As they blew through the plywood bad guys Harry showed Ben how to use the short collimator scope mounted on the guns. Once Ben grasped the concept of keeping both eyes open and using his dominant eye to follow his target, he mastered using the lighted dot in the scope to take off the plywood heads at twenty-five meters.
Harry moved Ben through the bullpup guns to the more traditional rifles like the M4 and M16. He explained to Ben that they had been shooting with five-five-six ammo, and he eventually brought out the larger seven-six-two round guns like the AK-47. They were a little harder for Ben to hold, but Harry was an excellent teacher and Ben was surgically removing limbs after some pointers and practice.
Eventually they switched to hunting rifles, and shot at a different type of target. Spread out at the back of the range were a dozen simple iron pipe frames welded to a metal base. Hanging from the frames’ horizontal pipes were small orange metal squares that pinged loudly and swung when hit. They moved to shooting while lying down. The guns were resting on moving blankets laid over sandbags stacked up on a large wooden platform with locking wheels.
Ben hit the little orange metal squares about half of the time at seventy-five meters, but he was getting exponentially better with each shot as they coached him. Lissa and Harry were pinging every shot at the back of the range at two hundred and fifty meters. Harry wore special glasses when he distance shot. They were a quarter-inch thick, and made him look even more like a frog.
They moved from hunting to sniper rifles. After Ben was getting pretty good with those Harry scooched his bulk off the shooting table and signed to Lissa, Time to bring out the thunder?
His wife rolled her eyes at him, but she smiled and said, “Yeah, sure, go ahead.”
Ben was surprised to see Harry could actually jog. He ran off to the front of the club and retrieved two large gun cases from under the front counter. The cases were very heavy and he had to walk slowly on the return trip, but he was smiling like a schoolgirl as he puffed towards them. He placed the cases on the platform in front of Ben and opened them slowly, like they were full of gold bars.
Harry sucked from his little oxygen mask and wagged his bushy eyebrows while Ben ran his fingers down the sniper rifles’ long, thick barrels. He touched their insanely large scopes and heavy bolt actions as Lissa described the specs of Harry’s McMillan Tac-50 and her C3A1. Although different sizes, they were a similarly customized matched pair. They were black, absurdly large, and looked to be insanely lethal. Harry signed for Ben to roll over another shooter’s table and toss on a few more sand bags as he walked over to the side wall of the range and held down a big green button.
The rear door at the far end of the range slowly slid open. Ben saw several rows of the pipe frames with more square orange targets disappearing up the slope behind the range. The farthest ones were barely visible with the haze and the falling snow dancing around them.
Lissa talked Ben through the differences between shooting the other rifles and these huge sniper’s cannons. She explained to him how every micrometer of error at this end meant meters of error at the other end, where it counted. She showed him how to hold the guns correctly to his shoulder, chamber a round, let out a breath, and squeeze the trigger. He missed his first two shots but with some more coaching pinged the target just outside of the open door, at three hundred meters.
“See, it’s the simplest thing in the world,” Lissa said, “and there’s only about three dozen people on the planet who can do it consistently when it really matters.”
Harry signed, The secret is the ability to do exactly the same thing every single time you pull the trigger...and by exact I mean you need to have the kind of muscle memory and concentration that makes Jack Nicklaus look like Michael J Fox.”
Lissa frowned at that description but she was nodding at the same time.
She said, “With this gear almost anyone can get hits half of the time in a quiet shooting range at two hundred meters. It’s distraction removal that separates the real shootists from the panty-crappers when the shit’s flying around you. Take any elite athlete, or an amazing artist, or even a top scientist or CEO…anyone who’s at the top of their game…and I’ll show you someone who has learned to remove distractions. It’s the same discipline here.”
Lissa smiled at him, and tapped him on the forehead as she said, “Ben, shooting is a fun hobby, but it can also be a lot more. If you can succeed at this you can do anything you put your scary little mind to.”
Ben nodded, and so did Spot and Smudge.
