Game of Snipers

by Stephen Hunter

  The data it contained hardly needed a program to be analyzed. It was just a matter of finding the earliest date of entry. That happened quickly enough.

  “New York” was all it said, and ID’d a date a week further on, the next Thursday, the eighth of the month.

  “So Mogul is going to New York on the eighth,” said Nick. “Why? And why would he know so far in advance? And why would it be ho-hum to Secret Service?”

  Obviously, nobody had any knowledge.

  The next call was to the FBI–White House liaison. It took a little longer because the guy was at the movies, he had to get home, go to his monitor, bring all this stuff up, check his numbers, call a good source in the White House, before he got back to them.

  Nick took the call, listened, nodded, and looked up.

  “Okay,” he said, “we have a date. We also have politics, ego, vanity, media manipulation, and personal enmity in the mix. In other words, any day in D.C. since 1784. On that date, Renegade is scheduled to give a speech here in D.C. At some Arab–American Co-Prosperity function, funded by the Saudis.”

  “Who’s Renegade?” asked Bob.

  “Think hard,” said Nick.

  “Oh, I get it. The predecessor. Number forty-four. The—”

  “You got it,” said Nick. “So Mogul knows Renegade’s talk will get a lot of attention and press. He doesn’t like it. So he counterprograms. He learns that on that day a certain newly constructed building is being officially opened. No, Mogul doesn’t own it, his company didn’t build it, but he’s pals with the guy that does and did. It’s in the East Village, overlooking Roosevelt Drive. The guy’s a big contributor, but, more, he’s a deep and abiding enemy of the mayor of New York City, who definitely won’t be at the ceremony. He hates the mayor, Mogul does, so it’s a New-York-in-your-face-schmuck kind of thing as well as a Renegade-in-your-face-schmuck kind of thing. So it’s been widely known for some time in New York political circles that Mogul would make a day trip up there, unannounced, and say a word at the ceremony. Maybe make a major announcement and pull the spotlight off Renegade.”

  Everybody looked at everybody else.

  “The building overlooks the East River,” said Nick. “Can someone go online and find an address?”

  It took Chandler about seven seconds.

  Neill called to one of his long-laboring computer techs, who came by and got the info and went off to run it against the shot-attribute program.

  “Okay,” said Bob, “is this just a party for geniuses like Mr. Gold and Chandler or can a country boy get a word in?”

  “Go ahead,” said Nick.

  “I just thought of another attribute. Sorry I didn’t think of it earlier, but it’s crucial.”

  “Does it help us winnow?”

  “I think it does. It just come to me like a kick in the head. See, there’s been a key component missing. My fault, nobody else’s.”

  “Go on.”

  “Most folks think you point a gun at someone, pull the trigger, and down he goes. Instant, like in a millionth of a second. But it ain’t that way.”

  “Go on.”

  “The bullet takes some time to get there. The farther it travels, the longer it takes. If you’re shooting at over a mile, it would be somewhere in the five-second range. It’s officially called time in flight. Could figure it out more precisely, but trust me on this.”

  He waited for the import to strike them—but it didn’t.

  “That means the target has to be still. The shooter has to be assured he ain’t going to leave to get a Coke between the pull of the trigger and the arrival of the bullet.”

  “So he’s stationary?”

  “Totally. He’s giving a speech, he’s sitting on a chair, he’s at his desk. He’s sitting down or standing still.”

  “We could cut out three-quarters of the possibilities by that test,” said Neill.

  “On the dais at that New York opening, he’d be still,” said Chandler.

  The young woman came back with a new sheet of paper.

  “I think you’ll like this,” she said. “It’s fourteen for fourteen on the attributes.”

  They all clustered around and saw about half a mile’s worth of circle arcing through the dockside real estate across the East River in Brooklyn, and, 1,847 yards away, across a broad expanse of river, the docks, Roosevelt Drive, the building at which Mogul would be in place, still as a posed portrait.

