We needn't have bothered. The driver had been shot at least five times; twice in his left arm, once through the back, then Richard's last two shots, one low in the throat, the other creasing the skull at the hairline. He was a young Hispanic man, probably around my age. He was propped up against the open door of the truck, short bubbling breaths coming through clenched teeth dark with blood. His right hand stirred listlessly through the dirt, hunting for the gun he had lost. His eyes were locked on mine, and I could see nothing but hate.
Richard covered him with his pistol, but didn't shoot. "You need to do one up close. Finish him. Put one in his head."
The young man's eyes flicked to Richard, and then back to me. He saw me hesitate for a moment.
"C'mon, cabron," he hissed between his clenched teeth, "do it, you little bitch."
I brought up the Glock in one hand and squeezed the trigger. The man's head snapped back against the truck door, then sagged until his chin rested on his chest, a neat dark hole in the bridge of his nose. The back of his head ran down the door in gobbets and streaks.
"We need to go back and account for the last man, the shooter near the camper," Richard said, reloading his pistol with another fresh magazine.
We didn't have to look for long. It took a few minutes to circle counter-clockwise back the way we had come and move to the right of the encampment. Approaching the camper, we immediately saw the body of a man lying by the corner, sprawled on his back. Up close, I could see I’d only hit him once, but the shot had torn open the side of his throat, and he had bled out thrashing in the dirt, gleaming sprays of drying crimson fanned across the corner of the camper.
"He didn't die easy, but at least he died quietly," Richard noted, staring down at the body.
I turned and looked at Richard. He was filthy from head to toe, night vision goggles askew on his forehead, sweat streaking the dust covering his face. Richard was back to looking calm and composed, no more concerned about the dead man lying in an enormous puddle of blood at his feet than if he was looking down at a broken lawn ornament.
"Small consolation, don't you think?" I asked.
Richard looked up and gave a small shrug, then turned and started walking towards where we had first begin the firefight, off to the side of the meth trailer. "Come on, let’s police our gear and get moving. It's going to be light soon, and someone's going to come looking when they see the smoke plume."
I let out a long, slow breath and moved to follow him, emotionally and physically exhausted. As I caught up to him, Richard turned his head my way just a bit.
"We'll go over the details after we get some shut-eye,” he said. “All in all though, not bad for your first time."
And then, incredibly, Richard winked at me.
TEN
I dreamed that night I stood outside the camp after the gun battle. I was looking at Richard, his face glowing in the firelight. Suddenly, he was no longer merely Richard, but a murderous, demonic warrior. The flickering light twisted Richard's features and made them savage and beastial. The twin lenses of the night-vision goggles on his forehead morphed into a pair of grotesque, barrel-like horns growing from his skull. Instead of black denim and wool, he was clothed in shadows and dried blood. Instead of the southern Texas desert, I was standing in a desolate expanse of Hell, the ground barren and featureless as far as I could see, dusted with fragments of bleached bone. I realized I had been tricked into descending into the underworld by a monster looking to corrupt another soul for his own devilish schemes.
Richard sensed by gaze and turned to me, his own pistol holstered but with captured weapons in both hands. I saw the fire wasn't actually reflected in his eyes; it burned from deep within two empty, smoking sockets.
Richard smiled, a hideous, rictus-like grin that stretched to impossible proportions, and he said to me, "Welcome to the brotherhood, William.”
Richard turned and walked away into the night.
I had no choice but to follow.
I didn't wake up the next day until almost ten. The cabin was hot and stuffy by then, heated by the desert sun for almost four hours, and I was too uncomfortable to stay asleep. I awoke feeling utterly drained, my eyes crusted with sleep, my mouth gummy and dried out. My body ached all over, I was ravenously hungry, and I felt like I needed to drink a gallon of water, I was so parched.
But I was alive. Despite all my enervation and discomfort, that thought alone made it the best morning of my life.
I vaguely recalled that I had fallen asleep around five that morning. After Richard and I found our spent and discarded magazines, we dragged the bodies of the two men I had killed in the camp into the camper, along with the lone sentry. The driver who tried to get away, we tossed inside the cab of his truck. Richard had me collect any weapons we could find in serviceable condition; the long-barreled pump shotgun, the assault rifle, a stainless steel .45 caliber automatic that the throat-shot man had fired at me, and the Ingram machine pistol used by the driver. There was also a scoped .30-06 bolt-action hunting rifle in the camper, and a .357 magnum revolver lying in the passenger seat of the white van.
"We'll take the guns, cache them under the cabin. Never hurts to have a few disposable stolen guns on hand for a rainy day. If they have a criminal ballistics profile already, it might help throw an investigation off-track and onto someone else, even for a short while."
In addition to the guns, we found a lock-box in the camper. Richard blew the flimsy lock out with a single shot from his H&K. Inside, we found about ten grand in various denominations of used bills.
"Don't ever feel bad about taking a dead man's money, especially scumbags like these. They can't take it with them, it wouldn't go back to anyone who'd make better use of it, and you never know when a nice wad of untraceable cash can come in handy. Otherwise, it'd just end up in an evidence locker, or buried in some crooked cop’s backyard."