She told Ben to find a shooting mantra, some phrase that he would recite in his head every time he shot. It could be a poem, or a song, anything with a rhythm that he knew by heart. She cautioned him to not share it with anyone as his buds and other shooters would certainly use it to fuck with him when shooting for cash, trophies, or bragging rights. She told Ben that before wartime snipers had learned to keep their mantras secret they had found the enemy would share it amongst themselves and use it to mess with the snipers on the front lines. They would go so far as to have their female undercover operatives try to seduce it out of the snipers.
They took turns shooting, and when Harry fiddled with the gun’s scope after each shot Lissa read him numbers from a small card. She said her husband was ‘doping’ the scope. Ben was fascinated, and what started as Lissa patiently answering a few questions turned into a full on class about windage, spindrift, drop, and the dozen other environmental factors that affected accuracy. She began to realize why Harry enjoyed teaching the boy. He drank in information like water. He also grasped the math behind the scope’s minutes-of-angle and reticle marks faster than anyone she’d ever taught. Ben started calling out adjustment clicks for the different distances and grain loads of ammunition, and doing most of the range calculations in his head before they could find it on their little reference card.
Harry signed to his wife over Ben’s shoulder after he pinged a target far out in the field, The boy’s a savant.
Spot and Smudge were sitting together near Ben’s feet on the back of the shooting table, and Spot had been checking Ben’s math. He turned to share a proud nod with Smudge but his sister had a puss on her face. When she made a snide comment about it being somehow okay for Ben to be showing off Spot dismissed her with a big smile.
Lissa and Harry were also exchanging a smile behind Ben’s back. The club offered classes to teach kids to shoot. It was a mandatory part of the Nellis’ silly ‘lifetime founding members’ obligation that Lissa and Harry didn’t much enjoy but generally supported with quiet apathy. Aside from a small handful of sweet ones, the Chogins felt kids were mostly just mean little retarded people and generally a pain in the ass. They had chosen not to have any children for that very reason, but they liked teaching on those rare occasions when the kid listened and seemed into it. As she watched Ben stare intently while her husband gave him pointers, Lissa recalled seeing that same look on his sister’s face. Kelcy hadn’t been as into the guns as Ben was but she had that same focus, and they had enjoyed her company equally as much.
The Chogins were also enjoying his well-behaved dogs. They seemed quite content to just sit behind Ben and watch him learn, and shoot. One of them seemed to never stop wagging.
When Ben showed the range card to Spot the Chogins laughed, especially as the dog pawed it gently and licked him on the chin.
Even though he was tall for an eleven year old, and had little trouble holding and sighting the guns, Ben was still relatively thin in the shoulders. Lissa thought he must be starting to feel the ache after expending a few full magazines from each rifle. Her large sniper rifle kicked some but Harry’s fifty caliber was a teeth-jarring beast. Even with its advanced recoil suppression it still punched hard in the shoulder with each trigger pull. The whole table shook and the ceiling rattled when it fired. Lissa suggested he take a break, saying she didn’t want Hamish’s wrath when he went home black and blue. Ben shrugged her off, and asked for the next pointer as he lowered
to look through the scope again. Harry signed for his wife to stop coddling the lad, and directed Ben to let his breath out slower.
The police dogs hadn’t been flinching at any of the other barrages of gunfire, but they looked up when Lissa’s rifle fired, and they paused when the fifty caliber let loose. Vuur and Rook were back on task quickly but they still gave the big gun a sideways look whenever it chugged off another devastating round.
Harry and Lissa coached Ben with things like head position and watching the bullet’s vapor trail after each shot. They kept tweaking his techniques and explained how they were reducing micro-differences between each of his shots. Lissa smiled whenever his handsome little face screwed into a knot of concentration as he ingested the next tip. He nodded while he seemed to be locking it into his brain, which he often did while looking at one of his wagging pups.
Ben hit the five hundred meter target four times in a row with his last magazine.
