The Long Shot (Stephen Leather Thrillers)

by Stephen Leather

  “Terrific,” said Howard as Clayton lifted the lid of the box and took out the board. Lisa kicked him under the table, but not too hard. She knew how much he loathed game-playing.

  Kelly Armstrong sashayed into Howard’s office unable to control her excitement. Howard was sipping a cup of hot coffee and he put it down on his desk and looked at her with an amused smile on his face. He was still feeling pleased with himself after his and Lisa’s victory at Trivial Pursuit the previous evening. It was the first time Clayton and his wife had ever lost, and Howard had been unable to stop grinning all the way home. He was still smiling when he woke up that morning. It would take a lot to spoil his day. “Yes, Kelly, what is it?” he asked.

  “I’ve found the firms that hired the cars!” she gushed. “Two firms, one leased a blue Chrysler Imperial three days before the plane was shot down, another leased a white Imperial two days before. Both cars have been returned.”

  “Well done,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “Do they still have them?”

  “The blue one is out with another customer, the white one is still available. And it hasn’t been cleaned yet! I’ve told them to hold it for us.”

  Howard stood up. “That’s the best news I’ve heard today,” he said. “How did you find the companies?”

  “Like you said, I contacted all the home addresses of the drivers who’d rented the cars. Two used fake addresses – one of the streets didn’t even exist, and both were recently issued licences.”

  “And the credit cards?”

  “Same addresses as the licences. Both cards were recent and are tied to bank accounts here in Phoenix. I’m applying to have access to the account records. With your say-so, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Howard. “Go for it.” He handed her copies of the photographs which Clayton had given him. “Then go out and talk to both rental firms. Show them these photographs, see if they recognise anyone.”

  Kelly scrutinised the pictures. “These are from the video?” she asked.

  “They’ve been computer enhanced,” said Howard. “I’m expecting to get improved pictures later this week.” As he and Lisa had left Clayton’s house, the industrialist had slapped Howard on the back, congratulated him on his unexpected victory at Trivial Pursuit and whispered that his researchers had been working on the tape over the weekend and had made considerable progress. They’d be in touch before the week was out, Clayton had promised.

  “Where are the rental companies?” Howard asked Kelly.

  “Both here in Phoenix,” she said. “There’s something else. One of the men wasn’t American, the woman who rented out the blue Imperial said she thought he had an accent: Scottish or Australian.”

  “Interesting,” said Howard. He sat down again. “Good work, Kelly. I’ll make sure Jake Sheldon gets to hear what a help you’ve been on this.”

  Her green eyes widened and a red glow spread across her cheeks and Howard knew without asking that she’d already spoken to Sheldon. Howard’s smile tightened and he picked up his coffee. “Thanks, Kelly,” he said. He watched her buttocks twitch under her skirt as she left his office and he imagined burying a long, sharp knife between her elegant shoulder blades.

  Cole Howard knew that he needed a briefing from someone with sniping experience, someone who could give him an idea of what sort of men he was up against. His office at 201 East Indianola Street was on the fourth floor and immediately below was the Treasury Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Howard knew one of the agents in the department, a fifteen-year veteran called Bradley Caine. Howard rang Caine’s extension but got the engaged tone, so rather than wait he took the stairs down and stood at the agent’s door until he’d finished his call. The two men shook hands and Howard dropped down into the chair opposite Caine’s desk. Caine was a former soldier and he still wore his hair military-style. He was forever suffering from migraine headaches and swallowed aspirin like M & Ms. Without going into details, Howard explained that he needed information on snipers and their weaponry. Caine unscrewed the top of his bottle of aspirin and tossed two into his mouth, swallowing them dry.

  “There’s a guy in the Phoenix SWAT team, Joe Bocconelli, let me give him a call,” said Caine. He held out the aspirin bottle to Howard, who shook his head.

  “A bit early for me, Brad,” said Howard, with a smile.

  Caine shrugged and dialled Bocconelli’s number. He put the call on the speaker-phone so that they could both hear him.

