I, Sniper

by Stephen Hunter

  “There’s always choices, Grogan.”

  “Not for Anto there’s not. All right, I’ll give you a chance. You tell me honest, maybe we won’t go to the waterboard. It’ll just be a quick nine in the ear. That’s a fine bargain, isn’t it? Why should a man like you suffer? You’ve given so much. I know death don’t scare you a bit, you’ll take the bullet like a man eating a piece of toast. But the water in the lungs, the panic it looses in your head, the fear of drowning as deep as any ancient human thought, the joy when the air comes back, and the crushing tragedy when the water comes again. It takes your soul, it takes your dignity, it eats your courage, and it dissolves your nobility. You don’t want to be where it leaves you. Believe me, I’ve seen it. This is how we ran intel in Basra, until the Clara Bartons got on us and ruined our fine game. This is how we became Lord High Death with over a hundred kills in a week. This is how we broke the fucking back of their insurrection and put their leaders facedown in the sand with flies nibbling on the brains all over the wall. I know it, I’ve seen it. Nobody can work the board better than I, and I’ll kill you dead a hundred times and you’ll believe it each time. Ready for a hundred deaths, Bobby Lee Swagger?”

  “All right,” said Swagger. “You get an Oscar for the speech. What do you want to know?”

  “Who are you working for? What have you told them? What is the state of their intel? What are your callback protocols? How far have you gotten? How far into it are you, and do they believe you or are you here as some kind of prelim, as a way to snatch evidence to convince them? Do they expect a callback by a certain time? Do you have a control in a motel a few miles away? Or is there a team there, a big SWAT thing, ready to jump? What will their next move be?”

  “Jesus, you think I’m some kind of FBI undercover, don’t you? You poor fool, you better watch the paranoia. I’m pure freelance on this one. Like you, I’m mercenary. I want the money, the gals in Spain, and the patch, only mine’ll be full of peas, not potatoes.”

  Grogan looked at him.

  “Do you believe him, Ginger?”

  “Not a bit of it,” said Ginger. “Let’s wet him a bit and see how the tune changes.”

  “I was asked by the feds to look over their case, because I’m such a smart guy,” said Bob. “I realized whoever done the shooting couldn’t have done it with the scope on Carl’s rifle. I do know someone at the FBI, and I got a chance to look at the evidence. They got me in your school. But I told ’em the bad guys had to be one of your clients and when you gave me the client list—brilliant, someone smarter than you figured it out, right—”

  “That was me,” said Ginger.

  “Someone around here has to have some brains. Anyhow, they’ve been out wasting time on those names. I knew it was you on the trigger, Anto, when I saw you nail those beachballs. You know how? You hit ’em dead center. That was your mistake, you shot too well.”

  “I told you that,” said Ginger.

  “Go on,” said Anto. “I’m listening hard.”

  “So I realized all the sniper bullshit was camouflage to run a mission on the Strongs. I used a cop connection I had to get into their house and I found evidence that their mood had suddenly gotten real good. They were going to get big money just ahead. It tracked back to the death of a guy named Ozzie Harris. They got something from Ozzie Harris, and as I reasoned and later proved, it gave them leverage over Tom Constable. They thought he was going to move a chunk of dough into their Swiss account and they could live happily ever after in the land of chocolates and ski bunnies. Instead, they got 168ers through the central medulla, courtesy of one Anto Grogan, along with two other poor souls, including the babe Constable once was married to, and her presence emptied tons of irrelevant bullshit into the case so thick you need a pitchfork. I knew that underneath it, under all the crap about movie stars and stand-up comics, all that yellow smoke, there was something, I don’t know what it was, but some little object, maybe a photo or a letter, whatever, that was worth billions to Constable. I thought it had to be here at this ranch, in this house once I saw it. My deal was I’ll crack that place, I’ll recon, I’ll see what I need, for next time. Then I’ll blow and put a team of professionals together. When we come back, we’ll take whatever it was and we’ll leave a yardful of dead Irishmen, payback for Carl and Denny. Then I’ll run the deal with Constable, and because I’m a professional and have been around the block a bit, I won’t end up with my brains on the windshield. My guess was it’s here. So I’m here.”