Harry tapped his headphones and gave him a big okay sign with the only fingers he had on that hand, and a big smile.
Ben switched positions and spotted through the pair of binoculars setup on a small tripod while Harry and Lissa shot. They were pinging hits all day long at five hundred meters, and still hitting more than half at the seven hundred and fifty meter target. At those distances only the dogs could hear the ping that came long after they saw the hit as the bullet travelled almost a half-mile downrange at twice the speed of sound.
Harry bitched about the wind and the snow, mostly because he was behind his wife by three hits. He even challenged Ben’s last ‘miss’ call.
Ben appeared to be conferring with his dogs, and they all laughed when he said both pups agreed the shot had indeed been a miss.
Later in the afternoon, after they had packed up the guns and were having snacks in the front of the range, the Chogins were answering Ben’s questions about being explosives techs. Lissa explained how she and Harry had met at a Canadian forces base in New Brunswick. She had been a commissioned instructor at the ordinance and bomb disposal school there, and he had rotated in from deployment for update training. According to Lissa he was, “The cutest, and worst student I’ve ever instructed.” As she draped an arm over her husband and bent to give him a big smooch on his cheek she turned to Ben and said, “My Harry couldn’t find the red wire if it was labelled and wrapped around his finger. The man was half color blind even before his accident. I wondered how in the hell he had even made it into the boom-busters, but his colleagues said he was one of the best. Of course I didn’t believe them for a second. Still don’t. All of those disposal guys stick together…pardon the pun.”
Harry started to sign and Lissa reached over him to grab his fingers.
“Here’s the part where he tells you he was just playing dumb,” she said, “He’ll say it was part of his master plan to get some one-on-one instruction after class…and get into my, uh, good graces. Well, if that was the case he was a much better actor than he was a tech.”
She let his hands go and Harry signed, I was only going to tell our young friend here to never, ever cut the red wire…and that I’m the luckiest man alive, for oh so many reasons.
Lissa patted her husband’s arm and smiled at him. She said, “Yes my love, we’ve have a pretty good run.” She looked up at Ben and said, “I would recommend against it as a career, but we’ve travelled the world, and it’s an interesting damn brotherhood.”
Yeah, Harry signed, We have friends scattered all over the place.
Lissa groaned, and Ben laughed out loud. He shook his head, and noticed Smudge had found Harry’s joke a lot funnier than Spot had.
They heard a bark and Ben turned to watch Christa playing with Vuur and Rook. She and the police dogs were at the rear corner of the range rolling around in the sand together. She had taken her legs off and was being dragged around by her flopping pant legs by Rook as she held out a rope toy to fend off Vuur’s frontal assault.
As Harry fed Smudge a bite of sandwich Ben walked to the glass wall and asked the couple, “What happened to Christa’s legs?”
Lissa was making them another sandwich and she paused. She said, “Ben, maybe you should ask her yourself. Or maybe that’s a conversation you and Hamish should have first.”
Ben said, “I asked him. He made a joke, and then didn’t answer me. I would ask her but…I don’t know…I get the feeling she wouldn’t want to talk about it.”
After a moment Harry knocked softly on the bar, pointed to Ben, and signed to his wife.
“Alright,” Lissa said, patting her husband’s arm. She turned to Ben and said, “When Canada joined that ridiculousness in the Middle East Christa told her parents she was going to join the army. They fought her tooth and nail but she wanted to serve, and she wanted to go in as a sniper. Remember when I told you three dozen people in the world can pull the trigger right every time? Well that girl rolling around over there with those big ugly mutts was one of them.”
Harry looked at Ben over the rim of his glasses and nodded his agreement.
Lissa continued, “Hamish had been there when Christa took her first steps, raced her first sled, shot her first gun, and kissed her first boy. Her parents are lovely people but I think Hamish has played a bigger role in her life. He can be a bit like a big magnet, I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
Ben had, and so had the pups.