  Bocconelli’s first thought was that Howard needed someone with a military background and Caine nodded in agreement. Bocconelli said that only a very, very special sniper could have shot down a plane with a rifle and he suggested that Howard check with the Marines, or the Navy SEALs. According to the sergeant, there were only about a dozen men in this country who could make a two thousand yard shot and that most of them would be in the military. Bocconelli recommended a sniper who lived in Virginia, not far from the Quantico Marine Corps Air Station where the Marines trained their snipers. Bocconelli had explained that the man, Bud Kratzer, was a former Marine Captain who had retired in 1979 after twenty years’ service, most of it as a sniper. He now worked as an independent consultant, selling his military skills to police SWAT teams around the country, and was a frequent visitor to Quantico where he was treated with a respect which bordered on reverence. Bocconelli also said he was on retainer from several counter-terrorist organisations but that details were understandably sketchy. Howard knew Quantico well. The FBI’s Academy was there, and so too was its Behavioral Science Unit, the office responsible for psychological profiling of hunted criminals, especially serial killers. Howard scribbled a reminder to himself on a notepad that if all else failed the BSU might give him a clue as to the sort of men who might be involved in the assassination.

  Back in his own office, Howard telephoned Kratzer who said he’d be in Washington the following day and that he’d be more than happy to chat with him. Howard had hoped that the former Marine would fly to Phoenix but he said it was out of the question, much as he’d wanted to help. He was going straight from Washington to Germany for a two-week training session with the Kampfschwimmerkompanie, the German equivalent of the Navy SEALs.

  Howard caught the redeye flight and he washed and shaved in the men’s room at Dulles Airport. Kratzer had suggested they meet at the FBI’s headquarters and Howard had readily agreed because visiting Washington would give him a chance to see Andy Kim and find out how he was getting on with his computer simulations. Howard had phoned ahead and arranged for an interview room to be available and given Kratzer’s details to reception so that his clearances would be ready.

  Kratzer was on time and Howard went down to the reception area to meet him and escort him up to the interview room on the third floor. He was a big man, not what Howard had expected at all. He’d assumed that snipers were lean, anxious-looking men, the sort who could sit silently for hours in one position before pulling the trigger. Kratzer looked as if he’d be more at home with a pint of beer in one hand and a pizza in the other. He was about six feet six inches tall, and had the physique of a linebacker who’d spent too much time on the bench. There was something amiss with his hair and it took Howard a few minutes to realise that he was wearing some sort of toupee or hair weave and that it was a slightly different colour from Kratzer’s own hair. His hair was grey at the sides and back and black on top and Howard had to fight from staring at it.

  Kratzer had huge fingers, as massive as bananas: they looked too big to squeeze into a trigger guard. His hands were clenching and unclenching as if he were exercising. “Joe Bocconelli gave you my name, you said?” he asked as they rode up in the elevator.

  “Yeah, he’s a member of the Phoenix SWAT team. He said he’d been in one of your training programmes a couple of years back.”

  “Can’t say I remember,” said Kratzer. “But it was good of him to put you on to me.”

  The elevator doors hissed open and the two men walked along th
e corridor to the interview room. “Good of him? Why do you say that?” asked Howard.

  “Well, the FBI is going to pay me for this, isn’t it? A consulting fee?”

  “Well . . .” said Howard, who hadn’t expected to be asked for money.

  “Because I’ll tell you right now, Bud Kratzer doesn’t do anything for free. I put in twenty hard years with the Marine Corps for shit money, and now it’s payback time. My skills are my pension, and I have to squeeze it for every cent I can. Capish?”

  “Loud and clear,” said Howard. “Though I was sort of hoping that you’d do it as a public service.”

  Kratzer stopped and looked at Howard as if to see if he was joking. Suddenly he burst into laughter and slapped Howard on the back. “Hell, and I thought you FBI guys had no sense of humour.”

  Howard took him along to the interview room and held the door open for him as he tried to guess how much money the former Marine might be talking about. The room contained a large desk and several chairs and Kratzer slid into the largest. He looked at a chunky gold watch on his wrist. “Okay, my meter is running, let’s get on with this. What do you want to know?”

  “Snipers,” said Howard, “I want to know what sort of men they are.”

