“They haven’t touched it?”
“Not yet,” said Neill.
Swagger rotated into the hatch of the helicopter, going naturally to prone, rolling slightly to the right to pry open the red box of Hornady 6.5 Creedmoor—one was missing, and he knew what had happened to it—and began threading them into the well in the receiver revealed by the pulled-open bolt.
“Time to hunt,” he said, but nobody heard him.
1503
The man walked to the ball on the green, bent to examine it, walked to the pin, bent to examine it—had he never seen one before?—but would not be still. He was mapping his stroke to the most precise degree, he stopped for a brief chat with his assistant, who offered him some sort of counsel, he stepped off the green to squat and peer at the ball in relation to the hole and the course its trajectory had to follow to arrive squarely, then stood up.
It was evidently an important shot, even if he had balls in his pocket and in the golf cart.
But he would not stay still, he would not begin his fatal address of the ball, which would put him in the kill box.
Juba monitored his own breathing, enjoying the fact that he was so calm, that things were progressing so well.
He had a brief flash of what happened after the shots.
Close the window.
Launch the hate pages to the Dark Web.
Make a last quick check that no traces of Juba remained.
Dump the gloves, mask, and cap in the getaway bag.
Slip out the door, which would lock behind him.
Go to the street without hurry or urgency.
Walk due south on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and look for a black BMW SUV to pick him up.
He came out of his projection and back to the scope.
The golfer finally had come to the ball and was preparing for the putt.
1503.23
City and river slid by in a blur as the craft ate the distance between the FBI roof and the Anacostia River. Vibration, like a charge of electricity, roared through everything. The wind was a primal reality, bashing at him.
Bob lay prone on the deck of the bird, legs splayed for stability. He hadn’t gone to a shooting position yet because he didn’t want to hold it before he had acquired a target. But the rifle against his shoulder, its barrel projecting outward to the broad bright expanse of reality that was before him, was reassuring.
He wore a headset and throat mic, and now used it to address the pilot, “Lieutenant, if I have to shoot, can you hold her steady?”
“Yes, sir,” came the pilot’s reply. “Give me a second’s notice, and I’ll go to autorotate, which means I cut the engine, tune the blades, and we just sustain ourselves on the rotation without the buzz. I’ve only got about ten seconds, though, before I have to power up.”
“Got it, and great. I’ll sing out.”
The copilot said, “It’s got to be that newer building. The upper floor would get you the vantage.”
“Yeah,” said Nick. “If he’s anywhere, he’s there.”
“Okay, boys,” said the pilot, “I’m laying myself right in his angle on the target. I’m coming around and holding. Find him for the sniper. Find him.”
1504
Now at last.
The man was still. He bent over the ball, addressing it squarely, all his attention focused on it. He did not know that the red dot of Juba’s 5.5×25×56 Schmidt & Bender lay without tremor or remorse upon the center of his body and that Juba’s finger caressed the curve of the trigger, that all systems were perfect, that it was only a matter not of technique but will.
Juba’s focus went to the dot, not the target, and his trigger finger began its microprogress—
And then the image disappeared.
Something blurred and heavy settled between himself and it, and he recognized the shape as a helicopter. His fingers flew to the focus ring, and he dialed the blur to sharpness. And now he recognized the open hatch and, in one corner of it as if from his nightmares, bent and concentrated and unmoving, the American sniper.
1505.5
“Open window, middle, top floor!” screamed Nick.
“On it,” Bob replied. “Lieutenant, go to auto.”
The bird’s roar ceased, and there was a moment of stillness as the rotors sustained the machine of their own without the assistance of power but purely on the laws of aerodynamics, sucking the strength of the atmosphere through their canted blades. And in that pause Bob went hard to shooting position lock-in, rifle tight, eye centered on scope, finger on trigger, saw the open window and, though darkened, what could only be the silhouette of a man hunched over a rifle.
Without willing it, he fired, even as he read the flash from the other’s muzzle.
1504.066
He fired. The American sniper fired.
It was too late, of course.