“It was Hamish that finally convinced her to go into the military police as a canine trainer instead of a sniper,” Lissa said, “Our Christa’s pretty stubborn but I think Hamish could convince a nun to give up her panties.”
Ben nodded, and so did the pups.
“She reluctantly agreed. While she was in basic training Hamish moved to Medicine Hat,” Lissa said, “That’s in Alberta. He wanted to be close to the base at Suffield where the army’s dog training school is. He had been a contractor there decades earlier, and still had friends among the brass. While Christa was in basic Hamish visited his preferred breeders to select a pup to be Christa’s partner. He flew to Colorado, and then to Germany, and Ireland, and Israel. Eventually he saw whatever magic he looks for in a puppy at a ranch in Sweden. He brought her to Alberta and started to train her, and he named Sholto after some knighted Royal Air Force hero of his. As expected, Christa was assigned to Suffield after basic and Hamish went on base every day to help her work with their new super-pup.”
Lissa paused to sip her coffee. She said, “Ben, you know how he is, right? I’ve known him almost thirty years and as intensely passionate as he is about training dogs today, picture him twice as motivated raising Sholto. She’s the finest police dog he’s ever created. In her day she was probably the best in the world.”
Spot agreed with Smudge’s nod, And she is still one sharp cookie.
“Christa had been helping Hamish with dogs since she could walk. She rose quickly in the ranks and in short order she and Sholto ended up running the canine training program. It kept her in Canada, and Hamish moved back home.”
Harry signed and Lissa waved him off. “Hush,” she said, “I’m getting there.”
She said, “Christa had less than six months left to her commitment when she found out Hamish had pulled every string he could with his friends to keep her in Canada. Her name had been taken off several overseas deployment rotations, and all of their talks about how much she was contributing to the fight now seemed tainted to her. They weren’t of course. Her training of those teams of handlers and dogs had easily saved a hundred lives, but she wouldn’t hear it.”
Lissa walked to the glass wall and stood next to Ben. They watched the double amputee and her dogs playing in the sand.
She said, “Christa was angry.”
Harry tapped the table. He shook his head and signed, Christa was fucking pissed.
Lissa nodded and said, “Well, she pulled a few strings of her own and she and Sholto were on the next plane to Afghanistan. They were there for three weeks and she and Sholto had already won two citations for valor a
nd the base commander put her in charge of operations. While on patrol in a maze of tight streets in downtown Mosul a pair of IEDs took out the first and last vehicles in their convoy.
It was a well-coordinated ambush. The enemy pounced on them, and her team was taking heavy casualties. Christa was wounded but she returned fire and held them back long enough for Sholto to drag the survivors into a building. She had seventeen confirmed kills that afternoon, and Sholto had six all by herself. Some of her team told Hamish the real numbers were twice that.
As they pulled the last man through the doorway the enemy rained down enough concentrated rocket and mortar fire to bring the whole block down on their heads. She grabbed Sholto, hugged her close, and they were thrown into what Christa described as a concrete washing machine.
She woke sometime later and they were trapped in a small pocket under two slanted walls, buried under five stories of collapsed building. Her gear was gone, as was her radio and her sidearm. Sholto was free but Christa’s legs were crushed below the knees and trapped under a concrete wall.
She heard a helicopter, and reinforcements came pretty quickly. She could hear them faintly yelling, and then she could hear them taking more rounds of fire. Christa realized the basement must have collapsed as they were below ground level and all of the action was happening above them. She tried to yell but could only draw dust filled breaths and cough them out. Sholto barked but no one could hear them through the noise of the fight and thirty feet of twisted steel and concrete debris above them. After a while everything went quiet. She was in tough shape, one arm was bleeding badly and she was drifting in and out.
For hours she watched Sholto trying to find a way through the rubble. The dog scrambled around in the dark and kept coming back to check on Christa. She brought back water bottles and two pistols. All of them were covered in blood.”
The Glasgow Gray: Spot and Smudge - Book 2 Page 20
