“Thus, this operation against the United States, extravagantly budgeted, extravagantly planned, extravagantly slow in gestation, is not merely about killing a certain high-value target. It is about subverting via its brutal didacticism. It means to be ‘a Big Event,’ in the way the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a Big Event. It means to resonate for decades, to haunt and cripple and dispirit. In order to do that, its execution is not enough. It must have arrived caparisoned in legend, and it must reveal a perpetrator of legendary proportions.”
“A patsy, is that what you mean?” asked zombie 4.
“Exactly,” said Gold.
“How does Mossad see it accomplishing this goal?”
“It’s not merely that the sniper kills. It’s that the blame is put upon a certain figure, and that figure must have status and meaning of disturbing weight.”
“And that would be Brian A. Waters.”
“Exactly. He cannot be a piece of unimpressive trash like Lee Harvey Oswald or James Earl Ray. His meaning must be immediately accessible. The press must uncover—or think that it is uncovering—a paper trail of meaning. What that meaning will be, we don’t know yet.”
“Sounds like they want to do Dallas again.”
“But better. This time, controlled, managed, brilliantly syncopated. These people are very clever, and in Juba the Sniper they have found the ideal instrument of their will. And in the unfortunate Mr. Waters, they have found the ideal vessel.”
“Agent Chandler?” said Nick.
“He is, or was, forty-two years old,” said the perfect one, “born in Corpus Christi, Texas, with a superior technical education at Texas Western University and a master’s in petroleum geology from Rice University. Four years working for Phillips in the Geology Department, fast promotion, excellent reputation. In 2004, he resigned, though he was next in line to take over the division, and opened his own survey-and-development company. Fabulously successful, and in six years he sold it for seventeen million dollars. Never married, no kids obviously, a man of extreme intelligence, self-discipline, and drive. Well, I should say, he did marry. He married a rifle.
“His obsession is long-range precision shooting, and he bought land enough in New Mexico for a mile-long range, as well as a collection of rifles capable of accuracy at that distance. He’s spent the last eight years on an odyssey to put five holes in a bull’s-eye a mile away. It’s been done by about fifty men, Mr. Waters hopes to be the fifty-first.
“He has no vices, no politics, no angers, no hatreds, has never said a bad thing about anybody on earth that we can find. But he is an isolate. Being entirely alone with his obsession, he is perfect prey for men who would use him. And we feel he has been used.”
“Do you believe he is dead?”
“Yes, sir. Well, dead in reality. That death is not known. To his few friends and neighbors, he’s simply disappeared, but he disappears a lot. He travels all over the world to shooting matches, he hunts in Africa and Asia and New Zealand, he goes to conferences. His friends are elite shooters, the world over, who share his obsession and speak his language.”
“What is his current official status?”
“He—or somebody with access to his email—has announced to his friends that he’s going on a hunting trip in Southeast Asia and will be incommunicado for several months. We have checked with every known outfitter, and he is not on any trip docket. He has applied for no visas or hunting permits in any Southeast Asian country. His house is closed and locked, a lawn service attends to the yard once a week, prepaid via the Internet. He has vanished, but without any alarm being raised. That is why our hope for his survival is so low. It would be so much easier for them to kill him, help themselves to his life, and use him as an avatar to their purpose under a false flag. So he is being kept alive—well, not physically, but by reputation and counterfeit footprint.”
“Is there any evidence or is this just a working assumption?”
“Well, sir, no physical trace—that is, face-to-face, eyewitness accounts—have been documented with him in several months. Physically, he seems to have vanished from the earth.”
Nick continued, “We believe that a part of this operation is to implicate him as the perpetrator of whatever crime it is that Juba the Sniper means to accomplish. A ‘legend,’ as those of you with intelligence experience will recognize, will be or is being created, and a paper trail will be uncovered, skillfully counterfeited by the best covert people in the world, to suggest that he did this, he did that, he believed this, he believed that. All of that information will play in a certain way to create a certain meaning—certain ramifications. That is why we must stop this thing.”