  “Don’t believe him, Anto,” said Ginger. “I smell the constabulary all over him. Them FBI fellas would never have pulled no strings to get him into our tutorial if he weren’t working for them. He’s with them, they’re waiting for a callback, and if he don’t give it to ’em soon, they’ll hit this place and we’ll have a gunfight on our hands, twenty dead garda and the Americans after us till forever turns to cheese.”

  “I think Ginger sees through you, Bobby Lee, friend. I don’t for a second believe you’d go for money. Your kind doesn’t need money. Your type gives it all to king and country, no matter who’s king. You’re rotten with honor, that’s you, sniper. You stink of the shit. I always hated your type because the bloody smell of virtue just made you stronger, and the more pain you racked up, the more you loved it.”

  “I say, work him hard now,” said Ginger. “Get his callback and get him to use it, and make sure we don’t get the SWAT boys in their little Johnny Ninja outfits tossing them bangers in and trying to be all herolike.”

  “That’s good advice,” said feral Raymond. “Anto, Ginger’s got the point. He’ll be tough, but we have to snap him now.”

  “Wonder if he’ll go as long as the lieutenant colonel,” said Jimmy, contributing for the first time.

  “Good question, Jimbo. Bobby, the lieutenant colonel rode the board for close to three hours. He was a believer, head boy in al-Sadr’s militia. Strong and tough he was, hard inside as he was outside. Lord, the man fought us. Remember, fellas? But in the end, even Lieutenant Colonel Abu Sha-heed broke, and he gave us a coupla caches and we set up upside and dropped them sand niggers for a day and a half before we called in sappers to blow the joints. Got me nineteen in the first hour alone, great sniper shooting it was too.”

  Swagger said nothing while the Irishman recalled his day of killing, probably the episode that got him nicknamed Lord High Death.

  “All right, sniper,” Anto finally said. “I hate to do this, but I only half believe what you said. I have to know the other half. It’s time for the water.”

  38

  Constable was precise, organized, immaculate. He left little to chance. He knew what was important: that was his talent. He cut to the core, acted swiftly and decisively, and made endless preparations.

  Now the thing was coming to a climax. The forces he had set in motion were brewing and would explode. He had to be at his best, he had to be ready. Two days hence, the Cold Water Cowboy Action Shoot, at Cold Water, Colorado, would commence and he would—there was no doubt in his mind—win the Senior Black Powder Duelist Shooter championship.

  To that end, he sat at a table in the rear of his gigantic rec-V and tested cartridges. They were .44-40s, for his two Clell Rush–tuned six guns, painstakingly assembled by Custom Cartridges of Roswell, New Mexico, 14.5 grains of Goex FFFg over 250-grain semi-wads from Ten-X. CC was the best in the business, and they’d weighed each and every piece of brass (from Starline), reamed the primer holes, squared the primer pockets, measured the rim thickness, and segregated the two thousand rounds by that thickness into four lots, so that he’d always be shooting cartridges in the same lot together, for continuity of point of impact.

  But that wasn’t enough. Constable now sat with the two thousand cartridges and a Wilson .44-40 cartridge gauge—that is, a replica chamber precise to the nanomeasurement—and now he inserted each cartridge into that chamber, making sure that it fit, that it slid in easily, that no rogue burrs or lead smears in any way defiled the ci
rcumference of the shells. When he loaded, over the next few days, he’d load fast, and he didn’t want some unseen microscopic chip of metal screwing him up.

  He worked intently, some might say insanely. When he was done he would do the same with the .44-40s for his rifle and 12-gauges for his 1897 Winchester pump, just like the fellows in The Wild Bunch had carried. Everything would be tested; any shell that was in the slightest out of spec would be discarded. He would have the best and it would be up to him to be the best.

  He loved the way the cartridges slid neatly into the chamber; that was one of the joys of guns, the way parts fit, meshed, clicked, moved in syncopation, smoothly and efficiently. He had a gift for the mechanics of it and saw the big picture, the way the rods and pins all worked together, powered by the mechanical energy of the springs. It was such genius old Sam Colt had rendered onto earth all those decades ago when he ushered the modern revolver into existence in 1836, and in that way, Tom Constable felt a part of a great American tradition, totally and completely.