He was where fate and destiny had decreed, in another’s crosshairs, even as that other was in his own. The flashes were simultaneous, even at that range, and the time in flight was as well.
It had to happen. It did. Now, here, today, this minute, this second, this fraction of a second.
He entered the light.
1504.079
“Bingo!” screamed Nick. “Brains on the ceiling, baby, you nailed his ass. Oh god, what a shot, what a shot, Swagger is the best. Did he shoot? I thought I saw flash. Did he—”
He looked down to see Swagger, face flat on the deck, as if dumped loosely on his rifle, now flattened under him.
“Swagger!” he yelled.
He bent, touched the man’s neck for pulse and found the feeblest excuse for one, a weak pumping. A pool of blood began to roll across the deck, vibrating as the pilot powered on and revved the torque.
“Swagger?”
He pulled him half up, saw the chalk-white face, the unfocused eyes, just the faintest tremor of breath.
“Lieutenant, go to nearest shock trauma, fastest, someplace set up with helicopter pad, fastest. I say again, fastest! Copilot, radio ahead, tell them we have medical emergency incoming, severe gunshot trauma, lung or chest. Get people on roof to get him into surgery. I say again: Emergency! Emergency! Emergency!”
“Roger, FBI, wilco,” came the reply.
1504.082
Where had it gone? It had vanished—rifle, helicopter, target. Someone was yelling. It was Nick.
“SWAGGER!”
Nick yelled again, from farther out.
“SWAGGER!”
Where had he gone?
“SWAGGER?”
“SWAGGER!”
It was so far away.
“SWAGGER!”
62
Cascade, Idaho
Spring
Fall came hard, winter harder. Bleak, even savage, months, with harsh winds and blankets of snow that lay across the prairie like the base coat for the end of the world in ice. He saw none of it.
The collarbone wasn’t the problem. It was replaced by titanium, coated in nitride to prevent tissue stain. The bone chips weren’t the problem. They were picked out, one at a time, all two hundred and thirty-one of them, ranging in size from .25 inch to .004 inch, scattered throughout the thoracic cavity. The clavical, hit by the .338 Lapua traveling sideways after having been slowed and deflected by the helicopter’s fuselage, had exploded like a grenade, deflating his left lung, pricking his heart. But that was not the problem. The lung was patched and reinflated, the heart de-pricked.
The problem was the chip of bone shrapnel that had cut into and almost—it was a matter of a few thousandths of an inch—destroyed his aorta. That would have been fatal in a few seconds.
But in minutes they cracked his chest, pried him open like an oyster, and went to work. They delicately removed the intruder and sutured the artery up. It was fourteen hours on the table, with relays of
surgeons and nurses, the whole thing a close-run battle of its own, leaving exhausted participants soaked in sweat and limp from fatigue all over the surgery floor. But they were brave and tough and the best, and they saved him in time. Somehow the major vessel eventually healed. Seventy-three-year-old blood highways are not noted for such cooperation, but his nevertheless came through for him.
He sat, he rocked. No horseback riding, but each morning two hours of physical therapy, administered by a no-nonsense young woman from the hospital who saw him merely as a data unit to be manipulated toward certain goals, and who was always behind schedule and always cranky. Not much love flowed between them.
Audrey the Evil gone, he sat, he rocked. Late March. Scabby patches of snow on yellowed prairie grass. No buds yet, just nodules. The smell of wet everywhere. The clouds fat with rain, low and surly, moving remorselessly, a breeze that cut. One color and few variations, all off the murkiest part of the spectrum. It was a landscape designed by Nietzsche to melody composed by Wagner, both men in their deepest depressive phase of their bipolarity. He sat, wrapped in an old Indian blanket, his walker on the porch beside him. He had a thermos of coffee, black as usual, and a nice pair of binoculars in case any animal life decided to acknowledge his existence.
Phone made that god-awful sound and showed the front gate, where a new, expensive, and, hopefully, temporary guard spent the day, chasing off the too-many assholes who had propositions.