  “So that’s got to be it, then,” said Nick. “Next Thursday, the eighth, at three o’clock in the afternoon, shooting from an unknown site in Queens a mile out, Juba’s going to kill Mogul.”

  59

  1,847 yards out

  A few days before

  The key pickup was without incident, and Juba said farewell to Alberto. He understood that the man now had a chance to turn him in to the FBI and become a hero. But he simply had to bet he wouldn’t. Alberto was Arab where it mattered: in blood, in heart, in mind. He could be trusted.

  The apartment to which the key admitted him had been rented, again by elaborate ruse and considerable bribery, to get him where he had to be, in a building subsidized for lower-income families by no less than the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Everything was seemingly legal and had been handled by a completely innocent contract employee of Iranian intelligence on money supplied by—well, that was unknown, even to the most intimate of conspirators, but by somebody with an interest in havoc, mayhem, anarchy, and collapse, especially in the United States of America.

  The apartment was sparsely furnished with furniture, also rented. The dining room table could be shored up for stability and used as a shooting bench upon which he would execute his mission. Nothing else was memorable, except for a crate that had been delivered a few days before he arrived: it was from a boutique furniture craftsman in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Examined carefully, it revealed no signs of tampering. He disassembled it, first the crate, then the bookshelves themselves, reducing both to wooden slats neatly stacked against the wall. The process revealed the rifle.

  Accuracy International Arctic Warfare model, .338 Lapua Magnum, Schmidt & Bender 5.5×25×56 scope calibrated in MOA. He pored over it, checking the fingernail polish marking on each screw to make sure that they remained tightened exactly to the torque he had applied in Wyoming for maximum accuracy. In the kit of tools, he’d packed, along with the ten rounds of ammunition, dedicated wrenches, a lens-cleaning pen, his iPhone 8 with the FirstShot app already calculated to zero on the rifle at eighteen hundred yards, a Kestrel Pocket Weather Meter, and, among other shooter knickknacks, a bore sighter. This instrument allowed him to test for the scope setting for inadvertent alterations against the valuations he’d made in Wyoming. Again, it was unchanged, perfect.

  Juba slept on the floor without a problem, took all his meals out, bought a few clothes with cash left over from the trip and washed them out every night, to dry overnight, so that he didn’t attract attention due to shabbiness. Occasionally, he met other tenants in the lobby or in the elevator, but nobody here cared about anybody else’s woes, much less existence. The tenants were in their own world.

  In the apartment, he wore a mask, a hairnet, hospital slippers, and tight rubber gloves to safeguard against inadvertent DNA deposits in order to sustain the fiction that the occupant of the room, when it was discovered after the event, was one Brian Waters of Albuquerque, New Mexico, NRA life member, thousand-yard rifle champion, well-known hunter and gun crank, and author of some hideous screeds as yet to be deposited on the Dark Web. He would do that in the aftermath of the shooting with a single keystroke. In the next minutes, Juba would scrub down the rifle with acetone and apply certain biological traces of Brian Waters. Then he would disappear, and what would happen would happen.

  He confronted the view. He initially was almost afraid to look, but it was all right. He was on the sixth floo
r, sixty-seven feet off the ground. He overlooked the building across the street and, beyond that, the roofs of smaller buildings, descending to the broad band of river three blocks away, and, across the river, his target zone.

  Everything was as it should be, yet everything was different. It was as if he were confronting the reality of a dreamscape. He had seen this view in his mind, consciously and unconsciously, for over four months. Everything familiar, yet nothing familiar: that was the dynamic. He had to learn it, adapt to it, not let it throw his concentration off.

  He understood that to make his shot, he had to be on-site days before. Unlike combat sniping, it wasn’t a case of putting the crosshairs on the target, letting your reflexes squeeze the trigger, scrambling away before they could locate you and send incoming fire after you. It had to be his reality, as familiar as his mother’s face, known in all its nuances, comforting in its exactitude. So he spent hours each day on the rifle, on the scope, on the table, his fingers learning anew—as if they’d forgotten—the shape and feel of the design via the exercise of the dry fire, his muscles learning the weight, his arms reacquiring the sensation of holding the rifle in that perfect merger of strength and gentleness. He had to become one with the rifle, a kind of exalted state of biomechanical intimacy, not easily achieved, not achieved, in fact, except through great effort and with practice, especially on demand. And he had to be able to do it on demand.