“Since we seem to know he’s being used, it seems like we can quickly counter any—”
“May I?” said Gold. “Nothing is known these days. All fact is conditional. Modern media allows any interested party to influence millions of people. Who brays the loudest or frames the most skillfully or feeds prejudices the most earnestly is the most believed. False news—particularly if it is backed with credible journalistic sources, as uncovered by reporters who believe they’re doing God’s work. We will be telling another version of a story, and who’s to say ours is better than theirs?”
“Where are you now?”
Nick ran through it: the guise of looking for Juba as a triple murderer and the boy as a felony assault perp in Detroit, which enabled circulation to all law enforcement agencies, as well as maximum social network and media exposure. The penetration of long-range shooting culture to obtain any hints of unusual activity that might have indicated preparation for the shot Juba was to take. The monitoring of criminal enterprises—cartels, more traditional mobs, gangs, crews, paramilitary organizations—for indicators of unusual activity in support of such an operation. The use of satellite technology to discover shooting-range layouts on private property that might also support Juba’s enterprise. The hunt for traces of “Brian Waters,” for provocative statements and clues meant to establish his legend but which might lead to their creators. Finally, the alerting of all field office SWAT teams for high readiness so that apprehension or interdiction could commence immediately upon acquisition of a breakthrough in the hunt.
“Counterterrorism is in on this?”
“Yes,” said zombie number 9, who happened to be Ward Taylor, division chief and Nick’s pal and ally. “Assistant Director Memphis has been extremely solicitous of our participation. No turf wars from Nick, I’m happy to report.”
“Good, I like that,” said zombie number 1. “Now, Memphis, CIA liaison?”
“No, sir.”
“They won’t be happy.”
“I suppose you could say, ‘Too many crooks spoil the broth’”—a little laughter at Nick’s pun—“but there’s more: CIA involvement doesn’t complicate matters by two but rather to an exponential degree. Their agenda can be so murky that even they don’t know what it is, and it can vary, week by week, or even office by office or cubicle by cubicle. It’s not that I don’t trust them—it’s that I don’t trust them. When the time comes, we’ll be happy to go to them.”
“What about Secret Service? If the target should turn out to be Executive Branch—”
“That’s when we’d come to them. At this point, to alert them to the possibility is simply to set up leaks.”
Zombie number 1 nodded. “Your next move?”
“I want to put a clandestine forensics team on the ground in Albuquerque. I don’t want our mobile lab units and three hundred technicians showing up at the closed-down Waters house. I need to get a good workup on what is missing from his house, I want to know if there are any forensic discoveries that could lead us another step—prints of any sort, DNA, who knows whatever clues. But I don’t want them to know we’ve picked up on this. If they do, they’ll take steps to cover further footprints, they’ll enter a higher state of vigilance, and th
ey may alter their plans. We want them confident that they’ve evaded for now, which will give us time to track them down, then we’ll jump.”
“Mr. Swagger, you’ve been hunted. You’re also a rifleman of great skill and experience. Where is Juba now? Mentally, psychologically?”
“He’s happy as he’s ever been. He’s made his getaway, he’s got his rifle, he’s working with it, which for a man like Juba is not a duty but an obsession. A pleasure. He’s a sniper with a target, and a sense of importance and contribution, according to the tenets of his faith. He’s one happy boy.”
“Your job is to make him unhappy,” said a zombie.
“Swagger’s a sniper,” said Nick. “Unhappiness is his business.”
32
The shop, the ranch
The rifle is not beautiful. Its designers yielded on aesthetics from the very start. They knew and loved the look of rifles—the sweep of dark wood, the glow of deeply blued metal, the grace, the symmetry. It was in their blood, but they knew, as well, that they had to ignore that siren call. Theirs was a single-minded objective, not dedicated to the kill so much as to the shot. There was no kill without the shot and thus the shot was everything.