“Mr. Swagger, woman here, says she knows you. What is it, ma’am? Yeah, McDowell—a Mrs. McDowell.”
“Yeah, she’s okay.”
He knew she’d come this way as before, unannounced, so that nobody would feel the need to make preparations, and in a cheap rental car, this one in an even more insane shade than the last, some kind of econo Chevy that pushed its underpowered way over the crest and into the yard.
The same old Janet got out, no more chic or polished up than the last time, in jeans and a sweater under some kind of waxed outdoorsy jacket. As usual, running shoes, as if she still had a marathon to run when she’d just finished one.
“Well, hey,” he called.
“Was in the neighborhood,” she said, “thought I’d drop by.”
“Yeah, I’m halfway between the 7-Eleven and the dry cleaners.”
She laughed. “Well, it’s a big neighborhood.”
He didn’t rise; he couldn’t. She bent and hugged him, he nodded toward a chair nearby, and she pulled it over.
“So, how’s the hero?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Ask him, if you can find one. I just pulled a trigger.”
“Knowing he’d be pulling a trigger too.”
“Didn’t think that far ahead.”
They caught up. The news was good, as everyone had prospered. Nick got to retire again, this time as an Assistant Director, a goal finally achieved. Neill and Chandler got promotions, commendations, and Glory Wall photos with Mogul. Mr. Gold was back in the black cube, and even Cohen was respectful—at least for a little while.
“All you got was a bullet,” Janet said.
“I’m a big boy. It’s okay.”
Health notes: his progress, his mood, his day-to-day, his expected recovery rate.
“I’ll be back on the horse in three months. Not sure about the motorcycles. Doctors do not like motorcycles. I’ve recently started working in the shop again—you know, the crazy gun tinkering that I enjoy. Still be a few weeks before I can get behind a rifle. Lucky he nicked me in my left shoulder, not the right.”
“Some nick,” she said.
And finally: the thing itself. Who was behind it, who put up the money? The Iranians facilitated it and supported it, but nobody at the CIA thought it was their sort of operation. They sensed a bigger, smarter state actor, maybe a Putin, drawing on five centuries of Russian intelligence tradecraft. The Chinese? They were that good, so that was a possibility. Or maybe some “friend” who saw the ingredients on the table to take an ally down hard and move to the front of the line. Anyway, a joint Bureau–Agency task force was on it.
“Tell me your thoughts,” she said, “who saw it as a possibility, where it could have come from. Is there anything like it?”
“More than anything, it reminds me of our job on a Japanese admiral in World War Two. We were reading their code. Their guy Yamamoto was on an inspection tour. Our intel guys worked out the route and saw that on one tiny stretch of his flight he would be in range of our fighters. When he got there, the P38s were waiting and jumped him. Remember Pearl Harbor, and all that. Same thing here. Renegade’s in range for the few minutes he’s on the eighth green. Juba knew. Like the P38s, Juba was waiting.”
“And the cover story: New York? Did they just get lucky it was the same time?”
“Not really. They knew Mogul’s personality would compel him to show up Renegade. So they knew something would happen and that they could use it. That’s the kind of thinking the Agency people consider beyond the Iranians.”
She nodded, as if she understood or even cared. But it was clear she didn’t. She’d come for one thing, and, finally, it was all that was left.
“So I really came to ask a question,” she said.
“Figured as much.”
“How should I feel?”
“Pretty good, I’d say. You got him. Seemed impossible, but you got him.”
“I don’t really feel it was me. I had help from the best folks in the world. They believed, and, on that, I could keep going.”
“No, it was you. It all happened because you made it happen. The rest of us did our parts and got the screws tightened up real good, but no Janet, Juba gets away with it. No justice, nothing for Tommy, nothing for Baghdad, nothing for the bus, nothing for the New Mexico gun guy, nothing for the homeless fellows popped at a mile, nothing for a former president and the chaos his death would bring to us. We’re so fragile these days, maybe some kind of civil war. Nothing for the others on down the line that Juba would have put down. All that’s because Janet made it so.”