  Kratzer leaned back in his chair and looked up at the polystyrene-tiled ceiling. “A sniper is the most cost-effective killing machine there is, and at the same time he’s one of the most maligned,” he said, speaking as if he were delivering a speech to a large auditorium. “During the Second World War, to kill one enemy soldier the Allied Forces had to fire about twenty-five thousand rounds. In Korea our soldiers had to shoot an average of fifty thousand rounds and by the time Vietnam came around that had jumped to two hundred and fifty thousand. Just think about that, Special Agent Howard, a quarter of a million bullets fired just to kill one VC. And that doesn’t include all the bombs we dropped on them. Now, take the sniper. When I was in Nam, our unit averaged 1.5 rounds per kill. For every three bullets we fired, we killed two Victor Charlie. The sniper’s the surgeon of the battlefield. He goes in with his rifle, takes out an assigned target, and returns to his base. It’s the cleanest form of combat there is. No innocent bystanders get hurt, there’s no fallout, no dangerous hardware left behind. Snipers are the élite.”

  Kratzer lowered his eyes and looked at Howard. “But the generals don’t see the sniper as a saviour, they see him as belonging to the dirty tricks department. I’ve had it said to me by some of our most respected military minds that the snipers are cowards of war, that they shouldn’t even be used. These are the same generals who want to spend billions on nuclear weapons. They’re prepared to kill civilians on a scale undreamed of, but they don’t want to remove one enemy from the battlefield with a single shot. I can see you frowning. You don’t follow me?”

  “I follow you, but I don’t see what point you’re trying to make.”

  “The point is that snipers have to believe in themselves totally. They have to know that what they are doing is right.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a paperback book. He threw it onto the desk in front of Howard who picked it up and looked at the cover. ‘Marine Sniper’, it said, and underneath, ‘93 confirmed kills’.

  “You want to get inside the mind of a sniper, read this,” said Kratzer. “It’s the biography of a guy called Carlos Hathcock, a gunnery sergeant who served with the Marines and did two tours in Nam. A couple of publishers have been after me to write a book like it, but I’ve never gotten around to it.”

  “Ninety-three kills?” queried Howard.

  “Confirmed kills,” said Kratzer. “Those are the ones with witnesses. I got eighteen myself, but I was in Nam towards the end, when we weren’t interested in winning. Read that book and you’ll have a good idea of how a sniper thinks. The first kill you’ll read about is a twelve-year-old boy. The kill he’s most proud of is a woman.”

  Howard looked at the cover: a painting of a man in a bush hat with a rifle pressed to his cheek, his face smeared with camouflage make-up.

  “Long Tra’ng the VC called him, because of a white feather he wore in his hat,” Kratzer continued. “He was just a kid in Nam, but he was an amazing shot. He once plugged a VC at twenty-five hundred yards.”

  “Do youngsters usually make the best snipers?” asked Howard.

  “Not necessarily,” said Kratzer. “They need to be experienced with guns, so country boys are best, especially ones from poor families who have to hunt to supplement the cooking-pot. An empty stomach is the best incentive there is, right?”

  “Right,” agreed Howard.

  “But there’s a lot of technical stuff to learn as a military sniper. It’s one thing to hunt rabbits with a shotgun, quite another to nail a VC at a thousand yards. It’s only with age that you get that experience. I was in my late twenties when I was in Nam. Hathcock was twenty-five, I think. But it’s not a skill you lose. There’s some stamina involved, but once you’ve got the technique, and providing you can maintain the level of concentration needed, you could be a world-class sniper well into your forties.”

  “I was thinking about what you were saying about conscience. Doesn’t it get harder to pull the trigger as you get older?”

  Kratzer smiled. He picked up a match off the desk and began to pick his teeth with it. “I’d have no hesitation at all,” he said. “I went down on bended knees and begged them to send me to the Gulf. I’d love to have blown away a few ragheads.”

  Kratzer’s eyes widened. Howard had seen the same hungry look in his father-in-law’s eyes when he was discussing his latest hunting expedition.

  Howard held up the book. A soldier who could kill at twenty-five hundred yards sounded like just the man he was looking for. “This Hathcock, is he still in the Marines?”