The rifle acquired the configuration of a prosthetic limb with a hole in it, and two giant tubes organically absorbed into it. The hole afforded the shooter’s trigger hand purchase on the grip, just under the bolt. Its placement was not arbitrary, its angle was not arbitrary, its size was not arbitrary, nothing was arbitrary. Everything was designed, tested, adjusted, and retested, before it became part of the specifications. The stock behind the thumbhole was itself a spectacular construct: it was a monstrosity of bulbous swellings and pads, all in play at the convenience of screws. They could be adjusted almost infinitely, so as to fit length of neck, arm, and hand, the thickness of shoulder, breadth of chest, strength of muscle, firmness of grip. All human variables were accounted for, and the shooter before he took his first shot needed to find the ideal harmony of parts, so that the whole fit to and against his body and took advantage of his unique skeletal alignment and musculature. All these adjustable parts were issued in high-strength plastic, giving the thing in question the dull gleam of, perhaps, reptile skin, something without warmth or life. It was not meant to be loved, but respected. It was not meant to please the shooter’s heart, but the intelligence officer’s, the general’s, the president’s, the mullah’s. It was policy as firearm.
All angles machined into it were true. All springs of the finest metals. All steel of that superb blend of strength and flexibility. The trigger was almost as soft as a woman’s most private part, and it took a refined finger that had already pulled a trigger a hundred thousand times to nurse the finest action from it. People don’t realize how much of the gun is about the machinework and what miracles a man who has spent his life shaving pieces of metal to an exact measurement can do. The receiver is epoxied and bolted into the stock, so that the hold is again true, so that no oddities of alignment will haunt a shooter years on down the line. You could use it as a hammer and build a house with it, though to its owners such a thing would seem a desecration. The barrel—barrel making is an art in and of itself—drew even more attention than the other parts, because the barrel, that long steel tube embracing the supersonic missile driven down its bore toward the target, couldn’t be merely excellent, it had to be perfect. Perfect is never cheap, neither in effort nor cost. The men who made the barrels had practiced their crafts for years in such British houses as Purdey or Holland & Holland or Westley Richards. They knew the interior dynamics of steel and how it responds when grooves are engraved along the tube’s polished interior. They hunted with spectroscopes for inner flaws that might play hob with vibrational patterns, because they knew the vibrations must be true as a violin’s strings to deliver the kind of accuracy that they demanded. None of this happened easily, but only after so much experimentation, so much trial and error, all of it piled atop the years of experience.
Then came the scope. It was German, as are all the best optics, a thirty-four-millimeter tube of aluminum, steel, plastic, and polished glass, studded with dials that control adjustments for magnification, focus, windage, elevation, even a laser whose pinprick of red light focused on the target’s center, making it stand out to the shooter’s eye in the dark world of the lens. Its magnification runs from a power of 5 to 25. And the internals on such an instrument are dazzling, as is the machinework that makes everything not merely function but function smoothly as if sheathed in petroleum lubricant so that the sliding between focal distances or in and out of magnification is accomplished without notice by the adjuster. All scopes do this reasonably well, but the S & Bs do it better.
But, of course, the scope does not make all things copasetic. For if the scope magnifies the target, it also magnifies you. That means every tremor, tremble, or twitch, every breath, sniffle, gulp, burp, or fart, is instantly transmuted into action. Accuracy demands mastery of these animal impulses, which a few can achieve but most cannot. And the farther the range, the stiller the body attempting to engineer the connection must be. It is no small thing, and a Juba or a Bob Lee Swagger or any of the great rifle killers have subsumed stillness to a transcendental level. It is a skill that even with talent takes years to master, a discipline that clamps steel expectations on something so prehensile and spontaneous as a human body. Take the trigger finger and the little twitch that fires the weapon: so easy, yet so hard. You can do it a million times and fuck it up on one million and one. Why? Because for the greats, it is a part of their identity, yet beyond knowing, becoming that way only by those endless repetitions, in concert with breath, muscle, and sheer willpower.
