Game of Snipers

by Stephen Hunter

  The killers—ISIS, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, ex–CIA contractors gone rogue, cartelistas?—had probably put a .22 bullet, suppressed, into his brain as he slept. No signs of a struggle, no signs of anything being neatened up after a struggle. The agents took his pillowcases for analysis, hoping to uncover microscopic traces of blood from the shot.

  The shop could have been a museum. Again, the neatness was spooky, and it indicated why Brian Waters had never brought a woman into his life: no human being could live up to his standards of precision. Swagger noted that his many yellow boxes containing L.E. Wilson neck sizers and bullet seaters were arranged in ascending order by calibration, beginning with the humble .222 Remington, America’s first dedicated varmint cartridge, and working up to the gigantic .458 Lott elephant bouncer. But again, his neatness had tripped up his murderers and fooled them into leaving behind traces of their presence; when they’d plucked out the .338 Lapua Magnum boxes, they’d been smart enough not to leave a gap by pushing the remaining boxes together to hide the missing ones. However, they’d done so sloppily, so that the row was slightly out of whack, the boxes not perfectly dressed on one another. Waters, Swagger already knew, would never have done such a thing.

  The locksmith cracked the gun safe without much trouble, and Swagger examined the firearms that had captured Waters’s imagination. He seemed to have a nice collection of vintage 1911 target pistols, as upgraded by the armorers attached to each service’s marksmanship units: from army, marines, navy, and coast guard. He had other .45s from masters of the bull’s-eye craft like Jim Stroh, Armand Swenson, Bob Pachmayr, and Jim Clark, on up to modern masters of the craft of building a handgun that could put five into an inch at fifty yards, offhand.

  The long guns were equally to the point. He liked sniper rifles, and had one each of the chosen weapons of Our Boys since War 1: a Springfield, a Winchester Model 70 with Unertl, an M1D, a Remington M40 from ’Nam that Swagger knew well, and an M14 with Leupold 10× scope, which the army folks had chosen. Not quite so comprehensively, he had variations of other countries’ War 2 choices: an Enfield .303 No. 4(T), as sniperfied by the geniuses at Holland & Holland for the Brits; a Mauser 98 with a Hensoldt scope on a claw mount and with SS runes on its receiver, making it not Wehrmacht but genuinely Nazi. He even had a Barrett .50, looking like an M16 after years of pumping iron, which had proved so useful in Afghanistan, and when it delivered, it landed with such force that the guy on the other end usually pinwheeled through the air, he had so much energy loosed against his poor bones. But, of course, no Accuracy International, in .338 Lapua Magnum. And, of course, there was a slot empty near the front of the gun safe’s rack, where presumably that rifle, his current number one and his match gun and the font of his recent dedication, his intensity, his high-IQ brain, and his quiet passion, had lain.

  But all in all, the event had to be categorized as confirmation, not progress. It strongly suggested incursion, murder, careful looting, without leaving a trace. It was a quality intelligence operation. Whoever had done it this time had done it before, or something similar, and they’d left little to track, nothing to go on, no next step.

  Annoying?

  Yes, because he’d thought it would take them somewhere instead of nowhere, and it left them with nothing new to do except to monitor reports on the whereabouts of the missing criminal and his little buddy Jared Akim, presumably under the aegis of some masterful criminal organization. But nothing specific emerged, and none of the divisions responsible for monitoring such organizations reported anything untoward, any hints of maximum preparation—vibrations of extra effort or deep planning—occurring within their precincts. It was very frustrating, until it wasn’t.

  Jeff Neill, the Cyber Division guru, came to call. He was in the paper-distribution network and saw everything Swagger, Memphis, and the others did, only a bit later.

  “Okay,” he said, “I want to run something by you.”

  “Let’s hear it,” said Swagger.

  The younger man laid two photos on the desk. They were taken using infrared illumination at the Waters house the night of the search. Bob looked and saw only what should have been there, which was the interior of a closet stacked neatly with packaging.