  Totally and completely could have been his creed. Tom never did things halfway. He was a creature of obsessions, and when he discovered a new one, whether it was sailing, radical politics, billions making, movie star courting, book writing, network starting, old movie colorizing, whatever, he hammered it with the full force of will and intelligence until it became his, he beat it into the shape he desired. This cowboy gunfighter business: stupid, sure, with the aliases—“Texas Red”—the costumes, his being jeans, leather vest, red placket shirt, and ten-gallon Stetson, as he was of the realistic school, whereas some were of the fanciful school and still others of the character school (Hoppy was big, and so were Marshal Dillon and Paladin) and some of the Wild Bunch school. Yet the culture, the challenges, the guns—all of it was incredibly

  satisfying.

  He loved being Texas Red. Wild as a pony, fast, loose, beautiful, proud, dangerous, all the things that Tom himself had once aspired to be and that, even though he was a buccaneer of business, he felt he’d never really let out. He’d always played by their rules, and somehow Texas Red, the twenty-four-year-old gunman with twenty notches, was his way of imagining a life, of touching a life, lived by his own rules.

  Where did Tom end and Red begin? He got into character and he got out of character by simple act of will. It wasn’t some horror-movie freak show of him turning into Texas Red, and there being no Tom Constable to turn back into. Maybe he’d caught an acting bug—he’d caught several others!—from Joan, maybe the TV images had poured into his unresisting head in a torrent of unfiltered power when he was a defenseless seven, maybe it was his quest for the outlaw ideal that had moved millions of men, only he, in his T. T. Constable way, had let it go too far, as was his tendency. Whatever, like no one else in his life, from a father dead early to business associates to women to smooth operators to whomever, Texas Red made him happy. He would not let Texas Red down.

  If he could just hold together on the multiple target scenarios, especially the last one Sunday night, just before he flew to Seattle for a speech as Tom “T. T.” Constable. But he worried about his hands.

  He’d worked for a year to strengthen them, developing forearm muscles, relentlessly squeezing rubber balls, finger-cruncher gizmos, rolling up weights at the end of ropes, anything. The problem was he was cursed with fast-twitch muscles, and the strength simply would not adhere. Someone like Clell had large, strong fingers and abnormally shaped and defined forearm muscles and off-the-charts natural dexterity that would have made him a superb pianist, watchmaker, blackjack dealer, or surgeon; his fingers were living organisms, each with a seeming brain to keep it on mission. Goddamn it, Tom’s were not so gifted; his strength stayed level, his grip stayed at the same measure, and he simply was not dextrous enough to manipulate the gun, even with Colonel Colt’s great imagination for ergonomics, with efficiency. So Tom had substituted labor and repetitions for genius and had been practicing six hours a day for the last few weeks.

  He could shoot fast. He could shoot accurately through three targets. And then that goddamned fourth target came up and he missed. Or he stopped, readjusted his grip, and fired again, this time hitting but hopelessly blowing his time. He’d even hired a numbers cruncher to examine the course from an arithmetical point of view and answer definitively the question of priority: speed or accuracy. Which was more important? After hours on a mainframe computer, the fellow came up with an answer: both.

  Agggh. The problem was that the gun shifted with each report, as it took a long stretch of his short, weak thumb to reach the hammer spur, ratchet it back, then resettle thumb on frame, then fire again. Each time, the gun shifted incrementally, and by the time it had been fired three times, it had cranked around to such a degree that it no longer aligned with his wrist and held true; thus, misses.

  What on earth can I do? He’d tried an orthotic brace, adjustments to the gun (such as lowering the hammer spur, which was technically illegal, but even a few unspottable hundredths of an inch might help), and ammunition selection (the last three rounds being a load that tended to shoot, compensatingly, to the right), and nothing worked consistently.

  I am so afraid of that goddamned Mendoza, where I go against the five Mexican brothers I—

  His cell rang, his very private cell. Only one person had the number.

  “Yes, Bill.”

