wonderland of mountains and gulches and high meadows and glades and forests and mesas and canyons—you got them out there, hunting you, and like many a man before, they discovered you were hunting them. But to play that game the way Bob had set it up, he had to get the goddamned thing, and he didn’t even know what it was, much less where it was. Probably in a safe. And how do you get the safe open? Maybe if you asked politely, they’d oblige.

  He eyed the building, whose details were vanishing in the setting sun. It was the old ranch house, refurbished for this duty. Its barn was a garage that housed four jeeps and a dozen wheeled off-road buggies, ATVs. The house itself was an old piece of prairie design, familiar from a thousand and ten westerns, rewired, rewindowed, redoored, remade as a modern security vault. Bob saw cameras everywhere, and a network of lights, and some kind of bar code entry mechanism, and alarm circuits at all the windows, all seemingly high tech, maybe higher tech, maybe nowhere-near highest tech. Men—none of them Graywolf commandos, but all of them tough-looking townie cowpokes—hung about, all armed not with the ubiquitous M4s but with Ruger Mini-14s, which looked a little more ranchlike in the hands of boys in jeans and boots and hats. There was a regular patrol rotation, and every hour, three vehicles left to run perimeter; there was another complement of two after dark and one during daylight that staffed the entry gate, which was miles away. There was a big kitchen and a day room, and that was the downstairs. Who knew what was in the basement? Upstairs were sleeping quarters for the night shift. People came and went by a utility route that led off to the right and into an arroyo, because the grand people in the big house didn’t want to be troubled by the sight of Johnny Lunchbucket showing up for work every morning.

  Swagger had picked a zigzag approach, meaning a long night’s crawl in the bulk of a ghillie suit. His entry point was the basement window, southeast corner. The building wasn’t properly speaking patrolled or guarded, except by the presence of those living within. There seemed no steady, regular surveillance, no pattern of lights. He could pick out no motion detectors or Doppler radar screens. Security developmentwise, it was mid tech, definitely late twentieth century. Constable had laid out the bucks for it fifteen years ago, and that was that; maybe an upgrade was on his to-do list but he hadn’t gotten to it yet.

  The problem was the window. Kick it in? Noise, alarm. Cut the wires? Probably couldn’t reach ’em. Set some sort of diversionary element—a charge, a fire, an alarm? Get too many cowboys awakened. Pick the lock? He had picked locks before and knew how to do it, and this lock w
as probably pretty easy; it was just wired.

  No, the only way was to cut a hole in the glass, reach in, and cut the wire, then get through the lock.

  Then he’d slide in and see what was what. He had no weapons, but he had five smoke grenades and five flashbang munitions, all of which would create considerable confusion if necessary. Here was the official version of the plan, the one he had to convince himself he’d believe in, the one they’d try to beat him away from, and he knew, if he gave it up, it was the first step toward losing this one. The idea seemed to be to find “it,” booby-trap the place with smokers and flashbangs, disable most of the vehicles—not exactly high tech, he’d just pierce each tire with an icepick—and disappear with one. By the time they got the vehicles up and running, he’d be long gone and they’d have to call in the big boys, the trackers and the snipers, the Graywolf pros, to hunt him down.

  But he knew that hope was a dream. The reality: this’ll be a bad one.

  There’s going to be a lot of pain ahead, getting through this one.

  You’re going to pay for this one.

  Then he thought, man, I am too old for this shit. I do not need this shit. I saw the six-zero a few years back and I ought to be rocking this way, then that, not putting gunk on my face and slithering in a suit that looks like a bush downhill a thousand yards to try to get in and out and away and gone, but instead probably getting my ass kicked hard and long until I ain’t hardly human no more.

  I do not want to do this.

  But he looked around, and as usual, nobody else was there. If not him, who? Tell the feds. Telling the feds just opens a can of worms and lets lawyers and politicians and bullshit artists of all stripes into what is essentially clear-cut and demands action and justice.

  So here I am and here I go.

  His face blackened, he began the long crawl down.

  It took six hours and he arrived at 0230. The temp had dropped, and a keening wind knifed down from the mountains. There was no moon, but tides and pinwheels of stars splattering the vault of dark threw off enough dim glow to let him navigate, and he’d committed the plan of the place, the location of the trees, the spotlights, the shadows, to memory. He slid between cones of light, riding the shadows, moving with a kind of slow swimmer’s urgency as if through mud. You’d have to look hard at him to see movement at all, and he doubted the cameras were high-res enough to pick him out of the shadows in what was undoubtedly black-and-white. Every time he heard some odd noise, he froze, waiting to see if anything would develop, and of course it never did. At one point, around eleven, a couple of cowboys came out and smoked on the porch, had a good laugh at a supervisor’s expense, and one took a nip from a secret flask. Then they ducked back in. At two-hour intervals, there was some clambering as a security shift climbed into vehicles, tested engines and lights, then left for a perimeter patrol, making a lot of noise as they went. Each circuit took four hours, so the first crew was back while the second and third were still out, prowling around inside the barbed wire in the dark in far distant places. It was a hell of a big spread.

  Now he scooted the last few feet until he was flush against the house. He lay, stifling his breathing, waiting for discovery. Why didn’t they have dogs? A dog might pick up scent, where a man never would. But maybe Tom Constable, ever conscious of his image, didn’t want the world to see him as guarded by baying howlers, long in teeth, red in fang; he was the modern billionaire, too cool and streamlined and ironic for that. So his muscle was hidden under down-home cowboy wardrobes, townies and locals in jeans just like in olden days. It made him more interesting for the celebrity magazine people whom he always had out for his big parties.