  “This guy was ultra-organized,” said Neill. “He didn’t just save stuff, he catalogued it and stored it alphabetically so that he could access it in seconds. He’d be the rare individual who always sends in the warranty card on the first day.”

  “That’s him.”

  “So this is stuff he bought this year—he’s probably got the other years saved in a storage unit somewhere. Or, rather, the packaging from it.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Look closely.”

  Bob looked. He saw a few gun shipment boxes; as for convenience, Waters had a Federal Firearms License, an FFL, and a license for Curios & Relics, both of which enabled him to receive firearms at home by common carrier. There was no evidence he operated at the retail level with his purchases, as he was strictly a shooter and a collector. He just had to enter them in a book for the occasional ATF examiners, who must have treated him like a pal, as he offered no threat and kept transparent, perfect records. Bob saw packaging that was probably left over from his last big-ticket get, the Accuracy International. He saw supporting implements, plus other mundane things, such as a box for a new Cuisinart, a new speaker for his nifty hi-fi system, book packages from Amazon—quite a bit of stuff from Amazon, in fact, as Amazon was the perfect abettor for such a lifestyle.

  “Am I supposed to notice something?” Bob said.

  Neill put his finger on a slim piece of packaging lodged neatly between two larger pieces, almost indistinguishable. But part of the overlapping cover art was visible on the edge, and Neill had identified it.

  “If I’m not mistaken, that’s the world-famous apple with a bite taken out of it. The corporate pictogram for the world’s largest computer outfit.”

  Bob squinted. Yep, there it was: a bitten apple, a little leaf up top.

  “That’s the package the iPhone comes in. I would know because I’ve just picked up my X and spent an hour or so programming it.”

  Swagger carried an iPhone 3, or something Cro-Magnon like that, and wouldn’t have noted such a thing in a million years.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’m with you. But where is this going?”

  “Well, it fits, doesn’t it? A tech and engineering guy like this, he’d have the latest variation of iPhone, just as, upstairs, he’s got the latest variation of desktop system—he’s always upgrading everything. He’s probably got an X on order, it just hasn’t come in yet.”

  “So?”

  “We got into his desktop system and found nothing much of interest, other than that after a certain date, when he told his few friends he was going hunting, it hadn’t been accessed.”

  “Okay.”

  “So he’s got the 8. Now they’ve got the 8. They’d have to take it, because he’d no doubt downloaded his ballistic app into it, I’m guessing FirstShot. Anyone smart enough to use the rifle at highest capacity would know that that’s the best. Anyone taking the rifle would take the iPhone and use it to set up his really long shots. Juba would have to have it.”

  Bob nodded. Seemed right so far.

  “Here’s the issue. The later iPhones—the 8 and the X—are really a bitch to crack if you don’t have the code. Those fuckers at Apple are smart, you can bet on it. One of the things they’re selling is security. When one comes up in a case—say, recovered in a drug raid—we can’t even crack it. It has to go off to one of three or four high-tech computer labs, where the engineers can diddle with it for weeks before they can finally get in. And I’m guessing next that Waters was the kind of guy who shut down every night before he went to bed. So if they plugged him and they need to get in, how do they do it?”

  “You don’t think they’d take him?”
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  “No, because if he’s alive, all sorts of complexities are added to what is already too complex. Security, support, interrogation, the fact that they would assume someone like this tough-ass, high-IQ Texas oil engineer wasn’t going to give up his secrets easily, which generates another major headache and more drama for them. No, they’d probably cap him and trust they could crack it by their own devices.”

  “Could they?”

  “As I said, there’s a handful of labs that could do the work. But they’re not going to a lab.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So they’d go into crime world. And, as it turns out, there are about three guys in that world capable of cracking a late-gen iPhone. They don’t hang out in small towns like Toad Lick, Mississippi. One’s in Boston; one’s in Seattle, obviously; and one’s in Dallas. We know all of ’em, have for years. Sometimes they help us so that we will leave them alone. Putting them in the slammer is of no use at all. Plus, we get tips from them on stuff they hear.”