The last thing we did before leaving was to burn everything. Richard produced a number of small incendiaries from his gusset bag, tossing one into the camper and one into the cab of each vehicle. Each of the grenades burst with a soft "whump", and sprayed out burning fragments of what Richard called white phosphorous. It burned at an extremely high temperature, capable of melting through glass and steel. In a few moments, the three vehicles and the camper were completely engulfed in flames, the white-hot fires lighting up the desert night for a hundred meters all around us.
Once everything was well on its way to being completely incinerated, Richard and I hiked back to the Suburban. Before we drove away, Richard unlimbered a makeshift contraption from the trunk; a long, heavy wooden beam studded with a number of thick iron spikes, with a length of chain attached to either end. Richard fastened the middle of the chain to the trailer hitch.
"We'll drag this behind us as we drive out, and it'll obscure our tracks so no one can get an identification on the kind of vehicle we drove based on tire treads or the width and length of the chassis. This way, even if they track us back to this point with dogs, they'll have no idea which way we came or what kind of vehicle we used."
I assisted Richard in getting the makeshift "rake" back into the Suburban once we got to the road. When we hit the pavement, I slumped back in my seat, exhausted, and I dozed until we returned to the cabin. I took a few minutes to strip down, splash a little water on my face, and wipe my body down with a damp rag. I passed out the moment I hit my cot.
This morning, I dressed quickly, t-shirt and shorts and sneakers as usual, straw hat on my head. I picked up a lukewarm mug of tea Richard had left me on the table next to the stove, along with a tin plate of dried apricots, beef jerky, some salted table crackers, and a wedge of cheese. Caffeine, sugar, protein, carbohydrates, and some fat; the breakfast of champions. I also took a handful of vitamins left in a small plastic cup, dietary supplements provided by Richard to make sure that I wasn't missing out on anything important.
I stepped out onto the porch. Richard sat in his customary wooden rocker, faded jea
ns, check shirt, straw hat, cowboy boots, a wet bandana tied around his neck. He looked the picture-perfect grizzled cowboy resting in the shade of the covered porch, except for the brick of nine-millimeter cartridges balanced on one thigh, and a half-dozen long black magazines balanced on the other. He had one magazine in his hands, popping shiny brass cartridges into the end with such speed and efficiency he might as well be feeding quarters into a laundromat dryer. He looked up at me, peering from the side of his eye out from under the corner of his hat.
"Howdy," he said to me. "Sleep well?"
"Like the dead."
Richard gave me one of his trademark mirthless smiles. "The dead don't sleep, they rot. Best to keep that in mind."
"After last night, I won't forget that any time soon."
Richard turned away for a moment and went back to feeding cartridges into the magazine in his hand. "Do we need to talk about your feelings? Need a hug, perhaps?"
I sat in the other chair, propped my mug and my plate on the railing in front of me. I chewed a bit of jerky for a moment, swallowed.
"No need to be an asshole about it, Richard."
"You want to think I'm being an asshole about it, that's your prerogative. I just want to know how you feel about last night."
I thought for a minute, drank some tea, ate a couple of dried apricots. Despite the relatively early hour, it was already in the 80s. If it wasn't for the roof over the porch, I'm sure I'd already be sweating.
"Last night I had a dream. You were a demon covered in blood, and you tricked me into following you down into Hell, where I killed those men and gave up my soul so you could corrupt me for your own diabolical schemes."
"Sounds about right to me."
"The best part," I said, "was that at the end, you welcomed me into your brotherhood, and I followed you off into the darkness."
Richard nodded, not even looking at me. "Still sounds about right."
"Me dreaming you’re demon from Hell and corrupting my soul sounds about right to you?"
Richard finished loading the magazine in his hand, laid it across his leg, picked up another empty magazine, and continued loading. "I've been on the warpath for forty years. I've probably put a thousand men in the ground. Women too. Hell, probably some kids mixed in along the way, although I can't say for sure. And I know some good guys got caught in the crossfire, too; cops, security guards, watchmen, even your run of the mill innocent bystanders. Wrong place at the wrong time and all that."
I stared off into space. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you need to remember I'm not a nice guy. I'm not far removed from that thing in your dream. Call me a war criminal and you'd probably be more right than wrong. I always thought at the time I was working for the good guys, fighting for the right reasons. But the Cold War was still a bloody business and I was always there at its bloodiest. Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, Iran, India, Brazil, Russia...I've been all over, always where the fighting was the dirtiest. Tore up some places here in the States as well. Things the press was threatened to keep quiet about, or bribed into silence, or worse."
"Just keeps getting better and better," I said.
"And just remember, I'm one of the good guys. Some of the animals I worked with, they make your run of the mill concentration camp guard look like he's gentle enough to run a daycare center. Some of those older guys, they probably were concentration camp guards back in the day. Plenty of the grey-hairs I went into the field with, those were the war addicts, the guys who couldn't go back home. Saw it after 'Nam, too; men who lived for death, lived for the blood and the thrill of the kill. They weren't much better than the dummies we were gunning after. Matter of fact, most of them were probably worse. At least the guys at the end of my gun usually died for a cause: communism, Islam, even plain old fashioned world domination. Some of the savages I fought with, they killed simply for the fun of it. The money? That was just gravy."