  He prayed the required five times a day. It was pleasing to be back to such discipline. That was of great benefit. In speaking to Allah, in beseeching His holiness, in putting his petition for assistance before His greatness, he calmed himself. Was he speaking to God? That wasn’t the point. The point was, his brain thought he was speaking to God, and Juba’s respiratory system, his musculature, his digestive track, even his subconscious, felt subdued by the rigor. A great calm spread through him, and his limbs and veins thrummed with energy and confidence. No man in the world could do this thing, save him—not even Bobleeswagger—and his prayers enabled his effort.

  Of course, he made sure to be on the rifle, eye locked on the scope, at the same time each day as the shot so that he could learn the play of the light in different weather conditions. Snap! went the dry trigger, over and over again. Maybe the day would be cloudy, maybe bold with sun. Snap! Shadows would cut the image, maybe not. Trees and the rills on the river would describe the wind, and he would have to understand how to read them. Snap!

  Each day, afresh, he ran the program on the FirstShot ballistic calculator, and, each time, the solution came up the same for the preset eighteen-hundred-yard zero, arriving at the setting to which the scope was now set, 48 MOA elevation and 24 MOA right windage, which took it all into consideration—the wind, the temp, the humidity, the air density.

  In the afternoons, after a brief lunch at a fast-food place and a cup of god-awful American coffee, he walked down as close to the river as he could get. Various barriers prevented actual riverside visits, and he couldn’t risk violating them, for if nabbed by security or police, how could he explain the Kestrel?

  He ran the Kestrel to record the exact weather conditions. He marked the waves in the water to match them to wind speed and learn it. There wasn’t much variation, only in the cloud cover. No rain expected, humidity not ominous, wind tepid. It was as if Allah were sending him the ideal conditions. He looked across the river at the cityscape, the skyline. It was, as he expected, majestic, with proud towers and soaring structures, alive with the reflection of the sun off a million windows, humming with power, the dynamo of the West in one image.

  He loved it. He hated it. It beckoned him. It sickened him. It mattered so much to him. He mattered so little to it.

  Your buildings tell us our place, which is in their shadow, bent and craven. We reject that, and you declare us monsters. We fight that, and you call us murderers. Your airplanes drop bombs guided by technical magic we could not understand and smash our children to jelly, and yet we are the beasts.

  Tomorrow, I will destroy you.

  Snap!

  60

  Zombieland, the sixth floor

  Nick was back from the big meeting, and all waited for his account and direction. He’d worn his best suit, blue with banker’s pinstripes, peaked lapel, white shirt, red ancient madder tie, black Alden Long Wings. He looked like a Washington power player.

  “Good news, bad news,” he said. “Anybody want to pick the order?”

  Nobody did. Maybe the game wasn’t appropriate for them, as they were tired from the hours spent on The Problem, and eager to move on, and had no need for Nick’s charm, though on many other occasions they’d appreciated it.

  “Boss,” said Chandler finally, “whatever.”

  “Okay, nobody cares,” said Nick. “So I’ll start with the good. And it’s really good.”

  He paused, smiled.

  “Congratulations to you all, and I suppose to me too. At the top levels, they are extremely pleased and extremely eager. They believe your work represents a major victory over the threat of jihad in the West and the opportunity for a major victory. Not only have we saved a life and prevented the political and cultural chaos that would ensue from a terrorist event against a high-value target, they see a chance to be proactive and turn it into a major advantage. Even as I speak, that response is being organized. There’s just enough time to set the trap, and the people involved are talented and skilled enough to bring it off.”