  “You’re guessing it was the Dallas guy.”

  “I’m guessing he was paid a pretty penny for his work. So we bust him, work him over hard. We leverage him. He can tell us who paid him, what he did, what was on there, whatever. Again, I’d do it real low-profile, bust him on another charge, never move him out of Dallas, maybe just pick him up privately and take him to a parking garage, someplace anonymous, no drama, nothing to cause any ripples in the water. Maybe he leads us to whoever’s funding this thing, and we can track them to the source.”

  “It’s two things,” said Bob. “It’s our best lead and it’s our only lead. Let’s go to Nick.”

  34

  The range

  Much was known now. He’d finally settled on 91.5 grains of Hodgdon H1000, once-fired Hornady brass, Federal 215M big-rifle Magnum primers, overall length 3.73 inches, a Wheddle bullet die-sharpened Sierra 250-grain MatchKing hollow-point boattail bullet, as loaded by an L.E. Wilson bullet seater, with a .367 neck bushing. Fired, it delivered a muzzle velocity 2,755, plus or minus, and of course each individual round he made was tested in a Hornady concentricity gauge for circular perfection. The result was a brilliant chord of power and accuracy, the MatchKing bullets being the most accurate in his ambitious testing program. He also rolled them—the bullets themselves—before seating them, for consistency, on the Hornady gauge, making certain that they were perfect.

  They produced a thousand pounds of energy at twenty-one hundred yards, enough to splatter any living target, human or animal, save perhaps the great thick-skinned and heavy-boned beasts of Africa. They could pulverize the thoracic cavity of a man at that range. It would be a wound there’d be no walking away from.

  Now he sat at the bench, constructed by Menendez’s clever carpenters seven feet off the ground in a solid beech tree. Before him, though edged by pines that led to mountains—lofty, green, snow-covered or not—was more than a mile of heavy grass. It was yellowish, full enough to wave in the breeze. Three hundred yards out, water—too big to be a pond, too small to be a lake—gleamed in the sun. It spread for a couple of hundred yards, a kind of swampy stew under the tufts of grass, before yielding to more solid land. Finally, 1,847 yards away and sixty-seven feet lower, at the edge of the meadow, was his target. The range was perfect, the height difference too, exactly to his specifications and verified many times over by range finder.

  He peeked through his spotting scope, a Swarovski 60×. In the circle of that magnification, he saw what he had to see. The image at 60× was one hundred and thirty feet wide, more than enough to make out the scene. A post had been driven deep into the earth. It had a medieval look to it, something the great Saladin would have erected as a site for execution by fire of cowards and traitors. Moored to the post, though hanging limply unconscious from it, was a man.

  He stirred, shook, then twitched hard, as if gripped in the talons of a nightmare. Juba had no interest in what those nightmares might be. What he saw was only a target, something to be hit solidly with one 1,847-yard shot. He knew that the Mexicans sat a few feet to the left, their Land Rover not far from the scene of the action, which promised to amuse them greatly. They had brought a cooler of Diet Cokes and Tecates, and some lawn furniture.

  The phone on the bench buzzed. Juba picked it up.

  “My friend,” said Jorge, in Arabic, “we think he will awaken soon. You won’t have to wait long, although these drugs are tricky.”

  “It’s fine,” said Juba. “I have no rush. Besides, I have some calculations yet to make.”

  “Excellent. We have bets going on how many shots it will take you to hit him. I bet two.”

  “Probably too few,” said Juba. “The program never works perfectly the first time. We must learn its refinements.”

  “Ah, well, it’s only for a bottle of tequila.”

  Juba put the phone down, pulled on surgical rubber gloves, and picked up the iPhone 8. Always with the gloves so that not only would his fingerprints be protected, so would any oily excretions, any flakes of dead skin, any strands of hair that might adhere, all of which would reveal that the DNA was not that of Brian Waters. Of course, on the great day itself, the thing would be carefully scrubbed with acetone and seeded with some souvenirs of the late Mr. Waters—saliva, mucus, oil from his fingers, hair—which were the key part of the deception.