I turned to look at Richard, slouched in his rocker, hat pulled down low over his blue eyes. "So what about you? Killing for a cause, or was it the fun?"
Richard finally turned and looked me square in the eye. "You ain't figured that out yet? I killed for profit, kid. And back in the day, business was good. Business was really good."
I finished my meal in silence.
Although it was mid-morning, and the sun was already setting the sand on fire, Richard and I did our stretching, calisthenics and run. Neither of us said anything; we just worked through our routine in silence with the occasional gesture, nod, or inarticulate grunt. It was perhaps the closest I’d seen Richard get to being embarrassed, although I didn't think that was necessarily the problem. I think he had to remind himself now and then I was struggling to come to grips with a great deal in a short amount of time, and he needed to throttle back sometimes or risk burning me out.
After we finished our exercise, Richard called me back into the cabin. He had laid out the DeLisle carbine on the table top, broken down into its constituent parts.
"We've spent a week working on the basics of submachine guns and pistols. Last night you proved you know how to use those tools effectively. Now it's time to move to something a little more exacting."
"The sniper rifle," I replied.
"Not exactly a rifle, a carbine. It's a longarm firing a pistol round, but that's just being pedantic."
I stepped closer and took a good look. The wooden stock had a folded aluminum butt, spray-painted black. The magazine was removed, and a box of pistol ammunition sat next to it. The scope was removed, and set next to the DeLisle's receiver. The bolt had been pulled free, and sat next to the receiver as well. A small black collapsible bipod lay folded underneath the barrel.
Richard gestured to the parts. "I want you to put it together for me."
It took a couple of minutes for me to figure out, but eventually I locked the bolt in place, reattached the scope and the bipod, loaded and inserted the magazine. The parts were meticulously machined and well-oiled, and the weapon clicked and snapped together effortlessly.
"Take it apart, unload the mag, and do it again," Richard stated.
I reversed the process, and put the gun back together again. This time I assembled and loaded it within a minute.
"How was that?" I asked.
"Well, this isn't the Marine Corps. As long as you can put it together quickly, and then break it back down, that's good enough for me."
"Glad to hear it. I'm no Forrest Gump."
Richard cracked a ghost of a smile. "Now, let's go shoot."
We went back outside, me with the carbine, Richard with several boxes of ammunition and two sandbags draped over his shoulders. We walked out to our makeshift shooting range, and I saw Richard had set up some bulls-eye targets earlier this morning, perhaps a hundred meters away from our normal shooting position.
"The .45 ACP can fly hundreds of meters, but you're going to want to keep your distances short, a hundred meters or less. That puts you within a good-sized city block of your target, maybe a little more or a little less."
"But bullets drop as they fly, and a pistol bullet is going to drop faster than a rifle bullet."
"Correct. The key is to know that drop, anticipate it, and compensate for it by altering the windage and elevation of the scope."
Extending the bipod legs, I laid down on the ground, propping my elbows on one sandbag and the bipod on the other, so there was a steady surface underneath me and the carbine. I worked the bolt to chamber a bullet, then hit the button to pop open the scope cover. Peering through the optics, I could see the target a hundred meters away, concentric rings of black and white perhaps a foot across at its widest point. The scope used a simple set of crosshairs, and I slowly settled myself in, watching the crosshairs wobble around on the target.
"Whenever you're ready, just go through the seven round magazine and get a feel for it. Keep the crosshairs settled on the center of the target, breathe in, let it out a little, and then squeeze off the shot. Don't drop the h
ammer until you feel you're ready. It's all about patience and timing."
I took perhaps four minutes to fire the whole magazine. When I was done, we walked over to take a look at the target. All my shots were clustered in a space as big as the palm of my hand, right at the bottom of the target.
"Subsonic 230-grain hollowpoint loads like these are going to strike six or seven inches low at this range," Richard told me. "You're going to want to adjust the elevation and try again."
We changed out the targets, marked the old target with the date and time, ammunition and weapon used, range and firing position.
"A sniper is like any precision craftsman; he wants to look back at his body of work and be able to remember when and how he accomplished that particular task. By keeping these notes, you'll begin to build a body of knowledge you can refer to in your own mind in order to adjust the scope or correct for windage."
After reloading the carbine, I adjusted the scope several clicks and emptied the magazine downrange again, this time taking all seven shots in two minutes. Checking the target, the grouping had tightened up a little, and was only halfway below the bulls-eye.
"What you've got dialed in now would be a good general-purpose adjustment. Too fine-tuned, and you'll shoot too high up close, say within 20 meters or so. Better to aim a little low at a distance so you're not aiming too high if you have to use it quick and can't adjust the scope. But for good measure, let's pin down the range."
Two more magazines' worth, and I worked out the range so all my shots clustered around the bullseye. My grouping tightened up a little more, but Richard explained to me that pistol ballistics at this range just wouldn't lend themselves well to precision shooting.
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