  “We ought to be on the Acela for New York right now,” said Neill. “I’m packed, and I’ve told my wife—hmm, what was her name? Wendy? Susie? Something like that—anyway, I’ve told her we’re going.”

  “Neill, we’ve all worked long hours and gone without spousal visitations,” said Nick, “but the point is taken: you want it done fast so you can get back to normalcy. Me too. But that brings me to the bad news.”

  He paused. “We’ve been fired.”

  He let it sink in.

  “I don’t see this as an insult, a gesture of contempt, a reaffirmation of the principle that no good deed goes unpunished. It’s not ‘Thank you very much, but what have you done for me lately?’ It’s simply the way the system works, and I should have prepared you better for it.”

  “Is it politics?” Swagger asked.

  “Well, I’d rather not speculate on meaning,” said Nick.

  “Does this kind of shit happen in Israel?” Swagger asked Mr. Gold.

  “Never. Except every day. And twice on most.”

  “From a management point of view, I see the issue,” said Nick. “If we’re up there, we’re another layer that has to be briefed, kept in the loop—and, worst of all, listened to. We just get in the way of the Incident Command staff and turn it all murky. We think it’s our turf, and we’re hardwired to protect turf. Maybe we make different calls than they do, maybe we know too much, which can be as destructive as knowing too little. Maybe—and they’re right on this—Nick Memphis doesn’t have the experience to run something this big and complicated, and maybe the loyalty his people feel toward him clouds their judgment. Not saying it’s so, just saying that’s how it could be seen. And, once seen, it has to be avoided.”

  “And maybe some Bigfoot wants the credit,” said Bob. “And maybe someone has a debt to be paid or wants to advance a protégé up the ladder. Or maybe someone thinks Nick’s shoes ain’t shiny enough or he should have worn cotton socks instead of wool ones, which he would have learned if he’d gone to a university that didn’t have ‘State’ in its name.”

  “These are silk,” said Nick. “My only pair. So it’s not that.”

  “So what happens to us?” asked Chandler.

  “We stay here. We are copied on everything but asked to comment on nothing. If questioned, we answer to the best of our knowledge. On operation day, we will set up in the Command Center and will be able to follow the action by uplink to the New York Field Office in r
eal time. We get a front-row seat, watching it all go down. That’s what everybody wants—and I do mean everybody.”

  Again silence, as each tried to work his or her way around what was deemed necessary by upper management.

  “I smell the White House,” said Neill. “I smell Mogul.”

  “Okay,” said Nick, “maybe you do. Off the record, this was always in the cards, we just didn’t see it. But upper floor reads the Juba operation as a win-win. You all know there’s a cloud over the Bureau, and maybe a big triumph helps it go away. That’s the first win, and you better believe the Director is hot for that one. Then there’s the White House. You all know that elections are coming up, and if Mogul can get a victory over Islamic fundamentalism, that’s another big win. If he looks like a hero, it’s big enough to get him that second term. So everybody’s salivating, and intelligence concerns, strategic implications, and plain old justice just go out the window. Too much to be gained, in that superficial Washington way, with no downside. The best I can offer is, you’ve really pissed off the CIA, and they want in. But since it’s our baby, Mogul won’t let them in. So in the eternal war in Heaven between the angels, our side has won a big one, and you are the angels that did it. Recompense will come in many forms—promotions, Glory Wall photos and letters, commendations, everything that should make good little boys and girls happy. Swagger gets a new BarcaLounger at Bureau expense. And when it’s all over, Mr. Gold, maybe there’ll be enough Juba pie left over to send to Israel. Wouldn’t that make you and the boys in the black cube happy?”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Gold.

  “It should even make Mrs. McDowell happy,” said Nick.

  “What have these geniuses come up with?” asked Swagger.

  “It’ll be run out of the New York Field Office, with a lot of New York SWAT and aviation thrown in. Real big, but I think it’ll work out.”

  “Are you afraid to tell us?” asked Neill. “Is that why you’re buttering it up?”