He now opened a package and removed a cartridge. Remington—green-and-gold box—.338 Lapua Magnum. He would of course not use factory ammunition in his shot, for so much more could be gotten out of a hand-loading program, half of which he was already through. Still, the round itself was instructive, even inspirational. It seemed like a small missile, heavier by far than one expected, more than three inches long and almost half an inch wide. It was dense, far heavier than it looked, and indeed it looked heavy. It also looked absolute, without any softness about it. It was a serious thing—in its way, more serious than anything.
He held it in his hand, feeling its cool weight against the palm. He turned it to look at the perfect concentricity of the rim, the primer in the perfect center of the head, which was a perfect center again. He traced the smoothness of the brass, with its slight taper, as it rose to the shoulder, where the cartridge reduced itself and formed a neck to sustain a bullet. The bullet itself was all seriousness—copper sheathing over some kind of lead alloy, again concentric to an extreme degree. These bullets were from Sierra, a world-class expert, and since the ammunition was premium, no expense had been spared in achieving their perfection. He looked at the shanks of the thing, admiring the perfect grace of its curve in accordance with the laws of streamlining, the smoothness of the skin, for a nick or a gouge might throw it from true to meplat, as the technical call the tip, and saw again concentricity as a small hole that precludes the tip from becoming a point, absorbing the rushing atmosphere as it flies, and work, with the spin facilitated by the grooves in the rifle’s barrel, stabilizing it during its time in flight before it arrives exactly at its destination, for better, for worse, for whatever purpose filled the head of the shooter.
The statistics of the event are impressive. Muzzle velocity is near twenty-five hundred feet per second for a 250-grain bullet, the kind Juba would shoot, and at the muzzle it delivers 4,813 pounds of energy. It was with such an instrument that the British infidel Craig Harrison had killed in Afghanistan at a distance of 1.54 measured miles.
Now what remained? He’d continue his development, having found three loads of three different powders, three different seating depths, and two different primers that were superior to all the others. Now he could shoot at eleven hundred y
ards, twelve hundred, thirteen hundred, moving a hundred at a time, easing his way so that what seemed gigantic at the start seemed tiny by the end. He knew how far he had to shoot. He knew where the sun would be, what the temperature should be, what the humidity should be, what the velocity of the breeze should be. All these facts had to be factored in until he could do it on the first shot, cold bore, over and over again. Because on the day when the time finally came, after all the months of preparation, he would have only one chance to speak for God.
33
Zombieland
Swagger went on the raid, just as he had gone on the raid in southern Syria with the Israeli commandos. But unlike that episode, this one was strictly routine.
The house and property of Brian A. Waters were deserted. The Bureau team entered from overland, a mile away, after midnight, using night vision. No problems. A law enforcement–affiliated locksmith cracked the door easily, pointing out to Swagger that it had been cracked before, as evidenced by the toolmarks on the lock. That meshed perfectly with the assumed scenario.
Two gifted dogs quickly searched for explosives and drugs and found none. Once inside, the investigators used their infrared to discover that Brian Waters was systematic, neat, organized, thorough. His books, CDs, and DVDs, for example, lay on shelves in perfect, parade-like dress, alphabetized. There were books on American history, books on marksmanship, riflery, the history of the rifle, company histories, anything about the gun. There was no porn, nothing at all of a salubrious nature. This was a man dedicated to and caring for one thing: rifle accuracy. To that end, he had no family, though pictures of his nephews—towheaded boys frolicking in a backyard—were arranged perfectly on a shelf in the living room. They lent a certain human dimension—a little anyway—to a room otherwise without character and style. He seemed to have no tastes or eccentricities. It could have been a rental, for all the home furnishings revealed. Only his framed NRA Life Membership and certificate proving he’d gone Distingushed Expert–Rifle suggested an ego. These hung in perfect symmetry over his bed.
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