“Maybe,” said Janet.
“But you don’t feel any better, is that it?”
“Not really. Not where it counts. I’m a mom, that’s all. I’d rather have my son back than all that other stuff, and no matter how much of what someone calls good came from it, the price was too high. That’s how I feel.”
He didn’t say a thing. What was there to say?
“How long will that last?” she said. “That’s my question. You would know. You lost so many over the years.”
“Oh, you can do things. Help veterans, write an inspirational book, and if you make some money—and you should—endow a scholarship, fund a school, contribute, keep Tommy alive that way.”
“Sure,” she said. “Good advice, all of it. But you know it only takes you so far. Bob, tell me the truth. How long does it really last?”
“It lasts forever,” he said.
Acknowledgments
This book began with and is respectfully dedicated to Tracy Miller, whose son Nick Ziolkowski—“The Sniper from Boys’ Latin,” dedicatee in Dead Zero—was killed in Fallujah in 2004. Instead of letting her grief cripple and destroy her, she turned it to energy, the energy to engagement, and the engagement to help others. She has spent her last fourteen years as an advisor to veterans and other recent arrivals at Towson University, where she is an adjunct professor of education and serves on the Veterans Committee, among about a thousand other things. That’s heroism. I have taken the kernel of her story and do what I do, which is dramatize, romanticize, exaggerate, and open fire. Hence, Game of Snipers.
Now, on to apologies, excuses, and evasions. Let me offer the first to Tel Aviv; Dearborn, Michigan; Greenville, Ohio; Wichita, Kansas; Rock Springs, Wyoming; and Anacostia, D.C. I generally go to places I write about to check the lay of streets, the fall of shadows, the color of police cars, and the ta
ste of local beer. At seventy-three, such ordeals-by-airport are no longer fun, not even the beer part; I only go where there’s beaches. For this book, I worked from maps and Google, and any geographical mistakes emerge out of that practice. Is the cathedral three hundred yards from the courthouse in Wichita? Hmm, seems about right, and that’s good enough for me on this.
On the other hand, I finally got Bob’s wife’s name correct. It’s Julie, right? I’ve called her Jen more than once, but I’m pretty sure Jen was Bud Pewtie’s wife in Dirty White Boys. For some reason, this mistake seemed to trigger certain Amazon reviewers into psychotic episodes. Folks, calm down, have a drink, hug someone soft. It’ll be all right.
As for the shooting, my account of the difficulties of hitting at over a mile is more or less accurate (snipers have done it at least eight times). I have simplified, because it is so arcane it would put all but the most dedicated in a coma. I have also been quite accurate about the ballistics app FirstShot, because I made it up and can make it do anything I want. The other shot, the three hundred, benefits from the wisdom of Craig Boddington, the great hunter and writer, who looked it over and sent me a detailed email, from which I have borrowed much. Naturally, any errors are mine, not Craig’s.
I met Craig when shooting something (on film!) for another boon companion, Michael Bane, and his Outdoor Channel Gun Stories crew. For some reason, he finds it amusing when I start jabbering away and likes to turn the camera on. Don’t ask me why. On the same trip, I also met the great firearms historian and all-around movie guy (he knows more than I do) Garry James, who has become a pal. Gentlemen three, God bless them all.
In Baltimore, the usual suspects came to my aid. First, my friends John Bainbridge, Lenne Miller, and Gary Goldberg were diligent and thorough on my behalf. Why, I cannot say. Meanwhile, Mike Hill and Jim “Six Days of the Condor” Grady had useful insights and enthusiasm, as did Bill Smart and Barrett Tillman. And in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, my good friend Dave Dunn, owner of Trop Gun Shop, offered me cigars, bourbon, and deals—all important to morale. In Baltimore, Ed De Carlo, maître d’, majordomo, and NCOIC of On Target, kept my shooting life running smoothly. In L.A., old pal Jeff Weber pitched in as usual. Thanks to all, and particularly to Lenne, who also had a major health crisis to deal with but stayed on course.
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