  Kratzer shook his head. “Bit of a sad story, really. He had to leave the Marines for medical reasons a few months before he’d put in his twenty.”

  “What was wrong with him?”

  “Multiple sclerosis, I think. Shakes all the time. Ironic, isn’t it? His main claim to fame was that he could lie perfectly still and shoot a bullet thousands of feet with almost perfect accuracy. Now he can’t even lift a beer to his lips without spilling it. There’s a lesson there for all of us: when it comes down to it, all you’ve got is yourself to depend on. You can give your all to an organisation like the Marines but if you’re no more use to them, out you go. I tell you, when they call me in to help with their sniper training, they pay through the nose. I’m not giving them the chance to kick me in the balls, no sir.”

  Kratzer sounded bitter and Howard wondered if he’d also been put under pressure to resign from the Marines. Howard hadn’t had much experience with snipers, but it seemed to him that there was something not quite right about Kratzer. He was too overbearing, like a television evangelist.

  “What’s involved in making a shot of two thousand yards or more?” Howard asked.

  “You need a gun that packs a real punch, for a start,” said Kratzer, still working at his back molars with the matchstick. “A lot of snipers in Nam used Model-70 Winchesters, .30-06 Springfield calibre, but I wouldn’t be happy shooting one beyond a thousand yards. Sometime in the late Sixties, 1967 I think, Marine Corps snipers began using the Remington 700 with an M-40 scope. They used the same 7.62 ammo that the M-14 rifle used but it had more than its fair share of problems, not the least being it wasn’t really up to taking the sort of hard knocks a rifle gets out in the field, and neither the stock nor the barrel were camouflaged. The boys at Quantico ended up modifying it to come up with the M-40A1. It had a modified stock of pressure-moulded fibreglass and a twenty-four-inch stainless-steel barrel with a large diameter. I’ll tell you, Agent Howard, with that weapon you could hold your shot group inside a twelve-inch circle at almost fifteen hundred yards. If you were up to it. But for the really long shots we’d use the M-2 .50-calibre machine gun, it’s got a stable trajectory for almost three thousand yards. The bullets are so much bigger,
you see, 700 grains, so they get more momentum. You could fire one of those babes well over two thousand yards, and with a ten-power telescopic sight like a Lyman or a Unertl you’d have a high degree of accuracy. Maybe not as accurate as the M-40A1, but close. Certainly enough to hit the target and, with the man-stopper bullets, that’s all you’d need.”

  Howard nodded. He had the computer-enhanced photographs of the Arizona snipers in his briefcase but he wanted to get a general idea of how snipers operated before showing them to Kratzer. “Joe said that only military-trained snipers can make the really long shots.”

  “Damn right,” said Kratzer. He took the matchstick from his mouth, examined the moist end and then chewed it again. “SWAT teams don’t have the space, not in the urban environment. But in a war zone, the further you are from the target, the better. You don’t want the enemy to hear or see you.”

  “And long shots create special problems?”

  “Sure do. Gravity and wind. When you shoot at point-blank range they’re relatively unimportant, but over long distances they’re as vital as the type of gun and ammunition. Do you want the short explanation, or the detailed one?”

  Howard felt like asking for a price breakdown first, but instead he told the former Marine that he wanted as much detail as possible. Kratzer swung his legs up on the desk. His shoes gleamed as if he’d spent all morning polishing them.

  “A bullet is just like a baseball being thrown through the air,” he said. “As it travels, gravity pulls it down, so to throw a long distance you have to throw it up and along. It follows a parabolic path, moving up to a peak and then down as it travels through the air. A bullet is the same: the path it travels depends on its initial velocity, the rate it loses velocity, and the distance it has to travel. Over one hundred yards, a 650-grain bullet will probably fall about six inches. So to hit the target you’d have to aim six inches high. And over that distance the bullet’s velocity would probably fall from twenty-eight hundred feet per second to about twenty-six eighty feet per second. Over five hundred yards the drop would be about eighty-two inches. Almost seven feet. And the bullet would slow to twenty-one hundred feet per second. Still not much of a change in the velocity.”