  He held it, pressed the HOME button. It blinked awake and asked him for the code behind which lay all its treasures. Expensively, this had been found. He keyed it in and immediately emails came up, not many of late, but a few, saying such things as “Can’t wait to hear your stories, buddy” and “SE Asia! Now, that’s for the man who’s done everything!” and “Have fun, pal, but I wouldn’t go anywhere that didn’t have Magic Fingers in the motel rooms.”

  Juba only went to the icon page and knew exactly where to look. His finger hit the one that said FirstShot, the icon a tiny bull’s-eye.

  FirstShot came up, the menu offering him a selection of previously installed load choices, each one of which Waters had run through the program in his search for a winning handload for the matches. The newer were Juba’s experimental loads, the last the load he had selected, simply marked as #12. He clicked on it.

  The number 12 load page came up, everything entered. It displayed his previous selections: bullet brand, bullet weight, bullet length, velocity, twist rate of barrel, height of scope above barrel, all the aspects of the bullet that could determine, support, or reduce its accuracy. Additionally, the point of zero was registered, for it would be the baseline off of which all further computations would be calculated. He had selected fifteen hundred yards for zero, verified that synchronization among rifle, scope, and load at that range in his last session.

  He poked it again, and a blank menu called CONDITIONS arrived, and this is where the weather aspects under which the shot would be taken were factored in. But it wasn’t necessary to laboriously measure by Kestrel Pocket Weather Meter and enter them, one at a time. The genius of the FirstShot program is that pressing the GET CONDITIONS button at the bottom of the screen, the machine downloaded them from the U.S. Weather Service. Thus, in a second he learned, watching these numbers deploy in their slots, that it was 74 degrees Fahrenheit, with a southwest wind of 4 to 8 miles per hour, the humidity was 51 percent, the sky was generally sunny (18 percent, or intermittent, cloud cover), the altitude 1,457 feet above sea level. All these figures would be factored into the algorithm the little genius inside the box was about to solve in nanotime.

  He pressed CALCULATE. Magically, a table rose before him on the screen. The machine decreed the amount in minutes of angle by which the scope had to be moved off its fifteen-hundred-yard zero to put the crosshairs on the target in these conditions. It was indexed by distance. He surfed the lengthy listing via the left-hand distance column until he got to the nearly exact value. It was 1,845 yards. Moving his eye right to left, he came to the elevation
column. It read 13 MOA. Since each of his clicks was worth a half of an arcminute, he multiplied by two to come up with the number 26. He carefully turned the elevation knob atop the scope up 26 clicks. In the next column, the windage was listed; it gave him 4 arcminutes left. Factoring 4 times 2 equals 8, he cranked the windage knob eight snicks left on Herrs Schmidt and Bender’s magical tube.

  That would do it. Now he found another turret on the tube and illuminated the red dot at the center of the—

  His phone rang.

  “Yes?”

  “Juba, he’s up. Confused. Just discovered the cuffs. Seems to think he can pull his way free.”

  “I’ll spare him his effort shortly. You must watch and report to me on the impact of the shot if I miss so that I can make the corrections.”

  “I will.”

  “I am going to fire now.”

  The most sophisticated ballistic software program in the world is of no use if the shooter lacks technique. Juba did not. It’s a thing acquired over long years of practice or, instantaneously, by genius. He had both.

  The rifle, solid on its Atlas bipod, came to his shoulder. Important: all shoulder must touch flat and consistent against the crescent of the butt. Without thought, Juba did this. He eased his thumb through the thumbhole, came around with his hand to place his remaining four fingers and as much palm as possible on the grip itself, as well as applying rearward pressure, tightening it to shoulder. The adjustable comb was set to support his cheek weld precisely, given the length of his neck, and, laying his cheek upon it, positioned his eye instantly to the center of the scope. He anchored his left, supporting hand over the grip, pressuring it downward toward the table. He had made himself as solid as the inevitable caliphate of the future.