  Bob touched the low-lying window. And what if he got through it and came across that drunken cowboy? Did he kill him? Choke the life out of him? Some nineteen-year-old townie punk who just needed a job and ended up on the night shift at Big Tom’s. That wasn’t right. Oh, “knock him out,” that good one from the movies. Yeah, and brain-damage him forever, or siphon off IQ points the boy couldn’t spare? What then? Cross that one when he came to it. He had a couple of Kimber pepper sprays aboard, which wouldn’t put a man out but should put him down. But if it came to that, the whole thing had gone to hell anyway.

  He slid out of the ghillie until he felt like he was lying next to a dead buffalo, a puffy weaving of silks and cottons configured to look like the great outdoors. With a good one you could go to ground and a hundred men could walk right by you and never catch on that you were the sniper, you were here to kill them. This one was very good. He hated to leave it behind, even if he had others.

  The wind cut his cotton shirt, which was sweat-soaked after the long, hard creep, and the cold penetrated as he finally came free. He nestled next to the low window. He pulled a small waist pack around from his backside, unpeeled the Velcro fasteners to display a cache of small tools and one piece of Double Bubble bubble gum. He opened the gum and threw it in his mouth—it was cold and hard, dusted with sugar—and began to knead it to something malleable with his jaws. He took out a small SureFire and checked each corner for wires and went four for four. He went to the latch, saw that it snapped shut. He ran the cone of illumination across the room he was about to penetrate and saw that happily it didn’t contain sleeping men but mostly housed stacked junk—some kind of storeroom. Very good.

  He removed a glass cutter’s tool from his pouch, tapped the glass to make certain it was no super security plastic, and was rewarded with the vibration of regular window pane. He turned the tool so that the auger installed at the other end of the grip was upmost and crudely drilled deep into the glass, feeling it yield to powder as he rotated, until finally he’d opened enough edge for the cutter to bite. Quickly he sliced a four-inch wound in the glass, cranked the thing horizontally and cut another. In short enough time, he’d cut a four-by-four square in the window. He plucked the gum from his mouth, applied it to the window gently, pressing hard enough to make it stick but not hard enough to break. Then he pulled, and the sixteen-square-inch glass rectangle plopped out. He gently set it down.

  Wire cutters snipped the central wire to which each of the corner devices was linked; then he popped the lock, opened the window, jimmied his body, and slid through. He closed the window behind him, though a breeze now pulsed through the open square in the glass. Nothing could be done about that; the cowboys wouldn’t notice, or so the theory went.

  He waited, his eyes adjusting to the quality of indoor darkness, with no starlight or far-off spotlights. It was clear he was in the kitchen supply depot, as industrial-sized plastic bottles of ketchup, mustard, and relish stood everywhere, as did other wrapped-in-plastic foodstuffs. A glowing stainless steel door admitted the cookie to the walk-in freezer where perishables were kept. Bob ignored it, slid to the door, unlocked it, and opened it a crack. Not much to see: institutional green walls, a few other closed doors probably giving admittance to other storage facilities, at the far end a hold tank, where drunks or paparazzi could be secured until LE came out from town to haul them away. At the close end he saw stairs, slipped quietly to them, eased halfway up—would there be a crack as the old wood adjusted to weight bearing? no, not this time—and slipped up a bit further.

  He could see into the big room, well-lit but empty. Junky Walmart furniture mostly broken down from daily use, piles of magazines from Guns & Ammo to Pussy & Juggs. In other words, the debris and squalor of men living together. Coke cans, paper plates, candy bar wrappers, like any day room in any guard post anywhere in the world. The guys were upstairs, he guessed, having a feeling of dense sleep above him, hearing the wheeze of one, the fart of another, the dream-driven toss of a third.

  He slid along the wall, peeked into the kitchen and saw the cookie hadn’t arrived yet to throw the day shift breakfast on. Beyond it lay the security HQ office, he could tell, because although he did not see into that room directly, he saw the gray glow of security monitors on the wall through the doorway. A man or two would be in th
ere; so would the arms safe and, he’d bet, in that would be the package, the whatever. Wouldn’t that be the safest spot on the ranch: in a room guarded 24/7 by armed guys with orders to shoot to kill? It made sense, if anything made sense.

  He didn’t let rogue thoughts fly. He suppressed the notion that a) Tom Constable had simply destroyed the object (he wouldn’t; holding it would thrill him too much; he would think there’d always be time to destroy it; it had some kind of meaning to him), or that b) he’d lock it in a safe in his bedroom, where his various wives and now visitors stored their jewels, or c) he had it with him, wherever he was, just to keep it near and dear, or d) he put it in a safe deposit box in the biggest vault in the world. Nope, none of those: couldn’t be, wouldn’t be, no way.

  Bob stepped around the corner.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Huh?” said the security officer, rising from a soft chair where he’d been watching not the bank of monitors on the wall but a television showing some kind of spaceship thing.

  Bob hit him in the face and eyes with the Kimber pepper and down he went, coughing spastically, and before he could reorient, Bob had him trussed in plastic cuffs pulled tight.

  “You shut up, partner, or I’ll have to hurt you harder.”

  The man spluttered, groaned, bucked, and Bob put a knee against the back of his neck.

  “I can close you down the hard way if you don’t do what I say.”

  The man went limp. But then he said, “Mister, do you have any idea what you’re fucking with? You are going to be so messed up.”

  “Anyone else here? A partner, another patrolman? You alone, bub? Tell me or I’ll hit you with two or three more shots of pepper, and son, you won’t like that a bit.”

  “I’m alone,” the man said. “Down here. But there are six very tough guys upstairs, so my advice to you is to run like hell and hope you get off the property before you get them pissed.”