  “Well, Tom, tomorrow’s the day. The Times has verified that photo. It runs, page one, with a dynamite piece by our friend Banjax, and I don’t see how the Bureau can do anything but make Memphis’s suspension official, make the Robot the new head of Task Force Sniper, and get the report out by the end of next week. Then it’ll go to the judge and everything’s sealed up forever. No ‘Did Tom kill Joan’ books or articles, not without any access to evidence.”

  “Good, Bill. Boy, that’s good news. Bill Fedders comes through again. You know that town, I give it to you, pal.”

  “Tom, for what you’re paying me, I’d better.”

  “I think you’ll be pleased with a little bonus that comes your way when all this settles down.”

  “Why, thank you, Tom.”

  “The pleasure is mine, Bill.”

  Yet the victory over the FBI didn’t delight Tom as much as it ought to. Such manipulations were a part of his way of doing business, and he hired expensive experts, such as Bill Fedders, to get them done—fixers, nudgers, influence peddlers. He never expected a different outcome. This one just took a little longer than—

  The phone again. No, the other phone, the encrypted satellite phone, entrusted only to those who handled Tom’s special business. He checked the number, knew in a flash what it was, felt a spasm attack his heart.

  “Yes.” He was breathing heavily.

  “Mr. Constable, his self-same?”

  “Of course. I hope this isn’t an emergency. I told you, only in cases of dire emergency.”

  “I have that instruction learned, sir, that I do, and no, this ain’t no emergency. Still, I do believe you’d care to hear what’s been happening, if only to set your mind at ease.”

  “Go on.”

  “’Tis himself that came, that annoying fellow I’ve been telling you about. He presented himself to us as predicted. No miscues as in the unfortunate business in Chicago. The fellow all but surrendered himself.”

  “No problems?”

  “It’s him I’ve got for certain, sir. Presently we’ll learn what secrets he’s carrying and what’s he’s after and what his knowledge would be. We’ll know what authorities he’s told and how much. He won’t wish to tell us, but then that’s the nature of the game he and I chose to play many years ago. We’ll know all his secrets and see then where we stand. As for him, he’ll be gone forever and a long day, sir, if that’s still what it is you desire. I’m only checking so there’s no misunderstanding, this being strong stuff.”

  “It is, Grogan. That’s why I chose strong men. You do this thing as you said you would, and it’s over and gone, and t
he little taste you’ve had of life at the topmost level is only a start. I’ll settle on each of you enough for an estate in the aulde sod.”

  “That’s a right fair thing, sir, and me and all the boys be thanking you, though if you don’t mind, I think we’ll choose Spain instead. It don’t rain there so much and the taxes are lower.”

  39

  Anto had many interesting observations and thoughts to share. He commented on the events transpiring before him as if the man were a learned don at Trinity College, Dublin, a barroom poet known for his loquaciousness, an epiphany-rich critic of the art in the great days of the Irish belles lettres tradition, say around the 1920s, when revolution made for murder and brilliant prose.

  “Now,” he explained to Bob, “there are to be found several kinds of torturers. First there’s the sex torturer. He is deeply miswired. In his fetid little atmosphere, he’s got pain and pleasure not only entwined but hopelessly confused. He’s not the one to take pleasure in the suck of nipple, the lap of cunt, the piquancy of the anus, the zoom of the first wet plunge; no, no, more likely he gets his member heavy with blood at the sight of the welt, at the tightness of the buckle, the way it imprints so deep, down to bone itself, in the flesh. He is all monster, and any sane society would cull him early, put the nine just behind the ear, and throw him by the pathway for the trashman. But no, that rigor has left the formerly Christian nations of the West; only the barbarians have the strength of will and the confidence to execute the perverse on sight, though it is said that they themselves lean toward perversity behind the casbah’s closed byways.”

  Raymond and Jimmy wrapped heavy rope around Bob, binding him tightly from shoulder to wrist to the chair. Then, each taking a side, they carefully tilted the bound man backwards, not fully to the floor but to a crate nested where it was to give the chair support while putting Bob’s head at precisely the right downward angle, which all the boys knew from long experience.